AGE OF THE SOURCES, COMPOSITION OF THE PENTATEUCH
Deuteronomy is a fixed point, by reference to which the age of other
strata in the Pentateuch may be determined, at least relatively. Thus
in P the patriarchs never offer sacrifice at the ancient holy places
of Canaan, and the notion that legitimate sacrifice can be made only
on one altar is so fundamental an article of religion that the first
thing at Sinai is the construction of the tabernacle to be transported
from one station to another in the desert. The inference is plain that
P was written at a time when the principle of the unity of the
sanctuary for which Deuteronomy contends with the zeal of innovation
was no longer disputed, at least in the author's surroundings, so that
he has no need to enjoin it, and can, indeed, ignore the fact that
there ever had been other sanctuaries of Jehovah. Such a state of
things never existed while the kingdom stood; it was only in the
Persian period, when Judæa was reduced to a circle of a few miles
about Jerusalem, that the conditions implied in P arose. Only in that
age, through political circumstances, did the high priests attain the
pre-eminence to which P gives the sanction of divine right; and P
itself not obscurely witnesses that these towering pretensions did not
go unchallenged (see especially Num. 16). With this all the other
evidence concurs: the supramundane conception of God and the avoidance
of everything that seems to bring the deity into too close contact
with earthly things or tempts the imagination to figure him too
humanly speak of the progress of theological reflection. The language
is plainly in decadence: apart from words which seem to be new, and
occasionally foreign, the sentence is losing its flexibility, or
authors are losing their mastery of it; it is only necessary to
compare even the best passages in P (such as Gen. 23) with examples of
really classical Hebrew prose (say, in 2 Sam. 11 ff. or the stories of
Elijah in Kings), on the one hand, and with the writing of the
Chronicler (third century B.C.), on the other, to see that P is nearer
to the latter than to the former.
The age of the laws now set in the framework of the Origins is a
distinct question, or rather, as will be understood from what has been
said above, it is a separate question for every law, and often for
successive paragraphs of the same law. And behind the question of the
age of the law in its present formulation is frequently the remoter
problem of the age of the institution or custom. Various criteria are
available in the history of the Kingdoms, in the prophets, in other
collections of laws, and in Ezekiel's programme for the New Jerusalem
(Ezek. 40 ff.). It must be enough here to say that the older laws in P
go back, substantially in their present shape, to the days of the
kingdom, and in many cases represent a prescriptive usage which is of
remote antiquity; while the latest additions to P were made at a time
so recent that they had not found entry into the copies from which the
earliest Greek version was made in the third century B.C.
J and E are both older than Deuteronomy. In Genesis, as has already
been noted, they recite the foundation legends of Shechem, Bethel,
Hebron, Beersheba, and other of the holy places of Canaan, telling how
the patriarchs built the altars, set up the sacred stones, planted the
sacred trees, dug the holy wells, and offered sacrifice to their own
God at these spots, by this origin legitimating as Israelite
sanctuaries what were, at the time of the conquest and long after,
Canaanite "high places." Similarly, in Joshua, Gilgal and Shiloh are
Israelite foundations. These were all, in the time of the kingdoms,
holy places of great repute, frequented by pilgrims from distant
quarters; but there were others, of less ancient pretensions, which
attained equal celebrity. Dan, for instance, which came into the
hands of the Israelites in the time of the Judges, claimed a
priesthood descended from Moses, and became proverbial for the
tenacity with which the good old traditions of Israel were preserved
there.
The narratives in Judges, Samuel, and Kings show that every town and
village had its own holy place, with an altar and a sacred stone, and
sometimes a hall for feasts (e.g. 1 Sam. ix. 22), and that temporary
altars were built whenever and wherever there was reason. This
practice is presumed in an ancient fragment of a law, Exod. xx. 24-26,
which prescribes that all offerings must be made at an altar, which
may be a mound of earth or a heap of field-stones (not hewn stone),
and promises that at every place where God has given signs of his
presence he will come to the sacrifice and bless the offerer. This
rule, which probably originally stood in the context of J, expressly
sanctions the local altars and sacrifices which are so abhorrent to
the deuteronomic reformers of the seventh century.
On the other hand, the strong interest in the origins of the holy
places of Canaan indicates that when J and E were written these high
places were Israelite sanctuaries, which had as such their sacred
legends; indeed, a considerable part of the patriarchal stories is
ultimately derived from these legends of local sanctuaries, which form
a cycle, harmonized and connected by a migration motive. That both J
and E were written long after the settlement of the Israelites in
Palestine is proved even more conclusively by the fact that the
obligatory religious observances are those of an agricultural people.
