Prolegomena to the History of Israel

by Julius Wellhausen

XI.I.

XI.I.1. The upholders of the prevailing view do not assert that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, but they maintain all the more firmly that he organised the congregation of the tabernacle in the wilderness after the fashion described in the Priestly Code. They seem to think that Moses had no importance further than this; as if it were an act of no moment to cast into the field of time a seed which the action and reaction thence arising bring an immeasurable time after to maturity (Mark iv. 26 seq.). In fact Moses is the originator of the Mosaic constitution in about the same way as Peter is the founder of the Roman hierarchy. Of the sacred organisation supposed to have existed from the earliest times, there is no trace in the time of the judges and the kings. It is thought to have been a sort of pedagogic strait-waistcoat, to subdue the ungovernable obstinacy of the Hebrews and to guard them from evil influences from without. But even should it be conceded that a constitution could come into existence in ancient times which was so utterly out of relation to the peculiar life and temper of the people, the history of the ancient Israelites shows us nothing so distinctly as the uncommon freshness and naturalness of their impulses. The persons who appear always act from the constraining impulse of their nature, the men of God not less than the murderers and adulterers: they are such figures as could only grow up in the open air. Judaism, which realised the Mosaic constitution and carried it out logically, left no free scope for the individual; but in ancient Israel the divine right did not attach to the institution but was in the Creator Spirit, in individuals. Not only did they speak like the prophets, they also acted like the judges and kings, from their own free impulse, not in accordance with an outward norm, and yet, or just because of this, in the Spirit of Jehovah. The different view of different times is seen very characteristically in the views taken of Saul by the two versions above sifted and compared <VII.II.2 >.

XI.I.2. It is a simple and yet a very important remark of Vatke, that the sacred constitution of the congregation, so circumstantially described to us in the Priestly Code, is after all very defective, and presupposes the existence of that which it was the chief task of the age of Moses to bring about, namely the state, in the absence of which the church cannot have any subsistence either. To maintain an elaborate and expensive worship, and an immense swarm of clergy, must have required considerable rates and taxes: and to raise these, as well as to uphold the authority of the sacred persons and institutions, and most of all to enforce the strict centralization and uniformity of the legitimate worship, all this among a people not yet very civilised, must have required an executive power which embraced and was able to control, the whole people. But where is this central authority in the period of the judges? Judicial competence resided at that time chiefly in the smallest circles, the families and houses. These were but little controlled, as it appears, by the superior power of the tribe, and the very notion of the state or of the kingdom did not as yet exist. Houses related to each other sometimes united for common undertakings, as no doubt also did neighbouring tribes; but this was not on the basis of any constitutional order, but from necessity, when it happened that a well-known man came forward to take the command and his summons to the levy was obeyed. These transient combinations under generals were the forerunners of a permanent union under a king: and even at the time of the Midianite war an attempt seems to have been made in this direction, which, however, was not quite successful. In the severe and protracted struggle with the Philistines the necessity for a solid union of the tribes was cryingly manifest, and the man came forward to meet the hour. Saul, a distinguished Benjamite of Gibeah, was overcome by anger at the scornful challenge which even the Ammonites ventured at such a time to cast in the teeth of his people: he called his fellow-countrymen to battle, not in virtue of any office he held, but on the strength of his own impulses; his enthusiasm proved contagious, none dared to say him nay. He began his career just like one of the earlier judges, but after he had led his people to victory they did not let him retire again. The person sought for, the king, was found.

