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THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL AND THEIR PLACE IN HISTORY TO THE CLOSE OF THE EIGHTH CENTURY, B.C.

LECTURE 1: ISRAEL AND JEHOVAH.

The revelation recorded in the Bible is a jewel which God has given to us in a setting of human history. The love of God to His people now is the continuation of the love which He showed to our fathers; and Christianity, like all else that is of value in the spiritual possessions of mankind, is an inheritance the worth and permanence of which have been tried by the experience of generations. Such treasures are not won without effort and battle. What is appropriated easily is as easily lost, and the abiding possessions of humanity consist of truths that have been learned by laborious experiences, relations that have been knit and strengthened by long habit, and institutions that have been shaped and polished by the friction of practical use. A religion fit to be a part of actual life cannot be exempt from this law, and revelation itself has become a force in human conduct only by first becoming a factor in human history. It was not enough that God should declare His will and love to man. The declaration required to be incorporated with the daily lessons of ordinary life, to be woven into the personal experience of humanity, to become part of the atmosphere of moral and intellectual influences which surrounds every man's existence, of which he is often as little conscious as of the air he breathes, but without which spiritual life would be just as impossible as physical life is under an exhausted receiver.

It is often remarked upon as a strange thing that Jesus was born so late into the world, that Christianity has been permitted to spread through slow and imperfect agencies from so narrow a centre as Judaea, and that the divine wisdom deemed it fitting to prepare the way for the world-wide religion of Jesus by that long series of rudimentary revelations, addressed to a single nation, of which the Hebrew Scriptures form the record. The slowness of the moral process by which God's will for our salvation realises itself on earth, the incomplete establishment of the moral kingdom of God in the midst even of professing Christians, and the fact that for long ages the power of revealing love seemed to pass by the greater mass of mankind altogether, and to deal very tardily and partially even with the chosen nation of Israel, appear hard to reconcile with the sovereignty of the divine purpose and the omnipotence of the divine working. It would serve no good purpose to deny that there is a difficulty in understanding these things, but the difficulty lies less in the facts to be explained than in the limited point of view from which finite creatures contemplate the work of an infinite and eternal being. That the eternal and infinite God has anything to do either in the way of nature or of grace with the finite world of time is a mystery which we cannot hope to comprehend; but in itself it is not more surprising that revelation follows the laws of historical progress than that a law of continuity runs through the succession of physical phenomena. The difference between nature and grace is not that nature follows fixed laws and that grace breaks through them; there are laws in the moral world as well as in the material cosmos, and the sovereignty of revealing grace does not lie in the arbitrary quality of the acts in which it is manifested, but in its dominion over the moral order of things to which the physical order is subservient. In revelation God enters into personal relations with man; but these personal relations would not be spiritually valuable unless they were constituted, maintained, and perfected by the same methods as the personal relations of a man to his fellows. According to the doctrine of the Old Testament the whole work of revelation and salvation rests on the fact that man was created in the image of God, and so is capable of entering into intelligent moral relationship with his heavenly father. But even in the sphere of ordinary human life the filial relation is one that has a gradual growth. The mere physical fact of parentage is but a small element in the meaning of the words father and son; the greater part of what these words involve, as used between a loving father and son, lies in the relation of affection and reverence, which is not of mere physical origin, but grows up with the growth and training of the child. Thus the analogies which the Bible itself presents as our guides in understanding the work of divine grace lead us to expect that revelation must have a history, conformed to the laws of human nature, and limited by the universal rule that every permanent spiritual and moral relation must grow up by slow degrees, and obey a principle of internal development.

The older theology was not sufficiently attentive to this truth. It had indeed learned from the parables of the Gospel that the growth of the kingdom of God is similar to the development of a great tree from a small seed; but it did not fully realise that this analogy not only affirms the contrast between the small beginnings and ultimate world-wide scope of the kingdom of grace, but teaches us to look on the growth as subject to an organic law similar to the physical law of development in a living germ. The very idea of law as applied to the course of history has been clearly grasped and fruitfully worked out only in recent times, and therefore it is not surprising that even those theological schools which made a serious effort to understand the successive stages of God's saving dealings with man did not get much beyond the notion of a mechanical series of covenants or dispensations. [1] And in particular almost all speculation on this topic, down to quite a recent date, fell into the cardinal mistake of over-estimating the knowledge of divine things given to the earliest recipients of revelation. The fact that the work of salvation is one from first to last, that Christ is the centre of all revelation and the head of all redeemed humanity, led to the idea that from the first the faith of the Old Testament believers looked to a personal Messiah as distinctly if not as clearly as the faith of the New Testament Church.

This assumption involved the study of the old dispensation in extraordinary difficulties. The Old Testament contains no explicit declaration in plain words of the cardinal New Testament truths about Christ, and it was therefore necessary to suppose that the men of the Old Covenant possessed, in addition to the written Word, certain traditional conceptions about the coming Saviour, which gave them a key to the symbolism of the sacred ordinances, and enabled them to draw a meaning from the language of the Prophets and the Psalms which does not lie on the surface of the words of Scripture. [2] This theory arose naturally enough in the ancient Church, which held that a similar state of things continued under the Christian dispensation, and that the help of ecclesiastical tradition was still necessary to understand the mysteries which formed the really valuable teaching of the New Testament as well as of the Old. But when the Protestant Church broke with the doctrine of ecclesiastical tradition, and sent every man to Scripture to edify himself by the plain sense of the holy oracles, it was a strange inconsistency to continue the figment of a hidden sense and a traditional interpretation as applied to the old dispensation. Far from reading in the words of the prophets a profounder sense that lay beneath the surface, the Hebrews, as their history abundantly proves, could hardly be taught to accept the simple and literal lessons inculcated upon them line by line, and enforced by providential discipline as well as by spoken words. It is plain that the very elements of spiritual faith were still but half learned by a nation that made continual relapses into crass and immoral polytheism, and the elementary character of much of the prophetic teaching is not to be explained as vailing a hidden sense, but simply by the fact that the most elementary teaching was still not superfluous in the spiritual childhood of the people of God.

This is the true state of the case, and perhaps the chief reason why people are still unwilling to admit that it is so is a fear that, by stripping the prophecies of their supposed mysteriousness, we shall destroy their interest and value for the Christian dispensation. Such a fear is altogether groundless. It would be absurd to expect to find in the Old Testament truth that is not in the New. The real use of the record of the earliest stages of revelation is not to add something to the things revealed in Christ, but to give us that clear and all-sided insight into the meaning and practical worth of the perfect scheme of divine grace which can only be attained by tracing its growth. A mechanism is studied by taking it to pieces, an organism must be studied by watching its development from the simplicity of the germ to the final complexity of the finished structure. Or, to put the thing under a more familiar analogy, the best way to understand the full-grown man is to watch his growth from childhood upwards, and the childhood of the Church shows us in simple and elementary expression the same principles which are still active in the full manhood of the Christian dispensation.

