simple life and invigorating climate of the steppes, there to bring up the children to a sense of the high mission he dreamed for them,-to uphold the liberty and equal rights of all men under the rule of their powerful though invisible God and King. More than a generation later, Joshua and Caleb, who alone had sympathized with and staunchly supported him during the whole migration, carried out the first condition of his plan and brought into Canaan a stalwart and eager band of warriors prepared to keep and spread the knowledge of their Covenant with Yahweh. Alas, in a few decades, the beauty of the land with its rich gifts of corn and wine and ease of living had allured their descendants to a laxity of morals and distinction of classes utterly opposed to His laws.

Looking back from his standpoint of the ninth century through many such lapses, consequent humiliations and new beginnings, J found the answer to his question in the blind indifference of his brethren to the teachings of experience (teachings embodied in the very tales they so delighted in), and hence the constant repetition of the old self-indulgence, old disobedience to the laws of right living, old ingratitude to God and injustice to their fellows. He set himself, therefore, not only to assemble these scattered lessons and show their meaning, but to trace Man's growth in intelligence, dignity and worth to the world through obedience to the inner promptings of right reason; and the inevitable disaster to himself and the world through a weak yielding to every selfish impulse.

The thesis of J begins with the condition of primitive man, newly conscious of free agency and the power of invention, not yet competent to see cause for gratitude, and therefore for obedience, in the gift of reason. Next he shows the innate sense of justice displayed by Abel in his grateful offering to the Giver of all good things, and the dire destruction of all social life which Cain's breach of the innate bond of kinship would entail. How small a percentage of men make a right use of privilege he shows in the story of the preservation of righteous Noah and his family; and how futile the presumptuous dependence upon the righteousness of ancestors as a shield against just punishment, in that of the Tower of Babel. He portrays the Patriarchs, none of them perfect, but always growing towards perfection by living in close communion with God; and he shows how far below them the immigrants from Egypt had fallen, in spite of the inspired teaching of Moses, their advance in material prosperity and culture, and the constant efforts of many teachers, such as Samuel and Nathan, to keep them to their covenant. He brings in examples of the evil bred of evil from recent events in the sister kingdom of Israel, contrasting them with the wisdom of their own king Asa and the consequent peace in Judah; but he feels sure that neither of the Twin Kingdoms can hope for help from Yahweh against onslaughts of "heathen peoples", unless they both reform.

The place of J is not among historians, though necessarily he has given us many historical incidents, and the ancestors of his nation live in his pages; but he must be classed with the great philosophers and religious reformers of all ages. Twenty-five hundred years before Vico published his Scienza Nuova, and initiated the modern method of writing history, J brilliantly illustrated its highest uses. And, for command of dramatic situation, powerful delineation of character and subtle distinction of motive, he is still unsurpassed.

The next great writer came from the Northern Kingdom. Like J he is anonymous, and is called E because he uses the word Elohim

(Strong ones) as the name of Deity. Hence the two are also distinguished as the "Yahwist" and the "Elohist". The latter wrote in the eighth century, about a hundred years after J. He too found his material in current traditions; but either those of the north differed greatly from those of the south, or the two authors differed widely in their preferences. So far as we can judge, E had no thesis to sustain, but gathered various interesting stories of the heroes of the northern tribes, and was careful to determine the scenes of their activity. E leans to narrative as J to the dramatic. Unlike J, he gives little foundation for psychological study in his accounts of the Exodus. J is careful to give natural causes for the wonders wrought in Egypt; E delights in the miraculous. For E, Moses is a mere mouthpiece for the Divine message; a messenger who reports verbatim; but he is a great enchanter, who governs the winds and waves, and brings disasters to pass by the waving of a wand. He even converts the wand into a serpent, as Pharaoh's magicians can also do; but Moses is greater than they. Evidently E was well acquainted with Egyptian folk-lore, which abounds in miracles; he also uses Egyptian titles and gives several of his characters Egyptian names. He draws few philosophical conclusions from his facts.

As J was contemporary with Elijah and possibly one of his disciples, yet left it to another hand to give the striking account of his career, so E, who was contemporary with at least three of the four literary prophets of his century who carried on and accentuated J's exhortations to religious reform, makes no mention of them. Apparently his interest was in the past, or he was too timid to chronicle actions and words so unpopular at court as those of Amos and Hosea; but we are greatly indebted to him for many an intimate detail in the lives of Israel's heroes, and for his masterly presentment of both humor and pathos. While by no means the equal of J for profound insight and clear reasoning, he is a most graphic narrator, and his style is both graceful and pungent.

