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Updated: May 26, 2025
In polytheism the grades of superhuman beings are continuous; but in monotheism there is a sharp distinction of kind, as well as degree, between God on the one hand, and all other superhuman beings on the other; the latter are the "angels." Hence they came to be used collectively of superhuman beings, distinct from Yahweh, and therefore inferior, and ultimately subordinate.
His name was Yahweh, and is said to have a metaphysical meaning, and to designate the god as more really existing than any other. This is doubted; what is certain is that Moses declared that Yahweh promised to be with the tribes, and that they took him for their God.
In the Old Testament prior to the sixth century B.C. the spirits, good and bad, which are not essentially different from those we find among the lower tribes, are massed under the control of Yahweh, and do his bidding without moral reflection; when he sends a lying spirit into the mouth of Ahab's prophets this spirit goes without malice merely to perform the will of the supreme god.
Hence it is probable that both beliefs will fall together. In the meantime, they give one another mutual support. He who believes in supernatural agency is the more likely to be credulous in regard to testimony advanced in its favor. Nature was at first regarded as a realm in which personal agency ruled. Yahweh thundered from Sinai and rode in the tempest. Apollo guided the horses of the sun.
There was then no need of the spirit of the tree, which accordingly soon passed away; the tree had lost its spiritual divine independence. The god who is said to have appeared to Moses in a burning bush, and is described as dwelling in the bush, is a local deity, the numen loci later identified with Yahweh, or called an angel.
It was naturally the more thoughtful and ethically better-developed part of the community that took this uncompromising position, and their spokesmen, the writing prophets whose discourses are preserved in the Old Testament, became preachers of morality as well as champions of the sole worship of Yahweh.
When we stop a moment to think, we realize that Amos and Hosea were certain to put their views under the sanction of their national god. Not to have done so would have been far stranger psychologically than the ideals which they championed. Did the prophetic claim that social justice was sanctioned by Yahweh help its advance? Probably.
+315+. If there be, in the next higher stratum of belief, a local or tribal god, it is he who is looked to for the rain supply; so the early Hebrews looked to Yahweh, and the Canaanites, doubtless, to the Baals. The economic importance of rain led, even in low tribes, to the conception of a special deity charged with its bestowal.
But a Jew who believed that Yahweh controlled everything that occurred in the Kingdom had to account for personal and social disasters in a rational way. What was more natural than the hypothesis that those whom disasters overtook had been guilty of some secret wrong? And it was this point of view which was adopted.
They were noble enough to feel that conditions were intolerable, and it was not a far step to believe that Yahweh would not tolerate them. A noble man has always a noble god. That is the reason why the god of Amos is noble. The theological view reverses the true causal relation. Morality is always human morality, expressive of human nature and human conditions.
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