The latter's temple was similar to Bel's, from which the Hebraic
ritual, terms of the Law, the Torah itself, may have proceeded, as, it
may be, the Sabbath did also. On a tablet recovered from the library
of Assurbanipal it is written: "The seventh day is a fast day, a lucky
day, a sabbatuv"--literally, a day of rest for the heart.[26]
[Footnote 26: Cuneiform Insc. W. A. ii. 32.]
In Aralu that day never ceased; the dead there, buried, Herodotos
said, in honey, were unresurrectably dead, dead to the earth, dead to
the Silver Sky. Yet though that was an article of faith, through a
paradox profoundly poetic, there was a belief equally general, in
ghosts, in hobgoblins, in men with the faces of ravens, in others with
the bodies of scorpions, and in the post-mortem persistence of girls
that died pure.
These latter, in searching for someone whom they might seduce, must
have afterward wandered into the presence of St. Anthony. Perhaps,
too, it was they who, as succubi, emotionalized the dreams of monks.
Yet, in view of Ishtar, they could not have been very numerous in
Babylon where, however, they had a queen, Lilit, the Lilith of the
_Talmud_, Adam's vampire wife, who conceived with him shapes of sin.
In these also the Babylonians believed, and naively they represented
them in forms so revolting that the sight of their own image alarmed
them away.
From these shapes or, more exactly, from sin itself, it was very
properly held that all diseases came. Medicine consequently was a
branch of religion. The physician was a priest. He asked the patient:
Have you shed your neighbour's blood? Have you approached your
neighbour's wife? Have you stolen your neighbour's garment? Or is it
that you have failed to clothe the naked? According to the responses
he prescribed.[27]
[Footnote 27: IV. R. 50-53. _Cf._ Delitzch: _op. cit._]
But the priest who was a physician was also a wizard. He peeped and
muttered, or, more subtly, provided enchanted philters in which
simples had been dissolved. These devices failing, there was a series
of incantations, the _Ritual of the Whispered Charm_, in which the
most potent conjuration was the incommunicable name. To that all
things yielded, even the gods.[28] But like the Shem of the Jews, it
was probably never wholly uttered, because, save to the magi, not
wholly known. In the formulae of the necromancers it is omitted, though
in practice it may have been pronounced.
[Footnote 28: Lenormant: La Magie chez les Chaldeens.]
Even that is doubtful. A knowledge of it conferred powers similar to
those that have been attributed to the Christ, and which the Sadducees
ascribed to his knowledge of the tetragrammation. A knowledge of the
Babylonian Shem was as potent. It served not only men but gods.
Ishtar, for purposes of her own, wanted to get into Aralu. In the
recovered epic of her descent, imperiously she demanded entrance:
Porter, open thy door.
Open thy door that I may enter.
If thou dost not open thy door,
I will attack it, I will break down the bars,
I will cause the dead to rise and devour the living.[29]
[Footnote 29: Records of the Past.]
Ishtar was admitted. But Aralu was the land whence none return. Once
in, she could not get out until, ultimately, the incommunicable name
was uttered. The epic says that, in the interim, there was on earth
neither love nor loving. In possible connection with which
incantations have been found, deprecating "the consecrated harlots
with rebellious hearts that have abandoned the holy places."[30]
[Footnote 30: Lenormant: _op. cit._]
In addition to the _Ritual of the Whispered Charm_, there was the
_Illumination of Bel_, an encyclopaedia of astrology in seventy-two
volumes which the suburban library of Borsippa contained. During the
captivity many Jews must have gone there. In the large light halls
they were free to read whatever they liked, religion, history,
science, the romance of all three. The books, catalogued and numbered,
were ranged on shelves. One had but to ask. The service was gratis.
Babylon, then, prismatic and learned, was the most respectable place
on earth. For ten thousand years man had there consulted the stars.
But though respectable, it was also equivocal. During a period equally
long--or brief--the girls of the city had loosed their girdles for
Ishtar and yielded themselves to anyone, stranger or neighbour, that
asked. In the service of the goddess their brothers occasionally
feigned that they too were girls. Meanwhile, from the summit of a
seven-floored pyramid, mortals contemplated the divine.
