|WE {204}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, {205}and 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
{206}and 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 {207}which 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 {208}for 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. {209}Yet 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 {210}monotheism, 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 {211}in 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: {212}the
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.’”
{213}So 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 Kewân 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, Kewân 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 {214}the 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
particular cult of Jahweh become at last exclusive and monotheistic?
To begin with, we must remember that from the very outset of the
national existence, Jahweh was clearly regarded on all hands as the
_ethnical_ god, the special god of Israel. The relation of such ethnical
gods to their people has been admirably worked out by Dr. Robertson
Smith in _The Religion of the Semites_. Even though we cannot, however,
accept as historical the view given us of the exodus in the Pentateuch,
nor admit that Jahweh played anything like so large a part in the great
national migration as is there indicated, it is yet obvious that
from the moment when Israel felt itself a nation at all, Jahweh was
recognised as its chief deity. He was the “god of Israel,” just
as Milcom was the god of the Ammonites, Chemosh the god of Moab, and
Ashtaroth the goddess of Sidon. As distinctly as every Athenian, while
worshipping Zeus and Hera and Apollo, held Athene to be the special
patron of Athens, so did every Israelite, while worshipping the Baalim
and the Molech and the local deities generally, hold Jahweh to be the
special patron of Israel.
Moreover, from the very beginning, there is reason to suppose that the
Israelites regarded Jahweh as their supreme god. Most pantheons finally
settle down into a recognised hierarchy, in which one deity or another
gradually assumes the first place. So, in Hellas, the supremacy of
Zeus was undoubted; so, in Rome, was the supremacy {215}of Jupiter.
Sometimes, to be sure, as among our Teutonic ancestors, we see room for
doubt between two rival gods: it would be difficult to assign the exact
priority to either of the two leading deities: among the English, Woden
rather bore it over Thunor; among the Scandinavians, Thor rather bore it
over Odin. In Israel, in like manner, there was apparently a time when
the Presidency of the Immortals hovered between Jahweh and one or other
of the local Baalim. But in the end, and perhaps even from the very
beginning, the suffrages of the people were mainly with the sacred stone
of the ark. He was the God of Israel, and they were the chosen people of
Jahweh.
The custom of circumcision must have proved at once the symbol and in
part the cause, in part the effect, of this general devotion of the
people to a single supreme god. At first, no doubt, only the first-born
or other persons specially dedicated to Jahweh, would undergo the
rite which marked them out so clearly as the devotees of the god of
fertility. But as time went on, long before the triumph of the exclusive
Jahweh-worship, it would seem that the practice of offering up every
male child to the national god had become universal. As early as the
shadowy reign of David, the Philistines are reproachfully alluded to in
our legends as “the uncircumcised”; whence we may perhaps conclude
(though the authority is doubtful) that even then circumcision had
become coextensive with Israelitish citizenship. Such universal
dedication of the whole males of the race to the national god must have
done much to ensure his ultimate triumph.
If we look at the circumstances of the Israelites in Palestine, we shall
easily see how both religious unity and intense national patriotism were
fostered by the very nature of their tenure of the soil; and also why
a deity mainly envisaged as a god of generation should have become the
most important member of their national pantheon. Their position
during the first few centuries of their {216}life in Lower Syria may be
compared to that of the Dorians in Peloponnesus: they were but a little
garrison in a hostile land fighting incessantly with half-conqùered
tributaries and encircling foes; now hard-pressed by rebellions of
their internal enemies; and now again rendered subject themselves to
the hostile Philistines on their maritime border. The handful of rude
warriors who burst upon the land under such bloodthirsty leaders as
the mystical Joshua could only hope for success by rapid and constant
increase of their numbers, and by avoiding as far as possible those
internal quarrels which were always the prelude to national disgrace.
To be “a mother in Israel” is the highest hope of every Hebrew woman.
Hence it was natural that a god of generation should become the chief
among the local deities, and that the promise held out by his priests of
indefinite multiplication should make him the most popular and powerful
member of the Israelitish pantheon. And though all the stone gods were
probably phallic, yet Jahweh, as the ethnical patron, seems most of all
to have been regarded as the giver of increase to Israel.
It seems clear, too, that the common worship of Jahweh was at first the
only solid bond of union between the scattered and discordant tribes who
were afterwards to grow into the Israelitish people. This solidarity of
god and tribe has well been insisted on by Professor Robertson Smith as
a common feature of all Semitic worship. The ark of Jahweh in its house
at Shiloh appears to have formed the general meeting-place for Hebrew
patriotism, as the sanctuary of Olympia formed a focus later for the
dawning sense of Hellenic unity. The ark was taken out to carry before
the Hebrew army, that the god of Israel might fight for his worshippers.
