Between Elim or the Yâm Sûph[192] and Mount Sinai lay the Wilderness of Sin. Sinai and Sin alike derived their names from Sin, the moon-god of Babylonia, whose worship had long since been brought by Babylonian conquest to the West. More than two thousand years before the Exodus the Babylonian conqueror, Naram-Sin, ‘the beloved of Sin,’ had carried his arms as far as the Sinaitic peninsula, and the inscriptions of Southern Arabia show that there also the Babylonian deity was adored.[193] It would seem probable that a temple dedicated to his service stood on the slopes of Mount Sinai.
Numerous attempts have been made to identify the mountain which the Israelites regarded as the scene of the first pronouncement of their Law. Most of these attempts are based on the belief that it is to be sought in the Sinaitic peninsula. The rival claims of Jebel el-’Ejmeh, Jebel Umm ’Alawî, Jebel Zebîr-Katarîna, Jebel Serbâl, and Jebel Mûsa have all been eagerly discussed. Jebel Mûsa alone can claim the support of tradition, though this does not go back further than the third or fourth century A.D., when the Christian hermits first settled in its neighbourhood. The Sinai of S. Paul and Josephus was still in the Arabia of Roman geography, the kingdom of which Petra was the capital.
In the geography of the Old Testament, however, Mount Sinai was in Edom. This is expressly stated in the Song of Deborah, one of the oldest products of Hebrew literature. Here we read (Judg. v. 4, 5), ‘Lord, when Thou wentest out of Seir, when Thou marchedst out of the field of Edom, the earth trembled, and the heavens dropped, the clouds also dropped water. The mountains melted from before the Lord, even that Sinai from before the Lord God of Israel.’ Similar testimony is borne by the blessing of Moses (Deut. xxxiii. 2), ‘The Lord came from Sinai, and rose up from Seir unto them; He shined forth from the Mount of Paran,’ an expression which appears in another form in Habakkuk (iii. 3), ‘God came from Teman, and the Holy One from the Mount of Paran.’ Teman denoted Southern Edom, and Paran was the desert which adjoined Edom on the west and Judah on the south, and in whose midst was the sanctuary of Kadesh-barnea.[194] In the Blessing of Moses the parallelism of Hebrew poetry requires that Sinai and Seir should be equivalent terms.
We must, then, look to the frontiers of Edom and the desert of Paran for the real Sinai of Hebrew history. But it is useless to seek for a more exact localisation until the mountains of Seir and the old kingdom of Edom have been explored. Then, if ever, the Sinai of the Pentateuch may be discovered. It would seem that it formed part of a range that was known as ‘Horeb,’ the ‘desert’ mountains, and as late as the age of Elijah it was still reverenced as ‘the Mount of God’ (1 Kings xix. 8).[195]
Before the Israelites actually reached the sacred mountain, they had to make more than one encampment in ‘the Wilderness of Sin.’ The itinerary in the book of Numbers gives the names of three—Dophkah, Alush, and Rephidim—the narrative mentions only the last. Rephidim, the ‘Encampments,’ was the scene of the first conflict the Israelites were called upon to face. Here they were attacked by the Amalekites, the Bedâwin tribes who still consider the desert as their own, and whose hand is against all that pass through it. The attack was repulsed, but not without loss, and the remembrance of it never faded from the minds of the Hebrew people. There was henceforth to be war between Amalek and Israel ‘from generation to generation,’ until the Bedâwin marauders of the desert should be destroyed. The Song of Deborah (Judg. v. 14) tells us how the struggle was continued after the settlement in Canaan, and the first Israelitish king did his utmost to root out these pests of the Hebrew borderland. Saul smote them, it is said, from Havilah to Shur (1 Sam. xv. 7), from the ‘sandy’ desert of Arabia Petræa to the great Wall of Egypt. And the Hebrew writer expressly adds that these were the same Amalekites as those who had lain in wait for Israel ‘in the way when he came up from Egypt.’ There were no Amalekites in the Sinaitic peninsula; the desert in which they ranged was that which adjoined Edom, and was known to the ancient Babylonians as the ‘land of Melukhkha.’ Hence it was that Edomites and Amalekites were mingled together, and that Amalek was counted by the genealogists a grandson of Esau.
The battle at Rephidim was followed by the visit of the father-in-law of Moses, Jethro, ‘the priest of Midian.’ The visit was natural, for the real Sinai lay on the frontier of Midian. It was while Moses was feeding the flock of Jethro that he had first come to it and received his commission from Yahveh. Here, therefore, at ‘the Mount of God,’ he was within hail of his old home.
Jethro’s visit marked the first step in the organisation of Israel. Under his guidance and counsel judges of various grades were appointed before whom minor cases could be brought, and each of whom was invested with a certain amount of power. The functions of the ‘judge’ were administrative and executive as well as legal; what was meant by the term we may learn from the book of Judges as well as from the Shophetim or judges who at one time took the place of the kings at Tyre. They corresponded closely with the higher officials in the Turkish provinces, who possess an undefined and in some respects absolute authority, subject only to the official who is immediately above them. The ‘judges’ established by Moses on Jethro’s advice derived their titles from the numerical extent of their jurisdiction. They were judges ‘of thousands,’ ‘of hundreds,’ ‘of fifties,’ and ‘of tens.’ The community was divided into ideal units, of larger and smaller size, the basis of the arrangement being the decimal system. The whole arrangement may have been of Midianite origin; at all events, in the Assyrian texts we hear also of a ‘captain of fifty’ and a ‘captain of ten.’[196]
Moses remained the supreme ‘judge’ and lawgiver of his people. To him alone all ‘great matters’ were referred, and from him came all the laws and ordinances, the rules and regulations which they were called upon to obey. The leader who had brought them safely out of ‘the house of bondage’ now became their recognised head and legislator. Moses ‘was king in Jeshurun,’ exercising all the authority in Israel which in later times belonged to the king.
Hardly was the political organisation of the new community completed before the Israelitish tribes reached the venerated sanctuary of Sinai, and encamped before ‘the Mount of God.’ The first object of their journey was accomplished, and the promise of Yahveh was fulfilled that they should ‘serve God’ on the mountain where He had appeared to their leader. Here at Sinai the earlier portion of the Mosaic legislation was promulgated. It was subsequently supplemented by the legislation at Kadesh-Barnea, that second resting-place of the tribes, where by the side of En-Mishpat, ‘the Spring of Judgment,’ they prepared themselves in the security of the heart of the desert for the future invasion of Canaan.
