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BURNETT LECTURES
1888-89
LECTURES
ON THE
RELIGION OF THE SEMITES
FIRST SERIES
THE FUNDAMENTAL INSTITUTIONS
BY
W. ROBERTSON SMITH, M.A, LL.D.
FELLOW OF Christ's college, and professor of Arabic
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
EDINBURGH
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1889
SRLH
PREFACE.
In April 1887 1 was invited by the trustees of the Burnett
Fund to deliver three courses of lectures at Aberdeen, in
the three years from October 1888 to October 1891, on
" The primitive religions of the Semitic peoples, viewed in
relation to other ancient religions, and to the spiritual
religion of the Old Testament and of Christiariity." I gladly
accepted this invitation ; for the subject proposed had
interested me for many years, and it seemed to me possible
to treat it in a way that would not be uninteresting to the
members of my old University, in whose hall the Burnett
Lectures are delivered, and to the wider public to whom
the gates of Marischal College are opened on the occasion.
In years gone by, when I was called upon to defend
before the courts of my Church the rights of historical
research, as applied to the Old Testament, I had reason to
acknowledge with gratitude the fairness and independence
of judgment which my fellow-townsmen of Aberdeen
brought to the discussion of questions which in most
countries are held to be reserved for the learned, and to
be merely disturbing to the piety of the ordinary layman ;
and I was glad to have the opportunity of commending to
the notice of a public so impartial and so intelligent the
study of a branch of comparative religion which, as I
venture to think, is indispensable to the future progress of
Biblical research.
VI PREFACE.
In Scotland, at least, no words need be wasted to
prove that a right understanding of the religion of the
Old Testament is the only way to a right understanding of
the Christian faith ; but it is not so fully recognised,
except in the circle of professed scholars, that the doctrines
and ordinances of the Old Testament cannot be thoroughly
comprehended until they are put into comparison with the
religions of the nations akin to the Israelites. The value
of comparative studies for the study of the religion of the
Bible was brought out very clearly, two hundred years ago,
by one of the greatest of English theologians. Dr. John
Spencer, Master of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge,
whose Latin work on the ritual laws of the Hebrews may
justly be said to have laid the foundations of the science
of Comparative Eeligion, and in its special subject, in spite
of certain defects that could hardly have been avoided at
the time when it was composed, still remains by far the
most important book on the religious antiquities of the
Hebrews. But Spencer was so much before his time that
his work was not followed up ; it is often ignored by
professed students of the Old Testament, and has hardly
exercised any influence on the current ideas which are
the common property of educated men interested in the
Bible.
In modern times Comparative Eeligion has become in
some degree a popular subject, and in our own country
has been treated from various points of view by men of
eminence who have the ear of the public ; but nothing
considerable has been done since Spencer's time, either in
England or on the Continent, whether in learned or in
popular form, towards a systematic comparison of the
religion of the Hebrews, as a whole, with the beliefs and
ritual practices of the other Semitic peoples. In matters
of detail valuable work has been done ; but this work has
PREFACE. vn
been too special, and for the most part too technical, to
help the circle to whom the Burnett Lectures are addressed ;
which I take to be a circle of cultivated and thinking men
and women, who have no special acquaintance with Semitic
lore, but are interested in everything that throws light on
their own religion, and are prepared to follow a sustained
or even a severe argument, if the speaker on his part will
remember that historical research can always be made
intelligible to thinking people, when it is set forth with
orderly method and in plain language. ^
There is a particular reason why some attempt in this
direction should be made now. The first conditions of an
effective comparison of Hebrew religion, as a whole, with
the religion of the other Semites, were lacking so long as
the historical order of the Old Testament documents, and
especially of the documents of which the Pentateuch is
made up, was unascertained or wrongly apprehended ;
but, thanks to the labours of a series of scholars (of
whom it is sufficient to name Kuenen and Wellhausen,
as the men whose acumen and research have carried
this enquiry to a point where nothing of vital importance
for the historical study of the Old Testament religion
still remains uncertain), the growth of the Old Testament
religion can now be followed from stage to stage, in a
way that is hardly possible with any other religion of
antiquity. And so it is now not only possible, but
most necessary for further progress, to make a fair com-
parison between Hebrew religion in its various stages
and the religions of the races with which the Hebrews
were cognate by natural descent, and with which also they
were historically in constant touch.
The plan which I have framed for my guidance in
carrying out the desires of the Burnett Trustees is ex-
plained in the first lecture. I begin with the institutions
viii PREFACE.
of religion, and in the present series I discuss those
institutions which may be called fundamental, particularly
that of sacrifice, to which fully one half of the volume
is devoted. It will readily be understood that, in the
course of the argument, I have found it convenient to
take up a good many things that are not fundamental, at
the place where they could most naturally be explained ;
and on the other hand I daresay that students of the
subject may sometimes be disposed to regard as funda-
mental certain matters which I have been compelled to
defer. But on the whole I trust that the present volume
will be found to justify its title, and to contain a fairly
adequate analysis of the first principles of Semitic worship.
It would indeed have been in some respects more satis-
factory to myself to defer the publication of the first
series of lectures till I could complete the whole subject
of institutions, derivative as well as primary. But it
seemed due to the hearers who may desire to attend the
second series of lectures, to let them have before them in
print the arguments and conclusions from which that
series must start ; and also, in a matter of this sort, when
one has put forth a considerable number of new ideas, the
value of which nmst be tested by criticism, one is anxious
to have the judgment of scholars on the first part of one's
work before going on to further developments.
I may explain that the lectures, as now printed, are
considerably expanded from the form in which they were
delivered ; and that only nine lectures of the eleven were
read in Aberdeen, the last two having been added to
complete the discussion of sacrificial ritual.
In dealing with the multiplicity of scattered evidences
on which the argument rests, I have derived great assist-
ance from the researches of a number of scholars, to whom
acknowledgment is made in the proper places. For
PREFACE. IX
Arabia I have been able to refer throughout to my friend
Wellhausen's excellent volume, Rcstc arabischen JHeiden-
tlmmes (Berl. 1887), in which the extant material for this
branch of Semitic heathenism is fully brought together,
and criticised with the author's well-known acumen. For
the other parts of Semitic heathenism there is no standard
exposition of a systematic kind that can be referred to
in the same way. In this country Movers's book on
Phcenician religion is often regarded as a standard
authority for the heathenism of the Northern Semites ;
but, with all its learning, it is a very unsafe guide, and
does not supersede even so old a book as Selden, De diis
Syris.
In analysing the origin of ritual institutions I have
often had occasion to consult analogies in the usages of
early peoples beyond the Semitic field. In this part of
the work I have had invaluable assistance from my friend,
Mr. J. G. Frazer, who has given me free access to his
unpublished collections on the superstitions and religious
observances of primitive nations in all parts of the globe.
I have sometimes referred to him by name, in the course
of the book, but these references convey but an imperfect
idea of my obligations to his learning and intimate
familiarity with primitive habits of thought. In this
connection I would also desire to make special acknow-
ledgment of the value, to students of Semitic ritual and
usage, of the comparative studies of Dr. Wilken of Leyden ;
which I mention in this place, because Dutch work is too
apt to be overlooked in England.
In transcribing Oriental words I have distinguished the
emphatic consonants, so far as seemed necessary to preclude
ambiguities, by the usual device of putting dots under the
English letters that come nearest to them in sound. But
instead of k (P) I write c, following a precedent set by
h
PREFACE.
eminent French Orientalists. Tn Eastern words both c and
g are always to be pronounced hard. But where there is
a conventional English form for a word I retain it ; thus
I write " Caaba," not " Ka ba ; " " Caliph/' not " Khalifa ; "
"Jehovah," not " Yahveh " or " lahwe." As regards the
references in the notes, it may be useful to mention that
C. I. S. means the Paris Corpus Inscriptionum Semiiicarum,
and ZDMG. the Zeitschrift of the German Oriental Society ;
that when Wellhausen is cited, without reference to the
title of a book, his work on Arabian Heathenism is meant ;
and that Kinship means my book on Kinship and Marriage
in Early Aralia (Cambridge, University Press, 1885).
Finally, I have to express my thanks to my friend, Mr.
J. S. Black, who has kindly read the whole book in proof,
and made many valuable suggestions.
W. PtOBERTSON Smith.
Chkist's College, Cambridge,
\st October 1889.
CONTENTS.
LECTURE I.
PAGE
Intkoduction : The Subject and the Method of Enquiry . 1
LECTURE IL
The Natuee of the Religious Community and the Relation
OF the Gods to theik "Woeshippebs . . .29
LECTURE in.
The Relation of the Gods to Natural Things— Holy Places
—The Jinn ....... 82
LECTURE IV.
Holy Places in their Relation to Man .... 132
LECTURE V.
Sanctuaries, Natural and Artificial — Holy Waters, Trees,
Caves, and Stones . . . . . .150
LECTURE VI.
Sacrifice — Preliminary Survey . . . . .196
LECTURE VII.
Fiestfruits, Tithes, and Sacrificial Meals . . . 226
LECTURE VIII.
The Original Significance of Animal Sacrifice, . . 251
XU CONTENTS.
LECTURE IX.
PAGE
The Sacramental Efficacy of Animal Sacrifice, and Cognate
Acts of Ritual — The Blood Covenant — Blood and Hair
Offerings ....... 294
LECTURE X.
The Development of Sacrificial Ritual— Fire-sacrifices and
PlACULA ....... 334
LECTURE XL
Sacrificial Gifts and Piacular Sacrifices — The Special Ideas
involved in the latter ..... 369
Additional Notes ....... 421
Index of Passages of Scripture ..... 475
General Index ....... 479
LECTUKE I.
INTRODUCTION : THE SUBJECT AND THE METHOD OF
ENQUIRY.
The subject before us is the religion of the Semitic peoples,
that is, of the group of kindred nations, including the Arabs,
the Hebrews and Phoenicians, the Aramaeans, the Baby-
lonians and Assyrians, which in ancient times occupied the
great Arabian Peninsula, with the more fertile lands of
Syria Mesopotamia and Irac, from the Mediterranean
coast to the base of the mountains of Iran and Armenia.
Among these peoples three of the great faiths of the
world had their origin, so that the Semites must always
have a peculiar interest for the student of the history of
religion. Our subject, however, is not the history of the
several religions that have a Semitic origin, but Semitic
religion as a whole in its common features and general
type. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are positive religions,
that is, they did not grow up like the systems of ancient
heathenism, under the action of unconscious forces operating
silently from age to age, but trace their origin to the
teaching of great religious innovators, who spoke as the
organs of a divine revelation, and deliberately departed
from the traditions of the past. Behind these positive
religions lies the old unconscious religious tradition, the
A
2 POSITIVE AND TRADITIONAL lect. i.
body of religious usage and belief which cannot be traced
to the influence of individual minds, and was not propagated
on individual authority, but formed part of that inheritance
from the past into which successive generations of the
Semitic race grew up as it were instinctively, taking it as
a matter of course that they should believe and act as their
fathers had done before them. The positive Semitic
religions had to establish themselves on ground already
occupied by these older beliefs and usages ; they had to
displace what they could not assimilate, and whether they
rejected or absorbed the elements of the older religion,
they had at every point to reckon with them and take up
a definite attitude towards them. No positive religion that
has moved men has been able to start with a tahula rasa,
and express itself as if religion were beginning for the first
time ; in form, if not in substance, the new system must
be in contact all along the line with the older ideas and
practices which it finds in possession. A new scheme of
faith can find a hearing only by appealing to religious
instincts and susceptibilities that already exist in its
audience, and it cannot reach these without taking account
of the traditional forms in which all religious feeling is
embodied, and without speaking a language which men
accustomed to these old forms can understand. Thus to
comprehend a system of positive religion thoroughly, to
understand it in its historical origin and form as well as in
its abstract principles, we must know the traditional
religion that preceded it. It is from this point of view
that I invite you to take an interest in the ancient religion
of the Semitic peoples ; the matter is not one of mere
antiquarian curiosity, but has a direct and important
bearing on the great problem of the origins of the spiritual
religion of the Bible. Let me illustrate this by an example.
You know how large a part of the teaching of the New
LECT. I. RELIGION AMONG THE SEMITES. S
Testament and of all Christian theology turns on the ideas
of sacrifice and priesthood. In what they have to say on
these heads the New Testament writers presuppose, as the
basis of their argument, the notion of sacrifice and priest-
hood current among the Jews and embodied in the
ordinances of the Temple. But, again, the ritual of the
Temple was not in its origin an entirely novel thing ; the
precepts of the Pentateuch did not create a priesthood and
a sacrificial service on an altogether independent basis, but
only reshaped and remodelled, in accordance with a more
spiritual doctrine, institutions of an older type, which in
many particulars were common to the Hebrews with their
heathen neighbours. Every one who reads the Old Testa-
ment with attention is struck with the fact that the origin
and rationale of sacrifice are nowhere fully explained ; that
sacrifice is an essential part of religion is taken for granted,
as something which is not a doctrine peculiar to Israel
but is universally admitted and acted on without as well as
within the limits of the chosen people. Thus when we wish
thoroughly to study the New Testament doctrine of sacrifice,
we are carried back step by step till we reach a point
where we have to ask what sacrifice meant, not to the old
Hebrews alone, but to the whole circle of nations of which
they formed a part. By considerations of this sort we are
led to the conclusion that no one of the religions of Semitic
origin which still exercise so great an influence on the lives
of millions of mankind can be studied completely and
exhaustively without a subsidiary enquiry into the older
traditional religion of the Semitic race.
You observe that in this argument I take it for
granted that, when we go back to the most ancient
religious conceptions and usages of the Hebrews, we shall
find them to be the common property of a group of
kindred peoples, and not the exclusive possession of the
MEANING OF THE lect. I.
tribes of Israel. The proof that this is so will appear
more clearly in the sequel ; but, indeed, the thing will
hardly be denied by any one who has read the Bible with
care. In the history of old Israel before the captivity,
nothing comes out more clearly than that the mass of the
people found the greatest difficulty in keeping their
national religion distinct from that of the surrounding
nations. Those who had no grasp of spiritual principles,
and knew the religion of Jehovah only as an affair of
inherited usage, were not conscious of any great difference
between themselves and their heathen neighbours, and fell
into Canaanite and other foreign practices with the greatest
facility. The significance of this fact is manifest if we
consider how deeply the most untutored religious sensi-
bilities are shocked by any kind of innovation. Nothing
appeals so strongly as religion to the conservative instincts ; \/
and conservatism is the habitual attitude of Orientals.
The whole history of Israel is unintelligible if we suppose
that the heathenism against which the prophets contended
was a thing altogether alien to the religious traditions of
the Hebrews. In principle there was all the difference in
the world between the faith of Isaiah and that of an
idolater. But the difference in principle, which seems so
clear to us, was not clear to the average Judeean, and the
reason of this was that it was obscured by the great
similarity in many important points of religious tradition
and ritual practice. The conservatism which refuses to
look at principles, and has an eye only for tradition and
usage, was against the prophets, and had no sympathy
with their efforts to draw a sharp line between the religion
of Jehovah and that of the foreign gods. This is a proof
that what I may call the natural basis of Israel's worship
was very closely akin to that of the neighbouring cults.
The conclusion on this point which is suggested by the
LECT. I. WORD SEMITIC.
facts of Old Testament history, may be accepted the more
readily because it is confirmed by presumptive arguments
of another kind. Traditional relisfion is handed down from
father to child, and therefore is in great measure an affair
of race. Nations sprung from a common stock will have
a common inheritance of traditional belief and usage in
things sacred as well as profane, and thus the evidence
that the Hebrews and their neighbours had a large common
stock of religious tradition falls in with the evidence
which we have from other sources, that in point of race
the people of Israel were nearly akin to the heathen
nations of Syria and Arabia. The populations of this
whole region constitute a well-marked ethnic unity, a fact
which is usually expressed by giving to them the common
name of Semites. The choice of this term was orginally
suggested by the tenth chapter of Genesis, in which most
of the nations of the group with which we are concerned
are represented as descended from Shem the son of Noah.
But though modern historians and ethnographers have
borrowed a name from the book of Genesis, it must be
understood that they do not define the Semitic group as
coextensive with the list of nations that are there reckoned
to the children of Shem. Most recent interpreters are
disposed to regard the classification of the families of
mankind given in Genesis x. as founded on principles
geographical or political rather than ethnographical ; the
Phoenicians and other Canaanites, for example, are made to
be children of Ham and near cousins of the Egyptians.
This arrangement corresponds to historical facts, for, at a
period anterior to the Hebrew conquest, Canaan was for
centuries an Egyptian dependency, and Phoenician religion
and civilisation are permeated by Egyptian influence.
But ethnographically the Canaanites were akin to the Arabs
and Syrians, and they spoke a language which is hardly
6 LANGUAGE AS A lect. i.
different from Hebrew. On the other hand, Elam and Lud,
that is, Snsiana and Lydia, are called children of Sheni,
and doubtless these lands were powerfully influenced by
Semitic civilisation, but there is no reason to think that
in either country the mass of the population belonged to
the same stock as the Syrians and Arabs. Accordingly it
must be remembered that when modern scholars use the
term Semitic, they do not speak as interpreters of Scripture,
but as independent observers of ethnographical facts, and
include all peoples whose distinctive ethnical characters
assign them to the same group with the Hebrews, Syrians,
and Arabs.
The scientific definition of an ethnographical group
depends on a variety of considerations ; for direct historical
evidence of an unimpeachable kind as to the original seats
and kindred of ancient peoples is not generally to be
had. The defects of historical tradition must therefore be
supplied by observation, partly of inherited physical
characteristics, and partly of mental characteristics habits
and attainments such as are usually transmitted from
parent to child. Among the indirect criteria of kinship
between nations, the most obvious, and the one which has
hitherto been most carefully studied, is the criterion of
language ; for it is observed that the languages of man-
kind form a series of natural groups, and that within each
group it is possible to arrange the several languages which
it contains in what may be called a genealogical order,
according to degrees of kinship. Now it may not always
be true that people of the same or kindred speech are as
closely related by actual descent as they seem to be from
the language they speak ; a Gaelic tribe, for example, may
forget their ancient speech, and learn to speak a Teutonic
dialect, without ceasing to be true Gaels by blood. But, in
general, large groups of men do not readily change their
LECT. I. CRITERION OF RACE. 7
language, but go on from generation to generation speaking
the ancestral dialect with such gradual modification as the
lapse of time brings about. As a rule, therefore, the classi-
fication of mankind by language, at least when applied to
large masses, will approach pretty closely to a natural classi-
fication ; and in a large proportion of cases, the language of
a mixed race will prove on examination to be that of the
stock whose blood is predominant. Where this is not the
case, where a minority has imposed its speech on a
majority, we may safely conclude that it has done so in
virtue of a natural pre-eminence, a power of shaping
lower races in its own mould, which is not confined to the
sphere of language, but extends to all parts of life. Where
we find unity of language, we can at least say with
certainty that we are dealing with a group of men who are
subject to common influences of the most subtle and far-
reaching kind ; and where unity of speech has prevailed for
many generations, we may be sure that the continued
action of these influences has produced great uniformity
of physical and mental type. When we come to deal with
groups which have long had separate histories, and whose
languages are therefore not identical but only cognate, the
case is not so strong. A Scot, for example, whose blood is
a mixture of the Teutonic and Celtic, and a North German,
who is partly Teutonic and partly Wendish, speak languages
belonging to the same Teutonic stock, but in each case the
non-Teutonic element in the blood, though it has not ruled
the language, has had a perceptible effect on the national
character, so that the difference of type between the two
men is greater than the difference of their dialects indicates.
It is plain, therefore, that kinship in language is not an
exact measure of the degree of affinity as determined by
the sum of race characters ; but on the whole it remains
true, that the stock which is strong enough, whether by
8 UNITY AND HOMOGENEITY lect. i.
numbers or by genius, to impress its language on a nation,
must exercise a predominant influence on the national
type in other respects also ; and to this extent the
classification of races by language must be called natural
and not artificial. Especially is this true for ancient times,
when the absence of literature, and especially of religious
books, made it much more difficult than it has been in
recent ages for a new language to establish itself in a race
to which it was originally foreign. All Egypt now speaks
Arabic — a Semitic tongue — and yet the population is
very far from having assimilated itself to the Arabic type.
But this could not have happened without the Coran and
the religion of the Coran, which have given what I may
call an artificial advantage to the Arabic language. In
very ancient times the language of a conquering people
had no such artificial help in preserving and propagating
itself. A tongue which is spoken and not written makes
way only in proportion as those who speak it are able
to hold their own without assistance from the literary
achievements of their ancestors.
As regards the Semitic nations, which, as I have already
said, are classed together on the ground of similarity of
language, we have every reason to recognise their linguistic
kinship as only one manifestation of a very marked general
unity of type. The unity is not perfect ; it would not, for
example, be safe to make generalisations about the Semitic
character from the Arabian nomads, and to apply them to
the ancient Babylonians. And for this there are probably
two reasons. On the one hand, the Semite of the Arabian
desert and the Semite of the Babylonian alluvium lived
under altogether different physical and moral conditions ;
the difference of environment is as complete as possible.
And on the other hand, it is pretty certain that the Arabs
of the desert have been from time immemorial a race
LECT. I. OF THE SEMITIC RACE. 9
practically unmixed, while the Babylonians, and other
members of the same family settled on the fringes of the
Semitic land, were in all probability largely mingled with
the blood of other races, and underwent a corresponding
modification of type.
But when every allowance is made for demonstrable or
possible variations of type within the Semitic field, it still
remains true that the Semites form a singularly well
marked and relatively speaking a very homogeneous group.
So far as language goes the evidence to this effect is parti-
cularly strong. The Semitic tongues are so closely related
to one another, that their affinity is recognised even by the
untrained observer ; and modern science has little difficulty
in tracing them back to a common speech, and determining
in a general way what the features of that speech were.
On the other hand, the differences between these languages
and those spoken by other adjacent races are so funda-
mental and so wide, that no sober philologist has ventured
to lay down anything positive as to the relation of the
Semitic tongues to other linguistic stocks. Their nearest
kinship seems to be with the languages of North Africa,
but even here the common features are balanced by pro-
found differences. The evidence of language therefore tends
to show that the period during which the original and
common Semitic speech existed apart, and developed its
peculiar characters at a distance from languages of other
stocks, must have been very long in comparison with the
subsequent period during which the separate branches of
the Semitic stock, such as Hebrew Aramaic and Arabic,
were isolated from one another and developed into separate
dialects. Or, to draw the historical inference from this, it
would appear that before the Hebrews, the Aramaeans, and
the Arabs spread themselves over widely distant seats, and
began their course of separate national development, there
10 UNITY AND HOMOGENEITY LECT. i.
must have been a long period in which the ancestors of all
these nations lived together and spoke with one tongue.
And as Hebrew Aramaic and Arabic are all much liker to
one another than the old common Semitic can possibly
have been to any of the languages of surrounding races, it
would seem that the separate existence of the several
Semitic nations up to the time when their linguistic dis-
tinctions were fully developed, can have been but short in
comparison with the period during which the undivided
Semitic stock, living in separation from other races, formed
its peculiar and distinctive type of speech.
The full force of this argument can hardly be made
plain without reference to philological details of a kind
unsuited to our present purpose ; but those of you who have
some acquaintance with the Semitic languages will readily
admit that the development of the common Semitic system
of triliteral roots, not to speak of other linguistic peculiari-
ties, must have been the affair of a number of generations
vastly greater than was necessary to develop the differences
between Hebrew and Arabic. If, now, the fathers of all the
Semitic nations lived together for a very long time, at the
very ancient date which preceded the separate history of
Hebrews Aramaeans and Arabs, — that is, in the infancy
of the races of mankind, the period of human history in
which individuality went for nothing, and all common
influences had a force which we moderns can with difficulty
conceive, — it is clear that the various swarms which ulti-
mately hived off from the common stock and formed the
Semitic nations known to history, must have carried with
them a strongly marked race character, and many common
possessions of custom and idea, besides their common
language. And further let us observe that the dispersion
of the Semitic nations was never carried so far as the
dispersion of the Aryans. If we leave out of account
LECT. I. OF THE SEMITIC RACE. 11
settlements made over the seas, — the South Arabian
colonies in East Africa, and the Phrenician colonies on the
coasts and isles of the Mediterranean, — we find that the
region of Semitic occupation is continuous and compact.
Its great immovable centre is the vast Arabian peninsula,
a region naturally isolated, and in virtue of its physical
characters almost exempt from immigration or change of
inhabitants. And from this central stronghold, which the
predominant opinion of modern scholars designates as the
probable starting-point of the whole Semitic dispersion, the
region of Semitic speech spreads out round the margin of
the Syrian desert till it strikes against great natural
boundaries, the Mediterranean, Mount Taurus, and the
mountains of Armenia and Iran. From the earliest dawn
of history all that lies within these limits was fully occu-
pied by Semitic tribes speaking Semitic dialects, and the
compactness of this settlement must necessarily have tended
to maintain uniformity of type. The several Semitic
nations, when they were not in direct contact with one
another, were divided not by alien populations but only by
the natural barriers of mountain and desert. These natural
barriers, indeed, were numerous, and served to break up the
race into a number of small tribes or nations ; but, like the
mountains of Greece, they were not so formidable as to
prevent the separate states from maintaining a great deal
of intercourse, which, whether peaceful or warlike, tended
to perpetuate the original community of type. Nor was
the operation of these causes disturbed in ancient times by
any great foreign immigration. The early Egyptian in-
vasions of Syria were not accompanied by any attempt at
colonisation ; and though the so-called Hittite monuments,
which have given rise to so much speculation, may afford
evidence that a non-Semitic people from Asia Minor at one
time pushed its way into Northern Syria, it is pretty clear
12 UNITY AND HOMOGENEITY lect. l.
that the Hittites of the Bible, i.e. the non-Aramaic com-
munities of Coele-Syria, were a branch of the Canaanite
stock, and that the utmost concession that can be made to
modern theories on this subject is that they may for a time
have been dominated by a non-Semitic aristocracy. At
one time it was not uncommon to represent the Philistines
as a non-Semitic people, but it is now generally recognised
that the arguments for this view are inadequate, and that,
though they came into Palestine from across the sea, from
Caphtor, i.e. probably from Crete, they were either mainly
of Semitic blood or at least were already thoroughly Semi-
tised at the time of their immigration, alike in speech and
in religion.
Coming down to later times, we find that the Assyrian
Babylonian and Persian conquests made no considerable
change in the general type of the population of the Semitic
lands. National and tribal landmarks were removed, and
there were considerable shiftings of population within the
Semitic area, but no great incursion of new populations of
alien stock. In the Greek and Eoman periods, on the
contrary, a large foreign element was introduced into the
towns of Syria ; but as the immigration was practically con-
fined to the cities, hardly touching the rural districts, its
effects in modifying racial type were, it would seem, of a
very transitory character. For in Eastern cities the death-
rate habitually exceeds the birth - rate, and the urban
population is maintained only by constant recruital from
the country, so that it is the blood of the peasantry which
ultimately determines the type of the population. Thus it
is to be explained that after the Arab conquest of Syria,
the Creek element in the population rapidly disappeared.
Indeed, one of the most palpable proofs that the populations
of all the old Semitic lands possessed a remarkable homo-
geneity of character, is the fact that in them, and in them
LECT. I. OF THE SEMITIC RACE. 13
alone, the Arabs and Arab influence took permanent root.
The Moslem conquests extended far beyond these limits,
but except in the old Semitic countries, Islam speedily took
new shapes, and the Arab domination soon gave way before
the reaction of the mass of its foreign subjects.
Thus the whole course of history, from the earliest date
to which authentic knowledge extends down to the time of
the decay of the Caliphate, records no great permanent
disturbance of population to affect the constancy of the
Semitic type within its original seats, apart from the
temporary Hellenisation of the great cities already spoken
of. Such disturbances as did take place consisted partly
of mere local displacements among the settled Semites,
partly, and in a much greater degree, of the arrival and
establishment in the cultivated lands of successive hordes
of Semitic nomads from the Arabian wilderness, which on
their settlement found themselves surrounded by popula-
tions so nearly of their own type that the complete
fusion of the old and new inhabitants was effected without
difficulty, and without modification of the general character
of the race. If at any point in its settlements, except
along the frontiers, the Semitic blood was largely modified
by foreign admixture, this must have taken place in
prehistoric times, or by fusion with other races which
may have occupied the country before the anival of the
Semites. How far anything of this sort actually happened
can only be matter of conjecture, for the special hypotheses
which have sometimes been put forth — as, for example, that
there was a considerable strain of pre-Semitic blood in the
Phoenicians and Canaanites — rest on presumptions of no
conclusive sort. What is certain is that the Semitic
settlements in Asia were practically complete at the first
dawn of history, and that the Semitic blood was constantly
reinforced, from very early times, by fresh immigrations
14 THE SEMITES OF lect. I.
from the desert. There is hardly another part of the
world where we have such good historical reasons for
presuming that linguistic affinity will prove a safe indica-
tion of affinity in race, and in general physical and mental
type. And this presumption is not belied by the results
of nearer enquiry. Those who have busied themselves
with the history and literature of the Semitic peoples, bear
uniform testimony to the close family likeness that runs
throuQ;h them all.
It is only natural that this homogeneity of type appears
to be modified on the frontiers of the Semitic field. To
the West, if we leave the transmarine colonies out of view,
natural conditions drew a sharp line of local demarcation
between the Semites and their alien neighbours. The Eed
Sea and the desert north of it formed a geographical barrier,
which was often crossed by the expansive force of the
Semitic race, but which appears to have eifectually checked
the advance into Asia of African populations. But on the
East, the fertile basin of the Euphrates and Tigris seems in
ancient as in modern times to have been a meeting-place
of races. The preponderating opinion of Assyriologists is
to the effect that the civilisation of Assyria and Babylonia
was not purely Semitic, and that the ancient population of
these parts contained a large pre-Semitic element, whose
influence is especially to be recognised in religion and in
the sacred literature of the cuneiform records.
If this be so, it is plain that the cuneiform material
must be used with caution in our enquiry into the type of
traditional religion characteristic of the ancient Semites.
That Babylonia is the best starting-point for a compara-
tive study of the sacred beliefs and practices of the Semitic
peoples, is an idea which has lately had some vogue, and
which at first sight appears plausible on account of the
great antiquity of the monumental evidence. But, in
LECT. I. BABYLONIA AND ASSYEIA. 15
matters of this sort, ancient and primitive are not
synonymous terms ; and we must not look for the most
primitive form of Semitic faith in a region where society
was not primitive. In Babylonia, it would seem, society
and religion alike were based on a fusion of two races, and
so were not primitive but complex. Moreover, the official
system of Babylonian and Assyrian religion, as it is known
to us from priestly texts and public inscriptions, bears clear
marks of being something more than a popular traditional
faith ; it has been artificially moulded by priestcraft and
statecraft in much the same way as the official religion of
Egypt ; that is to say, it is in great measure an artificial
combination, for imperial purposes, of elements drawn from
a number of local worships. In all probability the actual
religion of the masses was always much simpler than the
official system ; and in later times it would seem that, both
in religion and in race, Assyria was little different from the
adjacent Aramaic countries. These remarks are not meant
to throw doubt on the great importance of cuneiform studies
for the history of Semitic religion ; the monumental data
are valuable for comparison with what we know of the
faith and worship of other Semitic peoples, and peculiarly
valuable because, in religion as in other matters, the
civilisation of the Euphrates-Tigris valley exercised a great
historical influence on a large part of the Semitic field.
But the right point of departure for a general study of
Semitic religion must be sought in regions where, though
our knowledge begins at a later date, it refers to a simpler
state of society, and where accordingly the religious
phenomena revealed to us are of an origin less doubtful and
a character less comj)licated. In many respects the religion
of heathen Arabia, though we have few details concerning
it that are not of post-Christian date, exhibits an extremely
primitive character, corresponding to the primitive and un-
16 SOURCES AND METHOD leCT. i.
changing character of nomadic life. And with what may
be gathered from this source we must compare, above all,
the invaluable notices, preserved in the Old Testament, of
the religion of the small Palestinian states before their
conquest by the great empires of the East. For this
period, apart from the Assyrian records, we have only a
few precious fragments of evidence from inscriptions, and
no other literary evidence of a contemporary kind. At a
later date the evidence from monuments is multiplied and
Greek literature begins to give important aid ; but by
this time also we have reached the period of religious
syncretism — the period, that is, when different faiths and
worships began to react on one another, and produce
new and complex forms of religion. Here, therefore, we
have to use the same precautions that are called for in
dealing with the older syncretistic religion of Babylonia
and Assyria ; it is only by careful sifting and comparison
that we can separate between ancient use and modern
innovation, between the old religious inheritance of the
Semites and things that came in from without.
Let it be understood from the outset that we have
not the materials for anything like a complete com-
parative history of Semitic religions, and that nothing of
the sort will be attempted in these Lectures. But a careful
study and comparison of the various sources is sufficient
to furnish a tolerably accurate view of a series of general
features, which recur with striking uniformity in all parts
of the Semitic field, and govern the evolution of faith and
worship down to a late date. These widespread and
permanent features form the real interest of Semitic
religion to the philosophical student ; it was in them,
and not in the things that vary from place to place and
from time to time, that the strength of Semitic religion
lay, and it is to them therefore that we must look for help
LECT. I. OF THE ENQUIRY. 17
in the most important practical application of our studies,
for light on the great question of the relation of the
positive Semitic religions to the earlier faith of the race.
Before entering upon the particulars of our enquiry, I
must still detain you with a few words about the method
and order of investigation that seem to be prescribed by
the nature of the subject. To get a true and well-defined
picture of the type of Semitic religion, we must not only
study the parts separately, but must have clear views of
the place and proportion of each part in its relation to the
whole. To this end it is very desirable that we should
follow a natural order of enquiry and exposition, beginning
with those features of religion which stood, so to speak, in
the foreground, and therefore bulked most largely in
religious life. And here we shall go very far wrong if
we take it for granted that what is the most important
and prominent side of religion to us was equally important
in the ancient society with which we are to deal. In
connection with every religion, whether ancient or modern,
we find on the one hand certain beliefs, and on the other
certain institutions ritual practices and rules of conduct.
Our modern habit is to look at religion from the side of
belief rather than of practice ; a habit largely due to the
fact that, till comparatively recent times, almost the only
forms of religion which have attracted much serious study
in Europe have been those of the various Christian
Churches, and that the controversies between these Churches
have constantly turned on diversities of dogma, even where
the immediate point of difference has been one of xitual.
For in all parts of the Christian Church it is agreed that
ritual is important only in connection with its interpreta-
tion. Thus within Christendom the study of religion has
meant mainly the study of Christian beliefs, and instruc-
tion in religion has habitually begun with the creed,
B
18 DOGMA AND MYTHOLOGY. lect. i.
religious duties being presented to the learner as flowing
from the dogmatic truths he is taught to accept. All this
seems to us so much a matter of course that, when we
approach some strange or antique religion, we naturally
assume that here also our first business is to search for
■^ a creed, and find in it the key to ritual and practice. But
the antique religions had for the most part no creed ; they
consisted entirely of institutions and practices. No doubt
men will not habitually follow certain practices without
attaching a meaning to them ; but as a rule we find that
while the practice was rigorously fixed, the meaning
attached to it was extremely vague, and the same rite was
explained by different people in different ways, without
any question of orthodoxy or heterodoxy arising in conse-
quence. In ancient Greece, for example, certain things
were done at a temple, and people were agreed that it
would be impious not to do them. But if you had asked
why they were done, you would probably have had several
mutually contradictory explanations from different persons,
and no one would have thought it a matter of the least
religious importance which of these you chose to adopt.
Indeed the explanations offered would not have been of
a kind to stir any strong feeling ; for in most cases they
would have been merely different stories as to the circum-
stances under which the rite first came to be established,
by the command or by the direct example of the god.
The rite, in short, was connected not with a dogma but
with a myth.
In all the antique religions, mythology takes the place
of dogma, that is, the sacred lore of priests and people,
so far as it does not consist of mere rules for the perform-
ance of religious acts, assumes the form of stories about
the gods ; and these stories afford the only explanation that
is offered of the precepts of religion and the prescribed
LECT. I. MYTH AND RITUAL. 19
rules of ritual. But, strictly speaking, this mythology was
no essential part of ancient religion, for it had no sacred
sanction and no binding force on the worshippers. The
myths connected with individual sanctuaries and cere-
monies were merely part of the apparatus of the worship ;
they served to excite the fancy and sustain the interest of
the worshipper ; but he was often offered a choice of
several accounts of the same thing, and provided that he
fulfilled the ritual with accuracy, no one cared what he
believed about its origin. Belief in a certain series of
myths was neither obligatory as a part of true religion, nor
was it supposed that, by believing, a man acquired religious
merit and conciliated the favour of the gods. What was
obligatory or meritorious was the exact performance of
certain sacred acts prescribed by religious tradition. This
being so, it follows that mythology ought not to take the
prominent place that is too often assigned to it in the
scientific study of ancient faiths. So far as myths consist
of explanations of ritual their value is altogether secondary,
and it may be affirmed with confidence that in almost
every case the myth was derived from the ritual, and not
the ritual from the myth ; for the ritual was fixed and the
myth was variable, the ritual was obligatory and faith in
the myth was at the discretion of the worshipper. Now
by far the largest part of the myths of antique religions
are connected with the ritual of particular shrines, or with
the religious observances of particular tribes and districts.
In all such cases it is probable, in most cases it is certain,
that the myth is merely the explanation of a religious
usage ; and ordinarily it is such an explanation as could
not have arisen till the original sense of the usage had
more or less fallen into oblivion. As a rule the myth is
no explanation of the origin of the ritual to any one who
does not believe it to be a narrative of real occurrences,
20 THE DEPENDENCE OF lect. i.
and the boldest mythologist will not believe that. But, if
it be not true, the myth itself requires to be explained,
and every principle of philosophy and common sense
demands that the explanation be sought, not in arbitrary
allegorical theories, but in the actual facts of ritual or
religious custom to which the myth attaches. The con-
clusion is, that in the study of ancient religions we must
begin, not with myth, but with ritual and traditional usage.
Nor can it be fairly set against this conclusion, that
there are certain myths which are not mere explanations
of traditional practices, but exhibit the beginnings of larger
religious speculation, or of an attempt to systematise and
reduce to order the motley variety of local worships and
beliefs. For in this case the secondary character of the
myths is still more clearly marked. They are either pro-
ducts of early philosophy, reflecting on the nature of the
universe ; or they are political in scope, being designed to
supply a thread of union between the various worships of
groups, originally distinct, which have been united into
one social or political organism ; or, finally, they are due
to the free play of epic imagination. But philosophy
politics and poetry are something more, or something less,
than religion pure and simple.
There can be no doubt that, in the later stages of ancient
religions, mythology acquired an increased importance. In
the struggle of heathenism with scepticism on the one
hand and Christianity on the other, the supporters of the
old traditional reliflfion were driven to search for ideas of
a modern cast, which they could represent as the true
inner meaning of the traditional rites. To this end
they laid hold of the old myths, and applied to them an
allegorical system of interpretation. Myth interpreted
by the aid of allegory became the favourite means of
infusing a new significance into ancient forms. But the
LKCT. I. MYTH ON RITUAL. 21
theories thus developed are the falsest of false guides as
to the original meaning of the old religions.
On the other hand, the ancient myths taken in their
natural sense, without allegorical gloss, are plainly of great
importance as testimonies to the views of the nature of
the gods that were prevalent when they were formed.
For though the mythical details had no dogmatic value
and no binding authority over faith, it is to be supposed
that nothing was put into a myth which people at that
time were not prepared to believe without offence. But
so far as the way of thinking expressed in the myth was
not already expressed in the ritual itself, it had no
properly religious sanction ; the myth apart from the
ritual affords only a doubtful and slippery kind of
evidence. Before we can handle myths with any con-
fidence, we must have some definite hold of the ideas
expressed in the ritual tradition, which incorporated the
only fixed and statutory elements of the religion.
All this, I hope, will become clearer to us as we proceed
with our enquiry, and learn by practical examj)le the use
to be made of the different lines of evidence open to us.
But it is of the first importance to realise clearly from
the outset that ritual and practical usage were, strictly
speaking, the sum total of ancient religions. Eeligion
in primitive times was not a system of belief with
practical applications ; it was a body of fixed traditional
practices, to which every member of society conformed as
a matter of course. Men would not be men if they agreed
to do certain things without having a reason for their
action ; but in ancient religion the reason was not first
formulated as a doctrine and then expressed in practice,
but conversely, practice preceded doctrinal theory. Men
form general rules of conduct before they begin to
express general principles in words ; political institutions
22 ANALOGY OF RELIGIOUS lect. i.
are older than political theories, and in like manner
religious institutions are older than religious theories.
This analogy is not arbitrarily chosen, for in fact the
parallelism in ancient society between religious and
political institutions is complete. In each sphere great
importance was attached to form and precedent, but the
explanation why the precedent was followed consisted
merely of a legend as to its first establishment. That
the precedent, once established, was authoritative did not
appear to require any proof. The rules of society were
based on precedent, and the continued existence of the
society was sufficient reason why a precedent once set
should continue to be followed.
Strictly speaking, indeed, I understate the case when I
say that the oldest religious and political institutions
present a close analogy. It would be more correct to
say that they were parts of one whole of social custom.
Eeligion was a part of the organised social life into which
a man was born, and to which he conformed throvigh life
in the same vmconscious way in which men fall into any
habitual practice of the society in which they live. Men
took the gods and their worship for granted, just as they
took the other usages of the state for granted, and if they
reasoned or speculated about them, they did so on the
presupposition that the traditional usages were fixed
things, behind which their reasonings must not go, and
which no reasoning could be allowed to overturn. To
us moderns religion is above all a matter of individual
conviction and reasoned belief, but to the ancients it was
a part of the citizen's public life, reduced to fixed forms,
which he was not bound to understand and was not at
liberty to criticise. Society demanded of each of its
members the observance of the forms, not for his sake
but for its own, for if its religion was tampered with
LECT. I. AND POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. 23
the bases of society were undermined, and the favour of
the gods was forfeited. But so long as the prescribed
religious forms were duly observed, a man was recognised
as a pious man, and no one asked how his religion was
rooted in his heart or affected his reason. Eeligious like
political duty, of which indeed it was a part, was entirely
comprehended in the observance of certain fixed rules of
outward conduct.
The conclusion from all this as to the method of our
investigation is obvious. When we study the political
structure of an early society, we do not begin by asking
what is recorded of the first legislators, or what theory
men advanced as to the reason of their institutions ; we
try to understand what the institutions were, and how
they shaped men's lives. In like manner, in the study
of Semitic religion, we must not begin by asking what was
told about the gods, but what the working religious
institutions were, and how they shaped the lives of the
worshippers. Our enquiry therefore, will be directed to
the religious institutions which governed the lives of men i/
of Semitic race.
In following out this plan, however, we shall do well
not to throw ourselves at once upon the multitudinous
details of rite and ceremony, but to devote our attention
to certain broad features of the sacred institutions which
are sufficiently well marked to be realised at once. If we
were called upon to examine the political institutions of
antiquity, we should find it convenient to carry with us
some general notion of the several types of government
under which the multifarious institutions of ancient states
arrange themselves. And in like manner it will be useful
for us, when we examine the religious institutions of the
Semites, to have first some general knowledge of the types
of divine governance, the various ruling conceptions of the
24 THE NATURE LECT. I.
relations of the gods to man, which underlie the rites and
ordinances of religion in different places and at different
times. Such knowledge we can obtain in a provisional
form, before entering on a mass of ritual details, mainly by
considering the titles of honour by which men addressed
their gods, and the language in which they expressed their
dependence on them. From these we can see at once, in a
broad, general way, what place the gods held in the social
system of antiquity, and under what general categories
their relations to their worshippers fell. The broad
results thus reached must then be developed, and at the
same time controlled and rendered more precise, by an
examination in detail of the working institutions of
religion.
The question of the metaphysical nature of the gods, as
distinct from their social office and function, must be left
in the background till this whole investigation is com-
pleted. It is vain to ask what the gods are in themselves
till we have studied them in what I may call their public
life, that is, in the stated intercourse between them and
their worshippers which was kept up by means of the
prescribed forms of cultus. From the antique point of
view, indeed, the question what the gods are in themselves
is not a religious but a speculative one ; what is requisite
to religion is a practical acquaintance with the rules on
which the deity acts and on which he expects his
worshippers to frame their conduct — what in 2 Kings
xvii. 2 6 is called the " manner " or rather the " customary
law" (viishjmt) of the god of the land. This is true
even of the religion of Israel. When the prophets
speak of tlie knowledge of God, they always mean a
practical knowledge of the laws and principles of His
government in Israel,^ and a summary expression for
^ See especially Hosea, cliap. iv.
LECT. I. OF THE GODS. 2o
religion as a whole is " the knowledge and fear of Jehovah," ^
i.e. the knowledge of what Jehovah prescribes, combined
with a reverent obedience. An extreme scepticism towards
all religious speculation is recommended in the Book of
Ecclesiastes as the proper attitude of piety, for no amount
of discussion can carry a man beyond the plain rule to
" fear God and keep His commandments." ^ This counsel
the author puts into the mouth of Solomon, and so
represents it, not unjustly, as summing up the old view of
religion, which in more modern days had unfortunately
begun to be undermined.
The propriety of keeping back all metaphysical questions
as to the nature of the gods till we have studied the
practices of religion in detail, becomes very apparent if we
consider for a moment what befel the later philosophers
and theosophists of heathenism in their attempts to con-
struct a theory of the traditional religion. We find that
they were not able to give any account of the nature of
the gods from which all the received practices of worship
could be rationally deduced, and accordingly those of them
who had any pretension to be orthodox were compelled to
have recourse to the most violent allegorical interpreta-
tions in order to bring the established ritual into
accordance with their theories.^ The reason for this is
obvious. The traditional usages of religion had grown \\\i
gradually in the course of many centuries, and reflected
habits of thought characteristic of very diverse stages of
man's intellectual and moral development. No one con-
ception of the nature of the gods could possibly afford the
clue to all parts of that motley complex of rites and
ceremonies which the later paganism had received by
inheritance, from a series of ancestors in every stage of
1 Isaiah xi. 2. ^ Eccles. xii. 13.
^ See, for example, Plutarch's Greek and Eoman Quentions.
i/~
26 THE EELATIONS BETWEEN LECT. I.
culture from pure savagery upwards. The record of the
religious thought of mankind, as it is embodied in religious
institutions, resembles the geological record of the history
of the earth's crust ; the new and the old are preserved
side by side, or rather layer upon layer. The classification
of ritual formations in their proper sequence is the first
step towards their explanation, and that explanation itself
must take the form, not of a speculative theory, but of a
rational life-history.
I have already explained that, in attempting such a life-
history of religious institutions, we must begin by forming
some preliminary ideas of the practical relation in which
the gods of antiquity stood to their worshippers. I have
now to add, that we shall also find it necessary to have
before us from the outset some elementary notions of the
relations which early races of mankind conceived to
subsist between gods and men on the one hand, and the
material universe on the other. All acts of ancient
worship have a material embodiment, tlie form of which
is determined by the consideration that gods and men
alike stand in certain fixed relations to particular parts
or aspects of physical nature. Certain places, certain
things, even certain animal kinds are conceived as holy,
i.e. as standing in a near relation to the gods, and claiming
special reverence from men, and this conception plays
a very large part in the development of all religious
institutions. Here again we have a problem that cannot
be solved by a priori methods ; it is only as we move
onward from step to step in the analysis of the details of
ritual observances that we can hope to gain full insight
into the relations of the gods to physical nature. But
there are certain broad features in the ancient conception
of the universe, and of the relations of its parts to one
another, which can be grasped at once, upon a merely pre-
LECT. I. GODS MEN AND NATURE. 27
liminary survey, and we sliall find it profitable to give
attention to these at an early stage of our discussion.
I propose, therefore, to devote my second lecture to the
nature of the antique religious community and the relations
of the gods to their worshippers. After tliis we will pro-
ceed to consider the relations of the gods to physical nature,
not in a complete or exhaustive way, but in a manner
entirely preliminary and provisional, and only so far as is
necessary to enable vis to understand the material basis of
ancient ritual. After these preliminary enquiries have
furnished us with certain necessary points of view, we shall
be in a position to take up the institutions of worship in
an orderly manner, and make an attempt to work out
their life-history. We shall find that the history of
religious institutions is the history of ancient religion itself,
as a practical force in the development of the human race,
and that the articulate efforts of the antique intellect to
comprehend the meaning of religion, the nature of the gods,
and the principles on which they deal with men, take their
point of departure from the unspoken ideas embodied in
the traditional forms of ritual praxis. "Whether the con-
scious efforts of ancient religious thinkers took the shape
of mythological invention or of speculative construction,
the raw material of thought upon which they operated was
derived from the common traditional stock of religious con-
ceptions that was handed on from generation to generation,
not in express words, but in the form of religious custom.
In accordance with the rules of the Burnett Trust, three
courses of lectures, to be delivered in successive winters,
are allowed me for the development of this great subject.
When the work was first entrusted to me, I formed the plan
of dividing my task into three distinct parts. In the first
course of lectures I hoped to cover the whole field of
practical religious institutions. In the second I proposed
/
28 PLAN OF THESE LECTURES. lect. i.
to myself to discuss the nature and origin of the gods of
Semitic heathenism, their relations to one another, the
myths that surround them, and the whole subject of
religious belief, so far as it is not directly involved in the
observances of daily religious life. The third winter would
thus have been left free for an examination of the part
which Semitic religion has played in universal history, and
its influence on the general progress of humanity, whether
in virtue of the early contact of Semitic faiths with other
systems of antique religion, or — what is more important —
in virtue of the influence, both positive and negative, that
the common type of Semitic religion has exercised on the
formulas and structure of the great monotheistic faiths that
have gone forth from the Semitic lands. But the first
division of the subject has grown under my hands, and I
find that it will not be possible in a single winter to cover
the whole field of religious institutions in a way at all
adequate to the fundamental importance of this part of the
enquiry.
It will therefore be necessary to allow the first branch of
the subject to run over into the second course, for which I
reserve, among other matters of interest, the whole history
of religious feasts and also that of the Semitic priesthoods.
I hope, however, to give the present course a certain com-
pleteness in itself by carrying the investigation to the end
of the great subject of sacrifice. The origin and meaning
of sacrifice constitute the central problem of ancient religion,
and when this problem has been disposed of we may
naturally feel that we have reached a point of rest at which
both speaker and hearers will be glad to make a pause.
LECTUEE II.
THE NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY, AND THE
RELATION OF THE GODS TO THEIR WORSHIPPERS.
We have seen that ancient faiths must be looked on as
matters of institution rather than of dogma or formulated
belief, and that the system of an antique religion was part
of the social order under which its adherents lived, so that
the word " system " must here be taken in a practical sense,
as when we speak of a political system, and not in the
sense of an organised body of ideas or theological opinions.
Broadly speaking, religion was made up of a series of acts
and observances, the correct performance of which was
necessary or desirable to secure the favour of the gods or
to avert their anger ; and in these observances every
member of society had a share, marked out for him either
in virtue of his being born within a certain family and
community, or in virtue of the station, within the family
and community, that he had come to hold in the course of
his life. A man did not choose his religion or frame it for
himself ; it came to him as part of the general scheme of
social obligations and ordinances laid upon him, as a matter
of course, by his position in the family and in the nation.
Individual men were more or less religious, as men now
are more or less patriotic ; that is, they discharged their
religious duties with a greater or less degree of zeal accord-
ing to their character and temperament ; but there was no
such thing as an absolutely irreligious man. A certain
29
30 RELIGION AND lect. li.
amount of religion was required of everybody ; for the due
performance of religious acts was a social obligation in
which every one had to take his share, as a member of the
family or of the state. Of intolerance in the modern sense
of the word ancient society knew nothing ; it never per-
secuted a man into particular beliefs for the good of his own
soul. Eeligion did not exist for the saving of souls but for
the preservation and welfare of society, and in all that was
necessary to this end every man liad to take his prescribed
part, or break with the domestic and political community to
which he belonged.
Perhaps the simplest way of putting the state of the
case is this. Every human being, without choice on his
own part, but simply in virtue of his birth and upbringing,
becomes a member of what we call a natural society. He
belongs, that is, to a certain family and a certain nation,
and this membership lays upon him certain social obliga-
tions and duties which he is called upon to fulfil as a matter
of course, and on pain of social penalties and disabilities,
while at the same time it confers upon him certain social
rights and advantages. In this respect the ancient and
modern worlds are alike; but there is this important
difference, that the tribal or national societies of the ancient
world were not strictly natural in the modern sense of the
word, for the gods had their part and place in them equally
with men. The circle into which a man was born was not
simply a human society, a circle of kinsfolk and fellow-
citizens, but embraced also certain divine beings, the gods
of the family and of the state, which to the ancient mind
were as much a part of the particular community with
which they stood connected as the human members of the
social group. The relation between the gods of antiquity
and their worshippers was expressed in the language of
human relationship, and this language was not taken in a
LECT. II. NATURAL SOCIETY. 31
figurative sense but with strict literality. If a god was
spoken of as father and his worshippers as his offspring,
the meaning was that the worshippers were literally of his
stock, that he and they made up one natural family with
reciprocal family duties to one another. Or again if the
god was addressed as king, and the worshippers called
themselves his servants, they meant that the supreme
guidance of the state was actually in his hands, and
accordingly the organisation of the state included provision
for consulting his will and obtaining his direction in all
weighty matters, and also provision for approaching him
as king with due homage and tribute.
Thus a man was born into a fixed relation to certain
gods as surely as he was born into relation to his fellow-
men ; and his religion, that is, the part of conduct which
was determined by his relation to the gods, was simply
one side of the general scheme of conduct prescribed for
him by his position as a member of society. There was no
separation between the spheres of religion and of ordinary
life. Every social act had a reference to the gods as well
as to men, for the social body was not made up of men
only, but of gods and men.
Tliis account of the position of religion in the social
system holds good, I believe, for all parts and races of the
ancient world in the earlier stages of their history. The
causes of so remarkable a uniformity lie hidden in the mists
of prehistoric time, but must plainly have been of a general
kind, operating on all parts of mankind without distinction
of race and local environment ; for in every region of the
world, as soon as we find a nation or tribe emercrinfj from
prehistoric darkness into the light of authentic history, we
find also that its religion conforms to the general type
which has just been indicated. As time rolls on and the
development of society advances, modifications take place.
.32 RELIGION AND
LECT. II.
Ill religion as in other matters the transition from the
antique to the modern type of life is not sudden and
unprepared, but is gradually led up to by a continuous
disintegration of the old structure of society, accompanied
by the growth of new ideas and institutions. In Greece,
for example, the intimate connection of religion with the
organisation of the family and the state was modified and
made less exclusive, at a relatively early date, by the Pan-
Hellenic conceptions which find their theological expressions
in Homer. If the Homeric poems were the Bible of the
Greeks, as has so often been said, the true meaning of
this phrase is that in these poems utterance was given to
ideas about the gods which broke through the limitations
of local and tribal worship, and held forth to all Greeks a
certain common stock of religious ideas and motives, not
hampered by the exclusiveness which in the earlier stages
of society allows of no fellowship in religion that is not
also a fellowship in the interests of a single kin or a single
political group. In Italy there never was anything corre-
sponding to the Pan-Hellenic ideas that operated in Greece,
and accordingly the strict union of religion and the state,
the solidarity of gods and men as parts of a single society
with common interests and common aims, was character-
istically exhibited in the institutions of Eome down to
quite a late date. But in Greece as well as in Eome the
ordinary traditional work-a-day religion of the masses
never greatly departed from the primitive type. The final
disintegration of antique religion in the countries of Gr?eco-
Italian civilisation was the work first of the philosophers
and then of Christianity. But Christianity itself, in
Southern Europe, has not altogether obliterated the original
features of the paganism which it displaced. The Spanish
peasants who insult the Madonna of the neighbouring
village, and come to blows over the merits of rival local
LECT. II. NATURAL SOCIETY. 33
saints, still do homage to the same antique conception of
religion which in Egypt (as readers of Juvenal remember)
animated the feuds of Ombos and Tentyra, and made
hatred for each other's gods the formula that summed up
the whole local jealousies of the two towns.
The principle that the fundamental conception of ancient
religion is the solidarity of the gods and their worshippers
as part of one organic society, carries with it important
consequences, which I propose to examine in some detail,
with special reference to the group of religions that forms
the proper subject of these lectures. But though my
facts and illustrations will be drawn from the Semitic
sphere, a great part of what I shall have to say in the
present lecture might be applied, with very trifling modifi-
cations, to the early religion of any other part of mankind.
The differences between Semitic and Aryan religion, for
example, are not so primitive or fundamental as is often
imagined. Not only in matters of worship, but in social
organisation generally — and we have seen that ancient
religion is but a part of the general social order which
embraces gods and men alike — the two races, Aryans and
Semites, began on lines which are so much alike as to be
almost indistinguishable, and the divergence between their
paths, which becomes more and more apparent in the
course of ages, was not altogether an affair of race and
innate tendency, but depended in a great measure on the
operation of special local and historical causes.
In both races the first steps of social and religious
development took place in small communities, which at
the dawn of history exhibited a political system based
on the principle of kinship, and were mainly held together
by the tie of blood, the only social bond which then had
absolute and undisputed strength, being enforced by the
law of blood revenge. As a rule, however, men of several
34 THE OLDEST lect. ii.
clans lived side by side, forming communities which did
not possess the absolute homogeneity of blood brotherhood,
and yet were united by common interests and the habit
of friendly association. The origin of such associations,
which are found all over the world at a very early stage
of society, need not occupy us now. It is enough to note
the fact that they existed, and were not maintained by
the feeling of kindred, but by habit and community of
interests. These local communities of men of different
clans, who lived together on a footing of amity, and had
often to unite in common action, especially in war, but
also in affairs of polity and justice, were the origin of the
antique state. There is probably no case in ancient
history where a state was simply the development of a
single homogeneous clan or gens, although the several clans
which united to form a state often came in course of time
to suppose themselves to be only branches of one great
ancestral brotherhood, and were thus knit together in a
closer unity of sentiment and action. But in the begin-
ning, the union of several clans for common political
action was not sustained either by an effective sentiment
of kinship (the law of blood revenge uniting only members
of the same clan) or by any close political organisation,
but was produced by the pressure of practical necessity,
and always tended towards dissolution when this practical
pressure was withdrawn. The only organisation for
common action was that the leading men of the clans
consulted together in time of need, and their influence led
the masses with them. Out of these conferences arose the
senates of elders found in the ancient states of Semitic
and Aryan antiquity alike. The kingship, again, as we
find it in most antique states, appears to have ordinarily
arisen in the way which is so well illustrated by the
history of Israel. In time of war an individual leader is
LECT. II. SEMITIC COMMUNITIES. 35
indispensable ; in a time of prolonged danger the temporary
authority of an approved captain easily passes into the
lifelong leadership at home as well as in the field, which
was exercised by such a judge as Gideon ; and at length the
advantages of having a permanent head, both as a leader
of the army and as a restraint on the perennial feuds and
jealousies of clans that constantly threaten the solidity of
the state, are recognised in the institution of the kingship,
which again tends to become hereditary, as in the case of
the house of David, simply because the king's house
naturally becomes greater and richer than other houses,
and so better able to sustain the burden of power.
Up to this point the progress of society was much alike
in the East and in the West, and the progress of religion,
as we shall see in the sequel, followed that of society in
general. But while in Greece and Rome the early period
of the kings lies in the far background of tradition, and
only forms the starting-point of the long development with
which the historian of these countries is mainly occupied,
the independent evolution of Semitic society was arrested
at an early stage. In the case of the nomadic Arabs, shut
up m their wildernesses of rock and sand, nature herself
barred the way of progress. The life of the desert does
not furnish the material conditions for permanent advance
beyond the tribal system, and we find that the religious
development of the Arabs was proportionally retarded, so
that at the advent of Islam the ancient heathenism, like
the ancient tribal structure of society, had become effete
without having ever ceased to be barbarous.
The northern Semites, on the other hand, whose progress
up to the eighth century before Christ certainly did not
lag behind that of the Greeks, were deprived of political
independence, and so cut short in their natural develop-
ment, by the advance from the Tigris to the Mediterranean
36 THE NATIONS AND lect. li.
of the great Assyrian monarchs, who, drawing from the
rich and broad alluvium of the Two Elvers resources which
none of their neighbours could rival, went on from conquest
to conquest till all the small states of Syria and Palestine
had gone down before them. The Assyrians were con-
querors of the most brutal and destructive kind, and
wherever they came the whole structure of ancient society
was dissolved. From this time onwards the difference between
the Syrian or Palestinian and the Greek was not one of
race alone, it was the difference between a free citizen and
the slave of an Oriental despotism. Eeligion as well as
civil society was profoundly affected by the catastrophe of
the old free communities of the northern Semitic lands ;
the society of one and the same religion was no longer
identical with the state, and the old solidarity of civil and
religious life continued to exist only in a modified form.
It is not therefore surprising that from the eighth century
onwards the history of Semitic religion runs a very
different course from that which we observe on the other
side of the Mediterranean.
All this will become clearer as we proceed, and need
not detain us now. For the present we are concerned
with the first principles of Semitic religion, which must be
studied as they exhibit themselves in the early ages of the
Semitic states, before their free development was arrested
by the hand of foreign conquest, and before the history of
the East had been forced into the channels which make
its subsequent course so unlike the history of the West.
The ancient Semitic communities were small, and were
separated from each other by incessant feuds. Hence,
on the principle of solidarity between gods and their
worshippers, the particularism characteristic of political
society could not but reappear in the sphere of religion.
In the same measure as the god of a clan or town had
LECT. II. THEIR GODS. 37
indisputable claim to the reverence and service of the
community to which he belonged, he was necessarily
an enemy to their enemies and a stranger to those to
whom they were strangers. Of this there are sufficient
evidences in the way in which the Old Testament speaks
about the relation of the nations to their gods. When
David in the bitterness of his heart complains of those
who " have driven him out from connection with the
heritage of Jehovah,'' he represents them as saying to
him, " Go, serve other gods." ^ In driving him to seek
refuge in another land and another nationality, they
compel him to change his religion, for a man's religion is
part of his political connection. " Thy sister," says Naomi
to Euth, " is gone back unto her people and unto her
gods ; " and Euth replies, " Thy people shall be my people,
and thy God my God : " ^ the change of nationality involves
a change of cult. Jeremiah, in the full consciousness of the
falsehood of all religions except that of Israel, remarks that
no nation changes its gods although they be no gods : ^ a
nation's worship remains as constant as its political
identity. The Book of Deuteronomy, speaking in like
manner from the standpoint of monotheism, reconciles the
sovereignty of Jehovah with the actual facts of heathenism,
by saying that He has " allotted " the various objects of
false worship " unto all nations under the whole heaven." *
The " allotment " of false gods among the nations, as
property is allotted, expresses with precision the idea that
each god had his own determinate circle of worshippers,
to whom he stood in a peculiar and exclusive relation.
The exclusiveness of which I have just spoken naturally
finds its most pronounced expression in the share taken
by the gods in the feuds and wars of their worshippers.
The enemies of the god and the enemies of his people are
1 1 Sam. xxvi. 19. ^ jjuti^ i_ 14 .^^^_ 3 jgj.. ii. n. •* Deut. iv. 19.
38 THE NATIONS
LECT. 11.
identical ; even in the Old Testament " the enemies of
Jehovah " are originally nothing else than the enemies
of Israel/ In battle each god fights for his own people,
and to his aid success is ascribed ; Chemosh gives victory
to Moab, and Asshur to Assyria ; ^ in Arabia the tribal
war-cry invokes the name of the god ; in Palestine his
image or symbol accompanies the host to battle. "When
the ark was brought into the camp of Israel, the Philistines
said, " Gods are come into the camp ; who can deliver us
from the hand of these mighty gods ? " ^ They judged from
their own practice, for when David defeated them at Baal-
Perazim, part of the booty consisted in their idols which
had been carried into the field.* Similarly an Arabic
poet says, " Yaghiith went forth with us against Morad ; " ^
that is, the image of the god Yaghiith was carried into
the fray. You observe how literal and realistic was the
conception . of the part taken by the deity in the wars of
his worshippers.
When the gods of the several Semitic communities
took part in this way in the ancestral feuds of their
worshippers, it was impossible for an individual to change
his religion without changing his nationality, and a whole
community could hardly change its religion at all without
being absorbed into another stock or nation. Eeligious
like political ties were transmitted from father to son ;
for a man could not choose a new god at will ; the gods of
his fathers were the only deities on whom he could count
as friendly and ready to accept his homage, unless he
forswore his own kindred and was received into a new
circle of civil as well as religious life. In the old times
^ 1 Sam. XXX. 26, "the spoil of the enemies of Jehovah ;" Judg. v. 31.
^ See the inscription of King Mesha on the so-called Moabite stone, and
the Assyrian inscriptions passim.
3 1 Sam. iv. 7 sqq. * 2 Sam. v. 21. * Yacut, iv. 1023.
LECT. II. AND THEIR GODS. 39
hardly any but outlaws changed their religion ; ceremonies
of initiation, by which a man was received into a new
religious circle, became important, as we shall see by and
by, only after the breaking up of the old political life of
the small Semitic commonwealths.
On the other hand, all social fusion between two
communities tended to bring; about a religious fusion also.
This might take place in two ways. Sometimes two gods
were themselves fused into one, as when the mass of the
Israelites in their local worship of Jehovah identified Him
with the Baalim of the Canaanite high places, and carried
over into His worship the ritual of the Canaanite shrines,
not deeming that in so doing they were less truly Jehovah
worshippers than before. This process was greatly facili-
tated by the extreme similarity in the attributes ascribed
to different local or tribal gods, and the frequent identity
of the divine titles.^ One Baal hardly differed from another,
except in being connected with a different kindred or a
different place, and when the kindreds were fused by
intermarriage, or lived together in one village on a footing
of social amity, there was nothing to keep their gods
permanently distinct. In other cases, where the several
deities brought together by the union of their worshippers
into one state were too distinct to lose their individuality,
they continued to be worshipped side by side as allied
divine powers, and it is to this kind of process that we
1 It will appear in the sequel that the worship of the greater Semitic
deities was closely associated with the reverence which all primitive pastoral
tribes pay to their flocks and herds. To a tribe whose herds consisted of
kine and oxen, the cow and the ox were sacred beings, which in the oldest
times were never killed or eaten except sacrificially. The tribal deities
themselves were conceived as closely akin to the sacred species of domestic
animals, and their images were often made in the likeness of steers or heifers
in cow-keeping tribes, or of rams and ewes in shepherd tribes. It is easy to
see how this facilitated the fusion of tribal worships, and how deities
originally distinct might come to be identified on account of the similarity
of their images and of the sacrifices oifered to them.
40 POLYTHEISM. lect. ir.
must apparently ascribe the development of a Semitic
pantheon or polytheistic system. A pantheon, or organised
commonwealth of gods, such as we find in the state
religion of Egypt or in the Homeric poems, is not the
primitive type of heathenism, and no trace of such a
thing appears in the oldest documents of the religion
of the smaller Semitic communities. The old Semites
believed in the existence of many gods, for they accepted
as real the gods of their enemies as well as their own, but
they did not worship the strange gods from whom they
had no favour to expect, and on whom their gifts and
offerings would have been thrown away. When every
small community was on terms of frequent hostility with
all its neighbours, the formation of a polytheistic system
was impossible. Each group had its own god, or perhaps
a god and a goddess, to whom the other gods bore no
relation whatever. It was only as the small groups
coalesced into larger unities, that a society and kinship
of many gods began to be formed, on the model of the
alliance or fusion of their respective worshippers ; and
indeed the chief part in the development of a systematic
hierarchy or commonwealth of Semitic deities is due to
the Babylonians and Assyrians, among whom the labours of
statesmen to build up a consolidated empire out of a multi-
tude of local communities, originally independent, were
seconded by the efforts of the priests to give a correspond-
ing unity of scheme to the multiplicity of local worships.
Thus far we have looked only at the general fact, that
in a Semitic community men and their gods formed a
social and political as well as a religious whole. But to
make our conceptions more concrete we must consider
what place in this whole was occupied by the divine
element of the social partnership. And here we find that
the two leading conceptions of the relation of the god to
LECT. II. FATHERHOOD OF THE GODS. 41
his people are those of fatherhood and of kingship. We
have learned to look on Semitic society as built up on two
bases — on kinship, which is the foundation of the system of
clans or gentes, and on the union of kins, living inter-
mingled or side by side, and bound together by common
interests, which is the foundation of the state. We now see
that the clan and the state are both represented in religion :
as father the god belongs to the family or clan, as king
he belongs to the state ; and in each sphere of the social
order he holds the position of highest dignity. Both these
conceptions deserve to be looked at and illustrated in some
detail.
The relation of a father to his children has a moral as
well as a physical aspect, and each of these must be taken
into account in considering what the fatherhood of the
tribal deity meant in ancient religion. In the physical
aspect the father is the being to whom the child owes his
life, and through whom he traces kinship with the other
members of his family or clan. The antique conception
of kinship is participation in one blood, which passes from
parent to child and circulates in the veins of every member
of the family. The unity of the family or clan is viewed
as a physical unity, for the blood is the life, — an idea
familiar to us from the Old Testament, — and it is the same
blood and therefore the same life that is shared by every
descendant of the common ancestor. The idea that the
race has a life of its own, of which individual lives are only
parts, is expressed even more clearly by picturing the race
as a tree, of which the ancestor is the root or stem and
the descendants the branches. This figure is used by all
the Semites, and is very common both in the Old Testament
and in the Arabian poets.
The moral aspect of fatherhood, again, lies in the social
relations and obligations which flow from the physical
42 THE FATHERHOOD lect. ii.
relationship — in the sanctity of the tie of blood which
binds together the whole family, and in the particular
modification of this tie in the case of parent and child, the
parent protecting and nourishing the child, while the child
owes obedience and service to his parent.
In Christianity, and already in the spiritual religion of
the Hebrews, the idea of divine fatherhood is entirely
dissociated from the physical basis of natural fatherhood.
Man was created in the image of God, but he was not
begotten ; God-sonship is not a thing of nature but a thing
of grace. In the Old Testament Israel is Jehovah's son,
and Jehovah is his father who created him ; ^ but this
creation is not a physical act, it refers to the series of
gracious deeds by which Israel was shaped into a nation.
And so, though it may be said of the Israelites as a whole
" Ye are the children of Jehovah your God," ^ this sonship
is national, not personal, and the individual Israelite has
not the right to call himself Jehovah's son.
But in heathen religions the fatherhood of the gods is
physical fatherhood. Among the Greeks, for example, the
idea that the gods fashioned men out of clay, as potters
fashion images, is relatively modern. The older conception
is that the races of men have gods for their ancestors, or
are the children of the earth, the common mother of gods
and men, so that men are really of the stock or kin of the
gods. That the same conception was familiar to the older
Semites appears from the Bible. Jeremiah describes
idolaters as saying to a stock. Thou art my father ; and to a
stone. Thou hast brought me forth.* In the ancient poem.
Num. xxi. 29, the Moabites are called the sons and
daughters of Chemosh, and at a much more recent date the
^^Hosea xi. 1 ; Deut. xxxii. 6. * Deut. xiv. 1.
^ See details and references in Preller-Robert, Griechische Mythol. (1887)
i. 78 sqq. * Jer. ii. 27.
LECT. II. OF THE GODS. 43
prophet Malachi calls a heathen woman " the daughter of
a strange god." ^ These phrases are doubtless accommoda-
tions to the language which the heathen neighbours of
Israel used about themselves ; they belong to an age when
society in Syria and Palestine was still mainly organised
on the tribal system, so that each clan, or even each complex
of clans forming a small independent people, traced back its
origin to a great first father ; and they indicate that, just
as in Greece, this father or ap'^'q'yerr}<i of the race was
commonly identified with the god of the race. With this
it accords that in the judgment of most modern enquirers
several names of deities appear in the old genealogies of
nations in the Book of Genesis. Edom, for example, the
progenitor of the Edomites, was identified by the Hebrews
with Esau the brother of Jacob, but to the heathen he was
a god, as appears from the theophorous proper name
Obededom, " worshipper of Edom." '"* The remains of such
^ Mai. ii. 11.
2 Bathgen, Beitrdge zur Semitisclien Religionsg. p. 10, objects that not
all names compounded with "13y are theophorous. And it is true that on
the Nabatsean inscriptions we lind names of this form in wliich the second
element is the name of a king, but this is in a state of society where the
king was revered as at least quasi-divine, and where the apotheosis of dead
kings was not unknown. Cf. Wellh. p. 2 sq.; Euting, Nabat. Inschr. p.
32 sq. ; and especially Clermont-Ganneau, Rec. d'ArcMol. Or. i. 39 sqq. What
mX means in C. I. S. pt. i. pp. 365, 367, I do not, in the present state
of the evidence, presume to guess ; but I venture to say that DTS "l^D
cannot in the context mean " king of men."
As examples of names in the genealogies of Genesis which reappear in
other quarters as names of gods, I have elscAvhere adduced Uz (Gen. xxii.
21, xxxvi. 28 ; LXX, ii^, ill, ^s ; and in Job i. 1, Ava-ins) = ' Ami {Kinship,
261) and Yeush (Gen. xxxvi. 14) = Yaghuth. To the second of these identi-
fications, objections of much force have been raised by Lagarde, Mitth. ii. 77,
Bildung der Nomina, p. 124. The other has been criticised by Noldeke,
ZDMO. xl. 184, but his remarks do not seem to me to be conclusive.
That the Arabian god is a mere personification of Time is a hard saying, and
the view that 'audo or 'auda in the line of al-A'sha is derived from the
name of the god, which Noldeke finds to be "doch etwas bizarr," has at
least the authority of Ibn al-Kalbi as cited by Jauhari, and more clearly in
the Lisdn,
44 KINSHIP OF LECT. II.
mythology are naturally few in records which have come to
us not from the heathen tribes themselves, but through the
monotheistic Hebrews. On the other hand, the extant
fragments of Phoenician and Babylonian cosmogonies date
from a time when tribal religion and the connection of
individual gods with particular kindreds was forgotten or
had fallen into the background. But in a generalised form
the notion that men are the offspring of the gods still held
its ground. In the Phoenician cosmogony of Philo Byblius
it does so in a confused shape, due to the author's euhemer-
ism, that is, to his theory that deities are nothing more
than deified men who had been great benefactors to their
species. But euhemerism itself can arise, as an explanation
of popular religion, only where the old gods are regarded
as akin to men, and where therefore the deification of
human benefactors does not involve any such patent
absurdity as on our way of thinking. Again in the
Chaldaean legend preserved by Berosus,^ the belief that
men are of the blood of the gods is expressed in a form too
crude not to be very ancient. Not only men but animals
are said to have been formed out of clay mingled with the
blood of a decapitated deity. Here we have a blood-kinship
not only of gods and men, but of gods men and animals, a
behef which has points of contact with the lowest forms of
savage religion, and will engage our attention again at a
later stage of the enquiry.
It is obvious that the idea of a physical affinity between
the gods and men in general is more modern than that of
affinity between particular gods and their worshippers ; and
the survival of the idea in a generalised form, after men's
religion had ceased to be strictly dependent on tribal con-
nection, is in itself a proof that belief in their descent from
the blood of the gods was not confined to this or that clan,
1 MUller, Fr. Hist. Gr. ii. 497 sq.
LECT. II. GODS AND MEN. 45
but was a widespread feature in the old tribal religions of
the Semites, too deeply interwoven with the whole system
of faith and practice to be altogether thrown aside when
the community of the same worship ceased to be purely
one of kinship.
That this was really the case will be seen more clearly
when we come to speak of the common features of Semitic
ritual, and especially of the ritual use of blood, which is
the primitive symbol of kinship. Meantime let us observe
that there is yet another form in which the idea of divine
descent survived the breaking up of the tribal system
among the northern Semites. When this took place, the
worshippers of one god, being now men of different
kindreds, united by political bonds instead of bonds of
blood, could not be all thought of as children of the god.
He was no longer their father but their king. But as
the deities of a mixed community were in their origin the
old deities of the more influential families, the members of
these families might still trace their origin to the family
god, and find in this pedigree matter of aristocratic pride.
Thus royal and noble houses among the Greeks long con-
tinued to trace their stem back to a divine forefather, and
the same thing appears among the Semites. The testimony
of Virgil and Silius Italicus,^ that the royal house of Tyre
and the noblest families of Carthage claimed descent from
the Tyrian Baal, is confirmed by the name Abibaal, " my
father is Baal," borne by the father of Solomon's ally,
Hiram.^ Similarly among the Aramtean sovereigns of
1 JEn. i. 729 ; Punica i. 87.
2 The same name appears iu C. I. S. Nos. 378, 40r). In the former case
it is the name of a woman, "a handmaid of the gods," whose mother is named
but not her father. It is possible that the mother was a cedeaha or temple-
prostitute, and that the god was regarded as the father of the children of
religious prostitution. Cf. ibid. Nos. 253, 256, and Herod, i. 181 sq.,
compared (as regards the Theban case) with Strabo, xvii. 1. 46, p. 817. As
regards mnCTON, C. I. S. No. 3, 1. 14, it is doubtful whether it is not
46 KINSHIP OF
LECT. n.
Damascus, mentioned in the Bible, we find more than one
Ben-hadad, " son of the god Hadad ; " while among the later
Aramaeans names like Barlaha, " son of God," Barba'shmin,
" son of the Lord of Heaven," Barate, " son of Ate," are not
uncommon.^
The belief that all the members of a clan are sons and
daughters of its god, might naturally be expected to survive
longest in Arabia, where the tribe was never lost in the
state, and kinship continued down to the time of Mohammed
to be the one sacred bond of social unity. In point of
fact many Arabian tribes bear the names of gods, or of
celestial bodies worshipped as gods, and their members are
styled " sons of Hobal," " sons of the Full Moon," and the
like.^ There is no good reason for refusing to explain
these names, or at least the older ones among them, on
the analogy of the similar clan-names found among the
northern Semites ; for Arabian ritual, as well as that of
Palestine and Syria, involves in its origin a belief in the
kinship of the god and his worshippers. In the later ages
of Arabian heathenism, however, of which alone we have
any full accounts, religion had come to be very much dis-
sociated from tribal feeling, mainly, it would seem, in
equivalent to mriJi'y DnX, "handmaid of Astarte," for we find also JOt^'XIDX.
The name bV2T)2, "daughter of Baal," is not quite certain in any of the
three passages quoted by Levy, Phon. WOrtb. s.v. Compare, further, the
names nSpDn, Jl^bonn, "brother, sister of the Queen (Astarte)," nfjOri,
C. /. S. 221, 430 ; also Din, Hiram, and in Hebrev?, ^JXTl, nTlX, etc.
1 For the god-sonship of Assyrian monarchs, see Tiele, Babylonisch-Assyr.
Gesch. p. 492.
2 See Kinship, p. 205 sqq., and Wellhausen, Heidenthum, p. 4 sqq., who
explains all such names as due to omission of the prefix 'Ahd or the like.
In some cases this probably is so, but it must not be assumed that because
the same tribe is called (for example) 'Auf or 'Abd 'Auf indifferently, Banu
'Auf is a contraction of Banu 'Abd 'Auf. It is quite logical that the sons
of 'Auf form the collective body of his worshippers ; cf. Mai. iii. 17 ; and
for the collective use of 'abd, Hamdsa, p. 312, first verse. Personal names
indicating god-sonship are lacking in Arabia ; see on supposed Sabtean
examples ZDMG. xxxvii. 15.
LECT. II. GODS AND MEN. 47
consequence of the extensive migrations which took place
in the first centuries of our era, and carried tribes far away
from the fixed sanctuaries of the gods of their fathers.'
Men forgot their old worship, and as the names of gods
were also used as individual proper names, the divine
ancestor, even before Islam, had generally sunk to the rank
of a mere man. But though the later Arabs worshipped
gods that were not the gods of their fathers, and tribes of
alien blood were often found gathered together on festival
occasions at the great pilgrim shrines, there are many
evidences that all Arabic deities were originally the gods
of particular kins, and that the bond of religion was
originally co-extensive with the bond of blood.
A main proof of this lies in the fact, that the duties of
blood were the only duties of absolute and indefeasible
sanctity. The Arab warrior in the ages immediately pre-
ceding Islam was very deficient in religion in the ordinary
sense of the word ; he was little occupied with the things
of the gods and negligent in matters of ritual worship.
But he had a truly religious reverence for his clan, and a
kinsman's blood was to him a thing holy and inviolable.
This apparent paradox becomes at once intelligible when
we view it in the light of the antique conception, that the
god and his worshippers make up a society in which the
same character of sanctity is impressed on the relations of
the worshippers to one another as on their relations to their
god. The original religious society was the kindred group,
and all the duties of kinship were part of religion. And so
even when the clan-god had fallen into the background and
was little remembered, the type of a clan-religion was still
maintained in the enduring sanctity of the kindred bond.^
' See Wellhausen ut supra, p. 182 s^. , and compare 1 Sam. xxvi. 19.
^ Whea the oracle at Tabala forbade the poet Imraulcais to make war on
the slayers of his father, he broke the lot and dashed the pieces in the face
of the god, exclaiming with a gross and insulting expletive, "If it had
48 KINSHIP OF LECT. II.
Again, the primitive connection of religion with kindred
is attested by the existence of priesthoods confined to men
of one clan or family, which in many cases was of a
different blood from the mass of the worshippers. Cases
of this sort are common, not only among the Arabs,^ but
among the other Semites also, and generally throughout
the ancient world. In such cases the priestly clan may
often represent the original kindred group which was once
in exclusive possession of the sacra of the god, and con-
tinued to administer them after worshippers from without
were admitted to the religion.
And, further, it will appear when we come to the
subject of sacrifice, that when tribes of different blood
worshipped at the same sanctuary and adored the same
god, they yet held themselves apart from one another and
did not engage in any common act that united them in
religious fellowship. The circle of worship was still the
kin, though the deity worshipped was not of the kin, and
the only way in which two kindreds could form a religious
fusion was by a covenant ceremony, in which it was
symbolically set forth that they were no longer twain, but
of one blood. It is clear, therefore, that among the Arabs
the circle of religious soKdarity was originally the group
of kinsmen, and it needs no proof that, this being so, the
god himself must have been conceived as united to his
worshippers by the bond of blood, as their great kinsman,
or more specifically as their great ancestor.
been tliy father that was killed, thou wouldst not have refused me
vengeance." The respect for the sanctity of blood overrides respect for a
god who, by taking no interest in the poet's blood-feud, has shown that be
has no feeling of kindred for the murdered man and his son. Imraulcais's
act does not show that he was impious, but only that kinship was the
principle of his religion. That with such principles he consulted the oracle
of a strange god at all, is perhaps to be explained by the fact that his army
was a miscellaneous band of hirelings and broken men of various tribes.
1 Wellhausen, p. 129.
LECT. II. GODS AND MEN. 49
It cannot be too strongly insisted on that the idea of
kinship between gods and men was originally taken in a
purely physical sense. It is often said that the original
Semitic conception of the godhead was abstract and
transcendental ; that while Aryan religion with its poetic
mythology drew the gods down into the sphere of nature
and of human life, Semitic religion always showed an
opposite tendency, that it sought to remove the gods as far
as possible from man, and even contained within itself
from the first the seeds of an abstract deism. According
to this view the anthropomorphisms of Semitic religion,
that is, all expressions which in their literal sense imply
that the gods have a physical nature cognate to that of
man, are explained away as mere allegory, and it is urged,
in proof of the fundamental distinction between the Aryan
and Semitic conceptions of the divine nature, that myths
like those of the Aryans, in which gods act like men,
mingle with men, and in fact live a common life with
mankind, have little or no place in Semitic religion. But
all this is mere unfounded assumption. It is true that the
remains of ancient Semitic mythology are not very nume-
rous; but mythology cannot be preserved without literature,
and an early literature of Semitic heathenism does not
exist. The one exception is the cuneiform literature of
Babylonia, and in it we find fragments of a copious
mythology. It is true, also, that there is not much myth-
ology in the poetry of heathen Arabia, but Arabian poetry
has little to do with religion at all ; it dates from the
extreme decadence of the old heathenism, and is preserved
to us only in the collections formed by Mohammedan
scholars, who were careful to avoid or obliterate as far as
possible the traces of their fathers' idolatry. That the
Semites never had a mythological epic poetry comparable
to that of the Greeks is admitted, but the character of the
D
50 KINSHIP OF LECT. II.
literary genius of the Semites, which is deficient in plastic
power and in the faculty of sustained and orderly effort, is
enough to account for the fact. We cannot draw inferences
for religion from the absence of an elaborate mythology ;
the question is whether there are not traces, in however
crude a form, of the mythological point of view. And
this question must be answered in the affirmative. I must
not turn aside now to speak at large of Semitic myths, but
it is to the point to observe that there do exist remains of
myths, and not only of myths but of sacred usages, involv-
ing a conception of the divine beings and their relation
with man which entirely justifies us in taking the kinship
of men with gods in its literal and physical sense, exactly
as in Greece. In Greece the loves of the gods with the
daughters of men were referred to remote antiquity, but in
Babylon the god Bel was still, in the time of Herodotus,
provided with a human wife, who spent the night in his
temple and with whom he was believed to share his couch.^
In one of the few fragments of old mythology which have
been transplanted unaltered into the Hebrew Scriptures, we
read of the sons of gods who took wives of the daughters
of men, and became the fathers of the renowned heroes of
ancient days. Such a hero is the Izdubar of Babylonian
myth, to whom the great goddess Ishtar did not disdain to
offer her hand. Arabian tradition presents similar legends.
The clan of 'Amr b. Yarbu' was descended from a sii'dt, or
she-demon, who became the wife of their human father,
but suddenly disappeared from him on seeing a flash of
lightning.^ In this connection the distinction between
gods and demi-gods is immaterial ; the demi-gods are of
^ This is not more realistic than the custom of iiroviding the Hercules
(Baal) of Sanbulos with a horse, on wliich he rode out to hunt by night (Tac.
Avn. xii. 13 ; cf. Gaz. ArcMol. 1879, pp. 178 >iqq.). See also supra, p. 45,
note 2.
2 Ibu Doreid, Kitah al-ishticdc, p. 139.
LECT. II.
GODS AND MEN. 51
divine kind, though they have not attained to the full
position of deities with a recognised circle of worshippers.
It is plain, therefore, that there is nothing in the Semitic
conception of the divine nature which forbids us to take in
its literal sense the kinship between men and their tribal
god ; on the contrary, any other interpretation involves a
manifest distortion of the facts.
There is then a great variety of evidence to show that
the type of religion which is founded on kinship, and in
which the deity and his worshippers make up a society
united by the bond of blood, was widely prevalent, and
that at an early date, among all the Semitic peoples. But
the force of the evidence goes further, and leaves no
reasonable doubt that among the Semites this was the
original type of religion, out of which all other types
grew. That it was so is particularly clear as regards
Arabia, where we have found that the conception of the
circle of worship and the circle of kindred as identical was
so deeply rooted that it dominated the practical side of
religion, even after men worshipped deities that were not
kindred gods. But, among the other branches of the
Semites also, the connection between religion and kinship
is often manifested in forms that cannot be explained
except by reference to a primitive stage of society, in
which the circle of blood relations was also the circle
of all religious and social unity. Nations, as dis-
tinguished from mere clans, are not constructed on the
principle of kinship, and yet the Semitic nations
habitually feigned themselves to be of one kin, and
their national religions are deeply imbued, both in
legend and in ritual, with the idea that the god and
his worsliippers are of one stock. This, I apprehend,
is good evidence that the fundamental lines of all
Semitic religion were laid down, long before the begin-
52 THE RELIGION lect. it.
nings of authentic history, in that earliest stage of
society when kinship was the only recognised type of
permanent friendly relation between man and man, and
therefore the only type on which it was possible to
frame the conception of a permanent friendly relation
between a group of men and a supernatural being.
That all human societies have been developed from
this stage is now generally recognised ; and the evidence
shows that among tlie Semites the historical forms of
religion can be traced back to such a stage.
Kecent researches into the history of the family render
it in the highest degree improbable that the physical
kinship between the god and his worshippers, of which
traces are found all over the Semitic area, w^as originally
conceived as fatherhood. It was the mother's, not the
father's, blood wdiich formed the original bond of kinship
among the Semites as among other early peoples, and in
this stage of society, if the tribal deity was thought of
as the parent of the stock, a goddess, not a god, would
necessarily have been the object of worship. In point
of fact, goddesses play a great part in Semitic religion,
and that not merely in the subordinate role of wives of
the gods ; it is also noticeable that in various parts of
the Semitic field we find deities originally female changing
their sex and becoming gods, as if with the change in the
rule of human kinship.^ So long as kinship was traced
through the mother alone, a male deity of common stock
with his worshippers could only be their cousin, or, in the
language of that stage of society, their brother. This in
fact is the relationship between gods and men asserted by
Pindar, when he ascribes to both alike a common mother
Earth, and among the Semites a trace of the same point
^ See Kinship, p. 292 sqq., note 8. I hope to return to this subject on a
future opportunity.
LECT. II. OF KINSHIP. 53
of view may be seen in the class of proper names which
designate their bearers as " brother " or " sister " of a deity.^
If this be so, we must distinguish the religious significance
belonging to the wider and older conception of kinship
between the deity and the race that worshipped him, from
the special and more advanced ideas, conformed to a higher
stage of social development, that were added when the
kindred god came to be revered as a father.
Some of the most notable and constant features of
all ancient heathenism, and indeed of all nature-religions,
from the totemism of savages upward, find their sufficient
explanation in the physical kinship that unites the human
and superhuman members of the same religious and social
community, without reference to The" special doctrine of
divine fatherhood. From this point of view the natural
solidarity of the god and his worshippers, which has been
already enlarged upon as characteristic of antique religion,
at once becomes intelligible ; the indissoluble bond that
unites men to their god is the same bond of blood-fellow-
ship wdiich in early society is the one binding link
between man and man, and the one sacred principle of
moral obligation. And thus we see that even in its
rudest forms religion was a moral force ; the powers
that man reveres were on the side of social order and
tribal law ; and the fear of the gods was a motive to
enforce the laws of society, which were also the laws of
morality.
But though the earliest nature - religion was fully
identified with the earliest morality, it was not fitted
to raise morality towards higher ideals ; and instead of
leading the way in social and ethical progress, it was often
content to follow or even to lag behind. Eeligious feeling
is naturally conservative, for it is bound up with old
1 See above, p. 45, note 2.
'54 THE RELIGION LECT. ir.
custom and usage ; and the gods, who are approached
only in traditional ritual, and invoked as giving sanction
to long-established principles of conduct, seem always to
be on the side of those who are averse to change. Among
the Semites, as among other races, religion often came to
work against a higher morality, not because it was in
its essence a power for evil, but because it clung to the
obsolete ethical standard of a bygone stage of society.
To our better judgment, for example, one of the most
offensive features in tribal religion is its particularism ;
a man is held answerable to his god for wrong done to
a member of his own kindred or political community, but
he may deceive, rob, or kill an alien without offence to
religion ; the deity cares only for his own kinsfolk. This
is a very narrow morality, and we are tempted to call it
sheer immorality. But such a judgment would be alto-
gether false from an historical point of view. The larger
morality which embraces all mankind has its basis in
habits of loyalty, love, and self-sacrifice, which were
originally formed and grew strong in the narrower circle
of the family or the clan ; and the part w^hich the religion
of kinship played in the development and maintenance
of these habits, is one of the greatest services it has
done to human progress. This service it was able to
render because the gods were themselves members of
the kin, and the man wdio was untrue to kindred duty
had to reckon with them as well as with his human
clansmen.
An eloquent French writer has recently quoted with
approval, and applied to the beginnings of Semitic religion,
the words of Statins, Primus in orhe deos fecit iimor,^
" Man fancied himself surrounded by enemies whom he
sought to appease." But however true it is that savage
^ Renan, Hist, d' Israel , i. 29.
LECT. II. OF KINSHIP. 55
man feels himself to be environed by innumerable dangers
which he does not understand, and so personifies as invisible
or mysterious enemies of more than human power, it is not
true that the attempt to appease these powers is the founda-
tion of religion. From the earliest times religion, as distinct
from magic or sorcery, addresses itself to kindred and
friendly beings, who may indeed be angry with their people
for a time, but are always placable except to the enemies
of their worshippers or to renegade members of the com-
munity. It is not with a vague fear of unknown powers,
but with a loving reverence for known gods who are knit
to their worshippers by strong bonds of kinship, that
religion in the only true sense of the word begins.
Religion in this sense is not the child of terror, and
the difference between it and the savage's dread of un-
seen foes is as absolute and fundamental in the earliest
as in the latest stages of development. It is only in
times of social dissolution, as in the last age of the
small Semitic states, when men and their gods were
alike powerless before the advance of the Assyrians, that
magical superstitions based on mere terror, or rites
designed to conciliate alien gods, invade the sphere of
tribal or national religion. In better times the religion
of the tribe or state has nothing in common with the
private and foreign superstitions or magical rites that
savage terror may dictate to the individual Religion
is not an arbitrary relation of the individual man to a
supernatural power, it is a relation of all the members
of a community to a power that has the good of the
community at heart, and protects its law and moral
order. This distinction seems to have escaped some
modern theorists, but it was plain enough to the common
sense of antiquity, in which private and magical supersti-
tions were habitually regarded as offences against morals
56 FEMALE DEITIES lect. n.
and the state. It is not only in Israel that we find the
suppression of magical rites to be one of the first cares of
the founder of the kingdom, or see the introduction of
foreign worships treated as a heinous crime. In botli
respects the law of Israel is the law of every well-ordered
ancient community.
In the historical stage of Semitic religion the kinship
of the deity with his or her people is specified as father-
hood or motherhood, the former conception predominating,
in accordance with the later rule that assigned the son to
his father's stock. Under the law of male kinship woman
takes a subordinate place ; the father is the natural head
of the family, and superior to the mother, and accordingly
the chief place in religion usually belongs, not to a mother-
goddess, but to a father-god. At the same time the concep-
tion of the goddess-mother was not unknown, and seems
to be attached to cults which go back to the ages of
polyandry and female kinship. The Babylonian Ishtar in
]ier oldest form is such a mother-goddess, unmarried, or
rather choosing her temporary partners at will, the queen
head and first-born of all gods.'^ She is the mother of the
gods and also the mother of men, who, in the Chaldsean
■flood -legends, mourns over the death of her offspring.
In like manner the Carthaginians worshipped a "great
mother," who seems to be identical with Tanith-Artemis,
the " heavenly virgin," ^ and the Arabian Lat was
^ Tiele, Bahyloidsch-Assyrische Gesch. p. 528.
^nm D«, G. I. S. Nos. 195, 380; cf. No. 177. The identification of
Tanith with Artemis appears from No. 116, where n^m^l? = 'ApTif/.tlapo;, and
is confirmed by the prominence of the virgo ccelentis or nwmen virginale in
the later cults of Punic Africa. The identification of the mother of tlie gods
with the heavenly virgin, i.e. the unmarried goddess, is confirmed if not
absolutely demanded by Aug. Cii\ Dei, ii. 4. At Carthage she seems also
to be identical with Dido, of whom as a goddess more in another connection.
See Hoffmann, Ueb. einige. Phcen. Inschrr. p. 32 sq. The foul type of worship
corresponding to the conception of the goddess as polyandrous prevailed at
Sicca Veneria, and Augustin speaks with indignation of the incredible
LICOT. n.
AS MOTHERS. 57
worshipped by the Nabatoeans as mother of the gods, and
must be identified with the virgin-mother, whose worship
at Petra is described by Epiphanius.^
Originally, since men are of one stock witli their gods,
the mother of the gods must also have been, like Ishtar,
the mother of men ; but except in Babylonia and Assyria,
where the kings at least continued to speak of themselves
as the progeny of Islitar, it is not clear that this idea was
present to the Semitic worshipper when he addressed his
obscenity of the songs that accompanied the Avorship of the Carthaginian .
mother-goddess ; but perhaps this is not -wholly to be set down as of Punic
origin, for the general laxity on the point of female chastity in which such a
type of worship originates has always been characteristic of North Africa (see
Tissot, La Prov. d'Afrique, i. 477).
^De Vogiie, Syr. Cenir. Inscr. Nab. No. 8 ; Epiph., Panarium 51 (ii. 483
Dind.), see Kinahip, p. 292 sq. I am not able to follow the argument by which
Wellh., pp. 40, 46, seeks to invalidate the evidence as to the worship of a
mother-goddess by the Nabataeans. He supposes that the Xecafiov, which
Epiphanius represents as the virgin-mother of Dusares, is really nothing
more than the cippus, or betyl, out of which the god was supposed to have
been born, i.e.. the image of the god himself, not a distinct deity. But from
the time of Herodotus downwards, al-Lat was worshipped in these regions
side by side with a god, and the evidence of De Vogii^'s inscription and
that of Epiphanius agree in making Lat the mother and the god her
son. Epiphanius implies that the virgin-mother was worshipped also at
Elusa, and here Jerome, in his life of S. Hilarion, knows a temple of a
goddess whom he calls Venus, and who was worshipped "ob Luciferum,"
on account of her connection with the morning star. Wellhausen takes
this to mean that the goddess of Elusa was identified with the morning star ;
but this is impossible, for, in his comm. on Amos v., Jerome plainly indi-
cates that the morning star was worshi2)ped as a god, not as a goddess.
This is the old Semitic conception ; see Isa. xiv. 12, " Lucifer, son of the
Dawn;" and in the Arabian poets, also, the planet Venus is masculine, as
Wellhausen himself observes. I see no reason to believe that the Arabs of
Nilus worshipped the morning star as a goddess ; nor perhaps does the
worship of this planet as a goddess (Al-'Ozza) appear anywhere in Arabia,
except among the Eastern tribes who came under the influence of the
Assyrian Ishtar-worship, as it survived among the Aramreans. This point
was not clear to me when I wrote my Kinship, and want of attention to
it has brought some confusion into the argument. That the goddess of
Elusa was Al-'Ozza, as Wellh., p. 44, supposes, is thus very doubtful.
AVhether, as Tuch thought, her local name was Khalasa is also doubtful, but
we must not reject the identification of Elusa with the place still called
Khalasa ; see Palmer, Desert of the Exodus, p. 423, compared with p. 550 sqq.
58 FEMALE DEITIES LECT. il.
goddess as the great mother. But if we may judge from
analogy, and even from such modern analogies as are
supplied by the cult of the Virgin Mary, we can hardly
doubt that the use of a name appropriated to the tenderest
and truest of human relationships was associated in acts
of worship with feelings of peculiar w^armth and trustful
devotion. " Can a woman forget her sucking child, that
she should not have compassion on the son of her womb ?
Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forgot thee." ^
That such thoughts were not wholly foreign to Semitic
heathenism appears, to give a single instance, from the
language in which Assurbanipal appeals to Ishtar in his
time of need, and in the oracle she sends to comfort him.''^
But in this, as in all its aspects, heathenism shows its
fundamental weakness, in its inability to separate the
ethical motives of religion from their source in a merely
naturalistic conception of the godhead and its relation to
man. Divine motherhood, like the kinship of men and
gods in general, was to the heathen Semites a physical
fact, and the development of the corresponding cults and
myths laid more stress on the physical than on the ethical
side of maternity, and gave a prominence to sexual ideas
which was never edifying, and often repulsive. Especially
was this the case when the change in the law of kinship
deprived the mother of her old pre-eminence in the family,
and transferred to the father the greater part of her
authority and dignity. This change, as we know, went
hand in hand with the abolition of the old polyandry ; and
as women lost the right to choose their own partners at
will, the wife became subject to her husband's lordship,
and her freedom of action was restrained by his jealousy,
at the same time that her children became, for all purposes
^ Isaiah xlix. 1 5.
-George Smith, Assurbanipal, p. 117 sqq.; Records of the Past, ix. 51 sqq.
LECT. II. AS MOTHERS. 59
of inheritance and all duties of blood, members of his and
not of her kin. So far as religion kept pace with the
new laws of social morality due to this development,
the independent divine mother necessarily became the
subordinate partner of a male deity ; and so the old
polyandrous Ishtar reappears in Canaan and elsewhere
as Astarte, the wife of the supreme Baal. Or if the
supremacy of the goddess was too well established to be
thus undermined, she might change her sex, as in Southern
Arabia, where Ishtar is transformed into the masculine
'Athtar. But not seldom religious tradition refused to
move forward with the progress of society ; the goddess
retained her old character as a mother who was not a
wife bound to fidelity to her husband, and at her sanctuary
she protected, under the name of religion, the sexual
licence of savage society, or even demanded of the
daughters of her worshippers a shameful sacrifice of their
chastity, before they were permitted to bind themselves
for the rest of their lives to that conjugal fidelity which
their goddess despised.
The emotional side of Semitic heathenism was always
very much connected with the worship of female deities,
partly through the associations of maternity, which
appealed to the purest and tenderest feelings, and
partly through other associations connected with woman,
which too often appealed to the sensuality so strongly
developed in the Semitic race. The associations called
forth when the deity was conceived as a father were on
the whole of an austerer kind, for the distinctive note of
fatherhood, as distinguished from kinship in general, lay
mainly in the parental authority, in the father's claim to
be honoured and served by his son. The honour whicli
the fifth commandment requires children to pay to their
fathers is named in Mai. i. 6 along with that which a
GO THE GOD AS FATHER lkct. il.
servant owes to liis master, and the same prophet (iii. 17)
speaks of the considerate regard which a father shows
for " the son that serveth him." To this day the grown-up
son in Arabia serves his father in much the same offices
as the domestic slave, and approaches him with much the
same degree of reverence and even of constraint. It is
only with his little children that the father is effusively
affectionate and on quite easy terms. On the other hand,
the father's authority had not a despotic character. He
had no such power of life and death over his sons as
Eoman law recognised,^ and indeed, after they passed
beyond childhood, had no means of enforcing his authority
if they refused to respect it. Paradoxical as this may
seem, it is quite in harmony with the general spirit of
Semitic institutions that authority should exist and be
generally acknowledged without having any force behind
it except the pressure of public opinion. The authority
of an Arab sheikh is in the same position ; and when an
Arab judge pronounces sentence on a culprit, it is at the
option of the latter whether he will pay the fine, which is
the invariable form of penalty, or continue in feud with
his accuser.
Thus while the conception of the tribal god as father
introduces into religion the idea of divine authority, of
reverence and service due from the worshipper to the
deity, it does not carry with it any idea of the strict and
rigid enforcement of divine commands by supernatural
sanctions. The respect paid by the Semite to his father
1 See Deut. xxi. 18. where the word "chastened" should rather he
"admonished." The powerlessness of Jacob to restrain his grown-up sons is
not related as a proof that he was weak, but shows that a father had no means
of enforcing his authority. The law of Deuteronomy can hardly have been
carried into practice. In Prov. xxx. 17 disobedience to parents is cited as
a thing which brings a man to a bad end, not as a thing punished by law.
That an Arab father could do no more than argue with his son, and bring
tribal opinion to bear on him, appears from Ayh. xix. 102 sq.
LECT. II. OF HIS WORSHIPPERS. 61
is but the respect which he pays to kindred, focussed
upon a single representative person, and the father's
authority is only a special manifestation of the authority
of the kin, which can go no further than the whole kin is
prepared to back it. Thus in the sphere of religion the
god, as father, stands by the majority of the tribe in
enforcing tribal law against refractory members ; outlawry,
which is the only punishment ordinarily applicable to
a clansman, carries with it excommunication from religious
communion, and the man who defies tribal law has to fear
the god as well as his fellow-men. But in all minor
matters, where outlawry is out of the question, the long-
suffering tolerance which tribesmen in early society
habitually extend to the offences of their fellow-tribesmen
is ascribed also to the god ; he does not willingly break
with any of his worshippers, and accordingly a bold and
wilful man does not hesitate to take considerable liberties
with the paternal deity. As regards his worshippers at
large it appears scarcely conceivable, from the point of
view of tribal religion, that the god can be so much
displeased with anything they do that his anger can go
beyond a temporary estrangement, which is readily
terminated by their repentance, or even by a mere change
of humour on the part of the god, when his permanent
affection for his own gets the better of his momentary
displeasure, as it is pretty sure to do if he sees them to
be in straits, e.g. to be hard pressed by their and. his
enemies. On the whole, men live on very easy terms
with their tribal god, and his paternal authority is neither
strict nor exactmg.
This is a very characteristic feature of heathen religion,
and one which does not disappear when the god of the
community comes to be thought of as king rather than as
father. The inscription of King Mesha, for example, tells
62 THE GOD AS KING lect. ll.
US that Chemosh was angry with his people, and suffered
Israel to oppress Moab ; and then again that Chemosh
fought for Moab, and delivered it from the foe. There is
no explanation offered of the god's change of mind ; it
appears to be simply taken for granted that he was tired
of seeing his people put to the worse. In like manner
the mass of the Hebrews before the exile received with
blank incredulity the prophetic teaching, that Jehovah was
ready to enforce His law of righteousness even by the
destruction of the sinful commonwealth of Israel. To the
prophets Jehovah's long-suffering meant the patience with
which He offers repeated calls to repentance, and defers
punishment while there is hope of amendment ; but to
the heathen, and to the heathenly-minded in Israel, the
long-suffering of the gods meant a disposition to overlook
the offences of their worshippers.
To reconcile the forgiving goodness of God with His
absolute justice, is one of the highest problems of spiritual
religion, which in Christianity is solved by the doctrine of
the atonement. It is important to realise that in heathen-
ism this problem never arose in the form in which the
New Testament deals with it, not because the gods of the
heathen were not conceived as good and gracious, but
because they were not absolutely just. This lack of strict
justice, however, is not to be taken as meaning that the
gods were in their nature unjust, when measured by the
existing standards of social righteousness ; as a rule they
were conceived as sympathising with right conduct, but
not as rigidly enforcing it in every case. To us, who are
accustomed to take an abstract view of the divine attri-
butes, this is difficult to conceive, but it seemed perfectly
natural when the divine sovereignty was conceived as a
kingship precisely similar to human kingship.
In its beginnings, human kingship was as little absolute
LECT. 11. OF HIS PEOPLE. 63
as the authority of the fathers and elders of the clan,
for it was not supported by an executive organisation
sufficient to carry out the king's sentence of justice or
constrain obedience to his decrees. The authority of the
prince was moral rather than physical ; his business was
to guide rather than to dictate the conduct of his free
subjects, to declare what was just rather than to enforce
it. Thus the limitations of royal power went on quite
an opposite principle from that which underlies a modern
limited monarchy. With us the king or his government
is armed with the fullest authority to enforce law and
justice, and the limitations of his power lie in the
independence of the legislature and the judicial courts.
The old Semitic king, on the contrary, was supreme judge,
and his decrees were laws, but neither his sentences nor
his decrees could take effect unless they were supported
by forces over which he had very imperfect control. He
simply threw his weight into the scale, a weight which
was partly due to the moral effect of his sentence, and
partly to the material resources which he commanded, not
so much as king as in the character of a great noble and
the head of a powerful circle of kinsfolk and clients. An
energetic sovereign, who had gained wealth and prestige
by successful wars, or inherited the resources accumu-
lated by a line of kingly ancestors, might wield almost
despotic power, and in a stable dynasty the tendency was
towards the gradual establishment of absolute monarchy,
especially if the royal house was able to maintain a
standing army devoted to its interests. But a pure
despotism of the modern Eastern type probably had not
been reached by any of the small kingdoms that were
crushed by the Assyrian empire, and certainly the ideas
which underlay the conception of divine sovereignty date
from an age when the human kingship was still in a
64 THE GOD AS KING lect. ii.
rudimentary state, when its executive strength was very-
limited, and the sovereign was in no way held responsible
for the constant maintenance of law and order in all parts of
his realm. In most matters of internal order he was not
expected to interfere unless directly appealed to by one
or other party in a dispute, and even then it was not
certain that the party in whose favour he decided would
not be left to make good his rights with the aid of his own
family connections. So loose a system of administration
did not offer a pattern on which to frame the conception
of a constant unremitting divine providence, overlooking
no injustice and suffering no right to be crushed ; the
national god might be good and just, but was not con-
tinually active or omnipresent in his activity. But we
are not to suppose that this remissness was felt to be a
defect in the divine character. The Semitic nature is
impatient of control, and has no desire to be strictly
governed either by human or by divine authority. A god
who could be reached when he was wanted, but usually
left men pretty much to themselves, was far more accept-
able than one whose ever watchful eye can neither be
avoided nor deceived. What the Semitic communities
asked, and believed themselves to receive, from their divine
king lay mainly in three things : help against their enemies,
counsel by oracles or soothsayers in matters of national
difficulty, and a sentence of justice when a case was too
hard for human decision. The valour the wisdom and
the justice of the nation looked to him as their head, and
were strengthened by his support in time of need. For
the rest it was not expected that he should always be busy
righting human affairs. In ordinary matters it was men's
business to help themselves and their own kinsfolk, though
the sense that the god was always near, and could be
called upon at need, was a moral force continually workinn-
LECT. II.
OF HIS PEOPLE. 65
in some degree for the maintenance of social righteousness
and order. The strength of this moral force was indeed
very uncertain, for it was always possible for the evil-
doer to flatter himself that his offence would be overlooked ;
but even so uncertain an influence of religion over conduct
was of no little use in the slow and difficult process of the
consolidation of an orderly society out of barbarism.
As a social and political force, in the earlier stages of
Semitic society, antique religion cannot be said to have
failed in its mission ; but it was too closely modelled
on the traditional organisation of the family and the
nation to retain a healthful vitality when the social
system was violently shattered. Among the northern
Semites the age of Assyrian conquest proved as critical for
religious as for civil history, for from that time forward
the old religion was quite out of touch with the actualities
of social life, and became almost wholly mischievous. But
apart from the Assyrian catastrophe, there are good reasons
to think that in the eighth century B.C. the national
religion of the northern Semites had already passed its
prime, and was sinking into decadence. The moral springs
of conduct which it touched were mainly connected with
the first needs of a rude society, with the community's
instinct of self-preservation. The enthusiasm of religion
was seen only in times of peril, when the nation, under
its divine head, was struggling for national existence. In
times of peace and prosperity, religion had little force to
raise man above sensuality and kindle him to right and
noble deeds. Except when the nation was in danger it
called for no self-denial, and rather encouraged an easy
sluggish indulgence in the good things that were enjoyed
under the protection of the national god. The evils that
slowly sap society, the vices that at first sight seem too
private to be matters of national concern, the disorders
E
66 THE GOD LECT. n.
that accompany the increase and unequal distribution of
wealth, the relaxation of moral fibre produced by luxury
and sensuality, were things that religion hardly touched at
all, and that the easy, indulgent god could hardly be
thought to take note of. The God who could deal with
such evils was the God of the prophets, no mere Oriental
king raised to a throne in heaven, but the just and
jealous God, whose eyes are in every place, beholding the
evil and the good, who is of purer eyes than to behold
evil, and cannot look upon iniquity.^
In what precedes I have thought it convenient to assume
for the moment, without breaking the argument by pausing
to offer proof, that among the Semitic peoples which got
beyond the mere tribal stage and developed a tolerably
organised state, the supreme deity was habitually thought
of as king. The definitive proof that this was really so
must be sought in the details of religious practice, to which
we shall come by and by, and in which we shall find
indicated a most realistic conception of the divine king-
ship. Meantime some proofs of a different character may
be briefly indicated. In the Old Testament the kingship
of Jehovah is often set forth as the glory of Israel, but
never in such terms as to suggest that the idea of divine
kingship was peculiar to the Hebrews. On the contrary,
other nations are " the kingdoms of the false gods." ^ In
two exceptional cases a pious judge or a prophet appears
to express the opinion that Jehovah's sovereignty is incon-
sistent with human kingship,^ such as existed in the
surrounding nations, but this difficulty was never felt by
the mass of the Israelites, nor even by the prophets in the
regal period, and it was certainly not felt by Israel's
neighbours. If a son could be crowned in the lifetime of
1 Prov. XV. 3 ; Hab. i. 13. 2 Isa. x. 10.
3 Judges viii. 23 ; 1 Sam. xii. 12.
LECT. II.
AS KING. 67
his father, as was done in the case of Solomon, or could act
for his father as Jotham acted for Uzziah,^ there was no
difficulty in looking on the human king as the viceroy of
the divine sovereign, who, as we have seen, was often
believed to be the father of the royal race, and so to lend
a certain sanctity to the dynasty. Accordingly we find
that the Tyrian Baal bears the title of Melcarth, " king of
the city," or more fully, " our lord Melcarth, the Baal of
Tyre," ^ and this sovereignty was acknowledged by the
Carthaginian colonists when they paid tithes at his temple
in the mother city ; for in the East tithes are the king's
due.^ Similarly the supreme god of the Ammonites was
Milkom or Malkam, which is only a variation of Melek,
" king." So too Adrammelech and Anammelech, that is,
" King Adar " and " King Anu," are the gods of Sepharvaim
or Sippar in Babylonia (2 Kings xvii. 31); but indeed in
Babylonia and Assyria the application of royal tithes to
deities is too common to call for special exemplification.
Again, we have Malakhbel, " King Bel," as the great god
of the Aramaeans of Palmyra, but in this and other
examples of later date it is perhaps open to suppose that
the kingship of the supreme deity means his sovereignty
over other gods rather than over his worshippers. On
the other hand, a large mass of evidence can be
drawn from proper names of religious significance, in
which the god of the worshipper is designated as king.
Such names were as common among the Phoenicians
and Assyrians as they were among the Israelites,* and
1 1 Kings i. 32 sqq.; 2 Kings xv. 5. - C. I. S. No. 122.
