|THE {180}only people who ever invented or evolved a pure monotheism at
first hand were the Jews. Individual thinkers elsewhere approached
or aimed at that ideal goal, like the Egyptian priests and the Greek
philosophers: entire races elsewhere borrowed monotheism from the
Hebrews, like the Arabs under Mohammad, or, to a less extent, the Romans
and the modern European nations, when they adopted Christianity in
its trinitarian form: but no other race ever succeeded as a whole in
attaining by their own exertions the pure monotheistic platform, however
near certain persons among them might have arrived to such attainment in
esoteric or mystical philosophising. It is the peculiar glory of Israel
to have _evolved God_. And the evolution of God from the diffuse gods
of the earlier Semitic religion is Israel’s great contribution to the
world’s thought.
The sacred books of the Jews, as we possess them in garbled forms
to-day, assign this peculiar belief to the very earliest ages of their
race: they assume that Abraham, the mythical common father of all the
Semitic tribes, was already a monotheist; and they even treat monotheism
as at a still remoter date the universal religion of the entire world,
from which all polytheistic cults were but a corruption and a falling
away. Such a belief is nowadays, of course, wholly untenable. So also is
the crude notion that monotheism was smitten out at a single blow by the
genius of one individual man, Moses, at the moment {181}of the Hebrew
exodus from Egypt. The bare idea that one particular thinker, just
escaped from the midst of ardent polytheists, whose religion embraced an
endless pantheon and a low form of animal-worship, could possibly have
invented a pure monotheistic cult, is totally opposed to every known
psychological law of human nature. The real stages by which monotheism
was evolved out of a preceding polytheism in a single small group of
Semitic tribes have already been well investigated by Dutch and
German scholars: all that I propose to do in the present volume is to
reconsider the subject from our broader anthropological standpoint, and
show how in the great Jewish god himself we may still discern, as in
a glass, darkly, the vague but constant lineaments of an ancestral
ghost-deity.
Down to a comparatively late period of Jewish history, as we now
know, Jahweh was but one and the highest among a considerable group of
Israelitish divinities; the first among his peers, like Zeus among the
gods of Hellas, Osiris or Amen among the gods of Egypt, and Woden or
Thunor among the gods of the old Teutonic pantheon. As late as the
century of Hezekiah, the religion of the great mass of the Israelites
and Jews was still a broad though vague polytheism. The gods seem to
have been as numerous and as localised as in Egypt: “According to the
number of thy cities are thy gods, O Judah,” says the prophet Jeremiah
in the sixth century. It was only by a slow process of syncretism, by
the absorption into Jahweh-worship of all other conflicting creeds, that
Israel at last attained its full ideal of pure monotheism. That ideal
was never finally reached by the people at large till the return from
the captivity: it had only even been aimed at by a few ardent and
exclusive Jahweh-worshippers in the last dangerous and doubtful years of
national independence which immediately preceded the Babylonish exile.
In order to understand the inner nature of this curious gradual
revolution we must look briefly, first, at the general character {182}of
the old Hebrew polytheism; and secondly, at the original cult of the
great ethnical god Jahweh himself.
In spite of their long sojourn in Egypt, the national religion of the
Hebrews, when we first begin dimly to descry its features through the
veil of later glosses, is regarded by almost all modern investigators as
truly Semitic and local in origin. It is usually described as embracing
three principal forms of cult: the worship of the _teraphim_ or family
gods; the worship of sacred stones; and the worship of certain great
gods, partly native, partly perhaps borrowed; some of them adored in
the form of animals, and some apparently elemental or solar in their
acquired attributes. Although for us these three are one, I shall
examine them here in that wonted order.
The cult of the _teraphim_, I think, we cannot consider, on a broad
anthropological view, otherwise than as the equivalent of all the
other family cults known to us; that is to say, in other words, as
pure unadulterated domestic ancestor-worship. “By that name,”
says Kuenen, “were indicated larger or smaller images, which were
worshipped as household gods, and upon which the happiness of the family
was supposed to depend.” In the legend of Jacob’s flight from Laban,
we are told how Rachel stole her father’s teraphim: and when the angry
chieftain overtakes the fugitives, he enquires of them why they have
robbed him of his domestic gods. Of Micah, we learn that he made images
of his teraphim, and consecrated one of his own sons to be his family
priest: such a domestic and private priesthood being exactly what we are
accustomed to find in the worship of ancestral _manes_ everywhere. Even
through the mist of the later Jehovistic recension we catch, in passing,
frequent glimpses of the early worship of these family gods, one of
which is described as belonging to Michal, the daughter of Saul and wife
of David; while Hosea alludes to them as stocks of wood, and Zechariah
as idols that speak lies to the people. It is clear {183}that the
teraphim were preserved in each household with reverential care, that
they were sacrificed to by the family at stated intervals, and that they
were consulted on all occasions of doubt or difficulty by a domestic
priest clad in an ephod. I think, then, if we put these indications side
by side with those of family cults elsewhere, we may conclude that the
Jewish religion, like all others, was based upon an ultimate foundation
of general ancestor-worship.
