The Hebrew nation was preserved from the state of intellectual passivity by the aroused consciousness of national individuality. The consciousness of individuality awoke, and as soon as it was fully roused, there began that section of the life of the nation which was distinguished by a peculiar productiveness on the domain of ideas. The influences received from outside could be neither extinguished nor cancelled, seeing that to them was mainly due the formation of the mind of the nation; but the national consciousness had now introduced a new condition of further civilisation, which caused these foreign elements to be dealt with in a peculiar and independent way. No doubt a long time was needed to allow the results of this national reaction to strike root in the soul of the nation; but we shall see that a true Hebraism was formed by slow progress out of Canaanism, until at last the choicest and noblest minds of the nation seized upon the idea which gave full expression to the principle of nationality and freed it from the last traces of Canaanitish influence.
§ 2. The consequences of the national reaction are exhibited in the first representatives of the house of David, in the history of the Hebrew nation and in the desire of political unity to put an end to the old disunion and give strength against the Canaanites. The religious and political centralisation, which forms the program of David and Solomon, was the first and most forcible expression of the roused national spirit. I will leave the political arrangements on one side; for although they certainly come within the range of the general description which I have to give of the character of the period, yet the nature of these studies urges me more to consider the forces which act on the history of religion. With reference to this I must prefix some almost self-evident remarks on the relation of Polytheism to Monotheism: self-evident I say, yet even now still doubted and disputed, because on this subject even the least prejudiced inquirers on questions of antiquity and the history of ancient civilisation still use words in accordance with the old traditional system.[[642]] The idea that a Monotheistic instinct is inherent in a certain race or certain nations is refuted by historical facts so far as relates to the Semites, the consideration of whose psychological condition had suggested the opinion, and has also been exhibited as generally untenable by Steinthal’s and Max Müller’s psychological criticism of the meaning of instinct. But equally untrue is the idea of an original Monotheism, which later in history dissolved into Polytheism. This idea, which moreover identified the original monotheism with that of the Bible, prevailed almost universally in former times. Recently Rougemont, a French ethnologist, has endeavoured, in his work ‘Le Peuple Primitif’ (1855), to find a basis for it by supposing Polytheism to have sprung out of the original Monotheism through the medium of Pantheism by reason of a superfluity of religious life and over-richness in poetical inspiration.[[643]] Of course many theological systems endeavour to maintain this position; but also scholars who are but little influenced by theological prepossessions sometimes support it in their special provinces of study, having recourse to methods of deduction inspired mainly by an obsolete mysticism. So, for example, the sound scholar François Lenormant assumes that in Egypt Polytheism grew out of an original Monotheism by the process expressed in the following words: ‘L’idée de Dieu se confondit avec les manifestations de sa puissance; ses attributs et ses qualités furent personnifiés en une foule d’agents secondaires distribués dans une ordre hiérarchique, concourant à l’organisation générale du monde et à la conservation des êtres.’[[644]] This is the old story of the separation of the notion of a single god, given by an alleged primeval revelation, into its parts and factors! Another renowned investigator of Assyrian and Babylonian antiquity, Jules Oppert, also, speaks of a common monotheistic groundwork of all human religion.[[645]] But from the nature of the case, and in accordance with the laws of development of the human mind which can be deduced from experience, the fact is the very reverse. The history of the development of religion, modified of course in accordance with our more educated conception of its origin, appears in the main to be what old Hume asserted of it in his ‘Natural History of Religion:’ ‘It seems certain, that, according to the natural progress of human thought, the ignorant multitude must first entertain some groveling and familiar notion of superior powers, before they stretch their conception to that perfect Being, who bestowed order on the whole frame of nature. We may as reasonably imagine, that men inhabited palaces before huts and cottages, or studied geometry before agriculture, as assert that the Deity appeared to them a pure spirit, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, before he was apprehended to be a powerful though limited being, with human passions and appetites, limbs and organs. The mind rises gradually from inferior to superior.’[[646]] This becomes still surer when we remember that religion begins where mythology, from the elements of which theistic religion takes its rise, ceases to live. For as these elements are always very numerous, it is not possible but that every religion must begin with a multitude of divine figures, i.e. with Polytheism. For it is impossible to point to any mythology which has to do with only one single name; yet from such a one alone could a monotheistic religion spring directly. Accordingly Polytheism is the historical prius of Monotheism, which can never exhibit itself except as historically evolved out of Polytheism. The brilliant company of Olympian gods is therefore older than the first stirring of monotheistic feeling among the Greeks. Those who invert the historical order transfer to the religious condition of primitive humanity that which is only postulated by their own mind, and ascribe to the primeval man a religious tendency which in themselves was the result of laborious abstract speculations.
