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 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 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: 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.’” 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.