Canaanitish worship, combined with the threatening position of Assyria, gave a new, peculiar, and lofty flight to the religious development of the Israelites. In its struggles against the house of Omri the prophetic power was inwardly ripened and strengthened. With the relaxation of persecution the intensity and ecstacy of the prophets must have been relaxed. In the place of the passionate strife came a more peaceful tone, greater calmness, more earnest introspection. Yet the prophetic power was not merely purified, it was also deepened. By degrees, elements which had been developed in other spheres exercised an influence on the prophetic work, on the reflection on the nature and will of Jehovah, and the effort to be absorbed in him. The expression and outlet which religious feeling had found in religious songs, in invocations, and hymns of thanksgiving, praise and penitence, supplied to the prophetic feeling a fuller, broader and more variable background. To the oldest account of the fortunes of Israel, which arose in priestly circles, and of the covenant which his God had once made with him, to the collection and establishment of the law which formed the contents of this covenant, was soon added the second text, which described in a more lively manner the manifestations of the tribal God, his guidance of the patriarchs and forefathers of the nation, and, like the older text, it was for a long time in the hands of the prophets. Even before Joel, at the time when the high-priest Jehoiada was regent for king Joash in Judah (II. 259), urged the nation to repentance and introspection, the hand of a prophet had united those two texts. Penetrated by their contents, he had, as might be expected from his point of view, laid the main stress on the promises and prophecies, on the relation of man to God, on the nature of man, and his duty in life. In this form the books of the fortunes of the patriarchs, of the covenant of Jehovah and Israel, of the promise of protection and blessing in return for the observation of this covenant, must have exercised an especial influence on the circle of the prophets; they showed them the past in the closest relation to the present; they strengthened their conviction that the external relation was insufficient, that the essential point was the internal relation of man to his God.