materialistic conceptions of God gained entrance with the masses of the Israelitish people. If Moab had his Kemosh, and Ammon his Milkom, then Israel had his "Eternal," who, after the model of all other national gods, protected and abandoned his "clients" at pleasure, in the one case winning, in the other losing, the devotion of his partisans. In times of distress, in which the Israelites groaned under the yoke of the alien, the enslaved "forgot" their "conquered" "Eternal." As they paid the tribute due the strange king, and yielded themselves to his power, so they submitted to the strange god, and paid him his due tribute of devotion. It followed that liberation from the yoke of the stranger coincided with return to the God of Israel, the "Eternal." At such times the national spirit leaped into flaming life. This sums up the achievements of the hero-Judges. But the traces of repeated backsliding were deep and long visible, for, together with the religious ideas of the strange peoples, the Israelites accepted their customs, as a rule corrupt and noxious customs, in sharp contrast with the lofty principles of the Mosaic Law, designed to control social life and the life of the individual. [10] "Ye have forsaken me," says God unto Israel, "and served other gods; wherefore I will deliver you no more. Go and cry unto the gods which ye have chosen: let them deliver you in the time of your tribulations" (Judges X, 13-14). The same idea is brought out still more forcibly in the arguments adduced by Jephthah in his message to the king of Ammon (more correctly, Moab), who had laid claim to Israelitish lands: "Thou," says Jephthah, "mayest possess that which Kemosh thy god giveth thee to possess, but what the Lord our God giveth us to possess, that will we possess" (Judges xi, 24). Usually these words are taken ironically; to me they seem to convey literal truth rather than irony.