Let us make clear the point, essential to our present argument, that from cover to cover the “Old Testament” is propaganda. Those who created it created it as propaganda, having no remotest idea of anything else. Nowadays our docile population reads it and accepts it as the literal inspired Word--not realizing that the book is divided between two kinds of propaganda, which exactly cancel each other: the propaganda of a ruling class, teaching reverence for kings and priests, and the propaganda of rebels, clamoring for the overthrow of these same kings and priests! This Old Testament is also offered to us in the literature classes, so it will be worth our while to consider it from that point of view. Manifestly there is much of it which never pretended to be literature. There are weary chronicles of the doings of kings, and lists of their sons and grandsons. You may find acres of this in our big libraries, but it is classified as genealogy, not literature. Likewise there are the laws of the Hebrews, which belong in the legal department. There are architectural specifications for the temple, and rules of hygiene--all important to a historian, but rubbish to anybody else. There are a great number of legends which are eternally delightful to children, stories of the creation and the fall of man, and of gods and devils and miracles, precisely as important as similar stories among the ancient Anglo-Saxons, or the ancient Greeks, or the ancient Egyptians, or the ancient Hopis. Among these stories are a few which display fine feeling and narrative skill, and so for the first time we have literature. There is one attempt at a drama; it is crude and confused--any sophomore, having taken a course in dramatic construction at a state university, could show the author of the Book of Job how to clarify his theme and cut out the repetitions. But in the midst of such crudities is magnificent poetry, which our university courses have not yet taught us to equal. Likewise there is some shrewd philosophy--and it is amusing to note that our verbal inspirationalists accept the worldly-wise common sense of the Proverbs and the bleak cynicism of Ecclesiastes as equally divine with the fervor of Isaiah and the fanatical rage of Jeremiah. Finally, there is some lyric poetry of a spiritual nature, this also full of repetition. If you are judging it as ritual, that is all right, because ritual is intended to affect the subconscious, and repetition is the essence of the process. The difference between ritual and literature is that the latter makes its appeal to the conscious mind, where a little repetition goes a long way.