And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then shall Jahwe be my God....
CHAPTER VI
THE RITUAL DANCE ROUND A SACRED OBJECT
I
The ritual encircling dance, whether in procession with measured tread or in the form of a dance-step—and both are varieties of what is essentially the same thing—is perhaps the commonest kind of sacred dance. Its occurrence is world-wide. The object around which it takes place was in most cases, at any rate originally, a sacred one: an idol, an altar, a sacrificial victim, a holy tree, or a well. The encirclement was also performed round other things; but in these cases the dance is of another type to which attention will be drawn later.
Of sacred trees[133] and wells[134] among the Israelites we have abundant witness in the Old Testament; there is also plenty of evidence of their existence among other Semitic peoples, see, for example, Baudissin, Studien zur Semitischen Religionsgeschichte, II. 154 ff. (1876); Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, Lecture V. (1894); Lagrange, Études sur les religions sémitiques, pp. 158 ff., 162 ff. (1903), to mention but three of the foremost authorities. The Old Testament nowhere mentions any details of the cult in connexion with these sacred objects, for reasons which have been pointed out[135], and therefore there is no allusion to the dance around them; but as we know from so many sources that wherever sacred trees and springs existed (which has been all the world over) part of the ritual in connexion with them consisted of the sacred dance, we need not gather from the silence of the Old Testament that it did not take place.
An interesting instance may be given of the way in which we are able to supplement an Old Testament record from other sources. In Num. xxi. 17, 18, occurs this song to the well:
Spring up, O well. Sing ye unto it;
To the well which the princes digged,
Which the nobles of the people delved,