And this
is true of all beliefs from fetichism to Hellenic paganism.
The real distinction between gods and men consisted in the fact that the
former were immortal. A god came to be identical with an immortal man
and a man was deified, reputed as a god, when it was deemed that at his
death he had not really died. Of certain heroes it was believed that
they were alive in the kingdom of the dead. And this is a point of great
importance in estimating the value of the concept of the divine.
In those republics of gods there was always some predominating god, some
real monarch. It was through the agency of this divine monarchy that
primitive peoples were led from monocultism to monotheism. Hence
monarchy and monotheism are twin brethren. Zeus, Jupiter, was in process
of being converted into an only god, just as Jahwe originally one god
among many others, came to be converted into an only god, first the god
of the people of Israel, then the god of humanity, and finally the god
of the whole universe.
Like monarchy, monotheism had a martial origin. "It is only on the march
and in time of war," says Robertson Smith in _The Prophets of
Israel_,[38] "that a nomad people feels any urgent need of a central
authority, and so it came about that in the first beginnings of national
organization, centring in the sanctuary of the ark, Israel was thought
of mainly as the host of Jehovah.
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