It has been denied, indeed, that ancestor-worship pure and simple ever
existed among the Semitic races. A clear contradiction of this denial
is furnished by M. Lenormant, who comments thus on sepulchral monuments
from Yemen: “Here, then, we have twice repeated a whole series of
human persons, decidedly deceased ancestors or relations of the authors
of the dedications. Their names are accompanied with the titles they
bore during life. They are invoked by their descendants in the same way
as the gods. They are incontestably deified persons, objects of a family
worship, and gods or genii in the belief of the people of their race.”
After this, we need not doubt that the teraphim were the images of such
family gods or ancestral spirits.
It is not surprising, however, that these domestic gods play but a small
part in the history of the people as it has come down to us in the late
Jehovistic version of the Hebrew traditions. Nowhere in literature, even
under the most favourable circumstances, do we hear much of the _manes_
and _lares_, compared with the great gods of national worship. Nor
were such minor divinities likely to provoke the wrath even of that
“jealous god” who later usurped all the adoration of Israel: so that
denunciations of their votaries are comparatively rare in the rhapsodies
of the prophets. “Their use,” says Kuenen, speaking of the teraphim,
“was very general, and was by no means considered incompatible with
the worship of Jahweh.” They were regarded merely as family affairs,
poor foemen for {184}the great and awesome tribal god who bore no rival
near his throne, and would not suffer the pretensions of Molech or
of the Baalim. To use a modern analogy, their cult was as little
inconsistent with Jahweh-worship as a belief in fairies, banshees, or
family ghosts was formerly inconsistent with a belief in Christianity.
This conclusion will doubtless strike the reader at once as directly
opposed to the oft-repeated assertion that the early Hebrews had little
or no conception of the life beyond the grave and of the doctrine of
future rewards and punishments. I am afraid it cannot be denied that
such is the case. Hard as it is to run counter to so much specialist
opinion, I can scarcely see how any broad anthropological enquirer may
deny to the Semites of the tenth and twelfth centuries before Christ
participation in an almost (or quite) universal human belief, common to
the lowest savages and the highest civilisations, and particularly
well developed in that Egyptian society with which the ancestors of the
Hebrews had so long rubbed shoulders. The subject, however, is far too
large a one for full debate here. I must content myself with pointing
out that, apart from the _a priori_ improbability of such a conclusion,
the Hebrew documents themselves contain numerous allusions, even in
their earliest traditional fragments, to the belief in ghosts and in the
world of shades, as well as to the probability of future resurrection.
The habit of cave-burial and of excavated grotto-burial; the importance
attached to the story of the purchase of Machpelah; the common phrase
that such-and-such a patriarch “was gathered to his people,” or
“slept with his fathers”; the embalming of Joseph, and the carrying
up of his bones from Egypt to Palestine; the episode of Saul and the
ghost of Samuel; and indeed the entire conception of Sheol, the place of
the departed--all alike show that the Hebrew belief in this respect did
not largely differ in essentials from the general belief of surrounding
peoples. The very frequency of allusions to witchcraft and necromancy
{185}point in the same direction; while the common habit of assuming a
priestly or sacrificial garment, the _ephod_, and then consulting the
family teraphim as a domestic oracle, is strictly in accordance with all
that we know of the minor ancestor-worship as it occurs elsewhere.
Closely connected with the teraphim is the specific worship at tombs
or graves. “The whole north Semitic area,” says Professor Robertson
Smith, “was dotted over with sacred tombs, Memnonia, Semiramis
mounds, and the like; and at every such spot a god or demigod had his
subterranean abode.” This, of course, is pure ancestor-worship. Traces
of still older cave-burial are also common in the Hebrew Scriptures.
“At the present day,” says Professor Smith, “almost every sacred
site in Palestine has its grotto, and that this is no new thing is plain
from the numerous symbols of Astarte-worship found on the walls of
caves in Phoenicia. There can be little doubt that the oldest Phoenician
temples were natural or artificial grottoes.”
We are fairly entitled to conclude, then, I believe, that a domestic
cult of the _manes_ or _lares_, the family dead, formed the general
substratum of early Hebrew religion, though as in all other cases, owing
to its purely personal nature, this universal cult makes but a small
figure in the literature of the race, compared with the worship of the
greater national gods and goddesses.
Second in the list of worshipful objects in early Israel come the sacred
stones, about which I have already said a good deal in the chapter
devoted to that interesting subject, but concerning whose special nature
in the Semitic field a few more words may here be fitly added.
It is now very generally admitted that stone-worship played an
exceedingly large and important part in the primitive Semitic religion.
