the tenth unto thee'
(Genesis xxviii. 20-22). Language of this kind evinces not only a
temporary want of faith in God, but it shows that the conception of
God had not yet acquired that complete universality which alone
deserves to be called monotheism, or belief in the One God. To him who
has seen God face to face there is no longer any escape or doubt as to
who is to be his god; God is his god, whatever befall. But this Jacob
learnt not until he had struggled and wrestled with God, and committed
himself to His care at the very time when no one else could have
saved him. In that struggle Jacob asked for the true name of God, and
he learnt from God that His name was secret (Genesis xxxii. 29). After
that, his God was no longer one of many gods. His faith was not like
the faith of Jethro (Exodus xxvii. 11), the priest of Midian, the
father-in-law of Moses, who when he heard of all that God had done for
Moses acknowledged that God (Jehovah) was greater than all gods
(Elohim). This is not yet faith in the One God. It is a faith hardly
above the faith of the people who were halting between Jehovah and
Baal, and who only when they saw what the Lord did for Elijah, fell on
their faces and said, 'The Lord He is the God.'

And yet this limited faith in Jehovah as the God of the Jews, as a God
more powerful than the gods of the heathen, as a God above all gods,
betrays itself again and again in the history of the Jews. The idea of
many gods is there, and wherever that idea exists, wherever the plural
of god is used in earnest, there is polytheism. It is not so much the
names of Zeus, Hermes, &c., which constitute the polytheism of the
Greeks; it is the plural [Greek: theoi], gods, which contains the
fatal spell. We do not know what M. Renan means when he says that
Jehovah with the Jews 'n'est pas le plus grand entre plusieurs dieux;
c'est le Dieu unique.' It was so with Abraham, it was so after Jacob
had been changed into Israel, it was so with Moses, Elijah, and
Jeremiah. But what is the meaning of the very first commandment, 'Thou
shalt have no other gods before me?' Could this command have been
addressed to a nation to whom the plural of God was a nonentity? It
might be answered that the plural of God was to the Jews as revolting
as it is to us, that it was revolting to their faith, if not to their
reason. But how was it that their language tolerated the plural of a
word which excludes plurality as much as the word for the ce