But these defects did not check all progress.  The weakness of the government, the want of political consolidation, were insufficient to arrest intellectual advance or to corrupt the prevailing moral tone and feeling for justice; in fact it was precisely in this period (the period in which the main part of the Jehovistic history must have been written) that the intellectual and moral culture of the people stood at its highest.  Even when the machinery of the monarchy had got out of order, the organisation of the families and communes continued to subsist; the smaller circles of social life remained comparatively untouched by the catastrophes that shook the greater.  Above all, the national religion supplied the spiritual life with an immovable basis.

The favourite illustrations of the power of religion in the Israel of that period are drawn from the instances of great prophets who raised kings out of the dust and smote them to it again.  But the influence and importance of these is generally exaggerated in the accounts we have.  That among them there occasionally occurred manifestations of such power as to give a new turn in history is indeed true; a figure like that of Elijah is no mere invention.  But such a man as he was a prophecy of the future rather than an actual agent in shaping the present.  On the whole, religion was a peaceful influence, conserving rather than assailing the existing order of things.  The majority of the prophets were no revolutionists; rather in fact were they always too much inclined to prophesy in accordance with the wishes of the party in power.  Besides, in ordinary circumstances their influence was inferior to that of the priests, who were servants of royalty at the chief sanctuaries, but everywhere attached to the established order.

The Torah of Jehovah still continued to be their special charge.  It was not even now a code or law in our sense of the word; Jehovah had not yet made His Testament; He was still living and active in Israel.  But the Torah appears during this period to have withdrawn itself somewhat from the business of merely pronouncing legal decisions and to have begun to move in a freer field.  It now consisted in teaching the knowledge of God, in showing the right God-given way where men were not sure of themselves.  Many of the counsels of the priests had become a common stock of moral convictions, which, indeed, were all of them referred to Jehovah as their author, yet had ceased to be matters of direct revelation.  Nevertheless the Torah had still occupation enough, the progressive life of the nation ever affording matter for new questions.