CHAPTER IX
SEMITIC DEVELOPMENT IN CANAAN—SACRIFICE OF THE FIRST-BORN PERSISTS—ORIGIN OF THE IDEA OF SACRIFICE—THE CUSTOM WORLD-WIDE AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES—ASSOCIATED WITH CANNIBALISM—THE FOUNDATION SACRIFICE—DISCOVERIES IN PALESTINE.
IN treating of the Semitic race—a race that gave to humanity the Bible and the Koran, a race that founded Judaism, Christianity, and Islamism—its attitude will be better understood if we approach it through the tribes whose religions and humanitarian ideas were eventually to become the religions and humanitarian ideas of the civilized world.
The beginning of the nation of Israel was the result of the frequent immigration into Palestine of Semites who fused with the aborigines and formed the Phœnician or Canaanitish people. From the time of Lugalzaggisi (about 4000 B. C.) there were successive Babylonian immigrations also, and from 1500 B. C. onward there were added to this mixture the Aramean tribes that had previously inhabited the highlands between the Mesopotamian Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. Originally pure nomads, the Israelites after settling in Canaan became excellent agriculturists,[192] and there developed the worship of Yahweh—“the worship of no other god contributing to the sum of humanity’s ethical ideas and spiritual conceptions a tithe of the value of that contributed by the worshippers of Yahweh.”[193]
These nomadic Semites when they settled in Palestine about 1000 B. C., after years of wandering, had many of the characteristics of a highly cultivated people but they also had the habits of the nomadic people that had originally come out of Arabia. Many too were the lapses into the ways of primitive people during the four hundred years of their wandering after their life in Goshen.[194]
If, as has been said, three generations without education would reduce the civilized peoples of today to savagery, the proneness of the Semites to fall back into godless ways may be well understood; so too one may well understand the protests and lashings of the prophets who saw their people retrograding.
When the Israelites began to write their own history they were a highly developed race in which there were few traces of early savagery, but the habit of sacrificing the firstling was a remnant of earlier economic stress that had passed into their religion. In order to understand the Israelite branch of the Semitic race and how it was possible for it to produce, on the one hand, the humanitarian ideas that rule the world today, when at practically the same time its leaders were protesting against savage sacrifices, but a step removed from cannibalism, one can do no better than to quote the eloquent and learned Chwolson, though his theory of the innate quality of a race is open to serious objections.
Commenting on the fundamental causes of the peculiarities of a people, one of which he says is the nature of “its heart and nervous system,” he thus describes the disposition of the Israelites[195]: