If he told them that the favor of God could
only be gained by obeying the laws he taught, it was because he thought
such an appeal would be effective with a majority of them.
Dr. Budde, who is a good example of the modern hypercritical school, takes
very nearly the opposite ground. His theory is that Moses was in search of
a war god, and that he discovered such a god, in the god of the Bedouin
tribe of the Kenites whose acquaintance he first made when dwelling with
his father-in-law Jethro at Sinai. The morality of such a god he insists
coincided with the morality which Moses may have at times countenanced,
but which was quite foreign to the spirit of the decalogue.
Doubtless this is, in a degree, true. The religion of the pure Bedouin was
very often crude and shocking, not to say disgusting. But to argue thus is
to ignore the fact that all Bedouins did not, in the age of Moses, stand
on the same intellectual or moral level, and it is also to ignore the gap
that separated Moses and his congregation intellectually and morally from
such Bedouins as the Amalekites.
Dr. Budde, in his _Religion of Israel to the Exile_, insists that the
Kenite god, Jehovah, demanded "The sacred ban by which conquered cities
with all their living beings were devoted to destruction, the slaughter of
human beings at sacred spots, animal sacrifices at which the entire
animal, wholly or half raw, was devoured, without leaving a remnant,
between sunset and sunrise,--these phenomena and many others of the same
kind harmonise but ill with an aspiring ethical religion.
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