Forlong - Rivers of Life

Introductory Chapter.
Jehovah, and that, accordingly, in the translation of the Hebrew text into the Greek
(as Christians now have it), “the strong expressions of the Hebrew are softened down,
where human parts are ascribed to God.” It would have been as well if Moses’ remarks
in Exodus, chapter xxxiii., and elsewhere, had been blotted out or still more softened
down. The Jewish faith is a commercial one, and Christians have adopted the same
views of rewards and punishments, though their Heaven and Hell are quite foreign to
ancient as also to modern Israelites. Both, as a mass, are far behind the great Pythagoras,
who more than 500 years B.C., said that “virtue consisted in seeking truth and
doing good,” the very same thing that advanced thinkers of this day say is the essence
of all religion. Tersely put, true religion now seems to be, “Do good, and be good,
and seek diligently after Truth.”
The “Old Testament Law” (“Decalogue”) the Jews believe was written by the
finger of their God JHVH or Yhavh (second god, their first being Elohim) on stones,
on the top of a mountain. Moses, says the writer of Exodus, vi. 3, first knew God as
Jhavh, though elsewhere we may observe that Abram also uses this name. The
Hebrews described Jhavh as a god who commonly travelled about and talked with their
great leaders; they say he had part, “Moses seeing him face to face,” and arguing, and
occasionally peevishly finding fault with him; early Greek s called JHVH, IAW.
This god appeared to Abraham and others, who however sometimes called him
Elohim, El-Elohe-Israel, Adoni, and Adonai-Jhavh (Adonai being the third person
in the Phenician Trinity.—Love, or Creation, the offspring of Belus and Uranus)
as in Genesis xv. 2; at other times El Shadai, and El-Elohe, as when he sits in
the tent door an eats, and makes the great covenant (Genesis xvii. 2) on which Jews,
as also Christians, so much build. He is clearly a man-God. He argues with men,
and is often turned from his purposes by their arguments and entreaties, and can even
be vanquished by “chariots of iron,” for though he went with Judah and commanded
the expulsion of the inhabitants of the valley, yet the chariots of iron prevented his
will and purpose from being carried out.
The God of the Zendavesta, Ormazd, delivered that Bible to Zoroaster also “on
the top of a mountain;” so in the later Jewish tale, we may perhaps see the origin of
what the Jews committed to writing (be it remembered), only in the seventh century
B.C., if so early, more probably in the later days of Ezra and Nehemiah. There is no
just comparison between the grand Ormazd and the Jewish Elohim and Jhavh;
Ormazd is ever the Great, the Eternal, the Almighty one, as is the Hindoo Brahm (not
Brahma) and later, according to many writings concerning him, is not far from our
spiritual conception of God.
The Zoroastrians or Parsis see little in common between their Ormazd, and the
burning, jealous, and angry anthropomorphic Jewish God. They point to his causelessly
“loving Jacob and hating Esau;” to his being a “God of battles” and “of
wars,” of whom the Jews write a sacred book called “The battles of the Lord.”
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