vice! While this important business is being settled, the people below have turned traitors to their solemn vows just made in the immediate presence of Divinity, — and, — in open defiance of Yahvè and under the very shadow of the clouds which envelop him, are, under the lead of his appointed priest Aharon, sacrificing to Apis or the "golden calf." Of all this rebellion, Yahvè, absorbed in his "knops and flowers," his "loops of blue," his "curious girdles," his "bells and pomegranates," his "perfumes of the apothecary," and, most important of all, in the reserving the best pieces of the sacrificed animals for the priests, — is utterly unconscious, and is prescribing to the last minutia, the duties of Aharon in the sacrifices, at the very moment when the latter is sacrificing to the holy bull!

It seems evident that the introduction of this most elaborate detail of the ceremonies, etc., was an afterthought, with the object of giving the direct sanction of the god to the petty details of priestly business. The treachery of the people to Yahvè is a fine poetical effect, and his ignorance of it quite in accordance with the usual anthropomorphism, but the pettiness of the detail in these chapters is too great a blemish to the poem to have been originally part of it.

Chapter xxxii. When Yahvè, at the end of his important colloquy with "Moses" on the mount, sees the "golden calf" and the naughty doings of the "Israelites" below, he asks "Moses" to "let me alone, that my wrath may

It is scarcely doubtful, that the luxurious and costly details of the ornamentation. and service of the tabernacle, here given, (as well as those in "Numbers " iv., etc.,) must have been drawn from the actual details of ornament and service in David's tabernacle, (2 Sam. vi. 17,) or in Solomon's temple, in a partly civilized age; - rather than handed down by tradition as the religious furniture and ritual of the " Israelites " of the Exodus, who were but a horde of emancipated serfs, hastily fleeing from their late taskmasters, through desert and hostile regions, toward a problematical home. To give some appearance of naturalness to the quantity of gold, etc., used, the compiler resorted to the clumsy invention already noticed, of the borrowing of jewellery, etc., from the Egyptians, by the Hebrew women, before the flight; for the goldsmithwork of the tabernacle is made from this stolen Egyptian jewellery.

wax hot against them, and that I may consume them." "Moses," however, declines to be thus set aside; he pertinaciously reminds the god of his promises to “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," and Yahvè listens to his prudent counsellor, and, like a wise king, concludes not to indulge himself in the destruction of his people! “And Yahvè repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people" (v. 14). "Moses," nevertheless, on descending, massacres three thousand of them (v. 28)!

In chap. xxxiii. 11, Yehoshua remains in the tabernacle while "Moses" goes back to the camp;-apparently a mark of special favor to the former. Verses 18-23 contain the request of "Moses" to see Yahvè, and the statement that no man can look upon the face of Yahvè and live; yet before this, in v. II, Yahvè is said to have already spoken with "Moses" "face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend"! Yahvè accordingly, to gratify his "friend's" desire to see him, puts him into a "clift" in a rock, and shows him his "back parts" only. All this is most oddly anthropomorphic, as well as somewhat

contradictory.

After the reconciliation of Yahvè with his people, the whole of the tedious particulars about the tabernacle is literally repeated! In chaps. xxv.-xxxii. it was the specifications; in chaps. xxxv., xxxvi. to xl., it is the builders' ("Bezaleel's" and "Aholiab's ") report that they have faithfully carried them out, repeating every item with unnecessary minuteness. The book of " "Exodus" concludes with the permanent abode of Yahvè in his new tabernacle. The whole of these details respecting the tabernacle and its service, may seem rather to belong, properly, to the next book, "Leviticus," which is especially devoted to the ritual.

CHAPTER XII.

THE HEBREWS IN PALESTINE. - BIBLE REVIEW CONTINUED.

THE books forming the "Old Testament," from "Genesis" to "Job," seem properly classifiable under three heads; (1) the poetical or romantic, (2) the legendary or semi-historical, (3) the historical. To the first class belong "Exodus," "Numbers," and "Ruth;"- the former two books consisting of a rude epical or narrative poem, (with interpolated ritualistic details,') professedly giving an account of the wanderings, almost purely imaginary, of the Hebrews in Arabia, and abounding in passages of great imaginative force and grandeur;-to the second class belong "Joshua" and "Judges;" and to the third, the books of "Samuel," "Kings," "Chronicles," "Ezra," "Nehemiah," and "Esther." "Deuteronomy" is in a class by itself; it is a repetition or second edition, — deuteros nomos, or the second law, of the preceding three books, (which give the origin and text of the law, and the wanderings of the Hebrews,) and is, with great probability, supposed to be the work of the prophet Jeremiah.2 Its later date, (than that of the previous three books,) is evident from its being ostensibly a second edition, and from chap. xxxiv. 10, where "Moses" is spoken of as the predecessor of a long line of prophets already arisen,

I Nearly the whole of "Leviticus " belongs to the ritualistic interpolation.

