WE have seen that the Hebrews were originally polytheists, and that their ethnical god Jahweh seems to have been worshipped by them in early times under the material form of a cylindrical stone pillar. Or rather, to speak more naturally, the object they so worshipped they regarded as a god, and called Jahweh. The question next confronts us, how from this humble beginning did Israel attain to the pure monotheism of its later age? What was there in the position or conditions of the Hebrew race which made the later Jews reject all their other gods, and fabricate out of their early national Sacred Stone the most sublime, austere, and omnipotent deity that humanity has known?

The answer, I believe, to this pregnant question is partly to be found in a certain general tendency of the Semitic mind; partly in the peculiar political and social state of the Israelitish tribes during the ninth, eighth, seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries before the Christian era. Or, to put the proposed solution of the problem, beforehand, in a still simpler form, Hebrew monotheism was to some extent the result of a syncretic treatment of all the gods, in the course of which the attributes and characters of each became merged in the other, only the names (if anything) remaining distinct; and to some extent the result of the intense national patriotism, of which the ethnical god Jahweh was at once the outcome, the expression, and the fondest hope. The belief that Jahweh fought for Israel, 205and that by trust in Jahweh alone could Israel hold her own against Egypt and Assyria, wildly fanatical as it appears to us to-day, and utterly disproved by all the facts of the case as it ultimately was, nevertheless formed a central idea of the Hebrew patriots, and resulted by slow degrees in the firm establishment first of an exclusive, and afterwards of a truly monotheistic Jahweh-cult.

It is one of Ernest Renan’s brilliant paradoxes that the Semitic mind is naturally monotheistic. As a matter of fact, the Semitic mind has shown this native tendency in its first stages by everywhere evolving pretty much the same polytheistic pantheon as that evolved by every other group of human beings everywhere. Nevertheless, there is perhaps this kernel of truth in Renan’s paradoxical contention; the Semites, more readily than most other people, merge the features of their deities one in the other. That is not, indeed, by any means an exclusive Semitic trait. We saw already, in dealing with the Egyptian religion, how all the forms and functions of the gods faded at last into an inextricable mixture, an olla podrida of divinity, from which it was practically impossible to disentangle with certainty the original personalities of Ra and Turn, of Amen and Osiris, of Neith and Isis, of Ptah and Apis. Even in the relatively fixed and individualised pantheon of Hellas, it occurs often enough that confusions both of person and prerogative obscure the distinctness of the various gods. Aphrodite and Herakles are polymorphic in their embodiments. But in the Semitic religions, at least in that later stage where we first come across them, the lineaments of the different deities are so blurred and indefinite that hardly anything more than mere names can with certainty be recognised. No other gods are so shadowy and so vague. The type of this pantheon is that dim figure of El-Shaddai, the early and terrible object of Hebrew worship, of whose attributes and nature we know positively nothing, but who stands in the background of all Hebrew thought as the embodiment of the nameless 206and trembling dread begotten on man’s soul by the irresistible and ruthless forces of nature.

This vagueness and shadowiness of the Semitic religious conceptions seems to depend to some extent upon the inartistic nature of the Semitic culture. The Semite seldom carved the image of his god. Roman observers noted with surprise that the shrine of Carmel contained no idol. But it depended also upon deep-seated characteristics of the Semitic race. Melancholy, contemplative, proud, reserved, but strangely fanciful, the Arab of to-day perhaps gives us the clue to the indefinite nature of early Semitic religious thinking. There never was anether world more ghostly than Sheol; there never were gods more dimly awful than the Elohim who float through the early stories of the Hebrew mystical cycle. Their very names are hardly known to us: they come to us through the veil of later Jehovistic editing with such merely descriptive titles as the God of Abraham, the Terror of Isaac, the Mighty Power, the Most High Deity. Indeed, the true Hebrew, like many other barbarians, seems to have shrunk either from looking upon the actual form of his god itself, or from pronouncing aloud his proper name. His deity was shrouded in the darkness of an ark or the deep gloom of an inner tent or sanctuary; the syllables that designated the object of his worship were never uttered in full, save on the most solemn occasions, but were shirked or slurred over by some descriptive epithet. Even the unpronounceable title of Jahweh itself appears from our documents to have been a later name bestowed during the Exodus on an antique god: while the rival titles of the Baal and the Molech mean nothing more than the Lord and the King respectively. An excessive reverence forbade the Semite to know anything of his god’s personal appearance or true name, and so left the features of almost all the gods equally uncertain and equally formless.