It would be easy to illustrate this argument by additional analogies, but it will be more profitably elucidated in the actual study of the prophets and their work, to which we are to proceed during the hours we spend together. In these Lectures I propose to adopt the simplest and most straightforward historical treatment. I shall take up the prophetic writings in the order of their date, and look at them in connection with what is known of the prophet and his times, just as one does with any other ancient book. Instead of asking at the outset what the prophet has to teach us, I shall inquire what he desired to teach his own contemporaries to whom his message was directly addressed. In this way we shall get at the plain meaning of his words, and what is still more important, we shall learn something of his place and function in the unity of the divine work of revelation. We shall see the principles of revealing and redeeming grace shaping themselves from age to age in living contact with the life and needs of successive generations, and thus I hope we shall attain a more reasoned assurance of the consistency and supernatural wisdom of God's saving dealings in all ages, while at the same time the study of each divine word as it first came home to the immediate necessities of the people of God will make it easier for us to apply the same word to the support of our own spiritual life. The details of this practical application of course belong to the preacher or to the devotional reader, and not to the expositor of the Old Testament history. On the province of the preacher I do not propose to trench, but I hope that we shall be able to reach the point of view, and appreciate the methods and principles, from which the study of the prophecies can be profitably undertaken with the design of personal edification.

There is, however, one question of a general nature to which it may be well to devote a few words before we enter on this course of historical inquiry. The justification of the general conception of the method of revelation which I have just indicated must ultimately lie in the proof that it is consistent with historical facts. The doctrine of an organic development in the plan of revelation and redemption, analogous to the gradual education of a son by his father, can be established or refuted only by inquiring whether the analogy is justified by the actual course of history in the pre-Christian childhood of the people of God. But the whole conception of a progressive revelation worked out in special dealings of God with the people of Israel is often represented by modern thinkers as involving something inconsistent with the universality of the divine purpose. There is a large and thoughtful school of modern theologians, fully possessed with the idea of a divine education of mankind, and ready to do sincere homage to the teaching of Christ, which yet refuses to believe that God's dealings with Israel in the times before Christ can be distinguished under the specific name of revelation from His providential guidance of other nations. They contend, and so far they are undoubtedly right, that God prepared all nations, and not the Jews alone, for the reception of the truth as it is in Jesus; but they also maintain that there was no specific difference between the growth of divine truth in Israel and the growth of truth among other nations. The prophets who were the organs of God's teaching in Israel appear to them to stand on the same line with the other great teachers of mankind, who were also searchers after truth, and received it as a gift from God.

In one point of view this departure from the usual doctrine of Christians is perhaps less fundamental than it seems at first sight to be. For, as a matter of fact, it is not and cannot be denied that the prophets found for themselves and their nation a knowledge of God, and not a mere speculative knowledge, but a practical fellowship of faith with Him, which the seekers after truth among the Gentiles never attained to. This, at least, is sufficiently proved by the fact that the light which went forth in Christ Jesus to lighten the Gentiles did proceed from the midst of the Old Testament people. But behind this there appears to lie a substantial and practical difference of view between the common faith of the Churches and the views of the modern school of which I speak. The difference is generally expressed by saying that the modern theologians deny the supernatural; but I do not think that this phrase expresses the real gist of the point at issue. The practical point in all controversy as to the distinctive character of the revelation of God to Israel regards the place of Scripture as the permanent rule of faith and the sufficient and unfailing guide in all our religious life. When we say that God dealt with Israel in the way of special revelation, and crowned His dealings by personally manifesting all His grace and truth in Christ Jesus the incarnate Word, we mean that the Bible contains within itself a perfect picture of God's gracious relations with man, and that we have no need to go outside of the Bible history to learn anything of God and His saving will towards us, — that the whole growth of the true religion up to its perfect fulness is set before us in the record of God's dealings with Israel culminating in the manifestation of Jesus Christ. There can be no question that Jesus Himself held this view, and we cannot depart from it without making Him an imperfect teacher and an imperfect saviour. Yet history has not taught us that there is anything in true religion to add to the New Testament. We still stand in the nineteenth century where He stood in the first; or rather He stands as high above us as He did above His disciples, the perfect Master, the supreme Head of the fellowship of all true religion.

It is a bold thing, therefore, to affirm that we have any need to seek a wider historical foundation for our faith than sufficed Him whose disciples we are. And I apprehend that the apparent difficulty of the supposition that the whole course of revelation transacted itself in the narrow circle of a single nation is not so great as it appears at first sight. For it is not necessary to suppose that God gave no true knowledge of Himself to seekers after truth among the Gentiles. The New Testament affirms, on the contrary, that the nations were never left without some manifestation of that which may be known of God (Rom. i. 19; Acts xvii. 27); and the thinkers of the early Church gave shape to this truth in the doctrine of the — the seed of the Divine Word scattered through all mankind.

