Wellhausen's and other German ideas filter into popular traditions, as we
saw, through 'A Short Introduction to the History of Ancient Israel'
(pp. 19, 20), by the Rev. A.W. Oxford, M.A., Vicar of St. Luke's, Soho.
Here follows Mr. Oxford's undeniably 'short way with Jehovah.' 'Moses was
the founder of the Israelite religion. Jehovah, his family or tribal god,
perhaps originally the God of the Kenites, was taken as a tribal god by
all the Israelite tribes.... That Jehovah was not the original god of
Israel' (as the Bible impudently alleges) 'but was the god of the Kenites,
we see mainly from Deut. xxxiii. 2, Judges v. 4, 5, and from the history
of Jethro, who, according to Judges i. 16, was a Kenite.'
The first text says that, according to Moses, 'the Lord came from Sinai,'
rose up from Seir, and shone from Mount Paran. The second text mentions
Jehovah's going up out of Seir and Sinai. The third text says that Jethro,
Moses's Kenite (or Midianite) father-in-law, dwelt among the people of
Judah; Jethro being a priest of Midian. How all this proves that 'Moses
was a great impostor,' as the poet says, and that Jehovah was not 'the
original God of Israel,' but (1) Moses's family or tribal god, or (2) 'the
god of the Kenites,' I profess my inability to comprehend.
Wellhausen himself had explained Jehovah as 'a family or tribal god,
either of the family of Moses' (tribe of Levi) 'or of the tribe of
Joseph.' It seems to be all one to Mr. Oxford whether Jehovah was a god
of Moses's tribe or quite the reverse, 'a Kenite god.' Yet it really
makes a good deal of difference! For in a complex of tribes, speaking one
language, it is to the last degree unexampled (within my knowledge) that
one tribe, or family, possesses, all to itself, a family god who is also
the Creator and is later accepted as such by all the other tribes. One may
ask for instances of such a thing in any known race, in any stage of
culture. Peru will not help us--not the Creator, Pachacamac, but the Sun,
is the god of the Inca family. If, on the other hand, Jehovah was a Kenite
god, the Kenites were a half-Arab Semitic people connected with Israel,
and may very well have retained traditions of a Supreme Being which, in
Egypt, were likely to be dimmed, as Exodus asserts, by foreign religions.
The learned Stade, to be sure, may disbelieve in Israel's sojourn in
Egypt, but that revolutionary opinion is not necessarily binding on us and
involves a few difficulties.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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