sexual orgies. Such abominations exerted
their seductive influence upon the shepherd tribes of Israel in their new
home in Canaan, and thus aroused the fiercest indignation of prophet and
law-giver, who hurled their vials of wrath against those shocking rites,
those lewd idols, and those who "whored after them."(127) If Israel was to
be trained to be the priest people of the Only One in such an environment,
tolerance of such practices was out of the question. Thus in the Sinaitic
law God is spoken of as "the jealous God"(128) who punishes unrelentingly
every violation of His laws of purity and holiness.

4. The same sharp contrast of Jewish ethical and spiritual monotheism
remained also when it came in contact with the Graeco-Syrian and Roman
culture. Here, too, the myths and customs of the cult and the popular
religion offended by their gross sensuality the chaste spirit of the
Jewish people. Indeed, these were all the more dangerous to the purity of
social life, as they were garbed with the alluring beauty of art and
philosophy.(129) The Jew then felt all the more the imperative duty to
draw a sharp line of demarcation between Judaism with its chaste and
imageless worship and the lascivious, immoral life of paganism.

5. This wide gulf which yawned between Israel's One and holy God and the
divinities of the nations was not bridged over by the Christian Church
when it appeared on the stage of history and obtained world-dominion. For
Christianity in its turn succeeded by again dragging the Deity into the
world of the senses, adopting the pagan myths of the birth and death of
the gods, and sanctioning image worship. In this way it actually created a
Christian plurality of gods in place of the Graeco-Roman pantheon; indeed,
it presented a divine family after the model of the Egyptian and
Babylonian religions,(130) and thus pushed the ever-living God and Father
of mankind into the background. This tendency has never been explained
away, even by the attempts of certain high-minded thinkers among the
Church fathers. Judaism, however, insists, as ever, upon the words of the
Decalogue which condemn all attempts to depict the Deity in human or
sensual form, and through all its teachings there is echoed forth the
voice of Him who spoke through the seer of the Exile: "I am the Lord, that
is My name, and My glory will I not give to another, neither My praise to
graven images."(131)

6. When Moses came to Pharaoh saying, "Thus spe