1.A 01. The Grandeur Of The Law
THE GRANDEUR OF THE LAW
Although the Jews regarded all these books as sacred and holy, they did not give to all of them quite the same place. It was in the Law that the greatness of Scripture reached its full height and grandeur. It was tjj^JL^ which was Scripture par excellence. Using the layout of the Temple as a parallel, they said that the Writings were like the Outer Court; the Prophets were like the Holy Place; but the Law was the Holy of Holies. The Law, they said, was created one thousand generations before Moses, and nine hundred and seventy-four generations before die creation of the world, and was, therefore, older than the world itself. When the Messiah came, they said, the Prophets and the Writings would be abrogated, but the Law should endure for ever and ever. The Law, they said, was delivered to Moses by God complete and entire, and he who said that Moses himself wrote even one letter of it was guilty of sin; it was literally and completely the word of God. Jewish boys were taught the Law from their first consciousness, and had these laws, as it were, "engraven on their souls" (Josephus, Against Apion 2:18). They learn them from their earliest youth, so that "they bear the image of the laws in their souls" (Philo, Embassy to Cams 31). From their swaddling-clothes they were instructed in these sacred laws (Philo, Embassy to Caius 31). The Jew might in his national misfortunes lose everything, but he could not lose the Law’, and, however far from his native land he was, and however hostile a ruler might be, he feared the Law more than any man (Josephus, Against Apion 2:38). History was full of examples of Jews who had chosen to die rather than to be disloyal to, or to abandon, or to disobey the Law (Josephus, Against Apion i: 8). In the Law there was concentrated the very being and essence of Scripture. Great as the Prophets and the Writings might be, they were only quabbalah, tradition, explanation, or interpretation of the Law, It is, therefore, with the story of the canonization of the Law that we must begin. When we make a careful study of the Law, the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch the word means the five rolls as it is called, we come to see that it is a composite document, and that it must have been the product "of a long growth and development.” Jewish tradition ascribed every word of it to Moses, but there are clear signs that others besides Moses must have had a hand in its writing. Deuteronomy 34:1-12 tells of the death of Moses the story of which Moses himself could hardly have written. Genesis 36:1-43 gives a list of the kings of Edom, and then says that all these reigned before Israel had a king," which takes us down to the days of Saul at least (Genesis 36:31).
Genesis 14:14 tells us that Abram pursued those who had taken Lot captive as far as Dan, but from Judges 18:29 we find that Dan did not receive its name until long after Moses was dead. We find in the Pentateuch repeated references to the Philistines (Genesis 21:34; Genesis 26:14-18; Exodus 13:17), and the Philistines did not come into Palestine until about 1200 B.C., long after the time of Moses. There are quite certainly sections of the Pentateuch which come from a time long after Moses. Further, we find that the Pentateuch contains differing accounts of the same incident. There are, for instance, two stories of how Beersheba got its name, one tracing it back to a covenant between Abraham and Abimelech, the other to an incident in the relationships between Isaac and Abimelech (Genesis 21:31; Genesis 26:31). There are two stories of how Bethel got its name, the one tracing it back to the vision of Jacob on the way to Padanaram, the other to an incident years later when Jacob was returning from Padanaram (Genesis 28:19; Genesis 35:15).
These are small points, but often the difference is more important. There are two distinct accounts of the banishment of Hagar. In the one she is banished before her firstborn is born, and in the other she is banished when Ishmael has grown into a lad (Genesis 16:6 f; Genesis 21:9 f). Still more important, there are two quite distinct accounts of the creation story. In Genesis 1 man and woman are created at the end of creation after all the animals and the rest of the world have been formed. In Genesis 2:1-25 man is created first, then the animals and finally woman. There are two quite distinct accounts of the Flood story. In the one Noah is commanded to take into the ark two of every beast (Genesis 6:19), in the other seven of each clean animal and two of each unclean (Genesis 7:2), a difference which is underlined when the narrative goes on to say that all the animals went into the ark in pairs (Genesis 7:8-9). It is clear that in these stories the men who put the Pentateuch into its final form found two accounts of these incidents and events, and with complete honesty and fidelity to their sources they included both.
Perhaps most surprising of all is the difference in the use of the name of God. To see this clearly we must note that when the Authorized Version uses the word LORD in capital letters, it is translating Jehovah in the original Hebrew. In Exodus 6:2 we see God encouraging Moses for his contest with Pharaoh. " God spake unto Moses and said unto him: I am the LORD; and I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name Jehovah was I not known to them. ’ And yet in Genesis 15:2; Genesis 15:8 we find Abraham calling God by the name Jehovah. We find both Sarah and Laban. using that name (Genesis 16:2; Genesis 24:3; Genesis 24:1). We find the name used in the days of Seth (Genesis 4:26); and we even find Eve using the name Jehovah when she had borne a child (Genesis 4:1). There is quite clearly more than one source here, and to note these discrepancies is not in the least to belittle or criticize the compilers of the Pentateuch; it is rather to underline the meticulous honesty with which they dealt with the sources and documents with which they worked.
We must now go on to see the process by which the Law grew up, and by which it came to be accepted by the Jews as the very word of God. To the Jews God was characteristically a self-reveling God. As G. F. Moore puts it, the outstanding characteristic of Judaism is that it conceived of itself as a revealed religion. God, as the Jews thought of Him, is a God who desires to make Himself and His will known to men, and who continually takes steps to bring that knowledge to men. The natural result of this point of view is that in Judaism the supreme figure is the prophet, for the prophet is the messenger of God to men, and its through the prophet that the revelation of God to men is commonly made- The promise made through Moses is that God will always give to the nation a prophet (Deuteronomy 18:15). The claim of Amos is that God does nothing without revealing His secret to His servants the prophets (Amos 3:7). God by His Spirit sent His word to men in the prophets, and it was the sin of the nation that men refused to hear (Zechariah 7:12). That is why Judaism ranked all the great national figures as prophets. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Job, Ezra, Mordecai were all prophets; the Jewish scholars enumerated forty-eight prophets and seven prophetesses in their national history. This means that the revelation of God was conceived of as essentially a spoken revelation. God spoke to the prophets, and then the prophets spoke to men. The question then is, in a world of religious thought in which the supreme figures were inspired men how did the idea of an inspired book emerge? "How," as Pfeiffer asks, "did the Israelites come to believe that God not only spoke but also dictated a book?"