Less than twenty years after E had finished his work, Tiglath Pileser III., king of Assyria, appeared on the northern frontier of Israel, captured a few towns and deported their inhabitants, replacing them with his own people, and thus securing the head waters of the Jordan. Then he retired for a time. But, finding that Hoshea, king of Israel, was negotiating with Egypt to withstand him, he reappeared and laid siege to Samaria, the great fortress-capital of Israel and the rival of Jerusalem. The siege lasted three years; and when the city was finally taken, the Kingdom of Israel, which for over two hundred years had been the barrier between Egypt and Assyria, came to an end; the leading men of the tribes, the "Ten Lost Tribes", were deported, and no trace of them has ever been found. Yet, only forty years before, Jeroboam II., their greatest warrior-king, had regained all the neighboring territory conquered by David and left to Solomon; and he was contemplating the conquest of Judah and the reunion of the two kingdoms when he died. Had his plan been carried out, all the tribes of Israel might have perished together, the great uplifting power of Hebrew literature might have been strangled in its birth, the very name of its instigator forgotten, and we might still be openly worshiping Melech and Astarte, or such gods as Tiberius, Nero and Caligula. But Judah in her mountain fastnesses was spared; for "God meant it for good, to bring to pass the saving of many people alive."

The immediate result for Hebrew literature of the devastation of

the Northern Kingdom, the destruction of its records and the deportation of all who might have recalled its cherished traditions and replaced its writings, was a unique production which it is safe to say has caused more misunderstanding and discussion than any other work in literature. The Kingdom of Israel fell in 722 B.C. Before the end of the century, a patriotic but undiscriminating writer, striving to preserve at least its most sacred traditions, had grafted upon J's noble thesis the narratives of E in such fashion as to produce those strange discrepancies and contradictions already spoken of, the explanation of which has necessitated nearly a century of close study. The wellintentioned author of this confusion is appropriately called JE. How much of J's impressive argument and graphic illustration he sacrificed to his admiration of E, it is impossible to tell; but we are indebted to him not only for all we know of the latter, but also for the preservation of the two very ancient law-codes, the "Book of the Covenant" and the "Law of Holiness", both attributed with great probability to Moses, but later distributed by P among the laws that the tribes found in Canaan.

The awful object-lesson in the fate of the Ten Tribes, "which kept not the commandments of Yahweh their God, but walked in the statutes of the heathen and of the kings of Israel", had not been without effect upon Judah. The Assyrian army was nearing Jerusalem, and its heralds were stirring up the populace to revolt against their king and put themselves under the protection of Assyria. Therefore, acting upon the counsels of Isaiah, the cousin and couniellor of the king, Hezekiah and his Court rushed to the Temple, and with solemn prayer and sacrifice besought Yahweh for the honor of His name to save His Chosen People, And, marvelous to relate, Sennacherib raised the siege (whether because of a plague in the camp, as one writer gives it, or, according to another, because of tidings of a revolt at home), and Judah was saved. The deliverance was followed by a reform which lasted till Hezekiah's death; but his son and successor, Manasseh, did his utmost to root out the pure worship of Yahweh, substituting for it the licentious and cruel rites of the "gods of the nations". The rich resumed their old habits of luxurious living with its attendant evils; the poor were hideously oppressed; and the king "filled Jerusalem with innocent. blood". Tradition ascribes to him the martyrdom of the venerable Isaiah. The fifty-seven years of the reigns of Manasseh and his son Amon were an orgy of all that is most vile in irresponsible tyranny, the worst blot on the history of David's line. Nevertheless, from it was born, through revulsion of popular feeling, and the immediate instrumentality of D, the great reformation of Josiah's reign which established the Law on which was to be founded that "New Covenant" (Jer. xxxi, 31-34) which is the basis of all spiritual religion, and which Christ came "not to destroy, but to fulfil".

The graphic account of the occasion and completion of this reform is given in 2 Ki. xxi, 23—xxiii, 25. It begins: "The servants of Amon conspired against him and slew him in his own house; and the people of the land slew all that had conspired against King Amon, and made Josiah his son king in his stead". Thus the people cleared the way for the return of the priests of the ancient faith, under whose training and advice the boy-king grew up. Evidently he came to an impoverished kingdom; but in his twenty-sixth year he commanded that the people's voluntary offerings to the Temple should be used to remove every vestige of the altars to all sorts of foreign gods with which Manasseh had deflled it, to repair the breaches in its walls, and thoroughly to

restore its dignity and beauty. At some time during this restoration, the High Priest announced: "I have found the Book of the Law in the House of Yahweh"; and Josiah accepted it and acted upon it.

What is this epoch-making "Book of the Law"? It purports to give verbatim Moses' farewell words of counsel, warning and encouragement to the sons of the bondmen whom he had brought out of Egypt, and whom he had trained from childhood to establish a unique nation of freemen, self-governed under the promptings of gratitude to their beneficent God and King. But it is a late work, and no hint of any such address is given by any previous writer. Its language, free from archaisms, its form and its easy, flowing rhythm bear the stamp of high literary culture, the outcome of a long period of previous use. Jeremiah and later writers show its influence, notably in their adoption of its marked phraseology, of which there is no trace in the previous century; while its author is as evidently imbued with the lofty idealism first voiced by the poet-prophets of that century. It also presupposes forms of idolatry unmentioned by the same prophets, and presumably unknown in Judah before the apostasy of Manasseh. From this and other evidence we conclude that it could not have been written before the reign of Manasseh, nor, in all likelihood, long before it was found. It is free from those "redactions" from which it would surely have suffered had it not come fresh from the author's hand to the eye and heart of the king. A very few foreign lines, mostly repetitions, have crept into the text, and a later hand inserted the superb "Song of Moses" and "Blessing of Moses"; part of chapter xxvii, also, is either an interpolation or has lost a connecting link; but the main body of the work is a unit, apparently written currente calamo under the urgency of a special need. It falls easily into the divisions of a great oration, of which, indeed, it is the earliest known.

