Only with the Mosaic legislation does this work
arrive at its own ground, and it at once stifles the narrative
under a mass of legislative matter. Here also there is a thin
historical thread running parallel to the Jehovist, but we constantly
lose sight of it from the repeated interruptions made by extensive
ritual laws and statistical statements.
"These last four books of Moses have been made quite unreadable by
a most melancholy, most incomprehensible, revision. The course of
the history is everywhere interrupted by the insertion of
innumerable laws, with regard to the greater part of which it is
impossible to see any reason for their being inserted where they
are." The dislocation of the narrative by these monstrous growths
of legislative matter is not, as Goethe thinks, to be imputed to
the editor; it is the work of the unedited Priestly Code itself,
and is certainly intolerable; nor can it be original; the
literary form of the work at once shows this. It is still
possible to trace how the legal matter forces its way into the
narrative, and once there spreads itself and takes up more and
more room.
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