HEBREW WRITERS ON THE ORIGIN OF THE RELIGION OF
HUMANITY—CHILD SACRIFICE CONDEMNED IN THE STORY OF
ISAAC—CIRCUMCISION SUBSTITUTED—REVERSION TO BARBARIC
HABITS IN CANAAN—TRIUMPH OF THE PROPHETS.
Having reviewed the ethnological and archæological aspect of the
attitude of the Semitic people toward the sacrifice of the first-born,
we turn to the written record of the small bands of Semites who gave to
the world the humane ideas that dominate it today. From that written
record we will learn that nowhere among the civilization of the world
was there the same spirit that there was in that outlandish corner of
Syria. Israel was never content with the abuses of the world and in
this her philosophy differed from Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Mesopotamian,
Chinese, and Indian philosophies as we have been able to judge of them
in the writing of the civilizations they produced. If, to make one more
comparison, the Greeks were wanting in humanity the Israelites were
passionately human. “The Israelitish prophets were impetuous writers
such as we of the present day should denounce as socialists and
anarchists. They were fanatics in the cause of social justice.”[229]
Modern Bible criticism has made the period of the writing of the
Elohistic part of the Hexateuch about 770 B. C.[230] Whatever the
sources that were drawn on and whatever actual historical value they
have, we know that the ideas contained therein represent the ideas of
the eighth century B. C.[231]
According to these writings, Abraham, the eponymic father of the
Israelites, was tested in his loyalty to Yahweh by being told to take
his son Isaac into the land of Moriah, a district in Palestine, and
there sacrifice him as a burnt offering. In the land of Canaan at the
time the Jahvist and the Elohist wrote of this temptation, the ceremony
of sacrificing the first-born of a living thing was still practised;
among the neighbouring peoples—the Phœnicians on one side and the
Sabeans on the south-east—children were still sacrificed. The Elohist
therefore was anxious to show that a thousand or more years back, in
the time of the founder of their race, it was not the custom of the
tribe to sacrifice children and that it was only done when the Lord
gave the especial command.
[Illustration: ABRAHAM AND ISAAC
(FROM A PAINTING BY J. S. COPLEY, R. A.)]
With Abraham the command, while painful, was apparently not surprising.
He went about the execution in a businesslike way, only to find when
he was about to sacrifice the boy, that the Lord was satisfied with
his display of zeal and did not intend the command to be carried out.
Then “Abraham lifted up his eyes, and behold, behind him a ram caught
in the thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram and
offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.”[232]
Here was the first case of substitution, in which the early writer
testifies that not only was the substitution satisfactory to the deity,
but the human sacrifice was forbidden and an animal providentially
provided that the ceremony of sacrifice might be gone through without
loss of human blood. However strong the popular inclination to accept
the bloody rites of the religion of the surrounding tribes, from
that time there was a fixed standard to which the prophets and true
believers of Israel held—human sacrifice had been stopped by the Lord
himself.
Among the Assyrians also, father Orhan was represented as having
substituted an animal for human beings, the Assyrian patriarch being
represented as a man of benevolent aspect, seated in an armchair
without any sort of military pomp or circumstance.[233]
To make the substitution of an animal for a human being more effective,
and more popular, Abraham entered into a covenant with Yahweh by which
the deity was still given the blood of humans without a life being
sacrificed. The rite of circumcision is the substitution commanded by
Yahweh himself:
“This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and thee, and thy
seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised.”[234]
This rite, mixed as it is with phallic worship (see Genesis), had its
origin in the castration of prisoners of war,[235] and, as far as the
Israelites were concerned, probably originated in Egypt,[236] although
it has been found to be performed among the tribes of Central Australia
with a stone knife just as is recorded of the Israelites. With progress
and the fact that use was found for prisoners, castration gave way to
marking the prisoners, until the original significance passing, as
among the Egyptians according to Herodotus, the practice became one of
purely hygienic value.
That this covenant with Yahweh was kept when all about them the
first-born children of the Egyptians were sacrificed, the feast of the
Passover (from חטם, _pesach_, meaning “to pass by, to spare”) attests.
