Out of such natural beginnings did the state at that time arise:  it owed nothing to the pattern of the “Mosaic theocracy,” but bears all the marks of a new creation.  Saul and David first made out of the Hebrew tribes a real people in the political sense (Deuteronomy xxxiii. 5).  David was in the eyes of later generations inseparable from the idea of Israel:  he was the king par excellence:  Saul was thrown into the shade, but both together are the founders of the kingdom, and have thus a much wider importance than any of their successors.  It was they who drew the life of the people together at a centre, and gave it an aim; to them the nation is indebted for its historical self-consciousness.  All the order of aftertimes is built up on the monarchy; it is the soil out of which all the other institutions of Israel grow up.  In the time of the judges, we read, every man did that which was right in his own eyes, not because the Mosaic constitution was not in force, but because there was no king in those days.  The consequences were very important in the sphere of religion as well:  since the political advance of the people brought the historic and national character of Jehovah to the front again.  During the time of the judges the Canaanite festival cultus had gradually been coming to be embodied in the worship of Jehovah, a process which was certainly necessary; but in this process there was for some time a danger that Jehovah would become a God of husbandry and of cattle, like Baal-Dionysus.  The festivals long continued to be a source of heathenism, but now they were gradually divested of their character as nature-festivals, and forced at length to have reference to the nation and to its history, if they were not to disappear completely.  The relation of Jehovah to people and kingdom remained firm as a rock:  even to the worst idolaters He was the God of Israel; in war no one thought of looking for victory and success to any other God.  This was the result of Israel’s becoming a kingdom:  the kingship of Jehovah, in that precise sense which we associate with it, is the religious expression of the fact of the foundation of the kingdom by Saul and David.  The theocracy was the state of itself; the ancient Israelites regarded the civil state as a miracle, or, in their own words, a help of God.  When the later Jews thought or spoke of the theocracy, they took the state for granted as already there, and so they could build the theocracy on the top of it as a specially spiritual feature:  just as we moderns sometimes see the divine element in settled ordinances, such as marriage, not in their own nature, but in the consecration added to them by the church.