This rudimentary morality is summarized in the Decalogue,[344] for the Ten Commandments are indisputably of a high antiquity. One mark of the primitive character of this legislation is the negative form of the commandments.[345] Where there is need of the “thou shalt not,” the moral life is still on a low plane. The aim and purpose of the law thus worded are restraint and repression. There is a wide interval in moral chronology between the morality of the Ten Words and that of the Sermon on the Mount. In this earlier code there is only the slightest recognition of the truth that the truly moral life consists not in refraining from evil but in doing good. The nomads of the desert for whom these negative commands were framed, forbidding mostly crude, coarse crimes, were evidently a long way yet from that level of moral attainment where the only law is the law of love and liberty. [Sidenote: The moral anarchy of the age of the Judges] That period of transition which marks the passage of the Israelite tribes from the nomadic pastoral life of the desert to a settled agricultural life in Palestine may be instructively compared with that transition period in the history of Europe which followed the migration of the German tribes and their settlement in the provinces of the disrupted Roman Empire. It was an epoch characterized by the rapid decay of the clan and tribal organization, with an accompanying loss of the rude virtues of the nomadic and pastoral life, and the acquisition of the vices of the civilized or semicivilized communities among which they had thrust themselves and whose lands they had forcibly seized. Especially upon the religious system, which in Israel was ever closely bound up with morality, was felt the reaction of the new environment. Many foreign elements adopted from the Canaanite peoples were incorporated with it, while the national god Yahweh, as conceived by the popular imagination, tended to become sanguinary, capricious, and unjust. He became eminently a god of war, and is for his people right or wrong. Thus a chief bulwark of morality was impaired. The result was a moral interregnum. The old standards and rules of conduct lost their sanction. Every man did that which was right in his own eyes.[346] [Sidenote: Prophetism: its different elements] The necessities of the situation called into existence the monarchy (about 1050 B.C.). Then followed the disruption of the kingdom (about 953 B.C.). The significant matter in the moral domain during the period of the united and the divided kingdom[347] was the appearance of teachers called prophets or seers, men who were believed to speak the word given them by Yahweh. This emergence of prophetism in Israel is beyond controversy one of the most important phenomena in the moral history of the world.