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 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 215of 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 216life 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-conq霉ered 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 217david; 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, 218should 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 219equally 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 220thrown 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 221not 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 222his 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 jud忙a, after two generations had passed away, with a firm conviction that all their happiness 223depended 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 224of 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 gr忙co-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.