which is
to be noted in the eighth century B.C. The student who is familiar with
the theology implied, or expressed, in the books of Judges, Samuel, and
the first book of Kings, finds himself in a new world of thought, in
the full tide of a great reformation, when he reads Joel, Amos, Hosea,
Isaiah, Micah, and Jeremiah.

The essence of this change is the reversal of the position which, in
primitive society, ethics holds in relation to theology. Originally,
that which men worship is a theological hypothesis, not a moral ideal.
The prophets, in substance, if not always in form preach the opposite
doctrine. They are constantly striving to free the moral ideal from the
stifling embrace of the current theology and its concomitant ritual.
Theirs was not an intellectual criticism, argued on strictly scientific
grounds; the image-worshippers and the believers in the efficacy of
sacrifices and ceremonies might logically have held their own against
anything the prophets have to say; it was an ethical criticism. From
the height of his moral intuition--that the whole duty of man is to do
justice and to love mercy and to bear himself as humbly as befits his
insignificance in face of the Infinite--the prophet simply laughs at the
idolaters of stocks and stones and the idolaters of ritual. Idols of the
first kind, in his experience, were inseparably united with the
practice of immorality, and they were to be ruthlessly destroyed. As for
sacrifices and ceremonies, whatever their intrinsic value might be, they
might be tolerated on condition of ceasing to be idols; they might even
be praiseworthy on condition of being made to subserve the worship of
the true Jahveh--the moral ideal.

If the realm of David had remained undivided, if the Assyrian and the
Chaldean and the Egyptian had left Israel to the ordinary course of
development of an Oriental kingdom, it is possible that the effects of
the reforming zeal of the prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries
might have been effaced by the growth, according to its inevitable
tendencies, of the theology which they combated. But the captivity made
the fortune of the ideas which it was the privilege of these men to
launch upon an endless career. With the abolition of the Temple-services
for more than half a century, the priest must have lost and the scribe
gained influence. The puritanism of a vigorous minority among the
Babylonian Jews rooted out polytheism from all its hiding-places in