The Religion of Ancient Palestine Part 4

_pp._ 35-64 (Chicago, 1908).

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CHAPTER VIII

CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT--CONCLUSION

+Miscellaneous Ideas.+--Although the native literature of our period consists almost entirely of the begging-letters and reports in the Amarna Tablets, yet even from the language addressed to the human representative of the Sun-G.o.d, we may gain some idea of the intellectual environment, some hints, it may be, suggestive of the religious thought of the age.[1] The Egyptian monarch is addressed not only as king of lands, king of battle but as a G.o.d (pp. 63, 78). His commands are as powerful as the Sun (Shamash) in Heaven; he is like the Sun which rises over the lands every day, and, as for the rising of the Sun in Heaven, so the writers await the words which come from his mouth. They keep the king's command day and night and acknowledge that the king will curse {99} the man who does not serve him. He who hearkens not to the word of the king, his lord, his city and house go to ruin, and his name will not be in the land for ever; but (says the writer, the king of Tyre) the servant who hearkens to his lord, his city and house flourish, and his name is unto eternity, 'for thou art the Sun which rises over me and the wall of bronze which is lifted up for me.'

[1] It need hardly be remarked that the paragraphs cla.s.sifying the more interesting ideas in the letters from Palestine and Syria have been made as literal as possible.

The va.s.sals do obeisance seven and seven times; they prostrate themselves upon breast and back. (Both att.i.tudes are ill.u.s.trated in the rather later tomb of Harmheb.) They call themselves the throne on which the king sits, his footstool, the dust of his feet and of the soles of his sandals. They are the ground upon which he treads, the dirt over which he walks; his yoke is upon their neck and they bear it.

'Whether we mount up to heaven or descend to earth, our head is still in your hand,' writes one, and he makes the following striking acknowledgement: 'I look here and I look there and there is no light, but I look to my lord the king and there is light; and though a brick move away from under its coping, I will not move away from under the feet of my lord.' These phrases, which were evidently popular, are used by two {100} other writers. A va.s.sal thus declares his fidelity: 'I have not sinned in aught against the king my lord, I have not sinned; may the lord my king know his evil-doers.' Another seeks the way to his lord, and from his lord deserts not. A confident va.s.sal prays the king not to take anything to heart; let not thy heart be pained, he writes. One writer asks if he is a dog that he should not obey the royal commands, and a second emphasises his remarks by a repet.i.tion of the oath 'as the king, my lord, liveth.'

The king of Byblos, who calls his city the king's faithful handmaid, complains of a deed against his city which had not been done since eternity; the dogs (_i.e._ his adversaries) act after their hearts and cause the king's cities to go up in smoke. The fields are like a wife without a husband through lack of sustenance. He himself is caught like a bird in a cage. Again, he is old and stricken with disease; the G.o.ds of Byblos are enraged, and the illness is very severe, but, he continues, 'I have opened (confessed) my sins to the G.o.ds.' He declares that since the day he received favour from the king his heart had not changed, his face is (fixed) to serve him; if the king's heart is for his city (or, elsewhere, if it is on his heart) let him send help.

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The va.s.sals write that they stretch out their hand to the king's feet, or pray that the king may extend his hand unto them. The citizens of Tunip a.s.sert: 'thy city weeps and its tears flow; there is no seizing of the hand (help) for us.' The ruler of Beirut trusts that the royal troops may shatter the heads of the king's enemies, while his servant's eyes gaze (_i.e._ with pleasure) upon the king's life. The elders of a city entreat: 'May the king our lord hearken to the words of his true servants, and give a present to his servants, while our enemies look on and eat the dust; let not the king's breath depart from us.' The king is the breath of his va.s.sals' lives; they rejoice when it reaches them, for without it they cannot live. The thought was a common one, and in an Egyptian text the defeated Hitt.i.tes are represented as saying to Ramses II. 'in praising the Good G.o.d (_i.e._ the king) "Give to us the breath that thou givest, lo, we are under thy sandals."' Equally interesting are the words of the prince of Sidon on the receipt of tidings from the king, 'my heart rejoiced, my head was uplifted and my eyes shone.'

