Part 10 (2/2)

One town has one set of G.o.ds, another town another, and the same deity wears different and even opposite characters in different places. All that can be done is to single out a few features which we can see to have been on the whole characteristic of Phenician religion, and to have enabled it to influence the wors.h.i.+p of other peoples.

The Phenicians were very much in earnest about the maintenance of state and of religion. In their successive city-states of Sidon, Tyre, and Carthage, we see them exhibiting an intense devotion to the commonwealth, and very much under the influence of their priesthood.

Semitic religion tends to grow more sombre and intense as it develops; and the Phenicians, while still holding the principle of a G.o.d and G.o.ddess, concentrate their wors.h.i.+p more and more on a single divine figure, and come to regard that figure from a greater distance and with greater awe. The liberal and easy-going Baals and Asheras of agricultural life are not suited to the temple of a great commercial city; a figure of more dignity is wanted. And thus above the crowd of Baals there appears the Moloch or king, a much greater being and requiring a much statelier service. Moloch also is not originally a proper name; there are various Molochs or king-G.o.ds who rise above the Baals, and the individuals have special designations, as Melcarth, ”king of the city.” This type of deity occurs not with the Phenicians only, but with several other Syrian peoples about the same time. The Moloch of Sidon and Tyre is a being of the same character as the chief G.o.ds of Moab, Ammon, and Israel. He has to do not only with the blessings of agricultural life, but with state and government. He is the founder of a state; he is the inventor of navigation and of purple; he is the first king; when a colony is sent out, it goes with his approval, and he himself leads the expedition; he is the dread ruler whom none must disobey; the majesty, the power, and the enterprise of the state are all embodied in him. And as the king-G.o.d is far above the landlord-G.o.d in power, he is infinitely removed from him in character also. The chief G.o.ds of Sidon and Tyre have nothing luxurious or effeminate about them. They are strict and awful beings, and must not be incautiously approached. They retain their primitive character as sources of life, but they are destroyers of life as well. Pure and holy themselves, they require purity and holiness in all who draw near to them. Their priests are celibates, their priestesses virgins. They require sacrifices of a very different nature from those of the Baals, more costly and more dreadful. Human sacrifices appear to have been a regular feature of their wors.h.i.+p: when the Israelites turn to the wors.h.i.+p of Phenician G.o.ds, or when they copy Phenician practices, we hear of their ”making their children pa.s.s through the fire”--that is, offering them up as burnt-sacrifices. The Moloch requires what is most costly as a sacrifice, or what will cause the strongest thrill of terror in his wors.h.i.+p. Even the first-born child is not to be kept back from him (2 Kings xxiii. 10, Jerem. vii. 31, cf. Micah vi. 7).

So far the origin of the Phenician G.o.ds is simple. They are purely Semitic deities, formed on the pattern of human rulers and deriving their attributes from that character. When a state becomes highly organised before it is quite civilised in other respects, its religion is apt to be stern and cruel; of this various instances may be found in the history of religion, and the present is one of them.

The Phenician G.o.ds were of such a character as to favour the survival of savage practices; the Semite, as we saw, is extremely matter-of-fact and practical in his religion, and a G.o.d who was a king would receive the same kind of offerings as the king of Sidon or of Tyre was accustomed to. A strict and dreadful religion thus survives beyond the savage state; pleasure is taken in trampling on natural feelings and in setting forth shocking spectacles at the bidding of the deity.

Astral Deities of Phenicia.--It is not possible to arrange in a system the remaining phenomena of Phenician religion. In the historical period the G.o.ds have another character besides that of being heads and rulers of communities. They are connected with the heavenly bodies. The chief G.o.d, whatever name he bears, El, Baal, Moloch, Rimmon, or Adonis, is always the sun. A sun-G.o.d may have come from Egypt or Babylon, but there is no reason why the Phenicians may not have had a sun-G.o.d from the first, whose character spread to their other deities. And in accordance with the tendency above spoken of, the sun-G.o.d has a consort. Sometimes his consort is the earth; and then we have a sensuous and immoral wors.h.i.+p such as that of the Canaanites. Sometimes it is the moon; her name is Astarte or Ashtoreth, and she is a very different being from the Ashera of Canaan; the names are not the same, and the characters are opposite.

