more than 6,000 years into scenes essentially like, for all matters of great importance, those of our own time; and the distinction which we can make between backward and barbarous on the one hand and advanced and civilized on the other can be applied within the limits of modern history quite as properly as within the limits of what we have known as ancient history. The darkness

in Europe between A. D. 500 and A. D. 1000 was far more a darkness of primitive barbarism than the darkness in Greece a thousand years before, or the darkness in Egypt three thousand years before. The condition of the chief nations of Europe to-day, in respect of armies and of possible wars, is one of ancient darkness quite as lamentable as very much in the past which we are accustomed to refer to want of development in human progress.

The survey which we have already made of Babylonia and Egypt, of India, China, and Persia, has been intended to give sufficient knowledge of those fields of remote human culture to enable us to understand how the developments which are nearer to us reach back into a very remote past and are not by any means so exclusively modern as we suppose them. We have referred these distant fields of culture to the dawn of history, but we must understand that they represent far more than has been supposed a true dawn and not a night before the dawn. Of the really Dark Ages of the story of mankind, extending for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years back from the times of which we have record, the story cannot be told, but it is a reasonable inference that the human developments known to us by the earliest historical records were the sequel to earlier developments during thousands of

years.

It is probable that if we could listen to the earliest bards of the Veda and could look upon the people to whom they sang we would find both the figures of men and their minds not very different from that with which we are familiar. Countenances which we see to-day may fairly represent what could have been seen in the earliest ages of recorded history. The essential elements of modern refinement, both in the human form and human mind, must have begun to appear anywhere from six to eight or ten thou

sand years ago. In the very first pages

of the story of mankind we find evidence that there already existed the sage, the saint, the scholar; and that father and mother, son and daughter, husband and wife, neighbor and friend, citizen and statesman, were no more new things in the world than they are to-day.

Jewish Idea One of the peculiar featof Antiquity ures of limited and imperfect modern knowledge has been that of the religious tradition inherited by Christendom from the Jews, in connection with the adoption by Christians of Hebrew scripture as a part of the Christian Bible. Hebrew antiquity has been understood by Christians as the antiquity of mankind. antiquity of mankind. It has been supposed that the story of mankind from the creation was contained in the Hebrew scriptures, and that history had no important beginning until the establishment of Christianity on a wide scale in the Roman Empire. We call the Hebrew scriptures the "Old Testament "; we take Babylonia and Egypt, Greece and Rome as belonging to antiquity. We recognize nothing as modern until this antiquity had been left behind by Christian developments. And as darkness fell for hundreds of years, for a thousand years, in fact, on these developments, we designate a very long period as the Middle Ages, and hardly recognize as modern more than the last four or five hundred years. The intense rigor with which this religious tradition has been insisted on has rendered it extremely difficult to properly understand the history of mankind. In consequence of it Christians have been shut up to an exceedingly narrow Jewish view; the characteristically Semitic view.

Semitic

It is a peculiar fact of all Developments Semitic development that it has only scorn and hatred for everything human beyond its own limits. There have been three great historic Semitic developments, that of Assyria, that of the Jews, and that of Mohammed, and they have all reflected the spirit which engages the Moslem Turks to-day in the massacre of Christians. They have all had the penalty of death for change of religion. Intensity of belief in deity has in all of them taken the form of representing deity as prone to

anger, to jealousy, and to cruel punishments. There is no more impressive lesson anywhere than that of the three-fold lesson of the Semitic spirit, during the three successive periods of Assyrian, Jewish, and Mohammedan development.

of Mankind

Assyria the Curse From about 1300 B. C. to the fall of Nineveh in 606 B. C., Assyria was in the ascendant in Western Asia. It then fell with an utter destruction almost unparalleled and due especially to the hatred which it had inspired. Of this one of our recent authorities says:

"The time had come to destroy the proud nation which had treated all other peoples with the deepest disdain, considering themselves the true lords of the earth, more wise, more moral, more pious than the rest of mankind. It was one of the most terrible catastrophies that ever happened. Not only an empire was destroyed, that a few years before had ruled the whole of Western Asia, but a whole nation which for centuries had been the curse of all other nations, was utterly effaced. The four capitals, Assur, Nineveh, Kalach, and Dur-Sarrukin were so thoroughly blotted out that they never were inhabited again. They disappeared from the face of the earth as the nation that had built them.

A summary of the chief facts is thus given by Myers in his General History:

"The Assyrians were Semites, and as such they possessed the deep religious spirit that has always distinguished the people of this family. In this respect they were very much like the Hebrews. The wars which the Assyrian monarchs waged, were not alone wars of conquest, but were in a certain sense crusades made for the purpose of extending the worship and authority of the gods of Assyria. They have been likened to the wars of Hebrew kings and again to the conquests of the Saracens. As with the wars so was it with the architectural works of these sovereigns. The erection and endowment of the temples of the gods were matters of anxious and constant care on the part of the Assyrian monarchs. Their accounts of the construction and dedication of temples for their gods afford striking parallels to the biblical account of the building of the temple at Jerusalem by King Solomon. Not less prominently manifested is the religious spirit of these kings in what we may call their sacred literature, which is filled with prayers singularly like those of the Old Testament."

