• 80 W. R. Smith. f Nftldoke.
I Knl. l)Llitz.»:h, Pn>lfgomma,»i; ilommol, AlIT WO.
\ Lv 1:411 • liliu'pticiiml the name' is alrv*dy in L.\X 'named the nnnie ' Hut lul to Jewijih lQt<'rprctAtioti, cf. l>alauui, i>#r UotU*naint Adttnai, 44 (T.
I Uii UiQ wonl aee l)river, 'Tlie Tetra^rramnrntou ' Lb Studia BMiea, Oxf. Iii!i6.
new to Israel before their deliverance. A new name wouKl have been in those daj's a new Goil. The name of the motlier of Moses, Yokebctl {Ex G^), contains the word, and, if not among the tribes generally, the name was probably in use in the tribe of Levi, to which Moses belonged. The view (Tiele, Stade) that Moses became acquainted with the name among the Midianites, into a priestly family of which he had married, has no direct sujipor. in Heb. tradition, liut the people in ligypt had, no doubt, connexions with the desert tribes on the east of them, as the flight of Moses to Midian suggests. The Kenites, the Midianito relatives of Rloses, attached themselves to Israel (Jg 1" 4"). And the Rechabites, wlio originally may also have been Kenites (1 Cli 2"), were fer- vent worshippers of J" (2 K lO""'), and stren»ious ipholders of the severer nomadic ideal of religious ile as against the corruptions which Israel's accept- ince of the Canaanite civUization had introduced. Moses, too, demanded liberty to go ' a three days' journey into the wilderness' to sacrifice to the I ;od of the Hebrews (Ex 3'8 5'). These things at least suggest the question whether the name J" was not kno\vn also in the Sinaitic peninsula (cf. Ex 18", DtS.'?-"-, JgS^"-).
iv. Idea of God in various Periods.— (1) The ore-Mosaic period. — It has been made a question how much of the narratives regarding the patri- archal ancestors of Israel is history and how much legend. The stories were written do^vn probably between the middle of the 10th and the middle of the 8th centuries, and it has been argued that they reflect in the main tlie religious ideas of this period. But the historians (J, E) from whom we have them did not invent them, but transcribed tliem from the national consciousness, and they must in any case .eflect the ideas of an age considerably anterior to their own date as literature. The theory that names like Abraham and Sarah are those of ex- tinct deities is perhaps overcome. But how far the wanderings of Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph, and their relations with other peoples, reflect tribal rather than individual movements, is liable to dispute. It is strange that while Edom, Moab, and the like have all one eponymous ancestor, Israel has three, all most unlike one another. Shall we hold them three distinct ideals? Or is Abraham the ideal of what Israel should be, and Jacob the type of that which it was? The story of Jacob and his brother Esau has been read as reflecting the historical relations of the peoples Israel and Edom, and their respective characters. If so, the historian who depicted his own people as crafty, unscrupulous, and godly, and their bitterest enemy as the careless, noble, natural man, was a humorous satirist of the highest rank. Historically, however, his satire must be judged less than just to his own people and more than partial to Edom. Abraham appears a purely personal ligure. He may be transfigured by religious idealism, but the name nmst be traditional.
Apart from the patriarchal histories, sources of information for the condition of prehistoric Israel might be (1) the religious condition of the related peoples, Edom, Moali and Amnion, and Islimael or the Arabs ; and (2) any survivals appearing in post-Mosaic Israel from a lower stage of religion, e.ff. stone, tree, and fountain worship, or rites connected with the dead, the possible remains of ancestor worship. Unfortunately, our knowledge of the peoples related to Israel belongs to a period loll" after the Exodus, being derived from the Bible or inscriptions. The assumption that the tribes wliich united to form Israel stood at the Exodus on the same religious plane as these peoples has its difficulties. When we consider the eleva- tion at which eventually Israel stood above these
nations we hesitate to fix any historical perijd, particularly so ccpiiipaiatively modern a period as the Exodus, at which thej- must have stood on a level. However powerful and creative the genius of Moses may have been, he did not create a religion, any more tlian he did a nation, out of nothing. It is usually assumed that these small peoples, such as Edom and Moab, to whicli Israel was related, were henotlieistic, i.e. worshippers of one god to the exclusion of all others. The assump- tion seems without foundation. Moab had a chief god Chemosli, but a nation so polytheistic as Assyria had also a chief god, A.ssliur, and so other nations. A composite god, Aslitar-Cliemosli, is named on the Moabite Stone ; and iis it is only in S. Araliia tliat Aslitar (Alhtar) is jurtsr., the deity here allied with Chemosh is probalily Astarte. Neither is it certain that tlie Baal of I'eor or of Meon was Chemosh. Mount Nebo may also be named from the god. Various deities also appear among the Edoniites, as ^aush or IJos and l;Cuzah. The personal names Hadad, Baal-hanan, Malikram* are all tlieophorous. And Dusares (Dhu-sliSliara, ' lord of Sliara ') was worshipped at Petra, though this may have been later.t And, of course, the Arabs in addition to a number of gods had the three great goddesses (the daugliters of 'AllAh), al LAt (al-il/xhnt, ' the goddess ' of the sun), al 'Uzza (' the powerful,' possibly the Venus star), and ManOt ('fate,' 'fortune,' rixv, cf. Mciii, Is 65"). A monolatrous Shemitic people is not discoverable in the historic period. The territorial position of peoples like Moab and Edom exposed them greatly to influence from neighbouring n.ations. The name Hnd'id in Edom may suggest Arama'an influence, and Ashlar in Moab the influence of the Canaanites ; but the occurrence of the latter name in a royal document like the inscription of Mesha implies that the worship of Ashtar was national. If tliese small peoples be supposed to have been originally monolatrous, their history exhibits a degeneration and movement towards polj'theism. \Vhile the fundamental ideas of Deity may be presumed to have been similar among all the Shemitic peojiles, if they could be ascertained, the complete diflerence in the divine names current among the.se small nations and in Israel suggests a [jrolonged period of separate religious development, and renders any comparison of their religion with that of Israel at the Exodus barren of results.