There was one characteristic of Jahweh-worship, however, which especially helped to make it at last an _exclusive_ cult, and thus paved the way for its final development into a pure monotheism. Jahweh was specially known to be a “jealous god”: this is a trait in his temperament early and often insisted on. We do not know when or where the famous “Ten Words” were first promulgated; but we have every reason to believe that in essence at least they date from a very antique period. Now, at the head of these immemorial precepts of Jahweh stands the prohibition of placing any other gods before his face. Originally, no doubt, the prohibition meant exactly what it states; that Jahweh would endure no companion gods to share his temple; that wherever he dwelt, he would dwell alone without what the Greeks would have called fellow shrine-sharers. Thus we know that no ashera was to be driven into the ground near Jahweh’s ark; and that when Dagon found himself face to face with the Rock of Israel, he broke in pieces, and could not stand before the awful presence of the great Hebrew Pillar. No more than this, then, was at first demanded by “the jealous god”: he asked of his worshippers that they should keep him apart from the society of all inferior gods, {218}should allow no minor or rival deity to enter his precincts. Gradually, however, as Jahweh-worship grew deeper, and the conception of godhead became wider and more sublime, the Jahweh-worshipper began to put a stricter interpretation upon the antique command of the jealous god. It was supposed that every circumcised person, every man visibly devoted to Jahweh, owed to Jahweh alone his whole religious service. Nobody doubted as yet, indeed, that other gods existed: but the extreme Jehovists in the later days of national independence held as an article of faith that no true Israelite ought in any way to honour them. An internal religious conflict thus arose between the worshippers of Jahweh and the worshippers of the Baalim, in which, as might be expected, the devotees of the national god had very much the best of it. Exclusive Jahweh-worship became thenceforth the ideal of the extreme Jehovists: they began to regard all other gods as “idols,” to be identified with their images; they began to look upon Jahweh alone as a living god, at least within the bounds of the Israelitish nation.