"The Assyrians have been called the 'Romans of Asia'; they were a proud, martial, cruel, and unrelenting race. Although possessing, as we have just noticed, a deep and genuine religious feeling, still the Assyrian monarchs often displayed, in their treatment of prisoners, the disposition of savages. subjected their captives to the most terrible mutilations. The sculptured marbles taken from the palaces exhibit the cruel tortures inflicted upon prisoners; kings are being led before their

They

conqueror by means of hooks thrust through one or both lips; other prisoners are being flayed alive; the eyes of some are being bored out having their tongues cut out. An inscription with the point of a spear; and still others are by one monarch reads: Their men young and old I took prisoners. Of some I cut off the feet and hands; of others I cut off the noses, ears, and lips; of the young men's ears I made a heap; of the old men's heads I made a tower. I exposed their heads as a trophy in front of their city. The male children and the female children I burned in the flames.'"'

Two Periods of Hebrew Development

Hebrew development had two periods, one from the conquest and settlement of Canaan by the Hebrews, about 1300 B. C., to the overthrow of the two Hebrew kingdoms, that of Israel in 722 B. C., and that of Judah in 586 Jerusalem, about 538 B. C., to the deB. C.; the other from the restoration of struction of Jerusalem in the year 70 of the Christian era. The first of these periods was purely political, the second was chiefly religious. Those who wrote history during the second period endeavored to connect the Hebrew religion of their own time with the centuries of the earlier period, but this was a reconstruction for purposes of religious impression without regard to strict historical accuracy. As a matter of fact, these later histories, even while attempting to reconstruct the earlier history for purposes of religion, preserved the most abundant evidence that during the whole time from the conquest of Canaan down to the destruction of Jerusalem Hebrew development had exactly paralleled Assyrian. The statement just quoted from Myers clearly indicates the fact of this parallel. The books of the Old Testament abound in proofs of it. The great Hebrew prophets who lived in the last days of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah furnish abundant evidence that Hebrew customs, spirit, and religion had not differed from Assyrian, unless for the worse in the extent to which varieties of gross heathenism interfered with the worship of the national deity, Jehovah.

Second Hebrew Period

Torah, or Law, as it had grown up during the earlier period, that is in usage earlier than the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar (B. C. 586), or in fact the return from the captivity of half a century in Babylon (B. C. 538), meant the oral traditions held and acted on by the priests. Such writings as may have been in existence, whether embodying history or law, or preserving the first beginnings of literature, in psalms or proverbs, were held back in their own hands by the priests. We read somewhat earlier (B. C. 621) of a first fragment of Hebrew Bible having been discovered and brought out to notice. "Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of Jahveh." The scribe read it himself, and then read it to the king. And the king, finding that it laid down, as divine, laws which had not been known, and which there had been no pretense even of keeping, sent five of his priestly and other courtiers to inquire of Jahveh" for him in regard to the book. The king was in deep concern because of the probable wrath of Jahveh against them for not having known and kept the laws set down in the book found and brought out by the priests. So he most urgently said, "Go ye and inquire of Jahveh for me." The record says that to thus "inquire of Jahveh," they "went unto Huldah the prophetess," wife of the grandson of a keeper of the wardrobe. And it says that she told them to tell the king that Jahveh would bring evil upon Jerusalem and upon all the people, to make "a desolation and a curse, "because they had not been true to him, but had "burned incense to other gods." The facts thus stated would be alone conclusive of the previous heathenism of the Hebrews. But much more appears in the record. Josiah was but eight years old when he began his reign of thirty-one years. As a mere boy he seems to have come under the influence of the Jahveh priests at Jerusalem, who wished to suppress other worships and to concentrate interest not only on Jahveh, but on Jerusalem as his seat. The record tells us how, for six years, Josiah had carried out the wishes of the Jerusalem priests for a purer worship of Jehovah. Thus it says:

"

"In the twelfth year of his reign he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem from the high places,

and the Asherim, and the graven images, and the molten images. And they brake down the altars of the Baalim in his presence; and the sun images that were on high above them, he hewed down; and he burnt the bones of their priests upon their altars, and purged Judah and Jerusalem. And in the cities of Manasseh and Ephraim and Simeon, even unto Naphtali; and he brake down the altars, and beat the Asherim and the graven images into powder, and hewed down all the sun-images throughout all the land of Israel, and returned to Jerusalem."

