SEMITIC DEVELOPMENT IN CANAAN—SACRIFICE OF THE FIRST-BORN
PERSISTS—ORIGIN OF THE IDEA OF SACRIFICE—THE CUSTOM
WORLD-WIDE AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES—ASSOCIATED WITH
CANNIBALISM—THE FOUNDATION SACRIFICE—DISCOVERIES IN
PALESTINE.
In treating of the Semitic race—a race that gave to humanity the
Bible and the Koran, a race that founded Judaism, Christianity,
and Islamism—its attitude will be better understood if we approach
it through the tribes whose religions and humanitarian ideas were
eventually to become the religions and humanitarian ideas of the
civilized world.
The beginning of the nation of Israel was the result of the frequent
immigration into Palestine of Semites who fused with the aborigines
and formed the Phœnician or Canaanitish people. From the time of
Lugalzaggisi (about 4000 B. C.) there were successive Babylonian
immigrations also, and from 1500 B. C. onward there were added to this
mixture the Aramean tribes that had previously inhabited the highlands
between the Mesopotamian Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. Originally
pure nomads, the Israelites after settling in Canaan became excellent
agriculturists,[192] and there developed the worship of Yahweh—“the
worship of no other god contributing to the sum of humanity’s
ethical ideas and spiritual conceptions a tithe of the value of that
contributed by the worshippers of Yahweh.”[193]
These nomadic Semites when they settled in Palestine about 1000 B. C.,
after years of wandering, had many of the characteristics of a highly
cultivated people but they also had the habits of the nomadic people
that had originally come out of Arabia. Many too were the lapses into
the ways of primitive people during the four hundred years of their
wandering after their life in Goshen.[194]
If, as has been said, three generations without education would reduce
the civilized peoples of today to savagery, the proneness of the
Semites to fall back into godless ways may be well understood; so too
one may well understand the protests and lashings of the prophets who
saw their people retrograding.
When the Israelites began to write their own history they were a highly
developed race in which there were few traces of early savagery,
but the habit of sacrificing the firstling was a remnant of earlier
economic stress that had passed into their religion. In order to
understand the Israelite branch of the Semitic race and how it was
possible for it to produce, on the one hand, the humanitarian ideas
that rule the world today, when at practically the same time its
leaders were protesting against savage sacrifices, but a step removed
from cannibalism, one can do no better than to quote the eloquent and
learned Chwolson, though his theory of the innate quality of a race is
open to serious objections.
Commenting on the fundamental causes of the peculiarities of a people,
one of which he says is the nature of “its heart and nervous system,”
he thus describes the disposition of the Israelites[195]:
“In reference to the disposition (Gemueth) and organization of
the nervous system: the Semite possesses a deep, easily excitable
disposition, and is capable of mighty feelings; he is, therefore,
lively, mobile, easily excited, passionate, quickly enthused for an
idea, active and enterprising, flexible and adapting, easily finding
himself at home in strange relations and circumstances, accommodating
himself to them without difficulty, without, however, allowing of being
absorbed by them.”
While, therefore, some of the Israelites developed in humanitarianism
and poetry and religion, under the favourable conditions in Canaan,
others, under various other influences, reverted to former practices.
Among these practices was that of sacrificing the first-born child.
To understand better how the people who gave to the world the Child’s
Friend retained so late the habit of sacrificing children, the scope of
the custom must be understood.
The sacrifice of human beings to the gods, says Grimm,[196] rested on
the supposition that human food was agreeable to the gods and not until
man had advanced did the idea come that substitutes might be offered.
In the cannibalistic stage of development these sacrifices were eaten
by the sacrificers, thus establishing a connecting link between the
humans and the invisible gods whom they hoped to appease.
The whole theory of sacrifice will be better understood if we grasp
the fact that it was born of fear. When a nation sacrificed out of
gratitude or in apparent joyous exultation, it was in memory of days
when they suffered and their gratitude was as much a propitiation
as anything else. Born in fear, the next step in the development of
sacrifice was to economize “without impairing efficiency.”[197] The
result of this second effort is seen in ingenious devices by which the
burden on the worshipper is lightened by his substituting something
less valuable than what he is supposed to offer, or what the god is
supposed to want, but which the worshipper believes will be acceptable.