But, while all right thoughts of God in every nation come from God Himself, it is plain that a personal knowledge of God and His will — and without personal knowledge there can be no true religion — involves a personal dealing of God with men. Such personal dealing again necessarily implies a special dealing with chosen individuals. To say that God speaks to all men alike, and gives the same communication directly to all without the use of a revealing agency, reduces religion to mysticism. In point of fact, it is not true in the case of any man that what he believes and knows of God has come to him directly through the voice of nature and conscience. All true knowledge of God is verified by personal experience, but it is not exclusively derived from such experience. There is a positive element in all religion, an element which we have learned from those who went before us. If what is so learned is true we must ultimately come back to a point in history when it was new truth, acquired as all new truth is by some particular man or circle of men, who, as they did not learn it from their predecessors, must have got it by personal revelation from God Himself. To deny that Christianity can ultimately be traced back to such acts of revelation, taking place at a definite time in a definite circle, involves in the last resort a denial that there is any true religion at all, or that religion is anything more than a vague subjective feeling. If religion is more than this, the true knowledge of God and His saving will must in the first instance have grown up in a definite part of the earth, and in connection with the history of a limited section of mankind. For if revelation were not to be altogether futile it was necessary that each new communication of God should build on those which had gone before, and therefore that it should be made within that society which had already appropriated the sum of previous revelations. Some true knowledge of God might exist outside of this society, but at all events there must have been a society of men possessed of the whole series of divine teachings in a consecutive and adequate form. And under the conditions of ancient life this society could not be other than a nation, for there was then no free communication and interchange of ideas such as now exists between remote parts of the globe. Until the Greek and Roman empires broke up the old barriers of nationality, the intellectual and moral life of each ancient people moved in its own channel, receiving only slight contributions from those outside. There is nothing unreasonable, therefore, in the idea that the true religion was originally developed in national form within the people of Israel; nay, this limitation corresponds to the historical conditions of the problem. But at length a time came when the message of revelation was fully set forth in Christ. The coming of Christ coincided under divine providence with the breaking down of national barriers and the establishment of a cosmopolitan system of politics and culture under the first Roman emperors, and so Christianity was able to leave the narrow field of Old Testament development and become a religion not for one nation but for all mankind. [3] It would seem, then, that the distinctive character claimed by the Biblical revelation, and expressed in the creed of the Churches by the doctrine that the Bible is the supreme and sufficient rule of faith and life, ultimately resolves itself into something which is quite capable of verification. It will not be denied that the knowledge of God reached by Gentile nations was fragmentary and imperfect, that there was no solid and continuous progress in spiritual things under any heathen system, but that the noblest religions outside of Christianity gradually decayed and lost whatever moral power they once possessed. If the religion of the Bible can be shown to have run a different course, — if it can be shown that in it truth once attained was never lost and never thrust aside so as to lose its influence, but that in spite of all impediments the knowledge of God given to Israel moved steadily forward till at last it emancipated itself from national restrictions, and, without changing its consistency or denying its former history, merged in the perfect religion of Christ, which still satisfies the deepest spiritual needs of mankind, — then, I apprehend, the distinctive claims of the Bible and the religion of the Bible are set upon a broad and safe basis, and the revelation of the Old and New Testament may fairly claim to be the revelation of God to men in a special and absolute sense. It is not necessary to encumber the argument by comparing the way in which individual divine communications were given to Israel with the way in which the highest thinkers of other nations came to grasp something of spiritual truth. The mode of God's communication to man is a matter of detail; the essential advantage claimed by the religion of the Bible does not lie in details, but in the consistent unity of scheme that runs through its whole historical development, and gives to each part of the development a share in the unique character that belongs to it as a whole.

To thoughtful minds it has always been a matter of supreme interest to realise what proof of the truth and sufficiency of the Christian religion can be adduced apart from the internal impress of genuineness which it produces on the believing mind. The external evidences of religion have been very variously set forth, and perhaps no one statement of them has ever been quite satisfactory. In recent times the whole question has assumed a new and startling aspect, through the attacks that have been made on the old favourite evidence from miracle. Instead of accepting the miracles as a proof of Christianity, a large number of men, who are neither unthoughtful nor irreverent, have come to regard the miraculous narratives of the Bible record as a chief difficulty in the way of its acceptance. It is felt that the reality of these miracles is the very thing in the teaching of Scripture which it is most difficult to prove; and, so long as no deeper evidence can be offered of the truth of the Christian religion than is given by the old argument that it is attested by miracle, the objection is ready that this, far from being a distinctive peculiarity of one religion, is a prerogative to which all religions lay claim. Indeed, most of the arguments which make men unwilling to allow to the Bible the character of the record of a special revelation resolve themselves into objections to the idea that the narratives of a supernatural character which the Bible contains are different from the miraculous narratives found in other ancient histories. And in like manner it is contended that it is impossible to prove that the truths preached by the prophets came to them in any other way than the truths proclaimed by Gentile teachers.

I am not prepared to deny that these objections may be put in a form which has great force against many current apologetical arguments, but they do not go to the root of the matter. There is an external evidence of the truth of the Biblical revelation which lies behind the question of the supernatural as it is usually stated, an evidence which lies, not in the miraculous circumstances of this or that particular act of revelation, but in the intrinsic character of the scheme of revelation as a whole. It is a general law of human history that truth is consistent, progressive, and imperishable, while every falsehood is self-contradictory, and ultimately falls to pieces. A religion which has endured every possible trial, which has outlived every vicissitude of human fortunes, and has never failed to reassert its power unbroken in the collapse of its old environments, which has pursued a consistent and victorious course through the lapse of eventful centuries, declares itself by irresistible evidence to be a thing of reality and power. If the religion of Israel and of Christ answers these tests, the miraculous circumstances of its promulgation need not be used as the first proof of its truth, but must rather be regarded as the inseparable accompaniments of a revelation which bears the historical stamp of reality. Occupying this vantage-ground, the defenders of revelation need no longer be afraid to allow free discussion of the details of its history. They are not bound to start, as modern apologists too often do, with preconceived notions as to the kind of acts by which God made His presence and teaching known in Bible ages — they can afford to meet every candid inquirer on the fair field of history, and to form their judgment on the actual course of revelation by the ordinary methods of historical investigation.

It is on these lines that I ask you to join me in the inquiry on which we are about to enter, — not in a spirit of controversy, or with preconceived notions as to what must be the course and manner of a true revelation, but with a candid resolution to examine the documents of the Old Testament religion, and see whether they actually possess that evidence of consistent, progressive, and indestructible truth which entitles them to be received as embodying a scheme of Divine teaching. In a brief course of lectures our attention must necessarily be confined to one corner of this great subject, to a brief period of the history of Revelation and a very small part of the Old Testament documents. But the period and the books with which we shall be occupied are, in many respects, the most important that the Old Testament student has to deal with. They are very little understood by ordinary Bible readers, and yet they form the key to all the chief problems of Old Testament study, and without understanding them no one can hope to make real progress in the knowledge of the Old Testament as a whole. The work of the prophets of the Assyrian and Babylonian periods falls in the most critical stage of the history of the religion of Israel, — when, humanly speaking, it seemed far from improbable that that religion would sink to the level of common Semitic heathenism, and perish, like the religions of other Semitic peoples, with the political fall of the nation that professed it. It was the work of the prophets that averted such a catastrophe, drawing forth with ever-increasing clearness the elements of moral and spiritual truth which were well-nigh lost in the corruptions of the popular worship, holding up a conception of Jehovah's holy purpose and saving love to Israel in which even the utter ruin of the Hebrew state appeared as part of a gracious plan, and so maintaining the faith of Jehovah unbroken and victorious when every other part of the inheritance of Israel was swept away by the ruthless tide of Assyrian and Chaldaean conquest. Nowhere in the Old Testament history is the victory of true religion over the world, its power to rise superior to all human vicissitudes and bestow a hope and peace which the world cannot take away, so clearly manifested as in this great achievement of the prophetic word. In the long struggle with the empires of the East the Word of Jehovah was tried as gold in the furnace, and its behaviour under this crucial test is the best demonstration of its incorruptible purity and enduring worth. But there is another reason which gives this part of the history of the Old Covenant a central importance to the Biblical student. The Assyrian and Babylonian period is the age of written prophecy, the only age in which the whole movements of Israel's spiritual life can be closely studied in the writings of the very men who directed them. The period between Amos and the return is the golden age of Old Testament literature, which stands before us in contemporary records more clearly and fully than any other considerable period of Hebrew history. And for this period, too, we now possess in the Assyrian inscriptions a most valuable mass of contemporary illustration from the records of the foreign nation with which Israel's history was most closely involved, — a new source of light which, by a singular and admirable providence, has been put at our command at the very moment when the progress of Biblical study has concentrated the prime attention of all scholars on the prophets and their times. [4]

