The Evolution of Old Testament Religion

by W. E. Orchard

The Canaanitish Baal should be distinguished from the Baal of Tyre (Melkart) whose worship was introduced by Ahab. Here the introduction of an alien Baal, with probably different rites and ceremonies, awoke the resentment of the prophetic party under the leadership of Elijah, but the worship of the Canaanite Baal was maintained for long unchecked.

Closely connected with the worship of the Baalim we find the worship of the Ashtaroth (Judges ii. 13). The pronunciation of this word is obscure; it was probably Ashtart, and the singular form, Ashtoreth (1 Kings xi. 5), has been formed by inserting the vowels of the word bosheth (shame), a common device in the Old Testament for expressing contempt. Ashtart is the female counterpart of Baal, and is spoken of in the plural for a similar reason. Monuments of the worship of Ashtart are still to be found, and from these it is evident that we have here the worship of the goddess of sexual passion, as common in polytheistic systems, and best known in the Greek worship of Aphrodite. The whole conception of Ashtart can be traced to the famous goddess Ishtar of Babylonian religion, and there is only too certain evidence that in Canaan as elsewhere the degrading rite of religious prostitution was used in this worship of female divinity (Hosea iv. 13). The identification of Ashtart with the "Queen of Heaven" (Jer. vii. 18; xliv. 15–25) is not so certain. As far as the worship of the latter is described to us, it looks like an importation of the Babylonian worship of Ishtar, who was identified with the planet Venus or sometimes with the moon. The "cakes to pourtray her" (Jer. xliv. 19) may have been crescent-shaped cakes.

Of a similar character was the worship that gathered around the name of Molech. We have here simply the word for king (Milk) with the vowels of bosheth. Of this name, Moloch, Milcom, and Melkart of Tyre are variations. Molech is not to be distinguished from Baal, as may be seen from Jer. xix. 5, where the practice of passing children through the fire, which was certainly connected with the worship of Molech, is a part of the worship of Baal. This burnt-sacrifice of children evidently belonged to the Canaanitish religion (2 Kings xvi. 3).

This then was the religion of the Canaanites: in times of prosperity and fruitful seasons, one of rejoicing and festivity; but in time of famine, drought or national danger, one of the most hopeless gloom and of the most fearful fanaticism. In conflict with this religion, the purer worship of Jehovah yet presented certain weaknesses; these are found chiefly in points of possible identification, which in the course of the history actually took place. This may be difficult for us to understand until we remember that Baal and Molech, to Semitic ears, simply meant "Lord" and "King"; and Jehovah was the "Lord" and "King" of Israel. If the character of Jehovah was not clearly apprehended as moral by the common people, we can see how easy it was for confusion to take place.

The great weakness of the religion of Jehovah was that He was not the God of Canaan. His home was in distant Sinai, and the only symbol of His presence was the ark, a symbol bound up with the idea of war. As the people settled down to a peaceful agricultural life, the need for Jehovah, the warrior God, would not be keenly felt. There was certainly a party from the very first who recognised the difference between Jehovah and Baal and fought against their identification, but so long as Baal was believed to be a real being the danger of his secret worship at least was never far away. Every land had its own god, and although the people knew that Jehovah was their God, yet they might think it necessary, and not inconsistent, to pay their respects to the local Baalim on whom they were dependent for the fruits of the earth (Hosea ii. 8). Nothing therefore but a national calamity could revive the old religion in face of the attractions of the new; if peace had been continuous it is hard to see how the religion founded by Moses could have persevered. Such dangerous peace the Children of Israel were not to enjoy. We soon hear the rousing call to the help of Jehovah in the Song of Deborah, and it was the threatened domination by the Philistines that called the monarchy into existence and revived the religion of Jehovah.

Meanwhile, however, a process of syncretism was gradually taking place, which it was to be the task of the Prophets to unravel; and how far it had gone may be seen from the difficulty they found in making the character of Jehovah and the moral demand made upon His worshippers clear to the people. "Jehovah," it must be remembered, was a name largely personal. Baal was a general name for deity, and could be applied to Jehovah quite truthfully. That this actually took place may be seen from a number of passages in the Old Testament. The most instructive instance is to be found in Hosea ii. 16; but the names given to places point in the same direction: David calls the spot where Jehovah broke his enemies, Baal-perazim; the same god is called indiscriminately, Baal-berith (Judges viii. 33; ix. 4) and El-berith (Judges ix. 46). This practice accounts for the names of Saul's son, Eshbaal, and of Jonathan's son, Meribbaal (1 Chron. viii. 33, 34), both of which have been altered in the Book of Samuel to "bosheth." (In obedience to the command of Exod. xxiii. 13, Bosheth was substituted for Baal in reading the Scriptures. The written text was altered in many places at a later period; the Chronicler must have found Baal in his text of Samuel; that is about 200 B.C.) The names of Jehovah and Baal therefore came to have the same significance, and the distinction began to be missed; Jehovah was still the God of Israel, but the moral elements of His religion were gradually diluted with the naturalistic conceptions of the worship of Baal. Jehovah becomes the Baal of the land; that is, the relation between Him and Israel is conceived in a natural and even physical way. It is therefore no longer a covenant relation, which depends on the observance of moral obligations, but one of nature which cannot be broken by either party. Naturally the sanctuaries of the Canaanites are taken over by the Israelites, and Jehovah is worshipped in "the high places." All through the history worship at these local sanctuaries is condemned, but only from a later standpoint, for the earliest Book of Laws permitted an altar to be erected anywhere where Jehovah had manifested Himself (Exod. xx. 24). Around some of these undoubtedly Canaanitish sanctuaries the stories of the Patriarchs gathered, but from the practices which prevailed at such places as Bethel we can see that heathen rites were used, for here Jeroboam set up the golden calves, which seem to have been used in the worship of Jehovah, for neither Elijah nor Amos condemns them. Jehovah is now worshipped all over the land, but there is the same tendency to regard each separate place as having its local deity, and so Jehovah is multiplied (perhaps, Jer. xi. 13) and needs to be further identified by the addition of place names, as in the strange name El-bethel (Gen. xxxv. 7), El-elohe-Israel (Gen. xxxiii. 20), in a way that is very like the multiplication of the Baalim. So deeply was the worship of Jehovah mixed up with Canaanitish ideas that in the reign of Josiah the only possibility of reform lay in forbidding the worship at the local sanctuaries altogether and concentrating all worship at the central sanctuary of Jerusalem.

