* We here leave out of account, of course, the controversy as to whether in the oldest tradition Sinai and Horeb were already identified, as well as: the question where the Sinai or Horeb of our present narratives is to be found. See art. Sinai in vol. iv.
+So esp. Budde, Die Religion des Volkes Israel, Giessen, 1900, p. 17 ff. :
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RELIGION OF ISRAEL 627
* whereupon he organizes a sacrificial meal in honour of him, and admits Aaron and all the nobles of Israel to take part in it. In other words, he, the Kenite priest, opens for them at Sinai, the dwelling-place of his god, an approach to the cult of the latter. And this is the very reason why the religion of Israel became, according to Budde,” an ethical one, because it was a religion adopted by choice and not a nature religion.
Now we do not mean to deny the possibility of such an order of events. Yet there is no lack of weighty considerations of an opposite kind. It is true, indeed, that the argument that Sinai is the prover dwelling-place of Jahweh is not weakened
y the circumstance of His presence with the people in Egypt and during the Exodus (as also afterwards in the wilderness), since passing appear- ances for special ends are not inconsistent with the possession of a fixed abode. But might not Sinai (or Horeb) have been for long the ‘ mount of God’ also to certain Israelitish tribes, as appears to be implied in Ex 477? This supposition would be all the more plausible if it is true, as many have recently come to hold, that the whole of the tribes of Israel did not undergo serfdom in Egypt, but that part of them led the life of nomads in the neighbourhood of Sinai, and had Jong continued to worship the god that was established there. The work of Moses would thus have consisted in pro- claiming and securing recognition for the special god of certain tribes as the God of the whole nation. These are, indeed, mere conjectures, but they tally with a circumstance which ces to us to be far too readily ignored by the defenders of the Kenite hypothesis: this, namely, that even in the oldest sources of the Pentateuch it is always implied that Jahweh was not proclaimed to Israel as an absolutely new and therefore unknown god.
We have already remarked that the Jahwist uses the name ‘ Jahweh’ from the first, and regards it as known and honoured by the ancestors of Moses and his contemporaries. On the other hand, E (Ex 3%) and P (6%) assume that it was first revealed to Moses and through him to the people. At the same time it is not at all the idea of these sources that the God Himself was unknown tothe people. Weare not thinking of the frequent designation of Jahweh as the God of Abraham, Tsaac, and Jacob (Ex 3° 1 4°), for such allusions to the God of the patriarchs might quite con- ceivably have been in every instance inserted in order afterwards to give to the Canaanite places of worship, supposed to have been taken over from the patriarchs, a legitimate standing as sanctuaries of the same God. But even the assumption of interpolation of this kind would not destroy the fact that even the early sources of the Pentateuch see in Jahweh the God of the ancestors of Israel. At the very first mention of Him (Ex 3°) He is called ‘the God of thy (Moses’) father’; He has seen the oppression of His people in Egypt, and means now to deliver them (v.”:); face to face with Pharaoh the appeal of Moses is to be to ‘the God of the Hebrews’ (v.38, cf. also 5° 716 9! 1° 10%). Even if the term ‘Hebrews’ here be an anachron- ism, in none of the passages cited is it implied that Jahweh first became ‘the God of the Hebrews’ after the call of Moses; on the contrary, He has long held this position. If, all the same, Moses is regarded as the founder of the Jahweh religion, this can be understood only in the sense that the god of one or more tribes, or perhaps the god of one particular family, was proclaimed by him as the God of the whole body. Jahweh would thus not have been an absolutely strange and new god, but one whose power and help had already been experienced by part of the confederated tribes ;
* Op. cit. p. 31.
whereas, on the other hand, the proclamation of the yet untried god of the Kenites could hardly have met with such rapid acceptance. Beyond this we can fall back only upon conjectures. It will always remain the most plausible supposition that Jahweh had a connexion with Moses’ own tribe, the tribe of Levi. This hypothesis has at least as good a claim as that which makes Him the god of the Rachel-tribes.
As to the argument in support of the Kenite hypothesis drawn from Ex 18, we are at one with its defenders in holding that there we have a testimony to the community of worship of the Israelites and the Kenites. But this is quite different from ‘the admittance of the Israelites to the Jahweh cult of the Kenites’ (see above, p. 626>f.). The community of worship of Israel and the Kenites was a fact ; Ex 18 recounts its historical origin ; but the question of the origin of Jahwism among the two peoples is not considered. The circumstance that it is Jethro who organizes the sacrificial meal is sufficiently accounted for by his residence on the spot, which imposes upon him the duty of showing hospitality to the strangers.