And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations.- Exo_3:15.
1. The religion of Israel was not in the first instance made; it arose and grew in prehistoric periods; it had no founder; no man reduced it to system. Suddenly a new and higher religion appeared upon the scene. Instead of a vague belief in spirits, the tribes which afterwards coalesced into the Hebrew nation adopted the sole worship of a God who revealed Himself as Jehovah, and they made allegiance to Him the bond of union among themselves. This momentous revolution, which has affected the whole subsequent history of religion, took place at a time when the civilizations of Egypt and Babylon were already old.
Now while it is true that the documents which relate the history of the change were written centuries after the event, three facts rest on sufficient evidence to be accepted at the outset with confidence.
(1) The worship of Jehovah as Israel's only God preceded the settlement in Canaan and the political unity of the tribes. On the latter point we have proof positive in Deborah's song, a very ancient-perhaps the most ancient-relic of Hebrew literature. The poem presupposes that the tribes are still independent. Judah stood quite apart: it is not even mentioned, though the song enumerates in honorific terms the tribes which fought against Sisera, and reviles with hatred and scorn those who held aloof. Barak and Deborah summoned and led the Israelite clans, but there is no hint of any common ruler, any judge in the later sense, whose affair it was to levy troops and constrain obedience. Yet the tribes, though politically separate, were expected to be one in common zeal for Jehovah their God. It was Jehovah who made the people “offer themselves willingly,” Jehovah who went down to fight for His people against the Canaanites. The wrath of Heaven falls on Israelites who fail in the supreme duty of fighting with Jehovah's army. “Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty.” We may then confidently affirm that it was the worship of Jehovah that made the Hebrew tribes one in time of war, till slowly, and long after Deborah's time, they were moulded into a single commonwealth.
(2) Jehovah, then, was the God of the Hebrews when they first came to Canaan: but can we go further back? The earliest authorities which we have tell us that we may. Jehovah, says Amos (Amo_3:1), “brought up” all Israel “out of the land of Egypt,” and we need not multiply references when all the Biblical writers are at one. Their spirit was being crushed out of them, when God sent them a deliverer in the person of Moses. Moses rallied their fainting courage in the name of Jehovah, who was henceforth to be the sole object of their public worship.
(3) The religion of Jehovah as the God of Israel began with Moses. He is, beyond all reasonable doubt, a historical character, and it is impossible to understand the rise of nation or worship apart from him. Moses in some way which no man can fathom felt the Divine call; he became the priest of Israel, sprinkling the blood of the sacrifice (Exo_24:6) and giving the priestly oracles (Exo_18:1-27; Exo_33:7-11). The old priesthoods of Dan (Jdg_18:30) and of Shiloh (1Sa_2:27) traced their descent to him. Hosea (Hos_12:13) calls him a prophet, while in Deuteronomy (Deu_18:18) he is the greatest of the prophets; and, though the use of the word may be an anachronism, the sense conveyed is altogether true and right. Because he was the leader in religion he also commanded the tribes in war (Num_10:35 f.), for war was a religious function, and the battle-cry was in Jehovah's name. A great deliverance had been wrought: Moses was the prophet who interpreted it and taught the people the hidden sense of their common experience, and led them on to further victory. Under these conditions the new religion arose. From the time of Moses the religion of Israel was unique. Jehovah, and He alone, was to be adored. He was no mere tribal God, but, on the contrary, a God who gathered the tribes into a national confederation. Other nations claimed the protection of their god by virtue of a natural bond: Jehovah became the God of Israel by His own free choice. Other gods arose in dim prehistoric times, none knew how: the recollection of the crisis which made Jehovah Israel's God was never lost. Lastly, He had revealed Himself from the first, under a moral aspect, as one who punished the oppressor and let the captive go free.
2. Was Jehovah known at all to Israel before the time of Moses? There are two main hypotheses.
(1) The first is that the name and worship of Jehovah were utterly unknown to the Israelites before their introduction by Moses. In that case, as it is unlikely that Moses invented the name himself, we must suppose that he borrowed it from an outside source. Jehovah would be the God of some alien nation. That the name is Egyptian is a theory now almost universally abandoned. But some scholars have sought Jehovah's original home, not in Egypt, but in Midian. Upon the basis of various superstitious observances, still prevalent in Israel even in historic times, Stade essays to prove the existence of a very low religious level in the pre-Mosaic age, and more particularly of a system of ancestor and spirit worship, which, in other nations usually preceding polytheism, in Israel preceded monolatry. The Old Testament itself alludes in a few passages to a pre-Mosaic period of idolatry. Now tradition ascribes to Moses before his assumption of leadership a prolonged residence in the wilderness of Sinai; he married there a daughter of Jethro, a priest of Midian. In an old chapter of the Book of Judges, the relatives and descendants of Moses' father-in-law are called, not Midianites, but Kenites, and are in close alliance with Judah. In the rebellion of Jehu, the usurper receives assistance from Jonadab the son of Rechab, who shows himself an adherent of Jehovah. We learn from Jeremiah that the Rechabites were a family who had preserved the simple customs of nomads as a kind of family tradition, and from the Book of Chronicles we gather that the Rechabites were originally Kenites. It has, therefore, been conjectured that Jehovah was originally a God of the Kenites, and was borrowed by Moses from his Kenite (or Midianite) hosts.
