The Evolution of Old Testament Religion

by W. E. Orchard

The national consciousness of Israel goes back to a series of remarkable events in which the nation was born, and which are too deeply graven on the mind of the people to be mere legends without historical foundation. These events are the deliverance from the bondage in Egypt and the great covenant made with Jehovah at Sinai. The indispensable personal centre, round which these events revolve, is that of the great national leader, Moses. The fact that, outside the Pentateuch and the closely connected Book of Joshua, little is known of the work of Moses until after the exile, has given rise to doubts concerning his historical reality. If we take the writings of the Old Testament that are contemporary with the period they describe, there stand out in indisputable primacy the writings of the great literary Prophets. To these modern criticism has rightly turned to discover the opinions, customs, and religion, prevailing in the Eighth Century; and it is claimed that by these writings we can test the historical value of the Pentateuch, and of the other historical books. Now it must be admitted that in the pre-exilic Prophets the mention of Moses is less frequent than we should expect from the position which is claimed for him in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The Prophets do appeal with one consent to the original covenant of Jehovah with Israel, to the fulfilment of which they would recall the nation; but only rarely is the name of Moses associated with that covenant. There are only four references to Moses in the Prophets before the exile (Hosea xii. 13—Moses not actually named; Micah vi. 4; Jer. xv. 1; Isa. lxiii. 12—reckoned post-exilic by critics), and in none of these is Moses referred to as a law-giver, but as a prophet and national deliverer. We have to come to Prophets writing after the exile to find any reference to the legislative work of Moses (Mal. iv. 4; Dan. ix. 11–13). The purpose of the prophetic writings is moral rather than historical, and this forbids putting more evidential weight upon this argument from silence than it will bear; but in face of their continual appeal to the covenant of Sinai, this silence is at least significant. Evidently Moses was not a name to conjure with in their age. (Compare Jer. xxxi. 31, 32, where the mention of the name of Moses would have been most natural.)

We have, on these and other grounds, to disregard the later idea that Moses was the only law-giver of Israel and the author of the Pentateuch, although the fact that the later legislation could only find sanction as it was included under his name, points to him as in some way the initiator of Israel's great Code of Laws. While in addition to this, it must be admitted that a great deal of the story of his life is due to the growth of legend, there is no need to regard the figure of Moses as entirely mythical. The events by which a motley crowd of serfs became a nation and covenanted themselves to an almost new religion not only need for their explanation a great interpreter, but also a great leader; and this demand and need Moses fills. We may therefore safely regard Moses as one of the great Founders of Religion.

We have now to enquire how much of the marvellous story of his life can be safely reckoned as history. The document which gives the earliest, and therefore the most trustworthy, story of his life is dated by the critics in the Ninth Century, although it is not denied that it may, and probably does, go back for its material to a much earlier period. This document, known to the critics as "J," owes its origin to early prophetic influence. In this document, as might be expected from the analogy in similar cases (compare the absence of the birth stories in Mark), the story of the birth and finding of Moses is omitted; it is probably nothing more than an effort to find a popular explanation of his name, as derived from Mashah, "to draw out." A much more likely origin of the name is found by modern scholars in the Egyptian word for "son" (Mesu). The important thing to be noticed is that in this early document he appears first of all in Midian, although there are indications which show that it is known that he had previously been in Egypt. Here, alone in the wilderness, or in intercourse with the strange Bedawin who still inhabit that region, there came to him a revelation of Jehovah and the call to deliver Israel from their bondage. He returned to Egypt with a message at once religious and national. He calls upon the Israelites to leave Egypt and to seek a covenant with Jehovah at His shrine at Sinai. During a plague, the passage of the Red Sea was effected under conditions that were interpreted to be due to the direct intervention of Jehovah; and, the returning tide cutting off the pursuing Egyptians who challenged their flight, the Israelites stood delivered from their enemies and their first trust in Jehovah was vindicated. It is not for us to enquire into the exact causes which proved so favourable to the Israelites and so disastrous to the Egyptians; we only need to know that they were interpreted religiously. Then around Mount Sinai, with its impressive solitude and its awful storms, Moses gathered the people, imparted the secret of the new worship, made a solemn covenant by which the people of Israel became for ever the people of Jehovah, and probably laid down some rudiments of legislation fitted for their primitive and nomadic condition. This much at least the after history demands as the irreducible minimum.

