§ 1
As seen in their earliest historical documents (especially portions of the Book of Judges), the Hebrews are a group of agricultural and pastoral but warlike tribes of Semitic speech, with household Gods and local deities,[2] living among communities at the same or a higher culture stage. Their ancestral legends show similar religious practice.[3] Of the Hebrew tribes some may have sojourned for a time in Egypt; but this is uncertain, the written record being a late and in large part deliberately fictitious construction.[4] At one time twelve such tribes may have confederated, in conformity with a common ancient superstition, seen in Arab and Greek history as well as in the Jewish, as to the number twelve. As they advanced in civilization, on a basis of city life existing among a population settled in Canaan before them, parts of which they conquered, one of their public cults, that of Yahu or Yahweh, finally fixed at Jerusalem, became politically important. The special worshippers of this God (supposed to have been at first a Thunder-God or Nature-God)[5] were in that sense monotheists; but not otherwise than kindred neighbouring communities such as the Ammonites and Moabites and Edomites, each of which had its special God, like the cities of Babylonia and Egypt. But that the earlier conceptions of the people had assumed a multiplicity of Gods is clear from the fact that even in the later literary efforts to impose the sole cult of Yahweh on the people, the plural name Elohim, “Powers” or “Gods” (in general, things to be feared),[6] is retained, either alone or with that of Yahweh prefixed, though cosmology had previously been written in Yahweh’s name. The Yahwists did not scruple to combine an Elohistic narrative, varying from theirs in cosmology and otherwise, with their own.[7]
As to the original similarity of Hebraic and other Canaanite religions cp. E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. §§ 309–11 (i, 372–76); Kuenen, i, 223; Wellhausen, Israel, p. 440; Winckler, Gesch. Israels, passim; Réville, Prolég. de l’hist. des relig. 1881, p. 85. “Before being monotheistic, Israel was simply monolatrous, and even that only in its religious élite” (Réville). “Their [the Canaanites’] worship was the same in principle as that of Israel, but it had a higher organization” (Menzies, Hist. of Rel. p. 179; cp. Tiele, Outlines, pp. 85–89). On the side of the traditional view, Mr. Lang, while sharply challenging most of the propositions of the higher critics, affirms that “we know that Israel had, in an early age, the conception of the moral Eternal; we know that, at an early age, the conception was contaminated and anthropomorphized; and we know that it was rescued, in a great degree, from this corruption, while always retaining its original ethical aspect and sanction” (Making of Religion, p. 295). If “we know” this, the discussion is at an end. But Mr. Lang’s sole documentary basis for the assertion is just the fabricated record, reluctantly abandoned by theological scholars as such. When this is challenged, Mr. Lang falls back on the position that such low races as the Australians and Fuegians have a “moral Supreme Being,” and that therefore Israel “must” have had one (p. 309). It will be found, however, that the ethic of these races is perfectly primitive, on Mr. Lang’s own showing, and that his estimate is a misinterpretation. As to their Supreme Beings, it might suffice to compare Mr. Lang’s Making of Religion, chs. ix, xii, with his earlier Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i, 168, 335; ii, 6, etc.; but, as we have seen (above, p. 93), the Supreme Being of the Australians eludes the closest search in a number of tribes; and the “moral” factor is equally intangible. Mr. Lang in his later reasoning has merely added the ambiguous and misleading epithet “Supreme,” stressing it indefinitely, to the ordinary God-idea of the lower races. (Cp. Cox, Mythol. of Aryan Races, ed. 1882, p. 155; and K. O. Müller, Introd. to Sci. Mythol. Eng. tr. p. 184.)
There being thus no highly imagined “moral Eternal” in the religion of primitive man, the Hebrews were originally in the ordinary position. Their early practice of human sacrifice is implied in the legend of Abraham and Isaac, and in the story of Jephthah. (Cp. [Micah vi, 7], and Kuenen on the passage, i, 237.) In their reputed earliest prophetic books we find them addicted to divination ([Hosea iv, 12]; [Micah v, 12]. Cp. the prohibition in [Lev. xx, 6]; also [2 Kings xxiii, 24], and [Isa. iii, 2]; as to the use of the ephod, teraphim, and urim and thummim, see Kuenen, Relig. of Israel, Eng. tr. i, 97–100) and to polytheism. ([Amos v, 26], [viii, 14]; [Hosea i, 13, 17], etc. Cp. [Jud. viii, 27]; [1 Sam. vii, 3].) These things Mr. Lang seems to admit (p. 309, note), despite his previous claim; but he builds (p. 332) on the fact that the Hebrews showed little concern about a future state—that “early Israel, having, so far as we know, a singular lack of interest in the future of the soul, was born to give himself up to developing, undisturbed, the theistic conception, the belief in a righteous Eternal”—whereas later Greeks and Romans, like Egyptians, were much concerned about life after death. Mr. Lang’s own general theory would really require that all peoples at a certain stage should act like the Israelites; but he suspends it in the interest of the orthodox view as to the early Hebrews. At the same time he omits to explain why the Hebrews failed to adopt the future-state creed when they were “contaminated”—a proposition hardly reconcilable, on any view, with the sentence just quoted. The solution, however, is simple. Israel was not at all “singular” in the matter. The early (Homeric) Greeks and Romans (cp. as to Hades the Iliad, passim; Odyssey, bk. xi, passim; Tiele, Outlines, p. 209, as to the myth of Persephone; and Preller, Römische Mythologie, ed. Köhler, 1865, pp. 452–55, as to the early Romans), like the early Vedic Aryans (Tiele, Outlines, p. 117; Müller, Anthropol. Relig. p. 269), and the early Babylonians and Assyrians (Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 181–82; Sayce, Hib. Lect. p. 364) took little thought of a future state.
