Jehovah and Baal: rival claimants, unequal answers
Jehovah and Baal looked equally important, just as the sun and the moon looked the same size.
The distinction between seeming importance and actual authority can be compared with Elijah's challenge on Mount Carmel. In 1 Kings 18:21–39 the people must decide whether to follow the LORD or Baal; the rival cults receive a public test, and the god who answers by fire is to be acknowledged. Baal's prophets obtain no answer, whereas Elijah's prayer is followed by consuming fire and the people's acknowledgment of the LORD. The inspected text is the King James Version, Project Gutenberg eBook 10, 1 Kings 18:21–39.
This is a useful qualification of ‘the Hebrew god was one among many.’ The narrative certainly represents competing objects of allegiance; it does not represent the competition as proof that both gods possess comparable supernatural reality. Chesterton's solar analogy likewise distinguishes an observer's first impression from the hierarchy subsequently discovered. His sentence is strongest as an account of learning to discriminate among religious claims, rather than as a historical demonstration of how Israelite monotheism developed. The biblical episode supplies a narrative counterpart to that discrimination, not evidence for his proposed long chronology of supernatural experience.
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