The purification came in the discipline of the Exile. Surrounded liy the emblems of foreign idolatry, the exiles became deeply con.scious of tlie grandeur aod truth of the spiritual religion taught
by their prophets ; and although we know that a large number remained in Babylon, of whom many would become merged in the adjacent heathen mass, the remnant which returned brought with them the conteiniit of the great exilic prophet for the manufactured gods of gold and silver and wood, and the stubborn loyalty to J" which was to become in Roman times the wonder and the hatred of the world. That even after the Exile heathen practices lingered in the community is argued by Smend [loc. cit. p. 39) from Ps Iti'"-, Zee 10- 13-, .Job 31-«, cf. Is 27" ; but in any case it wa.s a rapidly vanishing quantity. And the lessons of past experience had been carefully gleaned. The dissolution of mixed marriages by Ezra excluded the most dangerous of the influences which made for heathenism, while the Law sought to guarantee the purity of religion by an unconiijromising policy of national isolation.
II. Idolatrous Worship of J".— In the age of the Judges, as we have seen, and in the middle period of tlie Xorthem Kingdom, the imminent danger h.ad been the submersion of Jalnvism under the refluent wave of heathenism. In the tilh and 7th cents, the object on which prophelism con- centrates its fervent energy is the purification or sjiiritualiz.ation of the worship which was rendered to the national God. Of that worship an ancient and increasingly marked feature was the use of images, and with Hosea there begins an attack upon image-service as inconsistent with the spirit of Jahwism, and virtually substituting fetishes for the living God (8'- « W).
That tlie practice was ancient, and sanctioned by high authority, does not admit of dispute. After his victory over Midian, one of the chosen instruments of J", Gideon, made an ephod out of the spoils — by which the context suggests that we are to understand a gold-])lated image (Jg S-'"-). Still more instructive is the story of Micah the Ephraimite, who out of 200 shekels of silver framed a graven image and a molten image, and hired Jonathan, a descendant of Mo.ses, to be his priest (Jg 17-'). Even David has closely as.<ociated with him emblems of idolatry ; for besides that he tolerates the probably ancestral cult of the hum.aD figures called Teraphim (1 S 19'^), the interroga- tion of the Ephod, here again most likely an imao;e of J", is a liabit of his religious life (1 S 21*23^" 3u'). It could not therefore, as above hinted, im- press the national mind as an impious innovation when Jeroboam associated the worship of J " with the symliols of the golden bulls, and the absence of anj' polemic against the image-worship in the crusade of Elijah is generally regarded as provin" that it was acquiesced in even by the enlightened conscience of the time. (On the other side Ktinig, Haitptproblcme der altisraelitischen Bcliyionsges- c/iic/ifc, p. 65). That the idolatrous worship of J" had even reached back to the Mosaic age, and was sanctioned by Moses, it is not nece.s.sary to admit. Apart from the case for the originality of the second commandment, there are indei)endent grounds for believing, on the analogy of other faiths, that primitive Mosaisni embodied the con- ception of an imageless worshiii (Reichel, ]'vr- hclknU-chc Gattcrculte). Suiruieiitiv significant is the obvious fact that from the .luilges to the 8th cent, the idols became more and more numerous and costly, and that only in the As,<iyrian period were they realized to be alien to the genius of the national religion.
In the prophetic campaign ngainst the historic- ally legitimated idolatry we may distinguish three important pha.ses. Were it made out that lix 34 contains an older Decalogue, we might li«.vo to recognize an earlier attempt at reformation, n-s it is i>ossible to hold tha' that code, in i>rohibitiDl(
448
IDOLATRY
IDOLATKY
'molten gods' (Ex 34"), tacitly sanctioned the Biinpler tyjie of the graven images (Smend, AT Theot. p. I'Jo). The great effort was put forth in the Northern Kingdom, but the prophets were unable even to weaken the idolatrj- which was embedded in the political framework, and the kings persisted to the last in the sin of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat. In Judah the first notable con- tribution to a more spiritual ritual was made by Ilezekiah, in whose refonuinj; spirit may be de- tected a rellection of the zeal of^ Isaiah. In the report of some of his acts, especially of his suppres- sion of the hi"h places and their insignia, critics have suspected the ante-dating of later reforms ; but there is at least unmistakable evidence of his active aggression against the idolatrous elements of the traditional religion (2 K IS*). Sjiecially noteworthy is '"s removal of the brazen serpent, by which he withdrew the most sacred of sanctions, the Mosaic, from the approach to J" throiigh figured sj-mbol. The Reformation under Josiali is liere memorable, not merely as consolidating the worship in an imageless sanctuary, but as energetic- ally acting on the Deuteronomic prohibition of the posts and pillars (Dt 16^"'-). which, before there had been images to give expression to the char- acter of a divinity, had been venerated as places of a god's abi«Je. ' He brought out the Asherah from the house of the Lord, and burned it at the brook kidron ' (2 K 23'). On the whole it may be said that in Judah more energy was shown in, ami more success followed on, the purification of the Jahweh- worship than was the case in Israel, but that in Judah also the purer Jahwism had its reaction in a grosser heathenism.