Part 5 (1/2)

Originally emigrants from Arabia, the nomads reached Syria, some directly, others circuitously, by way of Padan-Aram and across the Euphrates, whence perhaps their name of _Ibrim_ or Hebrews--_Those from beyond_. In the journey Babel and Ur must have detained. These cities, with their culture relatively deep and their observatories equally high, became, in after days, a source of legend, of wonder, of hatred, perhaps of revelation as well.

At the time the nomads had no cosmogony or theories. The Chaldeans had both. There was a story of creation, another of antediluvian kings and of the punishment that overtook them. There was also a story of an emir of Ur, an old man who had benevolently killed an animal instead of his son. The story, like the others, must have impressed. In after years the old man became Abraham, a great person, who had conversed with the Elohim and whose descendants they were.

The story of creation also impressed. It was enlightening and comprehensible. The parallel theory of spontaneous generation and the progressive evolution of the species which the magi entertained, they probably never heard. Even otherwise it was too complex for minds as yet untutored. The fables alone appealed. Mentally compressed into portable shape, carried along, handed down, their origin afterward forgotten, they became the traditions of a nation, which, eminently conservative, preserved what it found, among other things the name, perhaps inharmonious, of Jhvh.[31]

[Footnote 31: Renan: Histoire du peuple d'Israel. Kuenen: De G.o.dsdienst van Israel.]

That name, since found on an inscription of Sargon, appears to have been the t.i.tle of a local G.o.d of Sinai, whom the nomads may have identified with Elohim, particularly, perhaps, since he presided over thunder, the phenomenon that alarmed them most and which, in consequence, inspired the greatest awe. That awe they put into the name, the p.r.o.nunciation of which, like the origin of their traditions, they afterward forgot. In subsequent rabbinical writings it became Shem, the Name; Shemhammeph.o.r.esh, the Revealed Name, uttered but once a year, on the day of Atonement, by the high priest in the Holy of Holies. Mention of it by anyone else was deemed a capital offence, though, permissibly, it might be rendered El Shaddai, the Almighty.

That term the Septuagint translated into [Greek: ho Kyrios], a Greek form, in the singular, of the Aramaic plural Adonai, which means Baalim, or sun lords.

That form the Vulgate gave as Dominus and posterior theology as G.o.d.

The latter term, common to all Teutonic tongues, has no known meaning.

It designates that which, to the limited intelligence of man, has been, and must be, incomprehensible. But the original term Jhvh, which, in the seventeenth century, was developed into Jehovah, yet which, the vowels being wholly conjectural, might have been developed into anything else, clearly appealed to wayfarers to whom Chaldean science was a book that remained closed until Nebuchadnezzar blew their descendants back into the miraculous Babel of their youth.

Meanwhile, apart from the name--now generally written Jahveh--apart too from the fables and the enduring detestation which the colossal city inspired, probably but one other thing impressed, and that was the observance of the Sabbath. To a people whose public works were executed by forced labour, such a day was a necessity. To vagrants it was not, and, though the custom interested, it was not adopted by them until their existence from nomad had become fixed.

At this latter period they were in Kanaan. Whether in the interval a tribe, the Beni-Israel, went down into Egypt, is a subject on which Continental scholars.h.i.+p has its doubts. The early life of the tribe's leader and legislator is usually a.s.sociated with Rameses II., a pharaoh of the XIX. dynasty. But it has been found that incidents connected with Moses must apparently have occurred, if they occurred at all, at a period not earlier than the XXVI. dynasty, which const.i.tutes a minimum difference of seven hundred years. Yet, in view of the decalogue, with its curious a.n.a.logy to the negative confession in the _Book of the Dead_; in view also of a practice surgical and possibly hygienic which, customary among the Egyptians, was adopted by the Jews; in view, further, of ceremonies and symbols peculiarly Egyptian that were also absorbed, a sojourn in Goshen there may have been.

The spoiling of the Egyptians, a roguery on which Israel afterward prided herself, is a trait perhaps too typical to be lightly dismissed. On the other hand, if Moses were, which is at least problematic, and if, in addition to being, he was both the nephew of a pharaoh and the son-in-law of a priest, as such one to whom, in either quality, the arcana of the creed would be revealed, it becomes curious that nowhere in the Pentateuch is there any doctrine of a future life.

