To
MY MOTHER
ON THE OCCASION OF
HER SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY
"When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a People of strangelanguage, Jacob was His sanctuary and Israel His dominion. Jewish legendattempts to describe how God's sanctuary, the religion of Israel and Hisdominion, the beginnings of Israel as a nation, arose in the time between theExodus from Egypt and the entrance into the Holy Land.
Moses is regarded not only as the greatest religious guide of Israel, but alsoas its first national leader; he is "the wisest (If the wise, the father of theprophets," as well as " king in Jeshiurun, when the heads of the people and thetribes of Israel gathered together." hence his unique position in Jewishlegend, neither Abraham, the friend of God, nor Solomon, the wisest of all men,nor Elijah, the helper in time of need. can lay claim to such a position.
Great religious and national institutions like the Sabbath, the sanctuary, andmany other " commandments of God revealed to Moses " stand in a specialrelation to his life and work. The sanctification of the Sabbath became quite aliving thing to him through the miracle of the Manna, and the first sanctuarywas actually erected by Moses. The life of Moses ceased, therefore, to be athing of the past and became closely interwoven with the every-day life of thenation.
The most natural way for the popular mind to connect existing conditions withthe past is the symbolic method. The present volume contains, therefore, anumber of symbolic explanations of certain laws, as, for instance, thesymbolical significance of the Tabernacle, which, properly speaking, do notbelong to the domain of legend. The life of Moses, as conceived by Jewishlegend, would, however, have been in complete if the lines between Legend andSymbolism had been kept too strictly. With this exception the arrangement andpresentation of the material in the third volume is the same as that in the twopreceding ones.
LOUIS G1NZBERG.
NEW YORK, March 2, 1911