A camel’s-hair tent set in the desert was the first cathedral, the earliest cloister of latest ideals.  Set not in one desert merely but in two, in the infinite of time as well as in that of space, there was about it a limitlessness in which the past could sleep, the future awake, and into which all things, the human, the divine, gods and romance, could enter.

The human came first.  Then the gods.  Then romance.  The divine was their triple expansion.  It was an after growth, in other lands, that tears had watered.  In the desert it was unimagined.  Only the gods had been conceived.

The gods were many and yet but one.  Though plural they were singular.  The subjects of impersonal verbs, they represented the pronoun in such expressions as:  it rains; it thunders.  “It” was Elohim.  Already among nomad Sémites monotheism had begun.  Yet with this distinction.  Each tribe had separate sets of Its that guided, guarded, and scourged.  Omnipresent but not omnipotent, any humiliation to the family that they had in charge humiliated them.  It made them angry, therefore vindictive, consequently unjust.  It may be that they were not very ethical.  Perhaps the bedouins were not either.  Man fashions his god in proportion to his intelligence.  That of the nomad was slender.  He lacked, what the Aryan shepherd possessed, the ability for mythological invention.  The defect was due to his speech, which did not lend itself to the deification of epithets.  Even had it done so, it is probable that his mode of life would have rendered the paraphernalia of polytheism impossible.  People constantly moving from place to place could not be cumbered with idols.  The Elohim were, therefore, a convenience for travellers and an unidolatrous monotheism a necessity which the absence of vehicles imposed.  On the other hand, given every facility, it is presumable that the result would have been the same.  Mythology is the mother of poetry.  Idolatry is the father of art.  Neither could appeal to a people to whom delicacy was an unknown god.  Had it been known and a fetish, they could not have become the practical people that they are.  Even then they were shrewd.  Their Elohim might alarm but never delude.  Israel was uncheatable even in dream.

Originally emigrants from Arabia, the nomads reached Syria, some directly, others circuitously, by way of Padan-Aram and across the Euphrates, whence perhaps their name of Ibrim or Hebrews ­Those from beyond.  In the journey Babel and Ur must have detained.  These cities, with their culture relatively deep and their observatories equally high, became, in after days, a source of legend, of wonder, of hatred, perhaps of revelation as well.

At the time the nomads had no cosmogony or theories.  The Chaldeans had both.  There was a story of creation, another of antediluvian kings and of the punishment that overtook them.  There was also a story of an emir of Ur, an old man who had benevolently killed an animal instead of his son.  The story, like the others, must have impressed.  In after years the old man became Abraham, a great person, who had conversed with the Elohim and whose descendants they were.

The story of creation also impressed.  It was enlightening and comprehensible.  The parallel theory of spontaneous generation and the progressive evolution of the species which the magi entertained, they probably never heard.  Even otherwise it was too complex for minds as yet untutored.  The fables alone appealed.  Mentally compressed into portable shape, carried along, handed down, their origin afterward forgotten, they became the traditions of a nation, which, eminently conservative, preserved what it found, among other things the name, perhaps inharmonious, of Jhvh.

That name, since found on an inscription of Sargon, appears to have been the title of a local god of Sinai, whom the nomads may have identified with Elohim, particularly, perhaps, since he presided over thunder, the phenomenon that alarmed them most and which, in consequence, inspired the greatest awe.  That awe they put into the name, the pronunciation of which, like the origin of their traditions, they afterward forgot.  In subsequent rabbinical writings it became Shem, the Name; Shemhammephoresh, the Revealed Name, uttered but once a year, on the day of Atonement, by the high priest in the Holy of Holies.  Mention of it by anyone else was deemed a capital offence, though, permissibly, it might be rendered El Shaddai, the Almighty.  That term the Septuagint translated into [Greek:  ho Kyrios], a Greek form, in the singular, of the Aramaic plural Adonai, which means Baalim, or sun lords.