3 Diod. XX. 14 ; and for tlie payment of tithes to the king, 1 Sam. viii.
15, 17 ; Aristotle, (Econ. ii. p. 13526 of the Berlin ed., cf. p. 13456.
■* n^JD^Hw^, C. I. S. No. 50, cf. !)y3^nN, No. 54; -j^DinS King of Byblus,
No. 1, cf. bv-y\r\\ No. 69 ; jn^a!?^, No. 10, 16, etc., cf. \rrhvx No. 78, in-Dcn,
No. 44 ; "l^m^y, No. 46, cf. "IDXn^i?, pD'Siay. etc. ; "ibnTJ?, Nos. 189, 219,
386, cf. ^V3Ty, on a coin of Byblus, Head, p. 668. The title of n3^C»
"queen," for Astarte is seen probably in JlD^Dn, T\':ht2T\n {supra, p. 46,
68 THE WORSHIPPER LECT. ir.
are found even among the Arabs of the Syrian and
Egyptian frontier. ^
Where the god is conceived as a king, he will naturally
be addressed as lord, and his worshippers will be spoken
of as his subjects, and so we find as divine titles Adon,
" lord " (whence Adonis =: the god Tammuz), and Eabbath,
" lady " (as a title of Tanith), among the Phoenicians, with
corresponding phrases among other nations,^ while in all
parts of the Semitic field the worshipper calls himself the
servant or slave (^abd, 'ebcd) of his god, just as a subject
does in addressing his king. The designation " servant " is
much affected by worshippers, and forms the basis of a
large number of theophorous proper names — 'Abd-Eshmun
" servant of Eshmun," 'Abd-Baal, 'Abd-Osir, etc. At first
sight this designation seems to point to a more rigid con-
ception of divine kingship than I have presented, for it is
only under a strict despotism that the subject is the slave
of the monarch ; nay, it has been taken as a fundamental
distinction between Semitic religion and that of the Greeks
that in the one case the relation of man to his god is
servile, while in the other it is not so. But this conclu-
sion rests on the neglect of a nicety of language, a refine-
ment of Semitic politeness. When a man addresses any
superior he calls him " my lord," and speaks of himself and
note), and more certainly in DS^OriD, "handmaid of the queen," cf.
mnt^'ynO, No. 83, and in HdI^DJ;:, "favour of the queen," No 41. For
Assyrian names of simihir type see Schrader in ZDMG. xxvi. 140 sqq.,
where also an Edoniite king's name on a cylinder of Sennacherib is read
Malik-ramu, "the (divine) king, is exalted."
^ E.g. KorfiaXxxos, 'Ex^aX(^;^;o,-, " Cos, El is king," Bev. Arch. 1870, pp.
115, 117; Schrader, KAT. p. 257, reads Kausmalak as the name of an
Edomite king on an inscription of Tiglathpileser. For the god Cans, or
Cos, see Wellhausen, Heidenthum, p. 77 ; cf. ZDMG. 1887, p. 714.
2 E.g. Nabativan Rob, "Lord," in the proper name ^X2"l (Euting 21.3,
27.14; Waddington 2152, 2189, 2298), and at Gaza the god Marna, that is,
"our Lord," both on coins (Head, p. 680), and in M. Diaconus, Vita Porphyrii,
% 19 ; also at Kerak, Wadd. 2412^?.
LECT. ir. AS SERVANT. 69
Others as " thy servants," ^ and this form of politeness is
naturally de rigueur in presence of the king ; but where the
king is not addressed, his " servants " mean his courtiers
that are in personal attendance on him, or such of his
subjects as are actually engaged in his service, for example,
his soldiers. In the Old Testament this usage is constant,
and the king's servants are often distinguished from the
people at large. And so the servants of Jehovah are
sometimes the prophets, who hold a special commission
from Him; at other times, as often in the Psalms, His
worshipping people assembled at the temple ; and at other
times, as in Deutero-Tsaiah, His true servants as dis-
tinguished from the natural Israel, who are His subjects
only in name. In short, both in the political and in the
religious sphere the designation 'ahd, 'ehed, " servant," is
strictly correlated with the verb 'ctbad, " to do service,
homage, or religious worship," a word which, as we have
already seen, is sufficiently elastic to cover the service
which a son does for his father, as well as that which a
master requires from his slave.^ Thus, when a man is
named the servant of a god, the implication appears to be,
not merely that he belongs to the community of which the
god is king, but that he is specially devoted to his service
and worship. Like other theophorous names, compounds
with 'abd seem to have been originally most common in
royal and priestly families, whose members naturally
claimed a special interest in religion and a constant near-
ness to the god ; and in later times, when a man's particular
^ This holds good for Hebrew and Aramaic ; also for Phoenician (Schroder,
Phoen. Spr. p. 18, n. 5) ; and even in Arabia an old poet says, " I am the
slave of my guest as long as he is with me, but save in this there is no
trace of the slave in my nature " (Ilamdsa, p. 729).
■^ Supra, p. 60. Primarily 12]} is "to work," and in Aramaic " to
make, to do." Ancient worship is viewed as work or service, because it
consists in material operations (sacrifice). The same connection of ideas
appears in the root ilbs and in the Greek (Si^s/v ^lai.
70 THE GOD AS A CHIEF lect. ir.
worship was not rigidly defined by his national connection,
they served to specify the cult to which he was particularly
attached, or the patron to whom his parents dedicated him.
That the use of such names was not connected with the
idea of slavery to a divine despot is pretty clear from their
frequency among the Arabs, who had very loose ideas of
all authority, whether human or divine. Among the
Arabs, indeed, as among the old Hebrews, the relation of
the subject to his divine chief is often expressed by names
of another class. Of King Saul's sons two were named
Ishbaal and Meribaal, both meaning " man of Baal," i.e. of
Jehovah, who in these early days was called Baal without
offence ; among the Arabs of the Syrian frontier we have
Amriel, " man of El," Amrishams, " man of the Sun-god,"
and others like them ; ^ and in Arabia proper Imraulcais,
" the man of Cais," Shai ' al-Lat, " follower, comrade of Lat,"
all expressive of the relation of the free warrior to his chief.
That the Arabs, like their northern congeners, thought
of deity as lordship or chieftainship, is proved not only by
such proper names, and by the titles rahh, rahha, " lord,"
" lady," given to their gods and goddesses, but especially
by the history of the foundation of Islam. In his quality
of prophet, Mohammed became a judge, lawgiver, and
captain, not of his own initiative, but because the Arabs of
different clans were willing to refer to a divine authority
questions of right and precedence in which they would not
yield to one another. They brought their difficulties to
the prophet as the Israelites did to Moses, and his decisions
became the law of Islam, as those of Moses were the
foundation of the Hebrew Torah. But up to the time of
the prophet the practical development of the idea of divine
kingship among the nomadic Arabs was very elementary
and inadequate, as was to be expected in a society which
^ l>!'6ldeke,SUz^mgsb.Berl.Ac. 1880, p. 768; yfeWhansen, Heiclentimm, p. 3.
LECT. ir.
IN ARABIA. 71
had never taken kindly to the institution of human king-
ship. In the prosperous days of Arabian commerce, when
the precious wares of the far East reached the Mediter-
ranean chiefly by caravan from Southern Arabia, there were
settled kingdoms in several parts of the peninsula. But
after the sea-route to India was opened, tliese kingdoms
were broken up, and almost the whole country fell back
into anarchy. The nomads proper often felt the want
of a controlling authority that would put an end to the
incessant tribal and clan feuds, but their pride and im-
patience of control never permitted them to be long faithful
to the authority of a stranger ; while, on the other hand,
the exaggerated feeling for kindred made it quite certain
that a chief chosen at home would not deal with an even
hand between his own kinsman and a person of different
blood. Thus after the fall of the Yemenite and Nabattean
kingdoms, which drew their strength from commerce, there
was no permanently successful attempt to consolidate
a body of several tribes into a homogeneous state, except
under Eoman or Persian suzerainty. The decay of
the power of religion in the peninsula in the last days
of Arab heathenism presents a natural parallel to this
condition of political disintegration. The wild tribesmen
had lost the feeling of kinship with their tribal gods, and
had not learned to yield steady submission and obedience
to any power dissociated from kinship. Their religion sat
as loose on them as their allegiance to this or that human
king whom for a season they might find it convenient
to obey, and they were as ready to renounce their deities
in a moment of petulance and disgust as to transfer their
service from one petty sovereign to another.*
Up to this point we have considered the conception, or
' Eeligion had more strength in towns like Mecca and Taif, where there
was a sanctuary, and the deity lived in the midst of his people, and was
72 KINGSHIP IN THE EAST lect. ti.
rather the institution, of divine sovereignty as based on
the fundamental type of Semitic kingship, when the nation
was still made up of free tribesmen, retaining their tribal
organisation and possessing the sense of personal dignity
and independence engendered by the tribal system, where
all clansmen are brothers, and where each man feels that
his brethren need him and that he can count on the help
of his brethren. There is no principle so levelling as the
law of blood - revenge, which is the basis of the tribal
system, for here the law is man for man, whether in
defence or in ofi'ence, without respect of persons. In such
a society the king is a guiding and moderating force rather
than an imperial power ; he is the leader under whom men
of several tribes unite for common action, and the arbiter
in cases of difficulty or of irreconcilable dispute between
two kindreds, when neither will humble itself before the
other. The kingship, and therefore the godhead, is not a
principle of absolute order and justice, but it is a principle
of higher order and more impartial justice than can be
realised where there is no other law than the obligation
of blood. As the king waxes stronger, and is better able
to enforce his will by active interference in his subjects'
quarrels, the standard of right is gradually raised above the
consideration which disputant has the strongest kin to back
him, for it is the glory of the sovereign to vindicate the
cause of the weak, if only because by so doing he shows
himself to be stronger than the strong. And as the god,
though not conceived as omnipotent, is at least conceived
as much stronger than man, he becomes in a special
honoured by stated and frequent acts of worship. So under Islam, the
Bedouins have never taken kindly to the laws of the Coran, and live in
entire neglect of the most simple ordinances of religion, while the townsmen
are in their way very devout. Much of this religion is hypocrisy ; but so it
was, to judge by the accounts of the conversion of the Thacif at Taif, even in
the time of Mohammed. Religion was a matter of custom, of keeping up
appearances.
LECT. II. AND IN THE WEST. V3
measure the champion of right against might, the protector
of the poor, the widow, and the fatherless, of the man who
has no helper on earth.
Now it is matter of constant observation in early history
that the primitive equality of the tribal system tends in
progress of time to transform itself into an aristocracy of
the more powerful kins, or of the more powerful families
within one kin. That is, the smaller and weaker kins are
content to place themselves in a position of dependence
on their more powerful neighbours in order to secure their
protection ; or even within one and the same kin men begin
to distinguish between their nearer and more distant cousins,
and, as wealth begins to be unequally distributed, the great
man's distant and poor relation has to be content with a
distant and supercilious patronage, and sinks into a position
of inferiority. The kingship is the one social force that
works against this tendency, for it is the king's interest to
maintain a balance of power, and prevent the excessive
aggrandisement of noble families that might compete with
his own authority. Thus even for selfish reasons the
sovereign is more and more brought into the position of
the champion of the weak against the strong, of the masses
against the aristocracy. Generally speaking, the struggle
between king and nobles to which these conditions give
rise ended differently in the East and in the "West. In
Greece and Eome the kingship fell before the aristocracy ;
in Asia the kingship held its own, till in the larger states
it developed into despotism, or in the smaller ones it was
crushed by a foreign despotism. This diversity of political
fortune is reflected in the diversity of religious develop-
ment. For as the national god did not at first supersede
tribal and family deities any more than the king super-
seded tribal and family institutions, the tendency of tbe
West, where the kingship succumbed, was towards a
74 MONARCHY AND
LECT. ir.
divine aristocracy of many gods, only modified by a weak
reminiscence of the old kingship in the not very effective
sovereignty of Zeus, while in the East the national god
tended to acquire a really monarchic sway. What is
often described as the natural tendency of Semitic religion
towards ethical monotheism, is in the main nothing more
than a consequence of the alliance of religion with
monarchy. For however corrupt the actual kingships of
the East became, the ideal of the kingship as a source of
even-handed justice throughout the wdiole nation, without
respect of persons, was higher than the ideal of aristocracy,
in which each noble is expected to favour his own family
even at the expense of the state or of justice ; and it is on
the ideal, rather than on the actual, that religious concep-
tions are based, if not in ordinary minds, at least in the
minds of more thoughtful and pious men. At the same
time the idea of absolute and ever-watchful divine justice,
as we find it in the prophets, is no more natural to the
East than to the West, for even the ideal Semitic king is,
as we have seen, a very imperfect earthly providence, and
moreover he has a different standard of right for his own
people and for strangers. The prophetic idea that Jehovah
will vindicate the right even in the destruction of his own
people of Israel, involves an ethical standard as foreign to
Semitic as to Aryan tradition. Thus, as regards their
ethical tendency, the difference between Eastern and Western
religion is one of degree rather than of principle ; all that
we can say is that the East w^as better prepared to receive
the idea of a god of absolute righteousness, because its
political institutions and history, and not least the enor-
mous gulf between the ideal and the reality of human
sovereignty, directed men's minds to appreciate the need of
righteousness more strongly, and accustomed them to look
to a power of monarchic character as its necessary source.
LECT. II. MONOTHEISM. TS
A similar judgment must be passed on the supposed mono-
theistic tendency of the Semitic as opposed to the Hellenic
or Aryan system of religion. Neither system, in its natural
development, can fairly be said to have come near to
monotheism ; the difference touched only the equality or
subordination of divine powers. But while in Greece the
idea of the unity of God was a philosophical speculation,
without any definite point of attachment to actual religion,
the monotheism of the Hebrew prophets kept touch with
the ideas and institutions of the Semitic race by conceiving
the one true God as the king of absolute justice, the
national God of Israel, who at the same time was, or
rather was destined to become, the God of all the earth,
not merely because His power was world-wide, but because
as the perfect ruler He could not fail to draw all nations
to do Him homage (Isa. ii. 2 sqq.).
When I speak of the way in which the prophets con-
ceived of Jehovah's sovereignty, as destined to extend itself
beyond Israel and over all the earth, I touch on a feature
common to all Semitic religions, which must be explained
and defined before we can properly understand wherein
the prophets transcended the common sphere of Semitic
thought, and w^hich indeed is necessary to complete our
view of the ultimate development of the Semitic religions
as tribal and national institutions.
From a very early date the Semitic communities em-
braced, in addition to the free tribesmen of pure blood
(Heb. ezrdh, Arab, sank) with their families and slaves, a
class of men who were personally free but had no political
rights, viz. the protected strangers (Heb. gerliii, sing, ger ;
Arab, jlra-n, sing, jar), of whom mention is so often made
both in the Old Testament and in early Arabic literature.
The ger was a man of another tribe or district who, coming
to sojourn in a place where he was not strengthened by
V6 THE WORSHIPPER AS lect. ir.
the presence of his own kin, put himself under the protec-
tion of a clan or of a powerful chief. From the earliest
times of Semitic life the lawlessness of the desert, in which
every stranger is an enemy, has been tempered by the
principle that the guest is inviolable. A man is safe in
the midst of enemies as soon as he enters a tent or even
touches the tent rope.^ To harm a guest, or to refuse him
hospitality, is an offence against honour, which covers the
perpetrator with indelible shame. The bond of hospitality
among the Arabs is temporary ; the guest is entertained for
a night or at most for three days,^ and the protection
which the host owes to him expires after three days more.^
But more permanent protection is seldom refused to a
stranger who asks for it,* and when granted by any tribes-
man it binds the whole tribe. The obligation thus con-
stituted is one of honour, and not enforced by any human
sanction except public opinion, for if the stranger is wronged
he has no kinsmen to fight for him. And for this very
reason it is a sacred obligation, which among the old
Arabs was often confirmed by oath at a sanctuary, and
could not be renounced except by a formal act at the same
holy place,^ so that the god himself became the protector
of the stranger's cause. The protected stranger did not
necessarily give up his old religion any more than he gave
up his old kindred, and in the earliest times it is not to be
supposed that he was admitted to full communion in the
religion of his protectors, for religion went with political
rights. But it was natural that he should acknowledge in
some degree the god of the land in which he lived, and,
' See further Kinship, p. 41 sqq.
^ This is the space prescribed by the traditions of the prophet, Hariri (De
Sacy's 2nd ed. p. 177 ; of. Sharishi, i. 212). A viaticum sufficient for a day's
journey should be added, all beyond this is not duty but alms.
^ Burckhardt, Bedouins and Wahdbys, i. 336.
^ Burckhardt, op. cit. i. 174.
* Ibn Hisham, p. 243 sqq. ; Kinship, p. 43.
LECT. II. CLIENT OF HIS GOD. 77
indeed, since the stated exercises of religion were confined
to certain fixed sanctuaries, the man who was far from his
old home was also far from his own god, and sooner or
later could hardly fail to lose his old religion, and become
a dependent adherent of the cult of his patrons, though
not with rights equal to theirs. Sometimes, indeed, the
god was the direct patron of the ger, a thing easily under-
stood when we consider that a common motive for seeking
foreign protection was the fear of the avenger of blood, and
that there was a right of asylum at sanctuaries. From a
Phoenician inscription found near Larnaca, which gives the
monthly accounts of a temple, we learn that the gerim
formed a distinct class in the personnel of the sanctuary
and received certain allowances,^ just as we know from
Ezek. xliv. that much of the service of the first temple
was done by uncircumcised foreigners. This notion of the
temple-client, the man who lives in the precincts of the
sanctuary under the special protection of the god, is used in
a figurative sense in Psalm xv., " Who shall sojourn (ycigur,
i.e. live as a ger) in Thy tabernacles ? " and similarly the
Arabs give the title of jar allah to one who resides in
Mecca beside the Caaba.
The importance of this occasional reception of strangers
was not great so long as the old national divisions remained
untouched, and the proportion of foreigners in any com-
munity was small. But the case became very different
when the boundaries of nations were changed by the
migration of tribes, or by the wholesale deportations that
were part of the policy of the Assyrians towards conquered
countries where their arms had met with strenuous resist-
ance. In such circumstances it was natural for the new-
comers to seek admission to the sanctuaries of the " god of
the land," ^ which they were able to do by presenting
1 C.I.S. No. 86. ^ 2 Kings xvii. 26.
78 THE WORSHIPPER AS lect. ii.
themselves as his clients. In such a case the clients of
the god were not necessarily in a position of political
dependence on his old worshippers, and the religious sense
of the term ger became detached from the idea of social
inferiority. But the relation of the new worshippers to
the god was no longer the same as on the old purely
national system. It was more dependent and less per-
manent ; it was constituted, not by nature and inherited
privilege, but by submission on the worshipper's side and
free bounty on the side of the god ; and in every way it
tended to make the relation between man and god more
distant, to make men fear the god more and throw more
servility into their homage, while at the same time the
higher feelings of devotion were quickened by the thought
that the protection and favour of the god was a thing of
free grace and not of national right. How important this
change was may be judged from the Old Testament, where
the idea that the Israelites are Jehovah's clients, sojourniug
in a land where they have no rights of their own, but are
absolutely dependent on His bounty, is one of the most
characteristic notes of the new and more timid type of
piety that distinguishes post -exilic Judaism from the
religion of Old Israel.^ In the old national religions a
man felt sure of his standing with the national god, unless
he forfeited it by a distinct breach of social law ; but the
client is accepted, so to speak, on his good behaviour, an
idea which precisely accords with the anxious legality of
Judaism after the captivity.
In Judaism the spirit of legality was allied with genuine
moral earnestness, as we see in the noble description of the
character that befits Jehovah's ger drawn in Psalm xv.;
but among the heathen Semites we find the same spirit of
legalism, the same timid uncertainty as to a man's standing
1 Lev. XXV. 23 J Ps. xxxix. 12 [Heb. 13]; Ps. cxix. 19; 1 Cliroii. xxix. 15.
LECT. II. CLIENT OF HIS GOD. 79
with the god whose protection he seeks, while the con-
ception of what is pleasing to the deity has not attained
the same ethical elevation. The extent to which, in the
disintegration of the old nationalities of the East and
the constant movements of population due to political
disturbance, men's religion detached itself from their local
and national connections, is seen by the prevalence of names
in which a man is designated the client of the god. In
Phoenician inscriptions we find a whole series of men's
names compounded with Ger, — Germelkarth, Gerastart, and
so forth, — and the same type recurs among the Arabs of
Syria in the name Gairelos or Gerelos, " client of El." ^ In
Arabia proper, where the relation of protector and protected
had a great development, and whole clans were wont to
attach themselves as dependants to a more powerful tribe,
the conception of god and worshipper as patron and client
appears to have been specially predominant, not merely
because dependent clans took up the religion of the patrons
with whom they took refuge, but because of the frequent
shiftings of the tribes. Wellhausen has noted that the
hereditary priesthoods of Arabian sanctuaries were often in
the hands of families that did not belong to the tribe of
the worshippers, but apparently were descended from older
inhabitants ; ^ and in such cases the modern worshippers
were really only clients of a foreign god. So, in fact, at
the great Sabiean pilgrimage shrine of Eiyam, tlie god
Ta'lab is adored as " patron," and his worshippers are called
his clients.''' To the same conception may be assigned the
proper name Salm, " submission," shortened from such
theophorous forms as the Palmy rene Salm al-Lat, "submission
1 See Noldeke, Sitzungfth. Bed. Ah. 1880, p. 765.
2 Wellhausen, HeklentMm, p. 129 ; cf. p. 183.
3 Mordtmann u. JMiiller, Sah. Denhm. p. 22, No. 5, 1. 2 sq. (IDnjD-'t'), 1. 8
•s'/. OnDHX) etc. Cf. No. 13, 1. 12, riDHX, the clients of the goddess Shams.
80 THE WORSHIPPER AS lect. ll.
to Lat," ^ and corresponding to the religious use of the verb
istalama, "he made his peace," to designate the ceremony
of kissing, stroking, or embracing the sacred stone at the
Caaba ; " and, further, the numerous names compounded with
Taim, which also, if we may judge by the profane use of the
word, as applied to a deeply attached lover, denotes one
who voluntarily submits himself to the god. But above
all, the prevalence of religion based on clientship and
voluntary homage is seen in the growth of the practice of
pilgrimage to distant shrines, which is so prominent a
feature in later Semitic heathenism. Almost all Arabia
met at Mecca, and the shrine at Hierapolis drew visitors
from the whole Semitic world. These pilgrims were the
guests of tlie god, and were received as such by the
inhabitants of the holy places. They approached the god
as strangers, not with the old joyous confidence of national
worship, but with atoning ceremonies and rites of self-
mortification, and their acts of worship were carefully
prescribed for them by qualified instructors,^ the proto-
types of the modern Meccan Motawwif. The progress of
heathenism towards universalism, as it is displayed in these
usages, seemed only to widen the gulf between the deity
and man, to destroy the naive trustfulness of the old
religion without substituting a better way for man to be at
one with his god, to weaken the moral ideas of nationality
without bringing in a higher morality of universal obliga-
tion, to transform the divine kingship into a mere court
pageant of priestly ceremonies without permanent influence
on the order of society and daily life. The Hebrew ideal
1 De Vogii^, No. 54.
■- Ibn Doraid, Kit. al-ishticdc, p. 22. The same idea of a religion accepted
by voluntary submission is expressed in the name Islam. We shall see later
that much the same idea underlies the designation of the Christian religion
as a "mystery."
^ Lucian, Dt Dea Syria, Ivi.
LECT. II. CLIENT OF HIS GOD. 81
of a divine kingship that must one day draw all men to do
it homage offered better things than these, not in virtue of
any feature that it possessed in common with the Semitic
religions as a whole, but solely in virtue of its unique con-
ception of Jehovah as a God whose love for His people was
conditioned by a law of absolute righteousness. In other
nations individual thinkers rose to lofty conceptions of a
supreme deity, but in Israel, and in Israel alone, these
conceptions were incorporated in the accepted worship of
the national god. And so of all the gods of the nations
Jehovah alone was fitted to become the God of the whole
earth.
LECTUEE III.
THE RELATIONS OF THE GODS TO NATURAL THINGS
HOLY PLACES THE JINN.
In the last lecture I endeavoured to sketch in broad out-
line the general features of the religious institutions of the
Semites in so far as they rest on the idea that gods and
men, or rather the god and his own proper worshippers,
make up a single community, and that the place of the
god in the community is interpreted on the analogy of
human relationships. Our business in this enquiry was
not to ask what the gods were in themselves, but only to
see what part they held in the social organism, as kinsmen,
fathers, sovereigns or patrons of their worshippers. We
are now to follow out this point of view through the
details of sacred rite and observance, and to consider how
tlie various acts and offices of religion stand related to the
place assigned to the deity in the community of his wor-
shippers. But as soon as we begin to enter on these
details we find it necessary to take account of a new series
of relations connecting man on the one hand, and his god
on the other, with physical nature and material objects.
All acts of ancient worship have a material embodiment,
which is not left to the choice of the worshipper but is
limited by fixed rules. They must be performed at certain
places and at certain times, with the aid of certain material
appliances and according to certain mechanical forms.
These rules import that the intercourse between the deity
82
LECT. III. THE GODS AND NATURE. 83
and his worshippers is subject to physical conditions of a
definite kind, and this again implies that the relations
between gods and men are not independent of the material
environment. The relations of a man to his fellow-men
are limited by physical conditions, because man, on the side
of his bodily organism, is himself a part of the material
universe, and, when we find that the relations of a man to
liis god are limited in the same way, we are led to conclude
that the gods too are in some sense conceived to be a part
of the natural universe, and that this is the reason why
men can hold converse with them only by the aid of
certain material things. It is true that in some of the
higher forms of antique religion the material restrictions
imposed on the legitimate intercourse between gods and
men were conceived to be not natural but positive, that
is they were not held to be dependent on the nature of
the gods, but were looked upon as arbitrary rules laid
down by the free will of the deity. But in the ordinary
forms of heathenism it appears quite plainly that the gods
themselves are not exempt from the general limitations of
physical existence ; indeed we have already seen that
where the relation of the deity to his worshippers is con-
ceived as a relation of kinship, the kinship is taken to
have a physical as well as a moral sense, so that the wor-
shipped and the worshippers are parts not only of one
social community but of one physical unity of life.
It is important that we should realise to ourselves with
some definiteness the primitive view of the universe in
which this conception arose, and in which it has its natural
place. It is to be noted that the oldest institutions of
religion — and by this I do not mean such institutions only
as became obsolete at an early date, but such as survived
and played a considerable part in religious life down of
the later ages of heathenism — carry with them evidence to
^
84 THE GODS AND
LECT. III.
a conclusive kind, referring their origin to a time when
men had not learned to draw sharp distinctions between
the nature of one thing and another. Savages, we know,
are not only incapable of separating in thought between
phenomenal and noumenal existence, but habitually ignore
the distinctions, which to us seem obvious, between organic
and inorganic nature, or within the former region between
animals and plants. Arguing altogether by analogy, and
concluding from the known to the unknown with the
freedom of men who do not know the difference between
the imagination and the reason, they ascribe to all material
objects a life analogous to that which their own self-con-
sciousness reveals to them. They see that men are liker
to one another than beasts are to men, that men are liker
to beasts than they are to plants, and to plants than they
are to stones ; but all things appear to them to live, and
the more incomprehensible any form of life seems to them
the more wonderful and worthy of reverence do they take
it to be. Now this attitude of man to the natural things
bv which he is surrounded — an attitude which in modern
times is known to us only by observation among savage
races — is the very attitude attested to us for ancient times
by some of the most salient features of antique religion.
Among races which have attained to a certain decree of
culture the predominant conception of the gods is anthro-
pomorphic, that is they are supposed on the whole to
resemble men and act like men, and the artistic imagina-
tion, whether in poetry or in sculpture and painting, draws
them after the similitude of man. But at the same time
the list of gods includes a variety of natural objects of all
kinds, the sun moon and stars, the heavens and the earth,
animals and trees, or even sacred stones. And all these
gods, without distinction of their several natures, are
conceived as entering into the same kind of relation to
LECT. 111. NATUEAL THINGS. 85
man, are approached in ritual of the same type, and excite
the same kind of hopes and fears in the breasts of their
worshippers. It is of course easy to say that the gods
were not identified with these natural objects, that they
were only supposed to inhabit them ; but fur our present
purpose this distinction is not valid. A certain crude
distinction between soul and body, combined with the idea
that the soul may act where the body is not, is suggested
to the most savage races by familiar psychical phenomena,
particularly by those of dreams ; and the unbounded use of
analogy characteristic of pre-scientific thought extends this
conception to all parts of nature, which becomes to the
savage mind full of spiritual forces, more or less detached
in their movements and action from the material objects
to which they are supposed properly to belong. But the
detachment of the invisible life from its visible embodiment
is never complete. A man after all is not a ghost or
phantom, a life or soul without a body, but a body with
its life, and in like manner the unseen life that inhabits
the planet, tree, or sacred stone makes the sacred object
itself be conceived as a living being. And in ritual the
sacred object was spoken of and treated as the god himself ;
it was not merely his symbol but his embodiment, the
permanent centre of his activity in the same sense in
which the human body is the permanent centre of man's
activity. The god inhabits the tree or sacred stone not in
the sense in which a man inhabits a house but in the
sense in which his soul inhabits his body. ]n short the
whole conception belongs in its origin to a stage of thought
in which there was no more difficulty in ascribing living
powers and personality to a stone tree or animal, than to
a being of human or superhuman build.
The same lack of any sharp distinction between the
nature of different kinds of visible beings appears in the
S6 GODS MEN AND lect. in.
oldest myths, in which all kinds of objects, animate and
inanimate, organic and inorganic, appear as cognate with
one another, with men, and with the gods. The kinship
between gods and men which we have already discussed is
only one part of a larger kinship which embraces the
y^ lower creation. In the Babylonian legend beasts as well
as man are formed of earth mingled with the life-blood of
a god ; in Greece the stories of the descent of men from
gods stand side by side with ancient legends of men sprung
from trees or rocks, or of races whose mother was a tree
and their father a god.^ Similar myths, connecting both
men and gods with animals plants and rocks, are found all
over the world and were not lacking among the Semites.
To this day the legend of the country explains the name
of the Beni Sokhr tribe by making them the offspring of
^ the sandstone rocks about Madain Salih.'"^ To the same
stage of thought belong the stories of transformations of
men into animals which are not infrequent in Arabian
legend. Mohammed would not eat lizards because he
fancied them to be the offspring of a metamorphosed
clan of Israelites.^ Macrlzl relates of the Sei'ar in
Hadramaut that in time of drought part of the tribe
change themselves into ravening were- wolves. They have
a magical means of assuming and again casting off the
wolf shape.^ Other Hadramites changed themselves into
vultures or kites.^ In the Sinai Peninsula the hyrax and
the panther are believed to have been originally men."
1 Odysmy, xviii. 163 ; Preller-Robert, i. 79 sq.
" Doughtj-, Travels in Jrahia, i. 17 ; see Ibn Dovaid, p. 329, 1. 20.
Conversely many stones and rocks in Arabia were believed to be transformed
'^ men, but especially women. Dozy, Israeliteu te Mekka, p. 201, gives
examples. See also Yficut, i. 123,
* Damiri, ii. 88 ; cf. Doughty, i. 326.
* De valle Hadhramaut (Bonn 1866), p. 19 sq.
'•> Ibid. p. 20. See also Ibn Mojawir in Sprenger, Post-routen, p. 142,
" See Kinship, p. 203 sq., where I give other evidences on the point.
LECT. III. NATURAL THINGS. 87
Among the northern Semites transformation myths are
not uncommon, though they have generally been preserved
to us only in Greek forms. The .pregnant mother of
Adonis was changed into a myrrh tree, and in the tenth
month the tree burst open and the infant god came forth/
The metamorphosis of Derceto into a fish was related both
at Ascalon and at Bambyce, and so forth. In the same
spirit is conceived the Assyrian myth which includes
among the lovers of Ishtar the lion the eagle and the
war-horse, while in the region of plastic art the absence of
any sharp line of distinction between gods and men on the
one hand and the lower creation on the other is displayed
in the predilection for fantastic monsters, half human half
bestial, which began with the oldest Chald?ean engraved
cylinders, gave Phoenicia its cherubim griffins and sphinxes,^
and continued to characterise the sacred art of the Baby-
lonians down to the time of Berosus.'^ Of course most of
these things can be explained away as allegories, and are
so explained to this day by persons who shut their eyes to
the obvious difference between primitive thought, which
treats all nature as a kindred unity because it has not yet
differentiated things into their kinds, and modern monistic
philosophy, in which the universe of things, after having
been realised in its multiplicity of kinds, is again brought
into unity by a metaphysical synthesis. But by what
process of allegory can we explain away the belief in were-
wolves ? When the same person is believed to be now a
man and now a wolf, the difference which we recognise
between a man and a wild beast is certainly not yet
^ ApoUodorus, iii. 14. 3 ; Servius on ^n. v. 72.
2 See Meuant, Glyptique Orientcde, vol. i.
' Berosus {Fr. Hist. Gr. ii. 497) refers to the images at the temple of Bel
which preserved the forms of the strange monsters that lived in the time of
chaos. But the peculiar prevalence of such figures on the oldest gems shows
that the chaos in c^uestion is only the chaotic imagination of early man.
88 PHYSICAL AFFINITIES lect. lir.
perceived. And such a belief as this cannot be a mere
isolated extravagance of the fancy ; it points to a view of
nature as a whole which is, in fact, the ordinary view of
savages in all parts of the world, and everywhere produces
just such a confusion between the several orders of natural
and supernatural beings as we find to have existed among
the early Semites.
The immediate inference from all this is that the origins
of Semitic, and indeed of all antique religion, go back to
a stage of human thought in which the question of the
nature of the gods, as distinguished from other beings, did
not even arise in any precise form, because no one series
of existences was strictly differentiated from another. And
this observation brings us back again to the point on
which I laid so much stress in my first lecture. In early
religion we have not to consider the nature of things, but
only the relations of things to one another, and the stated
forms of intercourse between the gods and men to which
these relations gave rise. Whatever ideas as to the
specific divine nature grew up in connection with the
development of heathen systems of religion were second-
ary formations ; whereas sacred institutions, in some shape
or other, are primary and as old as religion itself. The
gods, that is, were originally known and regarded not in
themselves, and in their distinct entity, but in the series
of orderly relations and stated activities that connected
them with their worshippers and formed the basis of
fixed institutions. The element of order and statedness,
which makes fixed institutions possible, was in fact that
which made religion, as distinct from mere superstition,
possible. Where the superhuman forces of nature are
purely arbitrary in their dealings with men we have not
religion, but only sorcery and magic. But these remarks are
a digression ; let us return to the course of the argument.
LECT. III. OF THE GODS. 89
So far as religious institutions depend on direct and
immediate relations between the gods and men we have
already considered the main types on which they were
formed. But these immediate relations do not exhaust
the subject. Men's lives are conditioned not only by
their personal relations to other men but also by the
whole natural environment in which they move ; and
other lives affect mine not only directly, in virtue of my
direct relations with certain persons, but in an indirect
way, in so far as I and others influence, and are influenced
by, the same material surroundings. Consider, for example,
the enormous eff'ects which property, and the relations of \^
man to man which depend on property, have exercised on
the whole structure of society.
Now in ancient religion, as we have seen, the gods have
what may be called physical relations and affinities, not
only to man but to all kinds of natural objects, to
beasts and trees and inanimate thincfs. The idea of the
metaphysical transcendency of the godhead is altogether
inconsistent with the view of the universe which we have
just been considering, in which neither gods nor men are
sharply differentiated from the lower orders of beings.
And as that view was never entirely superseded in ancient
faith and practice, we must expect to find, in addition to
the direct relations between gods and men, indirect
relations due to the fact that certain gods and certain
men are brought into contact with one another through
their respective relations with the same class of material
things. Gods as well as men have a physical environ-
ment, on and through which they act, and by which their
activity is conditioned.
The influence of this idea on ancient religion is very
far-reaching and often difficult to analyse. But there is
one aspect of it that is both easily grasped and of funda-
90 THE LOCAL RELATIONS lect. hi.
mental importance ; I mean the connection of particular
gods with particular places. The most general term to
express the relation of natural things to the gods which
our language affords is the word " holy ; " thus when
we speak of holy places, holy things, holy persons, holy
times, we imply that the places things persons and times
stand in some special relation to the godhead or to its
manifestation. But the word "holy" has had a long and
complicated history, and has various shades of meaning
according to the connection in which it is used. It is not
possible, by mere analysis of the modern use of the word, to
arrive at a single definite conception of the meaning of
holiness ; nor is it possible to fix on any one of the modern
aspects of the conception, and say that it represents the
fundamental idea from which all other modifications of the
idea can l)e deduced. The primitive conception of holiness,
to which the modern variations of the idea must be traced
back, belonged to a primitive habit of thought with which
we have lost touch, and we cannot hope to understand it
by the aid of logical discussion, but only by studying it on
its own ground as it is exhibited in the actual working of
early religion. It would be idle therefore at this stage to
attempt any general definition, or to seek for a compre-
hensive formula covering all the relations of the gods to
natural things. The problem must be attacked in detail
before we can seek its general solution, and for many reasons
the most suitable point of attack will be found in the con-
nection that ancient religion conceived to exist between
particular deities and particular " holy " places. This topic
is of fundamental importance, because all complete acts of
ancient worship were necessarily performed at a holy place,
and thus the local connections of the gods are involved,
expKcitly or implicitly, in every function of religion.
The local relations of the gods may be considered
LECT. III.
OF THE GODS. 91
under two heads. In the first place the activity power
and dominion of the gods were conceived as bounded
by certain local limits, and in the second place they were
conceived as having their residences and homes at certain
fixed sanctuaries. These two conceptions are not of course
independent, for generally speaking the region of divine
authority and influence surrounds the sanctuary which is
the god's principal seat, but for convenience of exposition
we shall look first at the god's land and then at his
sanctuary or dwelling-place.
Broadly speaking the land of a god corresponds with
the land of his worshippers ; Canaan is Jehovah's land as
Israel is Jehovah's people.^ In like manner the land of
Assyria (Asshur) has its name from the god Asshur," and
in general the deities of the heathen are called indifferently
the gods of the nations and the gods of the lands,^ Our
natural impulse is to connect these expressions with the
divine kingship, which in modern kingdoms of feudal
origin is a sovereignty over land as well as men. But
the older Semitic kingdoms were not feudal, and before
the captivity we shall hardly find an example of a
Semitic sovereign being called king of a land.* In fact
1 Hos. ix. 3 ; cf. Reland, Palcestina, vol. i. p. 16 nqq.
2 Schrader, KAT. 2nd ed. p. 35 sqq. ; cf. Micah v. 6 (Heb. 5) where the
"land of Asshur" stands in parallelism with "land of Ninirod." Nimrod
is a god, see his article in Enc. Brit., 9th ed. , and Wellhausen, Hexateuch
(■2nd ed., 1889), p. 308 sqq. On the possibility that the Land of Uz has
its name from the god 'Aud, see above p. 43, note.
^ 2 Kings xviii. 33 .svj'c/.
* The Hebrews say "king of Asshur" (Assyria) Edom Aram (Syria) etc.,
but these are names of nations, the countries being properly the "land of
Asshur " etc. The local designation of a king is taken from his capital, or
royal seat. Thus the king of Israel is king of Samaria (1 Kings xxi. 1),
Sihon, king of the Amorites, is king of Heshbon (Deut. iii. 6). Hiram, whom
the Bible calls king of Tyre, appears on the oldest of Phcenician inscriptions
(C. /. 8. No. 5) as king of the Sidonians, i.e. the Ph(enicians (cf. 1 Kings
xvi. 31), Nebuchadnezzar is king of Babylon, and so forth. The only excep-
tion to this rule in old Hebrew is, I think, Og king of Bashaii (Deut. i. 4 ; 1
Kings iv. 19), who is a mythical figure, presumably an old god of the region.
/^
92 THE GOD AS lect. hi.
the relations of a god to his land were not merely
political, or dependent on his relation to the inhabitants.
The Aramaeans and Babylonians whom the king of
Assyria planted in northern Israel brought their own gods
with them, but when they were attacked by lions they
felt that they must call in the aid of " the god of the
land," who, we must infer, had in his own region power
over beasts as well as men.-^ Similarly the Aramaeans
of Damascus, after their defeat in the hill-country of
Samaria, argue that the gods of Israel are gods of the hills
and will have no power in the plains ; the power of the
gods has physical and local limitations. So too the
conception that a god cannot be worshipped outside of his
own land, which we find applied even to the worship of
Jehovah,^ does not simply mean that there can be no
worship of a god where he has no sanctuary, but that the
land of a strange god is not a fit place to erect a sanctuary.
In the language of the Old Testament foreign countries
are unclean,'^ so that Naaman, when he desires to worship
the God of Israel at Damascus, has to beg for tw^o mules'
burden of the soil of Canaan, to make a sort of enclave
of Jehovah's land in his Aramaean dwelling-place.
In Semitic religion the relation of the gods to particular
places which are special seats of their power is usually
expressed by the title Baal (pi. Baalim., fem. Baalath).
As applied to men haal means the master of a house, the
owner of a field cattle or the like ; or in the plural the
haalim of a city are its freeholders and full citizens.* In a
secondary sense, in which alone the word is ordinarily used
in Arabic, haal means husband ; but it is not used of the
relation of a master to his slave, or of a superior to his
^ 2 Kings xvii. 24 sqq. " 1 Sam. xxvi. 19 ; Hos. ix. 4.
^ Amos vii. 17; Josh. xxii. 19.
* So often in the Old Testament, and also in Phaaiician. Baalath is used
of a female citizen [G. I. S. No. 120).
LECT. III.
BAAL OF HIS LAKD. 93
inferior, and it is incorrect to regard it, when employed as
a divine title, as a mere synonym of the titles implying
lordship over men which came before us in the last lecture.
"When a god is simply called " the Baal," the meaning is
not " the lord of the worshipper " but the possessor of some
place or district, and each of the multitude of local Baalim
is distinguished by adding the name of his own place.
Melcarth is the Baal of Tyre, Astarte the Baalath of Byblus;^
there was a Baal of Lebanon,^ of Mount Hermon,^ of Mount
Peor, and so forth. In Southern Arabia Baal constantly
occurs in similar local connections, e.g. Dhu Samawi is the
Baal of the district Bacir, 'Athtar the Baal of Gumdan, and
the sun- goddess the Baalath of several places or regions.*
1 C. I. S. Nos. 1, 122. 2 c I. S. No. 5.
3 See Judg. iii. -3, where this mountain is called the mountain of the Baal
of Hermon. Hermon properly means a sacred place. In the Old Testament
place-names like Baal-Peor, Baal-Meou are shortened from Beth Baal Peor,
*' house or sanctuary of the Baal of Mount Peor," etc.
* Special forms of Baal occur which are defined not by the name of a place
or region but in some other way, e.g. by the name of a sacred object, as Baal-
Tamar, "lord of the palm-tree," preserved to us only in the name of a town,
Judg. XX. 33. So too Baal-Hammiin, on the Carthaginian Tanith inscrip-
tions, maybe primarily " Lord of the sun-pillar ; " yet compare jCPi bn, "the
divinity of (the place) Hamnidn " (C. /. S. Xo. 8, and the inscr. of Ma'siib) ;
see G. Hoffmann in the Ahhandlujujen of the Gottingen Academy, vol. xxxvi.
(4 May 1889). Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron, is "owner of flies," rather than
B«ax Mwa, the fly-god. In one or two cases the title of Baal seems to be
prefixed to the name of a god ; thus we have Baal-Zephon as a place-name
on the frontiers of Egypt, and also a god JS^f (C. /. S. IS^os. 108, 265).
Similarly the second element in Baal-Gad, a town at the foot of Mount
Hermon, is the name of an ancient Semitic god. The grammatical explana-
tion of these forms is not clear to me. Another peculiar form is Baal-Berith
at Shechem, which in ordinary Hebrew simply means "possessor of covenant,"
i.e. "covenant ally," but may here signify the Baal who presides over cove-
nants, or rather over the special covenant by which the neighbouring Israelites
were bound to the Canaanite inhabitants of the city. Peculiar also is the
more modern Baal-Marcod, Kolpavo; KM//.av (near Bairut), known from inscrip-
tions (Wadd. Nos. 1855, 1856 ; Gannoau, Bee. d'Arch. Or. i. 95, 103). The
Semitic form is supposed to be TpiD 7j/'3, " lord of dancing," i.e. he to whom
dancing is due as an act of homage ; cf. for the construction, Prov. iii. 27.
In later times Baal or Bel became a proper name, especially in connection
with the cult of the Babylonian Bel, and entered into compounds of a new kind
94 THE BAAL lect. ili.
As the heathen gods are never conceived as ubiquitous,
and can act only where they or their ministers are present,
the sphere of their permanent authority and influence is
naturally regarded as their residence. It will be observed
that the local titles which I have cited are generally derived
either from towns where the god had a temple, or as the
Semites say a house, or else from mountains, which are
constantly conceived as the dwelling-places of deities. The
notion of personal property in land is a thing that grows
up gradually in human society and is first applied to a
man's homestead. Pasture land is common property,^ but
a man acquires rights in the soil by building a house, or by
" quickening " a waste place, i.e. bringing it under cultiva-
tion. Originally, that is, private rights over land are a
mere consequence of rights over what is produced by
private labour upon the land.^ The ideas of building and
cultivation are closely connected — the Arabic 'amara, like
the German hauen covers both — and the word for house or
homestead is extended to include the dependent fields or
territory. Thus in Syriac " the house of Antioch " is the
territory dependent on the town, and in the Old Testament
the land of Canaan is called not only Jehovah's land but
his house.^ If the relation of the Baal to his district is to
like the Aglibol and Malakhbel of Palmyra. Baal Sliamaim, "the lord of
heaven," belongs to the class of titles taken from the region of nature in
which the god dwells or has sway. NSID /]}2 {C I. S. No. 41 ) and rb]}2
rrnnn {ibid. No 177) are of doubtful interpretation. On the whole there is
nothing in these peculiar forms to shake the general conclusion that Baal is
primarily the title of a god as inhabitant or owner of a place.
^ Common, that is, to a tribe, for the tribes are very jealous of encroach-
ments on their pastures. But, as we have here to do with the personal rights
of the Baal within his own community, the question of intertribal rights does
not come in.
3 The law of Islam is that land which has never been cultivated or
occupied by houses becomes private property by being " quickened " {bil-
ihyd). See Nawawi, Minhdj, ed. Van den Berg, ii. 171. This is in accord-
ance with pre-Islamic custom. Cf. Wellhausen, Heidenthum, p. 105.
^ Hos. viii. 1, ix. 15, comjiared with ix. 3.
LECT. HI. AND HIS LAND. 95
be judged on these analogies, the land is his, first because
he inhabits it, and then because he " quickens " it, and
makes it productive.
That this is the true account of the relations of the name
Baal appears from what Hosea tells us of the religious con-
ceptions of his idolatrous contemporaries, whose nominal
Jehovah worship was merged in the numerous local cults of
the Canaanite Baalim. To the Baalim they ascribed all the
natural gifts of the land, the corn the wine and the oil, the
wool and the flax, the vines and fig-trees,^ and we shall
see by and by that the whole ritual of feasts and sacrifices
was imbued with this conception. We can however go a
step further, and trace the idea to an eai'lier form, by the
aid of a fragment of old heathen phraseology which has
survived in the language of Hebrew and Arabic agxiculture.
Both in the Jewish traditional law and in the system of
Mohammedan taxation a distinction is drawn between land
which is artificially irrigated and land that does not require
irrigation. The latter is called haal (Ar. ha'l), an abbre-
viated expression, for which the Talmud offers the fuller
form " house of Baal " or " field of the house of Baal," and
Arabic documents the phrase " what the Ba'l waters." In
Arabic law ground of the second class pays double tithes.
It must be remembered that in the East the success of
agriculture depends more on the supply of water than on
anything else, and the "quickening of dead ground" {ihya,
al-mawdt), which, as we have seen, creates ownership, has
reference mainly to irrigation.^ Accordingly what the
husbandman irrigates is his own property, but what is
naturally watered he regards as irrigated by a god and as
the field house or property of this god, who is thus looked
upon as the Baal or owner of the spot.
' Hos. ii. 8 sqq.
2 See, for example, Abu Yusuf Ya'cub, Kitdh al-Khardj, Cairo, A.H,
1302, p. 37.
96 ORIGINAL SENSE lect. hi.
It has been generally assumed that Baal's land, in the
sense in which it is opposed to irrigated fields, means land
watered by the rains of heaven, " the waters of the sky " as
the Arabs call them ; and when the Arabs speak at one time
of " what the Ba'l waters" and at another of " what the sky
waters " it is natural to assume that the two phrases mean
the same thing,^ and to infer that the Baal is the sky or
the god of the sky (Baal-shamaim) who plays so great
a part in later Semitic religion and is identified by Philo
Byblius with the sun. But, strictly regarded, this view,
which is natural in our climate, appears to be inconsistent
with the conditions of vegetable growth in the Semitic
lands, where the rainfall is precarious or confined to certain
seasons. The surface moisture from the " water of heaven "
is at most sufficient to raise one quick-growing crop, and
the face of the earth is bare and lifeless for the greater
part of the year, save where there is irrigation or a flow of
water underground. The contrast between lands fertilised
by rain and lands that need irrigation is a contrast of
climate, whereas the peculiarity of Baal-land is one of soil
or bottom, in a climate where most ground needs irrigation.
And in fact the best Arab authorities expressly say that
tlie ha I is not fertilised by rain but by subterranean
waters.^
^ See Wellhausen, 3[oh. hi Med. p. 420 (where however irrigated laud is
contrasted not simjily with land fed by rains but with land fed by rains or
flowing water) ; Heidenthum, y^. 170. In mj Prophets of fsraei, Tp. 172, I
have fallen into the same tra[i, which indeed was set by the less accurate of
the later Arabic authorities : see the next note.
- See the passages collected in De Goeje's Glossary to Baladhori and in the
Llsdn al-'Ai'ah. When the Arabian empire extended to very various
climates confusion naturally arose, and the true meaning of 6a7 was disputed
out of mere ignorance (see al-Azhari's criticism of al-Cotabi in the Lisaii), or
changed to suit changed conditions, as in Spain (De Sacy's Chrest. Ar. i.
225). The true Arabic name for land watered by rain alone, because it lies
too high or too far for irrigation, is 'idhy ; such soil was little worth, as
appears from the synonym bakhs. As regnrds the Jewish usage (Mishnic
^ya. Sue. in. 3, Terum. x. 11, Shebi. ii. 9, or ^ynn niU, B.B. iii. 1 ;
LECT. III. OF baal's land. 97
Now, if the Baal's land is fertilised by ground-water, all
connection between the deity and the sky falls to the
ground ; for Semitic antiquity does not connect springs
rivers and subterranean flow with rain, but regards the
primeval store of water as divided into two distinct bodies,
one above the sky, whence rain comes, the other in the
great deep, which feeds springs and lakes as well as seas.^
And so, when we find that in later times all Semitic deities
were usually conceived as heavenly or astral, we must con-
clude that the connection of the Baalim with underground
waters dates from an earlier stage of religion, and that the
seat of the gods was sought by springs and river banks, in
the groves and tangled thickets and green tree-shaded
glades of mountain hollows and deep watercourses, before
all deities were raised to heavenly seats. To one who has
wandered in the Arabian wilderness, traversing day after
day stony plateaus, black volcanic fields, or arid sands
walled in by hot mountains of bare rock, and relieved by
Talmudic ~)]}2n TT'D) the best discussion is that of Guisius in Surenh. i. 163.
That here also the moisture is subterranean appears from Sue. iii. 3 (for
the Populus Evphratica requires a wet bottom), as well as from the gloss in
Buxtorf S.V., wliich says that the ha'l lies in a valley.
The Arabs have another term, 'athari, which apparently means the land of
'Athtar, the S. Arabian god who corresponds in name, but not in sex, to the
Babylonian Ishtar and the Phcenician Astarte. There is still more dispute
about this word than about the other, and, though it is often identified with
ba'l, there is somewhat better evidence for connecting it with rainfall. In a
word that seems to be cf Yemenite origin this is not unnatural, for the
monsoon rains are of great importance in S. Arabia, and in Hadramaut
not only cereal crops but trees are dependent on them (Macrizi, Hadramaut,
pp. 19, 25). But even in Yemen 'Athtar was worshipped as a god of wells
(C. /. S. pt. iv. No. 47, cf. Miiller in ZDMG. xxxvii. 371), and in North
Arabia 'athari seems to be exactly sj'nonymous with ha'l, for the oasis near
Kaf in W. Sirhfin, Avliich Guarmani (p. 209) calls Etera, and Lady Anne
Blunt {Nejd, i. 89 sqq.) writes Itheri, must be 'Atharlwiih a thiiming of the
first vowel in modern pronunciation. Ba'l and 'athari designate the pro-
duce as well as the land, and in this sense the reference is mainly to trees,
particularly to the date palm (for which in most parts of Arabia irrigation or
underground M-ater is a necessity), not to such quick-growing crops as are
raised on thirsty land after the copious rains that sometimes fall.
^ See Gen. i. 2, vii. 11, xlix. 25 ; Deut. xxxiii. 13, etc.
G
98 THE BAALIM AS lect. hi.
no other vegetation than a few grey and thorny acacias or
scanty tufts of parched herbage ; till suddenly, at a turn of
the road, he emerges on a Wady where the ground-water
rises to the surface, and passes as if by magic into a new
world, where the ground is carpeted with verdure and a
grove of stately palm-trees spreads forth its canopy of
shade against the hot and angry heaven, it is not difficult
to realise that to early man such a spot was verily a garden
and habitation of the gods. In Syria the contrasts are
less glaring than in the desert ; but only in the spring
time, and in many parts of the country not even then, is
the general fertility such that a fountain or a marshy
bottom with its greensward and thicket of natural wood
can fail strongly to impress the imagination. Nor are the
religious associations of such a scene felt only by heathen
barbarians. " The trees of the Lord drink their fill, the
cedars of Lebanon which He hath planted : Where the birds
make their nests ; as for the stork, the fir-trees are her
house" (Ps. civ. IG). This might pass for the description of
the natural sanctuary of the Baal of Lebanon, but who does
not feel its solemn grandeur ? Or who will condemn the
touch of primitive naturalism that colours the comparison
in the first Psalm : " He shall be like a tree planted by
watercourses, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season ;
his leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth
shall prosper " (Ps. i. o) ?
When the conception of Baal's land is thus narrowed to
its oldest form, and limited to certain favoured spots that
seem to be planted and watered by the hand of the gods,^
we are on the point of passing from the idea of the land of
the god to that of his homestead and sanctuary. But
before we take this step it will be convenient for us to
^ To tlie same circle of ideas belongs the conception of the Garden of Eden,
planted by God, and watered not by ruin but by rivers.
LECT. III. LORDS OF WATER. 99
glance rapidly at the way in which the primitive idea was
widened and extended. In Arabia and in Palestine also,
as we see from the account of Isaac's dealings with
Abimelech in Genesis xxvi., property in water is more
important and more primitive than property in land.
Without access to water the land is useless, and so in
Arabia the right of a tribe or a family to certain pasturages
is defined by the ownership of certain springs wells or
watercourses. So too in the agricultural stage of society
a man who has land without water is dependent on his
neighbour for the first requisite of husbandry, and has
to procure it of him at a price. If therefore the local
Baalim hold the springs and watery bottoms, the whole
agricultural population is dependent on them, and must pay
them tribute for the right of irrigation. The gifts of first-
fruits and the like that form the main part of Canaanite
ritual are to be explained on this principle, for they are
paid not only by Baal's own land but by the lands of all
his neighbours. In this way all natural growth and in-
crease comes to be looked upon as the gift of the god, who
is the universal author of productivity, or in Semitic phrase
" giver of life to the dead soil." And when this idea is
once established it tends, in virtue of that uncontrolled use
of analogy which is characteristic of early thought, to gain
wider and wider applications.
On the one hand the fertilising rains of heaven are in
like manner conceived as the gifts of a power seated in the
sky, and various imaginative devices are called in, to effect
an identification between the god above who sends rain
and the old local Baal of the waters of the land. The
scientific explanation, that the lower waters come ultimately
from the rain, is not that which recommends itself to early
thought. On the contrary, in mountainous regions, where
the godhead dwells in the highest glens and woody crown
100 THE BAALIM AS lect. in.
of the summits, he gathers the clouds around him in his
earthly sanctuary, and then moves forth in storm and
tempest to pour their waters on the thirsty land. Or in
later times, when the deities are conceived as mainly
astral, a star-goddess is identified with the local goddess
of a fountain by aid of a legend, such as that which was
related at Aphaca in the Lebanon, where on the occasion
of the annual feast a ball of fire was believed to fall into
the sacred stream.^
On the other hand 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 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.'^
^ Sozomen, ii. 5 ; cf. the fallen star which Astarte is said to have conse-
crated at the holy isle of Tyre (Philo Byblius in Fr. Hist. Gr. iii. 569).
^ To this class belong primarily the numerous Hebrew and Phcenician
names compounded with forms of the root \T\l or jn\ "to give" (Heb.
Jonathan, Plicen. Baaljathon ; Heb. Mattaniah, Phcen. Mutumbal [masc.
LECT. III. GIVERS OF FERTILITY. 101
In this rapid sketch of the development of the idea of
the local Baalim I have left many things to be confirmed
or filled out in detail by subsequent reference to the
particulars of their ritual, and I abstain altogether from
entering at this stage into the influence which the con-
ception of the Baalim as productive and reproductive
powers exercised on the development of a highly sensual
mythology, especially when the gods were divided into
sexes, and the Baal was conceived as the male principle
of reproduction, the husband of the land which he
fertilised,^ for this belongs rather to the discussion of the
nature of the gods.
You will observe also that the sequence of ideas which
I have proposed is applicable in its entirety only to
agricultural populations, such as those of Canaan and
Syria on the one hand and of Yemen on the other. It is
and fern.] etc. ; Nabatoean, Cosnatlian [Euting, No. 12]) ; and Arabic names
formed by adding the god's name to Wahb, Zaid (perhaps also Aus), "gift
of." Cognate to these are the names in which the birth of a son is recog-
nised as a proof of the divine favour (Heb. Hananiali, Johanan ; Phcen.
Hannibal, No'ammilkat [C. /. S. No. 41], etc. ; Edomite, Baal-Hanan [Gen.
xxxvi. 38]; Ar. N«^^x^ [Wadd. 2143], "favour of El," Auf-el "[good]
augury from El," Ova.'^hxos [Wadd. 2372] "love of El"), or which express
the idea that he has helped the parents or heard their prayers (Heb. Azariah,
Shemaiah ; Pho^n. Asdrubal, Eshmunazar, etc.); cf. Gen. xxix., xxx.,
1 Sam. i. Finally there is a long series of names such as Yehavbaal
(C. /. S. No. 69), Kemoshyehi (De Voglie, Melanges, p. 89), "Baal, Chemosh
gives life." The great variety of gods referred to in Phrenician names of
these forms shows that the gift of children was not ascribed to any one god,
but to all Baalim, each in his own sphere ; cf. Hosea, chap. i.
1 This conception appears in Hosea and underlies the figure in Isa. Ixii. 4,
where married land (be'ulah) is contrasted with wilderness ; Wellhausen,
Heidenthum, p. 170. It is a conception which might arise naturally enough
from the ideas above developed, but was no doubt favoured by the use of
haal to mean "husband." How baal comes to mean husband is not
perfectly clear ; the name is certainly associated with monandry and the
appropriation of the wife to her husband, but it does not imply a servile
relation, for the slave-girl does not call her master ba'l. Probably the key
is to be found in the notion that the wife is her husband's tillage (Goran
ii. 223), in which case private rights over land were older than exclusive
marital rights.
102 BAAL WOESHIP lect. hi.
in these parts of the Semitic field that the conception of the
local gods as Baalim is predominant, though traces of Ba'l as
a divine title are found in Central Arabia in various forms.-^
In the central parts of Arabia agriculture was confined
to oases, and the vocabulary connected with it is mainly
borrowed from the northern Semites.^ Many centuries
before the date of the oldest Arabic literature, when
the desert was the great highway of Eastern commerce,
colonies of the settled Semites, Yemenites and Aramteans,
occupied the oases and watering-places in the desert that
were suitable fur commercial stations, and to these immi-
grants must be ascribed the introduction of agriculture
and even of the date-palm itself. The most developed
cults of Arabia belong not to the pure nomads, but to
these agricultural and trading settlements, which the
Bedouins visited only as pilgrims, not to pay stated
homage to the lord of the land from which they drew
their life, but in fulfilment of vows. As most of our
knowledge about Arabian cults refers to pilgrimages and
the visits of the Bedouins, the impression is produced
that all offerings were vows, and that fixed tribute of the
fruits of the earth, such as was paid in the settled lands
to local Baalim, was unknown ; but this impression is not
accurate. From the Coran (vi. 137) and other sources we
have sufficient evidence that the settled Arabs paid to the
god a regular tribute from their fields, apparently by
marking off as his a certain portion of tlie irrigated and
cultivated ground.^ Thus as regards the settled Arabs
1 For the evidence see Nokleke in ZDMG. vol. xl. (1SS6) p. 174 ; and
"Wellhausen, Heklenthum, p. 170.
2 Frankel, Aram. Fremdww. p. 125.
^ All the evidence on this point luas been confused by an early misunder-
standing of the passage in the Coran : "They set apart for AUah a portion
of the tilth or the cattle he has created, and say, This is Allah's— as they
fancy — and this belongs to our partners (idols) : but what is assigned to
idols does not reach Allah and what is assigned to Allah really goes to
LECT. III. IN ARABIA. 103
the parallelism with the other Semites is complete, and
the only question is whether cults of the Baal type and
the name of Baal itself were not borrowed, along with
agriculture, from the northern Semitic peoples.
This question I am disposed to answer in the affirmative ;
for I find nothing in the Arabic use of the word la'l and
its derivatives which is inconsistent with the view that
they had their origin in the cultivated oases, and much
that strongly favours such a view. Tlie phrase " land
which the Baal waters " has no sense till it is opposed to
" land which the hand of man waters," and irrigation is
certainly not older than agriculture. It is very question-
able whether the idea of the godhead as the permanent
or immanent source of life and fertility — a very different
thing from the belief that the god is the ancestor of his
worshippers — had any place in the old tribal religion of
the nomadic Arabs. To the nomad, who does not practise
irrigation, the source of life and fertility is the rain that
quickens the desert pastures, and there is no evidence that
rain was ascribed to tribal deities. The Arabs regard rain
as depending on the constellations, i.e. on the seasons,
which affect all tribes alike within a wide range ; and so
when the showers of heaven are ascribed to a god, that
the idols." It is plain that the heathen said inditFerently "this heloiigs to
Allah," meaning the local god (of. Wellh., Heid. p. 185), or this belongs to
such and such a deity (naming him), and Mohammed argues, exactly as
Hosea does in speaking of the homa<j;e paid by his contemporaries to local
Baalim, whom they identitied with Jehovah, that whether they say
"Allah " or " Hobal," the real object of their homage is a false god. But
the traditional interpretation of the text is that one part was set aside for
the supreme Allah and another for the idols, and this distortion has
coloured all accounts of what the Arabs actually did, for of course historical
tradition must be corrected by the Coran. Allowance being made for this
error, which made the second half of the verse say that Allah was habitually
cheated out of his share in favour of the idols, the notices in Ibn Hisham,
p. 53, Sprenger, Leh. Moh. iii. 458, Pocock, Specimen, p. 112, may be
accepted as based upon fact. In Pocock's citation from the Xa~vi cd-dorr
it appears that iriigated land is referred to.
104 BAAL WORSHIP lect. hi.
god is Allah, the supreme and non-tribal deity.^ It is to
be noted also that among the Arabs the theophorous
proper names that express religious ideas most akin to
those of the settled Semites are derived from deities
whose worship was widespread and not confined to the
nomads. Further it will appear in a later lecture that
the fundamental type of Arabian sacrifice does not take
the form of a tribute to the god but is simply an act of
communion with him. The gift of firstlings indeed, which
has so prominent a place in Canaanite religion, is not
unknown in Arabia. But this aspect of sacrifice has very
little prominence ; we find no approach to the payment
of stated tribute to the gods, and the festal sacrifices at
fixed seasons, which are characteristic of religions that
regard the gods as the source of the annual renovation
of fertility in nature, seem to have been confined to the
great sanctuaries at which the nomads appeared only as
pilgrims before a foreign god." In these pilgrimages the
nomadic Arabs might learn the name of Baal, but they
could not assimilate the conception of the god as a land-
owner and apply it to their own tribal deities, for the
simple reason that in the desert private property in land
was unknown and the right of water and of pasturage was
common to every member of the tribe.'^ But in estimating
1 "Wellhaiisen, Heid. p. 175. ^cf. Wellhausen, p. 116.
^ We shall see in the next lecture that the institution of the himcl or
sacred pasture-land is based not on the idea of property but on a principle of
taboo, and affords no argument against the views that have just been
developed. A main argument for the antiquity of Baal religion in Arabia
is drawn from the denominative verb ba'ila = aliha, which means "to be in
a state of helpless panic and perplexity," literally "to be Baal-struck."
But such results are more naturally to be ascribed to the influence of an
alien god than of a tribal divinity, and the word may well be supposed to
have primarily expressed the conl'usion and mazed perplexity of the nomad
when he finds himself at some great feast at a pilgrim shrine, amidst the
strange habits and worship of a settled population ; cf. iEthiopic baCd,
"feast."
LECT. III.
m ARABIA. 105
the influence on Arabian religion of agriculture and the
ideas connected with settled life, we must remember how
completely, in the centuries before Mohammed, the gods
of the madar (" glebe," i.e. villagers and townsfolk) had
superseded the gods of the wahar (" hair," i.e. dwellers
in haircloth tents). Much the most important part of
the religious practices of the nomads consisted in pilgrim-
ages to the great shrines of the tow^n Arabs, and even
the minor sanctuaries, which were frequented only by
particular tribes, seem to have been often fixed at spots
where there was some commencement of settled life.
Where the god had a house or temple we recognise the
work of men who were no longer pure nomads, but had
begun to form fixed homes ; and indeed modern observation
shows that, when an Arab tribe begins to settle down, it
acquires the elements of husbandry before it gives up its
tents and learns to erect immoveable houses. Again there
were sanctuaries without temples, but even at these the
god had his treasure in a cave, and a priest who took care
of his possessions, and there is no reason to think that the
priest was an isolated hermit. The presumption is that
almost every holy place at the time of Mohammed was a
little centre of settled agricultural life, and so also a centre
of ideas foreign to the purely nomadic worshippers that
frequented it.^
^ In Arabia one section of a tribe is often nomadic while another is
agricultural, but in spite of their kinship the two sections feel themselves
very far apart in life and ways of thought, and a nomad girl often refuses
to stay with a village husband. In this connection the traditions of the
foreign origin of the cult at Mecca deserve more attention than is generally
paid to them, though not in the line of Dozy's speculations. To the tribes
of the desert the religion of the towns was foreign in spirit and contrasted
in many ways with their old nomadic habits ; moreover, as we have seen,
it was probably coloured from the first by Syrian and Nabativan influences.
Yet it exercised a great attraction, mainly by appealing to the sensual part
of the Bedouin's nature ; the feasts were connected with the markets, and
at them there was much jollity and good cheer. They began to be looked
106 THE HOMES OR HAUNTS lect. m.
The final result of this loncj discussion is that the
conception of the local god as Baal or lord of the land,
the source of its fertility and the giver of all the good
things of life enjoyed by its inhabitants, is intimately
bound up with the growth of agricultural society, and
involves a series of ideas unknown to the primitive life
of the savage huntsman or the pure pastoral nomad. But
we have also seen that the original idea of Baal's land was
limited to certain favoured spots that seem to be planted
and watered by the hand of the god and to form, as it
were, his homestead. Thus in its beginnings the idea of
the land of the god appears to be only a development, in
accordance with the type of agricultural life, of the more
primitive idea that the god has a special home or haunt
on eartli. Agricultural habits teach men to look on this
home as a garden of God, cultivated and fertilised by the
hand of deity, but it was not agriculture that created the
conception that certain places were the special haunts of
superhuman powers. That the gods are not ubiquitous
but subject to limitations of time and space, and that they
can act only where they or their messengers are present,
is the universal idea of antiquity and needs no explanation.
In no region of thought do men begin with transcendental
ideas and conceive of existences raised above space and
time. Thus whatever the nature of the gods, they were
doubtless conceived from the first as having their proper
homes or haunts, which they went forth from and returned
to, and v/here they were to be found by the worshippers
with whom they had fixed relations. "We are not entitled
to say a priori that this home would necessarily be a spot
on the surface of the earth, for, just as there are fowls of
on as making up tlie sum of religion, and the cult of the gods came to be
almost entirely dissociated from daily life, and from the customs associated
with the sanctity of kinship, -which at one time made up the chief part of
nomad religion. Cf. Wellh., Heid., p. 182.
LECT. III.
OF THE GODS. 107
the heaven and fish of the sea as well as beasts of the
field, there might be, and in fact were, celestial gods and
gods of the waters under the earth as well as gods
terrestrial. In later times celestial gods predominate, as
we see from the prevalence of sacrifice by fire, in which
the homage of the worshipper is directed upwards in the
pillar of savoury smoke that rises from the altar towards
the seat of the godhead in the sky. But all sacrifices are
not made by fire. The Greeks, especially in older times,
buried the sacrifices devoted to gods of the underworld
and threw into the water gifts destined for the gods of
seas and rivers. Both these forms of fireless ritual are
found also among the Semites ; and indeed among the
Arabs sacrifices by fire were almost unknown, and the gift
of the worshipper was conveyed to the deity simply by
being laid on sacred ground, hung on a sacred tree, or in
the case of liquid offerings and sacrificial blood, poured over
a sacred stone. In such cases we have the idea of locality
connected with the godhead in the simplest form. There
is a fixed place on the earth's surface, marked by a sacred
tree or a sacred stone, wdiere the god is wont to be found,
and offerings deposited there have reached their address.
In later times the home or sanctuary of a god was a
temple, or as the Semites call it a " house " or " palace."
But as a rule the sanctuary is older than the house, and
the god did not take up his residence in a place because a
house had been provided for him, but on the contrary,
when men had learned to build houses for themselves, they
also set up a house for their god in the place which was
already known as his home. Of course, as population in-
creased and temples were multiplied, means were found to
evade this rule, and new sanctuaries w^ere constituted in
the places most convenient for the worshippers ; but even
in such cases forms were observed which implied that a
108 THE HOMES OR HAUNTS LECT. ill.
temple could not fitly be erected except in a place which
was affected by the deity. No mere act of man, no choice
on his part, could constitute a sanctuary ; it was necessary
that the god should choose the place, and the greatest and
holiest sanctuaries were those which, according to un-
disputed tradition, he had been known to frequent from
time immemorial.
That the gods haunted certain spots, which in conse-
quence of this were holy places and fit places of worship,
was to the ancients not a theory but a matter of fact,
handed down by tradition from one generation to another,
and accepted with unquestioning faith. The reason for
frequenting a sanctuary was that it had been frequented
in the past, the proof that the god was to be found at a
certain spot was that by long custom he had been sought
there, and had shewn himself to his worshippers. Accord-
ingly we find that new sanctuaries can be formed and new
altars or temples erected, wherever the godhead has given
unmistakeable evidence of his presence. All that is
necessary to constitute a Semitic sanctuary is a precedent ;
it is assumed that where the god has once manifested him-
self and shewn favour to his worshippers he will do so
again, and wdien the precedent has been strengthened by
frequent repetition the holiness of the place is fully
secured. Thus in the earlier parts of the Old Testament
a theophany is always taken to be a good reason for
sacrificing on the spot. The deity has manifested himself
either visibly or by some mighty deed, and therefore an act
of worship cannot be out of place. Saul builds an altar
on the site of his victory over the Philistines,^ the patri-
archs found sanctuaries on the spot where the deity has
appeared to them,^ Gideon and Manoah present an offering
1 1 Sam. xiv. 35.
- Gen. xii. 7, xxii. 14, x.wiii. IS sqq. ; cf. ExoJ. xvii. 15.
LECT. HI. OF THE GODS. 109
where they have received a divine message.^ Even in the
Hebrew religion God is not equally near at all places and
all times, and when a man is brought face to face with
Him he seizes the opportunity for an act of ritual homage.
But the ordinary practices of religion are not dependent on
extraordinary manifestations of the divine presence ; they
proceed on the assumption that there are iixed places
where man can meet with god, and that where the deity
has appeared once he may be expected to appear again.
When Jacob has his dream of a divine apparition at
Bethel, he concludes not merely that Jehovah is present
there at the moment, but that the place is " the house of
God, the gate of heaven." And accordingly Bethel con-
tinued to be regarded as a sanctuary of the first class down
to the captivity. In like manner all the places where the
patriarchs were recorded to have worshipped or where God
appeared to them, figure as traditional holy places in the
later history, and at least one of them, that of Mamre, was
a notable sanctuary down to Christian times. We are
entitled to use these facts as illustrative of Semitic religion
in general, and not of the distinctive features of the
spiritual religion of the Old Testament ; for the worship of
Bethel, Shechem, Beersheba, and the other patriarchal holy
places, was mingled with Canaanite elements and is re-
garded as idolatrous by the prophets ; and the later ritual
at Mamre, w^hich was put down by the Christian emperors,
was purely heathenish.^ The conception, therefore, that
where the deity has once appeared in ancient times he is
still to be found by his worshippers, is not specific to the
Old Testament religion but is a common feature of Semitic
faith. It belongs in fact to the general principle that all
ancient religion is ruled by precedent.
^ Judges vi. 20, xiii. 19.
2 The evidence is collected by Reland, Palosntina, p. 711 sqq.
110 HOLY PLACES IN" lect. iir.
This law of precedent as forming a safe rule for ritual
institutions is, I say, common to the Old Testament
relio'ion and to the surrounding heathenism ; the difference
lies in the interpretation put on it. And even in this
respect all parts of the Old Testament are not on the same
level. By a prophet like Isaiah the residence of Jehovah
in Zion is almost wholly dematerialised. Isaiah has not
risen to the full height of the Xew Testament conception
that God, who is spirit and is to he worshipped spiritually,
makes no distinction of spot with regard to His worship,
and is equally near to receive men's prayers in every place ;
but he falls short of this view, not out of regard for ritual
tradition, but because, conceiving Jehovah as the king of
Israel, the supreme director of its national polity, he
necessarily conceives His kingly activity as going forth
from the capital of the nation. But the ordinary concep-
tion of the Old Testament, in the historical books and in
the Law, is not so subtle as this. Jehovah is not tied to
one place more than another, but He is not to be found
except in the places where " He has set a memorial of His
name," and in these He " comes to His worshippers and
blesses them" (Exod. xx. 24). Even this view rises above
the current ideas of the older Hebrews in so far as it
represents the establishment of fixed sanctuaries as an
accommodation to the necessities of man. It is obvious
that in the history of Jacob's vision the idea is not that
Jehovah came to Jacob, but that Jacob was unconsciously
guided to the place where there already was a ladder set
between earth and heaven, and where therefore the god-
head was peculiarly accessible. Precisely similar to this
is the old Hebrew conception of Sinai or Horeb, " the
Mount of God." It is clear that in Exod. iii. the ground
about the burning bush does not become holy because God
has appeared to Moses. On the contrary the theophany
LECT. III. THE OLD TESTAMENT. Ill
lakes place there because it is holy ground, Jehovah's
habitual dwelling-place. In Exod. xix. 4, when Jehovah
at Sinai says that He has brought the Israelites unto Him-
self, the meaning is that He has brought them to the Mount
of God ; and long after the establishment of the Hebrews
in Canaan, poets and prophets describe Jehovah, when He
comes to help His people, as marching from Sinai in
thundercloud and storm.^
This point of view, which in the Old Testament appears
only as an occasional survival of primitive thought, corre-
sponds to the ordinary ideas of Semitic heathenism. The
local relations of the gods are natural relations ; holy
ground is not consecrated by or for man's worship, but men
worship at a particular spot because it is the natural home
or haunt of the god. Holy places in this sense are older
than temples, and even older than the beginnings of settled
life. The nomad shepherd or the savage hunter has no
fixed home, and cannot think of his god as having one, but
he has a district or beat to which his wanderings are
usually confined, and within it again he has his favourite
lairs or camping-places. And on this analogy he can
imagine for himself tracts of sacred ground, habitually
frequented by the gods, and special points within these
tracts which the deity particularly affects. By and by,
under the influence of agriculture and settled life, the
sacred tract becomes the estate of the god, and the special
sacred points within it become his temples ; but originally
the former is only a mountain or glade in the unenclosed
wilderness, and the latter are merely spots in the desert
1 Deut. xxxiii. 2 ; Judges v. 4 fsqq. ; Habak. iii. 3. That the sanctity of
Sinai is derived from the law-giving there is not the primitive idea. This
appears most clearly from the critical analj'sis of the Pentateuch, but is
sufficiently evident from the facts cited above ; indeed the whole narrative of
the law-giving implies a prior sanctity of Mount Sinai, else why should the
Israelites have been led out of their way to receive the law there rather than
at any other place ?
112 THE GODS AND lect. hi.
defined by some natural landmark, a cave, a rock, a
fountain or a tree.
AVe have seen that, when a sanctuary was once con-
stituted, the mere force of tradition and precedent, the
continuous custom of worshipping at it, were sufficient
to maintain its character. At the more developed
sanctuaries the temple, the image of the god, the
whole apparatus of ritual, the miraculous legends re-
counted by tlie priests, and the marvels that were
actually displayed before the eyes of the worshippers,
were to an uncritical age sufficient confirmation of the
belief that the place was indeed a house of God. But
in the most primitive sanctuaries there were no such
artificial aids to faith, and it is not so easy to realise
the process by which the traditional belief that a spot
in the wilderness was the sacred ground of a particular
deity became firmly established. Ultimately, as we have
seen, the proof that the deity frequents a particular place
lies in the fact that he manifests himself there, and the
proof is cumulative in proportion to the frequency of the
manifestations. The difficulty about this line of proof
is not that wliich naturally suggests itself to our minds.
We find it hard to think of a visible manifestation of the
godhead as an actual occurrence, but all primitive peoples
believe in frequent theophanies, or at least in frequent
occasions of personal contact between men and super-
human powers. When all nature is mysterious and full
of unknown activities, any natural object or occurrence
which appeals strongly to the imagination, or excites
sentiments of awe and reverence, is readily taken for a
manifestation of divine or demoniac life. But a super-
natural being as such is not a god, he becomes a god only
when he enters into stated relations with man, or rather
with a community of men. In the belief of the heathen
LECT. iir.
THE JINN. 113
Arabs, for example, nature is full of living beings of
superhuman kind, the Jinii or daemons.^ These jinn
are not pure spirits but corporeal beings, more like beasts
than men, for they are ordinarily represented as hairy,
but differing from ordinary beasts by their power of
assuming various shapes, like the were-wolves to whom
allusion has already been made. Like the wild beasts
they have, for the most part, no friendly or stated
relations with men, but are outside the pale of man's
society, and frequent savage and deserted places far from
the wonted tread of men.^ It appears from several
poetical passages of the Old Testament that the northern
Semites believed in demons of a precisely similar kind,
hairy beings {seirlm), nocturnal monsters (MUh), which
haunted waste and desolate places, in fellowship with
jackals and ostriches and other animals that shun the
abodes of man.^
In Islam the gods of heathenism are degraded into
jinn, just as the gods of north Semitic heathenism are
called seirwi^ in Lev. xvii. 7, or as the gods of Greece
and Eonie became devils to the early Christians. In all
these cases the adherents of a higher faith were not
prepared to deny that the heathen gods really existed, and
did the things recorded of them ; the difference between
^ For details as to the jinn in ancient times see Wellhaiisen, Heidenthum,
p. 135 sq(j[. The later form of the belief in such beings, much modified by
Islam, is illustrated by Lane in Note 21 of the Introduction to his version
of the Arabian Nights. In the old translation of the Arabian Nights they
are called Genii.
■^ Certain kinds of them however frequent trees and even human
habitations, and these were identified with the serpents which appear
and disappear so mysteriously about walls and the roots of trees. See
Noldeke, Zlschr. f. Volkerpsych. 1860, p. 412 sqq. ; Wellh. ut sup. p. 137.
For the snake as the form of t\\G jinn of trees, see Easmussen, Addit. p. 71,
compared with Jauhari and the Lisdn, s. rad. la^-^.
^ Isa. xiii. 21, xxxiv. 14 ; cf. Luke xL 24.
* "Hairy demons," E.V. "devils," but in Isa. xiii. 21 "satyrs."
H
114 THE GODS AND lect. hi.
gods and demons lies not in their nature and power —
for the heathen tliemselves did not rate the power of
their gods at omnipotence — but in their relations to
man. The jinn are gods without worshippers, and a
god who loses his worshippers goes hack to the class
from which he came, as a being of vague and inde-
terminate powers who, having no personal relations to men,
is on the whole to be regarded as an enemy. The demons,
like the gods, have their particular haunts which are
regarded as awful and dangerous places. But the haunt
of the jinn differs from a sanctuary as the jinii themselves
differ from gods. The one is feared and avoided, the
other is approached, not indeed without awe, but yet with
hopeful confidence; for though there is no essential physical
distinction between demons and gods, there is the funda-
mental moral difference that the jinn are strangers and
so, by the law of the desert, enemies, while the god, to
the worshippers who frequent his sanctuary, is a known
and friendly power. In fact the earth may be said to be
parcelled out between demons and wild beasts on the one
hand, and gods and men on the other. To the former
belong the untrodden wilderness with all its unknown
perils, the wastes and jungles that lie outside the familiar
tracks and pasture grounds of the tribe, and which only
the boldest men venture upon without terror ; to the
latter belong the regions that man knows and habitually
frequents, and within which he has established relations,
not only with his human neighbours, but with the super-
natural beings that have their haunts side by side with
him. And as man gradually encroaches on the wilderness
and drives back the wild beasts before him, so the gods in
like manner drive out the demons, and spots that were
once feared, as the habitation of mysterious and pre-
sumably malignant powers, lose their terrors and either
LECT. III.
THE JINX. 115
become common ground or are transformed into the seats
of friendly deities. From this point of view the recogni-
tion of certain spots as haunts of the gods is the religious
expression of the gradual subjugation of nature by man.
In conquering the earth for himself primitive man has
to contend not only with material difficulties but with
superstitious terror of the unknown, paralysing his energies
and forbidding him freely to put forth his strength to
subdue nature to his use. Where the unknown demons
reign he is afraid to set his foot and make the good things
of nature his own. But where the god has his haunt he
is on friendly soil, and has a protector near at hand ; the
mysterious powers of nature are his allies instead of his
enemies, " he is in league with the stones of the field and
the wild beasts of the field are at peace with him." ^
The triumph of the gods over the demons, like the
triumph of man over wild beasts, must have been effected
very gradually, and may be regarded as finally sealed and
secured only in the agricultural stage, when the god of the
community became also the supreme lord of the land and
the author of all the good things therein. When this
stage was reached the demons — or supernatural beings
that have no stated relations to their human neighbours —
were either driven out into waste and untrodden places,
or were reduced to insignificance as merely subordinate
beings, of which private superstition might take account,
but with which pul)lic religion had nothing to do.
Within the region frequented by a community of men
the god of the community was supreme ; every pheno-
menon that seemed supernatural was ordinarily referred to
his initiative and regarded as a token of his personal
presence, or of the presence of his messengers and agents ;
^ Job V. 23. The allusion to tlie wild beasts is cliaracteristic ; of. Hos. li.
20 (18); 2 Kings xvii. 26.
116 THE GODS AND lect. iir.
and in consequence every place that had special super-
natural associations was regarded, not as a haunt of
unknown demons, but as a holy place of the known god.
This is the point of "view which prevailed amoog the
ancient Hebrews, and undoubtedly prevailed also among
their Canaanite neighbours. Up to a certain point the
process involved in all this is not difficult to follow. That
the powers that haunt a district in wdiich men live and
prosper must be friendly powers is an obvious conclusion.
But it is not so easy to see how the vague idea of super-
natural but friendly neighbours passes into the precise
conception of a definite local god, or huw the local power
comes to be confidently identified with the tribal god of
the community. The tribal god, as we have seen, has very
definite and permanent relations to his worshippers, of a
kind quite different from the local relations which we
have just been speaking of; he is not merely their
friendly neighbour, but (at least in most cases) their
kinsman and the parent of their race. How does it come
about that the parent of a race of men is identified with
the superhuman being that haunts a certain spot, and
manifests himself there by visible apparitions, or other
evidence of his presence satisfactory to the untutored
mind ? The importance of such an identification is
enormous, for it makes a durable alliance between man
and certain parts of nature which are not subject to his
will and control, and so permanently raises his position in
the scale of the universe, setting him free, within a certain
range, from the crushing sense of constant insecurity and
vague dread of the unknown powers that close him in on
every side. So great a step in the emancipation of man
from bondage to his natural surroundings cannot have
been easily made, and is not to be explained by any slight
a 'priori method. The problem is not one to be solved off-
LECT. III.
THE JINK 117
hand, but to be carefully kept in mind as we continue our
studies, and broaden our views of ancient religion and of
the primitive processes of thought on which its develop-
ment rests.
There is one thing however in connection with this
problem which it may be well to note at once. We have
seen that through the local god, who on the one hand has
fixed relations to a race of men, and on the other hand
has fixed relations to a definite sphere of nature, the
worshipper is brought into stated and permanent alliance
with certain parts of his material environment which are
not subject to his will and control. But within somewhat
narrow limits exactly the same thing is effected, in the
very earliest stage of savage society, and in a way that
does not involve any belief in an individual stock-god,
through the institution of totemism. In the totem stage
of society each kinship or stock of savages believes itself
to be physically akin to some natural kind of animate or
inanimate things, most generally to some kind of animal.
Every animal of this kind is looked upon as a brother, is
treated with the same respect as a human clansman, and
is believed to aid his human relations by a variety of
friendly services.^ The importance of such a permanent
alliance, based on the indissoluble bond of kinship, with
a whole group of natural beings lying outside the sphere
of humanity, is not to be measured by our knowledge of
what animals can and cannot do. For as their nature is
imperfectly known, savage imagination clothes them with
all sort of marvellous attributes ; it is seen that their
powers differ from those of man and it is supposed that
they can do many things that are beyond his scope. In
1 See J. G. Frazer, Totemism (Edinburgh : A. & C. ]31ack, 1887), p. 20
xqq. This little vohuiie is the most cciiveuieiit .summary of the main facts
about totemism.
118 TOTEMS AND
LECT. III.
V
V
\J
fact they are invested with gifts such as we should call
supernatural, and of the very same kind which heathenism
ascribes to the gods — for example with the power of
giving omens and oracles, of healing diseases and the
like.
The origin of totemism is as much a problem as the
origin of local gods. But it is highly improbable that the
two problems are independent ; for in both cases the
thing to be explained is the emancipation of a society of
men from the dread of certain natural agencies, by the
establishment of the conception of a physical alliance and
affinity between the two parts. It is a strong thing to
suppose that a conception so remarkable as this, which is '
found all over the world, and which among savage races
is invariably put in the totem form, had an altogether dis-
tinct and independent origin among those races which we
know only in a state of society higher than that of which
totemism is characteristic. The belief in local nature-gods
that are also clan-gods may not be directly evolved out of
an earlier totemism, but there can be no reasonable doubt
that it is evolved out of ideas or usages which also find
their expression in totemism, and therefore must go back
to the most primitive stage of savage society. It is
important to bear this in mind, if only that we may be
constantly warned against explaining primitive religious
institutions by conceptions that belong to a relatively
advanced stage of human thought. But the comparison
of totemism can do more than this negative service to our
enquiry, for it calls our attention to certain habits of very
early thought which throw light on several points in the
conception of local sanctuaries.
In the system of totemism men have relations not with
individual powers of nature, i.e. with gods, but with certain
classes of natural agents. The idea is that nature, like ^
LECT. III.
THE JINN. 119
mankind, is divided into groups or societies of things,
analogous to the groups or kindreds of human society. As
life analogous to human life is imagined to permeate all
parts of the universe, the application of this idea may
readily he extended to inanimate as well as to animate
things. In Jotham's fahle the trees are represented as a
commonwealth and make themselves a king (Judg. ix. 8
sq^ci-), and fables, it will be admitted, are only modern
reproductions of primitive conceptions about the life of
nature. But the statistics of totemism shew that the
natural kinds with which the savage mind was most
occupied were the various species of animals. It is with
them especially that he has permanent relations of kinship
or hostility, and round them are gathered in a peculiar
degree his superstitious hopes and fears and observances.
Keeping these facts before us let us look back for a
moment at the Arabian jinn. One difference between
gods and jinn we have already noted ; the gods have
worshippers and the jinn have not. But there is another
difference that now forces itself on our attention ; the gods
have individuality, and the jinn have not. In the Arabian
Nights we find jinn with individual names and distinctive
personalities, but in the old legends the individual jinnl
who may happen to appear to a man has no more a
distinct personality than a beast.^ He is only one of a
^ This may be illustrated by reference to a point of grammar whicli is of
some interest and is not made clear in the ordinary books. The Arab says
" the rjhiil appeared," not " a ghfil appeared," just as David says, "the
lion came and the bear " (1 Sam. xvii. 34 ; Amos iii. 12, v. 19). The
definite article is used because in such cases definition cannot be carried
beyond the indication of the species. The individuals are numerically
different, but qualitatively indistinguishable. This use of the article is
sharply to be distinguished from such a case as C*''Nn in 1 Sam. ix. 9,
where the article is generic, and a general practice of men is spoken of,
and also from cases like tOvSH (Gen. xiv. 13), 3''Sn, DTH ^XJ, etc., where
the noun is really a verbal adjective inijilying an action, and the person is
defined by the action ascribed to him.
120 THE JINN AND
LECT. in.
group of beings which to man are indistinguishable from
one another, and which are regarded as making up a
nation or clan of superhuman beings, inhabiting a par-
ticular locality, and united together by bonds of kinship
and by the practice of the blood-feud, so that the whole
clan acts together in defending its haunts from intrusion
or in avenging on men any injury done to one of its
members. This conception of the communities of the jinn
is precisely identical with the savage conception of the
animal creation. Each kind of animal is regarded as an
organised kindred, held together by ties of blood and the
practice of blood revenge, and so presenting a united front
when it is assailed by men in the person of any of its
members. Alike in the Arabian superstitions about the
jinn and in savage superstitions about animals it is this
solidarity between all the members of one species, rather
than the strength of the individual jinni or animal, that
makes it an object of superstitious terror.
These points of similarity between the families of the
jinn in Arabia and the families of animals among savages
are sufficiently striking, but they do not nearly exhaust the
case. We have already seen that the jinn usually appear
to men in animal form, though they can also take the shape
of men. This last feature however cannot be resfarded as
constituting a fundamental distinction between them and
ordinary animals in the mind of the Arabs, who believed
that there were whole tribes of men who had the power of
assuming animal form.^ On the whole it appears that the
supernatural powers of the Jinn do not differ from those
which savages, in the totem stage, ascribe to wild beasts.
They appear and disappear mysteriously, and are connected
with supernatural voices and warnings, with unexplained
sickness or death, just as totem animals are ; they occasion-
^ See Additional Note A, The tram^formations of the Jinn.
LECT. III.
ANIMAL KINDS. 121
ally enter into friendly relations or even into marriages
with men, but animals do the same in the legends of
savages ; finally, a madman is possessed by the jinn
(majnun), but there are a hundred examples of the soul of
a beast being held to pass into a man. The accounts of
the jinn which we possess have come to us from an age
when the Arabs were no longer pure savages, and had
ceased to ascribe demoniac attributes to most animals ; and
our narrators, when they repeat tales about animals endowed
with speech or supernatural gifts, assume as a matter of
course that they are not ordinary animals but a special
class of beings. But the stories themselves are just such
as savages tell about real animals ; the blood-feud between
the Banu Sahm and the jinn of Dhii Tawa is simply a
war between men and all creeping things, which, as in the
Old Testament, have a common name ^ and are regarded as
a single species or kindred ; and the " wild beast of tlie
wild beasts of the jiiin," which Taabbata Sharran slew in
a night encounter and carried home under his arm, was as
concrete an animal as one can well imagine.^ The proper
form of the jinn, seems to be always that of some kind of
lower animal, or a monstrous composition of animal forms,
as appears even in later times in the description of the
four hundred and twenty species that were marshalled
before Solomon.^ But the tendency to give human shape
to creatures that can reason and speak is irresistible as soon
as men pass beyond pure savagery, and just as animal gods
1 Hanash = Jieb. pt^, ti'OI. For the stoiy see Azraci, p. 261 -s^g. ; Wellli. ,
p. 138.
" Agh. xviii. 210 ftqq. Taabbata Sharran is an historical person, and tlie
incident also is probably a fact. From the verses in which he describes his
foe it would seein that the sui)poscd (jJu'd was one of the feline carnivora.
In Damiri, ii. 212, last line, a ijhill ajipears in the form of a thieving cat.
^ Cazwini, i. 372 sq. Even when they appear in the guise of men they
have some animal attribute, e.g. a dog's hairy paw in place of a hand,
Uamirl, ii. 213, 1. 22.
122 THE JINN AND
LECT. Ill
pass over into anthropomorphic gods, figured as riding on
animals or otherwise associated with them, the jinn begin
to be conceived as manhke in form, and the supernatural
animals of the original conception appear as the beasts on
wliich they ride.-^ Ultimately the only animals directly
and constantly identified with the jinn were snakes
and other noxious creeping things. The authority of
certain utterances of the j)rophet had a share in this
limitation, but it is natural enough that these creatures,
of which men everywhere have a peculiar horror and
which continue to haunt and molest men's habitations
after wild beasts have been driven out into the desert,
should be the last to be stripped of their supernatural
character,^
It appears then that even in modern accounts jinn
and various kinds of animals are closely associated, while
^ The stories in which the apparition takes this shape are obviously late.
When a demon appears riding on a wolf or an ostrich to give his opinion on
the merits of the Arabian poets (^. <://<. viii. 78, ix. 163, cited by Wellh., p. 137),
we have to do with literary fiction rather than genuine belief ; and similarly
the story of a ghul who rides on an ostrich in CazwinI, i. 373 .sg., is only an
edifying Moslem tale. These stories stand in marked contrast with the
genuine old story in Maidani, i. 181, where the demon actirally is an ostrich.
The transition to the anthropomorphic view is seen in the story of Taabbata
Sharran, where the monster ghul is called one of the wild beasts of the/i«H,
as if he were only their animal emissary. The riding beasts of the jinn are
of many species ; they include the jackal, the gazelle, the porcupine, and it
is mentioned as an exceptional thing that the hare is not one of them {Sihuh
s.v. ; Rasmussen, Addit. p. 71, 1. 14), for which reason amulets are made
from parts of its body (cf. ZDMO. xxxix. 329). Prof. De Goeje supplies me
with an interesting ([notation from Zamakhshaii, Fdic, i. 71 : " Ignorant
people think that wild beasts are the cattle of the jinn, and that a man who
meets a wild beast is affected by them with mental disorder." The paralys-
ing effect of terror is assigned to supernatural agency. Cf. Arist. Mir. Ausc.
145 : "In Arabia there is said to be a kind of hyaena, which when it sees
a beast first {i.e. before being seen, Plato, Bep. i. p. 336 D ; Theocr. xiv. 22 ;
Virgil, Ed. 9. 54) or treads on a man's shadow, renders it or him incapable
of voice and movement."
^ The snake is an object of superstition in all countries. For superstitions
connected with "creeping things " in general among tlie northern Semites,
see Ezek. viii. 10.
LECT. III.
ANIMAL KINDS. 123
in the older legends they are practically identified, and
also that nothing is told of the jinn which savages do not
tell of animals. Under these circumstances it requires a
very exaggerated scepticism to doubt that the jinn, with all
their mysterious powers, are mainly nothing else than more
or less modernised representatives of animal kinds, clothed
with the supernatural attributes inseparable from the
savage conception of animate nature. A species of jinn
allied by kinship with a tribe of men would be indistin-
guishable from a totem kind, and instead of calling the
jinn gods without worshippers we may, with greater pre-
cision, speak of them as potential totems without human
kinsfolk. This view of the nature of ihQ jinn helps us to
understand the principle on which particular spots were
viewed as their haunts. In the vast solitudes of the
Arabian desert every strange sound is readily taken to be
the murmuring of iho, jinn, and every strange sight to be a
demoniac apparition. But, when certain spots were fixed
on as being pre-eminently haunted places, we must neces-
sarily suppose that the sights and sounds that were deemed
supernatural really were more frequent there than else-
where. Mere fancy might keep the supernatural reputation
of a place alive, but in its origin even the uncontrolled
imagination of the savage must have some point of contact
with reality. Now the nocturnal sights and sounds that
affray the wayfarer in haunted regions, and the stories of
huntsmen who go up into a mountain of evil name and
are carried oft' by the ghfd, point distinctly to haunted spots
being the places where evil beasts walk by night. More-
over, while the jinn frequent waste and desert places in
general, their special haunts are just those where wild
beasts gather most thickly — not the arid and lifeless
desert, but the mountain glades and passes, the neigh-
bourhood of trees and groves, especially the dense
124 THE FAVOURITE HAUNTS lect. hi.
untrodden thickets that occupy moist places in the
bottoms of the valleys.^
These, it is true, are the places where the spontaneous
life of nature is most actively exhibited in all its phases,
and where therefore it may seem self-evident that man will
be most apt to recognise the presence of divine or at least
of superhuman powers. But so general an explanation as
this is no explanation at all. Primitive religion was
not a philosophical pantheism, and the primitive deities
were not vague expressions for the principle of life in
nature. What we have to explain is that the places where
the life of nature is most intense — or rather some of these
l)laces — appeared to the primitive Semite to be the
habitations, not of abstract divine powers, but of very
concrete and tangible beings, with the singular attributes
which we have found the jinn to possess, and that this
belief did not rest on mere general impressions, but was
supported by reference to actual demoniac apparitions.
The usual vague talk about an instinctive sense of the
presence of the deity in the manifestations of natural life
does not carry us a whit nearer the comprehension of these
beliefs, but it is helpful to note that spots of natural fertility,
untouched by man's hand and seldom trodden by his foot,
are the favoured haunts of wild beasts, that all savages
clothe wild beasts and other animals with the very same
•^ All this, and especially the association of t\i&jinn with natural thickets,
is well brought out by AVellhausen, Heidtnthimi, p. 136, though he offers no
explanation of the reason wh}' "the direct impression of divine life present
in nature" is associated with so bizarre a conception. In Southern Arabia
natural jungles are still avoided as the haunts of wild beasts ; no Arab,
according to Wrede, willingly spends a night in the Wady Ma'isha,
because its jungles are the haunts of many species of dangerous carni-
vora (Wrede's ^eiie rn Hadhramaut, ed. Maltzan, p. 131). Tlie lions of
Al-Shara and of the jungles of the Jordan valley (Zech. xi. 3) may be com-
pared, and it is to be remembered that in savage life, when man's struggle
with wild beasts is one of life and death, the awe associated with such i>laees
is magnified tenfold.
LECT. III.
OF THE JINN. 125
supernatural qualities which the Arabs ascribe to the jinn,
and that the Arabs speak of Baccar as a place famous for
its demons in exactly the same matter-of-fact way in
which they speak of Al-Shara, and its famous lions.
While the most marked attributes of the jinn are
plainly derived from animals, it is to be remembered that
the savage imaghiation, which ascribes supernatural powers
to all parts of animate nature, extends the sphere of
animate life in a very liberal fashion. Totems are not
seldom taken from trees, which appear to do everything
for their adherents that a totem animal could do. And
indeed that trees are animate, and have perceptions passions
and a reasonable soul, was argued even by the early Greek
philosophers on such evidence as their movements in the
wind and the elasticity of their branches.^ Thus while
the supernatural associations of groves and thickets may
appear to be sufficiently explained by the fact that these
are the favourite lairs of wild beasts, it appears probable
that the association of certain khids of jinn with trees
must in many cases be regarded as primary, the trees
themselves being conceived as animated demoniac beings.
In Hadramaut it is still dangerous to touch the sensitive
Mimosa, because the spirit that resides in the plant will
avenge the injury.^ The same idea appears in the story of
Harb b. Omayya and Mirdas b. Abl 'Amir, historical
persons who lived a generation before Mohammed. When
these two men set fire to an untrodden and tangled thicket,
with the design to bring it under cultivation, the demons
of the place flew away with doleful cries in the shape of
white serpents, and the intruders died soon afterwards.
The jinn it was believed slew them " because they had
set fire to their dwelling-place." ^ Here the spirits of the
^ Aristotle, Deplantis, i. p. 815 ; Plutarch, Plac. Philos. v. 26.
^ WreJe's Eeist, ed. Maltzan, p. 131. ^ A(jh. vi. 92, xx. 135 sq.
126 SAVAGE VIEWS OF lect. hi.
trees take serpent form when they leave their natural
seats, and similarly in Moslem superstition the jinn of the
'osJir and the hamata are serpents which frequent trees of
these species. But primarily supernatural life and power
reside in the trees themselves, which are conceived as
animate and even as rational. Moslim b. 'Ocba heard in a
dream the voice of the gharcad tree designating him to the
command of the army of Yazid against Medina.^ Or
again the value of the gum of the acacia (samora) as an
amulet is connected with the idea that it is a clot of
menstruous blood {hair]), i.e. that the tree is a woman.^
And it has already been remarked that the fables of trees
that speak and act like human beings ^ have their origin in
the savage personification of vegetable species.
In brief it is not unjust to say that, wherever the
spontaneous life of nature was manifested in an emphatic
way, the ancient Semite saw something supernatural. But
this is only half the truth ; the other half is that the
supernatural was conceived in genuinely savage fashion,
and identified with the quasi-human life ascribed to the
various species of animals or plants or even of inorganic
things.
For indeed certain phenomena of inorganic nature
directly suggest to the primitive mind the idea of living-
force, and the presence of a living agent. That the stars
move because they are alive is a widespread belief, which
1 Atjh. i. 14.
- Rasniussen, Add. p. 71 ; Zaiiiaklishari, Asds s.v. ,u2J^»~. New-born
children's heads were rubbed with the gum to keep away the jinn, just as
they used to be daubed with the blood of the sacrifice called 'acica (see my
Kinship, p. 152). The blood of menstruation has supernatural qualities
among all races, and tlie value of the hare's foot as an amulet was connected
with the belief that this animal menstruates (Rasm. ut sup.). The same
thing was affirmed of the hyrena, which has many magical qualities and
pecidiar atRnities to man {Kinship, p. 199).
^ Judg. ix. 8 sqq. ; 2 Kings xiv. 9.
LECT. III. THE SUPERNATURAL. 127
underlies the planet and constellation worship of the
Semites as of other ancient nations. Volcanic phenomena,
in like manner, are taken for manifestations of supernatural
life, as we see in the Greek myths of Typhoeus and in the
Moslem legend of the crater of Barahiit in Hadramaut,
whose rumblings are held to be the groans of lost souls ; ^
and again, mephitic vapours rising from fissures in the
earth are taken to be potent spiritual influences.^ But
remote phenomena like the movements of the stars, and
exceptional phenomena like volcanoes, influence the savage
imagination less than mundane and everyday tilings, which
are not less mysterious to him and touch his common life
more closely. It seems to be a mistake to suppose that
distant and exceptional things are those from wliich primi-
tive man forms his general views of the supernatural ; on
the contrary he interprets the remote by the near, and
thinks of heavenly bodies, for example, as men or animals,
like the animate denizens of earth.^ Of all inanimate
things that which has the best marked supernatural associa-
tions among the Semites is flowing or as the Hebrews
say " living " water. In one of the oldest fragments of
Hebrew poetry * the fountain is addressed as a living being ;
and sacred wells are among the oldest and most ineradicable
1 SeeYacut, i. 598; De Goeje, Hadrammit, \k 20 (Rev. Col.Iuteni. 1886).
Does this belief rest on an early my tli connected with the name of Hadranniut
itself? See Olsliausen in Rhe'm. Mus. Sei'. 3, vol. viii. p. 322 ; Sitzungsb.
(I. Berliner Ar. 1879, p. 571 sqq.
^ It may be conjectured that the indignation of the jinn at tlie violation
of their haunts, as it appears in the story of Harb and Mirdas, would not
have been so firmly believed in but for the fact that places such as the jinn
were thought to frequent are also the haunts of ague, which is particularly
active when land is cultivated for the first time.
^ See Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, chap. v. Among the Semites the
worship of sun, moon and stars does not appear to have had any great
vogue in the earliest times. Among the Hebrews tliere is little trace of it
before Assyrian influence became potent, and in Arabia it is by no means
so jirominent as is sometimes supposed ; cf. Wellhausen, p. 173 sqq.
* Num. xxi. 17, 18 : " Spring up, well ! sing ye to it ! "
128 ORIGIN OF
LECT. III.
objects of reverence among all the Semites, and are
credited with oracular powers and a sort of volition by
which they receive or reject offerings/ Of course these
superstitions often take the form of a belief that the sacred
spring is the dwelling-place of beings which from time to
time emerge from it in human or animal form, but the
fundamental idea is that the water itself is the livins;
organism of a demoniac life, not a mere dead organ.^
If now we turn from the haunts of the demons to
sanctuaries proper, the seats of known and friendly powers
with whom men maintain stated relations, we find that in
their physical character thie homes of the gods are precisely
similar to those of the jinn — mountains and thickets, fertile
spots beside a spring or stream, or sometimes points
defined by the presence of a single notable tree. As man
encroaches on the wilderness, and brings these spots within
the range of his daily life and walk, they lose their terror
but not their supernatural associations, and the friendly deity
takes the place of the dreaded demons. The conclusion to
be drawn from this is obvious. The physical characters
that were held to mark out a holy place are not to be
explained by conjectures based on the more developed type
of heathenism, but must be regarded as taken over from
the primitive beliefs of savage man. The nature of the
1 On sacred fountains among the Semites see in general Baudissin, Studien,
ii. 154 sqq., and infra, p. 153 sqq. Waters that receive or reject offerings —
the rejected gifts refusing to sink or being cast up again — are those of Aphaca
(Zosimus, i. 58) and the Stygian cataract at Dia in the Nabataean desert
(Damascius, Vit.Isid. § 199). At Daphne oracles were obtained by dipping
a laurel leaf in the sacred stream (Sozomen, v. 19). Cf. the ordeal by casting
a tablet into the water at Palici in Sicily : the tablet sank if what was
written on it was false (Arist., Mir. Attsc. 57). I cite these particulars here
because they are most naturally understood as implying a belief that the
water itself was instinct with divine life and not merely a mechanical organ
of a deity outside.
^ In Arabian belief healing springs derive their power from jinn;
examples, ZDMG. xxxviii. 586 sq.
LECT. ITT.
HOLY PLACES. 129
god did not determine the place of his sanctuary, but
conversely the features of the sanctuary had an important
share in determining the development of ideas as to the
functions of the god. How this was possible we have seen
in the conception of the local Baalim. The spontaneous
luxuriance of marshy lands already possessed supernatural
associations when there was no thought of bringing it
under the service of man by cultivation, and when the rich
valley bottoms were avoided with superstitious terror as
the haunts of formidable natural enemies. How this
terror was first broken through, and the transformation of
certain groups of hostile demons into friendly and kindred
powers was first effected, we cannot tell ; we can only say
that the same transformation is already effected, by means
of totemism, in the most primitive societies of savages, and
that there is no record of a stage in human society in which
each community of men did not claim kindred and alliance
with some group or species of the living powers of nature.
But if we take this decisive step for granted, the subsequent
development of the relation of the gods to the land follows by
a kind of moral necessity, and the transformation of the vague
friendly powers that haunt the seats of spontaneous natural
life into the beneficent agricultural Baalim, the lords of the
land and its waters, the givers of life and fertility to all that
dwell on it, goes naturally hand in hand with the develop-
ment of agriculture and the laws of agricultural society.
I have tried to put this argument in such a way as may
not commit us prematurely to the hypothesis that the
friendly powers of the Semites were originally totems, i.e.
that the relations of certain kindred communities of men
with certain groups of natural powers were established
before these natural powers had ceased to be directly
identified with species of plants and animals. But if my
analysis of the nature of the jinn is correct, the conclusian
130 SEMITIC LECT. III.
that the Semites did pass through the totem stage can be
avoided only by supposing them to be an exception to the
universal rule, that even the most primitive savages have
not only enemies but permanent allies (which at so early a
stage in society necessarily means kinsfolk) among the
non-human or super-human animate kinds by which the
universe is peopled. And this supposition is so extrava-
. gant that no one is likely to adopt it. On the other hand
it may be argued with more plausibility that totemism, if
it ever did exist, disappeared when the Semites emerged
from savagery, and that it is open to us to suppose that
the religion of the race, in its higher stages, rested on
altogether independent bases. Whether this hypothesis is
or is not admissible must be determined by an actual
examination of the higher heathenism. If its rites usages
and behefs really are independent of savage ideas, and of
the purely savage conception of nature of which totemism
is only one aspect, the hypothesis is legitimate ; but it is
not legitimate if the higher heathenism itself is permeated
in all its parts by savage ideas, and if its ritual and insti-
tutions are throughout in the closest contact with savage
ritual and institutions of totem type. That the latter is
the true state of the case will I believe become over-
whelmingly clear as we proceed with our survey of the
phenomena of Semitic religion ; and a very substantial
step towards the proof that it is so has already been taken,
when we have found that the sanctuaries of the Semitic
world are identical in physical character with the haunts
of the jinn, so that as regards their local associations the
gods must be viewed as simply replacing the plant and
animal demons.^ If this is so we can hardly avoid the
^ The complete development of this argument as it bears on the nature of
the gods must be reserved for a later course of lectures ; but a provisional
discussion of some points on Avhich a difficulty may arise will be found
below : see Additional Note B, Gods, Demons, and Plants or Animals.
LECT. III. TOTEMISM. 131
conclusion that some of the Semitic gods are of totem
origin, and we may expect to find the most distinct traces
of this origin at the oldest sanctuaries. But we are not to
suppose that every local deity will have totem associations,
for new gods as well as new sanctuaries might doubtless
spring up at a later stage of human progress than that of
which totemism is characteristic. Even holy places that
had an old connection with the demons may, in many
instances, not have come to be looked upon as the abode of
friendly powers and become sanctuaries proper, i.e. seats of
worship, till the demons had ceased to be directly identified
with species of plants and animals, and had acquired quasi-
human forms like the nymphs and satyrs of the Greeks.
It is one thing to say that the phenomena of Semitic
religion carry us back to totemism, and another thing to
say that they are all to be explained from totemism.
LECTUKE IV.
HOLY PLACES IN THEIR EELATION TO MAN.
I HAVE spoken hitherto of the physical characters of the
sanctuary, as the haunt of divine beings that prove, in the
last resort, to be themselves parts of the mundane universe,
and so have natural connections with sacred localities ; let
us now proceed to look at the places of the gods in another
aspect, to wit in their relation to men, and the conduct
which men are called upon to observe at and towards them.
The fundamental principle by which this is regulated is
that the sanctuary is holy, and must not be treated as a
common place. The distinction between what is holy and
what is common is one of the most important things in
ancient religion, but also one which it is very difficult to
grasp precisely, because its interpretation varied from age
to age with the general progress of religious thought. To
us holiness is an ethical idea. God, the perfect being, is
the type of holiness ; men are holy in proportion as their
lives and character are godlike ; places and things can be
called holy only by a figure, on account of their associa-
tions with spiritual things. This conception of holiness
goes back to the Hebrew prophets, especially to Isaiah ;
but it is not the ordinary conception of antique religion,
nor does it correspond to the original sense of the Semitic
words that we translate by " holy," While it is not easy
to fix the exact idea of holiness in ancient Semitic religion,
it is quite certain that it has nothing to do with morality
132
LECT. IV. HOLINESS. 133
and purity of life. Holy persons were such, not in virtue
of their character but in virtue of their race, function, or
mere material consecration ; and at the Canaanite shrines
the name of " holy " (masc. cedeshim, fem. cedeshoth) was
specially appropriated to a class of degraded wretches, \
devoted to the most shameful practices of a corrupt
religion, whose life, apart from its connection with the
sanctuary, would have been disgraceful even from the
standpoint of heathenism. But holiness in antique
religion is not mainly an attribute of persons. The gods
are holy,^ and their ministers of whatever kind or grade
are holy also, but holy seasons holy places and holy
tilings, that is seasons places and things that stand in a
special relation to the godhead and are withdraw^n by
divine sanction from some or all ordinary uses, are
equally to be considered in determining what holiness
means. Indeed the holiness of the gods is an expression
to which it is hardly possible to attach a definite sense
apart from the holiness of their physical surroundings ;
it shows itself in and by the sanctity attached to the
persons places things and times through which the gods
and men come in contact with one another. The holiness
of the sanctuary, which is the matter immediately before
us, seems also to be on the whole the particular form of
sanctity which lends itself most readily to independent
investigation. Holy persons holy things and holy times,
as they are conceived in antiquity, all presuppose the
existence of holy places at which the persons minister,
the things are preserved, and the times are celebrated.
Nay the holiness of the godhead itself is manifest to men,
not equally at all places, but specially at those places
where the gods are immediately present and from which
1 The Phoenicians speak of "the holy gods" (Dtl'IpH Di^i^n, C. I. S.
No. 3, 1. 9, 22), as the Hebrews predicate holiness of Jehovah.
