281

CHAPTER VIII.

INTRODUCTION OF THE NAME JEHOVAH.

294. In the story of the Exodus we read as follows:

'And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am JEHOVAH. And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the Name of God Almighty (EL SHADDAI); but by my Name JEHOVAH was I not known to them. And I have also established my covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land of their pilgrimage, wherein they were strangers. And I have also heard the groaning of the children of Israel, whom the Egyptians keep in bondage; and I have remembered my covenant. Wherefore say unto the children of Israel, I am JEHOVAH. And I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will rid you out of their bondage, and I will redeem you with a stretched-out arm and with great judgments. And I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God. And ye shall know that I am JEHOVAH your God, which bringeth you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. And I will bring you in unto the land, concerning the which I did swear to give it, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob; and I will give it to you for an heritage. I am JEHOVAH.' E.vi.2-8.

295. The above passage cannot, as it seems to me, without a perversion of its obvious meaning,-the meaning which would be ascribed to it by the great body of simple-minded readers, who have never had their attention awakened to the difficulties, in which the whole narrative becomes involved thereby,- be explained to say anything else than this, that the Name Jehovah was not known at all to the Patriarchs, but was now for the first time revealed, as the Name by which the God of Israel would be henceforth distinguished from all other Gods.

So Prof. LEE admits, who in his Hebrew Lexicon explains the word Jehovah to be

the most sacred and unalienable name of God, unknown, however, to the Patriarchs; it is not, therefore, more ancient in all probability than the time of Moses.

T

And so JOSEPHUS writes, Ant.ii.12.4,

Wherefore God declared to him (Moses) His holy Name, which had never been discovered to men before.

296. But then we come at once upon the contradictory fact, that the Name Jehovah is repeatedly used in the earlier parts of the story, throughout the whole book of Genesis. And it is not merely employed by the writer, when relating simply, as an historian, in his own person, events of a more ancient date, in which case he might be supposed to have introduced the word, as having become, in his own day, after having been thus revealed, familiar to himself and his readers; but it is put into the mouth of the patriarchs themselves, as Abraham, xiv.22, Isaac, xxvi.22, Jacob, xxviii.16.

297. Nay, according to the story, it was not only known to these, but to a multitude of others,-to Eve, iv.1, and Lamech, v.29, before the Flood, and to Noah, after it, ix.26,— to Sarai, xvi.2, Rebekah, xxvii.7, Leah, xxix.35, Rachel, xxx.24,-to Laban also, xxiv.31, and Bethuel, xxiv.50, and Abraham's servant, xxiv.27,-even to heathens, as Abimelech, the Philistine king of Gerar, his friend, and his chief captain, xxvi.28. And, generally, we are told that, as early as the time of Enos, the son of Seth, then began men to call upon the Name of Jehovah,' iv.26, though the name was already known to Eve, according to the narrative, more than two centuries before.

298. The recognition of the plain meaning of E.vi.2-8, such as that quoted above from Prof. LEE, (a writer of undoubted orthodoxy,) would be enough at once to decide the question as to the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. If the Name originated in the days of Moses, then Moses himself, certainly, in writing the story of the ancient Patriarchs, would not have put the Name into their mouths, much less into those of heathen men, nor could he have found it so ascribed to them in an older document. Prof. LEE's view, therefore, would require us to suppose that, if Moses wrote the main story of the Exodus,

>

and of his own awful communications with God, as well as the Elohistic portions of Genesis, yet some other writer must have afterwards inserted the Jehovistic passages. But then it is inconceivable that any other writer should have dared to mix up, without any distinction, his own additions with a narrative so venerable and sacred, as one which had actually been written by the hand of Moses. The interpolator must have known that the older document was not written by Moses, and had no such sacred character attached to it.

299. The ordinary mode of 'reconciling' these discrepancies is exhibited in the following passage from KURTZ, ii.p.101:

It is not expressly said that the Name Jehovah was unknown before the time of Moses, but merely that, in the patriarchal age, God had not revealed the fulness and depths of His Nature, to which that Name particularly belonged.

And so writes KALISCH, E.vi.2,3 :—

The only possible explanation is that already alluded to,—‘My Name Jehovah has not been understood and comprehended by the Patriarchs in its essence and depth,' —although it was, even in this time, already occasionally mentioned.

