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Updated: May 12, 2025
There is, however, some compensation in the fact that he can move about without difficulty he can come down and go up. One might say, perhaps, that in J., though Jahweh cannot be everywhere, he can go to almost any place. All this is just like a child's thought.
In Leviticus, Jahweh threatens that if the Israelites will not reform he will "walk contrary to them in fury, and they shall eat the flesh of their own sons and daughters." In Deuteronomy is an account of how Bashan was utterly destroyed, men, women, and children being slain.
And here, in a long quotation, is an example of the mercy of Jahweh, and his faculty for cursing: The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee, until he have consumed thee from off the land, whither thou goest to possess it.
But when the Philistines captured the ark, the rival god, Dagon, fell down and broke in pieces so Hebrew legend declared before the face of Jahweh.
You enjoy with all your soul the sweet thunder of the Old Testament, forgetting the existence of Jahweh and Elohim; and you go home feeling that you have had "a glimpse of that perfection in which spirit and form dwell in immortal harmony; truth and beauty bearing a new growth on the ancient stem of time."
I will quote as fully as space permits: But Jahweh was an object of portable size, for, omitting for the present the descriptions in the Pentateuch which seem likely to be of later date, and not too trustworthy, through their strenuous Jehovistic editing he was carried from Shiloh in his ark to the front during the great battle with the Philistines at Ebenezer; and the Philistines were afraid, for they said, "A god is come into the camp."
The old Assyrian kings said exactly the same thing of the god Assur. Assur sent them to battle, gave defeat or victory, as he thought fit. The history, however, is very obscure up to the time of Samuel, and uncertain for some time after. Samuel organised a Jahweh party. Solomon was not exclusively devoted to Jahweh, for he built places of worship for other deities as well.
I have already instanced Jahweh's injustice in cursing the seed of Adam for Adam's sin, and in destroying the whole animal creation, except a selected few, because he was angry with mankind. And again Jahweh acted in blind wrath and injustice, for he sent a pestilence, which slew seventy thousand of the people for David's fault. But David he allowed to live.
I do not see, therefore, how we can easily avoid the obvious inference that Jahweh the god of the Hebrews, who later became sublimated and etherealised into the God of Christianity, was, in his origin, nothing more nor less than the ancestral sacred stone of the people of Israel, however sculptured, and, perhaps, in the very last resort of all, the unhewn monumental pillar of some early Semitic sheikh or chieftain.
Then Jahweh sent immense numbers of quails, and the people ate them, and the anger of their angry god came upon them in the act, and smote them with "a very great plague." One more instance out of many. This made Jahweh so angry that he smote the people, and slew more than fifty thousand of them. The Injustice of Jehovah
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