That form the Vulgate gave as Dominus and posterior theology as God.  The latter term, common to all Teutonic tongues, has no known meaning.  It designates that which, to the limited intelligence of man, has been, and must be, incomprehensible.  But the original term Jhvh, which, in the seventeenth century, was developed into Jehovah, yet which, the vowels being wholly conjectural, might have been developed into anything else, clearly appealed to wayfarers to whom Chaldean science was a book that remained closed until Nebuchadnezzar blew their descendants back into the miraculous Babel of their youth.

Meanwhile, apart from the name ­now generally written Jahveh ­apart too from the fables and the enduring detestation which the colossal city inspired, probably but one other thing impressed, and that was the observance of the Sabbath.  To a people whose public works were executed by forced labour, such a day was a necessity.  To vagrants it was not, and, though the custom interested, it was not adopted by them until their existence from nomad had become fixed.

At this latter period they were in Kanaan.  Whether in the interval a tribe, the Beni-Israel, went down into Egypt, is a subject on which Continental scholarship has its doubts.  The early life of the tribe’s leader and legislator is usually associated with Rameses II., a pharaoh of the XIX. dynasty.  But it has been found that incidents connected with Moses must apparently have occurred, if they occurred at all, at a period not earlier than the XXVI. dynasty, which constitutes a minimum difference of seven hundred years.  Yet, in view of the decalogue, with its curious analogy to the negative confession in the Book of the Dead; in view also of a practice surgical and possibly hygienic which, customary among the Egyptians, was adopted by the Jews; in view, further, of ceremonies and symbols peculiarly Egyptian that were also absorbed, a sojourn in Goshen there may have been.

The spoiling of the Egyptians, a roguery on which Israel afterward prided herself, is a trait perhaps too typical to be lightly dismissed.  On the other hand, if Moses were, which is at least problematic, and if, in addition to being, he was both the nephew of a pharaoh and the son-in-law of a priest, as such one to whom, in either quality, the arcana of the creed would be revealed, it becomes curious that nowhere in the Pentateuch is there any doctrine of a future life.  Of the entire story, it may be that only the journey into the Sinaiatic peninsula is true, and of that there probably remained but tradition, on which history was based much later, by writers who had only surmises concerning the time and circumstances in which it occurred.

Yet equally with the roguery, Moses may have been.  Seen through modern criticism his figure fades though his name persists.  To that name the Septuagint tried to give an Egyptian flavour.  In their version it is always [Greek:  Mouses], a compound derived from the Egyptian mo, water, and uses, saved from, or Saved-from-the-water. Per contra, the Hebrew form Mosheh is, as already indicated, the same as the Babylonian Masu, a term which means at once leader and litterateur, in addition to being the cognomen of a god.

Moses is said to have led his people out of bondage.  He was the writer to whom the Pentateuch has been ascribed.  But he was also a prophet.  In Babylon, the god of prophecy was Nebo.  It was on Mount Nebo that Jahveh commanded the prophet of Israel to die.  Moreover, the divinity that had Masu for cognomen was, as is shown by a Babylonian text, the primitive god of the sun at Nippur, but the sun at noon, at the period of its greatest effulgence, at the hour when it wars with whatever opposes, when it wars as Jahveh did, or as the latter may be assumed to have warred, since Isaiah represented him as a mighty man, roaring at his enemies, exciting the fury of the fight, marching personally to the conflict, and, in the Fourth Roll of the Law (Numbers), there is mention of a book entitled:  The Wars of Jahveh.

Whether, then, Moses is but a composite of things Babylonian fused in an effort to show a link between a god and a people, is conjectural.  But it is also immaterial.  The one instructive fact is that, in a retrospect, the god, immediately after the exodus, became dictator.

Yet even in the later age, when the retrospect was effected, conceptions were evidently immature.  On one occasion the god met Moses, tried to kill him, but finally let him go.  The picture is that of a personal struggle. Again, the spectacle of his back which he vouchsafed to Moses is construable only as an arrière-pensee, unless it be profound philosophy, unless it be taken that the face of God represents Providence, to see which would be to behold the future, whereas the back disclosed the past.

It is, however, hardly probable that that construction occurred to the editors of the Pentateuch, who, elsewhere, represented Jahveh as a butcher, insatiable, jealous, vindictive, treacherous, and vain, one that consigned all nations other than Israel to ruin and whom a poet represented trampling people in anger, making them drunk with his fury, and defiling his raiment with blood.