But this is, evidently, an assumption made only to get over a difficulty. If Abraham made use of the Name Jehovah at all, then God was known to him in some measure-in some sense or other by that Name, if not known so perfectly as by the Israelites in later days. If the Patriarchs employed the Name at all, it could scarcely have been said, 'I appeared unto them by the Name, El Shaddai; but by my Name, Jehovah, was I not known to them,' and surely not when we read such words as these:

'Abram believed in Jehovah, and He counted it to him for righteousness. And He said unto him, I am Jehovah, that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it.' G.xv.6,7.

'I am Jehovah, the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac ; the land, whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed, &c. And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me, &c. then shall Jehovah be my God.' G.xxviii. 13-21.

'O God of my father Abraham, and God of my father Isaac, Jehovah, which saidst unto me, &c.' G.xxxii.9.

Could Abram have believed in Jehovah, and God Himself have declared this Name to Abram, and yet Abram after all be said not to know God' by this Name?

After such words as the above, it appears to be a mere straining of the plain meaning of the Scripture, in order to escape from an obvious contradiction, to assign such a sense, as KURTZ and KALISCH and many other able commentators do, to the word 'know' in this passage of the Exodus.

300. Like the other contradictions, however, which appear in the accounts of the Creation and the Deluge, the whole is easily explained, when we know that different writers were concerned in composing the narrative of the book of Genesis. Wherever the Name Jehovah is put into the mouth of any person throughout this book, the writer is the Jehovist. The Elohist, as has been said, never uses it at all, even when narrating facts of history in his own person: much less does he allow it to be uttered by any one of the personages, whose story he is telling. Thus in G.xlvi.1-3, where God appears to Jacob, we find it written:

'And Israel took his journey with all that he had, and came to Beersheba, and offered sacrifices unto the Elohim of his father Isaac. And Elohim spake unto Israel in the visions of the night, and said, Jacob, Jacob.' And he said, 'Here am I.' And He said, 'I am Elohim, the Elohim of thy father.''

Compare the Jehovistic passage, xxviii. 13:

'And, behold, Jehovah stood above it, and said, 'I am Jehovah, the Elohim of Abraham thy father, and the Elohim of Isaac.''

So, too, in G.xlviii, where Jacob blesses Manasseh and Ephraim, and especially in v.15,16, where he accumulates, as it were, Divine titles,

'God, before whom my fathers, Abraham and Isaac, did walk, the God which fed me all my life long unto this day, the Angel which redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads,'

and where the writer could hardly have failed to have put the word Jehovah in the patriarch's mouth, if he had supposed it

known to him, it does not once occur. In fact, the Elohist never uses the Name, Jehovah, in his narrative, till after he has explained its origin in E.vi, or, perhaps, as we shall see presently, in E.iii, - just as he never uses the name Abraham, Sarah, or Israel, till after he has recorded the story of the change of the original name in each case, xvii.5,15, xxxii.28.

301. So, too, in all the Elohistic portions of the book of Genesis, in some of which a multitude of names occurs, and many of them compounded with the Divine Name in the form EL, there is not a single one compounded with the Name JEHOVAH, in the form either of the prefix Jeho or Jo, or the termination Jah, both of which were so commonly employed in later times. Thus there are thirteen names in G.v, sixteen in G.xi.10-32, fifteen in G.xxii.20-24, thirty-three in G.xxv.1-15, seventy in G.xlvi, in all one hundred and forty-seven names; and in the last of these passages we have Israel, Jemuel, Jahleel, Machiel, Jahzeel; but in not a single instance is any of these names compounded with the word Jehovah.

302. Again, in N.i.5-15, among twenty-four new names, there are nine compounded with Elohim,- Elizur, Shelumiel, Nethaneel, Eliab, Elishama, Gamaliel, Pagiel, Eliasaph, Deuel,— not one with Jehovah. Again, in the list of spies, N.xiii.4-15, out of twenty-four other new names, four are compounded with Elohim,-Gaddiel, Ammiel, Michael, Geuel,-none with Jehovah. And in the list of those, who are to divide the land by lot, N.xxxiv.19-28, we have seven other names compounded with El, Shemuel, Elidad, Hanniel, Kemuel, Elizaphan, Paltiel, Pedahel,-none with Jehovah. Also in Jo.xv we have six names of towns compounded with El, Jabneel, Kabzeel, Jokteel, Jezreel, Eltoled, Eltekon, besides the man, Othniel, but not one with Jehovah.

303. Some of the passages just quoted are, undoubtedly,