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 ............