Finally, the king of Jerusalem in his letters to his G.o.d, his Sun, protests that one has slandered him (_lit._ eaten the pieces). While other writers {102} disclaim guilt or sin (_khitu_), _i.e._ rebellion, he a.s.serts that he has been loyal (_saduk_) in his dealings. He acknowledges that neither his father nor his mother appointed him in his place, the king's strong arm has set him up in his father's house, he has 'put his name upon Jerusalem for ever,' therefore he cannot abandon its territory. Indeed, his recognition of Pharaoh's supremacy is unique, and in one of his communications to the king his Sun, after the usual obeisance ('at the feet of my lord, seven times and seven times I fall'), he declares that his lord 'has put his name upon the East and upon the West.'

+The Underlying Ident.i.ty of Thought+ throughout the old Oriental world shows itself alike in Egyptian texts and in Hitt.i.te tablets from Boghaz-keui. The literature of Babylonia, a.s.syria, and often, too, of Egypt so frequently has a.n.a.logies and parallels in the Old Testament, that we may a.s.sume that similar points of contact would be found, had we some of the religious writings of the Palestine of our period.

Though we do not know how the Palestinian addressed his G.o.ds, the evidence whether direct or indirect partially enables us to fill the gap. Even the simplicity and poverty of Oriental pastoral life have never {103} been accompanied by a corresponding inferiority of expression or dearth of religious reflection. An unbiased examination of the external religious literature shows the position which the deities held in the thoughts of their groups of worshippers. Religion was quite part of life, and the same fundamental conceptions underlay the manifold social-religious systems whether tribal or monarchical.

To their head each group looked for all the gifts of nature and also for protection and succour; him they were loyally prepared to sustain, and they expected a corresponding loyalty on his part.

A topical example of the ident.i.ty of thought is furnished by a hymn of the monotheist Ikhnaton in honour of Aton. The deities are largely what circ.u.mstances make them; the extension of Egypt's empire extended the supremacy of the national-G.o.d, the situation encouraged the conception of a world-G.o.d. Now, this domesticated and somewhat weak monarch, holding himself aloof from politics, endeavoured to found a cult of the sun-disc which was characteristically devoid of the usual a.s.sociation of the sun with the destructive aspect of the storm- or weather-G.o.d. Like other individual faiths, it was stamped with a profound spirit of humanity. Ikhnaton's deity {104} was the sole G.o.d, beside whom there was no other; the beginning of life, the creator of 'the countries of Syria, Nubia, the land of Egypt'; the maker of all mankind diverse in speech, and of all that is upon the earth and on high. It was a despotic and ill-timed monotheism. It introduced a cult which was too far from ordinary worship, one which threatened to overthrow the old-established deities. What was probably more important was the fact that the deity had not the forceful and dominating attributes of the old sun-G.o.d. He was not a G.o.d of war, and, from the current standpoint, would be of no avail in the political storms which were beating upon the Egyptian empire in Asia. But this remarkable attempt at a reform claims attention especially because the cult was as little upon traditional and specifically Egyptian lines as was the idea of the beneficent life-giving sun whose rays were not confined to Egypt alone. As Professor Breasted has observed, the hymn is especially interesting for its similarity in thought and sequence with the late Psalm civ. There is no evidence, however, that any effort was made to spread Ikhnaton's cult over the Egyptian dominions in Western Asia, and the possibility of Asiatic influence upon the shaping of the cult cannot be altogether excluded. We quote a {105} few lines from Professor Breasted's translation to ill.u.s.trate Ikhnaton's conceptions of the sun-G.o.d, whose worship was one of the most popular in Babylonia and a.s.syria, who, indeed, was regarded there not merely as an illuminator but as a supreme and righteous judge, the G.o.d of truth and justice.

'When thou risest in the eastern horizon of heaven, Thou fillest every land with thy beauty.

When thou settest in the western horizon of heaven, The world is in darkness like the dead.

