the only people who ever invented or evolved a pure monotheism at first hand were the jews. individual thinkers elsewhere approached or aimed at that ideal goal, like the egyptian priests and the greek philosophers: entire races elsewhere borrowed monotheism from the hebrews, like the arabs under mohammad, or, to a less extent, the romans and the modern european nations, when they adopted christianity in its trinitarian form: but no other race ever succeeded as a whole in attaining by their own exertions the pure monotheistic platform, however near certain persons among them might have arrived to such attainment in esoteric or mystical philosophising. it is the peculiar glory of israel to have evolved god. and the evolution of god from the diffuse gods of the earlier semitic religion is israel’s great contribution to the world’s thought.

the sacred books of the jews, as we possess them in garbled forms to-day, assign this peculiar belief to the very earliest ages of their race: they assume that abraham, the mythical common father of all the semitic tribes, was already a monotheist; and they even treat monotheism as at a still remoter date the universal religion of the entire world, from which all polytheistic cults were but a corruption and a falling away. such a belief is nowadays, of course, wholly untenable. so also is the crude notion that monotheism was smitten out at a single blow by the genius of one individual man, moses, at the moment 181of the hebrew exodus from egypt. the bare idea that one particular thinker, just escaped from the midst of ardent polytheists, whose religion embraced an endless pantheon and a low form of animal-worship, could possibly have invented a pure monotheistic cult, is totally opposed to every known psychological law of human nature. the real stages by which monotheism was evolved out of a preceding polytheism in a single small group of semitic tribes have already been well investigated by dutch and german scholars: all that i propose to do in the present volume is to reconsider the subject from our broader anthropological standpoint, and show how in the great jewish god himself we may still discern, as in a glass, darkly, the vague but constant lineaments of an ancestral ghost-deity.

down to a comparatively late period of jewish history, as we now know, jahweh was but one and the highest among a considerable group of israelitish divinities; the first among his peers, like zeus among the gods of hellas, osiris or amen among the gods of egypt, and woden or thunor among the gods of the old teutonic pantheon. as late as the century of hezekiah, the religion of the great mass of the israelites and jews was still a broad though vague polytheism. the gods seem to have been as numerous and as localised as in egypt: “according to the number of thy cities are thy gods, o judah,” says the prophet jeremiah in the sixth century. it was only by a slow process of syncretism, by the absorption into jahweh-worship of all other conflicting creeds, that israel at last attained its full ideal of pure monotheism. that ideal was never finally reached by the people at large till the return from the captivity: it had only even been aimed at by a few ardent and exclusive jahweh-worshippers in the last dangerous and doubtful years of national independence which immediately preceded the babylonish exile.

in order to understand the inner nature of this curious gradual revolution we must look briefly, first, at the general character 182of the old hebrew polytheism; and secondly, at the original cult of the great ethnical god jahweh himself.

in spite of their long sojourn in egypt, the national religion of the hebrews, when we first begin dimly to descry its features through the veil of later glosses, is regarded by almost all modern investigators as truly semitic and local in origin. it is usually described as embracing three principal forms of cult: the worship of the teraphim or family gods; the worship of sacred stones; and the worship of certain great gods, partly native, partly perhaps borrowed; some of them adored in the form of animals, and some apparently elemental or solar in their acquired attributes. although for us these three are one, i shall examine them here in that wonted order.

the cult of the teraphim, i think, we cannot consider, on a broad anthropological view, otherwise than as the equivalent of all the other family cults known to us; that is to say, in other words, as pure unadulterated domestic ancestor-worship. “by that name,” says kuenen, “were indicated larger or smaller images, which were worshipped as household gods, and upon which the happiness of the family was supposed to depend.” in the legend of jacob’s flight from laban, we are told how rachel stole her father’s teraphim: and when the angry chieftain overtakes the fugitives, he enquires of them why they have robbed him of his domestic gods. of micah, we learn that he made images of his teraphim, and consecrated one of his own sons to be his family priest: such a domestic and private priesthood being exactly what we are accustomed to find in the worship of ancestral manes everywhere. even through the mist of the later jehovistic recension we catch, in passing, frequent glimpses of the early worship of these family gods, one of which is described as belonging to michal, the daughter of saul and wife of david; while hosea alludes to them as stocks of wood, and zechariah as idols that speak lies to the people. it is clear 183that the teraphim were preserved in each household with reverential care, that they were sacrificed to by the family at stated intervals, and that they were consulted on all occasions of doubt or difficulty by a domestic priest clad in an ephod. i think, then, if we put these indications side by side with those of family cults elsewhere, we may conclude that the jewish religion, like all others, was based upon an ultimate foundation of general ancestor-worship.

