national god. This
god they brought with them into Canaan from the wilderness over which
they appear to have roamed with their flocks for a period and under
conditions not definitely known to us. Arrived in Canaan, the masses
were attracted by the local Canaanite deities (whose worship represented
a higher civilization than that of the nomadic Hebrews), and later, in
the seventh century B.C., a great part of the people of the little
kingdom of Judah adopted the Assyrian astral cult; but a group of
Israelites had always remained faithful to the national deity Yahweh
(Jehovah) and vigorously opposed all foreign worship. It was naturally
the more thoughtful and ethically better-developed part of the community
that took this uncompromising position, and their spokesmen, the writing
prophets whose discourses are preserved in the Old Testament, became
preachers of morality as well as champions of the sole worship of
Yahweh. It does not appear that they denied the existence of other gods,
but they regarded their own god as superior to all others in power,
standing in a peculiarly close relation to his people and bound to them
by peculiarly intimate ties.

+995+. This attachment to one deity proved to be the dominant sentiment
of the nation. As time went on and the people were sifted by the
Assyrian and Babylonian deportations, the higher moral feeling of the
best men attached itself more and more definitely to the national god.
Thus was established a monolatry which was practically monotheism,
though a theory of absolute monotheism was never formulated by the
pre-Christian Jews. It must be added, as is remarked above, that, from
the third or second century B.C. on, the somewhat undefined range of
activity attributed to Satan produced a sort of dualism, yet without
impairing the practically unitary conception of the divine government of
the world.[1817] The course of their national fortunes and the
remarkable power of self-contained persistence of the Jews brought
about a segregation of the people and, finally, their organization into
a community governed by a law held to be divinely revealed. This
capacity of social religious organization was the distinctive
characteristic of the Jewish people and, supported by their unitary
theistic system and a high moral code, gave the example of popular
monotheism which, through the medium of Christianity, finally imposed
itself upon the Roman world.

+996+. In the ancient world the most