Tabernacle in the Wilderness 35 them “to credit the last redactor with the authorship of the whole Old Testament Scriptures.” So also Professor Sayce affirms that, regarded as an invention, the Tabernacle story is “too elaborate, too detailed to be conceivable.” XI. OBJECTIONS OF THE HIGHER CRITICS It remains for us yet, in order to render our discussion really complete, to notice a few of the many objections which the higher critics have brought forward against the Taber nacle’s historicity. These objections, however, are, for the most part, so very frivolous in character, or so utterly lack ing in support either from fact or reason, that they do not really deserve an answer. Nevertheless, to furnish the reader with some notion of their real character, we will undertake to give them a cursory examination. They may all be divided into four classes. The first class embraces all those objections which are based upon the idea that the account given in the Bible of the Tabernacle’s con struction and services, is very unrealistic or impractical in its nature. A second class proceeds on the notion that the Mosaic Tabernacle is altogether too costly, highly artistic, and pon derous an affair, to have been produced by the Israelites at Mt. Sinai, and afterward carried by them all through the wilderness. Another of these classes—which is really only one objec tion—represents that in the very oldest sources out of which the Pentateuch was, according to the critic notion, constructed, there is mention made of another tent, much smaller than was the Mosaic Tabernacle, and different from that struc ture also in other respects; and that, therefore, this second tabernacle, as it may be called, being better substantiated by literary documents than is the Mosaic structure, it is not consistent with an acceptance of all the facts in the case to allow that the larger or Mosaic tent really existed.
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