But in the period related in Exodus, Jahveh was but the tutelary god of an itinerant tribe that, in its gipsy lack of territorial possessions, was not even a nation.  Like his people he too was a vagrant.  Like them he had no home.  Other gods had temples and altars.  He lacked so much as a shrine.  In prefigurement of the Wandering Jew, each day he moved on.  The threats of a land that never smiled were reflected in his face.  The sight of him was death.  Certainly he was terrible.

This conception, corrected by later writers, was otherwise revised.  In the interim Jahveh himself was transformed.  He became El, the god; presently El Shaddai, God Almighty.  In the ascension former traits disappeared.  He developed into the deity of emphatic right.  Morality, hitherto absent from religion, entered into it.  Israel, who perhaps had been careless, who, like Solomon, had followed Ishtar, became austere.  Thereafter, Judaism, of which Christianity and Muhammadanism were the after thoughts, was destined to represent almost the sum total of the human conscience.

But in Kanaan, during the rude beginnings, though Jahveh was jealous, Ishtar, known locally as Ashtoreth, allured.  Conjointly with Baal, the indigenous term for Bel, circumadjacently she ruled.  The propitiatory rites of these fair gods were debauchery and infanticide, the loosening of the girdles of girls, the thrusting of children into fires.  It may be that these ceremonies at first amazed the Hebrews.  But conscientiously they adopted them, less perhaps through zeal than politeness; because, in this curious epoch, on entering a country it was thought only civil to serve the divinities that were there, in accordance with the ritual that pleased them.

With the mere mortal inhabitants, Israel was less ceremonious.  Commanded by Jahveh to kill, extermination was but an act of piety.  It was then, perhaps, that the Wars of Jahveh were sung, a pæan that must have been resonant with cries, with the death-rattle of kingdoms, with the shouts of the invading host.  From the breast-plates of the chosen, the terror of Sinai gleamed.  Men could not see their faces and live.  The moon was their servant.  To aid them the sun stood still.  They encroached, they slaughtered, they quelled.  In the conquest a nation was born.  From that bloody cradle the God of Humanity came.  But around and about it was vacancy.  In emerging from one solitude the Jews created another.  They have never left it.  The desert which they made destined them to be alone on this earth, as their god was to be solitary in heaven.

Meanwhile there had been no kings in Israel.  With the nation royalty came.  David followed Saul.  After him was Solomon.  It is presumably at this period that traditions, orally transmitted from a past relatively remote, were first put in writing.  Previously it is conjectural if the Jews could write.  If they could, it is uncertain whether they made any use of the ability other than in the possible compilation of toledoth, such as the Book of the Generations of Adam and the Wars of Jahveh, works that, later, may have served as data for the Pentateuch.  Even then, the compositions must have been crude, and such rolls as existed may have been lost when Nebuchadnezzar overturned Jerusalem.

Presumably, it was not until the post-exilic period that, under the editorship perhaps of Ezra, the definitive edition of the Torah was produced.  This supposition existing texts support.  In Genesis (xxxvi it is written:  “These are the kings of Edom before there reigned any king over the children of Israel.”  The passage shows, if it shows anything, that there were, or had been, kings in Israel at the time when the passage itself was written.  It is, therefore, at least post-Davidic.  In Genesis another passage (xli says:  “The sceptre shall not pass from Judah until Shiloh come.”  Judah was the tribe that became pre-eminent in Israel after the captivity.  The passage is therefore post-exilic, consequently so is Genesis, and obviously the rest of the Pentateuch as well.  Or, if not obviously, perhaps demonstrably.  In II Esdras xi-48 it is stated that the writer, a candle of understanding in his heart, and aided by five swift scribes, recomposed the Law, which, previously burned, was known to none.

The burning referred to is what may, perhaps, be termed religious fiction.  Barring toledoth and related data that may have been lost, the Law had almost certainly not existed before, and this post-exilic romance concerning it was evolved in a laudable effort to show its Mosaic source.  What is true of the Law is, in a measure, true of the Prophets.  None of them anterior to Cyrus, all are later than Alexander.  Spiritually very near to Christianity, chronologically they are neighbourly too.  If not divinely inspired, they at least disclosed the ideal.

