It was during the age of the kings that the mass of cosmological myths and legends borrowed from Babylonia,--doubtless largely through contact with Assyria,--the traditions of the patriarchs, and the story of the sojourn in Egypt and the Exodus, all of which had been transmitted from the foretime orally or in writing, was worked over and edited afresh, in which process it received the indelible stamp of the deeper and truer moral consciousness of this later age. For though probably little of this work was done by the prophets themselves, it was done by men who wrote under the inspiration of the new thoughts of God and of his moral government which had been awakened in the souls of the great teachers of Israel. The polytheistic elements of these myths and traditions and their grosser and more archaic immoralities were pruned away, while at the same time they were given a monotheistic cast and a truer morality was breathed into them. In a word, all this literary material was censored by the growing moral consciousness of Israel. The outcome was the creation of a literature absolutely unique in its moral educative worth. Thus the remolded and moralized Chaldean account of the creation of the world and the beginnings of human history came to form the basis of the opening chapters of Genesis, whose influence upon Hebrew morality, through molding Israel’s idea of the character of Yahweh and of his relations to man, it would hardly be possible to exaggerate. Also the tradition of the Exodus, given now its final form and received by the later generations of Israel as an historically true account of the experiences of their fathers, left an ineffaceable impress upon the mind and heart of the Hebrew nation, determining largely their ideas as to their chief moral obligations as the chosen and covenanted people of Yahweh. It was this tradition of their heroic past which was the inspiration of the moral strivings of the nation. Furthermore, all this literary material, thus reshaped and colored by the growing monotheistic ideas of the teachers of Israel and bearing the stamp of their gradually deepening moral consciousness, and in this form transmitted to the Aryan nations of the West, was destined to become one of the most important factors not merely in the religious but especially in the moral life of the European peoples. [Sidenote: The ethicalizing of pagan festivals and cults] Just as the myths and traditions, in part borrowed from neighboring peoples and in part transmitted from Israel’s own foretime, were transformed and moralized by the ethical genius of the Hebrew spirit, so were the institutions and festivals borrowed by the Israelites from kindred Semitic peoples, and particularly from the Canaanites, transmuted and moralized.[365] Permeated by the ethical spirit of Israel’s great teachers and transformed into moral symbols, these originally nonethical agricultural cults and festivals were given a distinct educative value.