Yahweh told Moses that he was to claim the lives of not only the
first-born of the Egyptians “from the first-born of Pharaoh that sat on
his throne unto the first-born of the captive that was in the dungeon,”
but also the first-born of all the animals in the land. That the
chosen people might not suffer in this contemplated destruction they
were instructed, through Moses, to take the blood of a lamb, “a male of
the first year,” and “strike it on the two side-posts and on the upper
door-post of the houses,” that it might be known wherein the faithful
dwelt.
[Illustration: A NOTABLE CASE OF ABANDONMENT—THE FINDING OF MOSES
(AFTER PAINTING BY SCHOPIN)]
Here we see the beginning of the threshold sacrifice or covenant, which
became, in time, the foundation sacrifice.
So complete was this claiming of the first-born that “there was not a
house where there was not one dead.”[237]
From their deliverance from this visitation, Yahweh instructed Moses to
“sanctify unto me all the first-born, whatsoever openeth the womb among
the children of Israel; both of man and beast, it is mine.” Already
there was the example of the patriarch Abraham that an animal might be
substituted; now there was the statement from the One on high that the
first-born of the chosen people might be redeemed. Of the temper of the
people at this time and their proneness to fall into the vices of their
neighbours, and of idolatry, we need only the statement of Joshua[238]
that while in Egypt—Renan says that they were not there more than three
hundred years—they acquired the habit of worshipping false gods.
The speedy fall from grace, as shown by the worship of the golden calf
while Moses was away from them for a short time, is another evidence
of their excitability, although modern scientists have declared that
under adverse circumstances the entire civilized peoples would revert
to barbarity in three generations.
The struggle upward out of barbarism could have been attended with
nothing less than herculean belief on the part of the leaders of
Israel, when we see this lapse came after their miraculous escape from
Egypt and after the receipt of the ten commandments. Illuminating too
is the fact that the making of the golden calf was superintended by no
less a person than Aaron, the brother of Moses, his confidant and first
lieutenant.
When we come to the period of the Judges, we find the Israelites
falling away from their humanitarianism. While Joshua and his
contemporaries were alive, they held to their religion, but the gods
of Canaan, together with the more easily understood and more deeply
ingrained rites of idolatry, reappeared as soon as the patriarchs had
passed away.
Nothing indeed is more interesting in this study of the Old Testament
than the record of the difficulty that the leaders and prophets had in
keeping a semi-barbarous people up to their standard of civilization
and humanization. Ethnological and archæological data picture the
struggle forward but feebly, when compared to the written records of
the Israelites, especially during the period of the Judges.
The period of the Judges was the period of the formation of the nation,
and had there not been all around them reminders of their own previous
nomadic habits, and had they been a less excitable people, there would
not have been the recurrence to barbaric traits that we find. Even
then, the progress of the Israelites in humanitarianism is unique in
the world. From the settlement in Canaan, which was about 1200 B. C.,
until the birth of Christ, they suffered conquest, disintegration,
and many afflictions, but progressed steadily in humanitarianism. In
that time the Greeks rose and fell, achieving great intellectual and
æsthetic perfection, but failing to even approach the Israelites in
humanity. A few hundred years after the settlement in Canaan, the
Romans appear as a civilized people and, aided by a transplanted
stoicism, developed a great humanitarianism under the Emperors
Trajan and Hadrian; the last named, however, despite his greatness,
indissolubly linked with the degeneracy that was the mark of Greek
self-centredness, or lack of humanity, as Mahaffy calls it.