134 SACRED TRACTS lect. iv.
their activity proceeds. In fact the idea of holiness comes
into prominence wherever the gods come into touch with
men ; holiness is not so much a thing that characterises the
gods and divine things in themselves, as the most general
notion that governs their relations with humanity ; and, as
these relations are concentrated at particular points of the
earth's surface, it is at these points that we must expect to
find the clearest indications of what holiness means.
At first sight the holiness of the sanctuary may seem
to be only the expression of the idea that the sanctuary
belongs to the god, that the temple and its precincts are
his homestead and domain, reserved for his use and that
of his ministers, as a man's house and estate are reserved
for himself and his household. In one respect, at least, the
sanctuary exactly resembles private property ; it cannot be
appropriated to the private use of any other person than
the god. Not only is no one permitted to appropriate the
soil but no one is permitted to make private invasions on
the pertinents of the sanctuary. In Arabia for examjDle,
where there were great tracts of sacred land, it was for-
bidden to cut fodder, fell trees, or hunt game ; ^ all the
natural products of the holy soil were exempt from human
appropriation. But it would be rash to conclude that
lAVellh., Heidenfhiim, p. 102, and refs. there given to the ordinances laid
down by Mohammed for the Haram of Mecca and the Himd of Wajj at
Taif. In both cases the ordinance was a confirmation of old iisage. At
]\lecca the law against killing or chasing animals did not apply to certain
noxious creatures. The usually received tradition (Bokhari, ii. 195, of the
Brilac vocalised ed.) names the raven and the kite, the rat, the scorpion and
the "biting dog," which is taken to cover the lion, panther, and wolf, and
other carnivora that attack man (Mowatta, ii. 198). The serpent also was
killed without scruple at Mina, which is within the Haram (Bokh. ii. 196,
1. 1 sqq.). That the protection of the god is not extended to manslaying
animals and to the birds of prey that molest the sacred doves is intelligible.
The permission to kill vermin is to be compared with the story of the war
between the Jinn and the B. Sahm {supra, p. 121). From the law against
cutting plants the id/chir {Andropogon schcenanthus, or lemon-grass) was
excepted by Mohammed with some hesitation, on the demand of Al-'Abbas,
LECT. IV. IN ARABIA. 135
what cannot be the private property of men is therefore
the private property of the gods, reserved for the exclusive
use of them or their ministers. The positive exercise
of legal rights of property on the part of the gods is only
possible where they have human representatives to act
for them, and no doubt in later times the priests at the
greater heathen sanctuaries, and the Caliphs as Allah's
vicegerents in Islam, did treat the holy reservations as
their own domain. But in early times there was no
privileged class of sacred persons which had an interest
in asserting on their own behalf the doctrine of divine
proprietorship, and in these times accordingly the prohibi-
tion of private encroachment was consistent with the
existence of public or communal rights in holy places and
things. In nomadic Arabia sanctuaries are certainly older
than the first beginnings of private property in land. To
constitute private property, according to the ancient
doctrine still preserved in Moslem law, a man must build
on the soil or cultivate it ; there is no property in natural
pastures. Every tribe indeed has its own range of plains
and valleys, and its own watering-places, by which it
habitually encamps at certain seasons and from which it
repels aliens by the strong hand. But this does not con-
stitute property, for the boundaries of the tribal land are
who pointed out that it was the custom to allow it to be cut for certaiu
purposes. Here unfortunately our texts are obscure and vary greatly, but
tlie variations all depend on the reading of two words of which one is either
' ' smiths " or " graves " and the other " purification " or "roofs " of houses.
In the Arabic the variations turn on small graphical points often left
out by scribes. I take it that originally the two uses were either both
j)ractical, "for the smiths and the (thatching of) house-roofs," or both
ceremonial, "for entombment and the purification of houses." As the
lemon-grass was valued in antiquity for its perfume, and the fragrant
harmed was also used in old Arabia to lay the dead in, and is still used to
fumigate houses, the second reading is the better. The lemon-grass might
be cut for purposes of a religious or quasi-religious character. Mohammed
probably hesitated because these uses were connected with heathen
superstition. Cf. Muh, in Medina, p. 338.
136 SACRED TRACTS lect. iv.
merely maintained by force against enemies, and not only
every tribesman but every covenanted ally has equal and
unrestricted right to pitch his tent and drive his cattle
where he will. On this analogy we can understand that
the haunts of unfriendly demons will be shunned for fear
of their enmity, but the friendly god can have no exclusive
right of property as against his own worshippers. And so
we find that in upland Arabia there were tracts of sacred
land called liimCt which were to all intents and purposes
common pasture grounds, and whose sanctity was marked,
not by the exclusion of man, but by the fact that no single
tribe dared to appropriate them, and that respect for the
holy place, where every sojourner was under the immediate
protection of the god, enabled hostile clans to meet and
drive their flocks together in peace, whereas on any other
ground they would have flown at each other's throats.^
In Arabia chiefs as well as gods had their liimd. In
the times of heathenism when a chieftain camped at a
place with his followers, no one else was allowed to pasture
his cattle where the barking of his dog could be heard, but
1 See Wellhausen, op. cit. p. 103 sq., who tliinks that these himds were
more or less completely secularised, ami that in early times the sacred
pastures were reserved for the herds of the god. But the characteristic
thing is that on the sacred pastures rival tribes met in peace, as tliey did
in the haram of Mecca, which implies a very lively sense of the divine
^ presence and authority. It does indeed appear probable that at one time
certain tracts of holy ground were absolutely forbidden to human approach
{infra, p. 146), but in a state of society where property in land was unknown,
the meaning of this cannot have been that they were the private pasture
ground of the deity. The prohibition, as we shidl see, was of the nature of
a taboo, an idea older than the institution of property. Sacred animals
themselves, whether wild or of domestic species, were not so much the
property of the god as taboo to him. He protected them, but did not use
them. The oldest example of an Arabian sacred region is Mount Horeb.
At the theophany Exodus xix. the whole mountain is fenced off, and neither
man nor beast is allowed to approach it, but this seems to be a temporary
prohibition, and in Exod. iii. 1 sqq., it seems probable that Moses drove his
riocks to pasture on the holy ground. In any case the prohibition of access
does not turn on the idea of property, but on the awfulnoss of the presence
of God.
LECT. IV.
IN ARABIA. 137
beyond this range the pasture was common/ This is not
a right of property, but it is exactly on all fours with
the right of taboo exercised by a Polynesian chief. The
chief in Polynesia has a sacred character ; so apparently
had Arabian chiefs, for kings' blood cures hydrophobia, as
in the Middle Ages the touch of the king cured scrofula.
Here we have a type of sanctuary to all appearance older
than the institution of property in land. But even where
the doctrine of property is fully developed, holy places and
holy things, except where they have been appropriated to
the use of kings and priests, fall under the head of public
rather than of private estate. According to ancient con-
ceptions the interests of the god and his community are
too closely identified to admit of a sharp distinction
between sacred purposes and public purposes, and as a rule
nothing is claimed for the god in which his worshippers
have not a right to share. Even the holy dues presented
at the sanctuary are not reserved for the private use of the
deity, but are used to furnish forth sacrificial feasts in
w^iich all who are present partake. So too the sanctuaries
of ancient cities served the purpose of public parks and
public halls, and the treasures of the gods, accumulated
within them, were a kind of state treasure, preserved by
religious sanctions against peculation and individual en-
croachment, but available for public objects in time of
need. The Canaanites of Shechem took money from their
temple to provide means for Abimelech's enterprise, when
they resolved to make him their king, and the sacred
treasure of Jerusalem, originally derived from the fruits of
David's campaigns, was used by his successors as a reserve
fund available in great emergencies. On the whole then
it is evident that the difference between holy things and
^ Yacut, ii. 344, from Al-Hhrifi'i ; but Havid.m, p. 420, Maidiuii, i. 427,
A<jh. iv. 140 relate this as a peculiarity of the arrogant Kolaib.
138 HOLINESS AND lect. iv.
common things does not originally turn on ownership, as if
common things belonged to men and holy things to the
gods. Indeed there are many holy things which are also
private property, images, for example, and the other
appurtenances of domestic sanctuaries.
Thus far it would appear that the rights of the gods in
holy places and things fall short of ownership, because
they do not exclude a right of user or even of property
by man in the same things. But in other directions the
prerogatives of the gods, in respect of that which is holy, go
beyond what is involved in ownership. The approach to
ancient sanctuaries was surrounded by restrictions which
cannot be regarded as designed to protect the property of
the gods, but rather fall under the notion that the gods
will not tolerate the vicinity of certain persons — e.g. such
as are physically unclean — and certain actions — e.g. the
shedding of blood. Nay in many cases the assertion of a
man's undoubted rights as against a fugitive at the sanctuary
is regarded as an encroachment on its holiness ; justice
cannot strike the criminal, and a master cannot recover his
runaway slave, who has found asylum on holy soil. In
the Old Testament the legal right of asylum is limited to
the case of involuntary homicide ; ^ but the wording of the
law shows that this was a narrowing of ancient custom,
and many heathen sanctuaries of the Phoenicians and
Syrians retained even in Eoman times what seems to have
been an unlimited right of asylum.^ At certain Arabian
^ Exod. xxi. 13, 14. Here tlie right of a.sj'lum belongs to all altars, but
it was afterwards limited, on the abolition of the local altars, to certain old
sanctuaries — the cities of refuge.
^ This follows especially from the account in Tacitus, Ann. iii. 60 sqq., of
the enquiry made by Tiberius into abuses of the right of asylum. Among
the holy places to which the right was confirmed after due investigation
were Paphos and Amathus, both of them Phcenician sanctuaries. There
was also a right of asylum at Daphne near Antioch (Strabo, xvi. 2, 6 ; 2 Mac.
iv. 33), and many Phcenician and Syrian towns are designated as asylums on
LECT. IV. PKOPERTY. 139
sanctuaries the god gave shelter to all fugitives without
distinction, and even stray camels that reached the holy
ground became free from their owners.^ What was done
with these camels is not stated, but it is to he presumed
that they enjoyed the same liberty as the consecrated
animals which the Arabs, for various reasons, were accus-
tomed to release from service and suffer to roam half wild
over the sacred pastures. These herds seem to be sometimes
spoken of as the property of the deity," but they were n(jt
used for his service. Their consecration was simply a
limitation of man's right to use them.''*
We have here another indication that the relations of
holiness to the institution of property are mainly negative.
Holy places and things are not so much reserved for the
use of the god as surrounded by a network of restrictions
and disabilities which forbid them to be used by men
except in particular ways, and in certain cases forbid them
to be used at all. As a rule the restrictions are such as
to prevent the appropriation of holy things by men, and
sometimes they cancel existing rights of property. But
they do so only by limiting the right of user, and in the
case of objects like idols, which no one would propose to
their coins; see Head, Greek Num., Index iv., under A2TA02 and lEPAS
A2TA0r. The Heraclenni at the fishcuring station near tlie Canobic month
of the Nile (Herod., ii. 113) may also be cited, for its name and place h\\ve
little doubt that it was a Phcenician temple. Here the fugitive slave was
dedicated by being tattooed with sacred marks — a Semitic custom ; cf. Lncian,
Dea Syria, lix., and Aghdni, vii. 110, 1. 26, where an Arab patron stamps
his clients with his camel mark. I owe the last reference to Prof. De Goeje.
^ Yaeiit s.vv. Jalmd and Fah ; Wellhansen, pp. 48, 50. It is plain from
the texts that these camels were not confiscated as a punishment for their
trespass, but were set free by an extension of the law of asylum. In the
same way wild beasts could not be molested within the hima.
^ Seethe verse from Ibn Hisham, p. 58, explained by Wellh., p. 10-3.
^ E.g. their milk might be drunk only b}' guests (Ibn Hisham, p. 58).
Similarly, consecration sometimes meant no more than that men might eat
the flesh but not womeii, or that only particular persons might eat of it
(Sura, vi. 139 sq.).
140 EULES OF LECT. IV.
use except for sacred purposes, a thing may be holy and
still be private property. From this point of view it
would appear that common things are such as men have
licence to use freely at their own good pleasure without
fear of supernatural penalties, while holy things may be
used only in prescribed ways and under definite restrictions,
on pain of the anger of the gods. That holiness is essen-
tially a restriction on the licence of man in the free use of
natural things seems to be confirmed by the Semitic roots
used to express the idea. No stress can be laid on the
root t^'^p, which is that commonly used by the northern
Semites, for of this the original meaning is very uncertain,
though there is some probability that it implies "separation"
or " withdrawal." But the root Q-in, which is mainly em-
ployed in Arabic but runs through the whole Semitic field,
undoubtedly conveys the notion of prohibition, so that a
sacred thing is one which, whether absolutely or in certain
relations, is prohibited to human use.^ The same idea of
prohibition or interdiction associated with that of protection
from encroachment is found in the root ""Dn, from which
is derived the word himd, denoting a sacred enclosure or
temenos^
We have already found reason to think that in Arabia
the holiness of places is older than the institution of
property in land, and the view of holiness that has just
been set forth enables us to understand why it should be
so. "We have found that from the earliest times of savagery
certain spots were dreaded and shunned as the haunts of
supernatural beings. These however are not holy places
any more than an enemy's ground is holy ; they are not
1 In Hebrew tliis root is niaiuly applied to sucli consecration as implies
absolute separation from Imman use and association, i.e. the total destruction
of an accursed thing, or in more modern times excommunication.
'•^ Hence perhaps tlie name of Hamath on the Orontes; Lagarde, Bildung dtr
Nomina, p. 156.
LECT. IV.
HOLINESS. 141
hedged round by definite restrictions, but altogether avoided
as full of indefinite dangers. But when men establish
relations with the powers that haunt a spot it is at once
necessary that there should be rules of conduct towards
them and their surroundings. These rules moreover have
two aspects. On the one hand the god and his worshippers
form a single community — primarily, let us suppose, a
community of kinship — ^and so all the social laws that
regulate men's conduct towards a clansman are applicable
to their relations to the god. But on the other hand the
god has natural relations to certain physical things, and
these must be respected also ; he has himself a natural life
and natural habits in which he must not be molested.
Moreover the mysterious superhuman powers of the god —
the powers which we call supernatural — are manifested,
according to primitive ideas, in and through his physical
life, so that every place and thing which has natural
associations with the god is regarded, if I may borrow a
metaphor from electricity, as charged with divine energy
and ready at any moment to discharge itself to the destruc-
tion of the man who presumes to approach it unduly.
Hence in all their dealings with natural things men must
be on their guard to respect the divine prerogative, and
this they are able to do by knowing and observing the rules
of holiness, which prescribe definite restrictions and limita-
tions in their dealings with the god and all natural things
that in any way pertain to the god. Thus we see that
holiness is not necessarily limited to things that are the
property of the deity to the exclusion of men ; it applies
equally to things in which both gods and men have an
interest, and in the latter case the rules of holiness are
directed to regulate man's use of the holy thing in
such a way that the godhead may not be offended or
wronged.
142 HOLINESS AND lect. iv.
liules of holiness in the sense just explained, i.e. a
system of restrictions on man's arbitrary use of natural
things, enforced by the dread of supernatural penalties ^ are
found among all primitive peoples. It is convenient to
have a distinct name for this primitive institution, to mark
it off from the later developments of the idea of holiness
in advanced religions, and for this purpose the Polynesian
term taboo has been selected.^ The field covered by taboos
among savage and half-savage races is very wide, for there
is no part of life in which the savage does not feel himself
to be surrounded by mysterious agencies and recognise the
need of walking warily. Moreover all taboos do not
belong to religion proper, that is, they are not always rules
of conduct for the regulation of man's contact with, deities
that, when taken in the right way, may be counted on as
friendly, but rather appear in many cases to be precautions
against the approach of malignant enemies — against contact
with evil spirits, and the like. Thus alongside of taboos
that exactly correspond to rules of holiness, protecting the
inviolability of idols and sanctuaries, priests and chiefs, and
generally of all persons and things pertaining to the gods
and their worship, we find another kind of taboo which in
the Semitic field has its parallel in rules of un cleanness.
Women after child-birth, men who have touched a dead
body and so forth, are temporarily taboo and separated from
human society, just as the same persons are unclean in
Semitic religion. In these cases the person under taboo is
not regarded as holy, for he is separated from approach to
the sanctuary as well as from contact with men ; but his
^ Sometimes by civil penalties also. For in virtue of its solidarity the
whole community is compromised by the impiety of any one of its members,
and is concerned to purge away the offence.
- A good account of taboo, with references to the best sources of informa-
tion on the subject, is given by Mr. J. G. Frazer in the 9th ed. of the
Encyc. Britan. vol. xxiii. p. 15 sqq.
LECT. IV.
TABOO. 143
act or condition is somehow associated with supernatural
dangers, arising, according to the common savage explanation,
from the presence of formidable spirits, which are shunned
like an infectious disease. In most savage societies no
sharp line seems to be drawn between the two kinds of
taboo just indicated, and even in more advanced nations the
notions of holiness and uncleanness often touch. Among
the Syrians for example swine's flesh was taboo, but it was
an open question whether this was because the animal was
holy or because it was unclean.^ But though not precise,
the distinction between what is holy and what is unclean ^'
is real ; in rules of holiness the motive is respect for the
gods, in rules of uncleanness it is primarily fear of an
unknown or hostile power, though ultimately, as we see in
the Levitical legislation, the law of clean and unclean may
be brought within the sphere of divine ordinances, on the
view that uncleanness is hateful to God and must be
avoided by all that have to do with Him.
The fact that all the Semites have rules of uncleanness
as well as rules of holiness, that the boundary between the
two is often vague, and that the former as well as the
latter present the most startling agreement in point of
detail with savage taboos^ leaves no reasonable doubt as
to the origin and ultimate relations of the idea of holiness.
On the other hand the fact that the Semites — or at least
the northern Semites — distinguish between the holy and the
unclean, marks a real advance above savagery. All taboos
are inspired by awe of the supernatural, but there is a
great moral difference between precautions against the
invasion of mysterious hostile powers and precautions
founded on respect for the prerogative of a friendly god.
^ Lucian, Dea Syr. liv. ; cf. Autiplianes ap. Athen. iii. p. 95 [Muineke,
Fr. Com. Gr. iii. 68].
• See Additional Xote C, Holiness, Uncleanness, and Taboo.
144 THE LIMITS OF lect. iv.
The former belong to magical superstition — the barrenest
of all aberrations of the savage imagination — which, being
founded only on fear, acts merely as a bar to progress and
an impediment to the free use of nature by human energy
and industry. But the restrictions on individual licence
which are due to respect for a known and friendly power
allied to man, however trivial and absurd they may appear
to us in their details, contain within them germinant
principles of social progress and moral order. To know
that one has the mysterious powers of nature on one's side
so long as one acts in conformity with certain rules, gives
a man strength and courage to pursue the task of the
subjugation of nature to his service. To restrain one's
individual licence, not out of slavish fear, but from respect
for a higher and beneficent power, is a moral discipline of
which the value does not altogether depend on the reason-
ableness of the sacred restrictions : a modern schoolboy is
subject to many unreasonable taboos, which are not without
value in the formation of character. But finally, and
above all, the very association of the idea of holiness with
a beneficent deity, whose own interests are bound up with
the interests of the community, makes it inevitable that the
laws of social and moral order, as well as mere external
precepts of physical observance, shall be placed under the
sanction of the god of the community. Breaches of social
order are recognised as offences against the holiness of the
deity, and the development of law and morals is made
possible, at a stage when human sanctions are still wanting,
or too imperfectly administered to have much power, by
the belief that the restrictions on human licence which
are necessary to social well-being are conditions imposed
by the god for the maintenance of a good understanding
between himself and his worshippers.
As every sanctuary was protected by rigid taboos it
LECT. IV. THE SANCTUARY. 145
was important that its site and limits should be clearly
marked. From the account already given of the origin of
holy places, it follows that in very many cases the natural
features of the spot were sufficient to distinguish it. A
fountain with its margin of rich vegetation, a covert of
jungle haunted by lions, a shaggy glade on the mountain-
side, a solitary eminence rising from the desert, where
toppling blocks of weather-beaten granite concealed the
dens of the hyaena and the bear, needed only the support
of tradition to bear witness for themselves to their own
sanctity. In such cases it was natural to draw the border
of the holy ground somewhat widely, and to allow an
ample verge on all sides of the sacred centre. In Araliia,
as we have seen, the himcl sometimes enclosed a great tract
of pasture land roughly marked off by pillars or cairns,
and the haram or sacred territory of Mecca extends for
some hours' journey on almost every side of the city.
The whole mountain of Horeb was sacred ground, and so
probably was Mount Hermon, for its name means " holy,"
and the summit and slopes still bear the ruins of many
temples.^ In like manner Eenan concludes from the
multitude of sacred remains along the course of the
Adonis, in the Lebanon, that the whole valley was a
kind of sacred territory of the god from whom the river
had its name.^ In a cultivated and thickly peopled
land it was difficult to maintain a rigid rule of sanctity
over a wide area, and strict taboos were necessarily
limited to the temples and their immediate enclosures,
while in a looser sense the whole city or land of the
god's worshippers was held to be the god's land and to
participate in his holiness. Yet some remains of the
old sanctity of whole regions survived even in Syria to
^ For the sanctity of Hermon see further Reland, Palcestina, p. 323.
2 Renan, Mission de Phdnicie (1864), p. 295.
K
146 THE JEALOUSY lect. iv.
a late date. lamblichus, in the last days of heathenism,
still speaks of Mount Carmel as " sacred above all
mountains and forbidden of access to the vulgar," and
here Vespasian worshipped at the solitary altar, embowered
in inviolable thickets, to which ancient tradition forbade
the adjuncts of temple and image.^
The taboos or restrictions applicable within the wide
limits of these greater sacred tracts have already been
touched upon. The most universal of them was that men
were not allowed to interfere with the natural life of the
spot. No blood might be shed and no tree cut down ;
an obvious rule whether these living things are regarded
as the protected associates of the god, or — as was
perhaps the earlier conception — as participating in the
divine life. In some cases all access to the Arabian
himd was forbidden, as at the sacred tract marked off
round the "rave of Ibn Tofail.^ For with the Arabs
grave and sanctuary were kindred ideas, the grave of
Kolaib-Wail was shewn in a corner of the himd of
Dariya, and famous chiefs and heroes were honoured
by the consecration of their resting - place.^ But an
* lamblichus, Vit. Pyth. iii. (15) ; Tacitus, Hist. ii. 78. From 1 Kings
xviii. it would be clear, apart from the classical testimonies, that Carmel
was a sacred mountain of the Phoenicians, It had also an altar of Jehovah,
and this made it the fit place for the contest between Jehovah-worship and
Baal-worship. Carmel is still clothed with thickets (Conder, Tent-work,
i. 172) as it was in old Testament times (Amos i. 2 ; Mic. vii. 14 ;
Cant. vii. 5), and Amos ix. 3, Mic. vii. 14, where its woods appear as a
place of i-efuge, do not receive their full force till we combine them with
lamblichus's notice that the mountain was an a/Sarav, where the flocks,
driven up into the forest in autumn to feed on the leaves (as is still done,
Thomson, Land and Book [1860], pp. 204 sq. , 485), were inviolable, and where
the fugitive found a sure asylum. The sanctity of Carmel is even now
not extinct, and the scene at the Festival of Elijah, described by Seetzen,
ii. 96 f<q., is exactly like an old Canaanite feast.
" Agh. XV. 139 ; Wellh., p. 163.
^ Yaciit, ii. 343, 1. 15. This is not the place to go into the general question
of the worship of ancestors. See Wellhausen, ut supra ; Goldziher, Culte des
AncStres cliez les Arabes (Paris, 1885), and Muh. Studien, p. 229 sqq. ; and
LECT. IV.
OF THE GOD. 14T
absolute exclusion of human visitors, while not unin-
telligible at a tomb, could hardly be maintained at a
sanctuary which contained a place of worship, and
we have seen that some himds were open pastures,
while the haram at Mecca even contained a large
permanent population.^ The tendency was evidently
to a gradual relaxation of burdensome restrictions, not
necessarily because religious reverence declined, but from
an increasing confidence that the god was his servants'
well-wisher and did not press his prerogative unduly.
Yet the "jealousy" of the deity — an idea familiar to
us from the Old Testament — was never lost sight of in
Semitic worship. In the higher forms of religion this
quality, which nearly corresponds to self-respect and the
sense of personal dignity in a man, readily lent itself
to an ethical interpretation, so that the jealousy of the
deity was mainly conceived to be indignation against wrong-
doincp, as an offence a^jainst the honour of the divine
sovereign ; ^ but in savage times the personal dignity of
the god, like that of a great chief, asserts itself mainly
in punctilious insistence on a complicated etiquette that
some remarks, perhaps too sceptical, in my Kinship, p. 18 sqq. The matter
will come up again at a later point of these lectures.
1 Yacut, iii. 790 (cf. Wellh., p. 102), says that marks, called "scarecrows "
(akhlla), were set up to show that a place was a Mmd, and must not be
approached. But to " approach " a forbidden thing {cariba) is the general
word for violating a taboo, so the expression ought not perhaps to be pressed
too closely. The Greek a/3arov is also used simply in the sense of inviolable
(along Avith aa-vXov). It is notable, hoAvever, that in the same passage
Yacut tells us that two of the marks that defined the Jdvid of Faid were
called "the twin sacrificial stones " (ghariyun). He did not know the
ritual meaning of ghariij, and may therefore include them among the akhila
by mere inadvertence. But if the jdace of sacrifice really stood on the
border of the sacred ground, the inevitable inference is that the worshippers
were not allowed to enter the enclosure. This would be parallel to the
sacrifice in Exodus xxiv. 4, where he altar is built outside the limits of
Sinai, and the people are not allowed to approach the mountain.
'■^ This, it will be remembered, is the idea on which Anselm's theory of the
atonement is based.
148 THE JEALOdSY LECT. iv.
surrounds his place and person. Naturally the strictness
of the etiquette admits of gradations. When the god and
his worshippers live side by side, as in the case of Mecca,
or still more in cases where the idea of holiness has been
extended to cover the whole land of a particular religion,
the general laws of sacred observance, applicable in all
parts of the holy land, are modified by practical con-
siderations. Strict taboos are limited to the sanctuary
(in the narrower sense) or to special seasons and occasions,
such as religious festivals or the time of war ; in ordinary
life necessary actions that constitute a breach of ceremonial
holiness merely involve temporary uncleanness and some
ceremonial act of purification, or else are condoned alto-
gether provided they are done in a particular way. Thus
in Canaan, where the whole land was holy, the hunter was
allowed to kill game if he returned the life to the god by
pouring it on the ground ; or again the intercourse of the
sexes, which was strictly forbidden at temples and to
warriors on an expedition, entailed in ordinary life only
a temporary impurity, purged by ablution or fumigation.^
But in all this care was taken not to presume on the
prerogative of the gods, or trench without permission on
the sanctity of their domain ; and in particular, fresh en-
croachments on untouched parts of nature — the breaking
up of waste lands, the foundation of new cities, or even
the annual cutting down of corn or gathering in of the
vintage — were not undertaken without special precautions
to propitiate the divine powers. It was felt that such
encroachments were not without grave danger, and it
was often thought necessary to accompany them with
expiatory ceremonies of the most solemn kind." Within
^ See Additional Note D, Taboos on the Intercourse of the Sexe.^.
- The details, so far as they are concerned witli the yearly recurring ritual
of harvest and vintage, belong to the subject of Agricultural Feasts, and must
LECT. IV. OF THE GOD. 149
the god's holy land all parts of life are regulated with
constant regard to his sanctity, and so among the settled
Semites, who lived on Baal's ground, religion entered far
more deeply into common life than was the case among
the Arabs, where only special tracts were consecrated land
and the wide desert was as yet unclaimed either by gods
or by men.
be reserved for a future course of lectures. The danger connected with the
breaking up of waste lands is illustrated for Arabia by the story of Haib and
Miidas {supra, p. 125). Here the danger still comes from the jinn of the
place, but even where the whole Ifind already belongs to a friendly deity,
jirecautions are necessary when man lays his hand for the first time on any
of the good things of nature. Thus the Hebrews ate the fruit of new ti'ces
only in the fifth year ; in the fourth year the fruit was consecrated to
Jehovah, but the produce of the first three years was "un circumcised,"
i.e. taboo, and might not be eaten at all (Lev. xix. 23 sqq.). A similar
idea underlies the Sjaian traditions of human sacrifice at the foundation of
cities (Malalas, Bonn ed., pp. 37, 200, 203), which are not the less instructive
that they are not historically true.
LECTURE V.
SANCTUARIES, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL. HOLY WATERS,
TREES, CAVES, AND STONES.
We have seen that hohness admits of degrees, and that
within a sacred land or tract it is natural to mark off an
inner circle of intenser holiness, where all ritual restrictions
are stringently enforced, and where man feels himself to be
nearer to his god than on other parts even of holy ground.
Such a spot of intenser holiness becomes the sanctuary or
place of sacrifice, where the worshipper approaches the god
with prayers and gifts, and seeks guidance for life from
the divine oracle. As holy tracts in general are the
regions haunted by divine powers, so the site of the
sanctuary ^ar excellence, or place of worship, is a spot where
the god is constantly present in some visible embodiment,
or which has received a special consecration by some
extraordinary manifestation of deity. For the more de-
veloped forms of cultus a mere vague Mvul does not
suffice ; men require a special point at which they may
come together and do sacrifice with the assurance that
the god is present at the act. In Arabia, indeed, it seems
to be not improbable that certain sacrifices were laid on
sacred ground to be devoured by wild beasts. For such
worship perhaps it was not necessary to come face to face
with a definite symbol of the divine presence, inasmuch as
the beasts received the offering on his behalf. But a
sacrifice directed to the sacred beasts and not first pre-
150
LECT. V. HOLY SYMBOLS. 151
seiited to the individual god can hardly be understood
unless the beasts themselves are divine, in other words it
belongs to a religion not yet differentiated from totemism.
Even in Arabia the himd usually, probably always, con-
tained a fixed point where the blood of the offering was
directly presented to the deity by being applied to sacred
stones, or where a sacred tree was hung with gifts. In
the ordinary forms of heathenism, at any rate, it was
essential that the worshipper should bring his offering
into the actual presence of the god, or into contact with
the symbol of that presence.^
The symbol or permanent visible object, at and through
which the worshipper came into direct contact with the
god, was not lacking in any Semitic place of worship, but
had not always the same form, and was sometimes a
natural object, sometimes an artificial erection. The usual
natural symbols are a fountain or a tree, while the
ordinary artificial symbol is a pillar or pile of stones ;
but very often all three are found together, and this was
the rule in the more developed sanctuaries, particular
sacred observances being connected with each.
The choice of the natural symbols, the fountain and
the tree, is no doubt due in part to the fact that the
favourite haunts of animate life, to which a superstitious
reverence was attached, are mainly found beside wood and
running water. But besides this we have found evidence
of the direct ascription to trees and living waters of a life
analogous to man's, but mysterious and therefore awful.
1 The thing is not on this account incredible or without parallel in the
religions of the higher races, e.g. the Egyptians.
2 This rule is observed even when the god is a heavenly body. The
sacrifices of the Saracens to the morning star, described by Nilus, were cele-
brated when that star rose, and could not be made after it was lost to sight
on the rising of the sun {Nili op. qucedam, [Paris, 1639], pp. 28, 117).
^ Supra, p. 126 sqq.
152 SACRED FOUNTAINS lect. v.
To US this may seem to be quite another point of view ;
in the one case the fountain or the tree merely mark the
spot which the deity frequents, in the other they are
the visible embodiments of the divine presence. But the
primitive imagination has no difficulty in combining differ-
ent ideas about the same holy place or thing. The gods
are not tied to one form of embodiment or manifestation ;
for, as has already been observed,^ some sort of distinction
between life and the material embodiment of life is sug-
gested to the rudest peoples by phenomena like those of
dreams. Even men, it is supposed, can change their
embodiment, and assume for a time the shape of wolves or
birds ; ^ and of course the gods with their superior powers
have a still greater range, and the same deity may quite
well manifest himself in the life of a tree or a spring, and
yet emerge from time to time in human or animal form.
All manifestations of life at or about a holy place readily
assume a divine character and form a religious unity,
contributing as they do to create and nourish the same
religious emotion ; and in all of them the godhead is felt
to be present in the same direct way. The permanent
manifestations of his presence, however, the sacred fountain
and the sacred tree, are likely to hold the first place in
acts of worship, simply because they are permanent and so
attach to themselves a fixed sacred tradition. These con-
siderations apply equally to the sanctuaries of nomadic
and of settled peoples, but among the latter the religious
importance of water and w^ood could not fail to be greatly
reinforced by the growth of the ideas of Baal-worship, in
which the deity as the giver of life is specially connected
with quickening waters and vegetative growth.
With this it agrees that sacred wells, in connection with
sanctuaries, are found in all parts of the Semitic area, but
^ Supra, p. 85. '- Sup7'a, ji. 86.
LECT. V. IN ARABIA. 153
are much less prominent among the nomadic Arabs than
among the agricultural peoples of Syria and Palestine.
There is mention of fountains or streams at a good many-
Arabian sanctuaries, but little direct evidence that these
waters were holy, or played any definite part in the ritual.
The clearest case is that of Mecca, where the holiness of
the well Zamzam is certainly pre-Islamic. It would even
seem that in old time gifts were cast into it, as they were
cast into the sacred wells of the northern Semites.^ Some
kind of ritual lioliness seems also to have attached to the
pool beneath a waterfall at the Dausite sanctuary of
Dusares." Again, as healing springs and sacred springs are
everywhere identified, it is noteworthy that the Arabs still
regard medicinal waters as inhabited by jmn, usually of
serpent form,^ and that the water of the sanctuary at
the Palmetum was thoucfht to be health-giving, and was
carried home by pilgrims * as Zamzam water now is. In
like manner the custom of pilgrims carrying away water
from the well of 'Orwa ^ is probably a relic of ancient
1 So Wellhauseii, p. 101, concludes with probability from the story that
when the well was rediscovered and cleaned out by the grandfather of
Mohammed, two golden gazelles and a number of swords were found in it.
Everything told of the prophet's ancestors must be received with caution,
but this does not look like invention. The two golden gazelles are parallel
to the golden camels of Sabtean and Nabatsean inscriptions {ZDMG. xxxviii.
143 sq.).
- Ibn Hishilm, p. 253; Wellhausen, p. 4.5. A woman who adopts Islam
breaks with the heathen god by "purifying herself" in this pool. This
implies that her act was a breach of tlie ritiial of the spot ; persumably
a woman M'ho required purification (viz. from her courses) was not ad-
mitted to the sacred water; cf. Yacut, i. 657, 1. 2 sqq., and especially
iv. 651, 1. 4 sqq. (Manaf). This explanation is favoured by the fact that in the
same tradition a man who accepts Islam is also ordered to perform a
ceremonial ablution, but is not sent to the sacred water. Under ordinary
circumstances to bathe in the sacred spring would be an act of homage to
the heathen god : so at least it was in Syria. The waters called Thorayyil
(Pleiades) in the himd of Dariya (Yacut, i. 924, iii. 588 ; Bakri, pp. 214, 627)
probably were a group of seven sacred wells : see below.
^ Mordtmann in ZDMG. xxxviii. 587.
■• Agatharchides ap. Diod. Sic. iii. 43. * Yficilt, i. 434 ; Cazwini, i. 200.
154 SACRED WATERS OF lect. v.
sanctity. Further, on the borders of the Arabian field, we
have the sacred fountain of Ephca at Palmyra, with which
a legend of a demon in serpent form is still connected.
This is a sulphurous spring, which had a guardian
appointed by the god Yarhibol, and on an inscription
is called the " blessed fountain." ^ Again, in the desert
beyond Bostra, we find the Stygian waters, where a great
cleft received a lofty cataract. The waters had the power
to swallow up or cast forth the gifts flung into them, as a
sign that the god was or was not propitious, and the oath
by the spot and its stream was the most terrible known
to the inhabitants of the region,^ The last two cases
belong to a region in which religion was not purely
Arabian in character, but the Stygian waters recall the
waterfall in the Dausite sanctuary of Dusares, and
Ptolemy twice mentions a Stygian fountain in Arabia
proper.
Among the northern Semites, the agricultural Canaanites
and Syrians, sacred waters hold a much more prominent
place. Where all ground watered by fountains and streams,
without the aid of man's hand, was regarded as the Baal's
land, a certain sanctity could hardly fail to be ascribed to
every source of living water ; and where the divine
activity was looked upon as mainly displaying itself in
the quickening of the soil, the waters which gave fertility
to the land, and so life to its inhabitants, would appear
to be the direct embodiment of divine energies. Accord-
ingly we find that Hannibal, in his covenant with Philip
of Macedon, when he swears before all the deities of
Carthage and of Hellas, includes among the divine powers
to which his oath appeals " the sun the moon and the
earth, rivers meadows and waters." ^ Thus when we find
1 Wadd., No. 25710 ; De Vog., No. 95.
2
Damascius, Vita Isidori, § 199. ' Polybius, vii. 9.
LECT. V. THE PHCENICIANS. 155
that temples were so often erected near springs and rivers,
we must consider not only that such a position was
convenient, inasmuch as pure water was indispensable
for ablutions and other ritual purposes, but that the
presence of living water in itself gave consecration to
the place.^ The fountain or stream was not a mere
adjunct to the temple, but was itself one of the principal
sacra of the spot, to which special legends and a special
ritual were often attached, and to which the temple in
many instances owed its celebrity and even its name.
This is particularly the case with perennial streams and
their sources, which in a country like Palestine, where
rain is confined to the winter months, are not very
numerous, and form striking features in the topography
of the region. From Hannibal's oath we may conclude
that among the Phoenicians and Carthaginians all such
waters were held to be divine, and what we know in
detail of the waters of the Phcenician coast goes far to
confirm the conclusion.' Of the eminent sanctity of
certain rivers, such as the Belus and the Adonis, we have
direct evidence, and the grove and j)ool of Aphaca at the
source of the latter stream was the most famous of all
Phoenician holy places.^ These rivers are named from
gods, and so also, on the same coast, are the Asclepius,
near Sidon, the Ares (perhaps identical with the Lycus)
and presumably the Ivishon.^ In like manner the
Leontes, or Lion Paver, probably derives its name from
the " ancestral god," who was worshipped under the form
^ For the choice of a place beside a pool as the site of a chapel, see
Waddington, No. 2015, ivo-ifiifi; to'To; ouro; ov 'ixTiirtv iyyuh Xlfivn;.
^ The authorities for the details, so far as they are not cited below, will be
found in Baudissin, Studien, ii. 161.
^ Euseb., Vit. Const, iii. 55 ; Sozomen, ii. 5.
* Eiver of ^''p, Ar. Cais. Prof. De Goeje, referring to Hamdani, p. 3, 1. 9,
and perhaps p. 221, 1. 14, suggests to me by letter that Cais is a title,
" doniinus."
156 SACRED WATERS LECT. v.
of a lion at the great temple of Heliopolis or Baalbek,
which stands at the true source of the river.^ The river
of Tripolis, which descends from the famous cedars, is
still called the Cadlsha or holy stream, and the grove at
its source is sacred to Christians and Moslems alike.^
In Hellenic and Eoman times the source of the Jordan
at Paneas with its grotto was sacred to Pan, and in
ancient days the great Israelite sanctuary of Dan occupied
the same site. It is evident that Naaman's indignation
when he was told to bathe in the Jordan, and his con-
fidence that the rivers of Damascus were better than all
the waters of Israel, sprang from the idea that the Jordan
was the sacred healing stream of the Hebrews, as Abana
and Pharphar were the sacred rivers of the Syrians, and
in this he probably did no injustice to the belief of the
mass of the Israelites. The sanctity of the Barada, the
chief river of Damascus, was concentrated at its nominal
source, the fountain of El-Fiji, that is, irr^yaL The river-
gods Chrysorrhoa and Pegai often appear on Damascene
coins, and evidently had a great part in the religion of
the city.
The river of Coele-Syria, the Orontes, was carved out,
according to local tradition, by a great dragon, which
disappeared in the earth at its source.^ The connection
1 Damascius, Vit. I.-i'ul. % 20-3. That the fountains of Heliopolis, though
now spent in irrigation, are the true source of the Leontes appears from
Robinson, Bib. Res. iii. 506. It is noteworthy in this connection that the
old name of Dan, at the source of the Jordan, is Laish, " Lion," and that
a chief source of the Orontes is at a village called Lebwa. With the Lion-
god of Heliopolis compare J^lsculapius, "the Lion-holder," at Ascalon
(Marinus, Vita Prodi, 19). In Strabo's account of the Phoenician coast
the grave of iEsculapius and the city of lions are mentioned together
(xvi. 2. 22). Note also 7y2""lJ = XsavracroSiov (Holfm., Ph. Insclir. p. 27).
^Robinson, iii. 590. On Cartliaginian soil it is not impossible that the
Bagi'adas or Majerda, Macaros or Macros in MSS. of Polybius, bears the
name of the Tyrian Baal-Melcartli.
•* Strabo, xvi. 2. 7. Other sacred traditions about the Orontes are given
by Jlalalas, p. 38, from Pausauias of Damascus.
LECT. V.
OF SYRIA. 157
of jinn in the form of dragons or serpents with sacred or
heahng springs has already come before us in Arabian
superstition, and the lake of Cadas near Emesa, which is
regarded as the source of the river (Yacut, iii. 588) bears
a name which implies its ancient sanctity. Among Syrian
waters those of the Euphrates played an important part in
the ritual of Hierapolis, and from them the great goddess
was thought to have been born ; while the source of its
chief Mesopotamian tributary, the Aborrhas or Chaboras,
Was reverenced as the place where Hera (Atargatis) bathed
after her marriage with Zeus (Bel). It gave out a sweet
odour, and was full of tame, that is sacred, fishes.^
The sacredness of living waters was by no means
confined to such great streams and sources as have just
been spoken of. But in cultivated districts fountains
could not ordinarily be reserved for purposes exclusively
sacred. Each town or village had as a rule its own well,
and its own high place or little temple, but in Canaan the
well was not generally within the precincts of the high
place. Towns were built on rising ground, and the well
lay outside the gate, usually below the town, while the
high place stood on the higher ground overlooking the
human habitations.^ Thus any idea of sanctity that might
be connected with the fountain was dissociated from the
temple ritual, and would necessarily become vague and
attenuated.^ Sacred springs in the full sense of the word
1 iElian, Nat. An. xii. 30 ; Pliny, H. N. xxxi. 37, xxxii. 16.
2 Gen. xxiv. 11 ; 1 Sam. ix. 11 ; 2 Sam, ii. 13, xxiii. 16 ; 2 Kings ii. 21 ;
1 Kings xxi. 13, 19, compared with chap. xxii. 38.
3 There are, however, indications that in some cases the original sanctnaiy
was at a well heneath the town. In 1 Kings i. 9, 38, the fountains of En-
rogel, where Adonijah held his sacrificial ieast, and of Gihon, where Solomon
was crowned, are plainly the original sanctuaries of Jerusalem. The former
was by the "serpent's stone," and may })erhaps be identified with the
" dragon well " of Neh. ii. 13. Here again, as in Arabia and at the Orontes,
the dragon or serpent has a sacred significance.
158 LEGENDS ABOUT lect. v.
are generally found, not at the ordinary local sanctuaries,
but at remote pilgrimage shrines like Aphaca, Beersheba,
Mamre, or within the enclosure of great and spacious
temples like that at Ascalon, where the pool of Atargatis
was shewn and her sacred fishes were fed. Sometimes, as
at Daphne near Antioch, the water and its surrounding
groves formed a sort of public park near a city, where
religion and pleasure were combined in the characteristic
Syriac fashion.^
The myths attached to holy sources and streams, and
put forth to worshippers as accounting for their sanctity,
were of various types ; but the practical beliefs and ritual
usages connected with sacred waters were much the same
everywhere, and so are plainly based on general conceptions
independent of the variations of local story. The one
general principle which runs through all the varieties of
the legends, and which also lies at the basis of the ritual,
is that the sacred waters are instinct with divine life and
energy. The legends explain this in diverse ways, and
bring the divine quality of the waters into connection with
various deities or supernatural powers, but they all agree
in this, that their main object is to explain how the foun-
tain or stream comes to be impregnated, so to speak, with
the vital energy of the deity to which it is sacred.
Among the ancients blood is generally conceived as the
principle or vehicle of life, and so the account often given
of sacred waters is that the blood of the deity flows in
them. Thus as Milton writes, —
Smooth Adonis from his native rock
Ean pnrple to the sea, supposed with blood
Of Thammuz yearly wounded. -
^A similar example, AVadd., No. 2370. A sacred fountain of Eshmun
"in the mountain" seems to appear in C. /. S. No. 3, I. 17 ; cf. G. Hoff-
mann, Ueber einige Pham. Inschrr. p. 52 sq.
2 Paradise Lost, i. 450, following Lucian, Dea Syria, viii.
LECT. V. SACRED WATERS. 159
The ruddy colour which the swollen river derived from
the soil at a certain season was ascribed to the blood of
the god who received his death-wound in Lebanon at that
time of the year, and lay buried beside the sacred source.^
Similarly a tawny fountain near Joppa was thought to
derive its colour from the blood of the sea-monster slain
by Perseus,^ and Philo Byblius says that the fountains and
rivers sacred to the heaven-god (Baalshamaim) were those
which received his blood when he was mutilated by his
son.^ In another class of legends, specially connected
with the worship of Atargatis, the divine life of the waters
resides in the sacred fish that inhabit them. Atargatis
and her son, according to a legend common to Hierapolis
and Ascalon, plunged into the waters — in the first case
the Euphrates, in the second the sacred pool at the temple
near the town — and were changed into fishes.* This is
only another form of the idea expressed in the first class
of legend, where a god dies, that is ceases to exist in
human form, but his life passes into the waters where he
is buried ; and this again is merely a theory to bring the
divine water or the divine fish into harmony with anthro-
pomorphic ideas.^ The same thing was sometimes effected
^ Melito in Cureton, Spic. Syr. p. 25, 1. 7. That the grave of Adonis
was also shewn at the mouth of the river has been inferred from Den
Syr. vi. vii. The river Belus also had its Memnonion or Adonis tomb.
(Josephus, B. J. ii. 10. 2). The reddening of the Adonis was observed by
Maundrell on March if, 169f.
2 Pausanias, iv. 35. 9.
s Euseb. , Prcep. Ev. i. 10, 22 [Fr. Hid. Gr. iii. 568). The fountain of the Clia-
boras, where Hera (/.ito. rov; ya/Aov; . . aviXoiKraro, belongs to the same class.
* Hyginus, Astr. ii. 30; Manilius, iv. 580 sqq.; Xanthus in Athenaus,
viii. 37. I have discussed these legends at length in the English Hist.
Review, April 1887, to which the reader is referred for details.
^ The idea that the godhead consecrates waters by descending into them
appears at Aphaca in a peculiar form associated with the astral character
which, at least in later times, was ascribed to the goddess Astarte. It was
believed that the goddess on a certain day of the year descended into tlie
river in the form of a fieiy star from the top of Lebanon. So Sozomen,
160 LEGENDS ABOUT lect. v.
in another way by saying that the anthropomorphic deity
was born from the water, as Aphrodite sprang from the
sea-foam, or as Atargatis, in another form of the Euphrates
legend, given by Germanicus in his scliolia on Aratus, was
born of an egg which the sacred fishes found in the
Euphrates and pushed ashore. Here, we see, it was left
to the choice of the worshippers whether they would think
of the deity as arising from or disappearing in the water,
and in the ritual of the Syrian goddess at Hierapolis both
ideas were combined at the solemn feasts, when her image
was carried down to the river and back again to the
temple. Where the legend is so elastic we can hardly
doubt that the sacred waters and sacred fish were wor-
shipped for their own sake before the anthropomorphic
goddess came into the religion, and in fact the sacred fish
at the source of the Chaboras are connected with an
altogether different myth. Fish, as we have seen, were
taboo, and sacred fish were found in rivers or in pools
at sanctuaries, all over Syria.^ This superstition has
proved one of the most durable parts of ancient heathen-
ism ; sacred fish are still kept in pools at the mosques of
H. E. ii. 4, 5. Zosinms, i. 58, says only that fireballs appeared at the
temple and the places about it, on the occasion of solemn feasts, anil does not
connect the apparition with the sacred waters. There is nothing improbable
in the frequent occurrence of striking electrical phenomena in a mountain
sanctuary. We shall presently find fiery apparitions connected also with
sacred trees {infra, p. 176). "Thunders, lightnings and light flashing
in the heavens," appear as objects of veneration among the Syrians (Jacob
of Ed., Qu. 43) ; cf. also the fiery globe of the Heliopolitan Lion-god, whose
fall from heaven is described b}'' Damascius, Vit. Is. § 203, and what
Pausanias of Damascus relates of the fireball that checked the flood of the
Orontes (Malalas, p. 38).
1 Xenophon, Anab. i. 4, 9, who found such fish in the Chains near
Aleppo, expressly says that they were regarded as gods. Lucian, Dea Syr.
xlv., relates that at the lake of Atargatis at Hierapolis the sacred fish
wore gold ornaments, as did also the eels at the sanctuary of the war-god
Zeus, amidst the sacred plane-trees (Herod., v. 119), at Labrannda in Caria
(Pliny, H. N. xxxii. 16, 17 ; yElian, N. A. xii. 30). Caria was thoroughly
permeated by Phoenician influence.
LECT. V. SACRED WATERS. 161
Tripolis and Edessa. At the latter place it is believed
that death or other evil consequences would befall the
man who dared to eat them.^
The living power that inhabits sacred waters and gives
them their miraculous or healing quality is very often held
to be a serpent, as in the Arabian and Hebrew cases which
have been already cited/ or a huge dragon or water
monster, such as that which in the Antiochene legend
hollowed out the winding bed of the Orontes and dis-
appeared beneath its source.^ In such cases the serpents
are of course supernatural serpents or jinn, and the
dragon of Orontes was identified in the Greek period with
Typhon, the enemy of the gods.*
In all their various forms the point of the legends is
that the sacred source is either inhabited by a demoniac
being or imbued with demoniac life. The same notion
appears with great distinctness in the ritual of sacred
waters. Though such waters are often associated with
temples, altars, and the usual apparatus of a cultus addressed
to heavenly deities, the service paid to the holy well re-
tained a form which implies that the divine power addressed
was in the water. We have seen that at Mecca, and at the
Stygian waters in the Syrian desert, gifts were cast into the
holy source. But even at Aphaca, where, in the times to
which our accounts refer, the goddess of the spot was held
to be the Urania or celestial Astarte, the pilgrims cast
^ Sachau, Reise, p. 197. ^ Supra, p. 153 sqq.
^ The Leviathan (pSD) of Scripture, like the Arabian tinnln, is probably
a personification of the waterspout (Mas'udi, i. 263, 266 ; Psalm cxlviii. 7).
Thus we see how readily the Eastern imagination clothes aquatic pheno-
mena with an animal form.
* Hence perhaps the modern name of the river Nahr al-'Asi, " the rebel's
stream ; " the explanation in Yacut, iii. 588, does not commend itself. The
burial of the Typhonic dragon at the source of the Orontes may be compared
with the Moslem legend of the well at Babylon, where the rebel angels
Harut and Marut were entombed (Cazwini, i. 197).
L
162 ORACLES FROM lect. v.
into the pool jewels of gold and silver, webs of linen and
byssus, and other precious stuffs, and the obvious contra-
diction between the celestial character of the goddess and
the earthward destination of the gifts was explained by
the fiction that at the season of the feast she descended
into the pool in the form of a fiery star. Similarly, at the
annual fair and feast of the Terebinth, or tree and well of
Abraham at Mamre, the heathen visitors, who reverenced the
spot as a haunt of " angels,"^ not only offered sacrifices beside
the tree, but illuminated the well with lamps, and cast
into it libations of wine, cakes, coins, myrrh and incense.^
In ancient religion offerings are the proper vehicle of
prayer and supplication, and the worshipper when he pre-
sents his gift looks for a visible indication whether his
prayer is accepted.^ At Aphaca and at the Stygian
fountain the accepted gift sank into the depths, the
unacceptable offering was cast forth by the eddies. It
was taken as an omen of the impending fall of Palmyra
that the gifts sent from that city at an annual festival
were cast up again in the following year."^ In this
example we see that the holy well, by declaring the
favourable or unfavourable disposition of the divine power,
becomes a place of oracle and divination. In Greece,
also, holy wells are connected with oracles, but mainly
in the form of a belief that the water gives prophetic
inspiration to those who drink of it. At the Semitic
oracle of Aphaca the method is more primitive, for the
answer is given directly by the water itself, but its range
is limited to what can be inferred from the acceptance or
rejection of the worshipper and his petition.
^ I.e. daemons. Sozomen says "angels," and not "devils," because the
sanctity of the place was acknowledged by Christians also.
2 Sozomen, H. E. ii. 4. ^ cf. Gen. iv. 4, 5.
* Zosimus, i. 58. At Aphaca, as at the Stygian fountain, the waters fall
down a cataract into a deep gorge.
LECT. V. SACRED WATERS. 163
The oracle at Daphne near Antioch, which was ohtained
by dipping a laurel leaf into the water, was presumably of
the same class, for we cannot take seriously the statement
that the response appeared written on the leaf.^ The
choice of the laurel leaf as the offering cast into the
water must be due to Greek influence, but Daphne was a
sanctuary of Heracles, i.e. of the Semitic Baal, before the
temple of Apollo was built.^
An oracle that speaks by receiving or rejecting the wor-
shipper and his homage may very readily pass into an
ordeal, where the person who is accused of a crime, or is
suspected of having perjured himself in a suit, is presented
at the sanctuary, to be accepted or rejected by the deity,
in accordance with the principle that no impious person
can come before God with impunity.^ A rude form of
this ordeal seems to survive even in modern times in
the widespread form of trial of witches by water. In
Hadramaut, according to Macrlzl,* when a man was in-
jured by enchantment, he brought all the witches suspect
to the sea or to a deep pool, tied stones to their backs and
threw them into the water. She who did not sink was
the guilty person, the meaning evidently being that the
sacred element rejects the criminal.^ That an impure
person dare not approach sacred waters is a general
principle — whether the impurity is moral or physical is
not a distinction made by ancient religion. Thus in
Arabia we have found that a woman in her uncleanness
^ Sozomen, v. 19. 11.
2 Malalas, p. 204. A variant of this form of oracle occurs at Myra in Lycia,
where the omen is from the sacred tish accepting or rejecting the food offered
to them (Pliny, H. N. xxxii. 17 ; ^lian, N. A. viii. 5 ; Athenoeus, viii. 8,
p. 333). How far Lycian worship was influenced by the Semites is not
clear.
2 Cf. Job xiii. 16 ; Isa xxxiii. 14. * De Valle Hadhramaut, p. 26 sq.
^ The story about Mojammi' and Al-Ahwa^ [Agh. iv. 48), cited by Well-
hausen, Heid. p. 152, refers to this kind of ordeal, not to a form of magic.
164 THE WATER
LECT. V.
was afraid, for her children's sake, to bathe in the water of
Dusares ; and to this day among the Yezldls no one may
enter the valley of Sheik Adi, with its sacred fountain,
unless he has first purified his body and clothes.^ The
sacred oil-spring of the Carthaginian sanctuary described
by Aristotle ^ would not flow except for persons ceremoni-
ally pure. An ordeal at a sacred spring based on this
principle might be worked in several ways,^ but the usual
Semitic method seems to have been by drinking the water.
Evidently, if it is dangerous for the impious person to come
into contact with the holy element, the danger must be
intensified if he ventures to take it into his system, and it
was believed that in such a case the draught produced
disease and death. At the Asbama3an lake and springs
near Tyana the water was sweet and kindly to those that
swore truly, but the perjured man was at once smitten in
his eyes, feet and hands, seized with dropsy and wasting.*
In like manner he who swore falsely by the Stygian waters
in the Syrian desert died of dropsy within a year. In the
latter case it would seem that the oath by the waters
sufficed ; but primarily, as we see in the other case, the
essential thing is the draught of water at the holy place,
the oath simply taking the place of the petition which
ordinarily accompanies a ritual act. Among the Hebrews
this ordeal by drinking holy water is preserved even in the
Pentateuchal legislation in the case of a woman suspected
of infidelity to her husband.^ Here also the belief was
that the holy water, which was mingled with the dust of
^ LayarJ, Nineveh, i. 280. - Mir. Auac. § 113.
^ See, for example, the Sicilian oracle of the Palic lake, -wiiere the oath of
the accused was written on a tablet and cast into the water to sink or swim.
Aristotle, Mir. Ausc. § 57.
^ Arist. , Mir. Ausc. § 152 ; Philostr., Vit. ApoUonii, i. 6. That the sanc-
tiiary was Semitic I infer from its name ; see below, p. 166.
* Numb. V. 1 1 sqq.
LECT. V. OF JEALOUSY. 165
the sanctuary, and administered with an oath, produced
dropsy and wasting ; and the antiquity of the ceremony is
evident not only from its whole character, but because the
expression " holy water " (ver. 17) is unique in the language
of Hebrew ritual, and must be taken as an isolated survival
of an obsolete expression. Unique though the expression
be, it is not difficult to assign its original meaning ; the
analogies already before us indicate that we must think of
water from a holy spring, and this conclusion is certainly
correct. Wellhausen has shewn that the oldest Hebrew
tradition refers the origin of the Torah to the divine
sentences taught by Moses at the sanctuary of Kadesh or
Meribah,^ beside the holy fountain which in Gen. xiv. 7 is
also called " the fountain of judgment." The principle
underlying the administration of justice at the sanctuary is
that cases too hard for man are referred to the decision of
God. Among the Hebrews in Canaan this was ordinarily
done by an appeal to the sacred lot, but the survival of
even one case of ordeal by holy water leaves no doubt as
to the sense of the " fountain of judgment " (En-mishpat)
or " waters of controversy " (Meribah).
With this evidence before us as to the early importance
of holy waters among the Hebrews, we cannot but attach
significance to the fact that the two chief places of pilgrim-
age of the northern Israelites in the time of Amos were
Dan and Beersheba.^ We have already seen that there
was a sacred fountain at Dan, and the sanctuary of Beer-
sheba properly consisted of the " Seven Wells," which gave
the place its name. It is notable that among the Semites
a special sanctity was attached to groups of seven wells.^
In the canons of Jacob of Edessa (Qu. 43) we read of
1 Prolegomena, viii. 3 (E. Tr. p. 343).
" Amos viii. 14 ; cf. 1 Kings xii. 30.
3 See NoLleke in Litt. Centralblatt, 22 Mar. 1879, p. 364.
166 SEVEN WELLS. lect. v.
nominally Christian Syrians who bewail their diseases to
the stars, or turn for help to a solitary tree or a fountain
or seven springs or water of the sea, etc. Among the
Mandseans, also, we read of mysteries performed at seven
wells, and among the Arabs a place called "the seven wells"
C/^ is mentioned by Strabo, xvi. 4, 24.^ The name of the
Asbaniffian waters seems also to 'mean " seven waters " (Syr.
shab'd mayo) ; the spot is a lake where a number of
sources bubble up above the surface of the water." Seven
is a sacred number among the Semites, particularly affected
in matters of ritual, and the Hebrew verb " to swear "
means literally " to come under the influence of seven
things." Thus seven ewe lambs figure in the oath between
Abraham and Abimelech at Beersheba, and in the Arabian
oath of covenant described by Herod., iii. 8, seven stones
are smeared with blood. The oath of purgation at seven
wells would therefore have peculiar force.^
It is the part of a divine power to grant to his
worshippers not only oracles and judgment, but help in
trouble and blessing in daily life. The kind of blessing
which it is most obvious to expect from a sacred spring is
the quickening and fertilisation of the soil and all that
depends on it. That fruitful seasons were the chief object
of petition at the sacred springs requires no special proof,
for this object holds the first place in all the great religious
occasions of the settled Semites, and everywhere we find
that the festal cycle is regulated by the seasons of the
agricultural year.^ Beyond doubt the first and best gift
1 Cf. also the seven marvellous wells at Tiberias (Cazwini, i. 193), and the
" Pleiad " waters at Dariya {supra, p. 153).
■^ In Amos viii. 14 there is mention of an oath by the way (ritual ?) of
Beersheba. The pilgrims at Mamre would not drink of the water of the
well. Sozomen supposes that the gifts cast in made it undrinkable ; but at
an Oriental market, where every bargain is accompanied by false oaths and pro-
testations, the precaution is rather to be explained by fear of the divine ordeal.
•* A myth of the connection of sacred waters with the origin of agriculture
LECT. V. HEALING WATERS. 167
of the sacred spring to the worshipper was its own life-
giving water, and the first object of the religion addressed
to it was to encourage its benignant flow.^ But the life-
giving power of the holy stream was by no means confined
to the quickening of vegetation. Sacred waters are also
healing w^aters, as we have already seen in various examples,
particularly in that of the Syrians, who sought to them for
help in disease, I may here add one instance which, though
it lies a little outside of the proper Semitic region, is con-
nected with a holy river of the Syrians. In the Middle
Ages it was still believed that he who bathed in the spring-
time in the source of the Euphrates would be free from
sickness for the whole year.^ This healing power was not
confined to the water itself, but extended to the vegetation
that surrounded it. By the sacred river Belus grew the
Colocasium plants by which Heracles was healed after his
conflict with the Hydra, and the roots continued to be used
as a cure for bad sores.^ At Paneas an herb that healed
all diseases grew at the base of a statue which was
supposed to represent Christ, evidently a relic of the old
heailienism of the place,* Thus when Ezekiel describes
the sacred waters that issue from the New Jerusalem as
giving life wherever they come, and the leaves of the trees
seems to survive in modernised form in the mediaival legend of 'Ain al-
bacar, " the oxen's well," at Acre. It was visited by Christian, Jewish and
Moslem ])ilgrims, because the oxen with which Adam jjloughed issued from
it (Cazvvini, Yacut). There was a mashhed, or sacred tomb, beside it,
perhaps the modern representative of the ancient Memnonium.
^ In Numb. xxi. 17 we find a song addressed to the well exhorting it to
rise, which in its origin is hardly a mere poetic figure. We may compare
what CazwinI, i. 1 89, records of the well of Ilabistan. When the water failed,
a feast was held at the source, with music and dancing, to induce it to flow
again.
'^ Cazwini, i. 194. I may also cite the numerous fables of amulets, to be
found in the Tigris and other rivers, which protected their wearers against
wild beasts, demons and other dangers (Arist., Mir. Ausc. 159 sq.).
^ Claudius lolaus, ap. Steph. Byz., s.v. "Axv.
* Theophanes, c^uoted by Reland, ii. 922.
168 HEALING WATERS. lect. v.
on their banks as supplying medicine, his imagery is in full
touch with common Semitic ideas (Ezek. xlvii. 9, 12).
The healing power of sacred water is closely connected
with its purifying and consecrating power, for the primary
conception of uncleanness is that of a dangerous infection.
Washings and purifications play a great part in Semitic
ritual, and were performed with living water, which was as
such sacred in some degree. Whether specially sacred
springs were used for purification, and if so under what
restrictions, I cannot make out ; in most cases, I apprehend,
they were deemed too holy to be approached by a person
technically impure. It appears, however, from Ephrsem
Syrus that the practice of bathing in fountains was one of the
heathen customs to which the Syrians of his time were much
addicted, and he seems to regard this as a sort of heathen con-
secration.^ Unfortunately the rlietoric of the Syrian fathers
seldom condescends to precise details on such matters.
Erom this account of the ritual of sacred wells it
will, I think, be clear that the usages and ceremonies are
all intelligible on general principles, without reference to
particular legends or the worship of the particular deities
associated with special waters. The fountain is treated as
a living thing, those properties of its waters which we call
natural are regarded as manifestations of a divine life, and
the source itself is honoured as a divine being, I had
almost said a divine animal. When religion takes a form
decidedly anthropomorphic or astral, myths are devised to
reconcile the new point of view with the old usage, but the
substance of the ritual remains unchanged.
Let us now pass on from the worship of sacred waters
to the cults connected with sacred trees."
1 0pp. iii. 670 sq.; H. et S., ed. Lamy, ii. 395, 411.
^ On sacred trees among the Semites, see Baudissin, Studien, ii. 184 sqq.;
for Arabia, Wellhausen, Heid. p. 101. Compare BiJtticher, Baumcxdtus der
IIeUenen{Bevl. 1856), and Mannliardt, Wald- und Feld-CuUe (Berl. 1875, 77).
LKCT. V. SACRED TREES. 1G9
That the conception of trees as demoniac beings was
familiar to the Semites has been already shewn by many
examples/ and there is also abundant evidence that in all
parts of the Semitic area trees were adored as divine.
Tree worship pure and simple, where the tree is_in all
respects treated as a god, is attested for Arabia in the case
of the'^sacred date-palm at Nejran," It was adored at an
annual feast, when it was all hung with fine clothes and
women's ornaments. A similar tree, to which the people
of Mecca resorted annually, and hung upon it weapons,
garments, ostrich eggs and other gifts, is spoken of in the
traditions of the prophet under tlie vague name of a dhdt
anwdt, or " tree to hang things on." It seems to be
identical witli the sacred acacia at ISTakhla in which the
goddess Al-'Ozza was believed to reside.^ By the modern
Arabs sacred trees are called mandJiil, places where angels
or jinn descend and are heard dancing and singing. It is
deadly danger to pluck so much as a bough from such a
tree ; they are honoured with sacrifices, and parts of the
flesh are hung on them, as well as shreds of calico, beads,
etc. The sick man who sleeps under them receives counsel
in a dream for the restoration of his health.'^
Among the heathen Syrians tree worship must have had
a large place, for this is one of the superstitions which
Christianity itself was powerless to eradicate. We have
already met with nominal Christians of Syria who in their
sicknesses turned for help to a solitary tree, while zealous
Christians were at pains to hew down the " trees of the
demons."^ As regards the Phoenicians and Canaanites we
have the testimony of Philo Byblius that the plants of
the earth were in ancient times esteemed as gods and
1 Supra, p. 126. ^ Tabari, i. 922 (Noldeke's trans, p. 181).
' Wellhausen, p. 30 sqq., p. 35.
■* Doughty, Arabia Deserta, i. 448 sqq.
^ See the citatious in Kayser, Jacob v. Edessa, p. 141.
O^
170 SACRED TREES. lect. v.
honoured with libations and sacrifices, because from them
the successive generations of men drew the support of their
life. To this day the traveller in Palestine frequently
meets with holy trees hung like an Arabian dlult anwdt
with rags as tokens of homage.
What place the cult of trees held in the more developed
forms of Semitic religion it is not easy to determine. In
later times the groves at the greater sanctuaries do not
seem to have been direct objects of worship, though
they shared in the inviolability that belonged to all the
surroundings of the deity, and were sometimes — like
the ancient cypresses of Heracles at Daphne — believed
to have been planted by the god himself.^ It was not at
the great sanctuaries of cities but in the open field, where
the rural population had continued from age to age to
practise primitive rites without modification, that the
worship of " solitary trees " survived the fall of the
great gods of Semitic heathenism.
There is no reason to think that any of the greater
Semitic cults was developed out of tree worship. In all
of them the main place is given to altar service, and we
shall see by and by that the beginnings of this form of
worship, so far as they can be traced back to a time when
the gods were not yet anthropomorphic, point to the cult of
animals rather than of trees. That trees are habitually
found at sanctuaries is by no means inconsistent with this
view, for where the tree is merely conceived as planted by
the god or as marking his favourite haunt, it receives no
direct homage.
When, however, we find that no Canaanite high place
was complete without its sacred tree standing beside the
altar, and when we take along with this the undoubted
1 Similarly the tamarisk at Beersheba was believed to have been planted
by Abraham (Gen. xxi. 33).
LECT. V.
THE ASHERA. 171
fact that the direct cult of trees was familiar to all the
Semites, it is hardly possible to avoid the conclusion that
some elements of tree worship entered into the ritual
even of such deities as in their origin were not tree-gods.
The local sanctuaries of the Hebrews, which the prophets
regard as purely heathenish, and which certainly were
modelled in all points on Canaanite usage, were altar-
sanctuaries. But the altars were habitually set up
" under green trees," and, what is more, the altar was
incomplete unless an ashera stood beside it. The meaning
of this word, which the Authorised Version wrongly renders
"grove," has given rise to a good deal of controversy.
What kind of object the ashera was appears from Deut.
xvi. 21 : "Thou shalt not plant an ashera of any kind of
wood (or, an ashera, any kind of tree) beside the altar
of Jehovah ; " it must therefore have been either a living
tree or a tree-like post, and in all probability either form
was originally admissible. The oldest altars, as we gather
from the accounts of patriarchal sanctuaries, stood under
actual trees ; but this rule could not always be followed,
and in the period of the kings it would seem that the
place of the living tree was taken by a dead post or pole,
planted in the ground like an English Maypole.^ Tlie
ashera undoubtedly was an object of worship ; for the
^ It is a thing made b)' man's hands ; Isa. xvii. 8, cf. 1 Kings xvi. 33, etc.
In 2 Kings xxi. 7 (cf. xxiii. 6) we read of the Ashera-image. Similarly in
1 Kings XV. 13 there is mention of a "grisly object" which Queen Maacah
made for an Ashera. These expressions may imply that the sacred pole
was sometimes carved into a kind of image. That the sacred tree should
degenerate first into a mere Maypole, and then into a nide wooden idol,
is in accordance with analogies found elsewhere, e.g. in Greece ; but it seems
quite as likely that the af^hera is described as a kind of idol simply because
it was used in idolatrous cultus. An Assyrian monument from Khorsabad,
figured by Botta and Layard, and reproduced in Rawlinson, Monarchien,
ii, 37, Stade, Gesch. Isr. 1. 461, shows an ornamental pole planted beside a
portable altar. Priests stand before it engaged in an act of worship, and touch
the pole wilh their hands, or perhaps anoint it with some liquid substance.
172 THE CANAANITE . LECT. V.
prophets put it on the same line with other sacred
symbols, images cippi and Baal-pillars (Isa. xvii. 8 ; Micah
V. 12 sqq.), and the PhoBnician inscription of IMas'iib
speaks of " the Astarte in the Ashera of the divinity of
Hammon." The ashera therefore is a sacred symbol, the
seat of the deity, and perhaps the name itself, as G.
Hoffmann has suggested, means nothing more than the
" mark " of the divine presence. But the opinion that
there was a Canaanite goddess called Ashera, and that
the trees or poles of the same name were her particular
symbols, is not tenable ; every altar had its ashera, even
such altars as in the popular, pre-prophetic forms of
Hebrew religion were dedicated to Jehovah.^ This is
not consistent with the idea that the sacred pole was the
symbol of a distinct divinity ; it seems rather to show
that in early times tree worship had such a vogue in
Canaan that the sacred tree, or the pole its surrogate,
had come to be viewed as a general symbol of deity which
might fittingly stand beside the altar of any god.^
^ The prohibition in Deut. xvi. 21 is good evidence of the previous practice
of the thing prohibited. See also 2 Kings xiii. 6.
- If a god and a goddess were worshipped together at tlie same sanctuary,
as was the case, for example, at Aphaca and Hierapolis, and if the two sacred
symbols at the sanctuary were a pole and a pillar of stone, it might naturally
enough come about that the pole was identified with the goddess and the
pillar with the god. The worship of Tammuz or Adonis was known at
Jerusalem in the time of Ezekiel (viii. 14), and with Adonis the goddess
Astarte must also have been worshipped, probably as the "queen of heaven "
(Jer. vii., xliv. ; cf. on this worship Kuenen in the Verdagen, etc., of the
Koyal Acad, of Amsterdam, 1888). It is not therefore surprising that in
one or two late passages, written at a time when all the worship of the high
places was regarded as entirely foreign to the religion of Jehovah, the
Asherim seem to be regarded as the female partners of the Baalim ; i.e.
that the ashera is taken as a symbol of Astarte (Judg. iii. 7). The prophets
of the ashera in 1 Kings xviii. 19, who appear along witli the projihots of
the Tyrian Baal as ministers of the foreign religion introduced by Jezebel,
must have been prophets of Astarte. They form part of the Tyrian queen's
court, and eat of her table, so that they have nothing to do with Hebrew
religion. And conversely the old Hebrew sacred poles can have had nothing
to do with the Tyrian goddess, for Jehu left the ashera at Samaria standing
LECT. V.
ASH ERA. 173
The general adoption of tree symbols at Canaanite
sanctuaries must be connected with the fact that all
Canaanite Baalim, whatever their original character, were
associated with naturally fertile spots (Baal's land), and
were worshipped as the givers of vegetable increase. "We
have seen already in the case of sacred streams how the
life-blood of the god was conceived as diffused through
the sacred waters, which thus became themselves impreg-
nated with divine life and energy. And it was an easy
extension of this idea to suppose that the tree which
overshadowed the sacred fountain, and drew perennial
strength and freshness from the moisture at its roots, was
itself instinct with a particle of divine life. With the
ancients the conception of life, whether divine or human,
was not so much individualised as it is with us ; thus for
example all the members of one kin were conceived as
having a common life embodied in the common blood
which flowed through their veins. Similarly one and the
same divine life might be shared by a number of objects,
when lie abolished all trace of Tyriau worship (2 Kings xiii. 6). There is
no evidence of the worship of a divine pair among the older Hebrews ; in
the time of Solomon Astarte worship was a foreign religion (1 Kings xi. 5),
and it is plain from Jer. ii. 27 that in ordinary Hebrew idolatry the tree
or stock was the syml)ol not of a goddess but of a god. Even among the
Phoenicians the association of sacred trees with goddesses rather than with
gods is not so clear as is often supposed. From all this it tollows that the
"prophets of the Ashera" in 1 Kings I.e. are very misty personages, and
that the mention of them implies a confusion between Astarte and the
Ashera, which no Israelite in Elijah's time, or indeed so long as the
northern kingdom stood, could have fallen into. In fact they do not
reappear either in v. 22 or in v. 40, and the mention of them seems to
be due to a late interpolation (Wellh., He.xateuch, 2nd ed. (1889), p. 281).
The evidence offered by Assyriologists that Ashrat = Ashera was a
goddess (see Schrader in Zeitschr. f. A.ssyriologie, iii. 363 xq.) cannot
overrule the plain sense of the Hebrew texts. Whether it suffices to show
that in some places the general symbol of deity had become a special
goddess is a question on which I do not offer an opinion ; but see G.
Hoffmann, Ueber einige Fhcen. Lischrr. (1889), p. 26 .sv/r/., whose whole
remarks are noteworthy. In Cit. 51 {ZDMO. xxxv. 424) the goddess seems
to be called the mother of the sacred pole (mt>'Nn DX).
174 LEGENDS OF lect. V.
if all of them were nourished from a common vital
source, and the elasticity of this conception made it very-
easy to bring a variety of natural sacred objects of different
kinds into the worship of one and the same god. Elements
of water worship of tree worship and of animal worship
could all be combined in the ritual of a single anthropo-
morphic deity, by the simple supposition that the life of
the god flowed in the sacred waters and fed the sacred
tree.
As regards the connection of holy waters and holy trees,
it must be remembered that in most Semitic lands self-
sown wood can flourish only where there is underground
water, and where therefore springs or wells exist beside
the trees. Hence the idea that the same life is manifested
in the water and in the surrounding vegetation could
hardly fail to suggest itself, and, broadly speaking, the
holiness of fountains and that of trees, at least among the
northern Semites, appear to be parts of the same religious
conception, for it is only in exceptional cases that the one
is found apart from the other.^
Where a tree was worshipped as the symbol of an
anthropomorphic god we sometimes find a transformation
legend directly connecting the life of the god with the
vegetative life of the tree. This kind of myth, in which
a god is transformed into a tree or a tree springs from the
blood of a god, plays a large part in the sacred lore of
Phrygia, where tree worship had peculiar prominence, and
is also common in Greece. The Semitic examples are not
numerous, and are neither so early nor so well attested as
to inspire confidence that they are genuine old legends
independent of Greek influence.^ The most important of
^ In Greece also it is an exception to find a sacred tree without its foun-
tain ; Botticher, p. 47.
2 Cf. Baudissin, op. cit. p. 214.
LECT. V.
HOLY TREES. l7o
them is the myth told at Bybhis in the time of Plutarch,
of the sacred erica which was worshipped in the temple
of Isis, and was said to have grown round the dead body of
Osiris. At Byblus, Isis and Osiris are really Astarte and
Adonis, so this may possibly be an original Semitic legend
of a holy tree growing from the grave of a god.^
I apprehend, however, that the physical link between
trees and anthropomorphic gods was generally sought in
the sacred water from which the trees drew their life.
This is probable from the use of the terms Ba'l and 'Athari
to denote trees that need neither rain nor irrigation, and
indeed from the whole circle of ideas connected with Baal's
land. A tree belonged to a particular deity, not because it
was of a particular species, but simply because it was the
natural wood of the place where the god was worshipped
and sent forth his quickening streams to fertilise the
earth. The sacred trees of the Semites include every
prominent species of natural wood — the pines and cedars
of Lebanon, the evergreen oaks of the Palestinian hills, the
tamarisks of the Syrian jungles, the acacias of the Arabian
wadies, and so forth. So far as these natural woods are
concerned, the attempts that have been made to connect
individual species of trees with the worship of a single
deity break down altogether; it cannot, for example, be
said that the cypress belongs to Astarte more than to
Melcarth, who planted the cypress trees at Daphne.
^ Plut., Is. et Os. §§ 15, 16. One or two features in the story are note-
worthy. The sacred erica was a mere dead stump, for it was cut down by
Isis and presented to the Byblians wrapped in a linen cloth and anointed
with myrrh like a corpse. It therefore represented the dead god. But as
a mere stump it also resembles the Hebrew ashera. Can it be that the
rite of draping and anointing a sacred stump supplies the answer to the
unsolved question of the nature of the ritual practices connected with the
Ashera ? Some sort of drapery for the aahera is spoken of in 2 Kings xxiii.
7, and the Assyrian representation cited on p. 171, note 1, perhaps repre-
sents the anointing of the sacred pole.
176 FIERY LECT. V.
Cultivated trees, on the other hand, such as the palm,
the olive and the vine, might a 2yriori he expected, among
the Semites as among the Greeks, to be connected with
the special worship of the deity of the spot from which
their culture was diffused ; for religion and agricultural arts
spread together and the one carried the other with it.
Yet even of this there is little evidence ; the palm was a
familiar symbol of xA.starte, but we also find a " Baal of the
palm-tree " (Baal Tamar) in a place-name in Judges xx.
33. The only clear Semitic case of the association of a
particular deity with a fruit tree is, I believe, that of the
Nabatrean Dusares, who was the god of the vine. But
the vine came to the iN'abatiieans only in the period of
Hellenic culture,^ and Dusares as the wine - god seems
simply to have borrowed the traits of Dionysus.
At Aphaca at the annual feast the goddess appeared in
the form of a fiery meteor, which descended from the
mountain-top and plunged into the water, while according
to another account fire played about the temple, presumably,
since an electrical phenomenon must have lain at the
foundation of this belief, in the tree-tops of the sacred
grove.^ In like manner Jehovah appeared to Moses in
the bush in flames of fire, so that the bush seemed to burn
yet not to be consumed. The same phenomenon, according
to Africanus ^ and Eustathius ■* was seen at the terebinth
of Mamre ; the whole tree seemed to be aflame, but when
the fire sank acjain remained unharmed. As lights were
set by the well under the tree, and the festival was a
nocturnal one, this was probably nothing more than an
optical delusion exaggerated by the superstitious imagination,
a mere artificial contrivance to keep up an ancient belief
which must once have had wide currency in connection
^ Dio'loTOs, xix'. 94. 3. - Supra, p. 159, note 5.
'■^ Georg. Sj'ncellus, Bonn ed. p. 202. •• Cited by Reland, p. 712.
LECT. V.
APPARITIONS. 17Y
with sacred trees, and is remarkable because it shows how
a tree might become holy apart from all relation to
agriculture and fertility. Jehovah, " who dwells in the
bush" (Deut. xxxiii. 16), in the arid desert of Sinai, was
the God of the Hebrews while they were still nomads
ignorant of agriculture ; and indeed the original seat of a
conception like the burning bush, which must have its
physical basis in electrical phenomena, must probably be
sought in the clear dry air of the desert or of lofty
mountains. The apparition of Jehovah in the burning
bush belongs to the same circle of ideas as His apparition
in the thunders and lightnings of Sinai.
When the divine manifestation takes such a form as
the flames in the bush, the connection between the god and
the material symbol is evidently much looser than in the
Baal type of religion, where the divine life is immanent
in the life of the tree ; and the transition is comparatively
easy from the conception of Deut. xxxiii. 16, where
Jehovah inhabits (not visits) the bush, as elsewhere He is
said to inhabit the temple, to the view prevalent in most
parts of the Old Testament, that the tree or the pillar at
a sanctuary is merely a memorial of the divine name, the
mark of a place where He has been found in the past and
may be found again. The separation between Jehovah
and physical nature, which is so sharply drawn by the
prophets and constitutes one of the chief points of
distinction between their faith and that of the masses,
whose Jehovah worship had all the characters of Baal
worship, may be justly considered as a development of the
older type of Hebrew religion. It has sometimes been
supposed that the conception of a god immanent in nature
is Aryan, and that of a transcendental god Semitic ; but
the former view is quite as characteristic of the Baal
worship of the agricultural Semites as of the early faiths
M
178 DIVINATION
LECT. V.
of the agricultural Aryans. It is true that the higher
developments of Semitic religion took a different line, but
they did not grow out of Baal worship.
As regards the special forms of cultus addressed to
sacred trees, I can add nothing certain to the very scanty
indications that have already come before us. Prayers
were addressed to them, particularly for help in sickness,
but doubtless also for fertile seasons and the like, and they
were hung with votive gifts, especially garments and
ornaments, perhaps also anointed with unguents as if they
had been real persons. More could be said about the use
of branches, leaves or other parts of sacred trees in
lustrations, as medicine, and for other ritual purposes.
But these things do not directly concern us at present ;
they are simply to be noted as supplying additional
evidence, if such be necessary, that a sacred energy, that
is a divine life, resided even in the parts of holy trees.
The only other aspect of the subject which seems to
call for notice at the present stage is the connection of
sacred trees with oracles and divination. Oracles and
omens from trees and at tree sanctuaries are of the com-
monest among all races,^ and are derived in very various
ways, either from observation of phenomena connected
with the trees themselves, and interpreted as manifestations
of divine life, or from ordinary processes of divination
performed in the presence of the sacred object. Some-
times the tree is believed to speak with an articulate
voice, as the gharcad did in a dream to Moslim ; ^ but
except in a dream it is obvious that the voice of the
tree can only be some rustling sound, as of wind in the
branches, like that which was given to David as a token
■* Cf. Botticher, op. cit., cli. xi.
2 Supra, p. 126. The same belief in trees from wliich a spirit speaks oracles
occurs in a modern legend given by Doughty, Ar, Des., ii. 209.
LECT. V.
FROM TREES. 179
of the right moment to attack the Phihstines,^ and requires
a soothsayer to interpret it. The famous holy tree near
Shechem, called the tree of soothsayers in Judg. ix. 37,^
and the " tree of the revealer " in Gen. xii. G, must have
been the seat of a Canaanite tree oracle.^ We have no
hint as to the nature of the physical indications that
guided the soothsayers, nor have I found any other case
of a Semitic tree oracle where the mode of procedure is
described. But the belief in trees as places of divine
revelation must have been widespread in Canaan. The
prophetess Deborah gave her responses under a palm near
Bethel, which according to sacred tradition marked the
grave of the nurse of Rachel.^ That the artificial sacred
tree or ashera was used in divination would follow from
1 Kings xviii. 19, were it not that there are good grounds
for holding that in this passage the prophets of the
ashera are simply the prophets of the Tyrian Astarte.
But in Hosea iv. 1 2 the " stock " of which the prophets'
contemporaries sought counsel can hardly be anything else
than the ashera.^ Soothsayers who draw their inspiration
1 2 Sam. V. 24. " A.V. "plain of Meonenim."
^ It was perhaps only one tree of a sacred grove, for Deut. xi. 30 speaks
of the "trees of the revealer " in the plural.
* Gen. XXXV. 8. There indeed the tree is called an aUOn, a word gene-
rally rendered oak. But allon, like eldh and elon, seems to be a name
applicable to any sacred tree, perhaps to any great tree. Stade, Gesch. Is.
i. 455, would even connect these words with el, god, and the Phcenician
alonlm.
* As the next clause says, "and their rod declareth to them," it is
commonly supposed that rhabdomancy is alluded to, i.e. the use of divining
rods. And no doubt the divining rod, in which a spirit or life is supposed
to reside, so that it moves and gives indications apart from the will of the
man who holds it, is a superstition cognate to the belief in sacred trees ; but
when "their rod" occurs in parallelism with "their stock" or tree, it
lies nearer to cite Philo Byblius ap. Eus., Pr. Ev. i. 10. 11, who speaks of
rods aud pillars consecrated by the Phojnicians and worshipped by annual
feasts. On this view the rod is only a smaller ashera. Drusius therefore
seems to hit the mark in comparing Festus's note on delubriim, where the
Romans are said to have worshipped pilled rods as gods. See more on rod
180 HOLY CAVES lect. v.
from plants are found in Semitic legend even in the
Middle Ages.^
To the two great natural marks of a place of worship,
the fountain and the tree, ought perhaps to be added
grottoes and caves of the earth. At the present day
almost every sacred site in Palestine has its grotto, and
that this is no new thing is plain from the numerous
symbols of Astarte worship found on the walls of caves in
Phoenicia. There can be little doubt that the oldest
Phoenician temples were natural or artificial grottoes, and
that the sacred as well as the profane monuments of
Phoenicia, with their marked preference for monolithic
forms, point to the rock-hewn cavern as the original type
that dominated the architecture of the region.^ But if
this be so, the use of grottoes as temples in later times
does not prove that caverns as such had any primitive
religious significance. Pieligious practice is always con-
servative, and rock-hewn temples would naturally be used
after men had ceased to live like troglodytes in caves and
holes of the earth. Moreover ancient temples are in
most instances not so much houses where the gods live, as
storehouses for the vessels and treasures of the sanctuary.
The altar, the sacred tree, and the other divine symbols to
which acts of worship are addressed, stand outside in front
of the temple, and the whole service is carried on in the
open air. Now all over the Semitic world caves and pits
are the primitive storehouses, and we know that in Arabia
a pit called the ghabghab, iu which the sacred treasure
worship in Botticlier, op. clt. xvi. 5. Was the omen derived from the
rod flourishing or withering ? We have such an omen in Aaron's rod
(Numb. xvii. ), and Adonis rods, set as slips to grow or wither, seem to be
referred to in Isa. xvii. 10 sqq., a passage which would certainly gain foice
if the withering of the slips was an ill omen. Divination from the flourish-
ing and withering of sacred trees is very common in antiquity (Botticher,
ch. xi.).
^ Chwolsohn, Smbier, iL 914. 2 Renan, Phinicie, p. 822 sq.
LECT. V.
AND PITS. 181
was stored, was a usual adjunct to sanctuaries.^ At the
same time there seem to be weighty reasons for doubting
whether this is the whole explanation of cave sanctuaries.
In other parts of the world, as for example in Greece,
there are many examples of caves associated with the
worship of chthonic deities, and also with the oracles of
gods like Apollo, who are not usually looked upon as
chthonic or subterranean ; and the acts performed in these
caves imply that they were regarded as the peculiar seats
of divine energy and influence. The more common
opinion seems to be that the gods of the Semites were
never chthonic, in the sense that their seats and the
source of their influence were sought underground. But
even in Arabia the ghcibyhab is not merely a treasure
house ; a victim is said to be brought to the ghahghab, and
the word is explained as the name of a place of sacrifice,
or the place where the blood was poured out.^ The blood
therefore was allowed to flow into the pit, just as the
annual human sacrifice at Dumfetha (Duma) was buried
under the altar that served as an idol.^ It is doubtful
whether such rites necessarily imply that the god was
conceived as living underground, but they certainly lend
themselves readily to that conception, and among the
northern Semites there is at least one case where the
sacred pit in the sanctuary was supposed to be inhabited
by a subterranean deity. At the temple of Hierapolis
there was a cleft in the earth under the temple, which
was thought to communicate with the great storehouse of
subterranean waters, and in later Hellenised legend was be-
lieved to have swallowed up the water of Deucalion's flood.*
1 Wellhausen, Held. p. 100.
2 Yacut, iii. 772 sq. ; Ibn Hisham, p. 55, 1. 8.
^ Porphyry, De Abst. ii. 56.
■• Lueian, De dea Syria, xiii. At Jerusalem also there was a cleft, in
which the waters of the flood disappeared.
182 HOLY CAVES. lect. v.
Melito ^ calls this cleft a well, and explains the ritual
of pouring water from the " sea " {i.e. the Euphrates)
into it, which was practised twice a year with great
solemnity, as designed to prevent the demon of the well
{i.e. the god of the subterranean waters) from issuing
forth to injure men. I take it that this is only a some-
what distorted form of the flood legend, and that the god
of the well is not substantially different from any other
Semitic Baal. For we know that the Baal was specially
connected with subterranean waters, and the same god
who in his goodwill sends fertilising streams, may be
supposed in his anger to send forth a destroying flood.
The ritual of pouring water into the cleft has its parallel
in the modern practice at the fountain of water before
the gates of Tyre, when in September the water becomes
red and troubled, and the natives gather for a great feast
and restore its limpidity by pouring a pitcher of sea-
water into the source — presvimably an offering to appease
the angry god.^
That the Baalim, as gods of the subterranean waters
from which springs are fed, have a certain chthonic
character, appears also from the frequent occurrence,
especially beside sacred streams, of tombs of the god ;
for a buried god is one who has his seat underground.
On the whole, therefore, I am inclined to conjecture that
caverns and clefts in the earth may not seldom have been,
like the cleft at Hierapolis, more than mere adjuncts to
the sanctuary, and may have been chosen as places of
worship because through them the god ascended and
descended to and from the outer world, and through them
the gifts of the worshipper could be brought nearer his
subterranean abode. And what seems particularly to
^ In Cureton, Spic. Syr., p. 25.
^ Volney, Etat pol. de la Syrie, cli. viii. ; Mariti, ii. 269.
LECT. V. HOLY STONES. 183
strengthen this conjecture is that the adytum, or dark
inner chamber, found in many temples both among the
Semites and in Greece, was almost certainly in its origin
a cave ; indeed in Greece it was often wholly or partially
subterranean and is called /xejapov, which is the Semitic
myjD and means a cave. The adytum is not a constant
feature in Greek temples, and the name /xeyapou seems to
indicate that it was borrowed from the Semites.^ Where
it does exist it is a place of oracle, as the Holy of Holies
was at Jerusalem, and therefore cannot be looked upon
in any other light than as the part of the sanctuary where
the god is most immediately present.
From ' this obscure topic we pass at once into clearer
light when we turn to consider the ordinary artificial
mark of a. Semitic sanctuary, viz. the sacrificial pillar,
cairn or rude altar. The sacred fountain and the sacred
tree are common symbols at sanctuaries, but they are not
invariably found, and in most cases they have but a
secondary relation to the ordinary ritual. In the more
advanced type of sanctuary the real meeting -place
between man and his god is the altar. The altar in its
developed form is a raised structure upon which sacrifices
are presented to the god. Most commonly the sacrifices
are fire-offerings, and the altar is the place where they
are burned, but in another type of ritual, of which the
Iioman ledisternium and the Hebrew oblation of shewbread
are familiar examples, the altar is simply a table on which
a meal is spread before the deity. Whether fire is used
or not is a detail in the mode of presentation and does
not affect the essence of the sacrificial act. In either
case the offering consists of food, " the bread of God "
^ The possibility of this can hardly be disputed when we think of thi;
temple of Apollo at Delos, where the holy cave is the original sanctuary.
For this was a jjlace of worship wliich the Greeks took over from the
Phoenicians.
184 ALTARS AND
LECT. V.
as it is called in the Hebrew ritual/ and there is no
real difference between a table and altar. Indeed the
Hebrew altar of burnt-offering is called the table of the
Lord, while conversely the table of shewbread is called
an altar.^
The table is not a very primitive article of furniture/
and this circumstance alone is enough to lead us to suspect
that the altar was not originally a raised platform on
which a sacrificial meal could be set forth. In Arabia,
where sacrifice by fire is almost unknown, we find no
proper altar, but in its place a rude pillar or heap of
stones, beside which the victim is slain, the blood being
poured out over the stone or at its base.'* This ritual of
the blood is the essence of the offering ; no part of the
flesh falls as a rule to the god, but the whole is distributed
among the men who assist at the sacrifice. The sacred
stones, which are already mentioned by Herodotus, are
called anscih (sing, noiib), i.e. stones set up, pillars. We
also find the name ghariy, " blood-bedaubed," with reference
to the ritual just described. The meaning of this ritual
will occupy us later ; meantime the thing to be noted
is that the altar is only a modification of the nosb, and
that the rude Arabian usage is the primitive type out
of which all the elaborate altar ceremonies of the more
cultivated Semites grew. Whatever else was done in
connection with a sacrifice, the primitive rite of sprinkling
or dashing the blood against the altar, or allowing it to
flow down on the ground at its base, was hardly ever
^Lev. xxi. 8, 17, etc.; cf. Lev. iii. 11.
-Mai. i. 7, 12 ; Ezek. xli. 22 ; cf. Wellhausen, Prolegomena, p. 69. Tlie
same word C]")!?) is used of setting a table and disposing the pieces of the
sacrifice on the fire-altar.
^ The old Arabian sofra is merely a skin spread on the gronnd, not a
raised table.
'Wellhausen, Held., p. 113; cf. ibid. pp. 39 s^. 99.
LECT. V. SACRIFICIAL STONES. 185
omitted ; ^ and this practice was not peculiar to the
Semites but was equally the rule with the Greeks and
Romans, and indeed with the ancient nations generally.
As regards fire sacrifices we shall find reason to doubt
whether the hearth on which the sacred flesh was con-
sumed was originally identical with the sacred stone or
cairn over which the sacrificial blood was allowed to flow.
It seems probable, for reasons that cannot be stated at
this point, that the more modern form of altar, which
could be used both for the ritual of the blood and as a
sacred hearth, was reached by combining two operations
which originally took place apart. But in any case it is
certain that the original altar among the northern Semites,
as well as among the Arabs, was a great stone or cairn
at which the blood of the victim was shed. At Jacob's
covenant with Laban no other altar appears than the
cairn of stones beside which the parties to the compact
ate together; in the ancient law of Ex. xx. 24, 25, it is
prescribed that the altar must be of earth or of unhewn
stone ; and that a single stone sufficed appears from 1
Sam. xiv. 32 sqq., where the first altar built by Saul is
simply the great stone which he caused to be rolled unto
him after the battle of Michmash, that the people might
slay their booty of sheep and cattle at it, and not eat the
flesh with the blood. The simple shedding of the blood by
the stone or altar consecrated the slaughter and made it a
legitimate sacrifice. Here, therefore, there is no difference
between the Hebrew altar and the Arabian nosh or gharly.
^ There were indeed altars at which no animal sacrifices were presented.
Such are, among the Hebrews, the altar of incense and the table of shewbread,
and among the Phoenicians the altar at Paphos (Tac, Hist. ii. 3) ; perliaps
also the "altar of the pious" at Delos (Porph., De Abst. ii. 28) was of
Phoenician origin. In later times certain exceptional sacrifices were burned
alive or slain without effusion of blood, but this does not touch the general
l)rinciple.
186 THE HEBREW " lect. v.
Monolithic pillars or cairns of stone are frequently
mentioned in the more ancient parts of the Old Testament
as standing at sanctuaries/ generally in connection with
a sacred legend about the occasion on wliich they were
set up by some famous patriarch or hero. In the Biblical
story they usually appear simply as memorial pillars,
without any definite ritual significance ; but this is due
to the fact that the narratives are conformed to the
standpoint of the law and of the later prophets, who
look on the ritual use of sacred pillars as idolatrous.
The condemnation of their use by the Hebrew prophets
is the best evidence that such pillars had an important
place among the appurtenances of Canaanite temples,^ and
as Hosea (iii. 4) speaks of the masseha, or pillar, as an
indispensable feature in the sanctuaries of northern Israel
in his time, we may be sure that by the mass of the
Hebrews the pillars of Shechem, Bethel, Gilgal and other
northern shrines were looked upon not as mere memorials
of historical events, but as necessary parts of the ritual
apparatus of a place of worship. That the special ritual
acts connected with the Canaanite masseha were essentially
the same as in the case of the Arabian nosh may be
gathered from Philo Byblius, who, in his pseudo-historical
manner, speaks of a certain Usous who consecrated two
pillars to fire and wind, and paid worship to them, pouring
out libations to them of the blood of beasts taken in
hunting.^ From these evidences, and especially from the
fact that libations of the same kind are applied to both,
•* At Shechem, Josh. xxiv. 26 ; Bethel, Gen. xxviii. 18 sqq. ; Gilead,
(Ramoth-GileaJ), Gen. xxxi. 45 sqq. ; Gilgal, Josh. iv. 5 ; Mizpeh, 1 Sam.
vii. 12 ; Gibson, 2 Sara. xx. 8 ; En-Rogel, 1 Kings i. 9.
2 Exod. xxxiv. 13 ; Deut. xii. 3 ; cf. Micah v. 13 (12). For pillars A.V.
generally gives, incorrectly, "images."
^Euseb., Prcej). Ev. i. 10. 10. Libations of blood are mentioned as a
heathenish rite in Psalm xvi. A.
LECT V. MASSEBA. 187
it seems clear that the altar is a differentiated form of the
primitive rude stone pillar, the nosh or masseha} But the
sacred stone is more than an altar, for in Hebrew and
Canaanite sanctuaries the altar, in its developed form as a
table or hearth, does not supersede the pillar ; the two are
found side by side at the same sanctuary, the altar as a
piece of sacrificial apparatus, and the pillar as a visible
symbol or embodiment of the presence of the deity, which
in process of time comes to be fashioned and carved in
various ways, till ultimately it becomes a statue or anthro-
pomorphic idol of stone, just as the sacred tree or post was
ultimately developed into an image of wood.
It has been disputed whether the sacred stone at
Semitic sanctuaries was from the first an object of
worship, a sort of rude idol in which the divinity was
somehow supposed to be present. It is urged that in
the patriarchal religion the masseha is a mere mark
without intrinsic relio'ious sis;nificance. But here the
answer is obvious,' that the original sense of the patriarchal
symbols cannot be concluded from the sense put upon
them by the Biblical writers, who lived many centuries
after these ancient sanctuaries were first founded, and
that, at the time when the oldest of these narratives
were written, the Canaanites and the great mass of the
Hebrews certainly treated the masseha as a sort of idol
or embodiment of the divine presence. Moreover Jacob's
pillar is more than a mere landmark, for it is anointed,
just as idols were in antiquity, and the pillar itself, not
the spot on which it stood, is called " the house of God," "
' For readers who do not know Hebrew it may be noted that nosh and
mas.^eba are derived from the same root (NSB, "set up"). Another name
for tlie pillar or cairn is 3''^'J, which occurs in place-names, both in Canaan
and am.ong the Aramaeans (Nisibis, "the pillars"); cf. Lagarde, Bildung
der Nomina, p. 95.
* Gen. xxviii. 22.
188 SACRED STONES. lect. v.
as if the deity were conceived actually to dwell in the
stone, or manifest himself therein to his worshippers.
And this is the conception which appears to have been
associated with sacred stones everywhere. When the
Arab daubed blood on the nosb his object was to bring
the offering into direct contact with the deity, and in like
manner the practice of stroking the sacred stone with the
hand is identical with the practice of touching or stroking
the garments or beard of a man in acts of supplication
before him.^ Here, therefore, the sacred stone is altar and
idol in one; and so Porphyry (De Ahst. ii. 56) in his
account of the worship of Duma in Arabia expressly
speaks of " the altar which they use as an idol." The
same conception must have prevailed among the Canaanites
before altar and pillar were differentiated from one another,
otherwise the pillar would have been simply changed into
the more convenient form of an altar, and there could have
been no reason for retaining both. So far as the evidence
from tradition and ritual goes, we can only think of the
sacred stone as consecrated by the actual presence of the
godliead, so that whatever touched it was brought into
immediate contact with the deity. How such a concep-
tion first obtained currency is a matter for which no direct
evidence is available, and which if settled at all can be
settled only by inference and conjecture. At this stage of
our enquiry it is not possible to touch on this subject
except in a provisional way. But some things may be
said which will at least tend to make the problem more
definite.
Let us note then that there are two distinct points to
be considered — (1) how men came to look on an artificial
structure as the symbol or abode of the god, (2) why the
particular artificial structure is a stone or a cairn of stones.
^ Wellhausen, p. 105 ; ibid. p. 52.
LECT. V. SACRED STONES. 189
(1) In tree worship and in the worship of fountains
adoration is paid to a thing which man did not make,
which has an independent life, and properties such as to
the savage imagination may well appear to be divine.
On the same analogy one can understand how natural
rocks and boulders, suited by their size and aspect to affect
the savage imagination, have acquired in various parts of
the world the reputation of being animated objects with
power to help and hurt man, and so have come to receive
religious worship. But the worship of artificial pillars
and cairns of stones, chosen at random and set up by man's
hand, is a very different thing from this. Of course not
the rudest savage believes that in setting up a sacred stone
he is making a new god ; what he does believe is that the
god comes into the stone, dwells in it or animates it, so that ly^
for practical purposes the stone is thenceforth an embodi-
ment of the god, and may be spoken of and dealt with as
if it were the god himself. But there is an enormous
difference between worshipping the god in his natural
embodiment, such as a tree or some notable rock, and
persuading him to come and take for his embodiment a
structure set up for him by the worshipper. From the
metaphysical point of view, which we are always tempted
to apply to ancient religion, the worship of stocks and
stones prepared by man's hand seems to be a much cruder
thing than the worship of natural life as displayed in a
fountain or a secular tree ; but practically the idea that
the godhead consents to be present in a structure set
for him by his worshippers implies a degree of intimacy
and permanency in the relations between man and the
being he adores which marks an advance on the
worship of natural objects. It is true that the rule
of Semitic worship is that the artificial symbol can
only be set up in a place already consecrated by
190 SACRED STONES lect. v.
tokens of the divine presence ; but the sacred stone is not
merely a token that the place is frequented by a god, it
is also a permanent pledge that in this place he consents
to enter into stated relations with men and accept their
service.
(2) That deities like those of ancient heathenism, which
were not supposed to be omnipresent, and which were
commonly thought of as having some sort of corporeal
nature, could enter into a stone for the convenience of
their worshippers, seems to us a fundamental difhculty,
but was hardly a difficulty that would be felt by primitive
man, who has most elastic conceptions of what is possible.
When the principle is once granted that the god is willing
to meet with man in the way just described, there does
not seem to be any reason in the nature of things for
choosing: one form of embodiment rather than another.
When we speak of an idol we generally think of an image
presenting a likeness of the god, because our knowledge of
heathenism is mainly drawn from races which had made
some advance in the plastic arts, and used idols shaped in
such a way as to suggest the appearance and attributes
which legend ascribed to each particular deity. But there
is no reason in the nature of things why the physical
embodiment which the deity assumes for the convenience
of his worshipper should be a copy of his proper form, and
in the earliest times to which the worship of sacred stones
goes back there was evidently no attempt to make the idol
a simulacrum. A cairn or rude stone pillar is not a
portrait of anything, and I take it that we shall go on
altogether false lines if we try to explain its selection as a
divine symbol by any consideration of what it looks like.
Even when the arts had made considerable progress the
Semites felt no need to fashion their sacred symbols into
likenesses of the gods. Melcarth was worshipped at Tyre in
LECT. V. AS DIVINE SYMBOLS. 191
the form of two pillars/ and at the great temple of Paphos,
down to Eoman times, the idol was not an anthropomorphic
image of Astarte but a conical stone.^ These antique
forms were not retained from want of plastic shill, or
because there were not well-known types on which images
of the various gods could be and often were constructed ;
for we see from the second commandment that likenesses
of things celestial, terrestrial and aquatic were objects of
worship in Canaan from a very early date. It was simply
not thought necessary that the symbol in which the divinity
was present should be like the god.
Phoenician votive cippi were often adorned with rude
figures of men, animals and the like, as may be seen in the
series of such monuments dedicated to Tanith and Baal
Hamman which are depicted in the Corpus Inscr. Scm.
These figures, which are often little better than hierogly-
phics, served, like the accompanying inscriptions, to indicate
the meaning of the cippus and the deity to which it was
devoted. An image in like manner declares its own
meaning better than a mere pillar, but the chief idol of a
great sanctuary did not require to be explained in this
way ; its position showed what it was without either figure
or inscription. It is probable that among the Phoenicians
and Hebrews, as among the Arabs at the time of Mohammed,
portrait images, such as are spoken of in the second com-
mandment, were mainly small gods for private use. For
public sanctuaries the sacred pillar or ashera sufficed.
1 Herod., ii. 44. Twin pillars stood also before the temples of Paphos and
Hierapolis, and Solomon set up two brazen pillars before his temple at
Jerusalem. As he named them "The Stablisher " and ' ' lu him is strength,"
they were doubtless symbols of Jehovah.
^ l^c. , Hist. ii. 2. Other examples are the cone of Elaf;abalus at Emesa
(Herodian, v. 3, 5) and that of Zeus Casius. More in Zoega, De obeliscis,
p. 203. The cone at Emesa was believed to have fallen from heaven, like the
idol of Artemis at Ephesus and other ancient and very sacred idols in
antiquity.
192 SACRED STONES lect. v.
The worship of sacred stones is often spoken of as if it
belonged to a distinctly lower type of religion than the
worship of images. It is called fetichism — a merely
popular term, which conveys no precise idea, but is vaguely
supposed to mean something very savage and contemptible.
And no doubt the worship of unshapen blocks is from the
artistic point of view a very poor thing, but from a purely
religious point of view its inferiority to image worship is
not so evident. The host in the mass is artistically as
much inferior to the Venus of Milo as a Semitic masseba
was, but no one will say that mediaeval Christianity is
a lower form of religion than Aphrodite worship. What
seems to be implied when sacred stones are spoken of as
fetiches is that they date from a time when stones were
regarded as the natural embodiment and proper form of
the gods, not merely as the embodiment which they took
up in order to receive the homage of their worshippers.
Such a view, I venture to think, is entirely without
foundation. Sacred stones are found in all parts of the
world and in the worship of gods of the most various kinds,
so that their use must rest on some cause which was
operative in all primitive religions. But that all or most
ancient gods were originally gods of stones, inhabiting
natural rocks or boulders, and that artificial cairns or pillars
are imitations of these natural objects, is against evidence
and quite incredible. Among the Semites the sacred pillar
is universal, but the instances of the worship of rocks and
stones in situ are neither numerous nor prominent, and
the idea of founding a theory of the origin of sacred stones
in general upon them could hardly occur to any one, except
on the perfectly gratuitous supposition that the idol or
symbol must necessarily be like the god.^
^ The stone of al-Lat at Taif, in which the goddess was supposed to dwell,
is identified by local tradition with a mass which seems to be a natural block
LECT. V. AND FETICH WORSHIP, 193
The notion that the sacred stone is a simulacrum of
the god seems also to be excluded by the observation that
several pillars may stand together as representatives of a
single deity. Here, indeed, the evidence must be sifted
with some care, for a god and a goddess were often
worshipped together, and then each would have a pillar.^
But this kind of explanation does not cover all the cases.
In the Arabian rite described in Herod, iii. 8, two deities
are invoked, but seven sa credstones are anointed with
blood, and a plurality of sacred stones round which the
worshippers circled in a single act of worship are frequently
spoken of in Arabian poeti-y."^ Similarly in Canaan the
place - name Anathoth means images of 'Anath in the
in situ, though not one of unusual size or form. See my Kinship, p. 293, and
Doughty, ii. 515. At 'Okaz the saered circle was performed round rocks
(soht'ir, Yaciit, iii. 705), presumably the remarkable group which I described
in 1880 in a letter to the Scotsman newspaper. " In the S.E. corner of the
small plain, which is barely two miles across, rises a hill of loose granite
blocks, crowned by an enormous pillar standing quite erect and flanked by
lower masses. I do not think that this pillar can be less than 50 or 60 feet
in height, and its extraordinary aspect, standing between two lesser guards
on either side, is the first thing that strikes the eye on nearing the plain."
The rock of Dusares, referred to by Steph. Byz., is perliaps the cliff with a
waterfall which has been already mentioned {supra, p. 153), and so may be
compared with the rock at Kadesh from which the fountain gushed. The
sanctity of rocks from which water flows, or of rocks that form a sacred grotto,
plainly cannot be used to explain the origin of sacred cairns and pillars
which have neither water nor cavern.
That the phrase "Rock of Israel, " applied to Jehovah, has anything to do
with stone worship may legitimately be doubted. The use of baetylia, or
small portable stones to which magical life was ascribed, hardly belongs to
the present argument. The idol Abnil at Nisibis is simply "the Cippus of
El " (Assem. i. 27).
1 Cf. Kinship, p. 293 sqq. p. 262. Whether the two ghari at Hira and
Faid (Wellh., p. 40) belong to a pair of gods, or are a double image of one
deity, like the twin pillars of Heracles-Melcarth at Tyre, cannot be decided.
Wellhausen inclines to the latter view, citing Hamdsa, 190. 15. But in
Arabic idiom the two 'Ozzas may mean al-'Ozza and her companion goddess
al-Lat. Mr. C. Lyall suggests the reading gharlyaini.
^ Wellh., Jfeid. p. 99. The poets often seem to identify the god with
one of the stones, as al-'Ozza was identified with one of the three trees at
Nakhla. The ansab stantl beside the god {Taj. iii. 560, 1. 1) or round him,
which probably means that the idol proper stood in the midst. In the verse
194 OPvIGIN OF LECT. V.
plural ; and at Gilgal there were twelve sacred pillars
according to the number of the twelve tribes/ as at Sinai
twelve pillars were erected at the covenant sacrifice.^
Twin pillars of Melcarth have already been noticed at
Tyre, and are familiar to us as the " pillars of Hercules "
in connection with the Straits of Gibraltar.
Another view taken of sacred pillars and cippi is that
they are images, not of the deity, but of bodily organs taken
as emblems of particular powers or attributes of deity,
especially of life-giving and reproductive power. I will
say something of this theory in a note ; but as an explana-
tion of the origin of sacred stones it has not even a show
of plausibility. Men did not begin by worshipping
emblems of divine powers, they brought their homage and
offerings to the god himself. If the god was already con-
ceived as present in the stone, it was a natural exercise of
the artistic faculty to put something on the stone to indi-
cate the fact ; and this something, if the god was anthro-
pomorphically conceived, might either be a human figure,
or merely an indication of important parts of the human
figure. At Tabfda in Arabia, for instance, a sort of crown
was sculptured on the stone of Al-Lat to mark her head.
Tn like manner other parts of the body may be rudely
designated, particularly sucli as distinguish sex. But that
the sacred cippus, as such, is not a sexual emblem is
plain from the fact that exactly the same kind of
of al-Farazdac, Agh. xix. 3, 1. 30, to which Wellhausen calls attention, the
Oxford MS. of the Nacaid and that of the late Spitta-Bey read, 'aid hina Id
tuhyd l-banuHi iva-idhhimiu 'uhufun 'aid 'l-anmbi hawla 'l-mudawwari, and
the scholia explain al-mudawioar as sanam yadiiriina hawlahu. In the
line of al-A'sha (Ibn Hisham, 256. 8 ; Morg. Forsch. p. 258), the god who is
\\hme\i mamuh, "set up as a pillar," is yet called '^ dhu 'l-nusub." It is
impossible to believe that this distinction between one stone and the rest is
primitive.
1 Josh. iv. 20. These stones are probably identical with the stone-idols
(A.V. "(quarries") of Judg. iii. 19, 26.
- Exod. xxiv. 4.
LECT. V. SACRED STONES. 195
pillar or cone is used to represent gods and goddesses
indifferently.-^
On a review of all these theories it seems most probable
that the choice of a pillar or cairn as the primitive idol
was not dictated by any other consideration than con-
venience for ritual purposes. The stone or stone-heap was
a convenient mark of the proper place of sacrifice, and at
the same time, if the deity consented to be present at it,
provided the means for carrying out the ritual of the sacri-
ficial blood. Further than this it does not seem possible
to go, till we know why it was thought so essential to
bring the blood into immediate contact with the god
adored. This question belongs to the subject of sacrifice,
which I propose to commence in the next lecture.
^ See Additional Note E, Phallic Symbols.
LECTURE VL
SACEIFICE PRELIMINAEY SURVEY.
We have seen in the course of the last lecture that the
practices of ancient religion require a fixed meeting-place
between the worshippers and their god. The choice of
such a place is determined in the first instance by the
consideration that certain spots are the natural haunts of
a deity, and therefore holy ground. But for most rituals
it is not sufiicient that the worshipper should present his
service on holy ground ; it is necessary that he should
come into contact with the god himself, and this he
believes himself to do when he directs his homage to a
natural object, like a tree or a sacred fountain, which
is believed to be the actual seat of the god and embodi-
ment of a divine life, or when he draws near to an
artificial mark of the immediate presence of the deity.
