Again, the conception of Yahweh suffered modification. In the desert he was worshipped as an atmospheric deity, who manifested himself in thunder and lightning, whose abode was in the sky, whose sanctuary was on the mountain summit of Horeb-Sinai, and whose movable palladium was the ark of the covenant. But when the nomadic clans of Israel came to occupy the settled abodes of the agricultural Canaanites who had a stake in the soil which they cultivated, these conditions evidently reacted on their religion. Now the local Baal was the divine owner of the fertile spot where his sanctuary (qōdesh) was marked by the upright stone pillar, the symbol of his presence, on which the blood of the slaughtered victim was smeared. To this Baal the productiveness of the soil was due. Consequently it was needful to secure his favour, and in order to gain this, gifts were made to him by the local resident population who depended on the produce of the land (see [Baal], especially ad init.). Now when the Hebrews succeeded to these agricultural conditions and acquired possession of the Canaanite abodes, they naturally fell into the same cycle of religious ideas and tradition. Yahweh ceased to be exclusively regarded as god of the atmosphere, worshipped in a distant mountain, Horeb-Sinai, situated in the south country (negebh), and moving in the clouds of heaven before the Israelites in the desert, but he came to be associated with Israel’s life in Canaan. He manifested His presence either by a signal victory over Israel’s foes (Josh. x. 10, 11; 1 Sam. vii. 10-12) or by a thunderstorm (1 Sam. xii. 18) or through a dream (Gen. xxviii. 16 foll.; cf. 1 Kings iii. 5 foll.) at a sacred spot like Bethel. Accordingly, whenever His presence and power were displayed in places where the Canaanite Baal had been worshipped, they came to be attached to these spots. He had “put his name,” i.e. power and presence (numen) there, and the same festivals and sacrifices which had previously been devoted to the cult of the Canaanite Baal were now annexed to the service of Yahweh, the war-god of the conquering race. The process of transference was facilitated by two potent causes: (a) Both Canaanite and Hebrew spoke a common language; (b) the name Baal is not in reality an individual proper name like Kemōsh (Chemosh), Rammān or Hadad, but is, like Ēl (Ilu) “god,” an appellative meaning “lord,” “owner” or “husband.” The name Baal might therefore be used for any deity such as Milk (Milcom) or Shemesh (“sun”) who was the divine owner of the spot. It was simply a covering epithet, and like the word “god” could be transferred from one deity to another. In this way Yahweh came to be called the Baal or “lord” of any sacred place where the armies of Israel by their victories attested “his mighty hand and outstretched arm.” (See Kautzsch in Hastings’s D.B., extra vol., p. 645 foll.)
Such was the path of syncretism, and it was fraught with peril to the older and purer faith. For when Yahweh gradually became Israel’s local Baal he became worshipped like the old Canaanite deity, and all the sensuous accompaniments of Kedēshōth,[11] as well as the presence of the ashērah or sacred pole, became attached to his cult. But the symbol carried with it the numen of the goddess symbolized, and there can be little doubt that Ashērah came to be regarded as Yahweh’s consort. In the days of Manasseh syncretism went on unchecked even in the Jerusalem temple and its precincts, and it was not till the year of Jesiah’s reformation (621 B.C.) that the Kedēshīm and Kedēshōth as well as the Ashērah were banished for ever from Yahweh’s sanctuary (2 Kings xxi. 7, xxiii. 7), which their presence had profaned.
Now local worship means the differentiation of the personality worshipped in the varied local shrines, in other words Ba’ālīm or Baals. Just as we have in Assyria an Ishtar of Arbela and an Ishtar of Nineveh (treated in Assur-bani-pal’s (Rassam) cylinder[12] like two distinct deities), as we have local Madonnas in Roman Catholic countries, so must it have been with the cults of Yahweh in the regal period carried on in the numerous high places, Bethel, Shechem, Shiloh (till its destruction in the days of Eli) and Jerusalem. Each in turn claimed that Yahweh had placed his name (i.e. personal presence and power or numen) there. Each had a Yahweh of its own.
