a priest of Midian. How all this proves that 'Moses
was a great impostor,' as the poet says, and that Jehovah was not 'the
original God of Israel,' but (1) Moses's family or tribal god, or (2) 'the
god of the Kenites,' I profess my inability to comprehend.

Wellhausen himself had explained Jehovah as 'a family or tribal god,
either of the family of Moses' (tribe of Levi) 'or of the tribe of
Joseph.' It seems to be all one to Mr. Oxford whether Jehovah was a god
of Moses's tribe or quite the reverse, 'a Kenite god.' Yet it really
makes a good deal of difference! For in a complex of tribes, speaking one
language, it is to the last degree unexampled (within my knowledge) that
one tribe, or family, possesses, all to itself, a family god who is also
the Creator and is later accepted as such by all the other tribes. One may
ask for instances of such a thing in any known race, in any stage of
culture. Peru will not help us--not the Creator, Pachacamac, but the Sun,
is the god of the Inca family. If, on the other hand, Jehovah was a Kenite
god, the Kenites were a half-Arab Semitic people connected with Israel,
and may very well have retained traditions of a Supreme Being which, in
Egypt, were likely to be dimmed, as Exodus asserts, by foreign religions.
The learned Stade, to be sure, may disbelieve in Israel's sojourn in
Egypt, but that revolutionary opinion is not necessarily binding on us and
involves a few difficulties.

Have critics and manual-makers no knowledge of the science of comparative
religion? Are they unaware that peoples infinitely more backward than
Israel was at the date supposed have already moral Supreme Beings
acknowledged over vast tracts of territory? Have they a tittle of positive
evidence that early Israel was benighted beyond the darkness of Bushmen,
Andamanese, Pawnees, Blackfeet, Hurons, Indians of British Guiana, Dinkas,
Negroes, and so forth? Unless Israel had this rare ill-luck (which Israel
denies) of course Israel must have had a secular tradition, however dim,
of a Supreme Being. We must ask for a single instance of a family or
tribe, in a complex of semi-barbaric but not savage tribes of one
speech, owning a private deity who happened to be the Maker and Ruler of
the world, and, as such, was accepted by all the tribes. Jehovah came out
from Sinai, because, there having been a Theophany at Sinai, that mountain
was regarded as one of his seats.[26]

We have seen that it seemed to make no differe