"But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.
"But thou shalt utterly destroy them, namely the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee." (Deut. xx. 10-17.)
It accounts, too, for the ferocity of the punishments for the infringement of the Taboo. Death was the penalty. The man who fails to pour dust on the blood of a pigeon that he has knocked down with an arrow, the man who picks up sticks upon the Sabbath, the perfumer who imitates a temple smell, the man who roasts the smallest particle of fat or blood, the labourer who has an abscess and fails to take two turtle doves as a "sin offering" to the priest at "the door of the tabernacle of the congregation" (Levit. xv. 15), may all be cut off. Every one may be stoned for infringing the Taboo.
Sir John Lubbock has pointed out that the god of the savage is of limited power and intelligence, and that the Taboo was designed to control rather than conciliate him. He cites the "Eeweehs" of the Nicobar Islands, who put up scarecrows to frighten their gods, and the inhabitants of Kamtschatka, who insult their deities if their wishes are unfulfilled. He cites also the Rishis and heroes of the Indian epics, who are constantly overcoming the gods of the Indian pantheon. Certainly the early god of the Jew was not deemed all-powerful. When the Jews fought against Askelon it is recorded:—
"The Lord was with Judah, and he drove out the inhabitants of the mountain, but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron." (Judges i. 19.)
He wrestles with Jacob (Gen. xxxii. 29), and the superior wrestling of the man forces the god to give his blessing. He strives to kill Moses, but fails to do it. (Exod. iv. 24.) He is a purely local god, like Kemosh and other Semitic deities.
"Surely Yahve is in this place," said Jacob in Mesopotamia, "and I knew it not."
"David himself," says M. Soury, "who was not and could not have been the monotheistic king of tradition, David, who had teraphim in his house, as had Jacob in his time, does he not seem to restrict the kingdom of Yahve to the land of Israel when he complains that Saul has driven him out from abiding in the inheritance of Yahve, saying, 'Go, serve other gods'? Finally, many centuries afterwards the contemporaries of Ezekiel still believed that Yahve, having abandoned the country, could no longer see them." (Ezek. ix. 9.) (Soury, "Religion of Israel," c. v.)
Anthropology divides the early races who used stone implements into two groups, the palæolithic or rough-stone-using man, and the neolithic man, who polished his implements. The editing of Ezra has burnished up the early Hebrew a little, but it is plain that he had not emerged from the stone age. His god is a stone. Jacob erected a menhir. A menhir is a piece of chipped rock, erect, huge, imposing, the neolithic man's first rude piece of sculpture, the neolithic man's god. Moses erected a circle of these stone monoliths. Joshua erected twelve stone gods on the Jordan, and sacrificed to them. (Josh. iv. 9.) Palestine abounds in such circles archæologists tell us. These circles were the "high places" of scripture.
Some hold that the Yahve who travelled with Israel in the Ark was a stone. The mighty God of Jacob is called the "Stone of Israel." (Gen. xlix. 24.) We read of Eben-ezer, the "Stone of Help," when the Ark gives the victory to Samuel. (1 Sam. vii. 12.) Daniel's "stone cut out of the mountain without hands" brake in pieces the kings and the kingdoms. (Dan. ii. 45.) The "Shem Hamphoras," the stone in the Holy of Holies in Solomon's temple, was said to be the "Stone of Jacob."