[3] Or Jahveh. I prefer to use the best known term in a case where the more exact spelling adds no significance.
[4] This, the grandest of all the elohistic names, became the nearest Hebrew word for devils—shedim.
[5] Even his jealous command against rivals, i.e., ‘graven images,’ had to be taken along with the story of Laban’s images (Gen. xxxi.), when, though ‘God came to Laban,’ the idolatry was not rebuked.
Chapter VI.
The Consuming Fire.
The Shekinah—Jewish idols—Attributes of the fiery and cruel Elohim compared with those of the Devil—The powers of evil combined under a head—Continuity—The consuming fire spiritualised.
That Abraham was a Fire-worshipper might be suspected from the immemorial efforts of all Semitic authorities to relieve him of traditional connection with that particular idolatry. When the good and evil powers were being distinguished, we find the burning and the bright aspects of Fire severally regarded. The sign of Jehovah’s covenant with Abram included both. ‘It came to pass that when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces’ (of the sacrifice). In the legend of Moses we have the glory resting on Sinai and the burning bush, the bush which, it is specially remarked, was ‘not consumed,’ an exceptional circumstance in honour of Moses. To these corresponded the Urim and Thummim, marking the priest as source of light and of judgment. In his favourable and adorable aspect Jehovah was the Brightness of Fire. This was the Shekinah. In the Targum, Jonathan Ben Uzziel to the Prophets, it is said: ‘The mountains trembled before the Lord; the mountains Tabor, Hermon, Carmel said one to the other: Upon me the Shekinah will rest, and to me will it come. But the Shekinah rested upon Mount Sinai, weakest and smallest of all the mountains. This Sinai trembled and shook, and its smoke went up as the smoke of an oven, because of the glory of the God of Israel which had manifested itself upon it.’ The Brightness[1] passed on to illumine every event associated with the divine presence in Semitic mythology; it was ‘the glory of the Lord’ shining from the Star of Bethlehem, and the figure of the Transfiguration.
The Consuming Fire also had its development. Among the spiritual it was spiritualised. ‘Who among us shall dwell with the Devouring Fire?’ cries Isaiah. ‘Who among us shall dwell with the Everlasting Burnings? He that walketh righteously and speaketh uprightly; he that despiseth the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hands from holding of bribes, that stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood, and shutteth his eyes from seeing evil.’ It was by a prosaic route that the Devouring Fire became the residence of the wicked.
After Jeroboam (1 Kings xiii.) had built altars to the Elohim, under form of Calves, a prophet came out of Judah to denounce the idolatry. ‘And he cried against the altar in the word of Jehovah, and said, O altar, altar! thus saith Jehovah, Behold, a child shall be born unto the house of David, Josiah by name; and upon thee shall he offer the priests of the high places that burn incense upon thee, and men’s bones shall be burnt upon thee.’ It was deemed so important that this prophecy should be fulfilled in the letter, when it could no longer be fulfilled in reality, that some centuries later Josiah dug up the bones of the Elohistic priests and burned them upon their long-ruined altars (2 Kings xxiii.).