intrinsic interest; and also much annalistic record of fact. But this material has been welded together by a writer or writers who were supremely interested in the religious condition of their people, who believed that the character and purpose of God were manifest in the vicissitudes of their national history, and who desired to make the ethical and spiritual import of that history clear to their fellow-men. Hence in their present form their works are not scientific records but rather what may be termed "history with a motive." For instance, the space given to the tales about Elisha the prophet compared with the brief allusion to Omri King of Israel is entirely disproportionate to their respective values in the political sphere. The books of Samuel and Kings are practical and powerful appeals to history in the interests of religious faith. The same is true of Chronicles, and to an even greater degree, because Chronicles belongs to a later period than Samuel-Kings (see § 3), when the religious convictions of Israel were felt with extraordinary intensity, and could be expressed in accordance with certain precise theological beliefs.
(2) Method: the treatment of "sources." It is of no less importance to realise something of the difference of method between ancient and modern historians, particularly as regards their treatment of "sources."
For all that lies beyond his personal experience the historian is, of course, dependent on sources, documentary or otherwise. The modern writer recognises the duty of testing and verifying the accuracy of the sources he uses for his narrative, and in producing his own account of affairs he is expected, where desirable, to state the sources upon which he has relied. The ancient historian also made use of sources, but (1) he used them uncritically, with little or no anxiety concerning their accuracy, and (2) it was his custom simply to select from the available material any passages, long or short, even words or phrases, which served his purpose, and to incorporate these in his work, frequently without any indication of the borrowing. Only in certain instances was the source precisely referred to. Moreover
