Excessive rain set down to the wrath of the deity.
In Israel the excess as well as the deficiency of rain seems to have been set down to the wrath of the [pg 023] deity.[61] When the Jews returned to Jerusalem from the great captivity and assembled for the first time in the square before the ruined temple, it happened that the weather was very wet, and as the people sat shelterless and drenched in the piazza they trembled at their sin and at the rain.[62] In all ages it has been the strength or the weakness of Israel to read the hand of God in the changing aspects of nature, and we need not wonder that at such a time and in so dismal a scene, with a lowering sky overhead, the blackened ruins of the temple before their eyes, and the steady drip of the rain over all, the returned exiles should have been oppressed with a double sense of their own guilt and of the divine anger. Perhaps, though they hardly knew it, memories of the bright sun, fat fields, and broad willow-fringed rivers of Babylon,[63] which had been so long their home, lent a deeper shade of sadness to the austerity of the Judean landscape, with its gaunt grey hills stretching away, range beyond range, to the horizon, or dipping eastward to the far line of sombre blue which marks the sullen waters of the Dead Sea.[64]
Hebrew kings apparently supposed to heal disease and stop epidemics.
In the days of the Hebrew monarchy the king was apparently credited with the power of making sick and making whole. Thus the king of Syria sent a leper to the king of Israel to be healed by him, just as scrofulous patients [pg 024] used to fancy that they could be cured by the touch of a French or English king. However, the Hebrew monarch, with more sense than has been shown by his royal brothers in modern times, professed himself unable to work any such miracle. “Am I God,” he asked, “to kill and to make alive, that this man doth send unto me to recover a man of his leprosy?”[65] On another occasion, when pestilence ravaged the country and the excited fancy of the plague-stricken people saw in the clouds the figure of the Destroying Angel with his sword stretched out over Jerusalem, they laid the blame on King David, who had offended the touchy and irascible deity by taking a census. The prudent monarch bowed to the popular storm, acknowledged his guilt, and appeased the angry god by offering burnt sacrifices on the threshing-floor of Araunah, one of the old Jebusite inhabitants of Jerusalem. Then the angel sheathed his flashing sword, and the shrieks of the dying and the lamentations for the dead no longer resounded in the streets.[66]
The rarity of references to the divinity of Hebrew kings in the historical books may be explained by the circumstances in which these works were composed or edited.
To this theory of the sanctity, nay the divinity of the Hebrew kings it may be objected that few traces of it survive in the historical books of the Bible. But the force of the objection is weakened by a consideration of the time and the circumstances in which these books assumed their final shape. The great prophets of the eighth and the [pg 025] seventh centuries by the spiritual ideals and the ethical fervour of their teaching had wrought a religious and moral reform perhaps unparalleled in history. Under their influence an austere monotheism had replaced the old sensuous worship of the natural powers: a stern Puritanical spirit, an unbending rigour of mind, had succeeded to the old easy supple temper with its weak compliances, its wax-like impressionability, its proclivities to the sins of the flesh. And the moral lessons which the prophets inculcated were driven home by the political events of the time, above all by the ever-growing pressure of the great Assyrian empire on the petty states of Palestine. The long agony of the siege of Samaria[67] must have been followed with trembling anxiety by the inhabitants of Judea, for the danger was at their door. They had only to lift up their eyes and look north to see the blue hills of Ephraim, at whose foot lay the beleaguered city. Its final fall and the destruction of the northern kingdom could not fail to fill every thoughtful mind in the sister realm with sad forebodings. It was as if the sky had lowered and thunder muttered over Jerusalem. Thenceforth to the close of the Jewish monarchy, about a century and a half later, the cloud never passed away, though once for a little it seemed to lift, when Sennacherib raised the siege of Jerusalem[68] and the watchers on the walls beheld the last of the long line of spears and standards disappearing, the last squadron of the blue-coated Assyrian cavalry sweeping, in a cloud of dust, out of sight.[69]
The historical books were composed or edited under the influence of the prophetic reformation.
It was in this period of national gloom and despondency that the two great reformations of Israel's religion were accomplished, the first by king Hezekiah, the second a century later by king Josiah.[70] We need not wonder then [pg 026] that the reformers who in that and subsequent ages composed or edited the annals of their nation should have looked as sourly on the old unreformed paganism of their forefathers as the fierce zealots of the Commonwealth looked on the far more innocent pastimes of Merry England; and that in their zeal for the glory of God they should have blotted many pages of history lest they should perpetuate the memory of practices to which they traced the calamities of their country. All the historical books passed through the office of the Puritan censor,[71] and we can hardly doubt that they emerged from it stript of many gay feathers which they had flaunted when they went in. Among the shed plumage may well have been the passages which invested human beings, whether kings or commoners, with the attributes of deity. Certainly no pages could seem to the censor more rankly blasphemous; on none, therefore, was he likely to press more firmly the official sponge.
The Baal and his female Baalath the sources of all fertility.
But if Semitic kings in general and the kings of Byblus in particular often assumed the style of Baal or Adonis, it follows that they may have mated with the goddess, the Baalath or Astarte of the city. Certainly we hear of kings of Tyre and Sidon who were priests of Astarte.[72] Now to the agricultural Semites the Baal or god of a land was the author of all its fertility; he it was who produced the corn, the wine, the figs, the oil, and the flax, by means of his quickening waters, which in the arid parts of the Semitic world are oftener springs, streams, and underground flow than the rains of heaven.[73] Further, “the life-giving power of the god was not limited to vegetative nature, but to him also was ascribed the increase of animal life, the [pg 027] multiplication of flocks and herds, and, not least, of the human inhabitants of the land. For the increase of animate nature is obviously conditioned, in the last resort, by the fertility of the soil, and primitive races, which have not learned to differentiate the various kinds of life with precision, think of animate as well as vegetable life as rooted in the earth and sprung from it. The earth is the great mother of all things in most mythological philosophies, and the comparison of the life of mankind, or of a stock of men, with the life of a tree, which is so common in Semitic as in other primitive poetry, is not in its origin a mere figure. Thus where the growth of vegetation is ascribed to a particular divine power, the same power receives the thanks and homage of his worshippers for the increase of cattle and of men. Firstlings as well as first-fruits were offered at the shrines of the Baalim, and one of the commonest classes of personal names given by parents to their sons or daughters designates the child as the gift of the god.” In short, “the Baal was conceived as the male principle of reproduction, the husband of the land which he fertilised.”[74] So far, therefore, as the Semite personified the reproductive energies of nature as male and female, as a Baal and a Baalath, he appears to have identified the male power especially with water and the female especially with earth. On this view plants and trees, animals and men, are the offspring or children of the Baal and Baalath.