Another main article of faith was that Jehovah judges and recompenses, not after death (then all men were thought to be alike), but upon the earth.  Here, however, but little account was taken of the individual; over him the wheel of destiny remorselessly rolled; his part was resignation and not hope.  Not in the career of the individual but in the fate of families and nations did the righteousness of Jehovah find scope for its manifestation; and this is the only reason why the religion could dispense with the conceptions of heaven and hell.  For the rest, it was not always easy to bring the second article into correlation with the first; in practice the latter received the superior place.

It need hardly be said that superstition of every kind also abounded.  But the superstition of the Israelites had as little real religious significance as had that poetical view of nature which the Hebrews doubtless shared in greater or less degree with all the other nations of antiquity.

6.  THE FALL OF SAMARIA.

Under King Jeroboam II., two years before a great earthquake that served ever after for a date to all who had experienced it, there occurred at Bethel, the greatest and most conspicuous sanctuary of Jehovah in Israel, a scene full of significance.  The multitude were assembled there with gifts and offerings for the observance of a festival, when there stepped forward a man whose grim seriousness interrupted the joy of the feast.  It was a Judaean, Amos of Tekoa, a shepherd from the wilderness bordering on the Dead Sea.  Into the midst of the joyful tones of the songs which with harp and tabor were being sung at the sacred banquet he brought the discordant note of the mourner’s wail.  For over all the joyous stir of busy life his ear caught the sounds of death:  “the virgin of Israel is fallen, never more to rise; lies prostrate in her own land with no one to lift her up.”  He prophesied as close at hand the downfall of the kingdom which just at that moment was rejoicing most in the consciousness of power, and the deportation of the people to a far-off northern land.

There was something rotten in the state of Israel in spite of the halcyon days it enjoyed under Jeroboam II.  From the indirect results of war, from changes in the tenure and in the culture of the soil, from defective administration of justice, the humbler classes had much to suffer; they found that the times were evil.  But it was not this that caused Amos to foresee the end of Israel, not a mere vague foreboding of evil that forced him to leave his flocks; the dark cloud that threatened on the horizon was plain enough—­the Assyrians.  Once already at an earlier date they had directed their course south-westwards, without, however, on that occasion becoming a source of danger to the Israelites.  But now that the bulwark against the Assyrians, Aram of Damascus, was falling into ruins, a movement of these against Lebanon in the time of Jeroboam II. opened to Israel the alarming prospect that sooner or later they would have to meet the full force of the irresistible avalanche.