It was amid the terrors of a thunderstorm that Yahveh declared His laws to the people of Israel. While darkness rested on the summit of the mountain, broken only by the flashes of the lightning and the voice of the thunder, ‘the Ten Words’ were delivered to man. In their forefront stood that stern, uncompromising declaration of monotheism which henceforth marked the religion of Israel. They began with the commandment that Israel should have ‘no other gods before’ the Lord. Yahveh had brought them forth from Egypt, and Yahveh only must they therefore serve. The commands which followed were partly general, partly applicable to the Israelites alone. The prohibition to make ‘the likeness of any thing in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth,’ defined the character of the God before whom no other was to be worshipped. He had no form or attributes which could be represented by art; it was the gods of the Gentiles only of whom images or pictures could be made. Egypt had been a land of idols, and in leaving Egypt Yahveh required that the idols also should be left behind. In the simple life of the desert there was no place for art: here man was alone with his Creator, who revealed Himself in the light of the burning bush or the thunderings of the storm, not under the forms of the creatures He had made. The second commandment was part of the teaching which the wanderings in the desert were intended to enforce; and if Israel was to remain a ‘peculiar people,’ dedicated to the service of Yahveh, and secure from absorption into the nations that surrounded it, it was necessary that it should be fenced about with a law of puritanical strictness, which forbade the introduction of art under any shape. Art in the world of the Exodus was too closely interwoven with the religions of Egypt and Canaan and Babylonia to be other than a forbidden thing. The subsequent history of Israel proved how wise and needful had been the prohibition. The art which adorned the temple and palace of Solomon was followed by the erection of altars to the divinities of the heathen, and even in the wilderness the golden calf was worshipped in sight of Sinai itself.
The third and fourth commandments were, like the second, Israelitish rather than general in character. The third forbade taking in vain the name of Yahveh; the name of the national God of Israel which had been so specially revealed was too sacred to be lightly spoken of. The ‘name’ of Yahveh, in fact, was equivalent to Yahveh Himself, and to deal lightly with the name was to deal lightly with One of whose essence it was. The obligation to keep the Sabbath was part of the culture which Western Asia had received from Babylonia. Among the Babylonians the Sabbath had been observed from early times, and the institution seems to have gone back to a pre-Semitic period. At all events, it was denoted in Sumerian by a term which a cuneiform tablet explains as ‘a day of rest for the heart,’ and its Assyrian name of Sabattu or ‘Sabbath’ was even derived by the native etymologists from the two Sumerian words sa, ‘a heart,’ and bat, ‘to rest.’[197] In Babylonia and Assyria, as in Israel, the Sabbath was observed every seventh day, perhaps in accordance with the astronomical system which dedicated the seven days of the week to the seven planets of Babylonian science. These seven-day weeks, however, were based on the lunar months of the Babylonian year, the Sabbath or rest-day being on the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th of each month. There was, moreover, another Sabbath on the 19th of the month, that being the end of the seventh week from the first day of the preceding month. On these Sabbath days work of all kinds was forbidden to be performed. The king, it was laid down, ‘must not eat flesh that has been cooked over the coals or in the smoke, must not change the garments of his body, must not wear white clothing, must not offer sacrifices, must not ride in a chariot, must not issue royal decrees.’ Even the diviner was not allowed to ‘mutter incantations in a secret place.’ Nor was it permitted to take medicine.
With the other elements of Babylonian culture the institution of the Sabbath had made its way to the West. But at Sinai it was given a new and special application. Not only was it to be observed each seventh day of the week, irrespective of the beginning of the month, it became also a sign and mark of the covenant between Israel and its national God. In the book of Exodus, it is true, the reason given for keeping it is that Yahveh had rested on the seventh day from His work of creation—a reason which will hardly be accepted by the geologist—but in Deuteronomy (v. 15) it is more fittingly brought into direct connection with the deliverance from Egypt: ‘Remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm: therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the Sabbath day.’
The sanction of the fifth commandment is also one which applied to Israel alone: children were enjoined to honour their parents that their days might be long in the land which Yahveh had promised to give them. But the last five commandments are of general application, and accordingly no reason is given for keeping them derived from the accidents of Hebrew history. They apply to all mankind, at all times and in all parts of the world. Murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and covetousness are all crimes forbidden everywhere by the legal or moral code. But it is strange that lying and deceit are not included among them; in this respect the so-called negative confession, which the soul of the dead Egyptian was called upon to make in the next world, was more complete.[198] The lie, however, which does not involve false witness is apt to be condoned among the nations of the East.
The ten commandments were followed by a series of other laws, many of which were probably re-enactments of laws or regulations already in force. The law of retaliation, for instance (Exod. xxi. 23-25), is as old as human society; so also is the law that murder should be punished by death (xxi. 12). The law which punished the master for the murder of a slave if he died on the spot, but allowed him to go scot-free if the slave lingered for a day or two (xxi. 20, 21), had its parallel in ancient Babylonia, and the death-penalty exacted from the ox which had gored a man (xxi. 28-32) is a survival from the days when dumb animals and even inanimate objects were regarded as responsible for the injuries they had caused.[199] The regulations in regard to ‘a field or vineyard,’ or ‘the standing corn’ of a field (xxii. 5, 6), belonged to the land of Goshen or to Canaan, not to the life in the wilderness, and the dedication of the firstborn to God (xxii. 29, 30) was one of the most ancient articles of Semitic faith.
Equally applicable to Egypt or Canaan only are the injunctions to let the land lie fallow every seventh year (xxiii. 11), and to celebrate the three great feasts of the year (xxiii. 14-19). They were all feasts of the agriculturist rather than of the pastoral nomad. The year was ushered in with the spring festival of unleavened bread; then in the summer came the feast of harvest, and finally in the autumn—‘the end’ of the old civil year—the feast of the ingathering of the fruits.
Such were some of the laws promulgated under the shadow of the sacred mountain, when Israel first encamped before Mount Sinai. They concluded with an exhortation to march against Canaan. Yahveh declared that He would send His Angel before His people to guide them in their way, like the sukkalli or ‘angels’ of the Babylonian gods. Yahveh would fight for them, and they should drive out the older inhabitants of the land and take their place. They were in no wise to mingle with them or worship their gods; like the idolaters themselves, the idols they adored were to be destroyed. ‘From the Yâm Sûph to the sea of the Philistines and from the desert to the river’ were to be the bounds of their new home, a promise which was fulfilled in the kingdom of David.[200] That, too, extended to ‘the river’ Euphrates, and included the land of Edom with its two ports on the Yâm Sûph. ‘The sea of the Philistines’ is a new name for the Mediterranean, and bears testimony to the maritime fame those pirates from the north had already acquired.[201]
The laws thus promulgated at Sinai became the first code of Israel. They rested on the covenant that had been made between Yahveh and His people, of which the first clause was that they should worship none other gods but Him. The book in which they were written by Moses was accordingly called the Book of the Covenant, and its words were read aloud to the assembled multitude (Exod. xxiv. 7). The audience, it must be remembered, included not the Israelites only, but the ‘mixed multitude’ as well (Numb. xi. 4).
