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 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 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 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 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 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.