Prolegomena to the History of Israel

by Julius Wellhausen

It need not be said that the sacrificial seats (even when the improvised ones are left out of account) were not all alike in the regard in which they were held, or in the frequency with which they were resorted to. Besides purely local ones, there were others to which pilgrimages were made from far and near. Towards the close of the period of the judges, Shiloh appears to have acquired an importance that perhaps extended even beyond the limits of the tribe of Joseph. By a later age the temple there was even regarded as the prototype of the temple of Solomon, that is, as the one legitimate place of worship to which Jehovah had made a grant of all the burnt-offerings of the children of Israel (Jer. vii.12; 1Samuel ii. 27-36). But, in point-of fact, if a prosperous man of Ephraim or Benjamin made a pilgrimage to the joyful festival at Shiloh at the turn of the year, the reason for his doing so was not that he could have had no opportunity at his home in Ramah or Gibeah for eating and drinking before the Lord. Any strict centralisation is for that period inconceivable, alike in the religious as in every other sphere. This is seen even in the circumstance that the destruction of the temple of Shiloh, the priesthood of which we find officiating at Nob a little later, did not exercise the smallest modifying influence upon the character and position of the cultus; Shiloh disappears quietly from the scene, and is not mentioned again until we learn from Jeremiah that at least from the time when Solomon's temple was founded its temple lay in ruins.

For the period during which the temple of Jerusalem was not yet in existence, even the latest redaction of the historical books (which perhaps does not everywhere proceed from the same hand, but all dates from the same period—that of the Babylonian exile—and has its origin in the same spirit) leaves untouched the multiplicity of altars and of holy places. No king after Solomon is left uncensured for having tolerated the high places, but Samuel is permitted in his proper person to preside over a sacrificial feast at the Bamah of his native town, and Solomon at the beginning of his reign to institute a similar one at the great Bamah of Gibeon, without being blamed. The offensive name is again and again employed in the most innocent manner in 1Samuel ix., x., and the later editors allow it to pass unchallenged. The principle which guides this apparently unequal distribution of censure becomes clear from 1Kings iii. 2: "The people sacrificed upon the high places, for as yet no house to the name of Jehovah had been built." Not until the house had been built to the name of Jehovah—such is the idea—did the law come into force which forbade having other places of worship besides./1/

— Footnote 1. Compare 1Kings viii. 16. According to Deut. xii.10 seq., the local unity of worship becomes law from the time when the Israelites have found rest (menuha). Comparing 2Samuel vii.11 and 1Kings v. 18 (A.V., v.4), we find that "menuha" first came in with David and Solomon. The period of the judges must at that time have been regarded as much shorter than appears in the present chronology. — Footnote

From the building of the temple of Solomon, which is also treated as a leading epoch in chronology, a new period in the history of worship is accordingly dated,—and to a certain extent with justice. The monarchy in Israel owed its origin to the need which, under severe external pressure, had come to be felt for bringing together into the oneness of a people and a kingdom the hitherto very loosely connected tribes and families of the Hebrews; it had an avowedly centralising tendency, which very naturally laid hold of the cultus as an appropriate means for the attainment of the political end. Gideon even, the first who came near a regal position, erected a costly sanctuary in his city, Ophrah. David caused the ark of Jehovah to be fetched into his fortress on Mount Sion, and attached value to the circumstance of having for its priest the representative of the old family which had formerly kept it at Shiloh. Solomon's temple also was designed to increase the attractiveness of the city of his residence. It is indubitable that in this way political centralisation gave an impulse to a greater centralisation of worship also, and the tendency towards the latter continued to operate after the separation of the two kingdoms,—in Israel not quite in the same manner as in Judah. Royal priests, great national temples, festal gatherings of the whole people, sacrifices on an enormous scale, these were the traits by which the cultus, previously (as it would seem) very simple, now showed the impress of a new time. One other fact is significant: the domestic feasts and sacrifices of single families, which in David's time must still have been general, gradually declined and lost their importance as social circles widened and life became more public.

