a cruel Molech, calling for savage rites of pitiless bloodshed. Thou, Iahvah--not these nor their fellows--art our true and only God. _Surely, in vain_ (for nought, bootlessly, 1 Sam. xxv. 21; chap. v. 2, xvi. 19) _on the hills did we raise a din_ (lit. 'hath one raised'; reading בַּגְּבָעוֹת and הֵרִים); _surely, in Iahvah our God is the safety of Israel!_ The Hebrew cannot be original as it now stands in the Masoretic text, for it is ungrammatical. The changes I have made will be seen to be very slight, and the sense obtained is much the same as Ewald's _Surely in vain from the hills is the noise, from the mountains_ (where every reader must feel that _from the mountains_ is a forcible-feeble addition which adds nothing to the sense). We might also perhaps detach the _mem_ from the term for 'hills,' and connect it with the preceding word, thus getting the meaning: _Surely, for Lies are the hills, the uproar of the mountains!_ (הָרִים הֲמֹון ... לִשְׁקָרִים); that is to say, the high-places are devoted to delusive nonentities, who can do nothing in return for the wild orgiastic worship bestowed on them; a thought which contrasts very well with the second half of the verse: _Surely, in Iahvah our God is the safety of Israel!_ The confession continues: _And as for the Shame_--the shameful idol, the Baal whose worship involved shameful rites (chap. xi. 13; Hos. ix. 10), and who put his worshippers to shame, by disappointing them of help in the hour of their need (ii. 8, 26, 27)--_as for the Shame_--in contrast with Iahvah, the Safety of Israel, who gives all, and requires little or nothing of this kind in return--_it devoured the labour of our fathers from our youth, their flocks and their herds, their sons and their daughters_. The allusion is to the insatiable greed of the idol-priests, and the lavish expense of perpetually recurring feasts and sacrifices, which constituted a serious drain upon the resources of a pastoral and agricultural community; and to the bloody rites which, not content with animal offerings, demanded human victims for the altars of an appalling superstition. _Let us lie down in our shame, and let our infamy cover us! for toward Iahvah our God we trespassed, we and our fathers, from our youth even unto this day, and obeyed not the voice of Iahvah our God._ A more complete acknowledgment of sin could hardly be conceived; no palliating circumstances are alleged, no excuses devised, of the kind with which men usually seek to soothe a disturbed conscience. The strong seductions of Canaanite worship, the temptation to join in the joyful merriment of idol-festivals, the invitation of friends and neighbours, the contagion of example,--all these extenuating facts must have been at least as well known to the prophet as to modern critics, but he is expressively silent on the point of mitigating circumstances in the case of a nation to whom such light and guidance had come, as came to Israel.