But all the contents of the human mind, like those of the material world, are subject to a constant evolution, or progressive change of form into something more perfect; and so Polytheism has an inherent tendency to further development, being indeed itself the result of a similar development of mythology. This tendency paves the way for the approach of Monotheism; for this it is to which the polytheistic stages of religion tend in their further development. We may see in the human mind, equally on a large and on a small scale, the inclination to the unification of whatever is similar in kind though hitherto divided into many individuals; abstraction and formation of general ideas are the climax of his power of thought. So is it in politics, and so also in the conception of nature.
The same unifying mental action, operating on the development of religion, creates in Polytheism an active tendency towards Monotheism. Even in those ethnological races for whom, in contradistinction to the Semitic race, Renan vindicates a polytheistic instinct, this tendency is active; and in any sphere which exhibits a complete and finished chain of religious evolution, we always find at the beginning Polytheism and at the end the Unitarian idea of God, whether in the form of Pantheistic Monism or of abstract personal Monotheism; whether coupled with the ideas of the Transcendency, or that of the Immanency, of God; whether excited by religious contemplation and absorption as with the Hebrew prophets, or by philosophical speculation as with the Greek sages. A mode of transition from Polytheism to Monotheism is found in the religious system which, while assuming a multitude of gods, distinguishes one of them as the most powerful, as the ruler not only of the world, but of the company of gods also. This system, to which Homer’s conception of Zeus as πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε belongs, possesses quite as much of Monotheism as of Polytheism, and expresses powerfully the monotheistic inclination concealed in Polytheism. Max Müller justly makes a distinction between Monotheism and Henotheism. A penetrating investigation of the Greek and the Indian literatures, the chief representatives of what Renan calls the polytheistic instinct, would prove the gradual formation of strata of monotheistic transformation, which attached themselves to Aryan polytheism and drew it in the monotheistic direction. Classical philologians have not neglected the study of the religious spirit on this subject, which prevails in the Greek tragedians and historians, not to mention the philosophical writers.
We have noted two kinds of impulse which usually promote a monotheistic revolution from Polytheism: religious absorption and contemplation on the one hand, and philosophical speculation on the other. Another powerful force must be mentioned in this connexion—the form of political institutions. This also exercises no small influence on the formation of the idea of God. If man has ascribed to the Deity the attribute of might and sovereignty, which is very natural to him, he will then apply to the gods the idea of power which he has gained by experience of human rulers, and will estimate their power according to the quality which he perceives every day in his earthly sovereigns; for the picture of these forms his sole conception of beings endowed with might and dominion. Only in the Immortals, he extends into infinity whatever he observes in his earthly rulers as something finite; since that which excites religious feeling in man is the impulse ‘to advance beyond what is given him, beyond what he finds existing, and to push forward from the limited to the illimitable and absolutely perfect.’ But this advance beyond what we have here is more than ‘in itself a valuation of what we have, a measuring of it against the infinite,’ as Steinthal admirably describes it in his fine lecture on ‘Myth and Religion.’[[647]] It also connects the valuation of the infinite, and the quality attributed to it, with what we have here and know from daily experience. Hence the tendency of religious ideas is directly dependent on the ideas which are embodied in political and social life. Thus it was said by so early a writer as Aristotle, ‘that all men say that the gods are under regal rule, because they themselves, some even now, and others in ancient times, have been so ruled; for men conceive not only the forms but the lives also of the gods as similar to their own.’