Ashtoreth, like the primitive Semitic G.o.ddess (chapter x.), is a chaste matron; she is represented robed and in stately att.i.tude, and is a fit companion for the strict Moloch of the cities. Her wors.h.i.+p is described to us by Jeremiah, in whose time the matrons of Jerusalem made cakes for her and poured out drink-offerings and burned incense to her as the ”queen of heaven”; all this was done with the knowledge and co-operation of their husbands, so that the wors.h.i.+p had nothing immoral about it. This strict G.o.ddess is not to be identified with Istar of Babylonia, although the names are alike.

Istar is not a moon-G.o.ddess like Ashtoreth; in Babylonia, in fact, the moon is masculine, and the characters of the two G.o.ddesses are opposite. The Sidonian Astarte and the Canaanite Ashera represent two opposing types of female deity, both of which may possibly have their reflections in Greece--the latter in the lower forms of the wors.h.i.+p of Aphrodite, and the former in the figures of such strict maiden G.o.ddesses as Artemis and Athene.

Another wors.h.i.+p which prevailed in Phenicia should not be left unnoticed--that of the Cabiri. There were temples of the Cabiri in several of the towns; their wors.h.i.+p, however, was secret, and little was known of it even in antiquity. We know at all events that the Cabiri were seven in number, and the number is thought to be connected, not with the seven planets, but with the seven heavenly spheres of early astronomy. They have a head called Eshmun, who is the G.o.d of the eighth or highest sphere. The Cabiri are beings of a moral character; they are not only mighty ones and creators, but they are the children of Sydyk--that is, of Righteousness; and they give counsel. It is here that the tendency to speculative exaltation of the deity appears in Phenicia; but there is little of it, and neither in this direction nor in that of morals was the religion destined to have any remarkable growth. The service of the G.o.ds was so closely identified with the service of the state,--for either the priest and the king were one, as in Israel after the exile, or nothing could be done without the priesthood,--that no independent religious development was possible. In a theocracy religion cannot grow, at least it cannot be openly acknowledged to do so; and the prophet and reformer finds every influence arrayed against him.

How greatly Israel was indebted to Phenician art is known to all. It was by artificers from Tyre that Solomon's royal buildings were planned and executed, when he had married a daughter of Egypt and was compelled to aim at some magnificence. A royal temple formed part of these buildings, and was necessarily erected according to the ideas which prevailed in the more advanced neighbouring kingdoms. It was from the same source that the Greeks a century or two later drew suggestions for their sacred architecture; and thus we find that the ground-plan of Solomon's temple and that of the Greek temple are closely similar. Both are to be traced ultimately to the model derived by the Phenicians from Egypt. And those who borrowed from Phenicia the form of their temple, borrowed many other things too. In the porch of Solomon's temple stood two great pillars of bronze, which were called Jachin and Boaz; they were simply the symbols which stood at the entrance to every Phenician temple of the sun-G.o.d wors.h.i.+pped there. The priests of Israel were dressed like those of Tyre and Sidon; they offered the same animals as sacrifices, they received the same dues for their maintenance. When so much apparatus was borrowed, it is no wonder that the G.o.ds of Phenicia were at times wors.h.i.+pped at Jerusalem. We see from this whole chapter that the religion of Israel was not so much apart from that of the other Syrian peoples as we have been wont to imagine. Even in his religion Israel owed something to his neighbours; his religion came to be better than theirs, but it was the result of a movement in which they also had taken part.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

The Histories of Antiquity. E. Meyer, Duncker (see p. 101).

Tiele's _Egyptische en Mesopotamische G.o.dsdiensten_. Book II.: Phenicia and Israel.

The Histories of Israel, especially Kuenen, _The Religion of Israel_.

F. Jeremias, in De la Saussaye, vol. i. pp. 348-383.

E. Meyer, ”Phenicia,” in _Encyclopaedia Biblica_.

CHAPTER XII ISRAEL

It is a circ.u.mstance of the greatest value for the science of religion that the Old Testament is so well known. That book is the most valuable literary storehouse we possess of the facts and ideas connected with the early religion of mankind; it is the best text-book of the earlier portion of our subject. In our chapters on primitive wors.h.i.+p, as well as in that on the Semites, we have drawn largely from this source, and for the earlier stages of the religion of Israel we may refer to these chapters. We have now, however, to deal specially with the religion of the Old Testament, and to endeavour to show, as has been done in other cases, what was its specific character, and how its character determined its history. The story to be told in this chapter is, even apart from our special interest in it, as fascinating as any in this volume; it was through a mental movement of unparalleled grandeur, as well as through an outward history of tragic and entrancing interest, that the Jews came to possess the religion which was the desire of all nations, and the chief preparation for Christianity.