Beneath was cosmopolis, the golden cup that, in the words of Jeremiah,
made the whole world drunk. Seated immensely on the twin banks of the
Euphrates--banks that bridges above and tunnels beneath
interjoined--Babylon more nearly resembled a walled nation than a
fortified town. Within the gates, in an enclosure ample and noble, a
space that exceeded a hundred square miles, an area sufficient for
Paris quintupled, observatories and palaces rose above the roar of
human tides that swept in waves through the wide boulevards, surged
over the quays, flooded the gardens, eddied through the open-air
lupanar, circled among statues of gods and bulls, poured out of the
hundred gates, or broke against the polychrome walls and seethed back
in the avenues, along which, to the high flourishes of military bands,
passed armed hoplites, merchants in long robes, cloaked bedouins,
Kelts in bearskins, priests in spangled dresses, tiara'd princes,
burdened slaves, kings discrowned, furtive forms--prostitutes,
pederasts, human wolves, vermin, sheep--the flux and reflux of the
gigantic city.
In that ocean, the captive Jews, if captive they were, rolled, lost as
a handful of salt spilt in the sea. Yet, from the depths, a few had
swum up and, filtering adroitly, had reached the dignity of high
place. One was pontiff. Others were viceroys. In addition to being
pontiff, Daniel was chancellor of the realm. Ezra was rector of the
university. As pontiff of a college of wizards, Daniel may have known
the future. As Minister of Wisdom, Ezra may have known, what is quite
as difficult, the past. For the moment there was but the present. Over
it ruled Belshazzar.
Yet, ruler though he was, there were powers potenter than his own:
Baalim, outraged at the elevation of a parvenu god; a priesthood
consequently disaffected; and, without, at the gates, the foe.
It would have been interesting to have assisted at the final festival
when, beneath cyclopean arches, in the sunlight of clustered
candelabra, amid the glitter of gold and white teeth, among the fair
sultanas that were strewn like flowers through the throne-room of the
imperial court, Belshazzar lay, smiling, amused rather than annoyed at
the impudent menace of Cyrus.
Babylon was impregnable. He knew it. But the subtle Jews, the
indignant gods, the alienated priests to whom the Persian was a
redeemer, of these he did not think. Daniel had indeed warned him and,
vaguely, he had promised something which he had since forgot.
Beyond, an orchestra was playing. Further yet, columns upheld a
ceiling so lofty that it was lost. On the adjacent wall was a frieze
of curious and chimerical beasts. Belshazzar was looking at them. In
their dumb stupidity was a suggestion of the foe. The suggestion
amused. Smiling still he raised a cup. Abruptly, before it could reach
his lips, it fell with a clatter on the lapis lazuli of the floor
beneath. Before him, on that wall, beneath those beasts, the
necromancy of the priesthood had projected an armless, fluidic hand
that mounted, descended, tracing with a forefinger the three luminous
hierograms of his doom.
The story, a little drama, was, with the tale concerning
Nebuchadnezzar, that of Daniel, and other novels quite as strange,
evolved long later in the wide leisures of Jerusalem. The fluidic hand
did not appear. Even had it zigzagged there was no Belshazzar to
frighten.
Only the doom was real. Cyrus was clothed with it. To the trumpetings
of heralds and the sheen of angels' wings, triumphantly he came. Then,
presently, by royal decree, the Jews, manumitted and released,
retraced their steps, burdened with spoil; with the lore of two
distinct civilizations, which, fusing in the great square letters of
the Pentateuch, was to become the poetry of all mankind.
Babylon, ultimately, with her goblin gods and harlot goddess, sank
into her own Aralu. Nourished there on dust, Lilit, with the sister
vampires of eternal night, fed on her.
V
JEHOVAH
A camel's-hair tent set in the desert was the first cathedral, the
earliest cloister of latest ideals. Set not in one desert merely but
in two, in the infinite of time as well as in that of space, there was
about it a limitlessness in which the past could sleep, the future
awake, and into which all things, the human, the divine, gods and
romance, could enter.
The human came first. Then the gods. Then romance. The divine was
their triple expansion. It was an after growth, in other lands, that
tears had watered. In the desert it was unimagined. Only the gods had
been conceived.
The gods were many and yet but one. Though plural they were singular.