And now I trust that enough has been said to justify the choice of our subject, to give at least an initial conception of its importance, and to define the point of view from which I design to consider it. Let us turn without further preface to the matter in hand, and begin by assuring ourselves in a rapid historical survey that we possess a sufficiently clear conception of the field in which the prophets laboured, and the political and religious condition of the people to whom they spoke.

We have already had occasion to note that the conception of a personal revelation of God to man, which underlies the scheme of Biblical religion in both Testaments, implies that God approaches man in the first instance in the way of special dealing with chosen individuals. According to the Old Testament prophets, the circle chosen for this purpose is the nation of Israel, the only nation, as Amos expresses it, among all the families of the earth which Jehovah knows in a personal way (Amos iii. 2). To the prophets, then, the nation of Israel is the community of the true religion. But it is important to observe how this is put. Amos does not say that Israel knows Jehovah, but that Jehovah knows or personally recognises Israel, and no other nation. The same idea is expressed by Hosea in figures drawn from domestic life. Israel is Jehovah's spouse (chaps, i. to iii.), or His son (chap. xi. 1). Thus the basis of the prophetic religion is the conception of a unique relation between Jehovah and Israel, not, be it observed, individual Israelites, but Israel as a national unity. The whole Old Testament religion deals with the relations between two parties — Jehovah on the one hand, and the nation of Israel on the other. Simple as this conception is, it requires an effort of attention to fix it in our minds. We are so accustomed to think of religion as a thing between individual men and God that we can hardly enter into the idea of a religion in which a whole nation in its national organisation appears as the religious unit, — in which we have to deal, not with the faith and obedience of individual persons, but with the faith and obedience of a nation as expressed in the functions of national life. We shall have frequent opportunity as we proceed to familiarise ourselves with this fundamental Old Testament conception in its practical aspects. For the present it may suffice to illustrate it by a single example. In the New Testament dispensation every believer is regarded as a son of God. Under the Old Covenant it is the nation of Israel that is Jehovah's son. There are two questions, then, which lie at the root of all study of the prophetic teaching — Who is Israel? and who is Jehovah?
 

The history of the ancient world, so far as it exists for us, was transacted within a narrow strip of the earth's surface, running eastward from the Atlantic to the Pacific, so as to include the lands easily accessible from the Mediterranean waters and the countries of Southern Asia as far as India and China, but excluding the great mass of Africa and the northern parts of Europe and Asia. Even this small world was again cut in two by the great mountains and deserts that divide Eastern and Western Asia, and the far East which lay beyond these boundaries was practically an isolated part of the globe. The geography of the Bible, as contained in the tenth chapter of Genesis, extends from Tarshish in the West — the Spanish settlements of the Phoenicians in the region of Cadiz — to the Eastern lands of Persia and Media lying between the Caspian and the Persian Gulf. And here again we have a further limitation to make. The nations of Europe had not yet begun to play an independent part in the drama of universal history. To the Hebrews the lands that gird the Northern and Western Mediterranean were known as the Isles or rather Coasts of the Sea — a vague designation, derived, no doubt, from the Phoenician mariners who skirted their shores without penetrating into the interior. Thus, at the epoch with which we are concerned, the main movements of Western civilisation lay between the mountains of Media and the Libyan desert, the shores of the Levant and the Persian Gulf. In the eastern and western quarters of the region so defined lie two great alluvial countries, fertilised by mighty rivers, and producing the means of life in such abundance that they not only sustained a teeming population, but supplied their inhabitants with that superfluity of natural wealth which is the first condition for the growth of material civilisation. Egypt on the Nile, Babylonia and Assyria in the Euphrates and Tigris valleys, were marked out by nature as the seats of populous cities and great empires, strong enough to defy or subdue their neighbours, and rich enough to cultivate the arts of life. The bridge between these two great civilisations was the land which we call Syria, extending from the Euphrates to the Egyptian frontier, from the Mediterranean to the deserts of Northern Arabia. Syria, as well as the huge peninsula of Arabia, which bounded it on the south-east, and which in its northern parts was habitable only by nomads, was occupied by branches of the great family which we call Semitic. In language, and presumably also in race, the Semites of Syria and Arabia were closely related to the main stem of the Assyrians and Babylonians. They had also many kinsmen in the Delta of Egypt, but the Egyptian civilisation acknowledged no brotherhood with them, and held itself aloof from its Eastern neighbours (Gen. xliii. 32).

The natural features of Syria were not favourable to the growth of a great and united nation fit to meet on equal terms with the empires on each side of it. For a time, indeed, a powerful people, called Hittites in the Bible, but better known from the Egyptian and Assyrian monuments, where they appear as Khita and Khatti, occupied the part of Syria between the Orontes and the Euphrates, and from their capital of Carchemish (Jirbas on the Euphrates) seem to have extended their influence far into Asia Minor. [5] But the prime of the Hittite monarchy was earlier than the period with which we are immediately concerned, perhaps indeed earlier than the settlement of the Hebrews in Canaan. It is possible that they were not of Semitic stock, and they hardly come within the sphere of the Biblical history. Apart from this mysterious people, the inhabitants of Syria (I still use the word in the ordinary English sense, including Palestine) were broken up into a multitude of small nations, as was natural from the deserts and mountains that divided the land. By their language these nations can be arranged in two groups, according as they spoke Aramaic or dialects belonging to the Hebrew stock. In the English Bible Aramaic is called Syriac (2 Kings xviii. 26; Dan. ii. 4; Ezra iv. 7), and when Syria or Syrians are mentioned we are not to think of modern Syria, but of the land and people of Aramaic tongue. The Aramaeans of the Bible were partly settled in Mesopotamia, partly west of the Euphrates as far as Damascus and the borders of Canaan. They formed a number of small states, of which Damascus was from the time of Solomon the most important, at least in relation to Israel, exercising the hegemony over a considerable district to the north-west of Canaan.

