The most rational explanation of this much-disputed and ambiguous passage must necessarily be such as can be deduced from a consideration of Ezekiel’s environment.
Giving due weight to every doubt, there remains this feature: the prophet unquestionably was influenced and actuated by the ideas of his day and generation, which looked upon the humiliations to which he subjected himself as the outward manifestations of an inward spirituality.
Psychologically speaking, there is no great difference between the consumption of human excrement and the act of lying on one’s side for three hundred and ninety days; both are indications of the same perverted cerebration, mistaken with such frequency for piety and holiness.
“Isaiah had periods of indecent maniacal outbursts; for we are told that he once went about stark naked for three years, because so commanded by the Lord.”—(“Rivers of Life,” vol. ii. p. 537, quoting Isaiah xx. 2, 3.)
THE SACRED COW’S EXCRETA A SUBSTITUTE FOR HUMAN SACRIFICE.
The foregoing testimony, which could readily be swelled in volume, proves the sacred character of these excreta, which may be looked upon as substitutes for a more perfect sacrifice. In the early life of the Hindus it is more than likely that the cow or the heifer was slaughtered by the knife or burnt; as population increased in density, domestic cattle became too costly to be offered as a frequent oblation, and on the principle that the part represents the whole, hair, milk, butter, urine, and ordure superseded the slain carcass, while the incinerated excrement was made to do duty as a burnt sacrifice.[38]
It was hardly probable that such practices, or an explanation of the causes which led to their adoption and perpetuation, should have escaped the keen criticism of E. B. Tylor.
“For the means of some of his multifarious lustrations, the Hindu has recourse to the sacred cow.... The Parsi religion prescribes a system of lustration which well shows its common origin with that of Hinduism by its similar use of cow’s urine and water.... Applications of nirang, washed off with water, form part of the daily religious rites, as well as of such special ceremonies as the naming of the new-born child, the putting on of the sacred cord, the purification of the mother after childbirth, and the purification of him who has touched a corpse.”—(E. B. Tylor, “Primitive Culture,” London, 1871, vol. ii. pp. 396, 397.)
“It will help us to realize how the sacrifice of an animal may atone for a human life, if we notice in South Africa how a Zulu will redeem a lost child from the finder by a bullock, or a Kimbunda will expiate the blood of a slave by the offering of an ox, whose blood will wash away the other. For instances of the animal substituted for man in sacrifice, the following may serve: Among the Khonds of Orissa, where Colonel MacPherson was engaged in putting down the sacrifice of human victims by the sect of the Earth-goddess, they at once began to discuss the plan of sacrificing cattle by way of substitutes. Now, there is some reason to think that this same course of ceremonial change may account for the following sacrificial practice in the other Khond sect. It appears that those who worship the Light-god hold a festival in his honor, when they slaughter a buffalo in commemoration of the time when, as they say, the Earth-goddess was prevailing on men to offer human sacrifices to her, but the Light-god sent a tribe-deity who crushed the bloody-minded Earth-goddess under a mountain and dragged a buffalo out of the jungle, saying, ‘Liberate the man, and sacrifice the buffalo.’ It looks as though this legend, divested of its mythic garb, may really record a historical substitution of animal for human sacrifice. In Ceylon, the exorcist will demand the name of the demon possessing a demoniac, and the patient in frenzy answers, giving the demon’s name, ‘I am So-and-so; I demand a human sacrifice, and I will not go without.’ The victim is promised, the patient comes to from the fit, and a few weeks later the sacrifice is made; but instead of a man they offer a fowl. Classic examples of a substitution of this sort may be found in the sacrifice of a doe for a virgin to Artemis in Laodicæa, a goat for a boy to Dionysos at Potniæ.
“There appears to be a Semitic connection here, as there clearly is in the story of the Æolians of Tenedos sacrificing to Melikertes (Melkarth) instead of a new-born child a new-born calf, shoeing it with buskins and tending the mother cow as if a human mother.”—(Idem, vol. ii. p. 366; or in New York edition, 1879, vol. ii. pp. 403, 404.)