If this is at all an accurate view of the founding of the religion of Jehovah, then we are faced with the phenomenon of a nation practically adopting a new religion. We do not ignore "revelation" when we feel compelled to seek for natural causes which might prepare the way for this event; and this we may attempt by an enquiry into the meaning of the name "Jehovah."

It should be noted at the outset that "Jehovah" is a personal name, like that of Zeus or Poseidon, conveying the idea of some aspect of deity. The meaning of the name is exceedingly obscure. The general name for deity common to all Semites, and therefore belonging to the undivided primitive stock, is "El," meaning either "the Mighty One" or, and more in accord with Semitic conceptions of God, "the Leader." The meaning of the name "Jehovah" is difficult to discover, because in the first place the exact pronunciation of the word has been lost, probably beyond recovery.

The word "Jehovah" is a hybrid compound, and as a matter of fact was never used as a name for God until the Reformation. We can be certain only that the consonants of the word were JHVH (or YHWH, Hebrew pronunciation). This extraordinary state of things is accounted for by the fact that for centuries the Hebrew Scriptures were "unpointed" or unvocalised—that is, the consonants only were written and the necessary connecting vowels were taught orally, and only retained in the memory for use when the Scriptures were read aloud. When in the Ninth Century A.D. it was likely that the pronunciation of the sacred language would be entirely forgotten, a device for its preservation was made whereby the vowel pronunciation was indicated by means of "points" placed chiefly underneath the consonantal text; very much like the dots and dashes used for vowels in Pitman's system of shorthand. When, however, it came to the "pointing" of JHVH, it was found that the pronunciation of this word had been entirely lost. Reverence for the name of God had become so exaggerated that, in reading aloud from the Scriptures, wherever the sacred name occurred another word had always been substituted. This word was one of respect, but of less marked exaltation—Adonai, equal to our word "Lord." The only course open to the punctuators was that of inserting under the consonants JHVH, the vowels (with suitable euphonic modifications) of the word Adonai, with the result that we get the conflate "Jehovah," a word which has become invested with so much solemnity to our ears, but which was certainly not the right pronunciation, and which has never been used by the Jews. Scholars have endeavoured, at present without any universally accepted result, to recover the lost pronunciation by linguistic enquiries, with the desire to discover what the word originally meant, in the hope that it would throw some light on the origin of the religion founded by Moses. In Exod. iii. 13 ff. (R. V. margin) we have the traditional explanation of the word, an explanation which is not altogether satisfactory from a grammatical point of view; the great Hebraist Ewald goes so far as to pronounce it highly artificial. It has been objected that the man who wrote this account, about 750 B.C., surely understood his own language. Probably; but that is not to say that he understood the etymology of it, for etymology is a new science, and has upset many popular derivations in the case of our own language. If the explanation given in Exodus is correct, and we cannot with certainty put anything much better in its place, then the meaning of the word "Jehovah" would be "He that is," perhaps an equivalent in Hebrew form to the Western idea of "The Eternal." Only one of the numerous guesses as to the meaning of the original name need be quoted here: that the word comes from a verb, hawah, meaning either "to fall," or "to blow." Similar ideas would seem to account for either of these meanings. "He who blows," looks like the name for the Tempest God, while "that which falls" has been taken to indicate a fallen meteorite, which may have been preserved as a symbol of Jehovah. When we remember the thunderstorms at Sinai, and the common belief that thunder was a special theophany of Jehovah, these ideas are not to be hastily dismissed as altogether incredible. Nor should we be prevented from considering such an idea from the prejudice that it would make the origin of the religion of Israel a piece of Nature-worship and superstition. God has taken man where He has found him, and none can dare to define the limits of childish and crude conceptions within which the Spirit of God can begin His work in man's mind.

The conclusion derived from the examination of the meaning of the name "Jehovah" must therefore remain open until some further light is thrown on the subject. (Scholars usually adopt the pronunciation, Yahwe, as our nearest approach to the original.)

