It was a period of anarchy and perpetual war. Without a head, and without cohesion, it seems strange that they did not perish utterly or become absorbed by the older population of the land. That the nation should have survived admits of only one explanation. It possessed a common faith, a common sanctuary, and a common code of sacred laws. As in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire the Church preserved the fabric of society, and eventually brought order out of chaos, so, too, in ancient Israel, the nation owed its continued existence to the law which had been given by Moses. Only the iron fetters of a written law, with its organised priesthood and sanctions, and, above all, the knowledge that it existed, could have prevented the process of political and social disintegration from rapidly running its course. Had the religion of Israel been merely that result of evolution which is dreamed of by some modern writers, and the law of Moses the invention of a later age, there would have been no Israel in which a religion could have developed, or a code of laws have been compiled. The outward unity of the tribes in Egypt and the desert was shattered by the settlement in Canaan, and all that remained was the inward and religious unity that had been forced upon them by the genius of an individual legislator. The place of the political head and leader was supplied by the organised cult and elaborate code of laws which he had bequeathed to the nation. To all external appearance, indeed, Israel had ceased to be a nation, and had been reduced to a scattered and anarchical collection of marauding tribes; but the elements which could again bind them together still existed—the belief in the same national God, the rites with which He was worshipped, and the priesthood and sanctuary where the tradition of the law was preserved. That this is no imaginary picture is proved by the Song of Deborah. The Song is admitted by the most sceptical of critics to belong to the age to which it is assigned, and consequently to reflect the ideas of the Israelite shortly after the settlement in Canaan. No composition of the Exilic period could be more uncompromising in its monotheism, and its assertion that Yahveh alone is the God of Israel. And the Song further assumes that the tribes of Israel, disunited though they otherwise may be, are nevertheless bound together by a common faith in the one national God. Nor is this all. Israel still possesses, even among its northern tribes, ‘legislators’ like Moses, and scribes who handle the pen (Judg. v. 14). Writing, therefore, is still known and practised even among a people so oppressed by their enemies that ‘the highways were unoccupied,’ and the fellahin of the villages had ceased to exist. Laws, too, were still promulgated in continuation of the laws of Moses, and the people of Israel are ‘the people of the Lord.’