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:—