A noble EXORDIUM briefly reviews the Exodus, and brings the hearer to the time and place of delivery, the ford of the Jordan, and the eve of the Crossing into Canaan. The force of the aged leader is spent; he must not set foot in the Promised Land; Joshua must complete his work. But how will it be when his voice is hushed and no one else may have the same sense of intimate communion with God? when no one can say: Yahweh bade me speak this and this? He himself, therefore, must once more impress upon his beloved children the laws of right reason and right living, adjuring them by all they hold most dear to love their God "with all their heart and with all their soul and with all their strength", and gratefully to obey Him for love's sake. Next comes the STATEMENT of the original laws, the Decalogue, and of the People's choice of him, Moses, to be their intermediary between them and Yahweh and the expositor of His will. Then come the EXPOSITIONS; first, of the inner meaning of the laws of the First Table, their Duty towards God; secondly, the detailed application of the other six laws,-their Duty towards their Fellow-men. Then comes the DEDUCTION or COROLLARY,-the blessings that shall reward their obedience, and the evils that will be their curse if they disobey. Finally, with a magnificent PERORATION (ch. xxix, 2-9 and xxx, 11-20), the oration ends, and with it the work of D.

A superb piece of oratory! but far more-a dramatic creation of the imagination in a supreme effort to deliver the once "holy nation" from a slavery as much worse than that of Egypt as sin eats deeper than hard labor into the forces of life. With the audacity of genius, D brings before them in their degradation the figure of their great leader at the most heart-moving crisis of his career. Not for a moment does he let

them forget Moses' advanced age and failing powers as he repeats again and again his anxious forebodings and pathetic entreaties. (It was another hand that wrote "his eye was not dimmed nor his natural force abated".) By impassioned sympathy D has entered into the mind of the great law-giver, has comprehended the wisdom and ideals implicit in his laws, and emphasized them by appeals not to the reason but to the heart. At the fitting moment, for which doubtless he had watched as Moses had watched for the moment to advance upon Canaan, D prudently placed the document where it would certainly be found; but not too easily, since it must be believed to come out of the sacred past, and its author must remain forever unknown or his purpose could not be achieved. How far otherwise it might have been received we may learn from the treatment of Amos by the High Priest of Bethel (Am. vii, 10-13), or of Jeremiah's scroll by Jehoiakim, son of Josiah (Jer. xxxvi, 21-25). The form of the work has been a model for orators. As a Dramatic Monologuist, D was the forerunner of such literary artists as Walter Mapes, Marlowe and Pope, Tennyson and Browning; but he remains for all time as far greater than they as his aim was higher; and when Theocracy was revived after the Exile, it was built up upon this Book of Deuteronomy, thought to be Moses' Second Giving of the Law.

King Josiah carried out a drastic reform not only in Judah but in the cities of Samaria, and among the rural population of Israel whom Shalmaneser IV. had left when he deported the prominent families of the Ten Tribes. But Josiah could not renew the dread of Yahweh's mysterious power which had aforetime held "the heathen peoples" in awe. That had disappeared forever when Ahaz, father of Hezekiah, scorning the counsels of Isaiah, then a young man, had turned to the "arm of flesh" for protection, and offered tribute to Assyria, paying it by despoiling the Temple of Solomon of its treasures. Later in his career, Isaiah saw considerable merit in Ahaz's policy in view of the changed conditions of the age, and used it as the basis of his doctrine of pacifism. Judah had neither army nor abundant food-supplies to compete with either of the great empires. Her eminence henceforth would lie in the superior nobility of her religion. Yahweh would determine when the "yoke of her burden" should be broken. Meanwhile, her "strength was to sit still". In the eyes of his contemporaries, it had been happy for Judah if Josiah and his sons had obeyed this warning. Josiah died all too young in a futile attempt to turn back the invading army of the Egyptians. On the other hand, his son and grandson, siding with Egypt, brought upon themselves the wrath of Nebuchadrezzar, the destruction of Jerusalem and her temple, and the same fate that had befallen Israel in the deportation of her people. But God sees not as man sees. Josiah's reform, like Hezekiah's, had affected only the outward aspect of her national life; it had neither touched the heart nor inspired sound morality in the majority of the people. Such reform cannot be brought about by mandate. But, from the bitter sorrows of exile; from the compulsory abolition of caste; from intimate acquaintance with despotic military government and a fatalistic religion, the Children of Israel were to return in the third generation to the land of their fathers with a strong conviction of the wisdom of their prophets and of the high value of their own laws and religion for ensuring happiness and the highest development of mankind.

When the populace slew the murderers of King Amon, brought back the priesthood of their ancient faith to the Temple and set a promising young prince upon the throne, they prepared the way for