faithfulness to his covenant is uppermost. We cannot pursue these parallels here, but the themes of God’s forbearance, his delay of judgment to allow space for repentance, his hardening meanwhile of those who refuse his grace, and the idea of an historical survey in which his strange purposes are seen and understood, are all clearly reminiscent of Jewish apocalyptic writings such as 4 Ezra or 2 Baruch, and share with such works common roots in the literature of the exile.14 The main subject-matter