The transition from idealism to nationalism is never affected with
impunity, says Renan, and so the growing nation suffered in its
material growth and through the insistence that Yahweh “loved Israel
and hated all the rest of the world.”[239] Baal and Yahweh were not far
apart and at Sechem there was a Baal-berith, or Baal covenant, which
the idolators worshipped as Baal, and the Israelites as Yahweh.[240]
“If the religion of Israel had not gone beyond this phase, it is
certainly the last religion to which the world would have rallied.”[241]
It is in this period that we have the story of Jephthah, an outcast,
the head of banditti and an illegitimate son, who was asked by the
Israelites of Gilead to help them against the Ammonites. Jephthah vowed
that if he should be successful he would sacrifice to Yahweh the first
thing that met him on his return from the campaign, and the first thing
to meet him was his daughter. “And he sent her away for two months
and she went with her companions and bewailed her virginity upon the
mountains. And it came to pass that at the end of two months that she
returned unto her father who did with her according to the vow which he
had vowed.”[242]
It is suggested by Renan that what probably happened was that Jephthah,
before undertaking a difficult war, sacrificed one of his daughters
according to the barbarous custom put into practice on solemn occasions
when the country was in danger. “Patriarchal deism,” he says, “had
condemned these immolations; Yahwehism with its exclusively national
principle was rather favourable to them. Not many human sacrifices
were offered to God nor to the Elohim. The gods whom they thought to
propitiate by means of human sacrifices were the patriot gods, Camos of
the Moabites, Moloch of the Canaanites, Melqarth of Carthage.”[243]
The coming of David was the triumph of Yahweh over the contending
religions, though, as modern critics have pointed out, there was
little humanitarianism in the semi-barbarous poet. When there was a
three years’ famine in the land it was ascribed to the wrong done the
Gibeonites by Saul and the Gibeonites were allowed to say what should
be the sacrifice to atone for the wrong. The ancient historian records
the fact that they asked that they might be allowed to hang the seven
sons of Saul, and this was done. The sacrifice was asked for by the
Gibeonites and it was for the purpose of ending the famine, but,
incidentally, it enabled David to get rid of those who stood in his
way.[244]
A few hundred years later, in the ninth century, we find the effect of
the sacrifice of the first-born telling on the Israelites even though
at that time it is evident that they themselves have given up human
sacrifice. Jehoram, King of Israel, and Jehosophat, King of Judah,
united to defeat the remarkable King of Moab, Mesha. The combined
forces drove him within his strong fortifications of Kir-Haraseth and
when he found that there was no way of escape, as a last resort:
“He took his eldest son, that should have reigned in his stead,
and offered him for a burnt offering upon the wall. And they [the
Israelites] departed from him and returned to their own land.”
The efficacy of the sacrifice is hereby admitted although it was
offered to Camos and not to Yahweh. The ancient historian says nothing
in extenuation of the effect. Ewald suggests that Yahweh, full of
bitterness[245] against Israel for having driven the King of Moab to
such a deed of fearful bravery, filled the army full of terror. Renan,
however, suggests that though they did not then offer human sacrifices
themselves, the Israelites still had the fullest faith in their
efficacy and retired lest they be defeated.
Coming nearer, to a period that is contemporaneous with that which is
revealed in the excavations at Gezer and Tell Ta’Annek, we have the
direct statement in Kings and Chronicles[246] that Ahaz, the eleventh
King of Judah (about 741 to 725 B. C.), “made his son pass through the
fire.” To gain the aid of Tiglath-Pileser against the Edomites and the
Philistines he became a vassal of the Assyrian monarch and his name
appears among the names of those who acknowledged his sovereignty and
paid tribute.
Manasseh was another King of Judah (697 to 642 B. C.) who sacrificed
his son,[247] emulating Ahaz in this as in other heathenish customs,
increasing the popularity of the foreign gods and causing the streets
of Jerusalem to run with the blood of the prophets whom he put to
death. In every way he tried to make the heathen religions more
acceptable and accessible to the whole nation by providing them with
temples and altars. In addition to sacrificing one of his own sons to
Moloch, he revived that religion on a large scale, building for it
a magnificent burning place (Tophet) in the valley of Hinnom on the
southern wall of Jerusalem. The tortures to which the children were
subjected soon associated themselves in the minds of the pious with
what punishment beyond the grave must be like, so that the name of hell
itself was taken from this valley, Ge-Hinnom.[248]
With the reforms of Josiah we hear no more of such treatment of
children but we must not suppose that while barbarous practices were
going on the prophets had remained silent. The latter day writers
revolted against the entire idea of sacrifice, Hosea declaring: “I
desired mercy and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of Yahweh more than
burnt offerings.”[249] Jeremiah even declared that the Lord had not
commanded the people to sacrifice when they came forth from Egypt:
“For I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them in the day that
I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or
sacrifices.”[250]
To Micah, however, it was reserved to express in those early days the
vigorous protest that was to become the ethical keynote of the future
religion:
“Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high
God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a
year old?
“Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousand
rivers of oil? Shall I give my first son for my transgression, the
fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
“He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord
require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly
with thy God?”[251]