These substitutions are always made when the forces of nature are
treating man more kindly and when his attitude toward his gods is less
fearful, for the mind of man in time of plenty and security has always
presupposed that time to be when the gods are more or less drowsy.
With some primitive peoples, the sacrifice began as an offering of a
meal to the ancestor who had gone before, but as with all primitive
peoples the determining factor in religion is fear rather than
affection, it became a method of soliciting favours for the future, and
such were the sacrifices among the Greeks and Romans, the Hebrews, the
Aryans, and the Chinese.[198]
Primitive man, when unwelcome children were born, found easy excuse for
getting rid of them by offering them as a sacrifice to the impatient
and fearful gods. That at some stage in the development of the parental
instinct the excuse that the gods must be propitiated was needed to
quiet the awakening mother love, is more than likely. And surely, no
more crushing answer could there be to the request to allow a child to
live than that the gods were angry and had to be propitiated.
Another reason given for offering children was that, having just come
from the other world, they were nearer to the gods and freer of sin
and therefore more acceptable. Such reasoning argues a stage far in
advance of the cannibal who ate his own children under the idea that he
was propitiating an angry god. “The institutions of man develop with
considerable uniformity all over the globe, although as races advance,
they naturally diverge more or less under the influence of different
climate, food, and other conditions.”[199] Cannibalism was one of the
earliest stages to which we are able to trace many of the customs
even of today, and the idea of sacrifice of children undoubtedly
had its origin in primitive cannibalistic feasts, “ceremonies that
were softened by the rise of civilization as well as migration to
more fertile land and an abundance of food sufficient to make the
substitution of an animal for a human possible.”[200]
Among primitive people the sacrifice of children is common. In most
cases there is some specific result that is desired when the child is
sacrificed. In the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific, the sacrifice
of the child is called _nawgia_ and strangling is the method adopted,
whenever it is found that the ordinary cures do not affect some sick
parent. It is said that the natives watch the ceremony of strangling
with much pity but that they feel it is better “to sacrifice a child
who is at present of no use to society, and perhaps may not otherwise
live to be,” than to allow a sick chief to die.[201] On one occasion
when the gods had been offended the native priests decreed that
the child of Toobo Toa, the chief, should be sacrificed, “on such
occasions the child of a male chief being always chosen as being
worthier than others,” and a two-year-old child was strangled against
the protests of its mother, who tried to conceal it.[202]
That the health of the Ynca also led to sacrifice of children is stated
by Acosta:
“They vsed in Peru to sacrifice yong children of foure or six yeares
old vnto tenne; and the greatest parte of these sacrifices were for the
affaires that did import the Ynca, as in sickness for his health, and
when he went to the warres for victory, or when they gave the wreathe
to their new Ynca, which is the marke of a King, as heere the Scepter
and the Crowne be. In this solemnitie they sacrificed the number of two
hundred children, from foure to tenne yeares of age, which was a cruell
and inhumane spectacle. The manner of the sacrifice was to drowne them
and bury them with certaine representations and ceremonies; sometimes
they cutte off their heads, annointing themselves with the blood from
one eare to another.”[203]
Acosta also declared that when an ordinary man was sick and believed he
would die, his own son was sacrificed to the Sun or to Virachoca.
Francisco de Jerez says that the Peruvian Indians sacrificed their own
children and tinted the doors of their temples and the faces of their
idols with the blood.
[Illustration: THE INCAS OFFERING A HUMAN SACRIFICE TO THEIR CHIEF
(FROM “MOEURS DES SAUVAGES AMERIQUAINS,” BY P. LAFITAU, PARIS, 1724)]
[Illustration: AMERICAN SAVAGES SUBSTITUTING AN ANIMAL FOR A HUMAN
SACRIFICE
(FROM “MOEURS DES SAUVAGES AMERIQUAINS,” BY P. LAFITAU, PARIS, 1724)]
“They sacrifice each month their own children, and with their blood
smear the faces of the idols and the doors of the temples, and sprinkle
the blood over the graves of their dead.”[204]
It is certain, according to the story of Sieur le Moyne de Mourgues,
that “in that part of Florida which is near Virginia,—and where the
French are under the leadership of Sieur le Laudonnière—the people
of this country regard their chiefs as sons of the Sun and, for this
reason, they pay them divine honours, sacrificing to them their
first-born.”[205]
“Their custom is,” according to Le Moyne, “to offer up the first-born
son to the chief. When the day for the sacrifice is notified to the
chief, he proceeds to a place set apart for the purpose, where there
is a bench for him on which he takes his seat. In the middle of the
area before him is a wooden stump two feet high and as many thick,
before which a mother sits on her heels, her face covered in her hands,
lamenting the loss of her child. The principal one of her female
relatives or friends now offers the child to the chief in worship,
after which the women who have accompanied the mother form a circle and
dance around with demonstrations of joy, but without joining hands.