Nothing but this process of syncretism can explain the condition of religion in the subsequent history, and it is needed to enable us to understand both the difficulty of the work of the Prophets and the form their message takes.

Nevertheless, there must have been from the earliest times elements that made for a purer faith, and that never acquiesced in this confusion between Jehovah and Baal, which certainly prevailed in the popular mind; otherwise the Reformation of the Eighth Century would be an isolated and inexplicable movement, and without that historical support the Prophets claimed. There was a party against Baal altogether, although they do not emerge until the monarchy. This party may have consisted of the "priests" of Jehovah. At mention of these we must not think of the sacrificing priests described in the Book of Leviticus. No such persons are known until after the exile; during this period anyone could sacrifice. The story of the priest in Judges xvii. gives a good idea of this class; his chief duties seem to have consisted in keeping the oracle and obtaining decisions by the lot. These decisions became the basis on which there was gradually built up the Torah (the Law), which, as the word implies, was a collection of decisions obtained by casting lots. For the purpose of obtaining these decisions the priests seem to have used an idol of some kind; for this is the most natural explanation of the Ephod and its use in the early history. There would be different degrees of intellectual and moral capacity found in the ranks of the priests, and many of them may have had higher ideals of their duties than the one mentioned in Judges. It would be likely that those who were in charge of the Sacred Ark possessed a superior dignity and maintained a purer tradition. Gradually the magical accompaniments to their oracular decisions may have given way to more judicial deliverances, although in the time of David and Abiathar they were apparently still used (1 Sam. xxx. 7). At any rate the priests kept alive the idea of Jehovah as the dispenser of justice, and helped to build up that system of laws for which Israel is so justly famous.

This "higher critical" view of the history is simply one to which we are driven by the records that stand nearest to the times they describe. It certainly alters considerably the ordinary conceptions of the type of religion that prevailed in those early days, before the coming of the Prophets; but that such was the type is only too clearly shown by the writings of the Prophets themselves. Nevertheless this view of the period, while it shuts out a somewhat stiff and mechanical religious interpretation of the history which has been forced upon it by a later age, is still not without a valuable lesson, which is perhaps not taught elsewhere in the Bible, and yet is one that we need to have always before us. It is one, the possibility of which always exists and often threatens a spiritual religion: the danger of a gradual encroachment and assimilation of pagan ideas until the original purity is lost almost beyond recovery. If this has happened anywhere it has happened in Christianity. It was the awakening to this paganisation of Christianity that provoked the struggle of the Reformation, not yet decided. Many of the conceptions that are still popularly identified with Christianity are the remnants of paganism. It is not necessary to enumerate the common customs which wear only a thin veneer of Christianity; but many of the ideas in connection with Christian Doctrine certainly owe more to pagan philosophy than they do to the New Testament. The syncretism between Paganism and Christianity has not been destroyed by the Reformation. Many of the popular ideas of the Atonement, for instance, rest on a pagan conception of God and a materialistic idea of Christ's work which are so deeply involved in the common presentation of Christianity that to present the actual New Testament teaching would seem to many like a denial of the foundation truths of the Gospel. Still more dangerous is the localisation of the god as the peculiar patron of the land, which justifies many unholy wars and makes such a thing as a national repentance almost impossible. There is a god of the British Empire who is remarkably like the Jehovah-Baal of the old syncretised religion that ruled in the period which we have been studying, and whose worship begets equal indifference to the claims of true religion, and equally cruel treatment for the prophet who strives to call men to a purer faith.

It is a relief to turn to a more comforting lesson. It is that which assures us that man's thought of God is not entirely his own, that it cannot be destroyed and is never wholly forgotten, but ever makes its way to higher truth and greater power. The way in which the higher religion comes is through the pure minds of those who wish only to live up to the fulness of the truth, and however mistaken they be, wish only to know and to do the will of God. A similar task lies equally before every honest man and every true Christian. The lesson is plain: beware of a stagnant religion that dreads progress, and keep the mind open as a child's to God's further revelation of Himself, which has yet many things to tell us.