command, even though we assume, with some, that we have here two distinct narratives loosely put together. But, at the worst, no serious difficulty need be found here. It is when we come to the following five verses that the real puzzle is presented. After this statement about Jehovah's threat and the people's humiliation, as indicated by their not wearing their ornaments from this time on, we.read (according to the usual rendering), "And Moses took the tent, and pitched it without the camp, and called it the Tent of Meeting. And it came to pass, when Moses went out unto the tent, that all the people rose up and stood, every man at his tent door, and looked after Moses until he was gone into the tent. And it came to pass, as Moses entered into the tent, the pillar of cloud descended, and stood at the door of the tent; and all the people rose up and worshipped, every man at his tent door. And Jehovah spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend. And he turned again into the camp: but his servant, Joshua, the son of Nun, a young man, departed not out of the tent."

The difficulties presented by this passage are two: (1) It speaks of the Tent of Meeting (A. V., "tabernacle of the congregation") as of a structure already erected, whereas, according to the rest of the book, it was as yet only projected, but not built; (2) the passage interrupts the narrative of ch. xxxiii. itself; for ver. 12 seqq. is a direct continuation of the communication between Jehovah and Moses; and vers. 7-11 have (as usually understood) no visible connection with it.

The first of these difficulties those who hold to the unity of authorship, or at least consistency of authorship, have attempted to solve in two ways: (a) Some have thought that the tent here spoken of was Moses' own tent, which he now set apart provisionally for sacred purposes until the permanent structure should be completed. But it is hard to see why, if Moses' private tent was intended, it should not have been called "his tent" instead of "the tent." Moreover, the following verses represent Moses as being only occasionally in this tent, i. e. only for the purpose of special communication with Jehovah. Where was he to eat and sleep? What was to be his ordinary dwellingplace? This difficulty is evaded, not met, when Keil translates "a tent," and says that it was a tent of Moses which, on account of the divine revelations made in it, became a provisional tabernacle. If the meaning is that it was one of Moses' tents, then, to say nothing of the fact that it is a pure assumption to suppose that he had several tents of his own, the use of the definite article is unaccountable. If he had but one tent, the definite article would be less objectionable,

though even then very strange; but if he had several, and this was only one, such a construction is quite inadmissible.

(6) The other explanation is that the tent here mentioned was a sanctuary which from the first had been used as a central place of worship, and is therefore familiarly called "the tent." The obvious objection to this is, that there is no previous reference to any such structure, and it seems singular that in the first place where it is mentioned it should be called simply "the tent." Moreover, the paragraph before us produces the impression that this was the beginning of the religious use made of this tent. It was now taken and pitched outside of the camp, and called the tent of meeting. It may, indeed, be urged that it is intrinsically probable that there had been some sanctuary from the first; but this narrative can be made to refer to such a sanctuary only by a very strained exegesis.

But these interpretations, while they, if otherwise admissible, remove the first difficulty-the absurdity of telling what was done with a building not yet erected-do not at all relieve the second one, the interruption of the account of Moses' conversation with Jehovah. When Moses says (ver. 12), "See, thou sayest unto me, Bring up this people; and thou hast not let me know whom thou wilt send with me," there is a manifest and direct reference to Jehovah's promise (ver. 2) that "an angel" should go before them. Moses is grieved because Jehovah himself refuses to go with them, and only sends an unknown angel; and he intercedes for a modification of the divine sentence. Now, in the midst of this negotiation is inserted the account of what Moses did with this unknown tent. No one can reasonably suppose that it describes what happened at this time; it is commonly understood to describe a customary use made of the tent; but there is obviously not only no reason for interjecting the account here, but the best of all reasons why it should not have been interjected, viz., that it has nothing to do with the things related in the context, and inexcusably interrupts the narrative. And these conjectures about what this tent was-conjectures at the best without any positive support, and such as would never have been thought of except for the anachronism respecting the real tabernacle-do not at all relieve us as regards the incongruity between this passage and the rest of the chapter. On any theory of the authorship of the Exodus, here is a very serious difficulty. Such a causeless breach of continuity is quite without parallel; and the least that can be said of the paragraph in question (as commonly understood) is that it is misplaced. And this brings us to a third theory respecting the difficulty in question.

(c) It is held that these five verses refer to the same tabernacle as

the one elsewhere more largely described, but that they are by a different author, and are here inserted out of place. In confirmation of this view, we are pointed to discrepancies between this account of the tabernacle and the more detailed one, besides the one already noticed. Thus it is observed that, according to the passage before us, the only use made of the tabernacle was its occasional occupation by Moses in order to receive divine communications, whereas elsewhere little or nothing is said about Moses' being in it, the chief use of it being sacerdotal. Again, according to the section before us, Joshua was to remain permanently in the tent; whereas, according to the other accounts (Num. i. 51, iii. 10, 38, xviii. 7, 22), only Aaron and his descendants were allowed to enter it. Furthermore, the tabernacle is here said to be outside of the camp, whereas later (Num. ii. 17) the tabernacle is located in the midst of the camp. These discrepancies are thought to betray the hand of a different writer in the passage before us from that of the author of the other accounts.