The subjects of impersonal verbs, they represented the pronoun in such
expressions as: it rains; it thunders. "It" was Elohim. Already among
nomad Semites monotheism had begun. Yet with this distinction. Each
tribe had separate sets of Its that guided, guarded, and scourged.
Omnipresent but not omnipotent, any humiliation to the family that
they had in charge humiliated them. It made them angry, therefore
vindictive, consequently unjust. It may be that they were not very
ethical. Perhaps the bedouins were not either. Man fashions his god in
proportion to his intelligence. That of the nomad was slender. He
lacked, what the Aryan shepherd possessed, the ability for
mythological invention. The defect was due to his speech, which did
not lend itself to the deification of epithets. Even had it done so,
it is probable that his mode of life would have rendered the
paraphernalia of polytheism impossible. People constantly moving from
place to place could not be cumbered with idols. The Elohim were,
therefore, a convenience for travellers and an unidolatrous monotheism
a necessity which the absence of vehicles imposed. On the other hand,
given every facility, it is presumable that the result would have been
the same. Mythology is the mother of poetry. Idolatry is the father of
art. Neither could appeal to a people to whom delicacy was an unknown
god. Had it been known and a fetish, they could not have become the
practical people that they are. Even then they were shrewd. Their
Elohim might alarm but never delude. Israel was uncheatable even in
dream.
Originally emigrants from Arabia, the nomads reached Syria, some
directly, others circuitously, by way of Padan-Aram and across the
Euphrates, whence perhaps their name of _Ibrim_ or Hebrews--_Those
from beyond_. In the journey Babel and Ur must have detained. These
cities, with their culture relatively deep and their observatories
equally high, became, in after days, a source of legend, of wonder, of
hatred, perhaps of revelation as well.
At the time the nomads had no cosmogony or theories. The Chaldeans had
both. There was a story of creation, another of antediluvian kings and
of the punishment that overtook them. There was also a story of an
emir of Ur, an old man who had benevolently killed an animal instead
of his son. The story, like the others, must have impressed. In after
years the old man became Abraham, a great person, who had conversed
with the Elohim and whose descendants they were.
The story of creation also impressed. It was enlightening and
comprehensible. The parallel theory of spontaneous generation and the
progressive evolution of the species which the magi entertained, they
probably never heard. Even otherwise it was too complex for minds as
yet untutored. The fables alone appealed. Mentally compressed into
portable shape, carried along, handed down, their origin afterward
forgotten, they became the traditions of a nation, which, eminently
conservative, preserved what it found, among other things the name,
perhaps inharmonious, of Jhvh.[31]
[Footnote 31: Renan: Histoire du peuple d'Israel. Kuenen: De Godsdienst
van Israel.]
That name, since found on an inscription of Sargon, appears to have
been the title of a local god of Sinai, whom the nomads may have
identified with Elohim, particularly, perhaps, since he presided over
thunder, the phenomenon that alarmed them most and which, in
consequence, inspired the greatest awe. That awe they put into the
name, the pronunciation of which, like the origin of their traditions,
they afterward forgot. In subsequent rabbinical writings it became
Shem, the Name; Shemhammephoresh, the Revealed Name, uttered but once
a year, on the day of Atonement, by the high priest in the Holy of
Holies. Mention of it by anyone else was deemed a capital offence,
though, permissibly, it might be rendered El Shaddai, the Almighty.
That term the Septuagint translated into [Greek: ho Kyrios], a Greek
form, in the singular, of the Aramaic plural Adonai, which means
Baalim, or sun lords.
That form the Vulgate gave as Dominus and posterior theology as God.
The latter term, common to all Teutonic tongues, has no known meaning.
It designates that which, to the limited intelligence of man, has
been, and must be, incomprehensible. But the original term Jhvh,
which, in the seventeenth century, was developed into Jehovah, yet
which, the vowels being wholly conjectural, might have been developed
into anything else, clearly appealed to wayfarers to whom Chaldean
science was a book that remained closed until Nebuchadnezzar blew
their descendants back into the miraculous Babel of their youth.