it has been denied, indeed, that ancestor-worship pure and simple ever existed among the semitic races. a clear contradiction of this denial is furnished by m. lenormant, who comments thus on sepulchral monuments from yemen: “here, then, we have twice repeated a whole series of human persons, decidedly deceased ancestors or relations of the authors of the dedications. their names are accompanied with the titles they bore during life. they are invoked by their descendants in the same way as the gods. they are incontestably deified persons, objects of a family worship, and gods or genii in the belief of the people of their race.” after this, we need not doubt that the teraphim were the images of such family gods or ancestral spirits.

it is not surprising, however, that these domestic gods play but a small part in the history of the people as it has come down to us in the late jehovistic version of the hebrew traditions. nowhere in literature, even under the most favourable circumstances, do we hear much of the manes and lares, compared with the great gods of national worship. nor were such minor divinities likely to provoke the wrath even of that “jealous god” who later usurped all the adoration of israel: so that denunciations of their votaries are comparatively rare in the rhapsodies of the prophets. “their use,” says kuenen, speaking of the teraphim, “was very general, and was by no means considered incompatible with the worship of jahweh.” they were regarded merely as family affairs, poor foemen for 184the great and awesome tribal god who bore no rival near his throne, and would not suffer the pretensions of molech or of the baalim. to use a modern analogy, their cult was as little inconsistent with jahweh-worship as a belief in fairies, banshees, or family ghosts was formerly inconsistent with a belief in christianity.

this conclusion will doubtless strike the reader at once as directly opposed to the oft-repeated assertion that the early hebrews had little or no conception of the life beyond the grave and of the doctrine of future rewards and punishments. i am afraid it cannot be denied that such is the case. hard as it is to run counter to so much specialist opinion, i can scarcely see how any broad anthropological enquirer may deny to the semites of the tenth and twelfth centuries before christ participation in an almost (or quite) universal human belief, common to the lowest savages and the highest civilisations, and particularly well developed in that egyptian society with which the ancestors of the hebrews had so long rubbed shoulders. the subject, however, is far too large a one for full debate here. i must content myself with pointing out that, apart from the a priori improbability of such a conclusion, the hebrew documents themselves contain numerous allusions, even in their earliest traditional fragments, to the belief in ghosts and in the world of shades, as well as to the probability of future resurrection. the habit of cave-burial and of excavated grotto-burial; the importance attached to the story of the purchase of machpelah; the common phrase that such-and-such a patriarch “was gathered to his people,” or “slept with his fathers”; the embalming of joseph, and the carrying up of his bones from egypt to palestine; the episode of saul and the ghost of samuel; and indeed the entire conception of sheol, the place of the departed—all alike show that the hebrew belief in this respect did not largely differ in essentials from the general belief of surrounding peoples. the very frequency of allusions to witchcraft and necromancy 185point in the same direction; while the common habit of assuming a priestly or sacrificial garment, the ephod, and then consulting the family teraphim as a domestic oracle, is strictly in accordance with all that we know of the minor ancestor-worship as it occurs elsewhere.

closely connected with the teraphim is the specific worship at tombs or graves. “the whole north semitic area,” says professor robertson smith, “was dotted over with sacred tombs, memnonia, semiramis mounds, and the like; and at every such spot a god or demigod had his subterranean abode.” this, of course, is pure ancestor-worship. traces of still older cave-burial are also common in the hebrew scriptures. “at the present day,” says professor smith, “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.”

we are fairly entitled to conclude, then, i believe, that a domestic cult of the manes or lares, the family dead, formed the general substratum of early hebrew religion, though as in all other cases, owing to its purely personal nature, this universal cult makes but a small figure in the literature of the race, compared with the worship of the greater national gods and goddesses.

second in the list of worshipful objects in early israel come the sacred stones, about which i have already said a good deal in the chapter devoted to that interesting subject, but concerning whose special nature in the semitic field a few more words may here be fitly added.

it is now very generally admitted that stone-worship played an exceedingly large and important part in the primitive semitic religion. how important a part we may readily gather from many evidences, but from none more than from the fact that even mohammad himself was unable to exclude from islam, the most monotheistic of all 186known religious systems, the holy black stone of the kaaba at mecca. in arabia, says professor robertson smith, the altar or hewn stone is unknown, and in its place we find the rude pillar or the cairn, beside which the sacrificial victim is slain, the blood being poured out over the stone or at its base. but in israel, the shaped stone seems the more usual mark of the ghost or god. such a sacred stone, we have already seen, was known to the early hebrews as a beth-el, that is to say an “abode of deity,” from the common belief that it was inhabited by a god, ghost, or spirit. the great prevalence of the cult of stones among the semites, however, is further indicated by the curious circumstance that this word was borrowed by the greeks and romans (in a slightly altered form) to denote the stones so supposed to be inhabited by deities. references to such gods abound throughout the hebrew books, though they are sometimes denounced as idolatrous images, and sometimes covered with a thin veneer of jehovism by being connected with the national heroes and with the later jahweh-worship.

