him the leadership of the tribes of his people, as an inalienable prerogative, which will ultimately be extended to the government of the world:

"Judah, thee, yea thee shall thy brethren praise; thy hand shall be upon the neck of thine enemies, thy father's sons shall, bow down before thee. Judah is a lion's whelp, from the prey, my son, thou art gone up [namely from the valley to thy lair in the mountains], he lay down, he couched as a lion, and as a lioness who would dare to wake him up? The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the baton of the commander from between his feet, until he come to Shiloh, and to him will be the obedience of peoples", that is, when he comes thither, his dominion over the tribes will be extended to a dominion over the nations. The personal explanation of (written fully according to the Massora) is inadmissible for the following reasons:

(1) In every place where

IV, 12, compare

occurs (Jos. XVIII, 9; 1 Sam. Judg. XXI, 12; 1 Sam. I, 24;

1 Sam. IV, 4; Kings XIV, 2. 4) the word

הלך שלה שלה

or is a local accusative, and the name of a place in the midst of the tribe of Ephraim, which, to be sure, is mentioned only in this place in Genesis, but which could have been well known to Jacob.

(2) The name

is derived from

to hang down in a flabby

manner, to be stretched, to rest and is abbreviated from 7, In itself it can be the name of a

שְׁלֹמוֹן from שְׁלמה like

person bringing rest (synonyme of which is equivalent to 1 Chron. XXII, 9) as well as that of a place

of rest, but it has its only analogy in the word, and does not occur elsewhere in the Old Testament as the name of the Messiah.

(3) Moreover the tradition, which considers as the name of the Messiah, does not derive it from, but holds unanimously, although this according to the scriptio plena of the Massoretic text is absolutely impossible, that it signifies the same as (1) which is equivalent to 5 is cujus est [regnum]. This explanation is indeed very old, since even Ezekiel (XXI, 32:

But nevertheless it is (עַד־בּוֹ אֲשֶׁר-לוֹ הַמִּשְׁפָּט

alludes
to
it.

most improbable that the abbreviation
which is rather Aramaic than Hebrew

(equivalent to

),

should be used as the

component part of a proper name, and in such a way that the main idea (i. e. kingdom) must be understood.

(4) Besides the arrival at Shiloh, which is here prophesied, was really the turning-point for Judah; for when, as is related in Jos. XVIII, 1, the entire congregation of Israel with Judah, the leader of the tribes, who as the first of the tribes received his possession in Gilgal, assembled at Shiloh, where the tabernacle of the covenant was pitched, the land was subdued before them. Hence the coming to Shiloh is an epoch in the history of Israel and especially in that of Judah. And even the phrase p was fulfilled after this epoch in Judah (compare Deut. XXXIII, 7). Subsequently to the wars of the Judges in which he marched according to God's revealed will before Israel (Judg. I, 1. 2; XX, 18), he became the royal tribe in Israel. Under David and Solomon Judah not only held command over the tribes of Israel but also still further over the neighboring nations. The single examples of weakening and breaking down, from which the power and the permanence of the kingdom of Judah suffered, seem but brief moments to the patriarch in his prophecy. Since however the Chaldean catastrophe made an end of the Davidic kingdom, and this only lasted as a shadow of its former self for a short time under Zerubbabel, the fulfilment of this blessing upon Judah would indeed lack its crown, if it had not found its final fulfilment in Him of whom it is said (Heb. VII, 14): πρόδηλον γὰρ ὅτι ἐξ Ἰούδα ἀνατέταλκεν ὁ κύριος ἡμῶν, and who is called in Rev. V, 5, with reference to Jacob's blessing ó éwv ὁ ἐκ τῆς φυλῆς Ἰούδα.

Rem. I. The translation of with the presumption that the reading bis equivalent to cujus est [regnum] is adopted by Onkelos, the second Jerusalem Targum, the Peshitto, Aquila, Symmachus, Aphraates, Saadia; also by the LXX (Theodotion), which however does not understand of a person but of a thing, and so does not translate it άnoxɛitat, "he to whom it belongs" (compare Ezek. XXI, 27: Ews où ¤λdy & zadýzet, cui convenit regnum), but ἕως ἐὰν ἔλθῃ τὰ ἀποκείμενα αὐτῷ. The following reasons are against this explanation:

(1) that, equivalent to, occurs at most only once in the combination of particles (as it should be read and not, Gen. VI, 3) quoniam; perhaps also in the proper name , if this signifies, who is what God is? (Ex. VI, 22; Lev. X, 4) synonymous with, who is like God? (Num. XIII, 13), but as the first part of a proper name, equivalent to does not occur.

(2) The following consideration however is decidely against the interpretation of as a proper name, that in such a case we should expect

the pronoun referring to and pp as the emblems of supremacy. Wellhausen, Geschichte Israels, Berlin 1878, vol. I, p. 375, however cuts the knot of this difficulty by expunging, so that what remains signifies: until the one comes to whom (b) the obedience of the nations belongs. This conjecture stands and falls with the correctness of the defective reading nbw. Rem. 2. It follows that is not the name of a person from the fact that Judah also remains the subject of that which follows (vs. 11-12): "Binding his ass's foal unto the vine, and his she ass's colt unto the choice vine. He washed his garment in wine and his mantle in the blood of grapes, the eyes dark from wine, and the teeth white from milk." The subject is here evidently Judah as a tribe, which after they had conquered the land, enjoyed the wine and milk of the country in peace and prosperity, whose fruitfulness was so great, that they did not hesitate to bind an ass to a noble fruit tree.

