s of Canaan became their strongest temptation.

The temples were so strange, so beautiful, the gods themselves so
mysterious, and then all was so easy, so pleasant! No stern
self-denial was needed; there were no difficult laws to keep; no
holiness was asked for. Drinking, feasting, and all kinds of
self-indulgence were part of the worship of Baal, and those who served
Ashtaroth, the goddess of beauty, might spend their whole lives in
wicked and degrading pleasures.

[Illustration: ANCIENT FIGURE OF ASHTAROTH, THE WICKED IDOL-GODDESS OF
CANAAN]

The backsliders of Israel found it only too easy to give up the
struggle for right, and to sink down into the horrible wickedness of
the heathen tribes around them.

Many people to-day are asking how a God of love and mercy could bid the
Israelites utterly to destroy the cities of Canaan, and to kill their
inhabitants, but the more we discover of these ancient tribes, the more
hopelessly depraved do we find them to have been. For centuries God
had been waiting in patience; the warning He had given to them through
Sodom's swift destruction had been unheeded; now at last the cup of
their iniquity was full (Genesis xv. 16) and the Israelites were to be
His means of ridding the world of this plague spot.

In the Book of Judges we see how each time His people disobeyed His
command and copied the sins they were called to sweep away, God
punished them by letting their merciless neighbours rule over them,
till they loathed the bondage and turned once more to the living God.

Had Israel absorbed the vices of these nations instead of destroying
them, try to think what the world would have lost! The one channel
through which God was giving His Book to man would have become so
choked and polluted with vice that in its turn it also would have
become a source of infection and not of health.

[1] This king's name is also spelt Hammurabi.

CHAPTER IV

THE HISTORY BOOKS

[Illustration: (drop cap T) Assyrian idol-god]

Thus little by little the Book of God grew, and the people He had
chosen to be its guardians took their place among the nations.

A small place it was from one point of view! A narrow strip of land,
but unique in its position as one of the highways of the world, on
which a few tribes were banded together. All around great empires
watched them with eager eyes; the powerful kings of Assyria, Egypt, and
Babylonia, the learned Greeks, and, in later times,