In the oldest forms of Semitic religion this mark is a
sacred stone, which is at once idol and altar ; in later
times the idol and the altar stand side by side, and the
original functions of the sacred stone are divided between
them ; the idol represents the presence of the god, and the
altar serves to receive the gifts of the worshipper. Both
are necessary to constitute a complete sanctuary, because
a complete act of worship implies not merely that the
worshipper comes into the presence of his god with gestures
of homage and words of prayer, but also that he lays before
the deity some material oblation. In antiquity an act of
19t>
LECT. VI.
SACRIFICE. 197
worship was a formal operation iu which certain prescribed
rites and ceremonies must be duly observed. And among
these the oblation at t!ie altar had so central a place that jX
among the Greeks and Eomans the words lepovpyla and
sacrijicium, which in their primary application denote
any action within the sphere of things sacred to the gods,
and so cover the whole field of ritual, were habitually used,
like our English word sacrifice, of those oblations at the
altar round which all other parts of ritual turned. In
English idiom there is a further tendency to narrow the l^
word sacrifice to such oblations as involve the slaughter
of a victim. In the Authorised Version of the Bible
" sacrifice and offering " is the usual translation of the
Hebrew z6bah uminha, that is " bloody and bloodless
oblations." For the purposes of the present discussion,
however, it seems best to include both kinds of oblation v/
under the term " sacrifice ; " for a comprehensive term is
necessary, and the word " offering," which naturally sug-
gests itself as an alternative, is somewhat too wide, as it
may properly include not only sacrifices but votive offerings,
of treasure images and the like, which form a distinct
class from offerings at the altar.
Why sacrifice is the typical form of all complete acts
of worship in the antique religions, and what the sacrificial •
act means, is an involved and difficult problem. The
problem does not belong to any one religion, for sacrifice
is equally important among all early peoples in all parts ,
of the world where religious ritual has reached any con-
siderable development. Here, therefore, we have to deal
with an institution that must have been shaped by the
action of general causes, operating very widely and under
conditions that were common in primitive times to all
races of mankind. To construct a theory of sacrifice
exclusively on the Semitic evidence would be unscientific
198 THE LEVITICAL lect. vi.
and misleading, but for the present purpose it is right to
put the facts attested for the Semitic peoples in the fore-
ground, and to call in the sacrifices of other nations to
confirm or modify the conclusions to which we are led.
For some of the main aspects of the subject the Semitic
evidence is very full and clear, for others it is fragmentary
and unintelligible without help from what is known about
other rituals.
Unfortunately the only system of Semitic sacrifice of
which we possess a full account is that of the second
temple at Jerusalem ; ^ and though the ritual of Jerusalem
as described in the Book of Leviticus is undoubtedly based
on very ancient tradition, going back to a time when there
was no substantial difference, in point of form, between
Hebrew sacrifices and those of the surrounding nations, the
system as we have it dates from a time when sacrifice was
no longer the sum and substance of worship. In the long
years of Babylonian exile the Israelites who remained true
to the faith of Jehovah had learned to draw nigh to their
God without the aid of sacrifice and offering, and, when
they returned to Canaan, they did not return to the old
type of religion. They built an altar indeed, and restored
1 The detailed ritual laws of the Pentateuch belong to the post-exilic
document commonly called the Priestly Code, which was adopted as the
law of Israel's religion at Ezra's reformation (444 B.C.). To the Priestly
Code belong the Book of Leviticus, together with the cognate parts of the
adjacent Books, Exod. xxv.-xxxi., xxxv.-xl., and Numb, i.-x., xv.-xix.,
.xxv.-xxxvi. (with some inconsiderable exceptions). With the Code is
associated an account of the sacred history from Adam to Joshua, and some
ritual matter is found in the historical sections of the work, especially in
Exod. xii., where the law of the Passover is mainly priestly, and represents
post-exilic usage. The law of Deuteronomy (seventh cent. B.C.) and the
older codes of Exod. xx.-xxiii., xxxiv., have little to say about the rules of
ritual, which in old times were matters of priestly tradition and not incor-
porated in a law-book. A just view of the sequence and dates of the several
parts of the Pentateuch is essential to the historical study of Hebrew religion.
Eeaders to whom this subject is new may refer to Wellhausen's Prolegomena
(Eng. Tr., Edin. 1883), and to the article " Pentateuch," i?nc?/c. Brit., 9th
ed., or to my Old Test, in the Jewish Church (Edin. 1881).
LECT. VI. SACRIFICES. 199
its ritual on the lines of old tradition, so far as these could
be reconciled with the teaching of the prophets and the
Deuteronomic law — especially with the principle that there
was but one sanctuary at which sacrifice could be accept-
ably offered. But this principle itself was entirely
destructive of the old importance of sacrifice, as the stated
means of converse between God and man. In the old
time every town had its altar, and a visit to the local
sanctuary was the easy and obvious way of consecrating
every important act of life. No such interweaving of
sacrificial service with everyday religion was possible
under the new law, nor was anything of the kind at-
tempted. The worsliip of the second temple was an
antiquarian resuscitation of forms which had lost their
intimate connection with the national life, and therefore
had lost the greater part of their original significance.
The Book of Leviticus, with all its fulness of ritual detail,
does not furnish any clear idea of the place which each
kind of altar service held in the old religion, when all
worship took the form of sacrifice. And in some parti-
culars there is reason to believe that the desire to avoid
all heathenism, the necessity for giving expression to new '
religious ideas, and the growing tendency to keep the
people as far as possible from the altar and make sacrifice
the business of a priestly caste, had introduced into the
ritual features unknown to more ancient practice.
The three main types of sacrifice recognised by the
Levitical law are the whole burnt - offering ( 'ola), the
sacrifice followed by a meal of which the flesh of the victim
formed the staple (shdem, zdhah), and the sin - offering
(hattdth), with an obscure variety of the last named called
asham (A.V. " trespass-offering "). Of these 'diet and z^bah
are frequently mentioned in the older literature, and they
are often spoken of together, as if all animal sacrifices
200 THE MATERIAL LECT. VI.'
fell under one or the other head. The use of sacrifice as
an atonement for sin is also recognised in the old literature,
especially in the case of the burnt-offering, but there is
little or no trace of a special kind of ofi'ering appropriated
for this purpose before the time of Ezekiel.^ The formal
distinctions with regard to Hebrew sacrifices that can be
clearly made out from the pre - exilic literature appear
to be —
(1) The distinction between animal and vegetable
oblations {z6hah and minha).
(2) The distinction between offerings that were consumed
by fire and such as were merely set forth on the sacred
table (the shewbread).
(3) The distinction between sacrifices in which the
consecrated gift is wholly made over to the god, to be
consumed on the altar or otherwise disposed of in his
service, and those at which the god and his worshippers
partake together in the consecrated thing. To the latter
class belong the zebahim, or ordinary animal sacrifices, in
which a victim is slain, its blood poured out at the altar,
and the fat of the intestines with certain other pieces
burned, while the greater part of the flesh is left to the
offerer to form the material of a sacrificial banquet.
These three distinctions, which are undoubtedly ancient,
and applicable to the sacrifices of other Semitic nations,
suggest three heads under which a preliminary survey of
the subject may be conveniently arranged. But not till
we reach the third head shall we find ourselves brought
face to face with the deeper aspects of the problem of the
origin and significance of sacrificial worship.
^ See AVellhausen, Prolegoviena, chap. ii. The Hebrew designations of
the species of sacrifices are to be compared with those on the Carthaginian
tables of fees paid to priests for the various kinds of offerings ; C. I. S.
Nos. 165, 167 sqq., but the information given in these is so fragmentary
that it is difficult to make much ot it. See below, p. 219 ?i.
LECT. VI. OF SACRIFICE. 201
1. The 7naterial of sacrifice. The division of sacrifices
into animal and vegetable offerings involves the principle
that sacrifices — as distinct from votive offerings of garments,
weapons, treasure and the like — are drawn from edible
substances, and indeed from such substances as form the
ordinary staple of human food. The last statement is
strictly true of the Levitical ritual ; but, so far as the
flesh of animals is concerned, it was subject, even in the
later heathen rituals, to certain rare but important excep-
tions, unclean or sacred animals, whose fiesh was ordinarily
forbidden to men, being offered and eaten sacramentally on
very solemn occasions. We shall see by and by that in
the earliest times these extraordinary sacrifices had a very
great importance in ritual, and that on them depends the
theory of the earliest sacrificial meals; but, as regards later
times, the Hebrew sacrifices are sufficiently typical of the
ordinary usage of the Semites generally. The four-footed
animals from which the Levitical law allows victims to be
selected, are the ox the sheep and the goat, that is, the
" clean " domestic quadrupeds which men were allowed to
eat. The same quadrupeds are named upon the Cartha-
ginian inscriptions that give the tariff of sacrificial fees to
be paid at the temple,^ and in Lucian's account of the
Syrian ritual at Hierapolis." The Israelites neither ate nor
sacrificed camels, but among the Arabs the camel was
common food and a common offering. The swine, on the
other hand, which was commonly sacrificed and eaten in
Greece, was forbidden food to all the Semites,^ and occurs
as a sacrifice only in certain exceptional rites of the kind
already alluded to. Deer, gazelles and other kinds of
game were eaten by the Hebrews, but not sacrificed, and
from Deut. xii. 16 we may conclude that this was an
1 C. I. S. Nos. 165, 167. - Bea Syria, liv.
3 Lucian, ut sup. (Syrians) ; Sozoinen, vi. -38 (all Saracens).
202 THE MATERIAL lect. vi.
ancient rule. Among the Arabs, in like manner, a gazelle
was regarded as an imperfect oblation, a shabby substitute
for a sheep.^ As regards birds, the Levitical law admits
pigeons and turtle-doves, but only as holocausts and in
certain purificatory ceremonies.^ Birds seem also to be
mentioned in the Carthaginian sacrificial lists ; what is
said of them is very obscure, but it would appear that they
might be used either for ordinary sacrifices (shelem halll)
or for special purposes piacular and oracular. That the
quail was sacrificed to the Tyrian Baal appears from
Athenaeus, ix. 47, p. 392f/.
Fish again were eaten by the Israelites, but not
sacrificed ; among their heathen neighbours, on the
contrary, fish — or at least certain kinds of fish — were
forbidden food, and were sacrificed only in exceptional
cases.^
Among the Hebrew offerings drawn from the vegetable
kingdom, meal wine and oil take the chief place,* and
these were also the chief vegetable constituents of man's
1 Wellh., p. 112; Harith, Mo'all. 69; especially Lisan, vi. 211. The
reason of this rule, and certain exceptions, will appear in the sequel.
^ Lev. i. 14, xii. 6, 8, xiv. 22, xv. 14, 29 ; Numb, vi; 10. Two birds,
of which one is slain and its blood used for lusti-ation, appear also in the
ritual for cleansing a leper, or a house that has been affected with leprosy
(Lev. xiv. 4 sq., 49 sq.). Further, the turtle-dove and nestling (pigeon)
appear in an ancient covenant ceremony (Gen. xv. 9 sqq. ). The fact that
the dove was not used by the Hebrews for any ordinary sacrifice, involving a
sacrificial meal, can hardly be, in its origin, independent of the sacrosanct
character ascribed to tliis bird in the religion of the heathen Semites. The
Syrians would not eat doves, and their very touch made a man unclean for
a day {Dea Syria, liv.). In Palestine also the dove was sacred with the
Phoenicians and Philistines, and on this superstition is based the common
Jewish accusation against the Samaritans, that they were worshippers of the
dove (see for all this Bochart, Hierozoicon, II. i. 1). Nay, sacred doves that
may not be harmed are found even at Mecca. In legal times the dove was
of course a "clean" bird to the Hebrews, but it is somewhat remarkable
tliat we never read of it in the Old Testament as an article of diet — not even
in 1 Kings v. 2 sqq. (A.V. iv. 22 sg^.)— though it is now one of the
commonest table-birds all over the East.
^ See below, p. 274. * Cf. Micah vi. 7 with Lev. ii. 1 sqq.
LECT. VI. OF SACRIFICE. 203
daily food.^ In the lands of the olive, oil takes the place that
butter and other animal fats hold among northern nations,
and accordingly among the Hebrews, and seemingly also
among the Pha3nicians,^ it was customary to mingle oil
with the cereal oblation before it was placed upon the
altar, in conformity with the usage at ordinary meals.
In like manner no cereal offering was complete without
salt,^ which, for physiological reasons, is a necessary of life
to all who use a cereal diet, though among nations that
live exclusively on flesh and milk it is not indispensable
and is often dispensed with. Wine, which as Jotham's
parable has it, " cheereth gods and men " * was added to
whole burnt-offerings and to the oblation of victims of
whose flesh the worshippers partook.^ The sacrificial use
of wine, without which no feast was complete, seems to
have been universal wherever the grape was known,^ and
even penetrated to Arabia, where wine was a scarce and
costly luxury imported from abroad. Milk, on the other
hand, though one of the commonest articles of food among
the Israelites, has no place in Hebrew sacrifice, but
libations of milk were offered by the Arabs, and also at
Carthage.^ Their absence among the Hebrews may
perhaps be explained by the rule of Ex. xxiii. 18, Lev.
ii. 11, which excludes all ferments from presentation at
the altar ; for in hot climates milk ferments rapidly and
is generally eaten sour.^ The same principle covers the
'Psalm civ. 14 sg.
^In C. I. S. No. 165, 1. 14, the word y?2 is to be interpreted by the aid of
Lev. vii. 10, and understood of bread or meal moistened with oil.
3 Lev. ii. 13. *Jiulg. ix. 13. * Numb. xv. 5.
* An exception, Athen. xv. 48, in Greek sacrifices to the sun, where the
libation was of honey.
7 Wellh., p. Ill sq.; a. I. S. No. 165, 1. 14, No. 167, 1. 10.
* The rule against olfering fermented things on the altar was not observed
in northern Israel in all forms of sacrifice (Amos iv. 5), and traces of greater
freedom in this respect appear also in Lev. vii. 13, xxiii. 17. It is possible
that in its oldest form the legal prohibition of leaven applied only to the
204 THE MATERIAL lect. vi.
prohibition of " honey," ^ which term, like the modern
Arabic dibs, appears to include fruit juice inspissated by
boiling — a very important article of food in modern and
presumably in ancient Palestine. Fruit in its natural
state, however, was offered at Carthage,^ and was probably
admitted by the Hebrews in ancient times.^ Among the
Hebrews vegetable or cereal oblations were sometimes
presented by themselves, especially in the form of
first-fruits, but the commonest use of them was as an
accompaniment to an animal sacrifice. When the Hebrew
passover, to which Ex. xxiii. 18, xxxiv. 25, specially refer. In this
connection the prohibition of leaven is closely associated with the rule that
the fat and flesh must not remain over till the morning. For we shall find
by and by that a similar rule applied to certain Saracen sacrifices nearly
akin to the passover, which were even eaten raw, and had to be entirely
consumed befoi-e the sun rose. In this case the idea was that the efficacy
of the sacrifice lay in the living flesh and blood of the victim. Everything
of the nature of putrefaction was therefore to be avoided, and the connection
Ijetween leaven and putrefaction is obvious.
The only positive law against the sacrificial use of milk is that in Ex.
xxiii. 19, xxxiv. 26, "Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk."
Mother's milk is simply goat's milk, wliieh was tliat generally used (Prov.
xxvii. 27), and flesh seethed in milk is still a common Arabian dish ; sour
milk is specified as the kind employed in P. E. F. Qu. St. 1888, p. 188.
The context of the passages in Exodus shows that some ancient form of sacri-
fice is referred to ; cf. Judg. vi. 19, where we have a holocaust of sodden flesh.
A sacrificial gift sodden in sour milk would evidently be of the nature of
fermented food, and on this principle I have formerly accounted for its prohibi-
tion (0. 7\ in J. Ch. p. 438). But I do not now feel sure that this goes
to the root of the matter ; for there seem to be indications that many primi-
tive peoples regard milk as a kind of equivalent for blood, and as containing
a sacred life. Thus to eat a kid seethed in its mother's milk might be taken
as equivalent to eating "with the blood," and be forbidden to the Hebrews
along with the bloody sacraments of the heathen, of which more hereafter.
^Lev. ii. 11. "-C. I. S. No. 166.
" The term hillt'dlm, applied in Lev. xix. 24 to the consecrated fruit
borne by a new tree in its fourth year, is applied in Judg. ix. 27 to the
Canaanite vintage feast at the sanctuary. The Carthaginian fruit-off"ering
consisted of a branch bearing fruit, like the " ethrog " of the modern Jewish
feast of Tabernacles. The use of "goodly fruits " at this festival is ordained
in Lev. xxiii. 40, but their destination is not specified. In Carthage,
though the inscription that speaks of the rite is fragmentary, it seems to
be clear that the fruit was offered at the altar, for incense is mentioned
with it ; and this, no doubt, is the original sense of the Hebrew rite also.
LECT. VI. OF SACRIFICE. 205
ate flesh, he ate bread with it and drank wine, and when
he offered flesh on the table of his God, it was natural that
he should add to it the same concomitants which were
necessary to make up a comfortable and generous meal.
Of these various oblations animal sacrifices are by far
the most important in all the Semitic countries. They
are in fact the typical sacrifice, so that among the
Phoenicians the word zdhah, which properly means a
slaughtered victim, is applied even to offerings of bread
and oil.^ That cereal offerings have but a secondary
place in ritual is not unintelligible in connection with
the history of the Semitic race. For all the Semites
were originally nomadic, and the ritual of the nomad
Arabs and the settled Canaanites has so many points in
common that there can be no question that the main
lines of sacrificial worship were fixed before any part of
the Semitic stock had learned agriculture and adopted
cereal food as its ordinary diet. It must be observed
however that animal food — or at least the flesh of domestic
animals, which are the only class of victims admitted
among the Semites as ordinary and regular sacrifices —
was not a common article of diet even among the
nomad Arabs. The everyday food of the nomad con-
sisted of milk, of game, when he could get it, and to a
limited extent of dates and meal — the latter for the most
part being attainable only by purchase or robbery. Flesh
of domestic animals was eaten only as a luxury or in
times of famine.^ If therefore the sole principle that
1 C. /. »S'. No. 165, 1. 12 ; 167, 1. 9. In the context "iv can hardly mean
game, but must be taken, as in Josh. ix. 11 sqq., of cereal food, the ordinary
"provision " of agricultural peoples.
^Seethe old narratives passim, and compare Doughty, i. 325 sq. The
statement of Frankel, Frenulworter, p. 31, that the Arabs lived mainly on
Hesh, overlooks the importance of milk as an article of diet among all the
pastoral tribes, and must also be taken with the (iualitication that the flesh used
as ordinary food was that of wild beasts taken in hunting. On this point
I/'
206 SACRIFICE AS THE lect. vi.
governed the choice of the material of sacrifices had been
that they must consist of human food, milk and not flesh
would have had the leading place in nomad ritual, whereas
its real place is exceedingly subordinate. To remove this
difficulty it may be urged that, as sacrifice is food offered
to the gods, it ought naturally to be of the best and most
luxurious kind that can be attained ; but on this principle
it is not easy to see why game should be excluded, for a
gazelle is not worse food than an old camel.-^ The true
solution of the matter lies in another direction, and cannot
be given till we come to look at the nature and significance
of the sacrificial feast. But that this is the quarter in
which the solution must be sought may, I think, be
made probable from the facts already before us. Anions
the Hebrews no sacrificial meal was provided for the
worshippers unless a victim was sacrificed ; if the oblation
was purely cereal it was wholly consumed either on the
altar or by the priests, in the holy place, i.e. by the
representatives of the deity.^ In like manner the only
Arabian meal-offering about which we have particulars,
that of the god Ocaisir,^ was laid before the idol in
handfuls. The poor, however, were allowed to partake
of it, being viewed no doubt as the guests of the deity.
The cereal offering therefore has strictly the character of
the evidence is clear ; Pliny, H. N. vi. 161, "nomadas lacte et ferina came
uesci ; " Agatharchides ap. Diod. Sic. iii. 44. 2 ; Ammianus, xiv. 4 6
' ' uictas uniuersis caro ferina est lactisque abundans copia qua sustentantur • "
Nilus, p. 27. By these express statements we must interpret the vaguer
utterances of Diodorus (xix. 94. 9) and Agatharchides {ap. Diod. iii. 43. 5)
about the ancient diet of the Nabatteans : the " nourisliment supplied by
their herds " was mainly milk. Certain Arab tribes, like the modern Sleyb,
had no herds and lived wholly by hunting, and these perhaps are referred
to in what Agatharchides says of the Banizomenes, and in the Syriac life
of Simeon Stylites (Assemani, Mart. ii. 345), where at any rate besra
d'haiwdthd means game.
iCf. Gen. xxvii. 7. 2 Lev. ii. 3, v. 11, vi. 16 (E.V. 22).
^ Yacut S.V.; Wellh., p. 58 sq.
LECT. VI. FOOD OF THE GODS. 207
a tribute paid by the worshipper to his god, as indeed is
expressed by the name minha, whereas when an animal
is sacrificed, the sacrificer and the deity feast together, part
of the victim going to each. The predominance assigned in
ancient ritual to animal sacrifice corresponds to the predomi-
nance of the type of sacrifice which is not a mere payment
of tribute but an act of social fellowship between the deity
and his worshippers, and the point to be explained is why
this social meal always includes the flesh of a victim.
All sacrifices laid upon the altar were taken by the
ancients as being literally the food of the gods. The
Homeric deities " feast on hecatombs," ^ nay, particular
Greek gods have special epithets designating them as the
goat-eater, the ram-eater, the bull-eater, even "the cannibal,"
with allusion to human sacrifices.^ Among the Hebrews
the conception that Jehovah eats the flesh of bulls and
drinks the blood of goats, against which the author of
Psalm 1. protests so strongly, was never eliminated from
the ancient technical language of the priestly ritual, in
which the sacrifices are called nTha nrb, " the food of the
deity." In its origin this phrase must belong to the same
circle of ideas as Jotham's " wine which cheereth gods and
men." But in the higher forms of heathenism the crass
materialism of this conception was modified, in the case of
fire-offerings, by the doctrine that man's food must be
etherealised or sublimated into fragrant smoke before the
gods partake of it. This observation brings us to the
second of the points which we have noted in connection
with Hebrew sacrifice, viz. the distinction between sacrifices
that are merely set forth on the sacred table before the
deity, and such as are consumed by fire upon the altar.
2, The table of shewbread has its closest parallel in
the ledisternia of ancient heathenism, when a table laden
^ Iliad, ix. 531. ' tt.lyoifa.yi>;, Kpiolfayo;, rtscupoipdyas, Aiovvao; ufiriTTri;.
208 LECTISTERNIA AND lect. VI.
with meats was spread beside the idol. Such tables were
set in the great temple of Bel at Babylon/ and, if any
weight is to be given to the apocryphal story of Bel and
the Dragon in the Greek Book of Daniel, it was popularly
believed that the god actually consumed the meal provided
for hmi,^ a superstition that might easily hold its ground
by priestly connivance where the table was spread inside
a temple. A more primitive form of the same kind of
offering appears in Arabia, where the meal-offering to Ocaisir
is cast by handfuls at the foot of the idol, mingled with
the hair of the worshipper,^ and milk is poured over the
sacred stones. A narrative of somewhat apocryphal
colour, given without reference to his authority by Sprenger,*
has it that in the worship of 'Amm-anas in Southern
Arabia whole hecatombs were slaughtered and left to be
devoured by wild beasts. Apart from the exaggeration,
there may be something in this ; for the idea that sacred
animals are the guests or clients of the god is not alien to
Arabian thought,* and to feed them is an act of religion
in many heathen systems, especially where, as in Egypt,*^
the gods themselves are totem-deities, i.e. personifications or
1 Herod, i. 181, 183 ; Diod. Sic. ii. 9. 7.
- The story, so far as it has a basis in actual superstition, is probably-
drawn from Egyptian beliefs ; but in such matters Egypt and Babylon were
much alike ; Herod, i. 182.
^ The same thing probably applies to other Arabian meal -offerings, e.g.
the wheat and barley offered to Al-Kholasa (Azraci, p. 78). As the dove
was the sacred bird at Mecca, the epithet Mot'im al-tair, " he who feeds the
birds," applied to the idol that stood upon Marwa {ibid.), seems to point to
similar meal-offerings rather than to animal victims left lying before the
god. The "idol" made of hais, i.e. a mass of dates kneaded up with
butter and sour milk, which the B. Hanifa ate up in time of famine (see
the lexx. s.v. l~[yj), probably belonged to the widespread class of cereal
offerings shaped as rude idols and eaten sacramentally (Liebrecht, Zur
Volkshinde, p. 436, ZDMG. xxx. 539).
* Leh. Moh. iii. 457.
* See above, p. 134 sqq., and the goJ-name Mot'im al-tair in the last
note but one.
•^ Strabo, xvii. 1. 39 sq. (p. 812).
LECT. VI. SIMILAR OBLATIONS. 209
individual representations of the sacred character and
attributes which, in the purely totem stage of religion,
were ascribed without distinction to all animals of the
holy kind. Thus at Cynopolis in Egypt, where dogs were
honoured and fed with sacred food, the local deity was the
divine dog Anubis, and similarly in Greece, at the sanctuary
of the Wolf-Apollo (Apollo Lycius) of Sicyon, an old tradi-
tion preserved — though in a distorted form — the memory of
a time when flesh used to be set forth for the wolves.^ It
is by no means impossible that something of the same sort
took place at certain Arabian shrines, for we have already
learned how closely the gods were related to the jinn and
the jinn to wild animals, and the list of Arabian deities
includes a Lion-god (Yaghuth) and a Vulture-god (Nasr),'^
to whose worship rites like those described by Sprenger
would be altogether appropriate.
But, while it cannot be thought impossible that sacri-
ficial victims were presented on holy ground and left to be
devoured by wild beasts as the guests or congeners of the
gods, I confess that there seems to me to be no sufficient
evidence that such a practice had any considerable place
in Arabian ritual. The leading idea in the animal sacrifices
of the Semites, as we shall see by and by, was not that of
a gift made over to the god, but of an act of communion,
in which the god and his worshippers unite by partaking
together of the flesh and blood of a sacred victim. It
is true that in the case of certain very solemn sacrifices,
especially of piacula, to which class the sacrifices cited by
Sprenger appear to belong, the victim sometimes came to
^ Piuisaiiias, ii. 9. 7. The later rationalism which changed the Wolf-god
into a Wolf-slaj'er gave the story a corresponding twist by relating that the
flesh was poisoned, under the god's directions, with the leaves of a tree whose
trunk was j)reserved in the temple, like the sacred erica at Byblus.
2 See Kinship, ]>. 192, 209 ; Noldcke, ZDMG. 1886, p. 186. See also for
the Himyarite Vulture-god, ZDMG. xxix. 600, and compare the eagle
standard of Morra, Nabigha, iv. 7, Ahlw. =xxi. 7, Dcr,
210 THE ARABIAN LECT. vi.
be regarded as so sacred that the worshippers did not
venture to eat of it at all, but that the flesh was burned
or buried or otherwise disposed of in a way that secured it
from profanation ; and among the Arabs, who did not use
burning except in the case of human sacrifices, we can
quite well understand that one way of disposing of holy
flesh might be to leave it to be eaten by the sacred
animals of the god. On the whole, however, all the
well-authenticated accounts of Arabian sacrifice seem to
indicate that the original principle, that the worshippers
must actually eat of the sacred flesh, was very rigorously
held to.^ Wellhausen indeed is disposed to think that the
practice of slaughtering animals and leaving them beside
the altar to be devoured by wild beasts was not confined
to certain exceptional cults, but prevailed generally in the
case of the widespread class of sacrifices called 'atair
(sing, 'atira). According to Moslem tradition this name
was mainly applied to certain annual sacrifices presented
in the month Eajab, which originally corresponded to the
Hebrew Passover - month (Abib, Nisan).^ Here, therefore,
^ The evidence of Nilus is very important in this connection ; for the
interval between his time and that of the oldest native traditions is scarcely
sufficient to allow for the development of an extensive system of sacrifice
without a sacrificial meal ; infra, p. 320.
^ Cf. Wellhausen, p. 94 sq. To complete the parallelism of the Passover
with the Rajab ofl'erings, Wellhausen desiderates evidence that the 'atdir of
Rajab were firstlings. From the scholia to Harith's Moall. 69, it would
seem that they correspond rather to tithes, with which, and not with the
firstlings, I have compared them in my Prophets, p. 383, following Ewald,
Alterih. p. 398. The traditionists, e.g. Bokhari, vi. 207 (at the close of the
Kit. al-'acica), distinguish between firstlings (fara') and 'atlra, but the line
of distinction is not sharp. The lexicons ajiply the name farob, not only
to firstlings sacrificed while their flesh was still like glue {Llsdn, x. 120),
but also to the sacrifice of one beast in a hundred, which is what the
scholiast above cited understands by the 'atira. Conversely the Lisdn,
vi. 210, defines the 'atlra as a firstling [atcwal ma yuntaj) which was
sacrificed to the gods. If we could accept this statement without reserve,
in the general confusion of the later Arabs on the subject, it would supply
what Wellhausen desiderates.
LECT. VT. ATAIR. 211
we seem to have to do with a very ancient sacrificial
custom, older than the separation of the Hebrews from
the Arabs, and it is precisely in connection with such very
ancient and therefore very holy rites that we might not
unreasonably expect to find the victim invested with a
sanctity so peculiar that no part of its flesh might be
eaten. But the positive evidence that it was so is very
meagre, and admits of a different explanation. " It is
remarkable," says Wellhausen, " how often we hear of the
'atair lying around the altar-idol, and sometimes in poetical
comparisons the slain are said to be left lying on the
battlefield like 'atair." ^ But on the Arabian method of
sacrifice the carcases of the victims naturally lie on the
ground, beside the sacred stone, till the blood, which is the
god's portion, has drained into the ghabghah, or pit at its
foot, and till all the other ritual prescriptions have been
fulfilled.^ Thus at a great feast when many victims were
offered together, the scene would resemble a battlefield.
It is not therefore necessary to suppose that the 'atair
at Eajab were not used for a sacrificial feast ; and, as the
name 'atira seems to be also used in a more general sense
of any victim whose blood is applied to the sacred stones
at the sanctuary, it is hardly to be thought that there
was anything very exceptional in the form of the Eajab
ceremony.
It must be supposed that when gifts of food —
whether animal or cereal — were first presented at the
^ Wellh., p. 115 ; cf. the verses cited ihiJ. pp. 16, 56 ; and, for the poetical
comparisons, Ibn Hisham, 534. 4 ; Alcama, vi. 3 Soc.
^ Cf. the verses from Yficut, iv. 852, translated by Wellhausen, p. 53 sq.
In the verse about Sowa , ibid. p. 16, I am inclined to point tuzallu. At
a feast, when the sun was hot, it was the custom to shade the flesh that
it might not putrefy; see Maidani, i. 133 (the first prov. under l*- i).
Maidani uses Mi II., but the parallel passage in Al-Mofaddal, p. 262
(Constant. A. H. 1301), has also Conj. IV. in the same seuse.
212 LIBATIONS OF lect. vi.
shrines of the gods, the belief was that they were actually
consumed by the deity. To enquire at length into the
origin of such a belief would carry us too far from our
present subject and trench on the question of the ultimate
nature and origin of the gods of heathenism. I will only
V remark that when we find early races all over the world
possessed with the idea that their oblations; serve as food
for the gods, we must not try to explain this away by
allegorical theories, but must look for facts that will
account for the ritual in a plain straightforward way.
So far as I know such facts are found only in connection
with the totem system of belief, for in totemism the gifts
laid before the sacred animals are actually eaten. Thus
in all religions in which the gods have been developed
out of totems, the ritual act of laying food before the
deity is perfectly intelligible. Whether we are entitled
to invert the argument, and conclude that the universal
practice of offering oblations of food to the gods indi-
t/ cates that all heathen religions are based on totemism,
is another question, into which I cannot enter now.
But however this may be, the idea that the gods actually
consume the solid food that is deposited at their shrines is
too crude to subsist without modification beyond the savage
state of society ; the ritual may survive, but the sacrificial
gifts, which the god is evidently unable to dispose of him-
self, will come to be the perquisite of the priests, as in
the case of the shewbread, or of the poor, as in the meal
sacrifice to Ocaisir. In such cases the actual eating is
done by the guests of the deity, but the god himself may
still be supposed to partake of the meal in a subtle and
supersensuous way. It is interesting to note the gradations
of ritual that correspond to this modification of the original
idea.
In the more primitive forms of Semitic religion the
LECT. VI. BLOOD AND WINE. 213
difl&culty of conceiving that the gods actually partake of
food is partly got over by a predominant use of liquid
oblations ; for fluid substances, which sink in and disappear,
are more easily believed to be consumed by the deity than
obstinate masses of solid matter.
The libation, which holds quite a secondary place in the
more advanced Semitic rituals, and is generally a mere
accessory to a fire-offering, has great prominence among the
Arabs, to whom sacrifices by fire were practically unknown
except, as we shall see by and by, in the case of human
sacrifice. Its typical form is the libation of blood, the
subtle vehicle of the life of the sacrifice ; but milk, which
was used in ritual both by the Arabs and by the Phoeni-
cians, is also no doubt a very ancient Semitic libation. In
ordinary Arabian sacrifices the blood which was poured
over the sacred stone was all that fell to the god's part, the
whole flesh being consumed by the worshippers and their
guests ; and the early prevalence of this kind of oblation
appears from the fact that the word -[dj, " to pour," which in
Hebrew means to pour out a drink-offering, is in Arabic the
general term for an act of worship.
In the north Semitic ritual the most notable feature in
the libation, which ordinarily consisted of wine, but some-
times of water (1 Sam. vii. 6), is that it was not consumed
by fire, even when it went with a fire-offering. The Greeks
and Eomans poured the sacrificial wine over the flesh, but
the Hebrews treated it like the blood, pouring it out at the
base of the altar.^ In Ecclesiasticus the wine so treated is
even called " the blood of the grape," from which one is
tempted to conclude that here also blood is the typical
form of libation, and that wine is a surrogate for it, as
^ Ecclus. 1. 15 ; Jos., Ayiil. iii. 9. 4. Numb. xv. 7 is sometimes cited as
proving that in older times the wine was poured over the sacrificial flesh,
but see against this interpretation Numb, xxviii. 7.
214 LIBATIONS.
LECT. vr.
fruit-juice seems to have been in certain Arabian rites.^
It is true that the blood of the sacrifice is not called a
libation in Hebrew ritual, and in Psalm xvi. 4 " drink-
offerings of blood " are spoken of as something heathenish.
But this proves that such libations were known ; and that
the Hebrew altar ritual of the blood is essentially a drink-
offering appears from Psalm 1. 13, where Jehovah asks,
" "Will I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats ? "
and also from 2 Sam xxiii. 17, where David pours out as
a drink-offering the water from the well of Bethlehem,
refusing to drink " the blood of the men that fetched it in
jeopardy of their lives." Putting all this together, and
noting also that libations were retained as a chief part of
ritual in the domestic heathenism of the Hebrew women
in the time of Jeremiah,^ and that private service is often
more conservative than public worship, we are led to con-
clude (1) That the libation of blood is a common Semitic
practice, older than fire-sacrifices, and (2) That the libation
of wine is in some sense an imitation of, and a surrogate
for, the primitive blood-offering.
In Hebrew ritual oil is not a libation, but when used in
sacrifice serves to moisten and enrich a cereal offering. The
ancient custom of pouring oil on sacred stones ^ was presum-
ably maintained at Bethel according to the precedent set
by Jacob ; and even in the fourth Christian century the
Bordeaux pilgrim speaks of the " lapis pertusus " at Jerusa-
lem " ad quem ueniunt ludsei singulis annis et ungunt
eum ; " but, as oil by itself was not an article of food, the
1 Kinship, p. 261 sq. ; Wellh., p. 121.
^ Jer. xix. 13, xxxii. 29, xliv. 17, 18. With this worship on the house-
tops, cf. what Strabo, xvi. 4. 26, tells of the daily offerings of libations and
incense presented to the sun by the Nabatseans at an altar erected on the
house-tops. The sacrificial act must be done in the presence of the deity (cf.
Nilus, pp. 30, 117), and if the sun or the queen of heaven is worshipped, a
place open to the sky must be chosen.
* Gen. xxviii. 18 ; xxxv. 14.
LECT. VI. OIL OFFERINGS. 215
natural analogy to this act of ritual is to be sought in the
application of unguents to the hair and skin. The use of
unguents was a luxury proper to feasts and gala days, when
men wore their best clothes and made merry ; and from
Ps. xlv. 8 (E.V. 7) compared with Isa. Ixi. 3, we may con-
clude that the anointing of kings at their coronation is part
of the ceremony of investing them in the festal dress and
ornaments appropriate to their dignity on that joyous day
(cf. Cant. iii. 11). To anoint the head of a guest was a
hospitable act and a sign of honour ; it was the completion
of the toilet appropriate to a feast. Thus the sacred stone
or rude idol described by Pausanias (x. 24. 6) had oil poured
on it daily, and was crowned with wool at every feast.
We have seen that the Semites on festal occasions dressed
up their sacred poles, and they did the same with their
idols.^ With all this the ritual of anointing goes quite
naturally. But apart from this, the very act of applying
ointment to the sacred symbol had a religious significance.
The Hebrew word meaning to anoint {mashali) means
properly to wipe or stroke with the hand, which was used
to spread the unguent over the skin. Thus the anointing
of the sacred symbol is associated with the simpler form of
homage common in Arabia, in which the hand was passed
over the idol (tamassoh). In the oath described by Ibn
Hisham, p. 85, the parties dip their hands in unguent and
then wipe them on the Caaba. The ultimate source of the
use of unguents in religion will be discussed by and by in
connection with animal sacrifice.
The sacrificial use of blood, as we shall see hereafter,
is connected with a series of very important ritual ideas,
turning on the conception that the blood is a special seat of
the life. But primarily, when the blood is offered at the
altar, it is conceived to be drunk by the deity. Apart from
1 Ezek. xvi. 18.
l^
<L^
216 OFFERINGS lect. vi.
Psalm 1. 1 3 the direct evidence for this is somewhat scanty,
so far as the Semites are concerned ; the authority usually
appealed to is Maimonides, who states that the Sabians
looked on blood as the nourishment of the gods. So late
a witness would have little value if he stood alone, but
the expression in the Psalm cannot be mere rhetoric, and
the same belief appears among early nations in all parts
of the globe.^ Nor does this oblation form an exception
to the rule that the offerings of the gods consist of human
food, for many savages drink fresh blood by way of
nourishment, and esteem it a special delicacy.^
Among the Arabs, down to the age of Mohammed, blood
drawn from the veins of a living camel was eaten — in
a kind of blood pudding — in seasons of hunger, and
perhaps also at other times.^ We shall find however, as
we proceed, that sacrificial blood, which contained the life,
gradually came to be considered as something too sacred
to be eaten, and that in most sacrifices it was entirely
made over to the god at the altar. As all slaughter of
domestic animals for food was originally sacrificial among
the Arabs as well as among the Hebrews, this carried with
it the disuse of blood as an article of ordinary food ; and
1 See Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii, 346. The testimony of Maimonides
will come before us again.
- See, for America, Bancroft, Native Faces, i. .55, 492, ii. 344. In Africa
fresh blood is held as a dainty by all the negroes of the White Nile (Marno,
Reise, p. 79) ; it is largely drunk by Masai warriors (Thomson, p. 430) ; and
also by the Gallas, as various travellers attest. Among the Hottentots the
pure blood of beasts is forbidden to women but not to men ; Kolben, State
of the Cape, i. 205, cf. 203. In the last case we see that the blood is sacred
food. For blood-drinking among the Tartars, see Yule's Marco Polo, i. 254,
and the editor's note. Where mineral salt is not used for food, the drinking of
blood supplies, as Thomson remarks, an important constituent to the system.
* Maidani, ii. 119; Jiamasa, p. 645, last verse. From Jf/Zt. xvi. 107. 20,
one is led to doubt whether the practice was confined to seasons of famine,
or whether this kind of food was used more regularly, as was done, on the
other side of the Red Sea, by the Troglodytes (Agatharchides in Fr. Geog.
Gr. i. 153). See further the Lexx., s.vv. fasada, 'ilhiz, bajja, musawwad.
LECT. VI. OF BLOOD. 217
even when slaughter ceased to involve a formal sacrifice, it
was still thought necessary to slay the victim in the name
of a god and pour the blood on the ground.^ Among the
Hebrews this practice soon gave rise to an absolute pro-
hibition of blood-eating ; among the Arabs the rule was
made absolute only by Mohammed's legislation.^
The idea that the gods partake only of the liquid parts
of the sacrifice appears, as has been already said, to indicate
a modification of the most crassly materialistic conception
of the divine nature. The direction which this modifica-
tion took may, I think, be judged of by comparing the
sacrifices of the gods with the oblations offered to the
dead. In the famous veKvia of the Odyssey ^ the ghosts
drink greedily of the sacrificial blood, and libations of
gore form a special feature in Greek offerings to heroes.
Among the Arabs, too, the dead are thirsty rather than
hungry, water and wine are poured upon their graves.*
Thirst is a subtler appetite than hunger, and therefore
more appropriate to the disembodied shades, just as it is
from thirst rather than from hunger that the Hebrews
and many other nations borrow metaphors for spiritual
longings and intellectual desires. Thus the idea that the
gods drink, but do not eat, seems to mark the feeling that
they must be thought of as having a less solid material
nature than men.
A farther step in the same direction is associated with
the introduction of fire sacrifices ; for, though there are
valid reasons for thinking that the practice of burning
^ Wellh., p. 114. In an Arab encampment slaves sleep beside "the blood
and the dung" {A'jh. viii. 74. 29) ; cf. 1 Sam. ii. 8.
^ Whether the blood of game was prohibited to the Hebrews before the
law of Lev. xvii. 13 is not quite clear ; Deut. xii. 16 is ambiguous.
' Bk. xi. ; cf. Pindar, 01. i. 90, where the word aifiXKovplai is explained
by Hesychius as ra. Uay'ifffAara. Tuv Ka.T(nx.ofj.iVMy ; Pausau., V. 13, § 2 ; Plut.,
Aristides, 21.
* Wellhausen, p. 161.
218 SACRIFICES LECT. VI.
the flesh or fat of victims originated in a different line
of thought (as we shall by and by see), the fire ritual
readily lent itself to the idea that the burnt flesh is simply
a food-offering etherealised into fragrant smoke, and that
the gods regale themselves on the odour instead of the
substance of the sacrifice. Here again the analogy of gifts
to the dead helps us to comprehend the point of view ;
among the Greeks of the seventh century B.C. it was, as
we learn from the story of Periander and Melissa, a new
idea that the dead could make no use of the gifts buried
with them unless they were etherealised by fire.^ A
similar notion seems to have attached itself to the custom
of sacrifice by fire, combined probably at an early date
with the idea that the gods, as ethereal beings, lived in the
upper air, towards which the sacrificial smoke ascended in
savoury clouds. Thus the prevalence among the settled
Semites of fire sacrifices, which were interpreted as offer-
ings of fragrant smoke, marks the firm establishment of a
conception of the divine nature which, though not purely
spiritual, is at least stripped of the crassest aspects of
materialism.
3. The distinction between sacrifices which are wholly
made over to the god and sacrifices of which the god and
the worshipper partake together requires careful handling.
In the later form of Hebrew ritual laid down in the
Levitical law, the distinction is clearly marked. To the
former class belong all cereal oblations (Heb. Tninha ; A.V.
" offering " or " meat-offering "), which so far as they are not
burned on the altar are assigned to the priests, and among
animal sacrifices the sin-offering and the burnt-offering or
holocaust. Most sin-offerings were not holocausts, but the
part of the flesh that was not burned fell to the priests.
^ Herodotus, v. 92 ; cf. Joannes Lydus, Mens. iii. 27, where the object of
burning the dead is said to be to etherealise the body along with the soul.
LECT. VI. BY FIRE. 219
To the latter class, again, belong the zehahlm or shelammi
(sing, z^hah, sMlcm, Amos v. 22), that is, all the ordinary-
festal sacrifices, vows and freewill offerings, of which the
share of the deity was the blood and the fat of the
intestines, the rest of the carcase (subject to the payment
of certain dues to the officiating priest) being left to the
worshipper to form a social feast.^ In judging of the
original scope and meaning of these two classes of sacrifice
it will be convenient, in the first instance, to confine our
attention to the simplest and most common forms of
offering. In the last days of the kingdom of Judah, and
still more after the exile, piacular sacrifices and holocausts
acquired a prominence which they did not possess in
ancient times. The old history knows nothing of the
Levitical sin-offering ; the atoning function of sacrifice is
not confined to a particular class of oblation, but belongs to
all sacrifices.^ The holocaust, again, although ancient, is
• In the English Bible zehafilm are rendered " sacrifices," and sAetomim
"peace-offerings." The latter rendering is not plausible, and the term
shelamlm can hardly be separated from the verb shillem, to pay or discharge,
(.g. a vow. Zehah is the more general word, including (like the Arabic
dhibh) all animals slain for food, agreeably with the fact that in old times all
slaughter was sacrificial. In later times, when slaughter and sacrifice were
no longer identical, zebah was not precise enough to be used as a teclmical
term of ritual, and so the term shelamlm came to be more largely used than
in the earlier literature.
On the sacrificial lists of the Carthaginians the terms corresponding to
n7j? and tilt seem to be 9?2 and nyiV. The former is the old Hebrew yb^
(Deut. xxxiii. 10 ; 1 Sam. vii. 9), the latter is etymologically quite obscure.
In the Carthaginian burnt-sacrifice a certain weight of the flesh was
apparently not consumed on the altar, but given to the priests (C. /. S. 165),
as in the case of the Hebrew sin-offering, which was probably a modification
of the holocaust. The ^^D uh^, which appears along with ^P3 and nj;iV
in C. I. S. 165 (but not in C. /. -S". 167), is hardly a third co-ordinate species of
sacrifice. The editors of the Corpus regard it as a variety of the holocaust
{hoi. eucharistiaim), which is not easily reconciled with their own restitution
of 1. 11 or with the Hebrew sense of chlt''. Perhaps it is an ordinary sacrifice
accompanying a holocaust.
2 To zebah and miiiha, 1 Sam. iii. 14, xxvi. 19, and still more to the
holocaust, Micah vi. 6, 7.
v"
220 SACRIFICIAL MEALS lect. vi.
not in ancient times a common form of sacrifice, and unless
on very exceptional occasions occurs only in great public
feasts and in association with zehahim. The distressful
times that preceded the end of Hebrew independence drove
men to seek exceptional religious means to conciliate the
favour of a deity who seemed to have turned his back on
his people. Piacular rites and costly holocausts became,
therefore, more usual, and after the abolition of the local
high places this new importance was still further accentu-
ated by contrast with the decline of the more common
forms of sacrifice. When each local community had its
own high place, it was the rule that every animal slain for
food should be presented at the altar, and every meal at
which flesh was served had the character of a sacrificial
feast.^ As men ordinarily lived on bread fruit and milk,
and ate flesh only on feast days and holidays, this rule was
easily observed as long as the local sanctuaries stood.
But when there was no altar left except at Jerusalem, the
identity of slaughter and sacrifice could no longer be main-
tained, and accordingly the law of Deuteronomy allows
men to slay and eat domestic animals everywhere, provided
only that the blood — the ancient share of the god — is
poured out upon the ground.^ When this new rule came
into force men ceased to feel that the eating; of flesh was
essentially a sacred act, and though strictly religious meals
were still maintained at Jerusalem on the great feast days,
the sacrificial meal necessarily lost much of its old signifi-
cance, and the holocaust seemed to have a more purely
sacred character than the zihah, in which men ate and
drank just as they might do at home.
^ Hosea ix. 4.
- Deut. xii. 15, 16 ; cf. Lev. xvii. 10 sq. The fat of the intestines was also
from ancient times reserved for the deity (1 Sam. ii. 16), and therefore it also
was forbidden food (Lev. iii. 17). The prohibition did not extend to the fat
distributed through other parts of the body.
LECT. VI. AND HOLOCAUSTS. 221
But in ancient times the preponderance was all the
other way, and the z6hah was not only much more frequent
than the holocaust but much more intimately bound up
with the prevailing religious ideas and feelings of the
Hebrews. On this point the evidence of the older litera-
ture is decisive ; zihah and minha, sacrifices slain to provide
a religious feast, and vegetable oblations presented at the
altar, make up the sum of the ordinary religious practices
of the older Hebrews, and we must try to understand these
ordinary rites before we attack the harder problem of
exceptional forms of sacrifice.
Now, if we put aside the piacula and whole burnt-
offerings, it appears that, according to the Levitical ritual,
the distinction between oblations in which the worshipper
shared, and oblations which were wholly given over to the
deity to be consumed on the altar or by the priests, corre-
sponds to the distinction between animal and vegetable
offerings. The animal victim was presented at the altar
and devoted by the imposition of hands, but the greater
part of the flesh was returned to the worshipper, to be
eaten by him under special rules. It could be eaten only
by persons ceremonially clean, i.e. fit to approach the
deity ; and if the food was not consumed on the same day,
or in certain cases within two days, the remainder had to
be burned.^ The plain meaning of these rules is that the
flesh is not common but holy,^ and that the act of eating
it is a part of the service, which is to be completed before
men break up from the sanctuary.^ The zdbah, therefore, is
1 Lev. vii. 15 sqq., xix. 6, xxii. 30. "Hag. ii. 12 ; cf. Jer. xi. 15, LXX.
3 The old sacrificial feasts occupy but a single day (1 Sam. ix.), or at most
two days (1 Sam. xx. 27). "When sacrificial occasions follow each other as
closely as possible, they come either daily or every three days, i.e. according
to our way of counting, every second day (Amos iv. 4, R.V.). Cf. 'Amir b.
al-Tofail, quoted by the scholiast to the I^'acdid, MS. Oxon. f. 2416 (a refer-
ence I owe to the late Prof. Wright) : Aid yd taita aklnvdll ghamyaii,
lahumfl kiiUi thdlithat'in daicdrun, where daudr is explained as "feast."
222 CEREAL
LECT. VI.
not a mere attenuated offering, in which man grudges to
give up the whole victim to his God. On the contrary, the
central significance of the rite lies in the act of communion
between God and man, when the worshipper is admitted to
eat of the same holy flesh of which a part is laid upon the
altar as " the food of the deity." But with the minha
nothing of this kind occurs ; the whole consecrated offering
is retained by the deity, and the worshipper's part in the
service is completed as soon as he has made over his gift.
In short, while the z6hah turns on an act of communion
between the deity and his worshippers, the minha (as its
name denotes) is simply a tribute.
I will not undertake to say that the distinction so
clearly laid down in the Levitical law was observed before
the exile in all cases of cereal sacrifices. Probably it was
not, for in most ancient religions we find that cereal
offerings come to be accepted in certain cases as sub-
stitutes for animal sacrifices, and that in this way the
difference between the two kinds of offering gradually gets
to be obliterated.^ But in such matters great weight is to
be attached to priestly tradition, such as underlies the
Levitical ritual. The priests were not likely to invent a
distinction of the kind which has been described, and in
point of fact there is good evidence that they did not
invent it. For there is no doubt that in ancient times
the ordinary source of the 7ninha was the offering of first-
fruits — that is, of a small but choice portion of the annual
produce of the ground, which in fact is the only cereal
oblation prescribed in the oldest laws.^ So far as can be
seen the first-fruits were always a tribute wholly made
^ So at Rome models in wax or dough often took the place of animals.
The same thing took place at Athens : Hesychius, s.vv. (ioZ; and 'ifi'hofjLOi
(ious ; cf. Thucyd., i. 126 and schoL At Carthage we have found the name
zebah applied to vegetable offerings.
^ Exod. xxii. 29, xxiii. 19, xxxiv. 26.
LECT. VI.
OFFERINGS. 223
over to the deity at the sanctuary. They vsrere brought by
the peasant in a basket and deposited at the altar,^ and so
far as they were not actually burned on the altar, they
were assigned to the priests ^ — not to the ministrant as a
reward for his service, but to the priests as a body, as the
household of the sanctuary.^
Among the Hebrews, as among many other agricultural
peoples, the offering of first-fruits was connected with the
idea that it is not lawful or safe to eat of the new fruit
until the god has received his due.* The offering makes
the whole crop lawful food, but it does not make it holy
food ; nothing is consecrated except the small portion
offered at the altar, and of the remaining store clean
persons and unclean eat alike throughout the year. This,
therefore, is quite a different thing from the consecration
of animal sacrifices, for in the latter case the whole flesh
is holy, and only those who are clean can eat of it.^
In old Israel all slaughter was sacrifice, and a man
could never eat beef or mutton except as a religious act,
but cereal food had no such sacred associations ; as soon
as God had received His due of first-fruits, the whole
domestic store was common. The difference between
cereal and animal food was therefore deeply marked, and
though bread was of course brought to the sanctuary to be
^ Deut. xxvi. 1 sqq.
^ Lev. xxiii. 17 ; Deut. xviii. 4. For the purpose of this argument it is
not necessary to advert to the distinction recognised by post-Biblical
tradition between rtshlth and hikkurim, on which see AVellh., Proleyojnena,
3rd ed. p. 161 sq.
3 This follows from 2 Kings xxiii. 9. The tribute was sometimes paid to
a man of God (2 Kings iv. 42), which is another way of making it over to
the deity. In the Levitical law also the minha belongs to the priests as a
whole (Lev. vii. 10). This is an important point. What the ministrant
receives as a fee comes from the worshipper, what the priests as a whole
receive is given them by the deity.
* Lev. xxiii. 14 ; cf. Pliny, H. JSf. xviii. 8.
* Hosea ix. 4 refers only to animal food.
224 SACRIFICIAL LECT. VI.
eaten with the zehaJmn, it had not and could not have the
same religious meaning as the holy flesh. It appears from
Amos iv. 4 that it was the custom in northern Israel to
lay a portion of the worshipper's provision of ordinary
leavened bread on the altar with the sacrificial flesh, and
this custom was natural enough ; for why should not the
deity's share of the sacrificial meal have the same cereal
accompaniments as man's share ? But there is no indica-
tion that this oblation consecrated the part of the bread
retained by the worshipper and made it holy bread. The
only holy bread of which we read is such as belonged to
the priests, not to the offerer.^ In Lev. vii. 14, Numb. vi.
15, the cake of common bread is given to the priest
instead of being laid on the altar, but it is carefully
distinguished from the minha. In old times the priests
had no altar dues of this kind. They had only the first-
fruits and a claim to a piece of the sacrificial flesh,^ from
which it may be presumed that the custom of offering
bread with the zclah was not primitive. Indeed Amos
seems to mention it with some surprise as a thing not
familiar to Judsean practice. At all events no sacrificial
meal could consist of bread alone. All through the old
history it is taken for granted that a religious feast
necessarily implies a victim slain.^
^ 1 Sam. xxi. 4. ^ Deut. xviii. 3, 4 ; 1 Sam. ii. 13 sqq.
3 What has been said above of the contrast between cereal sacrificial gifts
and the sacrificial feast seems to me to hold good also for Greece and Rome,
with some modification in the case of domestic meals, which among the
Semites had no religious character, but at Kome were consecrated by 'a
portion being offered to the household gods. This, however, has nothing to do
with public religion, in which the law holds good that there is no sacred feast
without a victim, and that consecrated aparchce are wholly given over to
the sanctuary. The same thing holds good for many other peoples, and
seems, so far as my reading goes, to be the general rule. But there are
exceptions. My friend Mr. J. G. Frazer, to whose wide reading I never
appeal without profit, refers me to Wilken's Alfoeren vati het eiland Beroe,
p. 26, where a true sacrificial feast is made of the first-fruits of rice. This
LECT. VI.
FEAST. 225
The distinction which we are thus led to draw between
the cereal oblation, in which the dominant idea is that of
a tribute paid to the god, and animal sacrifices, which are
essentially acts of communion between the god and his
worshippers, deserves to be followed out in more detail.
But this task must be reserved for another lecture.
is called " eating the soul of the rice," so that the rice is viewed as a living
creature. In such a case it is not unreasonable to say that the rice may
be regarded as really an animate victim. Agricultural religions seem often
to have borrowed ideas from the older cults of pastoral times.
LECTUEE VII.
riRST-FEUITS, TITHES, AND SACRIFICIAL MEALS.
It became apparent to us towards the close of the last
lecture that the Levitical distinction between minha and
zdhali, or cereal oblation and animal sacrifice, rests upon
an ancient principle ; that the idea of communion with
the deity in a sacrificial meal of holy food was primarily
confined to the z6bali, or animal victim, and that the proper
significance of the cereal offering is that of a tribute paid
by the worshipper from the produce of the soil. Now we
have already seen that the conception of the national
deity as the Baal, or lord of the land, was developed in
connection with the growth of agriculture and agricultural
law. Spots of natural fertility were the Baal's land,
because they were productive without the labour of man's
hands, which, according to Eastern ideas, is the only basis
of private property in the soil ; and land which required
■irrigation was also liable to the payment of a sacred
tribute, because it was fertilised by streams which belonged
to the god or even were conceived as instinct with divine
energy. This whole circle of ideas belongs to a condition
of society in which agriculture and the laws that regulate
it have made considerable progress, and is foreign to the
sphere of thought in which the purely nomadic Semites
moved. That the minim is not so ancient a form of
sacrifice as the zihah will not be doubted, for nomadic life
is older than agriculture. But if the foregoing argument
226
LECT. VI r.
TITHES. 227
is correct, we can say more than this ; we can affirm that
the idea of the sacrificial meal as an act of communion is
older than sacrifice in the sense of tribute, and that the
latter notion grew up with the development of agricultural
life and the conception of the deity as Baal of the land.
Among the nomadic Arabs the idea of sacrificial tribute
has little or no place ; all sacrifices are free-will offerings,
and except in some rare forms of piacular oblation —
particularly human sacrifice — and perhaps in some very
simple offerings such as the libation of milk, the object
of the sacrifice is to provide the material for an act of
sacrificial communion with the god.'
In most ancient nations the idea of sacrificial tribute is
most clearly marked in the institution of the sacred tithe,
which was paid to the gods from the produce of the soil,
and sometimes also from other sources of revenue.^ In
antiquity tithe and tribute are practically identical, nor is
the name of tithe strictly limited to tributes of one-tenth,
the term being used to cover any impost paid in kind upon
a fixed scale. Such taxes play a great part in the
revenues of Eastern sovereigns, and have done so from a
very early date. The Babylonian kings drew a tithe from
imports,^ and the tithe of the fruits of the soil had the
first place among the revenues of the Persian satraps.*
The Hebrew kinsrs in like manner took tithes of their
subjects, and the tribute in kind which Solomon drew
from the provinces for the support of his household may
1 Some points connected with this statement which invite attention, but
cannot be fully discussed at the present stage of the argument, will be
considered in Additmud Note F, Sacred Trihide in Arabia.
2 See the instances collected by Spencer, Lib. iii. cap. 10, § 1 ; Hermann,
Gottesdienstliche Alterth. d. Griechen, 2nd ed. § 20, note 4 ; Wyttenbach in
the index to his edition of Plutarch's Moralla, s.v. 'HpaxXvs.
3 Arist., CEco7i. p. 13526 of the Berlin edition. A tithe on imports is
found also at Mecca (Azraci, p. 107).
* Arist., (Econ. p. 1345(J.
228 THE TITHE IN lect. vii.
be regarded as an impost of this sort.^ Thus the in-
stitution of a sacred tithe corresponds to the conception
of the national god as a king, and so at Tyre tithes were
paid to Melcarth, " the king of the city." The Cartha-
ginians, as Diodorus - tells us, sent the tithe of produce
to Tyre annually from the time of the foundation of their
city. This is the earliest example of a Semitic sacred
tithe of which we have any exact account, and it is to be
noted that it is as much a political as a religious tribute ;
for the temple of Melcarth was the state treasury of Tyre,
and it is impossible to draw a distinction between the
sacred tithe paid by the Carthaginians and the political
tribute paid by other colonies, such as Utica.^
The oldest Hebrew laws require the payment of first-
fruits, but know nothing of a tithe due at the sanctuary.
And indeed the Hebrew sanctuaries in old time had not
such a splendid establishment as called for the imposition
of sacred tributes on a large scale. When Solomon
erected his temple, in emulation of Hiram's great buildings
at Tyre, a more lavish ritual expenditure became necessary ;
but as the temple at Jerusalem was attached to the palace,
this was part of the household expenditure of the sovereign,
and doubtless was met out of the imposts in natiira levied
for the maintenance of the court.* In other words, the
maintenance of the royal sanctuary was a charge on the
king's tithes ; and so we find that a tenth directly paid
to the sanctuary forms no part of the temple revenues
^ 1 Sam. vii. 15, 17 ; 1 Kings iv. 7 &qq^. The "king's mowings " (Amos
vii. 1 ) belong to the same class of imposts, being a tribute in kind levied on the
spring herbage to feed the horses of the king (cf. 1 Kings xviii. 5). Simi-
larly the Eomans in Syria levied a tax on pasture-land in the month Nisan
for the food of their horses : see Bruns and Sachau, Syrisch-Rom. Rechts-
buck, Text L, § 121; and AVright, Notulce Syriacce (1887), p. 6.
^ Lib. XX. cap. 14.
^ Jos., Antt. viii. 5. 3, as read by Niese after Gutschmid.
* Cf. 2 Kings xvi. 15 ; Ezek. xlv. 9 sqq.
LECT. vir. OLD ISRAEL. 229
referred to in 2 Kings xii. 4. In nortliern Israel the
royal sanctuaries, of which Bethel was the chief/ were
originally maintained, in the same way, by the king
himself ; but as Bethel was not the ordinary seat of the
court, so that the usual stated sacrifices there could not
be combined with the maintenance of the king's table,
some special provision must have been made for them.
As the new and elaborate type of sanctuary was due to
Phoenician influence, it was Phoenicia, where the religious
tithe was an ancient institution, which would naturally
suggest the source from which a more splendid worship
should be defrayed ; the service of the god of the land
ought to be a burden on the land. And the general
analogy of fiscal arrangements in the East makes it
probable that this would be done by assigning to the
sanctuary the taxes in kind levied on the surrounding
district ; ^ it is therefore noteworthy that the only pre-
Deuteronomic references to a tithe paid at the sanctuary
refer to the " royal chapel " of Bethel.^
The tithes paid to ancient sanctuaries were spent in
various ways, and were by no means, what the Hebrew
tithes ultimately became under the hierocracy, a revenue
appropriated to the maintenance of the priests ; thus in
South Arabia we find tithes devoted to the erection of
sacred monuments.* One of the chief objects, however,
for which they were expended was the maintenance of
feasts and sacrifices of a public character, at which the
worshippers were entertained free of charge.* This element
^ Amos vii. 13.
" Cf. the grant of the village of Bastocsece for the maintenance of the
sanctuary of the place, Waddington, No. 2720a.
^ Gen. xxviii. 22 ; Amos iv. 4.
* Mordtm. und Miiller, Sab. Denkm. No. 11.
* Xen. , Anab. v. 3. 9 ; Waddington, ut supj-a. Similarly the tithes of incense
paid to the priests at Sabota in South Arabia were spent on the feas which the
god spread for his guests for a certain number of days (Pliny, H. N xii. C3).
230 THE TITHE IN
LECT. vir.
cannot have been lacking at the royal sanctuaries of the
Hebrews, for a splendid hospitality to all and sundry who
assembled at the great religious feasts was recognised as
the duty of the king even in the time of David.^ And
so we find that Amos enumerates the tithe at Bethel as
one of the chief elements that contributed to the jovial
luxurious worship maintained at that holy place.
If this account of the matter is correct, the tithes
collected at Bethel were strictly of the nature of a tribute
gathered from certain lands, and payment of them was
doubtless enforced by royal authority. They were not
used by each man to make a private religious feast for
himself and his family, but were devoted to the mainten-
ance of the public or royal sacrifices, at which there was
a great deal of mirth and banqueting, but the persons
who enjoyed the feast were not necessarily those who
furnished the supplies. This, it ought to be said, is not
the view commonly taken by modern critics. The old
festivities at Hebrew sanctuaries before the regal period
were maintained, not out of any public revenue, but by
each man bringing up to the sanctuary his own victim
and all else that was necessary to make up a hearty feast,
with the sacrificial flesh as its pike de resistance.^ It is
generally assumed that this description was still applicable
to the feasts at Bethel in Amos's time, and that the tithes
were the provision that each farmer brought with him to
feast his domestic circle and friends. At first sight this
view looks plausible enough, especially when we find that
the Book of Deuteronomy, written a century after Amos
prophesied, actually prescribes that the annual tithes should
be used by each householder to furnish forth a family
feast before Jehovah. But it is not safe to argue back
from the reforming ordinances of Deuteronomy to the
1 2 Sam. vi. 19. - 1 Sam. i. 21, 24, x. 3.
LECT. VII. OLD ISRAEL. 231
practices of the northern sanctuaries, without checking the
inference at every point. The connection between tithe
and tribute is too close and too ancient to allow us to
admit without hesitation that the Deuteronomic annual
tithe, which retains nothing of the character of a tribute,
is the primitive type of the institution. And this dijBficulty
is not diminished when we observe that the Book of
Deuteronomy recognises also another tithe, payable once
in three years, which really is of the nature of a sacred
tribute, although it is devoted not to the altar but to
charity. It is arbitrary to say that the first tithe of
Deuteronomy corresponds to ancient usage, and that the
second is an innovation of the author ; indeed some
indications of the Book of Deuteronomy itself point all
the other way. In Deut. xxvi. 12 the third year, in
which the charity tithe is to be paid, is called 'par excellence
" the year of tithing," and in the following verse the
charity tithe is reckoned in the list of " holy things,"
while the annual tithe, to be spent on family festivities
at the sanctuary, is not so reckoned. In the face of these
difficulties it is not safe to assume that either of the
Deuteronomic tithes exactly corresponds to old usage.
And, if we look at Amos's account of the worship at
Bethel as a whole, a feature which cannot fail to strike
us is that the luxurious feasts beside the altars which
he describes are entirely different in kind from the old
rustic festivities at Shiloh described in 1 Samuel. They
are not simple agricultural merry-makings of a popular
character, but mainly feasts of the rich, enjoying them-
selves at the expense of the poor. The keynote struck in
chap. ii. 7, 8, where the sanctuary itself is designated as the
seat of oppression and extortion, is re-echoed all through
the book ; Amos's charge against the nobles is not that
they are professedly religious and yet oppressors, but that
232 THE TITHE IN
LECT. vn.
their luxurious religion is founded on oppression, on the
gains of corruption at the sacred tribunal and other forms
of extortion. This is not the description of a primitive
agricultural worship, and not the association in which we
can look for the idyllic simplicity of the Deuteronomic
family feast of tithes. But it is the very association in
which one expects to find the tithe as I have supposed it
to be ; and I do not hesitate to conclude that the tribute
of wheat taken from the poor, which is set forth among
the extortions of Bethel in Amos v. 11, is nothing else
than the tithe itself. The poor paid the sacred tribute,
but it was the rich who were invited to the public banquet
it furnished forth. The revenues of the state religion,
originally designed to maintain a public hospitality at the
altar, and enable rich and poor alike to rejoice before their
God, were monopolised by a privileged class, and were
exacted with the unsparing severity which usually attends
such misappropriation.
This being understood, the innovations in the law of
tithes proposed in the Book of Deuteronomy become
sufficiently intelligible. In the kingdom of Judah there
was no royal sanctuary except that at Jerusalem, the
maintenance of which was part of the king's household
charges, and it is hardly probable that any part of the
royal tithes was assigned to the maintenance of the local
sanctuaries. But as early as the time of Samuel we find
religious feasts of clans or of towns, which are not a mere
agglomeration of private sacrifices, and so must have been
defrayed out of communal funds ; from this germ, as
religion became more luxurious, a fixed impost on land for
the maintenance of the public services, such as was
collected among the PhcBnicians, would naturally grow.
Such an impost would be in the hands, not of the priests,
but of the heads of clans and communes, i.e. of the rich,
LECT. Til.
OLD ISEAEL. 233
and would necessarily be liable to the same abuses as
prevailed in the northern kingdom. The remedy which
Deuteronomy proposes for these abuses is to leave each
farmer to spend his own tithes as he pleases at the central
sanctuary. But this provision, if it had stood alone, would
have amounted to the total abolition of a communal fund
which, however much abused in practice, was theoretically
designed for the maintenance of a public table, where
every one had a right to claim a portion, and which was
doubtless of some service to the landless proletariate, how-
ever hardly its collection might press on the poorer farmer,^
This difficulty was met by the triennial tithe devoted to
charity, to the landless poor and to the landless Levite.
Strictly speaking, this triennial due was the only real
tithe left — the only impost for a religious purpose which
a man was actually bound to pay away — and to it the
whole subsequent history of Hebrew tithes attaches itself.
The other tithe, which was not a due but of a mere volun-
tary character, disappears altogether in the Levitical
legislation.
If this account of the Hebrew tithe is correct, that
institution is of relatively modern origin — as indeed is
indicated by the silence of the most ancient laws — and
throws very little light on the original principles of
Semitic sacrifice. The principle that the god of the land
claims a tribute on the increase of the soil was originally
expressed in the offering of first-fruits, at a time when
sanctuaries and their service were too simple to need any
elaborate provision for their support. The tithe originated
when worship became more complex and ritual more
splendid, so that a fixed tribute was necessary for its
^ The same principle was acknowledged in Greece, utto tuv Upuv yap ol 'vruxo'i
Z,Z(Tiv {Schol. on Aristoph. Phdus, 596, in Hermann op. cit. § 15, note 16). So
too in the Arabian meal-offering to Ocaisir {supra, p. 206).
234 TITHES AND lect. vii.
maintenance. The tribute took the shape of an impost on
the produce of land, partly because this was an ordinary-
source of revenue for all public purposes, partly because
such an impost could be justified from the religious point
of view, as agreeing in principle with the oblation of first-
fruits, and constituting a tribute to the god from the
agricultural blessings he bestowed. But here the similarity
between tithes and first-fruits ends. The first-fruits consti-
tuted a private sacrifice of the worshipper, who brought
them himself to the altar and was answerable for the pay-
ment only to God and his own conscience. The tithe, on the
contrary, was a public burden enforced by the community
for the maintenance of public religion. In principle there
was no reason why it should not be employed for any
purpose, connected with the public exercises of religion,
for which money or money's worth was required ; the way
in which it should be spent depended not on the individual
tithe-payer but on the sovereign or the commune. In
later times, after the exile, it was entirely appropriated to
the support of the clergy. But in old Israel it seems to
have been mainly, if not exclusively, used to furnish forth
public feasts at the sanctuary. In this respect it entirely
differed from the first-fruits, which might be, and generally
were, offered at a public festival, but did not supply any
part of the material of the feast. The sacred feast, at
which men and their god ate together, was originally quite
unconnected with the cereal oblations paid in tribute to
the deity, and its staple was the z6bah — the sacrificial
victim. We shall see by and by that in its origin the
zShah was not the private offering of an individual house-
holder but the sacrifice of a clan, and so the sacrificial
meal had pre-eminently the character of a public feast.
Now when public feasts are organised on a considerable
scale, and furnished not merely with store of sacrificial
LECT. VII. PUBLIC FEASTS. 235
Hesh, but — as was the wont in Israel under the kings —
with all manner of luxurious accessories, they come to be
costly affairs, which can only be defrayed out of public
moneys. The Israel of the time of the kings was not a
simple society of peasants, all living in the same way, who
could simply club together to maintain a rustic feast by
what each man brought to the sanctuary from his own
farm. Splendid festivals like those of Bethel were evi-
dently not furnished in this way, but were mainly banquets
of the upper classes in which the poor had a very subordi-
nate share. The source of these festivals was the tithe,
but it was not the poor tithe-payer who figured as host at
the banquet. The organisation of the feast was in the
hands of the ruling classes, who received the tithes and
spent them on the service in a way that gave the lion's
share of the good things to themselves ; though no doubt,
as in other ancient countries, the principle of a public feast
was not wholly ignored, and every one present had some-
thing to eat and drink, so that the whole populace was kept
in good humour.-^ Of course it is not to be supposed that
the whole service was of this public character. Private
persons still brought up their own vows and free-will
offerings, and arranged their own family parties. But
these, I conceive, were quite independent of the tithes,
which were a public tax devoted to what was regarded as
the public part of religion. On the whole, tlierefore, the
tithe system has nothing to do with primitive Hebrew
religion ; the only point about it which casts a light back-
wards on the earlier stages of worship is that it could
1 The only way of escape from this conclusion is to suppose that the rich
nobles paid out of their own pockets for the more expensive parts of the
public sacrifices ; and no one who knows the East and reads tlie Book of
Amos will believe that. Nathan's parable about the poor man's one lamb,
which his rich neighbour took to make a feast (necessarily at that date
sacrificial), is an apposite illustration.
236 SACRIFICIAL LECT. VII.
hardly have sprung up except in connection with the idea
that the maintenance of sacrifice was a public duty, and
that the sacrificial feast had essentially a public character.
This point, however, is of the highest importance, and must
be kept clearly before us as we proceed.
Long before any public revenue was set apart for the
maintenance of sacrificial ritual, the ordinary type of
Hebrew worship was essentially social, for in antiquity all
religion was the affair of the community rather than of the
individual. A sacrifice was a public ceremony of a town-
ship or of a clan,^ and private householders were accustomed
to reserve their offerings for the annual feasts, satisfying
their religious feelings in the interval by vows to be dis-
charged when the festal season came round.^ Then the
crowds streamed into the sanctuary from all sides, dressed
in their gayest attire,^ marching joyfully to the sound of
music,* and bearing with them not only the victims
appointed for sacrifice but store of bread and wine to set
forth the feast.^ The law of the feast was open-handed
hospitality; no sacrifice was complete without guests, and
portions were freely distributed to rich and poor within
the circle of a man's acquaintance.*' Universal hilarity
^ 1 Sam. ix. 12, xx. 6. In the latter passage " family" means "clan," not
"domestic circle." See below, p. 258, note.
2 1 Sam. i. 3, 21. 3 Hogea ii. 15 (E.V. 13).
* Isa, XXX. 29. 5 1 gam. x. 3.
^ 1 Sam. ix. 13 ; 2 Sam. vi. 19, xv. 11 ; Neli. viii. 10. The guests of
the sacrifice supply a figure to the prophets (Ezek. xxxix. 17 sqq. ; Zeph.
i. 7). Nadab's refusal to allow David to share in his sheep-shearing feast
was not only churlish but a breach of religious custom ; from Amos iv. 5 it
would appea'r that with a free-will offering there was a free invitation to all
to come and partake. For the Arabian usage in like cases, see Wellhausen,
p. 114 sq. A banqueting hall for the communal sacrifice is mentioned as
early as 1 Sam. ix. 22, and the name given to it {lishJca) seems to be identical
with the Greek xiirxri, from which it may be gathered that the Phoenicians
had similar halls from an early date ; of. Judg. ix. 27, xvi. 23 sqq. For
the communal feasts of the Syrians in later times, see Posidon. Apam. ap.
Athen., xii. 527 {Fr. Hist. Gr. iii. 258).
LECT. VII.
FESTIVALS. 237
prevailed, men ate drank and were merry together, rejoic-
ing before their God. The picture which I have drawn of
the dominant type of Hebrew worship contains nothing
peculiar to the religion of Jehovah. It is clear from the
Old Testament that the ritual observances at a Hebrew
and at a Canaanite sanctuary were so similar that to the
mass of the people Jehovah worship and Baal worship
were not separated by any well-marked line, and that in
both cases the prevailing tone and temper of the worshippers
were determined by the festive character of the service.
Nor is the prevalence of the sacrificial feast, as the
established type of ordinary religion, confined to the
Semitic peoples ; the same kind of worship ruled in
ancient Greece and Italy, and seems to be the universal
type of the local cults of the small agricultural com-
munities out of which all the nations of ancient civilisation
grew. Everywhere we find that a sacrifice ordinarily
involves a feast, and that a feast cannot be provided with-
out a sacrifice. For a feast is not complete without flesh,
and in early times the rule that all slaughter is sacrifice
was not confined to the Semites.-^ The identity of religious
occasions and festal seasons may indeed be taken as the
determining characteristic of the type of ancient religion
generally ; when men meet their god they feast and are
glad together, and whenever they feast and are glad they
desire that the god should be of the party. This view is
proper to religions in which the habitual temper of the
worshippers is one of joyous confidence in their god, un-
troubled by any habitual sense of human guilt, and resting
1 It is Indian (Manu, v. 31 sqq.) and Persian (Sprenger, Eranische Alterth.
iii. 578. Cf. Herod, i. 132; Strabo, xv. 3. 13, p. 732). Among the Romans
and the older Greeks there was something sacrificial about every feast, or
even about every social meal ; in the latter case the Romans paid tribute to
the household "ods. On the identity of feast and sacrifice in Greece, see
Atheuaeus, v. 19 ; Buchholz, Bom. Rtalien, II. ii. 202, 213 sqq.
238 MEANING OF lect. vii.
on the firm conviction that they and the deity they adore
are good friends, who understand each other perfectly and
are united by bonds not easily broken. The basis of this
confidence lies of course in the view that the gods are part
and parcel of the same natural community with their
worshippers. The divine father or king claims the same
kind of respect and service as a human father or king, and
practical religion is simply a branch of social duty, an
understood part of the conduct of daily life, governed by
fixed rules to which every one has been trained from his
infancy. No man who is a good citizen, living up to the
ordinary standard of civil morality in his dealings with his
neighbours, and accurately following the ritual tradition in
his worship of the gods, is oppressed with the fear that the
deity may set a higher standard of conduct and find him
wanting. Civil and religious morality have one and the
same measure, and the conduct which suffices to secure the
esteem of men suffices also to make a man perfectly easy
as to his standing with the gods. It must be remembered
that all antique morality is an affair of social custom and
customary law, and that in the more primitive forms of
ancient life the force of custom is so strong that there is
hardly any middle course between living well up to the
standard of social duty which it prescribes, and falling
altogether outside the pale of the civil and religious com-
munity. A man who deliberately sets himself against the
rules of the society in which he lives must expect to be
outlawed, but minor offences are readily condoned as mere
mistakes, which may expose the offender to a fine but do
not permanently lower his social status or his self-respect.
So too a man may offend his god, and be called upon to
make reparation to him. But in such a case he knows, or
can learn from a competent priestly authority, exactly what
he ought to do to set matters right, and then everything
LECT. VII. SACRIFICIAL FEASTS. 239
goes on as before. lu a religion of this kind there is no
room for an abiding sense of sin and unworthiness, or for
acts of worship that express the struggle after an unattained
righteousness, the longing for uncertain forgiveness. It is
only when the old religions begin to break down that these
feelings come in. The older national and tribal religions
work with the smoothness of a machine. IVIen are satis-
iied with their gods, and they feel that the gods are
satisfied with them. Or if at any time famine, pestilence
or disaster in war appears to shew that the gods are angry,
this casts no doubt on the adequacy of the religious system
as such, but is merely held to prove that a grave fault has
been committed by some one for whom the community is
responsible, and that they are bound to put it right by an
appropriate reparation. That they can put it right, and
stand as well with the god as they ever did, is not doubted ;
and when rain falls, or the pestilence is checked, or the
defeat is retrieved, they at once recover their old easy
confidence, and go on eating and drinking and rejoicing
before their god with the assurance that he and they are
on the best of jovial good terms.
The kind of religion which finds its proper aesthetic
expression in the merry sacrificial feast implies a habit of
mind, a way of taking the world as well as a way of
regarding the gods, which we have some difficulty in
realising. Human life is never perfectly happy and satis-
factory, yet ancient religion assumes that througli the help
of the gods it is so happy and satisfactory that ordinary
acts of worship are all brightness and hilarity, expressing
no other idea than that the worshippers are well content
with themselves and with their divine sovereign. This
implies a measure of insouciance, a power of casting off the
past and living in the impression of the moment, which
belongs to the childhood of humanity, and can exist only
240 THE GODS AND lect. vit.
aloncf with a childish unconsciousness of the inexorable
laws that connect the present and the future with the
past. Accordingly the more developed nations of antiquity,
in proportion as they emerged from national childhood,
began to find the old religious forms inadequate, and either
became less concerned to associate all their happiness with
the worship of the gods, and, in a word, less religious, or
else were unable to think of the divine powers as habitually
well pleased and favourable, and so were driven to look on
the anger of the gods as much more frequent and permanent
than their fathers had supposed, and to give to atoning
rites a stated and important place in ritual, which went
far to change the whole attitude characteristic of early
worship, and substitute for the old joyous confidence a
painful and scrupulous anxiety in all approach to the gods.
Among the Semites the Arabs furnish an example of the
general decay of religion, while the nations of Palestine in
the seventh century B.C. afford an excellent illustration of
the development of a gloomier type of worship under the
pressure of accumulated political disasters. On the whole,
however, what strikes the modern thinker as surprising is
not that the old joyous type of worship ultimately broke
down, but that it lasted so long as it did, or even that it
ever attained a paramount place among nations so advanced
as the Greeks and the Syrians. This is a matter which
well deserves attentive consideration.
First of all, then, it is to be observed that the frame
of mind in which men are well pleased with themselves,
with their gods, and with the world, could not have
dominated antique religion as it did, unless religion had
been essentially the affair of the community rather than
of individuals. It was not the business of the gods of
heathenism to watch, by a series of special providences,
over the welfare of every individual. It is true that
LECT. vii. THEIR WORSHIPPEflS. 241
individuals laid their private affairs before the gods, and
asked with prayers and vows for strictly personal blessings.
But they did this just as they might crave a personal
boon from a king, or as a son craves a boon from a father,
without expecting to get all that was asked. What the
gods might do in this way was done as a matter of
personal favour, and was no part of their proper function
as heads of the community. The benefits which were
expected from the gods were of a public character, affect-
ing the whole community, especially fruitful seasons,
increase of flocks and herds, and success in war. So long
as the community flourished the fact that an individual
was miserable reflected no discredit on divine providence,
but was rather taken to prove that the sufferer was an
evil-doer, justly hateful to the gods. Such a man was out
of place among the happy and prosperous crowd that
assembled on feast days before the altar ; even in Israel
Hannah, with her sad face and silent petition, was a strange
figure at the sanctuary of Shiloh, and the unhappy leper,
in his lifelong affliction, was shut out from the exercises
of religion as well as from the privileges of social life.
So too the mourner was unclean, and his food was not
brought into the house of God ; the very occasions of life
in which spiritual things are nearest to the Christian, and
the comfort of religion is most fervently sought, were in
the ancient world the times when a man was forbidden
to approach the seat of God's presence. To us, whose
habit it is to look at religion in its influence on the life
and happiness of individuals, this seems a cruel law ; nay,
our sense of justice is offended by a system in which
misfortunes set up a barrier between a man and his God.
But whether in civil or in profane matters, the habit of
the old world was to think much of the community and
little of the individual life, and no one felt this to be
Q
242 JOYOUS CHARACTER lect. yn.
unjust even though it bore hardly on himself. The god
was the god of the nation or of the tribe, and he knew
and cared for the individual only as a member of the
community. Why, then, should private misfortune be
allowed to mar by its ill-omened presence the public glad-
ness of the sanctuary ?
Accordingly the air of habitual satisfaction with them-
selves, their gods and the world, which characterises the
worship of ancient communities, must be explained without
reference to the vicissitudes of individual life. And so far
as the thing requires any other explanation than the
general insouciance and absorption in the feelings of the
moment characteristic of the childhood of society, I appre-
hend that the key to the joyful character of the antique
religions known to us lies in the fact that they took their
shape in communities that were progressive and on the
whole prosperous. If we realise to ourselves the conditions
of early society, whether in Europe or in Asia, at the
first daybreak of history, we cannot fail to see that a tribe
or nation that could not hold its own and make headway
must soon have been crushed out of existence in the
incessant feuds it had to wage with all its neighbours;
The communities of ancient civilisation were formed by
the survival of the fittest, and they had all the self-
confidence and elasticity that are engendered by success
in the struggle for life. These characters, therefore, are
reflected in the religious system that grew up with the
growth of the state, and the type of worship that corre-
sponded to them was not felt to be inadequate till the
political system was undermined from within or shattered
by blows from without.
These considerations sufficiently account for the develop-
ment of the habitual joyous temper of ancient sacrificial
worship. But it is also to be observed that when the
LECT. VII. OF ANCIENT RELIGION. 243
type was once formed it would not at once disappear, even
when a change in social conditions made it no longer an
adequate expression of the habitual tone of national life.
The most important functions of ancient worship were
reserved for public occasions, when the whole community
was stirred by a common emotion ; and among agricultural
nations the stated occasions of sacrifice were the natural
seasons of festivity, at harvest and vintage. At such times
every one was ready to cast off his cares and rejoice before
his god, and so the coincidence of religious and agricultural
gladness helped to keep the old form of worship alive,
long after it had ceased to be in full harmony with men's
permanent view of the world. Moreover it must be
remembered that the spirit of boisterous mirth which
characterised the oldest religious festivals was nourished
by the act of worship itself. The sacrificial feast was not
only an expression of gladness but a means of driving
away care, for it was set forth with every circumstance of
gaiety, with garlands, perfumes and music, as well as with
store of meat and wine. The sensuous Oriental nature
responds to such physical stimulus with a readiness foreign
to our more sluggish temperament ; to the Arab it is an
excitement and a delight of the highest order merely to
have flesh to eat.^ From the earliest times, therefore, the
relicjious a-ladness of the Semites tended to assume an
orgiastic character and become a sort of intoxication of
the senses, in which anxiety and sorrow were drowned
for the moment. This is apparent in the old Canaanite
festivals, such as the vintage feast at Shechem described
in Judg. ix. 27, and not less in the service of the Hebrew
1 A current Arabic saying, wliich I liave somewhere seen ascribed to
Taiibbata Sharran, reckons the eating of flesh as one of the three great
deliglits of life. In MaidanT, ii. 22, tiesh and wine are classed together as
seductive luxuries.
244 ORGIASTIC LECT. VII.
high places, as it is characterised by the prophets. Even
at Jerusalem the worship must have been boisterous
indeed, when Lam. ii. 7 compares the shouts of the storm-
ing party of the Chaldseans in the courts of the temple
with the noise of a solemn feast. Among the Nabatseans
and elsewhere the orgiastic character of the worship often
led in later times to the identification of Semitic gods,
especially of Dusares, with the Greek Dionysus. It is
plain that a religion of this sort would not necessarily
cease to be powerful when it ceased to express a habitu-
ally joyous view of the world and the divine governance ;
in evil times, when men's thoughts were habitually sombre,
they betook themselves to the physical excitement of
religion, as men now take refuge in wine. That this is
not a fancy picture is clear from Isaiah's description of
the conduct of his contemporaries during the approach of
the Assyrians to Jerusalem,-^ when the multiplied sacrifices
that were offered to avert the disaster degenerated into a
drunken carnival — " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow
we die." And so in general when an act of Semitic
worship began with sorrow and lamentation — as in the
mourning for Adonis, or in the great atoning ceremonies
which became common in later times — a swift revulsion
of feeling followed, and the gloomy part of the ser-
vice was presently succeeded by a burst of hilarious
revelry, which, in later times at least, was not a purely
spontaneous expression of the conviction that man is
reconciled with the powers that govern his life and
rule the universe, but in great measure a mere orgiastic
excitement. The nerves were strung to the utmost
tension in the sombre part of the ceremony, and the
natural reaction was fed by the physical stimulus of the
revelry that followed,
^ Isa. xxii. 12, 13, compared with i. 11 sqq.
LECT. VII.
EELIGION. 245
This, however, is not a picture of what Semitic religion
was from the first, and in its ordinary exercises, but of the
shape it tended to assume in extraordinary times of national
calamity, and still more under the habitual pressure of
grinding despotism, when the general tone of social life
was no longer bright and hopeful, but stood in painful
contrast to the joyous temper proper to the traditional
forms of worship. Ancient heathenism was not made for
such times, but for seasons of national prosperity, when its
joyous rites were the appropriate expression for the happy
fellowship that united the god and his worshippers to
the satisfaction of both parties. Then the enthusiasm of
the worshipping throng was genuine. Men came to the
sanctuary to give free vent to habitual feelings of thankful
confidence in their god, and warmed themselves into excite-
ment in a perfectly natural way by feasting together, as
people still do when they rejoice together.
In acts of worship we expect to find the religious ideal
expressed in its purest form, and we cannot easily think
well of a type of religion whose ritual culminates in a
jovial feast. It seems that such a faith sought nothing
higher than a condition of physical hien etre, and in one
sense this judgment is just. The good things desired of
the gods were the blessings of earthly life, not spiritual but
carnal things. But Semitic heathenism was redeemed
from mere materialism by the fact that religion was not
the affair of the individual but of the community. The
ideal was earthly, but it was not selfish. In rejoicing
before his god a man rejoiced with and for the welfare
of his kindred, his neighbours and his country, and, in
renewing by a solemn act of worship the bond that united
him to his god, he also renewed the bonds of family social
and national obligation. We have seen that the compact
between the god and the community of his worshippers
246 THE SOCIAL ELEMENT lect. vii.
was not held to pledge the deity to make the private cares
of each member of the community his own. The gods had
their favourites no doubt, for whom they were prepared to
do many things that they were not bound to do ; but no
man could approach his god in a purely personal matter
with that spirit of absolute confidence which I have
described as characteristic of antique religions ; it was the
community, and not the individual, that was sure of the
permanent and unfailing help of its deity. It was a
national not a personal providence that was taught by
ancient religion. So much was this the case that in purely
personal concerns the ancients were very apt to turn, not
to the recognised religion of the family or of the state, but
to magical superstitions. The gods watched over a man's
civic life, they gave him his share in public benefits, the
annual largess of the harvest and the vintage, national
peace or victory over enemies, and so forth, but they were
not sure helpers in every private need, and above all they
would not help him in matters that were against the
interests of the community as a whole. There was there-
fore a whole region of possible needs and desires for which
religion could and would know nothing ; and if supernatural
help was sought in such things it had to be sought through
magical ceremonies, designed to purchase or constrain the
favour of demoniac powers with which the public religion
had nothing to do. Not only did these magical supersti-
tions lie outside religion, but in all well-ordered states they
were regarded as illicit. A man had no right to enter into
private relations with supernatural powers that might help
him at the expense of the community to which he
belonged. In his relations to the unseen he was bound
always to think and act with and for the community, and
not for himself alone.
With this it accords that every complete act of worship
LECT. VII.
m RELIGION. 247
— for a mere vow was not a complete act till it was
fulfilled by presenting a sacrifice — had a public or quasi-
public character. Most sacrifices were offered on fixed
occasions, at the great communal or national feasts, but
even a private offering was not complete without guests,
and the surplus of sacrificial flesh was not sold but
distributed with an open liand.^ Thus every act of
worship expressed the idea that man does not live
for himself only but for his fellows, and that this j)artner-
ship of social interests is the sphere over which the
gods preside and on which they bestow their assured
blessing.
The ethical significance which thus appertains to the
sacrificial meal, viewed as a social act, received particular
emphasis from certain ancient customs and ideas connected
with eating and drinking. According to antique ideas
those who eat and drink together are by this very act tied
to one another by a bond of friendship and mutual
obligation. Hence when we find that in ancient religions
all the ordinary functions of worship are summed up in
the sacrificial meal, and that the ordinary intercourse ^
between gods and men has no other form, we are to
remember that the act of eating and drinking together is
the solemn and stated expression of the fact that all those
who share the meal are brethren, and that all the duties of
friendship and brotherhood are implicitly acknowledged in
their common act. By admitting man to his table the god
admits him to his friendship ; but this favour is extended
to no man in his mere private capacity ; he is received as
one of a community, to eat and drink along with his
fellows, and in tlie same measure as the act of worship
cements the bond between him and his god, it cements also
1 See above, p. 230. In Greece, in later times, sacriticial flesli was exposed
for sale (1 Cor. x. 25).
248 ETHICAL VALUE OF lect. vii.
the bond between liiui and his brethren in the common
faith.
We have now reached a point in our discussion at
which it is possible to form some general estimate of the
ethical value of the type of religion which has been
described. The power of religion over life is twofold,
lying partly in its association with particular precepts of
conduct, to which it supplies a supernatural sanction, but
mainly in its influence on the general tone and temper
of men's minds, which it elevates to higher courage and
purpose, and raises above a mere brutal servitude to the
physical wants of the moment, by teaching men that their
lives and happiness are not the mere sport of the blind
forces of nature, but are watched over and cared for by
a higher power. As a spring of action this influence is
more potent than the fear of supernatural sanctions, for
it is stimulative, while the other is only regulative. But
to produce a moral effect on life the two must go together ;
a man's actions must be not only supported by the feeling
that the divine help is with him, but regulated by the
conviction that that help wdll not accompany him except
on the right path. In ancient religion, as it appears
among the Semites, the confident assurance of divine help
belongs, not to each man in his private concerns, but to
the community in its public functions and public aims ; and
it is this assurance that is expressed in public acts of
worship, where all the members of the community meet
together to eat and drink at the table of their god, and
so renew the sense that he and they are altogether at one.
JSTow, if we look at the whole community of worshippers
as absolutely one, personify them and think of them as a
single individual, it is plain that the effect of this type
of religion must be regarded as merely stimulative and
not regulative. When the community is at one with
LECT. VII. SACRIFICIAL RELIGION. 249
itself and at one with its god, it may, for anything that
religion has to say, do exactly what it pleases towards
all who are outside it. Its friends are the god's friends,
its enemies the god's enemies ; it takes its god with it in
whatever it chooses to do. As the ancient communities
of religion are tribes or nations, this is as nmch as to say
that, properly speaking, ancient religion has no influence
on intertribal or international morality — in such matters
the god simply goes with his own nation or his own tribe.
So long as we consider the tribe or nation of common
religion as a single subject, the influence of religion is
limited to an increase of the national self-confidence — a
quality very useful in the continual struggle for life that
was waged between ancient communities, but which beyond
this has no moral value.
But the case is very different when we look at the
religious community as made up of a multitude of
individuals, each of whom has private as well as public
purposes and desires. In this aspect it is the regulative
influence of ancient religion that is predominant, for the
good things which religion holds forth are promised to the
individual only in so far as he lives in and for the com-
munity. The conception of man's chief good set forth
in the social act of sacrificial worship is the happiness
of the individual in the happiness of the community, and
thus the whole force of ancient religion is directed, so far
as the individual is concerned, to maintain the civil virtues
of loyalty and devotion to a man's fellows at a pitch of
confident enthusiasm, to teach him to set his highest good
in the prosperity of the society of which he is a member,
not doubting that in so doing he has the divine power on
his side and has given his life to a cause that cannot fail.
This devotion to the common weal was, as every one knows,
the mainspring of ancient morality and the source of all
250 ANCIENT MORALITY. lect. vii.
the heroic virtues of which ancient history presents so
many illustrious examples. In ancient society, therefore,
the religious ideal expressed in the act of social worship
and the ethical ideal which governed the conduct of daily
life were wholly at one, and all morality — as morality was
then understood — was consecrated and enforced by religious
motives and sanctions.
These observations are fully applicable only to the
typical form of ancient religion, when it was still strictly
tribal or national. When nationality and religion began
to fall apart, certain worships assumed a character more
or less cosmopolitan. Even in heathenism therefore, in
its more advanced forms, the gods, or at least certain gods,
are in some measure the guardians of universal morality,
and not merely of communal loyalty. But what was thus
gained in comprehensiveness was lost in intensity and
strength of religious feeling, and the advance towards
ethical universalism, which was made with feeble and
uncertain steps, was never sufficient to make up for the
decline of the old heroic virtues that w^ere fostered by the
narrower type of national faith.
LECTUEE VIIL
THE ORIGINAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ANIMAL SACRIFICE.
Enough has been said as to the significance of the sacri-
ficial feast as we find it among ancient nations no longer
barbarous. But to understand the matter fully we must
trace it back to its origin in a state of society much
more primitive than that of the agricultural Semites or
Greeks.
The sacrificial meal was an appropriate expression of the
antique ideal of religious life, not merely because it was a
social act and an act in which the god and his worshippers
were conceived as partaking together, but because, as has
already been said, the very act of eating and drinking
with a man was a symbol and a confirmation of fellowship
and mutual social obligations. The one thing directly
expressed in the sacrificial meal is that the god and his
worshippers are commensals, but every other point in their
mutual relations is included in what this involves. Those
who sit at 'meat together are united for all social effects,
those who do not eat together are aliens to one another,
without fellowship in religion and without reciprocal social
duties. The extent to which this view prevailed among
the ancient Semites, and still prevails among the Arabs,
may be brought out most clearly by reference to the law of
hospitality. Among the Arabs every stranger whom one
meets in the desert is a natural enemy, and has no protec-
tion against violence except his own strong hand or the fear
251
252 THE BOND LECT. vili.
that his tribe will avenge him if his blood be spilt.^ But
if I have eaten the smallest morsel of food with a man, I
have nothing further to fear from him ; " there is salt
between us," and he is bound not only to do me no harm,
but to help and defend me as if I were his brother.^ So
far was this principle carried by the old Arabs, that Zaid
al-Khail, a famous warrior in the days of Mohammed,
refused to slay a vagabond who carried off his camels,
because the thief had surreptitiously drunk from his father's
milk bowl before committing the theft.^ It does not
indeed follow as a matter of course that because I have
eaten once with a man I am permanently his friend, for
the bond of union is conceived in a very realistic way, and
strictly speaking lasts no longer than the food may be
supposed to remain in my system.^ But the temporary
bond is confirmed by repetition,^ and readily passes into a
permanent tie confirmed by an oath. " There was a sworn
alliance between the Libyan and the Mostalic, they were
wont to eat and drink together."*' This phrase of an Arab
narrator supplies exactly what is wanted to define the
^ This is the meaning of Gen. iv. 1 4 sq. Cain is ' ' driven out from the
face of the cultivated land " into the desert, where his only protection is
the law of blood revenge.
" The milha, or bond of salt, is not dependent on the actual use of mineral
salt with the food by which the bond is constituted. Milk, for example,
will serve the purpose. Cf. Burckhardt, Bedovins and Wahabys, i. 329, and
Kcimil, p. 284, especially the verse of Abu '1-Tamahan there cited, where salt
is interpreted to mean "milk."
* A(jh. xvi. 51 ; cf. Kinship, p. 149 sq.
* Burton, Pilgrimage, iii. 84 (1st ed. ), says that some tribes "require to
renew the bond every twenty-four hours," as otherwise, to use their own
phrase, " the salt is not in their stomachs" (almost the same phrase is used
in the verse of Abu l-Tamahan referred to above). But usually the protec-
tion extended to a guest lasts three days and a third after his departure
(Burckhardt, op. cit. i. 136) ; or according to Doughty, i. 228, two nights
and tlie day between.
* "0 enemy of God, wilt thou slay this Jew? Much of the fat on thy
paunch is of his substance" (Ibn Hisliam, p. 553 sq.).
" Diw. Ilodh. No. 87 (Kosegarten's ed. p. 170).
LECT. VIII. OF FOOD. 253
significance of the sacrificial meal. The god and his
worshippers are wont to eat and drink together, and by
this token their fellowship is declared and sealed.
The ethical sio-nificance of the common meal can be
O
most adequately illustrated from Arabian usage, but it was
not confined to the Arabs. The Old Testament records
many cases where a covenant was sealed by the parties
eatiniT and drinking together. In most of these indeed the
meal is sacrificial, so that it is not at once clear that two
men are bound to each other merely by partaking of the
same dish, unless the deity is taken in as a third party to
the covenant. The value of the Arabian evidence is that
it supplies proof that the bond of food is valid of itself,
that religion may be called in to confirm and strengthen it,
but that the essence of the thing lies in the physical act of
eating together. That this was also the case among the
Hebrews and Canaanites may be safely concluded from
analogy, and appears to receive direct confirmation from
Josh. ix. 14, where the Israelites enter into alliance with
the Gibeonites by taking of their victuals, without consult-
ing Jehovah. A formal league confirmed by an oatli
follows, but by accepting the proffered food the Israelites
are already committed to the alliance.
But we have not yet got to the root of the matter.
What is the ultimate nature of the fellowship which is
constituted or declared when men eat and drink together ?
In our complicated society fellowship has many types and
many degrees ; men may be united by bonds of duty and
honour for certain purposes, and stand quite apart in all
other things. Even in ancient times — for example, in the
Old Testament — we find the sacrament of a common meal
introduced to seal engagements of various kinds. But in
every case the engagement is absolute and inviolable, it
constitutes what in the language of ethics is called a duty
254 FOOD AND LECT. vili.
of perfect obligation. Now in the most primitive society
there is only one kind of fellowship which is absolute and
inviolable. To the primitive man all other men fall under
two classes, those to whom his life is sacred and those to
whom it is not sacred. The former are his fellows ; the
latter are strangers and potential foemen, with whom it is
absurd to think of forming any inviolable tie unless they
are first brought into the circle within which each man's
life is sacred to all his comrades.
But that circle again corresponds to the circle of
kinship, for the practical test of kinship is that the
whole kin is answerable for the life of each of its
members. By the rules of early society, if I slay my
kinsman, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, the act
is murder, and is punished by expulsion from the kin ; ^
if my kinsman is slain by an outsider I and every other
member of my kin are bound to avenge his death by
killing the manslayer or some member of his kin. It
is obvious that under such a system there can be no
inviolable fellowship except between men of the same
blood. For the duty of blood revenge is paramount, and
every other obligation is dissolved as soon as it comes into
conflict with the claims of blood. I cannot bind myself
absolutely to a man, even for a temporary purpose, unless
during the time of our engagement he is put into a
kinsman's place. And this is as much as to say that a
stranger cannot become bound to me, unless at the same
time he becomes bound to all my kinsmen in exactly the
same way. Such is, in fact, the law of the desert ; when
any member of a clan receives an outsider through the
bond of salt, the whole clan is bound by his act, and must,
^ Even in Homeric society no bloodwit can be accepted for slaughter
within the kin ; a point Avhich is commonly overlooked, e.g. by Buchholz,
Horn. Heal. II. i. 76.
LECT. VIII. KINSHIP. 255
while the engagement lasts, receive the stranger as one of
themselves.^
The idea that kinship is not purely an affair of birth,
but may be acquired, has quite fallen out of our circle
of ideas ; but so, for that matter, has the primitive con-
ception of kindred itself. To us kinship has no absolute
value, but is measured by degrees, and means much or
little, or nothing at all, according to its degree and other
circumstances. In ancient times, on the contrary, the
fundamental obligations of kinship had nothing to do
with degrees of relationship, but rested with absolute
and identical force on every member of the clan. To
know that a man's life was sacred to me, and that every
blood-feud that touched him involved me also, it was not
necessary for me to count cousinship with him by reckon-
ing up to our common ancestor ; it was enough that we
belonged to the same clan and bore the same clan-name.
What was my clan was determined by customary law,
which was not the same in all stages of society ; in the
earliest Semitic communities a man was of his mother's
clan, in later times he belonged to the clan of his father.
But the essential idea of kinship was independent of the
particular form of the law. A kin was a group of persons
whose lives were so bound up together, in what must be
called a physical unity, that they could be treated as parts
of one common life. The members of one kindred looked
on themselves as one living whole, a single animated mass
of blood, flesh and bones, of which no member could be
touched without all the members suffering. This point
of view is expressed in the Semitic tongues in many
1 This of course is to be understood only of the fundamental rights and
duties which turn on the sanctity of kindred blood. The secondary
privileges of kinship, in matters of inheritance and the like, lie outside of
the present argument, and with regard to them the covenanted ally had not
the full rights of a kinsman {Kinship, p. 47).
256 KINSHIP AND LECT. VIII.
familiar forms of speech. In a case of homicide Arabian
tribesmen do not say, " The blood of M. or K has been
spilt," naming the man ; they say, " Our blood has been
spilt." In Hebrew the phrase by which one claims
kinship is " I am your bone and your flesh." ^ Both in
Hebrew and in Arabic " flesh " is synonymous with " clan "
or kindred group.^ To us all this seems mere metaphor,
from which no practical consequences can follow. But
in early thought there is no sharp line between the meta-
phorical and the literal, between the way of expressing a
thing and the way of conceiving it ; phrases and symbols
are treated as realities. Now, if kinship means participa-
tion in a common mass of flesh blood and bones, it is
natural that it should be regarded as dependent, not
merely on the fact that a man was born of his mother's
body, and so was from his birth a part of her flesh, but
also on the not less significant fact that he was nourished
^ Judg. ix. 2 ; 2 Sam. v. 1. Conversely in acknowledging kinship the
phrase is "Thou art my bone and my flesh " (Gen. xxix. 14 ; 2 Sam. xix. 12) ;
cf. Gen. xxxvii. 27, "our brother and our flesh."
- Lev. XXV. 49 ; Kinship, p. 149. In this book, p. 39 sq., I argued that
the common Arabian name for a kindred group {hayy) probably means
"life," and rests on the idea that one life runs through the veins of the
whole group. Prof. De Goeje, however, has given excellent reasons for
rejecting this view in a MS. note on my book, which I will here quote in
his own words : — " You say very justly (p. 167) of the tent of the wife :
'This tent plays quite a significant part both in marriage and in divorce.'
And so it does in protection (p. 42 sq.), etc. (p. 65 sqq.). My opinion is
that linyy is originally 'tent,' as well as hiwd, Heb. Tl, r^Ti and nin. It
has this original meaning in the expression sa'afu 'l-hayy, ' the paraphernalia
of the bride,' originally the palmsticks wherewith the tent was constructed
or adorned. "We find the word too in this signification in the Berber
language {dh6, e.g. Earth, Reisen, v. 711). The word hiiod preserved the
old meaning. One says shadda (or (lamma) 'alaihd hiwdhu {e.g. Agh. xx.
7, 1. 8, 12) for hand 'alaihd, showing that your explanation of this phrase
(p. 167) is excellent. Thus we have in hayy the same metaphor as in bait,
ahl. Perhaps ahh ['brother'] has been diff"erentiated from this same root.
Prom ' tent ' to ' dwelling-place of the family ' and to ' family ' the transition
is easy. An older example of the use oHiayy for home is a verse of Taabbata
Sharran, TA. iv. 367 ; Hamdsa, 383 uU."
LECT. VIII. COMMON LIFE. 257
by her milk. And so we find that among the Arabs there
is a tie of milk, as well as of blood, which unites the
foster-child to his foster-mother and her kin. Again,
after the child is weaned, his flesh and blood continue to
be nourished and renewed by the food which he shares
with his commensals, so that commensality can be thought
of (1) as confirming or even (2) as constituting kinship in
a very real sense.^
As regards their bearing on the doctrine of sacrifice it
will conduce to clearness if we keep these two points
distinct. Primarily the circle of common religion and of
common social duties was identical with that of natural
kinship,^ and the god himself was conceived as a being of
the same stock with his worshippers. It was natural,
therefore, that the kinsmen and their kindred god should
seal and strengthen their fellowship by meeting together
from time to time to nourish their common life by a
common meal, to which those outside the kin were not
admitted. A good example of this kind of clan sacrifice,
in which a whole kinship periodically joins, is afforded by
the Roman sacra gentilicia. As in primitive society no
man can belong to more than one kindred, so among the
Eomans no one could share in the sacra of two gentes —
to do so was to confound the ritual and contaminate the
purity of the gens. The sacra consisted in common anni-
versary sacrifices, in which the clansmen honoured the
gods of the clan and after them the " demons " of their
ancestors, so that the whole kin living and dead were
brought together in the service.^ That the earliest sacri-
ficial feasts among the Semites were of the nature of sacra
gentilicia is matter of inference rather than of direct
1 Cf. Kinship, p. 149 sqq. ^ Supra, p. 51.
* For proofs anil further details see the evidence collected by Mari^uardt,
R<)7n. Staatsverwallumj, "ind ed. iii. 130 sq.
258 GENTILE LECT. vin.
evidence, but is not on that account less certain. For
that the Semites form no exception to the general rule
that the circle of religion and of kinship were originally
identical, has been shewn in Lecture II. The only thing,
therefore, for which additional proof is needed is that the
sacrificial ritual of the Semites already existed in this
primitive form of society. That this was so is morally
certain on general grounds ; for an institution like the
sacrificial meal, which occurs with the same general
features all over the world, and is found among the most
primitive peoples, must, in the nature of things, date
from the earliest stage of social organisation. And the
general argument is confirmed by the fact that after several
clans had begun to frequent the same sanctuary and
worship the same god, the worshippers still grouped them-
selves for sacrificial purposes on the principle of kinship.
In the days of Saul and David all the tribes of Israel
had long been united in the worship of Jehovah, yet the
clans still maintained their annual gentile sacrifice, at
which every member of the group was bound to be
present.^ But evidence more decisive comes to us from
Arabia, where, as we have seen, men would not eat
together at all unless they were united by kinship or by
a covenant that had the same effect as natural kinship.
Under such a rule the sacrificial feast must have been
confined to kinsmen, and the clan was the largest circle
1 1 Sam. XX. 6, 29. The word mitfhpaha, whicli the English Bible here
ami elsewhere renders "family," denotes not a household but a clan. In
verse 29 the true reading is indicated by the Se^ituagint, and has been re-
stored by Wellhausen CJIX y ^Vi ^«^). It was not David's brother, but
his brethren, that is his clansmen, that enjoined his presence. The annual
festivity, the duty of all clansmen to attend, the expectation that this
sacred duty would be accepted as a valid excuse for absence from court
even at the king's new-moon sacrifice, are so many points of correspondence
witli the Roman gentile worship ; cf. Gellius, xvi. 4. 3, and the other
passages cited by ]\lan|uardt, ut supra, p. 132, note 4.
LECT. viil. SACRIFICE. 259
that could unite in a sacrificial act. And so, though the
great sanctuaries of heathen Arabia were frequented at
the pilgrimage feasts by men of different tribes, who met
peaceably for a season under the protection of the truce
of God, we find that their participation in the worship of
the same holy place did not bind alien clans together in
any religious unity ; they worshipped side by side, but
not together. It is only under Islam that the pilgrimage
becomes a bond of religious fellowship, whereas in the
times of heathenism it was the correct usage that the
different tribes, before they broke up from the feast, should
engage in a rivalry of self-exaltation and mutual abuse,
which sent them home with all their old jealousies freshly
inflamed."^
That the sacrificial meal was originally a feast of kins-
men, is apt to suggest to modern minds the idea that its
primitive type is to be sought in the household circle, and
that public sacrifices, in which the whole clan united, are
merely an extension of such an act of domestic worship
as in ancient Eome accompanied every family meal. The
Eoman family never rose from supper till a portion of food
had been laid on the burning hearth as an offering to the
Lares, and the current opinion, which regards the gens as
nothing more than an enlarged household, naturally regards
^ See Goklzilier, Muh. Stud. i. 56. The prayer and exhortation of the
leader of the procession of tribes from 'Arafa (,A(jh. iii. 4 ; Wellh., p. 191)
seems to me to be meant for his own tribe alone. The prayer for "peace
among our women, a continuous range of pasture occupied by our herdsmen,
•wealth placed in tlie hands of our most generous men," asks only blessings
for the tribe. And the admonition to observe treaties, honour clients, and
be hospitable to guests contains nothing that -was not a point of tribal
morality. The ijdza, or right to give the signal for dissolving the worship-
ping assembly, belonged to a particular tribe ; it was the right to start first.
The man who gave tlie sign to this tribe closed the service for them by a
prayer and admonition. This is all that I can gather from the passage, and
it does not prove that the tribes had any other religious communion than
was involved in tlicir being in one place at one time.
260 GENTILE LECT. VIII.
the gentile sacrifice as an enlargement of this domestic
rite. But the notion that the clan is only a larger house-
hold is not consistent with the results of modern research.
Kinship is an older thing than family life, and in the
most primitive societies known to us the family or house-
hold group was not a subdivision of the clan, but contained
members of more than one kindred. As a rule the savage
man may not marry a clanswoman, and the children are
of the mother's kin, and therefore have no communion of
blood religion with their father. In such a» society there
is hardly any family life, and there can be no sacred
household meal. Before the family meal can acquire the
religious significance that it possessed in Eome, one of two
things must take place : either the primitive association
of religion with kinship must be dissolved, or means must
have been found to make the whole household of one
blood, as was done in Eome by the rule that the wife
upon her marriage was adopted into her husband's gens.'-
The rudest nations have religious rules about food, based
on the principle of kinship, viz. that a man may not eat the
totem animal of his clan ; and they generally have some
rites of the nature of the sacrificial feast of kinsmen ; but
it is not the custom of savages to take their ordinary
daily food in a social way, in regular domestic meals.
Their habit is to eat irregularly and apart, and this habit
is strengthened by the religious rules, which often forbid
to one member of a household the food which is permitted
to another.
We have no direct evidence as to the rules and habits
of the Semites in the state of primitive savagery, though
' In Greece, according to the testimony of Theoplirastus, ap. Porph. , De
Abst. ii. 20 (Bernays, p. 68), it was customary to pay to the gods an aparche
of every meal. The term a.-gafx,^(T6a.i seems to place this offering under the
head of gifts rather than of sacrificial communion, and the gods to whom the
offering was made were not, as at Rome, family gods.
LECT. VIII. SACRIFICE. 261
there is ample proof of an indirect kind that they originally
reckoned kinship through the mother, and that men often,
if not always, took their wives from strange kins. It is
to be presumed that at this stage of society the Semite did
not eat with his wife and children, and it is certain that if
he did so the meal could not have had a religious character,
as an acknowledgment and seal of kinship and adherence
to a kindred god. But in fact the family meal never
became a fixed institution among the Semites generally.
