The conception of the deity of a tribe or nation may be greatly developed under the influence of victory. War becomes a struggle between rival gods. Jephthah the Gileadite, after recounting the triumphs of Israel to the hostile Ammonite king, states the case with the most naked simplicity: "Yahweh, Israel's god, hath dispossessed the Amorites from before his people Israel, and shouldest thou possess them? Wilt thou not possess that which Chemosh thy god giveth thee to possess? So whomsoever Yahweh our god hath dispossessed from before us, them will we possess" (Judges xi. 23, 24). The land of Canaan was the gift of Israel's God, but at first his power was limited by its boundaries: to be driven from the country was to be {108} alienated from the right to offer him worship or receive from him protection. In the famous battle with the Hittites, celebrated by the court-poet of Rameses the Great (1300-1234 B.C.), the king, endangered by the flight of his troops, appeals to the great god Amen, a form of the solar deity Rê, with confidence of help, "Amen shall bring to nought the ignorers of God": and the answer comes, "I am with thee, I am thy father, my hand is with thee, I am more excellent for thee than hundreds of thousands united in one." Success thus enhanced the glory of the victor's gods. Like the Incas of Peru in later days, the Assyrian sovereigns confirmed their power by bringing the deities of tributary peoples in a captive train to their own capital: and the Hebrew prophet opens his description of the fall of Babylon by depicting the images of the great gods Bel and Nebo as packed for deportation on the transport-animals of the conqueror. Other causes further tended to give distinction to the personality of deities, and define their spheres. A promiscuous horde of spirits has no family relationships. A god may have a pedigree; a consort is at his side; and the mysterious divine power reappears in a son. Instead of the political analogy of a sovereign and his attendants, the family conception expresses itself in a divine father, mother and child. Thus the Ibani of Southern Nigeria recognised Adum as the father of all {109} gods except Tamuno the creator, espoused to Okoba the principal goddess, and mother of Eberebo, represented as a boy, to whom children were dedicated. The Egyptian triad, Osiris, Isis and Horus, is well known; and the divine mother with the babe upon her lap passed into the Christian Church in the form of the Virgin Mary and her infant son.