prophecy, and puts instead of it the purely contemporary principle that the prophets are to be distinguished by the gods whose worship they advocate. In harmony with this test, Jeremiah declares that the prophets who oppose him prophesy by Baal (2:8; 23:13). These two Judean writers, Jeremiah and the author of Deuteronomy, worked at a very late period of Hebrew history, in the seventh century B.C., near the time of the Babylonian exile; and they were the first of the Judeans to take the Baals up explicitly into the terms of the mishpat struggle. This remarkable fact leads to another chapter of exposition.

CHAPTER XIX

THE MISHPAT STRUGGLE TAKES FINAL FORM

The national struggle at length took the form of a conflict between the Yahweh and Baal factors in the Hebrew cult.-The great Hebrew conflict over the problem of law and morals found expression at last in the form of rivalry between the gods inherited from both sides of the nation's descent. The contest of Yahweh against the native Baal-principle was absolutely necesssary to the development of Bible religion. In no other way could the religion of Israel have achieved the double result of becoming completely identified with the struggle for morality and of casting out polytheism. This is the central feature of the problem. The final result of Hebrew history was the uniting of the moral principle with the doctrine of One God. The moral struggle and the cult rivalry cannot be treated as matters independent of each other. The religion of the Bible makes its appeal to mankind as a principle which identifies God not only with the worldwide struggle against injustice, but with a fierce conflict against polytheism. The two ideas were fused into a single idea in the glowing heat of Israel's warfare. Polytheism was gradually identified with injustice; and by the same token, monotheism slowly came to stand for justice. But neither monotheism nor ethics won the battle by itself. The religion of the Bible did not achieve its victory over other cults merely because it called for men to bow down to One God rather than to many gods; nor did it rise to its final triumph on the basis of the moral issue as an abstract principle. Neither aspect of Bible religion could have been woven into results of permanent value on the field of history

without the other. Both phases of the religious evolution of Israel had to be perceived as an identity; and this result was at length secured when the mishpat struggle took the form of warfare between the Yahweh and Baal ideas which came from both sides of the nation's ancestry. It was only through a mighty explosion within the Hebrew cult itself that the religion of Israel became a universally exclusive principle. It was only in the process of wiping out the native Baal idea pertaining to the Hebrew religion itself that the evolutionary process came to a clear issue. So long as Yahweh continued to be worshiped by one party in the state as a god having the same character as the Amorite Baals, and so long as the gods that were inherited from the Amorites remained, the religious evolution of Israel could not go on to its logical destiny.

The initial stage of the "mishpat" struggle was a blind protest against the usages of oriental civilization. The struggle within the Hebrew nation at first amounted only to a reaction of the highlanders against the monarchy, in which there was a blind protest by the more Israelite part of the kingdom against the usages of oriental civilization. The ideas and customs of the hill clans-especially in Judah and Gilead-were very similar to the usages of the desert people from which they descended. They turned against the rule of David. They were discontented under Solomon, the successor of David, "because he burdened the people with a heavy yoke." Finally they cast off the rule of Rehoboam, the successor of Solomon, because he would not reform the government. The hill clans objected to the new and strange customs that were being introduced by the national authorities; and their abhorrence was expressed in very forcible, dramatic ways (chap. xvii, p. 143). Thus we see that there was no question of rival worships in the initial stage of the mishpat struggle. Competition between cults did not enter into the problem. The

struggle did not at first assume the character of a contest between gods.'

But this is not to say that the initial stage of the struggle within the Hebrew nation had no religious character in any respect. We have repeatedly emphasized the intimate connection between politics and religion throughout ancient society. The customs regulating social intercourse were invariably under the jurisdiction of the gods. In accordance with this principle, we have seen that the mishpat which the clans of Israel brought into the hill-country was identified with Yahweh, so that the oppression of the free clansmen under the monarchy was an outrage upon their ancestral religion. From this point of view, the Hebrew struggle had a religious quality, or aspect, at the very beginning, in its first period. But it did not at once take the form which is characteristic of the Old Testament, in which it reduces itself to compact expression in terms of rivalry between Yahwism and Baalism. At first, there was nothing more than a blind protest, in the name of the national deity, against the legal usages that outraged the older customs of Yahweh; but this gave a natural point of departure for the entire subsequent unfolding of religious evolution among the Hebrews. The different stages that now follow draw themselves out in a logical order, each one arising from earlier conditions in the social life of the nation.

The second stage of the "mishpat" struggle brought Yahweh into conflict with the "border-Baals." The kings and ruling classes among the Hebrew people had striven, either consciously or unconsciously, to identify Yahweh, the national

The condemnation of Solomon for worshiping the gods of surrounding peoples (I Kings 11:1-8, 32 f.) is recognized as an insertion in the spirit of Deuteronomy. Cf. Skinner, Commentary on Kings (New York), pp. 173 f. But assuming for a moment that Ahijah's denunciation is historical, a number of important facts have to be noticed: (a) the prophet's words were privately whispered in a lonely field, vs. 29; (b) popular idolatry is nowhere alleged; (c) the references to "other gods" mention only the deities of outside peoples, not the Baals of the Amorites, vs. 33.

god, with the usages of settled commercial civilization. They did not abandon the worship of Yahweh. They acknowledged his lordship over the nation; and they supposed they were serving the same god whom the Israelite clans had brought into the country at the time of the original settlement in the Judges period. But the kings and official classes identified Yahweh with the standpoint of civilization as contrasted with the standpoint of the primitive clan. Now, civilization is a good thing in itself; but if its benefits are overbalanced by its abuses, it becomes an evil. If it ignore the welfare of the humbler social classes, and provide only for the happiness of a small, wealthy, upper class, then civilization menaces the higher interests of mankind.

This was the disease that afflicted the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, and other advanced peoples of the oriental world. Their social polity was untempered by the brotherhood of the primitive clan. They smothered the ideas of justice that prevail among the backward nomadic peoples. Their slaves consisted not only of alien bondmen, but of the native-born peasantry. And while the great gods of the mighty Semitic empires were probably once the divinities of simple desert clansmen, these gods had been long ago transformed, or metamorphosed, into the deities of settled civilization, identified with the customs, laws, and morals of commercial society. It was in the interest of this tendency that the official and wealthy classes of the Hebrew nation instinctively threw the weight of their influence. The kings and officials, as a rule, wanted to view the national god Yahweh in the character of a "civilized" Semitic deity, or Baal, having the same nature as the Baals of the wealthy Phoenicians, or the Baals inherited by the Hebrews from the Amorite side of their ancestry.

In the case of the Egyptians, Babylonians, and other civilized

'Cf. Breasted, History of Egypt (New York, 1905), p. 491; Luckenbill, Temple Documents from the Cassite Period (Chicago, 1907), p. 12.