[[648]] And similarly Schelling says, briefly, ‘It seems hardly necessary to point out how closely magisterial power, legislature, morals, and even occupations are bound up with conceptions of the gods in all nations.’[[649]] What, for instance, are the inhabitants of the Hellenic Olympus? A powerful and conscious Aristocracy, at the head of which stands the most powerful among them—not all-powerful, for he is dependent on a mightier Fate, which prevents his accomplishing all that his will has determined, and even on the surrounding aristocracy of the other gods, who once bound their powerful ruler! He owes his dominion to this very aristocracy: when Zeus had gained the victory over the Titans, says Hesiod,[[650]] the gods offered him the supreme rule (ὤτρυνον βασιλεύεμεν ἠδὲ ἀνάσσειν), and when he had entered upon it, he distributed offices and dignities among his electors (ὁ δὲ τοῖσιν ἐῢ διεδάσσατο τιμάς). Are these different circumstances from those of the aristocratic republics of Greece?—is the relation of Zeus to the subordinate gods unlike that of the εἵς κοίρανος to the members of the aristocracy who are subject to his command, but yet possess a considerable influence over him? Turning from the classical Hellenes to the boisterous Bedâwî, of Arabia, we discover a conception of God under the very same point of view. A great investigator of Arabia observes: ‘Nor did I ever meet, among the genuine nomade tribes, with any individual who took a more spiritual view, whether of the Deity, of the soul of man, or of any other disembodied being soever. God is for them a chief [[651]] If we turn our thoughts to a religious system of most recent origin, our experience is still the same. To the inhabitants of the Salt-Lake City in America, God is the President of immortal beings. ‘The employment of familiar political ideas, or application of political figures to theocratic ends, as in speaking of the Presidency of God, colonies, eligibility, race, is a natural and obvious device.’[[652]] This, however, must rather be referred to apperception than to symbolism.
In a despotic state the conception of God must take a different direction, because the apperception of the notion of dominion and power is essentially different. This may be observed not only in nations of high culture, but even in tribes living in a state of nature, on a comparison of their religious and political conditions; though in the latter case we have not the means of pursuing the analogy with the same certainty. But, by way of illustration, I will refer to a comparison of the political condition of the Negro tribes which incline to a monotheistic view of religion with those of the polytheistic Polynesians.[[653]] Molina, too, found in Chili that the god Pillan’s government of the world agrees exactly with the Araucanian political system, and concludes with the observation, ‘These ideas are certainly very rude; but it must be acknowledged that the Araucanians are not the only people who have regulated the things of heaven by those of the earth.’[[654]] But we will now stay on the firmer ground of civilised nations. Let us take, for instance, the great Assyrian empire. One powerful ruler, endowed with unlimited authority, at whose commands great and small, high-born and slave, bend the knee, to whose arbitrary will almost the whole of Western Asia is subject, guides the destinies of his colossal empire, independent of men. After him follow the Viceroys of the separate provinces, Satraps, and a host of officials of court and state with accurately defined powers and in distinct order of rank. Whoever honours them and is obedient to them, only honours in them the King of kings, and exhibits his obedience to the all-powerful lord. Thus it was at the flourishing period of this immense empire; and to this political system corresponds exactly the religious idea, which grew up parallel with the growth of the empire from small beginnings. At the head of many subordinate gods stands the ‘God of gods,’ to whom all the sacrifices and expressions of homage offered to the subordinate, so to speak, satrap-gods, are indirectly presented. He is adored in the temples built in honour of his subordinates (see supra, p. [122]). He is the ‘God of Armies,’ just as the King of kings is ‘Lord of Armies.’ In a word, we have to do with a form of religion that combines absolute monarchy with Polytheism. And is it surprising, considering the influence exercised by the mighty Assyrian empire on Western Asia, the nations of which it surpassed in manners and culture, that this form of religion became the prevailing tone of theology throughout the region?
