(1) _General Character._ A careful examination of its character shows that while it is by no means identical with the religion taught by the Prophets, and while it retained many heathen ideas and customs, yet it contained within itself the promise and guarantee of development. We have already had occasion to notice that it is not pure Monotheism. Jehovah is not the only God; He is the only God for Israel. The heathen deities are still regarded as having a real existence. Neither can it be called a purely spiritual religion, for Jehovah is rather said to have a spirit than to be a spirit; He has a form which, though terrible in its effect on the beholder, by reason of its glory, can nevertheless be seen; He inhabits a special place, which is His sacred territory, and on this Moses stumbles all unwittingly in Midian. Still more emphatically against the idea of a purely spiritual religion is the fact--which the editors have done their best to hide, but not successfully--that images of some kind were allowed, or existed unreproved. The Ephod, of which we hear so often, was evidently at one time an idol. The meaning of the word is of something "covered," as may be seen from Isa. xxx. 22, where the feminine form of the word (_aphuddah_) is used of the gold plating of images; but according to a later idea (Exod. xxviii. 6-14), the Ephod formed part of the dress of the High Priest, and was a kind of embroidered waistcoat. This explanation, however, does violence to a number of passages where the Ephod is mentioned. Gideon expended seventeen hundred shekels of gold on an Ephod which he "set up" in Ophrah (Jud. viii. 26 f.); this cannot be a waistcoat. Only the explanation that the Ephod was an image can do justice to the reference in Judges xvii. 5, and it suits the passage in 1 Sam. xxi. 9, if we think of the sword hanging behind an image. If the ephod was nothing more than a waistcoat by which lots were determined, we have to explain why it is so sharply condemned in Judges viii. 27, and why the text of 1 Sam. xiv. 18, which in the Septuagint reads "ephod," in the Hebrew text has been altered to read "ark"; an alteration which is quite impossible here, as the ark was at this time in Kirjath Jearim, and, moreover, was never used for the purpose of obtaining oracles. (The only explanation is that some scribe has made this alteration because he knew that there was something idolatrous about the ephod.) Even as late as Hosea (iii. 4) we find the ephod mentioned in a connection where it can only stand for an object of idolatrous worship. It is certainly strange that the same name should be in use for an image, and then later for a garment of the high-priest; but the likely explanation of this is that the image was at one time clothed with a dress, as was usual (Jer. x. 9), and that in the pockets of this the lots were kept. When the use of the image became offensive the garment was retained as part of the high-priest's dress.