Out of such natural beginnings did the state at that time arise: it owed nothing to the pattern of the "Mosaic theocracy," but bears all the marks of a new creation. Saul and David first made out of the Hebrew tribes a real people in the political sense (Deuteronomy xxxiii. 5). David was in the eyes of later generations inseparable from the idea of Israel: he was the king par excellence: Saul was thrown into the shade, but both together are the founders of the kingdom, and have thus a much wider importance than any of their successors. It was they who drew the life of the people together at a centre, and gave it an aim; to them the nation is indebted for its historical self-consciousness. All the order of aftertimes is built up on the monarchy; it is the soil out of which all the other institutions of Israel grow up. In the time of the judges, we read, every man did that which was right in his own eyes, not because the Mosaic constitution was not in force, but because there was no king in those days. The consequences were very important in the sphere of religion as well: since the political advance of the people brought the historic and national character of Jehovah to the front again. During the time of the judges the Canaanite festival cultus had gradually been coming to be embodied in the worship of Jehovah, a process which was certainly necessary; but in this process there was for some time a danger that Jehovah would become a God of husbandry and of cattle, like Baal-Dionysus. The festivals long continued to be a source of heathenism, but now they were gradually divested of their character as nature-festivals, and forced at length to have reference to the nation and to its history, if they were not to disappear completely. The relation of Jehovah to people and kingdom remained firm as a rock: even to the worst idolaters He was the God of Israel; in war no one thought of looking for victory and success to any other God. This was the result of Israel's becoming a kingdom: the kingship of Jehovah, in that precise sense which we associate with it, is the religious expression of the fact of the foundation of the kingdom by Saul and David. The theocracy was the state of itself; the ancient Israelites regarded the civil state as a miracle, or, in their own words, a help of God. When the later Jews thought or spoke of the theocracy, they took the state for granted as already there, and so they could build the theocracy on the top of it as a specially spiritual feature: just as we moderns sometimes see the divine element in settled ordinances, such as marriage, not in their own nature, but in the consecration added to them by the church.

XI.I.3. The kingdom of Saul and David did not long remain at its height. Decay set in even at the separation, and when once the Assyrians were heard at the door, it advanced with steps not to be arrested. But the memory of the period of glory and power was all the greener, and the hope arose of its return. From the contrast between the sorrowful present and the brilliant past there arose the picture of the state as it should be; when ruin was seen without and anarchy within, the prophets set against this the pattern of the theocracy. The theocracy as the prophets represent it to themselves is not a thing essentially different from the political community, as a spiritual differs from a secular power; rather, it rests on the same foundations and is in fact the ideal of the state. Isaiah gave this ideal its classical form in those pictures of the future which we are accustomed to call Messianic prophecies. These passages are not predictions of this or that occurrence, but announcements of the aims which, it is true, the prophet only expects the future to realise, but which are of force or ought to be of force in the present, and towards which the community, if true to its own nature, must strive.

The first feature of these Messianic descriptions is the expulsion of the Assyrians; but most emphasis is laid on the restoration of the inner bases of the state, the rottenness of which has brought about and rendered inevitable the present crisis. The collapse of the government, the paralysis fallen on the law, the spoliation of the weak by the strong, these are the evils that call for redress. "How is the honourable city become a harlot; it was full of judgment, righteousness lodged in it—but now murderers! Thy princes are rascals and companions of thieves, every one loveth gifts and followeth after bribes; they judge not the fatherless, neither cloth the cause of the widow come unto them. Therefore saith the Lord: Ah, I will ease me of mine adversaries, and avenge me of mine enemies! And I will turn my hand against thee, Zion, and as with Iye I will purge away thy dross, and I will restore thy judges as at the first, and thy counsellors as at the beginning; afterwards thou shalt be called a righteous and honourable city. Zion shall be redeemed by judgment and her inhabitants by righteousness" (Isaiah i. 21-27). The state the prophet has before his eye is always the natural state as it exists, never a community distinguished by a peculiar holiness in its organisation. The kingdom of Jehovah is with him entirely identical with the kingdom of David; the tasks he sets before it are political in their nature, similar, we might say, to the demands one would address to the Turkish Empire in our own days. He is unconscious of any difference between human and divine law: law in itself, jurist's law in the proper juristic sense of the word, is divine, and has behind it the authority of the Holy One of Israel.

In that day shall Jehovah of hosts be for a crown of glory and a diadem of beauty unto the residue of His people, and for a spirit of judgment to him that sitteth in judgment, and a spirit of strength to them that drive back the battle from the borders " (xxviii. 5, 6). Jehovah is a true and perfect King, hence justice is His principal attribute and His chief demand. And this justice is a purely forensic or social notion: the righteousness of the Sermon on the Mount can only come into consideration when civil justice and order have come to be a matter of course—which at that time they had not yet done.

The representative of Jehovah is the human king. The earthly ruler is not in the way of the heavenly: even the glorious kingdom of the future cannot dispense with him.

"Then a king shall reign in righteousness and princes shall rule in judgment; each of them shall be as an hiding-place from the wind and as a covert from the tempest; as rivers of waters in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land" (xxxii. 1, 2).

As the reigning king is in general unsatisfactory, Isaiah hopes for a new one who will answer the pattern of David of old, the Messiah.