§ 2. Here, however, we have to notice a peculiarity of Hebrew development resulting from the occupation of Canaan.
Politically, the Hebrew nation on settling in Canaan had power to annihilate a few small tribes which before the occupation had held the middle of the land. But they brought with them a minimum of civilisation and mental endowments, and intellectually had nothing to oppose to the long-established civilisation of the old inhabitants,[[607]] and especially of the neighbouring Phenicians, who even then were the ancient occupiers of a great historical position. In mercantile and industrial respects, especially, they were very dependent on that nation, which was the chief bearer of the commerce and industry of antiquity.[[608]] How should the Hebrews have risen above such dependence? for the Phenicians exerted a powerful intellectual influence not only upon the mentally inferior tribes of Canaan, but also upon the western nations with which they held intercourse; as in recent times Ewald has again strongly asserted.[[609]] Notwithstanding the contradiction of some scholars who depreciate Phenician civilisation,[[610]] this seems to be tolerably well established.
There is a phenomenon which has been repeated countless times in the history of the world. A conquered people intellectually superior to its conquerors may, any political dependence notwithstanding, enforce its intellectual preeminence by assimilating to itself the nation which has succeeded to its dominion. The political victor has no power to incorporate the mind of the subjugated, if the latter possesses a higher civilisation than his own. For example, the Hyksôs, who were strong enough to annihilate the rule of the Egyptians in the Delta, could found no independent civilisation in the conquered land, but made the Egyptian culture entirely their own. And when the Aztecs, or more strictly the second horde of the Chichimecs (Northmen), coming from Aztlan and California, overwhelmed Anahuac in the twelfth century, and subjugated the Toltecs, a people which had already attained a certain degree of civilisation, it was again the conquered that imparted their culture to the conquerors. All the elements of civilisation—arts, manners, rights, usages, writing, etc.—which the Spanish conquerors found existing among the Aztecs, had been received by them from the conquered Toltecs, to whose intellectual influence they were forced to accommodate themselves, not having anything more potent of their own to impart.[[611]] The same is seen in China, first in the tenth and again in the seventeenth century. The victorious Khitem dynasty, as later the Manchu dynasty, which still holds the sceptre of the Middle Kingdom, could only accept and advance the native civilisation and the peculiarities of the old Chinese nation. And who can help thinking of the often-quoted instance of the Franks as conquerors of Gaul? And the relation of the Normans to the population of France conquered by them is most curious. The conquerors lost their mother-tongue in favour of the French, took to themselves French institutions, laws and customs, and actually transplanted subsequently the French language to England.[[612]] The same phenomenon is also encountered on the domain of Religion.[[613]] For the Phenicians, to whom we recur, it was the easier to establish their system, as they came as conquerors to places where they found a population intellectually inferior to themselves. When by the foundation of Carthage they gained an establishment in Northern Africa, they exerted an influence on the Libyans which almost suppressed everything native. ‘Phenician civilisation prevailed in Libya just as Greek in Asia Minor and Syria after Alexander’s campaigns, if not with equal force. At the courts of the nomad Sheikhs Phenician was spoken and written, and the civilised native tribes took the Phenician alphabet for their languages; but it was neither the spirit of the Phenicians nor the policy of Carthage to Phenicise them entirely.’[[614]] But this very Phenician language, which as bearer of a higher civilisation suppressed the language of surrounding tribes and the civilisation connected with them, had in its turn to step into the background. A civilisation of superior force and intensity, the Arabian, assailed it, and put the Arabic language of the conquerors of North Africa in the place of that of the Carthaginian colonies. Renan is wrong in asserting, ‘L’arabe n’absorba que les dialectes qui lui étaient congénères, tels que le syriaque, le chaldéen, le samaritain. Partout ailleurs, il ne put effacer les idiomes établis.’[[615]] We will not here enter on an enquiry, to what extent Arabic in the middle ages and in modern times has supplanted other idioms. But two considerations must be suggested in answer to Renan’s thesis.
