of the ideal, but as a rule it is simply condemned.  That is one difference; another has to be added which is of far greater importance.  In the Chronicles the pattern according to which the history of ancient Israel is represented is the Pentateuch, i.e. the Priestly Code.  In the source of Chronicles, in the older historical books, the revision does not proceed upon the basis of the Priestly Code, which indeed is completely unknown to them, but on the basis of Deuteronomy.  Thus in the question of the order of sequence of the two great bodies of laws, the history of the tradition leads us to the same conclusion as the history of the cultus.

CHAPTER VIII.  THE NARRATIVE OF THE HEXATEUCH.

In the historical books the tradition is developed by means of supplement and revision; double narratives occur here and there, but not great parallel pieces of connected matter side by side.  In the Hexateuch additions and supplements have certainly taken place on the most extensive scale, but the significant feature is here that continuous narratives which can and must be understood each by itself are woven together in a double or threefold cord.  Critics have shown a disposition, if not in principle yet in fact, to take the independence of these so-called sources of the Hexateuch as if it implied that in point of matter also each is a distinct and independent source.  But this is, even a priori, very improbable.  Even in the case of the prophets who received their word from the Lord the later writer knows and founds upon the earlier one.  How much more must this be the case with narrators whose express business is with the tradition?  Criticism has not done its work when it has completed the mechanical distribution; it must aim further at bringing the different writings when thus arranged into relation with each other, must seek to render them intelligible as phases of a living process, and thus to make it possible to trace a graduated development of the tradition.

The striking agreement of the different works, not only in matter, but in their arrangement of the narratives, makes the office of criticism as now described not less but more necessary.  There is no primitive legend, it is well known, so well knit as the biblical one, and thus it is no wonder that it became the frame for many others and infused into them some of its own colour.  This connection is common in its main features to all the sources alike.  The Priestly Code runs, as to its historical thread, quite parallel to the Jehovist history.  This alone made it possible to interfuse the two writings as we now have them in the Pentateuch.  That this was not done altogether without violence is less to be wondered at than that the violence which was done is so small, and particularly that the structure of each writing is left almost unimpaired.  This can only be explained from the intimate agreement of the two works in point