How important a part we may readily gather from many evidences, but from
none more than from the fact that even Mohammad himself was unable to
exclude from Islam, the most monotheistic of all {186}known religious
systems, the holy black stone of the Kaaba at Mecca. In Arabia, says
Professor Robertson Smith, the altar or hewn stone is unknown, and
in its place we find the rude pillar or the cairn, beside which the
sacrificial victim is slain, the blood being poured out over the stone
or at its base. But in Israel, the shaped stone seems the more usual
mark of the ghost or god. Such a sacred stone, we have already seen, was
known to the early Hebrews as a Beth-el, that is to say an “abode of
deity,” from the common belief that it was inhabited by a god, ghost,
or spirit. The great prevalence of the cult of stones among the Semites,
however, is further indicated by the curious circumstance that this word
was borrowed by the Greeks and Romans (in a slightly altered form) to
denote the stones so supposed to be inhabited by deities. References to
such gods abound throughout the Hebrew books, though they are sometimes
denounced as idolatrous images, and sometimes covered with a thin veneer
of Jehovism by being connected with the national heroes and with the
later Jahweh-worship.
In the legend of Jacob’s dream we get a case where the sacred stone
is anointed and a promise is made to it of a tenth of the speaker’s
substance as an offering. And again, on a later occasion, we learn
that Jacob “set up a pillar of stone, and he poured a drink-offering
thereon, and he poured oil thereon;” just as, in the great phallic
worship of the linga in India (commonly called the _linga puja_), a
cylindrical pillar, rounded at the top, and universally considered as
a phallus in its nature, is worshipped by pouring upon it one of five
sacred anointing liquids, water, milk, ghee, oil, and wine. Similar
rites are offered in many other places to other sacred stones; and in
many cases the phallic value assigned to them is clearly shown by the
fact that it is usual for sterile women to pray to them for the blessing
of children, as Hindu wives pray to Mahadeo, and as so many Hebrew women
(to be noted hereafter) {187}are mentioned in our texts as praying to
Jahweh.
A brief catalogue of the chief stone-deities alluded to in Hebrew
literature may help to enforce the importance of the subject: and it
may be noted in passing that the stones are often mentioned in connexion
with sacred trees--an association with which we are already familiar.
In the neighbourhood of Sichem was an oak--the “oak of the prophets”
or “oak of the soothsayers”--by which lay a stone, whose holiness is
variously accounted for by describing it as, in one place, an altar
of Abraham, in another an altar of Jacob, and in a third a memorial of
Joshua. But the fact shows that it was resorted to for sacrifice, and
that oracles or responses were sought from it by its votaries. That is
to say, it was a sepulchral monument. Near Hebron stood “the oak of
Mamre,” and under it a sacred stone, accounted for as an altar of
Abraham, to which in David’s time sacrifices were offered. Near
Beersheba we find yet a third tree, the tamarisk, said to have been
planted by Abraham, and an altar or stone pillar ascribed to Isaac. In
the camp at Gilgal were “the twelve stones,” sometimes, apparently,
spoken of as “the graven images,” but sometimes explained away
as memorials of Jahweh’s help at the passing of the Jordan. Other
examples are Ebenezer, “the helpful stone,” and Tobeleth, the
“serpent-stone,” as well as the “great stone” to which sacrifices were
offered at Bethshemesh, and the other great stone at Gibeon, which was
also, no doubt, an early Hebrew deity.
So often is the name of Abraham connected with these stones, indeed,
that, as some German scholars have suggested, Abraham himself may
perhaps be regarded as a sacred boulder, the rock from which Israel
originally; sprang.
In any case, I need hardly say, we must look upon such sacred stones as
themselves a further evidence of ancestor-worship in Palestine, on the
analogy of all similar stones elsewhere. {188}We may conclude that,
as in previously noted instances, they were erected on the graves of
deceased chieftains.
And now we come to the third and most difficult division of early Hebrew
religion, the cult of the great gods whom the jealous Jahweh himself
finally superseded. The personality of these gods is very obscure,
partly because of the nature of our materials, which, being derived
entirely from Jehovistic sources, have done their best to overshadow the
“false gods”; but partly also, I believe, because, in the process of
evolving monotheism, a syncretic movement merged almost all their
united attributes into Jahweh himself, who thus becomes at last the
all-absorbing synthesis of an entire pantheon. Nevertheless, we can
point out one or two shadowy references to such greater gods, either by
name alone, or by the form under which they were usually worshipped.
The scholarship of the elder generation would no doubt have enumerated
first among these gods the familiar names of Baal and Molech. At
present, such an enumeration is scarcely possible. We can no longer see
in the Baal of the existing Hebrew scriptures a single great god. We
must regard the word rather as a common substantive,--“the lord” or
“the master,”--descriptive of the relation of each distinct god to
the place he inhabited. The Baalim, in other words, seem to have been
the local deities or deified chiefs of the Semitic region; doubtless
the dead kings or founders of families, as opposed to the lesser gods
of each particular household. It is not improbable, therefore, that
they were really identified with the sacred stones we have just been
considering, and with the wooden _ashera_. The Baal is usually spoken
of indefinitely, without a proper name, much as at Delos men spoke of
“the God,” at Athens of “the Goddess,” and now at Padua of “il
Santo,”--meaning respectively Apollo, Athene, St. Antony. Melcarth is
thus the Baal of Tyre, Astarte the Baalath of Byblos; there was a Baal
of Lebanon, of Mount {189}Hermon, of Mount Peor, and so forth. A few
specific Baalim have their names preserved for us in the nomenclature
of towns; such are Baal-tamar, the lord of the palm-tree; with Baal-gad,
Baal-Berith, Baal-meon, and Baal-zephon. But in the Hebrew scriptures,
as a rule, every effort has been made to blot out the very memory
of these “false gods,” and to represent Jahweh alone as from the
earliest period the one true prince and ruler in Israel.