Thus, while political division promotes in religion Polytheism, political unity and centralisation help the monotheistic development to break forth. As, when the political system is centralised, individuals only contribute to form a united political organism, and lose their personality in special functions which make each different from the other, so the idea of one common god arises and prevails over the many local deities, who are then subordinated to the former as their supreme Lord.
In the Hebrew nation likewise it was the political centralisation which established itself in the epoch distinguished by the names of David and Solomon, which at the same time conduced to the confirmation of Monotheism. It cannot be known for certain what sort of worship it was that was practised at various places in the land beside the so-called ‘Ark of the Covenant’ (arôn hab-berîth), before David removed the Ark to the political centre, and Solomon erected the magnificent Temple, of which the Books of Kings and the Chronicles give so elaborate an architectural description. But it must be assumed that the monotheistic working-out of the Elôhîm-idea in the Hebrew nation coincided with the centralising movement, that is with the period when the king directed the religious sentiment of the whole people to Jerusalem. This religious development again became powerful and was greatly encouraged by the newly strengthened National spirit, the influence of which on the spiritual life of the people was traced in the preceding chapter. For since the Hebrew nation was conscious of occupying a position of strict alienation from the tribes among and near which it dwelt, the exclusive tendency and negative character of this consciousness clung also to its conception of God, and thus it formed the idea of One God, who was the divine opposite to the gods of the nations, corresponding to the idea of the Hebrew nation as a nation opposed to the other nations. So long as the nation had no living consciousness of its national separation, and had not advanced to the point of saying ‘I am something quite different from you,’ no reason was forthcoming why the Hebrews should hold a negative position towards the objects of worship of other peoples; and they were, in fact, quite dependent on the latter, and receptive in temper. But having once risen to a consciousness of their own individuality, they regarded their own God exclusively as the Existing one, and denied the existence of the gods of nations towards which it acknowledged a national opposition. The germs of this religious development, so favourable to Monotheism, are bound up with the rise of a strong national consciousness; but the latter would not alone avail to create Monotheism at one blow; it only stimulates and encourages, but has need of other psychical and historical coefficients. Eduard Hartmann, who, in his recent work on the Philosophy of Religion, justly insists on the influence of the idea of nationality upon the growth of Monotheism, calls attention to another stage in the relation of the nation to the gods of strange peoples—that at which the strange gods are looked on as usurpers. Speaking of the three phases of development of Hebrew monotheism, he says:[[655]] ‘With the increase of national feeling, their pride in their God was heightened. From the moment when they raised him to the position of sole creator of heaven and earth, they could not but regard the dominion of other gods on the earth created by Jehovah as usurped, and could only hope for the honour of their own God that ultimately the peoples would turn to him and adore him as the highest God, the only creator of the world. But then the progressive development of Monotheism went further, to the point of not merely regarding the strange gods as usurpers beside Jehovah, but of declaring them to be false gods.’ What is the exact meaning of this view of usurping gods in the growth of Monotheism? In the growth of religions there is no stage at which certain divine persons are acknowledged as powerful and influential on the fate of the world or of a nation, and yet treated as possessing illegitimate power and influence. Their power might be unjustly exercised, but never illegitimate. The existence of gods is identified with their legitimacy. The conquest of some gods by others, which is told in theogonies and mythologies, is not explained by supposing one of the contending powers to have usurped his power, but by regarding the conquered as weaker than the conquering one.
