Divinity of Semitic kings.
The names of these kings suggest that they claimed affinity with their god Baal or Moloch, for Moloch is only a corruption of melech, that is, “king.” Such a claim at all events appears to have been put forward by many other Semitic kings.[29] The early monarchs of Babylon were worshipped as gods in their lifetime.[30] Mesha, king of Moab, perhaps called himself the son of his god Kemosh.[31] Among the Aramean sovereigns of Damascus, mentioned in the Bible, we find more than one Ben-hadad, that is, “son of the god Hadad,” the chief male deity of the Syrians;[32] and Josephus tells us that down to his own time, in the first century of our era, Ben-hadad I., whom he calls simply Adad, and his successor, Hazael, continued to be worshipped as gods by the people of Damascus, who held processions daily in their honour.[33] Some of the kings of Edom seem to have gone a step farther and identified themselves with the god in their lifetime; at all events they bore his name Hadad without any qualification.[34] King Bar-rekub, who [pg 016] reigned over Samal in North-Western Syria in the time of Tiglath-pileser (745-727 b.c.) appears from his name to have reckoned himself a son of Rekub-el, the god to whose favour he deemed himself indebted for the kingdom.[35] The kings of Tyre traced their descent from Baal,[36] and apparently professed to be gods in their own person.[37] Several of them bore names which are partly composed of the names of Baal and Astarte; one of them bore the name of Baal pure and simple.[38] The Baal whom they personated was no doubt Melcarth, “the king of the city,” as his name signifies, the great god whom the Greeks identified with Hercules; for the equivalence of the Baal of Tyre both to Melcarth and to Hercules is placed beyond the reach of doubt by a bilingual inscription, in Phoenician and Greek, which was found in Malta.[39]
Divinity of the Phoenician kings of Byblus and the Canaanite kings of Jerusalem. The “sacred men” at Jerusalem.
In like manner the kings of Byblus may have assumed the style of Adonis; for Adonis was simply the divine Adon [pg 017] or “lord” of the city, a title which hardly differs in sense from Baal (“master”) and Melech (“king”). This conjecture would be confirmed if one of the kings of Byblus actually bore, as Renan believed, the name of Adom-melech, that is, Adonis Melech, the Lord King. But, unfortunately, the reading of the inscription in which the name occurs is doubtful.[40] Some of the old Canaanite kings of Jerusalem appear to have played the part of Adonis in their lifetime, if we may judge from their names, Adoni-bezek and Adoni-zedek,[41] which are divine rather than human titles. Adoni-zedek means “lord of righteousness,” and is therefore equivalent to Melchizedek, that is, “king of righteousness,” the title of that mysterious king of Salem and priest of God Most High, who seems to have been neither more nor less than one of these same Canaanitish kings of Jerusalem.[42] Thus if the old priestly kings of Jerusalem regularly played the part of Adonis, we need not wonder that in later times the women of Jerusalem used to weep for Tammuz, that is, for Adonis, at the north gate of the temple.[43] In doing so they may only have been continuing a custom which had been observed in the same place by the Canaanites long before the Hebrews invaded the land. Perhaps the “sacred men,” as they were called, who lodged within the walls of the temple at Jerusalem down almost to the end of the Jewish kingdom,[44] may have acted the part of the living Adonis to the living Astarte of the women. At all events we know that in the cells of [pg 018] these strange clergy women wove garments for the asherim,[45] the sacred poles which stood beside the altar and which appear to have been by some regarded as embodiments of Astarte.[46] Certainly these “sacred men” must have discharged some function which was deemed religious in the temple at Jerusalem; and we can hardly doubt that the prohibition to bring the wages of prostitution into the house of God, which was published at the very same time that the men were expelled from the temple,[47] was directed against an existing practice. In Palestine as in other Semitic lands the hire of sacred prostitutes was probably dedicated to the deity as one of his regular dues: he took tribute of men and women as of flocks and herds, of fields and vineyards and oliveyards.
David as heir of the old sacred kings of Jerusalem.