After this demonstration in the interest of Jehovah worship at Jerusalem, King Josiah set his officers at the repair of the temple, and it was "when they brought out the money that was brought into the house of Jahveh," that "Hilkiah the priest found the book of the law of Jahveh by the hand of Moses." And upon the perusal of the book thus found, there took place a further demonstration by King Josiah, in the interest of Jehovah worship, the record of which makes perfectly clear that the heathenism of both Israel and Judah had been exceedingly gross from the supposed time of Moses; that no one had either known or heeded "Mosaic " requirements; and that at no previous time had an exclusive Jehovah worship existed, although about seven hundred years had passed since Moses. The extent to which wholly Canaanite worships had prevailed and were still familiar everywhere, appears from the Hebrew narrative.

Thus the record tells how the king caused to be brought out of the temple itself all the vessels that were made for Baal, and for the Asherah, and for all the hosts of heaven," and had them burned in the fields outside the city; how he also "put down the idolatrous priests, whom the king of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places in the cities of Judah and in the places about Jerusalem' -the old-time form of heathen worship"them also that burned incense unto Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of heaven. And he brought out the Asherah from the house of Jahveh [a peculiarly heathen object which had had a place in the temple itself]. And he brake down the houses of the Sodomites, that were in the house of Jahveh [the temple], where the women wove hangings for the Asherah. And he defiled Topheth, that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech [a form of human sacrifice in use up to this

time]. And he took away the horses that the kings of Judah had given to the sun, at the entering in of the house of Jahveh; and he burned the chariots of the sun with fire. And the altars that were on the roof of the chamber of Ahaz, which the kings of Judah had made, did the king break down. And the high And the high places that were before Jerusalem, which Solomon the king of Israel had builded for Ashtoreth the abomination of the Zidonians, and for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, and for Milcom the abomination of the children of Ammon, did the king defile. And he brake in pieces the obelisks and cut down the Asherim. Moreover the altar that was at Bethel, and the high place which Jereboam had made, he brake down; and all the houses also of the high places that were in the city of Samaria, which the kings of Israel had made to provoke Jahveh to anger, Josiah took away. And he sacrificed all the priests of the high places that were there upon the altars. Moreover them that had familiar spirits, and the wizards, and the teraphim, and the idols, and all the abominations that were spied in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem, did Josiah put away, that he might perform the words of the law which were written in the book that Hilkiah the priest found in the house of Jahveh. And like unto him was there no king before him, that turned to Jahveh with all his heart, according to all the law of Moses."

The very last word of this story brings in the name of Moses. The story as given is in the Book of Kings. The later Book of Chronicles uses the name of Moses more freely. It says, to begin with, that" Hilkiah the priest found the book of the law of Jahveh by the hand. of Moses," and later it calls it "the Book of Moses." This second later account does not give the particulars of the immense clearance of universal heathenism made by Josiah, winding up with a wholesale slaughter of priests of other gods and other worships than Jahveh's on the altars at which they had served, and the wrong of which no one before had acted on or even considered; not one of the long line of kings or early leaders; neither David nor Solomon, the latter in fact having begun a course of kingly devotion to "abominations" which his successors had continued down to Josiah's day.

the Hebrew Bible

Earliest Form of The book thus brought out in the name of Moses is considered to have been the main part of our Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Pentateuch, for the quite conclusive reason that the law acted on by Josiah is found in this book only, the other and older forms of law in the name of Moses, which were not published until later, having stopped far short of the requirements as to Jehovah and Jerusalem which Josiah undertook to execute.

The effort thus made by the priests to have a book of sacred law known and enforced, was a beginning only toward the Hebrew Bible. Practically nothing came of the book put forth by the priests until nearly 200 years later. King Josiah did not live to carry on the work he had begun. He fell in battle against an Egyptian army. Then the exile in Babylonia came, B. C. 586, and lasted forty-eight years. In 538 B. C. permission was given the Judean exiles to return, but only about 40,000 availed themselves of it, and not until B. C. 520 was the rebuilding of the temple begun. But almost to a man these returned exiles had adopted what, as we have seen, were then comparatively new views as to exclusive worship of Jehovah, and as to Jerusalem as the only place for true worship. They had learned also the character of the "Book of Moses" which was in the hands of the priests, and were inclined to separate themselves from everybody else in the world.

Origin of

Pharisaism

Their leaders, Ezra and Nehemiah, even instigated them to drive away of their own married women all those who did not belong to families of returned exiles. Numbers of exiles had married in Palestine after the return, and as the movement for rebuilding Jerusalem progressed all these were compelled to discard their wives. If they failed to do so, they were themselves driven out.

Ezra himself relates how, as Dr. Farrar puts it, "one hundred and thirteen marriages were ruthlessly annulled; four of the highest priests, thirteen other priests, ten Levites, and eighty-six laymen" ; all of the wives driven out; and some of the wives had borne children." Nehemiah proceeded in the same way, whenever he found that "the holy seed had mingled themselves with the peoples of

the lands.'

