him they brought all affairs with which they were not themselves able to cope.  The authority which his antecedents had secured for him made him as matter of course the great national “Kadhi” in the wilderness.  Equally as matter of course did he exercise his judicial functions, neither in his own interest nor in his own name, but in the interest of the whole community and in the name of Jehovah.  By connecting them with the sanctuary of Jehovah, which stood at the well of Kadesh, he made these functions independent of his person, and thus he laid a firm basis for a consuetudinary law and became the originator of the Torah in Israel.  In doing this he succeeded in inspiring the national being with that which was the very life of his own soul; through the Torah he gave a definite positive expression to their sense of nationality and their idea of God.  Jehovah was not merely the God of Israel; as such he was the God at once of law and of justice, the basis, the informing principle, and the implied postulate of their national consciousness.

The relationship was carried on in precisely the same manner as that in which it had been begun.  It was most especially in the graver moments of its history that Israel awoke to full consciousness of itself and of Jehovah.  Now, at that time and for centuries afterwards, the highwater marks of history were indicated by the wars it recorded.  The name “Israel” means “El does battle,” and Jehovah was the warrior El, after whom the nation styled itself.  The camp was, so to speak, at once the cradle in which the nation was nursed and the smithy in which it was welded into unity; it was also the primitive sanctuary.  There Israel was, and there was Jehovah.  If in times of peace the relations between the two had become dormant, they were at once called forth into fullest activity when the alarm of danger was raised; Israel’s awakening was always preceded by the awakening of Jehovah.  Jehovah awakened men who under the guidance of His spirit placed themselves at the nation’s head; in them His proper leadership was visibly expressed.  Jehovah went forth with the host to battle, and in its enthusiasm His presence was seen (Judges. v. 13, 23).  With signs and wonders from heaven Jehovah decided the struggle carried on upon earth.  In it He was always upon Israel’s side; on Israel was His whole interest concentrated, although His power (for He was God) reached far beyond their local limits.

Thus Jehovah was in a very real sense a living God; but the manifestations of His life in the great crises of His people’s history were of necessity separated by considerable intervals of time.  His activity had something abrupt and tumultuary about it, better suited for extraordinary occasions than for ordinary daily life.  Traces of this feeling appear very prominently in the later stages of the development.  But although the relations between Israel and Israel’s God came most strongly into prominence in times of