Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE ORIGIN OF THE HEBREW NATION How did the social group known as "the Hebrew nation" come into existence?—This question resolves the study of the Bible into sociological terms. The subject, of course, lends itself to other forms of expression; but, for present purposes, the Bible is a matter of sociology. We want to know, if possible, just how the social mechanism called "the Hebrew nation" originated. Two answers to this question have been given; and the contrast between them produces a very deep impression. The traditional view.—According to the more familiar view, the nation consisted of twelve tribes that were suddenly welded into a mighty social organism at Mount Sinai, in the desert of Arabia. The father of these clans, or tribes, was an Aramean patriarch, or sheikh, known as "Jacob-Israel."1 The nation which was here created was given a very elaborate, written constitution. According to this constitution, the people as a whole were to conduct religious services at one central meeting house, or church building. This was called "The Tent of Meeting," and was otherwise known as "The Tabernacle of Yahweh."2 It was a portable sanctuary, to be carried about in the desert. It contained the one altar where sacrifices might legally be offered. It was the one church building where the services of religion might proceed. The Tent of Meeting was a virtual proclamation that here, in the wilderness of Arabia, a new social group had come into existence. The desert sanctuary was thus the centralsymbol of the nation's political integrity. It was the sign that the twelve tribes no longer existed separately, but were merged into a single corporation. A good point of departure for sociological study of the Bible is, therefore, the law of the central sanctuary as recorded in ...