III. THE GOD OF HOSTS

Polytheism—Yahveh—Henotheism—Character of the Hebrew religion—The idea of sin—Sacrifice—Circumcision—The priesthood—Strange gods

Next to the promulgation of the “Book of Law,” the building of the Temple was the most important event in the epic of the Jews. It not only gave Yahveh a home, but it gave Judea a spiritual center and capital, a vehicle of tradition, a memory to serve as a pillar of fire through centuries of wandering over the earth. And it played its part in lifting the Hebrew religion from a primitive polytheism to a faith intense and intolerant, but none the less one of the creative creeds of history.

As they first entered the historic scene the Jews were nomad Bedouins who feared the djinns of the air, and worshiped rocks, cattle, sheep, and the spirits of caves and hills.⁵² The cult of the bull, the sheep and the lamb was not neglected; Moses could never quite win his flock from adoration of the Golden Calf, for the Egyptian worship of the bull was still fresh in their memories, and Yahveh was for a long time symbolized in that ferocious vegetarian. In Exodus (xxxii, 25-28) we read how the Jews indulged in a naked dance before the Golden Calf, and how Moses and the Levites—or priestly class—slew three thousand of them in punishment of their idolatry.* Of serpent worship there are countless traces in early Jewish history, from the serpent images found in the oldest ruins,⁵⁴ to the brazen serpent made by Moses and worshiped in the Temple until the time of Hezekiah (ca. 720 B.C.).⁵⁵ As among so many peoples, the snake seemed sacred to the Jews, partly as a phallic symbol of virility, partly as typifying wisdom, subtlety and eternity—literally because of its ability to make both ends meet.⁵⁶ Baal, symbolized in conical upright stones much like the linga of the Hindus, was venerated by some, of the Hebrews as the male principle of reproduction, the husband of the land that he fertilized.⁵⁷ Just as primitive polytheism survived in the worship of angels and saints, and in the teraphim, or portable idols, that served as household gods,⁵⁸ so the magical notions rife in the early cults persisted to a late day despite the protests of prophets and priests. The people seem to have looked upon Moses and Aaron as magicians,⁵⁹ and to have patronized professional diviners and sorcerers. Divination was sought at times by shaking dice (Urim and Thummim) out of a box (ephod)—a ritual still used to ascertain the will of the gods. It is to the credit of the priests that they opposed these practices, and preached an exclusive reliance on the magic of sacrifice, prayer and contributions.

Slowly the conception of Yahveh as the one national god took form, and gave to Jewish faith a unity and simplicity lifted up above the chaotic multiplicity of the Mesopotamian pantheons. Apparently the conquering Jews took one of the gods of Canaan, Yahu,*and re-created him in their own image as a stern, warlike, “stiff-necked” deity, with almost lovable limitations. For this god makes no claim to omniscience: he asks the Jews to identify their homes by sprinkling them with the blood of the sacrificial lamb, lest he should destroy their children inadvertently along with the first-born of the Egyptians;⁶¹ he is not above making mistakes, of which man is his worst; he regrets, too late, that he created Adam, or allowed Saul to become king. He is, now and then, greedy, irascible, bloodthirtsy, capricious, petulant: “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy to whom I will show mercy.”⁶² He approves Jacob’s use of deceit in revenging himself upon Laban;⁶³ his conscience is as flexible as that of a bishop in politics. He is talkative, and likes to make long speeches; but he is shy, and will not allow men to see anything of him but his hind parts.⁶⁴ Never was there so thoroughly human a god.

