the severe watchfulness against
all animism, spiritualism, worship of the dead, things in which the
environing world of the Jews' fellow Semites was steeped. The
Israelitish-Jewish prophetic movement did not first attain belief in a
Future Life, and then, through this, belief in God; but the belief in
God, strongly hostile to all those spiritualisms, only very slowly, and
not until the danger of any infusion of those naturalisms had become
remote, led on the Jews to a realization of the soul's survival with a
consciousness at least equal to its earthly aliveness. The Second Book
of Kings (chaps. xxii, xxiii) gives a graphic account of King Josiah's
rigorous execution of the Deuteronomic law.

The end of this most full second period is marked by the now rapid
predominance of a largely technical priestly legislation and a
corresponding conception of past history; by the inception of the
Synagogue and the religion of the Book; but also by writings the most
profound of any in the Old Testament, all presumably occasioned by the
probing experiences of the Exile. In 597 and 586 B.C. Jerusalem is
destroyed and the majority of the Jews are taken captives to Babylon;
and in between (in 593) occurs the vocation of the prophet-priest
Ezekiel, and his book is practically complete by 573 B.C. Here the
prophecies as to the restoration are strangely detailed and
schematic--already somewhat like the apocalyptic writers. Yet Ezekiel
reveals to us deathless truths--the responsibility of the individual
soul for its good and its evil, and God Himself as the Good Shepherd of
the lost and the sick (xviii. 20-32; xxxiv. 1-6); he gives us the grand
pictures of the resurrection unto life of the dead bones of Israel
(chap. xxxvii), and of the waters of healing and of life which flow
forth, ever deeper and wider, from beneath the Temple, and by their
sweetness transform all sour waters and arid lands that they touch
(xlvii. 1-12). A spirit and doctrine closely akin to those of Ezekiel
produced the third, last, and most extensive development of the
Pentateuchal legislation and doctrinal history--in about 560 B.C., the
Law of Holiness (Lev., chaps. xvii-xxvi); and in about 500 B.C., the
Priestly Code. As with Ezekiel's look forward, so here with these
Priests' look backward, we have to recognize much schematic precision of
dates, genealogies, and explanations instinct with technical interests.
The unity of sanctuary and the removal from the feasts a