About a hundred years later, towards the middle of the ninth century B.C., both these texts were combined and transformed into one work. The author of this combined text (the Jahvist) was guided by the feelings and views of the prophets. He is superior to the authors of the two texts in versatility, in reflection, and vivid power of imagination. Not only did he work up the two texts into one and insert into the whole his own views, but he has added some sections, the materials of which must have been furnished partly by tradition and partly by written records.[577] In this shape were the first four books of the Pentateuch, the beginning and the end of the fifth book, and the book of Joshua, at the time of the prophets Amos and Hosea. The "Second Law," _i.e._ the main portion of the fifth book of the Pentateuch,[578] on the other hand, was not written till the time of king Josiah, about 625 B.C., and was then added to the rest. The author of this second law also revised the book of Joshua.[579]
If we compare the Hebrew account of the Creation with the cosmogonies of Berosus and Philo (pp. 257, 353), and the narrative of Noah's deluge with the description of the flood on the Assyrian tablets and in Berosus (p. 240 ff.), we see at the first glance how far asunder the conceptions lie--with what clearness and vigour the Hebrews have succeeded in purifying and exalting the rude fancies of the nations so closely akin to them--the ancient common possession of the Eastern Semitic tribes, from whom the Hebrews were sprung. This power--the patient labour, the serious and thoughtful effort to deepen the traditions of the past into an ethical significance, to sublimate legends into simple moral teaching, and transplant the myth into the region of moral earnestness and moral purpose--to pass beyond the rude naturalism of their kinsmen into the supernatural--from the varied polytheism of Babel and Canaan to monotheism--this it is which gives to the Hebrews the first place, and not among Semitic nations only, in the sphere of religious feeling and development. At a later period the Greeks understood how to breathe life, beauty and nobility into the gods of the Phenicians, whose rites came over to Hellas; they could change Ashera-Bilit, the goddess of prostitution, into the youthful Aphrodite, the goddess of blooming grace, and the highest charm of love; but the Hebrews practised the severer, sterner, and loftier task of carrying religious feeling beyond the life of nature, of conceiving the highest power as morally in opposition to natural impulses and forces, of publishing the supremacy of the intellectual and moral over the natural being.