RELIGION OF ISRAEL
That Zéb@ 6th is the plural of zabd, ‘ host,’ and thus signifies ‘hosts’ or ‘armies,’ is generally admitted. It is equally recognized that ‘Jahweh Zéb@ 6th’ is simply an abbreviation-for the complete formula ‘ Jahweh *klohé Zéba@ oth,’ or, with the article, ‘ Jahweh ?Llohé hazg-Zéba@ oth,* i.e. ‘Jahweh, the God of Hosts.’+ But now, what species of hosts is meant? Or, to be more accurate, let us ask, What was originally meant? For there is the strongest initial probability that this name of God assumed in the usage of the Prophets a more com- prehensive sense than originally belonged to it. The controversy now turns upon the question whether the primary reference in the ‘hosts’ is to hosts of ‘demons,’ { or to the heavenly hosts (i.e. the angels),§ or, finally, to the earthly hosts of Israel.||
(a) It is probable enough, in the light of what has been formerly said, that even in the post- Mosaic period an important réle was more or less consciously attributed to the ‘demons’ in war as well as elsewhere. But that, after the adoption of Jahwism, Jahweh should have been treated simply as the leader of the ‘demons,’ and that the title ‘Jahweh of Hosts’ in this sense should have been employed even by the prophets without scruple, nay, even by preference, is inconceivable. For genuine Jahwism occupies a position of natural opposition to the faith in ‘demons,’ and hence we have nowhere any certain trace of such a quasi- official recognition of the latter as would be implied if the explanation we are examining were correct.
(8) On the other hand, a number of witnesses, some of them ancient, can be called in favour of the conception of an angelic host surrounding Jahweh. In this category we must not, indeed, include passages like 1 K 22 For ‘the whole host of heaven’ which the prophet Micaiah beheld on the right and the left of Jahweh is no morea war host than is ‘the host of the height’ in the very late passage Is 247. But in Gn 32? @) (E) the angels of God are probably thought of as belong- ing to a camp of war; the ‘leader of Jahweh’s host’ in Jos 5% can only mean the leader of a host of angels; and the horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha (2 K 6") are plainly driven by warrior angels.
(y) All this, however, does not weaken the force of the cireumstance that the plural zéba@ 6th, in all the 26 passages where it occurs outside the Divine title, never stands for the host of heaven,{ but always for the earthly battalions of Israel (Ex 74 12'7- “1 etc., down to the late Ps 44” ® ‘Thou goest not forth with our armies’); and it would surely be strange if zéba@’éth had a different meaning only in the collocation ‘ Jahweh Zéb@ 6th’
* Cf., on the different collocations of the word in the Divine name (including its reproductions in the LXX), the exhaustive synopsis of Lohr in his Untersuchungen zum Buch Amos (Giessen, 1901), p. 37 ff.
+ Such a shortening must be assumed even if the fuller for- mula, as Lohr holds, took its rise only a short time before the Exile (upon the analogy of ‘ Jahweh, the God of Israel’),
{ So already Wellhausen (‘Skizzen und Vorarbeiten,’ v. 77) and recently again Schwally (‘Der heilige Krieg im alten Israel,’ p- 5), only that the latter will have it that the special reference is to the ‘demons’ of war (the ‘ wild host which rages in war along with Jahweh’).
$ So most, following the example of Ewald (Die Lehre der Bibel von Gott, ii. 339), who supposed the new name to have been once proclaimed, by a great prophet upon the battlefield after a sudden victory had been gained. The same interpreta- ee been recently upheld afresh by Borchert in SK, 1896, p. 619 fi.
|| So already J. G. Herder (in Geist der hebriischen Poesie) and others ; then, after the view which refers the expression to the hosts of angels had long been the prevailing one, KE. Schrader in Jahrbiicher fiir prot. Theologie, 1875, p. 316 ff. ; and, recently, esp. Kautzsch in art. ‘Zebaoth’ in PRE 2 xvii. p. 423 ff., and in ZATW, 1886, p. 17 ff.
_ 4] This, on the contrary, is everywhere represented by the Singular g%b@; even in Ps 10321 and 1482 the plural form is demonstrably due to error.
RELIGION OF ISRAEL
But why—as Delitzsch asked years ago *—is it that the Divine name Jahweh Zéb@ 6th is not found in the very period when we should most naturally look for it, namely, at the time of the Exodus and of the conflicts with the Canaanites? Instead of this, the title first meets us in 1S 1° as an appellation of the God who dwells in Shiloh! Now, it is quite true that the complete absence of the name in the Hexateuch and the Book of Judges would be very surprising. But Klostermann (Geschichte Israels, p. 76) has made it in the highest degree probable that the name Jahweh Zéba@ dth was, at least in the case of the Hexateuch, removed from the text by the hand of a late redactor (perhaps from the fear of its being misunderstood in the sense of the pro- hibited star-worship). Thus in Jos 3%, in place of the strange expression ‘the ark with the law of the Lord of the whole earth,’ surely there must have stood originally the usual formula ‘the ark of Jahweh of Hosts’; and in 6" the LXX (Kuplg caBawsd) expressly witnesses to the reading Jahweh Zeba@ bth.