THE TRUE POSITION OP THE HEBREWS 71 



would be difficult to estimate, and are as full of 

 vigour as in the days of David. Their moral and 

 religious culture has prevailed over that of their 

 mighty neighbours, and is only now dropping out of 

 civilization. In the Middle Ages they were a most 

 important part of the agencies that roused Europe 

 from its barbaric slumber, and they may yet play an 

 even more important part in the pacification and 

 unification of the world. 



But, while we acknowledge the fullness of their 

 influence, we may claim the right to understand it. 

 Their own story, which is still solemnly and seriously 

 taught to children in all the schools of England, is 

 now absolutely excluded from serious history. They 

 had not even the " genius for morality " with which 

 Matthew Arnold credited them. They were civilized 

 by their neighbours, and they handed on to posterity 

 the ideals they received. Not until the middle of the 

 first millennium before Christ do we find among them 

 a moral culture to compare with that of Egypt and 

 Babylonia. Their Jahveh became " a god of righteous- 

 ness" a thousand years at least — to confine ourselves 

 to positively known facts — after Ra in Egypt, or 

 Marduk and Shamash in Babylonia, had assumed 

 that character. Indeed, the Egyptian Osiris was a 

 god of righteousness three thousand years earlier; 

 and Hammurabi, about 2,000 b.c, had hailed Shamash 

 as " the great judge of heaven and earth," by whose 

 command "justice shall glitter in the land," and who 

 bade him " sustain the feeble " and see that " the 

 strong may not oppress the weak." 



It is the prophets who made the chief contribution 

 to the moral culture of the Hebrews, and the circum- 

 stances in which this distinctive body of men arose 



