(M9) The myth of Adonis was localized and his rites celebrated with much
solemnity at two places in Western Asia. One of these was Byblus on the
coast of Syria, the other was Paphos in Cyprus. Both were great seats of
the worship of Aphrodite, or rather of her Semitic counterpart,
Astarte;(14) and of both, if we accept the legends, Cinyras, the father of
Adonis, was king.(15) Of the two cities Byblus was the more ancient;
indeed it claimed to be the oldest city in Phoenicia, and to have been
founded in the early ages of the world by the great god El, whom Greeks
and Romans identified with Cronus and Saturn respectively.(16) However
that may have been, in historical times it ranked as a holy place, the
religious capital of the country, the Mecca or Jerusalem of the
Phoenicians.(17) The city stood on a height beside the sea,(18) and
contained a great sanctuary of Astarte,(19) where in the midst of a
spacious open court, surrounded by cloisters and approached from below by
staircases, rose a tall cone or obelisk, the holy image of the
goddess.(20) In this sanctuary the rites of Adonis were celebrated.(21)
Indeed the whole city was sacred to him,(22) and the river Nahr Ibrahim,
which falls into the sea a little to the south of Byblus, bore in
antiquity the name of Adonis.(23) This was the kingdom of Cinyras.(24)
From the earliest to the latest times the city appears to have been ruled
by kings, assisted perhaps by a senate or council of elders.(25) The first
of the kings of whom we have historical evidence was a certain Zekar-baal.
He reigned about a century before Solomon; yet from that dim past his
figure stands out strangely fresh and lifelike in the journal of an
Egyptian merchant or official named Wen-Ammon, which has fortunately been
preserved in a papyrus. This man spent some time with the king at Byblus,
and received from him, in return for rich presents, a supply of timber
felled in the forests of Lebanon.(26) Another king of Byblus, who bore the
name of Sibitti-baal, paid tribute to Tiglath-pileser III., king of
Assyria, about the year 739 B.C.(27) Further, from an inscription of the
fifth or fourth century before our era we learn that a king of Byblus, by
name Yehaw-melech, son of Yehar-baal, and grandson of Adom-melech or
Uri-melech, dedicated a pillared portico with a carved work of gold and a
bronze altar to the goddess, whom he worshipped under the name of Baalath
Gebal, that is, the female Baal of Byblus.(28)
(M10) The names of these kings suggest that they claimed affinity with
their god Baal or Moloch, for Moloch is only a corruption of _melech_,
that is, “king.” Such a claim at all events appears to have been put
forward by many other Semitic kings.(29) The early monarchs of Babylon
were worshipped as gods in their lifetime.(30) Mesha, king of Moab,
perhaps called himself the son of his god Kemosh.(31) Among the Aramean
sovereigns of Damascus, mentioned in the Bible, we find more than one
Ben-hadad, that is, “son of the god Hadad,” the chief male deity of the
Syrians;(32) and Josephus tells us that down to his own time, in the first
century of our era, Ben-hadad I., whom he calls simply Adad, and his
successor, Hazael, continued to be worshipped as gods by the people of
Damascus, who held processions daily in their honour.(33) Some of the
kings of Edom seem to have gone a step farther and identified themselves
with the god in their lifetime; at all events they bore his name Hadad
without any qualification.(34) King Bar-rekub, who reigned over Samal in
North-Western Syria in the time of Tiglath-pileser (745-727 B.C.) appears
from his name to have reckoned himself a son of Rekub-el, the god to whose
favour he deemed himself indebted for the kingdom.(35) The kings of Tyre
traced their descent from Baal,(36) and apparently professed to be gods in
their own person.(37) Several of them bore names which are partly composed
of the names of Baal and Astarte; one of them bore the name of Baal pure
and simple.(38) The Baal whom they personated was no doubt Melcarth, “the
king of the city,” as his name signifies, the great god whom the Greeks
