In every one of these passages, and in many more which need not be quoted, but which will readily occur to every reader, Jahweh is represented especially as a god of increase, of generation, of populousness, of fertility. As such, too, we find him frequently and markedly worshipped on special occasions. He was the god to whom sterile women prayed, and from whom they expected the special blessing of a son, to keep up the cult of the family ancestors. This trait survived even into the poetry of the latest period. “He maketh the barren woman to keep house,” says a psalmist about Jahweh, “and to be a joyful mother of children.” And from the beginning to the end of Hebrew legend we find a similar characteristic of the ethnical god amply vindicated. When Sarah is old and well stricken in years, Jahweh visits her and she conceives Isaac. Then Isaac in turn “intreated Jahweh for his wife, because she was barren; and Jahweh was intreated of him, and Rebekah his wife conceived.” Again, “when Jahweh saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb; but Rachel was barren.” Once more, of the birth of Samson we are told that Manoah’s wife “was barren and bare not”: but “the angel of Jahweh appeared unto the woman and said unto her, Behold, now thou art barren and bearest not; but thou shalt conceive and bear a son.” And of Hannah we are told, even more significantly, that Jahweh had “shut up her womb.” At the shrine of Jahweh at Shiloh, therefore, she prayed to Jahweh that this disgrace might be removed from her and that a child might be born to her. If she bore “a man child,” she would offer him up all his life long as an anchorite to Jahweh, to be a Nazarite of the Lord, an ascetic and a fanatic. “Jahweh remembered her,” and she bore Samuel. And after that again, “Jahweh visited Hannah, so that she conceived and bare three sons and two daughters.” In many other passages we get the self-same trait: Jahweh is regarded above everything as a god of increase and a giver of offspring. “Children are a heritage from Jahweh,” says the much later author of a familiar ode: “the fruit of the womb are a reward from him.”
It is clear, too, that this desire for children, for a powerful clan, for the increase of the people, was a dominant one everywhere in Ephraim and in Judah. “Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine,” says Jahweh to his votary by the mouth of the poet; “thy children like olive plants round about thy table.” “Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them,” says another psalmist; “they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.” Again and again the promise is repeated that the seed of Abraham or of Joseph or of Ishmael shall be numerous as the stars of heaven or the sands of the sea: Jahweh’s chief prerogative is evidently the gift of increase, extended often to cattle and asses, but always including at least sons and daughters. If Israel obeys Jahweh, says the Deuteronomist, “Jahweh will make thee plenteous for good in the fruit of thy belly, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground”: but if otherwise, then “cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.”
Now, elsewhere throughout the world we find in like manner a certain class of phallic gods who are specially conceived as givers of fertility, and to whom prayers and offerings are made by barren women who desire children. And the point to observe is that these gods are usually (perhaps one might even say always) embodied in stone pillars or upright monoliths. The practical great god of India—the god whom the people really worship—is Mahadeo; and Mahadeo is, as we know, a cylinder of stone, to whom the linga puja is performed, and to whom barren women pray for offspring. There are sacred stones in western Europe, now crowned by a cross, at which barren women still pray to God and the Madonna, or to some local saint, for the blessing of children. It is allowed that while the obelisk is from one point of view (in later theory) a ray of the sun, it is from another point of view (in earlier origin) a “symbol of the generative power of nature,”—which is only another way of saying that it is an ancestral stone of phallic virtue. In short, without laying too much stress upon the connexion, we may conclude generally that the upright pillar came early to be regarded, not merely as a memento of the dead and an abode of the ghost or indwelling god, but also in some mysterious and esoteric way as a representative of the male and generative principle.
If we recollect that the stone pillar was often identified with the ancestor or father, the reason for this idea will not perhaps be quite so hard to understand. “From these stones we are all descended,” thinks the primitive worshipper: “these are our fathers; therefore, they are the givers of children, the producers and begetters of all our generations, the principle of fertility, the proper gods to whom to pray for offspring.” Add that many of them, being represented as human, or human in their upper part at least, grow in time to be ithyphallic, like Priapus, party by mere grotesque barbarism, but partly also as a sign of the sex of the deceased: and we can see the naturalness of this easy transition. From the Hermæ of the Greeks to the rude phallic deities of so many existing savage races, we get everywhere signs of this constant connexion between the sacred stone and the idea of paternity. Where the stone represents the grave of a woman, the deity of course is conceived as a goddess, but with the same implications. Herodotus saw in Syria stelæ engraved with the female pudenda. The upright stone god is thus everywhere and always liable to be regarded as a god of fruitfulness.
