This is, indeed, so peculiarly the proper and essential character of the God of the Bible, that this character has passed into the very language of the Hebrews, and has become there the very name of God. Several words are employed in the Bible as appellations of God. One of these _El, Eloah,_ in the plural _Elohïm_, expresses force, _creative power_, and is applied to the manifold gods of Paganism as well as to the one God of the Hebrews. _El Shaddaï_ is translated by _the all-powerful_. _Adonai_ signifies _Lord_. The word _Yahwe_ or _Yehwe_, which becomes in Hebrew pronunciation _Jehovah_, means simply _He is_, and means self-existence, the Being Absolute and Eternal. {162} This name occurs in no other of the Semitic languages, and it is at the epoch of Moses that it appears for the first time amongst the Hebrews: "And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am the Eternal" (_Yahwe, Jehovah_). "And I appeared unto Abraham, Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of the All-powerful (_El Shaddaï_), but by my name Eternal was I not known to them." [Footnote 35 ] _Yahwe, Jehovah_, is at once the true God and the national God of Israel. [Footnote 36] [Footnote 35: Exodus vi. 2, 3.] [Footnote 36: I have consulted respecting the precise sense and the different shades of meaning of the terms expressing God in Hebrew, my learned _confrère_ at the Academy of Inscriptions, M. Munk, who has replied to all my inquiries with as much clearness as courtesy.] The history of the Hebrews is neither less significant nor less expressive than their language; it is the history of the relations of the God, One and Immutable with the people chosen by Him to be the special representative of the religious principle, and the regenerating source of religious life in the human race. {163} This people undergoes the destiny and trials common to all nations; it demands, and becomes subject to, a variety of different governments; it falls into the errors and faults usual to nations; it frequently succumbs to the temptations of idolatry; like the others, it has its days of virtue and of vice, of prosperity and of reverses, of glory and of abasement. Amidst all the vicissitudes and errors of the people of the Bible, the God of the Bible remains invariably the same, without any tincture of anthropomorphism, without any alteration in the idea which the Hebrews conceive of his nature, either during their fidelity or disobedience to his Commandments. It is always the God who has said, "I Am That I Am," of whom his people demand no other explanation of himself, and who, ever present and sovereign, pursues the designs of his providence with men, who either use or abuse the liberty of action which that God had accorded to them at their creation. I wish to retrace, according to the Bible, the principal phases and the principal actors in this history. {164} The more I study, the more I feel that I am watching, as M. Ewald