She who holds the child goes and dances in the middle, singing some
praises to the chief. Meanwhile, six Indians, chosen for the purpose,
take their stand in a certain place in the open area; and midway
among them the sacrificing officer, who is decorated with a sort
of magnificence, and holds a club. The ceremony being through, the
sacrificer takes the child and slays it in honour of the chief, before
them all, upon the wooden stump. This offering was, on one occasion,
performed in our presence.”[206]
“It was the Custom in Peru, to sacrifice Children from four to ten
Years of Age, which was chiefly done when the Inga was sick, or going
to War, to pray for Victory, and at the Coronation of those Princes
they sacrific’d two hundred Children. Sometimes they strangl’d, and
bury’d them, and other times they cut their Throats, and the Priests
besmear’d themselves with the Blood from Ear to Ear, which was the
Formality of the Sacrifice. Nor were the Virgins (_Mamaconas_) of
the Temple exempt from being sacrific’d and, when any Person of Note
was sick, and the Priest said he must die, they sacrific’d his son,
desiring the Idol to be satisfied with him, and not take away his
Father’s life. The Ceremonies us’d at this Sacrifice were strange,
for they behav’d themselves like mad Men. They believ’d that all
Calamities were occasion’d by Sin, and that Sacrifices were the
Remedy.”[207]
Further evidence of the attitude of the Indians is given by the first
secretary of the Colony of Virginia Brittania, who asserted that the
Indians in Florida sacrificed the first-born male child. According
to this writer, their Quiyoughquisocks, or prophets to the Indians,
persuaded the warriors to resist the settlements of the white people
because their Okeus, who was god of the tribe, would not be appeased
by the sacrifice of a thousand children if they permitted the white
people, who despised their religion, to dwell among them.[208]
In parts of New South Wales[209] such as Bathurst, Goulburn, the
Lachlan, or MacQuarie, the first-born of every _lubra_ was eaten by the
tribe as a part of the religious ceremony. Here, too, it was the male
infant that was more desirable as a sacrifice, the female infants being
sometimes allowed to live. In this connection, it is interesting to
note that where children are killed without any other excuse than that
they are a drain on the resources of their parents, it is the female
children who are slaughtered. When, however, there is a so-called
religious reason for the infanticide, it is the male child that suffers.
In India, as we shall see, children were frankly killed for economic
reasons; but here too there are evidences of the sacrifice theory.
Up to the beginning of the present century, the custom of offering a
first-born child to the Ganges was common. A custom akin to this was
that of the Ganga Jatra, the murder of sick relatives on the banks of
the sacred river. As late as 1812, a mother and sister burned a leper
at Katwa near Calcutta, their excuse being that by so doing he would be
given a pure body in the next world.
Women, too, who had been long barren dedicated their first child, if
one were given them, to Omkar Mandharta.[210]
Bathing in blood, especially the blood of children, in Northern India
was regarded as a powerful remedy for disease. In 1870, a Mussulman
butcher, losing his child, was told by a Hindu conjurer that in order
to make the next child healthy, he should wash his wife in the blood of
a boy, with the result that a child was murdered. At Muzaffar Nagar a
child was killed and the blood drunk by a barren woman.[211]
In the city of Saugor in India, human sacrifices were offered up in the
year 1800, when they were stopped by the local governor, Assa Sahib,
although the Brahmin priests objected strenuously to the _innovation_.
