To Abraham must be carried back the belief in one God. Says Wellhausen, “The religious position of Moses stands before us unsupported and incomprehensible unless we believe the tradition (Exo_3:13) that he appealed to the God of their fathers. Moses would hardly have made his way amongst the people, if he had come in the name of a strange and hitherto unknown God. But he might reasonably hope for success, if a fresh revelation had been made to him by the God of Abraham, who was still worshipped in some circles and still lived in the memory of the people.” We may also ask, Why, unless there had been positive historical recollections forbidding it to do so, did not Israelite tradition concentrate all the glory of founding the national Church and State upon Moses? If, in spite of the great deliverance undoubtedly achieved by Moses, Israelitish tradition nevertheless goes back beyond Moses, and finds in the patriarchs the first roots not only of the possession of the land, but also of the people's higher worship of God, this can be reasonably accounted for only by the assumption that memory had retained a hold of the actual course of events.1 [Note: S. R. Driver, The Book of Genesis, xlvii.]
We left our steamer at Suez, remaining there that night; one hour of it, never forgotten, was spent on the roof of our hotel at sunset. The Sinaitic Range was to our left, the calm waters of the gulf before us repeating all the splendour of the heavens. We looked down at the dark silhouette of a little boat moored in the bay, in which a man standing upright looked to us like a sculptured figure in bronze. Suddenly from a minaret near went up the cry to heaven, “God is Great, God is Great, God is Great, God is Great, I witness that there is no God but God.” The figure in the boat made a gesture with the hands as of prayer, and then went prostrate before the glory.2 [Note: M. S. Watts, George Frederic Watts, ii. 64.]
