Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/65

Rh adapt them. If any one of them—e.g., Moses—had done so as an individual act, the feat would have had but one historic parallel, which would have furnished another coincidence between Israelite and Indian. It was performed by the Cheroki, Sequoia, who in less prosaic days would have become the hero of a Kadmos myth. But Sequoia left very distinct marks of his invention, while there is no evidence that the Israelites possessed an alphabet before they settled in Canaan, and there are strong inferences against that supposition.

The compilers of the Old Testament felt no doubt that the law could have been written on Sinai at the time of the exodus. They knew how to write and knew that their predecessors for several generations had written, so it did not occur to them that there had ever been a time in which persons of the higher classes were ignorant of writing.

It is probable that in the days of Samuel the Israelites had made some progress in the art of writing. An alphabet had been known to some of them before; but its common use is of greater consequence, and that depends much upon the substances used for writing, their cost, and the convenience of procuring them. The use, not the mere invention, of writing, not only divides the mythical and the historical periods, but reacts upon the character of the people in all their institutions, forming a new epoch in culture. The people did, perhaps, write under David a about 1100 Moses flourished about fifteen centuries before Christ, and the oldest legends relating to him, are in their present shape, five centuries later than his death. He did not practically organize a new formal state of society, or if he did, temporarily, by his personal power, it had no direct consequence or historical continuity. The old system of clans and religions continued as before. If the legislative portion of the Pentateuch was the work of Moses, it remained a dead letter for centuries, and not until the reign of Josiah did it become operative in the national history.

The historical account undoubtedly states that Moses was, by inspiration, the founder of the Torah; but the question is, What was that Torah? It was not the finished legislative code. Long after the exodus a dramatic account was furnished of the promulgation of the whole law at Sinai to produce a solemn impression, and thus the code, which had slowly and imperceptibly grown during centuries, was represented as having been pronounced on one occasion celebrated by tradition as momentous.

The code now ascribed to Moses was a revised code, and in an unusual sense a mosaic work. When the Israelites attained the use of writing they did as all people in the world have done when they began to use writing—i.e., they wrote out their own myths, traditions, and legends as they knew them at the time of writing.