in the ark of the covenant for preservation. Precisely how much of the
law this statement is meant to cover is not clear. Some have interpreted
it to cover the whole Pentateuch, but that interpretation, as we have
seen, is inadmissible. We may concede that it does refer to a body or
code of laws,--probably that body or code on which the legislation of
Deuteronomy is based.

These are all the statements made in the writings themselves concerning
their origin. They prove, if they are credible, that portions of these
books were written by Moses; they do not prove that the whole of them
came from his hand.

I see no reason whatever to doubt that this is the essential fact. The
theory of the destructive critics that this literature and this
legislation was all produced in Palestine, about the eighth century
before Christ, and palmed off upon the Jews as a pious fraud, does not
bear investigation. In large portions of these laws we are constantly
meeting with legal provisions and historical allusions that take us
directly back to the time of the wandering in the wilderness, and cannot
be explained on any other theory. "When," says Bleek, "we meet with laws
which refer in their whole tenor to a state of things utterly unknown in
the period subsequent to Moses, and to circumstances existing in the
Mosaic age, and in that only, it is in the highest degree likely that
these laws not only in their essential purport proceeded from Moses, but
also that they were written down by Moses or at least in the Mosaic age.
Of these laws which appear to carry with them such clear and exact
traces of the Mosaic age, there are many occurring, especially in
Leviticus, and also in Numbers and Exodus, which laws relate to
situations and surrounding circumstances only existing whilst the
people, as was the case in Moses' time, wandered in the wilderness and