Page:The Polytheism of Genesis Chapter 1.djvu/7

in their footsteps by adopting the gods of Egypt. Finally, when these stood on the borders of Canaan ready to commence its conquest, notwithstanding their newly-adopted faith in Yahweh, they were ready at once to recognize in the gods of the Canaanite nation real gods,^[1] whom they at once confused with Yahweh, putting him on a level with them.^[2] When Jacob went down into Egypt there was, as I have already intimated, no Israelite nation; it was yet to be born. From its fathers, the sons of Jacob, it had evidently inherited little knowledge of, or loyalty to El Shaddai, the personal god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Indeed, with the exception possibly of Joseph, the sons of Jacob may be viewed as just as much attached to the gods their mothers had brought with them from Padan-Aram as to their father's god, El Shaddai. Before they went down to Egypt we see Judah having commerce with a supposed kedeshah, or sacred prostitute of a heathen shrine (Gen. 35:21). If, then, the Canaanite-Israelite held his monotheism loosely, and was ready to worship at Canaanite shrines,^[3] so also must the sons of Jacob have held the henotheism of their father loosely, and have been equally ready to worship at the shrines of the Egyptians. Thus it was that before long their descendants in Egypt, possessing already the strange gods of their fathers, grew up to recognize the gods of the Egyptians as equally their gods. With them there was no "adoption" of these latter gods. Being already more or less polytheists, the gods of the country in which they were born were naturally the gods whom they included as such among the traditional gods of their fathers. Thus it is that Professor Sayce explains the calf-worship of the Israelites, when Moses seemed to have deserted them, as "their own faith in the days before the Exodus."^[4] Some modern scholars reject the once generally accepted opinion that the Israelites borrowed the calf-worship from the Egyptians, attributing it rather to "the primitive conception of the Semitic stock to which the Hebrews belonged, the bull being a symbol of deity throughout the Semitic

1. Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, s.v. "Idolatry."
2. Bennett, Theology of the Old Testament, 10, 11.
3. Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, s.v. "Israel."
4. Early History of the Hebrews, 201.