identified with Hercules; for the equivalence of the Baal of Tyre both to
Melcarth and to Hercules is placed beyond the reach of doubt by a
bilingual inscription, in Phoenician and Greek, which was found in
Malta.(39)
(M11) In like manner the kings of Byblus may have assumed the style of
Adonis; for Adonis was simply the divine Adon or “lord” of the city, a
title which hardly differs in sense from Baal (“master”) and Melech
(“king”). This conjecture would be confirmed if one of the kings of Byblus
actually bore, as Renan believed, the name of Adom-melech, that is, Adonis
Melech, the Lord King. But, unfortunately, the reading of the inscription
in which the name occurs is doubtful.(40) Some of the old Canaanite kings
of Jerusalem appear to have played the part of Adonis in their lifetime,
if we may judge from their names, Adoni-bezek and Adoni-zedek,(41) which
are divine rather than human titles. Adoni-zedek means “lord of
righteousness,” and is therefore equivalent to Melchizedek, that is, “king
of righteousness,” the title of that mysterious king of Salem and priest
of God Most High, who seems to have been neither more nor less than one of
these same Canaanitish kings of Jerusalem.(42) Thus if the old priestly
kings of Jerusalem regularly played the part of Adonis, we need not wonder
that in later times the women of Jerusalem used to weep for Tammuz, that
is, for Adonis, at the north gate of the temple.(43) In doing so they may
only have been continuing a custom which had been observed in the same
place by the Canaanites long before the Hebrews invaded the land. Perhaps
the “sacred men,” as they were called, who lodged within the walls of the
temple at Jerusalem down almost to the end of the Jewish kingdom,(44) may
have acted the part of the living Adonis to the living Astarte of the
women. At all events we know that in the cells of these strange clergy
women wove garments for the _asherim_,(45) the sacred poles which stood
beside the altar and which appear to have been by some regarded as
embodiments of Astarte.(46) Certainly these “sacred men” must have
discharged some function which was deemed religious in the temple at
Jerusalem; and we can hardly doubt that the prohibition to bring the wages
of prostitution into the house of God, which was published at the very
same time that the men were expelled from the temple,(47) was directed
against an existing practice. In Palestine as in other Semitic lands the
hire of sacred prostitutes was probably dedicated to the deity as one of
his regular dues: he took tribute of men and women as of flocks and herds,
of fields and vineyards and oliveyards.
(M12) But if Jerusalem had been from of old the seat of a dynasty of
spiritual potentates or Grand Lamas, who held the keys of heaven and were
revered far and wide as kings and gods in one, we can easily understand
why the upstart David chose it for the capital of the new kingdom which he
had won for himself at the point of the sword. The central position and
the natural strength of the virgin fortress need not have been the only or
the principal inducements which decided the politic monarch to transfer
his throne from Hebron to Jerusalem.(48) By serving himself heir to the
ancient kings of the city he might reasonably hope to inherit their
ghostly repute along with their broad acres, to wear their nimbus as well
as their crown.(49) So at a later time when he had conquered Ammon and
captured the royal city of Rabbah, he took the heavy gold crown of the
Ammonite god Milcom and placed it on his own brows, thus posing as the
deity in person.(50) It can hardly, therefore, be unreasonable to suppose
that he pursued precisely the same policy at the conquest of Jerusalem.
And on the other side the calm confidence with which the Jebusite
inhabitants of that city awaited his attack, jeering at the besiegers from
the battlements,(51) may well have been born of a firm trust in the local
deity rather than in the height and thickness of their grim old walls.
Certainly the obstinacy with which in after ages the Jews defended the
same place against the armies of Assyria and Rome sprang in large measure
from a similar faith in the God of Zion.