We have to begin, however, with repeating in this case what has been and will be the burden of our opening paragraphs in many chapters of this book, namely that the traditional ideas about the nature of this religion require to be corrected, and that its sacred books as they now stand do not accurately represent its history. The Old Testament literature has suffered in a high degree what seems to be the predestined fate of every set of sacred books. Old materials and new are mixed up together in it; many works have been revised by later editors, and so much changed, that laborious critical processes are necessary before they can be used by the historian. In forming his first impressions as to the relations the books bear to each other, and as to the purport of the whole, the reader is naturally guided by the order in which he finds them; but the order in which the sacred books of the Jews stand in the Old Testament was fixed from a peculiar point of view at a late age in Jewish history, and is in many respects quite unnatural and misleading. To come to particulars; the Old Testament as it stands suggests that the Law was the earliest product of Jewish literature, and that all the details of ritual, as well as of moral and social duty, were fixed for the Jews at the very outset of their history; and it suggests that the books of the prophets were written last. This, till quite recently, was generally believed to be the case, but by the labours of a series of ill.u.s.trious scholars of the Old Testament the conclusion has been reached, which is now less and less disputed, that the earlier prophetic books come first in chronological order, and that the law, which is not all of one piece, but contains a number of codes of different periods, together with a collection of legends and traditions drawn from various quarters and subjected to editorial treatment, did not a.s.sume the form in which we have it till after the exile. The historical books, in which no doubt various ancient pieces are embodied, were written under the inspiration of prophetic ideas; and the latest books of all are those which stand in the centre of the Old Testament in the English Bible; the Psalter, which had been growing during a long period before it came to contain its present number of pieces, the books of morals and philosophy, and the book of Job. Daniel belongs to the period of the Maccabees. The historian, therefore, starts from the age of the prophets of the eighth century B.C. The writings of these great men afford a graphic picture of their time, and an entirely trustworthy account of the mental furniture Israel then possessed. From this fixed point the student is able to infer what happened to Israel in earlier times, and to judge of the spirit in which the early history of the people was afterwards written and edited. The history of Israel which the student arrives at after these critical processes differs, it is true, in very important respects from that which appears at first sight on the face of the Bible. But the same thing has occurred in the case of other nations. The sacred books of Persia also have to be turned outside in before they furnish the historian with an account he can accept. Even of the speeches of Mohammed the same is true. Those who undertake the task of codifying sacred literatures have to consider the purpose to which the books are to be put in the community, and to arrange them so as best to serve that purpose; they do not ask, How must they be arranged so as to exhibit the true sequence of the history?--that interest only arises much later--but, How will they best serve the needs of the community? The order of books in sacred collections is, therefore, fixed by practical considerations, now of one kind and now of another, and not according to the requirements of the student of history. We now proceed to give the outline of the history of the religion of Israel as it appears in the light of recent critical investigation.

Israel consisted originally of a group of tribes, bound together by the memory of a great deliverance they had experienced in common, and of battles in which they had fought side by side. Accustomed to the free life of shepherds, they had been enslaved in Egypt and held to intolerable tasks; but they had made their escape in a wonderful manner under a leader who had known how to kindle them to heroic efforts by reminding them of their religious traditions. Under his leaders.h.i.+p they had visited the Sinaitic peninsula after leaving Egypt, and had wandered in the regions to the north of Sinai, till at last they conquered territory to the east of Jordan, on which some of them settled, while others crossed the Jordan, and took up their abodes among the Canaanite tribes whom they found there.

The nation and the religion came into the world at the same time.

Although the tribes retained their separate G.o.ds and religious observances, and families among them also had their own family cults, the bond by which they had been formed into a people and made capable of common action was stronger than these earlier ties; the G.o.d whom Moses proclaimed as their head inspired in them an enthusiasm and vigour unknown before. His name was Yahweh, and is said to have a metaphysical meaning, and to designate the G.o.d as more really existing than any other. This is doubted; what is certain is that Moses declared that Yahweh promised to be with the tribes, and that they took him for their G.o.d. Jehovah, to use the more familiar form of the name, was perhaps the G.o.d of the most powerful of the tribes; he was probably a nature-G.o.d, and connected with storms and thunder, and he had his seat at Mount Sinai. Thither the tribes repaired to hold a solemn meeting with him; from there he was afterwards represented as coming forth when about to do any mighty act for his people. He is thought of as a being who cannot be seen, since he dwells in clouds and darkness. He utters his voice in thunder and storm; he is possessed of irresistible energy which he unfolds in battle, and in which he causes his people to share when he goes before them to war. But he is also a G.o.d of counsel, and takes the greatest interest in the moral and social life of his people. His human representatives, aided by his spirit, settle disputes which are laid before them, and p.r.o.nounce authoritative counsels on difficult matters. This kind of guidance is constantly going on, so that Jehovah is felt to be watching over the conduct of his people, and to be an effective helper and guide in their domestic concerns, which not every G.o.d attends to, as well as in their meetings with their enemies.

