There was a special reason why the Israelites felt that their first duty was absolute obedience to the revealed will of Yahweh. They possessed a tradition which told how their fathers were serfs in the land of Egypt; how Yahweh, through his servant Moses, had intervened in their behalf, and with a strong arm and with mighty signs had brought them up out of the land of bondage; and how at Mt. Sinai he had entered into a covenant with them in which he pledged to them his powerful protection on condition of their fidelity in his worship and obedience to all his commandments. This belief was the germ out of which grew most of what was unique in the ethical development of Israel.[337] It played exactly the same part in creating and molding the religious conscience of Israel that the Christian’s belief in the descent of the Son of God into the world and his voluntary death to effect man’s deliverance has had in molding the religious conscience of Christendom. As we advance in our study we shall see how largely the moral consciousness of the Israelites was a creation of this belief in a most sacred covenant between Yahweh and their fathers at the “Terrible Mount” in the wilderness. [Sidenote: The rite of sacrifice] We have seen that religion on the lower levels of culture consists largely in sacrifice; that is, in gifts or offerings either to the spirits of the dead or to the gods. The religion of the ancient Hebrews did not differ in this respect from the religion of other peoples in the same stage of culture.[338] But the evolution of the rite of sacrifice among the Israelites differs from its development among all other peoples in that, under the influence of the Hebrew spirit, the rite was gradually reduced to symbolism and spiritualized. In this process it underwent the most remarkable metamorphoses. Beginning with meat and drink offerings from man to God, it ends with God giving himself a sacrifice for man. The system thus transformed became the great inspirer of ethical sentiment and a unique vehicle of moral instruction. [Sidenote: The vagueness of the belief in an after life] The Israelite’s thought of death and of the after life also reacted powerfully upon his moral feelings and colored all his ethical speculations; for, like the conceptions held of God, the notions entertained of man’s lot after death, as we have seen in the case of the ancient Egyptians, has far-reaching consequences for the moral life.