BIBLICAL SOCIOLOGY 22J
of their fathers under a new name. This of course collides with the other view; and neither of them adequately meets the de- mands of the situation. Both try to adjust the final system of Judaism with the crude ideas inherited from the primitive age; and neither is successful. If, as one tradition affirms, the name of Yahweh was known prior to Sinai, how came it that Moses and the Israelities were all of them ignorant of it? And if to this it be replied that they had forgotten him in Egypt, then what ground is there for Yahweh's own appeal to their memory of himself as "the god of their fathers"? Again, if the statement be correct that the forefathers knew the name, then the state- ment that they did not know it is incorrect. One or the other must be wrong, since both cannot be right. As a matter of fact, judged from the standpoint of the Old Testament as a whole, neither is right. But when considered together, both give sig- nificant indirect witness to an important change of religion dur- ing the Sinai period.
We are well aware that the older schools of biblical inter- pretation have a harmonistic adjustment of the difficulty at this point. They contend that the divergence between the two tra- ditions just noted is apparent and not real. It is claimed that the patriarchs knew the form and pronunciation of the name Yahweh, precisely as the Book of Genesis indicates; but that they did not know the real meaning of the name as a symbol of his character. But this is an artificial subtlety for which the Bible nowhere gives any warrant. When a biblical writer wants to say that the nature of Yahweh is not known, he says what he means. The great prophets exhort Israel to know Yahweh — not to know his name. "Did not thy father do justice and righteousness? He judged the cause of the poor and needy. Was not this to know me? saith Yahweh" (Jer. 22:15, 16). Conversely, when the prophets want to say that Israel knows not Yahweh, and acts contrary to his righteous character, they do not say, "Israel knows not the name of Yahweh." The tra- dition embodied in Exod. 6:3, then, means exactly what it says, i. e., that the forefathers were ignorant of the name itself. And this, as we have seen, is flatly contradicted by the Genesis tra-
