3. All the less can it be that, when man is said to have been created after the image of God and
* The fullest treatment of these questions is by H. Gunkel, Schipfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (Gottingen, 1894) ; and Frdr. Delitzsch, Das babylonische Weltschopfungsepos (Leipzig, 1896).
716 RELIGION OF ISRAEL
RELIGION OF ISRAEL
in His likeness (Gn 1°’), there is any thought of a copying of the bodily form of God. Even if some- thing of the kind may have been intended in the heathen source which is assumed by many to have been used by the narrator, he himself would have indignantly repelled any such conception. Man is the image of God in so far as he, in distinction from all other living creatures, belongs to the realm of rational and moral beings, whose supreme head is God Himself. The idea that this Divine image was lost by a fall into sin is quite unknown to P. On the contrary, he expressly notes (Gn 5?) that it was transmitted by Adam, through the process of generation, to Seth (and his further posterity) ; and, even after the Flood, murder is declared to be an act worthy of punishment by death (9°), because it amounts to a destroying of the Divine image.
A result of the position of pre-eminence held by man as the bearer of the Divine image is the dominion accorded him by God over the earth, and in particular over the world of animals (Gn 175), For the exercise of this dominion men are capacitated by becoming fruitful and multi- plying in accordance with the so-called ‘ Creation- blessing.’ At the same time, however, they are at first (v.%) confined exclusively to a vegetable diet; permission to use animal food (but to the exclusion of eating blood) does not come till after the Flood (Gn 9**:), z.¢. it is simply a concession to the corruption that has now set in, a perversion of the condition originally designed by God. In His perfect creation slaughter could not have held sway from the first.
ii. THE REGULATIONS OF THE THEOCRACY.— 1. That interest in the regulations of the theocracy by which the whole of P is dominated, makes itself felt already in the Creation narrative, in so far as the latter represents the Sabbath as blessed and hallowed from the beginning as the day on which God rested from His six days’ work (Gn 2°). The Flood is indeed, as in J, a judgment of God (64%) on a wholly corrupt humanity, but at the same time furnishes the occasion for concluding a bérith (cf., on this so-called ‘covenant,’ above, p. 630°f.) with the new race of men descended from Noah. It consists in God’s promise that mankind is in future to be safe from the recurrence of de- struction by the waters of a flood, and in the binding of Noah (and in him of all mankind) to abstain from eating blood and from murder. The covenantal sign confirmatory of the Divine promise is the rainbow (912#:).
2. In the history of the patriarchs, which is dis- missed by P in a few very brief notices, there emerges prominently once more the concluding of the bérith with Abraham (Gn 171). The Divine promise in this instance has reference to the be- stowing upon the patriarch of a very numerous posterity, which shall include even kings, and to the assigning of the land of Canaan to Abraham's seed as a permanent possession. On the other hand, Abraham is bound to an upright walk before God and to the adoption of circumcision as the outward sign of this second ‘covenant.’ It is clear that circumcision, which, as a very ancient practice of many nations surrounding Israel, must originally have rested upon other grounds (cf. above, p. 622°f.), is here brought under a specifically religious point of view. Since an uncircumcised person is ‘unclean,’ circumcision, as the taking away of a portion of the uncleanness, is a symbolical act of purifying. But this negative sense is supplemented by a positive one—an act of consecration. Circumcision is the rite whereby a child is received into the fellowship of the pure God-consecrated people, and it includes at the same time the obligation to conform to all the
Divine ordinances that are binding on this body. All these features (purification, consecration, en- gagement) impart to circumcision, as viewed by P, a sacramental character, which suggests com- parison with Christian Baptism. The circum- stance that, according to yv.™, circumcision is to be performed also on every class of slaves, appears at the first glance very strange, in view of the par- ticularism with which P elsewhere insists on the sole claim of Israel to the name of a people of God. But it seems to him even more important that no unclean one shall be tolerated in the company of the clean, and hence he resorts more readily to the expedient of requiring that even foreigners who have come into external fellowship with Israel shall be bound to the Law by circumcision, and be thereby constituted full citizens of the Divine commonwealth.
3. Except for his detailed account of the purchase of the burial-place at Hebron (Gn 23), upon which he evidently means to base a claim on the part of Abraham’s posterity to the land of Canaan, P hastens rapidly over the history preliminary to the Sinai covenant, that he may dwell all the more fully on this third bérith, whose duration is to be eternal, and whose sign is the Sabbath (Ex 318), In the forefront stands (Ex 678) the solemn revelation of the name ‘Jahweh’ to Moses. This name is expressly said to have been then first communicated, God having re- vealed Himself to the fathers only as El-shaddai (‘God almighty’). No explanation of the name ‘Jahweh’ is given. Doubtless, the explanation which underlies Ex 3 is assumed as long familiar. But here already the promises of Jahweh are enumerated, upon which the bérith at Sinai is to be founded : the deliverance from the bondage of Egypt, whereby at the same time Israel’s election as the people of God’s own pos- session is sealed, and the settlement of them in Canaan in fulfilment of the sworn promise to the patriarchs that this land was to be given to their descendants for a perpetual possession. The obli- gations, again, to which the people have to submit themselves, in order to prove themselves worthy of these Divine blessings and of the name ‘people of Jahweh,’ are laid down in the numerous ordi- nances which form the kernel of the so-called ‘Priests’ Code.’ The latter name is not meant to imply that this code is concerned only with pre- scriptions for the priests—by way of opposition, for instance, to Deuteronomy as a law-book for the people. On the contrary, the majority of the laws contained in it assume the form of communi- cations which Moses by God’s command imparts to the people. But, as all strictly ritual acts can be performed only by priests, and the laws have reierence very largely to the cultus, the designa- tion of the whole as the ‘ Priests’ Code’ is per- fectly justified. The realm of civil and criminal jurisprudence,* which plays by no means an un- essential part in the ‘Book of the Covenant,’ comes into consideration in P only where speci- gk religious interests are involved.