A man combining in that simple state of society several functions—­priest and judge and leader—­he had the prescience to divine the need of the age, and the wisdom to point out the man to meet it.  Saul was chosen King, in free gathering of the hardy yeomanry, and proved his human election a divine selection by rousing the nation to new efforts, which his genius led to victory.  Saul was followed by a brief period of national unity under David and Solomon, in which the rapid and brilliant progress made in the spread of the kingdom, in wealth and civilization, revealed the latent powers of this gifted race.

The progress of political and commercial greatness was stayed by the rending of the kingdom after Solomon.  No great advances were possible amid the chronic jealousies and frequent strife of the sister kingdoms, which were unable to come together again in a unity that would have restored their prestige, and were unable, apart, to achieve any signal success in diplomacy or war.

The social state of the people underwent the changes usual in this stage of a people’s history.  With peace came wealth, with wealth came luxury, with luxury new social vices, fed from the court which grew around the monarchy.  But that the heart of the people continued sound amid these organic changes we may see from several hints preserved by tradition.

The institution, or revival, of the Order of the Nazarites was a religio-moral movement.  It was a protest against the vice of drunkenness that was increasing in the land, as, relieved from war’s alarms and waxing fat upon their fertile fields, the people gave themselves to pleasure.  The first Prohibition Society, of which we have record, was this Order of the Nazarites.  This Order appears also to have had a still deeper moral aim, little noticed of old.  It was a reaction from the social changes that were going on in Israel, a protest against the new-fashioned ways of wealth, an earnest effort to hold to the simplicities of earlier days, to the good old plain living and high thinking.  It was a counter-movement of Old Israel, essaying to stem the mad rush for riches.  A still more convincing token of the healthy moral tone of the nation is to be found in the earliest considerable work of literature preserved to us, the Song of Songs.  It holds up to scorn the licentiousness that Solomon had made fashionable, and of which, in a just retribution, he had become the abhorred type.  The great king fails to corrupt the virtue of a simple country maiden, despite of all his blandishments.  Ewald assigns this poem to the northern kingdom, which had separated itself from Judah chiefly in reaction from the Solomonic innovations.  It leads us into the homes of the sturdy peasantry of the hill country, where burned the fires on the altars of pure wedded love.