ABSTRACT
ANY attempt to consider this problem statically would be doomed to failure, because the precise dating of social conditions, and especially of religious conditions, is scarcely ever possible; and in any case we can only arrive at the true character of the facts in question, their meaning and scope, by an inquiry into their origins. The obvious difficulty of this method should not prevent us from making the attempt. Life is manifested in movement; hence it is movement, transformation, in a word evolution, that we must try to capture in this survey of the Palestinian world, and we should have little hope of understanding the problem on the basis of a rigid chronology.
