^97:1.5 And he preached anew the story of God’s sincerity, his covenant-keeping reliability. Said Samuel: “The Lord will not forsake his people.” “He has made with us an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things and sure.” And so, throughout all Palestine there sounded the call back to the worship of the supreme Yahweh. Ever this energetic teacher proclaimed, “You are great, O Lord God, for there is none like you, neither is there any God beside you.”

^97:1.6 ¶ Theretofore the Hebrews had regarded the favour of Yahweh mainly in terms of material prosperity. It was a great shock to Israel, and almost cost Samuel his life, when he dared to proclaim: “The Lord enriches and impoverishes; he debases and exalts. He raises the poor out of the dust and lifts up the beggars to set them among princes to make them inherit the throne of glory.” Not since Moses had such comforting promises for the humble and the less fortunate been proclaimed, and thousands of despairing among the poor began to take hope that they could improve their spiritual status.

^97:1.7 But Samuel did not progress very far beyond the concept of a tribal god. He proclaimed a Yahweh who made all men but was occupied chiefly with the Hebrews, his chosen people. Even so, as in the days of Moses, once more the God concept portrayed a Deity who is holy and upright. “There is none as holy as the Lord. Who can be compared to this holy Lord God?”

^97:1.8 As the years passed, the grizzled old leader progressed in the understanding of God, for he declared: “The Lord is a God of knowledge, and actions are weighed by him. The Lord will judge the ends of the earth, showing mercy to the merciful, and with the upright man he will also be upright.” Even here is the dawn of mercy, albeit it is limited to those who are merciful. Later he went one step further when, in their adversity, he exhorted his people: “Let us fall now into the hands of the Lord, for his mercies are great.” “There is no restraint upon the Lord to save many or few.”

^97:1.9 ¶ And this gradual development of the concept of the character of Yahweh continued under the ministry of Samuel’s successors. They attempted to present Yahweh as a covenant-keeping God but hardly maintained the pace set by Samuel; they failed to develop the idea of the mercy of God as Samuel had later conceived it. There was a steady drift back toward the recognition of other gods, despite the maintenance that Yahweh was above all. “Yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all.”

^97:1.10 The keynote of this era was divine power; the prophets of this age preached a religion designed to foster the king upon the Hebrew throne. “Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty. In your hand is power and might, and you are able to make great and to give strength to all.” And this was the status of the God concept during the time of Samuel and his immediate successors.

^97:2.1 In the tenth century before Christ the Hebrew nation became divided into two kingdoms. In both of these political divisions many truth teachers endeavoured to stem the reactionary tide of spiritual decadence that had set in, and which continued disastrously after the war of separation. But these efforts to advance the Hebraic religion did not prosper until that determined and fearless warrior for righteousness, Elijah, began his teaching. Elijah restored to the northern kingdom a concept of God comparable with that held in the days of Samuel. Elijah had little opportunity to present an advanced concept of God; he was kept busy, as Samuel had been before him, overthrowing the altars of Baal and demolishing the idols of false gods. And he carried forward his reforms in the face of the opposition of an idolatrous monarch; his task was even more gigantic and difficult than that which Samuel had faced.

^97:2.2 When Elijah was called away, Elisha, his faithful associate, took up his work and, with the invaluable assistance of the little-known Micaiah, kept the light of truth alive in Palestine.

^97:2.3 But these were not times of progress in the concept of Deity. Not yet had the Hebrews ascended even to the Mosaic ideal. The era of Elijah and Elisha closed with the better classes returning to the worship of the supreme Yahweh and witnessed the restoration of the idea of the Universal Creator to about that place where Samuel had left it.

^97:3.1 The long-drawn-out controversy between the believers in Yahweh and the followers of Baal was a socio-economic clash of ideologies rather than a difference in religious beliefs.

^97:3.2 ¶ The inhabitants of Palestine differed in their attitude toward private ownership of land. The southern or wandering Arabian tribes (the Yahwehites) looked upon land as an inalienable — as a gift of Deity to the clan. They held that land could not be sold or mortgaged. “Yahweh spoke, saying, ‘The land shall not be sold, for the land is mine.’”

^97:3.3 The northern and more settled Canaanites (the Baalites) freely bought, sold, and mortgaged their lands. The word Baal means owner. The Baal cult was founded on two major doctrines: First, the validation of property exchange, contracts, and covenants — the right to buy and sell land. Second, Baal was supposed to send rain — he was a god of fertility of the soil. Good crops depended on the favour of Baal. The cult was largely concerned with land, its ownership and fertility.

^97:3.4 In general, the Baalites owned houses, lands, and slaves. They were the aristocratic landlords and lived in the cities. Each Baal had a sacred place, a priesthood, and the “holy women,” the ritual prostitutes.

^97:3.5 Out of this basic difference in the regard for land, there evolved the bitter antagonisms of social, economic, moral, and religious attitudes exhibited by the Canaanites and the Hebrews. This socio-economic controversy did not become a definite religious issue until the times of Elijah. From the days of this aggressive prophet the issue was fought out on more strictly religious lines — Yahweh vs. Baal — and it ended in the triumph of Yahweh and the subsequent drive toward monotheism.

^97:3.6 Elijah shifted the Yahweh-Baal controversy from the land issue to the religious aspect of Hebrew and Canaanite ideologies. When Ahab murdered the Naboths in the intrigue to get possession of their land, Elijah made a moral issue out of the olden land mores and launched his vigorous campaign against the Baalites. This was also a fight of the country folk against domination by the cities. It was chiefly under Elijah that Yahweh became Elohim. The prophet began as an agrarian reformer and ended up by exalting Deity. Baals were many, Yahweh was one — monotheism won over polytheism.

^97:4.1 A great step in the transition of the tribal god — the god who had so long been served with sacrifices and ceremonies, the Yahweh of the earlier Hebrews — to a God who would punish crime and immorality among even his own people, was taken by Amos, who appeared from among the southern hills to denounce the criminality, drunkenness, oppression, and immorality of the northern tribes. Not since the times of Moses had such ringing truths been proclaimed in Palestine.

^97:4.2 Amos was not merely a restorer or reformer; he was a discoverer of new concepts of Deity. He proclaimed much about God that had been announced by his predecessors and courageously attacked the belief in a Divine Being who would countenance sin among his so-called chosen people. For the first time since the days of Melchizedek the ears of man heard the denunciation of the double standard of national justice and morality. For the first time in their history Hebrew ears heard that their own God, Yahweh, would no more tolerate crime and sin in their lives than he would among any other people. Amos envisioned the stern and just God of Samuel and Elijah, but he also saw a God who thought no differently of the Hebrews than of any other nation when it came to the punishment of wrongdoing. This was a direct attack on the egoistic doctrine of the “chosen people,” and many Hebrews of those days bitterly resented it.