Nor is it a less singular proof of the power of cherished prepossessions that such a medley of the sublime religious ideas and lofty poetry of the prophetic ages, with such a mass of puerile and absurd legends, such obvious contradictions, and such a number of passages obviously dating from a later period, should be received by many men of intelligence, even to the present day, as the work of a single contemporary writer, the inspired prophet Moses. When we pass from the Pentateuch to the succeeding Books of Joshua and of Judges the same remarks apply. The falling of the walls of Jericho at the sound of the trumpet, and the defeat of an army of 135,000 men of Midian and Amalek with a slaughter of 120,000, by 300 men under Gideon, armed with pitchers and trumpets, are on a par with the wandering of 2,500,000 Israelites in the desert for forty years, fed with manna of the size of hoar-frost. The moral atmosphere also continues to be that of Red Indians down to the time of David, for we read of nothing but murders and massacres, sometimes of other races, sometimes of one tribe by another; while the actions selected for special commendation are like those of Jael, who drove a nail into the head of the sleeping fugitive whom she had invited into her tent; or of Jephthah, who sacrificed his daughter as an offering to the Lord in obedience to a vow. This barbarous state of manners is confirmed by Flinders Petrie's discoveries at the supposed site of Lachish, which show the ruins of a walled city of the Amorites, built upon by the mud hovels of a race as rude as the rudest Bedouins who now wander on the edge of the Arabian desert. The only safe conclusion seems to be that authentic annals of Jewish history only begin with the Monarchy, and that everything prior to David and Solomon, or possibly Saul and Samuel, consists of myth, legend, and oral tradition, so inextricably blended, and so mixed up with successive later additions, as to give no certain information as to events or dates.