Professor Kuenen, of Leyden, who is delivering a coarse of
Hibbert Lectures, both in London and Oxford, devoted the most interesting which he has yet given to the subject of "The Popular Religion of Israel : Priests and Prophets of Yahweh" (" Yahweh" being the modern scholastic equivalentfor "Jehovah," and a term which seems to us to lose more of literary and religious signifi- cance than it gains etymologically by the new spelling). His drift was one now familiar to Biblical students, that the priestly organisation of the worship of Jehovah must not be measured by the standards introduced after the return from exile. Much of the local worship, subsequently regarded as idolatrous, should not, in Dr. Kuenen's opinion, be treated as forbidden by the original revelation of Jehovah. He denied that the later his- torians reproduced the earlier religion of the Ten Tribes, for instance, fairly, when they branded it all as idolatry; Originally it had been a popular, and perhaps impure, but still not wholly impure, worship of Jehovah. The Prophets, he declared, while insisting on the righteous- ness of Jehovah, had by no means passed the sweeping condemnation upon all the local forms of the Jehovah worship which the later historians embodied in their account of the kingdom of Israel. In short, according to Dr. Knenen, the idea of the central Temple at Jerusalem as the only legitimate temple, was a late one, imported as post facto into the early history. But if that be so, if there were no traditional justifi- cation for the condemnation of local ceremonials as dangerous to the true worship of Jehovah, how did the historians manage to engraft, without exciting formidable resistance, so radically unpopular an idea on the Conservative instinct of such a people as the Jews ?
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