(xi. 15).  But we have still to add, in conclusion, that the idea here before us can only have arisen in an age which had no knowledge of Israel as a people and a state, and which had no experience of the real conditions of existence in these forms; in other words.  It is the offspring of exilic or post-exilic Judaism.  At that time the nation was transformed into a religious community, whose members were at liberty to concentrate themselves on what they held to be the great business of life, worship and religiousness, because the Chaldeans or the Persians had relieved them of all care for worldly concerns.  At that time, accordingly, the theocracy existed, and it is from that time that it is transported in an idealised form to early times.  The material basis on which the theocracy rested in fact, namely, the foreign domination, is put out of sight, and it is counted heathenism in the old Israelites that they cared for the external conditions of their national existence, that they are a people in the full sense of the word, and seek to maintain themselves as such with the weapons which are found necessary in the work-a-day world.  It naturally never came into the heads of these epigoni to conceive that the political organisation and centralisation which the monarchy called into being provided the basis for the organisation and centralisation of the worship, and that their church was merely a spiritualised survival of the nation.  What is added to Moses is taken away from the monarchy.

One more point has to be noticed.  The chapters vii. viii. x. 17 seq. xii. betray a close relationship with Judges xix.-xxi., not only by their general tendency, but by a geographical detail in which the two passages agree.  It is only here that Mizpeh, near Jerusalem, occurs as the place of meeting of all Israel; we find no further mention of the place in the whole period of the judges and the kings.  Only after the destruction of Jerusalem is it mentioned, and there as the centre of the new Jewish community instituted by the Chaldeans (Jeremiah xl. seq.) as the substitute of the old capital.  It appears once more, and in a similar character, in I Maccabees iii. 46 seq. at a time when the temple of Jerusalem was in the hands of the Syrians, and the Jews could not get to it.  The Mizpeh of Judges xx., 1Samuel vii. 10, is probably the same as that of Jeremiah xl. seq., and intended to be, like these, in place of Jerusalem, the only legitimate sanctuary, which, however, did not exist at that early time.  This is a further proof of the post-Deuteronomic and Jewish origin of these narratives, but at the same time an indication that, with every inclination to the views of the Priestly Code, the writer yet had not that code before him.  For in that work the projection of Jerusalem into the period before Solomon is carried out in quite a different way:  the tabernacle renders Mizpeh superfluous.  It has also to be remarked that the rite of pouring out water (1Samuel vii.) is foreign to the Priestly Code.