Once more Moses ascended the sacred mountain, to learn the ‘pattern’ of the tabernacle in which Yahveh was henceforth to be worshipped. It was to be a tent, moving along with the people, and containing all the objects of Israelitish veneration. Chief among these was the ark of the Covenant, surmounted by the mercy-seat and its two cherubim, between which Yahveh sat enthroned when He revealed Himself to His worshippers. Babylonia also had its arks, its mercy-seats, and its cherubim, and Nebuchadrezzar speaks of ‘the seat of the oracles’ in the great temple of Babylon ‘whereon at the festival of Zagmuku, the beginning of the year, on the 8th and 11th days, Bel, the god, seats himself, while the gods of heaven and earth reverently regard him, standing before him with bowed heads.’[202] The cherubim, indeed, were of Babylonian origin, and their presence in the tabernacle seems somewhat inconsistent with the prohibition to make a carven image. But the Israelites were the heirs of the ancient culture of Western Asia, and the tabernacle and its furniture embodied familiar forms of architecture and older religious conceptions.
In Egypt, too, the gods had their shrines, though these were usually boats which on the days of festival floated over the sacred lakes. Arks, however, were not unknown, and, as in Babylonia, contained the images of the gods. Sometimes, however, in Babylonia and Assyria, the ark, like that of Israel, had no image within it: the stone coffer, for instance, found by Mr. Hormuzd Rassam in the inner sanctuary of the little temple of Balawât contained two tables of alabaster on which the annals of king Assur-nazir-pal were engraved. The native workmen who discovered them naturally saw in them the two tables of stone which had been similarly placed by Moses in the ark (Deut. x. 5).[203]
The parallelism between the temples and ritual of Israel and of Babylonia is indeed close. The temple itself was of the same square or rectangular form. Outwardly it presented the appearance of a huge box. Within were the forecourt and court, while at the back came the Holy of Holies, with its altar and ark. There was, however, one distinguishing feature in the Babylonian temple which was lacking in the Hebrew tabernacle. That was the great tower which mounted up towards heaven, and the topmost stage of which seemed to approach the gods. In the absence of a tower the Hebrew tabernacle agreed with the temples of Canaan.
The Israelitish altars found their counterpart in Babylonia. So, too, did the table of shewbread, which similarly stood in the sanctuaries of the Chaldæan deities. The sacrifices and offerings were also similar. Babylonia had its daily sacrifice. its ‘meal-offering,’ and its offerings for sin; the same animals that were sacrificed to Yahveh were sacrificed also to Bel; and the Babylonian worshipper sought the favour of his gods with the same birds and the same fruits of the field. Oil, moreover, was used for purposes of anointing, and herein the ritual of Babylonia and Israel differed from that of Egypt, where oil was not employed.[204]
The contrast between Egypt and Israel, indeed, in the details of religious service was as great as the agreement in this respect between Israel and Babylonia. The children of Israel had never forgotten their Asiatic origin; throughout their long sojourn in Goshen they had preserved their old culture and habits of thought as tenaciously as they had preserved their language. Between them and the Egyptians, on the contrary, there had been antagonism from the outset. And this antagonism was accentuated by their lawgiver, who was naturally anxious to turn their thoughts from ‘the fleshpots of Egypt,’ and to prevent them from lapsing into Egyptian idolatries. Even the Egyptian legend of the Exodus bears witness to this fact.
In one detail, however, we find an analogy in Egypt. Professor Hommel[205] has pointed out that the breastplate of the high-priest, the mysterious Urim and Thummim, with its twelve engraved stones, is pictured on the breast of an Egyptian priest. Thus Seker-Khâbau, a high-priest of Memphis in the age of the nineteenth dynasty, wears upon his breast a sort of double network with four rows of precious stones set in it, each row consisting of three stones, alternately in the form of crosses and disks.[206] The Hebrew breastplate was used as an oracle, like the linen ephod which was worn under it, though how the future was divined from it we do not know. But in moments of danger it was usual to consult it; and the fact that ‘when Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets,’ is brought forward as a proof that he had been forsaken by his God (1 Sam. xxviii. 6). Like the lawgiver himself, it was the mouthpiece of Yahveh, and as such it bore the name of ‘the breastplate of judgment.’
The architects of the tabernacle and its adornment in precious metals were Bezaleel of Judah and Aholiab of Dan.[207] Modern criticism would hold them to be part of an elaborate fiction, of which the tabernacle was the subject. But the fiction would be too elaborate, too detailed, to be conceivable. Moreover, we have references to the tabernacle or ‘tent of meeting’ in the later history of Israel; and to declare these to be interpolations or the products of the same pen as that which invented the tabernacle itself may be an easy way of saving a theory, but it is not scientific. How far the description of the tabernacle is exact, how far it has not been coloured by the conceptions of a later age, is, of course, a question that may be asked. Those who maintain that the Pentateuch goes back in substance to the Mosaic age must nevertheless allow that it has undergone many changes and modifications before assuming its present shape. But, except in rare instances, it is impossible to indicate these changes with the assurance that the historian demands, and we must therefore be content with the probability that in the description of the tabernacle we have the revised version of an old story.
It has been asked how the materials used in the construction of the tabernacle could have been obtained in the desert, from whence came the silver and gold, the bronze and precious stones, the rich embroideries and cloths stained with Tyrian dye? Those who ask such questions have forgotten that the Israelites were not wild Bedâwin, and that they were laden with the spoils of Egypt. Like the invading hosts who attacked Egypt in the reign of Ramses III., they carried with them in their retreat the treasures of their late masters. And we are specially told that the gold was obtained from the bracelets and earrings and rings which were offered by the people and melted down.
It was during the second absence of Moses, when the conception and form of the tabernacle were being revealed to his mental vision, that his followers showed how little they understood the spirit and character of the legislation he was endeavouring to give them. They believed he had deserted them, and with his departure his religious teaching departed also. Israelitish religion was no slow growth: like Zoroastrianism or Buddhism or Christianity itself, it implies an individual founder who gave it the impress of his own individuality. Modern theories which attempt to explain it as a process of evolution start with a false assumption, and arrive consequently at false conclusions. None of the great religions of the world has been a product of evolution except in an indirect sense; they are all stamped with individualism, and owe their existence to the genius or inspiration of an individual. The religions of Babylonia and Egypt, as far as we know, were the results of a slow development; but Mosaism and Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Christianity derived not only their names, but their essence also from the individual founders who created them. We cannot understand the religion of Israel without the Law in its background, and we cannot understand the Law without the personality of its lawgiver.
The declaration that Israel should serve no other gods before Yahveh stood or fell with Moses, to whom Yahveh had revealed Himself. And Moses seemed to have vanished among the clouds that enveloped the summit of the sacred mountain. Their leader and his God had deserted them, and the people required another. Aaron the priest was ready to take the place of the lost lawgiver, and to provide them with a new deity and a new faith. And, after all, it was but an ancient faith, the faith of the kindred nations that surrounded them, their own faith, moreover, in the days before the Exodus. A calf was fashioned out of their golden earrings, and in it both priest and people beheld the god who had brought them out of Egypt. Aaron proclaimed a feast in honour of the divinity whose worship was celebrated with the same shameless rites as those which characterised the cult of the Semitic populations of Babylonia, of Canaan, and of Arabia.