In Egypt, down to the present day, many persons hardly
ever eat with their wives and children,^ and among the
Arabs, boys who are not of full age do not presume to eat
in the presence of their parents, but take their meals
separately or with the women of the house.^ No doubt
the seclusion of women has retarded the development
of family life in Mohammedan countries ; but for most
purposes this seclusion has never taken much hold on the
desert, and yet in northern Arabia no woman will eat
before men.^ I apprehend that these customs were
originally formed at a time when a man and his wife and
family were not usually of one kin, and when only kinsmen
would eat together.* But be this as it may, the fact
remains that in Arabia the daily family meal has never
1 Lane, Mod. Ecpjptians, 5th ed. i. 179 ; cf. Arabian NUjhts, chap. ii.
note 17.
- Burckhardt, Bed. and Wah. i. 355 ; Doughty, ii. 142.
* Burckhardt, op. cif. i. 349. Conversely Ibn Mojawir, ap. Sprenger,
Postrouten, p. 151, tells of southern Arabs who would rather die than accept
food at the hand of a woman.
* In Arabia, even in historical times, the wife was not adopted into her
husband's kin. The children in historical times were generally reckoned to
the father's stock ; but there is much reason to think that this new rule of
kinship, when it first came in, did not mean that the infant was born into
his father's clan, but that he was adopted into it by a formal act, which did
not always take place in infancy. We find that young children follow their
mother {Kinship, p. 114), and that the law of blood revenge did not prevent
fathers from killing their young daughters {ibid. p. 279 sqq.). Of this
more hereafter.
262 GENTILE LECT. VIII.
been an established institution with such a religious
significance as attaches to the Eoman supper.^
The sacrificial feast, therefore, cannot be traced back to
the domestic meal, but must be considered as having been
from the first a public feast of clansmen. That this is
true not only for Arabia but for the Semites as a whole
might be inferred on general grounds, inasmuch as ail
Semitic worship manifestly springs from a common origin,
and the inference is confirmed by the observation that
even among the agricultural Semites there is no trace of a
sacrificial character being attached to ordinary household
meals. The domestic hearth among the Semites was not
an altar as it was at Eome.^
Almost all varieties of human food were offered to the
gods, and any kind of food suffices, according to the laws
of Arabian hospitality, to establish that bond between two
men which in the last resort rests on the principle that
only kinsmen eat together. It may seem, therefore, that
in the abstract any sort of meal publicly partaken of by a
company of kinsmen may constitute a sacrificial feast.
The distinction between the feast and an ordinary meal
lies, it may seem, not in the material or the copiousness of
the repast, but m its public character. When men eat
alone they do not invite the god to share their food, but
when the clan eats together as a kindred unity the kindred
god must also be of the party.
Practically, however, there is no sacrificial feast according
to Semitic usage except where a victim is slaughtered.
The rule of the Levitical law, that a cereal oblation, when
^ The naming of God, by which every meal is consecrated according to
Mohammed's precept, seems in ancient times to have been practised only
when a victim was slaughtered ; cf. Wellh., p. 114. Here the tahlil
corresponds to the blessing of the sacrifice, 1 Sam. ix. 13.
- The passover became a sort of household sacrifice after the exile, but was
not so originally. See "Wellhausen, Prolejoviena, ch. iii.
LECT. viir. SACEIFICE. 263
ofi'ered alone, belongs wholly to the god and gives no
occasion for a feast of the worshippers, agrees with the
older history, in which we never find a sacrificial meal of
which flesh does not form part. Among the Arabs the
usage is the same ; a religious banquet implies a victim.
It appears, therefore, to look at the matter from its merely
human side, that the slaughter of a victim must have been
in early times the only thing that brought the clan together
for a stated meal. Conversely, every slaughter was a clan
sacrifice, that is, a domestic animal was not slain except to
procure the material for a public meal of kinsmen. This
last proposition seems startling, but it is confirmed by the
direct evidence of Nilus as to the habits of the Arabs of
the Sinaitic desert towards the close of the fourth Christian
century. The ordinary sustenance of these Saracens was
derived from pillage or from hunting, to wdiich, no doubt,
must be added, as a main element, the milk of their herds.
When these supplies failed they fell back on the flesh
(jf their camels, one of which was slain for each clan
(avyyeveta) or for each group which habitually pitched
their tents together (a-va-Krjvia) — which according to known
Arab usage would always be a fraction of a clan ^ — and
the flesh was hastily devoured by the kinsmen in dog-like
fashion, half raw and merely softened over the fire.
To grasp the force of this evidence we must remember
that, beyond question, there was at this time among the
Saracens private property in camels, and that therefore, so
far as the law of property went, there could be no reason
why a man should not kill a beast for the use of liis own
family. And though a whole camel might be too much
for a single household to eat fresh, the Arabs knew and
^ Nili opera quwdam nondum edita (Paris, 1639), p. 27. The ffvyyivna.
answers to the Arabic bain, the irvffKr.vix to tlie Arabic /(«,'/»/, in the sense of
encampment.
264 SARACEN LECT. viir.
practised the art of preserving flesh by cutting it into strips
and drying them in the sun. Under these circumstances
private slaughter could not have failed to be customary,
unless it was absolutely forbidden by tribal usage. In
short, it appears that while milk, game, the fruits of pillage
were private food which might be eaten in any way, the
camel was not allowed to be killed and eaten except in a
public rite, at which all the kinsmen assisted.
This evidence is all the more remarkable because, among
the Saracens of whom Nilus speaks, the slaughter of a
camel in times of hunger does not seem to have been con-
sidered as a sacrifice to the gods. For a couple of pages
later he speaks expressly of the sacrifices which these
Arabs offered to the morning star, the sole deity that they
acknowledged. These could be performed only when the
star was visible, and the whole victim — flesh, skin and
bones — had to be devoured before the sun rose upon it, and
the day-star disappeared. As this form of sacrifice was
necessarily confined to seasons when the planet Venus was
a morning star, while the necessity for slaughtering a
camel as food might arise at any season, it is to be inferred
that in the latter case the victim was not recognised as
having a sacrificial character. The Saracens, in fact, had
outlived the stage in which no necessity can justify
slaughter that is not sacrificial. The principle that the
god claims his share in every slaughter has its origin in the
religion of kinship, and dates from a time when the tribal
god was himself a member of the tribal stock, and when
therefore his participation in the sacrificial feast is only
one aspect of the rule that no kinsman must be excluded
from a share in the victim. But the Saracens of Nilus,
like the Arabs generally in the last ages of heathenism,
had ceased to do sacrifice to the tribal or clan gods with
whose worship the feast of kinsmen was originally con-
LECT. VIII.
SACRIFICE. 265
nected. The planet Venus, or Lucifer, was not a tribal
deity, but, as we know from a variety of sources, was
worshipped by all the northern Arabs, to whatever kin
they belonged. It is not therefore surprising that in case
of necessity we should meet with a slaughter in which the
non-tribal deity had no part ; but it is noteworthy that,
after the victim had lost its sacrificial character, it was
still deemed necessary that the slaughter should be the
affair of the whole kindred. That this was so, while
among the Hebrews, on the other hand, the rule that all
legitimate slaughter is sacrifice survived long after house-
holders were permitted to make private sacrifices on their
own account, is characteristic of the peculiar development
of Arabia, where, as Wellhausen has justly remarked,
religious feeling was quite put in the shade by the feeling
for the sanctity of kindred blood. Elsewhere among the
Semites we see the old religion surviving the tribal system
on which it was based, and accommodating itself to the
new forms of national life ; but in Arabia the rules and
customs of the kin retained the sanctity which they
originally derived from their connection with the religion
of the kin, long after the kindred god had been forgotten
or had sunk into quite a subordinate place. I take it,
however, that the eating of camels' flesh continued to be
regarded by the Arabs as in some sense a religious act,
even when it was no longer associated with a formal act of
sacrifice ; for abstinence from the flesh of camels and wild
asses was prescribed by Symeon Stylites to his Saracen
converts,^ and traces of an idolatrous significance in feasts
of camels' flesh appear in Mohammedan tradition.^
The persistence among the Arabs of the scruple against
private slaughter for a man's own personal use may, I
think, be traced in a modified form in other parts of Arabia
1 Theodoret, ed. Nosselt, iii. 1274 sq. ^ Wellli., p. 114 ; Kinship, p. 262.
266 GENTILE LECT. VIII.
and long after tlie time of Nilus. Even in modern times,
when a sheep or camel is slain in honour of a g'uest, the
good old custom is that the host keeps open house for his
neighbours, or at least distributes portions of the flesh as
far as it will go. To do otherwise is still deemed churlish,
though not illegal, and the old Arabic literature leaves the
impression that in ancient times tliis feeling was still
stronger than it is now, and that the whole encampment
was considered when a beast was slain for food.^ But be
this as it may, it is highly significant to find that, even in
one branch of the Arabian race, the doctrine that hunger
itself does not justify slaughter, except as the act of the
clan, was so deeply rooted as to survive the doctrine that
all slaughter is sacrifice. This fact is sufficient to remove
the last doubt as to the proposition that all sacrifice was
originally clan sacrifice, and at the same time it puts the
slaughter of a victim in a new light, by classing it among
the acts which, in primitive society, are illegal to an
individual, and can only be justified when the whole clan
shares the responsibility of the deed. So far as I know,
there is only one class of actions recognised by early nations
to which this description applies, viz. actions which involve
an invasion of the sanctity of the tribal blood. In fact, a
life which no single tribesman is allowed to invade, and
which can be sacrificed only by the consent and common
action of the kin, stands on the same footing with the life
of the fellow-tribesman. ISTeither may be taken away by
^ Compare especially the story of Mawia's courtship {Aghdnl, xvi. 104 ;
Caussin de Perceval, ii. 613). The beggar's claim to a share in the feast is
doubtless ultimately based on religious and tribal usage rather than on
personal generosity. Cf. Deut. xxvi. 13. Similarly among the Zulus,
" when a man kills a cow — which, however, is seldom and reluctantly done,
unless it happens to be stolen property — the whole jiopulation of the hamlet
assemble to eat it without invitation ; and people living at a distance of ten
miles will also come to partake of the feast" (Shaw, Memoriah of South
Africa, p. 59).
LECT. VIII. SACRIFICE. 267
private violence, but only by the consent of the kindred
and the kindred god. And the parallelism between the
two cases is curiously marked in detail by what I may call
a similarity between the ritual of sacrifice and of the execu-
tion of a tribesman. In both cases it is required that, as
far as possible, every member of the kindred should be not
only a consenting party but a partaker in the act, so that
whatever responsibility it involves may be equally dis-
tributed over the v/hole clan. This is the meaning of the
ancient Hebrew form of execution, where the culprit is
stoned by the whole congregation.
The idea that the life of a brute animal may be pro-
tected by the same kind of religious scruple as the life of
a fellow-man is one which we have a difficulty in grasping,
or which at any rate we are apt to regard as more proper
to a late and sentimental age than to the rude life of
primitive times. But this difliculty mainly comes from
our taking up a false point of view. Early man had
certainly no conception of the sacredness of animal life
as such, but neither had he any conception of the sacred-
ness of human life as such. The life of his clansman was
sacred to him, not because he was a man, but because he
was a kinsman ; and, in like manner, the life of an animal
of his totem kind is sacred to the savage, not because it
is animate, but because he and it are sprung from the same
stock and are cousins to one another.
It is clear that the scruple of Nilus's Saracens about
killing the camel was of this restricted kind ; for they had
no objection to kill and eat game. But the camel they
would not kill except under the same circumstances as
make it lawful for many savages to kill their totem, i.e.
under the pressure of hunger or in connection with
exceptional religious rites.^ The parallelism between the
^Frazer, Totemism, pp. 19, 48.
268 PROHIBITION OF lect. viii.
Arabian custom and totemism is therefore complete except
in one point. There is no direct evidence that the scruple
against the private slaughter of a camel was due to feelings
of kinship. But, as we have seen, there is this indirect
evidence, that the consent and participation of the clan,
which was required to make the slaughter of a camel
legitimate, is the very thing that is needed to make the
death of a kinsman legitimate.
The presumption thus created that the regard paid by
the Saracens for the life of the camel turned on the same
principle of kinship between men and certain kinds of
animals which is the prime factor in totemism, would not
be worth much if it rested only on an isolated statement
about a particular branch of the Arab race. But it is
to be observed that the same kind of restriction on the
private slaughter of animals must have existed in ancient
times among all the Semites. We have found reason to
believe that among the early Semites generally no slaughter
was legitimate except for sacrifice, and we have also found
reason, apart from Nilus's evidence, for believing that all
Semitic sacrifice was originally the act of the community.
If these two propositions are true, it follows that all the
Semites at one time protected the lives of animals proper
for sacrifice, and forbade them to be slain except by the
act of the clan, that is, except under such circumstances
as would justify or excuse the death of a kinsman. Now,
if it thus appears that the scruple against private slaughter
of an animal proper for sacrifice was no mere individual
peculiarity of Nilus's Saracens, but must at an early period
have extended to all the Semites, it is obvious that the
conjecture which connects the scruple with a feeling of
kinship between the worshippers and the victim gains
greatly in plausibility. For the origin of the scruple
must now be sought in some widespread and very primi-
LECT. viir. PRIVATE SLAUGHTER. 2G9
tive habit of thought, and it is therefore apposite to point
out that among primitive peoples there are no binding
precepts of conduct except those that rest on the principle
of kinship.^ This is the general rule which is found in
operation wherever we have an opportunity of observing
rude societies, and that it prevailed among the early
Semites is not to be doubted. Indeed among the Arabs
the rule held good without substantial modification down
to the time of Mohammed. No life and no obligation
was sacred unless it was brought within the charmed
circle of the kindred blood.
Thus the prima facie presumption, that the scruple in
question had to do with the notion that certain animals
were akin to men, becomes very strong indeed, and can
hardly be set aside unless those who reject it are prepared
to show that the idea of kinship between men and beasts,
as it is found in most primitive nations, was altogether
foreign to Semitic thought, or at least had no substantial
place in the ancient religious ideas of that race. But I
do not propose to throw the burden of proof on the
antagonist.
I have already had occasion in another connection to
shew by a variety of evidences that the earliest Semites,
like primitive men of other races, drew no sharp line of
distinction between the nature of gods, of men, and of
beasts, and had no difficulty in admitting a real kinship
between (a) gods and men, {h) gods and sacred animals,
(c) families of men and families of beasts.^ As regards
the third of these points, the direct evidence is fragmen-
tary and sporadic ; it is sufficient to prove that the idea of
1 In religions based on kinship, where the god and his worshippers are
of one stock, precepts of sanctity are, of course, covered by the principle
of kinship
2 Sujwa, pp. 42 sqq. , 84 sqq.
270 THE VICTIM A lect. viii.
kinship between races of men and races of beasts was not
foreign to the Semites, but it is not sufficient to prove
that such a belief was widely prevalent, and had pro-
minence enough to justify us in taking it as one of the
fundamental principles on which Semitic ritual was
founded. But it must be remembered that the three
points are so connected that if any two of them are
established, the third necessarily follows. Now, as regards
(a), it is not disputed that the kinship of gods with their
worshippers is a fundamental doctrine of Semitic religion ;
it appears so widely and in so many forms and applica-
tions, that we cannot look upon it otherwise than as one
of the first and most universal principles of ancient faith.
Again, as regards (5), a belief in sacred animals, which
are treated with the reverence due to divine beings, is an
essential element in the most widespread and important
Semitic cults. All the great deities of the northern
Semites had their sacred animals, and were themselves
worshipped in animal form, or in association with animal
symbols, down to a late date ; and that this association
implied a veritable unity of kind between animals and
gods is placed beyond doubt, on the one hand, by the
fact that the sacred animals, e.g. the doves and fish of
Atargatis, were reverenced with divine honours ; and, on
the other hand, by theogonic myths, such as that which
makes the dove-goddess be born from an egg, and trans-
formation myths, such as that of Bambyce, where it was
believed that the fish-goddess and her son had actually
been transformed into fish.^
' Examples of the evidence on this head have been given above ; a fuller
account of it will fall to be given in a future course of lectures. Meantime
the reader may refer to Kinship, chap. vii. I may here, however, add a
general argument which seems to deserve attention. We have seen {supra,
p. 134 sqq.) that holiness is not based on the idea of propert}^. Holy animals,
and holy things generally, are primarily conceived, not as belonging to the
LECT. VIII. SACRED ANIMAL. 271
Now if it thus appears that kinship between the gods
and their worshippers, on the one hand, and kinship
between the gods and certain kinds of animals, on the
other, are deep - seated principles of Semitic religion,
manifesting themselves in all parts of the sacred institu-
tions of the race, we must necessarily conclude that
kinship between families of men and animal kinds was an
idea equally deep-seated, and we shall expect to find that
sacred animals, wherever they occur, will be treated with
the regard which men pay to their kinsfolk.
Indeed in a religion based on kinship, where the god
and his worshippers are of one stock, the principle of
sanctity and that of kinship are identical. The sanctity
of a kinsman's life and the sanctity of the godhead are not
two things, but one ; for ultimately the only thing that
is sacred is the common tribal life, or the common blood
which is identified with the life. Whatever being par-
takes in this life is holy, and its holiness may be
described indifferently, either as participation in the
divine life and nature, or as participation in the kindred
blood.
Thus the conjecture that sacrificial animals were
originally treated as kinsmen is simply equivalent to the
conjecture that sacrifices were drawn from animals of a
holy kind, whose lives were ordinarily protected by reli-
gious scruples and sanctions ; and in support of this position
a great mass of evidence can be adduced, not merely for
Semitic sacrifice, but for ancient sacrifice generally.
In the later days of heathenism, when animal food was
deity, biit as being themselves instinct witli divine power or life. Thus a
holy animal is one which has a divine life ; and if it be holy to a particular
god, the meaning must bo that its life and his are somehow bound up
together. From what is known of primitive ways of thought we may infer
that this means that the sacred animal is akin to the god, for all valid and
permanent relation between individuals is conceived as kinship.
272 MYSTIC
LECT. VIII.
commonly eaten, and the rule that all legitimate
slaughter must be sacrificial was no longer insisted on,
sacrifices were divided into two classes ; ordinary
sacrifices, where the victims were sheep, oxen or other
beasts habitually used for food, and extraordinary
sacrifices, where the victims were animals whose flesh
was regarded as forbidden meat. The Emperor Julian ^
tells us that in the cities of the Roman empire such
extraordinary sacrifices were celebrated once or twice
a year in mystical ceremonies, and he gives as an example
the sacrifice of the dog to Hecate. In this case the
victim was the sacred animal of the goddess to which it
was offered ; Hecate is represented in mythology as
accompanied by demoniac dogs, and in her worship she
loved to be addressed by the name of Dog.^ Here,
therefore, the victim is not only a sacred animal, but an
animal kindred to the deity to which it is sacrificed. The
same principle seems to lie at the root of all exceptional
sacrifices of unclean animals, i.e. animals that were not
ordinarily eaten, for we have already seen that the idea of
uncleanness and holiness meet in the primitive conception
of taboo. I leave it to classical scholars to follow this
out in its application to Greek and Eoman sacrifice ; but
as regards the Semites it is worth while to establish the
point by going in detail through the sacrifices of unclean
beasts that are known to us.
1. The swine. According to Al - Nadim the heathen
Harranians sacrificed the swine and ate swine's flesh
once a year.^ This ceremony is ancient, for it appears
in Cyprus in connection with the worship of the Semitic
Aphrodite and Adonis. In the ordinary worship of
Aphrodite swine were not admitted, but in Cyprus wild
1 Orat. V. p. 176. ^ Porph., De Ahst. iii. 17, iv. 16.
» Fihrist, p. 326, 1. 3 sq.
LECT. viir. SACRIFICES. 273
boars were sacrificed once a year on April 2} The same
sacrifice is alluded to in the Book of Isaiah as a heathen
, abomination/ with which the prophet associates the sacri-
fice of two other unclean animals, the dog and the mouse.
We know from Lucian that the swine was esteemed sacro-
sanct by the Syrians,^ and that it was specially sacred to
Aphrodite or Astarte is affirmed by Antiphanes, ap. Athen.,
iii. 49.
2. The dog. This sacrifice, as we have seen, is mentioned
in the Book of Isaiah, and it seems also to be alluded to
as a Punic rite in Justin, xviii. 1, 10, where we read that
Darius sent a message to the Carthaginians forbidding
them to sacrifice human victims and to eat the flesh of
dogs : in the connection a religious meal must be under-
stood. In this case the accounts do not connect the rite
with any particular deity to whom the dog was sacred,*
but we know from Al-Nadim that the dog was sacred
among the Harranians. They offered sacrificial gifts to
it, and in certain mysteries dogs were solemnly declared
to be the brothers of the mystse.'^ A hint as to the
identity of the god to whom the dog was sacred may
perhaps be got from Jacob of Sarug, who mentions " the
Lord with the dogs " as one of the deities of Carrhse."
This god again may be compared with the huntsman
Heracles of the Assyrians "^ who is figured on cylinders
accompanied by a dog,^ and appears to be the same deity
^ Lydus, De Mensibtis, Bonn ed. p. SO. Exceptional sacrifices of swine to
Aphrodite also took place at Argos (Athen., iii. 49) and in Thessaly (Strabo,
ix. 5. 17), bnt the Semitic origin of these rites is not so certain as in the
case of the Cyprian goddess.
2 Isa. Ixv. 4, Ixvi. 3, 17. ' I>ea Syria, liv.
* Movers, Phoenizler, i. 404, is quite unsatisfactory.
5 Fihrist, p. 326, 1. 27 ; cf. p. 323, 1. 28 ; p. 324, 1. 2.
6 ZDMO. xxix. 110 ; cf. vol. xlii. p. 473.
7 Tacitus, Ann. xii. 13.
« Gazette Archdol. 1879, p. 178 sqq.
S
274 MYSTIC LECT. VIII.
whose name, as it occurs on the monuments, is usually
read Adar.^ The Tyrian Heracles or Melcarth also appears
accompanied by a dog in the legend of the invention of
the purple dye preserved by Pollux.^
3. Fish, or at least certain species of fish, were sacred
to Atargatis and forbidden food to all the Syrians, her
worshippers, who believed — as totem peoples do — that if
they ate the sacred flesh they would be visited by ulcers.^
Yet Mnaseas {ap. Athen., viii. 37) tells us that fish were
daily cooked and presented on the table of the goddess,
being afterwards consumed by the priests ; and Assyrian
cylinders display the fish laid on the altar or presented
before it, while, in one example, a figure which stands by
in an attitude of adoration is clothed, or rather disguised,
in a gigantic fish skin.^ The meaning of such a disguise
is well known from many savage rituals ; it implies that
1 The Sicilian god Adranus, wliose sacred dogs are mentioned by Mlmn,
2fat. An. xi. 20 (confirmed by moniimental evidence ; Gannean, Bee. de
Arch. Or. i. 236), is generally identified witli Adar (the Adrammelech of
the Bible); see Holm, Gesch. Sic. i. 95, 377.
^ Pollux, i. 46 ; Malalas, p. 32. If the conjecture that the Heracles
worshipped by the vo^oi in the Cynosarges at Athens was really the
Phoenician Heracles can be made out, the connection of this deity with
the dog will receive further confirmation. For Cynosarges means " the
dog's 3'ard " (Wachsmuth, Athen. i. 461). Steph. Byz. s.v. explains the
name by a legend that while Diomos was sacrificing to Heracles, a white
dog snatched the sacrificial pieces and laid them down on the spot where
the sanctuary afterwards stood. The dog is here the sacred messenger who
declares the will of the god, like the eagle of Zeus in Malalas, p. 199 ; cf.
Steph. Byz. s.v. yaXiZTcti. The sanctity of the dog among the Phcenicians
seems also to be confirmed by the proper names ^<3b^, DvX3/3, and by
the existence of a class of sacred ministers called "'dogs" (C. I. S. No. 86,
cf. Dent, xxiii. 18 (19)). Reinach and G. Hoffmann, op. cit. p. 17, are
harilly right in thinking of literal dogs ; but in any case that would only
strengthen the argument.
In Moslem countries dogs are still regarded with a curious mixture of
respect and contem[it. They are unclean, but it is an act of piety to feed
them ; and to kill a dog, as I have observed at Jeddah, is an act that excites
a good deal of feeling.
3 See the evidence collected by Selden, de Dlis Si/rls, Synt. ii. cap. 3.
■* Menant, Glyptique, ii. 53,
LECT. VIII. SACRIFICES. 275
the worshipper presents himself as a fish, i.e. as a being
kindred to his sacrifice, and doubtless also to the deity to
which it is consecrated.
4. The mouse appears as an abominable sacrifice in
Isa. Ixvi. 17, along with the swine and "the abomination"
(^pcr). The last word is applied in the Levitical law ^ to
creeping vermin generally (ptj' = Arab, hanash), a term
which included the mouse and other such small quadrupeds
as we also call vermin. All such creatures were unclean in
an intense degree, and had the power to communicate un-
cleanness to whatever they touched. So strict a taboo is
hardly to be explained except by supposing that, like the
Arabian hanash^ they had supernatural and demoniac quali-
ties. And in fact, in Ezek. viii. 10, we find them as objects
of superstitious adoration. On what authority Maimonides
says that the Harranians sacrificed field-mice I do not know,^
but the Biblical evidence is sufficient for our purpose.
5. The horse was sacred to the Sun -god, for 2 Kings
xxiii. 11 speaks of the horses which the kings of Judah
had consecrated to this deity — a superstition to which
Josiah put an end. At Rhodes, where religion is through-
out of a Semitic type, four horses were cast into the sea as
a sacrifice at the annual feast of the sun.'* The winged
horse (Pegasus) is a sacred symbol of the Carthaginians.
6. Tlie dove, which the Semites would neither eat nor
touch, was sacrificed by the Eomans to Venus ; ^ and as the
Roman Venus-worship of later times was largely derived
from the Phcenician sanctuary of Eryx, where the dove had
peculiar honour as the companion of Astarte,^ it is very
possible that this was a Semitic rite, thougli I have not
1 Lev. xi. 41. - Supra, p. 121.
3 Ed. Munk, vol. iii. p. 64, or Chwolsohii, Ssabier, ii. 456.
* Festus, s.v. " October equus ;" cf. Pausanias, iii. 20. 4 (sacrifice of horses
to the Sun at Taygetus) ; Kinship, p. 208 sq.
* Propertius, iv. 5. 62. « Lilian, N. A. iv. 2.
276 MYSTIC
LECT. Vlll.
found any conclusive evidence that it was so. It must
certainly have been a very rare sacrifice ; for the dove
among the Semites had a quite peculiar sanctity, and
Al-Nadim says expressly that it was not sacrificed by
the Harranians.^ It was, however, offered by the Hebrews,
in sacrifices whicli we shall by and by see reason to regard
as closely analogous to mystical rites ; and in Juvenal, vi,
459 sqq., the superstitious matrons of Eome are represented
as calling in an Armenian or Syrian (Commagenian)
haruspex to perform the sacrifice of a dove, a chicken,
a dog, or even a child. In this association an exceptional
and mystic sacrifice is necessarily implied.^
The evidence of these examples is unambiguous. When
an unclean animal is sacrificed it is also a sacred animal.
If the deity to which it is devoted is named, it is the
deity which ordinarily protects the sanctity of the victim,
and, in some cases, the worshippers either in words or by
symbolic disguise claim kinship with the victim and the
god. Further, the sacrifice is generally limited to certain
solemn occasions, usually annual, and so has the character
of a public celebrity. In several cases the worshippers
partake of the sacred flesh, which at other times it would
be impious to touch. All this is exactly what we find
among totem peoples. Here also the sacred animal is
forbidden food, it is akin to the men who acknowledge
its sanctity, and if there is a god it is akin to the god.
And, finally, the totem is sometimes sacrificed at an annual
feast, with special and solemn ritual. In such cases the
flesh may be buried or cast into a river, as the horses of
the sun were cast into the sea,^ but at other times it is
1 Fihrist, p. 319, 1. 21.
2 Cf. the nrn, C. I. S. No. 165, 1. 11. Some other sacrifices of wild
animals, which present analogies to these mystic rites, will be considered in
Additional Note G, Sacrifices of Sacred Animals.
^ Bancroft, iii. 168; Frazer, Totemism, p. 48.
LECT. VIII. SACRIFICES. 277
eaten as a mystic sacrament.^ These points of contact
with the most primitive superstition cannot be accidental ;
they show that the mystical sacrifices, as Julian calls
them, the sacrifices of animals not ordinarily eaten, are not
the invention of later times, but have preserved with great
accuracy the features of a sacrificial ritual of extreme
antiquity.
To a superficial view the ordinary sacrifices of domestic
animals, such as were commonly used for food, seem to
stand on quite another footing ; yet we have been led,
by an independent line of reasoning, based on the
evidence that all sacrifice was originally the act of the
clan, to surmise that they also in their origin were
rare and solemn offerings of victims whose lives were
ordinarily deemed sacred, because, like the unclean sacred
animals, they were of the kin of the worshippers and of
their god.^
And in point of fact precisely this kind of respect and
reverence is paid to domestic animals among many pastoral
^ The proof of this has to be put together out of the fragmentary evidence
which is generally all that we possess on such matters. As regards America
the most conclusive evidence comes from Mexico, where the gods, though
certainly of totem origin, had become anthropomorphic, and the victim, who
was regarded as the representative of the god, was human. At other times
paste idols of the god were eaten sacranientally. But that the ruder
Americans attached a sacramental virtue to the eating of the totem appears
from what is related of the ]5ear clan of the Ouataouaks {Letfren idif. ft cur.,
vi. 171), who when they kill a bear make hiiu a feast of his own tlesh, and
tell him not to resent being killed; "tii as de I'esprit, tu vols que nos
enfants souffrent la faim, ils t'aiment, ils veulcnt te faire entrer dans leur
corps, n'est il pas glorieux d'etre mange par des enfans de Capitaine 1 " The
bear feast of the Ainos of Jaj)an (fully described by Scheube in Mitth.
deutsch. Gesellsch. S. mid S. O. Asiens, No. 22, p. 44 sq.) is a sacrificial
feast on the flesh of the bear, which is honoured as divine, and slaiu
with many apologies to the gods, on the pretext of necessity. The
eating of the totem as medicine (Frazer, p. 23) belongs to the same circle
of ideas. See also infra, p. 296.
- Strictly speaking the thing is much more than a surmise, even on the
evidence already before us. But I prefer to understate rather than overstate
the case in a matter of such complexity.
278 SANCTITY
LECT. vni.
peoples in various parts of the globe. They are regarded
on the one hand as the friends and kinsmen of men, and
on the other hand as sacred beings of a nature akin to the
gods ; their slaughter is permitted only under exceptional
circumstances, and in such cases is never used to provide
a. private meal, but necessarily forms the occasion of a
public feast, if not of a public sacrifice. The clearest case
is that of Africa. Agatharchides,^ describing the Troglodyte
nomads of East Africa, a primitive pastoral people in the
polyandrous stage of society, tells us that their whole
sustenance was derived from their flocks and herds. When
pasture abounded, after the rainy reason, they lived on
milk mingled with blood (drawn apparently, as in Arabia,
from the living animal), and in the dry season they had
recourse to the flesh of aged or weakly beasts. But the
butchers were regarded as unclean. Further, " they gave
the name of parent to no human being, but only to the ox
and cow, the ram and ewe, from whom they had their
nourishment." Here we have all the features which our
theory requires ; the beasts are sacred and kindred beings,
for they are the source of human life and subsistence.
They are killed only in time of need, and the butchers are
unclean, w4iich implies that the slaughter was an impious
act.
Similar institutions are found among all the purely
pastoral African peoples, and have persisted with more or
less modification or attenuation down to our own time.'"*
The common food of these races is milk or game,^ cattle
^ The extracts of Photius and Diodorus are printed together in Fr. Geog.
Gr. i. 153. The former has some points which the latter omits.
^ For the evidence of the sanctity of cattle among modern rude peoples, I
am largely indebted to my friend Frazer.
' Sallust, Jugurtha, 89 (Numidians) ; Alberti, De Kaffers (Amst. 1810\
p. 37 ; Lichtenstein, Heifien, i. 444. Out of a multitude of proofs I cite
these, as being drawn from the parts of the continent most remote from one
another.
LECT. vin.
OF CATTLE. 279
are seldom killed for food, and only on exceptional
occasions, such as the proclamation of a war, the circum-
cision of a youth, or a wedding,^ or in order to obtain
a skin for clothing, or because the creature is maimed
or old.^
In such cases the feast is public, as among Nilus's
Saracens,^ all blood relations and even all neighbours having
a right to partake. Further, the herd and its members
are objects of affectionate and personal regard,* and are
surrounded by sacred scruples and taboos. Among the
Cafires the cattle kraal is sacred ; women may not enter
it,^ and to defile it is a capital offence.^ Finally, the
notion that cattle are the parents of men, which we
find in Agatharchides, survives in the Zulu myth that
men, especially great chiefs, " were belched up by a
cow." '
These instances may suffice to show how imiversally
the attitude towards domestic animals, described by
Agatharchides, is diffused among the pastoral peoples of
Africa. But I must still notice one peculiar variation
^ So among the Caffres ^Fleming, Southern Africa, p. 260 ; Lichtenstein,
Eeisen, i. 442).
=! Alberti, p. 163 (Caffres) ; cf. Gen. iii. 21, and Herod., iv. 189. The
religious significance of the dress of skin, which appears in the last cited
passage, will occupy us later.
2 So among the Zulus {supra, p. 266, note) and among the Caffres
(Alberti, ut supra).
* See in particular the general remarks of Munzinger on the pastoral
peoples of East Africa, Odafr. Studien (2nd ed. 1883), p. 547 : " The nomad
values his cow above all things, and weeps for its death as for that of a
child." Again : "They have an incredible attachment to the old breed of
cattle, which they have inherited from father and grandfather, and keep a
record of their descent " — a trace of the feeling of kinship between the herd
and the tribe, as in Agatharchides. See also Schweinfurth, Heart of Africa,
i. 59 (3rd ed. 1878), and compare 2 Sam. xii. 3.
* Fleming, p. 214.
^ Lichtenstein, i. 479, who adds that the punishment will not seem severe
if we consider how holy their cattle are to them.
' Lang, Myth Bilual, etc, i. 179.
280 SANCTITY LECT. viir.
of the view that the life of cattle is sacred, which occurs
both in Africa and among the Semites. Herodotus ^ tells
us that the Libyans, though they ate oxen, would not touch
the flesh of the cow. In the circle of ideas which we
have found to prevail throughout Africa this distinction
must be connected, on the one hand, with the prevalence
of kinship through women, which necessarily made the
cow more sacred than the ox, and, on the other, with the
fact that it is the cow that fosters man with her milk.
The same rule prevailed in Egypt, where the cow was
sacred to Hathor-Isis, and also among the Phoenicians,
who both ate and sacrificed bulls, but would as soon have
eaten hunmn flesh as that of the cow.^
The importance of this evidence for our enquiry is all
the greater because there is a growing disposition among
scholars to recognise an ethnological connection of a
somewhat close kind between the Semitic and African races.
But the ideas which I have attempted to unfold are not
the property of a single race. How far the ancient
holiness of cattle, and especially of the cow, among the
Iranians, presents details analogous to those which have
come before us, is a question which I must leave to the
professed students of a very obscure literature ; it seems
at least to be admitted that the thing is not an innovation
of Zoroastrianism, but common to the Iranians with their
Indian cousins, so that the origin of the sacred regard
paid to the cow must be sought in the primitive nomadic
life of the Indo-European race. But to show that exactly
1 Bk. iv. ch. 186.
^ See Porphyry, De Abst. ii. 11, for both nations ; and, for the Egyptians,
Herod., ii. 41. The Phoenician usage can hardly be ascribed to Egyptian
intiueuce, for at least a preference for male victims is found among the
Semites generally, even where the deity is a goddess. See what Chwolsohn,
Ssabier, ii. 77 sq'/., adduces in illustration of the statement of the Fihrist that
the Harranians sacrificed only male victims.
LECT. viir. OF CATTLE, 281
such notions as we have found in Africa appear among
pastoral peoples of quite different race, I will cite the case
of the Todas of South India. Here the domestic animal,
the milk-giver and the main source of subsistence, is the
buffalo. " The buffalo is treated with great kindness,
even with a degree of adoration,"^ and certain cows, the
descendants from ni other to daughter of some remote
sacred ancestor, are hung with ancient cattle bells and
invoked as divinities." Further, " there is good reason
for believing the Todas' assertion that they have never
at any time eaten the flesh of the female buffalo," and
the male they eat only once a year, when all the adult
males in the village join in the ceremony of killing and
eating a young bull calf, which is killed with special
ceremonies and roasted by a sacred fire. Venison, on the
other hand, they eat with pleasure.^ At a funeral one
or two buffaloes are killed ; ■* "as each animal falls, men,
women and children group themselves round its head,
and fondle, caress, and kiss its face, then sitting in groups
of pairs . . . give way to wailing and lamentation." These
victims are not eaten, Ijut left on the ground.
These examples may suffice to show the wide diffusion
among rude pastoral peoples of a way of regarding sacred
animals with which the Semitic facts and the inferences
I have drawn from them exactly correspond ; let us now
enquire how far similar ideas can be shewn to have
prevailed among the higher races of antiquity. In this
1 Marshall, Travels among the Todas (1873), p. 130.
-Ibid. p. 131.
•* Ibid. p. 81. The sacrifice is eaten only by males. So among the
CaflFres certain holy parts of an ox must not be eaten by women ; and in
Flebrew law the duty of festal worshij) was confined to males, thoun;h women
were not exchuled. Among the Todas men and women habitually eat
apart, as the Spartans did ; and the Spartan blood-broth may be compared
with the Toda animal sacrifice.
^ Ibid. p. 176.
282 SANCTITY LECT. VIII.
connection I would first of all direct your attention to
the wide prevalence among all these nations of a belief
that the habit of slaughtering animals and eating flesh
is a departure from the laws of primitive piety. Except
in certain ascetic circles, priestly or philosophical, this
opinion bore no practical fruit ; men ate flesh freely
when they could obtain it, but in their legends of the
golden age it was told how in the earliest and happiest
days of the race, when man was at peace with the gods
and with nature, and the hard struggle of daily toil had
not begun, animal food was unknown, and all man's wants
were supplied by the spontaneous produce of the bounteous
earth. This, of course, is not true, for even on anatomical
grounds it is certain that our remote ancestors were carni-
vorous, and it is matter of observation that primitive
nations do not eschew the use of animal food in general,
though certain kinds of flesh are forbidden on grounds
of piety. But, on the other hand, the idea of the golden
age cannot be a mere abstract speculation without any
basis in tradition. The legend in which it is embodied
is part of the ancient folk-lore of the Greeks,^ and the
practical application of the idea in the form of a
precept of abstinence from flesh, as a rule of perfection
or of ceremonial holiness, is first found, not among in-
novating and speculative philosophers, but in priestly
circles — e.g. in Egypt and India — whose lore is entirely
based on tradition, or in such philosophic schools as
that of Pythagoras, all whose ideas are characterised
by an extraordinary regard for ancient usage and
superstition.
In the case of the Egyptian priests the facts set forth
by Porphyry in his book De Ahstinentia, iv. 6 sqq., on the
1 Hesiod, Works and Days, 109 sqq. Cf. Preller-Robert, I. i. p. 87 sqq.,
for the other literature of the subject.
LECT. Till.
OF CATTLE. 283
authority of Chaeremoii,' enable us to make out distinctly the
connection between the abstinence imposed on the priests
and the primitive beliefs and practice of the mass of the
people.
From ancient times every Egyptian had, according to
the nome he lived in, his own particular kind of forbidden
flesh, venerating a particular species of sacred animal,
exactly as totemistic savages still do. The priests
extended this precept, being in fact the ministers of a
national religion, which gathered into one system the
worships of the various nomes ; but only some of them
went so far as to eat no flesh at all, while others, who
were attached to particular cults, ordinarily observed
abstinence only from certain kinds of flesh, though
they were obliged to confine themselves to a strictly
vegetable diet at certain religious seasons, when they were
specially engaged in holy functions. It is, however,
obvious that the multitude of local prohibitions could not
have resulted in a general doctrine of the superior piety of
vegetarianism, unless the list of animals which were sacred
in one or other part of the country had included those
domestic animals which in a highly cultivated country like
Egypt must always form the chief source of animal food.
In Egypt this was the case, and indeed the greatest and
most widely recognised deities were those that had associa-
tions with domesticated animals. In this respect Egyptian
civilisation declares its affinity to the primitive usages
and superstitions of the pastoral populations of Africa
generally ; the Calf-god Apis, who was supposed to be
incarnate in an actual calf at Memphis, and the Cow-
goddess Isis-Hathor, who is either represented in the form
of a cow, or at least wears a cow's horns, directly connect
1 The authoritj' is good ; see Bernays, Theophrastos' Schrift Ueber Frvm-
migktit (Breslau, 1866), p. 21.
284 SANCTITY LECT viir.
the dominant cults of Egypt with the sanctity ascribed to
the bovine species by the ruder races of Eastern Africa,
with whom the ox is the most important domestic animal ;
and it is not therefore surprising to learn that even in later
times the eating of cow's flesh seemed to the Egyptians
a practice as horrible as cannibalism. Cows were never
sacrificed, and though bulls were offered on the altar, and
part of the flesh eaten in a sacrificial feast, the sacrifice
was only permitted as a piacuhim, was preceded by a
solemn fast, and was accompanied by public lamentation
as at the death of a kinsman/ In like manner at the
annual sacrifice at Thebes to the Eam-god Amen, the
worshippers bewailed the victim, thus declaring its kin-
ship with themselves, while, on the other hand, its kinship
or identity with the god was expressed in a twofold way,
for the image of Amen was draped in the skin of the
sacrifice, while the body was buried in a sacred coffin.^
In Egypt the doctrine that the highest degree of holi-
ness can only be attained by abstinence from all animal
food was the result of the political fusion of a number of
local cults in one national religion, with a national priest-
hood that represented imperial ideas. Nothing of this sort
took place in Greece or in most of the Semitic lands,^ and
in these accordingly we find no developed doctrine of
priestly asceticism in the matter of food.*
Among the Greeks and . Semites, therefore, the idea of
1 Herod., ii. 39 sq. ^ Herod., ii. 42.
* Babylonia is perhaps an exception.
* On the supposed case of the Essenes see Lucius's books on the Essenes
and Therapeutae, and Schiirer, Gesch. des Jiid. Volkes, ii. 478. The Thera-
])eutre, whetlier Jews or Christian monks, appear in Egypt, and most
probably they were Egyptian Christians. Later developments of Semitic
asceticism almost certainly stood under foreign influences, among which
Buddhism seems to have had a larger and earlier share than it has been
usual to admit. In old Semitic practice, as among the modern Jews and Mos-
lems, religious fasting meant abstinence from all food, not merely from flesh.
LECT. viir.
OF CATTLE. 285
a golden age, and the trait that in that age man was
vegetarian in his diet, must be of popular not of priestly
origin. Now in itself the notion that ancient times were
better than modern, that the earth was more productive,
men more pious and their lives less vexed with toil and
sickness, needs no special explanation ; it is the natural
result of psychological laws which apply equally to the
memory of individuals and the memory of nations. But
the particular trait of primitive vegetarianism, as a
characteristic feature of the good old times, does not fall
under this general explanation, and can only have arisen
at a time when there was still some active feeling of
pious scruple about killing and eating flesh. This scruple
cannot have applied to all kinds of flesh, e.g. to game, but
it must have covered the very kinds of flesh that were
ordinarily eaten in the agricultural stage of society, to
which the origin of the legend of the golden age un-
doubtedly belongs. Flesh, therefore, in the legend means
the flesh of domestic animals, and the legend expresses
a feeling of respect for the lives of these animals, and an
idea that their slaughter for food was an innovation not
consistent with pristine piety.
When we look into the details of the traditions which
later writers cite in support of the doctrine of primaeval
vegetarianism, we see that in effect this, and no more than
this, is contained in them. The general statement that
early man respected all animal life is mere inference, but
popular tradition and ancient ritual alike bore testimony
that the life of the swine and the sheep,^ but above all of
the ox,^ was of old regarded as sacred, and might not be
1 Porph., DeAhst. ii. 9.
2 Ibid. ii. 10, 29 sq. ; Plato, Leges, vi. p. 782 ; Pausanias, viii. 2. 1 sqq.
compared with i. 28. 10 (bloodless sacrifices under Cecrops, sacrifice of an
ox in the time of Ereclitheus).
286 THE BUPHONIA lect. viii.
taken away except for religious purposes, and even then
only with special precautions to clear the worshippers from
the guilt of murder.
To make this quite plain it may be well to go in some
detail into the most important case of all, that of the ox.
That it was once a capital offence to kill an ox, both in
Attica and in the Peloponnesus, is attested by Varro.^ So
far as Athens is concerned this statement seems to be
drawn from the legend that was told in connection with
the annual sacrifice of the Diipolia, where the victim was a
bull, and its death was followed by a solemn enquiry as to
who was responsible for the act.^ In this trial every one
who had anything to do with the slaughter was called as a
party ; the maidens who drew water to sharpen the axe
and knife threw the blame on the sharpeners, they put it
on the man who handed the axe, he on the man who
struck down the victim, and he again on the one who cut
its throat, who finally fixed the responsibility on the knife,
which was accordingly found guilty of murder and cast
into the sea. According to the legend this act was a mere
dramatic imitation of a piacular sacrifice devised to expiate
the offence of one Sopatros, who killed an ox that he saw
eating the cereal gifts from the table of the gods. This
impious offence was followed by famine, but the oracle
declared that the guilt might be expiated if the slayer
were punished and the victim raised up again in connection
with the same sacrifice in which it died, and that it would
then go well with them if they tasted of the flesh and did
not hold back. Sopatros himself, who had fled to Crete,
undertook to return and devise a means of carrying out
these injunctions, provided that the whole city would share
the responsibility of the murder that weighed on his
1 li. B. ii. 5.
' Pausaiiias, i. 24. 4 ; Theophrastus ap. Poqih., De Abst. ii. 30.
LECT. VIII.
AT ATHENS. 287
conscience ; and so the ceremonial was devised, ■wliich con-
tinued to be observed down to a late date.^ Of course the
legend as such has no value ; it is derived from the ritual,
and not vice versa ; but the ritual itself shews clearly that
the slaughter was viewed as a murder, and that it was felt
to be necessary, not only to go through the form of throw-
ing the guilt on the knife, but to distribute the responsibility
as widely as possible, by employing a number of sacrificial
ministers — who it may be observed were chosen from
different kindreds — and making it a public duty to taste
of the flesh. Here, therefore, we have a well-marked case
of the principle that sacrifice is not to be excused except
by the participation of the whole community.^ This rite
does not stand alone. At Tenedos the priest who offered
a bull - calf to Dionysus avOpwiroppaia-Tq^ was attacked
with stones and had to flee for his life,^ and at Corinth in
the annual sacrifice of a goat to Hera Acra^a, care was
taken to shift the responsibility of the death off the
shoulders of the community by employing hirelings as
ministers. Even they did no more than hide the knife in
such a way that the goat, scraping with its feet, procured
its own death.* But indeed the idea that the slaughter
of a bull was properly a murder, and only to be justified
on exceptional sacrificial occasions, must once have been
general in Greece ; for /Sovcfiovia (/Sovcpopetv, ^oucpopo'i) or
" ox-murder," which in Athens was the name of the
^ Aristophanes alludes to it as a very old-world rite (Nubes, 985), but the
observance was still kept up in the days of Theophrastus in all its old
quaintness. In Pausanias's time it had undergone some simplification,
unless his account is inaccurate.
- The further feature that the ox chooses itself as victim, by approaching
the altar and eating the gifts laid on it, is noticeable, both because a similar
rite recurs at Eryx, as will be mentioned presently, and because in this way
the victim eats of the table of the gods, i.e. is acknowledged as divine.
3 ^lian, N. A. xii. 34.
* Hesychius, s.v. all '^"'y'^ \ Zenobius on the same proverb ; Schol. on Eurip.,
Mtdca.
288 THE SEMITIC lect. vm.
peculiar sacrifice of the Diipolia, is in older Greek a
general term for the slaughter of oxen for a sacrificial feast.^
.And that the "ox-murder" must be taken quite literally
appears in the sacrifice at Tenedos, where the bull-calf
wears the cothurnus and its dam is treated like a woman
in childbed. Here the kinship of the victim with man is
clearly expressed, bvit so also is his kinship with the
" man-slaying " god to whom the sacrifice is offered, for
the cothurnus is proper to Bacchus, and that god was often
represented and invoked as a bull.^
The same combination of ideas appears in the Hebrew
and Phcenician traditions of primitive abstinence from flesh
and of the origin of sacrifice. The evidence in this case
requires to be handled with some caution, for the PhcE-
nician traditions come to us from late authors, who are
gravely suspected of tampering with the legends they
record, and the Hebrew records in the Book of Genesis,
though they are undoubtedly based on ancient popular
lore, have been recast under the influence of a higher faith,
and purged of such elements as were manifestly inconsistent
with Old Testament monotheism. As regards the Hebrew
accounts, a distinction must be drawn between the earlier
Jahvistic story and the post-exile narrative of the priestly
historian. In the older account, just as in the Greek fable
of the Golden Age, man, in his pristine state of innocence,
lived at peace with all animals,^ eating the spontaneous
fruits of the earth ; but after the fall he was sentenced to
earn his bread by agricultural toil. At the same time his
1 See Iliad, vii. 466 ; the Homeric hymn to Mercury, 436, in a story which
seems to be one of the many legends about the origin of sacrifice ; iEsch,
Prom. 530.
^ See especially Plutarch, Qu. Gr. 36. Another example to the same
effect is that of the goat dressed up as a maiden, which was offered to
Artemis Munychia {Parcemiogr. Gr. i. 402, and Eustathius as there cited by
the editors).
» Cf. Isa. xi, 6 sq.
LECT. vitT. GOLDEN AGE. 289
war with hurtful creatures (the serpent) began, and
domestic animals began to be slain sacrificially, and their
skins used for clothing.^ In the priestly history, on the
other hand, man's dominion over animals, and seemingly
also the agricultural life, in which animals serve man in
the work of tillage, are instituted at the creation.''^ In this
narrative there is no Garden of Eden, and no Fall except
the growing corruption that precedes the Flood. After the
Flood man receives the right to kill and eat animals, if
their blood is poured upon the ground,^ but sacrifice begins
only with the Mosaic dispensation. Now, as sacrifice and
slaughter were never separated, in the case of domestic
animals, till the time of Deuteronomy, this form of the
story cannot be ancient ; it rests on the post-Deuteronomic
law of sacrifice, and especially on Lev. xvii. 10 sq. The
original Hebrew tradition is that of the Jahvistic story,
which agrees with Greek legend in connecting the sacrifice
of domestic animals with a fall from the state of pristine
innocence.* This, of course, is not the main feature in the
Biblical story of the Fall, nor is it one on which the narrator
lays stress, or to which he seems to attach any special
significance. But for tliat very reason it is to be presumed
that this feature in the story is primitive, and that it must
be explained, like the corresponding Greek legend, not by
1 Gen. ii. 16 sqq., iii. 15, 21, iv. 4. I am disposed to agree with Budde
{Bihl. Urgeschichte, p. 83) that the words of ii. 15, " to dress it and to keep
it," are by a later hand. They agree with Gen. i. 26 sqq. (priestly), but not
with iii. 17 (Jahvistic).
2 Gen. i. 28, 29, where the use of corn as well as of the fruit of trees is
implied.
2 Gen. ix. 1 sq.
* The Greek legend in the Works and Days agrees with the Jahvistic
story also in ascribing the Fall to the fault of a woman. But this trait does
not seem to appear iu all forms of the Greek story (see Preller-Kobert, i. 94
«^.), and the estrangement between gods and men is sometimes ascribed to
Prometheus, who is also regarded as the inventor of fire and of animal
sacrifice.
T
290 PHCENICIAN LECT. vm.
the aid of principles peculiar to the Old Testament revela-
tion, but by considerations of a more general kind. There
are other features in the story of the Garden of Eden —
especially the tree of life — which prove that the original
basis of the narrative is derived from the common stock of
North Semitic folk-lore ; and that this common stock in-
cluded the idea of primitive vegetarianism is confirmed by
Philo Byblius,^ whose legend of the primitive men, wlio
lived only on the fruits of the soil and paid divine honour
to these, has too peculiar a form to be regarded as a mere
transcript either from the Bible or from Greek literature.
It is highly improbable that among the ancient Semites
the story of a golden age of primitive fruit-eating can have
had its rise in any other class of ideas than those which
led to the formation of a precisely similar legend in Greece.
The Greeks concluded that primitive man did not eat the
tlesh of domestic animals because their sacrificial ritual
regarded the death of a victim as a kind of murder, only to
be justified under special circumstances, and when it was
accompanied by special precautions, for which a definite
historical origin was assigned. And just in the same way
the Cypro-Phcenician legend which Porphyry ^ quotes from
Asclepiades, to prove that the early Phrenicians did not eat
flesh, turns on the idea that the death of a victim was
originally a surrogate for human sacrifice, and that the
first man who dared to taste flesh was punished with death.
The details of this story, which exactly agree with Lamb's
humorous account of the discovery of the merits of roast
sucking pig, are puerile and cannot be regarded as part of
an ancient tradition, but the main idea does not seem to
be mere invention. We have already seen that the Phoeni-
cians would no more eat cow-beef than human flesh ; it
1 Ajh Eus., Pr. Ev. i. 106 [Fr. Hist. Gr. iii. 565).
2 De Ahst. iv. 15.
LECT. viii. SACRIFICES. 291
can hardly, therefore, be questioned that in ancient times
the whole bovine race had such a measure of sanctity as
would give even to the sacrifice of a bull the very character
that our theory requires. And when Asclepiades states
that every victim was originally regarded as a surrogate
.for a human sacrifice, he is confirmed in a remarkable way
by the Elohistic account of the origin of burnt-sacrifice in
Gen. xxii., where a ram is accepted in lieu of Isaac. This
narrative presents another remarkable point of contact
with Phoenician belief. Abraham says that God Himself
will provide the sacrifice (ver. 8), and at ver. 13 the ram
presents itself unsought as an offering. Exactly this prin-
ciple was observed down to late times at the great Astarte
temple at Eryx, where the victims were drawn from the
sacred herds nourished at the sanctuary, and were believed
to offer themselves spontaneously at the altar.^ This is
quite analogous to the usage at the Diipolia, where a
number of cattle were driven round the sacred table, and
the bull was selected for slaughter that approached it and ate
of the sacred 'popana, and must be regarded as one of the
many forms and fictions adopted to free the worshippers
of responsibility for the death of the victim. All this
goes to show that the animal sacrifices of the Phoenicians
were regarded as quasi-human. But that the sacrificial
kinds were also viewed as kindred to the gods may be con-
cluded from the way in which the gods were represented.
The idolatrous Israelites worshipped Jehovah under the
form of a steer, and the second commandment implies that
idols were made in the shape of many animals. So, too,
the bull of Europa, Zeus Asterius, is, as his epithet implies,
1 ^lian, ^V. A. x. 50 ; cf. Isa. liii. 7 ; Jer. xi. 19 (R.V.) ; but especially
1 Sam. vi. 14, where the kine halt at the sacrificial stone (Diog. Laert., i.
10. 3). That the victim presents itself spontaneously or comes to the altar
^villingly is a feature in many worships (I'orph., De Ahst. i. 25; Aristotle,
Mir. Ausc. 137).
292 COW-ASTARTE lkct. viir.
the male counterpart of Astarte, with whom Europa was
identified at Sidon.^ Astarte herself was figured crowned
with a bull's head/ and the place name Ashteroth
Karnaim^ is derived from the sanctuary of a horned
Astarte. It may indeed be questioned whether this last is
identical with the cow-Astarte of Sidon, or is rather a
sheep-goddess ; for in Deut. vii. 1 3 the produce of the
flock is called the " Ashtaroth of the sheep " — an antique
expression that must have a religious origin. This sheep-
Aphrodite was specially worshipped in Cyprus, where
her annual mystic or piacular sacrifice was a sheep,
and was presented by worshippers clad in sheepskins, thus
declaring their kinship at once with the victim and with
the deity.*
It is well to observe that in the most ancient nomadic
times, to which the sanctity of domestic animals must be
referred, the same clan or community will not generally
be found to breed more than one kind of domestic animal.
Thus in Arabia, though the lines of separation are not
so sharp as we must suppose them to have formerly
been, there is still a broad distinction between the
camel - breeding tribes of the upland plains and the
shepherd tribes of the mountains ; and in like manner
sheep and goats are the flocks appropriate to the steppes
of Eastern Palestine, while kine and oxen are more
suitable for the well-watered Phoenician mountains. Thus
in the one place we may expect to find a sheep-Astarte,
^ De Dea Syria, iv. ; Kinship, p. 306.
2 Philo Byb.,/r. 24 {Fr. Hist. Or. iii. 569).
^ Gen. xiv. 5. Kueiien in his paper on De, Melecheth des Hemels, p. 37,
thinks it possible that the true reading is "Ashteroth and Karnaim."
But the identity of the later Caruain or Camion with Ashtaroth or mnD'i'3,
" the temple of Astarte " (Josh. xxi. 27), is confirmed by the fact that there
was a Ti/xivo; or sacred enclosure there (1 Mac. v. 43). See further ZDMG.,
xxix. 431, note 1.
* See Additional Note H, The Sacrifice of a Sheep to the Cyprian Aphrodite.
LECT. VIII. AND SHEEP- AST ARTE. 293
and in another a cow - goddess, and the Hebrew idiom
in Deut. vii. 13 agrees with the fact that before the
conquest of agricultural Palestine, the Hebrews, like their
kinsmen of Moab, must have been mainly shepherds not
cowherds.^
I have now, I think, said enough about the sanctity of
domestic animals ; the application to the doctrine of sacri-
fice must be left for another lecture.
^ The great ancestress of tlie house of Joseph is Eachel, "the ewe." For
the Moabites see 2 Kings iii. 4.
LECTUEE IX.
THE SACKAMENTAL EFFICACY OF ANIMAL SACRIFICE, AND
COGNATE ACTS OF RITUAL THE BLOOD COVENANT
BLOOD AND HAIR OFFERINGS.
In the course of the last lecture we were led to look with
some exactness into the distinction drawn in the later ages
of ancient paganism between ordinary sacrifices, where the
victim is one of the animals commonly used for human
food, and extraordinary or mystical sacrifices, where the signi-
ficance of the rite lies in an exceptional act of communion
with the godliead, by participation in holy flesh which is
ordinarily forbidden to man. Analysing this distinction,
and carrying back our examination of the evidence to the
primitive stage of society in which sacrificial ritual first
took shape, we were led to conclude that in the most
ancient times all sacrificial animals had a sacrosanct cha-
racter, and that no kind of beast was offered to the gods
which was not too holy to be slain and eaten without a
religious purpose, and without the consent and active
participation of the whole clan.
For the most primitive times, therefore, the distinction
drawn by later paganism between ordinary and extra-
ordinary sacrifices disappears. In both cases the sacred
function is the act of the whole community, which is
conceived as a circle of brethren, united with one another
and with their god by participation in one life or life-blood.
The same blood is supposed to flow also in the veins of the
294
LECT. IX. THE BLOOD BOND. 295
victim, so that its death is at once a shedding of the tribal
blood and a violation of the sanctity of the divine life that
is transfused through every member, human or irrational,
of the sacred circle. Nevertheless the slaughter of such
a victim is permitted or required on solemn occasions, and
all the tribesmen partake of its flesh, that they may
thereby cement and seal their mystic unity with one
another and with their god. In later times we find the
conception current that any food which two men partake
of together, so that the same substance enters into their
flesh and blood, is enough to establish some sacred unity
of life between them ; but in ancient times this significance
seems to be always attached to participation in the flesh of
a sacrosanct victim, and the solemn mystery of its death
is justified by the consideration that only in this way can
the sacred cement be procured which creates or keeps alive
a living bond of union between the worshippers and their
god. This cement is nothing else than the actual life of
the sacred and kindred animal, which is conceived as
residing in its flesh, but especially in its blood, and so, in
the sacred meal, is actually distributed among all the
participants, each of whom incorporates a particle of it
with his own individual life.
The notion that, by eating the flesh, or particularly by
drinking the blood, of another living being, a man absorbs
its nature or life into his own, is one which appears
among primitive peoples in many forms. It lies at the
root of the widespread practice of drinking the fresh blood
of enemies — a practice which was familiar to certain
tribes of the Arabs before Mohammed and which tradition
still ascribes to the wild race of Cahtan ^ — and also of the
1 See the evidence in Khiship, p. 284 ; and cf. Doughty, ii. 41, where the
better accounts seem to limit the drinking of liuman blood by the Cahtan
to the blood covenant.
296 THE BLOOD
LECT. IX.
habit observed by many savage huntsmen of eating some
part {e.g. the liver) of dangerous carnivora, in order
that the courage of the animal may pass into them.
And in some parts of the world, where men have the
privilege of choosing a special kind of sacred animal
either in lieu of, or in addition to, the clan totem,
we find that the compact between the man and the
species that he is thenceforth to regard as sacred is
sealed by killing and eating an animal of the species,
which from that time forth becomes forbidden food to
him.^
But the most notable application of the idea is in the
rite of blood-brotherhood, examples of which are found all
over the world.^ In the simplest form of this rite two
men become brothers by opening their veins and sucking
one another's blood. Thenceforth their lives are not two
but one. This form of covenant is still known in the
Lebanon ^ and in some parts of Arabia.* In ancient
Arabic literature there are many references to the blood
covenant, but instead of human blood that of a victim slain
at the sanctuary is employed. The ritual in this case is
that all who share in tlie compact must dip their hands
into the gore, which at the same time is applied to the
sacred stone that symbolises the deity, or is poured forth
at its base. The dipping of the hands into the dish
^ Frazer {Totemism, p. 54) has collected evidence of the killing, but not
of the eating. For the latter he refers me to Cruickshank, Gold Coast
(1853), p. 133 ,sg.
^ See the collection of evidence in Trumbull, The Blood Covenant (New
York, 1885); and compare for the Arabs, Kinship, pp. 48 sqq., 261 ; Well-
hausen, p. 120 ; Goldziher, Literaturhl. f. or. Phil. 1886, p. 24, Muh.
Stud. p. 67. In what follows I do not quote examples in detail for things
sufficiently exemplified in the books just cited.
^ Trumbull, p. 5 sq.
* Doughty, ii. 41. The value of the evidence is quite independent of the
accuracy of the statement that the Cahtan still practise the rite ; at least
the tradition of such a rite subsists. See also Trumbull, p. 9.
LECT. IX. COVENANT. 297
implies communion in an act of eating,' and so the
members of the bond are called " blood-lickers." There
seems to be no example in the old histories and poems of
a covenant in which the parties lick one another's blood.
But we have seen that even in modern times the use of
human blood in covenants is not unknown to the Semites,
and the same thing appears for very early times from
Herodotus's account of the form of covenant used l)y the
Arabs on the borders of Egypt.^ Blood was drawn with
a sharp stone from the thumbs of each party, and smeared
on seven sacred stones with invocation of the gods. Tlie
smearing makes the gods parties to the covenant, but
evidently the symbolical act is not complete unless at the
same time the human parties taste each other's blood. It
is probable that this was actually done, though Herodotus
does not say so. But it is also possible that in course of
time the ritual had been so far modified that it was deemed
sufficient that the two bloods should meet on the sacred
stone.^ The rite described by Herodotus has for its object
the admission of an individual stranger * to fellowship with
an Arab clansman and his kin ; the compact is primarily
between two individuals, but the obligation contracted by
the single clansman is binding on all his " friends," i.e.
on the other members of the kin. The reason why it is so
binding is that he who has drunk a clansman's blood is no
longer a stranger but a brother, and included in the mystic
circle of those who have a share in the life-blood that is
common to all the clan. Primarily the covenant is not a
1 Matt. XXV. 23. " Herod., iii. 8.
•* Some furtlier remarks on tlie various modifications of covenant cere-
monies among the Semites will l)e found in Additional Note I.
* The ceremony might also take place between an Arab and his "towns-
man" (affTos), which, I apprehend, must mean another Arab, but one of a
<lifferent clan. For if a special contract between two clansmen were meant,
there would be no meaning in the introduction to the "friends" who agree
to share the covenant obligation.
298 THE BLOOD
LECT. TX.
special engagement to this or that particular effect, but a
bond of troth and life-fellowship to all the effects for which
kinsmen are permanently bound together. And this being
so, it is a matter of course that the engagement has a
religious side as well as a social, for there can be no
brotherhood without community of sacra, and the sanction
of brotherhood is the jealousy of the tribal deity, who
sedulously protects the holiness of kindred blood. This
thought is expressed symbolically by the smearing of the
two bloods, which have now become one, upon the sacred
stones, which is as much as to say that the god himself is
a third blood-licker, and a member of the bond of brother-
hood.^ It is transparent that in ancient times the deity
so brought into the compact must have been the kindred
god of the clan to which the stranger was admitted ; but
even in the days of Herodotus the old clan religion had
already been in great measure broken down ; all the Arabs
of the Egyptian frontier, whatever their clan, worshipped
the same pair of deities, Orotal and Alilat (Al-Lat), and
these were the gods invoked in the covenant ceremony.
If therefore both the contracting parties were Arabs, of
different clans but of the same region, neither could feel
that the covenant introduced him to the sac7'a of a new
god, and the religious meaning of the ceremony would
simply be that the gods whom both adored took the
compact under their protection. This is the ordinary
sense of covenant with sacrifice in later times, e.q. among
the Hebrews, but also among the Arabs, where the deity
invoked is ordinarily Allah at the Caaba or some other
great deity of more than tribal consideration. But that
the appeal to a god already acknowledged by both parties
^ Compare the blood covenant which a Mosquito Indian used to form with
the animal kind he eliose as his protectors; Bancroft, i. 740 sq. (Frazer,
p. 55).
LECT. IX.
COVENANT. 299
is a departure from the original sense of the rite is
apparent from the application of the blood, not only to the
human contractors, but to the altar or sacred stone, which
continued to be an invariable feature in covenant sacrifice ;
for this part of the rite, as we have just seen, has its full
and natural meaning only in a ceremony of initiation,
where the new tribesman has to be introduced to the god
for the first time and brought into life-fellowship with him,
or else in a periodical clan sacrifice held for the purpose of
refreshing and renewing a bond between the tribesmen and
their god, which by lapse of time may seem to have been
worn out.
In Herodotus the blood of the covenant is that of the
human parties ; in the cases known from Arabic literature
it is the blood of an animal sacrifice. At first sight this
seems to imply a progress in refinement and an aversion
to taste human blood. But it may well be doubted
whether such an assumption is justified by the social
history of the Arabs,^ and we have already seen that the
primitive form of the blood covenant has survived into
modern times. Bather, I think, we ought to consider that
the ceremony described by Herodotus is a covenant between
individuals, without that direct participation of the whole
kin, which, even in the time of Nilus, many centuries later,
was essential in those parts of Arabia to an act of sacrifice
involving the death of a victim. The covenants made by
sacrifice are generally if not always compacts between
whole kins, so that here sacrifice was appropriate, while at
the same time a larger supply of blood was necessary than
could well be obtained without slaughter. That the blood
of an animal was accepted in lieu of the tribesmen's own
blood is generally passed over by modern writers without
' See the examples of cannibalism and the drinking of human blood cited
in Kinship, p. 284 sq.
300 COVENANT LECT. IX.
explanation. But an explanation is certainly required, and
is fully supplied only by the consideration that, the victim
being itself included in the sacred circle of the kin, whose
life was to be communicated to the new-comers, its blood
served in all respects the same purpose as actual man's
blood would have done. On this view the rationale of
covenant sacrifice is perfectly transparent, and calls for no
further remark.
I do not, however, believe that the origin of sacrifice
can possibly be sought in the covenant between whole
kins — a kind of compact which in the nature of things
cannot have become common till the tribal system was
weak, and which in primitive times was probably quite
unknown. Even the adoption of individuals into a new
clan, so that they renounced their old kin and sacra, is
held by the most exact students of early legal custom to
be, comparatively speaking, a modern innovation on the
rigid rules of the ancient blood-fellowship ; much more,
then, must this be true of the adoption or fusion of whole
clans. I apprehend, therefore, that the use of blood drawn
from a living man for the initiation of an individual into
new sacra, and the use of the blood of a victim for the
similar initiation of a whole clan, must both rest in the
last resort on practices that were originally observed
within the bosom of a sincjle kin.
To such sacrifice the idea of a covenant, whether between
the worshippers mutually or between the worshippers and
their god, is not applicable, for a covenant means artificial
brotherhood, and has no place where the natural brother-
hood of which it is an imitation already subsists. The
Hebrews, indeed, who had risen above the conception
that the relation between Jehovah and Israel was that
of natural kinship, thought of the national religion as
constituted by a formal covenant-sacrifice at Mount Sinai,
LECT. IX.
SACRIFICE. 301
where the blood of the victims was applied to the altar
on the one hand, and to the people on the other/ or even
by a still earlier covenant rite in which the parties were
Jehovah and Abraham.^ And by a further development
of the same idea, every sacrifice is regarded in Ps. 1. 5
as a covenant between God and the worshipper.^ But in
purely natural religions, where the god and his community
are looked upon as forming a physical unity, the idea that
religion rests on a compact is out of place, and acts of
religious communion can only be directed to quicken and
confirm the life - bond that already subsists between the
parties. Some provision of this sort may well seem to be
necessary where kinship is conceived in the very realistic
way of which we have had so many illustrations. Physical
unity of life, regarded as an actual participation in one
common mass of flesh and blood, is obviously subject to
modification by every accident that affects the physical
system, and especially by anything that concerns the
nourishment of the body and the blood. On this ground
alone it might well seem reasonable to reinforce the sacred
life from time to time by a physical process. And this
merely material line of thought naturally combines itself
with considerations of another kind, which contain the
1 Ex. xxiv. 4 sqq. ^ Gen. xV. 8 sqq.
' That Jeliovah's relation to Israel is not natural but ethical, is the doctrine
of the prophets, and is emphasised, in dependence on their teacliinr^, in the
Book of Deuteronomy. But the passages cited show that the idea has its
foundation in pre-proplietic times ; and indeed the prophets, thougli they
"ive it fresh and powerful application, plainly do not regard the conception
as an innovation. In fact, a nation like Israel is not a natural unity like a
clan, and Jehovah as the national God was, from the time of Moses down-
ward, no mere natural clan god, but the god of a confederation, so that here
the idea of a covenant religion is entirely justified. The worship of Jehovah
throuo-hout all the tribes of Israel and Judah is probably older than the
genealogical system that derives all the Hebrews front one natural parent ;
of. Kinship, p. 257. Mohammed's conception of heathen religion as resting
on alliance (Wellh., p. 123) is also to be explained by the fact that the
great gods of Arabia in his time were not the gods of single clans.
302 OFFERINGS OF lect. ix.
germ of an ethical idea. If the physical oneness of the
deity and his community is impaired or attenuated, the
help of the god can no longer be confidently looked for.
And conversely, when famine, plague or other disaster
shows that the god is no longer active on behalf of his
own, it is natural to infer that the bond of kinship with
him has been broken or relaxed, and that it is necessary
to retie it by a solemn ceremony, in which the sacred life
is again distributed to every member of the community.
From this point of view the sacramental rite is also an
atoning rite, which brings the community again into
harmony with its alienated god, and the idea of sacrificial
communion includes within it the rudimentary conception
of a piacular ceremony. In all the older forms of Semitic
ritual the notions of communion and atonement are bound
up together, atonement being simply an act of com-
munion designed to wipe out all memory of previous
estrangement.
The actual working of these ideas may be seen in two
different groups of ritual observance. Where the whole
community is involved, the act of communion and atone-
ment takes the shape of sacrifice. But, besides this
communal act, we find what may be called private acts
of worship, in which an individual seeks to establish a
physical link of union between himself and the deity,
apart from the sacrifice of a victim, either by the use of
his own blood in a rite analogous to the blood covenant
between private individuals, or by other acts involving
an identical principle. Observances of this kind are
peculiarly instructive, because they exhibit in a simple
form the same ideas that lie at the root of the complex
system of ancient sacrifice ; and it will be profitable to
devote some attention to them before we proceed further
with the subject of sacrifice proper. By so doing we shall
LECT. IX. one's own blood. -303
indeed be carried into a considerable digression, but I hope
that we shall return to our main subject with a firmer
grasp of the fundamental principles involved.^
In the ritual of the Semites and other nations, both
ancient and modern, we find many cases in which the
worshipper sheds his own blood at the altar, as a means of
recommending himself and his prayers to the deity.^ A
classical instance is that of the priests of Baal at the
contest between the god of Tyre and the God of Israel
(1 Kings xviii. 28). Similarly at the feast of the Syrian
goddess at Mabbog, the Galli and devotees made gashes in
their arms, or offered their backs to one another to beat,'^
exactly as is now done by Persian devotees at the annual
commemoration of the martyrdom of Hasan and Hosain."*
I have elsewhere argued that the general diffusion of
this usage among the Aramteans is attested by the Syriac
word ethkashshaf, " make supplication," literally " cut
oneself." ^
The current view about such rites in modern as in
ancient times has been that the effusion of blood without
taking away life is a substitute for human sacrifice,^ an
explanation which recommends itself by its simplicity, and
•^ For the subject discussed in the following paragraphs, compare especially
the copious collection of materials by Dr. G. A. Wilken, Ueber das
Haaropfer, etc., Amsterdam, 1886-7.
^ Cf. Spencer, Leg. Bit. Heb. ii. 13. 2. ' Dea Syria, 1.
* This seems to be a modern survival of the old rites of Anaitis-worship,
for the similar observances in the worship of Bellona at liome under the
empire were borrowed from Cappadocia, and apparently from a form of the
cult of Anaitis (see the refs. in Roscher, .s.v.). The latter, again, was closely
akin to the worship of the Syrian goddess, and appears to have been
developed to a great extent under Semitic influence. See my paper on
"Ctesias and the Semiramis Legend," English Hist. Ihr., April 1887.
* Journ. Phil. xiv. 125 ; cf. Niildeke in ZDMG. xl. 723.
' See Pausanias, iii. 16. 10, where this is the account given of the bloody
flagellation of the Spartan ephebi at the altar of Artemis Orthia. Similarly
Euripides, Iph. Taur. 1458 sqq.; cf. also Bourkc, Snake Dance of the Ziinis,
p. 196 ; and especially Wilken, o/j. cit. p. 68 sqq.
304 OFFERINGS OF lect. ix.
probably hits the truth with regard to certain cases. But
as a general explanation of the offering of his own blood
by a suppliant, it is not quite satisfactory. Human
sacrifice is offered not on behoof of the victim, but at the
expense of the victim on behoof of the sacrificing com-
munity, while the shedding of one's own blood is in many
cases a means of recommending oneself to the godhead.
Further, there is an extensive class of rites prevalent
among savage and barbarous peoples in which blood-
shedding forms part of an initiatory ceremony, by which
youths, at or after the age of puberty, are admitted to
the status of a man, and to a full share in the social
privileges and sacra of the community. In both cases
the object of the ceremony must be to tie, or to confirm,
a blood-bond between the worshipper and the god by a
means more potent than the ordinary forms of stroking,
embracing or kissing the sacred stone. To this effect the
blood of the man is shed at the altar, or applied to the
image of the god, and has exactly the same efficacy as in
the forms of blood covenant that have been already
discussed.^ And that this is so receives strong confirma-
tion from the identical practices observed among so many
nations in mourning for deceased kinsmen. The Hebrew
law forbade mourners to gash or puncture themselves in
honour of the dead,^ evidently associating this practice,
which nevertheless was common down to the close of the
old kingdom,^ with heathenish rites. Among the Arabs
1 That the blood must fall on the altar, or at its foot, is expressly attested
in certain cases, e.g. in the Spartan worship of Artemis Orthia, and in
various Mexican rites of the same kind ; see Sahagnn, 2^ouvelle Espagne
(French Tr. 1880), p. 185. In Tibullus's account of Bellona worship (Lib.
i. El. 6, vv. 45 sqq.) the blood is s{)rinkled on the idol ; the church-fathers
add that those who shared in the rite drank one another's blood.
- Lev. xix. 28, xxi. 5 ; Deut. xiv. 1.
' Jer. xvi. 6. The funeral feast which Jeremiah mentions in tne follow-
ing verse (see the Revised Version, and compare Hos. ix. 4), and which has
LECT. IX. ONES OWN BLOOD. 305
in like manner, as among the Greeks and other ancient
nations, it was customary in mourning to scratch the face
to the effusion of blood.^ The original meaning of this
practice appears in the form which it has retained
among certain rude nations. In New South Wales,
" several men stand by the open grave and cut each
other's heads with a boomerang, and hold tlieir heads
over the grave so that the blood from the wound falls on
the corpse." ^ Similarly in Otaheite the blood as well as
the tears shed in mourning were received on pieces of
linen, which were thrown on the bier.^ Here the applica-
tion of blood and tears to the dead is a pledge of enduring
affection ; and in Australia the ceremony is completed by
cutting a piece of flesh from the corpse, which is dried,
cut up and distributed among the relatives and friends
of the deceased ; some suck their portion " to get strength
and courage." The two-sided nature of the rite in this
case puts it beyond question that the object is to make an
enduring covenant with the dead.
Among the Hebrews and Arabs, and indeed among
many other peoples both ancient and modern, the lacera-
tion of the flesh in mourning is associated with the practice
of shaving the head or cutting off part of the hair and
for its object to comfort the mourners, is, I apprelieud, in its origin a feast of
communion with the dead ; cf. Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii. 26 sqq. This
act of communion consoles the survivors ; but in the ohlest times the
consolation has a physical basis ; thus the Arabian solwdn, or draught that
makes the mourner forget his grief, consists of water with which is mingled
dust from the grave (Wellh., p. 142), a form of communion precisely
similar in principle to the Australian usage of eating a small piece of
the corpse.
^ Wellh., p. 160, gives the necessary citations. Cf. on the rites of
mourning in general, Bokhari, ii. 75 sq., and Freytag in his Latin version
of the Hamdsa, i. 430 sq.
" F. Bonney in Journ. Anthrop. Inst. xiii. (1884), p. 134. For this and
the following reference I am indebted to my friend Frazer.
3 Cook's First Voyage, Bk. i. ch. 19.
U
/
306 OFFERINGS lect. ix,
depositing it in the tomb or on the funeral pyre.^ Here
also a comparison of the usage of more primitive races
shews that the rite was originally two-sided, and had exactly
the same sense as the offering of the mourner's blood.
For among the Australians it is permitted to pull some
hair from the corpse in lieu of a part of its flesh. The
hair, in fact, is regarded by primitive peoples as a living
and important part of the body, and as such is the
object of many taboos and superstitions.^ Thus when the
hair of the living is deposited with the dead, and the
hair of the dead remains with the living, a permanent
bond of connection unites the two.
Now among the Semites and other ancient peoples the
hair-offering is common, not only in mourning but in the
^ See for the Arabs (among whom the practice was confined to -women)
the anthorities referred to above ; also Krehl, Rel. der Araber, p. 33, and
GolJziher, Muh. Stud. i. 248 ; note also the epithet halac = hdlica,
" death." For the Hebrews — whose custom was not to shave the whole head
but only the front of it — see Jer. xvi. 6 ; Amos viii. 10 ; Ezek. vii. 18 ;
and the legal prohibitions Lev. xix. 27 ; Deut. xiv. 1 ; cf. also Lev. xxi.
^ 5 ; Ezek. xliv. 20. In the Hebrew case it is not expressly said that the
hair was laid on the tomb, but in Arabia this was done in the times of
heathenism, and is still done by some Bedouin tribes, according to the
testimony of modern travellers. A notable feature in the Arabian custom
is that after shaving her head the mourner wrapped it in the sicdb, a cloth
stained with her own blood. See the verse ascribed to the poetess Al-
Khansa in Taj, s.i\
- Enc. Brit, article "Taboo." Wilken {op. cit. p. 78 sqq., and "De
Simsonsage," Gids, 1888, No. 5) has collected many instances to shew that
the hair is often regarded as the special seat of life and strength. It may
be conjectured that this idea is connected with the fact that the hair .
continues to grow, and so to manifest life, even in mature age, and this
conjecture is supported by the fact that the nails are among many peoples
the object of similar superstitious regard. The practice of cutting off the
hair of the dead, or a part of it, is pretty widely diffused ; see Wilken,
Haaropfer, p. 74, and for the Arabs an isolated statement of a Mahiiby
Arab in Doughty, i. 450, to which Mr. Doughty does not appear to attach
much weight. Yet it seems to me that a custom of cutting off the hair of
the dead is implied, when we read that the Bekrites before the desperate
battle of Cidda shaved their heads as devoting themselves to death [Ham.
253, 1. 17). Wilken supposes that the hair was originally cut away from
the corpse, or from the dying man, to facilitate the escape of the soul from
c/
LECT. IX. OF HAIR. 307
worship of the gods, and the details of the ritual in the
two cases are so exactly similar that we cannot doubt that
a single principle is involved in both. The hair of Achilles
was dedicated to the river-god Spercheus, in whose honour
it was to be shorn on his safe return from Troy ; but
knowing that he should never return, the hero transferred
the offering to the dead Patroclus, and laid his yellow locks
in the hand of the corpse. Arab women laid their hair
on the tomb of the dead ; young men and maidens in
Syria cut off their flowing tresses and deposited them in
caskets of gold and silver in the temples.^ The Hebrews
shaved the forepart of the head in mourning ; the
Arabs of Herodotus habitually adopted a like tonsure in
honour of their god Orotal, who was supposed to wear
his hair in the same way.^ To argue from these parallels
the body. This notion might very well recommend itself to the savage
mind, inasmuch as the hair continues to grow for some time after death.
But when Ave find the hair of the dead used as a means of divination, or as a
charm, as is done among many peoples (Wilken, Ilaaropfer, Anh. ii.), we
are led to think that the main object in cutting it off must be to preserve
it as a means of continued connection with the dead. The possession of hair
from a man's head or of a shaving from his nails is, in primitive magic, a
potent means of getting and retaining a hold over him. This, I suppose,
is the reason why an Arab before releasing a captive cut off his hair and
put it in his quiver ; see the authorities cited by Wilken, p. Ill, and add
Rasmussen, Addit. p. 70 sq. On the same principle Mohammed's hair was
preserved by his followers and worn on their persons (Muh. in Med. 429).
One such hair is the famous relic in the mosque of the Companion at
Cairawan.
^ Dea Syria, Ix., where modern editors, by a totally inadmissible con-
jecture, make it appear that maidens offered their locks, and youths only
their beard. Cf. Ephraem Syrus, Op. Syr. i. 246 ; the Syriac version of
Lev. xix. 27 renders " ye shall not let your hair grow long," and Ephraem
explains that it was the custom of the heathen to let their hair grow for a
certain time, and then on a fixed day to shave the head in a temple or beside
a sacred fountain.
^ The peculiar Arab tonsure is already referred to in Jer. xxv. 23,
R.V. It is found elsewhere in antiquity, e.g. in Euboea and in some parts
of Asia Minor {Iliad, ii. 542 ; Pint., Thes. 5 ; Strabo, x. 3. 6 ; Choerilus ap.
Jos., c. Ap. i. 22 ; Pollux, ii. 28). At Delphi, where Greek ephebi were
wont to offer the long liair of their childhood, this peculiar cut was called
hirnis, for Theseus was said to have bhorn only his front locks at the temple.
L —
c~
308 OFFERINGS lect. ix.
between customs of mourning and of religion that the
worship of the gods is based on the cult of the dead,
would be to go beyond the evidence ; what does appear
is that the same means which were deemed efficacious
to maintain an enduring covenant between the living
and the dead were used to serve the religious purpose
of binding together in close union the worshipper and his
god.
Starting from this general principle, we can explain
without difficulty the two main varieties of the hair-
offering as it occurs in religion. In its nature the
offering is a personal one, made on behalf of an individual,
not of a community. It does not therefore naturally
find a place in the stated and periodical exercises of
local or tribal religion, where a group of men is gathered
together in an ordinary act of communal worship. Its
proper object is to create or to emphasise the relation
between an individual and a god, and so it is in place
either in ceremonies of initiation, by which a new member
is incorporated into the circle of a particular religion, or
in connection with special vows and special acts of devo-
tion, by which a worshipper seeks to knit more closely
the bond between himself and his god. Thus in Greek
religion the hair-offeriug occurs either at the moment when
a youth enters on manhood, and so takes up a full share
in the religious as well as the political responsibilities of
a citizen, or else in fulfilment of a vow made at some
moment when a man is in special need of divine succour.
The same thing is true of Semitic religion, but to make
this clear requires some explanation.
Among the Curetes this was the way in which warriors wore their hair ;
presumably, therefore, children let the front locks grow long, and sacrificed
them on entering manhood, just as among the Arabs the two side locks are
the distinguishing mark of an immature lad.
LECT. IX. OF HAIR. 309
In early societies a man's religion is determined by his
birth, for he is destined from his birth to become a
member of a particular political and social, circle, which
is at the same time a distinct religious community. But
in many cases, perhaps in most, this destination has to be
confirmed by a formal act of admission to the community.
The child or immature stripling is not yet a full member
of his tribe or nation, he has not yet full civil privileges
and responsibilities, and in general, on the principle that
civil and religious status are inseparable, he has no full
part either in the rights or in the duties of the communal
religion. He is excluded from many religious ceremonies,
and conversely he can do without offence things which on
religious grounds are strictly forbidden to the full tribes-
man. Among rude nations the transition from civil and
religious immaturity to maturity is frequently preceded
by certain probationary tests of courage and endurance ;
for the full tribesman must above all things be a warrior.
In any case the step from childhood to manhood is too im-
portant to take place without a formal ceremony, and public
rites of initiation, importing the full and final incorporation
of the neophyte into the civil and religious fellowship
of his tribe or community.-^ It is clear from what has
already been said that the application of the blood of the
youth to the sacred symbol, or the depositing of his hair
at the shrine of his people's god, is a fitting and significant
feature in such a ritual ; and among very many rude
peoples one or other of these ceremonies is actually
observed in connection with the rites which every young
man must pass through before he attains the position of a
warrior, and is allowed to marry and exercise the other
^ In some cases the rite seems to be connected with the transference of
the lad from the mother's to the father's kin. But for the present argu-
ment, it is not necessary to discuss this aspect of the matter.
310 INITIATORY LECT. IX.
prerogatives of perfect manhood. Among wholly barbar-
ous races these initiation ceremonies have a very great
importance, and are often extremely repulsive in character.
The blood-offering in particular frequently takes a form
which makes it a severe test of the neophyte's courage —
as in the cruel flagellation of Spartan ephebi at the altar
of Artemis Orthia, or in the frightful ordeal which takes
the place of simple circumcision in some of the wilder
mountain tribes of Arabia.^ As manners become less
fierce, and society ceases to be organised mainly for war,
the ferocity of primitive ritual is naturally softened, and
the initiation ceremony gradually loses importance, and
ultimately becomes a mere domestic celebration, which in
its social aspect may be compared to the private festivities
of a modern family when a son comes of age, and in its
religious aspect to the first communion of a youthful
Catholic. When the rite loses political significance, and
becomes purely religious, it is not necessary that it should
be deferred to the age of full manhood ; indeed the natural
tendency of pious parents will be to dedicate their child
as early as possible to the god who is to be his protector
through life. Thus circumcision, which, as will be shewn
hereafter, was originally a preliminary to marriage, and so a
ceremony of introduction to the full prerogative of manhood,
is now generally undergone by Mohammedan boys before
they reach maturity, while, among the Hebrews, infants were
circumcised on the eighth day from birth. Similar varia-
tions of usage apply to the Semitic hair-offering. Among
the Arabs in the time of Mohammed it was common to
(y sacrifice a sheep on the birth of a child, and then to shave
the head of the infant and daub the scalp with the blood of
the victim. This ceremony — called 'acica, or " the cutting
^ The connection between circnmcision and the initiatory blood-offering
will be considered more fully in another place.
LECT. IX. HAIR-OFFERINGS. 311
off of the hair " — was designed to " avert evil from the
child," and was evidently an act of dedication by which
the infant was brought under the protection of the god
of the community.^ Among Lucian's Syrians, on the other
hand, the hair of boys and girls was allowed to grow
unshorn as a consecrated thing from birth to adolescence,
and was cut off and dedicated at the sanctuary as a neces-
sary preliminary to marriage. In other words, the hair-
offering of youths and maidens was a ceremony of religious
initiation, through which they had to pass before they were
admitted to the status of social maturity. The same thing
appears to have occurred, at least in the case of maidens,
at Phoenician sanctuaries ; for the female worshippers at
the Adonis feast of Byblus, who, according to the author
just cited, were required to sacrifice either their hair or
their chastity,^ appear from other accounts to have been
generally maidens, of whom this act of devotion was
1 That the liair was regarded as an offering appears from the Moslem
practice, referred by tradition to the example of Fatima, of bestowing in alms
its weight of silver. Alms are a religious oblation, and in the similar
custom which Herod., ii. 65, Diod., i. 83, attest for ancient Egypt, the silver
was paid to the sanctuary. See for further details Kinship, p. 152 sqq.,
where I have dwelt on the way in which such a ceremony would facilitate
the change of the child's kin, when the rule that the son followed the
father and not the mother began to be established. I still think that
this point is worthy of notice, and that the desire to fix the child's re-
ligion, and with it his tribal connection, at the earliest possible moment,
may have been one cause for performing the ceremony in infancy. But
Noldeke's remarks in ZDMG. xl. 184, and a fuller consideration of the
whole subject of the hair-offering, have convinced me that the name 'acica
is not connected with the idea of change of kin, but is derived from the
cutting away of the first hair. In this, however, I see a confirmation of the
view that among the Arabs, as among the Syrians, the old usage was to
defer the cutting of the first hair till adolescence, for 'acca is a very strong
term to apply to the shaving of the scanty hair of a new-born infant, while
it is quite appropriate to the sacrifice of the long locks characteristic of
boyhood. CC. also the use of the same verb in the phrases 'occat taml-
matuhu {Kdmil, 405, 1. 19), 'acca'l-shabdhu tdmlmatl {Taj, s.v.), used of
the cutting away, when manhood was reached, of the amulet worn during
childhood.
- Dea Syria, vi.
312 THE HAIR-OFFERING LECT. ix.
exacted as a preliminary to marriage.^ I apprehend that
among the Arabs, in like manner, the 'acica was originally
a ceremony of initiation into manhood, and that the
transference of the ceremony to infancy was a later in-
novation, for among the Arabs, as among the Syrians,
young lads let their hair grow long, and the sign of
immaturity was the retention of the side locks, which
adult warriors did not wear.^ The cutting of the side
locks was therefore a formal mark of admission into man-
hood, and in the time of Herodotus it must also have been
a formal initiation into the worship of Orotal, for other-
wise the religious significance which the Greek historian
attaches to the shorn forehead of the Arabs is unintelligible.
At that time, therefore, we must conclude that a hair-
offering, precisely equivalent to the 'aclca, took place upon
entry into manhood, and thereafter the front hair was
habitually worn short as a permanent memorial of this
dedicatory sacrifice. It is by no means clear that even in
later times the initiatory ceremony was invariably per-
formed in infancy, for the name 'aclca, which in Arabic
denotes the first hair as well as the religious ceremony of
cutting it off, is sometimes applied to the ruddy locks of a
lad approaching manhood,^ and figuratively to the plumage
of a swift young ostrich or the tufts of an ass's hair,
neither of which has much resemblance to the scanty
down on the head of a new-born babe.*
It would seem, therefore, that the oldest Semitic usage,
both in Arabia and in Syria, was to sacrifice the hair of
^ Sozomen, v. 10. 7. Cf. Socrates, i. 18, and the similar usage in
Babylon, Herod., i. 199. We are not to suppose that participation in
these rites was confined to maidens before marriage (Euseb., Vit. Const, iii.
58. 1), but it appears that it was obligatory on them.
2 See Wellh., Held. p. 119.
^ Imraulcais, 3. 1 ; see also Lisdn, xii. 129, 1. 18, and Dozy, s.v.
* Zohair, 1. 17; Dlw. Hoclh. 232. 9. The seilse of "down," which
Noldeke, ut vupra, gives to the word in these passages, is hardly appropriate.
LECT. IX. IN LATER LIFE. 313
childhood upon admission to the religious and social status
of manhood.
The bond between the worshipper and his god which
was estabhshed by means of the hair -offering had an
enduring character, but it was natural to renew it from
time to time, when there was any reason to fear that the
interest of the deity in his votary might have been relaxed.
Thus it was customary for the inhabitants of Taif in Arabia
to shave their heads at the sanctuary of the town whenever
they returned from a journey.^ Here the idea seems to be
that absence from the holy place might have loosened the
religious tie, and that it was proper to bind it fast again.
In like manner the hair-offering formed part of the ritual
in every Arabian pilgrimage,^ and also at the great feasts
of Byblus and Bambyce,^ which were not mere local
celebrations, but drew worshippers from distant parts.
The worshipper in these cases desired to attach himself
as firmly as possible to a deity and a shrine with which
he could not hope to keep up frequent and regular con-
nection, and thus it was fitting that, when he went forth
from the holy place, he should leave part of himself
behind, as a permanent link of union with the temple
and the god that inhabited it.
The Arabian and Syrian pilgrimages with which the
hair-offering was associated were exceptional services ; in
many cases their object was to place the worshipper under
the protection of a foreign god, whose cult had no place in
the pilgrim's local and natural religion, and in any case
'^ Muh. in Med. p. 381.
- AVellli., p. 117 ; Goldziher, op. cit. p. 249. That the hair was shaved
as an offering appeirs most clearly in the worship of Ocaisir, where it Avas
mixed with an oblation of meal.
3 Dea Syria, vi., Iv. In the latter case the eyehrows also were shaved,
and the sacrifice of hair from the eyebrow reappears in Peru, in the laws of
the Iiicas. On the painted inscription of Citium (C. 1. S. No. 86), barbers
(D3?J) are enumerated among tlie stated ministers of the temple.
314 THE HAIR-OFFERING lect. ix.
the service was not part of a man's ordinary religious
duties, but was spontaneously undertaken as a work of
special piety, or under the pressure of circumstances that
made the pilgrim feel the need of coming into closer
touch with the divine powers. Among the Hebrews, at
least in later times, when stated pilgrimages to Jerusalem
were among the ordinary and imperative exercises of
every man's religion, the pilgrimage did not involve a hair-
offering, nor is it probable that in any part of antiquity
this form of service was required in connection with
ordinary visits to one's own local temple. The Penta-
teuchal law recognises the hair-offering only in the case
of the peculiar vow of the Nazarite, the ritual of which
is described in Num. vi. The details there given do
not help us to understand what part the Nazarite held
in the actual religious life of the Jews under the law,
but from Josephus ^ we gather that the vow was generally
taken in times of sickness or other trouble, and that it
was therefore exactly parallel to the ordinary Greek vow
to offer the hair on deliverance from urgent danger. From
the antique point of view the fact that a man is in straits
or peril is a proof that the divine powers on which his life
is dependent are estranged or indifferent, and a warning to
bring himself into closer relation with the god from whom
he is estranged. The hair- offering affords the natural
means towards this end, and if the offering cannot be
accomplished at the moment, it ought to be made the
subject of a vow, for a vow is the recognised way of
antedating a future act of service and making its efficacy
begin at once. A vow of this kind, aiming at the redin-
tegration of normal relations with the deity, is naturally
more than a bare promise ; it is a promise for the per-
formance of which one at once begins to make active
^ B. J. ii. 15. ].
LECT. IX.
IN VOWS. 315
preparation, so that the life of the votary from the time
when he assumes the engagement is taken out of the
ordinary sphere of secular existence, and becomes one
continuous act of religion.^ As soon as a man takes
the vow to poll his locks at the sanctuary, the hair is a
consecrated thing, and as such inviolable till the moment
for discharging the vow arrives ; and so the flowing locks
of the Hebrew Nazarite or of a Greek votary like Achilles
are the visible marks of his consecration. In like manner
the Arabian pilgrim, whose resolution to visit a distant
shrine was practically a vow,^ was not allowed to poll
or even to comb and wash his locks till the pilgrimage
was accomplished ; and on the same principle the whole
course of his journey, from the day when he first set his
face towards the temple with the resolution to do homage
there, was a period of consecration (ihrdm),^ during which
he was subject to a number of other ceremonial restrictions
or taboos, of the same kind with those imposed by actual
presence in the sanctuary.
The taboos connected with pilgrimages and other vows
require some further elucidation, b^^t to go into the matter
now would carry us too far from the point immediately
before us. I will therefore reserve what I have still to say
on this subject for an additional note.* What has been
said already covers all the main examples of the hair-offer-
ing among the Semites. They present considerable variety
of aspect, but the result of our discussion is that they can
1 Of course if the vow is conditional on something to happen in the future,
the engagement does not necessarily come into force till the condition is
fulfilled.
^ In Mohammedan law it is expressly reckoned as a vow.
* Under Islam the consecration of the pilgrim need not begin till he
reaches the boundaries of the sacred territory. But it is pernntted, and
according to many authorities preferable, to assume the ihrdm on leaving
one's home, and this was the ancient practice.
* See Additional Note. K. The Taboos incident to Pifgrimnges and Vowti.
u
316 OFFERINGS OF lect. ix.
be referred to a single principle. In their origin the hair-
offering and the offering of one's own blood are precisely
similar in meaning. But the blood - offering, while it
presents the idea of life union with the god in the strongest
possible form, is too barbarous to be long retained as an
ordinary act of religion. It continued to be practised,
among the civilised Semites, by certain priesthoods and
societies of devotees ; but in the habitual worship of laymen
it either fell out of use or was retained only in a very
attenuated form, in the custom of tattooing the flesh with
punctures in honour of the deity.^ The hair-offering, on
the other hand, which involved nothing offensive to civilised
feelings, continued to play an important part in religion to
the close of paganism, and even entered into Christian ritual
in the tonsure of priests and nuns.^
Closely allied to the practice of leaving part of oneself
1 For the o-T/y^ttara on the wrists and necks of the heathen Syrians the
classical passage is Dea Syria, lix. ; compare for further evidence the discus-
sion in Spencer, Leg. Eit. Heh. ii. 14 ; and see also Kinship, p. 213 sqq.
The tattooed marks were the sign that the worshipper belonged to the god ;
thus at the temple of Heracles at the Canobic mouth of the Nile, the fugitive
slave who had been marked with the sacred stigmata could not be reclaimed
by liis master (Herod., ii. 113). The practice therefore stands on one line
with the branding or tattooing of cattle, slaves and prisoners of war. But in
Lev. xix. 28, where tattooing is condemned as a heathenish practice, it is
immediately associated with incisions in the flesh made iir mourning or in
honour of the dead, and this suggests that in their ultimate origin the
stigmata are nothing more than the permanent scars of punctures made to
draw blood for a ceremony of self-dedication to the deity. Among the Arabs
I find no direct evidence of a religious significance attached to tattooing, and
the practice appears to have been confined to women, as was also the habitual
use of amulets in mature life. The presumption is that this coincidence is
not accidental, but that the tattooed marks were originally sacred stigmata
like those of the Syrians, and so were conceived to have the force of a charm.
Pietro della Valle (ed. 1843), i. 395, describes the Arabian tattooing, and says
that it is practised all over the East by men as well as by women. But so
far as I have observed, it is only Christian men that tattoo in Syria, and
with them the pattern chosen is a sacred symbol, which has been shown to
me as a proof that a man was exempt from the military service to which
Moslems are liable.
2 The latter was practised in Jerome's time in the monasteries of Egypt
and Syria {Ep. 147 ad Sabinianum).
LECT. IX. CLOTHING AND EAGS. 317
— whether blood or hair — in contact with the god at the
sanctuary, are oJEferings of part of one's clothes or other
things that one has worn, such as ornaments or weapons.
In the Iliad Glaucus and Diomede exchange armour in
token of their ancestral friendship ; and when Jonathan
makes a covenant of love and brotherhood with David, he
invests him with his garments, even to his sword, his bow,
and his girdle.^ Among the Arabs he who seeks pro-
tection lays hold of the garments of the man to whom
he appeals, or more formally ties a knot in the head-
shawl of his protector.'^ In the old literature "pluck
away my garments from thine " means " put an end to our
attachment." ^ The clothes are so far part of a man that
they can serve as a vehicle of personal connection. Hence
the religious significance of suspending on an idol or
Dhat Anwai, not only weapons, ornaments and complete
garments, but mere shreds from one's raiment. These
rag - offerings are still to be seen hanging on the sacred
trees of Syria and on the tombs of Mohammedan saints ;
they are not gifts in the ordinary sense, but pledges of
attachment. In all probability the rending of garments in
mourning was originally designed to procure such an offer-
ing for the dead, just as the tearing of the hair on the like
1 1 Sam. xviii. 3 sq. I presume that by ancient law Saul was bound to
acknowledge the formal covenant thus made between David and his son, and
that this ought to be taken into account in judging of the subsequent
relations between the three.
2 Wellhausen, Heidenthum, p. 105, note 3 ; Burckhardt, Bed. and Walt.
i. 130 sq. ; Blunt, Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates, i. 42. The knot, sajs
Burckhardt, is tied that the protector may look out for witnesses to prove
the act, and "the same custom is observed when any transaction is to be
witnessed." But primarily, I apprehend, the knot is the symbolic sign of
the engagement that the witnesses are called to prove, and I was told in the
Hijaz that the suppliant gets a fragment of the fringe of the shawl to keep
as his token of the transaction. In the covenant sacrifice, Herod., iii. S, the
blood is applied to the sacred stones with threads from the garments of the
two contracting parties.
3 Imraulc, Moall. 1. 21.
318 ATONING FORCE lect. ix.
occasion is not a natural sign of mourning, but a relic of
the hair-offering. Natural signs of mourning must not be
postulated lightly ; in all such matters habit is a second
nature.-^
Finally, I may note in a single word that the counter-
part of the custom of leaving part of oneself or of one's
clothes with the deity at the sanctuary, is the custom of
wearing sacred relics as charms, so that something belong-
ing to the god remains always in contact with one's
person.
The peculiar instructiveness of the series of usages
which we have been considering, and the justification for
the long digression from the subject of sacrifice into which
they have led us, is that in them we find the conception of
ceremonies, designed to establish a life-bond between the
worshipper and his god, dissociated from the death of a
victim and from every idea of penal satisfaction to the
deity. They have indeed an atoning force, whenever they
are used to renew relations with a god who is temporarily
estranged, but this is merely a consequence of the concep-
tion that the physical link which they establish between
the divine and human parties in the rite binds the god to
the man as well as the man to the god. Even in the case
of the blood-offering there is no reason to hold that the
pain of the self-inflicted wounds had originally any signifi-
cant place in the ceremony. But no doubt, as time went
on, the barbarous and painful sacrifice of one's own blood
came to be regarded as more efficacious than the simpler
and commoner hair-offering ; for in religion what is un-
usual always appears to be more potent, and more fitted to
reconcile an offended deity.
^ It is to be noted that all expressions of sorrow and distress are derived
from the formal usages employed in primitive times in mourning for the
dead.
LECT. IX. OF BLOOD-OFFERINGS. 319
The use of the Syriac word ethkashshaph seems to show
that the sacrifice of one's own blood was mainly associated
among the Aramaeans with deprecation or supplication to
an angry god, and though I cannot point among the Semites
to any formal atoning ceremony devised on this principle,
the idea involved can be well illustrated by a rite still
sometimes practised in Arabia, as a means of making atone-
ment to a man for offences short of murder. With bare
and shaven head the offender appears at the door of the
injured person, holding a knife in each hand, and, reciting a
formula provided for the purpose, strikes his head several
times with the sharp blades. Then drawing his hands over
his bloody scalp, he wipes them on the doorpost. The
other must then come out and cover the suppliant's head
with a shawl, after which he kills a sheep, and they sit
down together at a feast of reconciliation. The character-
istic point in this rite is the application of the blood to the
doorpost, which, as in the passover service, or in the Arabian
custom of sprinkling the blood of a sacrifice on the tents
of a host going out to battle,^ is equivalent to applying it
to the person of the inmates. Here, therefore, we still see
the old idea at work, that the reconciling value of the rite
lies, not in the self-inflicted wounds, but in the application
of the blood to make a life-bond between the two parties.
On the same analogy, when we turn to those blood-
rites in which a whole community takes part, and in which
therefore a victim has to be slaughtered to provide the
material for the ceremony, we may expect to find that,
at least in old times, the significant part of the ceremony
does not lie in the death of the victim, but in the appli-
cation of its life or life-blood ; and in this expectation we
shall not be disappointed.
Of all Semitic sacrifices those of the Arabs have the rudest
^ Wacidi, ed. Kremer, p. 28, 1. 8.
320 ARABIAN LECT. IX.
and most visibly primitive character ; and among the Arabs,
where there was no complicated fire-ceremony at the altar,
the sacramental meal stands out in full relief as the very
essence of the ritual. Now in the oldest known form of
Arabian sacrifice, as described by Nilus, the camel chosen
as the victim is bound upon a rude altar of stones piled
tosether, and when the leader of the band has thrice led
the worshippers round the altar in a solemn procession
accompanied with chants, he inflicts the first wound, while
the last words of the hymn are still upon the lips of the
consresation. and in all haste drinks of the blood that
gushes forth. Forthwith the whole company fall on the
victim with their swords, hacking off pieces of the quiver-
ins- flesh and devouring them raw with such wild haste
that, in the short interval between the rise of the day star,
which marked the hour for the service to begin, and the
disappearance of its rays before the rising sun, the entire
camel, body and bones, skin, blood and entrails, is wholly
devoured. The plain meaning of this is that the victim was
devoured before its life had left the still warm blood and
flesh — raw flesh is called " living " flesh in Hebrew and
Syriac — and that thus in the most literal way all those who
shared in the ceremony absorbed part of the victim's life
into themselves. One sees how much more forcibly than
any ordinary meal such a rite expresses the establishment
or confirmation of a bond of common life between the
worshippers, and also, since the blood is shed upon the
altar itself, between the worshippers and their god.
In this sacrifice, then, the significant factors are two : the
conveyance of the living blood to the godhead, and the
absorption of the living flesh and blood into the flesh and
blood of the worshippers. Each of these is effected in the
simplest and most direct manner, so that the meaning
of the ritual is perfectly transparent. In later Arabian
LECT. IX. SACRIFICE. 321
sacrifices, and still more in the sacrifices of the more
civilised Semitic nations, the primitive crudity of the
ceremonial was modified, and the meaning of the act is
therefore more or less disguised, but the essential type of
the ritual remains the same.
In all Arabian sacrifices except the holocaust — which
occurs only in the case of human victims — the godward
side of the ritual is summed up in the shedding of the
victim's blood, so that it flows over the sacred symbol, or
gathers in a pit {ghahghab) at the foot of the altar idol.
An application of the blood to the summit of the sacred
stone may be added, but that is all.^ "What enters the
■ghahghab is held to be conveyed to the deity ; thus at
certain Arabian shrines the pit under the altar was the
place where votive treasures were deposited. A pit to
receive the blood existed also at Jerusalem under the
altar of burnt-offering, and similarly in certain Syrian
sacrifices the blood was collected in a hollow, which
apparently bore the name of mashkan, and thus was
designated as the habitation of the godhead.''
In Arabia, accordingly, the most solemn act in the ritual
is the shedding of the blood, which in Nilus's narrative
takes place at the moment when the sacred chant comes
to an end. This, therefore, is the crisis of the service, to
which the choral procession round the altar leads up.^
In later Arabia the taicaf, or act of circling the sacred
stone, was still a principal part of religion ; but even
1 Zohair, x. 24.
^ See tlie text published by Dozy and De Goeje in the Actes of the
Leyden Congress of Orientalists, 1883, vol. iii. pp. 337, 363. For the
ghahghab, see p. 181 supra, and Wellhausen, p. 100. Compare also the
Persian ritual, Strabo, xv. 3. 14, and that of certain Greek sacrifices,
Plutarch, Aristides, xxi. : t«v Taupov u; rhv rrvpav ffiflatas.
3 The festal song of praise {T^n, tahlll) properly goes with the dance
round the altar (cf. Ps. xxvi. 6 ><q.), for in primitive times song and dance
are inseparable.
X
322 ARABIAN LECT. IX.
before Mohammed's time it had begun to be dissociated
from sacrifice, and become a meaningless ceremony.
Again, the original significance of tlie wocfif, or " standing,"
which in the ritual of the post-Mohammedan pilgrimage
has in like manner become an unmeaning ceremomy, is
doubtless correctly explained by M^ellhausen, who compares
it with the scene described by more than one old poet
where the worshippers stand round the altar idol, at a
respectful distance, gazing with rapt attention, while the
slaughtered victims lie stretched on the ground. The
Dioment of this act of adoration must be that when the
slaughter of the victims is just over, or still in progress,
and their blood is draining into the ghahghah, or being
applied by the priest to the head of the nosh}
In the developed forms of North Semitic worship,
where fire - sacrifices prevail, the slaughter of the victim
loses its importance as the critical point in the ritual.
The altar is above all things a hearth, and the burning of
the sacrificial fat is the most solemn part of the service.
This, however, is certainly not primitive ; for even in
the period of fire - sacrifice the Hebrew altar is called
niTO, that is " the place of slaughter," ^ and in ancient
times the victim was slain on or beside the altar, just as
among the Arabs, as appears from the account of the
sacrifice of Isaac, and from 1 Sam. xiv. 34.^ The
latter passage proves that in the time of Saul the Hebrews
still knew a form of sacrifice in which the offering was
1 Wellh., p. 56 ^q. ; Yaciit, iii. 94, 1. 13 sq. (cf. Nolcleke in ZZ)il/(7. 1887,
p. 721) ; ibid. p. 182, 1. 2 sq. {supra, p. 211).
2 Aram, madbah, Arab, madhbah ; the latter means also a trench in the
ground, which is intelligible from what has been said about the ghahghab.
3 Supra, p. 185. In Ps. cxviii. 27 the festal victim is bound with
cords to the horns of the altar, a relic of ancient usage which was no
longer intelligible to the Septuagint translators or to the Jewish traditional
expositors. Cf. the sacrificial stake to which the victim is bound in Vedic
sacrifices.
LECT. IX. SACRIFICE. 323
completed in the oblation of the blood. And even in
the case of fire-sacrifice the blood was not cast upon the
flames, but dashed against the sides of the altar or poured
out at its foot ; tlie new ritual was not able wholly to
displace the old.
As regards the manward part of the ritual, the revolt-
ing details given by Nilus liave naturally no complete
parallel in the worship of the more civilised Semites, or
even of the later Arabs. In lieu of the scramble described
by Nilus — the wild rush to cut gobbets of flesh from the
still quivering victim — we find amoug the later Arabs a
partition of the sacrificial flesh among all who are present
at the ceremony. Yet it seems possible that the ijaza, or
" permission," that is, the word of command that terminates
the wocTif, was originally the permission to fall upon the
slaughtered victim. In the Meccan pilgrimage the ijaza
which terminated the loocuf at 'Arafa was the signal for
a hot race to the neighbouring sanctuary of Mozdalifa,
where the sacred fire of the god Cozah burned ; it was, in
fact, not so much the permission to leave 'Arafa as to draw
near to Cozah. The race itself is called ifada, which may
mean either " dispersion " or " distribution." It cannot
well mean the former, for 'Arafa is not holy ground, but
merely the point of assemblage, just outside the Haram,
at which the ceremonies began, and the station at 'Arafa
is only the preparation for the vigil at Mozdalifa. On
the other hand, if the meaning is " distribution," the ifdda
answers to the rush of Nilus's Saracens to partake of the
sacrifice. The only difference is that at Mozdalifa the
crowd is not allowed to assemble close to the altar, but
has to watch the performance of the solemn rites from
afar; compare Ex. xix. 10-13.^
^ It may be noted that the ceremonies at Mozdalifa lay wholly between
sunrise and sunset, and that there was apparently one sacrifice just at or
324 BLOOD-EATING IN lect. ix.
The substitution of an orderly division of the victim
for the scramble described by Nilus does not touch the
meaning of the ceremonial. Much more important, from
its effect in disguising an essential feature in the ritual,
is the modification by which, in most Semitic sacrifices,
the flesh is not eaten raw but sodden or roasted, for in
this way the point is lost that the participants receive
into themselves the very life of the victim. But it is
obvious that this change could not fail to establish itself
with the progress of civilisation, and various indications
remain to shew that the idea of communion in the actual
life of the victim w^as not altogether lost. Even in the
latest, post-exilic, part of the Pentateuchal legislation it
was found necessary in the law of the Passover to forbid
the Paschal lamb to be devoured raw ; and that bloody
morsels were consumed by the heathen in Palestine, and
also by the less orthodox Israelites, is apparent from
Zech. ix. 7, Ezek. xxxiii. 25,^ Lev. xix. 26. The context
of these passages, and the penalty of excommunication
attached to the eating of blood in Lev. vii. 27, justify us
in assuming that the heathen practice had a directly
religious significance, and occurred in connection with
sacrifice to heathen deities. That the eating of blood was
in fact used, as an act of communion with heathen deities,
is affirmed by Maimonides, not as a mere inference from
the Biblical texts, but on the basis of Arabic accounts of
after sunset and another before sunrise, — another point of contact with the
ritual described by Nilus. The u'oc?!/ corresponding to the morning sacrifice
was of coiarse held at Mozdalifa within the Haram, for the pilgrims were
already consecrated by the previous service. Nabigha in two places speaks
of a race of pilgrims to a place called Hal. If the reference is to the Meccan
hajj, Hal must be Mozdalifa, not, as the geographers suppose, a place at
'Arafa.