The first is, that it is difficult to see what power a relationship of language like that between Arabic and Phenician can possess to cause the weaker civilisation connected with one of the languages in question to be supplanted by the stronger civilisation belonging to the other; when the relationship is so remote as to be clearly understood only by linguists, and neither known to ordinary people speaking either tongue, nor even instinctively felt by the popular mind (if any such instinct can be allowed in psychology). Indeed Semitic philologists themselves, even with the knowledge of one or more of the Semitic dialects besides their mother-tongue, arrived comparatively late at acknowledgment of this relationship.[[616]] It is easy to understand how within the bounds of the Arabic tongue the Northern dialect supplanted the Southern, when the Northern tribes, especially that of Kureysh, gained the political and social hegemony over Arabia, and their dialect was written down and introduced into literature. Here, to say nothing of political and religious causes, the extraordinary similarity of the two shades of the Arabic language, of which the commonest Arab could not but be conscious, made the suppression of the one in favour of the other easy; we have frequent opportunities of observing the same in the dialects of European languages. But it is not so easy to conceive that a relationship in language which is only to be discovered by learned research can promote the process of suppression of dialects. To the Arab, Syriac is as foreign as French or any perfectly strange tongue. Botrus al-Bustâni, an eminent savant at Beyrût, the compiler of a dictionary of his native language and active editor of several Arabic journals, had no fewer difficulties to overcome when he devoted himself to the study of the Syriac language in the Maronite convents of Lebanon, than when he learned English by intercourse with Dr. Van Dijk at the American Protestant Mission; perhaps even greater, as in the latter case mouth-to-mouth intercourse removed many difficulties. A Maronite priest at Damascus assured me that the acquisition of the Italian language gave him but few hard nuts to crack, whilst in the language of his Syriac Church he could not get further than the elements which were indispensable to his office. The Fin found no special difficulty in becoming Swedish, because Swedish is a Teutonic and Finnish a Ugrian language. In Hungary, during a long subjection to the Turks, Turkish had no appreciable effect on the language, except in lending a few words, although Hungarian and Turkish belong to one and the same group of languages. Hence when one language ousts another, it is not their relationship, but solely the superiority of the one people in intellect and matters of culture that determines the result.
The second answer to Renan is that it is historically untrue that Arabic could conquer only cognate idioms, but elsewhere had no power to oust the native tongues. Where is the Coptic now? a once powerful language having no connexion with Arabic, the vernacular use of which in Egypt was totally annihilated by the Arabic. The dialects of the Negro countries are beginning to give place more and more to the Arabic, and their ultimate defeat in the contest with that language will be hastened by the advances of the power of the Viceroy over the equatorial regions.
This is the great struggle for existence on the domain of Mind—a struggle which the Hebrews, with the small amount of culture that they brought to Canaan, could not sustain, nor even attempt, against the settled population and the neighbouring powerful Canaanites of the coast. On this a basis could be found for a hypothesis which has never had any other foundation of the least firmness. It is now revived by Professor J.G. Müller of Basle.[[617]] The Hebrews, we are told, originally spoke a different language not connected with that of Canaan; but, not being able to bring it into general use in their new country, gave it up, and took over from the Canaanites the language that we call Hebrew, which really possesses a far more palpable similarity to all known relics of the old idioms of Canaan than is the case with languages which though connected, are intrinsically distinct. And assuredly the consideration of the lately found Moabitish monument, the column of victory of King Mesha, which shows us a form of language perfectly intelligible by the aid of the Hebrew grammar and the Hebrew lexicon, and an historical style indistinguishable from that of the Hebrews, involuntarily suggests the thought that we ought to speak rather of identity than of connexion of languages. Even the Phenician language, though not, as many erroneously suppose, absolutely identical with Hebrew, nor even so near to it as the more Southern language of Moab, exhibits a far closer relationship with the latter than is generally found between different languages of the same family.