But in the midst of the festival Moses suddenly reappeared. The sons of Levi rallied round their tribesman, and fell with him upon the rebels against his laws. Some of the latter were slain, the rest were terrorised, and the golden calf was ground to powder.[208] Aaron was forgiven, perhaps because he too had gone over to the side of Moses, perhaps because he was too powerful or too necessary to be removed.[209] But in his wrath at the defection of his people Moses had dashed to the ground the two stone tables on which the words of God had been written, and it was needful that they should be replaced. Once more, therefore, Moses left the camp and sought solitary communion with Yahveh on the summit of Sinai. Two fresh tables of stone were hewn, and with these he ascended the mountain.
We must not picture to ourselves heavy stelæ of stone such as the kings and princes of Egypt delighted to set up in their tombs and temples, or the ‘great slab’ which Isaiah was bidden to engrave (Isa. viii. 1). They were rather like the small alabaster slabs found in the ark of the Assyrian temple at Balawât, which measure only twelve and a half inches in length by eight in width and two and a half inches in thickness, and nevertheless contain a long and valuable text. They were, in fact, stone tablets cut in imitation of the clay tablets which served as books in the Asiatic world of the Exodus, and, like the latter, were probably inscribed with cuneiform characters. That these characters were used for ‘the language of Canaan’ we know from the existence of two seals of the age of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, now in the possession of M. de Clercq, which record the names of two Sidonians.[210] It is probable that the first draft of the Ten Commandments was also in the cuneiform script.
The book of Exodus ends fitly with the conclusion of the legislation which was promulgated from Mount Sinai and with the building of the tabernacle. Henceforward Yahveh was to reveal Himself to His people, not amid the clouds of a mountain in the wilderness, but in the sanctuary which they had raised in His honour. The first stage in the education of Israel had been completed; the Israelites had become a nation with a national God and a national sanctuary. Henceforth the sanctuary was to be the centre of their religious faith, the place where the law and judgment of God were to be declared, and to which the tribes were to resort that they might ask counsel from Him. The tabernacle, nomad though it still was, like the tribes themselves, had taken the place of ‘the mount of God,’ and with the legislation of Leviticus a new book of the Pentateuch begins.
We are not to suppose that this legislation has descended to us from the age of Moses without addition and change. Such a belief would be contrary to the history of other religious law-books, or indeed to historical probability. As the utterances of the Hebrew prophets were modified or enlarged according to the circumstances of the successive ages to which they were applied, so too the Mosaic legislation must have undergone revision and enlargement. Laws and regulations which suited the life in the desert needed adaptation to the changed conditions of life in Canaan; tribes fresh from their servitude in Egypt required different guidance from that required by a nation of conquerors; and the details of a legislation which was adapted to the period of Moses would have been wholly unsuited to the period of the Judges, and still more to the period of the Kings. So far as the change and modifications are concerned, which all institutions in this world must necessarily undergo, the Mosaic legislation was a matter of growth. But it was the form and details that changed, not the substance of the legislation. The spirit and conceptions of the legislator had imprinted themselves too indelibly upon it ever to be obliterated. The reiteration of the same law in various forms, and the confused arrangement of many of them, may indeed show that later hands have been at work, but in essence and origin they remain his. The book of Leviticus, modernised though it may be, nevertheless goes back to the age of Moses.
Even in the age of Moses many of its regulations were not new. We find their parallels in Babylonia and Canaan, and they had doubtless long been among the unwritten institutions of Israel. But Moses gave them a new sanction and a new adaptation. The Israelites must have had priests like the nations round about them; but it was Moses who defined the priestly character of the sons of Aaron, and consecrated his own tribe to the service of Yahveh. If Yahveh was the national God of Israel, He was also in a special way the tribal God of Levi.
We still know too little about the details of Babylonian ritual to be able to compare it with the religious institutions of Israel. We know, however, that the peace-offerings and trespass-offerings of the Mosaic Law were represented in it, that even the heave-offerings found in it their counterpart, and that solemn fasts and days of atonement were observed in Babylonia and Assyria as well as among the Israelites. In Babylonia, too, a distinction was made between clean and unclean animals, and, as in Israel (Lev. xxi. 17-23), none who was maimed or diseased was allowed to minister to the gods. Purification with water, moreover, played much the same part in Babylonian ritual that it played in the ritual of the Israelites, and tithes were exacted for the support of the service in the temples.
Similar regulations prevailed in Canaan, as we may learn from the Phœnician sacrificial tariffs found at Carthage and Marseilles. Both are mutilated, but the missing portions of the one can to a large extent be supplied from the other. The text thus obtained is as follows:—
‘In the temple of Baal the following tariff of offerings shall be observed which was prescribed in the time of the judge ...-Baal, the son of Bod-Tanit, the son of Bod-Ashmun, and in the time of Halzi-Baal, the judge, the son of Bod-Ashmun the son of Halzi-Baal, and their comrades. For an ox as a full-offering, whether it be a prayer-offering or a full thank-offering, the priests shall receive ten shekels of silver for each beast, and if it be a full-offering, the priests shall receive besides this three hundred shekels’ weight of flesh. And for a prayer-offering they shall receive besides the small joints (?) and the roast (?), but the skin and the haunches and the feet and the rest of the flesh shall belong to the offerer. For a bullock which has horns, but is not yet broken in and made to serve, or for a ram, as a full-offering, whether it be a prayer-offering or a full thank-offering, the priests shall receive five shekels of silver for each beast, and if it be a full-offering they shall receive besides this one hundred and fifty shekels’ weight of flesh; and for a prayer-offering the small joints (?) and the roast, but the skin and the haunches and the feet and the rest of the flesh shall belong to the offerer. For a sheep or a goat as a full-offering, whether it be a prayer-offering or a full thank-offering, the priests shall receive one shekel of silver and two zar for each beast; and in the case of a prayer-offering they shall have besides this the small joints (?) and the roast (?), but the skin and the haunches and the feet and the rest of the flesh shall belong to the offerer. For a lamb or a kid or a fawn as a full-offering, whether it be a prayer-offering or a full thank-offering, the priests shall receive three-fourths of a shekel of silver and two zar for each beast; and in the case of a prayer-offering they shall have besides this the small joints (?) and the roast (?), but the skin and the haunches and the feet and the rest of the flesh shall belong to the offerer. For a bird, whether wild or tame, as a full-offering, whether it be shetseph or khazuth, the priests shall receive three-fourths of a shekel of silver and two zar for each bird, and [a certain amount of flesh besides]. For a bird, or for the offering of the firstborn of an animal, or for a meal-offering, or for an offering with oil, the priests shall receive ten pieces of gold for each.... In the case of every prayer-offering which is offered to the gods, the priests shall receive the small joints (?) and the roast (?); and the prayer-offering ... for a cake and for milk and for fat, and for every offering which is offered without blood.... For every offering which is brought by a poor man in cattle or birds, the priests shall receive nothing.... Anything leprous or scabby or lean is forbidden, and no one as regards that which he offers shall taste of the blood of the dead. The tariff for each offering shall be according to that which is prescribed in this publication.... As for every offering which is not prescribed in this table, and which is not made according to the regulations which have been published in the time of ...-Baal the son of Bod-Tanit, and of Bod-Ashmun the son of Halzi-Baal, and of their comrades, every priest who accepts the offering which is not included in that which is prescribed in this table shall be punished.... As for the property of the offerer who does not discharge his debt for his offering [it shall be taken from him].’[211]
The general resemblances between these regulations and those of the Levitical law are obvious. In both we have the same kind of sacrifices and offerings—the ox, the sheep and the goat, the lamb and kid, birds and cakes, meal and oil. Silver shekels were to be paid to the priests, like the silver shekels of the sanctuary exacted in certain cases from the Israelite (Lev. v. 15, xxvii. 25), and the blood and the fat were to be offered to the gods. The necessities of the poor man were remembered as they were in the Levitical law (Lev. v. 7, xii. 8, xiv. 21), and whatever was ‘leprous or scabby or lean’ was forbidden to be brought to the altar. The firstborn could be claimed by Baal as they were claimed by Yahveh, and the offerer was not permitted to taste of the blood of the slain beast (compare Lev. vii. 26, 27). The ‘full-offerings’ of the Phœnician tariffs mean that the whole of the victim had been given to the gods, and so correspond with the burnt sacrifices of the Mosaic Code. It is unfortunate that we cannot fix with certainty the exact signification of the words denoting the parts of the animal which were the due of the priests, and consequently cannot be sure whether or not they answer to the breast and shoulder of the peace-offering, which under the Levitical legislation were assigned to the sons of Aaron (Lev. vii. 33, 34).
