Yahweh that it marked an epoch in his life. He returned to Egypt to preach to his enslaved kinsmen the hope of escape through the power of Yahweh. . . . A box or ark, which could be easily carried from place to place, and which, perhaps, contained a sacred stone, became the symbol of Yahweh's presence with them. The sum of his requirements of his new worshipers, as nearly as we can now ascertain them, consisted of ten commands. . . . The political and religious life of

2:16). To Yahweh's feast new agricultural feasts were added, and agricultural elements were introduced into the old ones. . . . During all this time the orthodox type of sanctuary for Yahweh was a high place open to the sky. We hear of one small temple at Shiloh (I Sam., chaps. 1-5), with doors and apparently a roof-a temple in the holiest place of which Samuel slept! The openair high place was nevertheless the normal type of sanctuary. Solomon's temple was an innovation. It was constructed on the general plan of the temples of Israel's more civilized neighbors. It contained an altar of bronze, whereas an altar of earth or unhewn stone was regarded long after this as the only proper altar (Exod. 20:24-25). Centuries later the temple of Solomon was revered as the ideal dwelling-place of Yahweh, but for a considerable time it was thought to be of a heretical type. [See also TEMPLE OF SOLOMON; and below: B.C. 537.] In the reign of Ahab there began a religious and social ferment which led to the transformation of Israel's religion. Ahab's Tyrian wife, Jezebel, had brought with her the worship of the Tyrian god Melkart. She and her husband in the case of Naboth (I Kings, chap. 21) outraged Hebrew popular rights. At this juncture Elijah came from Gilead, proclaiming the old nomadic ideal of Yahweh and linking his religious ideals to the rights of the people as against the king. To Elijah and his followers, not only was the worship of the Tyrian Melkart wrong, but the worship of the agriculturized Yahweh of the west Jordan lands was little better. It was, he thought, also the worship of Baal. In the person and work of the prophet Elisha the ideals of Elijah, though somewhat obscured, were to some degree cherished. In the circles of Elijah's disciples stress was laid on ethics rather than upon ritual as the essence of Yahweh's covenant with his people. The insight of four great men, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah, who lived and preached between 755 and 690 B.C., carried the work begun by Elijah to much higher levels. While they presented no philosophical theory of monotheism, each one of them was a practical monotheist. . . . They all represented Yahweh as a God whose one desire was his passion for social justice. His chief demand was righteousness between man and man. In their earlier ministry they maintained that this was the sum-total of his religion. They declared that he demanded no sacrifices; that he was disgusted with ritual (Amos 5:21, 25; Isa. 1:12-14); that the essence of his religion was that 'justice roll down as waters and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream' (Amos 5:24). . . Apparently in his old age Isaiah saw that the world was not ready for a religion without ritual and persuaded King Hezekiah to try to reduce ritual to such limits that it could be purified of those agricultural and primitive elements which the prophets now identified with the worship of the Canaanitish Baals. Hezekiah accordingly attempted to suppress all the outdoor shrines of the land and to center the worship in the temple at Jerusalem (II Kings 18:1-6 and 22). This movement naturally met with much opposition. . . . Under King Manasseh, 686-641 B.C., there was a violent reaction against the prophetic reforms. The country shrines were restored, and the people, led by their king. revived heathen Semitic customs that had been discarded. During this period, while the disciples of the great eighth-century prophets could do nothing openly, they cherished their ideals in secret and made plans for the future. In these circles about 650 B.C. the Deuteronomic law was composed. Its basis was the 'Book of the Covenant,'

the early time was in no sense organized. Until the time of Saul and David there was no national consciousness. In the early days there was no organized priesthood (cf. Judg., chaps. 17, 18). In the union of the tribes the vivid memories which the Rachel tribes entertained of their experiences triumphed over all other traditions of Yahweh.

Yahweh was now believed to send the rain and to give the crops. The old gods had been called baals, i.e., owners of the soil, and in time the name was applied to Yahweh also (see Hos.

