Justice & Law Quote by Julius Wellhausen

You can hear the scholar’s dry impatience in that “again and again.” Wellhausen isn’t praising legal piety; he’s pointing to a tell. When a text keeps repeating a rule, it’s rarely because everyone is happily complying. It’s because the authors are trying to bend lived religion into a new shape, using the one tool that can compete with habit: law.

“Local unity of worship” names a political-theological project more than a devotional ideal. In the biblical material Wellhausen famously dissected, the insistence on one legitimate sanctuary (and one authorized way to sacrifice) functions as a centralizing lever. It delegitimizes scattered shrines, village altars, family rites - the everyday, local, inconveniently plural religion that makes a community feel like itself. Repetition becomes strategy: hammer the norm until it sounds like it has always been the norm.

The subtext is historical. Wellhausen’s larger argument (associated with the Documentary Hypothesis) treats legal codes not as timeless dictation but as products of conflict and reform, often written to justify changes already underway. If “the Law” is “never weary,” it’s because the center is not secure. The temple, the priesthood, and the emerging state need the story that unity is obedience, and that decentralization is drift.

Calling him an “educator” undersells the role: this is cultural criticism in philological clothing. He’s reading religious repetition the way you’d read a politician’s stump speech - not for sincerity, but for what it’s trying to control.