We cannot, with any approach to historical certainty, assert more respecting the social and political condition of the first known ancestors of the Jews, than that they belonged to a race of nomad tribes wandering in the district which, roughly speaking, lies between Egypt and Palestine. In endeavouring to ascertain the religious ideas of this race, we may safely assume that the character of their religion was determined by the circumstances of their position. Living in a region which is either desert or barren and unprofitable land, the softer influences of nature could not affect them. The terror of nature would fascinate them; lightning and tempest would speak to them of their gods, and from the harshness of their surroundings they would derive the gloomiest impressions of the powers of the supernatural world. Their religion would be essentially a religion of fear.[2] Having little to deify on the earth around them, their mythology would be based on the phenomena of the sky. Sun and moon and stars would be their divinities, and to these they would ascribe jealous and implacable tempers. This sternness of their religion would carry with it many advantages. Their deities would be more majestic, more removed from themselves, than the gods of happier peoples, and the humility they would feel in worship would have within it the seeds of a higher religious development. A still more important feature of their mythology would be its narrowness. The poverty of their environment would cause their gods to be few and limited in number. No fresh divinities would discredit the older ones and reveal the weakness of their theology. And this would be likely to produce a serious effect on the outward form of their religion.
Whenever a common polytheism is professed by peoples politically separate, there is a tendency to localise deities. Now a large mythology throws great difficulties in the way of this tendency. If there are many gods, each one individually is too unimportant to be the divinity of a people, and the political divisions of course being few, after every tribe or state has appropriated a deity, a surplus is left with no particular duty to discharge. When this occurs, it usually results that the national deities are formed into a higher order of gods; and probably divine oligarchies, like that of the Hellenic mythology, are always created in this manner. But it is obvious that if the number of gods is small at the time of the formation of political divisions, the process of localization is greatly facilitated. The fewer they are, the more honour attaches to the gods individually; each one is sufficiently dignified to become the god of a separate people. After a system of this kind has been fully developed, the gods form a federal council, in which each state or tribe has a representative. The quarrels and rivalries of the earthly bodies are of course transferred to their heavenly representatives; all local patriotism expresses itself in the general religion.