highlands of Judah and Gilead in close touch with desert life and ways of thought."

2. The historical memories of the Judges period were another circumstance that preserved the distinction between Yahweh and the local Baals. This distinction was implied in the vivid stories that came down across the centuries from the early period of the settlement, enshrined in the recollections of the people. These ancient folk-tales from the pre-monarchic period were taken up eagerly by the Deuteronomic school, which combined them into a treatise later known as the "Book of Judges." In this work, the campaign against the local Baal-worship is treated with great energy and effect.

3. The military victories of David supplied another tendency in the direction of emphasizing the contrast between Yahweh and the Amorite gods. The martial progress of the Hebrew nation lifted Yahweh high above the local Baals. The Amorite Araunah, of Jerusalem, is represented as speaking to David about "Yahweh thy god" (II Sam. 24:23); and it was impossible that Araunah and his Amorite neighbors could have imagined that the strong god whose tent had been lately set up on the hill of Zion was in any sense a deity whom their own forefathers had venerated as a local Baal. When the

It is a well-established law that every stage in social development finds its point of departure in some diversity, or heterogeneity, that existed in the preceding stage of evolution. This is treated in the writer's Examination of Society (1903). See sec. 78 of that book with reference to the lack of uniformity among the Hebrews. As we shall see later, the social diversity of the nation explains the peculiar distribution of emphasis upon local Baalism in the Old Testament. The final reaction against it in the early period is placed in the time of the Judges, before the Israelites and Amorites had coalesced (I Sam. 7:4). The local Baals are not again mentioned for many centuries (I Kings 18:18; 21:26; II Kings 21:2, 3). Elijah apparently struggled only against foreign Baalism. The eighth-century southern school of prophecy (consisting of Amos, Micah, and Isaiah) had nothing explicit to say about Baalism. The first prophet of Israel to raise the issue as a local matter was Hosea, who lived amid the Baal-worship of the north. But the final characteristic development of the Baal issue took place in the south, under the leadership of Jeremiah and the Deuteronomists, long after the time of Hosea. This interesting phase of the process will be treated in the chapters that follow.

Amorites of Gibeon sacrificed the grandsons of Saul "before Yahweh," they could hardly have identified the national god with the provincial Baals (II Sam. 21:1-9).

No doubt, many persons in David's time worshiped Yahweh in the same character as the local Baals; and later on, many people may have gone farther, and regarded the provincial gods as local forms of Yahweh, the great national Baal. Yet there were clear-sighted minds among the Hebrews, down to the very end of the national history, such as Hosea, Jeremiah, and the Deuteronomic school. The military exploits of David, by lifting Yahweh high above the local Baals, were among the subtle and pervasive circumstances that helped the later prophets to keep alive the distinction between the gods.

Hosea tells the people to cease calling Yahweh a Baal (Hos. 2:16); and Jeremiah declares that the people have forgotten Yahweh's "name" by reason of Baal (Jer. 23:27). In the end, the tendency to confuse Yahweh and the Baals, both as to "personality" and as to "character," was overcome by the tendency to distinguish between the gods.'

Under the Hebrew kings, the "established religion" took the form of a pantheon, with Yahweh as the leading divinity.—“It is nothing surprising," writes Professor H. P. Smith, "to find the tutelary deities of all Solomon's subjects united in a pantheon." The reason for this is, that "the religion of Yahweh was not at this period sufficiently exclusive to protest against it."

The actual religion of the Hebrews, before the Exile, was clearly a system of polytheism, in which many divinities were included, and wherein Yahweh, the national god, was the

I Although a few Baal names date from the time of David, which point to the application of this common term to Yahweh, there are far more names from this period which include the proper name of the national god. Moreover, these names are not borne by common folk, but by persons of distinction (II Sam. 3:4; 8:16; 12:25; 13:3; 20:23; 20:24; I Kings 1:5; 4:2; 4:3; 11:29).

2 H. P. Smith, Old Testament History (New York, 1903), p. 169 (italics ours). "As empires brought different tribes or cities into political unity, pantheons were formed."-George A. Barton, op. cit. Kuenen says that it was quite natural that the other gods should be served in the high places beside Yahweh (The Religion of Israel London], Vol. I, p. 351).

leading figure. Among "other gods" the local Baals became the most important, because the religion of Israel took on its world-renowned character of absolute exclusiveness through the fight against the Amorite gods.

When treated in this way, Bible-study acquires a new interest for the modern mind. We behold the Hebrew kingdom born at the point of coalescence between Amorite civilization and Israelite nomadism. Each race contributes its own gods and its own social point of view to the composite nation. But there is a fundamental difference between the standpoints of civilization and nomadism. This conflict slowly takes form within the nation. It is the later prophets who realize the facts of the problem in a broad way; and only after a long and agonizing struggle is the difference between social usages expressed in the form of a rivalry within the "established" Hebrew religion itself. Just here lay the heart-shattering feature of the problem. The standpoints of nomadism and civilization were identified respectively with Yahweh and the Baals at the start; and the logic of history pursued the Hebrew mind like invisible fate until the conflict at last came to an issue around the hostility between Yahwism and Baalism.'

'It must be remembered that the term baal indicated ownership, and that it implied the social system of slavery. The Amorite Baals represented a social system in which freemen could legally be reduced to bondage. Hence, in the eyes of prophets such as Jeremiah, this term should not be applied to Yahweh, since it did not represent his attitude toward the clansmen of Israel (cf. pp. 160–61).

CHAPTER XVI

THE INTERACTION OF TENDENCIES

The development of Bible religion took place through the pressure of diverse "forces."-The religion of the Bible is not the outcome of one special thread of influence, but the product of many tendencies and circumstances working together.

At the beginning of this part of our study, we showed that the Yahweh cult got its peculiar and exclusive character through a long struggle (chap. ix). The following chapter showed that this conflict involved the shock of opposing standpoints represented by nomadism and civilization (chap. x). We then took up the Judges period, showing that the YahwehBaal struggle was at first an incident of the contact of alien social groups, Yahweh retaining his character as a god of the primitive, brotherhood mishpat (chap. xi). In the ensuing chapter, we passed on to consider Saul's kingdom in the highlands, which marked the beginning of the national movement. We saw that the Israelites continued apart from the Amorites in this period, without taking up the standpoint of civilization; that Yahweh became fully acclimatized as a god of the highlands, but that he still represented the ancient clan usages (chap. xii). We then took up the coalescence of Israelites and Amorites in the military Hebrew monarchy under the house of David (chap. xiii). Our next item for study was the effect of the new national development upon the prestige of Yahweh (chap. xiv). Then followed inquiry into the relations borne toward each other by the cults inherited from the double ancestry of the Hebrews (chap. xv). We saw that the nation was convulsed by a struggle wherein the tendency to "identify" the national god with the local gods was defeated by the principle of distinction between Yahweh and the Baals. To this great conflict we now turn.