But besides the difficulty of accurately distinguishing between the forms and functions of the different Semitic deities 207which even their votaries must have felt from the beginning, there was a superadded difficulty in the developed creed, due to the superposition of elemental mysticism and nature-worship upon the primitive cult of ancestral ghosts as gods and goddesses. Just as Ra, the sun, was identified in the latest ages with almost every Egyptian god, so solar ideas and solar myths affected at last the distinct personality of almost every Semitic deity. The consequence is that all the gods become in the end practically indistinguishable: one is so like the other that different interpreters make the most diverse identifications, and are apparently justified in so doing (from the mythological standpoint) by the strong solar or elemental family likeness which runs through the whole pantheon in its later stages. It has even been doubted by scholars of the older school whether Jahweh is not himself a form of his great rival Baal: whether both were not at bottom identical—mere divergent shapes of one polyonymous sun-god. To us, who recognise in every Baal the separate ghost-god of a distinct tomb, such identification is clearly impossible.

To the worshippers of the Baalim or of Jahweh themselves, however, these abstruser mythological problems never presented themselves. The difference of name and of holy place was quite enough for them, in spite of essential identity of attribute or nature. They would kill one another for the sake of a descriptive epithet, or risk death itself rather than offer up sacrifices at a hostile altar.

Nevertheless, various influences conspired, here as elsewhere, to bring about a gradual movement of syncretism—that is to say, of the absorption of many distinct gods into one; the final identification of several deities originally separate. What those influences were we must now briefly consider.

In the first place, we must recollect that while in Egypt, with its dry and peculiarly preservative climate, mummies, idols, tombs, and temples might be kept unchanged and undestroyed 208for ages, in almost all other countries rain, wind, and time are mighty levellers of human handicraft. Thus, while in Egypt the cult of the Dead Ancestor survives as such quite confessedly and openly for many centuries, in most other countries the tendency is for the actual personal objects of worship to be more and more forgotten; vague gods and spirits usurp by degrees the place of the historic man; rites at last cling rather to sites than to particular persons. The tomb may disappear; and yet the sacred stone may be reverenced still with the accustomed veneration. The sacred stone may go; and yet the sacred tree may be watered yearly with the blood of victims. The tree itself may die; and yet the stump may continue to be draped on its anniversary with festal apparel. The very stump may decay; and yet gifts of food or offerings of rags may be cast as of old into the sacred spring that once welled beside it. The locality thus grows to be holy in itself, and gives us one clear and obvious source of later nature-worship.

The gods or spirits who haunt such shrines come naturally to be thought of with the lapse of ages as much like one another. Godship is all that can long remain of their individual attributes. Their very names are often unknown; they are remembered merely as the lord of Lebanon, the Baal of Mount Peor. No wonder that after a time they get to be practically identified with one another, while similar myths are often fastened by posterity to many of them together. Indeed, we know that new names, and even foreign intrusive names, frequently take the place of the original titles, while the god himself still continues to be worshipped as the same shapeless stone, with the same prescribed rites, in the same squalid or splendid temples. Thus, Melcarth, the Baal of Tyre, was adored in later days under the Greek name of Herakles; and thus at Bablos two local deities, after being identified first with the Syrian divinities, Adonis and Astarte, were identified later with the Egyptian divinities, Osiris and Isis. 209Yet the myths of the place show us that through all that time the true worship was paid to the dead stump of a sacred tree, which was said to have grown from the grave of a god—in other words, from the tumulus of an ancient chieftain. No matter how greatly mythologies change, these local cults remain ever constant; the sacred stones are here described as haunted by djinns, and there as memorials of Christian martyrs; the holy wells are dedicated here to nymph or hero, and receive offerings there to saint or fairy. So the holy oaks of immemorial worship in England become “Thor’s oaks” under Saxon heathendom, and “Gospel oaks” under mediaeval Christianity.

