n had very different material to work upon,
but they succeeded with the aid of Eloah, or Allah, supporting their
own efforts.

It is probably historically true that the good old patriarch Abraham
once lived, and may be considered to be the father of the Jewish,
Christian, and Muhammadan religions. According to Arab tradition,
Abraham, assisted by Ishmael, built the Kaabah at Mecca, so called
because it was nearly a kaabah, or square. Anyhow, Abraham has ever
been regarded with the greatest veneration by the Muslims, and his
tomb at Hebron at the present day is so jealously guarded by them that
the Jews and the Christians are not permitted to enter its sacred
precincts.

Abraham and his followers worshipped Eloah, or the Almighty God, as
the one and only God, offering up to Him at times various sacrifices.
According to Renan, in his 'History of the People of Israel,' 'the
primitive religion of Israel was the worship of the Elohim, a
collective name for the invisible forces that govern the world, and
which are vaguely conceived as forming a supreme power at once single
and manifold.'

'This vague primitive monotheism got modified during the migrations of
the children of Israel, and especially during their struggles for the
conquest of Palestine, and at last gave place to the conception of
Jahveh, a national God conceived after the fashion of the gods of
polytheism, essentially anthropomorphic, the God of Israel in conflict
with the gods of the surrounding nations.'

'It was the task of the prophets to change this low and narrow
conception of the Deity for a nobler one, to bring back the Jews to
the Elohistic idea in a spiritualized form, and to transform the
Jahveh or Jehovah of the times of the Judges into a God of all the
earth--universal, one and absolute, that God in spirit and in truth of
whom Jesus, the last of the prophets, completed the revelation.'

Certain events in the life of Joseph brought the family of Jacob to
Egypt, separated it from the other tribes, and made the Israelites
into a peculiar people.[5] As the twelve families of the sons of Jacob
expanded into twelve tribes, they grew in number to such an extent
that the Egyptian Government of the day began to be alarmed, and
commenced coercive proceedings, which led to the appearance of Moses,
first as a liberator, and then as the organizer of the twelve tribes
into a Jewish nationality.

[Footnote 5: The actual dates of these events and of the