Meanwhile, apart from the name--now generally written Jahveh--apart
too from the fables and the enduring detestation which the colossal
city inspired, probably but one other thing impressed, and that was
the observance of the Sabbath. To a people whose public works were
executed by forced labour, such a day was a necessity. To vagrants it
was not, and, though the custom interested, it was not adopted by them
until their existence from nomad had become fixed.
At this latter period they were in Kanaan. Whether in the interval a
tribe, the Beni-Israel, went down into Egypt, is a subject on which
Continental scholarship has its doubts. The early life of the tribe's
leader and legislator is usually associated with Rameses II., a
pharaoh of the XIX. dynasty. But it has been found that incidents
connected with Moses must apparently have occurred, if they occurred
at all, at a period not earlier than the XXVI. dynasty, which
constitutes a minimum difference of seven hundred years. Yet, in view
of the decalogue, with its curious analogy to the negative confession
in the _Book of the Dead_; in view also of a practice surgical and
possibly hygienic which, customary among the Egyptians, was adopted by
the Jews; in view, further, of ceremonies and symbols peculiarly
Egyptian that were also absorbed, a sojourn in Goshen there may have
been.
The spoiling of the Egyptians, a roguery on which Israel afterward
prided herself, is a trait perhaps too typical to be lightly
dismissed. On the other hand, if Moses were, which is at least
problematic, and if, in addition to being, he was both the nephew of a
pharaoh and the son-in-law of a priest, as such one to whom, in either
quality, the arcana of the creed would be revealed, it becomes curious
that nowhere in the Pentateuch is there any doctrine of a future life.
Of the entire story, it may be that only the journey into the
Sinaiatic peninsula is true, and of that there probably remained but
tradition, on which history was based much later, by writers who had
only surmises concerning the time and circumstances in which it
occurred.
Yet equally with the roguery, Moses may have been. Seen through modern
criticism his figure fades though his name persists. To that name the
Septuagint tried to give an Egyptian flavour. In their version it is
always [Greek: Mouses], a compound derived from the Egyptian _mo_,
water, and _uses_, saved from, or Saved-from-the-water.[32] Per contra,
the Hebrew form Mosheh is, as already indicated, the same as the
Babylonian Masu, a term which means at once leader and litterateur, in
addition to being the cognomen of a god.[33]
[Footnote 32: Josephus: Antiq. ii. 9.]
[Footnote 33: Sayce: The Religion of the Babylonians.]
Moses is said to have led his people out of bondage. He was the writer
to whom the Pentateuch has been ascribed. But he was also a prophet.
In Babylon, the god of prophecy was Nebo. It was on Mount Nebo that
Jahveh commanded the prophet of Israel to die. Moreover, the divinity
that had Masu for cognomen was, as is shown by a Babylonian text, the
primitive god of the sun at Nippur, but the sun at noon, at the period
of its greatest effulgence, at the hour when it wars with whatever
opposes, when it wars as Jahveh did, or as the latter may be assumed
to have warred, since Isaiah represented him as a mighty man, roaring
at his enemies, exciting the fury of the fight, marching personally to
the conflict, and, in the Fourth Roll of the Law (Numbers), there is
mention of a book entitled: _The Wars of Jahveh_.
Whether, then, Moses is but a composite of things Babylonian fused in
an effort to show a link between a god and a people, is conjectural.
But it is also immaterial. The one instructive fact is that, in a
retrospect, the god, immediately after the exodus, became dictator.
Yet even in the later age, when the retrospect was effected,
conceptions were evidently immature. On one occasion the god met
Moses, tried to kill him, but finally let him go. The picture is that
of a personal struggle.[34] Again, the spectacle of his back which he
vouchsafed to Moses is construable only as an _arriere-pensee_, unless
it be profound philosophy, unless it be taken that the face of God
represents Providence, to see which would be to behold the future,
whereas the back disclosed the past.
[Footnote 34: Exodus iv. 24-26.]
It is, however, hardly probable that that construction occurred to the
editors of the Pentateuch, who, elsewhere, represented Jahveh as a
butcher, insatiable, jealous, vindictive, treacherous, and vain, one
that consigned all nations other than Israel to ruin and whom a poet
represented trampling people in anger, making them drunk with his
fury, and defiling his raiment with blood.[35]
[Footnote 35: Isaiah lxiii. 1-6.]