(M13) Be that as it may, the history of the Hebrew kings presents some
features which may perhaps, without straining them too far, be interpreted
as traces or relics of a time when they or their predecessors played the
part of a divinity, and particularly of Adonis, the divine lord of the
land. In life the Hebrew king was regularly addressed as
_Adoni-ham-melech_, “My Lord the King,”(52) and after death he was
lamented with cries of _Hoi ahi! Hoi Adon!_ “Alas my brother! alas
Lord!”(53) These exclamations of grief uttered for the death of a king of
Judah were, we can hardly doubt, the very same cries which the weeping
women of Jerusalem uttered in the north porch of the temple for the dead
Tammuz.(54) However, little stress can be laid on such forms of address,
since _Adon_ in Hebrew, like “lord” in English, was a secular as well as a
religious title. But whether identified with Adonis or not, the Hebrew
kings certainly seem to have been regarded as in a sense divine, as
representing and to some extent embodying Jehovah on earth. For the king’s
throne was called the throne of Jehovah;(55) and the application of the
holy oil to his head was believed to impart to him directly a portion of
the divine spirit.(56) Hence he bore the title of Messiah, which with its
Greek equivalent Christ means no more than “the Anointed One.” Thus when
David had cut off the skirt of Saul’s robe in the darkness of a cave where
he was in hiding, his heart smote him for having laid sacrilegious hands
upon _Adoni Messiah Jehovah_, “my Lord the Anointed of Jehovah.”(57)
(M14) Like other divine or semi-divine rulers the Hebrew kings were
apparently held answerable for famine and pestilence. When a dearth,
caused perhaps by a failure of the winter rains, had visited the land for
three years, King David inquired of the oracle, which discreetly laid the
blame not on him but on his predecessor Saul. The dead king was indeed
beyond the reach of punishment, but his sons were not. So David had seven
of them sought out, and they were hanged before the Lord at the beginning
of barley harvest in spring: and all the long summer the mother of two of
the dead men sat under the gallows-tree, keeping off the jackals by night
and the vultures by day, till with the autumn the blessed rain came at
last to wet their dangling bodies and fertilize the barren earth once
more. Then the bones of the dead were taken down from the gibbet and
buried in the sepulchre of their fathers.(58) The season when these
princes were put to death, at the beginning of barley harvest, and the
length of time they hung on the gallows, seem to show that their execution
was not a mere punishment, but that it partook of the nature of a
rain-charm. For it is a common belief that rain can be procured by magical
ceremonies performed with dead men’s bones,(59) and it would be natural to
ascribe a special virtue in this respect to the bones of princes, who are
often expected to give rain in their life. When the Israelites demanded of
Samuel that he should give them a king, the indignant prophet, loth to be
superseded by the upstart Saul, called on the Lord to send thunder and
rain, and the Lord did so at once, though the season was early summer and
the reapers were at work in the wheat-fields, a time when in common years
no rain falls from the cloudless Syrian sky.(60) The pious historian who
records the miracle seems to have regarded it as a mere token of the wrath
of the deity, whose voice was heard in the roll of thunder; but we may
surmise that in giving this impressive proof of his control of the weather
Samuel meant to hint gently at the naughtiness of asking for a king to do
for the fertility of the land what could be done quite as well and far
more cheaply by a prophet.
(M15) In Israel the excess as well as the deficiency of rain seems to have
been set down to the wrath of the deity.(61) When the Jews returned to
Jerusalem from the great captivity and assembled for the first time in the
square before the ruined temple, it happened that the weather was very
wet, and as the people sat shelterless and drenched in the piazza they
trembled at their sin and at the rain.(62) In all ages it has been the
strength or the weakness of Israel to read the hand of God in the changing
aspects of nature, and we need not wonder that at such a time and in so
dismal a scene, with a lowering sky overhead, the blackened ruins of the
temple before their eyes, and the steady drip of the rain over all, the
returned exiles should have been oppressed with a double sense of their
own guilt and of the divine anger. Perhaps, though they hardly knew it,
memories of the bright sun, fat fields, and broad willow-fringed rivers of
Babylon,(63) which had been so long their home, lent a deeper shade of
sadness to the austerity of the Judean landscape, with its gaunt grey
hills stretching away, range beyond range, to the horizon, or dipping
eastward to the far line of sombre blue which marks the sullen waters of
the Dead Sea.(64)
(M16) In the days of the Hebrew monarchy the king was apparently credited
with the power of making sick and making whole. Thus the king of Syria
sent a leper to the king of Israel to be healed by him, just as scrofulous
patients used to fancy that they could be cured by the touch of a French
or English king. However, the Hebrew monarch, with more sense than has
been shown by his royal brothers in modern times, professed himself unable
to work any such miracle. “Am I God,” he asked, “to kill and to make
alive, that this man doth send unto me to recover a man of his
leprosy?”(65) On another occasion, when pestilence ravaged the country and
the excited fancy of the plague-stricken people saw in the clouds the
figure of the Destroying Angel with his sword stretched out over