As for Molech, that title merely means “the king”; and it may have
been applied to more than one distinct deity. Dr. Robertson Smith does
not hesitate to hold that the particular Molech to whom human sacrifices
of children were offered by the Jews before the captivity was Jahweh
himself; it was to the national god, he believes, that these fiery
rites were performed at the Tophet or pyre in the ravine just below the
temple.
We are thus reduced to the most nebulous details about these great
gods of the Hebrews, other than Jahweh, in the period preceding
the Babylonian captivity. All that is certain appears to be that a
considerable number of local gods were worshipped here and there at
special sanctuaries, each of which seems to have consisted of an altar
or stone image, standing under a sacred tree or sacred grove, and
combined with an _ashera_. While the names of Chemosh, the god of Moab,
and of Dagon, the god of the Philistines, have come down to us with
perfect frankness and clearness, no local Hebrew god save Jahweh has
left a name that can now be discerned with any approach to certainty.
It should be added that the worship of many of the gods of surrounding
Semitic tribes undoubtedly extended from the earliest times into Israel
also.
I must likewise premise that the worship of the Baalim, within and
without Israel, was specially directed to upright conical stones, the
most sacred objects at all the sanctuaries; and that these stones
are generally admitted to have {190}possessed for their worshippers a
phallic significance.
Certain writers have further endeavoured to show that a few animal-gods
entered into the early worship of the Hebrews. I do not feel sure that
their arguments are convincing; but for the sake of completeness I
include the two most probable cases in this brief review of the vague
and elusive deities of early Israel.
One of these is the god in the form of a young bull, specially
worshipped at Dan and Bethel, as the bull Apis was worshipped at
Memphis, and the bull Mnevis at On or Heliopolis. This cult of the bull
is pushed back in the later traditions to the period of the exodus, when
the Israelites made themselves a “golden calf” in the wilderness.
Kuenen, indeed, lays stress upon the point that this Semitic
bull-worship differed essentially from the cult of Apis in the fact that
it was directed to an image or idol, not to a living animal. This is
true, and I certainly do not wish to press any particular connexion
between Egypt and the golden bulls of Jeroboam in the cities of Ephraim:
though I think too much may perhaps be made of superficial differences
and too little of deep-seated resemblances in these matters, seeing that
bull-worship is a common accompaniment of a phallic cult in the whole
wide district between Egypt and India. It is the tendency of the
scholastic mind, indeed, to over-elaborate trifles, and to multiply to
excess minute distinctions. But in any case, we are on comparatively
safe ground in saying that a bull-god was an object of worship in Israel
down to a very late period; that his cult descended from an early age of
the national existence; and that the chief seats of his images were at
Dan and Bethel in Ephraim, and at Beersheba in Judah.
Was this bull-shaped deity Jahweh’ himself, or one of the polymorphic
forms of Jahweh? Such is the opinion of Kuenen, who says explicitly,
“Jahweh was worshipped in the shape of a young bull. It cannot be
doubted that the {191}cult of the bull-calf was really the cult of
Jahweh in person.” And certainly in the prophetic writings of the
eighth century, we can clearly descry that the worshippers of the bull
regarded themselves as worshipping the god Jahweh, who brought up his
people from the land of Egypt. Nevertheless, dangerous as it may seem
for an outsider to differ on such a subject from great Semitic scholars,
I venture to think we may see reason hereafter to conclude that this was
not originally the case: that the god worshipped under the form of the
bull-calf was some other deity, like the Molech whom we know to
have been represented with a bull’s head; and that only by the later
syncretic process did this bull-god come to be identified in the end
with Jahweh, a deity (as seems likely) of quite different origin, much
as Mnevis came to be regarded at Heliopolis as an incarnation of Ra, and
as Apis came to be regarded at Memphis as an avatar of Ptah and still
later of Osiris. On the other hand, we must remember that, as Mr. Frazer
has shown, a sacred animal is often held to be the representative and
embodiment of the very god to whom it is habitually sacrificed. Here
again we trench on ground which can only satisfactorily be occupied at a
later stage of our polymorphic argument.
A second animal-god, apparently, also adored in the form of a metal
image, was the asp or snake, known in our version as “the brazen
serpent,” and connected by the Jehovistic editors of the earlier
traditions with Moses in the wilderness. The name of this deity is given
us in the Book of Kings as Nehushtan, “the brass god”; but
whether this was really its proper designation or a mere contemptuous
descriptive title we can hardly be certain. The worship of the serpent
is said to have gone on uninterruptedly till the days of Hezekiah, when,
under the influence of the exclusive devotion to Jahweh which was
then becoming popular, the image was broken in pieces as an idolatrous
object. It is scarcely necessary to point out in passing that the asp
was one of the most sacred animals {192}in Egypt: but, as in the case of
the bull, the snake was also a widespread object of worship throughout
all the surrounding countries; and it is therefore probable that the
Hebrew snake-worship may have been parallel to, rather than derived
from, Egyptian ophiolatry.