Exod. 20:24-23:19, the legal kernel of the E document, but the law of the altar, Exod. 20:24-26, was changed so as to limit the sanctuary to the 'place which Yahweh should choose,' and other features of the code, which presupposed a multiplicity of sanctuaries, were modified to conform to this.... Josiah, the grandson of Manasseh, was friendly to the prophetic ideals, and by the eighteenth year of his reign the advocates of those ideals found a favorable opportunity to secure public action. . . . The country shrines were abolished, the cult was centralized in Jerusalem, while pillars, asheras, the ministers of social impurity, and other survivals of primitive Semitic religion were removed. The people of Judah did not acquiesce in this reform much more readily than in the time of Hezekiah and Manasseh, and a long spiritual struggle ensued.

"About six years before the finding of the Deuteronomic law, Jeremiah, a very young man, began to prophesy, and his prophetic activity, continued for forty years during the period of Judah's decline and fall. . . . Few realize how great a prophet Jeremiah was. He contributed four great ideas to Israel's religion which became potent in aftertime and which tended greatly to its purification and advancement. The first of these ideas was theoretical monotheism. Earlier prophets had been practical monotheists; it remained for Jere-, miah to declare that the gods of the heathen were 'vanities'-mere figments of the imagination (Jer. 10:15, 14:22). As a corollary of this conception he also taught that Yahweh was willing to become the God of the nations as well as of the Jews; that, if they were repentant, he would receive them (Jer. 16:17-21). His third contribution was the doctrine of the inwardness of religion. The heart must be changed, not the outward life only (Jer. 31:31-34). To these great doctrines Jeremiah added that of individual responsibility (Jer. 31:29, 30). Down to his time the nation or family had been the moral unit (see Josh., chap. 7), but on that basis no great progress could be made in personal religion or in ethics. The teaching of Jeremiah set religion free from many time-worn shackles. In addition to these doctrines, Jeremiah revived Hosea's conception of the covenant of Yahweh, enforcing the view that it was a covenant of marriage and that Yahweh was a God of love. . . . Ezekiel, a young priest who had been taken to Babylonia with those first deported by Nebuchadrezzar in 597, began to prophesy five years later. His prophetic activity continued until about 570 B.C. Until the fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., Ezekiel in Babylonia reinforced the teaching which Jeremiah was giving in Palestine. He was animated by the same lofty ethical ideals, as is shown by the seventeenth and eighteenth chapters of his prophecy. In 586 B.C. Jerusalem was again captured by Nebuchadrezzar, the temple was destroyed, and another considerable number of the more prominent inhabitants were transported to Babylonia. The poorer peasantry were left behind to drag out their existence among the ruins. After this event Ezekiel, who was a priest as well as a prophet, in brooding over the fortunes of his people felt certain that at some time Yahweh would rehabilitate a Hebrew state in Palestine, and he drew up a form of organization and of law for the regulation of such a state and its worship; see Ezek., chaps. 40-48. The plan outlined by Ezekiel advances a step farther than the law of Deuteronomy in blending prophetic ideals with the ritual law. . . . After the death of Ezekiel no great Hebrew voice was heard for twenty years. ... About 550 there arose in Babylonia a new

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prophet, whose utterances are now summed up in chapters 40-45 of the Book of Isaiah. We do not know his name, but we call him the second Isaiah because by some literary accident or misconception his prophecies were attached to the book containing those of Isaiah. . . . About 500 B.C. or earlier (perhaps during the time of the second Isaiah) a priest imbued with the prophetic spirit drew up the so-called Code of Holiness, which, excluding later additions, now constitutes Lev., chaps. 17-26. This writer felt the influence of Ezekiel strongly, as his laws and style prove. These laws were another step toward a religion which should attain by law what the great prophets had attempted to attain by loyalty to Yahweh.

