of a new time. One other fact is significant: the domestic feasts
and sacrifices of single families, which in David's time must still
have been general, gradually declined and lost their importance as
social circles widened and life became more public.

But this way of regarding the influence of the monarchy upon the
history of the worship is not that of the author of the Books of
Kings. He views the temple of Solomon as a work undertaken
exclusively in the interests of pure worship, and as differing
entirely in origin from the sacred buildings of the kings of
Israel, with which accordingly it is not compared, but contrasted
as the genuine is contrasted with the spurious. It is in its
nature unique, and from the outset had the design of setting aside
all other holy places,--a religious design independent of and
unconnected with politics. The view, however, is unhistorical; it
carries back to the original date of the temple, and imports into
the purpose of its foundation the significance which it had
acquired in Judah shortly before the exile. In reality the
temple was not at the outset all that it afterwards became. Its
influence was due to its own weight, and not to a monopoly
conferred by Solomon. We nowhere learn that that king, like a
forerunner of Josiah, in order to favour his new sanctuary sought
to abolish all the others; there is not the faintest historical
trace of any such sudden and violent interference with the
previously existing arrangements of worship. Never once did
Solomon's successors, confined though they were to the little
territory of Judah, and therefore in a position in which the
experiment might perhaps have been practicable, make the attempt
(which certainly would have been in their interest) to concentrate
all public worship within their own temple, though in other