CHAPTER VI

THE RELIGIOUS EVOLUTION OF ISRAEL

patriarchs and heroes of the Bible-Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob! Ah, the tricks and cunning of Jacob! How we admired and disapproved, became unconscious partisans for or against him, the wily Odysseus of Hebrew story! And again, the tale of Joseph. Most of us were with him from beginning to end; but I am afraid that on some of us, when we were children, he made the same impression which the good heroes of Sunday-school books seem to have made on Mark Twain. We rebelled against him; he was too good. His robe of many colours and his dreams were a personal affront, and we did want to take him down a peg, because we knew that he was setting himself up as better than ourselves. And then the heroes of Israel. Oh, what a charming passage that used to be about Gideon's victory over the Midianites! I am sure some of us tried to "lap water with his tongue, as a dog lappeth." We had an idea that it would be a sort of test of energy and courage. We would have liked, too, to break one of our mother's earthen pots in the night, and swing a light, and blow a horn, and shout to scare the Midianites. That was fine! And when we read about Jephthah's vow, to sacrifice what met him when he came home, and how it fell out that his daughter met him, you remember well the involuntary comparison you made, feeling as though it must be wrong to do so, with the story of Beauty and the Beast. When you had read the story of Elisha, you felt despite yourself a sympathy with the boys who were torn to pieces by

the bears, a personal sympathy, for you had done the same thing, and you certainly did not feel that the misdeed was so terrible as to merit death. I wonder if, when you were a good child, on Sunday afternoons you were allowed to take the big Bible, turn to the Apocrypha, and read the story of Bel and the Dragon, and whether you were quite clear in your mind as to the distinction between that and some of Grimm's fairy tales?

same.

You read those same stories now, but they are not quite the You surely must remember what a wonder and delight they were to you in childhood, however, and the strange meanings they conveyed to you. But they did teach you. You did not care for Amos, and Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel then, and Leviticus and Deuteronomy were dead letters. The lore of the child-world best taught the childish mind.

We have progressed; an evolution has taken place in our religious thoughts since childhood. We have all learned now to find progress, development, evolution in all things-in ourselves, in the physical or natural world, in thought, in ethics, in civilisation, in religion. We find ourselves believing in a development of religion in the world from childhood to maturity, just as we have known it in ourselves. And we find ourselves involuntarily, almost unconsciously, comparing religious ideas, rites, and ceremonies. Such a word as Easter of itself forces comparison in our minds. The fact that the name of the greatest of Christian feasts is the name of an old Teutonic goddess leads us to think with kindliness of the pagan faith which gave us that name. Christmas and All Hallowe'en are connected with customs having their acknowledged origin in paganism. A few summers since I found the Armenians celebrating the Transfiguration festival by ascending hills and mountains, and throwing water on one another. On investigation, I ascertained that both in date and mode of celebration their Transfiguration corresponded to the old Persian feast of Abrizan. The early missionaries adopted that feast bodily, and connected it with the Transfiguration, because of the practice of ascending mountains.

Whoever has travelled has seen much of this. He has seen the old pagan polytheism still surviving under Christian forms and names. On every Greek island where a fane of Apollo once crowned the heights he finds the similar St. George worshipped, while close to the sea St. Nicholas has assumed the heritage of Poseidon. On the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus, opposite Therapia, you see on a high hill the Moslem sacred tomb of the huge toe of that colossal saint, Joshua son of Nun. To the Christians the same tomb was the wonder-working tomb of St. Pantaleon; and to the heathen Greeks it was equally sacred as the Bed of Heracles. So at Smyrna Christians and Mussulmans alike worship at the tomb of Polycarp, each a different saint; while at Baghdad the same shrine serves Jew and Moslem for the worship respectively of Joshua son of Jozedek and of St. Yusuf. Jonah has succeeded Dagon and Oannes, and Astarte has given place to St. Mary, St. Anna, and other virgin saints; but under different names the old sacred places and something of the old worship still linger on. You see to-day the same sort of sacred trees and sacred stone-heaps which you read about alike in the sacred and profane literature of the Orient and a survival at least of the old rites connected with their cult. In Palestine religion has followed religion, but the old sacred places, and many of the ancient sacred practices, still linger on; places and customs that were sacred long before Israel entered Canaan.