"About 520 B.C. two prophets, Haggi and Zechariah, who had apparently recently returned to Jerusalem from Babylonia, persuaded the Judaeans that a lack of rain and its consequent famine were evidences of Yahweh's displeasure because the temple had not been rebuilt. The voices of these prophets were so persuasive that its rebuilding was undertaken, and by 516 B.C. the temple was completed, though in a fashion far inferior to its former splendor. After the completion of the temple ordinary historical sources fail us for seventy years. During this period, however, probably about 450 B.C., a prophet kindred in spirit to the second Isaiah came forward. . . . While the third Isaiah was preaching in Jerusalem, priestly circles, probably in Babylonia, were busy making a further codification of the priestly law. . . . During the administration of Nehemiah, which began in 444 B.C., a great convocation of Judaeans was held in the temple court at Jerusalem at which the new law was read to them and they bound themselves to keep it (see Neh., chaps. 8-10). The adoption of this law as the fundamental law of religion marked the complete transformation of the religion. The old nature religion was discarded and Judaism was born. While Judaism was the result of the transformation begun by the prophets it differed in many respects from the prophetic ideals of the eighth century. To them Yahweh was a present God, whose voice still spoke in the hearts of his prophets. From the priestly point of view Yahweh was a distant, exalted God, who long ago spoke to Moses. The prophets had little use for ritual; to the priests ritual was of the utmost importance. To all Hebrews up to this time the dealings of Yahweh with his people were confined to life on the earth. He rewarded his faithful here; he punished the wicked in this life. The pictures of the life after death drawn in Isa. 149 ff. and Ezek. 32:22-32 present the same gloomy non-religious conception as that held by the Babylonians and as that reflected in the eleventh book of Homer's Odyssey. The ancient Hebrews thought that the world was filled with spirits. These spirits were non-ethical, They were subject to Yahweh, and might be sent by him on missions either of blessing to man or of harm (see I Kings, chap. 22; Job, chaps. 1 and 2). In the prophetic period no need was felt for a belief in Satan. Yahweh was thought to do everything both good and evil (see Amos 3:6; Isa. 45:7). It was only after the exile that the figure of Satan began to emerge, and he was then only an adversary (Zech. 3:1), not the full-fledged prince of evil that he afterward became. The development of Israel's religion through the influence of the prophets from its primitive Semitic beginnings to the formation of Judaism is one of the most significant chapters in the history of the human race. In other countries, as in Egypt, monotheism was grasped by a few; in Israel alone was it made

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the possession of the people. Others conceived it as a great idea; the prophets linked it with human rights and common justice. Perhaps even here it would have failed but for the misfortunes of the Jewish state. These constituted a sifting process by which the devotees of the higher religion were separated from the reactionaries and formed into a community in which it was an axiom to men, women, and children that there is but one God and that he demands a righteous life. In this achievement were the seeds of the best religious experience of mankind. It was on account of this that the Hebrew religion became the mother of the three great monotheistic religions of the world, Judaism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity."-G. A. Barton, Religions of the world, pp. 61-77-See also CODES: B.C. 13th-6th centuries; IDOLATRY AND IMAGE WORSHIP: Influence on Judaism; PRIESTHOOD: Hebrew priesthood from 3000 B.C.; PROPHETS, HEBREW; RELIGION: B.C. 600A.D. 30: Inner logic of Hebrew religion.

Schools of the Prophets.-Council of Seventy. -Education in the time of Josephus. See EDUCATION: Ancient: B.C. 14th-A.D. 6th centuries.

Currency. See MONEY AND BANKING: Ancient: Jews.

Ancient architecture. See ARCHITECTURE: Oriental: Palestine; TEMPLE OF SOLOMON; JERUSALEM: B.C. 1400-700.

Development of music. See MUSIC: Ancient: c. B.C. 1000-A.D. 70.

Study and practice of medicine. See MEDICAL SCIENCE: Ancient: Jewish.

Historiography. See HISTORY: 14.

Early Semitic migrations.-"The original home of the Semites was somewhere in Arabia, but in course of generations of early nomadic life, so early that the exact dates are more or less guesswork, there began a movement resulting in five great migrations from the mother stock. First there was a movement westward toward Egypt.

