Evolution of the God Concept Among the Hebrews

97:0.1The spir­i­tual lead­ers of the He­brews did what no oth­ers be­fore them had ever suc­ceeded in do­ing—they dean­thro­po­mor­phized their God con­cept with­out con­vert­ing it into an ab­strac­tion of De­ity com­pre­hen­si­ble only to philoso­phers. Even com­mon peo­ple were able to re­gard the ma­tured con­cept of Yah­weh as a Fa­ther, if not of the in­di­vid­ual, at least of the race.

97:0.2The con­cept of the per­son­al­ity of God, while clearly taught at Salem in the days of Mel­chiz­e­dek, was vague and hazy at the time of the flight from Egypt and only grad­u­ally evolved in the He­braic mind from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion in re­sponse to the teach­ing of the spir­i­tual lead­ers. The per­cep­tion of Yah­weh’s per­son­al­ity was much more con­tin­u­ous in its pro­gres­sive evo­lu­tion than was that of many other of the De­ity at­tri­butes. From Moses to Malachi there oc­curred an al­most un­bro­ken ide­a­tional growth of the per­son­al­ity of God in the He­brew mind, and this con­cept was even­tu­ally height­ened and glo­ri­fied by the teach­ings of Je­sus about the Fa­ther in heaven.