in the legend of jacob’s dream we get a case where the sacred stone is anointed and a promise is made to it of a tenth of the speaker’s substance as an offering. and again, on a later occasion, we learn that jacob “set up a pillar of stone, and he poured a drink-offering thereon, and he poured oil thereon;” just as, in the great phallic worship of the linga in india (commonly called the linga puja), a cylindrical pillar, rounded at the top, and universally considered as a phallus in its nature, is worshipped by pouring upon it one of five sacred anointing liquids, water, milk, ghee, oil, and wine. similar rites are offered in many other places to other sacred stones; and in many cases the phallic value assigned to them is clearly shown by the fact that it is usual for sterile women to pray to them for the blessing of children, as hindu wives pray to mahadeo, and as so many hebrew women (to be noted hereafter) 187are mentioned in our texts as praying to jahweh.

a brief catalogue of the chief stone-deities alluded to in hebrew literature may help to enforce the importance of the subject: and it may be noted in passing that the stones are often mentioned in connexion with sacred trees—an association with which we are already familiar. in the neighbourhood of sichem was an oak—the “oak of the prophets” or “oak of the soothsayers”—by which lay a stone, whose holiness is variously accounted for by describing it as, in one place, an altar of abraham, in another an altar of jacob, and in a third a memorial of joshua. but the fact shows that it was resorted to for sacrifice, and that oracles or responses were sought from it by its votaries. that is to say, it was a sepulchral monument. near hebron stood “the oak of mamre,” and under it a sacred stone, accounted for as an altar of abraham, to which in david’s time sacrifices were offered. near beersheba we find yet a third tree, the tamarisk, said to have been planted by abraham, and an altar or stone pillar ascribed to isaac. in the camp at gilgal were “the twelve stones,” sometimes, apparently, spoken of as “the graven images,” but sometimes explained away as memorials of jahweh’s help at the passing of the jordan. other examples are ebenezer, “the helpful stone,” and tobeleth, the “serpent-stone,” as well as the “great stone” to which sacrifices were offered at bethshemesh, and the other great stone at gibeon, which was also, no doubt, an early hebrew deity.

so often is the name of abraham connected with these stones, indeed, that, as some german scholars have suggested, abraham himself may perhaps be regarded as a sacred boulder, the rock from which israel originally; sprang.

in any case, i need hardly say, we must look upon such sacred stones as themselves a further evidence of ancestor-worship in palestine, on the analogy of all similar stones elsewhere. 188we may conclude that, as in previously noted instances, they were erected on the graves of deceased chieftains.

and now we come to the third and most difficult division of early hebrew religion, the cult of the great gods whom the jealous jahweh himself finally superseded. the personality of these gods is very obscure, partly because of the nature of our materials, which, being derived entirely from jehovistic sources, have done their best to overshadow the “false gods”; but partly also, i believe, because, in the process of evolving monotheism, a syncretic movement merged almost all their united attributes into jahweh himself, who thus becomes at last the all-absorbing synthesis of an entire pantheon. nevertheless, we can point out one or two shadowy references to such greater gods, either by name alone, or by the form under which they were usually worshipped.

the scholarship of the elder generation would no doubt have enumerated first among these gods the familiar names of baal and molech. at present, such an enumeration is scarcely possible. we can no longer see in the baal of the existing hebrew scriptures a single great god. we must regard the word rather as a common substantive,—“the lord” or “the master,”—descriptive of the relation of each distinct god to the place he inhabited. the baalim, in other words, seem to have been the local deities or deified chiefs of the semitic region; doubtless the dead kings or founders of families, as opposed to the lesser gods of each particular household. it is not improbable, therefore, that they were really identified with the sacred stones we have just been considering, and with the wooden ashera. the baal is usually spoken of indefinitely, without a proper name, much as at delos men spoke of “the god,” at athens of “the goddess,” and now at padua of “il santo,”—meaning respectively apollo, athene, st. antony. melcarth is thus the baal of tyre, astarte the baalath of byblos; there was a baal of lebanon, of mount 189hermon, of mount peor, and so forth. a few specific baalim have their names preserved for us in the nomenclature of towns; such are baal-tamar, the lord of the palm-tree; with baal-gad, baal-berith, baal-meon, and baal-zephon. but in the hebrew scriptures, as a rule, every effort has been made to blot out the very memory of these “false gods,” and to represent jahweh alone as from the earliest period the one true prince and ruler in israel.