Originally he seems to have been a god of thunder, dwelling in the hills,⁶⁵ and worshiped for the same reason that the youthful Gorki was a believer when it thundered. The authors of the Pentateuch, to whom religion was an instrument of statesmanship, formed this Vulcan into Mars, so that in their energetic hands Yahveh became predominantly an imperialistic, expansionist God of Hosts, who fights for his people as fiercely as the gods of the Iliad. “The Lord is a man of war,” says “Moses”;⁶⁶ and David echoes him: “He teacheth my hands to war.”⁶⁷ Yahveh promises to “destroy all the people to whom” the Jews “shall come,” and to drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite and the Hittite “by little and little”;⁶⁸ and he claims as his own all the territory conquered by the Jews.⁶⁹ He will have no pacifist nonsense; he knows that even a Promised Land can be won, and held, only by the sword; he is a god of war because he has to be; it will take centuries of military defeat, political subjugation, and moral development, to transform him into the gentle and loving Father of Hillel and Christ. He is as vain as a soldier; he drinks up praise with a bottomless appetite, and he is anxious to display his prowess by drowning the Egyptians: “They shall know that I am the Lord when I have gotten me honor upon Pharaoh.”⁷⁰ To gain successes for his people he commits or commands brutalities as repugnant to our taste as they were acceptable to the morals of the age; he slaughters whole nations with the naive pleasure of a Gulliver fighting for Lilliput. Because the Jews “commit whoredom” with the daughters of Moab he bids Moses: “Take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the Lord against the sun”;⁷¹ it is the morality of Ashurbanipal and Ashur. He offers to show mercy to those who love him and keep his commandments, but, like some resolute germ, he will punish children for the sins of their fathers, their grandfathers, even their great-great-grandfathers.⁷² He is so ferocious that he thinks of destroying all the Jews for worshiping the Golden Calf; and Moses has to argue with him that he should control himself. “Turn from thy fierce wrath,” the man tells his god, “and repent of this evil against thy people”; and “the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.”⁷³ Again Yahveh proposes to exterminate the Jews root and branch for rebelling against Moses, but Moses appeals to his better nature, and bids him think what people will say when they hear of such a thing.⁷⁴ He asks a cruel test—human sacrifice of the bitterest sort—from Abraham. Like Moses, Abraham teaches Yahveh the principles of morals, and persuades him not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if there shall be found fifty—forty—thirty—twenty—ten good men in those cities;⁷⁵ bit by bit he lures his god towards decency, and illustrates the manner in which the moral development of man compels the periodical re-creation of his deities. The curses with which Yahveh threatens his chosen people if they disobey him are models of vituperation, and inspired those who burned heretics in the Inquisition, or excommunicated Spinoza:

Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field. . . . Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land. . . . Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out. . . . The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation. . . . The Lord will smite thee with the botch of Egypt, and with the emerods (tumors), and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed. The Lord shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart. . . . Also every sickness, and every plague, which is not written in the Book of this Law, them will the Lord bring upon thee, until thou be destroyed.⁷⁶

Yahveh was not the only god whose existence was recognized by the Jews, or by himself; all that he asked, in the First Commandment, was that he should be placed above the rest. “I am a jealous god,” he confesses, and he bids his followers “utterly overthrow” his rivals, and “quite break down their images.”⁷⁷ The Jews, before Isaiah, seldom thought of Yahveh as the god of all tribes, even of all Hebrews. The Moabites had their god Chemosh, to whom Naomi thought it right that Ruth should remain loyal;⁷⁸ Baalzebub was the god of Ekron, Milcom was the god of Ammon: the economic and political separatism of these peoples naturally resulted in what we might call their theological independence. Moses sings, in his famous song, “Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods?”⁷⁹ and Solomon says, “Great is our god above all gods.”⁸⁰ Not only was Tammuz accepted as a real god by all but the most educated Jews, but his cult was at one time so popular in Judea that Ezekiel complained that the ritual wailing for Tammuz’ death could be heard in the Temple.⁸¹ So distinct and autonomous were the Jewish tribes that even in the time of Jeremiah many of them had their own deities: “according to the number of thy cities are thy gods, O Judah”; and the gloomy prophet goes on to protest against the worship of Baal and Moloch by his people.⁸² With the growth of political unity under David and Solomon, and the centering of worship in the Temple at Jerusalem, theology reflected history and politics, and Yahveh became the sole god of the Jews. Beyond this “henotheism”* they made no further progress towards monotheism until the Prophets.† Even in the Yahvistic stage the Hebraic religion came closer to monotheism than any other pre-Prophetic faith except the ephemeral sun-worship of Ikhnaton. At least equal as sentiment and poetry to the polytheism of Babylonia and Greece, Judaism was immensely superior to the other religions of the time in majesty and power, in philosophic unity and grasp, in moral fervor and influence.