Such, then, seen through the dim veil of Jehovism, are the misty
features of that uncertain pantheon in which, about the eighth century
at least, Jahweh found himself the most important deity. The most
important, I say, because it is clear from our records that for many
ages the worship of Jahweh and the worship of the Baalim went on side by
side without conscious rivalry.
And what sort of god was this holy Jahweh himself, whom the Hebrews
recognised from a very early time as emphatically and above all others
“the God of Israel”?
If ever he was envisaged as a golden bull, if ever he was regarded as
the god of light, fire, or the sun, those concepts, I believe, must have
been the result of a late transference of attributes and confusion of
persons, such as we may see so rife in the more recent mystical religion
of Egypt. What in his own nature Jahweh must have been in the earliest
days of his nascent godhead I believe we can best judge by putting
together some of the passages in old traditionary legend which bear most
plainly upon his character and functions.
In the legendary account of the earliest dealings of Jahweh with the
Hebrew race, we are told that the ethnical god appeared to Abraham
in Haran, and promised to make of him “a great nation.” Later on,
Abraham complains of the want of an heir, saying to Jahweh, “Thou hast
given me no seed.” Then Jahweh “brought him forth abroad, and said,
Look now toward heaven and tell the stars: so shall thy seed be.” Over
and over again we get similar promises of fruitfulness made to Abraham:
“I will multiply thee exceedingly”; “thou shalt be a father of
many nations”; “I will make thee exceeding fruitful”; “kings
shall come out of thee”; “for a father of many nations {193}have I
made thee.” So, too, of Sarah: “she shall be a mother of nations;
kings of people shall be of her.” And of Ishmael: “I have blessed
him and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly:
twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation.”
Time after time these blessings recur for Abraham, Isaac, and all his
family: “I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as
the sand which is upon the seashore, and thy seed shall possess the gate
of his enemies.”
In every one of these passages, and in many more which need not
be quoted, but which will readily occur to every reader, Jahweh
is represented especially as a god of increase, of generation, of
populousness, of fertility. As such, too, we find him frequently and
markedly worshipped on special occasions. He was the god to whom sterile
women prayed, and from whom they expected the special blessing of a son,
to keep up the cult of the family ancestors. This trait survived even
into the poetry of the latest period. “He maketh the barren woman
to keep house,” says a psalmist about Jahweh, “and to be a joyful
mother of children.” And from the beginning to the end of Hebrew
legend we find a similar characteristic of the ethnical god amply
vindicated. When Sarah is old and well stricken in years, Jahweh visits
her and she conceives Isaac. Then Isaac in turn “intreated Jahweh for
his wife, because she was barren; and Jahweh was intreated of him, and
Rebekah his wife conceived.” Again, “when Jahweh saw that Leah was
hated, he opened her womb; but Rachel was barren.” Once more, of the
birth of Samson we are told that Manoah’s wife “was barren and bare
not”: but “the angel of Jahweh appeared unto the woman and said
unto her, Behold, now thou art barren and bearest not; but thou shalt
conceive and bear a son.” And of Hannah we are told, even more
significantly, that Jahweh had “shut up her womb.” At the shrine
of Jahweh at Shiloh, therefore, she prayed to Jahweh that this disgrace
might be removed from her and that a child might {194}be born to her. If
she bore “a man child,” she would offer him up all his life long as
an anchorite to Jahweh, to be a Nazarite of the Lord, an ascetic and
a fanatic. “Jahweh remembered her,” and she bore Samuel. And after
that again, “Jahweh visited Hannah, so that she conceived and bare
three sons and two daughters.” In many other passages we get the
self-same trait: Jahweh is regarded above everything as a god of
increase and a giver of offspring. “Children are a heritage from
Jahweh,” says the much later author of a familiar ode: “the fruit of
the womb are a reward from him.”
It is clear, too, that this desire for children, for a powerful clan,
for the increase of the people, was a dominant one everywhere in Ephraim
and in Judah. “Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine,” says Jahweh to
his votary by the mouth of the poet; “thy children like olive plants
round about thy table.” “Happy is the man that hath his quiver full
of them,” says another psalmist; “they shall speak with the enemies
in the gate.” Again and again the promise is repeated that the seed
of Abraham or of Joseph or of Ishmael shall be numerous as the stars
of heaven or the sands of the sea: Jahweh’s chief prerogative is
evidently the gift of increase, extended often to cattle and asses, but
always including at least sons and daughters. If Israel obeys Jahweh,
says the Deuteronomist, “Jahweh will make thee plenteous for good in the
fruit of thy belly, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of
thy ground”: but if otherwise, then “cursed shall be the fruit of thy
body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the
flocks of thy sheep.”