as for molech, that title merely means “the king”; and it may have been applied to more than one distinct deity. dr. robertson smith does not hesitate to hold that the particular molech to whom human sacrifices of children were offered by the jews before the captivity was jahweh himself; it was to the national god, he believes, that these fiery rites were performed at the tophet or pyre in the ravine just below the temple.

we are thus reduced to the most nebulous details about these great gods of the hebrews, other than jahweh, in the period preceding the babylonian captivity. all that is certain appears to be that a considerable number of local gods were worshipped here and there at special sanctuaries, each of which seems to have consisted of an altar or stone image, standing under a sacred tree or sacred grove, and combined with an ashera. while the names of chemosh, the god of moab, and of dagon, the god of the philistines, have come down to us with perfect frankness and clearness, no local hebrew god save jahweh has left a name that can now be discerned with any approach to certainty. it should be added that the worship of many of the gods of surrounding semitic tribes undoubtedly extended from the earliest times into israel also.

i must likewise premise that the worship of the baalim, within and without israel, was specially directed to upright conical stones, the most sacred objects at all the sanctuaries; and that these stones are generally admitted to have 190possessed for their worshippers a phallic significance.

certain writers have further endeavoured to show that a few animal-gods entered into the early worship of the hebrews. i do not feel sure that their arguments are convincing; but for the sake of completeness i include the two most probable cases in this brief review of the vague and elusive deities of early israel.

one of these is the god in the form of a young bull, specially worshipped at dan and bethel, as the bull apis was worshipped at memphis, and the bull mnevis at on or heliopolis. this cult of the bull is pushed back in the later traditions to the period of the exodus, when the israelites made themselves a “golden calf” in the wilderness. kuenen, indeed, lays stress upon the point that this semitic bull-worship differed essentially from the cult of apis in the fact that it was directed to an image or idol, not to a living animal. this is true, and i certainly do not wish to press any particular connexion between egypt and the golden bulls of jeroboam in the cities of ephraim: though i think too much may perhaps be made of superficial differences and too little of deep-seated resemblances in these matters, seeing that bull-worship is a common accompaniment of a phallic cult in the whole wide district between egypt and india. it is the tendency of the scholastic mind, indeed, to over-elaborate trifles, and to multiply to excess minute distinctions. but in any case, we are on comparatively safe ground in saying that a bull-god was an object of worship in israel down to a very late period; that his cult descended from an early age of the national existence; and that the chief seats of his images were at dan and bethel in ephraim, and at beersheba in judah.

was this bull-shaped deity jahweh’ himself, or one of the polymorphic forms of jahweh? such is the opinion of kuenen, who says explicitly, “jahweh was worshipped in the shape of a young bull. it cannot be doubted that the 191cult of the bull-calf was really the cult of jahweh in person.” and certainly in the prophetic writings of the eighth century, we can clearly descry that the worshippers of the bull regarded themselves as worshipping the god jahweh, who brought up his people from the land of egypt. nevertheless, dangerous as it may seem for an outsider to differ on such a subject from great semitic scholars, i venture to think we may see reason hereafter to conclude that this was not originally the case: that the god worshipped under the form of the bull-calf was some other deity, like the molech whom we know to have been represented with a bull’s head; and that only by the later syncretic process did this bull-god come to be identified in the end with jahweh, a deity (as seems likely) of quite different origin, much as mnevis came to be regarded at heliopolis as an incarnation of ra, and as apis came to be regarded at memphis as an avatar of ptah and still later of osiris. on the other hand, we must remember that, as mr. frazer has shown, a sacred animal is often held to be the representative and embodiment of the very god to whom it is habitually sacrificed. here again we trench on ground which can only satisfactorily be occupied at a later stage of our polymorphic argument.

a second animal-god, apparently, also adored in the form of a metal image, was the asp or snake, known in our version as “the brazen serpent,” and connected by the jehovistic editors of the earlier traditions with moses in the wilderness. the name of this deity is given us in the book of kings as nehushtan, “the brass god”; but whether this was really its proper designation or a mere contemptuous descriptive title we can hardly be certain. the worship of the serpent is said to have gone on uninterruptedly till the days of hezekiah, when, under the influence of the exclusive devotion to jahweh which was then becoming popular, the image was broken in pieces as an idolatrous object. it is scarcely necessary to point out in passing that the asp was one of the most sacred animals 192in egypt: but, as in the case of the bull, the snake was also a widespread object of worship throughout all the surrounding countries; and it is therefore probable that the hebrew snake-worship may have been parallel to, rather than derived from, egyptian ophiolatry.