The Early Ritual was Simple.--In all this we have a very apt example of the advance which, as we saw in a former chapter, religion makes when it becomes national instead of merely tribal; when the great G.o.d of the nation takes his place above the G.o.ds of the tribes. In Israel, however, it is not the case that the national religion, when it appears, at once develops a higher style of wors.h.i.+p, and draws attention to itself by greater pomp and deeper solemnity of form. The priestly legislation of Exodus and Leviticus, indeed, represents this as having been the case. Here the tribes have scarcely adopted the service of Jehovah, when an army of thousands of priests is called into being, for whose maintenance elaborate provision is made, and a splendid and highly-organised wors.h.i.+p is arranged. This directory of wors.h.i.+p, however, most scholars are agreed, never was in operation till after the exile: we see in it the wors.h.i.+p which Ezra and his fellow-scribes aimed at introducing in the second temple at Jerusalem. The wors.h.i.+p of the wilderness and of the early period of Israel in Canaan was of a very different nature. The leading features and principles of it differed little from what we have described in former parts of this book (chapter v., chapter x.). It was conducted according to custom rather than statute, and its leading characteristic was that it was a common meal at which the G.o.d was present along with his wors.h.i.+ppers, and a.s.surances were given that the good understanding still continued which bound the tribesmen to their G.o.d and each other. It was by the person of his G.o.d rather than by a more elaborate wors.h.i.+p, or a more numerous priesthood, that Israel was distinguished from Moab and Ammon.

Contact with Canaanite Religion.--After being delivered out of Egypt by the power of Jehovah, and entering Canaan, Israel was placed in a position in which it is wonderful, indeed, that the national character and the national religion were not merged in those of the surrounding population. Bringing with them the few ideas and the scanty appliances of the wilderness, they found themselves dwelling amid a people whose civilisation was fully formed, and who possessed a comparatively elaborate wors.h.i.+p. The tribes of Canaan spoke the same language, and were of the same race with themselves, but had advanced to the higher life of agriculture and of cities. Their wors.h.i.+p was the same in principle as that of Israel, but it had a higher organisation. The land was studded with sacred places, the sanct.i.ty of which Israel could not deny, and which formed centres of pilgrimage and wors.h.i.+p. The wors.h.i.+p of the Canaanites was described in last chapter (chapter xi.); the reader will remember the upright stone (ma.s.seba) representing the Baal, and the tree-trunk (ashera), if there was no living tree, representing the G.o.ddess. If all this or most of it was new to the Israelites, so was the sacred year which fixed the seasons of wors.h.i.+p in Canaan. Minor festivals were fixed by the appearance of the new moon, or by the regular return of the seventh day (it is doubtful if the Sabbath was observed in the wilderness, it is connected with agriculture, and is scarcely compatible with pastoral life); greater ones by the epochs of the year, such as harvest and vintage. The wors.h.i.+p connected with agriculture in the early world is of a noisy and frantic order; and where G.o.ds are wors.h.i.+pped who are connected with fertility, it is apt, as we saw, to be marked by s.e.xual features.

Danger of Fusion.--The Israelites were naturally prompted to adopt what they could of the religion of the Canaanites. The old sacred places of the land, whether connected with their own ancestral traditions or not, they could not help adopting; it would have been strange, indeed, if, when they became agriculturists, they had not adopted the agricultural festivals; and if, as was natural, they regarded the Baal of the Canaanite as the lord of the land and the giver of its fertility, their thanks for the harvest would be addressed to him (Hosea ii. 8). Their wors.h.i.+p of Jehovah could not be left poorer than that which their neighbours addressed to Baal; for it also they erected asheras and made use of standing stones, and of Jehovah also they had images. One of these, which was destroyed by Hezekiah, was in the form of a serpent: in other places Jehovah was wors.h.i.+pped under the form of a bull. Where an image of him was kept, he could be consulted by means of lots or in other ways. The ark or chest which was kept at one of the more important shrines, represented him most fully; it was carried into battle, and he was thought to go with it.

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