But this way of regarding the influence of the monarchy upon the history of the worship is not that of the author of the Books of Kings. He views the temple of Solomon as a work undertaken exclusively in the interests of pure worship, and as differing entirely in origin from the sacred buildings of the kings of Israel, with which accordingly it is not compared, but contrasted as the genuine is contrasted with the spurious. It is in its nature unique, and from the outset had the design of setting aside all other holy places,—a religious design independent of and unconnected with politics. The view, however, is unhistorical; it carries back to the original date of the temple, and imports into the purpose of its foundation the significance which it had acquired in Judah shortly before the exile. In reality the temple was not at the outset all that it afterwards became. Its influence was due to its own weight, and not to a monopoly conferred by Solomon. We nowhere learn that that king, like a forerunner of Josiah, in order to favour his new sanctuary sought to abolish all the others; there is not the faintest historical trace of any such sudden and violent interference with the previously existing arrangements of worship. Never once did Solomon's successors, confined though they were to the little territory of Judah, and therefore in a position in which the experiment might perhaps have been practicable, make the attempt (which certainly would have been in their interest) to concentrate all public worship within their own temple, though in other directions we find them exercising a very arbitrary control over affairs of religion. The high places were not removed; this is what is regularly told us in the case of them all. For Israel properly so called, Jerusalem was at no time, properly speaking, the place which Jehovah had chosen; least of all was it so after the division of the kingdom.

The Ephraimites flocked in troops through the entire length of the southern kingdom as pilgrims to Beersheba, and, in common with the men of Judah, to Gilgal on the frontier. Jerusalem they left unvisited. In their own land they served Jehovah at Bethel and Dan, at Shechem and Samaria, at Penuel and Mizpah, and at many other places. Every town had its Bamah, in the earlier times generally on an open site at the top of the hill on the slopes of which the houses were. Elijah, that great zealot for purity of worship, was so far from being offended by the high places and the multiplicity of altars to Jehovah that their destruction brought bitterness to his soul as the height of wickedness, and with his own hand he rebuilt the altar that had fallen into ruins on Mount Carmel. And that the improvised offering on extraordinary occasions had also not fallen into disuse is shown by the case of Elisha, who, when his call came as he was following the plough, hewed his oxen to pieces on the spot and sacrificed. In this respect matters after the building of Solomon's temple continued to be just as they had been before. If people and judges or kings alike, priests and prophets, men like Samuel and Elijah, sacrificed without hesitation whenever occasion and opportunity presented themselves, it is manifest that during the whole of that period nobody had the faintest suspicion that such conduct was heretical and forbidden. If a theophany made known to Joshua the sanctity of Gilgal, gave occasion to Gideon and Manoah to rear altars at their homes, drew the attention of David to the threshing-floor of Araunah, Jehovah Himself was regarded as the proper founder of all these sanctuaries,—and this not merely at the period of the Judges, but more indubitably still at that of the narrator of these legends. He rewarded Solomon's first sacrifice on the great Bamah at Gibeon with a gracious revelation, and cannot, therefore, have been displeased by it. After all this, it is absurd to speak of any want of legality in what was then the ordinary practice; throughout the whole of the earlier period of the history of Israel, the restriction of worship to a single selected place was unknown to any one even as a pious desire. Men believed themselves indeed to be nearer God at Bethel or at Jerusalem than at any indifferent place, but of such gates of heaven there were several; and after all, the ruling idea was that which finds its most distinct expression in 2Kings v.17,—that Palestine as a whole was Jehovah's house, His ground and territory. Not outside of Jerusalem, but outside of Canaan had one to sojourn far from His presence, under the dominion and (cujus regio ejus religio) in the service of strange gods. The sanctity of the land did not depend on that of the temple; the reverse was the case. /1/