Between the Aramaeaus and Egypt, again, we find a number of small nations speaking a language distinct from Aramaic, in several dialects sufficiently close to one another to be mutually intelligible, — Canaanites, Philistines, Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, and finally Israelites, all gathered in the narrow isthmus of habitable land between the Mediterranean and the Desert, which, from Damascus and Hermon southwards, forms the only passage between the two great seats of civilisation and empire on the Euphrates and the Nile. The whole habitable area of this isthmus, which on the south is separated from Egypt by a tract of desert, is very small. It may be roughly compared in length and breadth with Northern England from the Humber to the Scottish border, but even this measurement includes great tracts either wholly desert, or, like the wilderness of Judaea, capable of supporting only a scanty population of herdsmen. From north to south it is split up the centre by the great natural depression of the Jordan valley and the Dead Sea, the surface of the latter lying a quarter of a mile below the Mediterranean. To the east of this valley, or rather trough, lies a tableland gradually merging into wild desert; to the west are the mountains of Palestine, intersected by fertile valleys, which in the north are wide and numerous, and slope westward in long glades towards the Mediterranean, while further south the maritime plain is wider, but the mountains are stony and sterile, and the valleys often narrow defiles, till at length the cultivable land passes into bare steppe, and finally into absolute desert.

Even in its geographical features this narrow region has a singular interest. It is almost an epitome of the ancient world, where the ocean and the desert, the pastures of the wilderness and the terraced vineyards of sunny hills, the cedars, fir-trees, and rhododendrons of Lebanon, the cornfields of Jezreel and the oak-clad glades of Tabor, the shores of the Lake of Galilee bright with shrubbery of oleander, the hot cane brakes and palm groves of Jericho, represent in brief compass almost every variety of material condition which enters into the development of Eastern antiquity. But a more important influence on the history of Palestine lay in the fact that it was the bridge between the East and the West. Before the opening up of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean as a waterway, all the through traffic of the world necessarily crossed it, or passed along the edge of the adjoining deserts. And, in close connection with this, the cities of the Phoenician coast became the central emporia of the world. It was Phoenician sailors who opened up the Western waters, extending their voyages as far as the tin mines of Cornwall, and tapping the trade of inland Europe by their stations on the Gulf of Lyons, and at the mouths of the great rivers of Russia. How Tyre was the very centre of the world's commerce, drawing riches on all sides from the furthest lands, we still read in Ezekiel xxvii.

The Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon, who held so important a place in the ancient world, were only one branch of the so-called Canaanites or Amorites (the two names are practically interchangeable), [6] who at the earliest date for which we have precise information not only occupied Palestine west of the Jordan, but had extensive eastern settlements in Bashan and Gilead. Their language, which was nearly the same as the Hebrew of the Bible, marked them off alike from the Aramaeans who lay to the north and from the Arabs of the southern and eastern desert. They were an agricultural and trading people, with walled towns and considerable material civilisation, but politically weak from their division into a multitude of petty states, each with its own kinglet or aristocratic senate, and morally corrupted by a licentious religion, in which drunken carousals and the grossest sexual excesses were practised in honour of the gods. These gods, which were worshipped under a multitude of local forms, had a twofold type — male and female. The male god of any community was its Ba'al (lord or owner); the corresponding female deity was 'Ashtoreth. The one was often identified with the sun, the other with the moon. In general terms it may be said that the Canaanites looked on their deities as productive powers — givers of life, fertility, and increase. Just as physical life is divided into two sexes, they thought that the divine productive power was male and female; and, assigning to this sexual analogy a great and literal prominence in all the observances of worship, their religion easily ran into sensuality, and lent its countenance to every form of immorality, if only performed at the sanctuary and the sacred feasts. Instead of affording a sanction to sobriety and domestic purity, the exercises of Canaanite religion gave the rein to the animal nature, and so took the form of Dionysiac orgies of the grossest type. Through the Phoenicians the practices of Canaanite worship were carried across the sea and introduced to the Western nations, and wherever they came they formed an element of pollution, a blacker spot even in the darkness of heathenism.

The situation of Palestine naturally exposed it to invasion from different sides. The early campaigns of the Egyptians in this quarter do not concern our present purpose, and the western movements of Babylonia and Assyria were later than the Canaanite period. But apart from these, the Aramaeans from the north, the Arabs from the south and east, were constantly pressing on the land. The relation of the Northern Arabs to Palestine has been much the same in all ages. Their hordes make periodical descents on the cultivated land, which are easily repelled by a good and strong government, but prove successful when the settled inhabitants are weakened by division and misrule. So, in ancient times, the Midianites, Amalekites, and other tribes overran the land from time to time. The Amalekites seem at one time to have ranged freely as far as the mountains of Ephraim; and the population of the east, but especially of the south, in the wilderness or steppe of Judaea, contained an important Arab element in Biblical times. Indeed the large population of Judah, which gave that tribe such a preponderance in the time of David, was due, as can still be proved from the Biblical genealogies, to a fusion between the pure Judaeans and other families of nomad origin. [7]