But in the period related in _Exodus_, Jahveh was but the tutelary god
of an itinerant tribe that, in its gipsy lack of territorial
possessions, was not even a nation. Like his people he too was a
vagrant. Like them he had no home. Other gods had temples and altars.
He lacked so much as a shrine. In prefigurement of the Wandering Jew,
each day he moved on. The threats of a land that never smiled were
reflected in his face. The sight of him was death. Certainly he was
terrible.
This conception, corrected by later writers, was otherwise revised. In
the interim Jahveh himself was transformed. He became El, the god;
presently El Shaddai, God Almighty. In the ascension former traits
disappeared. He developed into the deity of emphatic right. Morality,
hitherto absent from religion, entered into it. Israel, who perhaps
had been careless, who, like Solomon, had followed Ishtar, became
austere. Thereafter, Judaism, of which Christianity and Muhammadanism
were the after thoughts, was destined to represent almost the sum
total of the human conscience.
But in Kanaan, during the rude beginnings, though Jahveh was jealous,
Ishtar, known locally as Ashtoreth, allured. Conjointly with Baal, the
indigenous term for Bel, circumadjacently she ruled. The propitiatory
rites of these fair gods were debauchery and infanticide, the
loosening of the girdles of girls, the thrusting of children into
fires. It may be that these ceremonies at first amazed the Hebrews.
But conscientiously they adopted them, less perhaps through zeal than
politeness; because, in this curious epoch, on entering a country it
was thought only civil to serve the divinities that were there, in
accordance with the ritual that pleased them.
With the mere mortal inhabitants, Israel was less ceremonious.
Commanded by Jahveh to kill, extermination was but an act of piety. It
was then, perhaps, that the _Wars of Jahveh_ were sung, a paean that
must have been resonant with cries, with the death-rattle of kingdoms,
with the shouts of the invading host. From the breast-plates of the
chosen, the terror of Sinai gleamed. Men could not see their faces and
live. The moon was their servant. To aid them the sun stood still.
They encroached, they slaughtered, they quelled. In the conquest a
nation was born. From that bloody cradle the God of Humanity came. But
around and about it was vacancy. In emerging from one solitude the
Jews created another. They have never left it. The desert which they
made destined them to be alone on this earth, as their god was to be
solitary in heaven.
Meanwhile there had been no kings in Israel. With the nation royalty
came. David followed Saul. After him was Solomon. It is presumably at
this period that traditions, orally transmitted from a past relatively
remote, were first put in writing. Previously it is conjectural if the
Jews could write. If they could, it is uncertain whether they made any
use of the ability other than in the possible compilation of toledoth,
such as the _Book of the Generations of Adam_ and the _Wars of
Jahveh_, works that, later, may have served as data for the
Pentateuch. Even then, the compositions must have been crude, and such
rolls as existed may have been lost when Nebuchadnezzar overturned
Jerusalem.
Presumably, it was not until the post-exilic period that, under the
editorship perhaps of Ezra, the definitive edition of the Torah was
produced. This supposition existing texts support. In Genesis (xxxvii.
31) it is written: "These are the kings of Edom before there reigned
any king over the children of Israel." The passage shows, if it shows
anything, that there were, or had been, kings in Israel at the time
when the passage itself was written. It is, therefore, at least
post-Davidic. In Genesis another passage (xlix. 10) says: "The sceptre
shall not pass from Judah until Shiloh come." Judah was the tribe that
became pre-eminent in Israel after the captivity. The passage is
therefore post-exilic, consequently so is Genesis, and obviously the
rest of the Pentateuch as well. Or, if not obviously, perhaps
demonstrably. In II Esdras xiv. 22-48 it is stated that the writer, a
candle of understanding in his heart, and aided by five swift scribes,
recomposed the Law, which, previously burned, was known to none.
The burning referred to is what may, perhaps, be termed religious
fiction. Barring toledoth and related data that may have been lost,
the Law had almost certainly not existed before, and this post-exilic
romance concerning it was evolved in a laudable effort to show its
Mosaic source. What is true of the Law is, in a measure, true of the
Prophets. None of them anterior to Cyrus, all are later than
Alexander. Spiritually very near to Christianity, chronologically they
are neighbourly too. If not divinely inspired, they at least disclosed
the ideal.