Moses, says Budde, is tending the sheep of his father-in-law Jethro, priest of Midian, when he finds God. He cannot have tended the flocks elsewhere than in the pasture-land of the tribe to which his father-in-law belonged and whose chief he probably was. For the steppe is by no means ownerless. Every nomad tribe knows its own district very well, and woe to the tribe which encroaches on the territory of another! Yahweh, therefore, is the God of the tribe to which Moses, on his flight from Egypt, joined himself by marriage; the mountain-God of Horeb, who appears to him and promises him to lead his brethren out of Egypt. The tribe with which Moses found refuge and into which he married bears elsewhere the name “Kenite.” This would seem to be a narrower term, the more comprehensive name being “Midianite”; i.e., the Kenites were a tribe of the Midianites.1 [Note: Karl Budde, Religion of Israel to the Exile, 19.]
Yahweh is closely associated with Sinai: Sinai is called a “mountain of God” before Moses visited it; thither Moses led his people after the Exodus; there Jehovah manifested Himself in the storm-clouds that gathered, and in the lightnings which played about its mountain summit; there He revealed His will to Moses and gave His covenant to Israel (Exo_19:1-25; Exo_20:1-26; Exo_21:1-36; Exo_22:1-31; Exo_23:1-33; Exo_24:1-18); thence He marched forth, in thunderstorm and cloud, to lead Israel into Canaan (Deu_33:2)-
Jehovah came from Sinai,
And beamed forth from Seir (Edom) unto them;
He shined forth from Mount Paran,
And came from holy myriads [read probably, with a very
slight change in the Heb., from Meribath-Kadesh];
and thither also Elijah repaired (1Ki_19:8 f.f), to find Divine encouragement in his despair. Yahweh must thus have been a God who, in some very special sense, had His home on Sinai, and whose worship, in some fuller and more formal sense than had previously been the case, was there accepted by the Israelites. From the connexion of Moses with the Kenite (Jdg_4:11) Jethro (Exo_2:18) and the friendliness which subsisted afterwards between Israel and the Kenites (Jdg_1:16; 1Sa_15:6), it has been supposed that Yahweh was the God of the Kenites, and that Israel at Sinai adopted His worship from them. But this view would imply that there was no connexion between Yahweh and Israel before Moses became the son-in-law of Jethro, which is not probable: a new and foreign deity would hardly have been so rapidly accepted by the Israelites.2 [Note: S. R. Driver, The Book of Exodus, xlix.]
(2) The second hypothesis assumes that Jehovah was already known to the Israelites as one God out of many, or even as the chief and common Deity of all their clans. To this hypothesis, in its turn, the Old Testament gives the support that Moses is represented as charged by Jehovah to accredit himself to the children of Israel as the emissary of their fathers' God. There is also this further argument, that it is difficult to imagine the Israelites rallying round the leadership of one who spoke to them in the name, and urged them to adopt the worship, of a foreign and hitherto unknown Divinity. Moreover, as Dillmann urges, the higher religion of Moses must surely have had its points of connexion with pre-existing beliefs within his people or tribe. By force of the Mosaic teaching, and by the great event which proved the power and favour of Jehovah, the combined Israelite tribes accepted the God of Moses as their own. Religion welded them together. In the name of Jehovah they achieved their earliest victories, and their common patriotism became identified with their common religion.
If Jehovah had been a Kenite god, then in our opinion the Kenites would have become the leading nation and Israel would have been absorbed into it. For it was religion, the characteristic belief in God, which to a large extent determined the national peculiarity of the ancient nations and tribes. That Israel became the leading nation is due to its religion. So the Kenites were absorbed into the Israelites.1 [Note: R. Kittel, The Scientific Study of the Old Testament, 175.]
3. The question has been raised whether Israel's religion owed any of its distinctive features to Egypt or to Midian. At present little or no evidence is forthcoming in favour of either alternative. The available facts, indeed, tend to confirm the truth of the account given in the Old Testament itself-that the religion taught by Moses was imparted to him by Divine revelation. Doubtless he found in the ancestral beliefs of the Hebrews the necessary basis for his teaching; but the simplest explanation of his commanding influence is to be found in the fact that he was a prophet, divinely chosen, inspired, and prepared for his task, and sent to the Hebrews with an authoritative message from the God of their fathers. The work of Moses was, indeed, in the strict sense “prophetic.” He proclaimed the sovereignty of God and declared His purpose of grace. From the first there was an ethical tendency in his teaching and an element of expansiveness. The religion of a family or of a clan became under his guidance the faith of an entire people; and the key-notes of the system were practically two: first, the exaltation of Jehovah, the Deliverer of the Hebrews from bondage, as the one Deity of their allegiance; second, the insistence upon social righteousness as His one essential requirement.
Society is made up of individuals, and “social righteousness” is the righteousness of individuals in the mass. But righteousness of character springs from rightness of heart, and apart from the atonement and Spirit of Christ the human heart is wrong. The wail of Cotter Morison was that “there is no cure for a bad heart,” and that multitudes of men and women around us have got bad hearts. But, thank God! if “there is no cure for a bad heart,” the Spirit of God can give “a new heart,” from which springs righteousness. We cannot have a social and ethical revival that will purify the springs of our social and national life, except as the result of a spiritual revival. We cannot have a widespread “social righteousness,” apart from a widespread spiritual awakening in which men's hearts are made right by the operation of the Spirit of God.1 [Note: T. Waugh, Twenty-three Years a Missioner, 151.]