More lasting in their results were the migrations of a group of small nations which came from the direction of Aram, and acknowledged kindred to one another. They were four in number — Ammon, Moab, Edom, and Israel. The Ammonites and Moabites settled to the east of the Dead Sea, on the verge of the great desert, taking the place of the aboriginal Zamzummim and Emim (Deut. ii. 10, 20), but not interfering with the Canaanites proper. The Edomites found a seat to the south of the Dead Sea, where they conquered or absorbed the early troglodyte inhabitants (Horim). They were a wilder, less settled race than their northern cousins, and appear to have approached much more closely to the Arabic type. Their land, as it is described in Gen. xxvii. 39, was "far from the fat places of the earth and from the dew of heaven above." They lived by their sword — that is, by robbery — and the importance of their position lay in the fact that the caravan routes from Arabia and the Red Sea to Gaza and the other mercantile towns of the coast passed through their territory. [8] The fourth nation, Israel, found no fixed abode, and, crossing the southern desert, dwelt for a time on the borders of Egypt, where they continued to live a pastoral nomadic life, and, though acknowledging a certain dependence on the Pharaohs, never came into close contact with Egyptian culture. [9] Their most intimate relations at this time were with Arab tribes, and, when the Egyptians oppressed them and tried to break them to forced labour on public works, it was among the Arabian Kenites that Moses, the leader of Israel's flight, found help and counsel. [10] Once more crossing the desert, the tribes of Israel appeared after long wanderings on the eastern frontier of Palestine. It was only by the sword that they could win a place of rest; but, respecting their cousins in Edom, Moab, and Ammon, they fell on the Amorites, east of the Jordan, and, after occupying their seats, crossed the river and established themselves in Western Palestine, not by one sustained and united effort, but by a multitude of local campaigns, in which each tribe generally fought for its own hand. [11] A war of emigrants for the possession of territory is always bloody, and this war was no exception to the rule. Whole communities of Canaanites were exterminated in the long struggle, for the Israelites, as well as their foes, were fighting for existence, and the "ban" by which a hostile community was devoted to utter destruction was an institution of Semitic warfare which the Israelites had in common with the kindred nations — for example, with Moab. [12] But the Canaanites were not exterminated. On the Phoenician coast their force was unbroken, and many strong places even in the centre of the land remained unsubdued till the time of the Davidic kingdom. Such were the mountain fastness of Jerusalem, long esteemed impregnable, and a whole series of walled cities on the edge of the fertile plain of Jezreel, where, in fact, after the first tide of victory was stayed, the tribe of Issachar sank into the condition of a tributary (Gen. xlix. 15). The struggle lasted for generations before all the Israelites found a fixed abode; the Danites, for example, are still found ranging the land as an armed horde in the days of the grandson of Moses (Judges xviii.), when they at last found a settlement at the base of Mount Hermon. In the days of Deborah and Barak the Canaanites were near re-establishing their mastery at least over Northern Palestine, and the tribes of Israel were too little at one to make common front against them. But, on the whole, Israel maintained its superiority, and the large Canaanite population which still survived in all parts of the land was gradually reduced to vassalship. To a certain extent the two nationalities began to fuse and form intermarriages, as was not difficult, since both spoke one language. Once at least we find an attempt to form a mixed Hebrew and Canaanite state, for Shechem, which was then a Canaanite city with a Canaanite aristocracy of the Bne Hamor family, was the centre of the short-lived kingdom of Abimelech, who himself apparently was a Canaanite on the mother's side. Though the adventurer Abimelech failed to establish a dynasty, the temporary success of the experiment shows how far the original antagonism of race had been softened, and the condemnation pronounced by the moral sense of the Hebrews on the slaughter of the tributary Gibeonites by Saul proves that the Israelite aristocracy and their Canaanite subjects began to feel themselves united by the bonds of common humanity. And so, in the age of the Judges, it might readily appear that this invasion was to run the same course as so many other incursions from the desert into a land of higher civilisation, and that the conquerors would gradually become assimilated to the conquered, from whom the Hebrew nomads on their first introduction to settled life and agricultural pursuits had everything to learn. At the close of the period of the Judges the greater part of the Israelites had quite lost their pastoral habits. They were an agricultural people living in cities and villages, and their oldest civil laws are framed for this kind of life. All the new arts which this complete change of habit implies they must have derived from the Canaanites, and as they learned the ways of agricultural life they could hardly fail to acquire many of the characteristics of their teachers. To make the transformation complete only one thing was lacking — that Israel should also accept the religion of the aborigines. The history and the prophets alike testify that to a great extent they actually did this. Canaanite sanctuaries became Hebrew holy places, and the vileness of Canaanite nature-worship polluted the Hebrew festivals. For a time it seemed that Jehovah, the ancestral God of Israel, who brought their fathers up out of the house of bondage and gave them their goodly land, would be forgotten or transformed into a Canaanite Baal. If this change had been completed Israel would have left no name in the world's history; but Providence had other things in store for the people of Jehovah. Henceforth the real significance of Israel's fortunes lies in the preservation and development of the national faith, and the history of the tribes of Jacob is rightly set forth in the Bible as the history of that divine discipline by which Jehovah maintained a people for Himself amidst the seductions of Canaanite worship and the ever-new backslidings of Israel.
 

To understand who Jehovah was, and what He was to Israel, we must return to the deliverance of the Hebrew tribes from Egyptian bondage, to which later ages looked back as the birth of the nation. In the land of Goshen the Hebrews had not even a vestige of national organisation. The tribes into which they were divided acknowledged a common ancestry, but had no institutions expressive of the unity of race; and, when Moses called them to a united effort for liberty, the only practical starting-point for his work was an appeal to the name of Jehovah, the God of their fathers. It is not easy to say how far the remembrance of this God was a living power among the Hebrews. The Semitic nomads have many superstitions, but little religion. The sublime solitudes of the desert are well fitted to nourish lofty thoughts about God, but the actual life of a wandering shepherd people is not favourable to the formation of such fixed habits of worship as are indispensable to make religion a prominent factor in everyday life. It would seem that the memory of the God of the Hebrew fathers was little more than a dormant tradition when Moses began his work; and among the Israelites, as among the Arabs of the desert, whatever there was of habitual religious practice was probably connected with tribal or family superstitions, such as the use of teraphim, a kind of household idols which long continued to keep their place in Hebrew homes. The very name of Jehovah (or Iahwe, as the word should rather be pronounced) became known as a name of power only through Moses and the great deliverance.

At any rate it would be a fundamental mistake to suppose that the traditional faith in an ancestral God, round which Moses rallied his brethren, included any developed metaphysical conceptions such as we associate with the idea of a spiritual God. Not the nature of the Deity, but His power and will to help His people were the points practical to the oppressed Hebrews. A living God, according to a conception never fully superseded in the Old Testament, must have a kingly seat on earth where He showed Himself to men, and this seat, it would seem, an ancient tradition placed on Mount Sinai, which still appears in the Song of Deborah as the place from which the divine majesty goes forth in thunderstorm and rain to bring victory to Israel. It would be a profitless task to attempt to analyse this conception, and seek a symbolic meaning in the poetic language in which it is clothed. The Israelites thought in poetic figures, and we must take their thoughts as they themselves present them. The storm that broke on the mountains of Sinai and rolled across the desert in fertilising showers made the godhead of Jehovah real to them; the thunder was His voice of majesty, the voice of the same God who wrought the great deliverance at the Red Sea, and beyond this they did not care to go. The new message that Moses brought to his brethren was not an abstract revelation of Jehovah's spiritual attributes, but an assurance of His personal interest in Israel, and a promise of effectual help. The promise was fulfilled in a marvellous display of Jehovah's saving strength; and, when the proud waters rolled between the Hebrews and the shattered power of the Egyptians, Israel felt that it was a nation, the nation of Jehovah. I have explained in a former course of lectures [19] that the ordinances of the Pentateuch, in which tradition has accustomed us to seek the forms under which the great idea of Israel, the people of Jehovah, was organised during the wilderness wanderings, are really of very various dates, and that the law of Israel did not take final shape till after the Babylonian captivity. The Pentateuch as we now have it is not the immediate record of the institutions of Moses, but the last codification of the divine teaching begun by Moses, and carried on and perfected through many centuries by the discipline of history and the word of the prophets who took up Moses' work. The sacred writers of the Old Testament were so deeply convinced of the unity and consistency of all Jehovah's teaching that they did not attempt to leave an historical record of its several stages. In every age their one concern was to set forth a clear testimony to the whole truth of God as they themselves knew it. It did not seem important to them to distinguish the very words of Moses from the equally authoritative additions of later organs of revelation. Thus it is difficult for us to determine with precision how far Moses in person carried the work of giving to Israel divine ordinances fitted to express the new-born consciousness that Israel was the nation of Jehovah. We may be sure, however, that his work was carried out on practical lines. The ordinary judges of the people were still the elders, or, as an Arab would call them, the sheikhs of the several tribes and sub-tribes; and this fact implies that Moses did not cancel the old customary laws which already existed as the basis of tribal justice. [14] But the new circumstances of Israel, and, above all, the new sense of national unity, which was no longer a mere sentiment of common ancestry, created a multitude of new questions. On these Moses had to decide, and he sought the decision from Jehovah, whose ark now led the march of Israel. It is only on the march and in time of war that a nomad people feels any urgent need of a central authority, and so it came about that in the first beginnings of national organisation, centering in the sanctuary of the ark, Israel was thought of mainly as the host of Jehovah. The very name of Israel is martial, and means "God (El) fighteth," and Jehovah in the Old Testament is Iahwe Cebaoth, the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on the battlefield that Jehovah's presence was most clearly realised; but in primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in time of peace, and the sanctuary of Jehovah, where Moses and the priests, his successors, gave forth the sacred oracle, was the final seat of judgment in all cases too hard for the ordinary heads of the Hebrew clans.