such, then, seen through the dim veil of jehovism, are the misty features of that uncertain pantheon in which, about the eighth century at least, jahweh found himself the most important deity. the most important, i say, because it is clear from our records that for many ages the worship of jahweh and the worship of the baalim went on side by side without conscious rivalry.

and what sort of god was this holy jahweh himself, whom the hebrews recognised from a very early time as emphatically and above all others “the god of israel”?

if ever he was envisaged as a golden bull, if ever he was regarded as the god of light, fire, or the sun, those concepts, i believe, must have been the result of a late transference of attributes and confusion of persons, such as we may see so rife in the more recent mystical religion of egypt. what in his own nature jahweh must have been in the earliest days of his nascent godhead i believe we can best judge by putting together some of the passages in old traditionary legend which bear most plainly upon his character and functions.

in the legendary account of the earliest dealings of jahweh with the hebrew race, we are told that the ethnical god appeared to abraham in haran, and promised to make of him “a great nation.” later on, abraham complains of the want of an heir, saying to jahweh, “thou hast given me no seed.” then jahweh “brought him forth abroad, and said, look now toward heaven and tell the stars: so shall thy seed be.” over and over again we get similar promises of fruitfulness made to abraham: “i will multiply thee exceedingly”; “thou shalt be a father of many nations”; “i will make thee exceeding fruitful”; “kings shall come out of thee”; “for a father of many nations 193have i made thee.” so, too, of sarah: “she shall be a mother of nations; kings of people shall be of her.” and of ishmael: “i have blessed him and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly: twelve princes shall he beget, and i will make him a great nation.” time after time these blessings recur for abraham, isaac, and all his family: “i will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore, and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies.”

in every one of these passages, and in many more which need not be quoted, but which will readily occur to every reader, jahweh is represented especially as a god of increase, of generation, of populousness, of fertility. as such, too, we find him frequently and markedly worshipped on special occasions. he was the god to whom sterile women prayed, and from whom they expected the special blessing of a son, to keep up the cult of the family ancestors. this trait survived even into the poetry of the latest period. “he maketh the barren woman to keep house,” says a psalmist about jahweh, “and to be a joyful mother of children.” and from the beginning to the end of hebrew legend we find a similar characteristic of the ethnical god amply vindicated. when sarah is old and well stricken in years, jahweh visits her and she conceives isaac. then isaac in turn “intreated jahweh for his wife, because she was barren; and jahweh was intreated of him, and rebekah his wife conceived.” again, “when jahweh saw that leah was hated, he opened her womb; but rachel was barren.” once more, of the birth of samson we are told that manoah’s wife “was barren and bare not”: but “the angel of jahweh appeared unto the woman and said unto her, behold, now thou art barren and bearest not; but thou shalt conceive and bear a son.” and of hannah we are told, even more significantly, that jahweh had “shut up her womb.” at the shrine of jahweh at shiloh, therefore, she prayed to jahweh that this disgrace might be removed from her and that a child might 194be born to her. if she bore “a man child,” she would offer him up all his life long as an anchorite to jahweh, to be a nazarite of the lord, an ascetic and a fanatic. “jahweh remembered her,” and she bore samuel. and after that again, “jahweh visited hannah, so that she conceived and bare three sons and two daughters.” in many other passages we get the self-same trait: jahweh is regarded above everything as a god of increase and a giver of offspring. “children are a heritage from jahweh,” says the much later author of a familiar ode: “the fruit of the womb are a reward from him.”

it is clear, too, that this desire for children, for a powerful clan, for the increase of the people, was a dominant one everywhere in ephraim and in judah. “thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine,” says jahweh to his votary by the mouth of the poet; “thy children like olive plants round about thy table.” “happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them,” says another psalmist; “they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.” again and again the promise is repeated that the seed of abraham or of joseph or of ishmael shall be numerous as the stars of heaven or the sands of the sea: jahweh’s chief prerogative is evidently the gift of increase, extended often to cattle and asses, but always including at least sons and daughters. if israel obeys jahweh, says the deuteronomist, “jahweh will make thee plenteous for good in the fruit of thy belly, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground”: but if otherwise, then “cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.”

