Earlier in a long and well-regarded essay, Dubnow wrote about the "two halves" of Jewish history. The first "seems to be but slightly different from the history of other nations." But if we "pierce to its depths" we find a "spiritual people". "The national development is based upon an all-pervasive religious tradition... embracing a luminous theory of life and an explicit code of morality and social converse." Their history reveals that the Jewish people "has been called to guide the other nations toward sublime moral and religious principles, and to officiate for them, the laity as it were, in the capacity of priests." "The Prophets were the real and appointed executors of the holy command enjoining the 'conversion' of all Jews into 'a kingdom of priests and a holy nation'." After the close of the Tanakh era in Israel, this first half of their history, the "strength and fertility" of the Jews as a spiritual nation "reached a culminating point".