There are always especially dry times in the Arabian peninsula when the nomads were forced to wander far to keep their flocks alive. The Nile Valley was one of the well-watered regions sought again and again in time of drought by the Semitic tribes. Thus, doubtless, in very early days the original Hamitic stock of Egypt became mixed with the Semitic immigrants from the east. This was the first great migration. The second was northward into the upper end of the peninsula. Here what is known as the Mesopotamian branch of the Semites settled. Mesopotamia is a word which the Grecks applied to the region between the two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, from the Greek words mesos, middle, and potamos, river. The Semites who were pushing northward and eastward finally settled in this basin of the Euphrates River, forming the colony known as Akkad. [See also AKKAD.] They mixed with an earlier people, the Sumerians, from the mountainous regions northeast of this plain, and gradually pushed south to the mouth of the river forming the Babylonian colony. [See also BABYLONIA: Earliest inhabitants.] They then ceased their wanderings and became agriculturists instead of nomads, and now we find them grouped together in cities. There were ten of these very old cities near the mouth of the Euphrates River. Ur was one of the oldest of them. . . . Farther inland was the city of Babylon, which in time became the capital of the colony. Another of these exceedingly ancient places is Nippur. . . . This migration from Mesopotamia to Babylonia was the third great Semitic movement. These people were called Akkadians and had a well-established kingdom by

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2800 B.C. About the same time another branch moved westward from Mesopotamia to the green strip of land on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. The people taking part in this fourth migration settled on the narrow plain at the foot of the Lebanons, where they formed the Phoenician colony, and also in the lowlands of Palestine, where they formed the Canaanite race. We find this race well established in walled villages by 2500 B.C. Palestine was originally called Canaan, which some scholars derive from a word meaning 'lowland.' Therefore it may have been so named because it was in the green valleys and plains that these early Semitic colonists established themselves. They must, however, be very definitely distinguished from the Hebrews or Israelites, with whose history we are especially concerned. The Phoenicians have been called 'the Canaanites of the Coast.'"-L. H. Wild, Evolution of the Hebrew people, pp. 149-151.-See also ARABIA: Ancient succession and fusion of races; Sabæans; ASSYRIA: People, etc.; CANAAN; SEMITES.

Early Hebrew history.-"The narratives in Genesis... lead us to the following conception of Israel's early history. Canaan was originally inhabited by a number of tribes-of Semitic origin,

The

who applied themselves to the rearing of cattle, to agriculture, or to commerce, according to the nature of the districts in which they were established. The countries which were subsequently named after Edom, Ammon, and Moab, also had their aboriginal inhabitants, the Horites, the Zamzummites, and the Emites. Whilst all these tribes retained possession of their dwelling-places, and the inhabitants of Canaan especially had reached a tolerably high stage of civilization and development, there occurred a Semitic migration, which issued from Arrapachitis (Arphacsad, Ur Casdim), and moved on in a south-westerly direction. countries to the east and the south of Canaan were gradually occupied by these intruders, the former inhabitants being either expelled or subjugated; Ammon, Moab, Ishmael, and Edom became the ruling nations in those districts. In Canaan the situation was different. The tribes which-at first closely connected with the Edomites, but afterwards separated from them-had turned their steps towards Canaan, did not find themselves strong enough either to drive out, or to exact tribute from, the original inhabitants; they continued their wandering life among them, and lived upon the whole at peace with them. But a real settlement was still their aim. When, therefore, they had become more numerous and powerful, through the arrival of a number of kindred settlers from Mesopotamia-represented in tradition by the army with which Jacob returns to Canaan -they resumed their march in the same southwesterly direction, until at length they took possession of fixed habitations in the land of Goshen, on the borders of Egypt."-A. Kuenen, Religion of Israel, v. 1, ch. 2.-See also CANAAN.-"In the oldest extant record respecting Abraham, Gen. xiv..