On the other hand, old deities still lurked in old spots which had been for centuries their abode. It was no easy task to establish Yahweh in permanent possession of the new lands conquered by the Hebrew settlers. The old gods were not to be at once discrowned of might. Of this we have a vivid example in the episode 2 Kings xviii. 24-28. The inhabitants of Babylonia and other regions whom the Assyrian kings had settled in Ephraim after 721 B.C. (cf. Ezra iv. 10) are described as suffering from the depredations of lions, and a priest from the deported Ephraimites is sent to them to teach them the worship of Yahweh, the god of the land. Similarly in the earlier pre-exilian period of Israel’s occupation of Canaanite territory the Hebrews were always subject to this tendency to worship the old Baal or ’Ashtoreth (the goddess who made the cattle and flocks prolific).[13] A few years of drought or of bad seasons would make a Hebrew settler betake himself to the old Canaanite gods. Even in the days of Hosea the rivalry between Yahweh and the old Canaanite Baal still continued. The prophet reproaches his Ephraimite countrymen for going after their “lovers,” the old local Baals who were supposed to have bestowed on them the bread, water, wool, flax and oil, and for not knowing that “it is I (Yahweh) who have bestowed on her (i.e. Israel) the corn, the new wine and the oil, and have bestowed on her silver and gold in abundance which they have wrought into a Baal image” (Hos. ii. 10).
External danger from a foreign foe, such as Midian or the Philistines, at once brought into prominence the claim and power of Yahweh, Israel’s national war-god since the great days of the exodus. The religion of Yahweh (as Wellhausen said) meant patriotism, and in war-time tended to weld the participating tribes into a national unity. The book of Judges with its “monotonous tempo—religious declension, oppression, repentance, peace,” to which Wellhausen[14] refers as its ever-recurring cycle, makes us familiar with these alternating phases of action and reaction. Times of peace meant national disintegration and the lapse of Israel into the Canaanite local cults, which is interpreted by the redactor as the prophets of the 8th century would have interpreted it, viz. as defection from Yahweh. On the other hand, times of war against a foreign foe meant on the religious side the unification, partial or complete, of the Israelite tribes by the rallying cry “the sword of Yahweh” (Judges vii. 20). In this way ’Ophrah became the centre of the coalition under Gideon in the tribe of Manasseh. Its importance is attested by Judges viii. 22-28, and we may disregard the “snare” which the Deuteronomic writer condemns in accordance with the later canons of orthodoxy. What ’Ophrah became on a small scale in the days of Gideon, Jerusalem became on a larger scale in the days of David and his successors. It was the religious expression of the unity of Israel which the life and death struggle with the Philistines had gradually wrought out.
Despite the capture of the ark after the disastrous battle of Shiloh, Yahweh had in the end shown himself through a destructive plague superior in might to the Philistine Dagon. There are indeed abundant indications that prove that in the prevalent popular religion of the regal period monotheistic conceptions had no place. Yahweh was god only of Israel and of Israel’s land. An invasion of foreign territory would bring Israel under the power of its patron-deity. The wrath with which the Israelite armies believed themselves to be visited (probably an outbreak of pestilence) when the king of Moab was reduced to his last extremity, was obviously the wrath of Chemosh the god of Moab, which the king’s sacrifice of his only son had awakened against the invading army (2 Kings iii. 27). In other words, the ordinary Israelite worshipper of Yahweh was at this time far removed from monotheism, and still remained in the preliminary stage of henotheism, which regarded Yahweh as sole god of Israel and Israel’s land, but at the same time recognized the existence and power of the deities of other lands and peoples. Of this we have recurring examples in pre-exilian Hebrew history. See 1 Sam. xxvi. 19; Judges xi. 23, 24; Ruth i. 16.
5. Characteristics and Constituent Elements.—It is only possible here to refer in briefest enumeration to the material and external objects and forms of popular Hebrew religion. These were of the simplest character. The upright stone Material objects. (or maṣṣēbah) was the material symbol of deity on which the blood of sacrifice was smeared, and in which the numen of the god resided. It is probable that in some primitive sanctuaries no real distinction was made between this stone-pillar and the altar or place where the animal was slaughtered. In ordinary pre-exilian high places the custom described in the primitive compend of laws (Ex. xx. 24) would be observed. A mound of earth was raised which would serve as a platform on which the victim would be slaughtered in the presence of the concourse of spectators. In the more important shrines, as at Jerusalem or Samaria, there would be an altar of stone or of bronze. Another accompaniment of the sanctuary would be the sacred tree—most frequently a terebinth (cf. Judges ix. 37 “terebinth of soothsayers”), or it might be a palm tree (cf. “palm tree of Deborah” in Judges iv. 5), or a tamarisk (‘ēshel), or pomegranate (rimmōn), as at the high place in Gibeah where Saul abode. Moreover, we have frequent references to sacred springs, as that of Beēr-sheba, ‘Ēnharōd (‘ēyn-ḥarod) (Judges vii. 1; cf. also Judges 19, ‘Ēn-haḳḳōrē [‘ēyn-haqqōre’]). (On this subject of holy trees, holy waters and holy stones, consult article [Tree-Worship], and Robertson Smith’s Religion of the Semites, 2nd ed., pp. 165-197.)
