The book contains much archaic material--traditions, customs, judicial decisions, laws, and rituals--manifestly handed down from the earliest times in Israel, with additions made at the moment of its appearance, and all bearing plainly the stamp of the spirit and temper of these later times. Hence it comes that there are two moralities embodied in the work--an atavistic ritual morality and a progressive social morality. [Sidenote: The ritual ethics of the code] In that part of the code which has to do with the ethics of ritualism the dominant motive of the editors or compilers springs from a dread and abhorrence of idolatry, like the dread and abhorrence of heresy in medieval Christendom. Yahweh will divide his worship with no other god. Israel had gone after other gods and Yahweh had given her into the hands of the Assyrians. A like fate awaited Judah if she served any other than him: “Ye shall not go after other gods, or the gods of the people which are round about you, lest the anger of the Lord be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth,”[369] is the first commandment with threatening. Fear that Yahweh would do unto Judah as he had done unto Israel awakened the conscience of the nation. Idolatry was suppressed; the high places on which incense was burned unto the Baals were defiled, and the altars and the images of the strange gods were broken down and ground into dust. This reform movement practically ended the long struggle which had gone on now for six hundred years and more between polytheism and the rising monotheism of the people of Israel. But unfortunately while the monotheistic element of the religion of Yahweh was brought out by the reform in sharper outline, the ethical element was obscured. The religion that was now made the exclusive worship was really little more than a pagan cult. It consisted in the careful keeping of feast days and the observance of the rites and sacrifices of the Temple--an inheritance largely from the heathen nations around about Israel. Nothing could have been more opposed to true prophetism. It was the triumph of reactionary ritualism. This victory of ritualism has exerted an almost incalculable influence upon the development of morality from the time of King Josiah down to the present day. The immediate effect upon prophetism in Judah was most lamentable. “Deuteronomy simply confirmed the belief that religion was concerned with ritual rather than with morality.”[370] And so the outcome of the promulgation of a written revealed law was, in the words of Wellhausen, “the death of prophecy.”[371]