But if Jerusalem had been from of old the seat of a dynasty of spiritual potentates or Grand Lamas, who held the keys of heaven and were revered far and wide as kings and gods in one, we can easily understand why the upstart David chose it for the capital of the new kingdom which he had won for himself at the point of the sword. The central position and the natural strength of the virgin fortress need not have been the only or the principal inducements which [pg 019] decided the politic monarch to transfer his throne from Hebron to Jerusalem.[48] By serving himself heir to the ancient kings of the city he might reasonably hope to inherit their ghostly repute along with their broad acres, to wear their nimbus as well as their crown.[49] So at a later time when he had conquered Ammon and captured the royal city of Rabbah, he took the heavy gold crown of the Ammonite god Milcom and placed it on his own brows, thus posing as the deity in person.[50] It can hardly, therefore, be unreasonable to suppose that he pursued precisely the same policy at the conquest of Jerusalem. And on the other side the calm confidence with which the Jebusite inhabitants of that city awaited his attack, jeering at the besiegers from the battlements,[51] may well have been born of a firm trust in the local deity rather than in the height and thickness of their grim old walls. Certainly the obstinacy [pg 020] with which in after ages the Jews defended the same place against the armies of Assyria and Rome sprang in large measure from a similar faith in the God of Zion.
Traces of the divinity of Hebrew kings.
Be that as it may, the history of the Hebrew kings presents some features which may perhaps, without straining them too far, be interpreted as traces or relics of a time when they or their predecessors played the part of a divinity, and particularly of Adonis, the divine lord of the land. In life the Hebrew king was regularly addressed as Adoni-ham-melech, “My Lord the King,”[52] and after death he was lamented with cries of Hoi ahi! Hoi Adon! “Alas my brother! alas Lord!”[53] These exclamations of grief uttered for the death of a king of Judah were, we can hardly doubt, the very same cries which the weeping women of Jerusalem uttered in the north porch of the temple for the dead Tammuz.[54] However, little stress can be laid on such forms of address, since Adon in Hebrew, like “lord” in English, was a secular as well as a religious title. But whether identified with Adonis or not, the Hebrew kings certainly seem to have been regarded as in a sense divine, as representing and to [pg 021] some extent embodying Jehovah on earth. For the king's throne was called the throne of Jehovah;[55] and the application of the holy oil to his head was believed to impart to him directly a portion of the divine spirit.[56] Hence he bore the title of Messiah, which with its Greek equivalent Christ means no more than “the Anointed One.” Thus when David had cut off the skirt of Saul's robe in the darkness of a cave where he was in hiding, his heart smote him for having laid sacrilegious hands upon Adoni Messiah Jehovah, “my Lord the Anointed of Jehovah.”[57]
The Hebrew kings seem to have been held responsible for drought and famine.
Like other divine or semi-divine rulers the Hebrew kings were apparently held answerable for famine and pestilence. When a dearth, caused perhaps by a failure of the winter rains, had visited the land for three years, King David inquired of the oracle, which discreetly laid the blame not on him but on his predecessor Saul. The dead king was indeed beyond the reach of punishment, but his sons were [pg 022] not. So David had seven of them sought out, and they were hanged before the Lord at the beginning of barley harvest in spring: and all the long summer the mother of two of the dead men sat under the gallows-tree, keeping off the jackals by night and the vultures by day, till with the autumn the blessed rain came at last to wet their dangling bodies and fertilize the barren earth once more. Then the bones of the dead were taken down from the gibbet and buried in the sepulchre of their fathers.[58] The season when these princes were put to death, at the beginning of barley harvest, and the length of time they hung on the gallows, seem to show that their execution was not a mere punishment, but that it partook of the nature of a rain-charm. For it is a common belief that rain can be procured by magical ceremonies performed with dead men's bones,[59] and it would be natural to ascribe a special virtue in this respect to the bones of princes, who are often expected to give rain in their life. When the Israelites demanded of Samuel that he should give them a king, the indignant prophet, loth to be superseded by the upstart Saul, called on the Lord to send thunder and rain, and the Lord did so at once, though the season was early summer and the reapers were at work in the wheat-fields, a time when in common years no rain falls from the cloudless Syrian sky.[60] The pious historian who records the miracle seems to have regarded it as a mere token of the wrath of the deity, whose voice was heard in the roll of thunder; but we may surmise that in giving this impressive proof of his control of the weather Samuel meant to hint gently at the naughtiness of asking for a king to do for the fertility of the land what could be done quite as well and far more cheaply by a prophet.