The
main point, however, is this, that the tabernacle of the Priestly
Code in its essential meaning is not a mere provisional shelter for
the ark on the march, but the sole legitimate sanctuary for the
community of the twelve tribes prior to the days of Solomon, and
so in fact a projection of the later temple. How modest, one might
almost say how awkwardly bashful, is the Deuteronomic reference
to the future place which Jehovah is to choose when compared with
this calm matter-of-fact assumption that the necessary centre of
unity of worship was given from the first! In the one case we
have, so to speak, only the idea as it exists in the mind of the
lawgiver, but making no claim to be realised till a much later
date; in the other, the Mosaic idea has acquired also a Mosaic
embodiment, with which it entered the world at the very first.
By the same simple historical method which carries the central
sanctuary back into the period before Solomon does the Priestly
author abolish the other places of worship. His forty-eight
Levitical cities are for the most part demonstrably a
metamorphosis of the old Bamoth to meet the exigencies of the time.
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