Their authority was divine, or,
as we should say, moral, in its character; it rested upon that
spontaneous recognition of the idea of right which, though
unexpressed, was alive and working among the tribes--upon Jehovah
Himself, who was the author of this generally diffused sense of
right, but revealed the proper determinations on points of detail
only to certain individuals. The priestly Torah was an entirely
unpolitical or rather prepolitical institution; it had an
existence before the state had, and it was one of the invisible
foundation pillars on which the state rested.
War and the administration of justice were regarded as matters
of religion before they became matters of obligation and civil
order; this is all that is really meant when a theocracy is
spoken of. Moses certainly organised no formal state, endowed
with specific holiness, upon the basis of the proposition "Jehovah
is the God of Israel;" or, at all events, if he did so, the fact
had not in the slightest degree any practical consequence or
historical significance. The old patriarchal system of families
and clans continued as before to be the ordinary constitution, if
one can apply such a word as constitution at all to an unorganised
conglomeration of homogeneous elements.
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