Finally, in the latest stages of worship, an attempt is always made to work in the heavenly bodies and the great energies of nature into the mythological groundwork or theory of religion. Every king is the descendant of the sun, and every great god is therefore necessarily the sun in person. Endless myths arise from these phrases, which are mistaken by mythologists for the central facts and sources of religion. But they are nothing of the kind. Mysticism and symbolism can never be primitive; they are well-meant attempts by cultivated religious thinkers of later days to read deep-seated meaning into the crude ideas and still cruder practices of traditional religion. I may add that Dr. Robertson Smith’s learned and able works are constantly spoiled in this way by his dogged determination to see nature-worship as primitive, where it is really derivative, as the earliest starting-point, where it is really the highest and latest development.

Clearly, when all gods have come to be more or less solar in their external and acquired features, the process of identification and internationalisation is proportionately easy.

The syncretism thus brought about in the Hebrew religion by the superposition of nature-worship on the primitive cult must have paved the way for the later recognition of 210monotheism, exactly as we know it did in the esoteric creed of Egypt, by making all the gods so much alike that worshippers had only to change the name of their deity, not the attributes of the essential conception. Let us look first how far this syncretism affected the later idea of Jahweh, the phallic stone-god preserved in the ark; and then let us enquire afterward how the patriotic reaction against Assyrian aggression put the final coping-stone on the rising fabric of monotheistic Jahweh-worship.

It is often asserted that Jahweh was worshipped in many places in Israel under the form of a golden calf. That is to say, Hebrews who set up images of a metal bull believed themselves nevertheless to be worshipping Jahweh. Even the prophets of the eighth century regard the cult of the bull as a form of Jahweh-worship, though not a form to which they can personally give their approbation. But the bull is probably in its origin a distinct god from the stone in the ark; and if its worship was identified with that of the Rock of Israel, it could be only by a late piece of syncretic mysticism. Perhaps the link here, as in the case of Apis, was a priestly recognition of the bull as symbolising the generative power of nature; an idea which would be peculiarly appropriate to the god whose great function it was to encourage fruitfulness. But in any case, we cannot but see in this later calf-worship a superadded element wholly distinct from the older cult of the sacred stone, just as the worship of Ra was wholly distinct in origin from the totem-cult of Mnevis, or as the worship of Amen was wholly distinct from that of Khem and Osiris. The stone-god and the bull-god merge at last into one, much as at a far later date the man Jesus merges into the Hebrew god, and receives more reverence in modern faiths than the older deity whom he practically replaces.

Even in the Temple at Jerusalem itself, symbols of bull-worship were apparently admitted. The altar upon which the daily sacrifice was burnt had four horns; and the laver 211in the court, the “brazen sea,” was supported upon the figures of twelve oxen. When we remember that the Molech had the head of a bull, we can hardly fail to see in these symbols a token of that gradual syncretism which invariably affects all developed pantheons in all civilised countries.

Much more important are the supposed signs of the later identification of Jahweh with the sun, and his emergence as a modified and transfigured sun-god. It may seem odd at first that such a character could ever be acquired by a sacred stone, did we not recollect the exactly similar history of the Egyptian obelisk, which in like manner represents, first and foremost, the upright pillar or monolith—that is to say, the primitive gravestone—but secondarily and derivatively, at once the generative principle and a ray of the sun. With this luminous analogy to guide us in our search, we shall have little difficulty in recognising how a solar character may have been given to the later attributes and descriptions of Jahweh.

I do not myself attach undue importance to these solar characteristics of the fully evolved Jahweh; but so much has been made of them by a certain school of modern thinkers that I must not pass them over in complete silence.

