After Josiah's death we again see Bamoth appearing on all hands,
not merely in the country, but even in the capital itself.
Jeremiah has to lament that there are as many altars as towns in
Judah. All that had been attained by the reforming party was
that they could now appeal to a written law that had been solemnly
sworn to by the whole people, standing ever an immovable witness
to the rights of God. But to bring it again into force and to
carry it out was no easy matter, and would certainly have been
impossible to the unaided efforts of the prophets--a Jeremiah or an
Ezekiel.

I.3 Had the people of Judah remained in peaceful possession of their
land, the reformation of Josiah would hardly have penetrated to
the masses; the threads uniting the present with the past were too
strong. To induce the people to regard as idolatrous and heretical
centres of iniquity the Bamoth, with which from ancestral times
the holiest memories were associated, and some of which, like
Hebron and Beersheba, had been set up by Abraham and Isaac in
person, required a complete breaking-off of the natural tradition
of life, a total severance of all connection with inherited
conditions. This was accomplished by means of the Babylonian
exile, which violently tore the nation away from its native soil,
and kept it apart for half a century,--a breach of historical
continuity than which it is almost impossible to conceive a
greater. The new generation had no natural, but only an
artificial relation to the times of old; the firmly rooted
growths of the old soil, regarded as thorns by the pious, were
extirpated, and the freshly ploughed fallows ready for a new
sowing. It is, of course, far from being the case that the whole
people at that time underwent a general conversion in the sense of