Outside the city, there was a spot where the young men sacrificed
themselves in order to fulfil the vows of their mothers. The belief
was that when a woman was without a child, she could overcome
barrenness by promising her first-born, if a male, to the god of
destruction, Mahadea. If a boy was born after this vow, she concealed
from him the vow until he attained the age of puberty, when it was his
duty to obey his mother’s call and throw himself, at the annual fair
on the sandstone hills, from a perpendicular height of four or five
hundred feet and be dashed to pieces upon the rocks below.[212]
Among the Banjarilu, a caste of travelling traders noted in
“Bhadrachellam and Rekapalli Taluquas,”[213] the custom in former years
was, before starting off on a business journey, to procure a little
child and bury it in the ground up to its shoulders. Then the traders
would drive their loaded bullocks over the victim and in proportion as
the bullocks “thoroughly trampled the child to death” was their belief
in a successful journey increased. Probably very little credence can
be given to their assertions that they have completely left off such
cruelties.
The Chinese philosopher, Mih Tsze, who lived about the fourth century
before Christ, wrote that there existed at one time in China a state
called Kai-muh, where it was the custom to kill and devour the eldest
brother as an offering to the gods.[214]
We come now to the results of recent excavations in Palestine.
There were discovered at Gezer, the bodies of adults that had been
sacrificed at foundation rites and deposited with the corner-stones
much as moderns deposit mementoes and newspapers. Mr. MacAlister, who
had charge of the excavations at Gezer, says, however, that adult or
adolescent victims were rare in comparison with the number of infants
or very young children whose remains were found under the corners of
houses. Such deposits were found in all the Semitic strata but were
very rare in the Hellenistic stratum, showing that the practice died
down when the Greeks came into control of the land. The children
sacrificed at these foundation rites were deposited in the same
manner as those found at the _messobath_ or high place, where there
was discovered a cemetery of jar-buried infants that went to show how
general was the practice of sacrificing their new-born infants among the
Canaanites.
[Illustration: MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS FOUND IN A CHILD’S GRAVE, AT TELL
TA’ANNEK
(REPRODUCED FROM “DENKSCHRIFTEN DER KAISERLICHEN AKADEMIE DER
WISSENSCHAFT”)]
“That these sacrificed infants were the first-born, devoted in the
Temple, is indicated by the fact that none were over a week old. This
seems to show that the sacrifices were not offered under stress or
any special calamity, or at the rites attaching to any special season
of the year. The special circumstance which led to the selection of
these infants must have been something inherent in the victims
themselves, which devoted them to sacrifice from the moment of their
birth. Among various races, various circumstances are regarded as
sufficient reason for infanticide—deformity, the birth of twins, etc.;
but among the Semites the one cause most likely to have been effective
was primogeniture.”[215]
In the vessels in which the infants were placed, were found by the
excavators smaller vessels which were probably food vessels with a
viaticum for the victim.
At Ta’Annek[216] after the discoveries at Gezer, a cemetery containing
some twenty infants, also buried in jars, was discovered about a
rock altar, the age of the infants that had been sacrificed having
been as much as five years. At Megiddo[217] underneath a corner of
a temple, there were found four jars with the bones of children and
near them smaller jars and a bowl, which undoubtedly contained the
food that children were supposed to need in the other world. Professor
Sellin suggests that the bones found at Tell Ta’Annek may have been
the bones of children that had died too young to be buried in the
family sepulchres, but the burden of evidence suggests a different
explanation. Here, then, we have a double reason for the sacrifice
of the children, for the foundation sacrifices were—one might almost
say _are_, so recently have there been instances of the practice—of a
different order from the sacrifice of the first-born.
On these foundation sacrifices, Dr. Driver has made some interesting
notes. We are all familiar with our own foundation ceremonies, which
are really nothing more or less than a modification of these primitive
ceremonies that consisted almost entirely of the sacrifice of a human
being and in many instances of an infant, inasmuch as the infant,
having just come into the world, was purer and nearer to god and
therefore more acceptable. Traces of the custom of sacrificing a human
life in order that some destructive god or demon might be propitiated
and the lives of those about to occupy the building thereby made safer
are found in India, New Zealand, China, Japan, Mexico, Germany, and
Denmark.
The extent of these foundation sacrifices had been revealed by Dr.
