Page:The Polytheism of Genesis Chapter 1.djvu/6

 These Jacob simply buried beneath the sacred terebinth at Shechem, thus showing his respect for them, although they formed no part of the worship of his own special deity (Gen. 35:2-4). But Jacob's action does not show that his household had put the conception of their own gods out of their hearts, for their later adoption of the gods of Egypt shows that they had remained inherently true polytheists. Nor must we neglect to note that the number of persons mentioned as comprising Jacob's family which went down to Egypt could not have included all that came out with him from Padan-Aram. When we recall Abraham's three hundred servants born in his house, and then think of the enormous number of cattle Jacob must have owned (Gen. 32:13-20), we can readily understand that he too must have had a great number of servants. All this is confirmed by the statement of Joseph to Pharaoh's butler and baker, that he had been stolen out of the land of the Hebrews. Such a description of Canaan at that time shows that it must have been full of these people, most of whom were descendants of Abraham's, Isaac's, and Jacob's servants brought from Padan-Aram. These could never have been more than nominal worshipers of El Shaddai, the more or less personal deity of their respective masters (Gen. 6:3), so that it was only natural that they should have first included him among their own gods of Padan-Aram, and then have lost both in a later acceptance of the gods of their new Canaanite home. It was, as Joshua indicates, thus in Egypt with Jacob's own immediate descendants, and all owing to an inherent tendency to polytheism derived from their original fathers, who had themselves been polytheists (Josh. 24:2, 14, 15). Professor Kautzsch, however, would have us believe that the fathers of the Hebrew-Israelite-Egyptians whom Joshua was addressing had not "from the first .... their own specifically Israelitish gods, but that they abandoned themselves to the worship of the foreign gods in whose country and sphere they sojourned." But the fathers of the Babylonian Hebrews, southern Arabians, were pronounced polytheists who, in conquering the Sumerian-Babylonians, adopted their polytheism because they themselves were polytheists. Their descendants, that is, so many of them as finally went down into Egypt and there became Hebrew-Israelite-Egyptians, followed