But did this idea of the stone pillar extend to Palestine and to the Semitic nations? There is evidence that it did, besides that of Herodotus. Major Conder, whose opinion on all questions of pure archaeology (as opposed to philology) deserves the highest respect, says of Canaanitish times, “The menhir, or conical stone, was the emblem throughout Syria of the gods presiding over fertility, and the cup hollows which have been formed in menhirs and dolmens are the indications of libations, often of human blood, once poured on these stones by early worshippers.” He connects these monuments with the linga cult of India, and adds that Dr. Chaplin has found such a cult still surviving near the Sea of Galilee. Lucian speaks of the two great pillars at the temple of Hierapolis as phalli. Of the Phoenicians Major Conder writes: “The chief emblem worshipped in the temples was a pillar or cone, derived no doubt from the rude menhirs which were worshipped by early savage tribes, such as Dravidians, Arabs, Celts, and Hottentots.” That they were originally sepulchral in character we can gather from the fact that “they often stood beneath trilithons or dolmens, or were placed before an altar made by a stone laid flat on an upright base.” “The representations on early Babylonian cylinders of tables whereon a small fire might be kindled, or an offering of some small object laid, seem to indicate a derivation from similar structures. The original temple in which the cone and its shrine, or its altar, were placed, was but a cromlech or enclosure, square or round, made by setting up stones.” Remains of such enclosures, with dolmens on one side, are found at various spots in Moab and Phoenicia. Nothing could be more obviously sepulchral in character than these rude shrines or Gilgals, with the pillar or gravestone, from which, as Major Conder suggests, the hypæthral temples of Byblos and Baalbek are finally developed.
That Jahweh himself in his earliest form was such a stone god, the evidence, I think, though not perhaps exactly conclusive, is to say the least extremely suggestive. I have already called attention to it in a previous chapter, and need not here recapitulate it in full; but a few stray additions may not be without value. Besides the general probability, among a race whose gods were so almost universally represented by sacred stones, that any particular god, unless the contrary be proved, was so represented, there is the evidence of all the later language, and of the poems written after the actual stone god himself had perished, that Jahweh was still popularly regarded as, at least in a metaphorical sense, a stone or rock. “He is the Rock,” says the Deuteronomist, in the song put into the mouth of Moses; “I will publish the name of Jahweh; ascribe greatness unto our god.” “Jahweh liveth, and blessed be my rock,” says the hymn which a later writer composes for David in the Second Book of Samuel: “exalted be the god of the rock of my salvation.” And in the psalms the image recurs again and again: “Jahweh is my rock and my fortress”; “Who is a god save Jahweh, and who is a rock save our god?”; “He set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings”; “Lead me to the rock that is greater than I”; “Jahweh is my defence, and my god is the rock of my refuge”; “O come, let us sing to Jahweh; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.” And that the shape of this stone was probably that of a rounded pillar, bevelled at the top, we see in the fact that later ages pictured to themselves their transfigured Jahweh as leading the Sons of Israel in the wilderness as a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by daytime.
The earlier Israelites, however, had no such poetical illusions. To them, their god Jahweh was simply the object—stone pillar or otherwise—preserved in the ark or chest which long rested at Shiloh, and which was afterwards enshrined, “between the thighs of the building” (as a later gloss has it), in the Temple at Jerusalem. The whole of the early traditions embedded in the books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings show us quite clearly that Jahweh himself was then regarded as inhabiting the ark, and as carried about with it from place to place in all its wanderings. The story of the battle with the Philistines at Eben-ezer, the fall of Dagon before the rival god, the fortunes of the ark after its return to the Israelitish people, the removal to Jerusalem by David, the final enthronement by Solomon, all distinctly show that Jahweh in person dwelt within the ark, between the guardian cherubim. “Who is able to stand before the face of Jahweh, this very sacred god?” ask the men of Bethshemesh, when they ventured to look inside that hallowed abode, and were smitten down by the “jealous god” who loved to live in the darkness of the inmost sanctuary. *
* Mr. William Simpson has some excellent remarks on the
analogies of the Egyptian and Hebrew arks and sanctuaries in
his pamphlet on The Worship of Death.
It may be well to note in this connexion two significant facts: Just such an ark was used in Egypt to contain the sacred objects or images of the gods. And further, at the period when the Sons of Israel were tributaries in Egypt, a Theban dynasty ruled the country, and the worship of the great Theban phallic deity, Khem, was widely spread throughout every part of the Egyptian dominions.
Is there, however, any evidence of a linga or other stone pillar being ever thus enshrined and entempled as the great god of a sanctuary? Clearly, Major Conder has already supplied some, and more is forthcoming from various other sources. The cone which represented Aphrodite in Cyprus was similarly enshrined as the chief object of a temple, as were the stelæ of all Egyptian mummies. “The trilithon,” says Major Conder, “becomes later a shrine, in which the cone or a statue stands.” The significance of this correlation will at once be seen if the reader remembers how, in the chapter on Sacred Stones, I showed the origin of the idol from the primitive menhir or upright pillar. “The Khonds and other non-Aryan tribes in India,” says Conder once more, “build such temples of rude stones, daubed with red,—a survival of the old practice of anointing the menhirs and the sacred cone or pillar with blood of victims, sometimes apparently human. Among the Indians, the pillar is a lingam, and such apparently was its meaning among the Phoenicians.” And in the Greek cities we know from Pausanias that an unhewn stone was similarly enshrined in the most magnificent adytum of the noblest Hellenic temples. In fact, it was rather the rule than otherwise that a stone was the chief object of worship in the noblest fanes.