“Jacob seems to have made a sort of bargain with Jehovah that he would serve Him instead of other gods, on condition that He took care of him during his exile from home. The next stage in popular Jewish theology was a denial of the power of the Gentile gods, and the treatment of them as idols. Tradition and history point to Abraham as the first on whom the idea of the impotence of the deities of his father’s house first broke. He is said to have smashed the images in Nahor’s oratory, and to have put a hammer into the hands of one idol which he left standing, as a sign to Nahor that that one had destroyed all the rest.”
Unfortunately for this view—according to the only authentic narrative we have of the facts, Gen. xii.—Abraham must have preceded Jacob by at least two generations!
I think that, after this, we may fairly ask Mr Baring Gould, who is learned in medieval myths, to trace for us more distinctly the notion of the chronicler who had a theory that Henry II. lived before Henry I.
With this passage I shall conclude this chapter, merely observing, that if any department of study existed which had for its special object the investigation of tradition,[124] it is simply impossible that a work (clever in many respects) such as that of Mr Baring Gould should ever have been written.
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VII.
Cardinal Wiseman (“Lectures on Science and Religion,” ii. 228–232), in speaking of what was characteristic of most Oriental religions—a belief “in the existence of emanated influences intermediate between the divine and earthly natures,” is led on to give an account of the curious Gnostic sect, the Nazarians—“The first of these errors was common, perhaps, to other Gnostic sects; but in the Codex Nasaræus we have the two especially distinguished as different beings—light and life. In it the first emanation from God is the king of light; the second, fire; the third, water; the fourth, life.” I wish to note that, whether or not their notions as to emanations originally meant more than the act of creation, a tradition as to the successive order of the creation seems clearly embodied in the text. God created first of all light; then the sun (the firmament) is fire (the distinct creation of the light and the sun in Genesis is so marked as to create a special difficulty in the cosmogony); then water; then life, in beasts, birds, reptiles, &c; lastly, man. Comp. with supra, [p. 138], and with the above legend of Michabo.
“A Slavonian account of Creation.—The current issue of the Literary Society of Prague includes a volume of popular tales collected in all the Slavonian countries, and translated by M. Erben into Czech. We extract the shortest—‘In the beginning there was only God, and He lay asleep and dreamed. At last it was time for Him to wake and look at the world. Wherever He looked through the sky, a star came out. He wondered what it was, and got up and began to walk. At last He came to our earth; He was very tired; the sweat ran down His forehead, and a drop fell on the ground. We are all made of this drop, and that is why we are the sons of God. Man was not made for pleasure; he was born of the sweat of God’s face, and now he must live by the sweat of his own: that is why men have no rest.’”—The Academy, Feb. 12, 1870.
I wish also to examine, in greater detail than I should have had space for in a note, how far the case of the Samoyeds bears out Mr Baring Gould’s theory of the development of idolatry from its grosser to its more refined manifestations, or of the progress of the human race from barbarism to the light of religion and of civilisation.
“‘When a Schaman is aware that I have no household god,’ said a Samoyed to M. Castren, the linguist, ‘he comes to me, and I give him a squirrel, or an ermine skin.’ This skin he brings back moulded ‘into a human shape.’ ... ‘This Los is a fetish; it is not altogether an idol; it is a spirit entangled in a material object. What that object is matters little; a stump of a tree, a stone, a rag, or an animal, serves the purpose of condensing the impalpable deity into a tangible reality.’ Through this coarse superstition glimmers an intelligent conception. It is that of an all-pervading Deity, who is focussed, so to speak, in the fetish. This deity is called Num. ‘I have heard some Samoyeds declare that the earth, the sea—all nature, in short—are Num.’ ‘Where is Num? asked Castren of a Samoyed, and the man pointed to the blue sea: but an old woman told him that the sun was Num. The Siethas, worshipped by the Lapps, had no certain figure or shape formed by nature or art; they were either trees or rough stones, much worn by water. Tomæus says they were often mere tree stumps with the roots upwards.”[125]