The struggle upward out of barbarism could have been attended with nothing less than herculean belief on the part of the leaders of Israel, when we see this lapse came after their miraculous escape from Egypt and after the receipt of the ten commandments. Illuminating too is the fact that the making of the golden calf was superintended by no less a person than Aaron, the brother of Moses, his confidant and first lieutenant. When we come to the period of the Judges, we find the Israelites falling away from their humanitarianism. While Joshua and his contemporaries were alive, they held to their religion, but the gods of Canaan, together with the more easily understood and more deeply ingrained rites of idolatry, reappeared as soon as the patriarchs had passed away. Nothing indeed is more interesting in this study of the Old Testament than the record of the difficulty that the leaders and prophets had in keeping a semi-barbarous people up to their standard of civilization and humanization. Ethnological and archæological data picture the struggle forward but feebly, when compared to the written records of the Israelites, especially during the period of the Judges. The period of the Judges was the period of the formation of the nation, and had there not been all around them reminders of their own previous nomadic habits, and had they been a less excitable people, there would not have been the recurrence to barbaric traits that we find. Even then, the progress of the Israelites in humanitarianism is unique in the world. From the settlement in Canaan, which was about 1200 B. C., until the birth of Christ, they suffered conquest, disintegration, and many afflictions, but progressed steadily in humanitarianism. In that time the Greeks rose and fell, achieving great intellectual and æsthetic perfection, but failing to even approach the Israelites in humanity. A few hundred years after the settlement in Canaan, the Romans appear as a civilized people and, aided by a transplanted stoicism, developed a great humanitarianism under the Emperors Trajan and Hadrian; the last named, however, despite his greatness, indissolubly linked with the degeneracy that was the mark of Greek self-centredness, or lack of humanity, as Mahaffy calls it. The transition from idealism to nationalism is never affected with impunity, says Renan, and so the growing nation suffered in its material growth and through the insistence that Yahweh “loved Israel and hated all the rest of the world.”[239] Baal and Yahweh were not far apart and at Sechem there was a Baal-berith, or Baal covenant, which the idolators worshipped as Baal, and the Israelites as Yahweh.[240] “If the religion of Israel had not gone beyond this phase, it is certainly the last religion to which the world would have rallied.”[241]