BIBLICAL SOCIOLOGY 219
mount of the elohim, forty days journey to the south (I Kings, 19:8). Even in the century following Elijah, the ancient idea of Yahweh as a god of mountains, thunder, and war held with such tenacity that Hosea found it difficult to convince the people that it was Yahweh, and not the Baalim, who blessed the soil of Israel and made the crops grow (Hosea, passim).
As to the significance of these data, it is becoming clear to scholars that Israel derived the worship of Yahweh from the Kenites of the Sinai desert. It is not that the religion of Israel, as we have it in its final and peculiar biblical form, issues from such a source. Far from that. The religion by which Israel finally became distinguished from the other nations of the ancient world is the result of a process of development. But in the early Semitic stage of Israel, Yahweh was regarded as one among many real gods. Being a local god of Israel, and at the same time a covenant-god, it follows that his worship must have been adopted by Israel from some outside source. The transaction at Mount Sinai has never been adequately treated from the standpoint of the older theology of Christendom. All the data relating to it call for the most careful and patient study. The leading modern scholars are turning to this view, not hastily, but as a result of long inquiry into the facts of primi- tive religion. The drift of criticism toward this position repre- sents an encouraging approach to the sociological standpoint from the ground of theology. For it means that biblical critics, who are mostly theological scholars, have succeeded in working their own way up to the proposition that the covenant feature of Old Testament religion is due primarily to the contact of alien social groups.
Having sketched this position, we must now examine the biblical data further with reference to it. Some of the strong- est evidence has not yet come before us. We have said that when the narrative relates to Israel in Egypt it is loaded with historical improbabilities ; but that when it carries Israel into the desert it includes material that has affinity with Semitic social conditions at large. Yet it is the miraculous and the dramatic that have been emphasized in popular study of the Bible; while
