volved long later in the wide leisures of Jerusalem. The fluidic hand
did not appear. Even had it zigzagged there was no Belshazzar to
frighten.

Only the doom was real. Cyrus was clothed with it. To the trumpetings
of heralds and the sheen of angels' wings, triumphantly he came. Then,
presently, by royal decree, the Jews, manumitted and released,
retraced their steps, burdened with spoil; with the lore of two
distinct civilizations, which, fusing in the great square letters of
the Pentateuch, was to become the poetry of all mankind.

Babylon, ultimately, with her goblin gods and harlot goddess, sank
into her own Aralu. Nourished there on dust, Lilit, with the sister
vampires of eternal night, fed on her.

V

JEHOVAH

A camel's-hair tent set in the desert was the first cathedral, the
earliest cloister of latest ideals. Set not in one desert merely but
in two, in the infinite of time as well as in that of space, there was
about it a limitlessness in which the past could sleep, the future
awake, and into which all things, the human, the divine, gods and
romance, could enter.

The human came first. Then the gods. Then romance. The divine was
their triple expansion. It was an after growth, in other lands, that
tears had watered. In the desert it was unimagined. Only the gods had
been conceived.

The gods were many and yet but one. Though plural they were singular.
The subjects of impersonal verbs, they represented the pronoun in such
expressions as: it rains; it thunders. "It" was Elohim. Already among
nomad Semites monotheism had begun. Yet with this distinction. Each
tribe had separate sets of Its that guided, guarded, and scourged.
Omnipresent but not omnipotent, any humiliation to the family that
they had in charge humiliated them. It made them angry, therefore
vindictive, consequently unjust. It may be that they were not very
ethical. Perhaps the bedouins were not either. Man fashions his god in
proportion to his intelligence. That of the nomad was slender. He
lacked, what the Aryan shepherd possessed, the ability for
mythological invention. The defect was due to his speech, which did
not lend itself to the deification of epithets. Even had it done so,
it is probable that his mode of life would have rendered the
paraphernalia of polytheism impossible. People constantly moving from
place to place could not be cumbered with idols. The Elohim were,
therefore, a convenience for travellers and an unidolatr