One more curious trait must be noted in the worship of Jahweh. Not only did he rejoice in human sacrifices, but he also demanded especially an offering of the firstborn, and he required a singular and significant ransom from every man-child whom he permitted to live among his peculiar votaries. On the fact of human sacrifices I need hardly insist: they were an integral part of all Semitic worship, and their occurrence in the cult of Jahweh has been universally allowed by all unprejudiced scholars. The cases of Agag, whom Samuel hewed to pieces before the face of Jahweh, and of Jephthah’s daughter, whom her father offered up as a thank-offering for his victory, though not of course strictly historical from a critical point of view, are quite sufficient evidence to show the temper and the habit of the Jahweh-worshippers who described them. So with the legend of the offering of Isaac, who is merely rescued at the last moment in order that the god of generation may make him the father of many thousands. Again, David seeks to pacify the anger of Jahweh by a sacrifice of seven of the sons of Saul. And the prophet Micah asks, “Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”—a passage which undoubtedly implies that in Micah’s time such a sacrifice of the eldest child was a common incident of current Jahweh-worship.
From human sacrifice to circumcision the transition is less violent than would at first sight appear. An intermediate type is found in the dedication of the first-born, where Jahweh seems to claim for himself, not as a victim, but as a slave and devotee, the first fruits of that increase which it is his peculiar function to ensure. In various laws, Jahweh lays claim to the first-born of man and beast,—sometimes to all, sometimes only to the male first-born. The animals were sacrificed; the sons, in later ages at least, were either made over as Nazarites or redeemed with an offering or a money-ransom. But we cannot doubt that in the earliest times the first-born child was slain before Jahweh. In the curious legend of Moses and Zipporah we get a strange folk-tale connecting this custom indirectly with the practice of circumcision. Jahweh seeks to kill Moses, apparently because he has not offered up his child: but Zipporah his wife takes a stone knife, circumcises her son, and flings the bloody offering at Jahweh’s feet, who thereupon lets her husband go. This, rather than the later account of its institution by Abraham, seems the true old explanatory legend of the origin of circumcision—a legend analogous to those which we find in Roman and other early history as embodying or explaining certain ancient customs or legal formulae. Circumcision, in fact, appears to be a bloody sacrifice to Jahweh, as the god of generation: a sacrifice essentially of the nature of a ransom, and therefore comparable to all those other bodily mutilations whose origin Mr. Herbert Spencer has so well shown in the Ceremonial Institutions.
At the same time, the nature of the offering helps to cast light upon the character of Jahweh as a god of increase; exactly as the “emerods” with which the Philistines were afflicted for the capture of Jahweh and his ark show the nature of the vengeance which might naturally be expected from a deity of generation.
Last of all, how is it that later Hebrew writers believed the object concealed in the ark to have been, not a phallic stone, but a copy of the “Ten Words” which Jahweh was fabled to have delivered to Moses? That would be difficult to decide: but here at least is an aperçu upon the subject which I throw out for what it may be worth. The later Hebrews, when their views of Jahweh had grown expanded and etherealised, were obviously ashamed of their old stone-worship, if indeed they were archaeologists enough after the captivity to know that it had ever really existed. What more natural, then, than for them to suppose that the stone which they heard of as having been enclosed in the ark was a copy of the “Ten Words,”—the covenant of Jahweh? Hence, perhaps, the later substitution of the term, “Ark of the Covenant,” for the older and correcter phrase, “Ark of Jahweh.” One more suggestion, still more purely hypothetical. Cones with pyramidal heads, bearing inscriptions to the deceased, were used by the Phoenicians for interments. It is just possible that the original Jahweh may have been such an ancient pillar, covered with writings of some earlier character, which were interpreted later as the equivalents or symbols of the “Ten Words.”
Putting all the evidence together, then, as far as we can now recover it, and interpreting it on broad anthropological lines by analogy from elsewhere, I should say the following propositions seem fairly probable:
The original religion of Israel was a mixed polytheism, containing many various types of gods, and based like all other religions upon domestic and tribal ancestor-worship. Some of the gods were of animal shapes: others were more or less vaguely anthropomorphic. But the majority were worshipped under the form of sacred stones, trees, or wooden cones. The greater part of these gods were Semitic in type, and common to the Sons of Israel with their neighbours and kinsmen. The character of the Hebrew worship, however, apparently underwent some slight modification in Egypt; or at any rate, Egyptian influences led to the preference of certain gods over others at the period of the Exodus. One god, in particular, Jahweh by name, seems to have been almost peculiar to the Sons of Israel,—their ethnical deity, and therefore in all probability an early tribal ancestor or the stone representative of such an ancestor. The legends are probably right in their implication that this god was already worshipped (not of course exclusively) by the Sons of Israel before their stay in Egypt; they are almost certainly correct in ascribing the great growth and extension of his cult to the period of the Exodus. The Sons of Israel, at least from the date of the Exodus onward, carried this god or his rude image with them in an ark or box through all their wanderings. The object so carried was probably a conical stone pillar, which we may conjecture to have been the grave-stone of some deified ancestor: and of this ancestor “Jahweh” was perhaps either the proper name or a descriptive epithet. Even if, as Colenso suggests, the name itself was Canaanitish, and belonged already to a local god, its application to the sacred stone of the ark would be merely another instance of the common tendency to identify the gods of one race or country with those of another. The stone itself was always enshrouded in Egyptian mystery, and no private person was permitted to behold it. Sacrifices, both human and otherwise, were offered up to it, as to the other gods, its fellow’s and afterwards its hated rivals. The stone, like other sacred stones of pillar shape, was regarded as emblematic of the generative power. Circumcision was a mark of devotion to Jahweh, at first, no doubt, either voluntary, or performed by way of a ransom, but becoming with the growth and exclusiveness of Jahweh-worship a distinctive rite of Jahweh’s chosen people. (But other Semites also circumcised themselves as a blood-offering to their own more or less phallic deities.)
More briefly still, among many Hebrew gods, Jahweh was originally but a single one, a tribal ancestor-god, worshipped in the form of a cylindrical stone, perhaps at first a grave-stone, and regarded as essentially a god of increase, a special object of veneration by childless women.
From this rude ethnical divinity, the mere sacred pillar of a barbarous tribe, was gradually developed the Lord God of later Judaism and of Christianity—a power, eternal, omniscient, almighty, holy; the most ethereal, the most sublime, the most superhuman deity that the brain of man has ever conceived. By what slow evolutionary process of syncretism and elimination, of spiritual mysticism and national enthusiasm, of ethical effort and imaginative impulse that mighty God was at last projected out of so unpromising an original it will be the task of our succeeding chapters to investigate and to describe.