[110] Crooke, Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces, iv. 281.
[111] Kohler, Rechtsvergleichende Studien, p. 208.
[112] Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums, p. 128.
The last mentioned case, which implies shedding of blood as a means of sealing a compact, leads us to a special class of sacrifices offered to gods, namely, the covenant sacrifice, known to us from Semitic antiquity. The Hebrews, as Professor Robertson Smith observes,[113] thought of the national religion as constituted by a formal covenant sacrifice at Mount Sinai, where half of the blood of the sacrificed oxen was sprinkled on the altar and the other half on the people,[114] or even by a still earlier covenant rite in which the parties were Yahve and Abraham;[115] and the idea of sacrifice establishing a covenant between God and man is also apparent in the Psalms.[116] In various cases recorded in the Old Testament sacrifice is accompanied by a sacrificial meal;[117] “the god and his worshippers are wont to eat and drink together, and by this token their fellowship is declared and sealed.”[118] Robertson Smith and his followers have represented this as an act of communion, as a sacrament in which the whole kin—the god with his clansmen—unite, and in partaking of which each member renews his union with the god and with the rest of the clan. At first, we are told, the god—that is, the totem god—himself was eaten, whilst at a later stage the practice of eating the god was superseded by the practice of eating with the god. Communion still remains the core of sacrifice; and it is said that only subsequently the practice of offering gifts to the deity develops out of the sacrificial union between the worshippers and their god.[119] But I venture to think that the whole of this theory is based upon a misunderstanding of the Semitic evidence, and that existing beliefs in Morocco throw new light upon the covenant sacrifice.
[113] Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 318 sq.
[114] Exodus, xxiv. 4 sqq.
[115] Genesis, xv. 8 sqq.
[116] Psalms, l. 5.
[117] Genesis, xxxi. 54. Exodus, xxiv. 11. 1 Samuel, xi. 15. Wellhausen says (Prolegomena to the History of Israel, p. 71) that, according to the practice of the older period, a meal was nearly always connected with a sacrifice.
[118] Robertson Smith, op. cit. p. 271.