d. But it may
be that foreknowledge of the future rested on a consciousness of the past.

There, in the desert, had stood a bedouin preparing the tenets of a
creed; in the remoter past a shadow in which there was lightning, then the
splendor of the first dawn where the future opened like a book, and, in
that grammar of the eternal, the promise of an age of gold. Through the
echo of succeeding generations came the rumor of the impulse that drew the
world in its flight. The bedouin had put the desert behind him and stared
at another, the sea. As he passed, the land leaped into life. There were
tents and passions, clans not men, an aggregate of forces in which the
unit disappeared. For chieftain there was Might and, above, were the
subjects of impersonal verbs, the Elohim, from whom the thunder came, the
rain, darkness and light, death and birth, dream too, nightmare as well.
The clans migrated. Goshen called. In its heart Chaldaea spoke. The Elohim
vanished and there was El, the one great god and Isra-el, the great god's
elect. From heights that lost themselves in immensity, the ineffable name,
incommunicable, and never to be pronounced, was seared by forked flames on
a tablet of stone. A nation learned that El was Jehovah, that they were in
his charge, that he was omnipotent, that the world was theirs. They had a
law, a covenant, a deity and, as they passed into the lands of the well
beloved, the moon became their servant, to aid them the sun stood still.
The terror of Sinai gleamed from their breast-plates. Men could not see
their faces and live. They encroached and conquered. They had a home, then
a capital, where David founded a line of kings and Solomon, the city of
God.

Solomon, typically satrapic, living in what then was splendor; surrounded
by peacocks and peris; married to the daughter of a Pharaoh, married to
many another as well; the husband of seven hundred queens, the pasha of
three hundred favorites, doing, as perhaps a poet may, only what pleased
him, capricious as potentates are, voluptuous as sovereigns were, on his
blazing throne and particularly in his aromatic harem, presented a
spectacle strange in Israel, wholly Babylonian, thoroughly sultanesque. To
local austerity his splendor was an affront, his seraglio a sin, the
memory of both became odious, and in the Song of Songs, which,
canonically, was attributed to him, but which the higher criticism has
shown to be an anonymous work, that contempt was e