The most casual reader of the Old Testament can scarcely fail to see that Israel borrowed many of its sacred places from heathen antiquity. One city, which plays a part as a sort of sacred city in the history of the ark, and which is called a city of the Levites, is Beth Shemesh, "house of the sun-god." (There are at least two more cities of the same name in Palestine, showing the popularity of this cult.) Another Levitical city was called Anathoth, place of the goddess Anah, or Anath. Another Levitical city, which was also a sanctuary, or place of refuge for the man who had committed manslaughter, was Kedesh, which means "sanctuary." Now, as the

name existed before the Hebrew period, it is manifest that it was a sanctuary in the pre-Israelitic times. Qishon was a sacred river before the time of the Israelites, bearing the name of an obscure divinity, Qish, or Qaish, which also appears in the name of the father of Saul, and which we meet among the heathen Arabs; and from the song of Deborah we find that this river retained some sort of reputation for sanctity among the Israelites of her day. Indeed, in a land where fountains and perennial streams are rare, all such tend to be held sacred and regarded as special manifestations of a divine force. So the Jordan was sacred, and more particularly its fountain-sources at the foot of Hermon, from the most remote antiquity. This sanctity was taken over by the Hebrews, and this it was which led to the erection at Dan, the sacred sources of Jordan, of one of the two great temples of northern Israel. Long after that temple had vanished, under a different cult, the sources of Jordan were sacred to Pan, and the remnants of a shrine of that god exist there to this day, while the place itself is still called Banias, after the name of Pan. A curious and interesting reference to the sanctity of the spot and its fountains is contained in Psalm xlii. Compare with this that ancient song of a well in the Book of Numbers (xxi. 17, 18), beginning, "Spring up, well; sing ye to it." Hermon itself was an ancient sacred mountain (its name means "devoted," or "separated"), as was also Carmel, and, in general, every isolated, high hill. It is interesting to find two mountains sacred from the earliest time, one of them certainly from pre-Israelitic times, namely Nebo and Sinai, bearing names familiar in Babylonia. Nebo is the name of the god Nebo, or Nabu, the god of prophecy, whose name forms a component part of the royal names, Nebuchadrezzar, Nabonidus, etc. The other, Sinai, bears the name of the ancient moon-god, Sin, the especial god of Ur, the birthplace of Abraham.

The permanence of locality in connexion with worship is a well-established fact. A place or object once regarded as holy will retain its sanctity, even though the religion

which sanctified it and the ceremonies of its cult change entirely.

And now, having considered places of worship, let us note some points connected with the manner of worship of God. All flesh-eating was sacrifice in early times. We have an example of the primitive Hebrew idea regarding this in the case of Saul after the victory over the Philistines near Michmash (1 Sam. xiv. 31 ff.). His men were very hungry, and began to kill and eat without any recognition of God. Saul was horrified, and setting up a stone as the representation of Deity, caused them to bring and kill the beasts there, the blood being poured out upon or before the stone, which thus received it for God. This conception of all flesh-eating as sacrifice still survives among the Arabs, even town Arabs, in language, and, to some extent, in fact. My workmen often asked me to "sacrifice" an ox or a sheep for them. And if I went to a chief's camp a sheep was "sacrificed" for me. So also people, both Christians and Moslems, sacrifice a sheep at some ziara, inviting all to eat of the flesh; and the flesh eaten on such occasions is practically the only flesh that the common people eat. Leviticus xvii. shows a similar condition among the ancient Hebrews. The Hebrew name for altar, it will be noticed, is "place of killing," and this, together with the fact that the words for kill and sacrifice are the same, is in itself sufficient evidence of the early Hebrew idea. But as early as the Book of Deuteronomy these primitive conditions change, giving place to a higher and more luxurious method of life.

The early idea of God as connected by blood with the worshipper lends itself to the idea of God as the head of the family, or family gods; of which we see a trace in Jonathan's excuse for David's absence from Saul's table, viz. that he had to go to take part in a family sacrifice. A little higher in the scale of advancing civilisation is a tribal god, then a national, and from this one advances a further step to true monotheism. The popular religion of Israel up to the time of the written prophets had not advanced beyond the national stage, and we