The continuity is, however, only a narrative continuity; historically there are great gaps in it, or, more exactly, the traditions cluster about only a few points, such as the exodus and the invasion of Palestine, and these are embellished with a wealth of legendary and mythical circumstance beneath which the facts are effectually hidden. The nature of this material may be judged from the fact that between Joshua and Eli there are only the episodes of the judges, strung on a chronological string, generalized as experiences of all Israel, and put under a theological judgment--invaluable as pictures of civilization, but as a history of a couple of centuries (the chronology says four) evidently insufficient. On the other side of the exodus are, according to the genealogies, three or four generations (the chronology again makes it four hundred years) of total ignorance; beyond that lies the patriarchal story, the realm of pure legend. Out of such materials Judæan authors in the tenth and following centuries constructed the history of their people from the remotest antiquity, and, as commonly happens with the first precipitation of national traditions, preformed all subsequent representations. This earliest book of history is commonly designated in the Pentateuch and Joshua by the symbol J. It is disputed whether the oldest history of the founding of the kingdom in Samuel should be regarded as a continuation of J. If it were meant thereby to affirm unity of authorship of this strand from Genesis to Samuel, that would be saying much more than the facts warrant; but there is through the whole so noteworthy a congruity of conception and sameness of excellence in style that it is not inappropriate to use for it the one symbol J in the sense of the oldest Judæan history. CHAPTER XI KINGS