In this way the increased importance of Judah after the fall of Samaria accrued in the first instance to the benefit of the capital and its sanctuary, especially as what Judah gained by the fall of her rival was not so much political strength as an increase of religious self-consciousness. If the great house of God upon Mount Zion had always overtopped the other shrines in Judah, it now stood without any equal in all Israel. But it was the prophets who led the way in determining the inferences to be drawn from the change in the face of things. Hitherto they had principally had their eyes upon the northern kingdom, its threatened collapse, and the wickedness of its inhabitants, and thus had poured out their wrath more particularly upon the places of worship there. Judah they judged more favourably, both on personal and on substantial grounds, and they hoped for its preservation, not concealing their sympathies for Jerusalem (Amos i.2). Under the impression produced by their discourses accordingly, the fall of Samaria was interpreted as a judgment of God against the sinful kingdom and in favour of the fallen house of David, and the destruction of the sanctuaries of Israel was accepted as an unmistakable declaration on Jehovah's part against His older seats on behalf of His favourite dwelling on Zion. Finally, the fact that twenty years afterwards Jerusalem made her triumphant escape from the danger which had proved fatal to her haughty rival, that at the critical moment the Assyrians under Sennacherib were suddenly constrained to withdraw from her, raised to the highest pitch the veneration in which the temple was held. In this connection special emphasis is usually laid— and with justice—upon the prophetical activity of Isaiah, whose confidence in the firm foundation of Zion continued unmoved, even when the rock began to shake in an alarming way. Only it must not be forgotten that the significance of Jerusalem to Isaiah did not arise from the temple of Solomon, but from the fact that it was the city of David and the focus of his kingdom, the central point, not of the cultus, but of the sovereignty of Jehovah over His people. The holy mount was to him the entire city as a political unity, with its citizens, councillors, and judges (xi.9); his faith in the sure foundation on which Zion rested was nothing more than a faith in the living presence of Jehovah in the camp of Israel. But the contemporaries of the prophet interpreted otherwise his words and the events which had occurred. In their view Jehovah dwelt on Zion because His house was there; it was the temple that had been shown by history to be His true seat, and its inviolability was accordingly the pledge of the indestructibility of the nation. This belief was quite general in Jeremiah's time, as is seen in the extremely vivid picture of the seventh chapter of his book; but even as early as the time of Micah, in the first third of the seventh century, the temple must have been reckoned a house of God of an altogether peculiar order, so as to make it a paradox to put it on a level with the Bamoth of Judah, and a thing unheard of to believe in its destruction.
At the same time, notwithstanding the high and universal reverence in which the temple was held, the other sanctuaries still continued, in the first instance, to subsist alongside of it. King Hezekiah indeed is said to have even then made an attempt to abolish them, but the attempt, having passed away without leaving any trace, is of a doubtful nature. It is certain that the prophet Isaiah did not labour for the removal of the Bamoth. In one of his latest discourses his anticipation for that time of righteousness and the fear of God which is to dawn after the Assyrian crisis is: "Then shall ye defile the silver covering of your graven images and the golden plating of your molten images—ye shall cast them away as a thing polluted; Begone! shall ye say unto them" (xxx.22). If he thus hopes for a purification from superstitious accretions of the places where Jehovah is worshipped, it is clear that he is not thinking of their total abolition. Not until about a century after the destruction of Samaria did men venture to draw the practical conclusion from the belief in the unique character of the temple at Jerusalem. That this was not done from a mere desire to be logical, but with a view to further reforms, need not be said. With the tone of repudiation in which the earlier prophets, in the zeal of their opposition, had occasionally spoken of practices of worship at large, there was nothing to be achieved; the thing to be aimed at was not abolition, but reformation, and the end it was believed would be helped by concentration of all ritual in the capital. Prophets and priests appear to have made common cause in the prosecution of the work. It was the high priest Hilkiah who in the first instance called attention to the discovered book which was to be made the basis of action; the prophetess Huldah confirmed its divine contents; the priests and prophets were a prominent element in the assembly at which the new law was promulgated and sworn to. Now an intimate fellowship between these two leading classes appears to be characteristic of the whole course of the religious movement in Judah, and to have been necessarily connected with the lines on which that movement advanced; /1/
— Footnote 1. While Hosea, the man of northern Israel, frequently assails the clergy of his home, and lays upon them the chief share of the blame for the depraved and blinded condition of the people, Isaiah even in his fiercest declamation against the superstitious worship of the multitude, has not a word to say against the priests, with whose chief, Uriah, on the contrary, he stands in a relation of great intimacy. But it is from the Book of Jeremiah, the best mirror of the contemporary relations in Judah, that the close connection between priests and prophets can be gathered most particularly. To a certain extent they shared the possession of the sanctuary between them. (Compare Lam. ii.20.) — Footnote