now, elsewhere throughout the world we find in like manner a certain class of phallic gods who are specially conceived as givers of fertility, and to whom prayers and offerings are made by barren women who desire children. and the point to observe is that these gods are usually (perhaps one might even say always) embodied in stone pillars 195or upright monoliths. the practical great god of india—the god whom the people really worship—is mahadeo; and mahadeo is, as we know, a cylinder of stone, to whom the linga puja is performed, and to whom barren women pray for offspring. there are sacred stones in western europe, now crowned by a cross, at which barren women still pray to god and the madonna, or to some local saint, for the blessing of children. it is allowed that while the obelisk is from one point of view (in later theory) a ray of the sun, it is from another point of view (in earlier origin) a “symbol of the generative power of nature,”—which is only another way of saying that it is an ancestral stone of phallic virtue. in short, without laying too much stress upon the connexion, we may conclude generally that the upright pillar came early to be regarded, not merely as a memento of the dead and an abode of the ghost or indwelling god, but also in some mysterious and esoteric way as a representative of the male and generative principle.

if we recollect that the stone pillar was often identified with the ancestor or father, the reason for this idea will not perhaps be quite so hard to understand. “from these stones we are all descended,” thinks the primitive worshipper: “these are our fathers; therefore, they are the givers of children, the producers and begetters of all our generations, the principle of fertility, the proper gods to whom to pray for offspring.” add that many of them, being represented as human, or human in their upper part at least, grow in time to be ithyphallic, like priapus, party by mere grotesque barbarism, but partly also as a sign of the sex of the deceased: and we can see the naturalness of this easy transition. from the herm忙 of the greeks to the rude phallic deities of so many existing savage races, we get everywhere signs of this constant connexion between the sacred stone and the idea of paternity. where the stone represents the grave of a woman, the deity of course is conceived as a goddess, but with 196the same implications. herodotus saw in syria stel忙 engraved with the female pudenda. the upright stone god is thus everywhere and always liable to be regarded as a god of fruitfulness.

but did this idea of the stone pillar extend to palestine and to the semitic nations? there is evidence that it did, besides that of herodotus. major conder, whose opinion on all questions of pure archaeology (as opposed to philology) deserves the highest respect, says of canaanitish times, “the menhir, or conical stone, was the emblem throughout syria of the gods presiding over fertility, and the cup hollows which have been formed in menhirs and dolmens are the indications of libations, often of human blood, once poured on these stones by early worshippers.” he connects these monuments with the linga cult of india, and adds that dr. chaplin has found such a cult still surviving near the sea of galilee. lucian speaks of the two great pillars at the temple of hierapolis as phalli. of the phoenicians major conder writes: “the chief emblem worshipped in the temples was a pillar or cone, derived no doubt from the rude menhirs which were worshipped by early savage tribes, such as dravidians, arabs, celts, and hottentots.” that they were originally sepulchral in character we can gather from the fact that “they often stood beneath trilithons or dolmens, or were placed before an altar made by a stone laid flat on an upright base.” “the representations on early babylonian cylinders of tables whereon a small fire might be kindled, or an offering of some small object laid, seem to indicate a derivation from similar structures. the original temple in which the cone and its shrine, or its altar, were placed, was but a cromlech or enclosure, square or round, made by setting up stones.” remains of such enclosures, with dolmens on one side, are found at various spots in moab and phoenicia. nothing could be more obviously sepulchral in character than these rude shrines or gilgals, with the pillar or gravestone, from which, as major conder suggests, 197the hyp忙thral temples of byblos and baalbek are finally developed.

that jahweh himself in his earliest form was such a stone god, the evidence, i think, though not perhaps exactly conclusive, is to say the least extremely suggestive. i have already called attention to it in a previous chapter, and need not here recapitulate it in full; but a few stray additions may not be without value. besides the general probability, among a race whose gods were so almost universally represented by sacred stones, that any particular god, unless the contrary be proved, was so represented, there is the evidence of all the later language, and of the poems written after the actual stone god himself had perished, that jahweh was still popularly regarded as, at least in a metaphorical sense, a stone or rock. “he is the rock,” says the deuteronomist, in the song put into the mouth of moses; “i will publish the name of jahweh; ascribe greatness unto our god.” “jahweh liveth, and blessed be my rock,” says the hymn which a later writer composes for david in the second book of samuel: “exalted be the god of the rock of my salvation.” and in the psalms the image recurs again and again: “jahweh is my rock and my fortress”; “who is a god save jahweh, and who is a rock save our god?”; “he set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings”; “lead me to the rock that is greater than i”; “jahweh is my defence, and my god is the rock of my refuge”; “o come, let us sing to jahweh; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.” and that the shape of this stone was probably that of a rounded pillar, bevelled at the top, we see in the fact that later ages pictured to themselves their transfigured jahweh as leading the sons of israel in the wilderness as a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by daytime.