Trumbull in his _Threshold Covenant_, all going to show that different
branches of the human family, though far removed, mounted much the same
steps in their endeavour to achieve the truth about the world in which
they lived.
Among the Danes, when the fortifications were first being built around
Copenhagen many years ago, the walls, as they were built, kept sinking
in, and it did not seem possible that they would ever stand firmly.
“The workmen finally took a little girl, placed her at a table, and
gave her play toys and sweetmeats. Then, as she sat there enjoying
herself, the masons built an arch over her and in this way the walls
were made solid.”[218]
A similar story is told[219] of a castle of Liebenstein. It was made
fast and impregnable by buying a child from its mother and walling it
in.
Slavensk, a Slavonic town on the Danube, had been devastated by the
plague and when it was built anew the wise men of the town agreed that
there must be a human victim. Messengers were sent out before sunrise
to seize the first living creature they met. The victim was a child and
it was buried alive under the foundation stone of the citadel, and from
that time on, a citadel was called a Dyetinet, from Dyetina[220], a
child.
In Africa in Galam, Tylor says[221] that a boy and a girl were buried
alive before the gate of the city in order to make it impregnable. In
other places, such as Great Bassam and Yarriba, such sacrifices were
usual even when the foundation was only that of a house.
In some places, such as among the Tantis of Africa, the sacrifice was
made at every new moon. In Sargos, a girl was offered up that there
might be good crops. In Bonny, they sacrificed every year a beautiful
virgin to Juju that the evil spirits might be kept away.
“The connection between cannibalism and human sacrifice,” says Dr.
Waitz, “is manifest enough in the festivals of Dahomey.”[222]
There were two principal and solemn sacrifices among the Pipiles, a
Maya people in Central America—one at the commencement of summer and
one at the beginning of winter. Little boys of ten and twelve years of
age were the victims, and their blood was sprinkled in the direction of
the four cardinal points.[223]
Among the Milanau Dyaks when the largest house was being erected, a
deep hole was dug and a slave girl was placed in it. An enormous timber
was then allowed to descend on her and crush her to death.[224]
As late as 1843 in Germany, when a new bridge was being built at Halle,
the common people fancied that a child was wanted to be walled into
the foundations. According to Grimm, the tower called the Reichenfels
Castle was built on a live child and a projecting stone marks the
place. If that were pulled out, the wall, it is said, would tumble
down.[225]
According to a Servian legend, three hundred masons laboured for three
years at the foundation stones of Scutari, but what they built by day,
the _Vila_ tore down at night. At last she made known to the kings
that the place would never be finished until two brothers or sisters
“of like name” were built into the foundations. Nowhere could such be
found. Then the _Vila_ required that one of the wives of the kings
should be walled up in the ground. The next day the consort of the
youngest king, never dreaming of such a decree, brought out some dinner
to the workmen; thereupon the three hundred masons dropped their stones
around her and began to wall her in. At her entreaty, they left a small
opening and there she continued to suckle her babe who was held up to
her once a day.[226]
The foundation sacrifice is well known in India. At Madras, it has
long been a tradition that when the fort was first built a girl was
built into it to render it impregnable.[227] A Raja was once building
a bridge over the river Jargo at Chunar and when it fell down several
times, he was advised to sacrifice a Brahman girl to the local deity.
She has now become the _Mari_ or ghost of the place and is regularly
worshipped in time of trouble. In Kumaun, there are professional
kidnappers known as Doqhutiya, or two-legged beasts of prey, who go
about capturing boys that they may be used in foundation sacrifices.
Up to 1867, when a house was built among the Tlinkits tribe in Alaska,
the relatives and friends of the chief or wealthy man were invited to
appear on the spot that he had chosen for the site. Addressing them
at great length, he referred with pride to the various deeds of his
ancestors and promised to so conduct himself as to shed more lustre on
the family name. The space for the house was then cleared, a spot for
the fireplace designated, and four holes dug wherein the corner posts
were to be set. A slave, or the descendant of a slave who had been
captured in war, was then blind-folded and compelled to lie down face
uppermost on the spot selected for the fireplace. A sapling was then
cut, laid across the throat of the slave, and, at a given signal, the
two nearest relatives of the house sat upon the respective ends of the
sapling, thereby choking the wretch to death.[228]