Canaanites and their other neighbors, the law became
more rigid in prohibiting such idolatrous practices, and the prophets
poured forth their unscathing wrath against the "stiff-necked people" and
endeavored by unceasing warnings and threats to win them for the pure
truth of monotheism.(208)

3. The God of Sinai proclaims Himself in the Decalogue as a "jealous God,"
and not in vain. He cannot tolerate other gods beside Himself. Truth can
make no concession to untruth, nor enter into any compromise with it
without self-surrender. A pagan religion could well afford to admit
foreign gods into its pantheon without offending the ruling deities of the
land. On the contrary, their realm seemed rather to be enlarged by the
addition. It was also easy to blend the cults of deities originally
distinct and unite many divinities under a composite name, and by this
process create a system of worship which would either comprise the gods of
many lands or even merge them into one large family. This was actually the
state of the various pagan religions at the time of the decline of
antiquity. But such a procedure could never lead towards true monotheism.
It lacks the conception of an inner unity, without which its followers
could not grasp the true idea of God as the source and essence of all
life, both physical and spiritual. Only the One God of revelation made the
world really one. In Him alone heaven and earth, day and night, growth and
decay, the weal and woe of individuals and nations, appear as the work of
an all-ruling Power and Wisdom, so that all events in nature and history
are seen as parts of one all-comprising plan.(209)

4. It is perfectly true that a wide difference of view exists between the
prohibition of polytheism and idolatry in the Decalogue and the
proclamation in Deuteronomy of the unity of God, and, still more, between
the law of the Pentateuch and the prophetic announcement of the day when
Israel's God "shall be King of the whole earth, and His name shall be
One."(210) Yet Judaism is based precisely upon this higher view. The very
first pages of Genesis, the opening of the Torah, as well as the exilic
portions of Isaiah which form the culmination of the prophets, and the
Psalms also, prove sufficiently that at their time monotheism was an axiom
of Judaism. In fact, heathenism had become synonymous with both
image-worship and belief in many gods beside the Only One of Israel, and
accordingly had lost all hold upon