are no longer as a body driven hither and thither by the same internal and external impulses, and everything that happens is no longer made to depend on the attraction and repulsion exercised by Jehovah.  Instead of the alternating see-saw of absolute peace and absolute affliction, there prevails throughout the whole period a relative unrest; here peace, there struggle and conflict.  Failure and success alternate, but not as the uniform consequences of loyalty or disobedience to the covenant.  When the anonymous prophet who, in the insertion in the last redaction (chap. vi. 7-10), makes his appearance as suddenly as his withdrawal is abrupt, improves the visitation of the Midianites as the text for a penitential discourse, the matter is nevertheless looked at immediately thereafter with quite different eyes.  For to the greeting of the angel, “Jehovah is with thee, thou mighty man of velour,” Gideon answers, “If Jehovah be with us, why then is all this befallen us? and where be all His miracles, of which our fathers told us ?  “He knows nothing about any guilt on the part of Israel.  Similarly the heroic figures of the judges refuse to fit in with the story of sin and rebellion:  they are the pride of their countrymen, and not humiliating reminders that Jehovah had undeservedly again and again made good that which men had destroyed.  Finally, with what artificiality the sins which appear to be called for are produced, is incidentally made very clear.  After the death of Gideon we read in chap. viii. 33, “the children of Israel went a-whoring after the Baals, and made Baal Berith their god.”  But from the following chapter it appears that Baal or El Berith was only the patron god of Shechem and some other cities belonging to the Canaanites; the redactor transforms the local worship of the Canaanites into an idolatrous worship on the part of all Israel.  In other cases his procedure is still more simple,—­for example, in x. 6 seq., where the number seven in the case of the deities corresponds with the number seven of the nations mentioned in that connection.  Ordinarily he is content with “Baals " or “Astartes " or “Asheras,” where the plural number is enough to show how little of what is individual or positive underlies the idea, not to mention that Asheras are no divinities at all, but only sacred trees or poles.

In short, what is usually given out as the peculiar theocratic element in the history of Israel is the element which has been introduced by the redaction.  There sin and grace are introduced as forces into the order of events in the most mechanical way, the course of events is systematically withdrawn from all analogy, miracles are nothing extraordinary, but are the regular form in which things occur, are matters of course, and produce absolutely no impression.  This pedantic supra-naturalism, “sacred history” according to the approved recipe, is not to be found in the original accounts.  In these Israel is a people just like other people, nor is even his relationship