Speculation on subjects so remote must be conjectural, but our suggestion
would, perhaps, account for sacrifices to Jehovah, paid by a race
which, by reason of 'nomadic habits,' was never much given to
ancestor-worship, but had been in contact with great sacrificing,
polytheistic civilisations. Mr. Huxley, however, while he seems to slur
the essential distinction between ghost-gods and the Eternal, grants,
later, that 'there are very few people(s?) without additional gods,
which cannot, with certainty, be accounted for as deified ancestors.'
Tá-li-y-Tooboo, of course, is one of these gods, as is Jehovah. Mr. Huxley
gives no theory of _how_ these gods came into belief, except the
suggestion that 'the polytheistic theology has become modified by the
selection of the cosmic or tribal god, as the only god to whom worship is
due on the part of that nation,' without prejudice to the right of other
nations to worship other gods.[23] This is 'monolatry,' and 'the ethical
code, often of a very high order, comes into closer relation with the
theological creed,' _why_, we are not informed. Nor do we learn out of
what polytheistic deities Jehovah was selected, nor for what reason. The
hypothesis, as usual, breaks down on the close relation between the
ethical code and the theological creed, among low savages, with a
relatively Supreme Being, but without ancestor-worship, and without
polytheistic gods from whom to select a heavenly chief.
Whence came the moral element in the idea of Jehovah? Mr. Huxley supposes
that, during their residence in the land of Goshen (and _a fortiori_
before it), the Israelites 'knew nothing of Jehovah.'[24] They were
polytheistic idolaters. This follows, apparently, from Ezekiel xx. 5:
'In the day when I chose Israel, and lifted up mine hand unto the seed of
the house of Jacob, _and made myself known unto them_ in the land of
Egypt.' The Biblical account is that the God of Moses's fathers, the God
of Abraham, enlightened Moses in Sinai, giving his name as 'I am that I
am' (Exodus iii. 6, 14; translation uncertain). We are to understand that
Moses, a religious reformer, revived an old, and, in the Egyptian bondage,
a half-obliterated creed of the ancient nomadic Beni-Israel. They were no
longer to 'defile themselves with the idols of Egypt,' as they had
obviously done. We really know no more about the matter. Wellhausen says
that Jehovah was 'originally a family or tribal god, either of the family
of Moses or of the tribe of Joseph.' How a family could develop a Supreme
Being all to itself, we are not informed, and we know of no such analogous
case in the ethnographic field. Again, Jehovah was 'only a special name of
El, current within a powerful circle.' And who was El?[25] 'Moses was not
the first discoverer of the faith.' Probably not, but Mr. Huxley seems to
think that he was.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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