Evidently, therefore, from a very early date, Jahweh was regarded in a
literal sense as the god of battles, the power upon whom Israel might
specially rely to guard it against its enemies. When, as the legends
tell us, the national unity was realised under {217}David; when the
subject peoples were finally merged into a homogeneous whole; when the
last relics of Canaanitish nationality were stamped out by the final
conquest of the Jebusites; and when Jerusalem was made the capital of
a united Israel, this feeling must have increased both in extent
and intensity. The bringing of Jahweh to Jerusalem by David, and the
building of his temple by Solomon (if these facts be historical),
must have helped to stamp him as the great god of the race: and though
Solomon also erected temples to other Hebrew gods, which remained in
existence for some centuries, we may be sure that from the date of the
opening of the great central shrine, Jahweh remained the principal deity
of the southern kingdom at least, after the separation.
There was one characteristic of Jahweh-worship, however, which
especially helped to make it at last an _exclusive_ cult, and thus paved
the way for its final development into a pure monotheism. Jahweh was
specially known to be a “jealous god”: this is a trait in his
temperament early and often insisted on. We do not know when or where
the famous “Ten Words” were first promulgated; but we have every
reason to believe that in essence at least they date from a very antique
period. Now, at the head of these immemorial precepts of Jahweh stands
the prohibition of placing any other gods before his face. Originally,
no doubt, the prohibition meant exactly what it states; that Jahweh
would endure no companion gods to share his temple; that wherever he
dwelt, he would dwell alone without what the Greeks would have called
fellow shrine-sharers. Thus we know that no ashera was to be driven into
the ground near Jahweh’s ark; and that when Dagon found himself face
to face with the Rock of Israel, he broke in pieces, and could not stand
before the awful presence of the great Hebrew Pillar. No more than this,
then, was at first demanded by “the jealous god”: he asked of his
worshippers that they should keep him apart from the society of all
inferior gods, {218}should allow no minor or rival deity to enter his
precincts.
Gradually, however, as Jahweh-worship grew deeper, and the conception
of godhead became wider and more sublime, the Jahweh-worshipper began
to put a stricter interpretation upon the antique command of the jealous
god. It was supposed that every circumcised person, every man visibly
devoted to Jahweh, owed to Jahweh alone his whole religious service.
Nobody doubted as yet, indeed, that other gods existed: but the extreme
Jehovists in the later days of national independence held as an article
of faith that no true Israelite ought in any way to honour them. An
internal religious conflict thus arose between the worshippers of Jahweh
and the worshippers of the Baalim, in which, as might be expected, the
devotees of the national god had very much the best of it. Exclusive
Jahweh-worship became thenceforth the ideal of the extreme Jehovists:
they began to regard all other gods as “idols,” to be identified
with their images; they began to look upon Jahweh alone as a living god,
at least within the bounds of the Israelitish nation.
To this result, another ancient prohibition of the priests of Jahweh no
doubt largely contributed. The priesthood held it unlawful to make or
multiply images of Jahweh. The one sacred stone enclosed in the ark
was alone to be worshipped: and by thus concentrating on Shiloh, or
afterwards on Jerusalem, the whole religious spirit of the ethnical
cult, they must largely have succeeded in cementing the national unity.
Strict Jehovists looked with dislike upon the adoration paid to the
bull-images in the northern kingdom, though those, too, were regarded
(at least in later days) as representatives of Jahweh. They held that
the true god of Abraham was to be found only in the ark at Jerusalem,
and that to give to the Rock of Israel human form or bestial figure was
in itself a high crime against the majesty of their deity. Hence
arose the peculiar Hebrew dislike to “idolatry”; a dislike never
{219}equally shared by any but Semitic peoples, and having deep roots,
apparently, at once in the inartistic genius of the people and in the
profound metaphysical and dreamy character of Semitic thinking.
The comparative emptiness of Semitic shrines, indeed, was always a
stumbling-block to the Greek, with his numerous and exquisite images of
anthropomorphic deities.
All that was now wanted to drive the increasingly exclusive and
immaterial Jahweh-worship into pure monotheism for the whole people
was the spur of a great national enthusiasm, in answer to some dangerous
external attack upon the existence of Israel and of Israel’s god.