An endeavour has been made to discover the origin of the religion of Israel from the persistent connection of Jehovah with the locality of Mount Sinai. This idea continues long after in the Promised Land (Deut. xxxiii. 2; Judges v. 5), and Elijah takes a long journey back to the sacred spot, presumably to get into closer touch with Jehovah (1 Kings xix.). With the prevailing beliefs of that age in the localisation of the god, this connection must be thought of as of more than accidental significance. It is fair to assume that the seat of Jehovah at Sinai must have been known before the great covenant, and is indeed required by the narrative itself (Exod. iii.; iv. 27), while recent discoveries are said to prove that the traditional Sinai must have been a sacred place from the earliest times. Moses, however, is clearly represented as coming to know of Jehovah during his stay in Midian. The exact means of the revelation is said to have been the sight of a bush on fire, yet miraculously unconsumed. What actually lies behind this story—whether it is a creation of the religious imagination which sees "every common bush afire with God"—it is useless for us to try and discover. A natural explanation has been sought in the fact that Jethro, the Kenite, was the priest of Midian, and presumably of some shrine of Jehovah. Certainly Jethro knew the name of Jehovah, but apparently only regarded Him as one of the gods, until the marvellous deliverance of the Exodus proved Him to be the greatest of gods (Exod. xviii. 9–11). Jethro performs an act of sacrifice to Jehovah, in the presence of Aaron and the elders, that looks remarkably like an act of initiation by which Israel are introduced to the worship of Jehovah by the regular priest of the shrine (Exod. xviii. 12). The hypothesis is further strengthened by the fact that the Kenites are found later dwelling in Palestine (Judges i. 16), and are always remembered long after as the friends of the Israelites (1 Sam. xv. 6; xxvii. 10; xxx. 29). The inference from this is that Moses first learned of Jehovah from his father-in-law Jethro, but that he understood more of the character of Jehovah than Jethro, and by his superior religious consciousness conceived of Him as in some way Supreme who to Jethro had been only one of the desert gods.

This theory would certainly be strengthened if Sinai could be identified, not with the traditional site of Jebel Musa in the southern part of the Sinaitic peninsula, but with some spot in the land of Midian, across the gulf of Akaba. This does indeed seem necessary from the narrative, for from the most natural interpretation of Exod. iii. 1, Horeb, the mount of God, was in Midian. It is generally taken for granted that Horeb and Sinai are identical; the respective names are used by different documents. It is said that, for some reasons, Midian would fit in with the record of the journey through the wilderness better than the Sinaitic peninsula. If the parallelism of Sinai with Seir in Deut. xxxiii. 2 can be taken to show identity, as is natural, we have a further confirmation, for Seir is in Midian.

The grave difficulty of all this is that it would make the religion of Jehovah a distinct importation. Is such a thing as its reception by the Hebrews credible on this account? The idea of a nation changing its religion is certainly repugnant to the Semitic mind (Jer. ii. 10, 11), and some more natural connection seems necessary, both from the narrative and from general considerations. Now the narrative hints that the religion was not entirely new (Exod. vi. 3), but was known to the Patriarchs under different forms; while the sanctity of Sinai would seem to have been already known to some of the tribes (Exod. iv. 27). There is nothing here definite enough for us to proceed to historical certainty, but it is fair to suppose that the shrine at Sinai was known to the Patriarchs in their wanderings, and that Jehovah would be worshipped; as would any other local god whose territory they happened to be in. Grant that this was partly known to the Hebrew slaves in Egypt; that Moses received the revelation of the power of Jehovah in his exile in Midian, and by a splendid leap of inspiration identified the actual shrine and the Person of Jehovah with the Mighty Spirit dimly known to the Patriarchs, and we have an explanation that is natural and is also true; for the Object of man's worship has been One through all history. When the successful passage of the Red Sea and the defeat of the Egyptians were interpreted by Moses as the direct intervention of Jehovah, the transition to the great covenant is made possible. All this may be very contrary to the traditional idea of how Moses received the revelation of Jehovah, but the facts do point this way; and it is not for us to deny that the Spirit of God could work through these natural events and through the mind of this commanding personality, and so bring about this identification of Jehovah and the Great Spirit of the Patriarchal thought, which was to lead to such great results for religion.