' I cannot comprehend ivhy Cornill corrects Ezek. xxxiii. 25 by Ezek. xviii.
6, xxii. 9, and not conversely ; cf. LXX. on Lev. xix. 26, where the same
mistake occurs.
LECT. IX. LATER SACRIFICES. 325
the religion of the Harranians.^ It would seem, however,
that even among the heathen of the Northern Semitic
lands the ritual of blood-eating must have been rare ;
presumably, indeed, it was confined to certain mystic
initiations, and did not extend to ordinary sacrifices.^
In the legal sacrifices of the Hebrews blood was never
eaten, but in the covenant sacrifice of Ex. xxiv. it is
sprinkled on tlie worshippers, which, as we have already
learned by a comparison of the various forms of the blood
covenant between men, has the same meaning. In later
forms of sacrifice this feature disappears, and the com-
munion between god and man, which is still the main
thing in ordinary sacrifices, is expressed by burning part
of the flesh on the altar, while the rest is cooked and
eaten by the worshippers. But the application of the
1 Dalulat al-Hairln, iii. 46, vol. iii. p. 10-4 of Munk's ed. (Paris, 1866)
and p. 371 of liis translation. That Maimonides had actual accounts of the
Harranians to go on appears by comparing the passage with that quoted
above from an Arabic source in the Actts of the Leyden Congress ; but
there may be a doubt whether his authorities attested blood-eating among
the Harranians, or only supplied hints by which he interpreted the Biblical
evidence.
- For the mystic sacrifices of the heathen Semites see above, p. 272 sqq.
That these sacrifices were eaten with the blood appears from a com})aiis()n
of Isa. Ixv. 4, Ixvi. 3, 17. All these passages refer to the same circle of rites,
in which the victims chosen were such animals as were strictly taboo in
ordinary life— the swine, the Jog, the mouse and vermin iXpt') generally.
To such sacrifices, as we learn from Ixvi. 17, a peculiar consecrating and
purifying efficacy was attached, which must be ascribed to the sacramental
l)articipation in the sacrosanct flesh. Tlie flesh was eaten in the form of
broth, which in Ixv. 4 is called broth of piggu'lm, i.e. of carrion, or flesh so
killed as to retain the blood in it (Ezek. iv. 14 ; cf. Zech. ix. 7). We are
to think, therefore, of a broth made with the blood, like the black broth of
the Spartans, which seems also to have been originally a sacred food, reserved
for warriors. The dog-sacrifice in Ixvi. 3 is killed by breaking its neck,
which agrees with this conclusion. Similarly in the mysteries of the Ainos
the sacred bear, which forms the sacrifice, is killed without eft'usion of blood ;
cf. the Indian rite, Strabo, xv. 1. 54 (Satapatha Brahmana, tr. Eggeling, ii.
190), and the Cappadocian, ibid. xv. 3. 15 ; also the Finnish sacrifice,
Mannhardt, Ant. Wald u. Feldkulte, p. 160, and other cases of the same
kind, Journ. B. Oeog. Sue. vol. iii. p. 283, vol. xl. p. 171. Spencer
compares the vtixru of Acts xv. 20.
326 THE SPRINKLING lect. ix.
living blood to the worshipper is retained in certain special
cases — at the consecration of priests and the purification
of a leper ^ — where it is proper to express in the strongest
way the establishment of a special bond between the god
and his servant," or the restitution of one who has been
cut off from religious fellowship with the deity and the
community of his worshippers. In like manner, in the
forms of sin-offering described in Lev. iv., it is at least
required that the priest should dip his finger in the blood
of the victim ; and in this kind of ritual, as is expressly
stated in Lev. x. 17, the priest acts as the representative
of the sinner or bears his sin. Again, the blood of the
Paschal lamb is applied to the door-posts, and so extends
its efficacy to all within the dwelling — the " house " in all
the Semitic lancfuages standin^r for the household or familv.
Quite .similarly, before the Coraish went forth to the battle
of Bedr, camels were slaughtered, and every tent was
sprinkled with the blood of a victim whose life was dill in
it? This last detail supplies a noteworthy parallel to
Nilus's narrative ; and so also the precept that the passover
must be eaten in haste, in ordinary outdoor attire, and
that no part of it must remain till the morning, becomes
intelligible if we regard it as having come down from a
time when the living flesh was hastily devoured beside the
altar before the sun rose.* From all this it is apparent
1 Lev. viii. 23, xiv. 6, 14.
- The relation between God and His priests rests on a covenant (Deut.
xxxiii. 9 ; Mai. ii. 4 sqq.). * Wacidi, ed. Kremer, p. 28, 1. 8.
* There is so much that is antique about the Paschal ritual that one is
tempted to think that the law of Ex. xii. 46, "neither shall ye break a
bone thereof," may be a prohibition of some usage descended from the rule,
given by Nilus, that the bones as well as the flesh must be consumed. Were
the bones in certain sacrifices pounded and eaten ? If so, we can understand
the Harranian legend [Fihrist, p. 322, 1. 29), that the bones of the murdered
Tammuz were pounded in a mill ; for the legends of the death of the gods —
as we see in the Dionysiac myths— are ordinarily projections into mythology
of the rules of sacrificial ritual.
I.ECT. IX. OF BLOOD. 327
that the ritual described by Nilus is by no means an
isolated invention of the religious fancy, in one of the most
barbarous corners of the Semitic world, but a very typical
embodiment of the main ideas that underlie the sacrifices
of the Semites generally. Even in its details it probably
comes nearer to the primitive form of Semitic worship than
any other sacrifice of which we have a description.
We may now take it as made out that, throughout the
Semitic field, the fundamental idea of sacrifice is not that
of a sacred tribute, but of communion between the god and
his worshippers by joint participation in the living flesh
and blood of a sacred victim. We see, however, that in
the more advanced forms of ritual this idea becomes
attenuated and tends to disappear, at least in the commoner
kinds of sacrifice. When men cease to eat raw or liviutr
flesh, the blood, to the exclusion of the solid parts of the
body, comes to be regarded as the vehicle of life and the
true Tcs sacramenti. And the nature of the sacrifice as a
sacramental act is still further disguised when — for reasons
that will by and by appear more clearly — the sacramental
blood is no longer drunk by the worshippers but only
sprinkled on their persons, or finally finds no manward
application at all, but is wliolly poured out at the altar,
so that it becomes the proper share of the deity, while the
flesh is left to be eaten by man. This is the common
form of Arabian sacrifice, and among the Hebrews the
same form is attested by 1 Sam. xiv. 34. At this stage,
at least among the Hebrews, the original sanctity of the
life of domestic animals is still recognised in a modified
form, inasmuch as it is held unlawful to use their flesh for
food except in a sacrificial meal. But this rule is not
strict enough to prevent flesh from becoming a familiar
luxury. Sacrifices are multiplied on trivial occasions of
religious gladness or social festivity, and the rite of eating
328 ATONING LECT. IX.
at the sanctuary loses the character of an exceptional
sacrament, and means no more than that men are invited
to feast and be merry at the table of their god, or that no
feast is complete in which the god has not his share.
This stage in the evolution of ritual is represented by
the worship of the Hebrew high places, or, beyond the
Semitic field, by the religion of the agricultural com-
munities of Greece. Historically, therefore, it coincides
with the stage of religious development in which the
deity is conceived as the king of his people and the lord
of the land, and as such is habitually approached with
gifts and tribute. It was the rule of antiquity, and still
is the rule in the East, that the inferior must not present
himself before his superior without a gift to " smooth his
face " and make him gracious.^ The same phrase is
habitually applied in the Old Testament to acts of
sacrificial worship, and in Ex. xxiii. 1 5 the rule is formu-
lated that no one shall appear before Jehovah empty-
handed. A(opa 6€ov<i ireWet, hoop alBotov^ /SacrtX^a?.
As the commonest gifts in a simple agricultural state of
society necessarily consisted of grain, fruits and cattle,
which served to maintain the open hospitality that pre-
vailed at the courts of kings and great chiefs, it was natural
that animal sacrifices, as soon as their sacramental signifi-
cance fell into the background, should be mainly regarded
as gifts of homage, presented at the court of the divine
king, out of which he maintained a public table for his
worshippers. In part they were summed up along with
the cereal oblations of first-fruits as stated tributes, which
every one who desired to retain the favour of the god was
expected to present at fixed seasons, in part they were
M''JD rhn, Prov. xix. 6; Ps. xlv. 13 (12), E.V., " intreat his favour.'
In the Old Testament the phrase is much oftener used of acts of worship
addressed to the deity, e.g. 1 Sam. xiii. 12, of the burnt-offering.
LECT. IX. OFFERINGS. 329
special offerings with which the worshipper associated
special petitions, or with which he approached the deity to
present his excuses for a fault and request forgiveness.^
In the case where it is the business of the worshipper to
make satisfaction for an offence, the gift may assume
rather the character of a fine payable at the sanctuary ;
for in the oldest free communities personal chastisement
is reserved for slaves, and the offences of freemen are
habitually wiped out by the payment of an amerce-
ment.^ But in the older Hebrew custom the fines
paid to the sanctuary do not appear to have taken the
form of victims for sacrifice, but rather of payments in
money to the priest,^ and the atoning effect ascribed to
gifts and sacrifices of all kinds seems simply to rest on
the general principle that a gift smooths the face and
pacifies anger.
It has sometimes been supposed that this is the oldest
form of the idea of atoning sacrifice, and that the elaborate
piacula, which begin to take the chief place in the altar
ritual of the Semites from the seventh century onwards,
are all develoj)ed out of it. The cliief argument that
appears to support this view is that the whole burnt-
offering, which is entirely made over to the deity, the
worshipper retaining no part for his own use, is prominent
among piacular sacrifices, and may even be regarded as
the piacular sacrifice par excellence. In the later forms
of Syrian heathenism the sacrificial meal practically
disappears, and almost the whole altar service consists of
1 1 Sam. xxvi. 19, " If Jehovah hath stirred tliee up against me, k^t Him
be gratified by an oblation."
^ The reason of this is that not even a chief oan strike or mutihite a free-
man without exj>osing himself to retaliation. This is still the case among
the Bedouins, and so it was also in ancient Israel ; see my Old Testament,
in the Jetoish Church (Edin. 1881), p. 367.
3 2 Kings xii. 16 ; of. Amos ii. 8, Hos. iv. 8.
330 HOLOCAUSTS AND lect. ix.
l)iacular holocausts/ and amoug the Jews the highest sm-
offerings, whose blood was brought into the inner sanctuary,
were wholly consumed, but not upon the altar,^ while the
flesh of other sin-offerings was at least withdrawn from the
offerer and eaten by the priests.
We have seen, however, that a different and profounder
c(uiception of atonement, as the creation of a life - bond
between the worshipper and his god, appears in the most
primitive type of Semitic sacrifices, and that traces of it
can still be found in many parts of the later ritual. Forms
of consecration and atonement in which the blood of the
victim is applied to the worshipper, or the blood of the
worshipper conveyed to the symbol of godhead, occur in all
stages of heathen religion, not only among the Semites but
among the Greeks and other races ; and even on a 'priori
grounds it seems probable that when the Northern Semites,
in the distress and terror produced by the political con-
vulsions of the seventh century, began to cast about for
tites of extraordinary potency to conjure the anger of the
gods, they were guided by the principle that ancient and
half obsolete forms of ritual are more efficacious than the
everyday practices of religion.
Further, it is to be observed that in the Hebrew ritual
both of the holocaust and of the sin-offering the victim
is slain at the altar " before Jehovah," a phrase which is
wanting in the rule about ordinary sacrifices, and implies
that the act of slaughter and the effusion of the blood
beside the altar have a special significance, as in the
ancient Arabian ritual. Moreover, in the sin - offering
there is still — although in a very attenuated form — a
' That the Harranians never ate sacrificial flesh seems to be an exaggera-
tion, but one based on the prevalent character of their ritual ; see Chwolsohn,
ii. 89 sq.
- Lev. vi. 23 (.SO], xvi. 27, iv. 11, 20.
LKCT. IX. SIN-OFFERINGS. 331
trace of the manward application of the blood, when
the priest dips his finger in it, and so applies it to the
horns of the altar, instead of merely dashing it against
the sides of the altar from a bowl ; ^ and also as regards
the destination of the flesh, which is eaten by the priests
in the holy place, it is clear from Lev. x. 17 that the
flesh is given to the priests because they minister as the
representatives of the sinful people, and that the act of
eating it is an essential part of the ceremony, exactly as in
the old ritual of communion. In fact the law expressly
recognises that the flesh and blood of the sin-offering is a
sanctifying medium of extraordinary potency ; whosoever
touches the flesh becomes holy, the garment on which the
blood falls must be washed in a holy place, and even the
vessel in which the flesh is sodden must be broken or
scoured to remove the infection of its sanctity.^ That
this is the reason why none but the priests are allowed
to eat of it has been rightly discerned by Ewald ; ^ the
flesh, like the sacramental cup in the Koman- Catholic
Church, was too sacred to be touched by the laity. Thus
the Levitical sin-off'ering is essentially identical with the
ancient sacrament of communion in a sacred life ; only
the communion is restricted to the priests, in accordance
with the general principle of the priestly legislation,
which surrounds the holy things of Israel by fence
within fence, and makes all access to God pass through
the mediation of the priesthood.
I am not aware that anything quite parallel to the
ordinary Hebrew sin-offering occurs among the other
Semites ; and indeed no other Semitic religion appears
to have developed to the same extent the doctrine of
1 Lev. iv. 6, 17, 34, compared with chap. iii. 2. pnT is to sprinkle or dash
fi-om the bowl, piTC
- Lev. vi. 20 (,27). ' AUerthiimer, 3rd ed. p. 87 sq.
332 HOLINESS OF lect. ix.
the consuming holiness of God, and the consequent need
for priestly intervention between the laity and the most
holy things. But among the Romans the flesh of certain
piacula was eaten by the priests, and in the piacular
sacrifice of the Arval brothers the ministrants also partook
of the blood.^ Among the Greeks, again, piacular victims
— like the highest forms of the Hebrew sin-offering —
were not eaten at all, but either burned, or buried, or
cast into the sea, or carried up into some desert mountain
far from the foot of man.^ It is commonly supposed
that this was done because they were unclean, being
laden with the sins of the guilty worshippers ; but this
explanation is excluded, not only by the analogy of the
Hebrew sin-offering, which is a cddcsh codashim, or holy
thing of the first class, but by various indications in Greek
myth and ritual. For to the Greeks earth and sea are
not impure but holy, and at Troezen a sacred laurel was
believed to have grown from the buried carcase of the
victim used in the atonement for Orestes.^ Further, the
favourite piacular victims were sacred animals, e.g. the
swine of Demeter and the dog of Hecate, and the
essential part of the lustration consisted in the applica-
tion of the blood of the offering to the guilty person,
which is only intelligible if the victim was a holy sacra-
ment. It was indeed too holy to be left in permanent
contact with a man who was presently to return to
common life, and therefore it was washed off again
with water.* According to Porphyry the man who
touched a sacrifice designed to avert the anger of the
gods was required to bathe and wash his clothes in
^ Marquardt, Sacralwesen, p. 185 ; Servius on Mn., iii. 231.
- Hippocrates, ed. Littr^, vi. 362.
^ Paiisanias, ii. 31. 8.
* Apoll. Rhod., Argon, iv. 702 sqq. Cf. Schoemann, Gr. AUerth. II. v. 13.
LECT. IX. SIN-OFFEPJNGS. 333
running water before entering the city or his house/ an
ordinance which recurs in the case of such Hebrew sin-
offerings as were not eaten, and of the red heifer whose
ashes were used in lustrations. These were burnt " with-
out the camp," and both the niinistrant priest and the
man who disposed of the body had to bathe and wash
their clothes exactly as in the Greek ritual.^
From all this it would appear that the sin-offering and
other forms of piacula, including the holocaust, in which
there is no sacrificial meal of which the sacrificer himself
partakes, are yet lineally descended from the ancient
ritual of sacrificial communion between the worshippers
and their god, and at bottom rest on the same principle
with those ordinary sacrifices in which the sacrificial meal
played a chief part. But the development of this part of
our subject nnist be reserved for another lecture, in which
I will try to explain how the original form of sacrifice
came to be differentiated into two distinct types of
worship, and gave rise on the one liand to the " honorific "
or ordinary, and on the other to the " piacular " or
exceptional sacrifices of later times.
1 De Abst. ii. 44.
2 Lev. xvi. 24, 28 ; Nunib. xix. 7-10.
LECTURE X.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SACRIFICIAL EITUAL
FIRE-SACRIFICES AND PIACULA.
We have come to see that the sin-otferin>j; as well as the
ordinary sacrificial meal is lineally descended from the
primitive sacrifice of communion, in which the victim is
a sacred animal that may not ordinarily be killed or used
for food. But while in the one case the notion of the
special holiness and inviolable character of the victim has
gradually faded away, in the other this aspect of the
sacrifice has been intensified, till even a religious participa-
tion in the flesh is regarded as an impiety. Each of these
opposite processes can to a certain extent be traced from
stage to stage. As regards the sacrificial meal we find,
both in the case of Nilus's Saracens and in that of African
peoples, with whom the ox has a sanctity similar to that
which the Arabs ascribed to the camel, that the sacra-
mental flesh begins to be eaten as food under the pressure
of necessity ; and when this is done, it also begins to be
cooked like other food. Then we have the stage, repre-
sented by the early Hebrew religion, in which domestic
animals are freely eaten, but only on condition that they
are presented as sacrifices at the altar and consumed in a
sacred feast. And, finally, a stage is reached in which, as
in Greece in the time of the Apostle Paul, sacrificial meat
is freely sold in the shambles, or, as in Arabia before
Mohammed, nothing more is required than that the beast
334
LKCT. X. DEVELOPMENT OF ATONING KITES. 335
designed for food shall be slain in the name of a god. In
piacular sacrifices, on the other hand, we find, in a variety
of expressions, a struggle between the feeling that the
victim is too holy to be eaten or even touched, and the
principle that its atoning efficacy depends on the participa-
tion of the worshippers in its life, flesh and blood. In
one rite the flesh uiay be eaten, or the blood drunk, but
only by consecrated priests ; in another, the flesh is burned,
but the blood is poured on the hands or body of the sinner ;
in another, the lustration is effected with the ashes of the
victim (the red heifer of the Jewish law) ; or, finally, it is
enough that the worshipper should lay his hands on the
head of the victim before its slaughter, and tliat then its
life-blood should be presented at the altar.
The reasons for the gradual degradation of ordinary
sacrifice are not far to seek ; they are to be found, on the
one hand, in the general causes which make it impossible for
men above the state of savagery to retain a literal faith in
the consanguinity of animal kinds with gods and men, and,
on the other hand, in the pressure of hunger, and afterwards
in the taste for animal food, which in a settled country
could not generally be gratified except by eating domestic
animals. But it is not so easy to understand, first, why
in spite of these influences certain sacrifices retained their
old sacrosanct character, and in many cases became so
holy that men were forbidden to toucli or eat of them at
all ; and, second, why it is this class of sacrifices to which a
special piacular efficacy is assigned.
In looking further into this matter we must distinguish
between the sacred domestic animals of pastoral tribes —
the milk -givers, whose kinship with men rests on the
principle of fosterage — and those other sacred animals of
wild or half-domesticated kinds, such as the dove and the
swine, which even in the later days of Semitic heathenism
336 TWO KINDS OF lect. x.
were surrounded by strict taboos, and looked upon as in
some sense partakers of a divine nature. The latter are
undoubtedly the older class of sacred beings ; for observa-
tion of savage life in all parts of the world shows that the
belief in sacred animals, akin to families of men, attains its
highest development in tribes which have not yet learned
to breed cattle and live on their milk. Totemism pure
and simple has its home among races like the Australians
and the North American Indians, and seems always to
lose ground after the introduction of pastoral life. It
would appear that the notion of kinship with milk-giving
animals through fosterage has been one of the most
powerful agencies in breaking up the old totem-religions,
just as a systematic practice of adoption between men was
a potent agency in breaking up the old exclusive system
of clans. As the various totem clans began to breed
cattle and live on their milk, they transferred to their
herds the notions of sanctity and kinship which formerly
belonged to species of wild animals, and thus the way was
at once opened for the formation of religious and political
communities larger than the old totem kins. In almost
all ancient nations in the pastoral and agricultural stage,
the chief associations of the great deities are with the milk-
giving animals ; and it is these animals, the ox, the sheep,
the goat, or in Arabia the camel, that appear as victims in
the public and national worship. But experience shows
that primitive religious beliefs are practically indestructible,
except by the destruction of the race in which they are
ingrained, and thus we find that the new ideas of what I
may call pastoral religion overlaid the old notions, but did
not extinguish them. For example, the Astarte of the
Northern Semites is essentially a goddess of flocks and
herds, whose symbol and sacred animal is the cow, or
(among the sheep - rearing tribes of the Syro - Arabian
LECT. X. SACRED ANIMALS. 337
desert) the ewe.^ But this pastoral worship appears to
have come on the top of certain older faiths, in which the
goddess of one kindred of men was associated with fish,
and that of another kindred with the dove. These
creatures, accordingly, though no longer prominent in
ritual, were still held sacred and surrounded by taboos,
implying that they were of divine nature and akin to
the goddess herself. The very fact that they were not
regularly sacrificed, and, therefore, not regularly eaten
even in religious feasts, tended to preserve their antique
sanctity long after the sacrificial flesh of beeves and sheep
had sunk almost to tlie rank of ordinary food ; and thus,
as v/e have seen in considering the case of the mystic
sacrifices of the Roman Empire, the rare and exceptional
rites, in which the victim was chosen from a class of
animals ordinarily tabooed as human food, retained even
in later paganism a sacramental significance, almost
absolutely identical with that which belonged to the
oldest sacrifices. It was still felt that the victim was
of a divine kind, and that, in partaking of its flesh and
blood, the worshippers enjoyed a veritable communion
with the divine life. That to such sacrifices there was
ascribed a special cathartic and consecrating virtue requires
no explanation, for how can the impurity of sin be better
expelled than by a draught of sacred life ? and how can
man be brought nearer to his god than by physically
absorbing a particle of the divine nature ?
It is, however, to be noted that piacula of this kind, in
which atonement is effected by the use of an exceptional
victim of sacred kind, do not rise into prominence till the
national religions of the Semites fall into decay. The
public piacular sacrifices of the independent Semitic
states appear, so far as our scanty information goes, to
^ Supra, p. 292.
Y
338 MYSTIC
LECT. X.
have been mainly drawn from the same kinds of domestic
animals as supplied the ordinary sacrifices, except where
an exceptional emergency demanded a human victim.
Among the Hebrews, in particular, there is no trace of
anything answering to the later mystic sacrifices up to the
time of the captivity. At this epoch, when the national
religion appeared to have utterly broken down, and the
judgment of those who were not upheld by the faith of
the prophets was that " Jehovah had forsaken His land," ^
all manner of strange sacrifices of unclean creatures — the
swine, the dog, the mouse and other vermin — began to
become popular, and were deemed to have a peculiar
purifying and consecrating power.^ The creatures chosen
for these sacrifices are such as were unclean in the first
degree, and surrounded by strong taboos of the kind which
in heathenism imply that the annual is regarded as divine ;
and in fact the sacrifices of vermin described in the Book
of Isaiah have their counterpart in the contemporary
worship of all kinds of vermin described by Ezekiel.^
Both rites are evidently part of a single superstition,
the sacrifice being a mystical communion in the body
and blood of a divine animal. Here, therefore, we have
a clear case of the re-emergence into the light of day of
a cult of the most primitive totem type, which had been
banished for centuries from public religion, but must have
been kept alive in obscure circles of private or local
superstition, and sprang up again on the ruins of the
national faith, like some noxious weed in the courts of a
deserted temple. But while the ritual and its interpreta-
ion are still quite primitive, the resuscitated totem
mysteries have this great difference from their ancient
1 Ezek. viii. 12.
- Isa. Ixv. 3 .sv/f/., Ixvi. 3, 17 ; see above, p. 273 sq., p. 325, note 2.
' Ezck. viii. 10.
LECT. X.
PIACULA. 339
models, that they are no longer the exclusive possession
of particular kins, but are practised, by men who desert
the religion of their birth, as means of initiation into a
new religious brotherhood, based not on natural kinship,
but on mystical participation in the divine life held forth
in the sacramental sacrifice. From this point of view the
obscure rites described by the prophets have a vastly
greater importance than has been commonly recognised ;
they mark the firsc appearance in Semitic history of the
tendency to found religious societies on voluntary associa-
tion and mystic initiation, instead of natural kinship and
nationality. This tendency was not confined to the
Hebrews, nor did it reach its chief development among
them. The causes which produced a resuscitation of obsolete
mysteries among the Jews were at work at the same period
among all the Northern Semites ; for everywhere the old
national deities had shown themselves powerless to resist
the gods of Assyria and Babylon. And among these
nations the tendency to fall back for help on primitive
superstitions was not held in check, as it was among the
Hebrews, by the counter -influence of the Prophets and
the Law. From this period, therefore, we may date witli
great probability the first rise of the mystical cults which
played so large a part in the later developments of
ancient paganism, and spread their influence over the
whole Groeco-Eoman world. Most of these cults appear
to have had their origin among the Northern Semites, or
in the parts of Asia Minor that fell under the empire of
the Assyrians and Babylonians. The leading feature that
distinguishes them from the old public cults, with which
they entered into competition, is that they were not based
on the principle of nationality, but sought recruits from
men of every race who were willing to accept initiation
through the mystic sacraments ; and in pursuance of this
340 ATONEMENT BY lect. x.
object they carried on a missionary propaganda in all parts
of the Eoman Empire, in a way quite alien to the spirit
of national religion. The nature of their sacramental sacri-
fices, so far as it is known to us, indicates that they were
of a like origin with the Hebrew superstitions described
by Isaiah ; they used strange victims, invoked the gods by
animal names, and taught the initiated to acknowledge
kinship with the same animals.^ To pursue this subject
further would carry us beyond the limits of our present
task ; for a full discussion of mystical sacrifices cannot
be confined to the Semitic field. These sacrifices, as we
have seen, lie aside from the main development of the
national religions of the Semites, and they acquire public
importance only after the collapse of the national systems.
In later times they were much sought after, and were
held to have a peculiar efficacy in purging away siu, and
bringing man into living union with the gods. But
their atoning efificacy proceeds on quite different lines
from that of the recognised piacular rites of national
religion. In the latter the sinner seeks reconciliation
with the national god whom he has offended, but in
mystic religion he takes refuge from the divine wrath
by incorporating himself in a new religious community.
Something of the same kind takes place in more primitive
society, when an outlaw, who has been banished from the
social and religious fellowship of his clan for shedding
kindred blood, is received by the covenant of adoption
into another clan. Here also the act of adoption, which
is a religious as well as a civil rite, is in so far an act
of atonement that the outlaw has again a god to receive
his worship and his prayers ; but he is not reconciled to
the god of his former worship, for it is only in a some-
what advanced stage of polytheism that acceptance by one
1 Porph., De Ahst. iv. 16, compared witli Fihrlsf, p. 326, 1. 25 sq.
LECT. X. FOREIGN RITES. 341
god puts a man right with the gods as a whole. Among
the Greeks, where the gods formed a sort of family circle,
and were accessible to one another's influence, the outlaw,
like Orestes, wanders about in exile, till he can find a god
willing to receive him and act as his sponsor with the
other deities ; and here, therefore, as in the mystical rites
of the Semites, the ceremony of purification from blood-
shed is essentially a ceremony of initiation into the cult
of some god who, like the Apollo of Troezen, makes it
his business to receive suppliants. But among the older
Semites there w^as no kinship or friendship between the
gods of adjacent tribes or nations, and there was no way
of reconciliation with the national god through the media-
tion of a third party, so that all atoning sacrifices were
necessarily offered to the national god himself, and drawn,
like ordinary sacrifices, from the class of domestic animals
appropriated to his worship.
In the oldest stage of pastoral religion, when the tribal
herd possessed inviolate sanctity, and every sheep or camel
— according as the tribe consisted of shepherds or camel-
lierds — was regarded as a kinsman, there was no occasion
and no place for a special class of atoning sacrifices. The
relations between the god and his worshippers were
naturally as good and intimate as possible, for they were
based on the strongest of all ties, the tie of kinship. To
secure that this natural good understanding should continue
unimpaired, it was only necessary that the congenital bond
of kinship should not wear out, but continue strong and
fresh. And this w^as provided for by periodical sacrifices,
of the type described by Nilus, in which a particle of the
sacred life of the tribe was distributed, between the god
and his worshippers, in the sacramental flesh and blood of
an animal of the holy stock of the clan. To make the
sacrifice effective it was only necessary that the victim
342 HUMAN LECT. X.
should be perfect and without fault — a point which is
strongly insisted upon in all ancient sacrifice — i.e. that
the sacred life should be completely and normally
embodied in it. In the later ages of antiquity there was a
very general belief — the origin of which will be explained
as we proceed — that in strictness the oldest rituals
demanded a human victim, and that animal sacrifices were
substitutes for the life of a man. But in the oldest times
there could be no reason for thinking a man's life better
than that of a camel or a sheep as a vehicle of sacramental
communion ; indeed, if we may judge from modern examples
of that primitive habit of thought which lies at the root of
Semitic sacrifice, the animal life would probably be deemed
purer and more perfect than that of man.
On the other hand, there is every reason to think that
even at this early stage certain impious crimes, notably
murder within the kin, were expiated by the death of the
offender. But the death of such a criminal cannot with
any justice be called a sacrifice. Its object was simply to
eliminate the impious person from the society whose
sanctity he had violated, and outlawry was accepted as an
alternative to execution.
As time went on the idea of the full kinship of men
with their cattle began to break down. The Saracens of
Nilus killed and ate their camels in time of hunger, but
we may be sure that they would not in similar circum-
stances have eaten one another. Thus even in a society
where the flesh of the tribal camel was not ordinary food,
and where private slaughter was forbidden, a camel's life
was no longer as sacred as that of a man ; it had begun to
be recognised that human life, or rather the life of a tribes-
man, was a thing of unique sanctity. At the same time
the old forms of sacrifice were retained, and the tradition
of their old meaning cannot have been lost, for the ritual
LECT. X.
SACRIFICE. 343
forms were too plainly significant to be misinterpreted.
In short, the life of a camel, which no longer had the full
value of a tribesman's life for ordinary purposes, was
treated as a tribesman's life when it was presented at the
altar ; so that here we have already a beginning of the idea
that the victim qua victim possesses a sacrosanct character,
which does not belong to it merely in virtue of its natural
kind. But now also, let it be noted, it is expressly attested
that the sacrificial camel is regarded as the substitute for
a human victim. The favourite victims of the Saracens
were young and beautiful captives, but if these were not
to be had they contented themselves with a white and
faultless camel. As to the veracity of this account there
is no question ; Nilus's own son, Theodulus, when a captive
in the hands of these barbarians, escaped being sacrificed
only by the accident that, on the appointed morning, his
captors did not awake till the sun rose, and the lawful hour
for the rite was past ; and there are well-authenticated
instances of the sacrifice of captives to Al-'Ozza by the
Lakhmite king of Al-Hira at least a century later.^
It is true that in these cases the victims are aliens and
not tribesmen, as in strictness the sense of the ritual
requires ; but the older Semites, when they had recourse to
human sacrifice, were more strictly logical, and held with
rigour to the fundamental principle that the life of the
victim must be a kindred life.^ The modification accepted
by the Saracens was one for which there was the strongest
motive, and accordingly all over the world we find cases
of human sacrifice in which an alien is substituted for a
1 Noldeke's Tabari, p. 171 (Procop., Pers. ii. 28 ; Land, Anecd. iii. 247).
2 See, for the Hebrews, Gen. xxii. ; 2 Kings xxi. 6 ; Micah vi. 7 ; for the
Moabites, 2 Kings iii. 27 ; for the Phrenicians, Philo Byblius in Fr. Hist.
Gr. iii. 570 (Eus., Pr. Ev. 156 D) ; Poiph., De Abst. ii. 56 ; for the Cartha-
ginians, Porpb., ibid. ii. 27, and Diodorus, xx. 14; for the Syrians, Dta
Syr, Iviii.; for the Babylonians, 2 Kings xvii. 31.
344 HUMAN
LECT. X.
tribesman. This was not done in accordance with any
change in the meaning of the ritual, for originally the
substitution was felt to be a fraud on the deity ; thus
Diodorus tells us that the Carthaginians, in a time of
trouble, felt that their god was angry because slave boys
had been privily substituted for the children of their best
families ; and elsewhere we find that it is considered
necessary to make believe that tlie victim is a tribesman,
or even, as in the human sacrifices of the Mexicans, to
dress and treat him as the representative of the deity to
whom he is to be offered. Perhaps something of this kind
was in the mind of Nilus's Saracens when they drank with
prisoners destined to death, and so admitted them to boon
fellowship.^
From a purely abstract point of view it seems plausible
enough that the Saracens, who accepted an alien as a
substitute for a tribesman, might also accept a camel as
a substitute for a man. The plan of substituting an
offering which can be more readily procured or better
spared, for the more costly victim which traditional
ritual demands, was largely applied throughout antiquity,
and belongs to the general system of make - believe by
which early nations, that are entirely governed by regard
for precedents, habitually get over difficulties in the
^ Kilus, p. 66, wliere, however, the slaughter is not formally a sacrifice.
The narrative represents the offer of drink as mere mockery, but it is
(liificult to reconcile this with known Arabian custom ; see above, p. 252.
A more serious attempt to adopt Theodulus into the Saracen community
seems to have been made after his providential escape from death ; he was
invited to eat unclean things and sport with the women (p. 117). The
combination is significant, and as fitoi.fioipot,yu> must refer to the eating of
idolatrous meats, presumably camel's flesh, — which Symeon Stylites forbade
to his Arab converts, — the question arises whether ywaii) -rpotrTai^iiv has not
also a reference to some religious practice, and whether Wellhausen, p. 40,
has not been too hasty in supposing that the orgies of the Arabian Venus
renounced by the converts just mentioned are mere rhetorical orgies; cf.
Kinship, p. 295.
LECT. X.
SACRIFICE. 345
strict carrying out of traditional rules. If a Eoman
rite called for a stag as victim, and a stag could not
be had, a sheep was substituted and feigned to be a stag
(cervaria ovis), and so forth. The thing was really a fraud,
but one to which the gods were polite enough to shut
their eyes rather than see the whole ceremony fail. But
in the particular case before us it is difficult to believe
that the camel was substituted for a man, and ultimately
for a tribesman. In that case the ritual of the camel-
sacrifice would have been copied from that of human
sacrifice, but in reality this was not so. The camel was
eaten, but the human victim was burned, after the blood
had been poured out as a libation,^ and there can be no
question that the former is the more primitive rite. I
' Tliis appears from what we read of the preparations for the sacrifice of
Tlieoduhis, among which are mentioned frankincense (the accompaniment
of hre-otferings) and a bowl for the libation, p. 110 ; and, at p. 113, Theodiilus
prays: "Let not my blood be made a libation to demons, nor let nncleau
spirits be made glad with the sweet smoke of my flesh." See Wellhausen,
p. 113, who conjectnres that in Arabia human sacrifices were generally
burned, citing Yaciit, iv. 425, who tells that every clan of Rabi'a gave a
son to the god Moharric, "the burner," at Salman (in 'Iiac, on the pilgrim
road from Cufa). Noldeke, in ZDMG. xli. 712, doubts whether the re'erence
is to human sacrifice ; for Yaciit {i.e. Ibn al-Kalbi) presently cites examples
of men of different elans called "sons of Moharric," which may imply that
the sons were not sacrificed, but consecrated as children of the god. This,
however, is so peculiar an institution for Arabia that it still remains
probable that the consecration was a substitute for sacrifice. At Salman,
iu the neighbourhood of Hira, we are in the ngion of the human sacrifices
of the Lakhmite kings. And these wei-e probably burnt-offerings ; cf. the
legend of the holocaust of one hundred prisoners by 'Amr b. Hind, Kdmil,
]). 97. Hence this king is said to have been called Moharric ; but, as
Noldeke observes {Ghas-san. F'ursten [1887], p. 7), IMoharrie without the
article is hardly a mere epithet [lacab), and I apprehend that the Lakhmite
family was called "the family of Moharric" after their god, presumably
Lucifer, the morning star, who afterwards became feminine as al-'Ozzfi
{supra, p. 57, note 1). The Ghassanid princes of the house of Jafna were
also called "the family of Moharric," Ibn Cot., p. 314; Ibn Dor., p. 259,
and here the tradition is that their ancestor was the first Arab who burned
his enemies in their encampment. This, however, is obviously a form of
herem, and must, I take it, be a religious act. For the "family" {dl)
of a god, as meaning his worshippers, see Kinship, p. 258.
34G HUMAN LECT. X.
apprehend, therefore, that human sacrifice is not more
ancient than the sacrifice of sacred animals, and that
the prevalent behef of ancient heathenism, that animal
victims are an imperfect substitute for a human life,
arose by a false inference from traditional forms of
ritual that had ceased to be understood. In the oldest
rituals the victim's life is manifestly treated as sacred,
and in some rites, as we have seen in our examination
of the Attic Biqjhojiia, the idea that the slaughter is
really a murder, i.e. a shedding of kindred blood, was
expressed down to quite a late date. When the full
kinship of animals with men was no longer recognised
in ordinary life, all this became unintelligible, and was
explained by the doctrine that at the altar the victim
took the place of a man.
This doctrine appears all over the ancient world in
connection with atoning sacrifices, and indeed the false
inference on which it rests w^as one that could not fail
to be drawn wherever the old forms of sacrifice had been
shaped at a time when cattle were revered as kindred
beings. And this appears to have been the case in the
beginnings of every pastoral society. Accordingly, to
cite but a few instances, the notion that animal sacrifice
is accepted in lieu of an older sacrifice of the life of a
man appears among the Hebrews, in the story of Isaac's
sacrifice,^ among the Phcenicians,^ among the Egyptians,
where the victim was marked with a seal bearing the
image of a man bound, and with a sword at his throat,^
and also among the Greeks, the Romans, and many other
nations.* As soon, however, as it came to be held that
1 Gen. xxii. 13 ; cf. Lev. xvii. 11. " Porph., De Abst. iv. lii.
^ Plut., Is. et Os. xxxi.
* See the examples in Porph., De Abst. ii. 54 sqq., and for the Romans
Ovid, Fasti, vi. 162. We have had before us Greek rites where the victim is
disguised as a man ; but conversely human sacrifices are often dressed up as
LECT. X. SACRIFICK 347
cattle were merely substitutes, and that the full sense of
the sacrifice was not brought out without an actual human
victim, it was naturally inferred that the original form
of offering was more potent, and was indicated on all
occasions of special gravity. Wherever we find the
doctrine of substitution of animal life for that of man,
we find also examples of actual human sacrifice, some-
times confined to seasons of extreme peril, and sometimes
practised periodically at solemn annual rites.^
I apprehend that this is the point from which the
special development of piacular sacrifices, and the distinc-
tion between them and ordinary sacrifices, takes its start.
It was impossible that the sacrificial customs should con-
tinue unmodified where the victim was held to represent
a man and a tribesman, for even savages commonly refuse
to eat their own kinsfolk, and to growing civilisation the
idea that the gods had ordained meals of human flesh, or
of flesh that was as sacred as that of a man, was too
repulsive to be long retained. But when I say " repulsive,"
animals, or said to represent animals : an example, from the worship at
Hierapolis-Bamliyce, is found in Dea Syria, Iviii., where fathers sacrificing
their children say that they are not children but beeves,
^ Examples of human sacrifices, many of which subsisted within the
Eoman Empire down to the time of Hadrian, are collected by Porphyry,
ut supra, on whom Eusebius, Proep. Ev. iv. 16, Lavs Const, xiii. 7,
depends. See also Clem. Alex., Coh. ad Gentes, p. 27 (p. 36, Potter);
cf. Hermann, Gr. Alth. ii. § 27. In what follows I confine myself to the
Semites ; it may therefore be noted that, in antiquity generally, liuman
victims were buried, burned, or cast into the sea or into a river (cf. Mann-
hardt's essay on the Lityerses legend). Yet indications survive that they
were originally sacrifices of communion, and as such were tasted by the
worshippers : notably in the most famous case of all, the human sacrifice
offered in Arcadia to Zeus Lycseus — the wolf-god — where a frngraent of the
exta was placed among the portions of sacrificial flesh derived from other
victims that were offered along with tlie liuman sacrifice, and the man
who tasted it was believed to become a were -wolf (Plato, Bep. viii. 15,
p. 565 D ; Pausanias, viii. 2).
Of the human sacrifices of rude peoples those of the Mexicans are perhaps
the most instructive, for in them the theanthropic character of the victim
comes out most clearly.
348 HUMAN
LECT. X.
I put the matter rather in the light in which it appears to
us, than in that wherein it presented itself to the first men
who had scruples about cannibalism. Primarily the horror
of eating human flesh was no doubt superstitious ; it was
felt to be dangerous to eat so sacrosanct a thing, even with
all the precautions of religious ceremonial. Accordingly,
in human sacrifices, and also in such other offerings as
continued to be performed with a ritual simulating human
sacrifice, the sacrificial meal tended to fall out of use ;
while, on the other hand, where the sacrificial meal was
retained, the tendency was to drop such features in the
ritual as suggested the disgusting idea of cannibalism.^
And so the apparent paradox is explained, that precisely in
those sacrifices in which the victim most fully retained its
original theanthropic character, and was therefore most
efficacious as a vehicle of atonement, the primitive idea of
atonement by communion in the sacred flesh and blood
was most completely disguised. The modifications in the
form of ritual that ensued, when sacrifices of a certain
class were no longer eaten, can be best observed by
taking the case of actual human sacrifice and noting
how other sacrifices of equivalent significance follow its
model.
Whether the custom of actually eating the flesh survived
in historical times in any case of human sacrifice is more
than doubtful," and even in the case of animal piacula —
^ Of course neither tendency was consistently carried out in every detail
of ritual ; there remains enough that is common to honorific and piacular
sacrifice to enable ns to trace them back to a common source.
- According to Mohammedan accounts the Harrauians in the Middle Ages
annually sacrificed an infant, and boiling down its flesh, baked it into cakes,
of which onlyfreeborn men were allowed to partake (i^iA»-i.s<, p. 323, 1. 6sqq.;
cf. Chwolsohn's Excursus on Human Sacrifice, vol. ii. p. 142). But in regard
to the secret mysteries of a forbidden religion, such as Syrian heathenism
was in Arabian times, it is always doubtful how far we can trust a hostile
narrator, who, even if he did not merely reproduce popular fictions, might
easily take for a real human sacrifice what was only the mystic offering of a
LECT. X.
SACRIFICE. 349
apart from those of mystic type, in which the idea of
initiation into a new religion was involved — the sacrificial
meal is generally wanting or confined to the priests. The
custom of drinking the blood, or at least of sprinkling it
on the worshippers, may have been kept up longer ; there
is some probability that it was observed in the human
sacrifices of Nilus's Saracens ;^ and the common Arabian
belief that the blood of kings, and perhaps also of other men
of noble descent, is a cure for hydrophobia and demoniacal
possession, seems to be a reminiscence of blood-drinking
in connection with human sacrifice, for the Greeks in like
manner, who ascribed epilepsy to demoniacal possession,
sought to cure it by piacular offerings and purifications
with blood.^
tlicaiithropic animal. The new-born infant corresponds to the Arabian /ara',
otFered while its flesh was still like glue, and to the Hebrew piaculum of a
sucking lamb in 1 Sam. vii. 9.
' The reason for thinking this is that on the Arabian mode of sacrifice a
bowl was not required to convey the blood to the deity, while it would be
necessary if the blood was drunk by the worshippers or sprinkled upon them.
It is true that the narrative speaks also of the preparation of a libation —
whether of water or of wine does not appear — but this in the Arabian ritual
can hardly be more than a vehicle for the more potent blood, just as the
blood was mixed with water in Greek sacrifices to heroes. Water as a
vehicle for sacrificial ashes appears in the Hebrew ritual of the red heifer
(Numb. xix. 9), aud is prescribed as a vehicle for the blood of lustration in
Lev. xiv. 5 sq. In the legends cited in the next note we find the notion
that if the blood of a human victim touches the ground, vengeance will be
taken for it. That the drinking of human blood, e.(j. from an enemy slaiu
in battle, was a Saracen practice, is attested by Ammianus and Procopius
(see Kinship, p. 284 sqq.) ; and the anecdote given by AVellh., p. 120, from
Agh. xii. 1-14, where a husband, unable to save liis wife from the enemy,
kills her, anoints himself with her blood, and fights till he is slain, illustrates
the significance which the Arabs attached to human blood as a vehicle of
communion.
^ Hippocrates, cd. Littr^, vi. 362. The evidence for this Arabian supersti-
tion is collected by Freytag in his notes to the Hamdsa, ii. 583, and by
Wellh., p. 142. It consists in poetical and proverbial allusions, to which may
be added a verse in Mas'udi, iii. 193, and in a legend from the mythical
story or Queen Zabba (Arjh. xiv. 74 ; Tabari, i. 760 ; Maidani, i. 205 sqq.),
where a king is slain by opening the veins of his arms, and the blood, to be
used as a magical medicine, is gathered in a bowl. Not a drop must fall on
350 DISPOSAL OF
LECT. X.
When the sacrosanct victim ceased to be eaten, it was
necessary to find some other way of disposing of its flesh.
It will be remembered that, in the sacrificial meals of
Nilus's Saracens, it was a point of religion that the whole
carcase should be consumed before the sun rose ; the victim
was so holy that no part of it could be treated as mere
waste. The problem of disposing of the sacred carcase
was in fact analogous to that which occurs whenever a
kinsman dies. Here, too, the point is to find a way of
dealing with the body consistent with the respect due to
the dead — a respect which does not rest on sentimental
grounds, but on the belief that the corpse is tahoo, a source
of very dangerous supernatural influences of an infectious
kind. In later times this infectiousness is expressed as
uncleanness, but in the primitive taboo, as we know,
sanctity and uncleanness meet and are indistinguishable.
Now, as regards the kindred dead generally, we find a great
range of funeral customs, all directed to make sure that
the corpse is properly disposed of, and can no longer be a
source of danger to the living, but rather of blessing.^ In
certain cases it is the duty of the survivors to eat up their
dead, just as in Nilus's sacrifice. This was the use of the
Issedones, according to Herodotus, iv. 26. At other times
the ground, otherwise there will be blood-revenge for it. I cannot but
suspect that the legend is based on an old form of sacrifice applied to captive
chiefs (cf. the case of Agag) ; it is described as the habitual way of killing
kings. The rule that not a drop of the blood must fall on the ground appears
also in Caifre sacrifice ; JMaclean, Caffre Laics, p. 81. According to later
authorities, cited in the Tclj al-'Arus (i. 3. 181 of the old edition), it was
/ enough for this cure to draw a drop of blood from the finger of a noble, and
drink it mixed with water.
This subject has been fully handled by Mr. J. G. Frazer in Journ.
Anthrop. Inst. xv. 64 sqq., to which I refer for details. I think Mr. Frazer
goes too far in supposing that mere fear of ghosts rules in all these observ-
ances. Not seldom we find also a desire for continued fellowship with the
dead, under such conditions as make the fellowship free from danger.
In the language of physics sanctity is a polar force, it both attracts and
repels.
LECT. X. SACRIFICIAL FLESH. 351
the dead are thrown outside the kraal, to be eaten by wild
beasts (Masai land), or are deposited in a desert place
which men must not approach ; but more commonly the
body is buried or burned. All these practices reappear in
the case of such sacrifices as may not be eaten. Mere
exposure on the soil of the sanctuary was perhaps the use
in certain Arabian cults,^ but this, it is plain, could not
suffice unless the sacred enclosure was an adyton forbidden
to the foot of man. Hence at Duma the annual human
victim is buried at the foot of the altar idol,^ and elsewhere,
perhaps, the corpse is hung up between earth and heaven
before the deity.^ Or else the sacrosanct flesh is carried
away into a desert place in the mountains, as was done in
the Greek piacula of which Hippocrates speaks, or is
simply flung down (a precipice) from the vestibule of the
temple, as was the use of Hierapolis.* Among the Hebrews,
on the same principle, the heifer offered in atonement
for an untraced murder was sacrificed by striking off
its head in a barren ravine.^
^ Supra, p. 208 sqq.
- Porph., De Ahst. ii. 56. In old Arabia little girls were often buried
alive by their fathers, apparently as sacrifices to the goddesses, see Kinship,
p. 28L A similar form of human sacrifice probably lies at the root of the
legend about the tombs of the lovers whom Semiramis buried alive (Syncellus,
i. 119, from John of Antinch), for though these lovers are gods, all myths of
the death of gods seem to be derived from sacrifices of theauthropic victims.
■* Deut. xxi. 21 ; cf. 1 Sam. xxxi. 10. The execution of criminals con-
stantly assumes sacrificial forms, for the tribesman's life is sacred even if he
be a criminal, and he must not be killed in a common way. This principle
is finally extended to all religious executions, in which, as the Hebrews and
Moabites say, the victim is devoted, as a herem, to the god (Stele of Mesha,
1. 17). In one peculiar sacrifice at Hierapolis {Dea Syr. xlix. ) the victims
were suspended alive from trees, and the trees were then set on fire. The
fire is perhaps a later addition, and the original rite may have consisted in
suspension alone. The story of a human victim hung up in the temple
at Carrhaj by the Emperor Julian (Thcod., //. E. iii. 21), and the similar
stories in the Syriac Julian-romances (ed. Hoflm., p. 247, etc.), are too
apocryphal to be used, though they probably reflect some obsolete popular
superstition.
* Dea Syria, Iviii. ^ Deut. xxi. 4.
352 HUMAX
LECT. X.
Most commonly, however, human sacrijfices, and in
general all such sacrifices as were not eaten, were burned ;
and this usage is found not only among the Hebrews and
Phoenicians, with whom fire - sacrifices were common, but
among the Arabs, who seem to have admitted the fire-
offering in no other case. In the more advanced rituals
the use of fire corresponds with the conception of the gods
as subtle beings, moving in the air, whose proper nourish-
ment is the fragrant smoke of the burning flesh ; so that
the burnt-offering, like the fat of the vitals in ordinary
victims, is the food of the gods, and falls under the head of
sacrificial gifts. But in the Levitical ritual this explana-
tion is sedulously excluded in the case of the sin-offering ;
the fat is burned on the altar, but the rest of the flesh, so
far as it is not eaten by the priests, is burned outside the
camp, i.e. outside the walls of Jerusalem, so that in fact
the burning is merely an additional precaution added to
the older rule that the sacred flesh must not be left
exposed to human contact. But the Levitical sin-offering
is only a special development of the old piacular holocaust,
and thus the question at once suggests itself whether in its
first origin the holocaust was a subtle way of conveying a
gift of food to the god ; or whether rather the victim was
burned, because it was too sacred to be eaten and yet must
not be left undisposed of. In the case of the Arabian
holocaust, which is confined to human victims, this is
certainly the easiest explanation ; and even among the
Hebrews and their neighbours it would seem that human
sacrifices were not ordinarily burned on the altar or even
within the precincts of the sanctuary, but rather outside the
city. It is plain from various passages of the prophets
that the sacrifices of children among the Jews before the
captivity, which are commonly known as sacrifices to
Moloch, were regarded by the worshippers as oblations to
LECT. X. HOLOCAUSTS. 353
Jehovah, under the title of king,^ yet they were not pre-
sented at the temple, but consumed outside the town at
the Tophet in the ravine below the temple.^ From Isa.
XXX. 33 it appears that Tophet means a pyre, such as is
prepared for a king. But the Hebrews themselves did not
burn their dead, unless in very exceptional cases,^ and
burial was equally the rule among their Phoenician neigh-
bours, as is plain from researches in their cemeteries,*
and apparently among all the Semites. Thus, when the
prophet describes the deep and wide pyre " prepared for
the king," he does not draw his figure from ordinary life,
nor is it conceivable that he is thinking of the human
sacrifices in the valley of Hinnom, a reference which would
bring an utterly discordant strain into the imagery. What
he does refer to is a rite well known to Semitic religion,
which was practised at Tarsus down to the time of Dio
Chrysostom, and the memory of which survives in the
Greek legend of Heracles - Melcarth, in the story of
Sardanapalus, and in the myth of Queen Dido. At Tarsus
there was an annual feast at which a very fair pyre was
erected, and the local Heracles or Baal burned on it in
effigy.^ This annual commemoration of the death of the
' Jer. vii. 31, xix. 5, xxxii. 3.5 ; Ezek. xxiii. 39 ; Micah vi. 7. The form
Moloch (LXX.), or rather Molech (Heb.), is nothing but Mdech, " king," read
with the vowels of bonlteth, "shameful thing;" see Hoffmann in Stade's
Zeitschr. iii. (1883) p. 124. In Jer. xix. 5 delete ^]}2b mSy with LXX.
'■i The valley of Hinnom is the Tyropoeon; see Enc. Brit., arts. "Jeru-
salem " and ' ' Temple."
•' Saul's body was burned (1 Sam. xxxi. 12), possibly to save it from the
risk of exhumation by the Philistines, but perhaps rather with a religious
intention, and almost as an act of worship, since his bones were buried under
the sacred tamarisk at Jabesh. In Amos vi. 10 the victims of a plague are
burned, which is to be understood by comparing Lev. xx. 14, xxi. 9, Amos
ii. 1, and remembering that plague was a special mark of divine wrath
(2 Sam. xxiv.), so that its victims might well be regarded as intensely taboo.
4 This is true also of Carthage ; Tissot, La Prov. d'A/rique, i. 612 ;
Justin, xix. 1.
^ See 0. Midler, " Saudon und Sardanapal," in Bheln. Mus., Sen i., Bd. iii.
Z
354 HUMAN LECT. X.
god in lire must have its origin in an older rite, in which
the victim was not a mere effigy but a theanthropic sacri-
fice, i.e. an actual man or sacred animal, whose life, according
to the antique conception now familiar to us, was an
embodiment of the divine-human life.
The significance of the death of the god in Semitic
religion is a subject on which I must not enter in this
connection ; we are here concerned with it only in so far
as the details, scenic or mythical, of the death of the god
throw light on the litual of human sacrifice. And for
this purpose it is well to cite also the legend of the death
of Dido as it is related by Tim£eus,i where tlie pyre is
erected outside the walls of the palace, i.r. of the temple
of the goddess, and she leaps into it from the height of
the edifice. According to Justin the pyre stood " at the
end of the town ; " in fact the sanctuary of Coelestis, which
seems to represent the temple of Dido, stood a little way
outside the citadel or original city of Carthage, on lower
ground, and, at the beginning of the fourth century of our
era, was surrounded by a thorny jungle, which the popular
imagination pictured as inhabited by asps and dragons, the
guardians of the sanctuary.^ It can hardly be doubted that
the spot at which legend placed the self-sacrifice of Dido
to her husband Sicharbas was that at which the later
Carthaginian human sacrifices were performed.^
We have therefore a series of examples all pointing
to human sacrifice beneath and outside the city. At
Hierapolis the victims are cast down from the temple, but
^ Ft. Hist. dr. i. 197 ; cT. .Justin, xviii. G. On Diilo as identical with
Tanith (Tent), h ^alfjiuv t?,- Ka/jx-zioovs?, see the ingenious conjectures of G.
Hoffmann, Pluen. hiKchr. }). 32 s<i.
^ Tissot, i. 653. Silius Ital., i. 81 sqq., also describes the temple of Dido
as enclosed in a thick grove, and surrounded by awful mystery.
^ The name Sicliar-bas, py^ — iSr, "commemoration of Ijaal," is not a
divine title, but is to be understood from E.x. xx. 24.
LECT. X. HOLOCAUSTS. 355
we do not read that they are burned ; at Jerusalem they
are burned in the ravine below the temple, but not cast
down. At Carthage the two rites meet, the sacrifice is
outside the city and outside the walls of the temple ; but
the divine victim leaps into the pyre, and later victims, as
Diodorus tells us,^ were allowed to roll into a fiery pit
from a sort of scaffold in the shape of an image of the god
with outstretched arms. In this last shape of the rite the
object plainly is to free the worshippers from the guilt of
bloodshed ; the child was delivered alive to the god, and
he committed it to the flames. For the same reason, at
the so-called sacrifice of the pyre at Hierapolis, the holo-
causts were burnt alive," and so was the Harranian sacri-
fice of a bull to the planet Saturn described by Dimashkl.'^
This last sacrifice is the lineal descendant of the older
human sacrifices of which we have been speaking ; for
the Carthaginian Baal or Moloch was identified with Saturn,
and at Hierapolis the sacrificed children are called oxen.
But in the more ancient Hebrew rite the children offered
to Moloch were slaughtered before they were burned.* And
that the burning is secondary, and was not the original
substance of the rite, appears also from the use of Hiera-
polis, where the sacrifice is simply flung from the temple.
So too, although Dido in Timseus flings herself into the fire,
there are other forms of the legend of the sacrifice of a Semitic
goddess, in which she simply casts herself down into water.^
1 Diotl., XX. 14. - Dea Syria, xlix.
3 Ed. Mehreu, p. 40 (Fr. Transl. p. 42).
* Ezek. xvi. 20, xxiii. 39 ; Gen. xxii. 10. The inscriptions in Gesenius,
Mon. Phcen. p. 448 sq., which have sometimes been cited in this connec-
tion, are now known to have nothing to do with human sacrifice.
^ The Semiramis legend at Hierapolis and Ascalon ; the legend of the
death of Astarte at Aphaca (Meliton), which must be identified with the
falling of the star into the water at the annual feast, just as in another
legend Aphrodite after the death of Adonis throws herself from the
Leucadian promontory (Ptol., Nov. Hist. vii. p. 198, West.).
356 HUMAN
LECT. X.
When the burning came to be the essence of the rite,
the spot outside the city where it was performed might
naturally become itself a sanctuary, though it is plain
from the descriptions of the temple of Dido that the
sanctuary was of a very peculiar and awful kind, and
separated from contact with man in a way not usual in
the shrines of ordinary worship. And when this is so
the deity of this awful sanctuary naturally comes to be
regarded as a separate divinity, rejoicing in a cult which
the other gods abhor. But originally, we see, the human
sacrifice is offered to the ordinary god of the community,
only it is not consumed on the altar in the sanctuary, but
cast down into a ravine outside, or burned outside. This
rule appears to be universal, and I may note one or two
other instances that confirm it. Mesha burns his son as a
holocaust to Chemosh, not at the temple of Chemosh, but
on the wall of his beleaguered city ; ^ being under blockade,
he could not go outside the wall. Again, at Amathus the
human sacrifices offered to Jupiter Hospes were sacrificed
" before the gates," ^ and here the Jupiter Hospes of the
Eoman narrator can be none other than the Amathusian
Heracles or Malika, whose name, preserved by Hesychius,
identifies him with the Tyrian Melcarth. Or, again, Malalas ^
tells us that the 22nd of May was kept as the anniversary
L of a virgin sacrificed at the foundation of Antioch, at
sunrise, " half-way between the city and the river," and
afterwards worshipped like Dido as the Fortune of the town.
All this is so closely parallel to the burning of the flesh
of the Hebrew sin-offerings outside the camp that it seems
hardly doubtful that originally, as in the Hebrew sin-
offering, the true sacrifice, i.e. the shedding of the blood, took
place at the temple, and the burning was a distinct act.
1 2 Kings iii. 27. ^ Ovid., Metaph. x. 224 ; cf. Movers, i. 408 sq.
3 P. 200 of the Bonn ed.
LECT. X. HOLOCAUSTS. 357
An intermediate stage is exhibited in the sacrifice of the
red heifer, where the whole ceremony takes place outside
the camp, hut the blood is sprinkled in the direction of the
sanctuary (Numb. xix. 4). And in support of this view
let me press one more point that has come out in our
evidence. The human holocaust is not burned on an
altar, but on a pyre or fire pit constructed for the occasion.
This appears both in the myths of Dido and Heracles and
in actual usage. At Tarsus a very fair pyre is erected
yearly for the burning of Heracles ; in the Carthaginian
sacrifice of boys the victims fall into a pit of flame, and
in the Harranian ox- sacrifice the victim is fastened to a
grating placed over a vault filled with burning fuel ;
finally, Isaiah's Tophet is a broad and deep excavation
filled with wood. All these arrangements are totally
unlike the old Semitic altar or sacred stone, and are mere
developments of the primitive fireplace, made by scooping
a hollow in the ground.^ It appears then that in the
ritual of human sacrifice, and therefore by necessary
1 It seems to me that nSn is properly an Aramaic name for a fireplace, or
for tlie framework set on the lire to support the victim, which appears in the
Harranian sacrifice and, in a modified form, at Carthage. For we are not to
think of the hrazen idol as a shapely statue, but as a development of the dogs
of a primitive fireplace. I figure it to myself as a pillar or cone with a rude
head and arms, something like the divine symbol so often figured on
Carthaginian Tanith cippi. Now the name for the stones on which a pot
is set, and then for any stand or tripod set upon a fire, is in Arabic djjij],
Othfiya, in Syriac \^2lL, Tfdyd, of which we might, according to known
analogies, have a variant tfdf.h. The corresponding Hebrew word- is
nbC'tv (for shfuth), which means an ashpit or dunghill, but priiiMtfily must
have denoted the fireplace, since the denominative verb nDC is ' ' to set on
a pot." In nomad life the fireplace of one day is the ash -heap of the next.
Now at the time when the word nsn ^'st appears in Hebrew, the chief
foreign influence in Jud?ean religion was that of Damascus (2 Kings xvi.),
and there is therefore no improbability in the hypothesis that nsn is an
Aramaic word. The pronunciation tofeth is quite precarious, for LXX. has
Tx^'J, and the Massorets seem to have given the loathsome thing the points
of boshtth.
358 ALTARS OF lect. x.
inference in the ritual of the holocaust generally, the
burning was originally no integral part of the ceremony,
and did not take place on the altar or even within the
sanctuary, but in a place apart, away from the habitations
of man. For human sacrifices and for solemn piacula
this rule continued to be observed even to a late date, but
for ordinary animal holocausts the custom of burning the
flesh in the court of the sanctuary must have established
itself pretty early. Thus, as regards the Hebrews, both the
oldest narrators of the Pentateuch (the Jahvist and the
Elohist) presuppose the custom of burning holocausts and
other sacrifices on the altar,^ so that the fusion is already
complete between the sacred stone to receive the blood, and
the hearth on which the flesh was burned. But this does
not carry us back beyond the eighth or ninth century B.C.,
and the oldest history still preserves traces of a different
custom. The burnt-sacrifices of Gideon and Manoah are
not offered on an altar but on the bare rock,^ and even
at the opening of Solomon's temple the fire-offerings were
burned not on the altar, but in the middle of the court in
front of the news, as was done many centuries later at
Hierapolis on the day of the Pyre-sacrifice. It is true that
in 1 Kings viii. 64 this is said to have been done only
because " the brazen altar that was before the Lord " was
not large enough for so great an occasion ; but it is very
doubtful whether there was in the first temple any other
brazen altar than the two brazen pillars, Jacliin and Boaz,
which corresponded to the antique altar cippus, and so
might indeed be sprinkled with sacrificial blood, but could
not be used as altars of burnt-offering. The first definite
^ Gen. viii. 20, xxii. 9. Ex. xx. 24 makes the holocaust be slaughtered
on the altar, but does not expressly say that it was burned on it.
- Judg. vi. 20, xiii. 19 ; Judg. vi. 20, the more modern story of Gideon's
offering, gives the modern ritual.
LECT. X. BURNT-OFFERING. 359
appearance of a formal built-up altar of burnt-offering at
the temple of Jerusalem is in the reign of Ahaz, who had
one constructed on the model of the altar of Damascus.
This altar, and not the brazen altar, was anain the model
for the altar of the second temple, which was of stone not
of brass, and it is plain from the narrative of 2 Kings xvi.,
especially in the form of the text which has been preserved
by the Septuagint, that Ahaz's innovation was not merely
the introduction of a new architectural pattern, but involved
a modification of the whole ritual.^
We may now pass on to the case of ordinary fire-
offerings in which only the fat of the vitals is consumed
on the altar. It is easy to see that when men began to
shrink from tlie eating of sacrificial flesh, they would not
necessarily at once take refuge in entire abstinence. Tlie
alternative was to abstain from partaking of those parts
in which the sacred life especially centred. Accordingly
we find that in ordinary Hebrew sacrifices the whole blood
is poured out at the altar as a thing too sacred to be
eaten.^ Again, the head is by many nations regarded as
a special seat of the soul, and so, in Egyptian sacrifice, the
head was not eaten but thrown into the Nile,^ while
anion;? the Iranians the head of the victim was dedicated
to Haoma, that the immortal part of the animal might
return to him. But a not less important seat of life,
according to Semitic ideas, lay in the viscera, especially in
^ See Additional Note L, The Altar at Jerusalem. I may add that, in
1 Kings xviii., Elijah's altar does not seem to be a raised structure, but
simply a circle marked out by twelve standing stones and a trench.
" Among the Hottentots blood is allowed to men but not to women ;
the female sex being among savages excluded from many holy privileges.
Similarly the flesh of the Hebrew sin-ofl'ering must be eaten only by males
(Lev. vi. 22 (29)), and among the Caffres the head, breast and heart are
man's part (Lichtenstein, p. 451).
* Herod., ii. 39. The olyection to eating the head is very widely spread ;
we find it in Bavaria as late as the fifteenth century (Usener, Beligionsgesch.
Untersuchiingen, ii. 84).
360 SACREDNESS OF lect. x.
the kidneys and the liver, which in the Semitic dialects
are continually named as the seats of emotion, or more
broadly in the fat of the omentum and the organs that
lie in and near it.^ Now it is precisely this part of the
victim, the fat of the omentum with the kidneys and the
lobe of the liver, which the Hebrews were forbidden to
eat, and, in the case of sacrifice, burned on the altar.
The ideas connected with the kidney fat and its appur-
tenances may be illustrated by the usages of primitive
peoples in modern times. When the Australians kill an
enemy in blood revenge, " they always abstract the kidney
fat, and also take off a piece of the skin of the thigh " [or
a piece of the flank].- " These are carried home as trophies.
. . . The caul fat is carefully kept by the assassin, and
used to lubricate himself ; " he thinks, we are told, that
thus the strength of the victim enters into him.^ When
^ The Arabic Khilb (Heb. 2?^, Syr. helbd) primarily denotes the
omentum or midriff, but includes the fat or suet connected therewith ; see
Lev. iii. 3. An Arab says of a woman who has inspired him with passion,
" she has overturned my heart and torn my midriff" (Lane, p. 782). So
in Ps. xvi. 10 the sense is not "they have closed their fat (unfeeling)
heart," but " thej^ have shut up their midriff, and so are insensible to j)ity."
From this complex of fat parts the fat of the kidneys is particularly selected
by the Arabs, and by most savages, as the special seat of life. One says
" I found him with his kidney fat," meaning I found him brisk and all
alive (Lane, p. 1513). In Egypt, according to Burckhardt {Ar. Prov. No.
301), " when a sheep is killed by a private jierson, some of the bystanders
often take away the kidneys, or at least the fat that incloses them, as due
to the public from him who slaughters the sheep." This, I take it, is a relic
of old sacrificial usage ; what used to be given to the god is now given in
charity.
^ The thigh is a seat of life and especially of procreative power, as appears
very clearly in the idiom of the Semites (K'mship, p. 34). From tliis
may be explained the sacredness of the nervus ischiadicus among the
Hebrews (Gen. xxxii. 33), and similar superstitious among other nations. Is
this also the reason why the "fat thigh-bones'' are an altar-portion among
the Greeks ? The nature of the lameness produced by injury to the sinew of
tlie thigh socket is explained by the Arabic lexx., s.v. ij .l~^ ; the man
can only walk on the tips of his toes. This seems to have been a common
affection, for poetical metaphors are taken from it.
» Brough Smyth, ii. 289, i. 102.
LECT. X. KIDNEY FAT. 361
the Basiitos offer a sacrifice to heal the sick, as soon as
the victim is dead, they liasten to take the epiploon or
intestinal covering, which is considered the most sacred
part, and put it round the patient's neck. . . . The gall
is then poured on the head of the patient. After a
sacrifice the gall bladder is invariably fastened to the
hair of the individual for whom the victim has been slain,
and becomes a sign of purification.^
The importance attached by various nations to these
vital parts of the body is very ancient, and extends to
regions where sacrifice by fire is unknown. The point
of view from which we are to regard the reluctance to eat
of them is that, being more vital, they are more holy
than other parts, and therefore at once more potent and
more dangerous. All sacrificial flesh is charged with an
awful virtue, and all sacra are dangerous to the unclean
or to those who are not duly prepared ; but these are so
lioly and so awful that they are not eaten at all, but dealt
with in special ways, and in particular are used as power-
ful charms.^
We see from the case of the Basuto sacrifice that it is
by no means true that all that man does not eat must be
given to the god, and the same thing appeals in other
examples. The Hebrews pour out the blood at the altar,
but the Greeks use it for lustration and the old Arabs as
a cure for madness. The Persians restore the head and
with it the life to Haonia, while the Tauri, according to
Herodotus, iv. 103, in their human sacrifices, bury the
body or cast it down from the cliff on which the temple
' Casalis, p. 250.
- This may be illustrated by the case of the blood of sacrificial victims.
Among the Greeks bull's blood was regarded as a poison ; but for this
belief there is no physiological basis, tlie danger lay in its sacred nature.
But conversely it was used under divine direction as a medicine ; ^lian,
N^. A. xi. 35. On blood as a medicine see also Pliny, //. N. xxviii. 43,
xxvi. 8 ; and Adams's Paulus J<J(jiHeta, iii. 25 «</.
362 USE OF THE LECT. X.
stands, but fix the head on a pole above their houses as a
sacred guardian. Among the Semites, too, the magical
use of a dried head had great vogue. This sort of charm
is mentioned by Jacob of Edessa,^ and hares' heads were
worn as amulets by Arab women." So, too, when we find
bones, and especially dead men's bones, used as charms,'^
we must think primarily of tlie bones of sacrifices.
Nilus's Saracens at least broke up the bones and ate the
marrow, but the solid osseous tissue must from the first
have defied most teeth unless it was pounded, and so it
was particularly likely to be kept and used as a charm.
Of course the sacred bones may have been often buried,
and when fire was introduced they were likely to be burned,
as is the rule with the Caffres.* As the sacrifices of the
Caffres are not fire-sacrifices, it is clear that in this case
the bones are burned to dispose of the holy substance, not
to provide food for the gods. But even when the bones
or the whole carcase of a sacrosanct victim are burned, the
sacred virtue is not necessarily destroyed. The ashes of
sacrifice are used, like the blood, for lustrations of various
kinds, as we see in the case of the red heifer among the
Hebrews ; and in agricultural religions such ashes are very
commonly used to give fertility to the land. That is, the
sacred elements, after they cease to be eaten, are still used
in varied forms as a means of communicating the divine life
and life-giving or cleansing virtue to the worshippers, their
liouses, their lands, and all things connected with them.
1 Qu. 43 ; see more examples in Kayser's notes, p. 142, and in a paper by
Jahn, Ber. d. Scichs. Ges. d. Wiss. 1854, p. 48. For the magical human
head, ol which we read so much in the latest forms of Semitic heathenism,
see Ghwolsohn, ii. 150 sqq., and the Actes of the Leyden Congress, ii. 365 sq.
=* Diw. Hudh. clxxx. 9 ; ZDMG. xxxix. 329.
* Examples ivfra. Add. Note C, p. 429. The very dung of cattle
was a charm in Syria (Jacob of Edessa, Qu. 42), to which niany parallels
exist, not only in Africa, but among the Aryans of India.
■* Maclean, p. 81.
LECT. X. KIDNEY FAT. 363
In the later fire-rituals the fat of the victim, with its
blood, is quite specially the altar food of the gods. But
between the practice which this view represents and the
primitive practice, in which the whole body was eaten, we
must, I think, in accordance with what has just been said,
insert an intermediate stage, which can still be seen and
studied in the usage of primitive peoples. Among the
Damaras the fat of particular animals is supposed to
possess certain virtues, and is carefully collected and kept
in vessels of a particular kind. A small portion dissolved
in water is given to persons who return home safely after
a lengthened absence ; . . . the chief makes use of it as
an unguent for his body.^ So too " dried flesh and fat "
are used as amulets by the Namaquas.^ Among the
Bechuanas lubrication with grease is part of the ceremony
of admission of girls into womanhood, and among the
Hottentots young men on their initiation into manhood are
daubed with fat and soot.'^ Grease is the usual unguent
all over Africa, and from these examples we see that its
use is not merely hygienic, but has a sacred meaning.
Indeed, the use of various kinds of fat, especially human
fat, as a charm, is connnon all over tlie world, and we learn
from the Australian superstition quoted above that the
reason of this is that the fat, as a special seat of life, is a
vehicle of the living virtue of the being from which it is
taken. Now we have seen in speaking of the use of
unguents in Semitic religion,* that this particular medium
has in some way an equivalent value to blood, for which it
may be substituted in the covenant ceremony, and also in
the ceremony of bedaubing the sacred stone as an act of
^ Anderson, Lahe Ngami, p. 223.
- Ibid. p. 330. The dried flesh reminds us of the Arabian custom of
drying strips of sacriticial flesh on the days of Miml, ("VVellh., p. 79).
'^ Ibid. p. 465 ; Kolben, i. 121. ^ Supra, p. 215.
364 BURNING
LECT. X.
homage. If, now, we remember that the oldest unguents
are animal fats, and that vegetable oil was unknown to
the Semitic nomads,^ we are plainly led to the conclusion
that unction is primarily an application of the sacrificial
fat, with its living virtues, to the persons of the wor-
shippers. On this view the anointing of kings, and
the use of unguents on visiting the sanctuary, are at
once intelligible."
The agricultural Semites anointed themselves with olive
oil, and burned the sacrificial fat on the altar. This could
lie done without any fundamental modification of the old
type of sacred stone or altar pillar, simply by making a
hollow on the top to receive the grease ; and there is some
reason to think that fire-altars of this simple kind, which
in certain Phoenician types are developed into altar candle-
sticks, are older than the broad platform-altar proper for
receiving a burnt-offering.^ But there are evidences even
in the Old Testament that it was only gradually tliat the
burning of the fat came to be an integral part of the altar
ritual. In 1 Sam. ii. 15 we find a controversy between
the priests and the people on this very topic. The
worshippers maintain that the priest has no claim to his
fee of flesh till the fat is burned; but the priests assert their
right to have a share of raw flesh at once. It is assumed
in the argument that if the priests held back their claim
till they had burned the fat, the flesh would be already
cooked — so the worshippers at least did not wait to see
the fat burned. And probably the priests had precedent
on their side, for the old law of Ex. xxiii. 18 only
1 Frank el, Fremdivorter, p. 147.
*' The use of unguents by witches when they desire to transform them-
selves into animal shape, — as we find it, for example, in Apuleius's novel, —
belongs to the same region of superstition, and to that most primitive form
of the superstition which turns on the kinship of men with animals.
^ See below, Additional Note L.
LECT. X.
OF THE FAT. 365
requires that the fat of a festal sacrifice shall be burned
before daybreak — the sacrifice itself having talcen place in
the evening.
I fear that these details may seem tedious, but the
cumulative evidence which they afford that the burning of
the flesli or fat held quite a secondary place in ancient
sacrifice, and was originally no integral part of the oblation
at the altar, is of the greatest importance for the history of
sacrificial ideas. They show how impossible it is to regard
animal sacrifices as primarily consisting in a gift of food to
the gods, and how long it was before this notion superseded
the original notion of communion between men and their
gods in the life of the sacrifice.
I do not suppose that it is possible on the basis of the
evidences that have come before us to reconstruct from
step to step the whole history of the development of fire-
sacrifices. But we can at least see in a general way how the
chief modifications of sacrificial ritual and idea came in.
Originally neither the flesh nor the life of the victim
could be regarded as a gift or tribute — i.e. as something
which belonged to the worshipper, and of which he
divested; himself in order to make it over to the object of
his worship. It is probable that sacrifice is older than
the idea of private property, and it is certain that its
beginnings go back to a time when the owner of a sheep,
an ox, or a camel had no right to dispose of its life
according to his own good pleasure. Such an animal
could only be slain in order that its life might be distri-
buted between all the kin and the kindred god. At this
stage the details of the ritual are shaped by the rule that
no part of the life must be lost, and that therefore the
whole body, which is the vehicle of the life, must be
distributed and used up in the holy ritual. In the first
instance, therefore, everything must be eaten up, and eaten
366 ORIGIN OF LKCT. X.
while it is still alive — fresh and raw. (Iradually this
rule is modified, partly because it is difficult to insist,
in the face of growing civilisation, on the rule that
even bones, skin and offal must be devoured, and partly
because there is increasing reluctance to partake of the
holy life.^ This reluctance again is connected with the
growth of the distinction between degrees of holiness.
Not every man is holy enough to partake of the most
sacred sacraments without danger. What is safe for a
consecrated chief or priest is not safe for the mass of the
people. Or even it is better that the most sacred parts of
the victim should not be eaten at all ; the blood and the
fat are medicines too powerful to be taken internally, but
they may be sprinkled or daubed on the worshippers, while
the sacrificial meal is confined to the parts of the flesh in
which the sacred life is less intensely present. Or, finally,
it is most seemly and most safe to withdraw the holiest
things from man's use altogether, to pour out the whole
blood at the altar, and to burn the fat. All this applies
to ordinary sacrifices, in which the gradual concentration
of the holiness of the victim in its fat and blood tends to
make the rest of the flesh appear less and less holy, till
ultimately it becomes almost a common thing. But, on
special occasions, where the old ritual is naturally observed
with antique rigidity, and where, therefore, the victim is
treated at the altar as if it were a tribesman, the feeling
of sacred horror against too close an approach to things
most holy extends to the whole flesh, and develops itself,
especially in connection with actual human sacrifice, into
the rule that no part of such victims may be eaten, but
that the whole must be reverently ])urned.
If we may generalize from the case of Arabia, where
the holocaust was confined to human victims and the fat
^ Probably these two reasons are fundamentally one.
LECT. X. FIEE-SACEIFICE. 367
of ordinary sacrifices was not burned, it would appear that
it was human sacrifice that first gave rise to the use of fire
as a safe means of disposing of the bodies of the lioliest
victims. From this practice that of burning the fat in
common sacrifices may very well have been derived. But
the evidence is not sufficient to justify a positive con-
clusion on the matter, and it is quite possible that the use
of fire began among the Northern Semites in connection
with ordinary sacrifices, simply as a means of dealing with
such parts of the victim as were not or could not be eaten,
and yet were too holy to be left undisposed of. The
Hebrew ritual of ordinary sacrifices is careful to prescribe
that what is not eaten on the first or second day shall be
burned.-^ This is evidently a mere softening of the old
rule that the flesh of the victim must be consumed without
delay, while it is still alive and (|uivering, into the rule
that it must not be allowed to putrefy and decompose ;
and this again, since the close connection between putre-
faction and fermentation is patent even to the unscientific
observer, seems also to be the principle on which ferments
are excluded from the altar. The use of fire in sacrifice,
as the most complete and thorough means of avoiding
putrefaction in whatever part of the victim cannot or may
not be eaten, must have suggested itself so naturally
wherever fire was known, that no other reason is necessary
to explain its wide adoption. The burial of the sacrificial
flesh, of which we have found one or two examples, does
not appear to have met with so much favour, and indeed
was not so satisfactory from the point of view indicated by
the rules of Hebrew ritual.^
The use of fire in this sense does not involve any
fundamental modification in the ideas connected with
sacrifice. The critical point in the development is when
^ Lev. vii. 15 sqq. '^ Sec Additional Xotc. M, Ili'jh Places.
368 FIRE-SACRIFICE, LECT. X.
the fat of ordinary victims, or still more, the whole flesh
of the holocaust, is burned within the sanctuary or on the
altar, and is regarded as being thus made over to the deity.
This point claims to be examined more fully, and must be
reserved for consideration at our next meeting.
LECTUEE XL
SACRIFICIAL GIFTS AND PIACULAR SACRIFICES THE SPECIAL
IDEAS INVOLVED IN THE LATTER.
In connection with the later Semitic sacrifices fire is
employed for two purposes, apparently quite independent
of one another. Its ordinary use is upon the altar, where
it serves to sublimate, and so to convey to deities of an
ethereal nature, gifts of solid flesh, which are regarded as
the food of the gods. But in certain Hebrew piacula the
sacrificial flesh is burned without the camp, and is not
regarded as the food of the gods. The parts of the victim
which in the highest form of piacula are burned outside
the camp are the same which in lower forms of the sin-
offering were eaten by the priests as representatives of the
worshippers, or which in ordinary sacrifices would have
been eaten by the worshippers themselves. Here, there-
fore, the fire seems to play the same part that is assigned to
it under the rule that, if an ordinary sacrifice is not eaten
up within one or two days, the remnant must be burned.
All sacrificial flesh is holy, and must be dealt with accord-
ing to fixed ritual rules, one of which is that it must not
be allowed to putrefy. Ordinary sacrificial flesh may be
either eaten or burned, but sin-offerings are too holy to be
eaten except by the priests, and in certain cases are too
holy to be eaten even by them, and therefore must be
burned, not as a way of conveying them to the deity, but
simply as a way of fitly disposing of them.
2 a
370 OKIGIN OF LECT. XL
It is commonly supposed that the first use of fire was
upon the altar, and that the burning outside the camp is
a later invention, expressing the idea that, in the case of a
sacrifice for sin, the deity does not desire a material gift,
but only the death of the offender. The ritual of the
Hebrew sin-offering lends itself to such an interpretation
readily enough, but it is impossible to believe that its
origin is to be explained on any such view. If the sin-
offering is merely a symbolical representation of a penal
execution, why is the flesh of the victim holy in the first
degree ? and why are the blood and fat offered upon the
altar ? But it is unnecessary to press these minor objections
to the common view, which is refuted more conclusively
by a series of facts that have come before us in the course
of the last lecture. There is a variety of evidence that fire
was applied to sacrifices, or to parts of sacrifices, as an
alternative to their consumption by the worshippers, before
the altar became a hearth, and before it came to be thought
that what was burned was conveyed, as etherealised food,
to the deity. The Hebrew piacula that were burned
outside the camp represent an older form of ritual than
the holocaust on the altar, and the thing that really needs
explanation is the origin of the latter.
Originally all sacrifices were eaten up by the worshippers.
By and by certain portions of ordinary sacrifices, and the
whole flesh of extraordinary sacrifices, ceased to be eaten.
What was not eaten was burned, and in process of time it
came to be burned on the altar and regarded as made over
to the god. Exactly the same change took place with the
sacrificial blood, except that here there is no use of fire.
In the oldest sacrifices the blood was drunk by the'
worshippers, and after it ceased to be drunk it was all
poured out at the altar. The tendency evidently was to
convey directly to the godhead every portion of a sacrifice
L£CT. XI. BURNT-OFFERINGS. 371
that was not consumed by the worshipper ; but how did
this tendency arise ?
I daresay that some of you will be inclined to say that
I am making a difficulty of a matter that needs no expla-
nation. Is it not obvious that a sacrifice is a consecrated
thing, that consecrated things belong to the god, and that
the altar is their proper place ? No doubt this seems to ^
be obvious, but it is precisely the things that seem obvious
which in a subject like ours require the most careful
scrutiny. You say that consecrated things belong to the
god, but we saw long ago that this is not the primitive
idea of holiness. A holy thing is taboo, i.e. man's contact
with it and use of it are subject to certain restrictions, but
this idea does not in early society rest on the belief that it
is the property of the gods. Again you say that a sacrifice
is a consecrated thing, but what do you mean by this ? If
you mean that the victim became holy by being selected
for sacrifice and presented at the altar, you have not
correctly apprehended the nature of the oldest rites. For
in them the victim was naturally holy, not in virtue of its
sacrificial destination, but because it was an animal of holy
kind. So long as the natural holiness of certain animal
species was a living element in popular faith, it was by no \/
means obvious that holy things belong to the god, and
should find their ultimate destination at the altar.
In later heathenism the conception of holy kinds and
the old ideas of taboo generally had become obsolete, and
the ritual observances founded upon them were no longer
understood. And, on the other hand, the comparatively
modern idea of property had taken shape, and began to
play a leading part both in religion and in social life. The
victim was no longer a naturally sacred thing, over which
man had very limited rights, and which he was required to
treat as a useful friend rather than a chattel, but was
372 GIFT THEORY lect. xr.
drawn from the absolute property of the worshipper, of
which he had a right to dispose as he pleased. Before its
presentation the victim was a common thing, and it was
only by being selected for sacrifice that it became holy.
If, therefore, by presenting his sheep or ox at the altar, the
owner lost the right to eat or sell its flesh, the explanation
could no longer be sought in any other way than by the
assumption that he had surrendered his right of property
to another party, viz., to the god. Consecration was .in-
terpreted to mean a gift of man's property to the god, and
everything that was withdrawn by consecration from the
free use of man was conceived to have changed its owner.
The blood and fat of ordinary sacrifices, or the whole flesh
in the case of the holocaust, were withdrawn from human
use ; it was held, therefore, that they had become the
property of the god, and were reserved for his use. This
being so, it was inevitable that the burning of the flesh
and fat should come to be regarded as a method of convey-
ing them to the god ; and, as soon as this conclusion was
drawn, the way was open for the introduction of the
modern practice, in which the burning took place on the
altar. The transformation of the altar into the hearth, on
which the sacrificial flesh was consumed, marks the final
establishment of a new view of holiness, based on the
doctrine of property, in which the inviolability of holy
things is no longer made to rest on their intrinsic super-
natural quality, but upon their appropriation to the use
and service of the gods. The success of this new view is
not surprising, for in every department of early society
we find that as soon as the notion of property, and of
transfers of property from one person to another, gets firm
footing, it begins to swallow up all earlier formulas for the
relations of persons and things. But the adaptation of
old institutions to new ideas can seldom be efiected without
LECT. XT. OF SACRIFICE. 373
leaving internal contradictions between the old and the
new, which ultimately bring about the complete dissolu-
tion of the incongruous system. The new wine bursts the
old bottles, and the new patch tears the old garment
asunder.
In the case of ordinary sacrifices the theory that holy
things are the property of the deity, and that the consecra-
tion of things naturally common implies a gift from man
to his god, was carried out with little difficulty. It was
understood that at the altar the whole victim is made
over to the deity and accepted by him ; but that the
main part of the flesh is returned to the worshipper, to
be eaten sacrificially as a holy thing at the table of the
god. This explanation went well enough with the con-
ception of the deity as a king or great lord, whose temple
was the court at which he sat to receive the homage of
his subjects and tenants, and to entertain them with
princely hospitality. But it did not satisfactorily account
for the most characteristic feature in sacrifice, the applica-
tion of the blood to the altar, and the burning of the fat
on the sacred hearth. For these, according to the received
interpretation, were the food of the deity ; and so it
appeared that the god was dependent on man for his
daily nourishment, although, on the otlier hand, all the
good things that man enjoyed he owed to the gift and
favour of his god. This is the weak point in the current
view of sacrifice which roused the indignation of the author
of Psalm 1., and afforded so much merriment to later
satirists like Lucian. The difficulty might be explained
away by a spiritualising interpretation, which treated the
material altar gift as a mere symbol, and urged that the
true value of the offering lay in the lioraage of the
worshipper's heart, expressed in the traditional oblation.
But the relicfion of the masses never took so subtle a
374 GIFT THEORY
LECT. XI.
view as this, and to the majority of the worshippers even
in Israel, before the exile, the dominant idea in the
ritual was that the material oblation afforded a physical
satisfaction to the god, and that copious offerings were
an infallible means of keeping him in good humour. So
long as sacrifice was exclusively or mainly a social service,
performed by the community, the crassness of this con-
ception found its counterpoise in the ideas of religious
fellowship that have been expounded in Lecture VII.-^
But in private sacrifice there was little or nothing to
raise the transaction above the level of a mere bargain,
in which no ethical consideration was involved, but the
good understanding between the worshipper and his god
was maintained by reciprocal friendly offices of a purely
material kind. This superficial view of religion served
very well in times of prosperity, but it could not stand
the strain of serious and prolonged adversity, when
it became plain that religion had to reckon with the
sustained displeasure of the gods. In such circumstances
men were forced to conclude that it was useless to attempt
to appease the divine wrath by gifts of things which the
gods, as lords of the earth, already possessed in abundance.
It was not only Jehovah who could say, " I will take no
bullock out of thy house, nor he -goats from thy folds ;
for every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a
thousand hills." The Baalim too were in their way lords
of nature, and even from the standpoint of heathenism
it was absurd to suppose tliat they were really dependent
on the tribute of their worshippers. In short, the gift-
^ theory of sacrifice was not enough to account for the rule
that sacrifice is the sole and sufficient form of every act
of worship), even in religions which had not realised, with
the Hebrew prophets, that what the true God requires of
^ Siipra, p. 245 sqq.
LECT. XI. OF SACRIFICE. 375
His worshippers is not a material oblation, but " to do
justice, and love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God."
If the theory of sacrifice as a gift or tribute, taken from
man's property and conveyed to the deity, was inadequate
even as applied to ordinary oblations, it was evidently still
more inadequate as applied to the holocaust, and especially
to human sacrifice. It is commonly supposed that the
holocaust was more powerful than ordinary sacrifices,
l)ecause the gift to the god was greater. But even in
ordinary sacrifices the whole victim was consecrated and
made over to the god ; only in the holocaust the god kept
everything to himself, while in ordinary sacrifices he
invited the worshipper to dine with him. It does not
appear that there is any good reason, on the doctrine of
sacrificial tribute, why this difference should be to the
advantage of the holocaust. In the case of human sacri-
fices the gift-theory led to results which were not only
absurd but revolting — absurd, since it does not follow
that because a man's first-born son is dearer to himself
than all his wealth, the life of that son is the most
valuable gift that he can offer to his god ; and revolting,
when it came to be supposed that the sacrifice of children
as fire-offerings was a gift of food to a deity who delighted
in human flesh.^ So detestable a view of the nature of
the gods cannot fairly be said to correspond to the general
character of the old Semitic religions, which ought to be
judged of by the ordinary forms of worship and not by
exceptional rites. If the gods had been habitually
conceived as cannibal monsters, the general type of ritual
would have been gloomy and timorous, whereas really it
was full of joyous and even careless confidence. I
conclude, therefore, that the child-devouring King of the
later Moloch-worship owes his cannibal attributes, not to
1 Ezek. xvi. 20, xxiii. 37.
376 GIFT THEORY
LECT. XI.
\
the fundamental principles of Semitic religion, but to false
logic, straining the gift-theory of sacrifice to cover rites to
which it had no legitimate application. And this con-
clusion is justified when we find that, though human
sacrifices were not unknown in older times, the ancient
ritual was to burn them without the camp — a clear proof
that their flesh was not originally regarded as a food-
oftering to the deity. -^
On the whole, then, the introduction of ideas of
property into the relations between men and their gods
seems to have been one of the most fatal aberrations in
the development of ancient religion. In the beginnings
of human thought, the natural and the supernatural, the
material and the spiritual, were confounded, and this
confusion gave rise to the old notion of holiness, which
turned on the idea that supernatural influences emanated,
like an infection, from certain material things. It was
necessary to human progress that this crude conception
should be superseded, and at first sight we are disposed to
see nothing but good in the introduction of the notion
that holy things are forbidden to man because they are
reserved for the use of the gods, and that the danger
associated with illegitimate invasion of them is not due to
any deadly supernatural influence, directly proceeding from
the holy object, but to the wrath of a personal god, who
will not suffer his property to be tampered with. In one
direction this modification was undoubtedly beneficial, for
the vague dread of the unknown supernatural, which in
savage society is so strong that it paralyses progress of
every kind, and turns man aside from his legitimate task
of subduing nature to his use, receives a fatal blow as soon
as all supernatural processes are referred to the will and
^ Compare the remarks on the sacrifice of the first-born, infra, Additiona
Note r.
\
\
LECT. XI. OF SACRIFICE. 377
power of known deities, whose converse with man is
guided by fixed laws. But it was in the last degree
unfortunate that these fixed laws were taken to be largely
based on the principle of property ; for the notion of
property materialises everything that it touches, and its
introduction into religion made it impossible to rise to
spiritual conceptions of the deity and his relations to man
on the basis of traditional religion. On the other hand,
the more ancient idea of living communion between the
god and his worshippers, which fell more and more into
the background under the theory of sacrificial gifts,
contained an element of permanent truth wrapped up in
a very crude embodiment, and to it therefore all the
efforts of ancient heathenism towards a better way of
converse with the divine powers attach themselves,
taking hold of those forms and features of sacrifice
which evidently involved something more than the mere
presentation to the deity of a material tribute. And as
the need for something more than the ordinary altar gifts
supplied was not habitually present to men's minds, but
forced itself upon them in grave crises of life, and particu-
larly in times of danger, when the god seemed to be
angry with his people, or when at any rate it was of
importance to make sure that he was not angry, all the
aspects of worship that go beyond the payment of gifts
and tribute came to be looked upon as having a special
atoning character, that is, as being directed not so much
to maintain a good understanding with the deity, as to
renew it when it was interrupted.
When the idea of atonement is taken in this very
general form, there is obviously no sharp line between
atoning and ordinary sacrifices ; for in ordinary life the
means that are used to keep a man in good humour will
often suffice to restore him to good humour, if they are
378 GIFTS AND
LECT. XI.
sedulously employed. On this analogy a mere gift,
presented at a suitable moment, or of greater value than
usual, was often thought sufhcient to appease the divine
wrath ; a general atoning force was ascribed to all sacri-
fices, and the value of special piacula was often estimated
simply by the consideration that they cost the worshipper
more than an everyday offering. We have seen that even
human sacrifices were sometimes considered from this
point of view ; and in general the idea that every offence
against the deity can be appraised, and made good by a
payment of a certain value, was not inconsistent with the
principles of ancient law, which deals with offences against
persons on the doctrine of retaliation, but admits to an
almost unlimited extent the doctrine that the injured
party may waive his right of retaliation in consideration
of a payment by the offender. But it is not the doctrine
of ancient law that an injured party can be compelled to
accept material compensation for an offence ; and therefore,
even on ordinary human analogies, no religious system
could be regarded as complete which had not more
powerful means of conjuring the divine displeasure than
were afforded by the mere offer of a gift or payment.
In point of fact all ancient religions had sacrificial
ceremonies of this more powerful kind, in which the
notion of pleasing the god by a gift either found no
expression at all, or evidently did not exhaust the signifi-
cance of the ritual ; and these are the sacrifices to which
the distinctive name of piacula is properly applied.
It is sometimes supposed that special piacula did not
exist in the older Semitic religions, and were invented for
the first time when the gift -theory of sacrifice began to
break down. But this supposition is incredible in itself,
and is not consistent with the historical evidence. It is
incredible that a gift should have been the oldest known
^
LECT. XI. SPECIAL PIACULA. 379
way of reconciling an offended god, for in ordinary life
atonement by fine came in at a relatively late date, and
never entirely superseded the lex talionis ; and it is
certain, from what we have learned by observing the old
form of piacular holocausts, that these sacrifices were not
originally regarded as payments to the god, but arose on
quite different lines, as an independent development of the
primitive sacrifice of communion, whose atoning efficacy
rested on the persuasion that those in whose veins the
same life - blood circulates cannot be other than friends,
bound to serve each other in all the offices of brother-
hood.
It has appeared in the course of our inquiry that two
kinds of sacrifice, which present features inconsistent witli
the gift-theory, continued to be practised by the ancient
Semites ; and to both kinds there was ascribed a special
efficacy in persuading or constraining the favour of the
gods. The first kind is the mystic sacrifice, represented by
a small class of exceptional rites, in which the victim was
drawn from some species of animals that retained even in
modern times their ancient repute of natural holiness.
Sacrifices of this sort could never fall under the gift-theory,
for creatures naturally holy are not man's property, but, so
far as they have an owner at all, are the property of the
god. The significance attached to these sacrifices, and the
nature of their peculiar ef^cacy, has already received
sufficient attention. The other kind of offering which was
thought of as something more than a mere gift, consisted
of holocausts, and other sacrifices, whose flesh was not con-
veyed to the god and eaten at his table, but burned without
the camp, or buried, or cast away in a desert place. This
kind of sacrifice we have already studied from a formal
point of view, considering the way in which its ritual w^as
differentiated from the old communion sacrifice, and also
380 MEANING OF lect. xi.
the way in which most sacrifices of the kind were ulti-
mately brought under the class of sacrificial gifts, by the
introduction of the practice of burning the flesh on the
altar or burying it in the ghahghah ; but we have not yet
considered the way in which these successive modifications
of ritual were interpreted and made to fit into the general
progress of social institutions and ideas. A consideration
of this side of the subject is necessary to complete our
study of the principles of ancient sacrifice, and to it the
remainder of the present lecture will be devoted.
It must, however, be remembered that in ancient religion
there was no authoritative interpretation of ritual. It was
-j imperative that certain things should be done, but every
man was free to put his own meaning on what was done.
Now the more complicated ritual prestations, to which
the elaborate piacular services of later times must be
reckoned, were not forms invented, once for all, to express a
definite system of ideas, but natural growths, which were
slowly developed through many centuries, and in their
final form bore the imprint of a variety of influences, to
which they had been subjected from age to age under the
changing conditions of human life and social order. Every
rite therefore lent itself to more than one interpretation,
according as this or that aspect of it was seized upon as
the key to its meaning. Under such circumstances we
must not attempt to fix a definite interpretation on any of
the developments of ancient ritual ; all that we can hope
to do is to trace in the ceremonial the influence of succes-
sive phases of thought, the presence of which is attested
to us by other movements in the structure of ancient society,
or conversely to show how features in ritual, of which the
historical origin had been forgotten, were accounted for on
more modern principles, and used to give support to new
ideas that were struggling for practical recognition.
LECT. XI. SPECIAL PIACULA. 381
From the analysis of the ritual of holocausts and other
piacula given in the last two lectures, it appears that
through all the varieties of atoning ceremony there runs
a common principle ; the victim is sacrosanct, and the
peculiar value of the ceremony lies in the operation per-
formed on its life, whether that life is merely conveyed to
the god on the altar, or is also applied to the worshippers
by the sprinkling of the blood, or some other lustral
ceremony. Both these features are nothing more than
inheritances from the most primitive form of sacramental
communion ; and in the oldest sacrifices their meaning is
perfectly transparent and unambiguous, for the ritual
exactly corresponds with the primitive ideas, that holiness
means kinship to the worshippers and their god, that all
sacred relations and all moral obligations depend on
physical unity of life, and that unity of physical life can
be created or reinforced by common participation in living
flesh and blood. At this earliest stage the atoning force
of sacrifice is purely physical, and consists in the redinte-
gration of the congenital physical bond of kinship, on
which the good understanding between the god and his
worshippers ultimately rests. But in the later stage of
religion, in which sacrilices of sacrosanct victims and
purificatory offerings are exceptional rites, these antique
ideas were no longer intelligible ; and in ordinary sacrifices
those features of the old ritual were dropped or modified
which gave expression to obsolete notions about holiness,
and the physical transfer of holy life from the victim
to the worshippers. Here, therefore, the question arises
why that which had ceased to be intelligible was still
preserved in a peculiar class of sacrifices. The obvious
answer is that it was preserved by the force of use and
precedent.
It is common, in discussions of the significance of
382 ORIGIN OF LECT. XI.
piacular ritual, to begin with the consideration that piacula
are atonements for sin, and to assume that the ritual was
devised with a view to the purchase of divine forgiveness.
But this is to take the thing by the wrong handle. The
characteristic features in piacular sacrifice are not the
invention of a later age, in which the sense of sin and
divine wrath was strong, but are features carried over
from a very primitive type of religion, in which the sense
of sin, in any proper sense of the word, did not exist at
all, and the whole object of ritual was to maintain the
bond of physical holiness that kept the religious community
together. What we have to explain is not the origin of
the sacrificial forms that later ages called piacular, but the
way in which the old type of sacrifice came to branch off
into two distinct types. And here we must consider that,
even in tolerably advanced societies, the distinction between
piacular and ordinary offerings long continued to be mainly
one of ritual, and that the former were not so much
sacrifices for sin, as sacrifices in wliich the ceremonial
forms, observed at the altar, continued to express the
original idea that the victim's life was sacrosanct, and
in some way cognate to the life of the god and his
worshippers. Thus, among the Hebrews of the pre-
prophetic period, it certainly appears that a peculiar potency
was assigned to holocausts and other exceptional sacrifices,
as a means of conjuring the divine displeasure ; but a
certain atoning force was ascribed to all sacrifices ; and,
on the other hand, sacrifices of piacular form and force
were offered on many occasions when we cannot suppose
the sense of sin or of divine anger to have been present in
any extraordinary degree. For example, it was the custom
to open a campaign with a burnt -offering, which in old
Israel was the most solemn piaculum ; but this did not
imply any feeling that war was a divine judgment and a
LECT. XI. SPECIAL PIACULA. 383
sign of the anger of Jehovah.^ It appears rather that the
sacrifice was properly the consecration of the warriors ; for
the Hebrew phrase for opening war is " to consecrate war "
(non^o ^np), and warriors are consecrated persons, subject
to special taboos.^ Here, therefore, it lies near at hand to
suppose that the holocaust is simply the modification, on
lines which have been already explained, of an ancient
form of sacramental communion ; and this is confirmed
by comparison with the Arabian use, where, at the open-
ing of a campaign, victims are slain and the living blood
applied to the tents of the warriors.''^ The Greeks in like
manner commenced their wars with piacular sacrifices of
the most solemn kind ; indeed, according to Phylarchus,'*
a human victim was at one time deemed indispensable ;
but this probably means no more than that the offerings
made on such an occasion were of the exceptional and
sacrosanct character with which legends of actual human
sacrifice are so frequently associated. One illustration of
Phylarchus's statement will occur to every one, viz. the
sacrifice of Iphigenia ; and here it is to be noted that,
while all forms of the legend are agreed that Agamemnon
must have committed some deadly sin, before so terrible an
offering was required of him, there is no agreement as to
^ The bumt-offeriiig at the opening of a campaign appears in Judg. vi. 20
(cf. ver. 26), xx. 26 ; 1 Sam. vii. 9, xiii. 10. In Judg. xi. 31 we have,
instead of a sacrifice before the war, a vow to offer a holocaust on its success-
ful termination. The view taken by the last redactor of the liistorical
books (Judg., Sam., Kings), that the wars of Israel with its neighbours
were always chastisements for sin, is not ancient ; cf. Gen. xxvii. 29, xlix. 8 ;
Numb. xxiv. 24 ; Deut. xxxiii. 29.
2 Isa. xiii. 3 ; Jer. li. 8. See supra, p. 148, and Additional Note D.
* Supra, p. 326. I conjecture that the form of gatliering warriors
together by sending round portions of a victim that has been hewn into
pieces (1 Sam. xi. 7 ; cf. Judg. xix. 29) had originally a sacramental sense,
similar to that expressed by the covenant form in which the victim is cut
in twain ; cf. Additional Note I, and the Scythian custom noticed by Lucian,
Toxaris, § 48.
' Ap. Porph., De Abst. ii. 56.
384 • ORIGIN OF
LECT. xr.
what his sin was. It is not therefore unreasonable to
think that in the original story the piaculum was simply
the ordinary preliminary to a campaign, and that later
ages could not understand why such a sacrifice should
be made, except to atone for mortal guilt.-^
If, now, it be asked why the ordinary preliminary to a
campaign was a sacrifice of the exceptionally solemn kind
which in later times was deemed to have a special reference
to sin, the answer must be that the ritual was fixed by
immemorial precedent, going back to the time when all
sacrifices were of the sacramental type, and involved the
shedding of a sacrosanct life. At that time every sacrifice
was an awful mystery, and not to be performed except on
great occasions, when it was most necessary that the bond
of kindred obligation between every member of the com-
munity, divine and human, should be as strong and fresh
as possible. The outbreak of war was plainly such an
occasion, and it is no hazardous conjecture that the rule
of commencing a campaign with sacrifice dates from the
most primitive times." Accordingly the ceremonial, to be
observed in sacrifice on such an occasion, would be pro-
tected by well-established tradition, and the victim would
continue to be treated at the altar with all the old ritual
forms which implied that its blood w^as holy and akin to
man's, long after the general sanctity of all animals of
sacrificial kind had ceased to be acknowledged in daily
life. And in the same way sacrifices of exceptional form,
in which the victim was treated as a human being, or its
blood was applied in a primitive ceremonial to the persons
^ The opening of a campaign appears also in Africa as one of the rare
occasions that justify the slaughter of a victim from the tribal herds ; see
above, p. 279.
- There is also some reason to think that in very ancient times a sacrifice
was appointed to be oifered after a victory. See Additional Note Is, Sacrifi.ce
by Victorious Warriors.
LECT. XL SPECIAL PIACULA. 385
of the worshippers, or its flesh was regarded as too sacred
to be eaten, would continue to be offered on all occasions
which were marked out, as demanding a sacrifice, by some
very ancient rule, dating from the time when the natural
sanctity of sacrificial kinds was still recognised. In such
cases the ancient ceremonial would be protected by im-
memorial custom ; while, on the other hand, there would
be nothing to prevent a more modern type of ritual from
coming into use on occasions for which there was no
ancient sacrificial precedent, e.g. on sucli occasions as arose
for the first time under the conditions of agricultural life,
when the old sanctity of domestic animals was very much
broken down. Sacrifices were vastly more frequent with
the agricultural than with the pastoral nations of antiqiiity,
but, among the older agricultural Semites, the occasions
that called for sacrifices of exceptional or piacular form
were not so numerous that they may not fairly be regarded
as broadly corresponding to the rare occasions for which
the death of a victim was already prescribed by the rules
of their nomadic ancestors.
This, it may be said, is no more than a hypothesis, but
it satisfies the conditions of a legitimate hypothesis, by
postulating the operation of no unknown or uncertain
cause, but only of that force of precedent which in all
times has been so strong to keep alive religious forms of
which the original meaning is lost. And in certain cases,
at any rate, it is very evident that rites of exceptional
form, which later ages generally connected with ideas of
sin and atonement, were merely the modern representatives
of primitive sacraments, kept up through sheer force of
liabit, without any deeper meaning corresponding to the
peculiar solemnity of their form. Thus the annual piacula
that were celebrated, with exceptional rites, by most nations
of antiquity are not necessarily to be regarded as having
2 B
386 ANNUAL LECT. XI.
their first origin in a growing sense of sin or fear of divine
wrath, — although these reasons operated in later times to
multiply such acts of service and increase the importance
attached to them, — but are often nothing more than sur-
vivals of ancient annual sacrifices of communion in the
body and blood of a sacred animal. Eor in some of these
rites, as we have seen in Lecture VIII.,^ the form of com-
munion in flesh too holy to be eaten except in a sacred
mystery is retained ; and, where this is not the case, there
is at least some feature in the annual piaculum which
reveals its connection with the oldest type of sacrifice.
It is a mistake to suppose that annual religious feasts date
only from the beginnings of agricultural life, with its
yearly round of seed-time and harvest ; for in all parts of
the world annual sacraments are found, and that not
merely among pastoral races, but even in rude hunting
tribes that have not emerged from the totem stage.^ And
though some of these totem sacraments involve actual
communion in the flesh and blood of the sacred animal,
tlie commoner case, even in this primitive stage of society,
is that the theanthropic victim is deemed too holy to be
eaten, and therefore, as in the majority of Semitic piacula,
is burned, buried, or cast into a stream.^ It is certainly
illegitimate to connect these very primitive piacula with
any explicit ideas of sin and forgiveness ; they, have their
^ Supra, p. 272 sqq.
" For examples of animal sacraments by sacrifice of the totem, see Frazer;
Totemism, p. 48, and supra, p. 277, note 1.
^ I apprehend that in most climates the vicissitudes of the seasons are
certainly not less important to the savage huntsman or to the pastoral
barbarian than to the more civilised tiller of the soil. From Doughty's
account of the pastoral tribes of the Arabian desert, and also from what
Agatharchides tells us of the herdsmen by the Red Sea, we perceive that
in the purely pastoral life the seasons when pasture fails are annual periods
of semi-starvation for man and beast. Among still ruder races, like the
Australians, who have no domestic animals, the difference of the seasons is
yet more painfully felt ; so much so, indeed, that in some parts of Australia
LECT. XI. PIACULA. 387
origin in a purely naturalistic conception of holiness, and
mean nothing more than that the mystic unity of life in
the religious community is liable to wear out, and must be
revived and strengthened from time to time.
Among the annual piacula of the more advanced Semites
which, though they are not mystical sacrifices of an " un-
clean" animal, yet bear on their face the marks of extreme
antiquity, the first place belongs to the Hebrew Passover,
held in the spring month Msan, where the primitive
character of the offering appears not only from the details
of the ritual,^ but from the coincidence of its season with
that of the Arabian sacrifices in the month Eajab.
Similarly in Cyprus, on the first of April, a sheep was
offered to Astarte (Aphrodite) with ritual of a character
evidently piacular.2 At Hierapolis, in like manner, the
chief feast of the year was the vernal ceremony of the
Pyre, in which animals were burned alive — an antique
ritual which has been illustrated in the last lecture. And
again, among the Harranians, the first half of Nisan was
marked by a series of exceptional sacrifices of piacular
colour.^
So remarkable a concurrence in the season of the great
annual piacular rites of Semitic communities leaves little
doubt as to the extreme antiquity of the institution.
cLiltlren are not born except at one season of the j'ear ; the annual changes
of nature have impressed themselves on the life of man to a degree hardly
conceivable to us. In pastoral Arabia domestic cattle habitually yean in
the brief season of the spring pasture (Doughty, i. 429), and this would
serve to fix an annual season of sacrifice.
^ Supra, p. 326. Note also that the head and the inwards liave to be
eaten, i.e. the special seats of life (Ex. xii. 9).
2 Lydus, De Mens. iv. 45 ; cf. Additional Note H. The x.a'hiov marks
the sacrifice as piacular, whether my conjecture kuVim yKivaff/ji.ivoi for Kulia
t(rx.f^ocir/iiy(iv is accepted or not.
' Fihrlst, p. 322. Traces of the sacredness of the month Nisan are found
also at Palmyra {Enc. Brit, xviii. 199, note 2), and among the Nabatseaus,
as Berger has inferred from a study of the inscriptions of Madain-Sillih.
388 ANNUAL LECT. XI.
Otherwise the season of the annual piacula is not material
to our present purpose, except in so far as its coincidence
with the yeaning time appears to be connected with the
frequent use of sucking lambs and other very young
animals as piacular victims. This point, however, seems
to be of some importance as an indirect evidence of the
antiquity of annual piacula. The reason often given for
the sacrifice of very young animals, that a man thus got
rid of a sacred obligation at the very cheapest rate, is not
one that can be seriously maintained ; while, on the other
hand, the analogy of infanticide, which in many savage
countries is not regarded as murder, if it be performed
immediately after birth, makes it very intelligible that, in
those primitive times when a domestic animal had a life
as sacred as that of a tribesman, new-born calves or lambs
should be selected for sacrifice. The selection of an annual
season of sacrifice coincident with tlie yeaning-tim'e may
therefore be plausibly referred to the time when sacrificial
slaughter was still a rare and awful event, involving-
responsibilities which the worshippers were anxious to
reduce, by every device, within the narrowest possible limits.
The point, which I took a little time ago, that sacrifices
of piacular form are not necessarily associated with a sense
of sin, or even with a sense of the anger of the god, comes
out very clearly in the case of annual piacula. Among
the Hebrews, under the Law, the annual expiation on the
great Day of Atonement was directed to cleanse the people
from all their sins,^ i.e. according to the Mishnic interpre-
tation, to purge away the guilt of all sins, committed during
the year, that had not been already expiated by penitence,
or by the special piacula appointed for particular offences ; ^
but there is little or no trace of any view resembling this
in connection with the annual piacula of the heathen
^ Lev. xvi. 30. - Yomu, viii. 8, 9.
LECT. XI. PIACULA. 389
Semites ; and even in the Old Testament this interpreta-
tion appears to be modern. The Day of Atonement is a
much less ancient institution than the Passover ; and in
the Passover, though the sprinkled blood has a protecting
efficacy, the law prescribes no forms of humiliation and
contrition such as are enjoined for the more modern rite.
Again, the prophet Ezekiel, whose sketch of a legislation
for Israel, on its restoration from captivity, is older
than the law of Leviticus, does indeed provide for two
annual atoning ceremonies, in tlie first and in tlie seventh
month ; ^ but the point of these ceremonies lies in an
elaborate application of the blood to various parts of the
temple, with the object of "reconciling the house." This
reference of the sacrifice reappears also in Lev. xvi. ;
the sprinkling of the blood on the great Day of Atone-
ment " cleanses the altar, and makes it holy from all the
uncleanness of the children of Israel." '" Here an older and
merely physical conception of the ritual breaks through,
which has nothing to do with the forgiveness of sin ; for
uncleanness in the Levitical ritual is not an ethical concep-
tion. It seems that the holiness of the altar is liable to
be impaired, and requires to be annually refreshed by an
application of holy blood — a conception which it would be
hard to justify from the higher teaching of the Old Testa-
ment, but which is perfectly intelligible as an inheritance
from primitive ideas about sacrifice, in which the altar-
idol on its part, as well as the worshippers on theirs, is
periodically reconsecrated by the sprinkling of holy {i.e.
kindred) blood, in order that the life - bond between the
god it represents and his kindred worshippers may be kept
fresh. This is the ultimate meaning of the sprinkling
1 Ezek. xlv. 19, 20 (LXX.).
2 Lev. xvi. 19 ; cf. ver. 33, where the atonement extends to the whole
sanctuary.
