Two songs, attributed to Moses, are also incorporated in the book. They seem to be a reflection of the curses and blessings pronounced respectively on Ebal and Gerizim. The one paints the sufferings which forgetfulness of Yahveh was to bring upon Israel; the other describes the future happiness and glory of the several tribes. Chiefest among them are Levi and the house of Joseph; ‘the precious things’ of the Promised Land are reserved for Ephraim and Manasseh, whose warriors shall drive the enemies of Yahveh to the ends of the earth. Levi shall be the lawgiver and instructor of Israel, while Benjamin shall be the ‘beloved of the Lord,’ who shall ‘dwell between his shoulders’ at Shiloh. Judah, on the other hand, stands in the background; little is said of him except a prayer that he should be delivered from his enemies. And Simeon is passed over altogether. It is plain that this second song or ‘blessing’ must be of early date. It cannot be later than the early days of the conquest of Canaan, when Ephraim and Manasseh were still the most powerful of the tribes, and when the tabernacle of Yahveh was erected at Shiloh. The tribes were still united among themselves; they still recognised a common God and a common worship, and had not as yet fallen upon the evil days depicted in the book of Judges. The tone of the song throughout is that of triumph and success; the Israelites must have still been in their first flush of victory, and the house of Joseph have still been their leader in war. But history knows of only two periods when such was the case; the one period that which followed the conquest of the Amorite kingdoms east of the Jordan, the other period that which saw Joshua the Ephraimite at the head of the armies of Israel. Hebrew antiquity decided that it was to the first period that the song belonged.[253] The death of Moses was placed on the summit of one of the mountains of Abarim—the mountains of the ‘Hebrews’—in the land of Moab over against the temple of Baal-Peor. On the one side he looked down upon the scene of his last victory over the opponents of his law, on the place where the Midianites and their Israelitish sympathisers had been slain; on the other side lay the Land of Promise, to the borders of which he had led his people. The peak of Pisgah on which he stood had been dedicated in old days to the worship of Nebo, the Babylonian god of prophecy and literature, the interpreter of the will of Merodach, the supreme divinity of Babylon. It was no accident that the prophet and legislator of Israel, the interpreter of the will of Yahveh, should die on the same mountain-peak.