Refinement of feeling, personal cleanliness, self-restraint, order, and purity were taught by a system of ordinances and observances, which were intertwined through all the affairs of life, so that the Jew who lived up to his law must of necessity rise to a noble manhood. But this system, so ideally perfect, encountered an age of darkness. Like all beautiful ideals, the theocratic republic of Moses suffered under the handling of coarse human fingers. Without printed books or printing, or any of the thousand modern means of perpetuating ideas, the Jews were constantly tempted to lapse into the customs of the heathen tribes around. The question whether Jehovah or Baal were God was kept open for discussion, and sometimes, for long periods, idolatry prevailed. Then came the subjugation and the miseries of a foreign yoke, and the words of Moses were fulfilled: "Because thou servedst not the Lord thy God, with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things, therefore shalt thou serve the enemy whom the Lord shall send against thee, in hunger and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things; and he shall put a yoke of iron on thy neck, till he have destroyed thee." The history of the Jewish nation, in the Book of Judges, presents a succession of these periods of oppression, and of deliverance by a series of divinely inspired leaders, sent in answer to repentant prayers. It is entirely in keeping with the whole character of the Mosaic institutions, and the customs of the Jewish people, that one of these inspired deliverers should be a woman. We are not surprised at the familiar manner in which it is announced, as a thing quite in the natural order, that the chief magistrate of the Jewish nation, for the time being, was a woman divinely ordained and gifted. Thus the story is introduced:--