Thus in Exod. 34, in what was probably according to J the organic law
of the religion of Jehovah, and is indisputably the oldest collection
of religious laws in the Pentateuch, three festivals are ordained, at
which every male is bound "to see the face of Jehovah," that is, to
appear at the high place with his offering--he is warned not to try to
"see Jehovah" without something in his hands--namely, the Feast of
Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Weeks,[2] and the Feast of Ingathering
in the end of the year. The first of these, as we know, came at the
beginning of the barley harvest, at the second the firstfruits of the
wheat harvest were presented, the third celebrated the close of the
vintage and the olive-pressing. The firstlings of the flock and herd,
if we may infer from the order of the prescriptions, were to be
offered at the feast of Unleavened Bread in the Spring. The sabbath is
to be kept as a day of abstention from agricultural labour, "even in
ploughing-time and harvest thou shalt rest." The occupations of a
nomad go on one day like another; the care of the flocks cannot be
suspended for sabbath-keeping.
[2] The older name, Harvest Feast, is preserved in the parallel, Exod.
xxiii. 16.
It is difficult to reconstruct the narratives of the exodus and the
wanderings in the desert in J and E as they originally were. Extensive
transpositions seem to have been made at some stage in the
transmission, by which parallel relations of the same occurrence are
separated and appear as distinct events. There were evidently
considerable differences in the traditional accounts which the
earliest authors found current. The holy mountain is in E named Horeb,
in J (probably) as in P, Sinai; Moses' father-in-law in the one is
Jethro, in the other Hobab. In J there are some traces of a tradition,
perhaps the oldest of all, in which there was no mention of Sinai; the
Israelites made their way straight from the Red Sea to Kadesh.
A comparison of J and E with the history of the times of Saul and
David in Samuel, and with the stories of Elijah and Elisha in Kings,
would lead us to ascribe them both to the classic age of Hebrew prose
of which those narratives are specimens. On the other hand, in J and
the older stratum of E there is no influence of the prophetic movement
of the eighth century which left so deep a mark on religion and
literature. On these grounds J may be probably ascribed to the ninth
century, and E, which is somewhat younger, to the first half of the
eighth. Both used older sources, and both were revised and enlarged
by later hands; we have had more than one occasion to refer to an
edition of E which reflects the teaching of the prophets, particularly
of Hosea.
These two histories--the one, as we have seen, Judæan, the other
Israelite--ran so nearly parallel and contained so much matter in
common that an attempt to combine them in one continuous narrative was
natural. The task was accomplished with considerable skill, by a
Judæan historian in the seventh century, who probably introduced
variants or supplementary matter from other sources. The author's own
hand is most certainly recognized in the multiplied and emphasized
warnings against all sorts of heathenism and in a fine tone of
religious reflection on the history and its lessons, in which the
influence of the prophets is plainly visible, but the peculiar
theories of the seventh century historians do not appear. Whether this
history (JE) extended beyond the Book of Joshua, and if so where it
ended, are questions which must be reserved for later consideration.
It is the general opinion that the next stage in the growth of the
Hexateuch (Genesis-Joshua) was the inclusion in a new edition of JE of
the Book of Deuteronomy in the form and dimensions which it had
attained in the generation after the fall of Judah; and, perhaps in
connection with this, the history of the conquest in Joshua as
narrated in JE was recast and much enlarged by an author who was full
of the ideas and phrases of Deuteronomy.
At a considerably later time, perhaps in the fifth century B.C., or
even in the fourth, the Origins of the Religious Institutions, a
product of the Persian period, with the mass of laws that had been
incorporated in it (see above p. 57), was united with JED, thus
bringing together into one volume all that was preserved about the
history down to the conquest of Canaan and all the various
institutions and collections of laws which were attributed to Moses.
The author of this comprehensive work, as was most natural, took P,
with its sharply marked divisions and outstanding epochs, as his
basis, and introduced in each period the parts of JE which seemed to
him to belong there. Where P had a parallel narrative, as in the story
of the Flood, he wove the strands together with more or less
ingenuity, omitting, in ordinary cases, only the most palpable
doublets. It is possible that the same author first incorporated in P
a large part of the so-called priestly laws; it is more certain that,
besides the harmonistic changes necessary in combining his sources, he
made numerous additions; but there is usually no way of distinguishing
his hand from that of earlier or of still later editors.
This hypothesis, which, for all its seeming complexity, is doubtless a
great simplification of the actual literary history, is accepted by
the majority of Old Testament scholars--with many variations in
particulars, it need hardly be said. It is commended to the historian,
not merely by the fact that it explains the confusion and
contradiction which reign in the Pentateuch and offers a solution of
its literary problems, but that, when the sources are distinguished
and reconstructed and their age and relations determined, they become
historical sources of great value for the times in which they were
respectively written, confirming, supplementing, or interpreting the
evidence of the historical books and the prophets, and contributing
important material of various kinds to our knowledge of civilization
in ancient Israel and of its religious development.