The great pathologist of Judaism is quite right:  in the Mosaic theocracy the cultus became a pedagogic instrument of discipline.  It is estranged from the heart; its revival was due to old custom, it would never have blossomed again of itself.  It no longer has its roots in childlike impulse, it is a dead work, in spite of all the importance attached to it, nay, just because of the anxious conscientiousness with which it was gone about.  At the restoration of Judaism the old usages were patched together in a new system, which, however, only served as the form to preserve something that was nobler in its nature, but could not have been saved otherwise than in a narrow shell that stoutly resisted all foreign influences.  That heathenism in Israel against which the prophets vainly protested was inwardly overcome by the law on its own ground; and the cultus, after nature had been killed in it, became the shield of supernaturalistic monotheism.

The end of the Prolegomena

ISRAEL

Reprinted from the “Encyclopaedia Britannica”

I S R A E L.

1.  THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATION.

According to the Book of Genesis, Israel was the brother of Edom, and the cousin of Moab and Ammon.  These four petty peoples, which may be classed together as the Hebrew group, must at one time have formed some sort of a unity and have passed through a common history which resulted in their settlement in south-eastern Palestine.  The Israelites, or rather that section of the Hebrew group which afterwards developed into Israel, appear at first to have been the immediate neighbours of Edom, and to have extended westwards towards the border of Egypt.  As regards the ethnological position of the Hebrews as a whole, tradition has it that they had connexions not only with the Aramaeans of Osrhoene (Nahor), but also with certain of the old half-Arab inhabitants of the Sinaitic peninsula (Kenites, Amalek, Midian).  To the Canaanites, whose language they had adopted, their relation was that of foreign conquerors and lords to a subject race (Gen. ix, 26).

Some fifteen centuries before our era a section of the Hebrew group left its ancient seat in the extreme south of Palestine to occupy the not distant pasture lands of Egypt (Goshen), where they carried on their old calling, that of shepherds and goatherds.  Although settled within the territory of the Pharaohs, and recognising their authority, they continued to retain all their old characteristics,—­their language, their patriarchal institutions, their nomad habits of life.