the following is the right order : Ruth, Psalms, Job, Proverbs ; the Book of Ruth precedes the Psalter as its prologue, for Ruth is the ancestor of him to whom the sacred lyric owes its richest and most flourishing era. It is undoubtedly the most natural order that the Psalter should open the division of the Eethubim, and for this reason : that, according to the stock which forms the basis of it, it represents the time of David, and then afterwards in like manner the Proverbs and Job represent the Chokma-literature of the age of Solomon. But it is at once evident that it could have no other place but among the Eethubim.
The codex of the giving of the Law, which is the foundation of the old covenant and of the nationality of Israel, as also of all its subsequent literature, occupies the first place in the canon. Under the collective title of נביאים, a series of historical writings of a prophetic character, which trace the history of Israel from the occupation of Canaan to the first gleam of light in the gloomy retributive condition of the Babylonish Exile (Prophetee priores) is first attached to these five books of the Thora ; and then a series of strictly prophetical writings by the prophets themselves which extend to the time of Darius Nothus, and indeed to the time of Nehemiah's second sojourn in Jerusalem under this Persian king (Prophetee potteriores). Regarded chronologically, the first series would better correspond to the second if the historical books of the Persian period (Chronicles with Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther) were joined to it ; but for a very good reason this has not been done. The Israelitish literature has marked out two sharply defined and distinct methods of writing history, viz. the annalistic and the prophetic. The so-called Elohistic and so-called Jehovistic form of historical writing in the Pentateuch might serve as general types of these. The historical books of the Persian period are, however, of the annalistic, not of the prophetic character (although the Chronicles have taken up and incorporated many remnants of the prophetic form of historical writing, and the Books of the Eings, vice versd, many remnants of the annalistic) : they could not therefore stand among the Proplietce priores. But with the Book of Ruth it is different. This short book is so like the end of the Book of the Judges (ch. xvii — xxi), that it might
