aketh JHVH the God of
Israel, send off My people that they may serve Me," Pharaoh--so the Midrash
tells--took his list of deities to hand, looked it over, and said, "Behold,
here are enumerated the gods of the nations, but I cannot find thy God
among them." To this Moses replied, "All the gods known and familiar to
thee are mortal, as thou art; they die, and their tomb is shown. The God
of Israel has nothing in common with them. He is the living, true, and
eternal God who created heaven and earth; no people can withstand His
wrath."(132) This passage states strikingly the difference between the God
of Judaism and the gods of heathendom. The latter are but deified powers
of nature, and being parts of the world, themselves at one with nature,
they are subject to the power of time and fate. Israel's God is enthroned
above the world as its moral and spiritual Ruler, the only Being whom we
can conceive as self-existent, as indivisible as truth itself.

7. As long as the pagan conception prevailed, by which the world was
divided into many divine powers, there could be no conception of the idea
of a moral government of the universe, of an all-encompassing purpose of
life. Consequently the great thinkers and moralists of heathendom were
forced to deny the deities, before they could assert either the unity of
the cosmos or a design in life. On the other hand, it was precisely this
recognition of the moral nature of God, as manifested both in human life
and in the cosmic sphere, which brought the Jewish prophets and sages to
their pure monotheism, in which they will ultimately be met by the great
thinkers of all lands and ages. The unity of God brings harmony into the
intellectual and moral world; the division of the godhead into different
powers or personalities leads to discord and spiritual bondage. Such is
the lesson of history, that in polytheism, dualism, or trinitarianism one
of the powers must necessarily limit or obscure another. In this manner
the Christian Trinity led mankind in many ways to the lowering of the
supreme standard of truth, to an infringement on justice, and to
inhumanity to other creeds, and therefore Judaism could regard it only as
a compromise with heathenism.

8. Judaism assumed, then, toward paganism an attitude of rigid exclusion
and opposition which could easily be taken for hostility. This prevailed
especially in the legal systems of the Bible and the rabbis, and was
intended primarily to guard th