[200]. The exhortation, together with some of the laws, is given again in a somewhat changed form in Exod. xxxiv. 10-26.
[201]. The name belongs to the period when the Philistines were infesting the sea, before they had settled on the coast of Palestine, and indicates the early date of the passage in which it occurs. Perhaps the Greek tradition of the command of the sea by the Kretan Minos is a reminiscence of the same period.
[202]. W. A. I. i. 54, Col. ii. 54 sqq.
[203]. Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology, vii. 1, pp. 53, 54.
[204]. A contract-tablet dated in the 32nd year of Nebuchadrezzar, and published by Dr. Strassmaier (Inschriften von Nabuchodonoser, No. 217), gives us an insight into the details of Babylonian sacrifices, though, unfortunately, the signification of many of the technical words employed in it is doubtful or unknown. The tablet begins as follows: ‘Izkur-Merodach the son of Imbiya the son of Ilei-Merodach of his own free will has given for the future to Nebo-balásu-ikbi the son of Kuddinu the son of Ilei-Merodach the slaughterers of the oxen and sheep for the sacrifices of the king, the prescribed offerings, the peace-offerings (?) of the whole year, viz., the caul round the heart, the chine, the covering of the ribs, the ..., the mouth of the stomach, and the ..., as well as during the year 7000 sin-offerings and 100 sheep before Iskhara who dwells in the temple of Sa-turra in Babylon (not excepting the soft parts of the flesh, the trotters (?), the juicy meat and the salted (?) flesh), and also the slaughterers of the oxen, sheep, birds, and lambs due on the 8th day of Nisan, (and) the heave-offering of an ox and a sheep before Pap-sukal of Bit-Kidur-Kani, the temple of Nin-ip and the temple of Anu on the further bank of the New Town in Babylon.’
[205]. The Ancient Hebrew Tradition, pp. 282-284.
[206]. See the illustration in Erman’s Life in Ancient Egypt (Eng. tr.), p. 298.
[207]. Mr. G. Buchanan Gray (Studies in Hebrew Proper Names, p. 246, note 1) suggests that Aholiab is a foreign name. At all events, while we find names compounded with ohel, ‘tabernacle,’ in Minæan and Phœnician inscriptions, no other name of the kind is found among the Israelites.
[208]. Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici (Part i.), remarks on this: ‘I would gladly know how Moses, with an actual fire, calcined or burnt the golden calf into powder; for that mystical metal of gold, whose solary and celestial nature I admire, exposed unto the violence of fire, grows only hot and liquefies, but consumeth not.’
[209]. An interpolation (Exod. xxxiii. 1-5) makes the worship of the golden calf account for the fact that, as declared in Exod. xxiii. 20, an angel should lead Israel into Canaan, and not Yahveh Himself. But it ignores the further fact that Yahveh was really present in the Holy of Holies as well as in the pillar of fire and cloud.