Page 331 of 384
327 on Mount Sinai, asked Aaron to reinvoke the deity, he fash- ioned a golden calf—the image of the Apis Bull—to represent the Bull of Heaven. And when a plague afflicted the Israel- ites, Moses made a copper serpent—the symbol of Enki/ Ptah—to stop the plague. No wonder that the gods of Egypt, too, were fresh in the Israelites’ mind. And then there were the "other gods of the Westerners in whose lands you dwell"—the gods of the Canaanites (West- ern Asiatics) whose pantheon was headed by the retired olden god El (a proper name or epithet being the singular of the plural Elohim) and his spouse Asherah; the active Ba'ul (sim- ply meaning "Lord"), their son; his favorite female compan- ions Anal and Shepesh and Ashtoret, and his adversaries Mot and Yam. Their playgrounds and battlegrounds were the lands that stretched from the border of Egypt to the borders of Mesopotamia; every nation in that area worshiped them, sometimes under locally adjusted names; and the Children of Israel were now dwelling in their midst ... To compound the "Basic Problem" of the missing ingredi- ents of a genealogy and a primordial abode, was added the greater difficulty for the Israelites: an Unseen God who could not even be represented by a graven image. And so it was that, on and off, "the Children of Israel did wrong in the eyes of Yahweh, and worshiped the Ba'al gods; they forsook Yahweh, the Elohim of their forefathers who hath brought them out of Egypt, and followed other Elohim from among the gods of the nations that surrounded them ... and paid homage to Ba'al and to Ashtoreth gods" (Judges 2:11-13). And again and again leaders—designated Judges— arose to return the Israelites to their true faith and thereby remove Yahweh's wrath. One of those Judges, the female Deborah, is fondly recalled by the Bible as Nebi'ah—a Prophetess. Inspired by Yahweh, she chose the right commander and tactics for the defeat of Israel's northern enemies; the Bible records her victory song—a poem considered by scholars a unique ancient liter- ary masterpiece. David Ben-Gurion (the first prime minister of the modern State of Israel), in The Jews in Their Land, wrote that "that religio-national awakening was movingly ex- pressed in the Song of Deborah with its reference to the great Prophets of an Unseen God