degree unlawful, but, on the contrary, that the present state of matters is the right one,—­that until now the ark has invariably been housed under an equally simple and unpretentious roof.  As David’s tent does not date back to the Exodus, Nathan is necessarily speaking of changing tents and dwellings; the reading of the parallel passage in 1Chron. xvii.5, therefore, correctly interprets the sense.  There could be no more fundamental contradiction to the representation contained in the Pentateuch than that embodied in these words:  the ark has not as its correlate a single definite sacred tent of state, but is quite indifferent to the shelter it enjoys—­has frequently changed its abode, but never had any particularly fine one.  Such has been the state of matters since the time of Moses.

Such is the position of affairs as regards the tabernacle; if it is determined that the age of the Priestly Code is to hang by these threads, I have no objection.  The representation of the tabernacle arose out of the temple of Solomon as its root, in dependence on the sacred ark, for which there is early testimony, and which in the time of David, and also before it, was sheltered by a tent.  From the temple it derives at once its inner character and its central importance for the cultus as well as its external form.

I.III.2.  A peculiar point of view is taken up by Theodor Noldeke.  He grants the premisses that the tabernacle is a fiction, of which the object is to give pre-existence to the temple and to the unity of worship, but he denies the conclusion that in that case the Priestly Code presuppose; the unity of worship as already existing in its day, and therefore is late, than Deuteronomy.  In his Untersuchungen zur Kritik des Alten Testaments (p. 127 seq.) he says:—­

“A strong tendency towards unity of worship MUST have arisen as soon as Solomon’s temple was built.  Over against the splendid sanctuary with its imageless worship at the centre of the kingdom of Judah, the older holy places MUST ever have shrunk farther into the background, and that not merely in the eyes of the people, but quite specially also in those of the better classes and of those whose spiritual advancement was greatest (compare Amos iv. 4,viii.14).  If even Hezekiah carried out the unification in Judah with tolerable thoroughness, the effort after it MUST surely have been of very early date; for the determination violently to suppress old sacred usages would not have been easily made, unless this had been long previously demanded by theory.  The priests at Jerusalem MUST very specially at an early date have arrived at the conception that their temple with the sacred ark and the great altar was the one true place of worship, and an author has clothed this very laudable effort on behalf of the purity of religion in the form of a law, which certainly in its strictness was quite impracticable (ILeviticus xvii.4 seq.), and which, therefore, was modified later by the Deuteronomist with a view to practice.”