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.