uth, which now stood high above
Israel, had, after all, arisen within Israel and could still only be
found within it.' The two oldest lengthy narrative documents of the
Pentateuch--the Yahwist (J) and the Ephraemite (E)--appear to have been
composed, the first in Judah in the time of Elijah, the second in Israel
in the time of Amos. J gives us the immortal stories of Paradise and the
Fall, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood; E, Abraham's sacrifice of
Isaac; and the documents conjointly furnish the more naive and
picturesque parts of the grand accounts of the Patriarchs generally--the
first great narrative stage of the Pentateuch. God here gives us some of
His most exquisite self-revelations through the Israelitish
peasant-soul. And Isaiah of Jerusalem, successful statesman as well as
deep seer, still vividly lives for us in some thirty-six chapters of
that great collection the 'Book of Isaiah' (i-xii, xv-xx, xxii-xxxix).
There is his majestic vocation in about 740 B.C., described by himself,
without ambiguity, as a precise, objective revelation (chap. vi); and
there is the divinely impressive close of his long and great activity,
when he nerves King Hezekiah to refuse the surrender of the Holy City to
the all-powerful Sennacherib, King of Assyria: that Yahweh would not
allow a single arrow to be shot against it, and would turn back the
Assyrian by the way by which he came--all which actually happens as thus
predicted (chap. xxxvii).

The middle of this rich second period is filled by a great
prophet-priest's figure, and a great prophetical priestly reform.
Jeremiah is called in 628 B.C., and dies obscurely in Egypt in about 585
B.C.; and the Deuteronomic Law and Book is found in the Temple, and is
solemnly proclaimed to, and accepted by, the people, under the
leadership of the High Priest Hilkiah and King Josiah, 'the Constantine
of the Jewish Church,' in 628 B.C. Jeremiah and Deuteronomy (D) are
strikingly cognate in style, temper, and injunctions; and especially D
contrasts remarkably in all this with the documents J and E. We thus
have here the second great development of the Mosaic Law. Both Jeremiah
and Deuteronomy possess a deeply interior, tenderly spiritual, kernel
and a fiercely polemical husk--they both are full of the contrast
between the one All-Holy God to be worshipped in the one Holy Place,
Jerusalem, and the many impure heathen gods worshipped in so many places
by the Jewish crowd. Thus in Jeremiah Yahweh