It must, however, be observed that the idea of executive government as we understand it is quite unknown to the inhabitants of the desert. The business of a judge, among the Hebrews as among the Arabs, was to declare the law when consulted, not to enforce it, or even to offer a decision that was not asked. This principle held good alike in criminal and civil cases, and the foundation of what we call criminal law was the right of self-help on the principle of exact retaliation. [15] Thus Israel entered Canaan without any developed system of national government. As the tribes moved off from the central camp where the ark stood, and won themselves dwelling-places in different quarters of the land, often separated by districts which the Canaanites still held, their feelings of national unity ceased to find any regular expression, the Hebrew federation became weaker and weaker, and there was no central authority to enforce the duties of political and religious unity.

Now, it followed from the circumstances of the Exodus that these two unities necessarily went together. Jehovah was essentially the God of the whole nation, not of individual families; every act of worship to Jehovah, every approach to the sacred judgment-seat at the sanctuary, was an expression of national feeling, which lost the best part of its meaning when the Israelite forgot the bonds of national unity that had been knit at the Red Sea and in the wilderness. But, in fact, the Mosaic sanctuary soon lost much of its central importance. It was fixed on the first entrance into Canaan at the headquarters of the armed force of Israel, originally at Gilgal, afterwards at Shiloh, in the land occupied by the strongest and most martial of the Hebrew clans, the great tribe of Ephraim. The dispersion and isolation of the tribes, therefore, brought it about that Shiloh became the local sanctuary of Ephraim, and was not regularly visited by the more distant tribes. This, indeed, did not imply that the other tribes ceased to do sacrifice to Jehovah, whose altars of earth or unhewn stone were seen in all corners of the land, while in many places a priesthood claiming kinship with Moses administered the sacred oracle as his successors. But such local worship necessarily came into contact with the Canaanite service of Baal; and, apart from the fact that the luxurious festivals of the latter had a natural attraction for the sensuous Semitic nature the Hebrews, there was a more innocent motive which tended to assimilate the two worships. The offerings and festivals of Jehovah were acts of homage in which the people consecrated to Him the good things of His bestowing. These were no longer the scanty products of pastoral life, but the rich gifts of a land of corn and wine, which the Canaanites had taught the Hebrews to cultivate. Thus the religious feasts necessarily assumed a new and more luxurious character, and, rejoicing before Jehovah in the enjoyment of the good things of Canaan, the Israelites naturally imitated the agricultural feasts which the Canaanites celebrated before Baal. It is not therefore surprising that we find many indications of a gradual fusion between the two worships; that many of the great Hebrew sanctuaries are demonstrably identical with Canaanite holy places; that the autumn feast, usually known as the Feast of Tabernacles, has a close parallel in the Canaanite Vintage Feast; that Canaanite immorality tainted the worship of Jehovah; and that at length Jehovah Himself, who was addressed by His worshippers by the same general appellation of Baal or Lord which was the ordinary title of the Canaanite nature-god, was hardly distinguished by the masses who worshipped at the local shrines from the local Baalim of their Canaanite neighbours. [16]

The growth of this religious syncretism not only threatened to sap the moral strength of the Hebrews, but boded entire extinction to the national feeling which had no other centre than the religion of Jehovah. And so in the providence of God it was by a series of imperious calls to united national effort that Israel was prevented from wholly forgetting Jehovah. Every invasion which woke the dormant feeling of patriotism woke at the same time something of the old faith. There was no patriotic fire in the religion of the Baalim, which had not even stimulated the Canaanites to united struggle against their Hebrew conquerors. In battle and in victory Jehovah was still the ancestral God, shaking the earth and dissolving the mountains as He marched from the desert of Seir to deliver His people (Judges v.). Hence it is that in the time of the Judges every revival of the religion of Jehovah is connected with the wars in which the Hebrews succeeded in maintaining their ground against numerous invading foes.

It is plain, however, that the religion of Jehovah could not always stand still at the point which it had reached in the wilderness. It was not enough to have one religion for times of patriotic exaltation, and another for daily life. A God who dwelt afar off in Sinai and only came down to Canaan in the day of battle was not sufficient for human needs. It was necessary that the old religion should become master of the new and altogether changed life of the Hebrews in their new seats. Jehovah and the Baalim had to contend for sovereignty in the ordinary existence of the Hebrews, when the simplicity of the desert had inevitably given way to the progress of material civilisation in a rich and cultivated land. And here we must ask what was the essential difference between Jehovah and the Baalim, which had to be preserved amidst all changes of circumstances if Jehovah was still to maintain His individuality.  In the first place, as we have seen, Jehovah represented a principle of national unity, while the worship of the Baalim was split into a multitude of local cults without national significance. But this would have been an empty difference if there had been nothing behind. National unity is a meaningless thing unless the nation feels that it is united for some common task. Now Jehovah represented to Israel two of the greatest blessings that any people can enjoy, blessings for which it is well worth while to unite in sustained and strenuous effort. The first of these was liberty, for it was Jehovah that brought Israel forth from the house of bondage; the second was law, justice, and the moral order of society, for from the days of Moses the mouth of Jehovah was the one fountain of judgment. So in the Ten Words, the fundamental document of the religion of the Old Testament, the claim of Jehovah to the exclusive worship of Israel is based on the deliverance that made Israel a free people, and issues in the great laws of social morality. The cause of Jehovah in Israel was the cause of national freedom and social righteousness, and the task of the religion of Jehovah was to set these fast in the land of Canaan in a society which ever looked to Jehovah as its living and present head.
 

