nineteenth century. This reality was the holy matrimony of a
'holy' people with a 'holy' land, the local point of which was
the name of Zion.

It has been one of the disastrous errors of modern Biblical
criticism to attribute this category of the Holy, as applied in the
Scriptures to the people and the land, to the sacerdotalism of a
later age for which the claims of public worship were all-
important. On the contrary, it appertains rather to the primitive
conception of the Holy as we find it in tribes living close to nature,
who think of the two main supports of national life, man and the
earth, as endowed with sacred powers. In the tribes which united
to form ' Israel' this concept developed and became transformed
in a special way: holiness is no longer a sign of power, a magic
fluid that can dwell in places and regions as well as in people and
groups of people, but a quality bestowed on this particular people
and this particular land because God 'elects' both in order to
lead His chosen people into His chosen land and to join them
to each other. It is His election that sanctifies the chosen people
as His immediate attendance and the land as His royal throne
and which makes them dependent on each other. This is more a
political, a theopolitical than a strictly religious concept of holi-
ness: the outward form of worship is merely a concentrated
expression of the sovereignty of God. Abraham builds altars
where God has appeared to him, but he does so not as a priest
but as a herald of the Lord by whom he has been sent, and
when he calls on the name of his Lord above the altar he thereby
proclaims his Lord's royal claim to possession of the surrounding
land. This is not the transforming interpretation of a later age but
has its roots in primitive language, analogies of which are to be
found in other early peoples but nowhere in such historical
concreteness as here. Here 'holiness' still means to belong to God
not merely through religious symbols and in the times and places
consecrated to public worship but as a people and a land, in the
all-embracing range and reality of public life. It is only later that
the category of the Holy becomes restricted to public worship,
a process which increases the more the sphere of public life is with-
drawn from the sovereign rule of God.

That it is God who joins this people to this land is not a
subsequent historical interpretation of events; the wandering
tribes themselves were inspired again and again by the promise

-x-