one man, and handed down from him to Jews, Christians, and
Mohammedans, to all who believe in the God of Abraham. Nor was it
granted to Abraham entirely as a free gift. Abraham was tried and
tempted before he was trusted by God. He had to break with the faith
of his fathers; he had to deny the gods who were worshipped by his
friends and neighbours. Like all the friends of God, he had to hear
himself called an infidel and atheist, and in our own days he would
have been looked upon as a madman for attempting to slay his son. It
was through special faith that Abraham received his special
revelation, not through instinct, not through abstract meditation, not
through ecstatic visions. We want to know more of that man than we do;
but, even with the little we know of him, he stands before us as a
figure second only to one in the whole history of the world. We see
his zeal for God, but we never see him contentious. Though Melchisedek
worshipped God under a different name, invoking Him as Eliun, the Most
High, Abraham at once acknowledged in Melchisedek a worshipper and
priest of the true God, or Elohim, and paid him tithes. In the very
name of Elohim we seem to trace the conciliatory spirit of Abraham.
Elohim is a plural, though it is followed by the verb in the singular.
It is generally said that the genius of the Semitic languages
countenances the use of plurals for abstract conceptions, and that
when Jehovah is called Elohim, the plural should be translated by 'the
Deity.' We do not deny the fact, but we wish for an explanation, and
an explanation is suggested by the various phases through which, as
we saw, the conception of God passed in the ancient history of the
Semitic mind. Eloah was at first the name for God, and as it is found
in all the dialects of the Semitic family except the Phenician (Renan,
p. 61), it may probably be considered as the most ancient name of the
Deity, sanctioned at a time when the original Semitic speech had not
yet branched off into national dialects. When this name was first used
in the plural, it could only have signified, like every plural, many
Eloahs, and such a plural could only have been formed after the
various names of God had become the names of independent deities, i.
e. during a polytheistic stage. The transition from this into the
monotheistic stage could be effected in two ways--either by denying
altogether the existence of the Elohim, and changing them into devils,
as the Zoroastria