The Prophets were not philosophers of culture; they did not start from great principles abstracted from the study of experience, in pondering the course of the world; but conviction and enthusiasm lived in them. They were bad politicians, but unsurpassable representatives of the idea of Nationality. An experienced statesman of that age would have refrained from censuring the alliance with foreign powers; that was the only chance left to the Hebrew nation of adding a few hours of existence to those already counted. But the Prophets lash this political experiment at every step, and say that only the moral awakening of the nation can bring about a possibility of saving its political existence. ‘Ephraim delights in wind and pursues east-wind, while he daily perpetrates more lies and oppression, and they make covenant with Assyria, and oil is carried to Egypt,’ says Hosea (XII. 2 [2]), to the Northern kingdom. At the very last hour Jeremiah (II. 18) treats fraternisation with the foreigners as equivalent to abandoning Jahveh: ‘What hast thou to do with the road to Egypt to drink of the water of the Shîchôr [Nile]? and what hast thou to do with the road to Assyria to drink of the water of the River [Euphrates]?’ They were the purest and most ideal representatives of national individuality and independence. We are here especially interested in one point relating to the history of Religion—the Prophets’ mode of dealing with the two Divine names Elôhîm and Jahveh. § 2. It is well known that the Hebrew idea of God finds expression in the canonical Biblical literature in two distinct ways: in the direction of Elôhîm and in that of Jahveh. Each grasps the idea of God, and tries to use it for the instruction of the people, in its peculiar fashion. The Jahveistic school, which is identical with Prophetism, is opposed to the Elohistic, and avoids the employment of Elôhîm as a proper name of God; it treats Elôhîm as merely a universal generic name for Deity, but not as the proper name of the One God. We can easily convince ourselves of this by contemplating the collections of speeches of the Prophets, and the fundamental part of Deuteronomy, which stands nearer to the prophetic spirit than any other part of the Pentateuch. Here we have prevailingly only ‘Jehovah my (thy, our, Israel’s) Elôhîm,’ but these expressions are often abandoned for the simple hâ-Elôhîm, which is regarded as a proper name completely covering the name Jahveh.[697] But in prophetical books in which the Elohistic appellations occur here and there as proper names of the Deity, these cannot from their rare occurrence serve as a counterpoise to the extensive use of the name Jahveh. Their use can only be regarded as a reference to the past, in presence of the then modern view of the Deity. The immediate question, which still remains open after the results gained by the critical school, in establishing the mutual relation of the two Divine names, may