This monotheistic development was very gradual, and passed through many stages in unfolding itself out of Polytheism. People spoke of the ‘God of the Elôhîms of Israel’ (Êl elôhê Yisrâʾêl), without giving any account as to who these Elôhîms were and what were their names. Whatever may be said, the plural form Elôhîm itself, the interpretation of which as pluralis majestatis belongs to the stage of pure Monotheism, decidedly indicates that a plural conception was inherent in this word. Such expressions, created by polytheistic imagination, were retained at the monotheistic stages. Like the myth, they lost their original signification, and were used by zealous monotheists without any idea of the Polytheism which had created them and been expressed by them. This Monotheism comes to light in the monotheistic turn which was given to the name Elôhîm; and the stronger the national life, and the intenser the national sentiment grew, so much more eagerly did the people grasp this Elôhîm-idea as a national one, entirely ignoring the fact that the name was not its exclusive property. At the conclusion of the national development the Elohistic monotheism attained perfection; but from the very beginning the mind of the nation lived in the conviction that ‘Elôhîm was not like the Elôhîms of the nations.’ The monotheistic turn given to the word is distinctly impressed on the form hâ-Elôhîm = ὁ Θεός, which is related to Elôhîm exactly as among Mohammedans Allâh to Ilâh. An important part in the encouragement of this monotheistic development was played by the Levitical priesthood, which conducted the centralised worship; as also by those inspired men of action who appeared as teachers and monitors in the early days of the monarchy, precursors of the later great Prophets, harbingers of the epoch of the Prophètes écrivains, as Renan correctly calls them.[[656]] The later Prophets, although when writing history they depict these precursors as completely imbued with their own intentions, did not ignore their position as precursors. Elijah and Samuel were prototypes of prophecy, in whose lives and actions the prophetic historian of a later time unfolded his own program; but even they are endowed with infirmities foreign to later Jahveism; and these faults are characterised as such. A prophet of the Postexilian period, in which a history of the growth of Jahveism as reconciled with the law (tôrâ), with Moses as law-giving prophet at the head, was already brought into notice, regarded Elijah as the precursor of the ‘great and dreadful day of Jahveh.’ Malachi, namely (III. 22, 23 [IV. 4, 5]), one of the chief representatives of the reconciliation effected between the two opposites, Sacerdotalism and Jahveism, exhorts the people to remember the Tôrâ of Moses, and in the same breath speaks of Elijah, the chief member of the old school of prophecy, as precursor of the great day of Jahveh. These are two reminiscences, valuable in a religious sense to the prophet of the Postexilian period.[[657]] However gradual may have been the full development of Monotheism among the Hebrews, on a consideration of the chronology it is impossible to deny that it had a far more rapid course there than elsewhere. This rapidity of revolution is expressed very significantly in the monotheistic turn given to the word Elôhîm, which looks as if (to use mathematical language) the separate Elôahs had been added up and put in a bracket to represent a Divine Unity, adequate to the sudden national unity produced out of political divisions only just composed.
Thus the awakened idea of Nationality left its impress also on the domain of religion. But it is now quite intelligible that the religious expression thereby introduced, possessed an obvious defect, inasmuch as it bore on its front a contradiction which no mere National sentiment could get rid of, the word Elôhîm being common to the Hebrews and the Canaanites. This contradiction gave the first stimulus to the creation of the word ‘Jahveh,’ the specially Hebrew term. The origin of this Divine name may therefore be most probably assigned to this period, as a necessary result of the religious element of the idea of Nationality. An agricultural people could very easily grasp the idea of God as an idea of ‘him who makes to be, who produces;’ and it is not impossible that this appellation had its first origin at the time of the formation of a myth of civilisation, and passed from a primitive solar to a later religious significance. But during this whole period Jahveh remained a mere word, a flatus oris, an Elôhîm connected with the nation. No deeper meaning, distinguishing Jahveh from the Canaanitish Elôhîm, was as yet attached to the word; that belongs to a later age, that of the Prophets. Moreover, the name itself did not at first force its way deep into the soul of the whole people, but remained as something external,—a Divine name, identical with hâ-Elôhîm, and implying no more. Fights, such as the Prophets fought, first created the Jahveh-religion in opposition to Elohism. Accordingly, it will be best to lay no stress on the existence of the Name before the point at which it obtains a religious significance and begins to be filled with its lofty conception.