Previously the ideal had not perhaps been very apparent.  Apart from sécessions, rebellions, concussions, convulsions that deified Hatred until Jahveh, in the person of Nebuchadnezzar, talked Assyrian, and then, in the person of Cyrus, talked Zend, the god of Israel, even in Israel, was not unique.  He had a home, his first, the Temple, built gorgeously by Solomon, where invisibly, mysteriously, perhaps terribly, beneath the wings of cherubim that rose from the depths of the Holy of Holies, he dwelled.  But the shrine, however ornate, was not the only one.  There were other altars, other gods; the plentiful sanctuaries of Ashera, of Moloch and of Baal.  On the adjacent hilltops the phallus stood.  In the neighbouring groves the kisses of Ishtar consumed.

The Lady of Girdles was worshipped there not by men and women only, but by girls with girls; by others too, not in couples, but singly, girls who in their solitary devotions had instruments for aid. Religion, as yet, had but the slightest connection with morality, a circumstance explicable perhaps by the fact that it resumed the ethnical conscience of a race.  Between the altar of El Shaddai and the shrines of other gods there were many differences, of which geography was the least.  Jahveh, from a tutelary god, had indeed become the national divinity of a chosen people.  But the Moabites were the chosen people of Chemos; the Ammonites were the chosen people of Rimmon; the Babylonians were the chosen people of Bel.  The title conferred no distinction.  As a consequence, to differentiate Jahveh from all other gods, and Israel from all other people, to make the one unique and the other pontiff and shepherd of the nations of the world, became the dream of anonymous poets, one that prophets, sometimes equally anonymous, proclaimed.  It was the prophets that reviled the false gods, denounced the abominations of Ishtar, and purified the Israelite heart.  While nothing discernible, or even imaginable, menaced, however slightly, the great empires of that day, the prophets were the first to realize that the Orient was dead.  When the Christ announced that the end of the world was at hand, he but reiterated anterior predictions that presently were fulfilled.  A world did end.  That of antiquity ceased to be.

It was the prophets that foretold it.  Gloomy, fanatic, implacable and, it may be, mad, yet inspired at least by genius which itself, while madness, is a madness wholly divine, they heralded the future, they established the past.  Abraham they drew from allegory, Moses from myth.  They made them live, and so immortally that one survives in Islam, the other in words that are a law of grace for all.

If, in visions possibly ecstatic, they beheld heights that lost themselves in immensity, and saw there an ineffable name seared by forked flames on a tablet of stone; if that spectacle and the theophany of it were but poetry, the decalogue is a fact, one so solid that though ages have gone, though empires have crumbled, though the customs of man have altered, though the sky itself have changed, still is obeyed the commandment:  Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

From Chemos in Moab, from Rimmon among the Ammonites, no such edict had come.  It felled them.  Amon-Ra it tore from the celestial Nile, and Bel-Marduk from the Silver Sky.  The Refaim hid them in shadows as surely as they buried there the high and potent lords of Greece and Rome.  These interments, completed by others, the prophets began.  For it was they who, in addition to the command, revealed the commandant, creator of whatever is:  the Being Absolute that abhorred evil, loved righteousness, punished the transgressor and rewarded the just; El Shaddai, then really Lord of Hosts.

It may be that already in Israel there had been some prescience of this.  But it lacked the authority of inspired text.  The omission was one that only seers could remedy.  It was presumably in these circumstances that an agreement was imagined which, construed as a condition of a covenant, assumed to have been made with Abraham, was further assumed to have been renewed to Moses.  The resulting poetry was enveloped in a romance of which Continental scholarship has discovered two versions, woven together, perhaps by Ezra, into a single tale.

“In the beginning Elohim created the heaven and earth.”  That abrupt declaration, presented originally in but one of the versions, had already been pronounced of Indra and also of Ormuzd.  The Hebraic announcement alone prevailed.  It emptied the firmament of its monsters, dislodged the gods from the skies, and enthroned there a deity at first multiple but subsequently unique.  Afterward seraphs and saints might replace the evaporated imaginings of other creeds; Satan might create a world of his own and people it with the damned; theology might evolve from elder faiths a newer trinity and set it like a diadem in space; angels and archangels might refill the devastated heavens of the past; none the less, in the light of that austere pronouncement, for a moment Israel dwelled in contemplation of the Ideal.

