Abraham and his followers worshipped Eloah, or the Almighty God, as the one and only God, offering up to Him at times various sacrifices. According to Renan, in his 'History of the People of Israel,' 'the primitive religion of Israel was the worship of the Elohim, a collective name for the invisible forces that govern the world, and which are vaguely conceived as forming a supreme power at once single and manifold.' 'This vague primitive monotheism got modified during the migrations of the children of Israel, and especially during their struggles for the conquest of Palestine, and at last gave place to the conception of Jahveh, a national God conceived after the fashion of the gods of polytheism, essentially anthropomorphic, the God of Israel in conflict with the gods of the surrounding nations.' 'It was the task of the prophets to change this low and narrow conception of the Deity for a nobler one, to bring back the Jews to the Elohistic idea in a spiritualized form, and to transform the Jahveh or Jehovah of the times of the Judges into a God of all the earth--universal, one and absolute, that God in spirit and in truth of whom Jesus, the last of the prophets, completed the revelation.' Certain events in the life of Joseph brought the family of Jacob to Egypt, separated it from the other tribes, and made the Israelites into a peculiar people.[5] As the twelve families of the sons of Jacob expanded into twelve tribes, they grew in number to such an extent that the Egyptian Government of the day began to be alarmed, and commenced coercive proceedings, which led to the appearance of Moses, first as a liberator, and then as the organizer of the twelve tribes into a Jewish nationality. [Footnote 5: The actual dates of these events and of the exodus from Egypt have not yet been historically fixed. How the Israelites first migrated to the land of Goshen, and how they eventually left Egypt, is still a question of considerable controversy. Further discoveries may yet throw further light on the subject.] When Moses first took the children of Israel out of Egypt, it was probably his intention to lead them at once to the promised land. Finding, however, that their physical strength and courage was not equal to the conquest of Canaan, he kept them in the desert for forty years, until the open-air life and the hardy fare had produced a new generation of men fit to cope with the warriors of the land they were about to attempt to conquer.