we set him acting as a powerful domestic prince, among many similar princes, who like him held Canaan in possession; not calling himself King, like Melchizedek, the priest-king of Salem, because he was the father and protector of his house, living with his family and bondmen in the open country, yet equal in power to the petty Canaanite kings. ... Detached as this account may be, it is at least evident from it that the Canaanites were at that time highly civilised, since they had a priestking like Melchizedek, whom Abraham held in honour, but that they were even then so weakened by endless divisions and by the emasculating in

fluence of that culture itself, as either to pay tribute to the warlike nations of the north-east (as the five kings of the cities of the Dead Sea had done for twelve years before they rebelled, ver. 4), or to seek for some valiant descendants of the northern lands living in their midst, who in return for certain concessions and services promised them protection and defence. . . . This idea furnishes the only tenable historical view of the migration of Abraham and his kindred. They did

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able to prove all the details of that migration from the north towards Egypt, which probably continued for centuries, it may with great certainty be conceived as on the whole similar to the gradual advance of many other northern nations; as of the Germans toward Rome, and of the Turks in these same regions in the Middle Ages.... We now understand that Abraham's name can designate only one of the most important and oldest of the Hebrew immigrations. But since Abraham had

not conquer the land, nor at first hold it by mere force of arms, like the four north-eastern kings from whose hand Abraham delivered Lot, Gen. xiv. They advanced as leaders of small bands, with their fencible servants and the herds, at first rather sought or even invited by the old inhabitants of the land, as good warriors and serviceable allies, than forcing themselves upon them. Thus they took up their abode and obtained possessions among them, but were always wishing to migrate farther, even into Egypt. . . . Little as we are

so early attained a name glorious among the Hebrews advancing towards the south, and since he was everything especially to the nation of Israel which arose out of this immigration, and to their nearest kindred, his name came to be the grand centre and rallying-point of all the memory of those times."-H. Ewald, History of Israel, bk. 1,

sect. 1.

Children of Israel in Egypt.-"It has been very generally supposed that Abraham's visit to Egypt took place under the reign of one of the kings of

the twelfth dynasty [placed by Brugsch 24662266 B.C.], but which king has not yet been satisfactorily made out. . . . Some Biblical critics have considered that Amenemha III. was king of Egypt when Abraham came there, and others that Usertsen I. was king, and that Amenemha was the Pharaoh of the time of Joseph. . . . It is generally accepted now that Joseph was sold into Egypt at the time when the Hyksos were in power [and about 1750 B.C.]; and it is also generally accepted that the Exodus took place after the death of Rameses II. and under the reign of Merenptah, or Meneptah. Now the children of Israel were in captivity in Egypt for 400 or 430 years; and as they went out of Egypt after the death of Rameses II., it was probably some time about the year 1350 B.C. There is little doubt that the Pharaoh who persecuted the Israelites so shamefully was Rameses II."-E. A. W. Budge, Dwellers on the Nile, ch. 4.-"It is stated by George the Syncellus, that the syn

chronism of Joseph with Apepi, the last king of the only known Hyksos dynasty, was acknowledged by all.' The best modern authorities accept this view, if not as clearly established, at any rate as in the highest degree probable, and believe that it was Apepi who made the gifted Hebrew his prime minister, who invited his father and his brethren to settle in Egypt with their households,, and assigned to them the land of Goshen for their residence."-G. Rawlinson, History of ancient Egypt, v. 2, ch. 19.-"The new Pharaoh, 'who knew not Joseph,' who adorned the city of Ramses, the capital of the Tanitic nome, and the city of Pithom, the capital of what was afterwards the Sethroitic nome, with temple-cities, is no other, can be no other, than Ramessu II. or Rameses-the Sesostris of the Greeks, B.C. 1350, of whose buildings at Zoan the monuments and the papyrus-rolls speak in complete agreement. Ramessu is the Pharaoh

of the oppression, and the father of that unnamed princess, who found the child Moses exposed in the bulrushes on the bank of the river.

