The Mosaic Origin of the Pentateuchal Codes

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1886. Excerpt: ... many a city, and found natural expression in declaring the forty-eight places to have been the peculiar inheritance of the clems ever since the Mosaic times. Let us briefly see what these serious charges amount to. The impracticability of the command might be considerably less than Wellhausen imagines. His objection, that the arithmetical precision with which every thing is described proves an ideal character, falls immediately away as soon as we consider the numbers given as indicating the average allowance to be made for pasture-ground, nothing more than a general limit, a minimum which might be modified according to the circumstances or the geographical condition of the country. That the cities are considered as a point is true, if we take the point, not in its geometrical sense, but as having the size of each individual city. If Wellhausen means that the square of two thousand cubits included the city, there is nothing in the text to justify this view. The comparison with newly built cities is not entirely out of place; since in the conquest of Canaan many a city must have been destroyed, and a clean sweep made. That Levitical cities remained in possession of the Canaanites is nothing remarkable, and may at the same time account for the statement of Deuteronomy and later historical facts, which presuppose a partial scattering of the Levites all over the country. Wellhausen's remark, that no traces of the existence of Levitical cities appear in subsequent time, is most positively untrue. The fact is, that some very striking coincidences make the existence of this law highly probable. We refer to what happened in Beth-shemcsh; to the fact that Jeremiah, of priestly descent, was born in Anathoth; that Abiathar, when dismissed by Solomon, was told to go t...