gained strength under the monarchy, jus—­civil justice—­necessarily grew up into a separate existence from the older sacred fas.  The knowledge of God, which Hosea (chapter iv.) regards as the contents of the torah, has as yet a closer connection with jurisprudence than with theology; but as its practical issue is that God requires of man righteousness, and faithfulness, and good-will, it is fundamentally and essentially morality, though morality at that time addressed its demands less to the conscience than to society.  A ritual tradition naturally developed itself even before the exile (2Kings xvii. 27, 28).  But only those rites were included in the Torah which the priests had to teach others, not those which they discharged themselves; even in Leviticus this distinction may be traced; the instructions characterised as toroth being chiefly those as to animals which might or might not be eaten, as to clean and unclean states, as to leprosy and its marks (cf.  Deuteronomy xxiv. 8).

So it was in Israel, to which the testimony applies which we have cited:  and so it was in Judah also.  There was a common proverb in the days of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, “The Torah shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the ancient, nor the word from the prophet:”  but no doubt the saying was not new in their time, and at any rate it will apply to the earlier time as well.  Not because they sacrifice but because they teach, do the priests here appear as pillars of the religious order of things; and their Torah is a living power, equal to the occasion and never-failing.  Micah reproaches them with judging for reward (iii. 11), and this shows their wisdom to have been based on a tradition accessible to them alone; this is also shown by some expressions of Deuteronomy (xvii. 10 seq., xxiv. 8).  We have the counterpart to the proverb above cited (Jeremiah xviii. 18; Ezekiel vii. 26) in the complaint in Lamentations (ii. 9):  “Jerusalem is destroyed; her king and her princes are among the Gentiles:  the Torah is no more; the prophets obtain no vision from Jehovah;” after the ruin of the sanctuary and the priests there is no longer any Torah; and if that be so, the axe is laid to the root of the life of the people.  In the post-exile prophets the torah, which even in Deuteronomy (xvii. 11) was mainly legal in its nature, acquires a strong savour of ritual which one did not notice before; yet even here it is still an oral teaching of the priests (Haggai ii. 11).

The priests derived their Torah from Moses:  they claimed only to preserve and guard what Moses had left (Deuteronomy xxxiii 4, 9 seq.).  He counted as their ancestor (xxxiii. 8; Judges xviii. 30); his father in-law is the PRIEST of Midian at Mount Sinai, as Jehovah also is derived in a certain sense from the older deity of Sinai.  But at the same time Moses was reputed to be the incomparable originator and practicer of PROPHECY (Numbers xii. 6 seq.; Deuteronomy