from itself.  Any older or independent contemporary priestly movement in the same direction remained at least entirely without result, and so also has left no witnesses to itself.  Perhaps it occurs to us that the priests of Jerusalem must after all have been the first to catch sight of the goal, the attainment of which afterwards brought so great advantage to themselves, but it does not appear that they were so clever beforehand as we are after the event.  At least there are no other grounds for the hypothesis of a long previously latent tendency towards centralisation on the part of the Jerusalem priesthood beyond the presumption that the Priestiy Code must chronologically precede, not Deuteronomy merely, but also the prophets.  For the sake of this presumption there is constructed a purely abstract (and as such perfectly irrefragable) possibility that furnishes a door of escape from the historical probability, which nevertheless it is impossible to evade.

How absolutely unknown the Priestly Code continued to be even down to the middle of the exile can be seen from the Books of Kings, which cannot have received their present shape earlier than the death of Nebuchadnezzar.  The redactor, who cites the Deuteronomic law and constantly forms his judgment in accordance with it, considered (as we have learned from 1Kings iii.2) that the Bamoth were permissible prior to the building of Solomon’s temple; the tabernacle therefore did not exist for him.  Jeremiah, who flourished about a generation earlier, is equally ignorant of it, but—­on account of the ark, though not necessarily in agreement with traditional opinion—­regards the house of God at Shiloh (whose ruins, it would seem, were at that time still visible) as the forerunner of the temple of Jerusalem, and in this he is followed by the anonymous prophecy of 1Samuel ii.27-36, the comparatively recent date of which appears from the language (ii.33), and from the circumstance that it anticipates the following threatening in iii.  In all these writers, and still more in the case of the Deuteronomist himself, who in xii. actually makes the unity of the cultus dependent on the previous choice of Jerusalem, it is an exceedingly remarkable thing that, if the Priestly Code had been then already a long time in existence, they should have been ignorant of a book so important and so profound in its practical bearings.  In ancient Hebrew literature such an oversight could not be made so easily as, in similar circumstances, with the literature of the present day.  And how comes it to pass that in the Book of Chronicles, dating from the third century, the Priestly Code suddenly ceases to be, to all outward seeming, dead, but asserts its influence everywhere over the narrative in only too active and unmistakable a way?  To these difficulties Noldeke is unreasonably indifferent.  He seems to be of the opinion that the post-exilian time would not have ventured to take in hand so thoroughgoing an alteration, or rather reconstruction, of tradition as is implied in antedating the temple of Solomon by means of the tabernacle. 1