whose worship they were beginning to adopt. "And Jacob vowed a vow,
saying, If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go,
and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come
again to my Father's house in peace; then shall the Lord be my God."

He then declared that the pillar or stone which he had set up, and which
was the emblem of male procreative energy, should be God's house.

As at the time represented by Jacob there was evidently little or no
spirituality among the Israelites, this Lord whom they worshipped was
simply a life-giver in the most material or practical sense.

The reproductive energy in man had become deified. It had, in other
words, come to possess all the attributes of a god, or of a powerful
man, which in reality was the same thing. It is this god personified
which is represented as appearing to Abraham and talking with him face
to face. With this same god Jacob wrestled, while the real God--the dual
or triune principle, the Jehovah or Iav, no man could behold and live.

To conceal the fact that the God of Abraham originally consisted of a
dual or triple unity, and that the Deity was identical in significance
with that of contemporary peoples, the priests have, as usual, had
recourse to a trick to deceive the ignorant or uninitiated. In reference
to this subject Godfrey Higgins says:

"In the second book of Genesis the creation is described not to have
been made by Aleim, or the Aleim, but by a God of a double name Ieue
Aleim; which the priests have translated Lord God. By using the word
Lord, their object evidently is to conceal from their readers several
difficulties which afterward arise respecting the names of God and this
word, and which show clearly that the books of the Pentateuch are the
writings of different persons."(39)

39) Anacalypsis, book ii., ch, i.

Upon this subject Bishop Colenso observes:

"And it is especially to be noted that when the Elohistic passages
are all extracted and copied one after another, they form a complete,
connected narrative; from which we infer that these must have composed
the original story, and that the other passages were afterwards inserted
by another writer, who wished to enlarge or supplement the primary
record. And he seems to have used the compound Jehovah Aleim in the
first portion of his work in order to impress upon the reader that
Jehovah, of whom he goes on to speak in the later portions, is the