the earlier israelites, however, had no such poetical illusions. to them, their god jahweh was simply the object—stone pillar or otherwise—preserved in the ark or chest 198which long rested at shiloh, and which was afterwards enshrined, “between the thighs of the building” (as a later gloss has it), in the temple at jerusalem. the whole of the early traditions embedded in the books of judges, samuel, and kings show us quite clearly that jahweh himself was then regarded as inhabiting the ark, and as carried about with it from place to place in all its wanderings. the story of the battle with the philistines at eben-ezer, the fall of dagon before the rival god, the fortunes of the ark after its return to the israelitish people, the removal to jerusalem by david, the final enthronement by solomon, all distinctly show that jahweh in person dwelt within the ark, between the guardian cherubim. “who is able to stand before the face of jahweh, this very sacred god?” ask the men of bethshemesh, when they ventured to look inside that hallowed abode, and were smitten down by the “jealous god” who loved to live in the darkness of the inmost sanctuary. *

* mr. william simpson has some excellent remarks on the

analogies of the egyptian and hebrew arks and sanctuaries in

his pamphlet on the worship of death.

it may be well to note in this connexion two significant facts: just such an ark was used in egypt to contain the sacred objects or images of the gods. and further, at the period when the sons of israel were tributaries in egypt, a theban dynasty ruled the country, and the worship of the great theban phallic deity, khem, was widely spread throughout every part of the egyptian dominions.

is there, however, any evidence of a linga or other stone pillar being ever thus enshrined and entempled as the great god of a sanctuary? clearly, major conder has already supplied some, and more is forthcoming from various other sources. the cone which represented aphrodite in cyprus was similarly enshrined as the chief object of a temple, as were the stel忙 of all egyptian mummies. “the trilithon,” says major conder, “becomes later a shrine, in which the cone or a statue stands.” the significance 199of this correlation will at once be seen if the reader remembers how, in the chapter on sacred stones, i showed the origin of the idol from the primitive menhir or upright pillar. “the khonds and other non-aryan tribes in india,” says conder once more, “build such temples of rude stones, daubed with red,—a survival of the old practice of anointing the menhirs and the sacred cone or pillar with blood of victims, sometimes apparently human. among the indians, the pillar is a lingam, and such apparently was its meaning among the phoenicians.” and in the greek cities we know from pausanias that an unhewn stone was similarly enshrined in the most magnificent adytum of the noblest hellenic temples. in fact, it was rather the rule than otherwise that a stone was the chief object of worship in the noblest fanes.

one more curious trait must be noted in the worship of jahweh. not only did he rejoice in human sacrifices, but he also demanded especially an offering of the firstborn, and he required a singular and significant ransom from every man-child whom he permitted to live among his peculiar votaries. on the fact of human sacrifices i need hardly insist: they were an integral part of all semitic worship, and their occurrence in the cult of jahweh has been universally allowed by all unprejudiced scholars. the cases of agag, whom samuel hewed to pieces before the face of jahweh, and of jephthah’s daughter, whom her father offered up as a thank-offering for his victory, though not of course strictly historical from a critical point of view, are quite sufficient evidence to show the temper and the habit of the jahweh-worshippers who described them. so with the legend of the offering of isaac, who is merely rescued at the last moment in order that the god of generation may make him the father of many thousands. again, david seeks to pacify the anger of jahweh by a sacrifice of seven of the sons of saul. and the prophet micah asks, “shall i give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”—a passage 200which undoubtedly implies that in micah’s time such a sacrifice of the eldest child was a common incident of current jahweh-worship.

from human sacrifice to circumcision the transition is less violent than would at first sight appear. an intermediate type is found in the dedication of the first-born, where jahweh seems to claim for himself, not as a victim, but as a slave and devotee, the first fruits of that increase which it is his peculiar function to ensure. in various laws, jahweh lays claim to the first-born of man and beast,—sometimes to all, sometimes only to the male first-born. the animals were sacrificed; the sons, in later ages at least, were either made over as nazarites or redeemed with an offering or a money-ransom. but we cannot doubt that in the earliest times the first-born child was slain before jahweh. in the curious legend of moses and zipporah we get a strange folk-tale connecting this custom indirectly with the practice of circumcision. jahweh seeks to kill moses, apparently because he has not offered up his child: but zipporah his wife takes a stone knife, circumcises her son, and flings the bloody offering at jahweh’s feet, who thereupon lets her husband go. this, rather than the later account of its institution by abraham, seems the true old explanatory legend of the origin of circumcision—a legend analogous to those which we find in roman and other early history as embodying or explaining certain ancient customs or legal formulae. circumcision, in fact, appears to be a bloody sacrifice to jahweh, as the god of generation: a sacrifice essentially of the nature of a ransom, and therefore comparable to all those other bodily mutilations whose origin mr. herbert spencer has so well shown in the ceremonial institutions.

