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 belong the earliest attempts at
fixing the tradition of family and clan rights, and of the regulation of
personal conduct, as in the Book of the Covenant. Then comes the great
outburst of the prophetic spirit, the preaching of an age of great
religious revival. Then follows the law, with its minute regulation of
all details of life upon which would depend the favour of the God who
had brought punishment upon the people in the exile. The prophecy runs
on into apocalyptic like that of the book of Daniel. The contact with
the outside world makes possible a phase of literature such as that to
which the books of Job and Ecclesiastes belong. The deepening of the
inner life gave the world the lyric of the Psalms, some of which are
credibly assigned to a period so late as that of the Maccabees.

In this which has been said of the literature we have the clue also for
the reconstruction of the nation's history. The naive assumption in the
writing of all history had once been that one must begin with the
beginning. But to Wellhausen, Stade, Eduard Meyer and Kittel and
Cornill, it has been clear that the history of the earliest times is the
most uncertain. It is the least adapted to furnish a secure point of
departure for historical inquiry. The