The Child in Human Progress

by George Henry Payne

The period of the Judges was the period of the formation of the nation, and had there not been all around them reminders of their own previous nomadic habits, and had they been a less excitable people, there would not have been the recurrence to barbaric traits that we find. Even then, the progress of the Israelites in humanitarianism is unique in the world. From the settlement in Canaan, which was about 1200 B. C., until the birth of Christ, they suffered conquest, disintegration, and many afflictions, but progressed steadily in humanitarianism. In that time the Greeks rose and fell, achieving great intellectual and æsthetic perfection, but failing to even approach the Israelites in humanity. A few hundred years after the settlement in Canaan, the Romans appear as a civilized people and, aided by a transplanted stoicism, developed a great humanitarianism under the Emperors Trajan and Hadrian; the last named, however, despite his greatness, indissolubly linked with the degeneracy that was the mark of Greek self-centredness, or lack of humanity, as Mahaffy calls it.

The transition from idealism to nationalism is never affected with impunity, says Renan, and so the growing nation suffered in its material growth and through the insistence that Yahweh “loved Israel and hated all the rest of the world.”[239] Baal and Yahweh were not far apart and at Sechem there was a Baal-berith, or Baal covenant, which the idolators worshipped as Baal, and the Israelites as Yahweh.[240] “If the religion of Israel had not gone beyond this phase, it is certainly the last religion to which the world would have rallied.”[241]

It is in this period that we have the story of Jephthah, an outcast, the head of banditti and an illegitimate son, who was asked by the Israelites of Gilead to help them against the Ammonites. Jephthah vowed that if he should be successful he would sacrifice to Yahweh the first thing that met him on his return from the campaign, and the first thing to meet him was his daughter. “And he sent her away for two months and she went with her companions and bewailed her virginity upon the mountains. And it came to pass that at the end of two months that she returned unto her father who did with her according to the vow which he had vowed.”[242]

It is suggested by Renan that what probably happened was that Jephthah, before undertaking a difficult war, sacrificed one of his daughters according to the barbarous custom put into practice on solemn occasions when the country was in danger. “Patriarchal deism,” he says, “had condemned these immolations; Yahwehism with its exclusively national principle was rather favourable to them. Not many human sacrifices were offered to God nor to the Elohim. The gods whom they thought to propitiate by means of human sacrifices were the patriot gods, Camos of the Moabites, Moloch of the Canaanites, Melqarth of Carthage.”[243]

The coming of David was the triumph of Yahweh over the contending religions, though, as modern critics have pointed out, there was little humanitarianism in the semi-barbarous poet. When there was a three years’ famine in the land it was ascribed to the wrong done the Gibeonites by Saul and the Gibeonites were allowed to say what should be the sacrifice to atone for the wrong. The ancient historian records the fact that they asked that they might be allowed to hang the seven sons of Saul, and this was done. The sacrifice was asked for by the Gibeonites and it was for the purpose of ending the famine, but, incidentally, it enabled David to get rid of those who stood in his way.[244]

A few hundred years later, in the ninth century, we find the effect of the sacrifice of the first-born telling on the Israelites even though at that time it is evident that they themselves have given up human sacrifice. Jehoram, King of Israel, and Jehosophat, King of Judah, united to defeat the remarkable King of Moab, Mesha. The combined forces drove him within his strong fortifications of Kir-Haraseth and when he found that there was no way of escape, as a last resort:

“He took his eldest son, that should have reigned in his stead, and offered him for a burnt offering upon the wall. And they [the Israelites] departed from him and returned to their own land.”

The efficacy of the sacrifice is hereby admitted although it was offered to Camos and not to Yahweh. The ancient historian says nothing in extenuation of the effect. Ewald suggests that Yahweh, full of bitterness[245] against Israel for having driven the King of Moab to such a deed of fearful bravery, filled the army full of terror. Renan, however, suggests that though they did not then offer human sacrifices themselves, the Israelites still had the fullest faith in their efficacy and retired lest they be defeated.

Coming nearer, to a period that is contemporaneous with that which is revealed in the excavations at Gezer and Tell Ta’Annek, we have the direct statement in Kings and Chronicles[246] that Ahaz, the eleventh King of Judah (about 741 to 725 B. C.), “made his son pass through the fire.” To gain the aid of Tiglath-Pileser against the Edomites and the Philistines he became a vassal of the Assyrian monarch and his name appears among the names of those who acknowledged his sovereignty and paid tribute.