"When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a People of
strange language, Jacob was His sanctuary and Israel His dominion.
Jewish legend attempts to describe how God's sanctuary, the religion of
Israel and His dominion, the beginnings of Israel as a nation, arose in
the time between the Exodus from Egypt and the entrance into the Holy
Land.
Moses is regarded not only as the greatest religious guide of Israel,
but also as its first national leader; he is "the wisest (If the wise,
the father of the prophets," as well as " king in Jeshiurun, when the
heads of the people and the tribes of Israel gathered together." hence
his unique position in Jewish legend, neither Abraham, the friend of
God, nor Solomon, the wisest of all men, nor Elijah, the helper in time
of need. can lay claim to such a position.
Great religious and national institutions like the Sabbath, the
sanctuary, and many other " commandments of God revealed to Moses "
stand in a special relation to his life and work. The sanctification of
the Sabbath became quite a living thing to him through the miracle of
the Manna, and the first sanctuary was actually erected by Moses. The
life of Moses ceased, therefore, to be a thing of the past and became
closely interwoven with the every-day life of the nation.
The most natural way for the popular mind to connect existing
conditions with the past is the symbolic method. The present volume
contains, therefore, a number of symbolic explanations of certain laws,
as, for instance, the symbolical significance of the Tabernacle, which,
properly speaking, do not belong to the domain of legend. The life of
Moses, as conceived by Jewish legend, would, however, have been in
complete if the lines between Legend and Symbolism had been kept too
strictly. With this exception the arrangement and presentation of the
material in the third volume is the same as that in the two preceding
ones.
LOUIS G1NZBERG.
NEW YORK, March 2, 1911