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800 SEMITIC ORIGINS



the preparation for the place he was to hold in the religion
of the human race, for that place he would have been no
more fitted than any other Semitic Baal, if providentially
the Baalizing process had not been checked at the proper
point, and Yahwe forever differentiated in the minds of his
worshippers from these gods. The outward events which
were the occasion of this differentiation were as follows:
In the reign of Ahab the natural assimilation of Yahwe
to Baal was interrupted by the violent introduction of a
foreign influence. Ahab had married a Tyrian princess,
who was of course allowed to bring the worship of her
native gods with her. Being of an ambitious nature, she
prompted her husband to trample upon the popular rights,*
and thereby aroused the sentiment of the people against
her. She seems to have looked with disdain upon the
simpler religious rites of her new and comparatively rustic
home, and to have endeavored to introduce the more ornate
and voluptuous cult of Tyre. Tyre was at the time one
of the world's great emporia ; through its sea-faring mer-
chants the wealth of the nations flowed into it.^ Its
riches had pampered the lusts of its citizens, and had made
the excesses of that Semitic worship, the rites of which
appealed so strongly to the passions of men, as much
worse than the rites of that worship at Samaria as those
of Samaria were worse than those of the wandering tribes
of the steppe. It was this new and sudden excess of
wantonness combined with oppression which aroused the
opposition of the conservatives in Israel. This opposition
was headed by Elijah the Tishbite, from Gilead, a country
of pasture lands where the forms of nomadic life and the
original ritual of the worship of Yahwe were probably
less disturbed by the settled life of Israel than in the more
productive regions west of the Jordan. Accompanying
this new assertion of popular rights and of Yahwe's abhor-
rence of foreign gods and oppressive, debased morals, there
was manifested a new and unique conception of God and
1 1 KgB. 2 « Ez. 27, 28.