2 The unnaturalness of "Moses" making a speech of the length of an entire book, in which he recapitulates the whole of the chief incidents and conversations of the previous three books, is apparent, whether considered as the act of a real person or as an incident of an original fiction; on the other hand, it would not be unnatural for a later writer, making an abridgment of the original work, to give it authority by putting it into the form of a speech by "Moses."

"And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses;" as well as from many other indications unnecessary to be here recapitulated. Its authorship by Jeremiah in particular is inferred from, (among other reasons,) (1) many striking correspondences in its style, with that of the latter prophet; (2) from the fact of its directing each king to make a written copy of the Law with his own hand, a practice of which we hear nothing before the reign of Josiah; (3) from the Mosaic book of the Law being said, (2 Kings xxii., 2 Chron. xxxiv.,) to have been "found" by "Hilkiah" the high priest, Feremiah's father, in the ark or "in the temple," in the reign of Josiah, when Jeremiah was beginning his prophecies, whereas we are told in Kings viii. 8, that when the priests brought the ark into the temple, then just finished by Solomon, "there was nothing in the ark save the two tables of stone," which latter contained the "Ten Commandments" solely.' If "the book," or any book of the Law, therefore, was "found" by Hilkiah in the ark, it must have been put there later. Now "Deuteronomy " expressly directs that "this book of the Law" shall be placed "in the ark of the covenant" (xxxi. 26). The alleged "finding" of the Law, therefore, is, with reason, thought to have been a re-editing of it, with the addition of Deuteronomy, by Jeremiah and his father, and a placing of the work, — where it was afterwards to be "found," in the ark of the covenant.

The several "Old Testament" books, above enumerated and classified, are all, however, of a mixed character. Thus the narrative poem in Exodus and Numbers, is interpolated to a great extent with moral ordinances and with sacerdotal rules for the Hebrew ritual, forming a crude break and interruption, in the natural progress of the narrative, which is inartistically sought to be incorporated and harmonized with it by the mere introduction of a short formula, prefixed to each ritualistic chapter, nearly "These words the Lord spake . . . in the mount, . . . and he added no more. And he wrote them in two tables of stone." (Deut. v. 22.)

in these words; "And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying," etc.;-obviously for the purpose of giving the authority of direct Divine command, (as reported by the great lawgiver,) to the rules and routine of the business of the priests. Again, "Ruth" is a romantic pastoral of high poetic merit, to which a Davidian genealogy has been tacked. "Joshua" and "Judges," upon the slender skeleton of tradition, which is their foundation, heap a vast fabric of popular myth and fiction; while the six historical books, though probably in the main reliable as history, also contain no small admixture of these unhistoric elements.

The sacrificial regulations in the first seven chapters of "Leviticus" need not detain the serious inquirer for religious realities. Such "Hebrew old clothes" were better buried and forgotten, idle monstrosities of the childhood of human progress, like fetich worship and the taboo system.

In chaps. viii. and ix., "Moses" is made to give a practical illustration of the mode of offering the sacrifices, and in chap. x., the terrible consequences of the slightest deviation from the routine are brought to view by Yahvè's rushing forth in fire and "devouring " two neophytes, sons of Aharon, who had ignorantly lit their censers from some other than the regulation or "sacred" fire. The unfortunate relatives of the burned men are not permitted to show the slightest grief, -"lest ye die, and lest wrath. come upon all the people," (v. 6). "Moses" is angry with Aharon and his remaining sons because they do not eat the priest's portion of the sacrificed "goat of the sin offering," (16,) but when Aharon pitifully alludes to a natural

As an example, the not improbable traditional circumstance, in "Joshua," of Jericho being betrayed to the Hebrews by a woman of bad character, whose descendants, the author states, remained to his day, is laden with the preposterous fables or miracle-stories of the falling of the walls at the shout of the "Israelites," and of the crossing of the river dry-shod; - the latter a "favorite story," repeated four times in Hebrew books, (see Exod. xiv. 22; 2 Kings ii. etc.,) and told also of Krishna in his miraculous crossing of the divided Jumna. (Compare also Christ's walking the water, "Mark" vi. 48, etc.)