This intense and sombre religion never took on any of the ornate ritual and joyous ceremonies that marked the worship of the Egyptian and Babylonian gods. A sense of human nothingness before an arbitrary deity darkened all ancient Jewish thought. Despite the efforts of Solomon to beautify the cult of Yahveh with color and sound, the worship of this awful divinity remained for many centuries a religion of fear rather than of love. One wonders, in looking back upon these faiths, whether they brought as much consolation as terror to humanity. Religions of hope and love are a luxury of security and order; the need for striking fear into a subject or rebellious people made most primitive religions cults of mystery and dread. The Ark of the Covenant, containing the sacred scrolls of the Law, symbolized by its untouchability the character of the Jewish creed. When the pious Uzzah, to prevent the Ark from falling into the dust, caught it for a moment in his hands, “the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God smote him there for his error; and there he died.”⁸⁴

The central idea in Judaic theology was that of sin. Never has another people been so fond of virtue—unless it was those Puritans who seemed to step out of the Old Testament with no interruption of Catholic centuries. Since the flesh was weak and the Law complex, sin was inevitable, and the Jewish spirit was often overcast with the thought of sin’s consequences, from the withholding of rain to the ruin of all Israel. There was no Hell in this faith as a distinctive place of punishment; but almost as bad was the Sheol, or “land of darkness” under the earth, which received all the dead, good and wicked alike, except such divine favorites as Moses, Enoch and Elijah. The Jews, however, made little reference to a life beyond the grave; their creed said nothing of personal immortality, and confined its rewards and punishments to this mundane life. Not until the Jews had lost hope of earthly triumph did they take over, probably from Persia and perhaps also from Egypt, the notion of personal resurrection. It was out of this spiritualdénouement that Christianity was born.

The threat and consequence of sin might be offset by prayer or sacrifice. Semitic, like “Aryan,” sacrifice began by offering human victims;⁸⁵ then it offered animals—the “first fruits of the flocks”—and food from the fields; finally it compromised by offering praise. At first no animal might be eaten unless killed and blessed by the priest, and offered for a moment to the god.⁸⁶ Circumcision partook of the nature of a sacrifice, and perhaps of a commutation: the god took a part for the whole. Menstruation and childbirth, like sin, made a person spiritually unclean, and necessitated ritual purification by priestly sacrifice and prayer. At every turn tabus hedged in the faithful; sin lay potential in almost every desire, and donations were required in atonement for almost every sin.

Only the priests could offer sacrifice properly, or explain correctly the ritual and mysteries of the faith. The priests were a closed caste, to which none but the descendants of Levi* could belong. They could not inherit property,⁸⁷ but they were exempt from all taxation, toll, or tribute;⁸⁸ they levied a tithe upon the harvests of the flocks, and turned to their own use such offerings to the Temple as were left unused by the god.⁹⁰ After the Exile, the wealth of the clergy grew with that of the renascent community; and since this sacerdotal wealth was well administered, augmented and preserved, it finally made the priests of the Second Temple, in Jerusalem as in Thebes and Babylon, more powerful than the king.

Nevertheless the growth of clerical power and religious education never quite sufficed to win the Hebrews from superstition and idolatry. The hill-tops and groves continued to harbor alien gods and to witness secret rites; a substantial minority of the people prostrated themselves before sacred stones, or worshiped Baal or Astarte, or practised divination in the Babylonian manner, or set up images and burned incense to them, or knelt before the brazen serpent or the Golden Calf, or filled the Temple with the noise of heathen feasting,⁹¹ or made their children “pass through the fire” in sacrifice;⁹² even some of the kings, like Solomon and Ahab, went “a-whoring” after foreign gods. Holy men like Elijah and Elisha arose who, without necessarily becoming priests, preached against these practices, and tried by the example of their lives to lead their people into righteousness. Out of these conditions and beginnings, and out of the rise of poverty and exploitation in Israel, came the supreme figures in Jewish religion—those passionate Prophets who purified and elevated the creed of the Jews, and prepared it for its vicarious conquest of the western world.