“Homer knows no influence of the Psyche on the realm of the visible, and also no cult implying it.... A later poet, who made the last addition to the Odyssey, first introduced Hermes the ‘leader of souls’ [perhaps taken from a popular belief in some part of Hellas].... Underneath, in the gloomy shades, the souls waver, unconscious or at the best in a glimmering half-consciousness, endowed with faint voices, feeble, indifferent.... To speak, as do many old and recent scholars, of the ‘immortal life’ of such souls, is erroneous. They live rather as the spectre of the living in a mirror.... If the Psyche outlives her visible mate (the body), she is powerless without him.... Thus is the Homeric world free from ghosts (for after the burning of the body the Psyche appears no more even in dream).... The living has peace from the dead.... No dæmonic power is at work apart from or against the Gods; and the night gives to the disembodied spirits no freedom” (Rohde, Psyche, 4te Aufl. 1907, pp. 9–11).
This minimization of the normal primitive belief in spirits is one of the reasons for seeing in the Homeric poems the outcome of a period of loosened belief. It is not to be supposed that the pre-Homeric Greeks, like the easterns with whom the Greeks met in Ionia, had not the usual ghost-lore of savages and barbarians; and it may be that for all the early civilizations under notice the explanation is that primitive ghost-cults were abandoned by migrating and conquering races, who rejected the ghost-cults of the races whom they conquered, though they ostensibly accepted their Gods. In any case they made little religious account of a future state for themselves.
This attitude has again been erroneously regarded (e.g., Dickinson, The Greek View of Life, p. 35) as peculiar to the Greeks. Mr. Lang’s assumption may, in fact, be overthrown by the single case of the Phoenicians, who showed no more concern about a future life than did the Hebrews (see Canon Rawlinson’s History of Phoenicia, 1889, pp. 351–52), but who are not pretended to have given themselves up much to “developing, undisturbed, the belief in a righteous Eternal.” The truth seems to be that in all the early progressive and combative civilizations the main concern was as to the continuance of this life. On that head the Hebrews were as solicitous as any (cp. Kuenen, i, 65); and they habitually practised divination on that score. Further, they attached the very highest importance to the continuance of the individual in his offspring. The idea of a future state is first found highly developed in the long-lived cults of the long-civilized but unprogressive Egyptians; and the Babylonians were developing in the same direction. Yet the Hebrews took it up (see the evidence in Schürer, Jewish People in the Time of Jesus, Eng. tr. Div. II, vol. ii, p. 179) just when, according to Mr. Lang, their cult was “rescued, in a great degree, from corruption”; and, generally speaking, it was in the stage of maximum monotheism that they reached the maximum of irrationality. For the rest, belief in “immortality” is found highly developed in a sociologically “degenerate” and unprogressive people such as the Tasmanians (Müller, Anthrop. Rel. p. 433), who are yet primitively pure on Mr. Lang’s hypothesis; and is normal among negroes and Australian blackfellows.
This primary polytheism is seen to the full in that constant resort of Israelites to neighbouring cults, against which so much of the Hebrew doctrine is directed. To understand their practice the modern reader has to get rid of the hallucination imposed on Christendom by its idea of revelation. The cult of Yahweh was no primordial Hebrew creed, deserted by backsliding idolaters, but a finally successful tyranny of one local cult over others. It is probable that it was originally not Palestinian, but Sinaitic, and that Yahweh became the God of Caleb-Judah only under David.[8] Therefore, without begging the question as to the moral sincerity of the prophets and others who identified Yahwism with morality, we must always remember that they were on their own showing devotees of a special local worship, and so far fighting for their own influence. Similar prophesying may conceivably have been carried on in connection with the same or other God-names in other localities, and the extant prophets freely testify that they had Yahwistic opponents; but the circumstance that Yahweh was worshipped at Jerusalem without any image might be an important cause of differentiation in the case of that cult. In any case it must have been through simple “exclusivism” that they reached any form of “monotheism.”[9]
The inveterate usage, in the Bible-making period, of forging and interpolating ancient or pretended writings, makes it impossible to construct any detailed history of the rise of Yahwism. We can but proceed upon data which do not appear to lend themselves to the purposes of the later adaptors. In that way we see cause to believe that at one early centre the so-called ark of Yahweh contained various objects held to have supernatural virtue.[10] In the older historic documents it has, however, no such sacredness as accrues to it later,[11] and no great traditional prestige. This ark, previously moved from place to place as a fetish,[12] is said to have been transferred to Jerusalem by the early king David,[13] whose story, like that of his predecessors Saul and his son Solomon, is in part blended with myth.