Have critics and manual-makers no knowledge of the science of comparative religion?  Are they unaware that peoples infinitely more backward than Israel was at the date supposed have already moral Supreme Beings acknowledged over vast tracts of territory?  Have they a tittle of positive evidence that early Israel was benighted beyond the darkness of Bushmen, Andamanese, Pawnees, Blackfeet, Hurons, Indians of British Guiana, Dinkas, Negroes, and so forth?  Unless Israel had this rare ill-luck (which Israel denies) of course Israel must have had a secular tradition, however dim, of a Supreme Being.  We must ask for a single instance of a family or tribe, in a complex of semi-barbaric but not savage tribes of one speech, owning a private deity who happened to be the Maker and Ruler of the world, and, as such, was accepted by all the tribes.  Jehovah came out from Sinai, because, there having been a Theophany at Sinai, that mountain was regarded as one of his seats.[26]

We have seen that it seemed to make no difference to Mr. Oxford whether Jehovah was a god of Moses’s family or tribe or a Kenite god.  The former (with the alternative of Joseph’s family or tribal god) is Wellhausen’s theory.  The latter is Stade’s.[27] Each is inconsistent with the other; Wellhausen’s fancy is inconsistent with all that we know of religious development:  Stade’s is hopelessly inconsistent with Exodus iv. 24-26, where Moses’s Kenite wife reproaches him for a ceremony of his, not of her, religion.  Therefore the Kenite differed from the Hebrew sacra.

The passage is very extraordinary, and is said by critics to be very archaic.  After the revelation of the Burning Bush, Jehovah met Moses and his Kenite wife, Zipporah, and their child, at a khan.  Jehovah was anxious to slay Moses, nobody ever knew why, so Zipporah appeased Jehovah’s wrath by circumcising her boy with a flint.  ’A bloody husband art thou to me,’ she said, ’because of the circumcision’—­an Egyptian, but clearly not a Kenite practice.  Whatever all this may mean, it does not look as if Zipporah expected such rites as circumcision in the faith of a Kenite husband, nor does it favour the idea that the sacra of Moses were of Kenite origin.

Without being a scholar, or an expert in Biblical criticism, one may protest against the presentation to the manual-reading intellectual middle classes of a theory so vague, contradictory, and (by all analogy) so impossible as Mr. Oxford collects from German writers.  Of course, the whole subject, so dogmatically handled, is mere matter of dissentient opinion among scholars.  Thus M. Renan derives the name of Jehovah from Assyria, from ’Aramaised Chaldaeanism.’[28] In that case the name was long anterior to the residence in Egypt.  But again, perhaps Jehovah was a local god of Sinai, or a provincial deity in Palestine.[29] He was known to very ancient sages, who preferred such names as El Shaddai and Elohim.  In short, we have no certainty on the subject.[30]