from Gaza around the headland of Carmel, crossed the plain of Esdraelon, where Deborah's song of victory was sung, and then, rounding the northern end of the Sea of Galilee, stretched onward past Mount Hermon to Damascus, and still onward to Mesopotamia. Thus Palestine, though so sequestered, and in size too insignificant to be of importance among the leading nations, was yet in the very midst of the energies and activities of the ancient world, and felt the pulsation of all its movements.

It was not in the nature of the Hebrews to remain indifferent spectators of the movements of things around them. With their native genius for reading the signs of the times in events, their prophets and historians were keen critics of their neighbors, and curious observers of the course of empire. This aptitude finds much expression in their literature. Their historians trace their kinship with the nations round them, Edom, Moab, Ammon, Ishmael, Syria. Their prophets have oracles not only for their own people but for their neighbor nations, as one can read in Amos, Isaiah, Nahum, Obadiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Along with their own national experience they acquire a sense that their land is destined to be a center of light and guidance for other nations as well (cf. Isa. ii, 2–4; lx, 1-5); and that however the Hebrews may be dispersed among the nations, yet their capital and mother city is here, and they retain the customs and religion learned here. In other words, from this centrally located land there was destined to go forth, through its literature and its developed character, a leavening and penetrative influence into all the world. And from the beginning of their residence there the minds of their prophets and leaders were keyed to the idea that God had placed them there in the working out of some momentous design.

II

The Inherited Fund of Ideas. When Deborah sang of tribal coöperation and divine aid, she shaped her ode in conformity with ideas that had come in with her race's birth and grown with its growth. Her hearers had a fund of vital conceptions and sentiments on which she and all the leaders of Israel after her could draw, and to which they could appeal. This was their real heritage; more truly than the land, which was their culture-field, or than their prosperity and freedom, which were but adjuncts of their national success. It was their unique fund of ideas, inherited from long generations, which laid the foundation for their later power in the world.

We are not concerned here to trace the ideas which they had in common with the great Semitic stock from which they were derived. These will come up for consideration later.1 Their forms of worship were like those of the communities around them; which communities themselves were Semitic, inheriting much from a common source. The racial faith and temperament inherited from the patriarchs has already been noted—not so much an idea as a subconscious nature and temperament. Nor are we concerned with hereditary customs, many of them crude and barbaric, which they will naturally outgrow or refine as they advance to higher grades of civilization. We are to take note rather of certain ideas which differentiate the Israelite people from others; ideas which, being comparatively recent, have the vigor and vitality of newness still upon them. We may regard these as the formative principles of the nation's thought and religion and literature.

It will be remembered that with this Song of Deborah we are striking into the history of these Israelites when they have been only about a century released from an era

1 See Chapter III, Looking Before and After.

of Egyptian bondage. It was to that wonderful deliverance, with its attendant circumstances and revelations, that they traced their beginning as a nation. Before that their unit of corporate life had been that of the family, derived from the primitive conditions of the patriarchs. On their way from Egypt to Canaan, however, a transition which took a full generation of wilderness training, new ideas must be instilled into their minds, and emphasized by momentous events, to fit them for the freedom and development that awaited them. These we gather from the history recounted in the books of Exodus and Numbers. Three of the main fundamental ideas, all derived from concrete historical events, we will consider.

1. The God Who Is

While the Hebrews were still in Egypt, sunk in apathy and spirit-broken by oppression, Moses, one of their kinsmen of the tribe of Levi, who by a strange providence had obtained a thorough education (cf. Acts vii, 22) but then had been for forty years an outlaw in the land of Midian, received from God a commission to return and, putting himself at their head, lead them to the land promised to their fathers. It was a commission to be the founder and lawgiver of a nation, the pioneer in a new historical movement. According to the ideas of his time each nation or community was known by the name of its tutelar deity; it was natural therefore that Moses' first inquiry would be for the name of the God who thus commissioned him, that he might report it to his people. The divine answer assured him that this was no new or unfamiliar God but the one whom they and their fathers had always worshiped (Exod. iii, 16). The name, however, was new to them, and had a meaning which they could appropriate to their needs and ideals as citizens of a new commonwealth.

This revealing of a new name for God was like taking a conception of deity which had always been a kind of half

real abstraction and making it individual and concrete. The name by which the patriarchs had worshiped their deity was El Shaddai (Exod. vi, 3), which we translate "God Almighty"; the word for God, "El," which still survives in the Mohammedan name "Allah," meaning "might" or "power." In the scripture it is oftenest used in the plural, "Elohim," as if one should say The Powers," but construed with a singular verb. He was conceived, it would seem, as an undifferentiated power in nature and events, but with no clear idea of moral character or of personal relation. Such a God could indeed have become well-nigh lost to the enslaved Israelites in the multitude of local and natural deities of which Egypt was full. The new name, vouchsafed at Moses' request, was first given not as a name but as a meaning, from which the name should be coined. And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM; and He said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you (Exod. iii, 14). This was merely putting into the first person ('Eh'yeh) what they were to express and understand in the third. The name was "Yahweh," or "Jehovah" ("), and in its comprehensive meaning was to be understood as "He who is," or "The God who is."

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This name plays so commanding a part in the whole experience and literature of the Israelites that a further consideration of it is here in place. It is a peculiarity of the Hebrew verb that it has no present tense, in our feeling of the term. Its two tenses are past and future; and this name, being in the future, signifies more nearly "He who will be " than "He who is." But even the Hebrew past and future tenses are not like ours. Instead of denoting simply time, they denote rather completed action (or state) and continuous action. We come still nearer to the meaning of this name, then, by understanding it "He who is being, He who eternally is." Matthew Arnold's designation, "The Eternal," does not give quite the main emphasis of the term;

it may perhaps best be represented in modern phrase as "He who really is," or "The God Reality," -the Being who is and will be, as distinguished from some Power which seems to be, or which can be changed, or which is conjectured to be. The verb is left unpredicated. What He will eternally be it is for men's experience to find out: all that they need-guide, protector, defender, friend; or, if they are disloyal and false-judge, correcter, chastiser. And the more sincerely personal their felt relation to Him, the more real will He be to them. It is as if the loftiest theme of their literature and thinking were condensed into a word, whose depth and breadth of meaning are inexhaustible.

The Israelites' primal relation to this newly named God is very simple. When Moses receives the name and the duty they do not yet know Him, and they are not arbitrarily commanded or compelled to serve Him. He invites them rather to take Him on trust, and make the venture for freedom in reliance on His promise. The token by which they will know that their deliverer is indeed Jehovah is that later they will serve Him on that same mountain where He is now talking with Moses (Exod. iii, 12). Thus from the outset of their struggle for home and independence they are in the conscious attitude of a nation continually realizing and verifying a promise, discovering through experience the reality of their national Deity.

NOTES. 1. Written and Oral Use of the Name. It will be noted that in the Authorized and English Revised versions of the Bible the name " Jehovah" occurs but seldom, while in the American Revised it occurs very frequently; and that wherever it occurs in the American Revised the other versions have the title LORD printed in capitals. It is also asserted by scholars that " Jehovah " is not the right spelling of the name, but "Jahveh," or rather "Yahveh." These variations rise from the curious history connected with the name. The Hebrew alphabet, it must be premised, consists only of consonants, and until long after the language had ceased to be a living one the name was written in the four consonants YHVH. In the later writing of the language vowel