My purpose in these Lectures is to give a short history, as clear as I can make it, of the Religion of the Old Testament. By this I mean that I have endeavored to group the religious material contained in that book in chronological order, and to trace the historical development, which then becomes visible, from its beginning to its end. This beginning has been but lightly touched upon, partly because of its extreme obscurity and partly because of my own insufficient equipment to deal adequately with so complex a problem; but more space has thus been won for the delineation of that phase of the Jewish religion in which it stood at the close of the Old Testament period, and on the lines of which it was destined to develop for many subsequent centuries. from the Preface
