ng the crowning flower of Judaism.

It will suffice for our purpose if from this series we touch upon David,
the Psalms, the book of Job, Isaiah, and the literature of the Maccabean
time.

The real place of David is that of the warrior-king who gave
independence, unity, and victory to the people of Israel. It was he who
broke the yoke of the Philistines which Saul had weakened, and slew in
fight their gigantic champion. He conquered and subjected the
neighboring tribes; he put down the rebellions headed by his own sons; he
made and kept Israel for a brief term a proud and victorious military
monarchy. Within a single generation after his death it was divided into
two hostile fragments, and both of these gradually fell under foreign
conquerors. Very short was the period of Israel's warlike glory, and for
a thousand years afterward the national heart turned in love and
reverence to the hero of that time. As the Saxons remembered Alfred, as
Americans remember Washington, so the Israelites remembered David. It
was in his image and under his name that they pictured a future which
should outshine their past. Israel throughout the period when she is
most distinctly before us was a subject people. It was largely the
presence of a foreign oppressor which gave to the national voice that
tone of intense entreaty toward a divine friend and deliverer which runs
its pathos through psalm and history and prophecy. There had been a
better day for Israel, before Assyrian and Egyptian trampled her. There
had been a day when Philistia and Edom quailed and fell before her, and
the Lord wrought victory by the hand of David. So it is David's history
that stands out fullest and clearest in the whole record, from Abraham
onward. How much is true history and how much is imaginative addition
must be largely guesswork. But we see in David the ideal hero and type
of that period of Jewish history as we see in Achilles and Odysseus the
ideal types of primitive Greece.

And the story of David is as deeply colored with the primal passions of
humanity as are the songs of Homer. There is the picture of the
shepherd-boy, to which must be added the exquisite psalm which later
traditions put in his mouth; the victory over the giant; the most
pathetic story of the moody and wayward Saul--the power of music over his
melancholy, the alternations of jealous rage and compunction; the
friendship with Jonathan, more tender and pure than the frien