The wide prevalence of magic and soothsaying may be illustrated from the historical books of the Old Testament as well as from the pre-exilian prophets. The latter indeed tolerated the qōsēm (soothsayer) as they did the seer (rō’ēh). The rhabdomancy denounced by Hosea (iv. 12) was associated with idolatry at the high places. But the arts of the necromancer were always and without exception treated as foreign to the religion of Yahweh. The necromancer of ba‘al ‘ōbh’ was held to be possessed of the spirit who spoke through him with a hollow voice. Indeed both necromancer and the spirit that possessed him were sometimes identified, and the former was simply called ōbh. It is probable that necromancy, like the worship of Ashērah and ’Ashtoreth, as well as the cult of graven images, was a Canaanite importation into Israel’s religious practices. (See Marti, Religion des A.T., p. 32.)
The history of the rise of the priesthood in Israel is exceedingly obscure. In the nomadic period and during the earlier years of the settlement of Israel in Canaan the head of every family could offer sacrifices. In the primitive codes, Priesthood. Ex. xx. 22-xxiii. 19 (E), xxxiv. 10-28 (J), we have no allusion to any separate order of men who were qualified to offer sacrifices. In Ex. xxiv. 5 (E) we read that Moses simply commissioned young men to offer sacrifices. On the other hand the addendum to the book of Judges, chaps. xvii., xviii. (which Budde, Moore and other critics consider to belong to the two sources of the narratives in Judges, viz. J[15] as well as E), makes reference to a Levite of Bethlehem-Judah, expressly stated in xvii. 7 as belonging to a clan of Judah. This man Micah took into his household as priest. This narrative has all the marks of primitive simplicity. There can be no reasonable doubt that the Levite here was member of a priestly tribe or order, and this view is confirmed by the discovery of what is really the same word in south Arabian inscriptions.[16] The narrative is of some value as it shows that while it was possible to appoint any one as a priest, since Micah, like David, appointed one of his own sons (xvii. 5), yet a special priest-tribe or order also existed, and Micah considered that the acquisition of one of its members was for his household a very exceptional advantage: “Now I know that Yahweh will befriend me because I have the Levite as priest.”[17] In other words a priest who was a Levite possessed a superior professional qualification. He is paid ten shekels per annum, together with his food and clothing, and is dignified by the appellation “father” (cf. the like epithet of “mother” applied to the prophetess Deborah, Judges v. 7; see also 2 Kings ii. 12, vi. 21, xiii. 14). This same narrative dwells upon the graven images, ephod and terāphīm, as forming the apparatus of religious ceremonial in Micah’s household. Now the ephod and teraphim are constantly mentioned together (cf. Hos. iii. 4) and were used in divination. The former was the plated image of Yahweh (cf. Judges viii. 26, 27) and the latter were ancestral images (see Marti, op. cit. pp. 27, 29; Harper, Int. Comm. “Amos and Hosea,” p. 222). In other words the function of the priest was not merely sacrificial (a duty which Kautzsch unnecessarily detaches from the services which he originally rendered), nor did he merely bear the ark of the covenant and take charge of God’s house; but he was also and mainly (as the Arabic name kāhin shows) the soothsayer who consulted the ephod and gave the answers required on the field of battle (see 1 Sam. and 2 Sam. passim) and on other occasions. This is clearly shown in the “blessing of Moses” (Deut. xxxiii. 8), where the Levite is specially associated with another apparatus of inquiry, viz. the sacred lots, Urīm and Thummīm. The true character of Urīm (as expressing “aye”) and Thummīm (as expressing “nay”) is shown by the reconstructed text of 1 Sam. xiv. 41 on the basis of the Septuagint. See Driver ad loc.