At the time it is probable that the story of the love of the sons of Jahveh for the daughters of men, together with the pastel of Eden as it stands to-day, were not contained in existing accounts of that ideal.  These legends, which regarded as legends are obviously false, but which, construed as allegories, may be profoundly true, were probably not diffused until after the captivity, when Israel was not more subtle, that is not possible, but, by reason of her contact with Persia, more wise.

The origin of evil these myths related but did not explain.  Since then, from no church has there come an adequate explanation of the malediction under which man is supposed to labour because of the natural propensities of beings that never were.  That explanation these myths, which orthodoxy has gravely, though sometimes reluctantly, accepted, both provide and conceal.  They date possibly from the Ormuzdian revelation:  “In the beginning was the living Word.”

John, or more exactly his homonym, repeated the pronouncement, adding:  “The word was made flesh.”  But, save for a mention of the glory which he had before the world was, he omitted to further follow the thought of Ormuzd, who, in describing paradise to Zarathrustra, likened it, in every way, to heaven.  There the first beings were, exempt from physical necessities, pure intelligences, naked as the compilers of Genesis translated, naked and unashamed, but naked and unashamed because incorporeal, unincarnate and clothed in light, a vestment which they exchanged for a garment of flesh, coats of skin as it is in Genesis, when, descended on earth, their intelligence, previously luminous, swooned in the senses of man.

In Egypt, the harper going out from Amenti sang:  “Life is death in a land of darkness, death is life in a land of light.”  There perhaps is the origin of evil.  There too perhaps is its cure.  But the view accepted there too is pre-existence and persistence, a doctrine blasphemous to the Jew as it was to the Assyrian, to whom the gods alone were immortal, and to whom, in consequence, immortal beings would be gods.  In the creed of both, man was essentially evanescent.  To the Hebrew, he lived a few, brief days and then went down into silence, where no remembrance is.  There, gathered among the Refaim to his fathers, he remained forever, unheeded by God.

The conception, passably rationalistic and not impossibly correct, veiled the beautiful allegory that was latent in the Eden myth.  It had the further defect, or the additional advantage, of eliminating any theory of future punishment and reward.  In lieu of anything of the kind, there was a doctrine that evil, in producing evil, automatically punished itself.  The doctrine is incontrovertible.  But, for corollary, went the fallacy that virtue is its own reward.  Against that idea Job protested so energetically that mediaeval monks were afraid to read what he wrote.  Yet it was perhaps in demonstration of the real significance of the allegory that a spiritualistic doctrine ­always an impiety to the orthodox ­was insinuated by the Pharisees and instilled by the Christ.

The basis of it rested perhaps partially in the idealism of the prophets.  The clamour of their voices awoke the dead.  It transformed the skies.  It transfigured Jahveh.  It divested him of attributes that were human.  It outlined others that were divine.  It awoke not merely the dead, but the consciousness that a god that had a proper name could not be the true one.  Thereafter mention of it was avoided.  The vowels were dropped.  It became unpronounceable, therefore incommunicable.  For it was substituted the term vaguer, and therefore more exact, of Lord, one in whose service were fulfilled the words of Isaiah:  “I am the first and I am the last, and beside me there is no God.”

In the marvel of that miraculous realization were altitudes hitherto undreamed, peaks from whose summits there was discernible but the valleys beneath, and another height on which stood the Son of man.  Yet marvellous though the realization was, instead of diminishing, it increased.  It did not pass.  It was not forgot.  Ceaselessly it augmented.

In the Scriptures there are many marvels.  That perhaps is the greatest.  Amon, originally an obscure provincial god of Thebes, became the supreme divinity of Egypt.  Bel, originally a local god of Nippur, became in Babylon Lord of Hosts.  But Jahveh, originally the tutelary god of squalid nomads, became the Deity of Christendom.  The fact is one that any scholarship must admit.  It is the indisputable miracle of the Bible.