language, and thought—we are able to analyse the composite whole into its component parts. From the study of the separate sources thus revealed we gain invaluable information which would have been lost to us had the later writer (or rather, compiler and editor) given his version of the history entirely in his own words.
(3) The absence of the idea of Development. One other feature of the ancient writers, at least of the chroniclers of Israel, is of singular interest, and deserves special attention: it might be described as a feature of their temperament or of their mental environment. The idea of growth has become familiar to us, and we recognise that there has been a process of development in our religious and social institutions. We are content to trace the seeds of the present in the past. But the feeling of antiquity was apparently different. In Israel, at least, there was a tendency to suppose that the cherished system and organisations of the present had sprung into existence, as it were, full-grown at some great moment of the past. For example, by the Chronicler's time, the whole body of law and ritual embodied in the final form of the Pentateuch had come to be ascribed in its entirety to Moses, whereas historical and literary evidence demonstrates beyond all question that the system of Jewish worship and law was a gradual growth of which the stages can be traced with considerable clearness. Similarly, many features in the organisation of the Temple ministrants—the Priests, Levites, etc.—came into existence only in post-exilic days; but the whole system as it appeared in the Chronicler's time was believed by him, and doubtless also by his contemporaries, to have originated with King David. Indeed, it is very probable that the ancients felt it so natural and so necessary to justify important customs and institutions by giving them the sanction of an ancient and honourable origin, that occasionally the very ideals of the present were represented as facts of the past. The converse of this tendency was also in force. As the present sought the support of the authority of the past, so the past could only continue to be
