er the captivity. The passage is
therefore post-exilic, consequently so is Genesis, and obviously the
rest of the Pentateuch as well. Or, if not obviously, perhaps
demonstrably. In II Esdras xiv. 22-48 it is stated that the writer, a
candle of understanding in his heart, and aided by five swift scribes,
recomposed the Law, which, previously burned, was known to none.

The burning referred to is what may, perhaps, be termed religious
fiction. Barring toledoth and related data that may have been lost,
the Law had almost certainly not existed before, and this post-exilic
romance concerning it was evolved in a laudable effort to show its
Mosaic source. What is true of the Law is, in a measure, true of the
Prophets. None of them anterior to Cyrus, all are later than
Alexander. Spiritually very near to Christianity, chronologically they
are neighbourly too. If not divinely inspired, they at least disclosed
the ideal.

Previously the ideal had not perhaps been very apparent. Apart from
secessions, rebellions, concussions, convulsions that deified Hatred
until Jahveh, in the person of Nebuchadnezzar, talked Assyrian, and
then, in the person of Cyrus, talked Zend, the god of Israel, even in
Israel, was not unique. He had a home, his first, the Temple, built
gorgeously by Solomon, where invisibly, mysteriously, perhaps
terribly, beneath the wings of cherubim that rose from the depths of
the Holy of Holies, he dwelled. But the shrine, however ornate, was
not the only one. There were other altars, other gods; the plentiful
sanctuaries of Ashera, of Moloch and of Baal. On the adjacent hilltops
the phallus stood. In the neighbouring groves the kisses of Ishtar
consumed.

The Lady of Girdles was worshipped there not by men and women only,
but by girls with girls; by others too, not in couples, but singly,
girls who in their solitary devotions had instruments for aid.[36]
Religion, as yet, had but the slightest connection with morality, a
circumstance explicable perhaps by the fact that it resumed the
ethnical conscience of a race. Between the altar of El Shaddai and the
shrines of other gods there were many differences, of which geography
was the least. Jahveh, from a tutelary god, had indeed become the
national divinity of a chosen people. But the Moabites were the chosen
people of Chemos; the Ammonites were the chosen people of Rimmon; the
Babylonians were the chosen people of Bel. The title conferred no
distinction. As a conseq