"Thou shalt have no other gods before me."

It was a breach of the second--

"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any
likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in
the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:
thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them."

The Israelites did not conceive that they were abandoning the worship of
Jehovah; they still considered themselves as worshipping the one true
God. They were monotheists still, not polytheists. But they had taken
the first false step that inevitably leads to polytheism; they had
forgotten that they had seen "no manner of similitude on the day that
the Lord spake unto" them "in Horeb out of the midst of the fire," and
they had worshipped this golden calf as the similitude of God; they had
"changed their glory into the similitude of an ox that eateth grass."
And that was treason against Him; therefore St. Stephen said, "God
turned, and gave them up to worship the host of heaven;" the one sin
inevitably led to the other, indeed, involved it. In a later day, when
Jeroboam, who had been appointed by Solomon ruler over all the charge of
the house of Joseph, led the rebellion of the ten tribes against
Rehoboam, king of Judah, he set up golden calves at Dan and Bethel, and
said unto his people, "It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem:
behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of
Egypt." There can be little doubt that, in this case, Jeroboam was not
so much recalling the transgression in the wilderness--it was not an
encouraging precedent--as he was adopting the well-known cognizance of
the tribe of Joseph, that is to say, of the two tribes of Ephraim and
Manasseh, which together made up the more important part of his kingdom,
as the symbol of the presence of Jehovah.

The southern kingdom would naturally adopt the device of its predominant
tribe, Judah, and it was as the undoubted cognizance of the kingdom of
Judah that our Richard I., the Crusader, placed the Lion on his shield.

More definitely still, we find this one of the cherubic forms applied
to set forth Christ Himself, as "The Root of David," Prince of the house
of Judah--

"Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Juda, the Root of David,
hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals
thereof."

FOOTNOTES:

[187:1] Josephus, _Antiquities of the Jews_, III. vii. 5-7.

CHAPTE