In Dr. Lamberton, Professor of Greek, and Dean of the Department of
Philosophy, the University of Pennsylvania has a scholar as acute and
discerning in his observations as he is full and accurate in knowledge
in his special field of classic Greek. He has been familiar with the
results of my researches during my progress of recent years, and he has
this to say, after examining the proof-sheets of the completed work:
“Your induction seems to me to be very wide, and to include in its sweep
all phases of civilization, which is practically as much as to say all
periods of human existence, from the most primitive on.
“The significance of the threshold as altar, place of covenanting and
worship, in house, temple, and domain, I think is completely made out.
“Very striking is the smiting of the blood, as sign of the covenant
relation, upon the posts of the doorway; and in particular the mark of
the red hand. The connection you endeavor to show between all this and
the marriage rite is, to say the least of it, suggestive. The mystery of
the gift and transmission of life, it has always seemed to me, early
struck man; and that it did not have its issue only in perverted forms,
is clear from the fragmentary glimpses we get into the Eleusinian
mysteries, celebrated in honor of divinities of productivity.
Purification from sin and blessedness in the next world appear to have
been among the hopes of the initiated.
“May I call your attention to one or two points? The Greek word for
altar, βωμός (_bomos_), altar, from root βα (_ba_), seen in βαίνειν
(_bainein_), ‘to step.’
“May not the whipping of the boys mentioned on page 175 be a
misinterpreted substitute for sacrifices at the boundary posts, perhaps
even at one time human sacrifices? Such later modifications of sacrifice
into symbolic whippings are not unheard of elsewhere.”
Professor Lamberton’s suggestion that the Greek word for altar has its
origin in a “step” has confirmation in the fact, already noted, that the
earliest temples were a shrine at the summit of a series of steps, as in
a step-pyramid, in Babylonia, Egypt, Canaan, Mexico, Peru, and the South
Sea Islands.[720] Is there not a reference to this ordinary mode of
building an altar among the outside nations, in the divine command to
Israel in the wilderness as to the building of an altar to Jehovah?
“Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto mine altar, that thy nakedness
be not discovered thereon.”[721]
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Footnote 720:
See p. 111 f., _supra_.
Footnote 721:
Exod. 20 : 26.
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