Jerusalem, they laid the blame on King David, who had offended the touchy
and irascible deity by taking a census. The prudent monarch bowed to the
popular storm, acknowledged his guilt, and appeased the angry god by
offering burnt sacrifices on the threshing-floor of Araunah, one of the
old Jebusite inhabitants of Jerusalem. Then the angel sheathed his
flashing sword, and the shrieks of the dying and the lamentations for the
dead no longer resounded in the streets.(66)
(M17) To this theory of the sanctity, nay the divinity of the Hebrew kings
it may be objected that few traces of it survive in the historical books
of the Bible. But the force of the objection is weakened by a
consideration of the time and the circumstances in which these books
assumed their final shape. The great prophets of the eighth and the
seventh centuries by the spiritual ideals and the ethical fervour of their
teaching had wrought a religious and moral reform perhaps unparalleled in
history. Under their influence an austere monotheism had replaced the old
sensuous worship of the natural powers: a stern Puritanical spirit, an
unbending rigour of mind, had succeeded to the old easy supple temper with
its weak compliances, its wax-like impressionability, its proclivities to
the sins of the flesh. And the moral lessons which the prophets inculcated
were driven home by the political events of the time, above all by the
ever-growing pressure of the great Assyrian empire on the petty states of
Palestine. The long agony of the siege of Samaria(67) must have been
followed with trembling anxiety by the inhabitants of Judea, for the
danger was at their door. They had only to lift up their eyes and look
north to see the blue hills of Ephraim, at whose foot lay the beleaguered
city. Its final fall and the destruction of the northern kingdom could not
fail to fill every thoughtful mind in the sister realm with sad
forebodings. It was as if the sky had lowered and thunder muttered over
Jerusalem. Thenceforth to the close of the Jewish monarchy, about a
century and a half later, the cloud never passed away, though once for a
little it seemed to lift, when Sennacherib raised the siege of
Jerusalem(68) and the watchers on the walls beheld the last of the long
line of spears and standards disappearing, the last squadron of the
blue-coated Assyrian cavalry sweeping, in a cloud of dust, out of
sight.(69)
(M18) It was in this period of national gloom and despondency that the two
great reformations of Israel’s religion were accomplished, the first by
king Hezekiah, the second a century later by king Josiah.(70) We need not
wonder then that the reformers who in that and subsequent ages composed or
edited the annals of their nation should have looked as sourly on the old
unreformed paganism of their forefathers as the fierce zealots of the
Commonwealth looked on the far more innocent pastimes of Merry England;
and that in their zeal for the glory of God they should have blotted many
pages of history lest they should perpetuate the memory of practices to
which they traced the calamities of their country. All the historical
books passed through the office of the Puritan censor,(71) and we can
hardly doubt that they emerged from it stript of many gay feathers which
they had flaunted when they went in. Among the shed plumage may well have
been the passages which invested human beings, whether kings or commoners,
with the attributes of deity. Certainly no pages could seem to the censor
more rankly blasphemous; on none, therefore, was he likely to press more
firmly the official sponge.
(M19) But if Semitic kings in general and the kings of Byblus in
particular often assumed the style of Baal or Adonis, it follows that they
may have mated with the goddess, the Baalath or Astarte of the city.
Certainly we hear of kings of Tyre and Sidon who were priests of
Astarte.(72) Now to the agricultural Semites the Baal or god of a land was
the author of all its fertility; he it was who produced the corn, the
wine, the figs, the oil, and the flax, by means of his quickening waters,
which in the arid parts of the Semitic world are oftener springs, streams,
and underground flow than the rains of heaven.(73) Further, “the
life-giving power of the god was not limited to vegetative nature, but to
him also was ascribed the increase of animal life, the multiplication of
flocks and herds, and, not least, of the human inhabitants of the land.
For the increase of animate nature is obviously conditioned, in the last
resort, by the fertility of the soil, and primitive races, which have not
learned to differentiate the various kinds of life with precision, think
of animate as well as vegetable life as rooted in the earth and sprung
from it. The earth is the great mother of all things in most mythological
philosophies, and the comparison of the life of mankind, or of a stock of
men, with the life of a tree, which is so common in Semitic as in other
primitive poetry, is not in its origin a mere figure. Thus where the
growth of vegetation is ascribed to a particular divine power, the same
power receives the thanks and homage of his worshippers for the increase
of cattle and of men. Firstlings as well as first-fruits were offered at
the shrines of the Baalim, and one of the commonest classes of personal
names given by parents to their sons or daughters designates the child as
the gift of the god.” In short, “the Baal was conceived as the male
principle of reproduction, the husband of the land which he
fertilised.”(74) So far, therefore, as the Semite personified the
reproductive energies of nature as male and female, as a Baal and a
Baalath, he appears to have identified the male power especially with
water and the female especially with earth. On this view plants and trees,
animals and men, are the offspring or children of the Baal and Baalath.
