it, have been given to nomads in the wilderness?  Do not all parts of it assume a settled state of society and an agricultural life?  Do the historical books from Judges to the II.  Kings know anything about the law?  Are the practices of worship which they imply consonant with the supposition that the law was in force?  How is it that that law appears both under Josiah and again under Ezra, as something new, thus far unknown, and yet as ruling the religious life of the people from that day forth?  It seems impossible to escape the conclusion that only after Josiah’s reformation, more completely after the restoration under Ezra, did the religion of the law exist.  The centralisation of worship at one point, such as the book of Deuteronomy demands, seems to have been the thing achieved by the reform under Josiah.  The establishment of the priestly hierarchy such as the code ordains was the issue of the religious revolution wrought in Ezra’s time.  To put it differently, the so-called Book of the Covenant, the nucleus of the law-giving, itself implies the multiplicity of the places of worship.  Deuteronomy demands the centralisation of the worship as something which is yet to take place.  The priestly Code declares that the limitation of worship to one place was a fact already in the time of the journeys of Israel in the wilderness.  It is assumed that the Hebrews in the time of Moses shared the almost universal worship of the stars.  Moses may indeed have concluded a covenant between his people and Jahve, their God, hallowing the judicial and moral life of the people, bringing these into relation to the divine will.  Jahve was a holy God whose will was to guide the people coming up out of the degradation of nature-worship.  That part of the people held to the old nature-worship is evident in the time of Elijah.  The history of Israel is not that of defection from a pure revelation.  It is the history of a gradual attainment of purer revelation, of enlargement in the application of it, of discovery of new principles contained in it.  It is the history also of the decline of spiritual religion.  The zeal of the prophets against the ceremonial worship shows that.  Their protest reveals at that early date the beginning of that antithesis which had become so sharp in Jesus’ time.

This determination of the relative positions of law and prophets was the first step in the reconstruction of the history, both of the nation of Israel and of its literature.  At the beginning, as in every literature, are songs of war and victory, of praise and grief, hymns, even riddles and phrases of magic.  Everywhere poetry precedes prose.  Then come myths relating to the worship and tales of the fathers and heroes.  Elements of both these sorts are embedded in the simple chronicles which began now to be written, primitive historical works, such as those of the Jahvist and Elohist, of the narrators of the deeds of the judges and of David and of Saul.  Perhaps at this point