But the destruction of the national polity of Israel came in time to save the national religion. When Judæa was merely a province of a great empire, the nationality of the Jews could survive only in the religion of which Jahveh was the head. The very manner in which the change took place was exceptionally favourable to Judaism. The captivity, the carrying away of the best families of the Jews into an inland district of the empire, was admirably calculated to destroy Jahveh’s rivals. The nucleus of the nation, placed in such close contact with foreign religions, by patriotism alone would have been made sincere worshippers of Jahveh. Far away from the local idolatries of Judæa, the exiles accepted the pure religion of the prophets. The most imaginative and the most spiritual of the greater prophets, Ezekiel and the second Isaiah, sprang from their ranks. And thus at last the prophetic became the popular religion, and Jahveh as God reigned over Israel. When the exiles returned to Judæa, they carried with them a pure and moral monotheism. The remainder of the people readily adopted their principles. Judaism from this time was the sole religion of the Jews, the expression of their national patriotism. Consolidated now finally into the rigid system of the law, with a multitude of minute observances that kept it constantly before their eyes, it was placed beyond reach of attack. Henceforth all Jahveh’s people worshipped Jahveh only, professed obedience to his precepts, and knew him as the one true God.[32]
Thus, in outward semblance, the prophets won their battle. They won it in consequence of the events they most bitterly deplored. With their religion the only security of their nationality, the Jews never afterwards wavered in their allegiance to it. Persecution made them cling to it more firmly; it inspired them in the noblest period of their history, the crisis which produced the Maccabees. Even when an empire greater than the Chaldean conquered them, and a severer sentence exiled them from Judæa, dispersed over the world, they held to their religion. The moral monotheism which Jahvism had developed was now unalterably settled. New doctrines were added to it, some of which became of the first importance, but its primary principles were fixed for ever. And yet, at the very moment at which Judaism was thus established, there was sown the seed of a new religion, destined ultimately to spring from it in defiance of its spirit of privilege. The nobler prophets sought to make their religion the national glory of Israel, a blessing to be taken by all the world meekly from Israel’s hands; and their efforts long afterwards produced a religion which ignored national distinctions. For at the time of the full development of Judaism the movement towards Christianity began.