It is true that the tariffs of Carthage and Marseilles belong to a late period. But they embody regulations and usages which were common to the Semitic world of Western Asia, as we may gather from a comparison of them with the ritual of Babylonia, and which therefore must have been—at least in substance—of great antiquity. Two conclusions result from this fact. On the one hand the Levitical legislation cannot have been the invention of the Exilic age, as some adventurous critics have believed; on the other hand, it is based on customs and ideas which must have been prevalent in Israel long before the birth of Moses. The Hebrew legislator did but develop, modify, and define existing rites; the Levitical Code is not a new creation, but a body of religious and ritual laws which has been formed deliberately and with individual effort out of older customs and habits of thought. Doubtless there are laws and regulations which were the immediate creation of the lawgiver; from time to time new cases arose for which special legislation was needed, and of which the cases of Nadab and Abihu (Lev. x. 1-3), of the son of Shelomith and the Egyptian (Lev. xxiv. 10-16), and of the daughters of Zelophehad (Numb. xxvii. 1-11) are examples. To assume that such cases originated in the laws which they illustrated, and not the reverse, is a gratuitous supposition which is contradicted by the history of modern European law.[212]
Whether the Day of Atonement, the Feast of Trumpets on the first of each seventh month and the Year of Jubilee were also new creations of the lawgiver, may be questioned. The special legislation connected with them, as well as their association with the Exodus out of Egypt, was certainly peculiar to the Levitical code, but the same is true of the three older feasts of the Semitic calendar. These too were made to illustrate the events of Israelitish history, and new regulations were laid down for their observance. The Day of Atonement, however, had its counterpart in Babylonia and Assyria. There also in periods of danger or distress, days of humiliation and fasting were prescribed, and prayers and offerings were made to the gods that they might forgive the sins of the people. When at the beginning of Esar-haddon’s reign Assyria was threatened by the Kimmerian invasion, ‘religious ordinances and holy days’ were proclaimed by the priests for ‘a hundred days and a hundred nights,’ and the sun-god was besought to remove the sin of his worshippers.[213] So, again, after the suppression of the Babylonian revolt, Assur-bani-pal tells us that ‘by the command of the prophets I purified their sanctuaries and cleaned their streets which had been defiled. Their wrathful gods and angry goddesses I tranquillised with prayers and penitential hymns. Their daily sacrifice, which had been discontinued, I restored in peace and established again as it had been before.’ The Feast of Trumpets reminds us that in Babylonia the first day of each month was kept as a Sabbath, and the Babylonian analogy is still more manifest in the case of the Feast of Pentecost, on ‘the morrow after the seventh Sabbath,’ after the offering of the firstfruits. This ‘seventh Sabbath’ is the Babylonian Sabbath, on the 19th of the month, forty-nine days after the first Sabbath of the preceding month. The Year of Jubilee was a Babylonian institution of exceeding antiquity. We learn from classical writers[214] that once each year in the month of July the feast of Sakea was held at Babylon, when the slave changed places with his master, and for five days lived and was clothed as a free man. We can now carry the history of the institution back to the age of the third dynasty of Ur. Gudea, the high-priest of Lagas, B.C. 2700, states in his inscriptions that after he had finished building the temple of E-ninnu, he celebrated a festival; and ‘for seven days no obedience was exacted; the female slave became the equal of her mistress, and the male slave the equal of his master; the subject became the equal of the chief; and all that was evil was removed from the temple.’[215]
The Year of Jubilee, it is clear, was but an adaptation and improvement of one of the oldest institutions of Babylonian culture. To assert that, together with the other holy days of the Levitical Code, it was borrowed from Babylonia in the age of the Exile, is to assert what not only cannot be proved, but is in the highest degree improbable. In the age of the Exile, Babylonia had become a second Egypt to the Jews, and the religious party among them regarded with abhorrence all that was specifically Babylonian. The feasts consecrated to ‘Bel and Nebo,’ the rites associated with the worship of the Babylonian gods, were the last things that would be adopted or adapted by a pious Jew. Moreover, we now know that the culture which had been carried from Chaldæa to the west long before the period of the Exodus included the gods and sacred rites of the Babylonians. So distinctive a characteristic of it as ‘the feast of Sakea,’ or days of prayer and humiliation for ‘the removal of sin,’ would not be forgotten when Anu and Moloch and Ashtoreth and Nin-ip made their way to Canaan.
There are passages in the Levitical Code which look back very distinctly to Egypt. Thus marriage with a sister, whether a full sister or a half-sister, is forbidden (Lev. xviii. 9). This was one of ‘the doings of the land of Egypt’ (Lev. xviii. 3) which had been consecrated there both by the civil and by the religious law, and continued in force down to the time of the Roman conquest. So, too, tattooing the flesh, and shaving the head or lacerating the flesh for the dead, were prohibited (Lev. xix. 27, 28, xxi. 5), all of them practices which are still common in the valley of the Nile. But, on the whole, it is remarkable how entirely Egypt is ignored. The Mosaic legislation seems intentionally to close its eyes to all things Egyptian, and, wherever it is possible, to make enactments which tacitly contradict or set aside the beliefs and customs of Egypt. Even the doctrine of the resurrection, as Bishop Warburton long ago observed, is carefully dropped out of sight. There is no reference to it, no sign that obedience to the laws of Yahveh will benefit the Israelite in any other world than this. On any theory of the age and authorship of the Levitical law such a silence is remarkable. Indeed, if the law is as late as the epoch of the Babylonish exile the silence would be more than remarkable, since the doctrine of a future life and of the power of the god Merodach to raise the dead to life had been firmly established for centuries among the Babylonians. A belief in the resurrection, or at all events, in a life beyond the grave, could not but have betrayed itself in the atmosphere of the Exile. For those, however, who had the Egyptian house of bondage immediately behind them, and who feared lest the tribes in the desert might again lust after the flesh-pots and green pastures of the Delta, the silence is intelligible. The doctrine was closely associated with Egyptian idolatry, with Osiris and Anubis, with the assessors of the dead, and with the pictured polytheism of the Egyptian monuments.
