=Judæa.=--There is a similar lack of evidence concerning the existence among the Hebrews of anything that could be called literary property. The great body of the earlier Hebrew literature belonged, of course, to the class of sacred writings, best known to us through the books of the _Old Testament_ and of the _Apocrypha_. In addition to these, and partly, of course, included with these, were the various collections of the law and of the comments on the law, while later years produced the long series of commentaries known to the reader of to-day under the general name of the _Talmud_. The various transcripts required of these writings of the law and the prophets gave employment to numbers of scribes, who, in the first place, apparently were usually connected with the Temple, and must have derived their support from the ecclesiastical revenues, but who later formed a separate commercial class, receiving payment for their work as done. Professor Peters speaks of the age of Hezekiah as the golden age of Hebrew literature. He quotes the text, Prov. xxv., I, which says that “the men of Hezekiah translated” or transcribed, or wrote down the Proverbs of Solomon, as evidently an effort to collect and preserve the literary treasures of the past. He says, further: “It is not unnatural to suppose that the writing down of Solomon’s Proverbs was for the purpose of a library in Jerusalem, such as the Assyrian kings had long since collected at Nineveh. The _Book of Amos_ was edited (somewhere about 711 B.C.) apparently for this library ... and I suppose Hosea and Micah also to have been edited about this time and for the same purpose. It was the formation of this library at just this time and the desire to collect and preserve all the literary remains of the past, which led to the collection and preservation of so much of the literature of the Northern Kingdom, but lately brought into Judah by the Israelite _emigrés_. No tales of the valor of the heroes of Judah, no Judæan folk-lore ante-dating the time of David, have been handed down to us; this literature belonged to the Northern Kingdom. Literary and antiquarian zeal led to the collection and reception of these northern tales and poems into Hezekiah’s library ... where their use in historical works, owing to the awakened zeal for a knowledge of the past, was assured. So with the transfer of intellectual activity from Samaria, a new era begins in Judah, and soon the charming tales and poems of the north, preserved in the library of Hezekiah, begin to be woven into the more solid and ambitious works of the historians and lawyers of Jerusalem.