23. _Post-exilic Judaism._--With Nehemiah and Ezra we enter upon the era in which a new impulse gave to Jewish life and thought that form which became the characteristic orthodox Judaism. It was not a new religion that took root; older tendencies were diverted into new paths, the existing material was shaped to new ends. Judah was now a religious community whose representative was the high priest of Jerusalem. Instead of sacerdotal kings, there were royal priests, anointed with oil, arrayed with kingly insignia, claiming the usual royal dues in addition to the customary rights of the priests. With his priests and Levites, and with the chiefs and nobles of the Jewish families, the high priest directs this small state, and his death marks an epoch as truly as did that of the monarchs in the past. This hierarchical government, which can find no foundation in the Hebrew monarchy, is the forerunner of the Sanhedrin (q.v.); it is an institution which, however inaugurated, set its stamp upon the narratives which have survived. Laws were recast in accordance with the requirements of the time, with the result that, by the side of usages evidently of very great antiquity, details now appear which were previously unknown or wholly unsuitable. The age, which the scanty historical traditions themselves represent as one of supreme importance for the history of the Jews, once seemed devoid of interest, and it is entirely through the laborious scholarship of the 19th century that it now begins to reveal its profound significance. The Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis, that the hierarchical law in its complete form in the Pentateuch stands at the close and not at the beginning of biblical history, that this mature Judaism was the fruit of the 5th century B.C. and not a divinely appointed institution at the exodus (nearly ten centuries previously), has won the recognition of almost all Old Testament scholars. It has been substantiated by numerous subsidiary investigations in diverse departments, from different standpoints, and under various aspects, and can be replaced only by one which shall more adequately explain the literary and historical evidence (see further, p. 289).