ABSTRACT
Worthy of serious thought is the epigram of one who up to the time of his death was a pronounced and prominent opponent of Christianity, blasphemous as at first it seemed to us: “An honest god is the noblest work of man.” One is reminded of this as he traces the development of Yahwism among the Hebrews. The Eternal God with whom we all have to do is never to be confounded with any nation's conception of Him. 1 Though He may seek in many ways to reveal himself to a people, their god as he is proclaimed by them, and especially as he is set forth in their early literature, is their thought of what God is, which is never to be confounded with the Absolute Being. This is eminently true of the Yahweh of the Hebrews. As we patiently study their literature and seek to know them, we find certain conceptions of God as they apprehended Him. It is for us to account for these imperfect conceptions and to trace the effects of these upon their social life. We have not to do with the idea of “the Divine Being accommodating Himself” to a people on their way up out of a low stage of culture; we have to do with Yahwism. The low moral standards, the passion, and the hard, cruel, and unreasonable arbitrariness belong to Yahwism; and the leaving of these imperfections behind and the emergence of a lofty ethical standard and of an inspiring universalism such as we find in Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah, can be accounted for if we note the ethical development of the best type of life among the Hebrews. Yahwism never far surpassed this. Often, as in the earlier time, it seems to have fallen behind it, and it is to be feared that at its best in the eighth century it did not have a very salutary influence upon the social life of the people as a whole, for the Yahwism as the mass of the people understood it was quite different from Yahwism as their great prophets understood it.
