l hold your peace,' Exod. xiv. 14), and
a terrible relentlessness in the execution of His commands--as when
Moses orders the sons of Levi to go to and fro in the camp, slaying all
who, as worshippers of the Golden Calf, had not been 'on Yahweh's side'
(Exod. xxxii. 25-29); and when the chiefs, who had joined in the worship
of Baal-Peor, are 'hung up unto Yahweh before the sun' (Num. xxv. 1-5).
Long after Moses the Jews still believed in the real existence of the
gods of the heathen; and the religion of Moses was presumably, in the
first instance, 'Monolatry' (the adoration of One God among many); but
already accompanied by the conviction that Yahweh was mightier than any
other god--certainly Micah, 'Who is like Yahweh?,' is a very ancient
Israelitish name. And if Yahweh is worshipped by Moses on a mountain
(Sinai) and His law is proclaimed at a spring, if Moses perhaps himself
really fashioned the brazen serpent as a sensible symbol of Yahweh,
Yahweh nevertheless remains without visible representation in or on the
Ark; He is never conceived as the sheer equivalent of natural forces;
and all mythology is absent here--the vehement rejection of the
calf-worship shows this strikingly. Michael Angelo, himself a soul of
fire, understood Moses well, Gunkel thinks.[41]

The second period, from Elijah's first public appearance (about 860
B.C.) to the Dedication of the Second Temple (516 B.C.), and on to the
public subscription to the Law of Moses, under Ezra (in 444 B.C.), is
surpassed, in spiritual richness and importance, only by the classical
times of Christianity itself. Its beginning, its middle, and its end
each possess distinctive characters.

The whole opens with Elijah, 'the grandest heroic figure in all the
Bible,' as it still breathes and burns in the First Book of Kings. 'For
Elijah there existed not, in different regions, forces possessed of
equal rights and equal claims to adoration, but everywhere only one Holy
Power that revealed Itself, not like Baal, in the life of Nature, but
like Yahweh, in the moral demands of the Spirit' (Wellhausen).

And then (in about 750 B.C.) appears Amos, the first of the noble
'storm-birds' who herald the coming national destructions and divine
survivals. 'Yahweh was for these prophets above all the god of justice,
and God of Israel only in so far as Israel satisfied His demands of
justice. And yet the special relation of Yahweh to Israel is still
recognized as real; the ethical tr