302 THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY vm 



of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of 

 bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats" (Isa. i. 11). 

 Or of Micah's inquiry, " Will Jahveh be pleased 

 with thousands of rams or with ten thousands of 

 rivers of oil ? " (vi. 7.) And in the innumerable 

 passages in which Jahveh is said to be jealous of 

 other gods, to be angry, to be appeased, and to 

 repent ; in which he is represented as casting off 

 Saul because the king does not quite literally 

 execute a command of the most ruthless severity ; 

 or as smiting Uzzah to death because the un- 

 fortunate man thoughtlessly, but naturally enough, 

 put out his hand to stay the ark from falling- 

 can any one deny that the old Israelites con- 

 ceived Jahveh not only in the image of a man, 

 but in that of a changeable, irritable, and, occa- 

 sionally, violent man ? There appears to me, 

 then, to be no reason to doubt that the notion of 

 likeness to man, which was indubitably held of 

 the ghost Elohim, was carried out consistently 

 throughout the whole series of Elohim, and that 

 .lahveh-Elohim was thought of as a being of the 

 same substantially human nature as the rest, only 

 in i measurably more powerful for good and for evil. 

 The absence of any real distinction between 

 the Elohim of different ranks is further clearly 

 illustrated by the corresponding absence of any 

 sharp delimitation between the various kinds of 

 people who serve as the media of communication 

 between them and men. The agents through 