Bright is the earth when thou risest in the horizon, When thou shinest as Aton by day.

The darkness is banished, when thou sendest forth thy rays.

How manifold are all thy works, They are hidden from before us, O thou sole G.o.d, whose powers no other possesseth, Thou didst create the earth according to thy desire, While thou wast alone.

The world is in thy hand, Even as thou hast made them.

When thou hast risen, they live.

When thou settest, they die.

For thou art duration, beyond thy mere limbs, By thee man liveth, And their eyes look upon thy beauty, Until thou settest.'[2]

[2] See further the appreciative account of the reform by J. H.

Breasted, _History of Egypt_, _pp._ 355-378.

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+The Influence of Babylonia.+--The fact that Palestine used the script and language of Babylonia suggests that it shared other features of its culture. Among the Amarna Tablets were Babylonian mythological texts which had been carefully studied or used for reading-exercises in Egypt. One, the myth of Eresh-ki-gal and Nergal, narrating the descent of the latter into Hades, recalls the story of Persephone. Another, the myth of Adapa, tells how the hero who refused the food and water of life in heaven was denied the gift of immortality. It is inconceivable that Palestinian speculation did not turn to the mysteries of life and death, or that a people should acknowledge Nergal--or any other deity--without some formal beliefs. May we a.s.sume, therefore, that Palestinian thought was pre-eminently Babylonian? The question is as important for our period as for the Old Testament, and, in the absence of texts wherewith to inst.i.tute a comparison, we conclude with a brief account of the bearing of the available evidence upon the problem.

The formulated beliefs, the theology, and the mythology which all races possess to some degree or other have grown up from that primitive philosophy of man which seeks to explain all that he saw about him.

The old question: {107} 'What mean ye by this service?' (Exod. xii. 26) is typical of the inquiry which ritual (and indeed all other) acts invariably demand; the danger lies in our a.s.suming that the proffered explanations necessarily describe their origin, and in confusing the essential elements with those which are accidental and secondary. The excavations at Gezer suggest an ill.u.s.tration. What rites were practised in its caves or in the great tunnel which leads to the subterranean spring cannot be a.s.serted, but there is a living tradition that the waters of the flood burst forth in the neighbourhood. Similar flood-stories can be localised elsewhere. In Hierapolis water was poured into a chasm below the sanctuary twice a year, and according to the Pseudo-Lucian it was here that the waters of Deucalion's flood were absorbed--hence the rite! But Melito reports that water was emptied into a well in the city in order to subdue a subterranean demon--evidently some earlier chthonic deity. Similar water-rites were known in Palestine and Syria as a 'descent' or _Yerid_, and it may be presumed that an echo of the term survives in _'Ain Yerdeh_ at the foot of Gezer. We do not reach the root of the matter, but we can notice the diverse explanations of the same rite (which probably originated in a charm {108} to procure rain), the ubiquity of certain traditions, their persistence, and the ease with which they adjust themselves. Further, it is instructive to observe how the rite has been shaped in the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles and has been dressed in accordance with specific religious beliefs (cp. Zech. xiv. 16 _sq._).

Some archaeological details may next be summarised. An altar at Taanach, with protuberances suggestive of horns, bore in bold relief winged animals with human faces, lions, a tree with a goat on either side, and a small human figure clutching a serpent. Though it may belong to the eighth or seventh century, similar scenes recur upon seals and other objects of all dates. Animals (especially of the deer or gazelle kind) are common, either alone or in conjunction with trees or men. Man-headed bulls with wings, sphinxes, and scenes of combat also appear. The ubiquitous myth of the dragon-slayer finds a parallel in the Egyptian scene of a foreign G.o.d (Sutekh) piercing the serpent with his spear, or in the later grandiose representations of the st.u.r.dy boy at Petra who grips the dragon.[3] One {109} seal shows a seven-branched tree grasped by two men with the sun and moon on one side and two stags on the other. In a second, a human figure stands before a kind of pillar which is surmounted by an eight-rayed star. A third had been impressed upon a tablet from Gezer which bore nineteen distinct objects, including sun, moon, star, serpent, fish, crab, animals, etc. Some of the signs were at once recognised as zodiacal, and less elaborate specimens from Gezer and Megiddo furnish parallels.

