ability, and conversely a swaying from legitimacy and
law was responsible for disaster. With the Torah as a guide, prophecy
was forced into the channels of orthodoxy. Heterodox prophets, the
"false prophets," were consigned to oblivion. Their opponents alone
were given a hearing. Secular history there was to be none; there was
room only for the sacred. We may take it for granted that the
"prophets of Baal," as their adversaries triumphantly nicknamed them,
had their disciples who collected their writings and recorded the
deeds of _their_ spirit. But they were one and all suppressed. The
political achievements of mighty dynasts had been recorded by
annalists; the pious narrators in the so-called historical books of
the canon brush them aside, gloss over them with a scant hint or
reference; what is of absorbing interest to them is the activity of an
Elijah or an Elisha, or the particular pattern of the altar in the
Jerusalem sanctuary. In their iconoclastic warfare upon the
abomination of Samaria, the prophets gave a partisanly distorted view
of conditions in the North which for a long time had been the scene of
Hebrew tradition and Hebrew life.

_The Death-blow to the Old Hebraic Culture_

WHAT these upheavals meant in the history of Hebrew literature and
culture can only approximately be gauged. One thing is certain: they
all and one dealt the death-blow to the old Hebraic culture. When the
excavator sinks his spade beneath the ground of a sleepy Palestinian
village, he lays bare to view from under the overlaid strata, Roman
and Greek and Jewish and Israelitish, the Canaanite foundation with
its mighty walls and marvellous tunnels, its stelae and statuettes, its
entombed infants sacrificed to the abominable Moloch. Similarly if we
dig below the surface of the Scriptures, we uncover glimpses of the
civilization of the Amorite strong and mighty, which generations of
prophets and lawmakers succeeded in destroying root and branch. On the
ruins of the Canaanite-Amorite culture rose in the latter days Judaism
triumphant; the struggle--prolonged and of varying success--marked the
ascendancy of the Hebraic culture which was a midway station between
the indigenous Canaanite civilization on the one hand and that mighty
spiritual leaven, Mosaism in its beginnings and Judaism in its
consummation, on the other. The Hebraic culture was a compromise. It
began by absorbing the native civilization. The danger of succumbing
to it was