Now, elsewhere throughout the world we find in like manner a certain
class of phallic gods who are specially conceived as givers of
fertility, and to whom prayers and offerings are made by barren women
who desire children. And the point to observe is that these gods are
usually (perhaps one might even say always) embodied in stone pillars
{195}or upright monoliths. The practical great god of India--the god
whom the people really worship--is Mahadeo; and Mahadeo is, as we know,
a cylinder of stone, to whom the _linga puja_ is performed, and to whom
barren women pray for offspring. There are sacred stones in western
Europe, now crowned by a cross, at which barren women still pray to God
and the Madonna, or to some local saint, for the blessing of children.
It is allowed that while the obelisk is from one point of view (in later
theory) a ray of the sun, it is from another point of view (in earlier
origin) a “symbol of the generative power of nature,"--which is only
another way of saying that it is an ancestral stone of phallic virtue.
In short, without laying too much stress upon the connexion, we may
conclude generally that the upright pillar came early to be regarded,
not merely as a memento of the dead and an abode of the ghost or
indwelling god, but also in some mysterious and esoteric way as a
representative of the male and generative principle.
If we recollect that the stone pillar was often identified with the
ancestor or father, the reason for this idea will not perhaps be quite
so hard to understand. “From these stones we are all descended,”
thinks the primitive worshipper: “these are our fathers; therefore,
they are the givers of children, the producers and begetters of all our
generations, the principle of fertility, the proper gods to whom to pray
for offspring.” Add that many of them, being represented as human, or
human in their upper part at least, grow in time to be ithyphallic, like
Priapus, party by mere grotesque barbarism, but partly also as a sign
of the sex of the deceased: and we can see the naturalness of this easy
transition. From the Hermæ of the Greeks to the rude phallic deities of
so many existing savage races, we get everywhere signs of this constant
connexion between the sacred stone and the idea of paternity. Where the
stone represents the grave of a woman, the deity of course is conceived
as a goddess, but with {196}the same implications. Herodotus saw in
Syria stelæ engraved with the female pudenda. The upright stone god
is thus everywhere and always liable to be regarded as a god of
fruitfulness.
But did this idea of the stone pillar extend to Palestine and to
the Semitic nations? There is evidence that it did, besides that
of Herodotus. Major Conder, whose opinion on all questions of pure
archaeology (as opposed to philology) deserves the highest respect, says
of Canaanitish times, “The menhir, or conical stone, was the emblem
throughout Syria of the gods presiding over fertility, and the
cup hollows which have been formed in menhirs and dolmens are the
indications of libations, often of human blood, once poured on these
stones by early worshippers.” He connects these monuments with the
linga cult of India, and adds that Dr. Chaplin has found such a cult
still surviving near the Sea of Galilee. Lucian speaks of the two great
pillars at the temple of Hierapolis as _phalli_. Of the Phoenicians
Major Conder writes: “The chief emblem worshipped in the temples was
a pillar or cone, derived no doubt from the rude menhirs which were
worshipped by early savage tribes, such as Dravidians, Arabs, Celts, and
Hottentots.” That they were originally sepulchral in character we
can gather from the fact that “they often stood beneath trilithons or
dolmens, or were placed before an altar made by a stone laid flat on an
upright base.” “The representations on early Babylonian cylinders
of tables whereon a small fire might be kindled, or an offering of
some small object laid, seem to indicate a derivation from similar
structures. The original temple in which the cone and its shrine, or its
altar, were placed, was but a cromlech or enclosure, square or round,
made by setting up stones.” Remains of such enclosures, with dolmens
on one side, are found at various spots in Moab and Phoenicia. Nothing
could be more obviously sepulchral in character than these rude shrines
or Gilgals, with the pillar or gravestone, from which, as Major Conder
suggests, {197}the hypæthral temples of Byblos and Baalbek are finally
developed.
That Jahweh himself in his earliest form was such a stone god, the
evidence, I think, though not perhaps exactly conclusive, is to say the
least extremely suggestive. I have already called attention to it in a
previous chapter, and need not here recapitulate it in full; but a
few stray additions may not be without value. Besides the general
probability, among a race whose gods were so almost universally
represented by sacred stones, that any particular god, unless the
contrary be proved, was so represented, there is the evidence of all
the later language, and of the poems written after the actual stone god
himself had perished, that Jahweh was still popularly regarded as, at
least in a metaphorical sense, a stone or rock. “He is the Rock,”
says the Deuteronomist, in the song put into the mouth of Moses; “I
will publish the name of Jahweh; ascribe greatness unto our god.”
“Jahweh liveth, and blessed be my rock,” says the hymn which a later
writer composes for David in the Second Book of Samuel: “exalted be
the god of the rock of my salvation.” And in the psalms the image
recurs again and again: “Jahweh is my rock and my fortress”; “Who
is a god save Jahweh, and who is a rock save our god?”; “He set my
feet upon a rock, and established my goings”; “Lead me to the rock
that is greater than I”; “Jahweh is my defence, and my god is the
rock of my refuge”; “O come, let us sing to Jahweh; let us make a
joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.” And that the shape of this
stone was probably that of a rounded pillar, bevelled at the top, we see
in the fact that later ages pictured to themselves their transfigured
Jahweh as leading the Sons of Israel in the wilderness as a pillar of
fire by night and a pillar of cloud by daytime.
