HISTORY OF RELIGIONS CHAPTER I JUDAISM THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT ISRAEL Israelite Tribes in Canaan-The Kingdom-Religion and Migration— Nomadic and Agricultural Religion Jehovah and the BaalsPlaces and Modes of Worship-Festivals-Priests, Seers, Prophets -National Religion-Temples and Images. THE great upheaval of the populations of Asia Minor and Syria, of which the Hyksos invasion of Egypt was one result, did not come to rest with the expulsion of the Hyksos. The Syrian wars of the early Eighteenth Dynasty restored order under Egyptian supremacy in Palestine and southern Syria, but in the decadence of that dynasty under Amenophis III and IV, as we learn from the Amarna despatches, the country was again invaded by tribes of various origin and from different quarters, while the Hittite power in the north was becoming an increasing menace. In the disorders which followed the death of Amenophis IV the Syrian possessions of the empire were lost, and we get no further glimpse of the situation in Palestine until the Syrian campaigns of Seti I and Rameses II. Under Rameses' successor, Merneptah, European sea-rovers from the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean made their appearance in the western delta in alliance with the Libyans, and in the reign of Rameses III they threatened Egypt both on the Libyan border and from the side of Syria. In the recoil of this wave of invasion the Philistines were left behind on the coast plain from Gaza northward to Dor. 1 See Vol. I, pp. 178-180. Among the tribes which in this dislocation of peoples succeeded in gaining a foothold in Palestine were those whom we know under the collective name Israel. This name occurs first in an inscription celebrating the devastations which Merneptah had wrought in Palestine about 1225 B. C. From their own traditions of the invasion and settlement it appears that the centre of their strength was in the highlands south of the Great Plain. Kindred or allied tribes were scattered in Galilee and east of the Jordan, while another group settled in the south, where its principal member gave its name to the highlands of Judah. It is probable that these tribes had entered the country at different times and by different routes. The walled cities were naturally secure from their attacks unless by a stratagem or a lucky coup de main, and under the protection of the fortresses the Great Plain, the seaboard and adjacent foot-hills, and the wide valleys running inward from the coast long remained in the possession of the older inhabitants. The Israelites in different parts of the land were thus separated from one another, and a line of Canaanite strongholds, of which Jerusalem, on the main road north and south, was the key, interposed between Joseph and Judah. When the period of convulsion following the collapse of the Egyptian supremacy and the overrunning of the land by invaders from all quarters was over, the Canaanites recovered courage and resolved to be masters in their own country. Meanwhile the increase of the Israelite population in the central highlands constrained them to turn to agriculture for a living, and they began to cast covetous eyes on the fields of their neighbours. A struggle for the possession of the Great Plain ensued, which is celebrated in the triumphal ode of Deborah (Judges 5). In this poem the unity of the tribes appears distinctly as a religious bond: the conflict is the battle of Jehovah with the kings of Canaan, and Israel's victory is the victory of Jehovah.1 But though the Israelites in the battle of Megiddo conquered 1 The collective name Israel does not occur in the poem. their freedom from Canaanite dominion, they did not gain possession of the fortified cities along the plain. In the eleventh century the Philistines, from their base on the seaboard, subjected the interior. Their main object was, of course, the flourishing Canaanite cities and their rich territories, but the Israelite peasants also were made to pay heavy taxes and submitted to humiliating conditions. This crisis united the tribes in self-defence under the leadership of the Benjamite, Saul, whom after his daring relief of Jabesh Gilead they acclaimed king. The conflict went on. Saul fell in battle with the Philistines, but David succeeded in achieving independence and establishing a Judæan kingdom. After the death of Saul's feeble successor, the other tribes also acknowledged David as king. He captured Jerusalem, which till that time had been a Canaanite city, and made his capital in this strategic position between the north and the south. His successor attempted to transform the kingdom, in which the tribes preserved their organisation and a large measure of autonomy, into a centralised monarchy whose provinces were administered by governors appointed by the crown, and this, together with the heavy exactions demanded by Solomon's passion for building and the luxury of his court, was more than the Israelites would bear. The king, moreover, was a Judæan, and he was unwise enough to make this conspicuous by special privileges to Judah. At his death the double kingdom of Israel and Judah fell asunder; the Israelite tribes chose a king of their own, while Judah alone with its kindred clans held to the house of David. At the time of the struggle with the Canaanite city-kings of the Great Plain celebrated in the Song of Deborah, Israelite tribes were seated east of the Jordan from the head of the Dead Sea northward to the Yarmuk (Reuben, Gilead); in the hill country south of the Great Plain (Ephraim, Benjamin, Machir), and in Galilee, from the edge of the Great Plain to the Phoenician hinterland (Issachar, Zebulun, Naph tali, Asher, Dan). All these tribes owned Jehovah as their god; he fought for them, and overwhelmed their foes. This god was not native to Canaan; his seat was a mountain in the south, whence he came on the wings of the storm to deliver his people (Judges 5, 4). One strand of the narrative of their migrations calls his mountain Horeb, another Sinai. At this mountain, after their escape from Egypt under the lead of Moses, the tribes had sworn fealty to Jehovah as their deliverer, and pledged themselves to worship him as they were there taught by Moses. So far all the accounts of the Exodus concur, but on another very important point they differ. According to one, which is by various signs recognised as the tradition of the kingdom of Israel, the tribes had not previously worshipped Jehovah, or, as it is expressed, their fathers had not known him under that name. Judæan sources, on the other hand, make all the patriarchs worshippers of Jehovah, and carry back the origin of this religion almost to the beginning of human history (Gen. 4, 26). This difference may be combined with another: the patriarchal narratives as well as the genealogies connect the Israelites on the one side with Aramæan tribes, from the southern Lebanon eastward across the Euphrates to Harran, and on the other with the nomads of the deserts south of Palestine and in northwestern Arabia. The most natural explanation is the fusion, after the establishment of the kingdom, of northern and southern-Israelite and Judæan-traditions. There are independent reasons for thinking that the tribes to whom the name Israel in the narrower sense belonged were akin to their Aramæan neighbours, and came from the northeast, while the clans which went to make up Judah were of southern extraction. The latter may well have known the holy places of Jehovah from immemorial times, while the Israelites proper only later adopted his worship. An ancient sanctuary of Jehovah to which great prominence is given in the narratives of the Exodus is Kadesh, a 1 Hebrew Yahweh. |