This final touch was given by the aggression of Assyria, and later of
Babylon. For years the two tiny Israelitish kingdoms had maintained
a precarious independence between the mighty empires of Egypt and
Mesopotamia. In the eighth century, it became certain that they could
no longer play their accustomed game of clever diplomacy and polite
subjection. The very existence of Israel was at stake; and the fanatical
worshippers of Jahweh, now pushed to an extreme of frenzy by the
desperate straits to which they were reduced, broke out in that
memorable ecstasy of enthusiasm which we may fairly call the Age of
the Prophets, and which produced the earliest masterpieces of Hebrew
literature in the wild effort to oppose to the arms of the invaders the
passive resistance of a supreme Jahweh. In times of old, the prophets
say, when Jahweh led the forces of Israel, the horses and the chariots
of their enemies counted for naught: if in this crisis Israel would
cease to think of aid from Egypt or alliance with Assyria--if Israel
would get rid of all her other gods and trust only to Jahweh,--then
Jahweh would break asunder the strength of Assyria and would reduce
Babylon to nothing before his chosen people.
Such is the language that Isaiah ventured to use in the very crisis of a
grave national danger.
Now, strange as it seems to us that any people should have {220}thrown
themselves into such a general state of fanatical folly, it is
nevertheless true that these extraordinary counsels prevailed in both
the Israelitish kingdoms, and that the very moment when the national
existence was most seriously imperilled was the moment chosen by the
Jehovistic party for vigorously attempting a religious reformation. The
downfall of Ephraim only quickened the bigoted belief of the fanatics
in Judah that pure Jahweh-worship was the one possible panacea for the
difficulties of Israel. Taking advantage of a minority and of a plastic
young king, they succeeded in imposing exclusive Jehovism upon
the half-unwilling people. The timely forgery of the Book of
Deuteromony--the first germ of the Pentateuch--by the priests of the
temple at Jerusalem was quickly followed by the momentary triumph of
pure Jahweh-worship. In this memorable document, the exclusive cult of
Jahweh was falsely said to have descended from the earliest periods
of the national existence. Josiah, we are told, alarmed at the
denunciations in the forged roll of the law, set himself to work at once
to root out by violent means every form of “idolatry.” He brought
forth from the house of Jahweh “the vessels that were made for the
Baal, and for the Ashera, and for all the Host of Heaven, and he burned
them without Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron.” He abolished all the
shrines and priesthoods of other gods in the cities of Judah, and put
down “them that burned incense to the Baal, to the sun, and to the
moon, and to the planets, and all the Host of Heaven.” He also brought
out the Ashera from the temple of Jahweh, and burnt it to ashes; and
“took away the horses that the kings of Judah had given to the sun,
and burned the chariots of the sun with fire.” And by destroying the
temples said to have been built by Solomon for Chemosh, Milcom, and
Ashtoreth, he left exclusive and triumphant Jahweh-worship the sole
accredited religion of Israel.
All, however, was of no avail. Religious fanaticism could {221}not
save the little principality from the aggressive arms of its powerful
neighbours. Within twenty or thirty years of Josiah’s reformation,
the Babylonians ceased to toy with their petty tributaries, and thrice
captured and sacked Jerusalem. The temple of Jahweh was burnt, the
chief ornaments were removed, and the desolate site itself lay empty and
deserted. The principal inhabitants were transported to Babylonia, and
the kingdom of Judah ceased for a time to have any independent existence
of any sort.
But what, in this disaster, became of Jahweh himself? How fared or
fell the Sacred Stone in the ark, the Rock of Israel, in this general
destruction of all his holiest belongings? Strange to say, the Hebrew
annalist never stops to tell us. In the plaintive catalogue of the
wrongs wrought by the Babylonians at Jerusalem, every pot and shovel and
vessel is enumerated, but “the ark of God” is not so much as
once mentioned. Perhaps the historian shrank from relating that
final disgrace of his country’s deity; perhaps a sense of reverence
prevented him from chronicling it; perhaps he knew nothing of what had
finally been done with the cherished and time-honoured stone pillar
of his ancestors. It is possible, too, that with his later and more
etherealised conceptions of the cult of his god, he had ceased to regard
the ark itself as the abode of Jahweh, and was unaware that his tribal
deity had been represented in the innermost shrine of the temple by a
rough-hewn pillar. Be that as it may, the actual fate of Jahweh himself
is involved for us now in impenetrable obscurity. Probably the invaders
who took away “the treasures of the house of Jahweh, and cut in pieces
all the vessels of gold which Solomon, King of Israel, had made,”
would care but little for the rude sacred stone of a conquered people.
