Note 103 — Chapter IV · THE EVOLUTION OF THE CULT

Two brilliant French scholars have advanced the thesis that this alleged polytheism is imaginary;103 and that the Israelites in the mass always worshipped only the One God Yahweh.104 But this position, which is grounded on the inference that the mass of the historical and prophetic literature is post-exilic, outgoes its own grounds. Even if we assume, with the theorists, that Jewish monotheism was universalist from the moment it took shape as monotheism in literature,105 we get rid neither of the question of pre-exilic polytheism nor of that of popular survival. To say that the post-exilic Jews are “the only Jews known to history,” and that the apparently old lore in Genesis is “perhaps really the most modern,” being invented for purposes of parable, is only a screening of the fact that the Hebrews evolved religiously like other peoples. A resort to alien Gods is seen to be universal in the religious history of the ancient world. Every conquered race was suspected to have secret power in respect of “the God of the land106”; and wherever races mixed, cults mixed. It is only on a provision of special Sacred Books, themselves treated as fetishes, that the attractions of alien cults can be repelled; and not even Sacred Books can make real monotheists of an uncultured majority. Even later Judaism, with its angels, its Metatron, its Satan, was never truly monotheistic.107 Islam is not. The universalism which in later Judaism still commonly passes for a specialty of the Hebrew mind was really an assimilation and development of Perso-Babylonian ideas;108 and Satan made a dualism of the Jewish creed even as Ahriman did of the Persian.