In the eighteenth year of Josiah, 601 B.C., the first heavy blow fell upon the local sacrificial places.  How vigorously the king set to work, how new were the measures taken, and how deeply they cut, can be learned from the narrative of 2Kings xxiii.  Yet what a vitality did the green trees upon the high mountains still continue to show!  Even now they were but polled, not uprooted.  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 the prophets.  Perhaps the majority totally gave up the past, but just on that account became lost among the heathen, and never subsequently came into notice.  Only the pious ones, who with trembling followed Jehovah’s word, were left as a remnant; they alone had the strength to maintain the Jewish individuality amid the medley of nationalities into which they had been thrown.  From the exile there returned, not the nation, but a religious sect,—­those, namely, who had given themselves up body and soul to the reformation ideas.  It is no wonder that to these people, who, besides, on their return, all settled in the immediate neighbourhood of Jerusalem, the thought never once occurred of restoring the local cults.  It cost them no struggle to allow the destroyed Bamoth to continue Iying in ruins; the principle had become part of their very being, that the one God had also but one place of worship, and thenceforward for all time coming this was regarded as a thing of course.