Not to push the argument too far, then, we may say this much is fairly certain. The children of Israel in early times carried about with them a tribal god, Jahweh, whose presence in their midst was intimately connected with a certain ark or chest, containing a stone object or objects. This chest was readily portable, and could be carried to the front in case of warfare. They did not know the origin of the object in the ark with certainty, but they regarded it emphatically as “Jahweh their god, which led them out of the land of Egypt.” Even after its true nature had been spiritualised away into a great national deity, the most unlimited and incorporeal the world has ever known (as we get him in the best and purest work of the prophets), the imagery of later times constantly returns to the old idea of a stone pillar or menhir. In the embellished account of the exodus from Egypt, Jahweh goes before the Israelites as a pillar or monolith of cloud by day and of fire by night. According to Levitical law his altar must be built of unhewn stone, “for if thou lift up thy tool upon it thou hast polluted it.” It is as a Rock that the prophets often figuratively describe Jahweh, using the half-forgotten language of an earlier day to clothe their own sublimer and more purified conceptions. It is to the Rock of Israel--the sacred stone of the tribe--that they look for succour. Nay, even when Josiah accepted the forged roll of the law and promised to abide by it, “the king stood by a pillar (a menhir) and made a covenant before Jahweh.” Even to the last we see in vague glimpses the real original nature of the worship of that jealous god who caused Dagon to break in pieces before him, and would allow no other sacred stones to remain undemolished within his tribal boundaries. I do not see, therefore, how we can easily avoid the obvious inference that Jahweh, the god of the Hebrews, who later became sublimated and etherealised into the God {126}of Christianity, was in his origin nothing more nor less than the ancestral sacred stone of the people of Israel, however sculptured, and perhaps, in the very last resort of all, the unhewn monumental pillar of some early Semitic sheikh or chieftain. CHAPTER VI.--SACRED STAKES. |MILTON {127}speaks in a famous sonnet of the time “when all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones.” That familiar and briefly contemptuous phrase of the Puritan poet does really cover the vast majority of objects of worship for the human race at all times and in all places. We have examined the stones; the stocks must now come in for their fair share of attention. They need not, however, delay us quite so long as their sister deities, both because they are on the whole less important in themselves, and because their development from grave-marks into gods and idols is almost absolutely parallel to that which we have already followed out in detail in the case of the standing stone or megalithic monument.