from whom to select a heavenly chief.

Whence came the moral element in the idea of Jehovah? Mr. Huxley supposes
that, during their residence in the land of Goshen (and _a fortiori_
before it), the Israelites 'knew nothing of Jehovah.'[24] They were
polytheistic idolaters. This follows, apparently, from Ezekiel xx. 5:
'In the day when I chose Israel, and lifted up mine hand unto the seed of
the house of Jacob, _and made myself known unto them_ in the land of
Egypt.' The Biblical account is that the God of Moses's fathers, the God
of Abraham, enlightened Moses in Sinai, giving his name as 'I am that I
am' (Exodus iii. 6, 14; translation uncertain). We are to understand that
Moses, a religious reformer, revived an old, and, in the Egyptian bondage,
a half-obliterated creed of the ancient nomadic Beni-Israel. They were no
longer to 'defile themselves with the idols of Egypt,' as they had
obviously done. We really know no more about the matter. Wellhausen says
that Jehovah was 'originally a family or tribal god, either of the family
of Moses or of the tribe of Joseph.' How a family could develop a Supreme
Being all to itself, we are not informed, and we know of no such analogous
case in the ethnographic field. Again, Jehovah was 'only a special name of
El, current within a powerful circle.' And who was El?[25] 'Moses was not
the first discoverer of the faith.' Probably not, but Mr. Huxley seems to
think that he was.

Wellhausen's and other German ideas filter into popular traditions, as we
saw, through 'A Short Introduction to the History of Ancient Israel'
(pp. 19, 20), by the Rev. A.W. Oxford, M.A., Vicar of St. Luke's, Soho.
Here follows Mr. Oxford's undeniably 'short way with Jehovah.' 'Moses was
the founder of the Israelite religion. Jehovah, his family or tribal god,
perhaps originally the God of the Kenites, was taken as a tribal god by
all the Israelite tribes.... That Jehovah was not the original god of
Israel' (as the Bible impudently alleges) 'but was the god of the Kenites,
we see mainly from Deut. xxxiii. 2, Judges v. 4, 5, and from the history
of Jethro, who, according to Judges i. 16, was a Kenite.'

The first text says that, according to Moses, 'the Lord came from Sinai,'
rose up from Seir, and shone from Mount Paran. The second text mentions
Jehovah's going up out of Seir and Sinai. The third text says that Jethro,
Moses's Kenite (or Midianite) father-in-law, dwelt among the people of
Judah; Jethro being