ABSTRACT
We have to do with a people fixed to the land upon which they lived. The social life of the Hebrews after they settled in Canaan was not what it had been anterior to the settlement. Little is known of them up to this time. The fragmentary and imperfect records that remain in what purports to be a history of their progenitors in Genesis, and in later portions of the Hexateuch of themselves while in Egypt and after they got out into the Arabian peninsula, when freed from the manifest marks of late prophetic and priestly historians, leave us in great uncertainty. But that they were a nomadic people beyond the Jordan, before they entered Canaan, living as shepherds or herdsmen, unsettled and migratory, without private property in land, cultivating the ground but little if at all, subsisting for the most part upon their flocks and herds, with customs that differed not materially from those of later nomads of Arabia, is indisputable. That this old social order very largely disappeared, 1 giving place slowly in some regions, more rapidly in others, as they with considerable difficulty crowded in and took possession of unoccupied regions, 2 or dispossessed some of the weaker hill-folk west of the Jordan, we must also believe. They became an agricultural people, having homes of their own in villages and cities, though still to a considerable extent clinging to their flocks, practising not only the art of husbandry but also those closely allied thereto, the making of wine, oil, etc.