[[618]] Phenician was certainly not an idiom unintelligible to the Hebrews; and indeed a Hebrew prophet even calls his mother-tongue the ‘language of Canaan’ (sephath Kenaʿan, Is. XIX. 18). The idea that the Hebrews changed their language in Canaan possesses, indeed, no high degree of probability, especially in so extreme and violent a form as is given to it by J.G. Müller—least of all for us, inasmuch as the nomadic myth of the Hebrews, which was created quite independently of Canaan, never contains any but Hebrew names. But in matters of culture and manners, in which the Hebrews, only just working their way up out of the nomadic stage, still held a very primitive position at their entrance into Canaan, they were most certainly influenced by the conquered original inhabitants and by their powerful neighbours. These influences were immediately perceptible in the form given to Religion and to social and political institutions. The Hebrews did not possess sufficient resistant force of mind to work the solar elements of their own myth into a religion suitable to an agricultural people, and had no strength to repel the Canaanitish Solar religion, which must have been already long growing into completeness from an old Canaanitish Solar myth; they could not accept the challenge, but yielded. With general notions of religion they also adopted its forms and institutes—the Temples, which bear the same relation to the Sukkôth used for Divine worship as the fixed house of the townsman to the hut of the nomad; the High places;[[619]] the sacred Trees and Woods; the Human Sacrifices; the Priesthood, whose relation to the Sons of Levi among the nomads again resembles that of a powerful dynasty to the family of a Bedawî Sheikh; the Ritual of Sacrifice, and much besides. With the religion and religious institutions of the Canaanites, their religious terminology was also naturalised among the Hebrews. The Phenician title of the Priest, Kôhên—Κοίης (Hellenised from Κοίην) ἱερεὺς Καβείρων ὁ καθαίρων φονέα· ὁι δὲ κοής (Hesychius)—became among the Hebrews also the official name of the public sacrificers; and the fact that a derivative verb was formed from it proves it to have become completely naturalised in ordinary speech.[[620]] The extant monuments of the sacrificial ritual of the Phenicians, viz., the so-called Sacrificial Tablet of Marseilles, discovered in 1845, and the Carthaginian Sacrificial documents published more recently by Davis,[[621]] place before our eyes much the same as we have in part of the Book of Leviticus; and it is to be assumed that, although, after the profound investigations of Graf[[622]] and Zunz,[[623]] the Post-Captivity origin of that book is impressed with increasing urgency on our conviction, still the Sacrificial laws contained in it are only a codification of older regulations which arose and were in force in sacerdotal circles at the time of the Hebrew dominion in Canaan, but were not, and ought not to be, known to the people, as they referred only to priestly functions. It would be inconceivable that a regular sacrificial worship could exist without such arrangements and fixed ritual. Among the Carthaginians the contents of these sacrificial tables, with the ordinances and apportionments to be found on them, had canonical validity, and were not occasional or arbitrary orders. That this is so, is to be inferred from the fact that the sacrificial tariff discovered by Davis in the ruins of Carthage exhibits only an abridged edition of the Marseilles Tablet, which also was derived from Carthage.[[624]]
Not only religious, but also social and political institutions were introduced from the Phenicians into the public life of the Hebrews. How else could a nation passing suddenly without political experience from nomadic to civil life produce those institutions without which a nation can neither constitute itself as a state nor continue to exist? Thus we find among the Hebrews from the beginning the Shôpheṭîm (Judges), who are known as Suffetes of the Carthaginians from Livy and the Inscriptions. It must be assumed that, although this institution is not distinctly proved to have existed in the mother-country, its root is to be sought there; which harmonises well with the highly developed civic constitution of the Phenicians. To draw an inference from the institutions of the colonies to those of the mother-country must here, as in other cases also, be treated as perfectly justifiable. Let it be remembered that we should have no knowledge even of the elaborate system of priests and sacrifices among the Phenicians, but for two remarkable monuments of antiquity: the Tablets of Marseilles and of Carthage. On one of the most important elements of Phenician religious life, therefore, information is only to be found in the colonies; and the same must certainly be true of social and political questions. In the present case it is sure to be allowable, as the official name Shôphêṭ is found in a Greek translation used of Tyre and Sidon. It must not indeed be supposed that the Shôpheṭîm of the Hebrews can be placed exactly beside the Phenician Suffetes. Whilst the latter is a permanent dignity and a fixed institution, the Shôpheṭîm of the Hebrews are not so much officials as a sort of duces ex virtute, ‘who might come and go without any alteration in the legal bases of the state,’ as Ewald says.[[625]] But if we have to allow that the Hebrew Shôpheṭîm are not holders of so fixed an office as their namesakes in Phenicia, but were only guerilla-chiefs in times of pressure of war, yet Phenician influence cannot be denied, when we see that, just when the nomadic tribal divisions were beginning to grow very loose and to make way for town-life, these chiefs were called by a name identical with the official name of certain Phenician dignitaries of rather different character. It is evident from this that the Hebrews regarded their provisional chiefs as equivalents of these Phenician officers of state; they apperceived them, so to speak, by an idea derived from Phenicia. But, on the other hand, this view of the influence of the Shôpheṭîm rests on the picture of their actions given in the ‘Book of Judges.’ Now it must not be forgotten that many of these Judges’ names are mythical (as Samson, Jephthah, Gideon), used to fill up a period which to posterity was a mere blank with no historical contents, except the bare fact of a continuous contest with the Philistines. This historical frame, as we shall soon see, is filled with myths, which, when reinterpreted in a national sense, yield a supply of national heroes, who then can be introduced as Shôpheṭîm. But the harmonising of national stories was not pushed to a sufficient degree of continuity to form a foundation for a fixed historical picture. It is therefore better, in forming our judgment on the dignity of the so-called Judges, to allow ourselves to be determined more by the name Shôpheṭîm itself than by the nature of the nationalised myths attached to it. Grätz[[626]] has quite recently renewed the attempt to render doubtful the existence of the Shôpheṭîm-institution among the Hebrews, and especially combated any connexion of the Shôpheṭîm with the Punic Suffetes; and in this the judgment of the most competent professional authorities is on his side. But, not to speak of his view of the Shôpheṭîm as representatives of an institution, he sets up a linguistic conjecture which arouses many a doubt. For it requires strong etymological imagination to deny to the Hebrew word shâphaṭ the signification judicare. Sober Biblical students and philologists will not be imposed on by the passages quoted by Grätz in justification and support of his conjecture. Not to mention other passages, compare only the words of Is. I. 17, 23 with the passages of Scripture which, Grätz says, speak of rushing up to the aid of ‘oppressed or injured persons, widows and orphans.’ The word rîbh is not calculated to support this conjecture. But, that the Shôpheṭîm, though not hereditary nor even paid officers of state (as no one would pretend they were), were yet certainly heads of the state, appointed by the voice of the people, is proved by the mere fact that the Shôphêṭ was regarded in the same light as the Melekh, as a species of the same genus. So e.g. in Judges IX. 6, 16, where the instalment of a Shôphêṭ is denoted by hamlîkh, and Judges XVII. 6, XVIII. 1, XXI. 25, where the interregnum between one Shôphêṭ and the next is described as a time ‘in which no melekh (king) reigned over Israel, and every one could do what was right in his own eyes.’ And the consideration of the word Shôphêṭ itself leads to the conviction that the office was an institution suggested by Phenician custom. For it is found in no other Semitic language in the same signification as in these two dialects of Canaan.[[627]] The Samaritan, in which Shâphâṭ is also found,[[628]] scarcely requires separate mention. So the Hebrews, as was so often the case, must have borrowed the term shôphêṭ, together with the corresponding institution, from their cultivated neighbours; for it cannot be assumed that the expression for an idea implying so advanced a stage of civilisation as Judge had its origin in the primeval age of ethnological community between Hebrews and Canaanites. And later, when the Hebrews began to appreciate the institution of Kingship, as existing in many neighbouring nations,[[629]] and wished to be ruled by kings, the theocratic historian himself describes this innovation as borrowed, making the people say to the prophet Samuel, ‘Give us a King to judge us, as all the nations [have a king], that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles’ (1 Sam. VIII. 5, 20). Even concerning the political subjection of the tribes of Canaan, it has long been perceived that this was by no means so complete as is commonly supposed, but that the Canaanitish element in the centre of the Hebrew dominion was powerful enough[[630]] to nourish exterior religious or civilising influences. A somewhat later didactic poet exclaims, ‘They did not destroy the nations which Jahveh told them [to destroy]; but mixed with the nations and learned their works’ (Ps. CVI. 34 seq.). To this time belongs the naturalisation of theological terms and consequently of theological conceptions, for the independent working out of which the Hebrews had not passed through the necessary historical experience and continuous religious stages, but in which the history of the religion of the Canaanites found its natural result. At the time when the nomadic nation of the Hebrews entered Canaan, it first, so to speak, produced out of the ancient myth the first elements of a religion; we cannot speak of a system of religion existing in that age. In the Canaanitish peoples, on the other hand, a systematical religion had already been formed. Even independently of the preponderating spiritual influence of the native population, it was particularly natural to the Hebrews to attach themselves to their system, as community of language familiarised them with much of the religious terminology of the Canaanites. Ever since the Hebrews had by their own efforts begun to have any religious ideas, they called every power which they regarded as divine Êl and Shadday ‘the Powerful;’ and as these Powers (which they also called Elôhîm, i.e. ‘the Worshipped’ or ‘the Feared’) were seen by them on the dark sky, Êl was also called ʿElyôn ‘the Highest’ (a synonym of Abh-râm). To the Hebrews these names were not yet exclusively theological, termini technici of religion. Religion itself had not yet grown so stiff and fixed as to have taken from such names their appellative character: and that of Elôhîm and ʿElyôn continued to the latest times. But with the Canaanites even at that early age these ancient Semitic expressions had been already employed long enough in a theological sense to take the step which converted them into a religious terminology. Many synonyms of the terms in question are found among the Phenicians as religious terms, and among the Hebrews (when the words are equally native there) in a completely appellative sense, e.g. Baʿal ‘Lord,’ Kabbîr ‘Great, Powerful.’
