Now, it is just in the quality of moral force that the God of the Scriptures shows his superiority. The entire revealing process can be looked upon as one long story of the moralization of the idea of God. Let it be granted that the biblical idea was at the beginning marked by the naïve and the crude. Personally, we have never been able to see the pertinency of the reasonings which make the Hebrew Jehovah as imperfect as some students would have us believe. Nevertheless, for the sake of the argument we will admit limitations in the early Hebrew conception of God. Even with such concession, however, the outstanding characteristics of that God were from the beginning moral. Suppose that Jehovah was at the beginning just a tribal Deity. The difference between Jehovah and other tribal deities was that the commandments which were conceived of as coming from him looked in the direction of increasing moral life for the people, and these moral demands upon the chosen people were conceived of as arising out of the nature of Jehovah himself. To be sure, the early narratives employ expressions like "the jealousy of God," but even a slightly sympathetic reading of the Scriptures indicates that the jealousy was directed against whatever would harm human life. In the mighty pictures of the patriarchs the heroes speak to their God as if the same moral obligations rested upon God as upon themselves. There is nothing finer in the Old Testament than Abraham's challenge, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" We are not specially interested in the growth of the ideas as to the power of God, though we repeat that it is difficult for us to believe that the early Hebrews thought of their Deity as so narrowly limited in power as some modern students seek to prove. The conception of the might of Jehovah grew through the centuries and followed upon the extension of the knowledge of the Hebrews about the world in which they lived. If tomorrow morning some revolutionary astronomical discovery should convince us that the solar system is much vaster than we have ever imagined, the theist would, of course, extend the thought of the sway of God to all that solar system. If there were some method of becoming aware that the bodies of the entire astronomical system are millions of times more numerous than scientists ever have dreamed, the theist would, of course, maintain that the righteous purpose of his God reaches to all of these bodies. The growth of the Hebrew idea was somewhat parallel to this. Even when the Hebrew thought of the outside peoples as having gods of their own; he believed that as soon as his God came into conflict with the other gods, he would shatter them with his might. By the time the first chapters of Genesis were written the Hebrew conceived of God as creator of all things, and thereafter the growth of the belief in the power of God kept pace with the enlarging view of the world.