Yahweh—God of the Hebrews

96:0.1In con­ceiv­ing of De­ity, man first in­cludes all gods, then sub­or­di­nates all for­eign gods to his tribal de­ity, and fi­nally ex­cludes all but the one God of fi­nal and su­preme value. The Jews syn­the­sized all gods into their more sub­lime con­cept of the Lord God of Is­rael. The Hin­dus like­wise com­bined their mul­ti­far­i­ous de­i­ties into the “one spir­i­tu­al­ity of the gods” por­trayed in the Rig-Veda, while the Mes­o­po­ta­mi­ans re­duced their gods to the more cen­tral­ized con­cept of Bel-Mar­duk. These ideas of mono­the­ism ma­tured all over the world not long af­ter the ap­pear­ance of Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek at Salem in Pales­tine. But the Mel­chiz­e­dek con­cept of De­ity was un­like that of the evo­lu­tion­ary phi­los­o­phy of in­clu­sion, sub­or­di­na­tion, and ex­clu­sion; it was based ex­clu­sively on cre­ative power and very soon in­flu­enced the high­est de­ity con­cepts of Mes­o­po­ta­mia, In­dia, and Egypt.

96:0.2The Salem re­li­gion was revered as a tra­di­tion by the Ken­ites and sev­eral other Ca­naan­ite tribes. And this was one of the pur­poses of Mel­chiz­e­dek’s in­car­na­tion: That a re­li­gion of one God should be so fos­tered as to pre­pare the way for the earth be­stowal of a Son of that one God. Mi­chael could hardly come to Uran­tia un­til there ex­isted a peo­ple be­liev­ing in the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther among whom he could ap­pear.

96:0.3The Salem re­li­gion per­sisted among the Ken­ites in Pales­tine as their creed, and this re­li­gion as it was later adopted by the He­brews was in­flu­enced, first, by Egyp­tian moral teach­ings; later, by Baby­lo­nian the­o­logic thought; and lastly, by Ira­nian con­cep­tions of good and evil. Fac­tu­ally the He­brew re­li­gion is pred­i­cated upon the covenant be­tween Abra­ham and Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek, evo­lu­tion­ally it is the out­growth of many unique sit­u­a­tional cir­cum­stances, but cul­tur­ally it has bor­rowed freely from the re­li­gion, moral­ity, and phi­los­o­phy of the en­tire Lev­ant. It is through the He­brew re­li­gion that much of the moral­ity and re­li­gious thought of Egypt, Mes­o­po­ta­mia, and Iran was trans­mit­ted to the Oc­ci­den­tal peo­ples.