Of the entire story, it may be that only the journey into the Sinaiatic peninsula is true, and of that there probably remained but tradition, on which history was based much later, by writers who had only surmises concerning the time and circ.u.mstances in which it occurred.

Yet equally with the roguery, Moses may have been. Seen through modern criticism his figure fades though his name persists. To that name the Septuagint tried to give an Egyptian flavour. In their version it is always [Greek: Mouses], a compound derived from the Egyptian _mo_, water, and _uses_, saved from, or Saved-from-the-water.[32] Per contra, the Hebrew form Mosheh is, as already indicated, the same as the Babylonian Masu, a term which means at once leader and litterateur, in addition to being the cognomen of a G.o.d.[33]

[Footnote 32: Josephus: Antiq. ii. 9.]

[Footnote 33: Sayce: The Religion of the Babylonians.]

Moses is said to have led his people out of bondage. He was the writer to whom the Pentateuch has been ascribed. But he was also a prophet.

In Babylon, the G.o.d of prophecy was Nebo. It was on Mount Nebo that Jahveh commanded the prophet of Israel to die. Moreover, the divinity that had Masu for cognomen was, as is shown by a Babylonian text, the primitive G.o.d of the sun at Nippur, but the sun at noon, at the period of its greatest effulgence, at the hour when it wars with whatever opposes, when it wars as Jahveh did, or as the latter may be a.s.sumed to have warred, since Isaiah represented him as a mighty man, roaring at his enemies, exciting the fury of the fight, marching personally to the conflict, and, in the Fourth Roll of the Law (Numbers), there is mention of a book ent.i.tled: _The Wars of Jahveh_.

Whether, then, Moses is but a composite of things Babylonian fused in an effort to show a link between a G.o.d and a people, is conjectural.

But it is also immaterial. The one instructive fact is that, in a retrospect, the G.o.d, immediately after the exodus, became dictator.

Yet even in the later age, when the retrospect was effected, conceptions were evidently immature. On one occasion the G.o.d met Moses, tried to kill him, but finally let him go. The picture is that of a personal struggle.[34] Again, the spectacle of his back which he vouchsafed to Moses is construable only as an _arriere-pensee_, unless it be profound philosophy, unless it be taken that the face of G.o.d represents Providence, to see which would be to behold the future, whereas the back disclosed the past.

[Footnote 34: Exodus iv. 24-26.]

It is, however, hardly probable that that construction occurred to the editors of the Pentateuch, who, elsewhere, represented Jahveh as a butcher, insatiable, jealous, vindictive, treacherous, and vain, one that consigned all nations other than Israel to ruin and whom a poet represented trampling people in anger, making them drunk with his fury, and defiling his raiment with blood.[35]

[Footnote 35: Isaiah lxiii. 1-6.]

But in the period related in _Exodus_, Jahveh was but the tutelary G.o.d of an itinerant tribe that, in its gipsy lack of territorial possessions, was not even a nation. Like his people he too was a vagrant. Like them he had no home. Other G.o.ds had temples and altars.

He lacked so much as a shrine. In prefigurement of the Wandering Jew, each day he moved on. The threats of a land that never smiled were reflected in his face. The sight of him was death. Certainly he was terrible.

This conception, corrected by later writers, was otherwise revised. In the interim Jahveh himself was transformed. He became El, the G.o.d; presently El Shaddai, G.o.d Almighty. In the ascension former traits disappeared. He developed into the deity of emphatic right. Morality, hitherto absent from religion, entered into it. Israel, who perhaps had been careless, who, like Solomon, had followed Ishtar, became austere. Thereafter, Judaism, of which Christianity and Muhammadanism were the after thoughts, was destined to represent almost the sum total of the human conscience.

But in Kanaan, during the rude beginnings, though Jahveh was jealous, Ishtar, known locally as Ashtoreth, allured. Conjointly with Baal, the indigenous term for Bel, circ.u.madjacently she ruled. The propitiatory rites of these fair G.o.ds were debauchery and infanticide, the loosening of the girdles of girls, the thrusting of children into fires. It may be that these ceremonies at first amazed the Hebrews.