Tn view of all this there would be no valid reason for refusing to attribute to Moses himself a primi- tive concise form of the Decalogue, were it not
* Noteworthy indications pointing to this view are already supplied by A. Menzies (Sermons on the Ten Commandments, London, 1888), according to whom the Decalogue belongs to the age of the Prophets, and contains the fundamental prin- ciples of social life.
+ So, e.g., Luther: ‘ Wir sollen Gott ftirchten und lieben, dass wir keusch und ziichtig leben in Worten und Werken, und ein jeglicher sein Gemahl liebe und ehre’ (‘ We are to fear and love
God by living chaste and modest in words and deeds, and every man is to love and honour his wife’).
for the formidable difficulty presented by the pro- hibition of the use of images. Down to the 8th cent. no one appears to be acquainted with so categorical a command that images of Jahweh are not to be made. Are we to hold that originally another commandment stood in the place of this one, or that Moses promulgated not ten but seven Commandments? ‘The latter position has recently been maintained by Eerdmans.* He refers the command against images to the 7th cent., but seven of the commands of the Decalogue to the time of Moses, the first of these being ‘I, Jahweh, am your God.’ We are largely in accord with Eerdmans when he discovers no such affinity between the Decalogue and the great Prophets that it must be regarded as a product of the current of ideas initiated by them; we are at one with him also in holding that the different commands and prohibitions have not an absolute but only a relative scope. In this last respect, however, he goes too far when he maintains that the only obligations meant to be enjoined (¢.g. in the matter of the prohibition of killing) are to- wards fellow-countrymen, and when he transforms the ‘coveting’ of the tenth Commandment into appropriating of ownerless property, alleging that in the OT it is only the act and not the disposition that constitutes sin. It has been rightly urged by Wildeboer + against Eerdmans that in this way the deeper moral sense of the Decalogue is de- graded, and the whole reduced to a mere scheme ministering to the utilitarian necessities of the common life of Bedawin.
The result of the above discussion is that the Mosaic origin of some rudimentary form of the Decalogue (apart from the command against images) does not appear to be absolutely excluded, but that here again we must be content to refrain from pronouncing a more definite judgment. In any case, the religious and moral significance and the germinal power—we might almost say the power of expansion—of the ideas of the Decalogue are not lessened if we must place it, not at the first beginnings but in the later stages of development of the religion of Israel. Even then, in view of its aims, and above all in view of its structure, which in the first table shows an advance from the general and more spiritual to the more concrete and external duties, while in the second table the opposite course is followed, it remains a religious document which has a good title to be regarded, even by the Christian Church at the present day, as a kind of Magna Charta for the guidance of the religious life.
III. THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL IN CANAAN DURING THE PRE-PROPHETIC PERIOD.+
i. THE SOURCES.—For the periods with which we have hitherto been dealing we have had to content ourselves with backward inferences from later sources, but now we have at our command records of considerable compass, which enable us to take a reliable glance at the religious and moral conditions of the period of the judges and of the early monarchy. The circumstance is immaterial that the records in question, apart from the very ancient Song of Deborah, did not assume their present form till a considerable time after the events (somewhere from about the 10th to the middle of the 8th cent. B.c.). For, in the first
* “Oorsprong en beteekenis van de tien woorden’ (in Theol. Tijdschrift, xxxvii. p. 18 ff.).
t ‘De Dekalog’ (in Theol. Studién, 1903, p. 109 ff.).
{ Cf. Ch. Piepenbring, ‘La religion des Hébreux & l’époque des juges’ in Revue de Ul’ Histoire des Religions, t. xxvii. 1; F. Seyring, Die altisrael. Religion in den ‘ Heldengeschichten’ des Richterbuchs, Hamburg, 1892; CO. H. Toy, ‘The pre-Prophetic Religion of Israel’ in New World, 1896, p. 128 ff.
RELIGION OF ISRAEL
place, all the evidence is in favour of the sup- position that during the whole of this period the moral and religious viewpoint was a fixed one; and, secondly, the date when the traditions were finally committed to writing must not be con- founded with the date when the oral tradition became fixed. Thus the conditions underlying the patriarchal narratives as presented by the Jahwist cannot be brought down at latest beyond the time of Saul, even although the main part of the Jahwistic written source was not composed till about B.c. 850. The same remark applies to the so-called hero-narratives of the Book of Judges, which occupy themselves with the six ‘oreat judges’ (Ehud, Deborah, Barak, Gideon, Jephthah, Samson), and to the same category with which belong also the very ancient and important narratives contained in Jg 9 and in the Appendix, chs. 17-21 (although it is true that chs. 19-21 have been subjected to a very late revision). All these written sources—after various more recent com- ponents have been sifted out—give us a true picture of the conditions that prevailed during the period prior to the advent of written pro- phecy.