FOREWORD TO PART III In this division of the study we turn to our central theme, the social process through which the religion of the Bible came into the world. CHAPTER IX GENERAL CONDITIONS OF THE DEVELOPMENT The religion of the Hebrews acquired its distinctive character through a long struggle.-The religion of the Bible was born amid a great warfare. The Hebrew nation was the arena of a mighty struggle whose echoes have resounded through the ages. When we go behind the scenes, and begin to consider the circumstances amid which, and through which, the Bible religion came into the world, we are thrown back upon a local, definite, concrete situation of great interest. Yahweh emerges into distinction through a struggle against the Baal-worship which was derived from the Amorite side of the nation's ancestry. We do not connect him with warfare against Marduk of Babylon, or Amon of Egypt, or any other far-away deity. It is the Baal-idea that serves as the foil against which the Yahweh-idea takes on its distinctive character; and even in the New Testament period the opposition to Yahweh is condensed in Baal-zebub, the prince and leader of all the devils. The Bible-idea of God arose in connection with social movements. Sociological study of the Bible is not concerned with the question how religion in general came into the world. It does not undertake to show how the idea of the gods arose. Suffice it to know that all the ancient peoples, including the Hebrews, actually did have gods and religions. Sociological study of the Bible sets out with the idea of the gods as one of its presuppositions one of the facts, or categories, to be taken for granted at the beginning of the discussion. Religion was in the world many ages before the Hebrew nation was born. Our problem is not, How did religion arise? but, How did Bible religion arise? This religion took form around the idea of "Yahweh." We shall never know how the worship of Yahweh first became current, any more than we can trace the steps by which the Greeks got the worship of Zeus, the Egyptians that of Osiris, or the Babylonians that of Marduk. But there is no evidence that the worship of Yahweh stood at first upon any different footing than did the other cults of the ancient world. To anticipate the argument, we shall see that the Bible religion came into existence by the sifting of ancient religious ideas through the peculiar national experience of the Hebrews. This national experience was unlike that of any other ancient people; and it set the Hebrew mind at work in channels different from those that opened before their contemporaries. We cannot, of course, box the truth within the compass of mere words and phrases. The terms "evolution" and "natural development" are attractive; but they do not solve the problem before us. The problem of the Bible is that of the connections between certain facts. What the facts are, we shall see in due course. The religion of the Bible took form gradually through a series of emergencies, or crises, in which the idea of Yahweh passed from stage to stage. The epochs in this process have left their marks in the Bible as clearly as the various geological periods have left their traces in the strata of the earth. |