If Ramses-Sesostris . . . must be regarded beyond all doubt as the Pharaoh under whom the Jewish legislator Moses first saw the light, so the chronological relations-having regard to the great age of the two contemporaries, Ramses II. and Moses-demand that Mineptah [his son] should in all probability be acknowledged as the Pharaoh of the Exodus."-H. Brugsch-Bey, History of Egypt under the Pharaohs, ch. 14.The quotations given above represent the orthodox view of early Jewish history, in the light of modern monumental studies,-the view, that is, which accepts the Biblical account of Abraham and his seed as a literal family record, authentically widening into the annals of a nation. The more rationalizing views are indicated by the following: "There can be no doubt . . as to the Semitic character of these Hyksos, or 'Pastors,' who, more than 2,000 years B.C., interrupted in a measure the current of Egyptian civilisation, and founded at Zoan (Tanis), near the Isthmus, the centre of a powerful Semitic state. Hyksos were to all appearances Canaanites, near relations of the Hittites of Hebron. Hebron was in close community with Zoan, and there is a tradition, probably based upon historical data, that the two cities were built nearly at the same time. As invariably happens when barbarians enter into an ancient and powerful civilisation, the Hyksos soon became Egyptianised. . . . The Hyksos of Zoan could not fail to exercise a great influence upon the Hebrews who were encamped

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around Hebron, the Dead Sea, and in the southern districts of Palestine. The antipathy which afterwards existed between the Hebrews and the Canaanites was not as yet very perceptible. . . There are the best of reasons for believing that the immigration of the Beni-Israel took place at two separate times. A first batch of Israelites seems to have been attracted by the Hittites of Egypt, while the bulk of the tribe was living upon the best of terms with the Hittites of Hebron. These first immigrants found favour with the Egyptianised Hittites of Memphis and Zoan; they secured very good positions, had children, and constituted a distinct family in Israel. This was what was afterwards called the 'clan of the Josephel,' or the Beni-Joseph. Finding themselves well off in Lower Egypt, they sent for their brethren, who, impelled perhaps by famine, joined them there, and were received also favourably by the Hittite dynasties. These new-comers never went to Memphis. They remained in the vicinity of Zoan, where there is a land of Goshen, which was allotted to them. . . . The whole of these ancient days, concerning which Israel possesses only legends and contradictory traditions, is enveloped in doubt; one thing, however, is certain, viz., that Israel entered Egypt under a dynasty favourable to the Semites, and left it under one which was hostile. The presence of a nomad tribe upon the extreme confines of Egypt must have been a matter of very small importance for this latter country. There is no certain trace of it in the Egyptian texts. The kingdom of Zoan, on the contrary, left a deep impression upon the Israelites. Zoan became for them synonymous with Egypt. The relations between Zoan and Hebron were kept up, and . . . Hebron was proud of the synchronism, which made it out seven years older than Zoan. The first-comers, the Josephites, always assumed an air of superiority over their brethren, whose position they had been instrumental in establishing. Their children, born in Egypt, possibly of Egyptian mothers, were scarcely Israelites. An agreement was come to, however; it was agreed that the Josephites should rank as Israelites with the rest. They formed two distinct tribes, those of Ephraim and Manasseh. . . . It is not impossible that the origin of the name of Joseph (addition, adjunction, annexation) may have arisen from the circumstance that the first emigrants and their families, having become strangers to their brethren, needed some sort of adjunction to become again part and parcel of the family of Israel."-E. Renan, History of the people of Israel, v. 1, bk. 1, ch. 10.

"According to the oldest Hebrew records, the part of Egypt in which the Hebrews settled was the land of Goshen. The word has not yet been found on the Egyptian monuments, but there is little doubt regarding its general situation. In its broadest bounds, it apparently included the Wady Tumilat, and extended from the Crocodile Lake, the modern Lake Timsah, to the Pelusiac or the Tanitic branch of the Nile. It was a narrow strip of land thirty or forty miles long. On the west, where the Wady Tumilat opened into the Nile Delta, it broadened into an irregular triangle. Its angles were at the modern cities of Zigazig, in the northwest, Belbeis in the south, and Abu Hammad at the beginning of the valley on the east. By many scholars this triangle is regarded as the original land of Goshen. Until the days of Ramses II the entire region, including the Wady Tumilat, was given up to the shepherds. Here, therefore, the Israelites could keep their flocks and maintain their tribal unity and prac