890 ANNUAL LECT. XI.
with a tribesman's blood, which, as Theophrastus tells us,
was demanded yearly by so many altars of antiquity, and
also of the yearly sprinkling where the victim was not a
man but a sacrosanct or theanthropic animal.
The " reconciling of the house " or the " cleansing of the
altar," however, are mere priestly phrases, which had no
intelligible meaning to the worshippers themselves in the
later ages of antique religion. And, as I have already said,
it does not appear that any heathen nation habitually
looked on the annual piacula as a means of obtaining
forgiveness for the sins of the community during the past
year. On the contrary, the explanation was generally
sought in a myth, and the myth was founded on the
features of the ritual. The annual piacular sacrifice was
very often an actual human victim. Thus, to confine
ourselves to Semitic worships, although the same thing is
true also of Greece, a yearly human sacrifice was offered
by the Arabs of Dumaetha,-^ and by the Carthaginians.^
And where this was not the case we sometimes find a
legend that in old times a human victim had been offered,
but that an animal sacrifice had come to be accepted in its
room. Thus, for example, the annual victim at Laodicea
ad Mare was a stag, but the story was that in former
times a maiden was sacrificed.^ In such cases, if at all,
one would suppose that the awful rite would have served
to quicken the sense of human sinfulness, and lead men
to approach the altar with genuine contrition for their
personal failures to attain the standard of divine righteous-
ness. But, as a rule, no such ideas seem to have been
suggested, and the rite was simply taken as an established
thing, sufficiently explained when the circumstances had
1 Porph., Z)e Ahst. ii. 56.
2 Ibid. ii. 27 (from Theophrastus) ; Pliny, H. N. xxxvi. 29.
^ This interesting sacrifice is discussed at length in Additional Kott G.
LECT. XI.
PIACULA. 391
been related under which the sacrifice was first instituted.
In some cases indeed, at least in Greece/^ it was taught that
the annual sacrifice had been appointed as a punishment for
some ancient crime, for which the community was bound
to make yearly satisfaction from generation to generation.
Among the Semites, however, the myth generally assumed
another aspect, and the annual piaculum was taken to be a
commemoration of the death of the god. Originally, the
death of the god was nothing else than the death of the
theanthropic victim ; but, when this ceased to be under-
stood, it was thought that the piacular sacrifice represented
an historical tragedy, in which the god was killed. Thus
at Laodicea the annual sacrifice of the stag that stood for
a maiden, and was offered to the goddess of the city, stands
side by side with a legend that the goddess was a maiden,
who had been sacrificed to consecrate the foundation of
the town, and was thenceforth w^orshipped as its Fortune,
like Dido at Carthage ; it was therefore the death of the
goddess herself which was annually renewed in the piacular
rite. The same explanation applies to those scenic re-
presentations that have been spoken of in the last lecture,
where the deity is yearly burned in effigy ; for the effigy
in such cases takes the place of an actual victim.^ And
in like manner the annual mourning for the death of
Adonis, which supplies the closest parallel in point of
form to the fasting and humiliation on the Hebrew Day
of Atonement, is simply a scenic commemoration of the
death of the god, in which the worshippers take part
^ Tims the annual sacrifice to Hera Acrrea at Corinth {i^upi-a, p. 287) was
an atonement for the death of the children of Medea.
2 The substitution of an effigy for a human sacrifice, or a victim represent-
ing a god, is very common. The Romans, for example, substituted puppets
of rushes or wool for human offerings in the Argea and the worship of
Mania. In Mexico, again, human victims were habitually regarded as
incarnations of the deity, but also paste images of the gods were made and
eaten sacramentally.
392 ANNUAL DEATH lect. xi.
with appropriate wailing and lamentation, but without
any thought corresponding to the Christian idea that the
death of the God -man is a death for the sins of the
people. On the contrary, if, as in the Adonis myth,
an attempt is made to give some further account of the
annual rite than is supplied by the story that the god
had once been killed and rose again, the explanation
offered is derived from the physical decay and regenera-
tion of nature. The Canaanite Adonis or Tammuz was
a form of the local Baal, who, as we have already learned,
was regarded by his worshippers as the source of all
natural growth and fertility. His death therefore meant
a temporary suspension of the life of nature, and was held
to be annually repeated, not merely in ritual symbol at
the sanctuary, but in the annual withering and decay of
vegetative life. And this death of the life of nature the
worshippers lament out of natural sympathy, without any
moral idea, just as modern man is touched with natural
melancholy at the falling of the autumn leaves.^
1 The further discussion of the Adonis myth, and other legends of the
death of the gods, must be reserved for a future course of lectures, dealing
with Semitic mythology in detail. I may liere, however, say briefly that
the mourning for Adonis was not, in my judgment, originally a lament over
decaying nature, but simply the oflicial mourning over the slaughter of a
theanthropic victim in whose death the god died. Tlie accounts we possess
of the scenic representation of the Adonis tragedy, tell us how he was repre-
sented dead on a bier, and carried out to be cast into the sea, but they say
nothing of a representation of his death. This, however, cannot have been
lacking in tlie original rite, and was probably dropped because it was mis-
nnderstood. If the reference in Zech. xii. 10, 11, to the mourning of
Hadadrimmon is really, as seems most probable, an allusion to some form
of the lamentation for Adonis, it seems that the piercing of him who is
mourned over must also be part of the figure, and refer to a symbolical
representation of the death of the god. JVIy own belief is that tlie piacular
sacrifice of swine at Cyprus, on April 2, represents the death of the god
himself, not an act of vengeance for his death, just as in Crete the sacrifice
of a bull by tearing it in jjieces with the teeth (Firmicus, cap. 6) represented
the death of the Bull-god Diony.sus. Adonis, in short, is the Swinegod, and
in this, as in many other cases, the sacred victim has been changed by false
interpretation into the enemy of the god.
LECT. XI. OF THE GOD. 393
The interpretation of the death of the god as correspond-
ing to the annual withering up of nature, which was
naturally suggested by the ideas of Baal-worship, effectually
shut the door to any ethical interpretation of the annual
religious mourning. That the God-man dies for His people,
and that His death is their life, is an idea which was in
some degree foreshadowed by the oldest mystical sacrifices.
It was foreshadowed, indeed, in a very crude and material-
istic form, and without any of those ethical ideas which
the Christian doctrine of the atonement derives from a
profounder sense of sin and divine justice. And yet the
voluntary death of the divine victim, which we have seen
to be a conception not foreign to ancient sacrificial ritual,
contained the germ of the deepest thought in the Christian
doctrine : the thought that the Eedeemer gives Himself for
His people, that " for their sakes He consecrates Himself,
that they also might be consecrated in truth." * But in Baal-
worship, when the death of the god becomes a mere cos-
mical process, and the most solemn rites that ancient religion
knew sank to the level of a scenic representation of the
yearly revolutions of the seasons, the features of primseval
ritual which contained germs of better things are effectually
hidden out of sight, and the offices of religion cease to
appeal to any higher feeling than that of sympathy with
the changing moods of nature.
In the brighter days of Semitic heathenism the annual
wailing for the god hardly suggested any serious thought
that was not presently drowned in an outburst of mirth
saluting the resurrection of the Baal on the following
morning ; and in more distressful times, when the gloomier
aspects of religion were those most in sympathy with the
prevailing hopelessness of a decadent nation — such times
as those in which Ezekiel found the women of Jerusalem
1 John xvii. 19.
394 INTERPRETATION OF lect. xi.
mourning for Tammuz — the idea that the gods themselves
were not exempt from the universal law of decay, and had
ordered this truth to be commemorated in their temples
by bloody, or even human, sacrifices, could only favour the
idea that religion was as cruel as the relentless march of
adverse fate, and that man's life was ruled by powers that
were not to be touched by love or pity, but, if they could
be moved at all, would only be satisfied by the sacrifice of
man's happiness and the surrender of his dearest treasures.
The close psychological connection between sensuality and
cruelty, which is familiar to students of the human mind,
displays itself in ghastly fashion in the sterner aspects of
Semitic heathenism ; and the same sanctuaries which, in
prosperous times, resounded with licentious mirth and carnal
gaiety, were filled in times of distress with the cowardly
lamentations of worshippers, who to save their own lives
were ready to give up everything they held dear, even to
the sacrifice of a first-born or only child.
On the whole the annual piacula of Semitic heathenism
appear theatrical and unreal, when they are not cruel and
repulsive. The stated occurrence of gloomy rules at fixed
seasons, and without any direct relation to human conduct,
gave the whole ceremony a mechanical character, and so
made it inevitable that it should be either accepted as a
mere scenic tragedy, whose meaning was summed up in a
myth, or interpreted as a proof that the divine powers
were never thoroughly reconciled to man, and only tolerated
their worshippers in consideration of costly atonements
constantly renewed. I apprehend that even in Israel the
annual piacula, which were observed from an early date,
had little or no share in the development of the higher
sense of sin and responsibility which characterise the
religion of the Old Testament. The Passover is a rite of
the most primaeval antiquity ; and in the local cults
LECT. XI. ANNUAL PIACULA. 395
annual mournings, like the lamentation for Jeplithah's
daughter — which undoubtedly was connected with an
annual sacrifice, like that which at Laodicea commemorated
the mythical death of the virgin goddess — had been yearly
repeated from very ancient times. Yet only after the
exile, and then only by a sort of afterthought, which does
not override the priestly idea that the annual atonement is
above all a reconsecration of the altar and the sanctuary,
do we find the annual piaculum of the Day of Atonement
interpreted as a general atonement for the sins of Israel
during the past year. In the older literature, when
exceptional and piacular rites are interpreted as satisfac-
tions for sin, the offence is always a definite one, and the
piacular rite has not a stated and periodical character, but
is directly addressed to the atonement of a particular sin
or course of sinful life. Annual atonements, so far as they
received anything more than a mythical interpretation,
appear — if we may judge from the case of the Passover —
to have been regarded as a means of placing the worshippers
in a special way under the divine protection, without any
express reference to the taking away of guilt.
The conception of piacular rites as a satisfaction for sin
appears to have arisen, after the original sense of the
theanthropic sacrifice of a kindred animal was forgotten,
mainly in connection with the view that the life of the
victim was the equivalent of the life of a human member
of the religious community. We have seen that when the
victim was no longer regarded as naturally holy, and
equally akin to the god and his worshippers, the ceremony
of its death was still performed with solemn circumstances,
not appropriate to the slaughter of a mere common beast.
It was thus inevitable that the victim should be regarded
either as a representative of the god, or as the representa-
tive of a tribesman, whose life was sacred to his fellows
U-
396 SACRIFICES AND lect. xi.
The former interpretation x^redominated in the annual
piacula of the Baal religions, but the latter was that
naturally indicated in such atoning sacrifices as were not
periodical, but called for by special emergencies which
did not lend themselves to a mythical interpretation.
For we have already seen that in old times the circum-
stances of the slaughter were those of a death which could
only be justified by the consent, and even by the active
participation, of the whole community, i.e. of the judicial
execution of a kinsman.^ In later times this rule was
modified, and in ordinary sacrifices the victim was slain
either by the offerer, or by professional slaughterers, who
formed a class of inferior ministers at the greater sanctu-
aries." But communal holocausts and piacula continued to
be slain by the chief priests or by the heads of the
community or by their chosen representatives, so that the
slaughter retained the character of a solemn public act/
1 Supra, p. 266 .s-r/.
2 In C. I. S. Ko. 86 the ministers of the temple include a class of
slaughterers (Dn2T), and so it was at Hierapolis {Dea Syria, xliii.). Among
the Jews, at the second temple, the Levites often acted as slaughterers ; hut
before the captivity the temple slaughterers were uncircumcised foreigners
(Ezek. xliv. 6 sqq.), a usage which probably had its origin in the fact that
the temple was properly the king's chapel, and that the victims, at least in
older times, were mainly slain to provide his table. For " chief slaughterer "
is in Hebrew tlie title of the chief of the bodyguard ; tlie slaughter of cattle
being in ancient times an office not unworthy of a warrior {Odi/.s. i. 108 ;
Eurip., Electra, 815 ; cf. 0. T. in J. C'h., p. 426) ; and the bodyguard of
the Judffian kings, which also attended them in the temple, was composed of
foreigners. Foreign guards were preferred, because no feeling of kinship
could come in to prevent them executing the king's orders against any of
his subjects. Were foreigners preferred as butchers on a similar principle ?
We have seen that among the Troglodytes the butcher was unclean, and
that at Corinth the annual piaculum to Hera Acrsea was killed by slaves
{supra, pp. 278, 287).
3 Thus in the Old Testament we find young men as sacrificers in Ex.
xxiv. 5 ; the elders in Lev. iv, 15, Deut. xxi. 4 ; Aaron in Lev. xvi. 15 ;
cf. Yoma, iv. 3. All sacrifices, except the last named, might, according to
the E,abbins, be killed by any Israelite.
The choice of "young men," or rather " lads," as sacrificers in Ex. xxiv.
LECT. XI. JUDICIAL EXECUTIONS. 397
Again, the feeling that the slaying involves a grave
responsibility, and must be justified by divine permission,
was expressed by the Arabs, even in ordinary slaughter,
by the use of the bismillah, i.e. by the slaughterer striking
the victim in the name of his god/ But in many piacula
this feelins: was carried much further, and care was taken
to slay the victim without bloodshed, or to make believe
that it had killed itself.^ Certain holocausts, like those of
the Pyre-festival at Hierapolis, were burned alive ; and
other piacula were simply pushed over a height, so that
they might seem to kill themselves by their fall. This
was done at Hierapolis, both with animals and with
human victims ; and according to the Mishna the Hebrew
scapegoat was not allowed to go free in the wilderness,
but was killed by being pushed over a precipice.^ The
same kind of sacrifice occurs in Egypt, in a rite which
is possibly of Semitic origin,'* and in Greece, in more
than one case where the victims were human.'^
All such forms of sacrifice are precisely parallel to
is curiously analogous to the choice of lads as executioners. Judg. viii. 20
is not an isolated case, for Nilus also (p. 67) says that the Saracens charged
lads with the execution of their captives.
1 The same feeling is expressed in Lev. xvii. 11 ; Gen. viii. 3 sqq.
'^ The blood that calls for vengeance is blood that falls on the ground
(Gen. iv. 10). Hence blood to which vengeance is refused is said to be
trodden under foot (Ibn Hisham, p. 79, ult., p. 861, 1. 5), and forgotten
blood is covered by the earth (Job xvi. 18). And so we often hnd the idea
that a death in which no blood is shed, or none falls upon the ground, does
not call for vengeance. Infanticide in Arabia was effected by burying the
child alive ; captive kings were slain by bleeding them into a cup, and if
one drop touched the ground it was thought that their death would be
revenged (supra, p. 349, note 2). Applications of this priiiciple to sacri-
fices of sacrosanct and kimlred animals are frequent ; they are strangled or
killed with a blunt instrument (supra, p. 325 ; note also the club or
mallet that appears in sacrificial scenes on ancient Chaldean cylinders,
Iklenant, Glyptique, i. 151), or at least no drop of their blood must fall
on the ground (Bancroft, iii. 168).
3 Dca Syria, Iviii. ; Yomu, vi. 6.
* I'lutarch, Is. et Os. § 30 ; cf. Additional Note G.
' At the Thargelia, and in the Leucadian ceremony.
398 SACRIFICES AND lect. xi.
those which were employed in sacred executions, i.e. in
the judicial slaying of members of the community. The
criminal in ancient times was either stoned by the whole
congregation, as was the usual form of the execution among
the ancient Hebrews ; or strangled, as was commonly done
among the later Jews ; or drowned, as in the Eoman punish-
ment for parricide, where the kin in the narrower sense
is called on to execute justice on one of its own members ;
or otherwise disposed of in some way which either avoids
bloodshed or prevents the guilt of blood from being fixed
on an individual. These coincidences between the ritual
of sacrifice and of execution are not accidental ; in each
case they had their origin in the scruple against shedding
kindred blood ; and, when the old ideas of the kinship
of man and beast became unintelligible, they helped to
establish the view that the victim whose life was treated
as equivalent to that of a man was a sacrifice to justice,
accepted in atonement for the guilt of the worshippers.
The parallelism between piacular sacrifice and execution
came out with particular clearness where the victim was
wholly burnt, or where it was cast down a precipice ; for
burning was the punishment appointed among the Hebrews
and other ancient nations for impious offences,^ and casting
from a cliff is one of the commonest forms of execution.^
The idea originally connected with the execution of
a tribesman is not exactly penal in our sense of the
J Gen. xxxviii. 24 ; Lev. xx. 14, xxi. 9 ; Josh. vii. 15.
' The Tarpeian rock at Rome will occur to every one. Among the Hebrews
we find captives so killed (2 Chron. xxv. 12), and in our own days the Sinai
Arabs killed Prof. Palmer by making him leap from a rock ; (;f. also 2 Kings
viii. 12, Hos. x. 14, from which it would seem that this was the usual way
of killing non-combatants. I apprehend that the obscure form of execution
"before the Lord," mentioned in 2 Sam. xxi. 9 (and also Numb. xxv. 4), is
of the same sort, for the victims fall and are killed ; J?p"in will answer to
s.
«_itl. ^ote that this religious execution takes place at the season of the
paschal piaculum.
LECT. XI. JUDICIAL EXECUTIONS. 399
word ; the object is not to punish the offender, but to
rid the community of an impious member — ordinarily a
man who has shed tlie sacred tribal blood. Murder and
incest, or offences of a like kind against the sacred laws
of blood, are in primitive society the only crimes of which
the community as such takes cognisance ; the offences of
man against man are matters of private law, to be settled
between the parties on the principle of retaliation or by
the payment of damages. But murder, to which as the
typical form of crime we may confine our attention, is an
inexpiable oifence, for which no compensation can be
taken ; the man who has killed his kinsman or his
covenant ally, whether of design or by chance, is impious,
and must be cut off from his community by death or
outlawry. And in such a case the execution or banish-
ment of the culprit is a religious duty, for if it is not
performed the anger of the deity rests on the whole kin
or community of the murderers.^
In the oldest state of society the punishment of a
murderer is not on all fours with a case of blood-revenge.
Blood-revenge applies to manslaughter, i.e. to the killing of
a stranger. And in that case the dead man's kin make no
effort to discover and punish the individual slayer ; they
hold his whole kin responsible for his act, and take
vengeance on the first of them on whom they can lay
hands. In the case of murder, on the other hand, the
point is to rid the kin of an impious person, who has
violated the sanctity of the tribal blood, and here there-
fore it is important to discover and punish the criminal
himself. But if he cannot be discovered, some other means
must be taken to blot out the impiety and restore the
harmony between the community and its god, and for this
purpose a sacramental sacrifice is obviously indicated, such
1 Deut. xxi. 1-9.
400 DOCTRINE OF LECT. XI.
as Deut. xxi. provides for the purging of the community
from the guilt of an untraced murder. In such a case it
was inevitable that the sacrifice, performed as it was with
circumstances closely akin to those of an execution, should
come to be regarded as a surrogate for the death of the
true culprit. And this interpretation was all the more
readily established because, from an early date, the alliance
of different kins had begun to give rise to cases of homi-
cide in which the line of distinction was no lon^rer clear
between murder and manslaughter, between the case where
the culprit himself must die, and the case where any life
kindred to his may suffice. Thus in the time of David ^
the Israelites admit that a crime calling for exj^iation was
committed by Saul when he slew the Gibeonites, who were
the sworn allies of Israel. But, on the other hand, the
Gibeonites claim satisfaction under the law of blood-
revenge, and ask that in lieu of Saul himself certain
members of his house shall be given up to them. And in
this way the idea of substitution is brought in, even in a
case which is, strictly speaking, one of murder.
In all discussion of the doctrine of substitution as
applied to sacrifice, it must be remembered that private
sacrifice is a younger thing than clan sacrifice, and that
private piacula offered by an individual for his own sins
are of comparatively modern institution. The mortal sin
of an individual — and it is only mortal sin that has to be
considered in this connection — was a thing that affected
the whole community, or the whole kin of the offender.
Thus the inexpiable sin of the sons of Eli is visited on
his whole clan from generation to generation ; ^ the sin of
Achan is the sin of Israel, and as such is punished by the
defeat of the national army ; ^ and the sin of Saul and
" his bloody house " (i.e. the house involved in the blood-
^ 2 Sam. xxi. ^ 1 Sam. ii. 27 sqq. ' Josh. vii. 1, 11.
LECT. XI. SUBSTITUTION. 401
shed) leads to a three years' famine. Accordingly it is
the business of the community to narrow the responsibility
for the crime, and to free itself of the contagious taint by
fixincj the g;uilt either on a single individual, or at least on
his immediate kin, as in the case of Achan, who was stoned
and then burned with his whole family. Hence, when a
tribesman is executed for an impious offence, he dies on
behalf of the community, to restore normal relations
between them and their god ; so that the analogy with
sacrifice is very close in purpose as well as in form. And
so, the cases in which the anger of the god can be traced
to the crime of a particular individual, and atoned for by his
death, are very naturally seized upon to explain the cases in
which the sin of the community cannot be thus individualised,
but where, nevertheless, according to ancient custom, recon-
ciliation is sought through the sacrifice of a theanthropic
victim. The old explanation, that the life of the sacrosanct
animal is used to retie the life-bond between the god and his
worshippers, fell out of date when the kinship of races of
men with animal kinds was forgotten. A new explanation
had to be sought ; and none lay nearer than that the sin
of the community was concentrated on the victim, and
that its death was accepted as a sacrifice to divine justice.
This explanation was natural, and appears to have been
widely adopted, though it hardly became a formal dogma,
for ancient religion had no official dogmas, but contented
itself with continuing to practise antique rites, and letting
every one interpret them as he would. Even in the
Levitical law the imposition of hands on the head of the
victim is not formally interpreted as a laying of the sins of
the people on its head, except in the case of the scape-goat.^
And in this case the carrying away of the people's guilt
to an isolated and desert region (mn )*"iN*) has its nearest
^ Lev. xvi. 21.
2c
i/
1^
402 PIACULA AND lect. xi.
analogies, not in ordinary atoning sacrifices, but in those
physical methods of getting rid of an infectious taboo
which characterise the lowest forms of superstition. The
same form of disinfection recurs in the Levitical legis-
lation, wdiere a live bird is made to fly away with the
contagion of leprosy,^ and in Arabian custom, when a
widow before remarriage makes a bird fly away with
the uncleanness of lier widowhood.^ In ordinary burnt-
offerings and sin-offerings the imposition of hands is not
officially interpreted by the Law as a transference of sin
to the victim, but rather has the same sense as in acts of
blessing or consecration,^ where the idea no doubt is that the
physical contact between the parties serves to identify them,
but not specially to transfer guilt from the one to the other.
In the Levitical ritual all piacula, both public and
private, refer only to sins committed unwittingly. As
regards the sin-offering for the people this is quite intelli-
gible, in accordance with what has just been said ; for if the
national sin can be brought home to an individual, he of
course must be punished for it. But the private sin-
offerings presented by an individual, for sins committed
unwittingly, and subsequently brought to his knowledge,
appear to be a modern innovation ; before the exile the
private offences for which satisfaction had to be made at
the sanctuary were not mortal sins, and gave no room for
the application of the doctrine of life for life, but were
atoned for by a money payment, on the analogy of the
satisfaction given by payment of a fine for the offences of
^ Lev. xiv. 7, 53 ; cf. Zech. v. 5 sqq.
2 Taj al-' Arils, s.v. ^, VIII. (Lane, s.v. ; 0. T. in J. Ch. \). 439;
Wellh., p. 156). An Assyrian parallel in Records of the Past, ix. 151. It
is indeed probable that in the oldest times the outlawry of a criminal meant
nothing more than freeing the coninmnity, just in this way, from a
deadly contagion.
» Gen. xlviii. 14 ; Num. viii. 10 ; Dent, xxxiv. 9 ; cf. 2 Kings ii. 13 sqq.
LECT. XI. DIVINE JUSTICE. 403
man against man (2 Kings xii. 16). And, on the whole,
while there can be no doubt that public piacula were often
regarded as surrogates for the execution of an offender,
who either was not known or whom the community
hesitated to brin^ to justice, I very much doubt whether
private offerings were often viewed in this light ; even the
sacrifice of a child, as we have already seen, was conceived
rather as the greatest and most exorbitant gift that a
man can offer.^ The very idea of an execution implies a
public function, and not a private prestation, and so I
apprehend that the conception of a satisfaction paid to
divine justice could not well be connected with any but
public piacula. In these the death of* the victim might
very well pass for the scenic representation of an execution,
and so represent the community as exonerating itself from
all complicity in the crime to be atoned for. Looked at in
this view, atoning rites no doubt served in some measure
to keep alive a sense of divine justice and of the imperative
duty of righteousness within the community. But the
moral value of such scenic representation was probably
not very great ; and where an actual human victim was
offered, so that the sacrifice practically became an execu-
tion, and was interpreted as a punishment laid on the com-
munity by its god, the ceremony was so wholly deficient in
distributive justice that it was calculated to perplex,
rather than to educate, the growing sense of morality.
Christian theologians, looking on the sacrifices of the
Old Testament as a type of the sacrifice on the cross,
and interpreting the latter' as a satisfaction to divine
justice, have undoubtedly over-estimated the ethical lessons
embodied in the Jewish sacrificial system ; as may be
inferred even from the fact that, for many centuries, the
1 The Greek piacula for murder were certainly not regarded as executions,
but as cathartic rites.
404 CATHARTIC lect. xi.
official theology of the Church was content to interpret
the death of Christ as a ransom for mankind paid to the
devil, or as a satisfaction to the divine honour (Anselm)
rather than as a recognition of the sovereignty of the
moral law of justice. If Christian theology shews such
variations in the interpretation of the doctrine of substitu-
tion, it is obviously absurd to expect to find a consistent
doctrine on this head in connection with ancient sacrifice ;^
and it may safely be affirmed that the influence of piacular
sacrifices, in keeping the idea of divine justice before the
minds of ancient nations, was very slight compared with
the influence of the vastly more important idea that the
gods, primarily as the vindicators of the duties of kinship,
and then also of the wider morality which ultimately
grew up on the basis of kinship, preside over the public
exercise of justice, give oracles for the detection of hidden
offences, and sanction or demand the execution of guilty
tribesmen. Of these very real functions of divine justice
the piacular sacrifice, when interpreted as a scenic
execution, is at best only an empty shadow.
Another interpretation of piacular sacrifice, which has
great prominence in antiquity, is that it purges away
guilt. The cleansing effect of piacula is mainly associated
with the application to the persons of the worshippers of
sacrificial blood or ashes, or of holy water and other things
of sacred virtue, including holy herbs and even the
fragrant smoke of incense. This is a topic which it would
be easy to illustrate at great length and with a variety of
curious particulars ; but the principle involved is so
simple that little would be gained by the enumeration of
all the different substances to which a cathartic virtue was
^ Jewish theology has a great deal to say about the acceptance of the
merits of the righteous on behalf of the wicked, but very little about atone-
ment through sacrifice.
LECT. XI. SACRIFICES. 405
ascribed, either by themselves or as accessories to an
atoning sacrifice. A main point to be noted is that
ritual purity has in principle nothing to do with physical
cleanliness, though such a connection was ultimately
established by the common use of water as a means of
lustration. Primarily, purification means the application
to the person of some medium which removes a taboo,
and enables the person purified to mingle freely in the
ordinary life of his fellows. It is not therefore identical
with consecration, for the latter often brings special taboos
with it. And so we find that the ancients used purifica-
tory rites after as well as before holy functions/ But
as the normal life of the member of a religious community
is in a broad sense a holy life, lived in accordance with
certain standing precepts of sanctity, and in a constant
relation to the deity of the community, the main use of
purificatory rites is not to tone down, to the level of
ordinary life, the excessive holiness conveyed by contact
with sacrosanct things, but rather to impart to one who
has lost it the measure of sanctity that puts him on the
level of ordinary social life. So much indeed does this
view of the matter predominate, that among the Hebrews
all purifications are ordinarily reckoned as purification
from uncleanness ; thus the man who has burned the red
heifer or carried its ashes, becomes ceremonially unclean,
though in reality the thing that he has been in contact
with was not impure but most holy ; ^ and similarly the
handling of the Scriptures, according to the Eabbins,
defiles the hands, i.e. entails a ceremonial washing. Puri-
fications, therefore, are performed by the use of any of
the physical means that re-establish normal relations with
the deity and the congregation of his worshippers — in
' See infra, Additional Note C, p. 432 sq , and supra, p. 332 sq
^ Numb. xix. 8, 10.
406 CATHARTIC lect. Xl.
short, by contact with something that contains and can
impart a divine virtue. For ordinary purposes the use
of living water may suffice, for, as we know, there is a
sacred principle in such water. But the most powerful
cleansing media are necessarily derived from the body and
blood of sacrosanct victims, and the forms of purification
embrace such rites as the sprinkling of sacrificial blood
or ashes on the person, anointing with holy unguents, or
fumigation with the smoke of incense, which from early
times was a favourite accessory to sacrifices. It seems
probable, however, that the religious value of incense was
originally independent of animal sacrifice, for frankincense
was the gum of a very holy species of tree, which was
collected with religious precautions.^ Whether, therefore,
the sacred odour was used in unguents or burned like an
altar sacrifice, it appears to have owed its virtue, like the
gum of the samora tree,^ to the idea that it was the blood
of an animate and divine plant.
It is easy to understand that cathartic media, like holi-
ness itself, were of various degrees of intensity, and were some-
times used, one after another, in an ascending scale. All
contact with holy things has a dangerous side; and so, before
a man ventures to approach the holiest sacraments, he
prepares himself by ablutions and other less potent cathartic
applications. On this principle ancient religions developed
very complicated schemes of purificatory ceremonial, but in
all grave cases these culminated in piacular sacrifice; "with-
out shedding of blood there is no remission of sin." ^
In the most primitive form of the sacrificial idea the
blood of the sacrifice is not employed to wash away an
^ Pliny, xii. 54. The right even to see the trees was reserved to certain
holy families, who, when engaged in harvesting the gum, had to abstain from
all contact with Avonien and from participation in funerals.
'Supra, p. 126. =» Heh. ix. 22.
LECT. XI.
SACRIFICES. 407
impvirity, but to convey to the worshipper a particle of
holy life. The conception of piacular media as purifi-
catory, however, involves the notion that the holy medium
not only adds something to the worshipper's life, and
refreshes its sanctity, but expels from him something that
is impure. The two views are obviously not inconsistent,
if we conceive impurity as the wrong kind of life, which is
dispossessed by inoculation with the right kind. Some
idea of this sort is, in fact, that which savages associate
with the uncleanness of taboo, which they commonly
ascribe to the presence in or about the man of " spirits " or
livins agencies ; and the same idea occurs in much higher
forms of religion, as when, in the Catholic Church, exor-
cisms to expel devils from the catechumen are regarded as
a necessary preliminary to baptism.
Among the Semites the impurities whicli were thought
of as cleaving to a man, and making him unfit to mingle
freely in the social and religious life of his community, were
of very various kinds, and often of a nature that we should
regard as merely physical, e.g. uncleanness from contact
with the dead, from leprosy, from eating forbidden food,
and so forth. All these are mere survivals of savage
taboos, and present nothing instructive for the higher
developments of Semitic religion. They were dealt with,
where the uncleanness was of a mild form, mainly by
ablutions ; or where the uncleanness was more intense, by
more elaborate ceremonies involving the use of sacrificial
blood,^ of sacrificial ashes,^ or the like. Sometimes, as we
have seen, the Hebrews and Arabs conveyed the impurity
to a bird, and allowed it to fly away with it.^
1 Lev. xiv. 17, 51. - Numb. xix. 17.
' Supra, p. 402. In the Arabian case the woman also threw away a
piece of camel's clung, which must also be supposed to have become the
receptacle for her impurity ; or she cut her nails or plucked out part of her
hair (cf. Deut. xxi. 12'l, in which, as specially important parts of the body
408 BLOOD-GUILTINESS. lect. xi.
There is, however, one form of impurity, viz. that of blood-
shed, with which important ethical ideas connected them-
selves. Here also the impurity is primarily a physical
one ; it is the actual blood of the murdered man, staining
the hands of the slayer, or lying unatoned and unburied
on the ground, that defiles the murderer and his whole
community, and has to be cleansed away. We have
already seen ^ that the Semitic religions provide no atone-
ment for the murderer himself, that can restore him to his
original place in his tribe, and this principle survives in
the Hebrew law, which does not admit piacula for mortal
sins. The ritual idea of cleansing from the guilt of blood
is only applicable to the community, which disavows the
act of its impious member, and seeks the restoration of
its injured hohness by a public sacrificial act. Thus
in Semitic antiquity the whole ritual conception of the
purging away of sin is bound up with the notion of the
solidarity of the body of worshippers — the same notion
which makes the pious Hebrews confess and lament not
only their own sins, but the sins of their fathers.^ When
the conception that the community, as such, is responsible
for the maintenance of holiness in all its parts, is combined
with the thought that holiness is specially compromised by
crime, — for in early society bloodshed within the kin is the
typical form, to the analogy of which all other crimes are
referred, — a solid basis is laid for the conception of the
religious community as a kingdom of righteousness, which
lies at the root of the spiritual teaching of the Hebrew
prophets. The stricter view of divine righteousness which
distinguishes Hebrew religion from that of the Greeks, even
(sup7'a, p. 306, note 2), the impure life might be supposed to be concentrated ;
or she anointeil herself with perfume, i.e. with a holy medium, or rubbed
herself against an ass, sheep or goat, i.e. a holy animal.
^ Sujtra, p. 340 »']., 402.
^ Hos. X. 9 ; Jer. iii. 25 ; Ezra ix. 7 ; Ps. cvi. 6.
LECT. XI.
PENITENCE. 409
before the prophetic period, is mainly connected with the
idea that, so far as individuals are concerned, there is no
atonement for mortal sin/ This principle indeed is
common to all races in the earliest stages of law and
religion ; but among the Greeks it was early broken
down, for reasons that have been already explained," while
among the Hebrews it subsisted, without change, till a date
when the conception of sin was sufficiently developed to
permit of its being interpreted, as was done by the
prophets, in a way that raised the religion of Israel
altogether out of the region of physical ideas, with which
primitive conceptions of holiness are bound up.
"We had occasion a moment ago to glance at the subject
of confession of sin and lamentation over it. The connec-
tion of this part of religion with piacular sacrifice is
important enough to deserve a separate consideration.
Among the Jews the great Day of Expiation was a day
of humiliation and penitent sorrow for sin, for which a
strict fast and all the outward signs of deep mourning were
prescribed.^ Similar forms of grief were observed on all
occasions of solemn supplication at the sanctuary, not only
by the Hebrews,* but by their neighbours.^ On such
occasions, where the mourners assemble at a temple or
high place, we must, according to the standing rules of
ancient religion, assume that a piacular sacrifice formed
the culminating point of the service ; ^ and conversely it
appears probable that forms of mourning, more or less
^ Exod. xxi. 14. - Supra, p. 341.
^ According to Yoma, viii. 1, washing, unguents, and the use of shoes
were forbidden.
^ 1 Sam. vii. 6 ; Isa. xxxvii. 1 ; Joel ii. 12 sqq. ^ Isa. xv. 2 sqq.
^ In Hos. vii. 14 the mourners who howl upon their beds are engaged in
a religious function. And as ordinary mourners lie on the ground, I take it
that the beds are the couches on which men reclined at a sacrificial banquet
(Amos ii. 8, vi. 4), which here has the character, not of a joyous fenst, but
of an atoning rite.
410 MOURNING IN LECT. XI.
accentuated, habitually went with piacular rites, not only
when they were called for by some great public calamity,
but on other occasions too. For we have already seen that
in the annual piacula of the Baal religion there was also a
formal act of mourning, which, however, was not an ex-
pression of penitence for sin, but a lament over the dead
god. In this last case the origin and primary significance
of the obligatory lamentation is sufficiently transparent ; for
the death of the god is originally nothing else than the
death of the theanthropic victim, which is bewailed by
those who assist at the ceremony, exactly as the Todas
bewail the slaughter of the sacred buffalo.^ On the same
principle the Egyptians of Thebes bewailed the death of
the ram that was annually sacrificed to the god Amen,
and then clothed the idol in its skin and buried the
carcase in a sacred coffin.^ Here the mourning is for the
death of the sacrosanct victim, which, as the use of the
skin indicates, represents the god himself. But an act of
lamentation was not less appropriate in piacular rites,
where the victim was thought of rather as representing
a man of the kindred of the worshippers ; and primarily,
as we know, the theanthropic victim was equally akin to
the god and to the sacrificers.
I think it can be made probable that a form of lamenta-
tion over the victim was part of the oldest sacrificial ritual,
and that this is the explanation of such rites as the howl-
ing (oXoXvy/]) which accompanied Greek sacrifices, and in
which, as in acts of mourning for the dead, women took
the chief part. Herodotus (iv. 189) was struck with the
resemblance between the Greek practice and that of the
Libyans, a race among whom the sacredness of domestic
animals was very marked. The Libyans killed their
sacrifices without bloodshed, by throwing them over their
1 Supra, p. 281. 2 Herod., ii. 42.
LECT. XI.
SACKIFICE. 411
huts -^ and then twisting their necks. Where bloodshed is
avoided in a sacrifice we may be sure that the life of the
victim is regarded as human or theanthropic, and the
howling can be nothing else than an act of mourning.
Among the Semites, in like manner, the shouting {hallcl,
talilll) that accompanied sacrifice may probably, in its
oldest shape, have been a wail over the death of the
victim, though it ultimately took the form of a chant of
praise (Hallelujah), or, among the Arabs, degenerated into
a meaningless repetition of the word lahhaika. For it is
scarcely legitimate to separate the Semitic ta/ilU from the
Greek and Libyan 6Xo\.vy^, and indeed the roots ^^n and ^^^
(Ar. Jjl.), " to chant praises " and " to howl," are closely
connected.^
In ordinary sacrificial service the ancient attitude of
awe at the death of the victim was transformed into one
of gladness, and the shouting underwent a corresponding
change of meaning.^ But piacular rites continued to be
^ This is analogous to the spriuklincr of blood on a tent.
2 On this topic consult, but with caution, Movers, Phoen. i. 246 sq. The
Arabic ahalla, tahlil, is primarily connected with the slaughter of the victim
(supra, p. 321). Meat that has been killed in the name of an idol is md
ohilla Ughalri 'lldh, and the tahlil includes (1) the bismilluh of the sacrificer,
(2) the shouts of the congregation accompanying this act, (3) by a natural
extension, all religious shouting. If, now, we note that the bismilldh is the
form by which the sacrificer excuses his bold act, and that tahlil also means
"shrinking back in terror" (see Noldeke in ZDMG. xli. 723), we can
hardly doubt that the shouting was originally not joyous, but an expression
of awe and anguish. The derivation of \^\ from J^■^' ^''^ "^^^ moon
(Lagarde, Orientalia, ii. 19; Snouck-Hurgronje, Ilet mckkaansche Feest, p.
75), is tempting, but must be given up. Compare on the whole matter
Wellh., p. 107 sqq.
* This transition was probably much easier than it seems to us ; for shout-
ing in mourning and shouting in joy seem both to be primarily directed to
drive away evil influences. Of course, men, like children, are noisy when they
are glad, but the conventional shrill cries of women iu the East (zaijharU)
are not natural expressions of joy, and to my recollection do not diflfer
materially from the sound made in wailing. On this ])oint, however, I
should be glad to be confirmed or corrected by other observers.
412
FASTING WITH lect. xi.
conducted with signs of mourning, which were interpreted,
as we have seen, sometimes as a lamentation for the
death of the god, and sometimes as forms of penitent
supplication.
That feelings of contrition find an expression in acts of
mourning, is an idea so familiar to us that at first sight it
seems to need no explanation ; but a little reflection will
correct this impression, and make it appear by no means
unreasonable to suppose that the forms of mourning
observed in suppHcatory rites were not primarily expres-
sions of sorrow for sin, or lamentable appeals to the com-
passion of the deity, but simply the obligatory wailing for
the death of a kindred victim. The forms prescribed are
identical with those used in mourning for the dead ; and
if it be urged that this is merely an expression of the
most pungent grief, I reply that we have already found
reason to be chary in assuming that certain acts are
natural expressions of sorrow, and to recognise that the
customs observed in lamentation for the dead had originally
a very definite meaning, and could not become general ex-
pressions of grief till that meaning was forgotten.^ And it
is surely easier to suppose that the ancient rites of lamenta-
tion for the victim changed their sense, when men fell out
of touch with the original meaning of them, than that they
were altogether dropped for a time, and then resumed with
a new meamng.
Again, the idea that the gods have a kindred feeling with
their worshippers, and are touched with compassion when
they see them to be miserable, is no doubt familiar even to
early religions. But formal acts of worship in antiquity,
as we have seen from our analysis of sacrificial rites, are
directed, not merely to appeal to the sentiment of the deity,
but to lay him under a social obligation. Even in the
^ Supra, p. 304 *(/., p. 317 ffq.
LECT. XI.
SACEIFICE. 413
theology of the Eabbins penitence atones only for light
offences, all grave offences demanding also a material
prestation.^ If this is the view of later Judaism, after all
that had been taught by the prophets as to the worthless-
ness of material offerings, in the eyes of a God who looks
at the heart, it is hardly to be thought that in lieathen
religions elaborate forms of mourning and supplication
were nothing more than appeals to divine compassion.
And, in fact, there is no doubt that some of the forms
which we are apt to take as expressions of intense grief or
self-abasement before the god, had originally quite another
meaning. For example, when the worshippers gash their
own flesh in rites of supplication, this is not an appeal to
the divine compassion, but a purely physical means of
establishing a blood-bond with the god.^ Again, the usage
of religious fasting is commonly taken as a sign of sorrow,
the worshippers being so distressed at the alienation of
their god that they cannot eat ; but there are very strong
reasons for believing that, in the strict Oriental form in
which total abstinence from meat and drink is prescribed,
fasting is primarily nothing more than a preparation for
the sacramental eating of holy flesh. Some savage nations
not only fast, but use strong purges before venturing to eat
holy meat ; ^ similarly the Harranians fasted on the eighth
of Nisan, and then broke their fast on mutton, at the same
time offering sheep as holocausts ; * the modern Jews fast
from ten in the morning before eating the Passover ; and
even a modern Catholic must come to the communion with
an empty stomach. Similarly the ashes which were strewn
on the head in acts of religious mourning ^ are probably in
the first instance the ashes of the victim, and so sacramental,
1 Yoma, viii. 8, mbp nilUJ? ^5^ mS30 nZlti'D-
'■^ Supra, p. 303 sqq. ^ Thomson, Masai Land, p. 430.
Fihrist, p. 322. ' Ta'anith, ii. 2, and Bartenora's note.
414 SKIN OF
LECT. XI.
just as in ordinary mourning the dust strewn on the head
is primarily the dust from the grave, which is thus applied
to the person externally, as in the Arabian soliuun, or
draught of consolation,^ it is taken internally mixed with
water." On the whole, then, the conclusion seems to be
legitimate, that the ritual of penitent confession and
humiliation for sin follows the same law that we have
found to hold good in other departments of ritual observ-
ance ; the original interpretation turns on a physical con-
ception of holiness, and it is only gradually and incompletely
that physical ideas give way to ethical interpretation.
To the account that has been given of various aspects
of the atoning efficacy of sacrifice, and of ritual observances
that go with sacrifice, I have still to add some notice of
a very remarkable series of ceremonies, in which the skin
of the sacrosanct victim plays the chief part. In Nilus's
sacrifice the skin and hair of the victim are eaten up like
the rest of the carcase, and in some piacula, e.g. the
Levitical red heifer, the victim is burned skin and all.
Usually, however, it is flayed ; and in later rituals, where
rules are laid down determining whether the skin shall
belong to the sacrificer or be part of the priest's fee, the
hide is treated merely as an article of some commercial
value which has no sacred significance.^ But we have seen
that in old times all parts of the sacrosanct victim were
intensely holy, even down to the offal and excrement, and
' Supra, p. 304, note 3.
" The black garments of mourning are primarily sordid garments, stained
Avith dust or ashes, as appears in the Hebrew root "iTp. Sackcloth, i.e. hair-
cloth, is worn by mourners, not because it macerates the flesh, but because of
its sordid colour.
* By the Levitical law (Lev. vii. 8) the skin of the holocaust goes to the
ministrant priest ; in other cases it must be inferred that it was retained by
the owner. In the Carthaginian tariffs the usage varies, one temple giving
the hides of victims to the priests and another to the owner of the sacrifice
(C. /. S. Nos. 165, 167).
LECT. XI.
THE VICTIM. 415
whatever was not eaten or burned was used for other
sacred purposes, and had the force of a charm. The skin,
in particular, is used in antique rituals either to clothe the
idol or to clothe the worshippers. The meaning of both
these rites was sufficiently perspicuous at the stage of
religious development in which the god, his worshippers,
and the victim were all members of one kindred.
As regards the draping of the idol or sacred stone in the
skin, it will be remembered that in Lecture V, we came to
the conclusion that in most cases sacred stones are not
naturally holy, l)ut are arbitrary erections, which become
holy because the god consents to dwell in them. We also
find a widespread idea, persisting even in the ritual of the
Jewish Day of Atonement, that the altar (which is only a
more modern form of the sacred stone) requires to be conse-
crated with blood, and periodically reconsecrated in the same
way.^ In fact it is tlie sacred blood that makes the stone
holy and a habitation of divine life ; as in all the other
parts of ritual, man does not begin by persuading his god
to dwell in the stone, but by a theurgic process he actually
brings divine life to the stone. All sanctuaries are conse-
crated by a theophany ; but in the earliest times the
sacrifice is itself a rudimentary theophany, and the place
where sacred blood has once been shed is the fittest place
to shed it again. From this point of view it is natural
not only to pour blood upon the altar-idol, but to anoint it
with sacred fat, to fix upon it the heads and horns of
sacrifices, and so forth. All these things are done in
various parts of the world,^ and when the sacred stone is
on the way to become an idol, and primarily an animal-
1 Ezek. xliii. 18 sqq. ; Lev. viii. 15 ; Ezek. xlv. 18 sqq. ; Lev. xvi. 33.
- The heads of oxen are common symbols on Greek altars, and this is only
a modern surrogate for the actual heads of victims. The horns of the
Semitic altar have perhaps the same origin.
416 SKIN OF LECT. XI.
idol, it is peculiarly appropriate to dress it in the skin of
the divine victim.
On the other hand, it is equally appropriate that the
worshipper should dress himself in the skin of a victim,
and so, as it were, envelop himself in its sanctity. To
rude nations dress is not merely a physical comfort, but a
fixed part of social religion, a thing by which a man con-
stantly bears on his body the token of his religion, and
which is itself a charm and a means of divine protection.
Among African nations, where the sacredness of domestic
animals is still acknowledged, one of the few purposes
for which a beast may be killed is to get its skin as a
cloak; and in the Book of Genesis (iii. 21) the primitive
coat of skin is given to the first men by the deity Himself.
Similarly Herodotus, when he speaks of the sacrifices and
worship of the Libyans,^ is at once led on to observe
that the ffigis, or goat-skin, worn by the statues of Athena,
is nothing else than the goat-skin, fringed with thongs,
which was worn by the Libyan women ; the inference
implies that it was a sacred dress.^ When the dress of
sacrificial skin, which at once declared a man's religion
and his sacred kindred, ceased to be used in ordinary life,
it was still retained in holy and especially in piacular
functions. We have had before us various examples of
this : the Assyrian Dagon-worshipper who offers the mystic
1 Herod., iv. 188 >^qq. ; that the victims were goats is suggested by tlie
context, but becomes certain by comparison of Hippocrates, ed. Littre,
vi. 356.
" The thongs correspond to the fringes on the garment prescribed by
Jewish law, which had a sacred significance (Numb. xv. 38 sqq.). One of
the oldest forms of the fringed garment is probably the raht, or girdle of
skin slashed into thongs, which was worn by Arab children, and also, it is
said, by worshippers at the Caaba. From this primitive garment are derived
the thongs and girdles with lappets that appear as amulets among the Arabs
{harlm, morassa'a; the latter is pierced, and another thong passed through
it); compare the magical thongs of the Luperci, cut from the skin of the
piaculum, whose touch cured sterilitj*.
LECT. XL THE VICTIM. 417
fish-sacrifice to the Fish-god draped in a fish-skin ; the old
Phoenician sacrifice of game by. men clothed in the skin of
their prey ; the Cyprian sacrifice of a sheep to the Sheep-
goddess, in which sheep-skins are worn/ Similar examples
are afforded by the Dionysiac mysteries and other Greek
rites, and by almost every rude religion ; while in later
cults the old rite survives at least in the relio-ious use of
animal masks.^ When worshippers present themselves at
the sanctuary, already dressed in skins of the sacred kind,
the meaning of the ceremony is that they come to worship
as kinsmen of the victim, and so also of the god. But
when the fresh skin of the victim is applied to the
worshipper in the sacrifice, the idea is rather an impart-
ing to him of the sacred virtue of its life. Thus in
piacular and cathartic rites the skin of the sacrifice is
used in a way quite similar to the use of the blood, but
dramatically more expressive of the identification of the
worshipper's life with that of the victim. In Greek
piacula the man on whose behalf the sacrifice was per-
formed simply put his foot on the skin (kcoBcov) ; at
Hierapolis the pilgrim put the head and feet over his
own head while he knelt on the skin ; '' in certain late
Syrian rites a boy is initiated by a sacrifice in which his
feet are clothed in slippers made of the skin of th^
sacrifice.* These rites do not appear to have suggested
any idea, as to the meaning of piacular sacrifice, different
from those that have already come before us ; but as the
skin of a sacrifice is the oldest form of a sacred garment,
appropriate to the performance of holy functions, the figure
of a " robe of righteousness," which is found both in tlie
' Supra, pp. 274, 292 ; and A dcUtlonal Notes G and H.
^ Such masks were used by the Arabs of Nejrau in rites which the Bishop
Gregentius, in the laws he made for his flock (ch. xxxiv.), denounces as
heathonish (Boissonade, Anecd. Gr., vol. v.)
' Dea Syria, Iv. ■• Actes of the Leyden Congress, ii. 1. 3-36 (361).
2 D
-y
418 THEOLOGICAL lect. xi.
Old Testament and in the New, and still supplies one of
the commonest theological metaphors, may be ultimately
traced back to this source.
On the whole it is apparent, from the somewhat tedious
discussion which I have now brought to a close, that the
various aspects in which atoning rites presented them-
selves to ancient worshippers have supplied a variety of
religious images which passed into Christianity, and still
have currency. Eedemption, substitution, purification,
atoning blood, the garment of righteousness, are all
terms which in some sense go back to antique ritual.
But in ancient religion all these terms are very vaguely
defined ; they indicate impressions produced on the mind
of the worshipper by features of the ritual, rather than
formulated ethico- dogmatical ideas; and the attempt to
find in them anything as precise and definite as the
notions attached to the same words by Christian theo-
logians is altogether illegitimate. The one point that
comes out clear and strong is that the fundamental idea
of ancient sacrifice is sacramental communion, and that
all atoning rites are ultimately to be regarded as owing
their efficacy to a communication of divine life to the
worshippers, and to the establishment or confirmation of
a living bond between them and their god. In primitive
ritual this conception is grasped in a merely physical and
mechanical shape, as indeed, in primitive life, all spiritual
and ethical ideas are still wrapped up in the husk of a
material embodiment. To free the spiritual truth from
the husk was the great task that lay before the ancient
religions, if they were to maintain the right to continue
to rule the minds of men. That some progress in this
direction was made, especially in Israel, appears from our
examination. But on the whole it is manifest that none
of the ritual systems of antiquity was able by mere
LECT. XI. METAPHOES. 419
natural development to sliake itself free from the con-
genital defect inherent in every attempt to embody
spiritual truth in material forms. A ritual system must ^
always remain materialistic, even if its materialism is
disguised under the cloak of mysticism.
ADDITIONAL NOTES.
ADDITIONAL NOTE A (p. 120).
THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF TPIE JINN.
I CANNOT recall nny old legend in which the jinn cliange from
one animal form to another. Wellhausen thinks that the demon
in Frej'tag, Ar. Prov. i. 364 (MaidanI, i. 181), which appeared in
the form of a black ostrich, was really a snake, because the fever
that attacked the man who shot at it was such as, according to
Arabian superstitions, is produced by a snake bite. This is very
ingenious, but hardly conclusive. The idea that sickness is the
result of offending the jinn is still current in Arabia, and I had
myself from Al-mas, a servant of the SherTf of Mecca, the story
of a jinnl — a hairy creature, apparently an ape — that he saw in
the wild country at the upper end of Batn Marr; his companion
shot at it, and died soon after with the symptoms of rheumatism
fever. In totem superstitions it is a common idea that an insult
to the totem is followed by sickness (Frazer, p. 16 sqq.).
The loctis dassicus for the transformation of the glful, i.e. the
kind of jinn that attacks men and leads them astray or devours
them, is verse 8 of the Bdnat So'dd of Ka'b b. Zohair, whicli
Damiri (ii. 214) declares to be the source of the belief. This of
course is not correct, as the verb taghaivwala proves. But the
proper sense of this verb is not to undergo a metamorphosis, but
merely to change one's aspect. In the hadUh cited in the Lisdn,
S.V., and by Damiri, ii. 214. 16, taghawwalat laliu 'l-rililldn is
equivalent to the German spuken. The ghul appears by night,
and therefore fitfully, uncertainly, and in indeterminate form,
Similarl}'', Dhu 'l-Romma, cited in the Sihdh, speaks of the fear-
some and trackless desert where troops of ostriches fagJimvwalaf,
i.e. appear and disappear like demons. Tlie verse of the Nacaid
421
422 THE JINN. NOTE B.
of Jarir, cited in the Lisan, xiv. 21, stands thus in the Leyden
MS. f. r)lr, as the late Professor Wright told me, —
Fayauman yujdnna 'l-liatvd gliaira ma siban
vayauman tard minhunna (jhUlan taghawicala,
with the note al-tagawioul al-talawiciin waltafattul. See also Ibn
Hishiim's commentary on the Bdnat So'dd (ed. Gnidi), p. 75, 1. 7.
In all this I can see no support for the idea that the true
form of the jirm is serpentine, and that all other animal forms
are mere metamorphoses ; even in later accounts, like that
of iDamiri, the essential prerogative of the jmn is that it can
assume hitman form. Xor can I see any evidence that in
Imraulcais, lii. 29, the "teeth of ghuls" mean teeth of serpents.
The interpreters are not agreed on this explanation, which seems
to be a mere piece of later rationalism. It is one thing to say
that all serpents are jinn, and another to say that all jinn are
serpents.
ADDITIONAL NOTE B (p. 130).
GODS, DEMONS, AND PLANTS OR ANIMALS.
The object of this note is to consider some difficulties that
may be felt with regard to the argument in the text.
1. The importance which I have attached to Arabian supersti-
tions about the ji7m, as affording a clue to tlie origin of local
sanctuaries, may appear to be excessive when it is observed that
the facts are almost all drawn from one part of the Semitic field.
"What evidence is there, it may be asked, that these Arabian
superstitions are part of the common belief of the Semitic race ?
That the other Semites had their goblins and spectres Avill not of
course be denied ; but were these so like the Arabian jinn that
what is proved as to the ultimate nature of the latter may be
extended to the former? To this I reply, in the first place, that
the Arabian conception proves upon analysis to have nothing
peculiar about it. It is the ordinary conception of all primitive
savages, and involves ideas that only belong to the savage mind.
To suppose that it originated in Arabia, for special and local
reasons, after the separation of the other Semites, is therefore to
run in the teeth of all probability. Again, the little we do know
about the goblins of the Northern Semites is in full agreement
NOTE B. DEMONIAC PLANTS. 423
with the Arabian facts. The demons were banished from Hebrew
religion, and hardly appear in the Old Testament except in poetic
imagery. Eut the D'^T'^K^ or hairy ones, the D'^b''? or nocturnal
goblin, are exactly like the Arabian j/V/m (Wellhausen, p. 135).
The main point, however, is that the savage view of nature,
which ascribes to plants and animals discourse of reason, and super-
natural or demoniac attributes, can be shown to have prevailed
among the Northern Semites as well as the Arabs. The savage
point of view is constantly found to survive, in connection with
practices of magic, after it has been superseded in religion proper ;
and the superstitions of the vulgar in modern civilised countries are
not much more advanced than those of the rudest nations. So, too,
among the Semites, magical rites and vulgar superstitions are not
so much survivals from the higher official heathenism of the
great sanctuaries as from a lower and more primitive stage of
belief, which the higher forms of heathen worship overshadowed
but did not extinguish. And the view of nature that pervades
Semitic magic is precisely that savage view which we have found
to underlie the Arabian belief in the ji7m. Of the magical
practices of the ancient Syrians, which persisted long after the
introduction of Christianity, some specimens are preserved in the
Canons of Jacob of Edessa, edited in Syriac by Lagarde, Rel. iur.
eccl. ant. (Leipz. 1856), and translated by Kayser, Die Canones
Jacob's von Edessa (Leipz. 1886). One of these, used in cases of
sickness, was to dig up the root of a certain kind of thorn called
" ischiac," and make an offering to it, eating and drinking beside
the root, which was treated as a guest at the feast (Qu. 38).
Another demoniac plant of the Northern Semites is the Baaras,
described by Josephus, B. J. vii. 6. 3, which flees from those who
try to grasp it, and whose touch is death so long as it is rooted in
the ground. This plant seems to be the mandrake (Ar. yahruh),
about which the Arabs tell similar stories, and which even the
ancient Germans tliought to be inhabited by a spirit. When the
plants in Jotham's parable speak and act like men, this is mere
personification ; but the dispute of the mallow and the mandrake,
which Maimonides relates from the foi'ged Nahatanan Agriculture
(Chwolsohn, Ssahier, ii. 459, 914), and which prevents the mallow
from supplying her prophet with responses, is a genuine piece of
old Semitic superstition. In matters of this sort we cannot doubt
that even a forger correctly represents popular beliefs. As
regards animals, the demoniac character of the serpent in the
424 SEMITIC
NOTE B.
Garden of Eden is vinmistakeable ; the serpent is not a mere
temporary disguise of Satan, otherwise its punishment would be
meaningless. The practice of serpent cliarming, repeatedly
referred to in the Old Testament, is also connected with the
demoniac character of the creature ; and in general the idea that
animals can be constrained by spells, e.g. prevented from injuring
flocks and vineyards (Jacob of Ed., Qu. 46), rests on the same
view, for the power of wizards is over demons and beings that
are subject to the demons.
One of the most curious of the Syrian superstitions is as
follows : — When caterpillars infest a garden, the maidens are
assembled ; a single caterpillar is taken, and one of the girls is
constituted its mother. The insect is then bewailed and buried,
and the mother is conducted to the place where the other cater-
pillars are, amidst lamentations for her bereavement. The whole
of the caterpillars will then disappear (077. cit., Qu. 44). Here it is
clearly assumed that the insects understand and are impressed by
the tragedy got up for their benefit. The Syriac legends of Tur
'Abdin, collected by Prym and Socin (Gott. 1881), are full of
beasts with demoniac powers. In these stories each kind of beast
forms a separate organised community ; they speak and act like
men, but have supernatural powers, and close relations to the jinn
that also occur in the legends. In conclusion, it may be observed
that the universal Semitic belief in omens and guidance given
by animals belongs to the same range of ideas. Omens are not
blind tokens ; the animals know Avhat they tell to men.
2. If the argument in the text is correct, it may be asked why
there are not direct and convincing evidences of Semitic totemism.
You argue, it may be said, that traces of the old savage view of
nature, which corresponds to totemism, are still clearly visible in
the Semitic view of demons. But in savage nations that view is
habitually conjoined with the belief that one kind of demon — or
more correctly one kind of plants or animals endowed with
demoniac qualities — is allied by kinship with each kindred of
men. How does this square with the Arabian facts, in which all
demons or demoniac animals halntually appear as man's enemies 1
The general answer to this difficulty is that totems, or friendly
demoniac beings, rapidly develop into gods when men rise above
jnire savagery ; whereas unfriendly beings, lying outside the circle
of man's organised life, are not directly influenced by the social
progress, and retain their primitive characteristics unchanged.
NOTE B. TOTEMLSM. 425
When men deem themselves to be of the same blood with a
particular animal kind, every advance in their way of thinking
about themselves reacts on their ideas about the sacred animals.
When they come to think of their god as the ancestor of their
race, they must also think of him as the ancestor of their totem
animals, and, so far as our observation goes, they tend to figuie
him as having animal form. The animal god concentrates on his
own person the respect that used to be paid to all animals of the
totem kind, or at least the respect paid to them is made to depend
on the worship he receives. Finally, the animal god, who, as a
demoniac being, has many human attributes, is transformed into
an anthropomorphic god, and his animal connections fall quite
into the background. But nothing of this sort can happen to the
demoniac animals that are left outside, and not brought into
fellowship -with men. They remain as they were, till the progress
of enlightenment — a slow progress among the mass of any race —
gradually strips them of their supernatural attributes. Thus it is
natural that the belief in hostile demons of plant or animal kinds
should survive long after the friendly kinds have given way to
individual gods, whose original totem associations are in great
measure obliterated. At the stage which even the rudest Semitic
peoples had reached when they first become known to us, it would
be absurd to expect to find examples of totemism pure and simple.
What we may expect to find is the fragmentary survi^'al of totem
ideas, in the shape of special associations between certain kinds of
animals on the one hand, and certain tribes or religious communi-
ties and their gods on the other hand. And of evidence of this
kind there is, we shall see, no lack in Semitic antitpiity. For the
present I will only cite some direct evidences of kinship or
brotherhood between human communities and animal kinds.
Ibn al-jNIojawir relates that when the B. Harith, a tribe of South
Arabia, find a dead gazelle, they wash it, wrap it in cerecloths
and bury it, and the whole tribe mourns for it seven days
(Sprenger, Postrouten, p. 151). The animal is buried like a man,
and mourned for as a kinsman. Among the Arabs of Sinai the
wahr (the coney of the Bible) is the brother of man, and it is said
that he who eats his flesh will never see father and mother again.
In the Harranian mysteries the worshippers acknowledged dogs,
ravens and ants as their brothers {Fihrist, p. 326, 1. 27). At
Baalbek the yei/vaio?, or ancestral god of the town, was worshipped in
the form of a lion (Damascius, Vit Isid. § 203 ; cf. bv2. TJ, " leon-
426 ELOHIM. NOTE B.
topodion," Low, Aram. Pflanzenamen, p. 406 ; G. Hoffmann, Phoe?}.
Insclir. 1889, p. 27). On the banks of the Euphrates, according
to Aristotle, Mir. A use. 149 sq., there was found a species of
small serpents that attacked foreigners, but did not molest
natives, which is just what a totem animal is supposed to do.
3. If the oldest sanctuaries of the gods were originally haunts of
a midtiplicity of jinn, or of animals to which demoniac attributes
were ascribed, w^e should expect to find, even in later times, some
trace of the idea that the holy place is not inhabited by a single
god, but by a plurality of sacred denizens. If the relation between
the w^orshipping community and the sanctuary was formed in the
totem stage of thought, w^hen the sacred denizens were still veri-
table animals, all animals of the sacred species would multiply
unmolested in the holy precincts, and the individual god of the
sanctuary, Avhen such a being came to be singled out from the
indeterminate plurality of totem creatures, would still be the
father and protector of all animals of his own kind. And accord-
ingly we do find that many Semitic sanctuaries gave shelter to
various species of sacred animals, the dogs of Adranus, the doves
of Astarte, the gazelles of Tabala and Mecca, and so forth. But,
apart from this, we may expect to find traces of vague plurality in
the conception of the godhead as associated with special spots, to
hear not so much of the god as of the gods of a place, and that
not in the sense of a definite number of clearly individualised
deities, but with the same indefiniteness as characterises the con-
ception of the jtJin. I am inclined to think that this is the idea
Avhich underlies the Hebrew use of the plural DTlbt^, and the
Phoenician use of D^X, in a singular sense, on which cf. Hofi"mann,
op. cit. p. 17 t!qq. Merely to refer this to primitive polytheism,
as is sometimes done, does not explain hoAv the plural form is
habitually used to designate a single deity. But if the EloMm of
a place originally meant all its sacred denizens, viewed collectively
as an indeterminate sum of indistinguishable beings, the transition
to the use of the plural in a singular sense would follow naturally,
as soon as this indeterminate conception gave way to the concep-
tion of an individual god of the sanctuary. Further, the original
indeterminate plurality of the Elolum appears in the conception
of angels as Bne Elolum, "sons of Elohim," which, according to
linguistic analogy, means "beings of the Elohim kind." In the
Old Testament the " sons of God " form the heavenly court, and
ordinarily when an angel appears on earth he appears alone and on
NOTE c. HOLINESS. 427
a special mission. But, in some of the oldest Hebrew traditions,
angels frequent holy places, such as Bethel and Mahanaim, Avhen
they have no message to deliver (Gen. xxviii. 12, xxxii. 2).
That the angels, as "sons of God," form part of the old Semitic
mythology is clear from Gen. vi. 2, 4, for the sons of God who
contract marriages with the daughters of men are out of place in
the religion of the Old Testament, and the legend must have been
taken over from a lower form of faith ; perhaps it was a local
legend connected with Mount Hermon (Hilary on Ps. cxxxiii.,
cited by Eeland, Pakestma, p. 323), Ewald (Lehre der Bihd,
ii. 283) rightly observes that in Gen. xxxii. 28-30 the meaning
is that an angel has no name, i.e. no distinctive individiiality ; he
is simply one of a class ; cf. p. 119, note, supra. Yet in Avrestling
with him Jacob wrestles with D^nfj^ (cf. Hos. xii. 4).
That the Arabic jinn is not a loan-word, as has sometimes
been supposed, is shewn by Noldeke, ZDMG. xli, 717.
ADDITIONAL NOTE C (p. 143).
HOLINESS, UNCLEANNESS AND TABOO.
Various parallels between savage taboos, and Semitic rules of
holiness and uncleanness, will come before us from time to time ;
but it may be useful to bring together at this point some detailed,
evidences that the two are in their origin indistinguishable.
Holy and unclean things have this in common, that in both cases
certain restrictions lie on men's use of and contact with them, and
that the breach of these restrictions involves supernatural dangers.
The difference between the tAvo appears, not in their relation to
man's ordinary life, but in their relation to the gods. Holy things
are not free to man, because they pertain to the gods ; uncleanness
is shunned, according to the view taken in the higher Semitic
religions, because it is hateful to the god, and therefore not to be
tolerated in his sanctuary, his Avorshippers, or his land. But that
this explanation is not primitive can hardly be doubted, when Ave
consider that the acts that cause uncleanness are exactly the same
which among savage nations place a man \inder taboo, and that
these acts are often involuntary, and often innocent, or even
necessary to society. The savage, accordingly, imposes a taboo ou
428 UNCLEANNESS
NOTE C.
a -woman in childbed, or during her courses, and on the man
who touches a corpse, not out of any regard for the gods, but
simply because birth and everything connected with the propaga-
tion of the species on the one hand, and disease and death on the
other, seem to him to involve the action of superhuman agencies
of a dangerous kind. If he attempts to explain, he does so by
supposing that on these occasions spirits of deadly power are
present ; at all events the persons involved seem to him to be
sources of mysterious danger, which has all the characters of an
infection, and may extend to other people unless due precautions
are observed. This is not scientific, but it is perfectly intelligible,
and forms the basis of a consistent system of practice ; whereas,
Av^hen the rules of uncleanness are made to rest on the will of the
gods, they appear altogether arbitrary and meaningless. The affinity
of such taboos with laws of uncleanness comes out most clearly
when we observe that uncleanness is treated like a contafjion,
which has to be washed away or otherwise eliminated by physical
means. Take the rules about the uncleanness produced by the
carcases of vermin in Lev. xi. 32 sqq. ; whatever they touch
must be washed ; the water itself is then unclean and can pro-
pagate the contagion ; nay, if the defilement afi'ect an (unglazed)
earthen pot, it is supposed to sink into the pores, and cannot be
washed out, so that the pot must be broken. Kules like this
have nothing in common with the spirit of Hebrew religion ; they
can only be remains of a primitive superstition, like that of the
savage who shuns the blood of uncleanness, and such like things,
as a supernatural and deadly virus. The antiquity of the Hebrew
fahoos, for such they are, is shewn by the way in which many of
them reappear in Arabia; cf. for example Deut. xxi. 12, 13, with
the Arabian ceremonies for removing the impurity of widoAvhood
(Lane, p. 2409, or Taj al- Arils, quoted in Wellhausen, p. 156). In
the Arabian form the ritual is of purely savage type ; the danger
to life that made it unsafe for a man to marry the woman Avas
transferred in the most materialistic Avay to an animal, Avhich it
was believed generally died in consequence, or to a bird. So, too,
in the laAv for cleansing the leper (Lev. xiv. 4 sqq.) the impurity
is transferred to a bird, Avhich flies away Avith it ; compare also the
ritual of the scape-goat. So, again, the impurity of menstruation
Avas recognised by all the Semites,^ as in fact it is by all primitive
^ The precept of the Coran, 11. 222, rests on ancient practice ; see Baidawl
on the passage, Hcwidsa, p. 107, last verse, and A(jh. xvi. 27, 31. For the
NOTE C.
AND TABOO. 429
and ancient peoples. Xoav among savages this impvirity is dis-
tinctly connected Avith the idea that the blood of the menses is
dangerous to man, and even the Romans held that "nihil facile
reperiatur mulierum profluiiio magis mirificiim," or more full of
deadly qualities (Pliny, H. N. vii. 64). Similar superstitions are
current with the Arabs, a great variety of supernatural powers
attaching themselves to a woman in this condition (Cazwini, i. 36.5).
Obviously, therefore, in this case the Semitic taboo is exactly like
the savage one ; it has nothing to do with respect for the gods,
but springs from mere terror of the supernatural influences
associated with the woman's physical condition. That unclean
things are tabooed on account of their inherent supernatural
powers or associations, appears further from the fact that just these
things are most powerful in magic ; menstruous blood in particular
is one of the strongest of charms in most countries, and so it was
among the Arabs (Cazwini, ut sujira). Wellhausen has shewn how
closely the ideas of amulet and ornament are connected {Heid. p.
143), but lias not brought out the equally characteristic fact that
unclean things are not less potent. Such amulets are called by
the Arabs fanjls, inonajjasa ; and it is explained that the heathen
Arabs used to tie unclean things, dead men's bones and menstruous
rags, upon children, to avert the ji7in and the evil eye (Cdmils, s.r.) ;
cf. Jacob of Edessa, op. cit. Qu. 43.
We have seen, in the example of the swine, that prohibitions
against using, and especially eating, certain animals belong in the
higher Semitic religions to a sort of doubtful ground between the
unclean and the holy. This topic cannot be fully elucidated till
we come to speak of sacrifice, when it Avill appear probable that
most of these restrictions, if not all of them, are parallel to the
taboos which totemism lays on the use of sacred animals as food.
Meantime it may be observed that such prohibitions, like those
that have been already considered, manifest their savage origin
by the nature of the supernatural sanction attached to them. As
the Elk clan of the Omahas believe that they cannot cat the elk
without boils breaking out on their bodies, so the Syrians, with whom
Syrian heathen, Flhrist, p. 319, 1. 18. According to Wahidy, A><huh, women
in their courses were not allowed to remain in Ihe house, which is a
common savage rule. Girls at their first menstruation seem to have been
strictly confined to a hut or tent ; see the Lisdn on the term mo'm\ This
is also common all over the world. ^Yidows were similai-ly confined ; see the
Le.NX. .s.r. ^^i-^.
430 HOLINESS
NOTE C.
^
fish were sacred to Atargatis, thought that if they ate a sjDrat or
ail anchovy they were visited with ulcers, sweUings and wasting
disease.^ In both cases the punisliment of the impious act is not
a divine judgment, in our sense of that word, but flows directly
from the malignant influences resident in the forbidden thing,
which, so to speak, avenges itself on the ofi"ender. With this it
agrees that the more notable unclean animals possess magical
])owers ; the swine, for example, which the Saracens as well as the
Hebrews and Syrians refused to eat (Sozomen, vi. 38), supplies
many charms and magical medicines (Cazwini, i, 393).
The irrationality of laws of uncleanness, from the standpoint of
spiritual religion or even of the higher heathenism, is so manifest
that they must necessarily be looked on as having survived from
an earlier form of faith and of society. And, this being so, I do
not see how any historical student can refuse to class them with
savage taboos. The attempts to explain them otherwise, wdiich
ai"e still occasionally met with, seem to be confined to speculative
writers, who have no knowledge of the general features of thought
and belief in rude societies. As regards holy things in the proper
sense of the word, i.e. such as are directly coiniected with the
worship and service of the gods, more difliculty may reasonably
be felt; for many of the laws of holiness may seem to have a good
and reasonable sense even in the higher forms of religion, and to
find their sufficient explanation in the habits and institutions of
advanced societies. At present the most current view of the
meaning of restrictions on man's free use of holy things is that
holy things are the god's property, and I have therefore sought
{sujjra, p. 134 sqq.) to show that the idea of property does not
suffice to explain the facts of the case. A man's property consists
of things to which he has an exclusive right ; but in holy things
the worshippers have rights as well as the god, though their rights
are subject to definite restrictions. Again, an owner is bound to
respect other people's property while he preserves his own ; but
the principle of holiness, as appears in the law of asylum, can be
used to override the privileges of human ownership. In this
respect holiness exactly resembles taboo. The notion that certain
things are taboo to a god or a chief means only that he, as the
stronger person, and not only stronger but invested with super-
^ Menander ap. Porph., De Ahst. iv. 15; Plut., De Superst. x. ; Selden,
iJe Dim Syria, Syut. ii. Cap. 3. For savage parallels, see Frazer, Totenmm,
1). 16 sqq.
NOTE c. AND TABOO. 431
natural power, and so very dangerous to offend, will not allow
any one else to meddle with them. To bring the taboo into force
it is not necessary that there should be prior possession on the
part of god or chief ; other people's goods may become taboo, and
be lost to their original owner, merely by contact with the sacred
person or Avith sacred things. Even the ground on which a king
of Tahiti trod became taboo, just as the place of a theophany was
thenceforth holy among the Semites. Nor does it follow that
because a thing is taboo from the use of man, it is therefore in any
real sense appropriated to the use of a god or sacred person ; the
fundamental notion is merely that it is not safe for ordinary
people to use it ; it has, so to speak, been touched by the infection
of holiness, and so becomes a new source of supernatural danger.
In this respect, again, the rules of Semitic holiness show clear
marks of their origin in a system of taboo ; the distinction that
holy things are employed for the use of the gods, while unclean
things are simply forbidden to man's use, is not consistently
carried out, and there remain many traces of the view that holi-
ness is contagious, just as uncleanness is, and that things which
are to be retained for ordinary use must be kept out of the way of
the sacred infection. Of things undoubtedly holy, but not in any
way used for the divine service, the consecrated camels of the
Arabs afford a good example. But in old Israel also we find
something of the same kind. By the later law (Lev. xxvii. 27)
the firstling of a domestic animal that could not be sacrificed, and
which the owner did not care to redeem, was sold for the benefit
of the sanctuary, but by the old law (Ex. xiii. 13, xxxiv. 20) its
neck was broken — a less humane rule than that of Arabia, where
animals tabooed from human use were allowed to run free.^
Of the contagiousness of holiness there are many traces exactly
similar to taboo. In Isa. Ixv. 5 the heathen mystm warn the
bystander not to approach them lest he become taboo.^ The flesh
of the Hebrew sin-offering, which is holy in the first degree, con-
veys a taboo to every one who touches it, and if a drop of the
blood falls on a garment, this must be washed, i.e. the sanctity
must be washed out, in a holy place, while the earthen pot in
^ This parallel shows that the Arabian institution is not a mere degenerate
form of an older consecration to positive sacred uses.
^ The suffix shows that the verb is transitive ; not "for I am holier than
thou," but "for I would sanctify thee." We should therefore point it as
Piel.
432 SACRED
NOTE C.
■which the sacrilice is sodden must be broken, as in the case where
dead vermin falls in a vessel and renders it nn clean (Lev. vi. 27 sq.
[Heb. ver. 20 sq.'] ; cf. Lev. xvi. 26, 28). At Mecca, in the times
of heathenism, the sacred circuit of the Caaba was made by the
Bedouins either naked, or in clothes borrowed from one of the
Horns, or religious community of the sacred city. Wellhausen has
shown that this usage was not peculiar to Mecca, for at the
sanctuary of Al-Jalsad also it was customary for the sacrificer to
borrow a suit from the priest ; and the same custom appears in the
worship of the Tyrian Baal (2 Kings x. 22), to which it may be
added that, in 2 Sam. vi. 1 4, David wears the priestly ephod at
the festival of the inbringing of the ark. He had put off his
usual clothes, for Michal calls his conduct a shameless exposure
of his person; see also 1 Sam. xix. 24. The Meccan custom is
explained by saying that they Avould not perform the sacred rite
in garments stained with sin, but the real reason is quite different.
It appears that sometimes a man did make the circuit in his own
clothes, but in that case he could neither wear them again nor sell
them, but had to leave them at the gate of the sanctuary (Azraci,
p. 125). They became taboo by contact with the holy place and
function. If any doubt remains as to the correctness of this ex-
planation it will, I trust, be dispelled by a quotation from Short-
land's Southern Distrids of New Zealand (p. 293 sq.), which has been
given to me by my friend Frazer. "A slave or other person not
sacred would not enter a ' wahi tapu,' or sacred place, without
having first stripped off his clothes ; for the clothes, having
become sacred the instant they entered the precincts of the ' wahi
tapu,' would ever after be useless to him in the ordinary business
of his life."
In the case of the garment stained by the blood of the sin-
oflfering, Ave see that taboos produced by contact with holy things,
like those due to uncleanness, can be removed by washing. In
like manner among the Jews the contact of a sacred volume or a
phylactery " defiled the hands," and called for an ablution, ^ and
the high priest on the Day of Atonement washed his flesh with
water, not only when he put on the holy garments of the day, but
when he put them off (Lev. xvi. 24 ; cf. Mishna, Ydmd, viii. 4).
In savage countries such ablutions are taken to be a literal
physical removal of the contagious principle of the taboo, and all
symbolical interpretations of them are nothing more than an
^ See p. 405, supra.
NOTE C.
GARMENTS. 433
attempt, in higher stages of rehgious development, to justify
adhesion to traditional ritual.
These examples may suffice to show that it is impossible to
separate the Semitic doctrine of holiness and uncleanness from the
system of taboo. If any one is not convinced by them, I am
satisfied that he will not be convinced by an accumulation of
evidence. But as the subject is curious in itself, and may
possibly be found to throw light on some obscure customs, I will
conclude this part of the subject by some additional remarks, of
a more conjectural character, on the costume worn at the sanctuary.
The use of special vestments by priestly celebrants at religious
functions is very widespread, and has relations Avhich cannot be
illustrated till we come to speak of sacrifice.^ But it is certain
that originally every man was his own priest, and the ritual
observed in later times by the priests is only a development of
what was originally observed by all worshippers. As regards the
matter of vestments, it was certainly an early and widespread
custom to make a difference between the dress of ordinary life
and that donned on sacred occasions. The ancient Hebrews, on
approaching the presence of the Deity, either washed their
clothes (Ex. xix. 10) or changed them (Gen. xxxv. 2), that is,
put on their best clothes, and the women also wore their jewels
(Hos. ii. 13 [15]; cf. Sozomen's account of the feast at Mamre,
H. E. ii. 4).
The washing is undoubtedly to remove possible uncleanness,
and in Gen. xxxv. 2 the cliange of garments has the same
association. But the instances given above shew that, if it was
important not to carry impurity into the sanctuary, it was equally
necessary not to carry into ordinary life the marks of contact with
holy places and things. As all festive occasions in antiquity were
sacred occasions, it may be presumed that best clothes were also
holy clothes, reserved for festal purposes. They were perfumed
(Gen. xxvii. 15, 27), and perfume among the Semites is a very
holy thing (Pliny, xii. 54), used in purifications (Herod., i. 198),
and applied, according to Phoenician ritual, to all those who
stood before the altar, clad in the long byssus robes, with a single
purple strijje, Avhich were appropriated to religious offices (Silius,
iii. 23 sqq. ; cf. Herodian, v. 5. 10). Jewels, too, such as women
wore in the sanctuary, had a sacred character ; the Syriac word
^ See what is said of the skin of the victim as furnishing a sacred dress,
supra, p. 416 sq.
2 E
434 JEWELS.
NOTE C.
[^
for an earring is cdtlslid, "the holy thing," and generally speaking
jewels serve as amulets,^ On the whole, therefore, holy dress and
gala dress are one and the same thing, and it seems, therefore,
legitimate to svippose that in early times best clothes meant clothes
that were taboo for the pnrposes of ordinary life. But of course
the great mass of people in a poor society could not keep a
special suit for sacred occasions. Such persons would either
wash their clothes after as well as before any specially sacred
function (Lev. vi. 27, xvi. 26, 28), or would have to borrow
sacred garments. Shoes could not well be washed, unless they
Avere mere linen stockings, as in. the Phoenician sacred dress
described by Herodian ; they were therefore put off before
treading on holy ground (Ex. iii. 5 ; Josh. v. 15, etc.).'^
Among primitive peoples, taboos are often used to protect
human rights by a supernatural sanction, or to cover the encroach-
ments of chiefs and privileged persons on the rights of others.
To the latter usage a Semitic parallel has been given above
(sitpra, p. 136), while an exact parallel to the former lies in the
usage of laying a curse on an object to prevent it from being
interfered with (Judg. xvii. 2). Among the older Hebrews the
obligation of a curse does not depend on any consideration of its
reasonableness (1 Sam. xiv. 24 s</^.) ; it is a mechanical taboo.
Compare for the Arabs, Wellh., Held. p. 125 sqq. In Zech. v. .3
it is a new thing, characteristic of a better age, that the curse
of God seizes on every thief or perjurer, without having been
specially invoked in each case; cf. JJrw. Hodh. '^o. 245.
Closely allied to this kind of curse is the ban (Heb. Mrem) by
which impious sinners, or enemies of the community and its god,
were devoted to utter destruction. The ban is a form of devotion
to the deity, and so the verb "to ban" is sometimes rendered
" consecrate " (Micah iv. 13) or "devote" (Lev. xxvii. 28 sq.).
But in the oldest Hebrew times it involved the utter destruction,
not only of the persons involved, but of their property ; and only
^ As amulets, jewels are mainly worn to pi-otect the chief organs of action
(the hands and the feet), but especially the orifices of the body (earrings ;
nose-rings, hanging over the mouth ; jewels on the forehead, hanging down
and protecting the eyes). Similarly the lower orifices of the trunk are
protected by clothing, which has a sacred meaning {supra, p. 416 re ). Similar
remarks apply to tattooing, staining with stibium and henna, etc.
2 [A person about to consult the oracle of Trophonius, after being washed
and anointed, put on a linen shirt and shoes of the country, L'raSrxTa.y.ito;
iTi;^u>i>lcc; KprtTllaf (Pausanias, ix. 39). — J. G. Frazer.j
NOTE D. THE BAN. 435
metals, after they had passed through the fire, were added to the
treasure of the sanctuary (Josh. vi. 24, vii. 24 ; 1 Sam. xv.).
Even cattle were not sacrificed, but simply slain, and the devoted
city must not be rebuilt (Deut. xiii. 16 ; Josh. vi. 26).^ Such a
ban is a taboo, enforced by the fear of supernatural penalties
(1 Kings xvi. 34), and, as with taboo, the danger arising from it
is contagious (Deut. vii. 26 ; Josh, vii.) ; he that brings a
devoted thing into his house falls under the same ban himself.
ADDITIOXAL NOTE D (p. 148).
TABOOS ON THE INTERCOURSE OP THE SEXES.
According to Herodotus, ii. 64, almost all peoples, except the
(jieeks and Egyptians, fxia-yovraL iv Ipota-L Kal airb yvyaiKijiv
dvL(TTdfjL€vot aXovTOL l<Tip)(ovTaL £? \p6v. This is good evidence of
what the Greeks and Egyptians practised ; but the assertion about
other nations is incorrect, at least as regards the Semites anil
parts of Asia Minor,- whose religion had much in common with
theirs. As regards the evidence, it comes to the same thing
whether we are told that certain acts were forbidden at the
sanctuary, or to pilgrims bound for the sanctuary, or that no one
could enter the sanctuary without purification after committing
them. We find that among the Arabs sexual intercourse was
forbidden to pilgrims to Mecca. The same rule obtained among
the Minseans in connection with the sacred office of collecting
frankincense (Pliny, H. N. xii. 54). Among the Hebrews we
find the restriction in connection with the theophany at Sinai
(Ex. xix. 15) and the use of consecrated bread (I Sam. xxi. 5);
Sozomen, ii. 4, attests it for tlie heathen feast at Mamre ; and
Herodotus himself tells us that among the Babylonians and Arabs
^ In Judg. ix. 45 the site is sown with salt, which is ordinarily explained
Avith reference to the infertility of saline ground. But the strewing of salt
has elsewhere a religious meaning (Ezek. xliii. 24), and is a symbol of
consecration. Similarly Hesychius explains the phrase, apa; i-PTK^TiTpar 'i(a{
'is.v'rpiaiv (r^rnpotritiy xpi(a.; fx,i6 aXo; xarci.patrSa.i TiiXii.
^ See the inscription of Apollo Lermenus, Journ. Hell. Studies, viii. 380
■iqq., — this was not a Greek cult.
436 TABOOS ON
NOTE D.
every conjugal act was immediately followed, not only by an
ablution, but by such a fumigation as is still practised in the
Sudan (Herod., i. 1 98). This restriction is not directed against
immorality, for it applies to spouses ; nor does it spring from
asceticism, for the temples of the Semitic deities were thronged
with sacred prostitutes ; who, however, were careful to retire with
their partners outside the sacred precincts (Herod., i. 199, c^cu tov
Ipov ; cf. Hos. iv. 14, which curiously agrees in expression with
Ham. p. 599, second verse, where the reference is to the love-
making of the Arabs just outside the himtl).
The extension of this kind of taboo to warriors on an expedition
is common among rude peoples, and we know that it had place
among the Arabs ; see Agli. xiv. 67 (Tabari, ed. Kosegarten, i.
144), XV. 161, and the verse of Al-Akhtal, cited by Freytag,
llamdsa, Vei's. Lot. ii. 154. In the Old Testament war and
warriors are often spoken of as consecrated,— a phrase which seems
to be connected, not merely with the use of sacred ceremonies at
the opening of a campaign, but witli the idea that war is a holy
function, and the camp a holy place (Deut. xxiii. 10-15). That
the taboo on sexual intercourse applied to warriors in old Israel
cannot be positively affirmed, but is probable from Deut. xxiii.
10, 11, compared with 1 Sam, xxi. 5, 6 [E.V. 4, 5] ; 2 Sam. xi.
11. The passage in 1 Sam., which has always been a crujc
interpretum, calls for some remark. It seems to me that the text
can be translated as it stands, if only we take t^'^p'' as a plural,
which is possible without adding 1, David says, "Nay, but women
are forbidden to us, as has always been my rule when I go on an
expedition, so that the gear (clothes, arms, etc.) of the young
men is holy even when it is a common (not a sacred) journey ;
how much more so when [Prov. xxi. 27] to-day they will be
consecrated, gear and all." David distinguishes between expedi-
tions of a common kind, and campaigns which were opened by
the consecration of the warriors and their gear. He hints that
his present excursion is of the second kind, and that the ceremony
of consecration will take place as soon as he joins his men ; but he
reminds the priest that his custom has been to enforce the rules
of sanctity even on ordinary expeditions. U^Hp'' should perhaps
be pointed as Pual. The word mvj? might more exactly be
rendered " taboo," for it is evidently a technical expression. So
in Jer. xxxvi. 5, " I am "il^J?, I cannot go into the temple," does
not mean "I am imprisoned" (cf. ver. 19), but "I am restrained
NOTE E.
WARRIORS. 437
from entering the sanctuary by a ceremonial impurity." It seems
to me that the proverbial 21TP1 "llVy, one of those phrases which
name two categories, under one or other of which everybody is
included, means " he who is under taboo, and he who is free ; "
cf. alsoivyj, 1 Sam. xxi. 7 [8], and mvy, "tempus clausum." The
same sense appears in Arabic mdsir, applied to a girl who is shut
up under the taboo which, in almost all early nations, affects girls
at the age of puberty.
ADDITIONAL NOTE E (p. 195).
THE SUPPOSED PHALLIC SIGNIFICANCE OF SACRED POSTS AND
PILLARS.
That sacred posts and pillars among the Semites are phallic
symbols is an opinion which enjoys a certain currency, mainly
through the influence of Movers ; but, as is so often the case with
the theories of that author, the evidence in its favour is of the
slenderest. For the pre-Hellenistic period Movers relies on 1
Kings XV. 13, 2 Chron. xv. 16, taking m'^Sn, after the Vulgate, to
mean simulacrum Priapi ; but this is a mere guess, not supported
by the other ancient versions. He also appeals to Ezek. xvi. 17,
which clearly does not refer to phallic worship, but to images of
the Baalim ; the passage is imitated from Hos. ii. Many recent
commentators suppose that T", "hand," in Isa. Ivii. 8 means the
phallus. This is the merest conjecture, and, even if it were
certain, the use of T" in the sense of cippus, signpost, would still
have to be explained, not by supposing that every monument or
road mark was a phallic pillar, but from the obvious symbolism
which gives us the word fingerpost. The Phoenician cippi U
dedicated to Tanith and Baal Hamman often have a hand figured
on them, but a real hand, not a phallus.
In ancient times obscene symbols were used Avithout offence to
denote sex, and female symbols of this kind are found in many
Phoenician grottoes scratched upon the rock. Herodotus, ii. 106,
says that he saw in Syria Palaestina stelae engraved with ywatKos
aiSota, presumalily masseboth dedicated to female deities ; but how
this can support the view that the masseha represents avSpos
alSoLov I am at a loss to see. Indeed, the whole phallic theory
^
438 PHALLIC SYMBOLS. KOTE F.
seems to be wrecked on the fact that the masseba represents male
and female deities indifferently. At a later date the two great
pillars that stood in the Propylsea of the temple of Hierapolis are
called phalli by Lucian {Dea Si/r. xvi.). Such twin pillars are
very common at Semitic temples ; even the temple at Jerusalem
had them, and they are shewn on coins representing the temple at
Paphos ; so that Lucian's evidence seems important, especially as
he tells us that they bore an inscription to the effect that " these
phalli were set up by Dionysus to his mother Hera." But the
inscription appears to have been in Greek, and proves only that
the Greeks, who were accustomed to phallic symbols in Dionysus-
worship, and habitually regarded the licentious sacred feasts of
the Semites as Dionysiac, put their own interpretation on the
pillars. In § xxviii. of Lucian's work it clearly appears that the
meaning and use of the pillars was an open question. Men were
accustomed to ascend them, and spend a week on the top — like
the Christian Stylites of the same region. Lucian thinks that
this too was done because of Dionysus, but the natives said either
that at the immense height (which is stated at 300 fathoms) they
held near converse with the gods and prayed for the good of all
Syria, or that the practice was a memorial of the flood, when men
were driven by fear to ascend trees and mountains. It is not
easy to extract anything phallic out of these statements.
Besides this, Movers (i. 680) cites the statement of Arnobius,
Adv. Gentes, v. 19 (p. 212), that phalli, as signs of the grace of the
deity, were presented to the nujstm of the Cyprian Venus; but
the use of the phallus as an annilet — which was very widespread
in antiquity — can throw no light on the origin of sacred pillars.
Everything else that he adduces is purely fantastic and without a
])article of evidence, and I have not found anything in more recent
Avriters to strengthen his argument.
ADDITIONAL NOTE E (p. 227).
SACRED TRIBUTE IN ARABIA THE GIFT OF FIRSTLINGS.
I HAVE stated in the text that the idea of sacred tribute has
little or no place among the nomadic Arabs, and it will hardly be
NOTE F. SACRED TRIBUTE. 439
disputed that, broadly speaking, this statement accords with the
facts. P)Ut it is important to determine, with as much precision
as possible, whether the conception of tribute and gifts of homage
paid to the deity had any place at all in the old religion of the
purely nomadic Semites, and if it had, to define that place with
exactness. As the full discussion of this question touches on
matters which go beyond the subject of Lecture YIL, I have
reserved the topic for an additional note.
Among the agricultural Semites the idea of a sacred tribute
appears mainly in connection with first-fruits and tithes of
agricultural produce. Animal sacrifices were ultimately brought
under the category of gifts of homage ; and so, when they were
not presented as free-will offerings, but in accordance with ritual
laws that demanded certain definite oblations for definite occasions,
they also came to be looked upon as a kind of tribute. But we
have seen that, even in the later rituals, there was a clear distinction
between cereal oblations, which were simply payments to the god,
and animal sacrifices, which were used to furnish a feast for the
god and his worshippers together. The explanation that the
victim is wholly given up to the god, who then gives back part of
it to the worshipper, that he may feast at the temple as the guest
of his deity, is manifestly too artificial to be regarded as primitive ;
and if, on the other hand, we look on a sacrifice simply as a feast
provided by the Avorshipper, at which the god is the chief guest,
it does not appear that, according to ancient ideas, any payment
of tribute, or even any gift, is involved. Hospitality is not placed
by early nations under the category of a gift ; when a man
slaughters an animal, every one who is present has his share in
the feast as a matter of course, and those who eat do not feel that
any present has been made to them. And in like manner it seems
very doubtful Avhether the oblations of milk which were poured
out before certain Arabian idols can in any proper sense be called
gifts — i.e. transfers of valuable property — for in the desert it is
still a shame to sell milk (Doughty, i. 215, ii. 443), and a draught
from the milk-bowl is never refused to any one. In a society
where milk and meat are never sold, and where only a churl
refuses to share these articles of food with every by-passer, we
must not look to the sacrificial meal as a proof that the Arabs
})aid tribute to their gods.
The agricultural tribute of first-fruits and tithes is a charge on
the produce of the land, paid to the gods as Baalim or landlords.
440 TAXATION
NOTE F.
In this form tribute cannot appear among pure nomads. But
tribute is also paid to kings who are not landlords, by subjects
who are not their tenants. An example of such a tribute is the
royal tithe in Israel, which was paid by the free landowners ; and
on this analogy it seems quite conceivable that a sacred tribute
paid to the god, as king or chief of his worshippers, might arise
in a purely nomadic community. In examining this possibility,
however, we must have regard to the actual constitution of
Arabian society.
Among the free tribes of the Arabian desert there is no taxa-
tion, and the chiefs derive no revenue from their tribesmen, but,
on the contrary, are expected to use their wealth with generosity
for the public benefit. A modern Sheikh or Emir, according to
Burckhardt's description {Bed. and Wah. i. 118), is expected to
treat strangers in a better style than any other member of the
tribe, to maintain the poor, and to divide among his friends
whatever presents he may receive. " His means of defraying these
expenses are the tribute he exacts from the Syrian villages, and
his emoluments from the ]\Iecca pilgrim caravan,"- — in short, black-
mail. Black-mail is merely a regulated form of pillage, and the
gains derived from it correspond to those which in earlier times
came directly from the plundering of enemies and strangers. In
ancient Arabia the chief took the fourth part of the spoils of
war {Ham. p. 336, last verse; Wacidi, ed. Kr. p. 10), and had
also certain other perquisites, particularly the right to select
for himself, before the division, some special gift, such as a
damsel or a sword (the so-called safnyd, Ham. p. 458, last verse ;
and Abu Obaida ap. Eeiske, A71. Mos. i. 26 sqq. of the notes).i
Among the Hebrews, in like manner, the chief received a liberal
share of the booty (1 Sam. xxx. 20), including some choice gift
corresponding to the safdi/d (Judg. v. 30, viii. 24). In the
Levitical law a fixed share of the spoil is assigned to the
sanctuary (IS'um. xxxi. 28 sqq.), just as in the Moslem theocracy
the chief's fourth is changed to a fifth, payable to Allah and his
prophet, but partly used for the discharge of burdens of charity
and the like, such as in old times fell upon the chiefs (Sura
viii. 42). These fixed sacred tributes are modern, both in Arabia
and in Israel ; but even in old times the spoils of war were a chief
source of votive offerings. The votive offerings of the Arabs
^ Among the Arabs a sacrifice {nacl'a) preceded the division of the spoil ;
see below, Additional Note N.
NOTE F.
IN ARABIA. 441
frequently consisted of weapons (Wellh., p. 110; cf. 1 Sam. xxi. 9);
and, among the Hebrews, part of the chief's booty was generally
consecrated (Judg. viii. 27; 2 Sam. viii. 10 sq. ; Micah iv. 13).
Similarly, Mesha of Moab dedicates part of his spoil to Chemosh ;
and in Greece the sacred tithe occurs mainly in the form of a
percentage on the spoils of war. It is obvious, however, that the
apportionment of a share of booty to the chief or to the god does
not properly fall under the category of tribute. And on the
general Arabian principle that a chief must not tax his own
tribesmen, it does not appear that there was any room for the
development of a system of sacred dues, so long as the gods were
tribal deities worshipped only by their own tribe. Among the
Arabs tribute is a payment to an alien tribe or to its chiefs,
cither by way of black-mail, or in return for protection. A king
who receives gifts and tribute is a king reigning over subjects
who are not of his own clan, and Avhom therefore he is not bound
to help and protect at his own expense. I apprehend that the
oldest Hebrew taxation rested on this principle ; for even Solomon
seems to have excluded the tribe of Judah from his division of
the kingdom for fiscal purposes (1 Kings iv. 7 sqq.), while David,
as a prosperous warrior, who drew vast sums from conquered
nations, probably raised no revenue from his Israelite subjects.
As regards Saul, we know nothing more than that he enriched
his own tribesmen (1 Sam. xxii. 7). The system of taxation
described in 1 Sam. viii. can hardly have been in fidl force till
the time of Solomon at the earliest, and its details seem to
indicate that, in fiscal as in other matters, the developed Hebrew
kingship took a lesson from its neighbours of Phoenicia, and
possibly of Egypt.
To return, however, to the Arabs : the tributes which chiefs
and kings received from foreigners were partly transit dues from
traders (Pliny, H. N. xii. 63 sqq.). In such tribute the gods had
their share, as Pliny expressly relates for the case of the incense
traffic, and as Azraci (p. 107) appears to imply for the case of
Greek merchants at Mecca. Commerce and religion were closely
connected in all the Semitic lands ; the greatest and richest
temples are almost always found at cities which owed their
importance to trade.
Of the other kind of tribute, paid by a subject tribe to a
prince of alien kin, a lively picture is afforded by Agli. x. 12,
where we find Zohair b. Jadhima sitting in person at the fair of
442 SACRED TRIBUTE. note f.
'Okaz to collect from the Hawazin, who frequented this annual
market, their gifts of ghee, curds and small cattle. In like manner
the tribute of the pastoral Moabites to the kings of the house of
'Omri was paid in sheep (2 Kings iii. 4) ; and on such analogies
we can very well conceive that sacrificial oblations of food might
be regarded as tribute, wherever the worshippers were not the
tribesmen but the clients of their god. But to suppose that
sacrifices generally were regarded by tlie ancient Semitic nomads
as tributes and gifts of homage, is to suppose that the typical form
of Semitic religion is clientship, a position which is altogether
untenable.
Thus it would seem that all we know of the social institutions
of the Arabs is in complete accordance with the results, obtained
in the text of these lectures, with regard to the original meaning of
sacrifice. The conclusion to which the ritual points, viz. that the
sacrifice was in no sense a payment to the god, but simply an act
/ of communion of the worshippers with one another and their
god, is in accord with the relations that actually subsisted between
chiefs and their tribesmen ; and when we read that in the time of
Mohammed the ordinary Avorship of household gods consisted in
stroking them with the hand as one went out and in (Muh. in
Med. p. 350), we are to remember that reverent salutation was all
that, in ordinary circumstances, a great chieftain would expect
from the meanest member of his tribe. At the pilgrimage feasts
of the Arabs, as of the Hebrews, no man appeared without a
gift ; but this was in the worship of alien gods.
In a payment of tribute two things are involved — (1) a transfer
of property, and (2) an obligation, not necessarily to pay on a
fixed scale, but at least to pay something. That an Arabian
sacrifice cannot without straining be conceived as a transfer of
property has appeared in the course of this note, and is shown
from another point of view in Lecture XI. {supra, p. 371 sqq.). And
in most sacrifices the second condition is also im fulfilled, for in
Arabia it is left to a man's free will whether he will appear before
the god and do sacrifice, even in the sacred month of Kajab.
It seems, however, to be probable that the absolute freedom of
the individual will in matters of religious duty, as it appears
among the Arabs in the generations immediately preceding Islam,
was in part due to the breaking up of the old religion. There
can, for example, be hardly a doubt that the ascetic observances
during a war of blood-revenge, which in the time of the prophet
KOTE F.
FIRSTLINGS. 443
were assumed by a voluntary vow, were at one time imperatively
demanded by religious custom (ivfra, Note K). Again, there were
certain religious restrictions on the use of a man's property which,
even in later times, do not seem to have been purely optional, e.ff.
the prohibition of using for common work a camel which had
produced ten female foals. ]Jut, in older times at least, such a
camel was not given over in property to the god ; the restriction
was simply a taboo (supra, p. 139).
There is, however, one Arabian sacrifice which has very much
the aspect of a fixed due payable to the god, viz. the sacrifice of
firstlings (^ ; far a). It has already been remarked {supra,
p. 210, note 2) that the accounts which have been handed down
to us about the fara' are confused and uncertain ; but although
the word seems to have been extended to cover other customary
sacrifices, it appears properly to denote "the foal or lamb which is
first cast." This is the definition given in the hadWi, which in
such matters has always great weight, and it is confirmed by the
proverb in Maidani, ii. 20 (Freytag, Ar. Pr. ii. 212). As we also
learn from the had'ith (Lisdn, s.v.) that the custom was to sacrifice
the fara' when it was still so young that the flesh was like glue
and stuck to the skin, it would seem that this sacrifice must be
connected with the Hebrew sacrifice of the first-born of kine and
sheep, which according to the oldest law (Ex. xxii. 30) was to
be offered on the eighth day from birth. There is an unfortunate
ambiguity about the definition of the Arabian fara, for the first
birth may mean either the first birth of the dam, or the first birth
fif the year, and Maidani takes it in the latter sense, making /rt?-«'
a synonym of roba', i.e. a foal which being born in the rabl', or
season of abundant grass, when the mother Avas well fed, naturally
grew up stronger and better than foals born later (cf. Gen. iv. 4).
l]ut apart from the analogy of the Hebrew firstlings, which
are quite unambiguously explained as first-born (Dm "IDS, Ex.
xxxiv. 19), there are other uses of the Arabic word fara' which
make Maidanl's interpretation improbable ; and the presumption
is that, however the rule may have been relaxed or modified in
later times, there was a very ancient Semitic custom, anterior to
the separation of the Arabs and Hebrews, of sacrificing the first-
born of domestic animals. The conclusion that this offering was,
for nomadic life, what the off"ering of first-fruits was among
agricultural peoples, viz. a tribute paid to the gods, seems S(j
obvious that it requires some courage to resist it. Yet, from what
444 SACRIFICE OF
NOTE F.
has been already said, it seems absolutely impossible that, at the
very early date when the Hebrews and Arabs lived together, any
tribute could have been paid to the god as chief or king ; and,
even in the form of the sacrifice of firstlings which is found among
the Hebrews, there seem to be indications that the parallelism
with the offering of first-fruits is less complete than at first sight
it seems to be.
The first-fruits are an annual gift of the earliest and choicest
fruits of the year, but the firstlings are the first ofi"spring of an
animal. Their proper parallel in the vegetable kingdom is there-
fore found in the law of Lev. xix. 23 sqq., which ordains that for
three years the fruit of a new orchard shall be treated as " uncir-
cumcised," and not eaten, that the fourth year's fruit shall be
consecrated to Jehovah, and that thereafter the fruit shall be
common. The characteristic feature in this ordinance, from which
its original meaning must be deduced, is the taboo on the produce
of the first three years, not the offering at the temple paid in the
fourth year. And that some form of taboo lies also at the bottom
of the sacrifice of firstlings, appears from the provision of the older
Hebrew law that, if a firstling ass is not redeemed by its owner,
its neck shall be broken (Ex. xxxiv. 20). We see, however,
that the tendency was to bring all such offerings under the
category of sacred tribute ; for by the later law (Lev. xxvii. 27)
the ass that is not redeemed is to be sold for the benefit of the
sanctuary, and even in the older law all the first-born of men
must be redeemed.
/ Primarily, a thing that is taboo is one that has supernatural
qualities or associations, of a kind that forbid it to be used for
common purposes. This is all that is involved, under the older
law, in the holiness of the firstling ass ; it is such an animal as
the Arabs would have allowed to go free, instead of killing it.
But in the very earliest times all domestic animals had a certain
measure of holiness, and were protected by certain taboos which
prevented them from being used by man as mere chattels ; and
so it would appear that the holiness of the first-born, which is
congenital (Lev, xxvii. 26), is only a higher form of the original
sanctity of domestic animals. The correctness of this conclusion
can be verified by a practical test ; for, if firstlings are animals of
special intrinsic holiness, the sacrifices to which they are appropriate
will be special acts of communion, piacular holocausts or the like,
and not mere common sacrificial meals. And this is actually the,
NOTE F.
FIRSTLINGS. 445
case in the oldest Hebrew times ; for the Passover, Avhich is the
sacrifice of firsthngs par excellence, is an atoning rite of a quite
exceptional kind {supra, p. 387).-^
Further, there is a close connection between the firstlings and
the piacular holocaust ; both are limited to males, and the holo-
caust of Samuel (1 Sam. vii. 9) is a sucking lamb, while from
Ex. XX. 30 we see that firstlings were ofi"ered on the eighth day
(or, probably, as soon after it as was practicable ; cf. Lev.
xxii. 27).
The consecration of first-born male children (Ex. xiii. 13,
xxii. 28, xxxiv. 20) has always created a difficulty. The legal
usage was to redeem the human firstlings, and in Numb. iii. this
redemption is further connected in a very complicated way with
the consecration of the tribe of Levi. It appears, however, that
in the period immediately before the exile, when sacrifices of
first-born children became common, these grisly offerings were
supposed to fall under the law of firstlings (Jer. vii. 31, xix. 5 ;
Ezek. XX. 25). To conclude from this that at one time the
Hel)rews actually sacrificed all their first-born sons is absurd ;
but, on the other hand, there must have been some point of
attachment in ancient custom for the belief that the deity asked
for such a sacrifice. In point of fact, even in old times, when
exceptional circumstances called for a human victim, it was a
child, and by preference a first-born or only child, that was
selected by the peoples in and around Palestine. ^ This is
commonly explained as the most costly offering a man can
make ; but it is rather to be regarded as the choice for a special
purpose of the most sacred kind of victim. I apprehend that
all the prerogatives of the first-born among Semitic peoples are
originally prerogatives of sanctity ; the sacred blood of the kin
flows purest and strongest in him (Gen. xlix. 3). Neither in
the case of children, nor in that of cattle, did the congenital
^ That tlie paschal sacrifice was originally a saciifice of firstlings is clearly
brought out by Wellhausi^n, Prolegomena, vh. iii. § 1, 1. Ultimately the
paschal lamb and the firstlings fell apart ; the former was retained, with
much of its old and characteristic ritual, as a domestic sacrifice, while the
latter continued to be presented at the sanctuary and offered on the altai,
the whole flesh being the perquisite of the priest (Num. xviii. 18). But in
the law of Deuteronomy (xii. 17 sqq., xv. 19 -sgg.) the firstlings have not yet
assumed the character of a sacred tribute.
- 2 Kings iii. 27 ; Philo Byblius in Fr. Hist. Gr. iii. 571 ; cf. Porph.,
I}e Abst. ii. 56, tuv ifiATarut nva.
446 FIRST-BORN. note g.
holiness of the first-born originally imply that they must be
sacrificed, or given to the deity on the altar, but only that if
sacrifice was to be made they were the best and fittest, because
the holiest, victims. But when the old ideas of holhiess became
unintelligible, and holy beasts came to mean beasts set aside for
sacrifice, an obvious extension of this new view of holiness
demanded that the human first-born should be redeemed, by
the substitution of an animal victim (Gen. xxii.) ; and from this
usage again the Moloch sacrifices were easily developed in the
seventh century, when ordinary means seemed too weak to conjure
the divine anger.
In the Passover we find the sacrifice of firstlings assuming the
form of an annual feast, in the spring season. Such a combina-
tion is possible only when the yeaning time falls in spring. So
far as sheep are concerned, there were two lambing times in
ancient Italy, some sheep yeaning in spring, others in autumn,
and the latter were the goodlier and stronger, according to Roman
writers on agriculture. That the same thing was true of Palestine
may perhaps be inferred from the old versions of Gen. xxx. 41,
42.1 J5^t in Arabia all cattle, small and great, yean in the season
of the spring pasture, so that here we have the necessary condi-
tion for a spring sacrifice of firstlings,^ and also a reason, more
conclusive than the assertion of the Lisan {aiqjra, p. 210), for
identifying the Arabian Rajab sacrifices with the sacrifice of
firstlings.
ADDITIONAL NOTE G (p. 276).
SACRIFICES OF SACRED ANIMALS.
In the text I have spoken only of animals corresponding to
Julian's definition of the creatures suited for mystical piacula,
viz. that they were such as were ordinarily excluded from
human diet. But there are other animals which, though not
1 Not from the text itself; cf. Bochart, Pars I. Lib. ii. cap. 46. Much of
what is said in recent commentaries on these verses is nonsense ; taken
from Bochart at second hand and spoiled in the takiug.
^ Doughty, Arabia Deserta, i. 429.
NOTE G. SACRED ANIMALS. 447
strictly forbidden food in the times of which we have record,
retained a certain repntation of natural holiness, which gave them
a peculiar virtue when used in sacrifice. Of course, when the
sacredness of an animal , species ceases to be marked by the
definite taboos that we find in the case of the swine, the dog,
or the dove, the proof that it was once held to be holy in a
particular religious circle becomes dependent on circumstantial
evidence, and more or less vague. But it seems worth while to
cite one or two examples in which the point can be fairly well
made out, or at least made sufficiently probable to deserve further
examination.
1. Deer and antelopes of various kinds were sacred animals
in several parts of the Semitic field; see Kinship, p. 194 sq.
They were not indeed forbidden food, but they had special
relations to various deities. Troops of sacred gazelles occur down
to a late date at sanctuaries, e.g. at Mecca and Tabala (Wellh., p.
102), and in the island spoken of by Arrian, vii. 20. Moreover
stags or gazelles occur as sacred symbols in South Arabia, in
connection with 'Athtar-worship ; at Mecca, probably in connec-
tion with the worship of Al-'Ozzii, and in Phoenicia, both on gems
and on coins of Laodicea ad Mare. Further, Ibn Mojawir speaks
of a South Arab tribe which, when a gazelle was found dead,
solemnly buried it and mourned for seven days.
No kind of wild quadruped was an ordinary sacrificial animal
among the Semites, and even the Arabs regard a gazelle as a mean
substitute for a sheep ; but in certain rituals we find the stag or
gazelle as an exceptional sacrifice. The most notable case is the
annual stag sacrifice at Laodicea on the Phoenician coast, which
was regarded as a substitute for a more ancient sacrifice of a
maiden, and was off'ered to a goddess whom Porphyry calls
Athena {De Ahst. ii. 56), while Pausanias (iii. IG. 8) identifies
her with the Brauronian Artemis, and supposes that the cult was
introduced by Seleucus. But the town (Ramitha in Phoenician,
according to Philo ap. Steph. Byz.) is much older than its re-
christening by Seleucus, and, if the goddess had really been
Greek, she would not have been identified with Athena as well
as with Artemis. She was, in fact, a form of Astarte, the ancient
Tyche of the city, who, according to the usual manner of the
later euhemeristic Syrians, was supposed to have been a virgin,
immolated when the city was founded, and thereafter worshipped
as a deity (Malalas, p. 203). Here, therefore, we have one of the
448 usous.
NOTE G.
many legends of the death of a deity which are grafted on a rite
of annual human sacrifice ; or on the annual sacrifice of a sacred
animal, under circumstances that showed its life to be taken as
having the value of a human life on the one hand, or of the
life of the deity on the other. The stag, whose death has such
significance, is a theanthropic victim, exactly as in the mystic
sacrifices discussed in the text.
Of the stag or gazelle as a Phoenician sacrifice Ave have further
evidence from Philo Byblius (Pr. Ev. i. 10. 10) in the legend of
the god Usous, who first taught men to clothe themselves in the
skins of beasts taken in hunting, and to pour out their blood
sacrificially before sacred stones. This god was worshipped at
the sanctuary he instituted, at an annual feast, and doubtless
with the ceremonies he himself devised, i.e: Avith libations of the
blood of a deer or antelope — for these are the important kinds of
game in the district of the Lebanon — ^presented by Avorshippers
clad in deer-skins. The wearing of the skin of the victim, as Ave
have seen at p. 417, is characteristic of mystical and piacular rites.