The Levitical legislation was accompanied by a census of the people. What credit we are to attach to the numbers which have been handed down is a question that has been much debated. On the one hand it has been shown that the vast multitude presupposed by them could not have moved about in the desert, as it is represented to have done, and that many of the regulations in the Levitical Code could not have been carried out with a nomad population of over two millions.[216] On the other hand, the 600,000 men above twenty years of age who were ‘able to go forth to war’ are specified again and again, and the same number is implied in all the calculations that are made of the numerical strength of Israel. It is also the sum of the numbers assigned to the fighting men of the individual tribes. Throughout the history the ciphers are consistent with one another. If the number is exaggerated, it it is an exaggeration which has been consistently adhered to. We must either accept it, or believe that it belongs to an artificial system which has been framed with deliberate intention. But the same may be said of the chronology of the early patriarchs as well as of the chronology of the kings of Israel and Judah, and in both instances we know that the system is wrong. In the case of the chronology of the early patriarchs, indeed, there are at least three rival systems, all equally complete and self-coherent, while the chronology of the kings involves such hopeless anachronisms as have long since caused it to be rejected by the historian. The difficulties presented by the census of the Israelites in the wilderness are similar in character to the anachronisms presented by the chronology of the kings, and the same reasons which lead us to reject the one ought equally to induce us to reject the other.
Nevertheless, the chronology of the kings is not wholly incorrect. The length of reign assigned to the several kings is usually right. It is only the system into which it has been fitted that is at fault. And probably this is also the case as regards the numbering of the tribes of Israel. It may be that the 8580 Levites and the 22,273 firstborn males are authentic, and that the increase of the population by 3550 (Exod. xxxviii. 26; Numb. i. 46) a few months after the flight from Egypt, and its decrease by 1820 at the end of the wanderings (Numb. xxvi. 51), rest on a foundation of fact. Even the traditional number of 600,000 may have better support than its being a multiple of the Babylonian soss and ner.[217] Perhaps it originally represented the whole body of fugitives from Egypt.
At all events, some light may be thrown on the matter by a comparison of the numbers given in the Pentateuch with those of the Libyans and their allies as recorded in the inscription of Meneptah. Of the Libyans, 6365 men were slain and 230 (including 12 women) were captured; of their allies, 2370 fell on the field of battle, and 9146 were taken prisoners, while no less than 9111 bronze swords were taken from the Maxyes. We gather from the history of the battle that few, if any, of the enemy escaped. The whole force of fighting men, therefore, would not have amounted to very much over 25,000. And yet this was one of the most formidable hosts that had invaded Egypt; and its male population had not been decimated by the tyranny of an Egyptian king. On the other hand, a population of 2,000,000 in the land of Goshen is inconceivable, and there would hardly have been room in the eastern Delta for 600,000 able-bodied brickmakers. The Sweet-water Canal was dug by only 25,000 fellahin, though 250,000 worked at the Mahmudîya Canal, and for some years 20,000 fresh labourers were sent monthly to excavate the Suez Canal. Even in the desert, moreover, the Egyptians required a considerable number of troops to guard the serfs or convicts who worked for them. At Hammamât, for example, in the reign of Ramses IV., the 2000 bondservants of the temples who effected the transport of the stone were attended by 5000 soldiers, 800 mercenaries, and 200 officers; and provisions for this large body of men were carried across the desert in ten waggons, each drawn by six pairs of oxen, and laden with bread, meat, and cakes.[218] For 600,000 Israelites the whole Egyptian army would not have sufficed. According to Manetho, the Hyksos, when driven from Egypt, did not number more than 240,000 in all.
We cannot, then, look upon the numbers that have come down to us as exact. The occupants of the Israelitish camp, continually under the personal supervision of Moses, and constantly required to assemble before the tabernacle, could not have been a very large body of men. Had the fighting population amounted to anything like the number recorded, there would have been no need of avoiding ‘the way of the land of the Philistines,’ lest the people should ‘see war,’ or of doubting the issue of the combat at Rephidim with the Bedâwin tribes.
The year after the flight from Egypt, Sinai, ‘the mount of God,’ was left behind. The service that Yahveh required had been performed, the legislation revealed there had been completed, and the tabernacle and ark had been made. Israel had henceforth another religious centre than the sacred mountain of the desert, which had now fulfilled its part in the religious training of the tribes. Canaan, and not the wilderness, was the destined home of the descendants of Jacob, and to Canaan the ark and the tabernacle were to accompany them.
The guiding column of cloud moved accordingly from the wilderness of Sinai to that of Paran (Numb. x. 12). This is in harmony with the rest of Old Testament geography. In the blessing of Moses (Deut. xxxiii. 2) it is said that when God came from Sinai, ‘He shined forth from the mount of Paran,’ and in Habakkuk (iii. 3) the mount of Paran takes the place of Sinai itself. Paran, in fact, was the desert which formed not only the southern boundary of Canaan, but also the western frontier of Edom. The real Mount Sinai of Hebrew geography, therefore, was upon the Edomite border; and since Paran was the home of Ishmael (Gen. xxi. 21), it is not surprising that Esau should have taken one of Ishmael’s daughters to wife (Gen. xxxvi. 3).
Before Sinai was left, however, Hobab the Midianite, the brother-in-law of Moses, proposed to return to his own land. Sinai adjoined Midian, if indeed it was not included in Midianitish territory, and here, therefore, if at all, it was needful for the Midianite chief to quit the Israelitish camp. But his knowledge of the district was too valuable to be lost, and Moses persuaded him to remain with the Israelitish tribes and guide them to the places where they should encamp. The Kenites in later days traced their descent to him (Judg. i. 16, iv. 11), and the rocky nest of the Kenites was visible from the heights of Moab, perhaps in Petra itself (Numb. xxiv. 21).
The geographical details which follow are confused. In the itinerary (Numb. xxxiii. 15, 16) the camp is transported at once from the wilderness of Sinai to Kibroth-hattaavah. In the narrative, however, we are told that the people first went ‘three days’ journey,’ and then rested at Taberah, which seems to be identified with Kibroth-hattaavah; from thence they travelled to Hazeroth, and then pitched their tents ‘in the wilderness of Paran.’ On the other hand, the book of Deuteronomy (ix. 22) distinguishes between Taberah and Kibroth-hattaavah, and interpolates Massah between them, which, according to Exod. xvii. 7, was visited before Sinai. If we follow the official record, we must suppose that the incident connected with Taberah has been inserted in the wrong place, or else that Taberah and Kibroth-hattaavah are, like Massah and Meribah, one and the same. At all events, all these encampments must have lain on the outskirts of the desert of Paran. Hazeroth, ‘the enclosures,’ was a common name for the Bedâwin encampments in the desert south of Judah, and the Hazeroth mentioned here is doubtless that of which we read in Deut. i. 1. It lay near Paran on the borders of the plains of Moab.