This hypothesis, however, not only does nothing to relieve the first difficulty, the anachronism respecting the tabernacle, but leaves the second of the difficulties entirely untouched. The differences in the conception of the tabernacle might indeed be thus explained; but it is still left unexplained how the compiler of the book should ever have been led to insert this narrative in this place. That he might sometimes disregard or overlook discrepancies of a minor sort, in putting together writings of different authors, rather than dissect and distort the writings, is very conceivable. But there is everywhere manifest such a disposition to construct an orderly and on the whole self-consistent history, that so glaring an anachronism and contradiction as is here presented is without parallel and without excuse. He could not have been ignorant of the fact that the tabernacle which he now describes as in existence had, according to the other documents, not yet been built. Moreover, he must have seen that the present place is in every way a most inappropriate one for introducing it, inasmuch as it interrupts in an utterly impertinent and irrelevant manner the account of Moses' communication with Jehovah. When we consider how freely, on the ordinary theory of compilation, the writings of the various original authors were chopped up and patched together, sometimes so that one-half of a verse is assigned to one author and all of the context to another, there would seem to be no conceivable reason why the redactor should not here, when the occasion was so urgent, have either omitted this paragraph, or else have reserved it for a later time when it would have been in place.

It is therefore no material relief to assume that this whole section

(xxxii.-xxxiv.) about the golden calf and Moses' intercession being Jehovistic, the redactor finding it in this shape did not care to detach any part of it from the rest, notwithstanding the glaring discrepancy which was thus introduced into the history. But even if this did afford some relief, there would remain unexplained why the Jehovist himself should have put together his own material in such a way as this; for, as we have seen, irrespective of the anachronism between xxxiii. 7–11 and the longer account of the tabernacle, this section is out of place even as related to its immediate context. Dillmann, feeling this difficulty, attributes these verses (xxxiii. 7-11) not to the Jehovist, but to the younger Elohist, to whom he also attributes mainly the first six verses also. But this is only shifting the trouble, not removing it; it rather increases it. For if the redactor had two or three narratives to make his compilation from; if Ex. xxxiii. 7-11 was not a constituent and original part of the whole section xxxiixxxiv; then the wonder is all the greater why the redactor should have put together the narratives of different authors so as to create such palpable confusion and contradiction, when it would have been just as easy, and every way more sensible, to insert this short paragraph, if at all, in a place where it chronologically belongs. If it is supposed that the redactor himself is not responsible for this arrangement, but found these five verses from the younger Elohist already incorporated with the Jehovist's account of the golden calf, etc., then this only raises the question, How did such incorporation ever take place? Some one must have put together the two things in this absurd way; and go back as far as we may in our conjectures, the difficulty remains the same, and remains unsolved. There is every presumption against such a historical account of the use of the tabernacle having been interpolated into this narrative of the negotiation. between Jehovah and Moses.

Delitzsch, in the second of his recent articles on the Pentateuch, which treats of the tabernacle, ranks himself among those who assume that the tabernacle of this passage is the same as the one previously described, and that this passage is from a different author from that of the other and more detailed account of the tabernacle. He thinks that the one wrote without any purpose of supplementing the other, and that the two accounts were put together by a redactor who must have had some desire to harmonize them. "Probably," says he, "he was led by this desire to give this abruptly-beginning section its present position, so that the putting of the sacred tent out of the camp, and far away from it, appears as a penal consequence of the people's sin of apostasy." This suggestion is an approach towards what I

regard as the true solution. already set forth. If the redactor was influenced by a harmonistic intent here, he had very poor success in the execution of it, since, by representing Moses as removing the tabernacle at this juncture, he brings this account into the flattest contradiction with the other accounts of the tabernacle, according to which the sanctuary was not yet erected. That the removal of the tabernacle from the midst of the camp, might have served as a punishment of the people's apostasy, is very true, provided there was a tabernacle in existence; but, inasmuch. as according to the rest of the book, there was none as yet, and the redactor himself has given us to understand the fact, it seems almost like satire to speak of him as attempting to harmonize the different accounts by representing the people as punished by the removal of a non-existent tabernacle. Besides all this, there remains untouched the other difficulty, that the section in question is utterly incongruous with the immediate context.

But it does not remove the difficulties

One other explanation may be mentioned, that of those who hold (d) that the detailed account of the tabernacle is a fiction, and that the tent in the narrative before us is a real tent, in which the ark was kept. This is the view e. g. of Graf, who holds moreover that the Elohistic account of the tabernacle is later than the one before us. He explains the position of the longer narratives of the tabernacle with reference to Ex. xxxiii. 7-11 as follows: "It was occasioned by the mention of the bis in xxxiii. 7 sqq.; but the direction to build had been given to Moses on the mount, and therefore belonged to the place where his forty days' stay on the mount was told of, xxiv. 18; the execution of the command, however, had to be preceded by that which was immediately connected with his descent from the mount, xxxii.-xxxiv.; therefore the description of the structure was inserted immediately before the laws which were to be given before setting out from Sinai, with which laws this description was closely connected (Geschichtliche Bücher des A. T. p. 60).” But this solution is as inadequate as the others to meet the real difficulties. The whole value of it depends upon the shrewdness of the critic's guess as to the reason why these narratives are arranged as they are; but even if we assume the guess to be a shrewd one, the relief is the slightest possible. By assuming the Elohistic account to be a pure fiction we do indeed in one sense explain how the two accounts are inconsistent with one another; but inasmuch as the redactor is supposed to have had an intelligent motive in his work, the problem is not solved till we can discover both intelligence and motive. Graf has assigned a