All through the Old Testament the same story is repeated--sensuality, cruelty, and crime; and rebellion against the established laws. It is the burden of song and of prophecy--greed and scramble for power, the cause of continual dissension. The only time the Jews were reasonably quiet was when they were exterminating other nations, plundering and taking forcible possession of their women and female children as well as their property. The great burden of sin throughout the Old Testament consists in the infringement of the law established by Moses, to worship no other god except the one he manufactured--that is, a God endowed with all brutality and sensuality, without a representative form, a God that had all the senses and could utilize them. The wooden idol had these organs but could not use them, while the Mosaic God had them not but could exercise all the functions of animal life. In the light of history, all ages display the same process in the human mind--the same passions and the same tendencies, held more or less under restraint, according to the laws, customs, and habits of the people. The Jews during their whole career were more or less idolators, and were continually relapsing into the idolatry, of some one kind or another, of dead men, which was practiced under different celestial or animal emblems in the neighboring countries. And it was not ended until after the Babylonish captivity, 588 B.C., and when Ezra returned to Jerusalem, 557 B.C., who collected the various manuscripts and put them into some sort of shape and started to rebuild the Temple. This event took place during the reign of Xerxes son of Darius. Ezra and his companions had been educated meanwhile. They had enjoyed the privilege of a Babylonian education. They had the advantage of their learning, their philosophy. Now they returned better equipped mentally than ever they were before their captivity. And for the first time they began to call themselves "holy seed" (chapter ix). They had intermarried with the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians, Amorites, etc., (verse 2) "so that the holy seed have mingled themselves with the people of those lands." Verse 6, this priest goes into hysterics: "O my God, I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face to thee," etc. Chapter x: He prays, confesses, and weeps and casts himself down before the house of God, etc. Verse 11: "And separate yourself from the people of the land, and from the strange wives." Of course their wives were sent adrift. That was the first time in their history that marriages were restricted to their own nation. This also is the first wholesale divorce on record. Intermarriages they had been guilty of for many centuries, and they were never accounted a sin until the time of Ezra. After this reformation the same sins continue, intermarriages perhaps excepted. The animal predominated, as it naturally would. Selfishness was more prominent than ever.