Exodus 20:22-26

“2. You shall not make molten gods.

But it was truly pitiful to watch this great mind of Moses trying to adapt his sublime concept of El Elyon, the Most High, to the comprehension of the ignorant and illiterate Hebrews. To his assembled leaders he thundered, “The Lord your God is one God; there is none beside him”; while to the mixed multitude he declared, “Who is like your God among all the gods?” Moses made a brave and partly successful stand against fetishes and idolatry, declaring, “You saw no similitude on the day that your God spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire.” He also forbade the making of images of any sort.

1. You shall not serve any God but the Most High Creator of heaven and earth.

Moses, in the addition of the second commandment to the ancient Dalamatian moral code, made an effort to control fetish worship among the Hebrews. He carefully directed that they should make no sort of image that might become consecrated as a fetish. He made it plain, “You shall not make a graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or on the earth beneath, or in the waters of the earth.” While this commandment did much to retard art among the Jews, it did lessen fetish worship. But Moses was too wise to attempt suddenly to displace the olden fetishes, and he therefore consented to the putting of certain relics alongside the law in the combined war altar and religious shrine which was the ark.

Moses had endeavored to teach these Bedouins the idea of El Elyon, but before leaving Egypt, he had become convinced they would never fully comprehend this doctrine. Therefore he deliberately determined upon the compromise adoption of their tribal god of the desert as the one and only god of his followers. Moses did not specifically teach that other peoples and nations might not have other gods, but he did resolutely maintain that Yahweh was over and above all, especially to the Hebrews. But always was he plagued by the awkward predicament of trying to present his new and higher idea of Deity to these ignorant slaves under the guise of the ancient term Yahweh, which had always been symbolized by the golden calf of the Bedouin tribes.

“1. You shall worship no other god, for the Lord is a jealous God.

Moses proclaimed that Yahweh was the Lord God of Israel, who had singled out the Hebrews as his chosen people; he was building a new nation, and he wisely nationalized his religious teachings, telling his followers that Yahweh was a hard taskmaster, a “jealous God.” But nonetheless he sought to enlarge their concept of divinity when he taught them that Yahweh was the “God of the spirits of all flesh,” and when he said, “The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” Moses taught that Yahweh was a covenant-keeping God; that he “will not forsake you, neither destroy you, nor forget the covenant of your fathers because the Lord loves you and will not forget the oath by which he swore to your fathers.”

“Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, to bow myself before the Lord of all the earth? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, ten thousands of sheep, or with rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? No! for the Lord has showed us, O men, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you but to deal justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?

Moses feared to proclaim the mercy of Yahweh, preferring to awe his people with the fear of the justice of God, saying: “The Lord your God is God of Gods, and Lord of Lords, a great God, a mighty and terrible God, who regards not man.” Again he sought to control the turbulent clans when he declared that “your God kills when you disobey him; he heals and gives life when you obey him.” But Moses taught these tribes that they would become the chosen people of God only on condition that they “kept all his commandments and obeyed all his statutes.”

While Moses presented fleeting glimpses of a universal and beneficent Deity to the children of Israel, on the whole, their day-by-day concept of Yahweh was that of a God but little better than the tribal gods of the surrounding peoples. Their concept of God was primitive, crude, and anthropomorphic; when Moses passed on, these Bedouin tribes quickly reverted to the semibarbaric ideas of their olden gods of Horeb and the desert. The enlarged and more sublime vision of God which Moses every now and then presented to his leaders was soon lost to view, while most of the people turned to the worship of their fetish golden calves, the Palestinian herdsman’s symbol of Yahweh.