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 a priest of Midian.  How all this proves that ’Moses was a great impostor,’ as the poet says, and that Jehovah was not ’the original God of Israel,’ but (1) Moses’s family or tribal god, or (2) ’the god of the Kenites,’ I profess my inability to comprehend.

Wellhausen himself had explained Jehovah as ’a family or tribal god, either of the family of Moses’ (tribe of Levi) ’or of the tribe of Joseph.’  It seems to be all one to Mr. Oxford whether Jehovah was a god of Moses’s tribe or quite the reverse, ‘a Kenite god.’  Yet it really makes a good deal of difference!  For in a complex of tribes, speaking one language, it is to the last degree unexampled (within my knowledge) that one tribe, or family, possesses, all to itself, a family god who is also the Creator and is later accepted as such by all the other tribes.  One may ask for instances of such a thing in any known race, in any stage of culture.  Peru will not help us—­not the Creator, Pachacamac, but the Sun, is the god of the Inca family.  If, on the other hand, Jehovah was a Kenite god, the Kenites were a half-Arab Semitic people connected with Israel, and may very well have retained traditions of a Supreme Being which, in Egypt, were likely to be dimmed, as Exodus asserts, by foreign religions.  The learned Stade, to be sure, may disbelieve in Israel’s sojourn in Egypt, but that revolutionary opinion is not necessarily binding on us and involves a few difficulties.