er the exodus, became dictator.

Yet even in the later age, when the retrospect was effected,
conceptions were evidently immature. On one occasion the god met
Moses, tried to kill him, but finally let him go. The picture is that
of a personal struggle.[34] Again, the spectacle of his back which he
vouchsafed to Moses is construable only as an _arriere-pensee_, unless
it be profound philosophy, unless it be taken that the face of God
represents Providence, to see which would be to behold the future,
whereas the back disclosed the past.

[Footnote 34: Exodus iv. 24-26.]

It is, however, hardly probable that that construction occurred to the
editors of the Pentateuch, who, elsewhere, represented Jahveh as a
butcher, insatiable, jealous, vindictive, treacherous, and vain, one
that consigned all nations other than Israel to ruin and whom a poet
represented trampling people in anger, making them drunk with his
fury, and defiling his raiment with blood.[35]

[Footnote 35: Isaiah lxiii. 1-6.]

But in the period related in _Exodus_, Jahveh was but the tutelary god
of an itinerant tribe that, in its gipsy lack of territorial
possessions, was not even a nation. Like his people he too was a
vagrant. Like them he had no home. Other gods had temples and altars.
He lacked so much as a shrine. In prefigurement of the Wandering Jew,
each day he moved on. The threats of a land that never smiled were
reflected in his face. The sight of him was death. Certainly he was
terrible.

This conception, corrected by later writers, was otherwise revised. In
the interim Jahveh himself was transformed. He became El, the god;
presently El Shaddai, God Almighty. In the ascension former traits
disappeared. He developed into the deity of emphatic right. Morality,
hitherto absent from religion, entered into it. Israel, who perhaps
had been careless, who, like Solomon, had followed Ishtar, became
austere. Thereafter, Judaism, of which Christianity and Muhammadanism
were the after thoughts, was destined to represent almost the sum
total of the human conscience.

But in Kanaan, during the rude beginnings, though Jahveh was jealous,
Ishtar, known locally as Ashtoreth, allured. Conjointly with Baal, the
indigenous term for Bel, circumadjacently she ruled. The propitiatory
rites of these fair gods were debauchery and infanticide, the
loosening of the girdles of girls, the thrusting of children into
fires. It may be that these ceremonies at first amazed