226 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
east; and there he huilded an altar unto Yahweh, and called upon the name of Yahweh" (Gen. 12:6, 8).^ Thus Abraham fre- quently uses the name, beginning in the chapter cited and thence- forward into chap. 24. Looking farther, we read: "And
Isaac digged again the wells of water And he went
up from thence to Beer-sheeba And he builded an
altar there, and called upon the name of Yahweh" (Gen. 26:18, 23, 25). And farther we find: "And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said. Surely Yahweh is in this place" (Gen. 28: 16). Thus we see that one tradition denies, while the other affirms, that the patriarchs knew the name of Yahweh before the Sinai period. At first the student is puzzled by these contra- dictions; but their secret is very easy to penetrate. The Penta- teuch, as already pointed out, is a composite work. It is the joining together of a number of documents and traditions by a number of writers and editors. There is no result of modern scholarship more certain than this. With regard to the ques- tion just now before us, the contradiction of each other by Genesis and Exodus is clearly the result of bringing together, without harmonizing, two different traditions regarding the same fact. After Israel had been settled in Canaan for cen- turies as the people of Yahweh, and the idea of him as the only true God had arisen, it became incredible that the forefathers had never known him. Consequently, we have the traditions in Genesis which make the patriarchs call upon Yahweh by name and build altars in his name. Then, independently of this, another tradition arose which deferred to the Kenite origin of Yahweh far enough to make the patriarchs and their descend- ants ignorant of that name up to the time of Sinai; so that the Israelites took up at this time the worship of the god
- Readers who are confined to the King James Version lose this point.
As already explained, this version translates Yahweh as "the LORD," or "GOD," in capitals, unless the nattu-e of the context forces it to be more faithful to the Hebrew, in which case it renders it "Jehovah." Except for an occasional marginal reading, the English Revised is little better. But the American Re- vised translates the Hebrew consistently throughout as "Jehovah." Although even this barbarized form is not correct, the American Version, by this usage, exhibits fully the point under discussion.
