themselves were thoroughly conscious of the distance. The
revision of the books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings, undertaken
towards the end of the Babylonian exile, a revision much more
thorough than is commonly assumed, condemns as heretical the whole
age of the Kings. At a later date, as the past became more
invested with a certain nimbus of sanctity, men preferred to clothe
it with the characters of legitimacy rather than sit in judgment
upon it. The Book of Chronicles shows in what manner it was
necessary to deal with the history of bygone times when it was
assumed that the Mosaic hierocracy was their fundamental
institution.

2. The foregoing remarks are designed merely to make it plain
that the problem we have set before us is not an imaginary one,
but actual and urgent. They are intended to introduce it; but to
solve it is by no means so easy. The question what is the
historical place of the Law does not even admit of being put in
these simple terms. For the Law, If by that word we understand
the entire Pentateuch, is no literary unity, and no simple
historical quantity./1/

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1. Compare the article "Pentateuch" in the Ninth edition
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. xviii.
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Since the days of Peyrerius and Spinoza, criticism has acknowledged
the complex character of that remarkable literary production,
and from Jean Astruc onwards has laboured, not without success,
at disentangling its original elements. At present there are