IMost scholars, from Scaliger doAvnAvards, have compared Usous
Avith Esau ; but it has not been observed that the scene of Isaac's
blessing, Avhere his son must first approach him Avith the savoury
flesh of a gazelle, has all the air of a sacrificial scene. Moreover,
Jacob, Avho substitutes kids for gazelles, Avears their skin upon
his arms and neck. The goat, Avhich here appears as a substitute
for the game offered by the huntsman Esau, Avas one of the chief
HebreAV piacula, if not the chief of all. In Babylonia and Assyria
also it has an exceptional place among sacrifices; see the repre-
sentation in Menant, Glyptique, vol. i. p. 146 sqq., vol. ii. p. 68.
What is obsolete in common life often survives in poetic phrase
and metaphor, and I am tempted to see in the opening Avords of
David's dirge on Saul (" The gazelle, Israel, is slain on thy high
places," 2 Sam. i. 19) an allusion to some ancient sacrifice of
similar type to that which survived at Laodicea.
2. The Avild ass Avas eaten by the Arabs, and must have been
eaten Avith a religious intention, since its flesh Avas forbidden to
his converts by Symeon the Stylite. Conversely, among the
\y Harranians the ass Avas forbidden food, lilce the SAvine and the
dog ; but there is no evidence that, like these animals, it Avas
sacrificed or eaten in exceptional mysteries. Yet Avhen Ave
find one section of Semites forbidden to eat the ass, Avhile
another section eats it in a Avay Avhich to Christians appears
NOTE G. SACRED ANIMALS. 449
idolatrous, the presumption that the animal was anciently sacred
becomes very strong. An actual ass -sacrifice appears in Egypt
in the worship of Typhon (Set or Sutech), who was the chief
god of the Semites in Egypt, though Egyptologists doubt whether
he was originally a Semitic god. The ass was a Typhonic animal,
and in certain religious ceremonies the people of Coptus sacrificed
asses by casting them down a precipice, while those of Lycopolis,
in two of their annual feasts, stamped the figure of a bound ass
on their sacrificial cakes (Plut., Is. et Os. § 30) ; see, for the
meaning of these cakes, supra, jip. 208, note 3, 222, note 1 ; and
for sacrifice by casting from a precipice, supra, pp. 355, 397. Both
forms indicate a mystic or piacular rite, and stand on one line
with the holocausts of liviug men to Typhon mentioned by
Manetho (ibid. § 73). If it could be made out that these rites
were really of Semitic origin, the ass would be a clear case of
an ancient mystic piacnlum within our field ; but meantime the
matter must rest doubtful. It may, however, be noted that the old
clan-name Hamor ( "he-ass") among the Canaanites in Shecliem,
seems to confirm the view that the ass was sacred with some of the
Semites ; and the fables of ass -worship among the Jews (on
which compare Bochart, liierozoicoii, Pars I. Lib. ii. cap. 18)
probably took their rise, like so many other false statements
of a similar kind, in a confusion between the Jews and their
heathen neighbours. As regards the eating of wild asses' flesh
by the Arabs, I have not found evidence in Arabic literature
that in the times before Mohammed it had any religious
meaning, though Cazwini tells us that its flesh and hoofs supplied
p(jwerful charms, and this is generally a relic of sacrificial use.
See also supra, p. 408, note. On the religious associations of the
ass in classical antiquity, and the use of the ass's head as a charm,
see Compfe Rendu de la Com. Imp. Arch, pour 1863, p. 228 sq.,
and Berichte of the Saxon Society of Sciences, 1854, p. 48.
It has been supposed that the "golden" Set, worshipped by the
Semitic Hyksos in the Delta, was a Sun-god (E. Meyer, Gesch. des
Alt. p. 135). If this be so, the horses of the sun may have
succeeded to the older sanctity of the ass ; for the ass is much
more ancient than the horse in the Semitic lands.
3. To these two examples of sacred quadrupeds I am inclined
to add one of a sacred bird. The quail sacrifice of the Phamicians
is said by Eudoxus {ap. Athen., ix. 47) to commemorate the
resurrection of Heracles. But this was an annual festival at
2f
450 QUAIL SACRIFICE. note h.
Tyre, in the month Peritius (February — March), i.e. just at the
time when the quail returns to Palestine, immense crowds
appearing in a single night (Jos., Ant. viii. 5. 3, compared with
Tristram, Fauna, p. 124). An annual sacrifice of this sort,
connected with a myth of the death of the god, can hardly be other
than the mystical sacrifice of a sacred animal ; and it is to be
noted that the ancients regard quail's flesh as dangerous food,
producing vertigo and tetanus, while on the other hand an
ointment made from the brain is a cure for epilepsy (Bochart, II.
i. 1.5). Lagarde {Gr. UehevK. der Prow. p. 81) once proposed to
connect the Arabic j\^^. " quail," with the god Eshmun-Iolaos,
who restored Heracles to life by giving him a quail to smell at ;
if this be right, the god-name must be derived from that of the
bird, and not vice verm. If the other name for the quail, \.
salwd (in spite of Heb. vt^), is from a root meaning to forget
(Lagarde, Nomina, p. 190), it may be connected Avith the idea that
the quail feeds on hellebore, and that its flesh produces vertigo.
Is this why it is sacrificially eaten in connection with the death
of the god 1 Is it in fact a solwdn, or means of forgetting grief
in an act of communion with the dead ?
additio:nal note h (p. 292).
THE SACRIFICE OF A SHEEP TO THE CYPRIAN APHRODITE.
Instead of a note on this subject, I here print a paper read
before the Cambridge Philological Society in 1888, of which
only a brief abstract has hitherto been published : —
The peculiar rite which forms the subject of the present paper
is known to us from a passage in Joannes Lydus, De Mensibus^
iv. 45, which has been often referred to by writers on ancient
religion, but, so far as my reading goes, without any notice being
taken of a most serious difficulty, which it seems impossible to
overcome without a change of the text. Lydus in the chapter in
question begins \ij describing the practices by which women of
the higher and lower classes respectively did honour to Venus on
the Calends of April. Here, of course, he is speaking of Roman
NOTE H. CYPRIAN APHRODITE. 451
usage, as is plain from the general plan of his book and from the
ceremonies he specifies. The honourable women did service to
Venus vrrep 6/xovotas koI (Slov crw^poFo?. This agrees with the
Avorship of Venus verticordia, the patroness of female virtue,
whose worship Ovid connects with the Calends of April (Fasti,
iv. 155 sq.), and Mommsen conjectures to have been mentioned
luider that day in the FasH Preen. Again, Lydus says that the
women of the common sort bathed in the men's baths, crowned
with myrtle, which agrees with Ovid (ibid, 139 .s-g-.), Plutarch
(Numa, c. 19), and the service of Fortuna virilis in the Fast.
Pnen. The transition from this Roman worship of Venus to
the Cyprian ritual of the same day, is made by a remark as to
the victims proper to the goddess. Venus, he says, was wor-
shipped with the same sacrifices as Juno, but in Cyprus -Trpo/Sarov
KcoSt'o) iaKiTraafJiivov crvveOvov rfj 'AcftpoSiTrj' 6 Se. rpoTros t^s teparcias
iv Tjj Kvirpio airo Ty<; KopLvOov iraprjXOi ttotc. As Lydus goes on
to say that thereafter (etra 8i), on the second of April, they sacrificed
wild boars to the goddess, on account of the attack of that animal
on Adonis, it is clear that the sacrifice of a sheep took place on
the first of April, and that Engel (Kypros, ii. 155) entirely over-
looks the context when he says that, according to Lydus, the
ordinary sacrifices of Aphrodite were the same as those of Hera,
but that in Cyprus a favourite sacrifice to the former goddess was
a sheep with a woolly fleece. Lydus does not say that a sheep
was a favourite Cyprian sacrifice to Aphrodite, but that it was
the sacrifice appropriated to the first of April. The very point of
the passage is that the Roman feast of the first of April appears
in Cyprus with variations in detail.
This coincidence cannot be accidental, and the explanation is
not far to seek. The Cyprian Aphrodite is the Semitic Astarte,
and her ritual is throughout marked with a Semitic stamp. It is
to Semitic ritual, therefore, that we must look for the origin of
the April feast. Now, among the Syrians Nisan is the month
corresponding to April, and on the first three days of Nisan, as
we leani from the FiJirist, the Syrians of Harran, who clung to
the ancient Astarte-worship far into the Middle Ages, visited the
temple of the goddess in groups (Lydus's avveOvov), offered sacri-
fices, and burned living animals. The burning of living animals
answers to the ceremonies observed at Hierapolis in the great
feast of the Syrian goddess at the incoming of spring, when, as
we read in Lucian, goats, sheep and other living creatures were
452 SACRIFICES OF THE note h.
suspended on a pyre, and the whole was consumed. The feast,
therefore, is an annual spring feast of Semitic origin. The Eoman
observance was less solemn, and of a popular kind rather than
part of the State religion. Macrobius (Sat. i. 12. 12-15) tells us,
indeed, that at Kome this festival was not ancient, but was intro-
duced for an historical reason which he omits to record. Now, a
new ritual at Rome was almost certainly a borrowed one, and
there is ample evidence (for which it is enough to refer to
Preller's Romische Mythologie) that the most influential centre of
Venus-worship in the West, and that which had most to do with
the development of her cult in Italy, was the great temple at
Eryx, the "I1^< of the Carthaginians. From Phoenician inscrip-
tions it is certain that the goddess of Eryx ("]~IS rr\T\^V, C. I. S.
No. 140, cf. No. 135) was Astarte ; and thus it is easily under-
stood that the Asiatic festival found its way to Rome. A festival
so widespread, and one which held its ground so long, is well
worthy of careful examination.
Wlien Lydus, in passing from the Roman to the Cyprian rite,
says irifxaTO 8e rj 'A^poStxT^ rots aurois ots koL tj "Hpa, I cannot
find with Engel that he makes any general statement that, as a
rule, the same sacrifices were appropriate to Venus and to Juno.
Oriental worships allowed a far greater range in the choice of
victims for a single deity or temple than was customary in Greece
or Rome. For the Carthaginian temples of Baal this appears
from extant inscriptions ; and as regards Astarte-Aphrodite, Tacitus
{Hist. iii. 2) tells us that at Paphos, and ^Elian {Nat. An. x. 50)
that at Eryx, the worshipper chose any kind of sacrifice he pleased.
This liberty, which was evidently surprising to the Romans and
tlie Greeks, was probably due to the syncretism which established
itself at an early date at all the great Semitic sanctuaries ; one
deity, as we see in the case of Hierapolis, combining a number of
characters which originally belonged to different gods, and uniting
at a single temple a corresponding variety of ancient rituals.
Such syncretism was probably very ancient among the cosmo-
politan Phoenicians ; and throughout the Semitic world it received
a great impulse by the breaking up of the old small states through
Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian conquests. The political and
religious cosmopolitanism of the East uniler the Macedonians
rested on a basis which had been prepared centuries before.
In the West no such powerful political agencies were at work
to develop an early tendency to syncretism, nor was it so easy to
NOTE H. CYPRIAN APHRODITE. 453
confound the well-marked individualities of the Western Pantheon
as to combine the hazy personalities of different Baals or Astartes.
When the need for cosmopolitan forms of worship arose, Eastern
gods and rituals were borrowed, as in the case of Sarapis ; and
the old acknowledged worships still retained their individual
]ioculiarities. It is known that neither Juno nor Hera admitted
such a free choice of victims for her shrine as was permitted at
Eryx and Paphos. Their ordinary sacrifice was a cow ; for, like
other goddesses, they preferred victims of their own sex (Arnobius,
vii. 19). But, so far as the Oriental Aphrodite had a preference,
it was for male victims. So Tacitus tells us for Paphos, and
I-'lautus also in the Pcenulus has " sex agnos immolavi Veneri."
This preference was presumably connected with the androgynous
character ascribed to the Eastern goddess in Cyprus and else-
where, and of itself is sufficient to separate her sacrifices, as a
whole, from those of Juno and Hera.^ Besides, the favourite
victim of Aphrodite was the goat (Tac, Hist. iii. 2), which, except
at Sparta (Pausanias, iii. 15. 9) and in the annual piacular sacrifice
of Hera Acrsea at Corinth (Hesychius, s.v. at^ alya; Zenobius
on the same proverb; Schol. on Eurip., Medea), was excluded from
the altars of Hera. Juno has relations to the goat at Lanuvium,
l)ut at Rome her cultus was closely related to that of Jupiter,
from whose ofi'erings the goat was strictly excluded (Arnobius,
vii. 21).
I have perhaps spent too much time on this argument, for
surely the context itself is sufficient to show that Lydus is not
speaking of Venus-worship in general. What he says is that on
the Calends of April — a special occasion — Venus was Avorshipped
at Rome with the sacrifices of Juno. And as he is speaking of a
ritual in which the worshippers were women, I think we may go
a step further and recall the fact that the Calends of every month
were sacred to Juno Lucina, to whom on that day the regina
xacrorum offered in the Eegia a sow or ewe-lamb (Macrob., i. 15. 19).
The functions of Lucina, as the patroness of virtuous matrons and
the family life of women, were so nearly identical with those of
Venus verticordia that their sacrifices might well be the same.
And if this be so, it was natural for Lydus to pass on as he does
to a remark on the Cyprian ritual, where the same sacrifices occur
with characteristic variations. The sex of the victims is different,
^ The preference for male victims seems however to have other connections
also ; see p. 280, supra.
454 SHEEP SACRIFICE TO note h.
for a reason already explained, and the sacrifices are divided
between two days. But the victims are still the sheep and the
pig, so that the fundamental identity of the Roman and the
Eastern service of the day receives fresh confirmation.
So far all is plain ; but now we come to the unsolved difficulty.
It lies in the phrase Trpo/Sarov Kii>hLU) ecrKeTracr/AeVov. These worils
describe the characteristic peculiarity, for the sake of which our
author turns aside to mention the Cyprian rite, and it seems to
be in relation to this feature that he observes that " the manner
of the priestly service " was derived from Corinth. Unfortunately
we know nothing of the Corinthian ritual referred to. The
Corinthian Aphrodite-worship was Oriental in type, and any
feature in it Avhich reappears at Cyprus is almost certainly
Phoenician. That Cyprus borrowed from Corinth is far less
likely than that both borrowed from the East, and the authority
of Lydus is not enovigh to outweigh this probability. The
allusion to Corinth, however, is of value as teaching us that the
peculiar rite was not merely local ; and, further, the allusion to
" priestly service " shows that the sacrifice in question — as indeed
is implied in the word crwiOvov — was not a private offering, but a
public rite performed at a great temple. But this does not explain
the words KwSto) £crK€xao-/i,eVoi'. It is plain that the meaning
cannot be " a sheep with a woolly fleece," as Engel renders, nor
does it seem possible to understand with the Due de Luynes
{Num. et Insc. Cypr. p. 6), "un b61ier convert de toute sa
toisoUi" If the words could bear this meaning, the rendering
would be plausible enough, for we have seen that in the Syrian
form of the festival the victims were given to the flames alive.
But if Lydus had meant that the victim was consumed by fire,
skin and all, he would have given KwSto) the article, and would
liave used a more precise word than trwiOvov. And can KwStov
be used of the sheep-skin on the sheep, or icrKeTracrfxevov of the
natural coat? The plain sense of the words is that the sheep was
wrapped in a sheep-skin when it was presented for sacrifice, not
that its skin was left upon it, or wrapped round the sacrificial
flesh before it was laid on the altar.
If the skin had been that of a different kind of animal, we
might have explained the rite by the same principle of make-
believe which we find in the Roman offering of the cervaria ovis,
the sheep that was made to pass for a stag ; for the ordinary
meaning of skin-wearing in early religion is to simulate identifica-
NOTE H. THE CYPRIAN APHRODITE. 455
tion with the animal whose skin is worn. But to wrap a sheep
in a sheep-skin is like gilding gold. I propose therefore to change
a single letter, and read €o-K€7rao-/x.eVot, a change which produces a
sense good in itself and strongly recommended by the context and
by analogy.
The significance of the kmSlov or sheep-skin in ancient ritual has
been illustrated by Lobeck in his Aglaophanms, and by Preller in
his commentary on Polemo. It always appears in connection with
atoning and mystic rites, and in the majority of Greek examples
the practice appears to have been that the person to be purged of
guilt set his feet, or his left foot, upon the skin of a sacrificed
ram. But this was not the only way of using the kijoSlov. In
Thessaly there was, according to Diceearchus, a ceremony, observed
at the greatest heat of summer, in which the worshippers ascended
Mount Pelion to the temple of Zeus Acrseus, clad in new sheep-
skins (Fr. Hist. Gr. ii. 262). When Pythagoras was purified by
the priests of Morgus in Crete, he was made to lie beside water
(the sea by day, the river by night), wrapped in the fleece of a
black lamb, and descended to the tomb of Zeus clad in black
wool (Porph., Vita Pyfh. § 17). Again, the first sacrifice of every
worshipper at Hierapolis was a sheep. Having partaken of the
flesh, the sacrificer laid the skin on the ground, and knelt on it,
taking up the feet and head over his own head. In this posture
he besought the deity to accept his offering. Here it is evident
that the ceremony expresses the identification of the sacrificer
with the victim. He has taken its flesh into his body, and he
covers himself with its skin. It is, as it were, the idea of sub-
stitution turned outside in. The direct symbolism of vicarious
sacrifice, where an animal's life is accepted in place of the life of
a human being, is to treat the victim as if it were a man. At
Tenedos, for example, the bull-calf sacrificed to Bacchus wears the
cothurnus, and the mother cow is treated like a woman in child-
bed. But in our case the symbolism is inverted ; instead of
making believe that the victim is a man, the ritual makes believe
that the man is the victim, and so brings the atoning force of the
sacrifice into immediate application to him.
It is evident that if this kind of symbolism be applied, not to
purification of an individual, l)ut to a general and public atoning
service, the priests, as the representatives of the community on
whose behalf the rite is performed, are the persons to whom the
skin of the victim must be applied. And if there are many
456 ATONING SACRIFICE note h.
priests and only one victim, it will be convenient not to use the
actual skin of the sacrifice, which only one can wear at a time,
hut to clothe all the ministers in skins of the same kind. This,
according; to my conjecture, is what Avas done in Cyprus, And
here I would ask whether the context, which alludes to the
manner of the priestly service, does not show that some reference
to the priests has been already made or implied. Such a reference
the proposed emendation supplies.
Upon this view of the passage it is necessarily involved that
the rite described was expiatory. And that it was so seems to
appear from several arguments. The sacrifice of the following
day consisted in wild boars, and was explained in connection with
the Adonis myth, so that its Semitic origin is not doubtful.
Even in Greece the pig is the great purificatory sacrifice, but in
Semitic religion the offering of this animal is not a mere ordinary
piacuhim, but a mystic rite of the most exceptional kind {supra,
p. 272). Now, if the sacrifice of the second day of the feast was
mystic, and therefore piacular in the highest degree, we may be
sure that the first day's sacrifice was no ordinary sacrificial meal
of a joyous character. For a man must first be purified, and then
sit down gladly at the table of the gods, and not conversely.
Again, the Syrian and Roman rites, which we have found reason
to regard as forms of the same observance, were plainly piacular
or purificatory. In Rome we have the women bathing, which is
a form of lustration, and wearing myrtle, which had purifying
virtues, for it was with myrtle twigs that the Romans and
Sabines in the time of Romulus purged themselves at the temple
of Venus Cloacina (Preiler, Rom. Myth. 3rd ed. i. 439). And in
the Syrian rite, where animals are burned alive to the goddess,
the atoning nature of the sacrifice is unmistakeable, and the idea
of a mere sacrificial feast is entirely excluded,
A further argument for the atoning character of the rite may be
derived from the choice of the victim, for next to the swine the
ram was perhaps the commonest sin-offering in antiquity (cf,
Hesychius, s.v. 'A<^/)o8to-ta aypa) ; so much so, that Stephani, in the
Compte Rendu for 1869, explains the frequent occurrence of rams'
heads and the like in ancient ornament as derived from the
association of the animal with the power of averting calamity.
Such ornaments are in fact aTrorpoTraia. It is always dangerous
to apply general arguments of this kind to the interpretation of a
particular ritual ; for the same victim may be an atoning sacrifice
NOTE H.
OF A SHEEP. 457
in one rite and an ordinary sacrifice in another, and it by no
means follows that because, for example, a piacular bull was
offered to Zeus, the sams piaculum would be appropriate to the
Eastern Aphrodite. But in the case of the sheep used as a sin-
offering, we have evidence that there was no limitation to a single
deity ; for when Epimenides was brought to Athens to check the
plague, he suffered black and white sheep to straj' at will from the
Areopagus, and ordered each to be sacrificed, where it lay down,
to the nameless deity of the spot (Diog. Laert., i. 10). This form
of atonement came from Crete, which was one of the stepping-
stones by which Oriental influence reached Greece, so that the
example is the more appropriate to our present argument. And
that, in point of fact, sheep or rams were offered as piacular
sacrifices at the altars of the Eastern Aphrodite, seems to follow
from the Hierapolitan ritual already mentioned. The same thing
is implied for Carthage in the Poenulus of Plautus, where the
sacrifice of six male lambs is directed to proj)itiate the angry
goddess.
These considerations will, I hope, be found sufficient to justify
my general view of the Cyprian rite, and to support the proposed
correction on the text. The sacrifice was piacular, and the
kwSlov was therefore a])propriate to the ritual ; but on the received
text the use of it is entirely unintelligit)le, whereas the correction
ia-KeTraa-fxevoL restores a sense which gives to this feature the same
character as it possesses in analogous ceremonies. But the most
interesting aspect of the ceremony is only brought out when
we connect it with a fact which I have hitherto kept in the
background, because its significance depends on a theory of piacular
and mystic sacrifice which is not yet generally accepted. A
sheep, or a sheep's head, is a religious symbol of constant occur-
rence on Cyprian coins ; and some of these coins show us a figure,
which experts declare to be that of Aphrodite, clinging to the neck
and fleece of a running ram. This device has been compared
with others, which appear to be Eastern though not Cyprian, in
which Aj)hrodite rides on a ram (see De Luynes, Num. Cijpr. PI.
V. 3, vi. 5, and the references in Stephani, Coinpte Rendu pour
1869, p. 87). The inference is that in Cyprus the sheep was the
sacred animal of Aphrodite-Astarte. In this connection it is
important to note that the sheep is of frequent occurrence on
Semitic votive cippi of the class dedicated to Tanith (a form of
Astarte) and Baal-IIamman. Examples will be found in C. I. S.
458 ASTARTE AS A
NOTE H.
Pt. I. Xus. 398, 419, and in a cippus from Sulci, figured in
Perrot and Chipiez, iii. 253. The figures on this class of cippi are
of various kinds, and sometimes convey allusions to sacrifices
{C. I. S. p. 282 sg.), but it appears to have been essential to
introduce a figure or symbol of the deity. And when animals
are figured, they appear to be such symbols. Thus we find fish,
which are known to have been sacred to Astarte, and forbidden
food to her worshippers ; a InxU or cow couching, the symbol of
the Sidonian Astarte ; the elephant, which was not a sacrifice ; the
liorse, which appears so often on the coins of Carthage, and is
certainly a divine symbol, as it is sometimes winged. On these
analogies I conclude that among the Carthaginians, as in Cyprus,
the sheep was sacred to and symbolic of Astarte. To speak quite
exactly, one ought to say to a particular type of Astarte ; for as
this goddess, in the progress of syncretism so characteristic of
Semitic religion, absorbed a great number of local types, she had
a corresponding multiplicity of sacred animals, each of which was
prominent at particular sanctuaries or in particular rites. Thus
the dove- Aphrodite is specially associated with Ascalon, and the
Cow-goddess with Sidon, where she Avas identified with Europa,
the bride of the bull-Zeus {Dea Syria, iv.), and, according to Philo
Byblius, placed the head of a bull upon her own. The sheep-
Astarte is another type, but it also seems to have its original
home in Canaan, for in Deut. vii. 13 the produce of the flock is
called "the Ashtaroth of the sheep." A phrase like this, which
has descended from religion into ordinary life, and is preserved
among the monotheistic Hebrews, is very old evidence for the
association of Astarte with the sheep ; and it is impossible to
explain it except by frankly admitting that Astarte, in one of her
types, had originally the form of a sheep, and was a sheep herself,
just as in other types she was a dove or a fish.
To this it may be objected that the ram or sheep is not the
symbol of Tanith, but of the associated male deity Baal-Hamman,
Avho in a terra-cotta of the Barre collection (Perrot et Chipiez, iii.
73) is represented with ram's horns, and laying his hand on the
head of a sheep. But the inscription (C. /. S. No. 419), cited
above, is dedicated to Tanith, not to Tanith and Baal-Hammau
conjointly, from which it appears that the accompanying symbol
was appropriate to the goddess as well as to her male partner.
It is reasonable that the same animal symbol should belong to
the male and female members of a syzygy ; and in the case of a
NOTE H.
SHEEP-GODDESS. 459
goddess who was often represented as androgynous, it is not even
necessary to suppose that her symbol would be the ewe and her
partner's the ram. But in fact the sheep-symbols on the Tanith
cippi, which are commonly called rams, are hornless, and so
presumably stand for ewes. On the other hand, all wild sheep
and many domestic breeds are horned in both sexes, so that there
is no difficulty about a horned Sheep-goddess. The triangle
surmounted by a circle, with horns bent outwards, which is
commonly found on Tanith cippi, is probably a symbol of the god
or the goddess indifferently. And here the horns, being concave
outwards, can neither be bull's horns nor the horns of the crescent
moon, but must be the horns of sheep.
The Cypriote coins of Aphrodite, in which she clings in a
swimming attitude to a running ram, recall the legend of Helle
and the golden ram, but they also are obviously parallel to the
type of Europa and the bull. On this analogy we ought to
remember that the male god specially associated with the ram is
Hermes, and that the Cyprian goddess was worshipped in an
androgynous form, to which Theophrastus gives the name of
Hermaphroditus. I have already cited tliis androgynous character
to explain why the Paphian (and apparently the Punic) Aphrodite
preferred male victims ; it now supplies an additional reason for
supposing that it was the androgynous or bearded Astarte tluit
was specially connected with the ram. On one of the cippi
already cited, in which Tanith is figured under the symbol of a
sheep (C. I. S. 419), the inscription is not as usually "to the
Lady Tanith," but "to my Lord Tanith." If this is not a
sculptor's error it points in the same direction. And it seems not
unlikely that the standing title, ^i!2 JS njn, which lias given rise
to so much discussion, means nothing more than Tanith with
Baal's face — the bearded goddess.
If, now, the Cyprian goddess was a Sheep-deity, our rite presents
us with a piacular sacrifice in which priests, disguised as sheep,
offer to the Sheep-goddess an animal of her own kind. The
ceremony therefore is exactly parallel to the Roman Lupercalia,
a purificatory sacrifice to Faunus under the name of Lupercus.
The image of Lupercus at the Lupercal was naked, and was clad
in a goat-skin (Justin, xliii. 1. 7). Here, at the great lustration of
15th February, the Luperci, who have the same name as their god,
sacrifice goats and run about the city naked, daubed with mud
and girt with goat-skins, applying to the women who desire to
460 THE BL00D-C0VJ:NANT note I.
participate in the benefits of the rite strokes of thongs which were
out from tlie skins of the victims, and were called fehrua. Both
sacrifices are complete types of that most ancient form of sacra-
mental and piacular mystery in which the worshippers attest their
kinship with the animal-god, and offer in sacrifice an animal of the
same kind, which, except on these mystical occasions, it would be
impious to bring upon the altar.
ADDITIONAL NOTE I (p. 297).
FURTHER REMARKS ON THE BLOOD COVENANT.
An evidence for the survival among the Arabs of the form of
covenant described by Plerodotus, in which blood is drawn from
tlic parties themselves, seems to lie in the expression mi/jdsh,
"scarified," for "confederates" (Nabigha, xxiv. 1 Ahlw. = xvii.
1 Der.). Goldziher, in an interesting review of my Kimhip
{ Liter at livU. f. or. Phil. 1886, p. 25), thinks that the term properly
means "the burnt ones," which is the traditional interpretation,
and suggests that we have in it an example of a covenant by fire,
such as Jauhari (see Wellh., p. 124) and Nowairi (Kasm., Add.
p. 75, 1. 11 liqq.) speak of under the head of 7iar al-hula. It does
not, however, seem that in the latter case the fire touched the
parties ; what we are told is that every tribe had a sacred fire,
and that, when two men (obviously two tribesmen) had a dispute,
they were made to swear beside the fire, while the priests cast salt
on it. An oath by ashes and salt is mentioned by Al-A'sha in a
line cited by AVellhausen from Agli. xx. 139, and, as the ashes of
the cooking pot (ramdd aJ-cidr) are a metonym for hospitality,
there is perhaps nothing more in the oath by fire and salt than an
appeal to the bond of common food that unites tribesmen. This
does not indeed fully account for the fact that the fire is called
"the fire of terror," and that the poetical references to it show the
oath to have really been a terrible one, i.e. dangerous to the man
that perjured himself ; but it is to be remembered that, according
to Aral)ian belief, a man who broke an oath of i)urgation was
likely to die by divine judgment (Bokhari, iv. 219 av/., viii. 40 sq.).
NOTE I. AND ITS SURROGATES. 461
I think, therefore, that, in the present state of the evidence, we
must not attempt to connect the wihdsh with the nar al-hula. If
the former term really means "burnt ones," we must rather
suppose that the reference is to the practice of brandin<^ with the
tribal mark or wusm (which is also called ndr, Rasm., Add. p. 76) ;
for we learn from Agh. vii. 110, 1. 26, that the icasm was some-
times applied to men as well as to cattle. But ^JL:^\y4 primarily
means "to scarify," and, as it is plain from the article in the
Lisan that the traditional explanation of the word was uncertain,
I take it that the best and most natural view is to interpret
viihdsh as " scarified ones."
In process of time the Arabs came to use various substitutes for
the blood of covenant, e.g. robh, i.e. inspissated fruit juice (or
perhaps the lees of clarified butter), perfumes, and even holy
water from a sacred spring (Kinship, p. 261 ; Wellh., p. 121). In
all these cases we can still see that there was something about
the substitute which made it an equivalent for blood. As regards
"living water" this is obvious from what has been said in Lecture
v., p. 158 sq(2., on the holiness of sacred springs. Again, perfumes
were habitually used in the form of unguents ; and unguents
— primarily sacred suet — are equivalent to blood, as has appeared in
Lecture X., p. 363 sqg. If rohb in this connection means lees of
butter, the use of it in covenant -making is explained by the
sacredness of unguents ; but if, as the traditions imply, it is fruit
juice, we must remember that, in other cases also, vegetable juices
are looked upon as a kind of blood {supra, pp. 126, 213).
Compare what Lydus, De mensihus, iv. 29, says of the use of
bean juice for blood in a Eoman ceremony, with the explanation
that the bean (Kvaix.o';) Kvet aljxa : the whole passage is notable,
and helps to explain the existence of a bean-clan, the ge7is Fahia,
at Rome ; cf. also the Attic hero Kua/AiTT^?.
The Hebrew phrase n''"in JliD, "to make {literally, to cut) a
covenant," is generally derived from the peculiar form of sacrifice
mentioned in Gen. xv., Jer. xxxiv. 18, where the victim is cut
in twain and the parties pass between the pieces ; and this rite
again is explained as a symbolic form of imprecation, as if those
who swore to one another prayed that, if they proved unfaithful,
they might be similarly cut in pieces. But this does not explain
the characteristic feature in the ceremony — the passing between
the pieces ; and, on the other hand, we see from Ex. xxiv. 8,
" this is the blood of the covenant which Jehovah hath cut with
462 vows AND NOTE K.
you," that the dividing of the sacrifice and the application of the
blood to both parties go together. The sacrifice presumably was
divided into two parts (as in Ex. I.e. the blood is divided into
two parts), when both parties joined in eating it ; and, when it
ceased to be eaten, the parties stood between the pieces, as a
symbol that they were taken within the mystical life of the
victim. This interpretation is confirmed by the usage of Western
nations, who practised the same rite with dogs and other extra-
ordinary victims, as an atoning or puriticatory ceremony ; see the
examples collected by Bochart, Hierozoicon, lib. ii. capp. 33, 56.
There are many examples of a sacrifice being carried, or its blood
sprinkled, round the place or persons to which its efficacy is to
extend.
ADDITIONAL NOTE K (p. 315).
THE TABOOS INCIDENT TO PILGRIMAGES AND VOWS.
The subject of the taboos, or sacred restrictions, imposed on a
pilgrim or other votary, is important enough to deserve a detailed
examination. These restrictions are sometimes optional, so that
they have to be expressed when the vow is taken ; at other times
they are of the nature of fixed and customary rules, to which every
one who takes a vow is subject. To the latter class belong, e.g.,
the restrictions imposed upon every Arab pilgrim— he must not
cut or dress his hair, he must abstain from sexual intercourse, and
from bloodshed and so forth ; to the former class belong the special
encras:ements to which the Hebrews give the name of esdr or issdr
(obligatio), e.g. Ps. cxxxii. 3 sq., "I will not enter my house
or sleep on my bed until," etc.; Acts xxiii. 14, "We will not
eat until we have killed Paul." It is to be observed that restric-
tions of the optional class are evidently more modern than the
other, and only come in Avhen the fixity of ancient custom begins
to break down ; in old Arabia it was the rule that one who was
encracred on a blood -feud must abstain from women, wine and
unguents, but in the time of the prophet we find these abstinences
made matter of special engagments, e.g. Wacidi, ed. Kr. 182. 6 =
Ibn Hisham, 543. 8 ; Agh. vi. 99. 24, 30. Where the engagement
NOTE K.
PILGEIMAGE. 463
is optional, it naturally assumes the character of an incentive to
prompt discharge of the vow ; the votary stimulates his own zeal
by imposing on himself abstinence from certain of the comforts of
life till his task is discharged ; see Marzuci as quoted by Eeiske,
Abulfeda, vol. i. p. 18 of the Aclnotationes, Avhere the phrase 7na
taldaritlm H-nafsu hilii may be compared with the &'D3 niJj;^ "IDN
of Numb. XXX. 14. But the stated abstinences which go as a
matter of course with certain vows cannot be explained on this
principle, and when they are examined in detail, it becomes mani-
fest that they are simply taboos incident to a state of consecration,
the same taboos in fact which are imposed, without a vow, on
every one who is engaged in worship or priestly service in the
sanctuary, or even every one who is present in the holy place.
Thus the Hebrew Nazarite was required to abstain from wine, and
from uncleanness due to contact Avith the dead, and the same rules
applied to priests, either generally or when they were on service
(Lev. X. 9, xxi. 1 sqq.). Again, the taboo on sexual intercourse
which lay on the Arabian pilgrim applies, among the Semites
generally, to every one who is engaged in an act of worship or
present in a holy place (see above, p. 435) ; and the prohibition of
bloodshed, and therefore also of hunting and killing game, is only
an extension of the general rule that forbids bloodshed on holy
ground. Further, when the same taboos that attach to a pilgrim
apply also to braves on the war-path, and especially to men
Avho are under a vow of blood-revenge, it is to be remembered
that with the Semites, and indeed with all primitive peoples, war
is a sacred function, and the warrior a consecrated person (cf. pp.
383, 436). The Arabic root halla (Heb. ^^n) applied to the dis-
charge (lit. the untying) of a vow, is the same which is regularly
used of emergence from a state of taboo (the ihrcm, the 'idda of
widowhood, etc.) into ordinary life,
Wellhausen observes that the Arabic nadliara and the Hebrew
"IT3 both mean primarily "to consecrate." In an ordinary vow a
man consecrates some material thing, in the voav of pilgrimage or
Avar he consecrates himself for a particular purpose. The Arabs
have but one root to express both forms of vow, but in Hebrew
and Syriac the root is differentiated into two : "ilj, 5,J) "to vow,"
but 1''T3, i-A^, "a consecrated person." The Syriac nSzlr, not-
withstanding its medial 2, is not a mere loan-word from the Old
Testament, but is applied, for example, to maidens consecrated to
the service of Belthis (Is. Ant. i. 212, 1. 130).
464 vows AND NOTE K.
In the case of pilgrimage it seems that the votary consecrates
himself by devoting his hair, which is part of himself, as an offer-
ing at the sanctuary. Whether the consecration of the warrior
was originally effected in the same way, and the discharge of the
vow accomplished by means of a hair- offering, can only be matter
of conjecture, but is at least not inconceivable. If it was so, the
deity to whom the hair was dedicated must have been the kindred
god of the clan, who alone, in primitive religion, could be conceived
as interested in the avenging of the tribal blood ; and we may
suppose that the hair-offering of the warriors took place in con-
nection with the " sacrifice of the home-comers," to be spoken of
in note N, infra. It must, however, be observed that all over the
world the head and hair of persons under taboo are peculiarly
sacred and inviolable, and that the primitive notions about the
hair as a special seat of life, which have been spoken of at p. 306,
[y are quite sufficient to account for this, without reference to the hair-
offering, which is only one out of many applications of these ideas.
It is easy, for example, to understand why, if an important part of
the life resides in the hair, a man whose whole life is consecrated
— e.g. a Maori chief, or the Flamen Dialis, or in the Semitic field
such a person as Samuel or Samson — should either be forbidden
to cut his hair at all, or should be compelled, when he does so, to
use special precautions against the profanation of the holy growth.
From Ezek. xliv. 20 we may conclude that some Semitic priests
let their hair grow unpolled, like Samuel, and that others kept
it close shaved, like the priests of Egypt ; both usages may be
explained on a single principle, for the risk of profaning the hair
could be met by not allowing it to grow at all, as well as by not
allowing it to be touched. Among the Hebi'ews, princes as well as
priests were consecrated persons, and narur sometimes means a
prince, while nezer, " consecration," means " a diadem." As a
diadem is in its origin nothing more than a fillet to confine hair
that is worn long, I apprehend that in old times the hair of Hebrew
princes, like that of a Maori chief, was taboo, and that Absalom's
long locks (2 Sam. xiv. 26) were the mark of his political pre-
tensions, and not of his vanity. When the liair of a Maori chief
was cut it Avas collected and buried in a sacred place or hung on
a tree ; and it is noteworthy that Absalom's hair was cut annually
ly at the end of the year — i.e. in the sacred season of pilgrimage, and
that it was collected and weighed, which suggests a religious rite
similar to that mentioned by Herod., ii. 65.
NOTE K.
PILGRIMAGE. 465
While the general principle is clear, that the restrictions laid on
persons tinder a vow were originally taboos, incident to a state of
consecration, it is not to be supposed that we can always explain
these taboos in detail ; for in the absence of direct evidence, it is
often almost impossible for modern man to divine the workings
of the primitive mind.
Something, however, may be said about two or three rules
which seem, at first sight, to lend colour to the notion that the
restrictions are properly privations, designed to prevent a man
from delaying to fulfil his vow. The Syrian pilgrim, during his
whole journey, was forbidden to sleep on a bed. With this rule
Wellhausen compares the custom of certain Arabs, Avho, during
the ihram, did not enter their houses by the door, but broke in
from behind,— a practice which is evidently an evasive modifica-
tion of an older rule that forbade the house to be entered at all.
The link required to connect the Syrian and Arabian rules is
supplied by Ps. cxxxii. 3, and with the latter may also be
compared the refusal of Uriah to go down to his house during a
campaign (2 Sam. xi. 11), and perhaps also the Hebrew usage of
living in booths at the Feast of Tabernacles, to which there are
many parallels in ancient religion. From the point of view of
taboo, this rule is susceptible of two interpretations ; it may either
be a precaution against uncleanness, or be meant to prevent the
house and bed from becoming taboo, and unfit for profane use, by
contact with the consecrated person. In favour of the second
view may be cited the custom of Tahiti, where the kings habitually
abstained from entering an ordinary house, lest it should become
taboo, and be lost to its owner. However this may be, the Syrian
practice can hardly be separated from the case of priests like the
Selli at Dodona, who were dviTrroTroSc? -^afxaiivvai, nor the rule
against entering a house from the similar restriction imposed on
the religious order of the Rechabites (Jer. xxxv. 9 sq.). The
Rechabites, like the Xazarites and Arabian votaries, abstained
also from wine, and the same abstinence was ]iractised by
Egyptian priests (Porph., De Ahst iv, 6) and by the Pythagoreans,
whose whole life was surrounded by a network of taboos. These
parallels leave no doubt that the rule of abstinence is not an
arbitrary privation, but a taboo incident to the state of consecration.
From Judg. xiii. 4 it would seem that fermented drinks fall into
the same class Avith unclean meats ; compare the prohibition of
ferments in sacrifice. Again, the Arabian rule against Avashing
2 G
466 THE ALTAR note l.
or anointing the head is not ascetic, but is simply a consequence
from the inviolability of the head, which must not be touched in
a way that might detach hairs. The later Arabs did not fully
understand these rules, as appears from the variations of the
statements by different authorities about one and the same vow ;
cf. for example, the references given at the beginning of this note
for the vow of Abu Sofyan. Finally, the peculiar dress prescribed
to the Arabian pilgrim is no doubt a privation to the modern
Moslem, but the dress is really nothing else than the old national
garb of Arabia, which became sacred under the influence of
religious conservatism, combined with the principle already ex-
plained {f!upra, p. 432), that a man does not perform a sacred
function in his everyday clothes, for fear of making them taboo.
ADDITIONAL NOTE L (p. 359).
THE ALTAR AT JERUSALEM.
That there was always an altar of some kind before the temple
at Jerusalem might be taken for granted, even without the express
mention of it in 2 Kings xi. 11 (1 Kings viii. 22, 54); but this
passage throws no light on the nature of the altar. Let us
consider separately (a) the altar of burnt-off"ering, (5) the brazen
altar.
(a) According to 1 Kings ix. 25, Solomon built an altar of
burnt-ofi'ering, and offered on it three times a year. A built altar
is an altar of stone, such as Ahaz's altar and the altar of the
second temple were. There is no other trace of the existence of
such an altar before the time of Aliaz, and the verse, which is
omitted by the Septuagint, belongs to a series of fragmentary
notices, which form no part of the original narrative of Solomon's
reign, and are of various dates and of uncertain authority. Apart
from this passage Ave first read of a built altar in 2 Kings xvi.,
viz. that which Aliaz erected on the model of the altar (i.e. the
chief altar) at Damascus. Ahaz's innovation evidently proved
permanent, for the altar of the second temple was also a platform
of stone. According to the Massoretic text of 2 Kings xvi. 14, as
KOTE L.
AT JERUSALEM. 467
it is usually translated, a brazen altar was removed to make way
for Ahaz's altar, but this sense is got by straining a corrupt text ;
2"ip''1 cannot govern the preceding accusative, and to get sense we
must either omit naTOH nxi at the beginning of the verse or read
7]} for nx. The former course, which has the authority of the
LXX., seems preferable ; but in either case it follows that we must
point 3"ip»1, and that the whole verse is an elaborate description
of the new ritual introduced by the king. The passage in fact
now runs thus (v, 12): "The king went up upon the new altar
(v. 13) and burned his holocaust and his cereal oblation, and
poured out his libation ; and he dashed the blood of the
peace-offerings that were for himself against the altar (v. 14) of
brass that was before Jehovah, and drew nigh from before the
naos, hetween the naos and the (new) altar (cf. Ezek. viii. 16;
Joel ii. 17) and applied it {i.e. some of the blood) to the northern
flank of the altar." The brazen altar, therefore, stood quite close
to the naos, and the new altar stood somewhat further off, pre-
sumably in the middle of the court, which since Solomon's time
had been consecrated as the place of burnt-offering. Further,
it appears that the brazen altar was essentially an altar for the
sprinkling of blood ; for the king dashes the blood of his shelamlm
against it before applying the blood to the new altar. But,
according to ver. 15, he ordains that in future the blood of
sacrifices shall be applied to the new or great altar, while the
brazen altar is reserved for one particular kind of offering by the
king himself ("ip^b "h, E.V. " for me to inquire by"). The nature
of this offering is not clear from the words used in ver. 15, but from
ver. 14 it appears that it consisted of slieldmlm offered by the
king in person. In short, the old altar is not degraded but
reserved for special use ; henceforth none but the king himself is
to pour sacrificial blood upon it.
ib) It appears, then, that the brazen altar was an ancient and
sacred thing, which had existed long before Ahaz, and continued
after his time. Yet there is no separate mention of a brazen altar
either in the description of Solomon's temple furniture (1 Kings
vii.) or in the list of brazen utensils carried off by the Chaldseans.
The explanation suggested by Wellhausen (Prolegomena, 3rd ed. p.
45), that the making of the brazen altar has been omitted from
1 Kings vii. by some redactor, Avho did not see the need of a new
brazen altar in addition to that which the priestly author of the
Pentateuch ascribes to Moses, does not fully meet the case, and
468 CANDLESTICK note l.
I can see no way out of the difficulty except to suppose that the
brazen altar of 2 Kings xvi. is identical with one of the two
pillars Jachin and Boaz. In the old time there was no difference
between an altar and a sacred stone or pillar, and the brazen
pillars are simply the ancient sacred stones — which often occur
in pairs — translated into metal. Quite similarly in Strabo (iii.
5. 5) the brazen pillars of Hercules at Gades, which were twelve
feet high, are the place at which sailors do sacrifice. Of course,
an altar of this type belongs properly to the old tireless type of
sacrifice ; but, so long as the holocaust was a rare offering, it was
not necessary to have a liuge permanent hearth - altar ; it Avas
enough to erect from time to time a pyre of wood in the middle
of the court. It is true that 2 Kings xvi. speaks only of one
brazen altar used for the sprinkling of the sacrificial blood, but
it is intelligible that usage may have limited this function to
one of the two pillars.
I am inclined therefore to think that the innovation of Ahaz
lay in the erection of a permanent altar hearth, and in the intro-
duction of the rule that in ordinary cases this new altar should
serve for the blood ritual as well as for the hre ritual. One can
thus understand the fulness with which the ritual of the new
altar is described, for the rule of Ahaz was that which from his
time forward was the law of the sanctuary of Jerusalem. I feel,
however, that there still remains a difficulty as regards the burn-
ing of the fat of the shelamlm, which was practised in Israel even
before the royal period (1 Sam. ii. 16). In great feasts it would
appear that the fat of ordinary offerings was burned, along with
the holocaust, on the pavement of the court (1 Kings viii. 64),
but what was done with it on other occasions it is not so easy
to say. It is very noteworthy, however, that the details of tlie
capitals of the brazen pillars are those of huge candlesticks or
cressets. They had bowls (1 Kings vii. 41) like those of the
golden candlestick (Zech. iv. 3), and gratings like those of an
altar hearth. They seem therefore to have been built on the
model of those altar candlesticks which we find represented on
Phoenician monuments ; see C. I. S. Pt. I. pi. 29, and Perrot and
Chipiez, Hi'st. de I' Art, vol. iii. figs. 81 sqq. The similarity to
a candlestick, which strikes us in the description of the Hebrew
pillars, is also notable in the twin detached pillars which are
represented on coins as standing before the temple at Paphos.
See the annexed figure. Similar cressets, with worshippers before
NOTE L.
ALTARS.
469
them ill the act of adoration, are figured on Assyrian engraved
stones; see, for example, Menant, Glyiotiqne Orient, vol. ii. fig.
46. In most of the Assyrian examples
it is not easy to draw the line between
the candelabrum and the sacred tree
crowned with a star or crescent moon.
The Hebrew pillar altars had also asso-
ciations Avith the sacred tree, as appears
from their adornment of pomegranates,
but so had the golden candlestick, in
which the motive of the ornament was
taken from the almond tree (Ex. xxxvii. 17 sqq.).
It seems difficult to believe that the enormous pillars of
Solomon's temple, which, if the measures are not exaggerated,
were twenty-seven feet high, were actually used as tire altars ;
but, if they were, the presumption is that the cressets were fed
with the suet of the sacrifices. And perhaps this is after all a
less violent supposition than that the details of a Phoenician
altar candelabrum were reproduced in them in a meaningless
M'ay. At any rate there can be no doubt that one type of fire
altar among the Phoenicians and Assyrians was a cresset rather
than, a hearth, and as this type comes much nearer to the old
eippus than the broad platform fitted to receive a holocaust, I fancy
that it must be regarded as the oldest type of fire altar. In other
words, the permanent fire altar began by adding to the sacred stone
an arrangement for consuming the fat of ordinary sacrifices, at a
time Avhen holocausts were stiJl burned on a pyre. If the word
"Ariel," "hearth of El," originally meant such a pillar altar, Ave
get rid of a serious exegetical difficulty in 2 Sam. xxiii. 20 ; for
on this vieAV it Avill appear that Benaiah's exploit Avas to over-
throw the twin fire pillars of the national sanctuary of Moab —
an act Avhicli in tliese days probably needed more courage than
to kill tAvo "lion-like men," as the English Version has it. On
the stele of Mesha (1. 12), an Ariel appears as something that
(•an be moved from its place, Avhich accords with the view now
suggested. Compare the twin pillars of the Tyrian Baal, one of
which shone by night (Herod., ii. 44). It Avill be observed that
this line of argument lends some plausibility to Grotius's sugges-
tion that the hammdnlm of Isa. xvii. 8, xxvii, 9, etc., are Trupeia.
Finally, it may be noted that Amos ix. 1 becomes far more
470 SANCTUARIES note m.
intelligible if the altar at Eethel was a pillar crowned by a sort of
capital bearing a bowl like those at Jerusalem. For then it will
be the altar itself that is overthrown, as the context and the
parallelism of ch. iii. 14 seem to require: "smite the capital
till the bowls ring again, and dash them in pieces on the heads
of the worshippers."
ADDITIONAL NOTE M (p. 367).
HIGH PLACES.
In the text of the lectures I have tried to work out the history
of the fire altar, and shew how the place of slaughter and the
pyre ultimately met in the altar hearth. In the present note I
will give some reasons for thinking that the gradual change of
view, which made the burning and not the slaughter the chief
thing in sacrifice, also left its mark in another way, by influencing
the choice of places for worship.
It has been observed in Lecture V. (p. 157) that the sanctuaries
of the Northern Semites commonly lay outside and above the
town. This does not seem to have been the case in Arabia,
where, on the contrary, most sanctuaries seem to have lain in moist
hollows, beside wells and trees. And even in the Northern
Semitic lands Ave have found traces of sanctuaries beside fountains,
beneath the towns, which were older than the high places on the
hills. At Jerusalem the sanctity of Gihon and En-Kogel is older
than that of the waterless plateau of Zion above the town.
Now, in the discussion of the natural marks of holy places, we
saw how well-watered spots, thickets and the like, might naturally
come to be taken as sanctuaries, and we also found it to be
intelligible that mountain ranges should be holy tracts ; but Ave
have not found any natural reason for fixing a sanctuary on a
bare and barren eminence. It is often supposed that altars Avere
built on such spots because they Avere open to the heaven, and
nearer than other points of earth to the heavenly gods ; but this
explanation takes a great deal for granted that Ave have no right
to assume. On the other hand, if the explanation of the origin of
burnt-ofFering given above is correct, it is obvious that the barren
and unfrequented hill-top above a town Avould be one of the most
natural places to choose for burning the holocaust. In process of
NOTE N.
ON HILL-TOPS. 471
time a particular point on the hill would become the established
place of burning, and, as soon as the burnt flesh began to be
regarded as a food-offering presented to the deity, the place of
burning would be itself a sanctuary. Ultimately it would become
the chief sanctuary of the town, and be fitted up with all the
ancient apparatus of sacred posts and sacrificial pillars.
That the high places, or hill sanctuaries, of the Semites were
primarily places of burnt sacrifice cannot be proved by direct
evidence, but may, I think, be made probable, quite apart from
the argument that has just been sketched. In Arabia we read of
only one sanctuary that had " a place of burning," and this is the
hill of Cozah at Mozdalifa. Among the Hebrews the sacrifice of
Isaac takes place on a mountain (Gen. xxii. 2), and so does the
burnt sacrifice of Gideon. The annual mourning on the mountains
at Mizpeh in Gilead must have been connected Avith a sacrifice on
the mountains, wdiich, like that of Laodicea, was thought to
represent an ancient human sacrifice (Judg. xi. 40). In Isa. xv. 2
the Moabites in their distress go up to the high places to mourn,
and presumably to offer atoning holocausts. It is to offer burnt
sacrifice that Solomon visits the high place at Gibeon (1 Kings
iii. 4), and in general, "itsp, " to burn sacrificial flesh " (not as E.V.
" to burn incense"), is the usual word applied to the service of the
high places. A distinction between a high place (bama) and an
altar {mizhedh) is acknowledged in the Old Testament down to the
close of the kingdom (2 Kings xxiii. 15; Isa. xxxvi. 7); but
idtimately bama is the name applied to any idolatrous shrine or
altar.
ADDITIONAL NOTE N (p. 384).
SACRIFICE BY VICTORIOUS WARRIORS.
According to Abu 'Obaida, the Arabs, after a successful foray,
sacrificed one beast from the spoil, and feasted upon it before the
division of the booty {Ham. p. 458 ; Reiske, An. Mos. i. 26 sqq.
of the notes ; cf. Listin, x. 240). This victim is called nacl'a, or
more fully nactat al-codddin, "the nacl'a of the home-comers."
The verb *_iij is used generally of sacrificing for a guest, but its
primary sense is to split or rend, so that the name of nacl'a seems
to denote some peculiar way of killing the victim. Now it
472 THE SACRIFICE NOTE n.
appears from the narrative of Nilus that the victims of the
Saracens were derived from the choicest part of the booty, from
which they selected for sacrifice, by preference a handsome boy,
or if no boys had been captured, a white and immacidate camel.
The camel exactly corresponds to the nacia of the Arabs, and the
name probably means a victim torn to pieces in the way described
by Nilus. It seems probable, therefore, that the sacrifice made for
warriors on their return from a foray was not an ordinary feast,
but an antique rite of communion, in Avhich the victim was a
sacred animal, or might even be an actual man.
That the warriors on their return should unite in a solemn act
of service is natural enough ; the thing falls under the same
category with the custom of shaving one's head at the sanctuary
on returning from a journey, and is, in its oldest meaning, simply
a retying of the sacred links of common life, which may have
irrown weak through absence from the tribal seat. But of course
a sacrifice of this kind would in later times appear to be piacular
or lustral, and accordingly, in the Levitical law, an elaborate
purification is prescribed for warriors returning from battle, before
they are allowed to re-enter their homes (Numb. xxxi. 19 sqq.).
In ancient Arabia, on the other hand, where warriors were under
the same taboos as a man engaged on pilgrimage, the nacta was
no dovibt the means of untying the taboo, and so returning to
ordinary life.
These remarks enable us to put the sacrifice of captives, or of
certain chosen captives, in a somewhat clearer light. This
sacrifice is not an act of blood-revenge, for revenge is taken in
hot blood on the field of battle. The captive is simply, as Nilus
puts it, the choicest part of the prey, chosen for a religious
purpose ; and the custom of preferring a human victim to a
camel is probably of secondary growth, like other customs of
human sacrifice. It seems, however, to be very ancient, for Saul
undoubtedly spares Agag in order that he may be sacrificed, and
Samuel actually accomplishes this offering by slaying him " before
the Lord " in Gilgal. And in this, as in other cases of human
sacrifice, the choice of an alien instead of a tribesman is not of the
essence of the rite, for Jephthah looses his vow on his return
from smiting the Ammonites by the sacrifice of his own daughter.
According to the Arabian lexicographers, the term nacta may
be applied to sacrifices made on various occasions other than
return from war, e.g. to a coronation feast, or that which a man
NOTE N. OF HOME-COMERS. 473
makes for his intimates on his marriage ; while ultimately the
word appears to assume a very general sense, and be applied to
any slaughter to entertain a guest. For the occasions on which
the Arabs were wont to kill a victim, which are very much the
same as those on which slaughter of the sacred cattle is permitted
by African peoples {svjn'a, p. 279), note the verse cited in Lisdn,
vi. 226, X. 240 (and with a variation, Taj, v. 519, L 2), where the
desirable meats include the Iihors, the i'dhur, and the nacl'a.
The first, which is the nanie applied to the broth given to women
in child-bed, denotes also the feast made at a birth ; the i'dhdr is
the feast at a circumcision. In Journ. Phil. xiv. 124, I have
connected the hhors with the Hebrew D'Cin, " charms." Charmed
food is of course primarily holy food.
INDEX OF PASSAGES OF SCRIPTURE.
Genesis.
i. 2
i. 28, 29
ii. IGsqq.
hi. 15, 21
iv. 4, 5 ... 162,
iv. 10
iv. 14 sq.
\i. 2, 4
vii. 11
viii. 3sqq.
viii. 20
ix. 1 sq.
X.
xii. 6
xii. 7
xiv. 5
xiv. 13
XV. 8 sqq. 202,
.\xi. 21
xxi. 33
xxii.
xxii. 2
xxii. 8-13
xxii. 9 ...
xxii. 10
xxii. 13
xxii. 14
xxiv. 11
xxvi. ...
xxvii. 7
xxvii. 15, 27 ...
xxvii. 29
XX viii. 12
xxviii. 18 sqq. 108,
xxviii. 22
xxix. 14
XXX. 41, 42 ...
xxxi. 45 sqq. ...
xxxii. 2
xxxii. 28, 30 ...
xxxii. 33
xxxv. 2
xxxv. 8
xxxv. 14
xxxvi. 14
PAOE
... 97
... 289
... 289
... 289
289, 443
... 397
... 252
... 427
... 97
... 397
... 358
... 289
5
... 179
... 108
... 292
... 119
301, 461
... 43
... 170
343, 446
... 471
... 291
... 358
... 355
... 346
... 108
... 157
... 99
... 206
... 433
... 383
... 427
186, 214
187, 229
... 256
... 446
... 186
... 427
... 427
... 360
... 433
... 179
... 214
... 43
sxxvi. 28
xxxvii. 27
xxxviii. 24
xii. 46 sqq.
xlviii. 14
xlix. 3 ...
xlix. 8...
xlix. 25
PAGE
43
256
398
185
402
445
383
97
Exodus.
iii. 1 sqq.
iii. 5 ...
xii. 9 ...
xii. 46 ...
xiii. 13
xvii. 15
xix.
xix. 4 ...
xix. 10-13
xix. 15...
xix. 20
XX. 24s7. 110,
XX. 30 ...
xxi. 13, 14,
xxii. 28
xxii. 29
xxii. 30
xxiii. 15
xxiii. 18
xxiii. 19
xxiv. 4 sqq. 194
xxiv. 8
xxxiv. 1,3
xxxiv. 19
xxxiv. 20
xxxiv. 26
xxxvii. 17 sqq
110,
431,
185, 354,
204, 222,
,301,
325.
431, 444,
204,
136
434
387
326
445
108
136
111
32.'t
435
43.S
358
445
409
445
222
443
328
203
364
396
461
186
443
445
222
469
Leviticus.
i. 14 ...
ii. 1 sqq.
ii. 11, 13
... 202
202. 206
203, 204
iii. 3
iii. 11
iii. 17
iv'. 6,li;'l7,26r34
iv. 15
v. 11
vi. 16 (22) ...
vi. 20 (27) 331,
vi. 22 (29) ...
vi. 23 (30)
vii. 8
vii. 10
vii. 13
vii. 14 ...
vii. 15 sqq.
vii. 27
viii. 15
viii. 23
X. 7
X. 9
X. 17
xi. 32 sqq.
xi. 41
xii. 6, 8
xiv. 4, 6, 14, 22, 49
XIV.
xiv.
xvi.
xvi.
xvi.
xvi.
xvi.
xvi.
xvi.
xvi.
xvi.
xvii,
xvii
xvii
xvii
xix.
xix.
xix.
xix.
7,53
17,51
15
19, 33
21...
24...
24, 28
26, 28
27...
30...
33...
7 ...
. 11
. 10, 11
, 13
6 ...
17
23 sqq.
24
PACE
360
184
220
326
330, 331
396
206
206
432, 434
359
330
414
223
203
224
221, 367
324
415
326
331
463
326
428
275
202
202, 326,
428
... 402
... 407
... 396
389, 415
... 401
... 432
... 333
432, 444
... 330
... 388
... 415
... 113
346, 397
220, 289
... 217
... 221
... 407
149, 444
... 204
47 .'1
476
INDEX OF PASSAGES OF SCRIPTURE.
PAOE
xix. 26 324
xix. 27 ... 306, 307
xix. 28 ... 304, 316
XX. 14 353
xxi. 1 sqq. ... ... 463
xxi. .5 304, 306
xxi. 8, 17 sqq. ... 184
xxi. 9 353, 398
xxii. 27 445
xxii. 30 221
xxiii. 14 223
xxiii. 17 ... 203, 223
XXV. 23 78
XXV. 49 256
xxvii. 26 414
xxvii. 27 ... 431,444
xxvii. 28 434
Numbers.
iii 445
V. 11 sqq. ... ... J 64
vi. 10 202
vi.lSsqq 314
vi. 15 224
viii. 10 402
XV. 5 203
XV. 7 213
XV. 38 416
xvii 180
xviii. 18 445
xix. 4 3.57
xix. 7-10 ... 333, 405
xxi. 17, 18 ... 127, 107
x,x;i. 29 42
xxiv. 24 383
XXV. 4 398
xxviii. 7 213
XXX. 14 463
xxxi. 19 sqq 472
xxxi. 28 sqq 440
Deuteronomy.
iii. 6
iv. 19 ...
vii. 13 ...
vii. 26...
xi. 30 ...
xii. 3 ...
xii. 16 ...
xii. 17 sqq.
xiii. 16...
xiv. 1 ...
XV. 19 sqq.
xvi. 21
xviii. 4
xxi. 1-9
xxi. 4 ...
xxi. 12
xxi. 18
xxi. 21
91
91
37
458
435
179
-... 186
201, 217, 220
445
435
.. 42, 304, 306
445
171, 172
223, 224
399
.351, 39(5
408, 428
60
351
PAGE
PAGE
xxiii. 10-15
436
ii. 13 sqq.
... 221
xxvi. 1 sqq.
223
ii. 15
... 364
xxvi. 12
231
ii. 16
220. 468
xxvi. 13
...
266
ii. 27 sqq.
... 400
xxxii. 6
42
iii. 14
... 219
xxxiii. 2
111
iv. 7 sqq.
... 38
xxxiii. 9
326
vi. 14
... 291
xxxiii. 13
97
vii. 6
... 409
xxxiii. 16
177
vii. 9 ... 349
383, 445
xxxiii. 29
383
vii. 12
... 186
xxxiv. 9
...
402
vii. 15, 17
viii
... 228
... 67
Joshua.
ix
ix. 6
... 221
... 119
iv. 5
186
ix. 11
... 157
iv. 20 ...
194
ix. 12, 13
236, 262
v. 15 ...
. . •
434
X. 3
230, 236
vi. 24 ...
435
xi. 7
... 383
vi. 26 ...
435
xii. 12
... 66
vii.
• • >
435
xiii. 10
... .383
vii. 1, 11
...
400
xiii. 12
... 328
vii. 15 ...
398
xiv. 24 sqq.
... 434
vii. 24 ...
435
xiv. 32 sq.
... 185
ix. 14 ...
253
xiv. 34
322, 327
xxii. 19
92
xiv. 35
... 108
xxiv. 26
186
XV
xvii. 34
xviii. 3 sqq. ...
... 435
... 119
... 317
Judges.
xix. 24
... 432
XX. 6, 29
236, 258
iii. 3 ...
93
XX. 27
... 221
iii. 7 ...
172
xxi. 4 ...
... 224
iii. 19, 20
. ,
194
xxi. 5, 6
435, 43rt
V. 4 sqq.
111
xxi. 7
... 437
V. 30 ...
...
440
xxi. 9
... 441
vi. 19 ...
,
204
xxii. 7
... 441
vi. 20 ...
109,
383
358
xxvi. 19 37, 47, 92, 219, 329
vi. 26 ...
358
38M
XXX. 20
... 440
viii. 20
396
XXX. 26
... 38
viii. 23
66
xxxi. 10
... 351
viii. 24...
...
440
xxxi. 12
... 353
viii. 27 ..
441
ix. 2 ...
256
ix, 8 sqq.
119,
126
423
2 Samuel.
ix. 13 ...
203
ix. 27 ...
204,
236,
243
L 19
... 448
ix. 37 ...
179
ii. 13
... 157
ix. 45 ...
435
V. 1
... 256
xi. 31 ...
383
V. 21
... 38
xi. 40 ...
...
471
V. 25
... 179
xiii. 4 ...
465
vi. 14
... 432
xiii. 19
109,
358
vi. 19
230, 236
xvi. 2, 3 sqq. .
236
viii. 10 sqq. ...
... 441
xvii. 2 ...
43 1
ix. 14
... 38
xix. 29 ...
383
xi. 11
... 465
XX. 33 ...
176
xiv. 26
XV. 11
xix. 12
... 464
... 236
... 256
RU'
PH.
XX. 8
... 186
i. 14 sqq.
•■
...
37
xxi
xxi. 9
... 400
...3, 98
ISAM
tUEL.
xxiii. 16
xxiii. 17
... 157
... 214
i. 3, 21
..
...
236
xxiii. 20
. 469
i. 21, 24
..
...
230
xxiv
... 353
INDEX OF PASSAGES OF SCEIPTURE.
477
1 Kings.
Ezra.
PAGE
PACE
PAGR
xi. 6 sq.
2^8
i. 9, 38 157,18(5
ix. 7
408
xiii. 3 ...
383
i. 32 sq 67
xiii. 21...
113
iii. 4 471
XV. 2 sqq.
409, 471
iv. 7sfy(/. .. 228,441
Neiiemiah.
xvii. 8 ...
171, 172
iv. 19 91
xvii. 10 sqq.
180
vii 467
ii. 12
157
xxii. 12, 13
244
vii. 21 191
viii. 10
236
XXX. 29
236
vii. 41 468
XXX. 33
3.53
viii. 23, 54 466
xxxiii. 14
163
viii. 64 358, 4'i8
Job.
xxxiv. 14
113
ix. 25 466
xxxvi. 7
471
xi. 5 173
V. 22
115
xxxvii 1
409
xii. 30 165
xiii. 16
163
xlix. 15
.58
XV. 13 171, 437
xvi. 18
397
liii. 7 ...
291
xvi. 31 91
Ivii. 8 ...
437
xvi. 33 171
Ixi. 3 ...
215
xvi. 34 435
Psalms.
Ixii. 4 ...
101
xviii. 5 228
Ixv. 3 sqq.
338
xviii. ... ... 146, 359
i.
373
Ixv. 4 ...
273, 325
xviii. 19 ... 172, 179
i. 3
98
Ixv. 5 ...
431
xviii. 28 303
i. 5
301
Ixvi. 3, 17
273, 325, 338
xviii. 33 sqq 91
i. 13 ... 207, 214
216
xxi. 1 91
XV
77
xxi. 1.3, 19 157
xvi. 4 186
214
Jeremiah.
xxii. 38 1.57
xvi. 10
360
xxvi. 6 sqi]
321
ii. 11 ...
37
2 Kings.
xxxix. 12[H^b. 13J...
xlv. 8C7)
78
215
ii. 27 ...
iii. 25 ...
42, 173
408
xlv. 13(12)
328
vii.
172
ii. 13 sqq.
ii. 21 1.57
civ. 14 sqq
civ. 16
203
98
vii. 31 ...
xi. 15(lx.x.)
353, 445
221
iii. 4 293,442
cvi. 6
408
xvi. 6 ...
304, m\
iii. 27 ... 343, 356, 4i5
ex viii. 27
322
xix. 5 ...
3.53, 44.->
iv. 42 223
cxix. 19
78
xi.x. 13...
214
viii. 12 398
cxxxii. 3 S(/. ... 462,
465
XXV. 23
307, 3.53
X. 22 432
cxlviii. 7
161
xxxii. 29
214
xi. 11 466
XX xii. .35
353
xii. 4 229
xxxiv. 18
461
xii. 16 329, 403
Troverbs.
XXXV. 9 sq.
4'>.5
xiii. 6 172, 173
xxxvi. 5, 15
43()
xiii. 9 126
XV. 3
66
xliv.
172
XV. 5 67
xix. 6
328
xliv. 17, IS
214
xvi. 11 SOT- ... 359, 466
x.xi. 27
436
Ii. 8 ...
3>3
xvi. 14 467, 468
xxvii. 27
204
xvi. 15 228
xvii. 26 24, 77, 92, 115
XXX. 17
60
Lament
ations.
xvii. 31 343
ii. 7 ...
244
xxi. 6 343
Ecclesiastes.
xxi. 7 171
xxiii. 6 171
xii. 13
25
EZEI<
[JEL.
xxiii. 7 175
xxiii. 9 223
iv. 14 ...
S25
xxiii. 11 275
Canticles.
vii. 18 ...
306
xxiii. 15 471
viii. 10...
122, 33S
iii. 11
215
viii. 12...
338
1 Chronicles.
vii. 5
146
viii. 14...
viii. 16...
172
47
xxix. 15 78
Isaiah.
xvi. 17...
xvi. 18...
xvi. 20...
437
215
355, 375
2 CHRONICLE.S.
i. 11 sqq.
244
xviii. 6...
324
ii. 2 sqq.
75
X.X. 25 ...
... 445
XV. 16 437
X. 10
66
xxii. 9 ...
324
X.XV. 12 398
xi. 2
25
xxiii. 37
375
478
INDEX OF PASSAGES OF SCRIPTURE.
ii. 12 sqq.
ii. 17 ...
ii. 1
Joel.
Amos.
409
467
146
3.53
PAGE
PAGE
-xxiii. 39
353
, 3.55
ii. 7, S...
231, 329, 409
xxxiii. 25
...
...
324
iii, 12 ...
119
xxxix. 17 SQH.
236
iii. 14 ...
470
xli. 22 ...
...
184
iv. 4
221, 224, 229
xliii. 18 sqq. ...
415
iv. 5
203, 236
xliii. 24
...
435
V. 11 ...
232
xliv.
...
77
V. 19 ...
Ill
xliv. 6 sqq.
396
V. 22 ...
219
xliv. 20
306
4fi4
vi. 4
409
xlv. 9 sqq.
. . •
228
vi. 10 ...
3.53
xlv. 18 sqq
415
vii. 1 ...
228
xlv. 19, 20
■(Ixx.)
389
vii. 13 ...
229
xlvii. ...
...
167
vii. 17 ...
viii. 10...
viii. 14...
92
306
165, 166
HOSEA.
ix. 1 ...
ix. 3
469
146
ii.
...
437
ii. 8 sqq.
95
ii. 15 (13)
23G
433
Mic
ah.
ii. 20 (18)
. . >
115
iii. 4
186
iv. 13 ...
434, 441
iv.
24
V. 6(5)...
91
iv. 8
...
329
v. 12 sqq.
172, 186
iv. 12
179
vi. 7 ... 202,
219, 343, 353
iv. 14
...
436
vii. 14 ...
146
vii. 14
409
viii. 1
94
ix. 3
91
Haba
KKUK.
ix. 4
92^220,
223,
304
ix. 15
...
94
i. 13 ...
06
X. 9
408
iii. 3 ...
Ill
X. 14
...
398
xi. 1
...
42
xii. 4
427
Zephaniah.
i. 7
236
Haggai.
ii. 12 221
Zechariah.
iv. 3 ...
V. 3 ...
V. 5 sqq.
ix. 7 ...
xi. 3
xii. 10, 11
... 434
... 402
324, 325
... 124
... 392
Malachi.
i. 6 ...
i. 7,12...
ii. 4 sqq.
ii. 11 ...
iii. 17 ...
.. 59
.. 184
.. 326
.. 43
46,60
ECCLESIASTICUS.
1. 15
Matthew.
XXV. 23
xi. 24 ..
xvii. 19
xxiii. 14
Luke.
John.
Acts.
213
297
113
393
462
1 Corinthians.
X. 25 247
Hebrews.
... 468 ix. 22 ..
... 406
GENERAL INDEX.
Abibaal, father of Hiram, 45
Ablution after a piaciilar sacrifice,
332 sq. ; removes talioo, 432
Absalom, long hair of, 464
Acacia, see Samora
Achan, 401
'Acica, ceremony, 310 sq.
Adar, god, 274
Adonis, divine title, 68 ; Swine-god,
392 ; worship of, 172, 311, 456 ;
mourning for, 391 .sq. ; gardens,
180 ; sacred river, 145, 158 sg.
Adranus, god, 274 «., 426
Adytum, 183
Africa, cattle sacred in, 278 sqq,
Ahaz, altar of, 359
*Ain al-Bacar, at Acre, 166 n.
Altar as place of slaughter, 322 ; as
table, 183; as hearth, 358 »qq.;
cleansing of, 389 ; Ahaz's, 359, 466
Altars, candlestick, 364, 468
Amathus, human sacrifices at, 356 ;
asylum, 138 n.
Amen, god, how w-orshipped, 284 ;
annual sacrifice to, 410
' Amm-anas, Arabian god, 208
Amulets, 362, 429 ; cutoff on reaching
manhood, 311 ; of thongs, 416 ;
found in rivers, 167 ; jewels as,
434 ; phalli as, 438. See Charm
Anaitis, worship of, 303 n,
Anathoth, 193
Angels, 426 sq.
Animal gods, 425
Animals used for sacrifice, 201 ;
sanctity of, based on their kinship
Avith man, 267 sqq. ; substitution
of, for hunuin victims, 346 ; sacred,
in Egypt, 208 sq., 283 ; unclean,
276
Annual piacula, 385 sqq.
Anointing, 215, 364
Ansdb, sacred stones, 184, 193
Anselm, 147, 404
Anthropomorphism, 84
Antiocli, annual feast at, 356
Aphaca, 128, 155, 159, 161 sq.,
176
Apis, Calf-god, 283
Ajwllo Lermenus, 435 n.
April, Calends of, 450 sqq.
Arab tribes, named from gods, 46
Arabia, pilgrimage in, 102 sq. ;
lU'imitive sacrifice in, 320 ; sacred
tract (Hima) in, 134 sq., 145 sqq. ;
sanctuaries in, 104, 134 sq. ;
temples in, 105 ; commerce of, 71;
taxation in, 440
'Arafa, prayer at, 257 n.; rvociif at,
323
Ariel, 469
Aristocracy and kingship, 73
Artemis Munychia, 288 n.
Artemis Orthia, 303 sq.
Article, use of, in Heb., 119 «.
Asbamfean lake, 164
■|"lVy = taboo, 436 sq.
Asceticism, in relation to food, 284
Ascle^iiades, 290
Ashera, or sacred pole, 171 s(iq.
Ashes, lustrations with, 362 ; oath
by, 460
Ashteroth Karuaim, 292
Ass, sacred, 448 sq. ; firstling, 444 ;
head of, as charm, 449
Assyrian conquests, their influence
on religion, 36, 65, 77 sq.
Astarte, goddess of herds and flocks,
336 ; incorrectly called Ashera,
172 n. • as Cyprian Aphrodite,
451 ; of Eryx, 452 ; her sacrifices,
453 ; various types of, 458
Astral deities, as rain-givers, 100 ;
worship of, 127 n.
Asylum, 138 sq.
'Atdh', pi. oi Atlra, q.v.
479
480
GENERAL INDEX.
Atargatis, born from the Euphrates,
160 ; changed into a lisli, 159 ;
sacred fish of, 160 w.
'Atharl (Land of 'Athtar), 97 n.
•Athtar, god, 59, 93, 447 ; god of
wells, 97
'Atira, Arabian sacrifice, 210 ftqq.
Atonement, function of, ascribed to
nil sacrifice, 219 ; with one's own
blood, 319 ; by gifts, 328 sq., 377
.s^. ; annual, 388 ; for murder,
400 ; connection with idea of com-
munion, 302 ; dav of, in Levitical
law, 388 sq., 395," 409, 432 ; Chris-
tian doctrnie of, 393. See Piacula
Atoning sacrifices, development of,
377 sq.
Baal, meaning of the word, 92 sqq. ;
in sense of husband, 101 ; house
or land of, 95 .s^yr/. ; as divine title
[ba'l) in Arabia, 103 sq. ; Tanith
(with the) face of, 459
Laal-Rerith, 93 n.
Baal Hammiln, 92 n. ; votive cippi of,
191, 457*7/.
Baal-Marcod, 93 h.
Baal-Zebuli, 93 n.
Baalim, Canaanite, 39 ; as life-givers,
99
Baaras, magical plant, 423
Babylonians, diverse from other Sem-
ites, 8 sq. ; of mixed blood, 14 sq.
Bffitoca^ce, 229 n.
BiBtylia, 193
Ba'l, meaning of the term, 95 sq. See
Baal
]->ainbyce. See Hierapolis
Ban [herem), 140 n., 351, 434
Banqueting-honse, 236
Bann Sahni, fend with the jinn, 121
Barahut in Ha(lramaut, 127
Barlm, charm, 416 n.
Bathgen, cited, 43
Bathing in sacred springs, 153 n.,
168
Bean juice, 461
Beasts, of the jinn, 122; kindreds of,
120
Bed, pilgrim must not slcp on, 465
Beersheba, 165
Bel, table spread for, at Babylon,
208 ; human wife of, 50
Belus, sacred river, 155, 167
Berosus, legend of creation of men,
44 ; of chaos, 87
Bethel, 109; tithe paid at, 229 sq.;
feasts at, 235 ; altar at, 470
Bird, live, in purification, 402, 407
Birds sacrificed, 202
Bismilldh, 397, 411 n.
Black-mail, 440
Blood, as food, 216 ; drinking of, 295,
320, 324, 349, 359 w. ; libations
of, 214 ; lustrations with, 326,
332, 361 ; offerings of one's own,
303 ; sprinkling of, 319, 325 sq. :
sanctity of kindred, 256, 265 ; of
gods, flows in sacred waters, 159 ;
of bulls, superstitions about,
361 n. ; of the grape, 213 sq. ;
covenant, 296 sqq. ; revenge, 33
sq., 72, 254, 397 «., 399 ; among
beasts, 120
Bloodslied, impurity of, 408
Bone, means kin, 256
Booths, at Feast of Tabernacles, 463
Bo^'s wear long hair, 311 sq. ; as
executioners, 397 n.
Buffalo sacred with the Todas, 281
Bull's blood, superstitions about,
361 n.
Bujihonia at Athens, 286 sq., 291
Burial of sacrifices, 351
Burning, execution by, 398 ; of the
dead, 353
Burning bush, 176
Burnt-offering, a piacular sacrihce,
329 ; before a campaign, 382 sq.
See Fire sacrifices and Holocaust
Byblus, Adonis - worship at, 311 ;
sacred erica at, 175
Cahtan, tribe, 295 sq.
Cairn, sacred, 183. 185
Cais, meaning of word, 154 sq.
Camels, sacrificed by Arabs, 201, 320 ;
slaughter of, by Nilus's Saracens,
263 ; flesh of, forbidden to Chris-
tian Arabs, 265 ; sacred in Arabia,
139, 431, 443
Campaign, sacrifice before, 382 sq.
Canaanites, were Semites, 5
Candlestick altars, 364
Cannibalism, 347 sq.
Caphtor, 12
Captives, sacrifice of, 343, 345 n.
Carmel, sanctity of, 145 sq.
Carthage, deities of, 154 ; sacrificial
tarifls at, 201 sq. ; human sacrifice
at. 344, 354 sq., 357, 390
Cattle, sacred, 278 sqq.
Cans, god, 68 n.
Caves, sacred, 180 ■'^qq.
Gede.'iha (temple - prostitute), 45 «.,
133
Cereal offerings, wholly made over to
the god, 218 sq., 222 sq.
Cervaria ovis, 345
Chaboras, sacred river, 157
GENERAL INDEX.
481
Charms, thongs a'^, 416 k. ; head of
victim as, 362 ; diiut; as a, 362 n. ;
fat as a, 363 ; unclean things as,
429
Chastity, sacrifice of, 311
Cherubim, 87
Children sacrificed under the name
of cattle, 347 n.
Chthonic deities, 181
Circumcision, 310
Clan, not a larger household, 260 ;
sacra of, 232, 257 sqq. ; in Israel,
258
Clean animals, 201
Clients, 75 i<q. ; of a god, 77 ftq-, 442 ;
stamped with camel mark in Arabia,
139
Colocasium, healing plant, 167
Commensality, 251
Commerce, Arabian, 71 ; and re-
ligion, 441
Communion, and atonement, 302 ;
idea of, in ancient sacrifice, 377,
418
Communities, structure of anti(]^ue,
33 sqq.
Coney {hyrax Syr.), 425
Conical idols, 191
Contrition, ritual expression of, 412
Coran, Sura vi. 137 explained, 102
Covenant, by food, 252. sgg. ; by sacri-
fice, 300 ; of Jehovah and Israel,
300 sq.; ritual forms in, 296, 460
!<qq.
Cow, not eaten in Egypt and Phce-
nicia, 280, 284
Cow-Astarte, 292
Cozali, fire of, at Mozdalifa, 323, 471
Cuneiform records, 14 sq.
(^up of consolation, 305 n.
Curse, as taboo, 434
Cynosarges at Athens, 274 n.
Cyprus, piacular sacrifice in, 387, 451
Daphne, 128 «., 138 n., 158 ; oracle
of, 163 ; sacred cypresses at, 163,
170
David and Jonathan, 317
Day of Atonement, 388 sq., 395
Dead, drink-offerings to the, 217
Death of the gods, 354 sq., 391 sq.
Deborah, palm of, 179
Deer not sacrificed by the Hebrews,
201 ; annual sacrifice of, at Lao-
dicea, 390, 447
De Goeje, Professor, 122 n., 139 n.,
154 71., 256
Deities change their sex, 52
Dclplii, hair-offering at, 307 ii.
Demoniac plants, 423
Demons, how distinguished from
gods, 112 sqq. ; men descended
from, 50 ; serpent, 113 n., 125 sq.,
354 ; in springs, 153, 156. See
Jinn
Deuteronomic tithe, 231
Dhaf anwdt, 169, 317
Diatleni, why worn by kings, 464
Dibs, or grape honey, 204
Dido, 354, 391
Diipolia (Buphonia), 286 sq., 291
Dionysus, av^pwroppaiiTTtis, 287; Semi-
tic gods identified with, 176, 244,
438
Dog, sanctity of, 273 ; sacrificed
mystically, 273 ; Hecate's, 332
Dogma wanting in ancient religions,
18
Domestic animals, sanctity of,
266 sqq., 278 sqq.
Dove, forbidden food, 202 n., 275 ;
sacred to Astarte, ih. ; at Mecca,
208 n. ; sacrificed, 202 n., 275 srjq.
Dried flesh, 264, 363
Duma (Dumat al-Jandal), 351
Dum»tha. See Duma
Dung as a charm, 362 »/.
Dusares, Wine-god, 176, 244; pool
of, 153, 164
Eden, garden of, 98 n., 289
Edessa, sacred fish at, 161
Edom, god-name, 43
Etfigy, god liurned in, 353 ; substi-
tuted for victim, 391
Egypt, sacred animals in, 208 sq.,
283 ; vegetarianism in, 283
Elam (Susiana), 6
Elders, the council of, 34 ; slay the
sacrifice, 396
Elijah, Festival of, at Carmel, 146 n.
Eloldm, pi. in sing, sense, 426
Elusa, 57 n.
Ephca, fountain at Palmyra, 154
Epic poetry, wanting among the
Semites, 49 sq.
Erica, sacred, at Byblus, 175
Eryx, sanclnary oY, 275, 287, 291,
452 ; sacrifice to Astarte at, 291
Ethhashshtf, "make supplication,"
303
Ethrog, 204 n.
Eti(|uette, sacred, 147
Euhemeiism, 44, 447
Euphrates, sacred river, 157, 167
Europa, 292
Executions, analogy to sacrifice,
351 n., 398 sq.
Exorcism, 407
Ezrdh, free tribesman, 75
II
482
GENERAL INDEX.
Fables, origin of, 119
Fall, story of the, 288 sq.
Family meal, 260 sq.
Fara', firstling, 210 n., 443
Fasting, original sense, 413
Fat, forbidden food, 220 ; burning of
the, 364 ; as a charm, 363
Father, authority of, 60
Fatherhood, divine, 41 sqq. ; in
heathen religions is physical father-
hood, 42 sqq., 49 ; in the Bible, 42
Fellowship, by eating together,
247 sq.
Ferments excluded from the altar,
203, 367
Festivals, sacrificial, 236 nqq.
Fetichism, 192
Fines in ancient law, 329, 378 ; at
the sanctuary, 329
Fire sacrifices, 217 sq. ; development
of, 352 sq., 365 sq.
First-born, holiness of, 444 6V/.
First-frnits, 222 sqq.
Firstlings, in Arabia, 104, 210, 443 xg.
Fish, sacred, at Ascalon, 158 ; in the
Chaboras, 157 ; at Hierapolis, 160 ;
at Edessa, 161 ; mystic sacrifice of,
274 ; forbidden food, 430
Fish-skin, ministrant clad in, 274,
416
Flesh, laceration of, in mourning,
304; "living," 320; raw, 320,
324 ; dried, 363 ; means kin, 256 ;
used as food, 205 sq., 282 ; when
first eaten by the Hebrews, 288 sq. ;
of corpse as charm, 305
Flood legend at Hierapolis, 181, 438
Fosterage makes kinsliip, 257
Fountains, sacred, 153 sqq. ; hair-
olieriug at, 307 n. See Springs,
Waters
Frankincense, sanctity of, 406, 435
Fringes of garment, 416 m.
Fruit, offered in sacrifice, 204 ; "un-
circumcised," 444 ; juice of, in
ritual, 461
Fumigation, 406, 436
Funeral customs, 305, 850
Fusion of religious communities, 39
GALLt at Hierapolis, 303
Game, as food, 205 ; in sacrifice, 201
Garden of Eden, 98 n., 289
Garments, covenant by exchange of,
317 ; sacred, 416 sq., 432 sq.
Gazelle, sacrifice of, 202 ; golden,
153; sacred, 424, 447
Genii. See Jinn.
Oerim, or clients, 75 sq.
Ghabjhab, 180 sq., 211, 321
Gharcad tree, oracle from, 126, 178
Gharly ("bedaubed" stone), 147 n.,
184
Ghnl (Ghoul), 119 n., 121 n., 421
Gibeonites, 253, 400
Gilts, ancient use of, 328 ; as homage,
328 sq. ; cast into sacred waters,
161
Gift theory of sacrifice, 373 sq. ; in-
adequacy of, 365, 375
Gilgal, twelve sacred stones at, 194
Girls, seclusion of, 429 n., 437
Goat in sacrifice, 201, 448, 453
Go'ls, how distinguished from demons,
112 sqq. ; viewed as a part of nature,
83 ; relation of, to wurshippers, 29
sqq. ; as a part of antique society,
30 ; local relations of, 91 ; nature
of the, 24 ; death of the, 354 S'/.,
3i^l sq. ; habitation of the, 94,
106 sq. ; congenital relations to,
31 ; believed to fight for their
worshijqiers, 38 ; fusion of, 39
Golden age, legend of, 285
Greek influence on the Semites, 12
Groves at sanctuaries, 170
Habitation of the gods, 94, 106 sq.
Hadramaut, werewolves in, 86 ; trial
of witches in, 163
Hair, as relic, 307 n. ; cut oflf in
mourning, 305 sq. ; superstitions
connected witli, 306 n. ; offering
of, 307 ■'<q. ; offering of, in Penta-
teuch, 314 ; tabnos on, 464
Haldc, epithet of death, 306 n.
Hallel, 321, 411
Hanash, creeping things, 121, 275
Hands laid on head of victim, 335,
401 sq.
Hanging, execution by, 351
Hannibal, oath of, 154
Harb b. Omayya, slain by the Jinn,
* 125
Hairaniaus, sacrifices of, 272 sqq , to
Saturn, 355, see Syrians ; alleged
human sacrifices among, 348 n. ;
facts of, 413 ; mysteries of, 425
Hasan and Hosain, 303
Haunts of the jinn, 123
Hayy, "tribe," meaning of the
word, 256 n.
Head of the victim, not eaten, 359 ;
used as charm, 362, 449, 456
Healing springs, 153, 167
Heliopolis (Baalbek), 156, 425
Hera Acraa, 287, 391
Heracles, as huntsman, 273 ; at
Tarsus, 353 ; and the Hydra, 167 ;
Tyrian, see Melcarth
GENERAL INDEX.
483
Herem (ban), 140 v., 351, 434
Heniiaphroditus, 459
Heriiion, Mount, 145, 427
Hierapolis, 157, 160, 303, 351 «., 417 ;
pilgrimage to, 80 ; ritual of, 201,
455
High places, 171, 470 sq.
Himii, or sacred tract, in Arabia,
134 sq., 145 sqq.
Hinnom, valley of, 353
Hittites, 11 sq.
Holiness, of the gods, 133 ; of the
sanctuarjf, 134 ; of animals, 371 ;
relations of, to the idea of pro-
perty, 134 sq., 371 sq. ; rules of,
141 sq<i. ; Semitic roots denoting,
140 ; relation to uncleanness, 405,
427 ; to taboo, 142, 430 s^g. ; con-
tagious, 431 sqq. ; congenital,
444 sq.
Holocaust, origin of, 352 ; rare in
ancient times, 21 9 sq.
Holy, meaning of the word, 90,
132 sqq.
Holy places, 90 sqq. ; caves, 180 sqq. ;
stones, 186 sqq. ; trees, 169 sqii. ;
older than temples. 111
Homeric poems, religious importance
of, 32
Homs, sacred community of Mecca,
432
Honey, excluded from altar, 204 ;
in Greek sacrifice, 203 n.
Horeb, Mount, 136, 145
Horns of the altar, 415
Horse sacrificed to the sun, 275
Hospitality, law of, 76 ; in Arabia,
252 ; at sacrificial feasts, 236, 247,
266 ; not a gift, 439
House of Baal, 95
Household gods, 191, 442
House-tops, worshij) on, 214
Human blood, superstitions about,
349, 397 n.
Human sacrifice, 343 sqq. ; in the
Roman Empire, 347 n.
Hyoena, superstitions about, 122 n.,
126 ??.
Hydrophobia, 349
Ibn Tofail, grave of, 146
Iilkhir. See Lemon-grass
Idols, not necessarily simulacra,
190 ; origin of antlirojiomorphic,
194 ; in animal form, 291 ; in
form of cone, 191 ; of paste in
Arabia, 208 «.
Jhrdm, 315, 465
Ijdza, 323
llal, place, 324 n.
Imposition of hands, 335, 401 sq.
Impurity, 148, 407, 428. See Uu-
cleanness
Imraulcais at Tabiila, 47 n.
Incense, used in purification, 406 ;
tithes of, 229
Infanticide, 351 n., 388, 397 v.
Initial ion ceremonies, 309 ; mystical,
339 sq.
Iphigenia, sacrifice of, 383
Isaac, sacrifice of, 291 ; blessing of,
448
Ishtar, mother goddess, 56
Islam, meaning of, 80 n.
Izdubar, 50
Jachin and Boaz, 191, 358 sq., 468
Jci7- alldh, 77
Jealousy, of the deity, 147 ; water of,
164
Jehovah, prophetic conception of
sovereignty of, 66, 75, 81 ; abso-
lute justice of, 74
Jephthah's daughter, 395
Jewels, use of, 433 sv/.
Jinn (Arabian demons), 113 sqq. ;
have no individuality, 119 ; akin
to wild beasts, 120 sqq. ; at feud
with men, 121 ; haunts of, 123 ;
of healing springs, 153 ; trans-
formations of, 421
Joppa, sacred fountain at, 159
Julian, 272, 351 n.
Justice of the gods, 62
Kadesh, fountain of, judgment at,
165, 193 n.
nnn ma, 46i
Klialasa, ]ilace, 57 n.
Khalasa (Kholasa), deity, 208 n.
Khors {W^'\n)', 473
Kid in mother's milk, 204 n.
Kidney fat, 360 sqq.
Kin, the oldest circle of moral obliga-
tion, 254 ; how conceived, 255
Kindreds of beasts, 120
Kingship, origin of, 34 sq. ; charac-
ter ot Semitic, 63 ; as a social
force, 73 ; not feudal, 91 ; divine,
66 sqq.
Kings, blood of, superstition about,
349 ; killed by bleeding, 349 ??.,
397 n.
Kinship, of gods, men and animals,
269 ; of gods and men witli natural
things, 275 ; may be acquired, 255
Kcolwv, 417, 454 ,sv^.
Kolaib-Wail, 137 n., 146
Lackration of flesh in mourning, 304
484
GENERAL INDEX.
Lamb, Charles, source of the sucking
[lig story, 290
Land, property in, 94 ; of the gods,
91 sq.
Language, how far a criterion of race,
6 sqq.
Laodicea ad Mare, 390 sq., 447
Lapis^ pertusus at Jerusalem, 214
Lat (A1-), worshipped by the Naba-
t?eans, 56 ; in Herodotus, 298 ;
stone of, at Taif, 192 n. ; image of,
at Tabala, 194
Leaven, excluded from altar, 203
Leavened bread, ottered on altar,
203 n., 224
Lectisternia, 207 sq.
Lemon-grass at Mecca, 134 n.
Leontes, river, 155 sq.
Leper, cleansing of, 402, 428
Leucadian promontory, 355 n., 397 n.
Leviathan, 161
Levitical ritual, characterised, 198
sqq.
Libations, 213 sqq.
Libyans of Herodotus, 410, 416
Lion, divine symbol, 156, 425
Lion-god in Arabia, 209
Lish/ca (xia'x.'n), 236 11.
Live bird in lustrations, 402
Living tlesh, 320
Living water, 127
Lizanls, metamorphosed men, 86
Local god, kinship with, 116
Long-suffering of the gods, 62
Lucifer, 57, 151 n., 265
Lud (Lydia), 6
Luperci, 459
Lustrations, Avith blood, 326, 332 ;
with ashes, 362 ; sacrificial, 406
Lydus, De Mens. iv. 45, emended, 455
Mabbog. See Hierapolis
Madhhah in sense of trench, 322 n.
Magical superstitions, why forbidden,
246 ; rest on savage views of nature,
427
Make-believe in ancient religion, 344
sq.
Male victims preferred, 280 n.
Males, holy food eaten only by, 181 n.
Mamre, sanctuary of, 109 ; sacred
well at, 162, 166 n. ; feast at, 433,
435
Mandhil, sacred trees, 169
Mandrake, 423
Manslaughter, 399
Mama, god, 68 n.
Masai, 216, 351, 413
Masks, 417
Masseba, sacred stone, 186, 437 sq.
Meal-offering in Arabia. 206, 208
Mecca, haram of, 134, 136, 147 ;
well Zanizam at, 153 ; idols at,
208 ?t. ; sacred circuit at, 432 ;
character of the cult at, 105 n.
Megaron in Greek temples, 183
Melcarth, 67 ; at Tyre, 190 ; at
Daphne, 163, 170, 175 ; tithes paid
to, 228 ; annual resurrection of,
449 sq.
Menstruation, impurity of, 428 sq.
Meribah, or Kadesh, 165
Mesha, king of Moab, 38, 61 ; sacri-
fices his son, 356 ; dedicates part
of spoil to Ohemosh, 441
Metamorphosis, myths of, 86 s^.
Mexican sacrifices, 344, 347, 391
Midriff, a seat of life and feeling, 360
Mihash, 460
Milha, or bond of salt, 252
Milk, main diet of pastoral nomads,
205 ; in sacrifice, 203, 208, 439 ;
not sold in Arabia, 439 ; makes
kinship, 257,. 336
Mimosa thought to be animate, 125
Minha, cereal tribute, 200, 207, 218,
222 ; drawn from first-fruits, 222
Mohammed, compared with Moses,
70
Moharric, Arabian god, 345 n.
Moloch -worship, 351 sq., 375
Monotheism, alleged tendency of
Semites towards, 74
Monsters in Semitic art, 87
Morality and antique religion, 53,
248 sq.
Morassa'a, charm, 416 n.
Morning star, worship of, 151 n., 264
Mo'sir, girl under confinement at
age of puberty, 429 n., 437
Motherhood of deities, 52, 56 sqq.
Mot'im al-tair, god, 208 n.
jNIourning, at piacular rites, 409 sq. ;
laceration of fiesh in, 30, 304
Mouse, sacred victim, 275
Mozdalifa, 323, 471
Murder, 399
Myrtle, in lustration, 456
Mystery, Christianity why so desig-
nated, 80 n.
Mystical cults, 339 sq.
Mystic sacrifices, 272, 325, 337 sqq.,
379
Myth, place of, in ancient religion,
18 sqq. ; derived from ritual, 19 ;
value of, in the study of ancient
faiths, 21
Mythology, Semitic, why scanty, 49
Nabat/EAN Dionysus (Dusares), 176
GENERAL INDEX.
48i
Naci'a, sacrifice called, 471 sqq.
Naked worshippers at Mecca, 432
Nakhla, sacred acacia at, 169
Ndr-al-hfda, 460
"IDJ, 213
Nasr, Vulture-god, 209
Nationality and religion, 36 sq., 73
Nature of things not discriminated
by early man, 84
Nazarite, 314, 463
Nilus, 263, 320, 342, 343, etc.
Nimrod, 91 ?i.
Nisan, sacred month, 387, 451
Nisibis, named from sacred stones,
187 n.
Nomads, food of, 205
Nosb, sacred stone, 184
Oath of purgation, 164 sqq., 460
Obelisks as iilols, 191
Ocaisir, Arabian god, 206, 208
Oil, in sacrifice, 203 ; sacred fountain
of, 164
'Okaz, sanctuary of, 193 ; fair of, 441
'OXoXuyr,, 410 Sq.
Ombos and Tentyra, feuds of, 33
Omens from animals, 424
Oracles, from trees, 126, 178 sq. ; at
wells, 162 sq.
Ordeals by water, 163 sqq.
Orestes, 341
Orgiastic element in ancient religion,
243 sqq.
Orgies of the Arabian Venus, 344 n.
Oroutes, legend of the river, 156,
161
Orotal, 298, 307, 312
Orwa, holy well of, 153
Otaheite (Tahiti\ 305, 431, 465
Outlaw, purification of, 340 sq.
Ox, in sacrifice, 201 ; sacredness of,
280 ; in Greece, 286 sqq.
Palmetum, 153
I'alm - tree worshipped at Nejran,
169
I'almyra, sacred fountain at, 154
I'aneas, 156, 167
rail-Hellenic ideas, 32
ranthcou, Semitic, 40
I'aiental authority, 59 sq.
I'arricide, 398
I'articularism of ancient Semitic
religion, 36 sqq., 54
Passover, 204, 326, 387 ; as sacrifice
of firstlings, 445 sq. ; Arabian
equivalent of, 210 n.
Pastoral peoples regai'd their herds as
sacred, 278 sqq.
Pastoral religion, 338
Pasture land, tax on, 228 n.
Patron, god conceived as, 79
Pegasus, 275
Pentateuch, composition of, 198 n.
Perfume, in worship, 433
Periander and Melissa, 218
Petra, mother and son worshipped
at, 57
Phallic symbols, 194, 437 sq.
Philistines, origin of, 12
Philo Byblius, cosmogony of, 44 ;
cited, 169, 179 n., 186, 290, 292,
343, 448
Phrenicia, tithes in, 228 sq.
Phcenicians, hair-oti'erings of, 311
Piaciila, 209, 378 ; annual, 385 sqq. ;
Greek, 332; Levitical. 326, 330,
402 ; mystic, 379 ; Roman, 332 ; at
opening of campaign, 382 sq.
Piacular rites, distinctive characters
of, 379 sq. ; interpretation of, 380 ;
antique features in, how preserved,
381 sqq. ; not originally sin-offer-
ings, 382
Pilgrimage, 80 ; in Arabia, 102 sqq. ;
not a bond of religions union, 259 ;
hair-otfering in connection with,
313, 464 sq. ; ascetic observances
in, 465 ; dress worn in, 466
Pillar altar, 188
Pillar, sacred, 183 sqq.
Pillars, twin, as symbols, 438 ; of
Hercules, 190, 194
Pit under an altar, 321
Pole, sacred, 171 sqq.
Polyandry, of goddesses, 58 sq.
Precedent, the rule of ritual, 22,
110
Precipice, captives thrown from,
398 n.
Priesthoods, hereditary, 48, 79
Priests, eat sin-oti'ering, 331 sq. ;
slay victim, 396
Proper names, theophorous, 43, 45
sq., 67 sq., 79, 100 sq.
Property, in land, 94 ; in water, 99 ;
notion of, introduced into religion,
376
Prophets of the Ashera, 172 n.
Providence of the gods, 64 ; not
personal in heathenism, 246
Public parks, 137
Purification, by sacrifice, 404 .t'/. ; by
bathing, 153 n., 168, 332, 406
Pyre-festival at Hierapolis, 351, 355,
358, 387, 397, 451
Quail, sacrifice of, 202, 449
Queen of Leaven, 172
486
GENERAL INDEX.
E.ABBATH, divine title, 68
Rag-offerings, 317
Raiu-givers, astral deities as, 100
Rajab, sacrificial month, 210, 387,
442, 446
Ram's head as charm, 456
Raw flesh, 320, 324
Rechabites, 465
Red heifer, 333, 335, 357
Regions, holy. 111, 134, 145, 150 sqq.
Regulative influence of religion,
248 sqq.
Relics worn as charms, 318
Religion, positive and traditional,
1 sq. ; hereditary, 30, 38 ; relation
between Hebrew and Canaanite, 4 ;
development of, in East and West,
contrasted, 35 sq. ; oldest form is
religion of kinship, 51 sqq.
Religion, ancient, a part of public
lile, 22, 29 ; ethical value of, 53,
248 sq. ; make-believe in, 344 sq. ;
materialistic but not selfish, 245 ;
offers no consolation to private
sutt'ering, 241 ; habitually cheerful,
237 ; and public spirit, 249
Religious and political institutions,
analogy of, 22 ; beliefs, persistency
of, 330 ; restrictions, moral value
of, 144 ; communities, structure
of, 29 sqq., 258 .s^. ; fusion of, 39
Rhabdomancy, 179 7i.
Righteousness, divine, 408
Ritual, place of, in early religion, 18
Rivers, sacred, 145, 158 sq. ; of
Phtenicia, 155, 159; of Syria, 156
Eohh, fruit juice, 461
Robe of righteousness, 417
Rocks in situ, worshipi)ed, 192
Royal houses, sprung from gods, 45
Rules of holiness, 141 sqq.
Sacra gentilicia, 257
Sacred regions. 111, 134 sqq.
Sacrifice, 196 sqq. ; meaning of the
word, 197 ; synonymous with
slaughter, 223; 'by fire. 107, 217
sqq., 352; is the typical form of
ancient worship, 197 ; material of,
201 ; milk in, 203 ; oil in, 203 ;
salt in, 252 ; animal, 205 sqq. ;
human, 343 sqq., 347 n., 344,
354 sq., 356, 357, 390 ; of tribes-
men, 343 ; of captives, 343, 472 ;
of cluldren, 445 ; under name of
cattle, 347 «. ; of new-born victims,
349 «., 388, 443 ; of firstlings, 445 ;
how eaten, 221 ; primitive Arabian,
320 ; charms derived from, 361 sq. ;
gift theory of, 273 sq., 365, 375,
442 ; is communion, 442 ; is
originally a communal act, 236 sqq. ,
257 sqq. ; godward and manward
parts of, 320 sqq. ; stated occasions
of, 384 sq., 473
Sacrifices are the food of the gods,
207 ; simply laid on holy ground,
2QS sqq. ; buried, 107, 35l' ; thrown
into water, 107, 359 ; species
of, in Leviticus, 199 sq. ; species
of, at Carthage, 219 n. ; mystic,
272, 325, 337 sqq. ; killed with-
out eftusion of blood, 325 n., 397 ;
piacular, 332 ; atoning, develop-
ment of, 377 sqq.
Sacrificial feast, involves slaughter,
224 ; social character of, 236, 253,
263 ; view of life underlying, 239 ;
ethical significance of, 247, 253 ;
older than family meal, 262
Sacrosanct victim, in Greece, 286 sq.
'.5'f'/«y«, 440
Salm in theophorous names, 79
Salman, worship of Moharric at,
345 n.
Salt, in sacrifice, 203 ; bond of, 252 ;
strewing of ground with, 435 ii.
Samora (acacia), magic use of gum of
the, 126, 406'
Sanbulos, huntsman Baal of, 50 ;/.
Sanctuaries, how constituted, 107
sq., 188, 415 ; physical characters
of, 128, 145 ; in Arabia, 134 sqq.
Sanctuary, taboos attecting, 124 ;
Isaiah's conception of the, 110
Saturn, Carthaginian, 355 ; Harranian,
sacrifice to, 355
Satyrs {se'irlm) in 0. T., 113
Scapegoat, 397, 401 ; analogitsto, 402
Scriptures, the, defile the hands, 405
Sl'irim, 113
Selli, at Dodona, 465
Semii-amis, 351, 355
Semitic peoples enumerated, 1 ;
origin of the name, 5 ; geographical
dispersion, 11 ; original home, 11 ;
homogeneity and constancy of
type, 13 sq. ; alleged tendency of,
to monotheism, 74
Semitic speech, 9 sq.
Serpent in Gen. iii., 423 sq.
Serpent-demons, 113 ??., 125 sq.,
354, 421 sq. ; in springs, 153, 157
Servant i^ahd, 'ebed), use of the
word, 68 sq(i.
Set (Typhon), 449
Seven wells, sanctity of, 165 sq.
Sex of victim, 280, 453
Shaving the head, a sacrificial act,
306 sq.
GENERAL INDEX.
487
Shechem, oraculai- tree at, 179
Sheep, piacular sacritice, 450 sq.
Sheep-Astarte, 291, 457 s'/.
Sheep-skin worn by saeiificers in
Cyprus, 417, 454 sq.
Sheikh Adi, valley of, 164
Shdamlm (sing, shelevi) explained,
219
Shew-bread, 207 sq.
Shoes, put oli' on holy ground, 434
Sicdb, 306 n.
Sicharbas 6^3 "13T), 354
Sin, notion of, foreign to the oldest
worships, 382
Sin-offering, 199 ; why net tasted by
the laity, 330 ; viewed as an execu-
tion, 403 ; Helnew, 326, 330 sq. ;
sacrosanct, 332, 431
Sinai, sanctity of, 110 sq.
Sinew that shrank, 360
Skin of sacrifice, 414 sqq., 448 ; as
sacred dress, 416 sq.
Slaughter, private, forbidden, 263 ;
of victim, by whom performed,
396 ; requires consent of clan, 266 ;
originallv identical v.ith sacrifice,
223
Slaves sleep beside the blood and the
dung, 217 n.
Sleyb, hunting tribe, 206
Society, religious, in antiquity,
29 sqq.
Solidarity of gods and their worship-
pers, 33
Solwdn, 305 n., 414
Sous of God {Bne Elohim), 426
Soul and body, 85
Sovereignty of Jehovah, ]iro]ihetic
conception of, 66, 75, 81, 152 sqq.
Spoils of war, how divided, 440
Springs, sacred, 127 sq. ; bathing in,
153 n., 168. See Waters
Sprinkling of blood, 319, 325 sq.
Stag saciifice at Laodioea, 390 sq.,
447
Stars, thought to live, 127
Stigmata, 316
Stimiilative influence of religion, 249
Stone, saoi-ed, as symbol of deity, 189
sqq. ; daubed with blood, 184, 188 ;
stroked with the hand, 80, 188,
215; at Bethel, 187; anointed,
214 ; in riuenicia, 186
Strangers, protected, 75 sq.
Strangling, of victim, 325 ; execution
by, 39S"
Strolling, salutation liy, 80, 188, 215,
442
Stygian waters, 154, 164
Subjugation of nature by man, 115
Substitution of animals for human
victims, 346 ; doctrine of, 402 s([q.
Swine, holy or unclean, 143, 429 ; for-
bidden food to all Semites, 201 ; as
mvstic sacrifices, 272 sq. ; as pia-
cula, 332, 457
Swine-god (Adonis), 392 n.
Symbols, divine, 151 sqq.; phallic,
194, 437
Syncretism of later Semitic heathen-
ism, 16, 452
Syrians, hair-offerings of, 307, 311 ;
sacrifices of later, 272, 275, 321, 355;
magic of, 423 sq.
T A ABB ATA Sharran, 121
Tabrda, oracle at, 47 n. ; sacred
gazelles at, 447
Table of the gods, 184
Taboo ex|ilaineil, 142 sq.; relation of,
to holiness, 427 sqq. ; removed by
washing, 432 ; on sexual inter-
course, 435 sqq., 462
Taboos affecting the sanctuary, 124,
148
Ta'iiti. See Otaheite
Tahlll, 321, 411
Taim, in theophoious names, 80
Tammuz, his bones pounded, 326 n.
See Adonis
Tanith (Artemis, Dido), 56 ; pillars
of, 191, 437, 457 sq. ; with the
face of Baal, 459
Tarsus, annual festival at, 353, 357
Tattooing, 316
Tawdf, 321
Taxation, ancient, 227, 440 sq.
Temple, at Jerusalem, 228 ; worship
of second, 198 sq.; altars of, 359,
466 sqq.
Temjiles, in Arabia, 105; above towns,
157 ; treasures at, 137 ; rock-hewn,
180
Tenedos, sacrifice to Dionysus at, 287
Terebinth, feast and fair of the, 162 ;
at Mannv, burns and is not con-
sumed, 176
Theanthropic victim, 391, 395
Theodulus, son of Nilus, 342 sqq.
Theophany, 108, 112, 415
Theophorous proper names, 43, 45
sq., 67 sq., 79 ,sv/., 100 sq.
Therapeuta', 284 n.
Thoi'ayya, wells called, 153 »., 166 ii.
Tilierias, seven wells at, 166 n.
Tithes, 227 sq. ; in Ai'abia, 229 ; at
Bethel, 230 ; in Deuteronomy, 231 ;
in Levitical law, 233 ; how spent,
I 234 sq. ; of booty, 440 sq.
488
GENERAL INDEX.
Tod as, their sacred buffaloes, 281
Tonsure, Arabian, 307 ; of Greek
ephebi, ib., n.
To|)het, 353 ; etymology of -word,
357
Totem mysteries, 276 sq.
Totemism, 117 sq. ; Semitic, 130,
424 ; decline of, 3o6
Totems, fed as an act of -worship,
208 sq.
Traditional religion, 1 .sg. ; an affair
of race, 5
Transcendency of the godhead, 49 ;
not a primitive idea, 89, 177
Transformation myths, 86 sq.
Treasures at temples, 137
Trees, viewed as animate or de-
moniac, 125 ; sacred worship of, in
Syria, 169 ; oracles from, 169,
178 sq.; deities transformed into,
174 ; are of all species, 175 ; how
worshipped, 178
Trespass offeriiig, 199
Tribal religion in Arabia, 46 sq.
Tribesmen, sacrifice of, 343
Tribute, sacred, 99, 227 ; in Arabia,
102, 438 sqq.; on commerce, 441
Troezen, sacred laurel at, 332 ; Apollo
of, 341
'I'roglodytes, described by Agathar-
ciudes, 278
'I'yiiboeus, 127 •
Typhon (Set), 449
Un(!LEAN land means a foreign land,
92
Unclean things in magic, 429
Uncleanness, 405, 427 sqq. ; rules
of, 143 ; infectious, 428. See Im-
purity
Unction, unguents, ritual of, 214 sq.,
363 sq.
TTsous, Phoenician god, 186 ; relation
to Esau, 448
Uz, the same as 'Aud ? 43 n.
Yeoetable offerings, 202 sqq.
Vegetarianism, primitive, 282, 285 ;
Philo Byblius on, 290
A'euus, Arabian, orgies of, 344 n.
Vermin, sacrifice "of, 275; worship
of, 338
Vestments, priestly, 433
Victim, by whom slain, 396 ; effigy
substituted for, 391 ; head of, not
eaten, 359 ; used as charm, 362 ;
otters itself spontaneously, 291 ;
theanthropic, 391, 395 ; cast from
a precipice, 351, 355, 397 ; new-
born, sacrifice of, 349 n., 388, 443 ;
cut in twain, 460 sq.
View of life underlying antique
religion, 239 sqq.
Virgin mother, 56 sq.
Volcanoes, superstitions about, 127
Votive offerings, 197, 440 sq.
Vows, 314 ; taboos incident to, 462
sqq.
Vulture-god in Arabia, 209
Warriors, consecrated, 148, 383 ;
taboos on, 148, 436, 462 sq.
Washing of garments, 433
Water, living, 127 ; ordeals by, 163
sqq. ; property in, 99 ; poured into
sacred well, 182 ; as libation, 213 ;
in lustration, 349, 407 sq.
Waters, healing, in Ezekiel, 167 ;
sacred, 128, 154 ; discoloured at
certain seasons, 159, 182 ; blood
of gods in, 159 ; gifts cast into, ->
161 ; Stygian, 154, 164 C'
Waterspout personified, 161 n.
Wells, sacred, 152 ; ritual of, 162 sq.
Were-wolf, 347 n. ; in Hadramaut,
86
Widow, secluded as impure, 429 n. ;
purification of, in Arabia, 402 n.,
407 n., 428
Wild beasts, dread of, 115, 124
Wine, libations of, 203, 213 .sg.; re-
ligious abstinence from, 465
Witches, ti-ial by water, 163
Wociif, 322 sq.
Wolf Apollo at Sicyon, 209
Women, may not eat the holiest
things, 281 ; do not eat with men,
261
Yaghuth (Lion-god), 38, 209
Yeaning time, 388, 446
Zamzam, holy well, 153
Zebah, zebahim, meaning of the word,
219 ; at Carthage, includes cereal
offerings, 205
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