Jehovah inaugurates his reign by a manifesto against these giants, the Elohim, for whom the special claim—clamorously asserted when Aaron built the Golden Calf, and continued as the plea for the same deity—was that they (Elohim) had brought Israel out of Egypt. ‘I,’ cries Jehovah, ‘am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage: thou shalt have no other gods but me;’ and the first four commandments of the law are devoted entirely to a declaration of his majesty, his power (claiming credit for the creation), his jealous determination to punish his opponents and reward his friends, to vindicate the slightest disrespect to his name. The narrative of the Golden Calf was plainly connected with Sinai in order to illustrate the first commandment. The punishment of the believers in another divine emancipator, even though they had not yet received the proclamation, must be signal. Jehovah is so enraged that by his order human victims are offered up to the number of three thousand, and even after that, it is said, Jehovah plagued Israel on account of their Elohim-worship. In the same direction is the command to keep holy the Sabbath day, because on it he rested from the work of creation (Gen. xx.), or because on that day he delivered Israel from Egypt (Deut. v.), the editors do not seem to remember exactly which, but it is well enough to say both, for it is taking the two picked laurels from the brow of Elohim and laying them on that of Jehovah. In all of which it is observable that there is no moral quality whatever. Nero might equally command the Romans to have no other gods before himself, to speak his name with awe, to rest when he stopped working. In the fifth commandment, arbitrarily ascribed to the First Table, we have a transition to the moral code; though even there the honour of parents is jealously associated with Jehovah’s greatness (‘that thy days may be long in the land which Jehovah Elohim giveth thee’). The nature-gods were equal to that; for the Elohim had begotten the giants who were ‘in the earth in those days.’
‘Elohim spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am Jehovah; and I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob by (the name of) God Almighty (El-Shaddai), but by my name Jehovah was I not known to them’ (Exod. vi. 2, 3).
The ancient gods—the Elohim—were, in the process of absorption into the one great form, the repository of their several powers, distinguishable; and though, for the most part, they bear names related to the forces of nature, now and then they reflect the tendencies to humanisation. Thus we have ‘the most high god’ (El-elyon—e.g., Gen. xiv. 18); ‘the everlasting-god’ (El-elim, Gen. xxi. 33); ‘the jealous god’ (El-kana, Exod. xx. 5); ‘the mighty god, and terrible’ (El-gadol and nora, Deut. vii. 21); ‘the living god’ (El-chi, Josh. iii. 10); ‘the god of heaven’ (El-shemim, Ps. cxxxvi. 26); the ‘god almighty’ (El-shaddai,[4] Exod. vi. 2). These Elohim, with each of whose names I have referred to an instance of its characteristic use, became epithets, as the powers they represented were more and more absorbed by the growing personality of Jehovah; but these epithets were also characters, and their historic expressions had also to undergo a process of slow and difficult digestion. The all-devouring grandeur of Jehovah showed what it had fed on. Not only all the honours, but many of the dishonours, of the primitive deities adhered to the sovereign whose rule was no doubt inaugurated by their disgrace and their barbarism. The costliness of the glory of divine absolutism is again illustrated in the evolution of the premature monotheism, which had for its figure-head the dread Jehovah, who, as heir of the nature-gods, became responsible for the monstrosities of a tribal demonolatry, thus being compelled to fill simultaneously the rôles of the demon and the lawgiver.[5]
The two tables of the law—one written by Jehovistic theology, the other by the moral sense of mankind—ascribed to this dual deity, for whom unity was so fiercely insisted on, may be read in their outcome throughout the Bible. They are here briefly, in a few examples, set forth side by side.
Instances of this discrepancy might be largely multiplied. Any one who cares to pursue the subject can trace the building upon the powerful personal Jehovah of a religion of human sacrifices, anathemas, and priestly despotism; while around the moral ruler and judge of the same name, whose personality is more and more dispersed in pantheistic ascriptions, there grows the common law, and then the more moral law of equity, and the corresponding sentiments which gradually evolve the idea of a parental deity.
It is obvious that the more this second idea of the deity prevails, the more he is regarded as ‘merciful,’ ‘long-suffering,’ ‘a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right,’ ‘delighting not in sacrifice but mercifulness,’ ‘good to all,’ and whose ‘tender mercies are over all his works,’ and having ‘no pleasure in the death of him that dieth;’ the less will it be possible to see in the very same being the ‘man of war,’ ‘god of battles,’ the ‘jealous,’ ‘angry,’ ‘fire-breathing’ one, who ‘visits the sins of the fathers upon the children,’ who laughs at the calamities of men and mocks when their fear cometh. It is a structural necessity of the human mind that these two shall be gradually detached the one from the other. From one of the Jehovahs represented in parallel columns came the ‘Father’ whom Christ adored: from the other came the Devil he abhorred.
[1] Thes. Heb., p. 94.
[2] Heb. Handw., p. 90.