184 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1868- 



And such a demonstration of the might of Jahveh the 

 history supplies in the deliverance from Egypt through 

 Moses. Of this deliverance the prophets always speak 

 as the creation of the people. They appeal to the Exodus, 

 the wilderness journey, the law-giving, the establishment 

 in Canaan, as undoubted proofs that Jahveh alone is the 

 God of Israel, and the people silently admit the argument. 

 Nor can the modern criticism refuse to add its assent. If 

 the faith in Jahveh did not arise in the days of Moses, no 

 subsequent crisis in the history can suffice to explain its 

 origin. The growth of a purely fantastic myth about the 

 Exodus is infinitely more inexplicable than the truth of 

 the event. 1 That Moses really lived, that he led the 

 people out of Egypt in the name of Jahveh, that he im 

 pressed upon his countrymen an imperishable conviction 

 that to his God they stood in a peculiar indissoluble rela 

 tion, in short, in a covenant union which called on their 

 side for a moral service, and, on the other hand, assured 

 them of the all-powerful support of the Rock of Israel, is 

 no longer questioned ; and the universal acquiescence in 

 this result is due, not to the study of the Pentateuch, in 

 which Kuenen, for example, acknowledges only the 

 substance of the Decalogue as properly Mosaic, but to the 

 critical study of the prophecy of the eighth century. 

 This result, however, carries us but a little way. A 

 prophet is more than a worshipper of Jahveh asserting 

 the ancestral religion against modern corruptions, for his 

 authority is no less marked over the true worshippers of 

 the God of Israel. We have seen that the prophet ex 

 plained his words to himself as the words of Jahveh. So 

 broadly, as Kuenen has observed, does the seer &quot; dis 

 tinguish between the inspiration of Jahveh and his own 

 conceptions that there sometimes arises in him a struggle 

 between his personal wishes and views and the thoughts 

 of Jahveh, to which he yields only perforce.&quot; 2 How 



1 See this fully granted by Kuenen (Godsdienst, p. 121). 

 2 Onderzoek, ii. 32. 



