The Evolution of the Idea of God: An Inquiry Into the Origins of Religions

by Grant Allen

We are thus reduced to the most nebulous details about these great gods of the Hebrews, other than Jahweh, in the period preceding the Babylonian captivity. All that is certain appears to be that a considerable number of local gods were worshipped here and there at special sanctuaries, each of which seems to have consisted of an altar or stone image, standing under a sacred tree or sacred grove, and combined with an ashera. While the names of Chemosh, the god of Moab, and of Dagon, the god of the Philistines, have come down to us with perfect frankness and clearness, no local Hebrew god save Jahweh has left a name that can now be discerned with any approach to certainty. It should be added that the worship of many of the gods of surrounding Semitic tribes undoubtedly extended from the earliest times into Israel also.

I must likewise premise that the worship of the Baalim, within and without Israel, was specially directed to upright conical stones, the most sacred objects at all the sanctuaries; and that these stones are generally admitted to have possessed for their worshippers a phallic significance.

Certain writers have further endeavoured to show that a few animal-gods entered into the early worship of the Hebrews. I do not feel sure that their arguments are convincing; but for the sake of completeness I include the two most probable cases in this brief review of the vague and elusive deities of early Israel.

One of these is the god in the form of a young bull, specially worshipped at Dan and Bethel, as the bull Apis was worshipped at Memphis, and the bull Mnevis at On or Heliopolis. This cult of the bull is pushed back in the later traditions to the period of the exodus, when the Israelites made themselves a “golden calf” in the wilderness. Kuenen, indeed, lays stress upon the point that this Semitic bull-worship differed essentially from the cult of Apis in the fact that it was directed to an image or idol, not to a living animal. This is true, and I certainly do not wish to press any particular connexion between Egypt and the golden bulls of Jeroboam in the cities of Ephraim: though I think too much may perhaps be made of superficial differences and too little of deep-seated resemblances in these matters, seeing that bull-worship is a common accompaniment of a phallic cult in the whole wide district between Egypt and India. It is the tendency of the scholastic mind, indeed, to over-elaborate trifles, and to multiply to excess minute distinctions. But in any case, we are on comparatively safe ground in saying that a bull-god was an object of worship in Israel down to a very late period; that his cult descended from an early age of the national existence; and that the chief seats of his images were at Dan and Bethel in Ephraim, and at Beersheba in Judah.

Was this bull-shaped deity Jahweh’ himself, or one of the polymorphic forms of Jahweh? Such is the opinion of Kuenen, who says explicitly, “Jahweh was worshipped in the shape of a young bull. It cannot be doubted that the cult of the bull-calf was really the cult of Jahweh in person.” And certainly in the prophetic writings of the eighth century, we can clearly descry that the worshippers of the bull regarded themselves as worshipping the god Jahweh, who brought up his people from the land of Egypt. Nevertheless, dangerous as it may seem for an outsider to differ on such a subject from great Semitic scholars, I venture to think we may see reason hereafter to conclude that this was not originally the case: that the god worshipped under the form of the bull-calf was some other deity, like the Molech whom we know to have been represented with a bull’s head; and that only by the later syncretic process did this bull-god come to be identified in the end with Jahweh, a deity (as seems likely) of quite different origin, much as Mnevis came to be regarded at Heliopolis as an incarnation of Ra, and as Apis came to be regarded at Memphis as an avatar of Ptah and still later of Osiris. On the other hand, we must remember that, as Mr. Frazer has shown, a sacred animal is often held to be the representative and embodiment of the very god to whom it is habitually sacrificed. Here again we trench on ground which can only satisfactorily be occupied at a later stage of our polymorphic argument.

A second animal-god, apparently, also adored in the form of a metal image, was the asp or snake, known in our version as “the brazen serpent,” and connected by the Jehovistic editors of the earlier traditions with Moses in the wilderness. The name of this deity is given us in the Book of Kings as Nehushtan, “the brass god”; but whether this was really its proper designation or a mere contemptuous descriptive title we can hardly be certain. The worship of the serpent is said to have gone on uninterruptedly till the days of Hezekiah, when, under the influence of the exclusive devotion to Jahweh which was then becoming popular, the image was broken in pieces as an idolatrous object. It is scarcely necessary to point out in passing that the asp was one of the most sacred animals in Egypt: but, as in the case of the bull, the snake was also a widespread object of worship throughout all the surrounding countries; and it is therefore probable that the Hebrew snake-worship may have been parallel to, rather than derived from, Egyptian ophiolatry.

Such, then, seen through the dim veil of Jehovism, are the misty features of that uncertain pantheon in which, about the eighth century at least, Jahweh found himself the most important deity. The most important, I say, because it is clear from our records that for many ages the worship of Jahweh and the worship of the Baalim went on side by side without conscious rivalry.

And what sort of god was this holy Jahweh himself, whom the Hebrews recognised from a very early time as emphatically and above all others “the God of Israel”?

If ever he was envisaged as a golden bull, if ever he was regarded as the god of light, fire, or the sun, those concepts, I believe, must have been the result of a late transference of attributes and confusion of persons, such as we may see so rife in the more recent mystical religion of Egypt. What in his own nature Jahweh must have been in the earliest days of his nascent godhead I believe we can best judge by putting together some of the passages in old traditionary legend which bear most plainly upon his character and functions.

In the legendary account of the earliest dealings of Jahweh with the Hebrew race, we are told that the ethnical god appeared to Abraham in Haran, and promised to make of him “a great nation.” Later on, Abraham complains of the want of an heir, saying to Jahweh, “Thou hast given me no seed.” Then Jahweh “brought him forth abroad, and said, Look now toward heaven and tell the stars: so shall thy seed be.” Over and over again we get similar promises of fruitfulness made to Abraham: “I will multiply thee exceedingly”; “thou shalt be a father of many nations”; “I will make thee exceeding fruitful”; “kings shall come out of thee”; “for a father of many nations have I made thee.” So, too, of Sarah: “she shall be a mother of nations; kings of people shall be of her.” And of Ishmael: “I have blessed him and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly: twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation.” Time after time these blessings recur for Abraham, Isaac, and all his family: “I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore, and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies.”