But Jahweh was an object of portable size, for, omitting for the present the descriptions in the Pentateuch, which seem likely to be of late date, and not too trustworthy, through their strenuous Jehovistic editing, he was carried from Shiloh in his ark to the front during the great battle with the Philistines at Ebenezer; and the Philistines were afraid, for they said, “A god is come into the camp.” But when the Philistines captured the ark, the rival god, Dagon, fell down and broke in pieces—so Hebrew legend declared—before the face of Jahweh. After the Philistines restored the sacred object, it rested for a time at Kirjath-jearim, till David, on the capture of Jerusalem from the Jebusites, went down to that place to bring up from thence the ark of the god; and as it went, on a new cart, they “played before Jahweh on all manner of instruments,” and David himself “danced before Jahweh.” Jahweh was then placed in the tent or tabernacle that David had prepared for him, till Solomon built the first temple, “the house of Jahweh,” and Jahweh’s ark was set up in it, “in the oracle of the house, the most holy place, even under the wings of the cherubim.” Just so Mr. Chalmers tells us that when he was at Peran, in New Guinea, the peculiarly-shaped holy stone, Ravai, and the two wooden idols, Epe and Kivava, “made long ago and considered very sacred,” were for the moment “located in an old house, until all the arrangements necessary for their removal to the splendid new dubu prepared for them are completed.” And so, too, at the opposite end of the scale of civilisation, as Mr. Lang puts it, “the fetish-stones of Greece were those which occupied the holy of holies of the most ancient temples, the mysterious fanes within dark cedar or cypress groves, to which men were hardly admitted.”
That Jahweh himself, in the most ancient traditions of the race, was similarly concealed within his chest or ark in the holy of holies, is evident, I think, to any attentive reader. It is true, the later Jehovistic glosses of Exodus and Deuteronomy, composed after the Jehovistic worship had become purified and spiritualised, do their best to darken the comprehension of this matter by making the presence of Jahweh seem always incorporeal; and even in the earlier traditions, the phrase “the ark of the covenant of Jahweh” is often substituted for the simpler and older one, “the ark of Jahweh.” But through all the disfigurements with which the priestly scribes of the age of Josiah and the sacerdotalists of the return from the captivity have overlaid the primitive story, we can still see clearly in many places that Jahweh himself was at first personally present in the ark that covered him. And though the scribes (evidently ashamed of the early worship they had outlived) protest somewhat vehemently more than once, “There was nothing in the ark save the two tables of stone which Moses put there at Horeb, when Jahweh made a covenant with the children of Israel, when they came out of the land of Egypt,” yet this much at least even they admit—that the object or objects concealed in the ark consisted of a sculptured stone or stones; and that to dance or sing before this stone or these stones was equivalent to dancing or singing before the face of Jahweh.
The question whether the mysterious body concealed in the ark was or was not a lingam or other phallic object I purposely omit to discuss here, as not cognate to our present enquiry. It is sufficient to insist that from the evidence before us, first, it was Jahweh himself, and second, it was an object made of stone. Further than that ‘twere curious to enquire, and I for one do not desire to pry into the mysteries.
Not to push the argument too far, then, we may say this much is fairly certain. The children of Israel in early times carried about with them a tribal god, Jahweh, whose presence in their midst was intimately connected with a certain ark or chest, containing a stone object or objects. This chest was readily portable, and could be carried to the front in case of warfare. They did not know the origin of the object in the ark with certainty, but they regarded it emphatically as “Jahweh their god, which led them out of the land of Egypt.” Even after its true nature had been spiritualised away into a great national deity, the most unlimited and incorporeal the world has ever known (as we get him in the best and purest work of the prophets), the imagery of later times constantly returns to the old idea of a stone pillar or menhir. In the embellished account of the exodus from Egypt, Jahweh goes before the Israelites as a pillar or monolith of cloud by day and of fire by night. According to Levitical law his altar must be built of unhewn stone, “for if thou lift up thy tool upon it thou hast polluted it.” It is as a Rock that the prophets often figuratively describe Jahweh, using the half-forgotten language of an earlier day to clothe their own sublimer and more purified conceptions. It is to the Rock of Israel—the sacred stone of the tribe—that they look for succour. Nay, even when Josiah accepted the forged roll of the law and promised to abide by it, “the king stood by a pillar (a menhir) and made a covenant before Jahweh.” Even to the last we see in vague glimpses the real original nature of the worship of that jealous god who caused Dagon to break in pieces before him, and would allow no other sacred stones to remain undemolished within his tribal boundaries.
I do not see, therefore, how we can easily avoid the obvious inference that Jahweh, the god of the Hebrews, who later became sublimated and etherealised into the God of Christianity, was in his origin nothing more nor less than the ancestral sacred stone of the people of Israel, however sculptured, and perhaps, in the very last resort of all, the unhewn monumental pillar of some early Semitic sheikh or chieftain.
CHAPTER VI.—SACRED STAKES.
MILTON speaks in a famous sonnet of the time “when all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones.” That familiar and briefly contemptuous phrase of the Puritan poet does really cover the vast majority of objects of worship for the human race at all times and in all places. We have examined the stones; the stocks must now come in for their fair share of attention. They need not, however, delay us quite so long as their sister deities, both because they are on the whole less important in themselves, and because their development from grave-marks into gods and idols is almost absolutely parallel to that which we have already followed out in detail in the case of the standing stone or megalithic monument.
Stakes or wooden posts are often used all the world over as marks of an interment. Like other grave-marks, they also share naturally in the honours paid to the ghost or nascent god. But they are less important as elements in the growth of religion than standing stones for two distinct reasons. In the first place, a stake or post most often marks the interment of a person of little social consideration; chiefs and great men have usually stone monuments erected in their honour; the commonalty have to be satisfied with wooden marks, as one may observe to this day at Père Lachaise, or any other great Christian cemetery. In the second place, the stone monument is far more lasting and permanent than the wooden one. Each of these points counts for something. For it is chiefs and great men whose ghosts most often grow into gods; and it is the oldest ghosts, the oldest gods, the oldest monuments that are always the most sacred. For both these reasons, then, the stake is less critical than the stone in the history of religion.