Taberah, it was said, derived its name from the fire which had here consumed some of the people, while Kibroth-hattaavah marked the ‘graves’ of the murmurers who had died from a surfeit of quails. Similar flights of quails still visit the Egyptian Delta in the early spring, when the sky is sometimes overshadowed by myriads of birds. Hazeroth was remembered for the rebellion of Aaron and Miriam against their brother Moses, and the punishment that Miriam the prophetess had in consequence to endure. The authority of Moses was disputed because he had married an Ethiopian wife. It is the only passage in the Pentateuch where this ‘Cushite’ wife is alluded to; elsewhere we hear only of Zipporah the Midianitess. But it points to a traditional recollection of the days when Moses was still Messu, the Egyptian prince, and when, like that other Messu, his contemporary, he might have been the Egyptian governor of Ethiopia.[219] The objection to the Ethiopian wife came but ill from Aaron, whose grandson bore the Egyptian name of Phinehas, Pi-nehasi, ‘the negro.’ But Yahveh declared that the Cushite affinities of Moses were no bar to his being a true servant of the God of Israel and the divinely-appointed leader of the tribes. To him Yahveh had revealed His will openly, and as it were face to face; not, as to other prophets, in waking visions and dreams.
In the heart of the wilderness of Paran was the venerable sanctuary of Kadesh-barnea. Centuries before, the army of Chedor-laomer had swept through it, slaughtering its Amalekite inhabitants, and drinking the water of En-Mishpat, ‘the Spring of Judgment,’ where the shêkhs of the desert had given laws to their people. Its site has been found again in our own days by Dr. John Rowlands and Dr. Clay Trumbull.[220] The spring of clear water which fills the oasis with life and verdure is still called ’Ain Qadîs, the ‘Spring of Kadesh.’ It rises at the foot of a limestone cliff, in which a two-chambered tomb has been cut in early times, in the hollow of an amphitheatre of hills. The hills form a block of mountains which occupy the central part of the desert, midway between El-Arîsh and Mount Hor, and more than forty miles to the south of Sebaita, the supposed site of Hormah.
Kadesh, the ‘Sanctuary,’ was destined to be the second resting-place and scene of Israelitish legislation. The work which had been left unfinished at Sinai was completed here. The will of Yahveh, which had first been declared on the summit of the mountain, was now to be more fully unfolded among the soft surroundings of the oasis in the valley. Sinai and Kadesh-barnea were the two schools of the desert in which Israel was trained.
But Kadesh-barnea had other advantages as well. It was on the high-road from the desert to Canaan, it commanded the approach to the latter country, and nevertheless within its rocky barriers the Israelites were safe from attack. Here, therefore, at Kadesh-barnea, the first preparations were made for the invasion of Palestine. Twelve scouts were sent, in Egyptian fashion, to explore the land, and bring back a report of its capabilities for defence. They made their way as far as Hebron,[221] where a popular etymology derived the name of the valley of Eshcol from the cluster of grapes they had cut there.[222] But the report with which they returned was discouraging. The Amorites were tall and strong; by their side the children of Israel appeared but as grasshoppers; while the cities in which they dwelt were ‘very great,’ and walled, as it were, to heaven. It was folly for the desert tribes to dream of assaulting them; that would need the disciplined army of a Pharaoh, with its chariots and horses and machines for scaling the walls. ‘We be not able to go up against the people,’ they declared, ‘for they are stronger than we.’
Here, then, was an end to all the promises of Moses. The Promised Land was in sight, and they were excluded from it for ever. ‘Let us make another captain,’ they cried, ‘and return to Egypt.’ The leader who had brought them thus far had failed on the very threshold of their goal. The Hyksos, when they forsook Egypt, had found a refuge in Canaan; but the barren wastes of the wilderness were all that the Israelites could expect. It was little wonder that a rebellion broke out in the Israelitish camp, and that the supporters of Moses were threatened with stoning.
But experience soon showed that the Israelitish tribes were as yet no match for the people whose possessions they desired to seize. Despite the report of the spies, they climbed the cliff which formed the northern boundary of the oasis, and attempted to force their way beyond the frontiers of Canaan. But their enemies proved the stronger. When Seti I. had attacked the frontier fortress of Canaan, not far from Hebron, he had found it defended by Shasu or Bedâwin, and so, too, the Israelites now found themselves confronted not by the Canaanites only, but also by their Amalekite or Bedâwin allies. The assailants were utterly defeated and ‘discomfited even unto Hormah.’
Hormah was more usually known as Zephath (Judg. i. 17), and its site must be looked for south of Tell ’Arad. It was one of the cities of Palestine which Thothmes III. claims to have captured, and it lay towards the southern end of the Dead Sea, on the road to Hazezon Tamar (Gen. xiv. 7). The mention of it makes it clear that the Israelitish invasion of Canaan had been a serious attempt. The invaders had marched along the same military road as that followed by Chedor-laomer, and had penetrated as far as the hill country of what was afterwards Judah. But they did not succeed in getting further, and their shattered relics must have made their way with difficulty back to the fastness of Kadesh. The first attempt to conquer Palestine had failed.[223]
The disaster was never forgotten. It was some years before the Israelites again attempted to cross the Canaanitish boundary, and when they did so it was from a different quarter. A new generation had to grow up before they were strong enough to renew the attack; indeed, it is probable that most of the fighting men had been lost in the earlier expedition. When at last Israel felt able once more to march against Canaan, it was already in possession of land on the east of the Jordan, but its great ‘captain’ and lawgiver was dead. Israelitish history found its leader to the conquest of Palestine not in Moses, but in Joshua.
The history of the period that followed the disaster left little that was worth recording. The chief incidents of the life in the desert had been crowded into the first few months of the wanderings. But it was during this later period that trouble arose with Moses’ own tribesmen, the Levites. It was again a question of authority. The democratic spirit of the Israelites resented claims to superior power; and just as Aaron and Miriam had disputed the authority of Moses, so now the Levites disputed that of Aaron. It was a dispute which, if we are to believe modern criticism, was continued into later Jewish history, when it ended, as it did in the desert, in the triumph of the high-priest.
