: he
regards Him as a Being superior to other beings, but made like unto them
and moved by the same passions. He shows anger and is appeased, displays
sorrow and repents Him of the evil.* When the descendants of Noah build
a tower and a city, He draws nigh to examine what they have done, and
having taken account of their work, confounds their language and thus
prevents them from proceeding farther.** He desires, later on, to confer
a favour on His servant Abraham: He appears to him in human form, and
eats and drinks with him.*** Sodom and Gomorrah had committed abominable
iniquities, the cry against them was great and their sin very grievous:
but before punishing them, He tells Abraham that He will "go down and
see whether they have done according to the cry of it which is come unto
Me; and if not, I will know."****

* Exod. iv. 14 and xxxii. 10, anger of Jahveh against Moses
and against Israel; Gen. vi. 6, 7, where He repents and is
sorry for having created man; and Exod. xxxii. 14, where He
repents Him of the evil He had intended to do unto Israel.

** Gen. xi. 5-8.

*** Gen. xviii.

**** Gen. xviii. and xix.

Elsewhere He wrestles a whole night long with Jacob;* or falls upon
Moses, seeking to kill him, until appeased by Zipporah, who casts the
blood-stained foreskin of her child at her husband's feet.** This book,
though it breathes the spirit of the prophets and was perhaps written
in one of their schools, did not, however, include all the current
narratives, and omitted many traditions that were passing from lip to
lip; moreover, the excessive materialism of its treatment no longer
harmonised with that more idealised concept of the Deity which had
already begun to prevail. Consequently, within less than a century
of its appearance, more than one version containing changes and
interpolations in the narrative came to be circulated,*** till a scribe
of Ephraim, who flourished in the time of Jeroboam II., took up the
subject and dealt with it in a different fashion.****

* Gen. xxxii. 24, 25.

** Exod. iv. 24-26.

*** Schrader and Wellhausen have drawn attention to
contradictions in the primitive history of humanity as
presented by the Jehovist which forbid us to accept it as
the work of a single writer. Nor can these inconsistencies
be due to the influence of the Elohist, since the latter did
not deal with this period in his book. B