uence, to differentiate Jahveh from all other
gods, and Israel from all other people, to make the one unique and the
other pontiff and shepherd of the nations of the world, became the
dream of anonymous poets, one that prophets, sometimes equally
anonymous, proclaimed. It was the prophets that reviled the false
gods, denounced the abominations of Ishtar, and purified the Israelite
heart. While nothing discernible, or even imaginable, menaced, however
slightly, the great empires of that day, the prophets were the first
to realize that the Orient was dead. When the Christ announced that
the end of the world was at hand, he but reiterated anterior
predictions that presently were fulfilled. A world did end. That of
antiquity ceased to be.

[Footnote 36: _Cf._ Deut. xxiii. 17, where _'alamoth_ (puellae) is
rendered in the Sapphist sense. Ezekiel xvi. 17. _Fecisti tibi
imagines masculinas._]

It was the prophets that foretold it. Gloomy, fanatic, implacable and,
it may be, mad, yet inspired at least by genius which itself, while
madness, is a madness wholly divine, they heralded the future, they
established the past. Abraham they drew from allegory, Moses from
myth. They made them live, and so immortally that one survives in
Islam, the other in words that are a law of grace for all.

If, in visions possibly ecstatic, they beheld heights that lost
themselves in immensity, and saw there an ineffable name seared by
forked flames on a tablet of stone; if that spectacle and the
theophany of it were but poetry, the decalogue is a fact, one so solid
that though ages have gone, though empires have crumbled, though the
customs of man have altered, though the sky itself have changed, still
is obeyed the commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

From Chemos in Moab, from Rimmon among the Ammonites, no such edict
had come. It felled them. Amon-Ra it tore from the celestial Nile, and
Bel-Marduk from the Silver Sky. The Refaim hid them in shadows as
surely as they buried there the high and potent lords of Greece and
Rome. These interments, completed by others, the prophets began. For
it was they who, in addition to the command, revealed the commandant,
creator of whatever is: the Being Absolute that abhorred evil, loved
righteousness, punished the transgressor and rewarded the just; El
Shaddai, then really Lord of Hosts.

It may be that already in Israel there had been some prescience of
this. But it lacked the authority