This community of language greatly promoted the introduction of Canaanitish religion among the Hebrews. Although the above-mentioned names impressed the Hebrews differently, being not yet limited to a specially religious signification, yet the knowledge of their meaning as words, which was native to the Hebrews, promoted the acquisition of the ritual attached to them by the Canaanites. Thus it came to pass that besides Êl, Elôhîm, ʿElyôn, Shadday, even Baʿal received worship from the Hebrews in Canaan, of which the Biblical documents often speak (and he is not likely to have been the only divine person borrowed from the Phenicians), and that those names which had previously begun to assume a religious sense were, by intellectual as well as practical intercourse with the Canaanites, filled with the force they had to the Canaanites. It is therefore the exact opposite of the real state of things to call the Elôhîm-idea specially Hebrew, and make Jahveism Canaanitish, as some Dutch theologians do. It is equally impossible to suppose the names themselves to have been unknown till then to the Hebrews, as J.G. Müller infers in connexion with his ethnological hypothesis.[[631]] The names, as component parts of the language, are the property of Canaanites and Hebrews alike; only their theological employment and the worship founded upon them are to be regarded as Canaanitish. But it is especially this employment of the names which has to be considered in relation to the History of Civilisation.
Thus we see how the Hebrews in Canaan learned much as to religion as well as to politics from the conquered neighbouring aborigines. The religious ideas produced on the nomadic stage from the nomadic mythology were wiped away, and only a few relics of the old nomadic religion remained to a late age, either actual residues or mere memories. Spiritually poor, the nation was handed over to the powerful influence of the already formed culture of Canaan, and thus condemned to mere receptivity. Accordingly, they never had an opportunity of further developing their myths on the agricultural stage and converting them into elements of a religion. Hence comes the remarkable fact that from this point the myths of the Hebrews cease to grow, in the way in which those of the Aryan nations grew. Only a small cycle of myths of the Sun and of Civilisation were formed at this time; and the regular advance of the Mythical to the Religious was arrested by that religious influence which pressed in with full force from outside. The most complete and rounded-off solar myth extant in Hebrew is that of Shimshôn (Samson), a cycle of mythical conceptions fully comparable with the Greek myth of Herakles. But Samson never got so far as to be admitted, like Herakles, into the society of the gods. Those who say that mythologies have converted Samson to a deus solaris make a malicious perversion of the truth, merely because they set themselves against any mythological investigation on Semitic ground.[[632]] Whilst the Hebrews were thus taking in from the Canaanites things quite new to them, by which the regular further growth of their own was arrested, a considerable portion of their own store of legends must naturally have been starved out. For whatever ceases to grow, falls into slow decay, and at last disappears and leaves no sign behind. Here is discovered the origin of the defectiveness and fragmentary nature which strikes us in reconstructing the old Hebrew myths, when compared with the richness and variety of the Aryan myths among those nations which have passed through all stages of civilisation regularly and without obstruction or perverting influence from foreign forces.
The Myth is converted either into Religion or into History; the figures of the myth become either Gods and god-born Heroes, or Ancestors of the nation to which the myth belonged. What part of the myth cannot be converted, or has not been converted, into religion, and what has ceased to be religious without ceasing to exist in the popular mind, is converted into history; for all that remains in the human consciousness as a living portion of it must have a distinct impress; no meaningless vegetating is possible. Nothing is without an impressed form; when an old impress has lost its meaning, a new one is made. It is these new impressions that keep the elements of the ancient myth alive in the mind of the people far beyond the mythical age. Among the Hebrews this new force worked more powerfully than elsewhere in changing the form and impress of the still living elements of the myth, converting almost all myth into history.[[633]] This result was attained with the cooperation of an important factor in the History of Civilisation, which also determined the direction which the myth should take in being transformed into history. We must now consider this factor.