We may conjecture that they broke Jahweh into a thousand fragments and
ground him to powder, as Josiah had done with the Baalim and the Ashera,
so that his very relics could no longer be recognised or worshipped by
{222}his followers. At any rate, we hear no more, from that time forth,
of Jahweh himself, as a material existence, or of the ark he dwelt
in. His spirit alone survived unseen, to guard and protect his chosen
people.
Yet, strange to say, this final disappearance of Jahweh himself, as a
visible and tangible god, from the page of history, instead of proving
the signal for the utter downfall of his cult and his sanctity, was
the very making of Jahweh-worship as a spiritual, a monotheistic, and a
cosmopolitan religion. At the exact moment when Jahweh ceased to
exist, the religion of Jahweh began to reach its highest and fullest
development. Even before the captivity, as we have seen, the prophets
and their party had begun to form a most exalted and spiritualised
conception of Jahweh’s greatness, Jahweh’s holiness, Jahweh’s
unapproachable nature, Jahweh’s superhuman sublimity and omnipotence.
But now that the material Jahweh itself, which clogged and cramped their
ideas, had disappeared for ever, this spiritual conception of a great
Unseen God widened and deepened amazingly. Forbidden by their creed
and by Jahweh’s own express command to make any image of their chosen
deity, the Hebrews in Babylonia gradually evolved for themselves the
notion of a Supreme Ruler wholly freed from material bonds, to be
worshipped without image, representative, or symbol; a dweller in the
heavens, invisible to men, too high and pure for human eyes to look
upon. The conical stone in the ark gave place almost at once to an
incorporeal, inscrutable, and almighty Being.
It was during the captivity, too, that pure monotheism became for the
first time the faith of Israel. Convinced that desertion of Jahweh was
the cause of all their previous misfortunes, the Jews during their exile
grew more deeply attached than ever to the deity who represented their
national unity and their national existence. They made their way back
in time to Judæa, after two generations had passed away, with a firm
conviction that all their happiness {223}depended on restoring in ideal
purity a cult that had never been the cult of their fathers. A new form
of Jahweh-worship had become a passion among those who sat disconsolate
by the waters of Babylon. Few if any of the zealots who returned at last
to Jerusalem had ever themselves known the stone god who lay shrouded in
the ark: it was the etherealised Jahweh who ruled in heaven above among
the starry hosts to whom they offered up aspirations in a strange land
for the restoration of Israel. In the temple that they built on the
sacred site to the new figment of their imaginations, Jahweh was no
longer personally present: it was not so much his “house,” like
the old one demolished by the Babylonian invaders, as the place where
sacrifice was offered and worship paid to the great god in heaven. The
new religion was purely spiritual; Jahweh had triumphed, but only by
losing his distinctive personal characteristics, and coming out of the
crisis, as it were, the blank form or generic conception of pure deity
in general.
It is this that gives monotheism its peculiar power, and enables it so
readily to make its way everywhere. For monotheism is religion reduced
to its single central element; it contains nothing save what every
votary of all gods already implicitly believes, with every unnecessary
complexity or individuality smoothed away and simplified. Its simplicity
recommends it to all intelligent minds; its uniformity renders it the
easiest and most economical form of pantheon that man can frame for
himself.
Under the influence of these new ideas, before long, the whole annals of
Israel were edited and written down in Jehovistic form; the Pentateuch
and the older historical books assumed the dress in which we now
know them. From the moment of the return from the captivity, too, the
monotheistic conception kept ever widening. At first, no doubt, even
with the Jews of the Sixth Century, Jahweh was commonly looked upon
merely as the ethnical god of Israel. But, in time, the sublimer and
broader conception {224}of some few among the earlier poetical prophets
began to gain general acceptance, and Jahweh was regarded as in very
deed the one true God of all the world--somewhat such a God as Islam
and Christendom to-day acknowledge. Still, even so, he was as yet
most closely connected with the Jewish people, through whom alone the
gentiles were expected in the fulness of time to learn his greatness.
It was reserved for a Græco-Jewish Cilician, five centuries later, to
fulfil the final ideal of pure cosmopolitan monotheism, and to proclaim
abroad the unity of god to all nations, with the Catholic Church as its
earthly witness before the eyes of universal humanity. To Paul of Tarsus
we owe above all men that great and on the whole cosmopolitanising
conception.