Aaron and his sons, like Moses, were at the outset Levites, and as such doubtless had no claim to superior sanctity and power. But circumstances had placed them at the head of their tribe; and when that tribe became the ministers of the sanctuary, Aaron and his descendants necessarily occupied the foremost place in its services. They were in a special sense the guardians of the ark, and thus alone privileged to enter the Holy of Holies, where Yahveh revealed Himself above the cherubim. As long as there was but one sanctuary, it was easy to maintain the distinction between the priest of the house of Aaron and the ordinary Levite. But with the conquest of Canaan all this was changed. Sanctuaries were multiplied all over the land; the old high-places became seats of the worship of Yahveh, and there were rival centres of religious authority, like that of Baal-berith at Shechem, or that of the graven image at Dan (Judg. xviii. 14, etc.). Local temples or tabernacles took the place of the one that was hallowed by the presence of the ark, and the line of Aaron fell into the background. In the age of national trouble and disintegration which preceded the accession of Saul, the character of the high-priestly family itself had much to do with the loss of its power and influence. Eli, its representative at Shiloh, was old and feeble, and his sons set at defiance the Mosaic law, which required that Yahveh’s portion of the sacrifice should be burned on the altar before the priests received their share, and so they made ‘the offering of the Lord’ to be ‘abhorred.’ The capture of the ark by the Philistines and the massacre of the priests at Nob by order of Saul completed the dissolution of the high-priestly authority; and when the temple at Jerusalem was built under Solomon, a new branch of the family of Aaron was appointed to minister in it, and his descendants became little more than hereditary court-chaplains. It has even been doubted whether there was any high-priest, properly so called, under the kings; if there were, he had been divested of the power and position which had been given him by the Levitical law.
To conclude, however, as has sometimes been done by modern criticism, that because the priests of Solomon’s temple were no longer the high-priests of the Pentateuchal law, therefore there had been no such high-priests at all, is contrary to the evidence of archæology. Monumental discovery has disclosed the fact that among the Semitic kinsmen of the Israelites as well as in Chaldæa the high-priest preceded the king. Not to speak of the patesis or high-priests of the Babylonian cities who exercised royal sway within the limits of their territories, like the Popes within the limits of the Romagna, the earliest rulers both of Assyria and of Saba or Sheba in Southern Arabia were high-priests. The Assyrian kings followed the high-priests of the god Assur, and the Makârib or ‘high-priests’ of Saba came before the kings. Israel also had the same experience. The Israelitish kings appeared at a comparatively late period on the scene of Hebrew history, and Saul was preceded by the high-priest Eli.
In the book of Deuteronomy, it is true, we do not find the distinction between ‘the priests, the sons of Aaron,’ and the rest of the Levites that is made in the Levitical law. Here the priests are all alike called Levites; it is not ‘the priests, the sons of Aaron,’ but ‘the priests the Levites’ who are appointed to perform the highest offices of the sanctuary. How far the phraseology is due to a different conception of the Mosaic law, or how far it testifies to an older usage of language, is a question which need not concern us; what is important to observe is that the difference of expression is linguistic and not historical. Historically all the priests were Levites, though from the outset some of them must have been assigned higher positions than others, and have been invested with more sacred functions. The Levitical law draws the distinction which the book of Deuteronomy is not so careful to do. In fact, there was not the same necessity for doing so in the case of the Deuteronomic retrospect.
The tabernacle had been constructed, its services arranged, and the grades and duties of its ministers appointed. Now, therefore, disappointed in their hope of invading Canaan from the south, the Israelites settled themselves tranquilly at Kadesh, in the heart of the wilderness of Zin, and slowly developed into a strong and united community. Here it was, by the waters of En-Mishpat, that the legislation of Moses was completed, and the undisciplined horde of fugitive serfs from Egypt was moulded into a formidable band of warriors knit together by a common religion and worship, and continually gathering increased confidence in its own strength.[224]
How long the Israelites remained in their desert fastness we do not know. A time came when they once more resumed their wanderings, or at all events a portion of them must have done so. The Itinerary in Numb. xxxiii. gives a long list of their encampments before they again found themselves in the oasis of Kadesh. One of the places at which they rested was Mount Shapher, another was Moseroth, of which we hear in the book of Deuteronomy (x. 6). Moseroth was in the territory of the Horite tribe of Beni-Yaakan,[225] and it was from the Beeroth or ‘Wells’ of the Beni-Yaakan—Hashmonah, as it is called in the Itinerary—that they had made their way to it.
At Mosera or Moseroth, according to Deuteronomy, Aaron died, and was succeeded in his office by his son Eleazar. The statement, however, is not easily reconcileable with what we are told in the book of Numbers. There it is said that the death of the high-priest took place on the summit of Mount Hor after the departure from Kadesh.[226] The fact that Gudgodah was also called Hor-hagidgad, ‘the mountain of clefts,’ may have been the cause of the transference.
But it must be remembered that Kadesh was merely the headquarters of Israel during its weary years of waiting in the wilderness. The scanty notice of the unsuccessful invasion of Southern Palestine shows that it was only the camp as a whole which remained fixed there. Like the Bedâwin of to-day, portions of the tribes made distant expeditions, and the Itinerary may relate rather to their encampments than to that of the stationary part of the people. Kadesh was a sort of centre from which fragments of the main body could be sent forth to scour the frontiers of Seir and Edom, or to encamp at the foot of Ezion-geber on the Yâm Sûph.
In the book of Numbers (xxi. 14, 15) there is a quotation from ‘the Book of the Wars of the Lord,’ one of the old documents on which the history of Israel in the wilderness is based. The introductory words are unintelligible as they stand, thus testifying to the antiquity of the passage; all that can be made out of them is that they relate not only to the struggle between Israel and the Amorites at ‘the brooks of Arnon,’ but also to a previous war carried on by the Israelites ‘in Suphah,’ near the gulf of Aqaba.[227] Here the Israelites would have been on the borders of Edom, if indeed they were not in Edom itself; and it is therefore noticeable that the Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramses III., whose reign coincided with the period of the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert, declares that he had ‘smitten the Shasu (or Bedâwin) tribes of Seir and plundered their tents’ (ohélu). Ramses III. was the only Pharaoh of Egypt who had ventured to attack the Edomite Bedâwin in their mountain strongholds; while Canaan and the plateau east of the Jordan had been Egyptian provinces the inhabitants of Mount Seir had retained their independence. The synchronism, therefore, of this Egyptian expedition against, not the Edomites only, but ‘the Bedâwin of Seir’ and the war in which Israel was engaged ‘in Suphah,’ is, at least, worthy of notice. It may be that part of the training undergone by the Israelites in the desert for their future conquest of Canaan was the help they had rendered their kinsfolk of Edom in their contest with the old taskmasters of the Hebrew tribes.
However this may be, of the three leaders who had brought Israel out of the house of bondage, Moses alone survived the long sojourn at Kadesh. Miriam had died there; the death of Aaron also, if we may trust Deuteronomy, had taken place before the final departure from the great desert sanctuary. In any case, it had happened in sight of Kadesh, and before the march had commenced which was to lead the Israelitish tribes to the Promised Land. The time had now arrived when Israel felt strong enough once more to attempt its conquest; not, this time, by the road through the mountains of the south along which Chedor-laomer had marched to Kadesh, but from the plateau eastward of the Jordan where the kindred nations of Moab and Ammon had already established themselves. Here, too, the Israelites made their first permanent settlements in the land which they had marked out for their own.