we shall be justified therefore in assuming that the display of harmony between them on this occasion was not got up merely for the purposes of scenic effect, but that the change in the national cultus now proposed was really the common suggestion of prophets and priests. In point of fact, such a change was equally in accordance with the interests of the temple and with those of the prophetic party of reform. To the last named the restriction of the sacrificial worship must have in itself seemed an advantage; to it in later times the complete abolition of sacrifice was mainly due, and something of the later effect doubtless lay in the original intention. Then, too, the Jehovah of Hebron was only too easily regarded as distinct from the Jehovah of Bethshemesh or of Bethel, and so a strictly monarchical conception of God naturally led to the conclusion that the place of His dwelling and of His worship could also only be one. All writers of the Chaldaean period associate monotheism in the closest way with unity of worship (Jer. ii.28, xi.13). And the choice of the locality could present no difficulty; the central point of the kingdom had of necessity also to become the central point of the worship. Even Jerusalem and the house of Jehovah there might need some cleansing, but it was clearly entitled to a preference over the obscure local altars. It was the seat of all higher culture, Iying under the prophets' eyes, much more readily accessible to light and air, reform and control. It is also possible, moreover, that the Canaanite origin of most of the Bamoth, which is not unknown, for example, to Deuteronomy, may have helped to discredit them, while, on the other hand, the founding of Jerusalem belonged to the proudest memories of Israelite history, and the Ark, which had been the origin of the temple there, had a certain right to be considered the one genuine Mosaic sanctuary. /1/
— Footnote 1. Luther in his address to the princes of Germany counsels in the twentieth place that the field chapels and churches be destroyed, as devices of the devil used by him to strengthen covetousness, to set up a false and spurious faith, to weaken parochial churches, to increase taverns and fornication, to squander money and labour to no purpose, and merely to lead the poor people about by the nose. (Niemeyer's Reprint, p. 54 ) — Footnote
In the eighteenth year of Josiah, 601 B.C., the first heavy blow fell upon the local sacrificial places. How vigorously the king set to work, how new were the measures taken, and how deeply they cut, can be learned from the narrative of 2Kings xxiii. Yet what a vitality did the green trees upon the high mountains still continue to show! Even now they were but polled, not uprooted. After Josiah's death we again see Bamoth appearing on all hands, not merely in the country, but even in the capital itself. Jeremiah has to lament that there are as many altars as towns in Judah. All that had been attained by the reforming party was that they could now appeal to a written law that had been solemnly sworn to by the whole people, standing ever an immovable witness to the rights of God. But to bring it again into force and to carry it out was no easy matter, and would certainly have been impossible to the unaided efforts of the prophets—a Jeremiah or an Ezekiel.
I.3 Had the people of Judah remained in peaceful possession of their land, the reformation of Josiah would hardly have penetrated to the masses; the threads uniting the present with the past were too strong. To induce the people to regard as idolatrous and heretical centres of iniquity the Bamoth, with which from ancestral times the holiest memories were associated, and some of which, like Hebron and Beersheba, had been set up by Abraham and Isaac in person, required a complete breaking-off of the natural tradition of life, a total severance of all connection with inherited conditions. This was accomplished by means of the Babylonian exile, which violently tore the nation away from its native soil, and kept it apart for half a century,—a breach of historical continuity than which it is almost impossible to conceive a greater. The new generation had no natural, but only an artificial relation to the times of old; the firmly rooted growths of the old soil, regarded as thorns by the pious, were extirpated, and the freshly ploughed fallows ready for a new sowing. It is, of course, far from being the case that the whole people at that time underwent a general conversion in the sense of the prophets. Perhaps the majority totally gave up the past, but just on that account became lost among the heathen, and never subsequently came into notice. Only the pious ones, who with trembling followed Jehovah's word, were left as a remnant; they alone had the strength to maintain the Jewish individuality amid the medley of nationalities into which they had been thrown. From the exile there returned, not the nation, but a religious sect,—those, namely, who had given themselves up body and soul to the reformation ideas. It is no wonder that to these people, who, besides, on their return, all settled in the immediate neighbourhood of Jerusalem, the thought never once occurred of restoring the local cults. It cost them no struggle to allow the destroyed Bamoth to continue Iying in ruins; the principle had become part of their very being, that the one God had also but one place of worship, and thenceforward for all time coming this was regarded as a thing of course.
I.II
Such was the actual historical course of the centralisation of the cultus, and such the three stadia which can be distinguished. The question now presents itself, whether it is possible to detect a correspondence between the phases of the actual course of events and those of the legislation relating to this subject. All three portions of the legislation contain ordinances on the subject of sacrificial places and offerings. It may be taken for granted that in some way or other these have their roots in history, and do not merely hang in the air, quite away from or above the solid ground of actuality.
I.II.1. The main Jehovistic law, the so-called Book of the Covenant, contains (Exodus xx.24-26) the following ordinance: "An altar of earth shalt thou make unto me, and thereon shalt thou sacrifice thy burnt offerings and thy peace-offerings, thy sheep and thine oxen; in place where I cause my name to be honoured will I come unto and will bless thee. Or if thou wilt make me an altar of stones, thou shalt not build it of hewn stones, for if thou hast lifted up thy tool upon it thou hast polluted it. And thou shalt not go up to mine altar by steps, that thy nakedness be not discovered before it." Unquestionably it is not the altar of the tabernacle, which was made of wood and plated over with brass, nor that of Solomon's temple, which on its eastern side had a flight of steps, /1/