The idea of righteousness is of course familiar to everyone as a cardinal Old Testament conception. The idea of liberty may sound less familiar, but only because it has two aspects, which are covered by the conceptions of deliverance and peace. Thus, when the Psalmist speaks of righteousness and peace kissing each other (Psalm lxxxv. 10), he expresses precisely the ideal of the religion of Jehovah which we are now considering. At the very close of the Old Testament dispensation the same ideal meets us in the song of Zachariah, "That we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve Him in holiness and righteousness before Him all our days." Here indeed we have one more idea, that of holiness, which will come prominently before us as our argument advances, but which it would be premature to dwell on at present. The holiness of Israel is in fact a summary expression for the conception that the whole national vocation of Israel is a religious vocation discharged by a worshipping people, inasmuch as the Judge, Lawgiver, and King of Israel is none other than Israel's God.

Every true thought contains a deeper meaning and involves more important consequences than can be seen at once. And this is especially the case with religious truth, which presents itself in the first instance in the form not of general propositions but of direct personal experience. The early Hebrews did not think about Jehovah; they believed in Him, and experienced the reality of His sovereignty in the great things which He did for His people. Thus it was only by slow degrees and in connection with the historical experiences of the nation that the whole meaning of His religion, the full difference between Him and the gods of the nations, came to be realised, or that the Israelites learned all that was implied in their vocation as the people of Jehovah. In the first generations after the conquest of the great practical question, as we have already seen, was whether Israel would continue in any sense to retain that consciousness of national unity which, in the absence of all political centralisation, had no other rallying-point than the faith of Jehovah. We have seen, too, that the struggle for freedom against successive attacks of powerful enemies was the means used by Providence in the age of the Judges to preserve at once national feeling and national faith in Jehovah. Jehovah in this period appears pre-eminently as the champion of Israel's freedom, the divine King to whom Israel owes national allegiance, and whose majesty is dishonoured when His servants pay tribute and homage to other nations and their gods. The foreign invaders of Israel encroach on Jehovah's sovereignty, and thus are His enemies too. So He goes forth and rallies His armies, the armies of Israel, around Him, calling them to help Jehovah against the mighty (Judges v, 23). And when the victory remains with Israel the song of triumph ends with the prayer, "So let all thine enemies perish, O Jehovah; but let them that love Thee be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might."

At this stage of Israel's religion, pictured most clearly in the Song of Deborah, the presence of Jehovah with His people was quite fully realised only in the hour of battle and victory. The ark itself, the visible token of the angel, or rather embassy of Jehovah, sent by Him to direct the march of His people and subdue the Canaanite before them (Exod. xxiii. 20 seq.; Num. x. 33; Judges ii. 1), was rather the sanctuary of the host than of the settled nation, and after it was fixed at Shiloh became, as we have seen, little more than the local shrine of the tribe of Ephraim. In the Song of Deborah Jehovah has not yet a fixed seat in the land of Canaan, but goes forth from Sinai to help His people in their distress. Hence the establishment of local sanctuaries of Jehovah, at Dan, at Ophrah, and at other points throughout the land during the period of the Judges, must not be looked upon as essentially a retrograde movement. It is true that these local shrines exposed Jehovah-worship to the great danger of taking up Canaanite elements and assimilating itself to the worship of the Baalim, and thus it is easy to understand that from one point of view the age of the Judges may be represented as one of continual backsliding. But, on the other hand, these local shrines brought Jehovah nearer to the daily life of the people. He came down, as it were, from Sinai and took possession of Canaan as the suzerain to whom the people in every corner of the country did homage for the good things of Jehovah's land. At the close of the period of the Judges the religion of Jehovah is thoroughly identified with the possession of Palestine. "They have driven me out this day," says David, "from being attached to the inheritance of Jehovah, saying, 'Go serve other gods.'" In other words, banishment from Canaan is now conceived as banishment from the service of Jehovah, and the religion of Jehovah has become part of daily national life. Thus we see that the long struggle that was inevitable when the religion of Jehovah went forth from the desert and came into contact with the life of the larger world was not in vain. The crisis was sharp, and Israel had not passed through it unscathed; but in the end Jehovah was still the God of Israel, and had become the God of Israel's land. Canaan was His heritage, not the heritage of the Baalim, and the Canaanite worship appears henceforth, not as a direct rival to the worship of Jehovah, but as a disturbing element corrupting the national faith, while unable to supplant it altogether. This, of course, in virtue of the close connection between religion and national feeling, means that Israel had now risen above the danger of absorption in the Canaanites, and felt itself to be a nation in the true sense of the word. We learn from the books of Samuel how this great advance was ultimately and permanently secured. The earlier wars recorded in the book of Judges had brought about no complete or lasting unity among the Hebrew tribes. But at length a new enemy arose, more formidable than any whom they had previously encountered. The Philistines from Caphtor, who, like the Israelites, had entered Canaan as emigrants, but coming most probably by sea had displaced the aboriginal Avvim in the rich coastlands beneath the mountains of Judah (Deut. ii. 23; Amos ix. 7), pressed into the heart of the country, and broke the old strength of Ephraim in the battle of Ebenezer. This victory cut the Hebrew settlements in two, and threatened the independence of all the tribes. The common danger drew Israel together. They found a leader in the Benjamite Saul, whom Jehovah Himself designated as the king of Israel by the mouth of the prophet Samuel. The resistance which Saul first organised in the difficult hill country of his native tribe was conducted with varying fortune, but not without success. Saul himself fell in battle, but his work was continued by Abner in the north, while in the south David consolidated his power as king of Judah without disturbance from the Philistines, whose suzerainty he was content to acknowledge till his plans were ripe. When David was accepted as king of all Israel, and by a bold stroke found a capital in the centre of the land in the strong fortress of Jerusalem, till then deemed impregnable, Israel met the invader on more than equal terms, and the Hebrews became masters where a few years before they had been servants.
 

It was Jehovah who had given them this victory, and, what was more than any victory, had at length given permanent expression to the unity of the nation by placing at their head a king who reigned as the anointed of the Lord. The first crisis was past, and thenceforward Israel could never forget that it was one nation, with a national destiny and a national God.  

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