The founder of Samaritan worship was a Jew of accepted standing and character, and a priest of rank, but his wife, the daughter of the prince of Samaria, was not of the strict Jew fold, and because her husband would not heed the edict to cast her off, he was driven out. He was the son of the Jewish highpriest, and Nehemiah relates the energy with which he "chased him out." Of his driving off of other Jews who had married other women, he says: "I contended with them, and cursed them, and smote certain of them, and tore out their hair."

Earliest Hebrew Bible Idea

It was at a late date in these restoration proceedings, and in connection with what was done about the women, that a beginning was made of recognizing such writings as already existed as sacred scripture of divine authority. The famous Ezra was foremost in this.

The affairs of the new Judaism had made slow progress, until he came from Babylonia bringing large reinforcements both of population and of writings which Levites, or under-priests, had got into shape in Babylonia, the land of books, of Sabbaths, and of sacred scriptures. Ezra came in 458 B. C., full eighty years later than the first return of exiles, but he did nothing for thirteen years toward a Mosaic scripture, or nothing publicly. In 445 B. C. another leader appeared on the scene, in the person of Nehemiah, who, though a Jew, was sent as Persian governor. The next year, B. C. 444,

Ezra the Scribe and Nehemiah the Persian governor united in bringing to public knowledge the book of Mosaic history and law. It was practically what we call the Pentateuch, and measures were taken to have the people feel solemnly bound by it as a divine book. The synagogue meetings and the Sabbath, both of them developed, as well as the new idea of scripture, in Babylonia, were now used for impressing on the people the demands of the book, and the scribes became a class specially devoted to the book, in coöperation with the priests.

Two things are manifest in the body of writings thus begun and which by considerable additions grew to be the whole Hebrew Bible.* One is the pres

*The following summary of views given in Wildboer's recent "History of the Literature

ence of moral and religious elements of very high character; the other is the lingering of elements terribly Semitic and heathen, many examples of which may be read both in the laws and in the

of the Old Testament, according to its Chronological Arrangement," may be considered a fair result of the best investigation into the origin of all the parts of the Hebrew Bible:

Hebrew literature shows a few fragments older than the ninth century B. C., such as a concise form of "the Ten Words," the verses of Numbers x. 35, 36; and xxi. 14, 15, 17,18, 27-30; and parts of Exodus, xv. 1-18. In the two hundred years nearly covered by the period of the Judges, we get the Song of Deborah; Judges v. 1-31; Jotham's fable; Judges ix. 7-21; and part of the piece known as the blessing of Jacob. The time of David gives us 2 Samuel i. 19-27; and iii. 33b-34a, but not any psalms; Solomon's time the passages in 1 Kings viii.

12, 13.

In the ninth and eighth centuries B. C. were produced, each of a composite character, giving myth and legend as well as history, the Jehovistic and Elohistic portions of the Hexateuch [the first six books of the Old Testament, into which are apparently woven two writings, one of which is marked by the use of the word Jahveh, or Jehovah, and the other by the use of the word Elohim, as the name of deity]. The legal sections were in part the record of laws that were in use, and in part new priestly precepts then first laid down.

The oldest recorded prophecies (about 780 B. C.) are those in Isaiah xv. and xvi. Then come Amos and Hosea. Micah follows, with possibly all or part of chapters iv.-vii. of later origin. Isaiah is genuine in chapters i.-xxxix., excepting quite a number of interpolations; while the chapters x1.-lxvi. belong as late as the close of the exile in Babylonia.

Deuteronomy, for the main part, dates from B. C. 621, when King Josiah had in his hands the chapters xii.-xxvi. The two sections, chapters iv. and v.-xi., are by different authors, as are considerable sections also of the Hexateuch. In the period from 621 to 444, the school of priestly writers which brought out Deuteronomy, the earliest book of Hebrew scripture, diligently worked over the materials which appear in the Hexateuch, and those of Judges, Samuel, and Kings, which were pro

duced between B. C. 621 and B. C. 444.

It was during the Exile in Babylonia that the composition of the priestly code was begun. The "holiness law" of Leviticus xvii.-xxvi., and some other sections, were produced by the circle to which Ezekiel belonged. The socalled historical portion was composed in Babylon, between B. C. 500 and B. C. 475. Ezra brought the composite work to Judea in B. C. 458, and made some changes there, after which another writer or writers worked in with the priestly code the other documents now forming so large a part of the Pentateuch, the bringing out of which and imposition of which as of divine Mosaic authority was effected by Ezra.

Malachi, Jonah, and Ruth were produced soon after Ezra's death; Joel about B. C. 400; Isaiah xxiv.-xxvii., about B. C. 350; and Zecha