But inscribed Babylonian boundary-stones of our period bear a.n.a.logous symbols; they are the emblems of the deities whose powers are thus invoked by the inscription should the land-mark be damaged or removed.

The more G.o.ds, the more powerful the charm.

[3] The former is given by F. L. Griffith, _Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology_, xvi. p. 87, the latter by A. Jeremias, _Alte Test._, etc., p. 456 _sqq._, fig. 151.

Such objects with all their Babylonian a.s.sociations may in certain cases have been imported or copied from foreign originals; the scenes could have been absolutely meaningless or even subject to a new interpretation. But it is as difficult to treat every apparently foreign object as contrary to Palestinian ideas, as it is to determine how sacrificial and other scenes would otherwise have been depicted.

Religion found its expression in art; art was the ally of idolatry, and the later uncompromising att.i.tude of Judaism towards {110} display of artistic meaning implies that the current symbolism, etc., reflected intelligible religious conceptions. But it does not follow that these conceptions were everywhere identical.

Again, when a scimitar from a tomb at Gezer resembles that which a priest holds in a sacrificial scene upon a Gezer seal, we may suppose that the seal represents a familiar Palestinian ceremony. But the same type of weapon is found in a.s.syria and Egypt in the age of the Nineteenth Dynasty, and it is therefore impossible to treat it or the scene as _distinctively_ Palestinian. The ubiquity of the dragon-conflict, too, warns us that the same underlying motive will present itself in a great variety of external shapes, and it is interesting to find that the idea of the slayer as a _child_ actually points away from Babylonia. Features which find their only parallel in the acc.u.mulation of Babylonian evidence are not inevitably of Babylonian origin. Our land was exposed to diverse influences, an ill.u.s.tration of which is afforded by certain seals with cuneiform characters. The owner of one is styled a servant of Nergal (see p.

93); it bears Egyptian symbols (those of life and beauty), and a scene of adoration, partly Egyptian and partly Babylonian in treatment. It has been ascribed to the First Dynasty of Babylon. Later {111} come the seals of the Sidonian Addumu 'beloved of the G.o.ds (?)' and his son; on one is an Egyptianised representation of Set, Horus, and Resheph.

Yet another combines two conventional scenes, the priest leading a worshipper before a deity (Babylonian), a king slaying a kneeling enemy (Egyptian).[4] In the presence of such fusion the problem becomes more complex. If, in the Greek age, it is found that Adonis and Osiris or Astarte of Byblos and Isis resembled each other so closely that it was sometimes difficult to determine which deity was being celebrated, the relation between the Baalath of Byblos and Hathor, or between Shamash and Amon-Re could have been equally embarra.s.sing in our period. In fact, as Palestine continues to be brought into line with other lands the task of determining _specific_ external influences becomes more intricate.

[4] See (_a_), Sellin, _Tell Ta'annek_, fig. 22, _pp._ 27 _sq._, 105 (Vincent, _Canaan_, fig. 117, p. 170 _sq._); (_b_) Winckler, _Altorient. Forschungen_, iii. p. 177 _sq._; and (_c_) E. J. Pilcher, _Proc. Soc. Bibl. Arch._, xxiii. p. 362.

Finally, whatever was the true effect of the early Babylonian supremacy, both Palestine and Syria, when not controlled by Egypt, were influenced by the northern power of Mitanni and by the Hitt.i.tes who preserve distinctive features {112} of their own. According to Professor Sayce most of the seals we have been noticing are Syrian modifications of the Babylonian type, and 'the more strictly archaeological evidence of Babylonian influence upon Canaan is extraordinarily scanty.'[5] It is obvious that one must allow for the direct influence exerted upon the religious conditions from a quarter of which very little is known as yet. The fact that Babylonian was used in Palestine and among the Hitt.i.te peoples clearly does not allow sweeping inferences. Indeed, so far from the script or language having been imposed from without, the people of Mitanni apparently borrowed the cuneiform script and adapted it to their own language; while, in the Amarna Tablets, the native tongue of Palestine and Syria has left a distinct impress upon the Babylonian.[6] This individuality repeats itself in Palestinian pottery, which has neither originality of concept nor fertility of resource. But it has vigour and vitality, and has not developed into the superior art with which it came into contact. In general the archaeological evidence shows very {113} clearly that Palestine was not absorbed by Babylonian culture, still less by that of Egypt.[7]

