grave-stone of some deified ancestor: and of this ancestor “Jahweh” was perhaps either the proper name or a descriptive epithet. Even if, as Colenso suggests, the name itself was Canaanitish, and belonged already to a local god, its application to the sacred stone of the ark would be merely another instance of the common tendency to identify the gods of one race or country with those of another. The stone itself was always enshrouded in Egyptian mystery, and no private person was permitted to behold it. Sacrifices, both human and otherwise, were offered up to it, as to the other gods, its fellow’s and afterwards its hated rivals. The stone, like other sacred stones of pillar shape, was regarded as emblematic of the generative power. Circumcision was a mark of devotion to Jahweh, at first, no doubt, either voluntary, or performed by way of a ransom, but becoming with the growth and exclusiveness of Jahweh-worship a distinctive rite of Jahweh’s chosen people. (But other Semites also circumcised {203}themselves as a blood-offering to their own more or less phallic deities.) More briefly still, among many Hebrew gods, Jahweh was originally but a single one, a tribal ancestor-god, worshipped in the form of a cylindrical stone, perhaps at first a grave-stone, and regarded as essentially a god of increase, a special object of veneration by childless women. From this rude ethnical divinity, the mere sacred pillar of a barbarous tribe, was gradually developed the Lord God of later Judaism and of Christianity--a power, eternal, omniscient, almighty, holy; the most ethereal, the most sublime, the most superhuman deity that the brain of man has ever conceived. By what slow evolutionary process of syncretism and elimination, of spiritual mysticism and national enthusiasm, of ethical effort and imaginative impulse that mighty God was at last projected out of so unpromising an original it will be the task of our succeeding chapters to investigate and to describe. CHAPTER X.--THE RISE OF MONOTHEISM. |WE {204}have seen that the Hebrews were originally polytheists, and that their ethnical god Jahweh seems to have been worshipped by them in early times under the material form of a cylindrical stone pillar. Or rather, to speak more naturally, the object they so worshipped they regarded as a god, and called Jahweh. The question next confronts us, how from this humble beginning did Israel attain to the pure monotheism of its later age? What was there in the position or conditions of the Hebrew race which made the later Jews reject all their other gods, and fabricate out of their early national Sacred Stone the most sublime, austere, and omnipotent deity that humanity has known?