But as we follow Hebrew history, we soon find that cremation was transformed from a humiliating act of punition to the highest honor, to a distinction that was only accorded to royalty. The first king of Israel was cremated after the battle with the Philistines in Mount Gilboa, where he and his three sons fell. The Holy Bible relates how, when the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead heard of that which the Philistines had done to Saul (I. Samuel xxxi. 12): “All the valiant men arose, and went all night, and took the bodies of Saul and the bodies of his sons from the wall of Beth-shan, and came to Jabesh and burnt them there.”
And verse 13 of the same chapter informs us: “And they took their bones (ossilegio) and buried them under a tree at Jabesh and fasted seven days.”
Asa, king of Judah, was also consigned to the funeral pyre, as we glean from II. Chronicles xvi. 14: “And they buried him in his own sepulchres, which he had made for himself in the city of David, and laid him in the bed which was filled with sweet odors and divers kinds of spices prepared by the apothecaries’ art; and they made a very great burning of him.” Of Asa’s grandson, King Jehoram, it is said that his people cremated him not like his fathers, because he had furthered idolatry.
On the other hand, Isaiah xxx. 33 refers to a large pyre that was kept alight to consume the bodies of the deceased: “For Tophet is ordained of old; yea, for the king it is prepared; he hath made it deep and large; the pile thereof is fire and much wood; the breath of the Lord like a stream of brimstone doth kindle it.”
Jeremiah (xxxiv. 5) prophesied of Zedekiah, another king of Judah, that he would be burned with the same honors that attended the cremation of his predecessors. And in Amos vi. 10, we find the following, which also points to incineration: “And a man’s uncle shall take him up, and he that burneth him, to bring out the bones out of the house,” etc.
The last passage cited and the one mentioning the Vale of Tophet, are construed by some writers as meaning that the ancient Jews had recourse to cremation in great plagues; id est, for hygienic reasons.
Now, although these quotations plainly show that the Israelites of old did execute incineration, we also learn from them that the practice was never general; at first confined to criminals, at last to kings.
It is impossible to determine when the custom of burning the dead originated among the Hindoos. It was always connected with religious observances, and known to the people of India since the earliest times. It was restricted to certain classes or castes: mainly to Brahmins and warriors. The merchants, mechanics, and the tillers of the soil were interred. Children under two years of age were barred from cremation, and had to be buried in the earth. Some religious sects, however, were an exception from this rule and executed cineration indiscriminately—for instance the believers in Vishnu. When a Hindoo died away from home, or when his body was lost and could not be found, his relatives instituted a symbolical ceremony. They gathered 360 leaves of a certain shrub and as many woolen threads. They were under the impression that the human body consisted of 360 parts. Of the threads and leaves they formed a figure, somewhat resembling the human form, which was wound round with a strip of the hide of a black antelope, which had also been previously wrapped closely round with woolen thread. This figure was then besmeared with barley-meal and water and burnt as an effigy of the missing body.
From India cremation extended to Europe, and was adopted by all Indo-Germanic peoples. This was proven by Prof. Jacob Grimm in an oration on the burning of the dead, delivered before the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin, in 1849, in which the famous scholar highly commended the ancient custom.
In old tombs on the island of Malta, urns of a kind of clay containing ashes, lachrymatories, several mortuary lamps (some of excellent workmanship), and the model of a mummy, formed of a green semi-transparent substance, were found. This discovery demonstrates that the orientals who inhabited this isle of the Mediterranean in the earliest times were in the habit of cremating their deceased.