THE EVOLUTION OF HEBREW RELIGION. 595 



Israel, but also their elders, their priests, nay, large numbers even of 

 the very populace, shared in the most exalted, the most spiritual con- 

 ceptions of God, and nourished the most refined sentiments in regard 

 to human relationships, while immediately thereupon, and centuries 

 thereafter, violence, and bloodshed, and idolatry, do not cease from 

 the records? It has been argued, indeed, that the worship of idols 

 was but a relapse from the purity of a preceding age ; and that, though 

 the tradition of the Mosaic time may have been lost in the succeeding 

 period among the people at large, it was still preserved in the circle of 

 a select few, the judges, King David, and others. These, it is believed, 

 continued to remain faithful disciples of the great lawgiver. But 

 these very men, the judges King David himself all fall immeasura- 

 bly below the standard which is set up in the Pentateuch. If they 

 were esteemed the true representatives of the national religion in 

 their day, if the very points in which they transgressed the provi- 

 sions of the Mosaic code are distinguished by the approval of God 

 and man, we are forced to conclude that that standard by which 

 they stand condemned did not yet exist ; that, in the days of David, 

 the laws of Moses, as we now have them, were as yet unwritten and 

 unknown. Let us illustrate this important point by a few examples 

 taken from the records. Gideon no sooner returns from victory than 

 he makes a golden idol and sets it up for worship. Jephthah slay3 

 his daughter as an offering of thanksgiving to Jehovah. In the Pen- 

 tateuch the adoration of images is branded as the gravest of offenses. 

 David keeps household gods in his own home (1 Sam. xix.). In the 

 Pentateuch, on its opening page, God is proclaimed as a pure spirit, 

 maker of heaven and earth. In the eyes of David (1 Sam. xxvi. 19), 

 the sway of Jehovah does not extend beyond the borders of Pales- 

 tine. 1 In the Pentateuch the ark of the covenant is described as the 

 treasury of all that is brightest and best in "the worship of the 

 one God. None but the consecrated priest dare approach it, and 

 even he only under circumstances calculated to inspire peculiar ven- 

 eration and aw'e. In 2 Sam. vi., David abandons the ark to the keep- 

 ing of a heathen Philistine. In an early stage of culture, when fear 

 and terror in the presence of superior force entered largely into the 

 religious conceptions of the Hebrews, the taking of the census was 

 deemed an act of grave transgression. It appeared a vaunting of 

 one's strength ; it seemed to indicate a defiant attitude toward the 

 loftier power of the Deity, which he would certainly visit with con- 

 dign punishment. At a later period the priesthood found it in their 

 interest to override these scruples, and the taking of the census be- 

 came an affair of habitual occurrence. In the last chapter of Samuel 

 the more primitive view still predominated. Seventy thousand Israel- 

 ites are miserably slain to atone for King David's presumption in 

 commanding a census of the people. In the fourth book of Moses, on 

 1 Banishment being described as a transfer of allegiance to strange gods. 



