_The heroic age:_ B.C. 1300-1100.
After Moses there follows a period of at least two hundred years, of which
we have very imperfect accounts, and those plainly traditional and
commingled with legend. The Hebrew tribes appear to have gradually
gravitated upon Canaan; slowly settling into agricultural pursuits, and
winning from its previous occupants the land they coveted, inch by inch,
in bloody strife. They camped upon their hard-won fields for several
generations, maintaining their claims at the point of the sword, with
varying success; now mastering their foes, and again almost crushed by
them. The inter-relations of the several tribes during this period would
seem to have been of a very loose character. Each appears to have acted
for itself, except at critical moments, when common danger drew them
together in concerted action under leaders of commanding ability.
Tradition has preserved charming tales of some of these redoubtable
champions of the Hebrews, of whom we would gladly know much more. This was
the heroic age of Israel. Rude, rough times of constant alarm brought
forth little that was memorable save feats of courage. We have few
glimpses into the state of religion in this simple society, and upon what
is brought out into light the hues of later ages are reflected. Quite
clearly we may discern that the religion of the people in those days was
by no means that which we know as Mosaism. How could such a sublime
conception as that of Moses have ripened in a people at this stage of
their development? Like all founders of religion, he was far in advance of
his age. If a few higher natures, here and there, recognized and
appreciated the significance of the Ten Words of Jehovah, the mass of the
people could not have done so. And movement is determined toward the mass
in ethics as in physics. All that Moses could have hoped to do was to body
his seminal truth in an institution, that should keep it alive in the
nation until the proper conditions were found for its quickening and
growth. This he achieved in binding the tribes to the worship of Jehovah,
whose law was owned in the moral standards of the people. To this loyalty
to Jehovah, as _the_ God of Israel, Moses did securely bind the tribes.
They never wholly forswore Jehovah, and thus never lost the germ begotten
in the soul of the race, which held the promise and potency of the future.
But around Jehovah, as the supreme God of the race, the people still
continued to group their ancient divinities, and to worship them in the
old-time manner. The religion of a people in any stage of its history is
always a composite; a succession of layers that correspond to the
intellectual and moral classifications of society. But the proportion of
the true religion rises with a progressive civilization. In these
semi-civilized tribes the religion of the bulk of the people, in all
probability, corresponded with the ideas and forms of worship of other
peoples in the same stage of development In the lowest stratum fetichism
lingered on, the worship of any unusual thing that excited the wonder of a
simple people. Great trees of immemorial age, huge boulders standing
strangely in fertile valleys, continued the objects of superstitious awe.
Jehovahism took up these remnants of fetichism into its higher life, when
it found that they could not be dispossessed, just as Christianity did
long afterward with pagan customs, and gave them a higher significance in
connection with the worship of Jehovah.[39]
Higher strata of the people worshipped the various powers of nature, the
sun, the moon, the stars, after much the same fashion in vogue among their
kindred Semites.[40] Even the revolting rites of the surrounding
nature-worships were not lacking in Israel. While the gentle and gracious
warmth of the spring sun called forth the happy adoration of the people,
the scorching and consuming heat of the midsummer sun roused the fears of
the sufferers for their crops, their cattle, and their very lives. They
sought to propitiate this fierce Power, which was evidently hostile to
man, with offerings of the life it devoured so pitilessly. The choicest
lives--the first-born son, the fairest maiden of the village--were
sacrificed to glut its greed of death. Into the fiery arms of Moloch
parents laid the children of their love. Human sacrifices were
unquestionably a recognized form of worship during this period, at least
in times of deep distress.[41] The libertine longings of nature, the free
fecundities of mother-earth, imaged to the grosser people the Power
working round about them and within their very bodies; and men and women
gave free rein to their appetites and passions, in honor of divinities
like Ashera, the Syrian Venus.[42] The various tribes probably had
different rites.
The general picture we must fashion in our minds of this period is of a
polytheistic, idolatrous people, slightly distinguishable from the
surrounding Semites, save as they held, in their recognition of Jehovah
and his Ten Words, the germ of a higher thought and life.