Even in the Temple at Jerusalem itself, symbols of bull-worship were apparently admitted. The altar upon which the daily sacrifice was burnt had four horns; and the laver { 211}in the court, the “brazen sea,” was supported upon the figures of twelve oxen. When we remember that the Molech had the head of a bull, we can hardly fail to see in these symbols a token of that gradual syncretism which invariably affects all developed pantheons in all civilised countries.
Much more important are the supposed signs of the later identification of Jahweh with the sun, and his emergence as a modified and transfigured sun-god. It may seem odd at first that such a character could ever be acquired by a sacred stone, did we not recollect the exactly similar history of the Egyptian obelisk, which in like manner represents, first and foremost, the upright pillar or monolith--that is to say, the primitive gravestone--but secondarily and derivatively, at once the generative principle and a ray of the sun. With this luminous analogy to guide us in our search, we shall have little difficulty in recognising how a solar character may have been given to the later attributes and descriptions of Jahweh.
I do not myself attach undue importance to these solar characteristics of the fully evolved Jahweh; but so much has been made of them by a certain school of modern thinkers that I must not pass them over in complete silence.
To his early worshippers, then, as we saw, Jahweh was merely the stone in the ark. He dwelt there visibly, and where the ark went, there Jahweh went with it. But the later Hebrews--say in the eighth century--had acquired a very different idea of Jahweh’s dwelling-place. Astrological and solar ideas (doubtless Akkadian in origin) had profoundly modified their rude primitive conceptions. To Amos and to the true Isaiah, Jahweh dwells in the open sky above and is “Jahweh of hosts,” the leader among the shining army of heaven, the king of the star-world. “Over those celestial bodies and celestial inhabitants Jahweh rules”; they surround him and execute his commands: { 212}the host of heaven are his messengers--in the more familiar language of our modern religion, “the angels of the Lord,” the servants of Jahweh. To Micah, heaven is “the temple of Jahweh’s holiness”: “God on high,” is the descriptive phrase by which the prophet alludes to him. In all this we have reached a very different conception indeed from that of the early and simple-minded Israelites who carried their god with them on an ox-cart from station to station.