Rem. 3. The words in a prophetic connection indicate that which according to the range of the seer's vision appears to be the utmost limit, as the final point, or as the final period of history. For the dying Jacob (compare XLIX, 1) the promised possession of Canaan stands in the foreground of the final period, and all eschatological hopes move together with this future fact. That the blessing of Jacob is no vaticinium post eventum, as Anger and others maintain, is evident from the fact, that the actual possession of the land was never so fully realized as is here represented in the prophecy.

S 10.

Since Jacob designates the tribe of Judah as the royal tribe of Israel, the history, preparatory to the coming of Christ, is now so far advanced, that the tribe of Judah is chosen as the place for the Parousia of the future One. But nevertheless the idea of the promise and of the prophecy of the future mediatorship of the blessing, and of the future dominion over the world has not yet taken on a personal form. The subject of the victory is the human race, the subject of the blessing the posterity of Abraham, the subject of the worldempire the tribe of Judah. In the Mosaic age we may expect progress, since it is the primitive period of real prophecy.

Remark. Duhm, Die Theologie der Propheten, Bonn 1878, p. 18, says that the Pentateuch criticism, dating from Graf (d. 1869), blots out the Mosaic period and widens the horizon of the prophetic until the beginnings of the real Israelitic religion. At present we merely reply: (1) that the song of Deborah, the prophetess, whose genuineness no one has yet dared to question, celebrates the fact of God's revelation upon Sinai (Judg. V, 4-5); and (2) that according to the testimony of all the prophets the existence of Israel goes back to the divine act of redemption from Egypt, and that it is even in itself probable that this great period of the deliverance and establishment of the nation was a period of the deepest and highest spiritual, and hence prophetic, activity.

CHAPTER VIII.

Prophecy in the Time of Moses.

SII.

The Richness of the Prophetic Charisma.

The Tora expresses the mediatorial position of Moses (Deut. XVIII, 15) between the God of revelation and the people by the name. The unprecedentedly close manner of God's intercourse with his servant is compared with God's usual mode of intercourse with the prophets (Num. XII, 6—8), and even Moses in his incomparable preeminence bears as his proper official name the designation (Deut. XXXIV, 10). But as a prophet Moses does not stand alone; even his sister Miriam is called the prophetess (Ex. XV, 20). Miriam and Aaron are conscious that Jehovah speaks through them (Num. XII, 2). The seventy elders whom Moses associates with himself participate in the divine Spirit and begin to prophesy (Num. XI, 24. 25). The prophetic inspiration seizes others also among the people (Num. XI, 26-29); hence words of the law are indicated as reaching Israel through the prophets (Ezra IX, 11-12). But while we contemplate Moses as a prophet of the future, a promise of a prophet like him (Deut. XVIII, 15—16) first meets us at the beginning of the Sinaitic legislation, and it will be ours to see, whether it only ensures the continuity of the prophetic mediatorship or holds out the prospect of its culmination in an antitype of Moses.

Remark. Not only the priests, as Wellhausen says, derived their Tora from Moses, but the prophets also attest the prophetic character of Moses (Hos. XII, 14): “Through a prophet Jehovah brought Israel up out of Egypt, and through a prophet he was tended". They also attest the activity of the Holy Ghost in the Israel of the Mosaic period (Is. LXIII, 11). It is the Jehovist, who in Num. XI, 23-XII, 8, reports the animated prophetic life in the time of Moses, and the unique character of God's intercourse with him. And all the prophets testify unanimously that the redemption from Egypt indelibly stamped upon the people the spiritual character of its nationality (Amos II, 10, compare Micah VI, 4. 5; VII, 15).

$ 12.

The Prediction concerning the Prophet like Moses.

When the people at the giving of the Law on mount Sinai were unable to hear the voice of Jehovah in such dreadful proximity, and therefore Moses became a mediator between Jehovah and the people (Deut. V, 23-25; Ex. XX, 19), God also promised them for the future, to awaken a prophet from their midst (Deut. XVIII, 18—19):

=

"I will raise them up a Prophet from among their bretheren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him. And it shall come to pass, that whosoever will not hearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him” that is he will have to suffer punishment for the guilt which has been thereby occasioned. In order to rightly appreciate this prophecy, we must remember, that Moses was not the only prophet of his age. This historical consideration, in conjunction with others, is conclusive for the understanding of the expression and (Deut. XVIII, 15, 18). The interpretation as if it were a collective, indicating a class (prophetam prophetas) or a succession of individuals (one prophet, and then another, etc.), is open to the objection, that the singular is retained. without being interchanged with the plural, and that the essential idea of continuity is not expressed. The interpretation therefore remains which applies to a single person. The prophets who followed Moses are no more included under this than those who were contemporary with him, for none of them were prophets like Moses. The Tora (Deut. XXXIV, 10) says expressly that none were so great as Moses, for they were not mediators of such a divine revelation as he; they all moved in the sphere constituted through Moses' mediatorship. Their province was to represent the Spirit of the divine revelation on Sinai in such a manner, that they might at the same time prepare for God's future revelation, whose mediator the predicted prophet like Moses was to be. But shall we now he able to say that this prophet, as he is represented in Moses' prophecy is the Messiah? No. This picture of the prophet of the final period is first combined at a later age in the consciousness of the prophets with that of the king of the final period. Even the people in the time of Christ distinguish the great prophet, who had been predicted, from the