4, The fundamental notions on which the so- called Ceremonial Law, independence on the legisla- tive programme of Ezekiel, is based, are extremely simple. They amount essentially to the one idea that in the domain of Israel, Jahweh’s own people, everything without exception belongs, and is thus consecrated, to Him alone. This holds good. ac- cordingly of all space and time, and of all pro-
* On this side of the legislation, which we pass by here, the reader may compare the following : W. Nowack, Die socialen Probleme in Israel, Strassburg, 1892 ; E. Schall, Die Staatsver- Jassung der Juden, Leipzig, 1896; F. Buhl, Die socialen Verhdltnisse der Israeliten, Berlin, 1899; G. Forster, Das mosaische Strafrecht in seiner geschichtlichen Entwickelung, Leipzig, 1900.
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RELIGION OF ISRAEL
RELIGION OF ISRAEL ie,
a a ee eee
perty and life. The full logical consequence of this now would be, properly speaking, that man would have to renounce all use of what is God’s sole pro- perty—nay, that all life would have to be brought to Him in sacrifice. But this would make the continued existence of the God-consecrated people impossible. Hence God has so ordained it in His law that only a portion of the property in question is to be exclusively hallowed to Him and thus withdrawn from profane use. This due (térdmdh), levied upon the whole, gives symbolical expression to the confession that Jahweh is incontrovertibly Lord of everything. With this admission He is graciously satisfied ; and by the sacred térdmah all the rest is also hallowed and its safe use pro- cured for Israel. But all the heavier is the vengeance that overtakes him who omits the pre- scribed hallowing and rendering of a portion to Jahweh, or lays his hands on what has already been hallowed. It will be our object in the fol- lowing survey to show what was the special portion of Jahweh under all the categories above referred to.
(a) Holy places.—Jahweh is sole Lord of all space. But He contents Himself with requiring that a limited space be marked off and declared absolutely sacred. This space is the place where His ‘ glory’ dwells, and thus at the same time sup- plies the condition of approach to Him and of all kinds of ritual proceedings. (a) The latter became possible for the first time after the construction of the one legitimate sanctuary, in the form of the “Tent of Meeting’ (commonly called ‘ the taber- nacle,’ German Stiftshiitte) at Sinai. Hence P nowhere speaks of the erecting of altars or the offering of sacrifices by the patriarchs, but the constitution of the sanctuary is the first and very minutely handled subject of the Sinaitic legis- lation (Ex 25'* and 354f), the cultus at one legitimate sanctuary, which Deuteronomy (12'*) put forward as a new demand and which it carried through not without diffi- culty, appears in P as something that is self- evident and needs not to be specially enjoined. Nor does P, like Deuteronomy, regard the unifica- tion of the cultus as coming into force only after the termination of the conquest of Canaan [or, to be more precise, after the building of Solomon’s temple], but as a principle that was valid from the very first. The tent-sanctuary erected at Sinai is indeed, in view of its whole character, nothing but the Jerusalem temple projected back into the time of the wilderness journeyings; but there are two considerations that forbid our speaking, in this connexion, of P’s account as pure fiction. In the first place, even the ancient tradition (Ex 337") knows of a ‘Tent of Meeting,’ only that the latter is not a place of worship but simply the seat of an oracle, and that it stands not in the midst of but outside the camp. Secondly, the tent-sanctuary of P belongs to the numerous theories which owe their form, not to an actual tradition but to a religious postulate. Things must have been so ordered, it was argued, if they were to harmonize with the (much later, but) absolutely authoritative theories. Thus a delicate symbolical idea comes to be transformed into tangible history. Any one who straightway pronounces this a falsifying of history, shows that he has no notion of the peculiar character of the whole genus of literature known as the midrash (for it is to this realm that we must assign all this embodying of religious ideas in history, within the Ceremonial Law). See, further, art. TABERNACLE in vol. iv. ;
The setting up of the sacred tent in the midst of the camp of Israel naturally implies that Jahweh means to take up His abode amidst His people, if not in His real person, yet with a representation
The concentration of.
of His being (cf. above, p. 639°f., on the ‘glory of Jahweh’). The special seat of His revealing presence, and consequently the most holy centre of the sacred spot, is the lid of the Ark of the Law in the dark adytwm of the tent (Ex 25%), Next to this ‘Holy of Holies,’ which, it would appear from Lv 16, could be entered only by the high priest, and even by him only on the Cites’ Day of Atonement,* comes the ‘Holy Place,’ which only the priests, not the Levites, might enter. These two spaces are surrounded by the fore-court, in which the priests, with the assistance of the Levites, attend to the sacrificial cultus. Between the fore-court, again, and the tribes of Israel which—three on each side—surround the court, the Levites are encamped. In virtue of the consecration which they have undergone, they are fitted to serve as a bulwark to the people against the Divine holiness, which threatens with destruction everything unclean that comes near it (Nu 153),