And if Yahweh is worshipped by Moses on a mountain (Sinai) and His law is proclaimed at a spring, if Moses perhaps himself really fashioned the brazen serpent as a sensible symbol of Yahweh, Yahweh nevertheless remains without visible representation in or on the Ark; He is never conceived as the sheer equivalent of natural forces; and all mythology is absent here--the vehement rejection of the calf-worship shows this strikingly. Michael Angelo, himself a soul of fire, understood Moses well, Gunkel thinks.[41] The second period, from Elijah's first public appearance (about 860 B.C.) to the Dedication of the Second Temple (516 B.C.), and on to the public subscription to the Law of Moses, under Ezra (in 444 B.C.), is surpassed, in spiritual richness and importance, only by the classical times of Christianity itself. Its beginning, its middle, and its end each possess distinctive characters. The whole opens with Elijah, 'the grandest heroic figure in all the Bible,' as it still breathes and burns in the First Book of Kings. 'For Elijah there existed not, in different regions, forces possessed of equal rights and equal claims to adoration, but everywhere only one Holy Power that revealed Itself, not like Baal, in the life of Nature, but like Yahweh, in the moral demands of the Spirit' (Wellhausen). And then (in about 750 B.C.) appears Amos, the first of the noble 'storm-birds' who herald the coming national destructions and divine survivals. 'Yahweh was for these prophets above all the god of justice, and God of Israel only in so far as Israel satisfied His demands of justice. And yet the special relation of Yahweh to Israel is still recognized as real; the ethical truth, which now stood high above Israel, had, after all, arisen within Israel and could still only be found within it.' The two oldest lengthy narrative documents of the Pentateuch--the Yahwist (J) and the Ephraemite (E)--appear to have been composed, the first in Judah in the time of Elijah, the second in Israel in the time of Amos. J gives us the immortal stories of Paradise and the Fall, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood; E, Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac; and the documents conjointly furnish the more naive and picturesque parts of the grand accounts of the Patriarchs generally--the first great narrative stage of the Pentateuch. God here gives us some of His most exquisite self-revelations through the Israelitish peasant-soul. And Isaiah of Jerusalem, successful statesman as well as deep seer, still vividly lives for us in some thirty-six chapters of that great collection the 'Book of Isaiah' (i-xii, xv-xx, xxii-xxxix). There is his majestic vocation in about 740 B.C., described by himself, without ambiguity, as a precise, objective revelation (chap. vi); and there is the divinely impressive close of his long and great activity, when he nerves King Hezekiah to refuse the surrender of the Holy City to the all-powerful Sennacherib, King of Assyria: that Yahweh would not