— Footnote 1. Gen. iv.14, 16: when Cain is driven out of the land (Canaan), he is driven from the presence of Jehovah (Jonah i.3, 10). Gen. xlvi.4: Jacob is not to hesitate about going down into Egypt, for Jehovah will, by a special act of grace, change His dwelling-place along with him. Exodus xv.17: "Thou broughtest thy people to the mountain of thine inheritance, to the place which thou hadst prepared for thyself to dwell in," the explanation which follows, "to the sanctuary which thy hand had established," is out of place, for the mountain of the inheritance can only be the mountainous land of Palestine. 1Samuel xxvi.19: David, driven by Saul into foreign parts, is thereby violently sundered from his family share in the inheritance of Jehovah, and compelled to serve other gods. Hos. viii.1: one like an eagle comes against the house of Jehovah, i.e., the Assyrian comes against Jehovah's land. Hos. ix.15: "I will drive them out of mine house," i.e., the Israelites out of their land. Most distinct is the language of Hos. ix.3-5: "They shall not continue to dwell in Jehovah's land; Ephraim must back to Egypt, and must eat that which is unclean in Assyria. They shall not any more offer wine-offerings to Jehovah, or set forth offerings [read with Kuenen Y(RKW for Y(RBW ] before Him; their bread is as the bread of mourners; whosoever eats of it is polluted, for their bread shall be only for the staying of hunger, and shall not be brought into the house of Jehovah. What indeed will ye do in the time of the solemn assembly and in the day of the feast of Jehovah? "Compare Jer. xvi.13; Ezek. iv.13; Mal. ii.11; 2Kings xvii.25 seq. It is also possible that the "great indignation" of 2Kings iii.27 is regarded less as Jehovah's than as that of Chemosh, in whose land the army of Israel is at the time. — Footnote

I.I.2. A change in this respect first begins to be prepared at that important epoch of the religious history of Israel which is marked by the fall of Samaria and the rise of the prophets connected therewith. Amos and Hosea presuppose a condition of matters just such as has been described: everywhere—in the towns, on the mountains, under green trees—a multitude of sanctuaries and altars, at which Jehovah is served in good faith, not with the purpose of provoking Him, but in order to gain His favour. The language held by these men was one hitherto unheard of when they declared that Gilgal, and Bethel, and Beersheba, Jehovah's favourite seats, were an abomination to Him; that the gifts and offerings with which He was honoured there kindled His wrath instead of appeasing it; that Israel was destined to be buried under the ruins of His temples, where protection and refuge were sought (Amos ix.). What did they mean ? It would be to misunderstand the prophets to suppose that they took offence at the holy places— which Amos still calls Bamoth (vii.9), and that too not in scorn, but with the deepest pathos—in and by themselves, on account of their being more than one, or not being the right ones. Their zeal is directed, not against the places, but against the cultus there carried on, and, in fact not merely against its false character as containing all manner of abuses, but almost more against itself, against the false value attached to it. The common idea was that just as Moab showed itself to be the people of Chemosh because it brought to Chemosh its offerings and gifts, so Israel proved itself Jehovah's people by dedicating its worship to Him, and was such all the more surely as its worship was zealous and splendid; in times of danger and need, when His help was peculiarly required, the zeal of the worshippers was doubled and trebled. It is against this that the prophets raise their protest while they demand quite other performances as a living manifestation of the relation of Israel to Jehovah. This was the reason of their so great hostility to the cultus, and the source of their antipathy to the great sanctuaries, where superstitious zeal outdid itself; it was this that provoked their wrath against the multiplicity of the altars which flourished so luxuriantly on the soil of a false confidence. That the holy places should be abolished, but the cultus itself remain as before the main concern of religion, only limited to a single locality was by no means their wish; but at the same time, in point of fact, it came about as an incidental result of their teaching that the high place in Jerusalem ultimately abolished all the other Bamoth. External circumstances, it must be added, contributed most essentially towards the result.

As long as the northern kingdom stood, it was there that the main current of lsraelite life manifested itself; a glance into the Books of Kings or into that of Amos is enough to make this clear. In Jerusalem, indeed, the days of David and of Solomon remained unforgotten; yearning memories went back to them, and great pretensions were based upon them, but with these the actual state of matters only faintly corresponded. When Samaria fell, Israel shrivelled up to the narrow dimensions of Judah, which alone survived as the people of Jehovah. Thereby the field was left clear for Jerusalem. The royal city had always had a weighty preponderance over the little kingdom, and within it, again, the town had yielded in importance to the temple. From the few narratives we have relating to Judah one almost gathers an impression as if it had no other concern besides those of the temple; the kings in particular appear to have regarded the charge of their palace sanctuary as the chief of all their cares./1/

— Footnote 1. Nearly all the Judaean narratives in the Books of Kings relate to the temple and the measures taken by the ruling princes with reference to this their sanctuary. — Footnote