PENTATEUCHAL OBJECTIONS ( pen 'La tiik-al 613-jek'shims).
It has been claimed that all the Pentateuchal laws could not have been given through Moses because the same legislator would not give three different codes to the same people during forty years and under nearly related conditions.
But in order to make out three codes the ob jector is obliged to include those scattered groups of laws which are chiefly found in Lev. xvi, xxv, and are found also occasionally in Numbers and sometimes called "The Law of Holiness,"although this is not a Biblical term.
It may be shown, however, that the teaching (Torah) of the wilderness forms one progressive whole, and modern critics are not always qualified to fix the limits within which its progress was possible.
(1) Early. Even before the covenant at Ho reb, there was an early stratum of "Judgments" or precedents which Moses was commanded to "set before" the people in connection with the code which was given on Sinai or Horeb. These "judgments" are found in Exod. xxi., and this older and pre-Mosaic section is incorporated into the Sinaitic laws proper at or about Exodus xxii : 20. Beginning with the twenty-first chapter of Exodus we have a very ancient corpus furls which is written with a few exceptions in the third per son, whereas from verse 20 of chap. xxii the style changes and "thou" or "ye" is the uniform mode of address. The older method has a spirit of its own, besides a strong local color.
The "judgments" here given are evidently legal decisions, and they give us a series of pictures which illustrate a very primitive mode of life.
Sir Henry Maine says: "Parities of circum stances were probably commoner in the simple mechanism of ancient society than they are now, and in the succession of similar cases, awards are likely to follow and resemble each other. Here we have the germ or rudiment of a custom, a con ception posterior to that of Ceuteres (thentistes) or judgments. However strongly we, with our modern associations, may be inclined to lay down a priori that the notion of a custom must precede that of a judicial sentence, and that a judgment must affirm a custom or punish its breach, it seems quite certain that the historical order of ideas is that in which I have placed them . . .
Law has scarcely reached the footing of custom, it is rather a habit . . . The only authorita tive statement of right and wrong is a judicial sentence after the facts, not one supposing a law which has been violated,but one which is breathed for the first time by a higher power into the judge's mind at the moment of adjudication." (Ancient Law, p. 8.) This last idea is forcibly illustrated by the use of the term Elohint for Judges as in Exodus xxi: 6, also xxii :8.
Each of these early judgments represents a scene in pastoral life, while agriculture is also shown in the vineyard and harvest field.
Master and slave are alike Hebrews : "If thou buy a Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for noth ing" (Exod. xxi :2).
These old judgments contain also constant re minders of patriarchal life; for instance in Exod. xxii:to-r3 we read: "If a man deliver unto his neighbor" any animal "to keep, and it die or be hurt . . . If it be stolen from him, he shall make restitution to thc owner . . . . If it be torn in pieces let him bring it for a witness," etc.
This reminds one forcibly of Jacob's reproach to Laban, "That which was torn of beasts I brought not unto thee; I bare the loss. Of my hand didst thou require it . . . . stolen by day or by night" (Gcn. xxxi :39).
There is a glimpse of the future cities of refugc 1.vhcre it is said of the man who accidentally kills another: "Then will I appoint thce a place whither hc shall flee" (Exod. xxi:t3).
Thcre is nowhere here any retrospect to a state of earlier bondage, but a little later we find: "Ye were strangers in the land of Egypt,"and then fol lows the angel guide and the promise of "the place which I have prepared." All of these conditions exactly suit only one stage of Israel's history. Nearly all of them are inconsistent with the life in Canaan, and still less are they appropriate to the conditions which ob tained in the wilderness. The one stage to which they do apply is the life in Goshen, when the peo ple wcre "increasing abundantly and multiplying" in that region until "the land was filled with them" (Gen. xlvii :27 ; Exod. i :7).