The earlier Israelites, however, had no such poetical illusions.
To them, their god Jahweh was simply the object--stone pillar or
otherwise--preserved in the ark or chest {198}which long rested at
Shiloh, and which was afterwards enshrined, “between the thighs of the
building” (as a later gloss has it), in the Temple at Jerusalem. The
whole of the early traditions embedded in the books of Judges, Samuel,
and Kings show us quite clearly that Jahweh himself was then regarded as
inhabiting the ark, and as carried about with it from place to place
in all its wanderings. The story of the battle with the Philistines at
Eben-ezer, the fall of Dagon before the rival god, the fortunes of the
ark after its return to the Israelitish people, the removal to Jerusalem
by David, the final enthronement by Solomon, all distinctly show that
Jahweh in person dwelt within the ark, between the guardian cherubim.
“Who is able to stand before the face of Jahweh, this very sacred
god?” ask the men of Bethshemesh, when they ventured to look inside
that hallowed abode, and were smitten down by the “jealous god” who
loved to live in the darkness of the inmost sanctuary. *
* Mr. William Simpson has some excellent remarks on the
analogies of the Egyptian and Hebrew arks and sanctuaries in
his pamphlet on The Worship of Death.
It may be well to note in this connexion two significant facts: Just
such an ark was used in Egypt to contain the sacred objects or images
of the gods. And further, at the period when the Sons of Israel were
tributaries in Egypt, a Theban dynasty ruled the country, and the
worship of the great Theban phallic deity, Khem, was widely spread
throughout every part of the Egyptian dominions.
Is there, however, any evidence of a linga or other stone pillar being
ever thus enshrined and entempled as the great god of a sanctuary?
Clearly, Major Conder has already supplied some, and more is forthcoming
from various other sources. The cone which represented Aphrodite in
Cyprus was similarly enshrined as the chief object of a temple, as were
the stelæ of all Egyptian mummies. “The trilithon,” says Major
Conder, “becomes later a shrine, in which the cone or a statue
stands.” The significance {199}of this correlation will at once be
seen if the reader remembers how, in the chapter on Sacred Stones,
I showed the origin of the idol from the primitive menhir or upright
pillar. “The Khonds and other non-Aryan tribes in India,” says
Conder once more, “build such temples of rude stones, daubed with
red,--a survival of the old practice of anointing the menhirs and the
sacred cone or pillar with blood of victims, sometimes apparently human.
Among the Indians, the pillar is a lingam, and such apparently was its
meaning among the Phoenicians.” And in the Greek cities we know from
Pausanias that an unhewn stone was similarly enshrined in the most
magnificent adytum of the noblest Hellenic temples. In fact, it was
rather the rule than otherwise that a stone was the chief object of
worship in the noblest fanes.
One more curious trait must be noted in the worship of Jahweh. Not only
did he rejoice in human sacrifices, but he also demanded especially an
offering of the firstborn, and he required a singular and significant
ransom from every man-child whom he permitted to live among his peculiar
votaries. On the fact of human sacrifices I need hardly insist: they
were an integral part of all Semitic worship, and their occurrence in
the cult of Jahweh has been universally allowed by all unprejudiced
scholars. The cases of Agag, whom Samuel hewed to pieces before the face
of Jahweh, and of Jephthah’s daughter, whom her father offered up as a
thank-offering for his victory, though not of course strictly historical
from a critical point of view, are quite sufficient evidence to show the
temper and the habit of the Jahweh-worshippers who described them. So
with the legend of the offering of Isaac, who is merely rescued at the
last moment in order that the god of generation may make him the father
of many thousands. Again, David seeks to pacify the anger of Jahweh by
a sacrifice of seven of the sons of Saul. And the prophet Micah asks,
“Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body
for the sin of my soul?”--a passage {200}which undoubtedly implies
that in Micah’s time such a sacrifice of the eldest child was a common
incident of current Jahweh-worship.
From human sacrifice to circumcision the transition is less violent
than would at first sight appear. An intermediate type is found in the
dedication of the first-born, where Jahweh seems to claim for himself,
not as a victim, but as a slave and devotee, the first fruits of that
increase which it is his peculiar function to ensure. In various laws,
Jahweh lays claim to the first-born of man and beast,--sometimes to
all, sometimes only to the male first-born. The animals were sacrificed;
the sons, in later ages at least, were either made over as Nazarites or
redeemed with an offering or a money-ransom. But we cannot doubt that in
the earliest times the first-born child was slain before Jahweh. In
the curious legend of Moses and Zipporah we get a strange folk-tale
connecting this custom indirectly with the practice of circumcision.