(M20) If, then, at Byblus and elsewhere, the Semitic king was allowed, or
rather required, to personate the god and marry the goddess, the intention
of the custom can only have been to ensure the fertility of the land and
the increase of men and cattle by means of homoeopathic magic. There is
reason to think that a similar custom was observed from a similar motive
in other parts of the ancient world, and particularly at Nemi, where both
the male and the female powers, the Dianus and Diana, were in one aspect
of their nature personifications of the life-giving waters.(75)
(M21) The last king of Byblus bore the ancient name of Cinyras, and was
beheaded by Pompey the Great for his tyrannous excesses.(76) His legendary
namesake Cinyras is said to have founded a sanctuary of Aphrodite, that
is, of Astarte, at a place on Mount Lebanon, distant a day’s journey from
the capital.(77) The spot was probably Aphaca, at the source of the river
Adonis, half-way between Byblus and Baalbec; for at Aphaca there was a
famous grove and sanctuary of Astarte which Constantine destroyed on
account of the flagitious character of the worship.(78) The site of the
temple has been discovered by modern travellers near the miserable village
which still bears the name of Afka at the head of the wild, romantic,
wooded gorge of the Adonis. The hamlet stands among groves of noble
walnut-trees on the brink of the lyn. A little way off the river rushes
from a cavern at the foot of a mighty amphitheatre of towering cliffs to
plunge in a series of cascades into the awful depths of the glen. The
deeper it descends, the ranker and denser grows the vegetation, which,
sprouting from the crannies and fissures of the rocks, spreads a green
veil over the roaring or murmuring stream in the tremendous chasm below.
There is something delicious, almost intoxicating, in the freshness of
these tumbling waters, in the sweetness and purity of the mountain air, in
the vivid green of the vegetation. The temple, of which some massive hewn
blocks and a fine column of Syenite granite still mark the site, occupied
a terrace facing the source of the river and commanding a magnificent
prospect. Across the foam and the roar of the waterfalls you look up to
the cavern and away to the top of the sublime precipices above. So lofty
is the cliff that the goats which creep along its ledges to browse on the
bushes appear like ants to the spectator hundreds of feet below. Seaward
the view is especially impressive when the sun floods the profound gorge
with golden light, revealing all the fantastic buttresses and rounded
towers of its mountain rampart, and falling softly on the varied green of
the woods which clothe its depths.(79) It was here that, according to the
legend, Adonis met Aphrodite for the first or the last time,(80) and here
his mangled body was buried.(81) A fairer scene could hardly be imagined
for a story of tragic love and death. Yet, sequestered as the valley is
and must always have been, it is not wholly deserted. A convent or a
village may be observed here and there standing out against the sky on the
top of some beetling crag, or clinging to the face of a nearly
perpendicular cliff high above the foam and the din of the river; and at
evening the lights that twinkle through the gloom betray the presence of
human habitations on slopes which might seem inaccessible to man. In
antiquity the whole of the lovely vale appears have been dedicated to
Adonis, and to this day it is haunted by his memory; for the heights which
shut it in are crested at various points by ruined monuments of his
worship, some of them overhanging dreadful abysses, down which it turns
the head dizzy to look and see the eagles wheeling about their nests far
below. One such monument exists at Ghineh. The face of a great rock, above
a roughly hewn recess, is here carved with figures of Adonis and
Aphrodite. He is portrayed with spear in rest, awaiting the attack of a
bear, while she is seated in an attitude of sorrow.(82) Her grief-stricken
figure may well be the mourning Aphrodite of the Lebanon described by
Macrobius,(83) and the recess in the rock is perhaps her lover’s tomb.
Every year, in the belief of his worshippers, Adonis was wounded to death
on the mountains, and every year the face of nature itself was dyed with
his sacred blood. So year by year the Syrian damsels lamented his untimely
fate,(84) while the red anemone, his flower, bloomed among the cedars of
Lebanon, and the river ran red to the sea, fringing the winding shores of
the blue Mediterranean, whenever the wind set inshore, with a sinuous,
band of crimson.