Accordingly, the first thing God does when Moses goes up into the mount is to give him plans and specifications for a sacred tent—a portable temple—with all its furniture, an altar for sacrifice in the court before it, the vestments of the priests, and the apparatus of the high-priestly oracle, and to reveal in detail the ritual for the consecration of priests (Exod. 25-30). The making of the tabernacle and all the other things necessary for the complete cultus is described in Exod. 35-40; the consecration of the priests and the inaugural sacrifices by Aaron in Lev. 8-9; Lev. x. 1-7 is closely connected with cc. 8-9, and its sequel (combined with other matter) is found in c. 16, the ritual of atonement. Lev. 8-9 is a good specimen of the author's method. In the form of a description of the sacrifices of consecration and the inaugural sacrifices of Aaron, he gives a paradigm for every variety of offering.
Here was obviously a natural place to introduce laws prescribing the ritual of these species of sacrifice and the circumstances which demand them, and accordingly we find in Lev. 1-7 a collection of such laws, some of them (e.g. Lev. 1 and 3) unquestionably old both in substance and formulation, with slight adaptation to their surrounding (e.g. "the sons of Aaron," i. 5, etc.), or with supplements to meet new economic and social conditions, such as the burnt offering of doves (Lev. i. 14-17, cf. vs. 2); others are younger or have been more extensively enlarged and amended. The chapters thus represent a growth in actual custom and corresponding rule. In c. 4 we may observe an example of another kind of legal growth, namely, the systematic development of principles or ideas. The scale of sin-offerings, graduated by the social station of the sinner—the high priest, the whole people, the prince, a common citizen—is consistently thought out in conformity with a theory. Observe that the prince is assigned a modest place next the bottom, below the religious community corporately, while the priest takes his at the top. We can say with full confidence that this elaborate ritual is not the booking of usage, but is a product of sacerdotal theory; and, further, that so long as kings reigned, the most high-church ecclesiastic is not likely to have arrogated so much to himself, or, at least, to have proclaimed his ambitions. Only in days when, under foreign governors, the high priest was really the greatest man in the community is such a table of precedence conceivable. Whether even then this law was actually put in operation, may be an open question.
The position of the sacrificial laws, Lev. 1-7, explains itself, as has been said. In many other cases, however, we see no reason why a subject is brought in where it is. Thus, Lev. 11-15, on various forms of uncleanness and the prescribed purifications, to which x. 10 f. seems to be a fragmentary introduction, have no obvious association with anything in the context, though they are introduced appropriately enough before the general purification of the Day of Atonement, c. 16. The laws, which read like the chapters of an exactly formulated code of purity, have been expanded by the addition of new paragraphs (e.g. Lev. xiv. 21-32, 33-53), and in some cases changes in the ritual may be recognized; compare, for example, Lev. xiv. 1-8 with vss. 10-20.
Chapters 17-26 form a distinct body of law, having certain marked peculiarities of its own, notably the frequent recurrence of the motive of "holiness"—that is, the avoidance of things and actions tabooed by the religion of Israel—often coupled with the appeal to God's holiness, as in xix. 2, "Ye shall be holy, for I, Jehovah, your God, am holy," or simply asserting his authority, "I am Jehovah." On the other hand, much in the laws of this Holiness Book (H), as it now stands, has close affinity to the mass of ritual and ceremonial laws in Leviticus and Numbers. The hypothesis which seems best to explain the phenomena is that an independent collection of laws (or rather the remains of such a collection), characterized by the motive of holiness, has been expanded and edited in the spirit and manner of the priestly legislation, while some laws which were originally included in this collection have been transposed to other contexts.
The Holiness Book closed with an earnest exhortation and warning to observe all these laws, promising the blessing of God on obedience and depicting in strong colours the calamities with which he will punish defection (Lev. 26). The position and prophetic tenour of this chapter resemble Deut. 28, and the book in its original form is apparently the product of the same age with Deuteronomy.
The Origins (P) described in Exod. 28 f. and Lev. 8 f. the choice of Aaron and his sons to be priests and their installation in the sacred office. The inferior order of the ministry of the sanctuary, the levites, is not as yet instituted. This is done in Numbers, and indeed with a certain redundancy, for Num. 3 and 4 independently deal with the subject, and c. 18 takes it up afresh without any allusion to a previous appointment. Much stress is laid on the exclusive prerogative of Aaron and his sons in the service of the altar and the ministry "within the veil"; no levite, much less a layman, may presume to these sacred functions on pain of death. The levites are given to Aaron and his sons as temple slaves for the menial work of the sanctuary, in place of the first-born Israelites of all tribes who would naturally be dedicated to God, i.e. to the temple. Yet, as ministers of religion, they are supported by a general tithe of the products of the soil imposed on all the people.
The laws in Numbers present the same variety as in Leviticus. There are old laws with modifications and enlargements, and many others which by various signs betray a more recent origin. Num. 28-36 belong as a whole to the latter class; cc. 28 f. exemplify that growth of the law by the formulation of sacerdotal ideals or desiderata which has been noted in the case of Lev. 4. It is to be observed that the narrative of P has reached in Num. xxvii. 12-23 the end of Moses' career; nothing is in place after it but the ascent of Mt. Abarim and Moses' death (Deut. 34). Num. 28-36 thus stand even formally in the place of an appendix.
The narrative of P (Origin of the Religious Institutions) and the great mass of ritual and ceremonial laws in the three middle books of the Pentateuch are often called collectively the Priests' Code. The name naturally suggests to the English reader an orderly body of law, compiled, revised, and promulgated by some authority; and, in fact, many critics—except for the orderliness, which nobody has ventured to affirm, and with allowance for later additions—regard the Priests' Code as such a law book, compiled and edited by priestly scribes in Babylonia, brought to Judæa by Ezra, with the authority of the Persian king, to reform the many disorders that existed there, and ratified and put in force in B.C. 444 by the magnates and the people of the Jews. (See Ezra 7; Neh. 8-10, and below, pp. 129 ff.) Internal evidence of such an origin and destination is, however, sought in vain in the laws; the things that Ezra and Nehemiah were most zealous about, especially the veto on mixed marriages, do not stand out in the so-called Priests' Code as they do in other parts of the law, while about a reform of the cultus in Jerusalem in conformity with a new ritual introduced from Babylonia, the story of Ezra's doings is significantly silent.
The phenomena we have observed in Exodus-Numbers suggest the hypothesis, rather, that various old laws, dealing chiefly with sacrifice and with the rules of clean and unclean—the two principal subjects of priestly regulation—were inserted at suitable points in the Origins of the Religious Institutions (P); these received amendments and supplements both before and after their incorporation; other more independent developments, whether representing actual custom or sacerdotal aspirations, found place among or beside them; and thus the whole Priestly stratum grew by a process of accretion through many generations into its present inorganic magnitude. It is antecedently probable that this process went on in Palestine, where the ritual laws were a practical concern, rather than in the schools of Babylonia; and only strong evidence to the contrary could overcome this presumption.