Jahweh seeks to kill Moses, apparently because he has not offered up his
child: but Zipporah his wife takes a stone knife, circumcises her son,
and flings the bloody offering at Jahweh’s feet, who thereupon lets
her husband go. This, rather than the later account of its institution
by Abraham, seems the true old explanatory legend of the origin of
circumcision--a legend analogous to those which we find in Roman and
other early history as embodying or explaining certain ancient customs
or legal formulae. Circumcision, in fact, appears to be a bloody
sacrifice to Jahweh, as the god of generation: a sacrifice essentially
of the nature of a ransom, and therefore comparable to all those other
bodily mutilations whose origin Mr. Herbert Spencer has so well shown in
the _Ceremonial Institutions_.
At the same time, the nature of the offering helps to cast light
upon the character of Jahweh as a god of increase; exactly as the
“emerods” with which the Philistines were afflicted for the capture
of Jahweh and his ark show {201}the nature of the vengeance which might
naturally be expected from a deity of generation.
Last of all, how is it that later Hebrew writers believed the object
concealed in the ark to have been, not a phallic stone, but a copy of
the “Ten Words” which Jahweh was fabled to have delivered to Moses?
That would be difficult to decide: but here at least is an aperçu
upon the subject which I throw out for what it may be worth. The later
Hebrews, when their views of Jahweh had grown expanded and etherealised,
were obviously ashamed of their old stone-worship, if indeed they were
archaeologists enough after the captivity to know that it had ever
really existed. What more natural, then, than for them to suppose that
the stone which they heard of as having been enclosed in the ark was a
copy of the “Ten Words,”--the covenant of Jahweh? Hence, perhaps,
the later substitution of the term, “Ark of the Covenant,” for the
older and correcter phrase, “Ark of Jahweh.” One more suggestion,
still more purely hypothetical. Cones with pyramidal heads, bearing
inscriptions to the deceased, were used by the Phoenicians for
interments. It is just possible that the original Jahweh may have been
such an ancient pillar, covered with writings of some earlier character,
which were interpreted later as the equivalents or symbols of the “Ten
Words.”
Putting all the evidence together, then, as far as we can now recover
it, and interpreting it on broad anthropological lines by analogy from
elsewhere, I should say the following propositions seem fairly probable:
The original religion of Israel was a mixed polytheism, containing many
various types of gods, and based like all other religions upon domestic
and tribal ancestor-worship. Some of the gods were of animal shapes:
others were more or less vaguely anthropomorphic. But the majority were
worshipped under the form of sacred stones, trees, or wooden cones. The
greater part of these gods were Semitic in type, and common to the Sons
of Israel with their neighbours {202}and kinsmen. The character of the
Hebrew worship, however, apparently underwent some slight modification
in Egypt; or at any rate, Egyptian influences led to the preference
of certain gods over others at the period of the Exodus. One god, in
particular, Jahweh by name, seems to have been almost peculiar to the
Sons of Israel,--their ethnical deity, and therefore in all probability
an early tribal ancestor or the stone representative of such an
ancestor. The legends are probably right in their implication that this
god was already worshipped (not of course exclusively) by the Sons of
Israel before their stay in Egypt; they are almost certainly correct in
ascribing the great growth and extension of his cult to the period of
the Exodus. The Sons of Israel, at least from the date of the Exodus
onward, carried this god or his rude image with them in an ark or box
through all their wanderings. The object so carried was probably
a conical stone pillar, which we may conjecture to have been the
grave-stone of some deified ancestor: and of this ancestor “Jahweh”
was perhaps either the proper name or a descriptive epithet. Even if, as
Colenso suggests, the name itself was Canaanitish, and belonged already
to a local god, its application to the sacred stone of the ark would be
merely another instance of the common tendency to identify the gods of
one race or country with those of another. The stone itself was always
enshrouded in Egyptian mystery, and no private person was permitted to
behold it. Sacrifices, both human and otherwise, were offered up to it,
as to the other gods, its fellow’s and afterwards its hated rivals.
The stone, like other sacred stones of pillar shape, was regarded as
emblematic of the generative power. Circumcision was a mark of devotion
to Jahweh, at first, no doubt, either voluntary, or performed by way
of a ransom, but becoming with the growth and exclusiveness of
Jahweh-worship a distinctive rite of Jahweh’s chosen people. (But
other Semites also circumcised {203}themselves as a blood-offering to
their own more or less phallic deities.)
More briefly still, among many Hebrew gods, Jahweh was originally but
a single one, a tribal ancestor-god, worshipped in the form of a
cylindrical stone, perhaps at first a grave-stone, and regarded as
essentially a god of increase, a special object of veneration by
childless women.
From this rude ethnical divinity, the mere sacred pillar of a barbarous
tribe, was gradually developed the Lord God of later Judaism and of
Christianity--a power, eternal, omniscient, almighty, holy; the most
ethereal, the most sublime, the most superhuman deity that the brain of
man has ever conceived. By what slow evolutionary process of syncretism
and elimination, of spiritual mysticism and national enthusiasm, of
ethical effort and imaginative impulse that mighty God was at last
projected out of so unpromising an original it will be the task of our
succeeding chapters to investigate and to describe.