The very name of Israel is martial,
and means 'God (_El_) fighteth,' and Jehovah in the Old Testament is
Iahwe Cebaeoth--the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on the
battlefield that Jehovah's presence was most clearly realized; but in
primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in
time of peace."
God, the only God, issued, therefore, from man's sense of divinity as a
warlike, monarchical and social God. He revealed himself to the people
as a whole, not to the individual. He was the God of a people and he
jealously exacted that worship should be rendered to him alone. The
transition from this monocultism to monotheism was effected largely by
the individual action, more philosophical perhaps than theological, of
the prophets. It was, in fact, the individual activity of the prophets
that individualized the divinity. And above all by making the divinity
ethical.
Subsequently reason--that is, philosophy--took possession of this God
who had arisen in the human consciousness as a consequence of the sense
of divinity in man, and tended to define him and convert him into an
idea. For to define a thing is to idealize it, a process which
necessitates the abstraction from it of its incommensurable or
irrational element, its vital essence. Thus the God of feeling, the
divinity felt as a unique person and consciousness external to us,
although at the same time enveloping and sustaining us, was converted
into the idea of God.
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