§ 5. In general the Northern kingdom, in which no theocratic tendency seized on and transformed the existing mass of stories, held the legends, which were guided in a national direction, firmer, and felt more affection for them. Besides the Patriarchal stories, those which fill up the age of the Judges (Shôpheṭîm) gave the most scope to national pride. There the stories of the true Hebrew national heroes and their heroic battles with the Philistines are found. In respect to theocracy this whole age has little importance, and the stories were utterly incapable of a theocratic transformation. For the very aim of Hebrew theocracy was, first to prefigure the theocratic destiny of the Hebrews in the history of the primeval age, and then to show in as favourable a light as possible the beneficent revolution brought on by the house of David. But for this purpose it was essential that this period of theocratic movement should contrast advantageously with an untheocratic time, unfavourable to any such movement, and that the spirit of David’s rule should be the very opposite of the preceding administrations. Consequently, the stories of the Judges suffered no theocratic transformation. But transformation and development constitute the very life of Legend, which, if not accommodated to the new current of feeling, is abandoned, and ceases to live; having in its old form no meaning to a new age. There are unequivocal testimonies which prove that to the theocratic mind the stories of the Judges were utterly dead, and were consequently neglected by it. Two of these testimonies deserve especial mention. The Book of Chronicles (dibhrê hay-yâmîm), which we have been long accustomed to regard as a history written in a strictly sacerdotal spirit, enumerating by name all the priests, Levites, singers and door-keepers of the central sanctuary of Jerusalem, utters not a syllable respecting the entire period of the Judges, but commences the history proper at the death of Saul and accession of David. And another part of the Canon, the Book of Ruth, the object of which is to connect David’s genealogy with an idyl, and which expresses the moderate theocratic ideas of the restoration, while the matter of its narrative occupies no determinate chronological position, indicates this very chronological vagueness by the words wa-yehî bîmê shephôt hash-shôpheṭîm, ‘it was in the days when the Judges ruled,’ _i.e._ it was once in the olden time (Ruth I. 1). The ‘Judges’ time' here denotes an indeterminate period, whose chronology is effaced. That period, in fact, does labour under an indefiniteness which almost baffles the chronologist, and the Biblical Canon itself could only be drawn up by leaving an excessively lax connexion between the three periods—the occupation of Canaan by the Hebrews, the monarchy after David, and the untheocratic period lying between the two.