at the same time, the nature of the offering helps to cast light upon the character of jahweh as a god of increase; exactly as the “emerods” with which the philistines were afflicted for the capture of jahweh and his ark show 201the nature of the vengeance which might naturally be expected from a deity of generation.

last of all, how is it that later hebrew writers believed the object concealed in the ark to have been, not a phallic stone, but a copy of the “ten words” which jahweh was fabled to have delivered to moses? that would be difficult to decide: but here at least is an aper莽u upon the subject which i throw out for what it may be worth. the later hebrews, when their views of jahweh had grown expanded and etherealised, were obviously ashamed of their old stone-worship, if indeed they were archaeologists enough after the captivity to know that it had ever really existed. what more natural, then, than for them to suppose that the stone which they heard of as having been enclosed in the ark was a copy of the “ten words,”—the covenant of jahweh? hence, perhaps, the later substitution of the term, “ark of the covenant,” for the older and correcter phrase, “ark of jahweh.” one more suggestion, still more purely hypothetical. cones with pyramidal heads, bearing inscriptions to the deceased, were used by the phoenicians for interments. it is just possible that the original jahweh may have been such an ancient pillar, covered with writings of some earlier character, which were interpreted later as the equivalents or symbols of the “ten words.”

putting all the evidence together, then, as far as we can now recover it, and interpreting it on broad anthropological lines by analogy from elsewhere, i should say the following propositions seem fairly probable:

the original religion of israel was a mixed polytheism, containing many various types of gods, and based like all other religions upon domestic and tribal ancestor-worship. some of the gods were of animal shapes: others were more or less vaguely anthropomorphic. but the majority were worshipped under the form of sacred stones, trees, or wooden cones. the greater part of these gods were semitic in type, and common to the sons of israel with their neighbours 202and kinsmen. the character of the hebrew worship, however, apparently underwent some slight modification in egypt; or at any rate, egyptian influences led to the preference of certain gods over others at the period of the exodus. one god, in particular, jahweh by name, seems to have been almost peculiar to the sons of israel,—their ethnical deity, and therefore in all probability an early tribal ancestor or the stone representative of such an ancestor. the legends are probably right in their implication that this god was already worshipped (not of course exclusively) by the sons of israel before their stay in egypt; they are almost certainly correct in ascribing the great growth and extension of his cult to the period of the exodus. the sons of israel, at least from the date of the exodus onward, carried this god or his rude image with them in an ark or box through all their wanderings. the object so carried was probably a conical stone pillar, which we may conjecture to have been the grave-stone of some deified ancestor: and of this ancestor “jahweh” was perhaps either the proper name or a descriptive epithet. even if, as colenso suggests, the name itself was canaanitish, and belonged already to a local god, its application to the sacred stone of the ark would be merely another instance of the common tendency to identify the gods of one race or country with those of another. the stone itself was always enshrouded in egyptian mystery, and no private person was permitted to behold it. sacrifices, both human and otherwise, were offered up to it, as to the other gods, its fellow’s and afterwards its hated rivals. the stone, like other sacred stones of pillar shape, was regarded as emblematic of the generative power. circumcision was a mark of devotion to jahweh, at first, no doubt, either voluntary, or performed by way of a ransom, but becoming with the growth and exclusiveness of jahweh-worship a distinctive rite of jahweh’s chosen people. (but other semites also circumcised 203themselves as a blood-offering to their own more or less phallic deities.)

more briefly still, among many hebrew gods, jahweh was originally but a single one, a tribal ancestor-god, worshipped in the form of a cylindrical stone, perhaps at first a grave-stone, and regarded as essentially a god of increase, a special object of veneration by childless women.

from this rude ethnical divinity, the mere sacred pillar of a barbarous tribe, was gradually developed the lord god of later judaism and of christianity—a power, eternal, omniscient, almighty, holy; the most ethereal, the most sublime, the most superhuman deity that the brain of man has ever conceived. by what slow evolutionary process of syncretism and elimination, of spiritual mysticism and national enthusiasm, of ethical effort and imaginative impulse that mighty god was at last projected out of so unpromising an original it will be the task of our succeeding chapters to investigate and to describe.