To his early worshippers, then, as we saw, Jahweh was merely the stone in the ark. He dwelt there visibly, and where the ark went, there Jahweh went with it. But the later Hebrews—say in the eighth century—had acquired a very different idea of Jahweh’s dwelling-place. Astrological and solar ideas (doubtless Akkadian in origin) had profoundly modified their rude primitive conceptions. To Amos and to the true Isaiah, Jahweh dwells in the open sky above and is “Jahweh of hosts,” the leader among the shining army of heaven, the king of the star-world. “Over those celestial bodies and celestial inhabitants Jahweh rules”; they surround him and execute his commands: 212the host of heaven are his messengers—in the more familiar language of our modern religion, “the angels of the Lord,” the servants of Jahweh. To Micah, heaven is “the temple of Jahweh’s holiness”: “God on high,” is the descriptive phrase by which the prophet alludes to him. In all this we have reached a very different conception indeed from that of the early and simple-minded Israelites who carried their god with them on an ox-cart from station to station.

Furthermore, light and fire are constantly regarded by these later thinkers as manifestations of Jahweh; and even in editing the earlier legends they introduce such newer ideas, making “the glory of Jahweh” light up the ark, or appear in the burning bush, or combining both views, the elder and the younger, in the pillar of fire that preceded the nomad horde of Israel in the wilderness. Jahweh is said to “send” or to “cast fire” from heaven, in which expressions we see once more the advanced concept of an elemental god, whose voice is the thunder, and whose weapon the lightning. All these are familiar developments of the chief god in a pantheon. Says Zechariah in his poem, “Ask ye of Jahweh rain in the time of the latter showers: Jahweh will make the lightnings.” Says Isaiah, “The light of Israel shall be for a fire, And his holy one for a flame”; “Behold, the name of Jahweh cometh from afar, His anger burneth, and violently the smoke riseth on high: His lips are full of indignation, And his tongue is as a devouring fire.” In these and a hundred other passages that might be quoted, we seem to see Jahweh envisaged to a great extent as a sun-god, and clothed in almost all the attributes of a fiery Molech.

Sometimes these Molech-traits come very close indeed to those of the more generally acknowledged fire-gods. “Thus we read,” says Kuenen, “that ‘the glory of Jahweh was like devouring fire on the top of Mount Sinai’; and that ‘his angel appeared in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: the bush burned with fire but was not consumed.’” 213So Jahweh himself is called “a consuming fire, a jealous god”: and a poet thus describes his appearance, “Smoke goeth up out of his nostrils, And fire out of his mouth devoureth; coals of fire are kindled by him.” These are obviously very derivative and borrowed prerogatives with which to deck out the primitive stone pillar that led the people of Israel up out of Egypt. Yet we know that precisely analogous evolutions have been undergone by other stone-gods elsewhere.

Once more, though this is to anticipate a little, the later Jahweh-worship seems to have absorbed into itself certain astrological elements which were originally quite alien to it, belonging to the cult of other gods. Such for example is the institution of the Sabbath, the unlucky day of the malign god Kew芒n or Saturn, on which it was undesirable to do any kind of work, and on which accordingly the superstitious Semite rested altogether from his weekly labours. The division of the lunar month (the sacred period of Astarte, the queen of heaven) into four weeks of seven days each, dedicated in turn to the gods of the seven planets, belongs obviously to the same late cult of the elemental and astrological gods, or, rather, of the gods with whom these heavenly bodies were at last identified under Akkadian influence. The earlier prophets of the exclusive Jahweh-worship denounce as idolatrous such observation of the Sabbath and the astrological feasts—“Your Sabbaths and your new moons are an abomination to me”; and according to Amos, Kew芒n himself had been the chief idolatrous object of worship by his countrymen in the wilderness. Later on, however, the Jehovistic party found itself powerless to break the current of superstition on the Sabbath question, and a new modus vivendi was therefore necessary. They arranged a prudent compromise. The Sabbath was adopted bodily into the monotheistic Jahweh-worship, and a mythical reason was given for its institution and its sacred character which nominally linked it on to the cult of the ethnical god. On that day, said 214the priestly cosmogonists, Jahweh rested from his labour of creation. In the same way, many other fragments of external cults were loosely attached to the worship of Jahweh by a verbal connection with some part of the revised Jehovistic legend, or else were accredited to national Jehovistic or Jehovised heroes.

Having thus briefly sketched out the gradual changes which the conception of Jahweh himself underwent during the ages when his supremacy was being slowly established in the confederacy of Israel, let us now hark back once more and attack the final problem, Why did the par............