[5] A. H. Sayce, _Archaeology of the Cuneiform Inscriptions_ (London, 1907), _pp._ 151 _sq._

[6] For Mitanni, see Sayce, _op. cit._, p. 167; and for the dialect of the Amarna letters, Zimmern, _Keilinschr. u. d. Alte Test._, p. 651.

[7] Cp. Vincent, _op. cit._, p. 341 (also p. 439 and note 1).

+Conclusion.+--Recent research gives us a glimpse of the Religion of Ancient Palestine which becomes more distinct as it is found to be in general harmony with Oriental religions. The picture, as we see it, is neither Egyptian nor Babylonian, and if the latter colours it, this was inevitable, partly through the still obscure relations under the First Babylonian Dynasty, partly (though indirectly) through the influence of the northern peoples, and again partly because both (as opposed to Egypt) are Semitic. The picture, nevertheless, has distinctive traits of its own. By the side of sacred places of cult and rites often cruel and gross appear those indications of loftier elements which prove that we have no mere inchoate nature-worship. This co-existence need cause no surprise. The inst.i.tutions which combine to make civilisation do not necessarily move at the same rate or in parallel lines, either with each other or with the progress of religious thought. A variety of stages of development--such as can be observed in a single province of modern India--could have been easily found amid {114} conflicting political groups, or in the presence of foreign mercenaries or settlers. One may also a.s.sume that then, as now, there were the usual contrasts between the exposed sea-ports and the small inland townships, between the aristocracy and the peasantry, between the settled agriculturists and the roaming sons of the desert.

The fundamental religious conceptions have from time to time been elevated and enn.o.bled by enlightened minds; but what European culture was unable to change in the age of Greek and Roman supremacy, influences of Oriental origin could not expel. Official cults, iconoclastic reforms, new positive religions have left the background substantially unaltered, and the old canvas still shows through the coatings it has received.

Our evidence has taken us down through the age of Egyptian supremacy, which can be traced to the time of Ramses III., if not to the days of Wenamon and Zakarbaal (1100 B.C.). With the decay of Egypt we reach the close of a period which corresponds broadly to that wherein Israelite history has placed the Patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, and the Judges. The picture which the external sources furnish was not effaced at a stroke. But the transformation from Egypt's suzerainty to an independent Israelite monarchy, {115} from the polytheism of the Amarna age to the recognition of a single G.o.d does not belong to these pages.

The rise of Yahweh as the national G.o.d, and the development of conceptions regarding his nature must be sought in the native Israelite records themselves, and in such external evidence as the future may produce. Our task is finished when we point out that the external (archaeological) evidence does not reveal that hiatus which would have ensued had there been a dislocation of earlier conditions by invading Israelite tribes; earlier forms are simply developed, the evolution is a progressive one.[8]

[8] Cp. R. A. S. Macalister, 'Excavation of Gezer,' _Quarterly Statements_, 1904, p. 123; 1907, p. 203; Sellin, _op. cit._, p. 102; _id._, _Der Ertrag der Ausgrabungen in Orient fur die Erkenntnis der Entwicklung der Religion Israels_ (Leipzig, 1905), _pp._ 33, 36 _sq._, 39 _sq._, see, in general, Vincent, _op. cit._, _pp._ 19 _sq._, 147 _sqq._, 199-204, 225, 345, 352 _sq._, 463 _sq._, and S. A. Cook, _English Historical Review_, 1908, _pp._ 325 _sq._