Part 8 (1/2)
Let us now take the best-remembered incident in the life of Abraham, the attempted murder and the rescue of his son Isaac, and see what will come of applying the symbolic instead of the literal interpretation to it.
Let it be noted that this is not an original story. The ancient Hindoos have one like it. King Haris-candra had no son. He prayed for one, and promised that if one should be born to him he would sacrifice him to the G.o.ds. One was born, and he named him Rohita. One day his father told him of his promise to Varuna to offer him in sacrifice. The son bought a subst.i.tute, and when he was about to be immolated he was marvellously rescued. Then there is the well-known similar story written by the Phnician Sanchoniathon
thirteen hundred years before our era. Then there is the Grecian story of Agamemnon, to whom, when about to sacrifice his daughter, a stag was furnished by a G.o.ddess as a subst.i.tute. There is another Grecian fable in which a maiden was about to be sacrificed, and as the priest uplifted his knife to shed her blood the victim suddenly disappeared, and a goat of uncommon beauty stood in her place as a subst.i.tute. Another story runs thus: In Sparta the maiden Helena was about to be immolated on the altar of the G.o.ds, when an eagle carried off the knife of the priest and laid it upon the neck of a heifer, which was sacrificed in her stead.
Similar stories might be produced from among many nations in the most ancient times, long before the Jews picked this up in Babylon and rewrote it, with modifications, so as to apply it to their mythical progenitor; for this fable of Abraham's offering was not written until after their return from their Babylonish captivity-much nearer our own time than is generally suspected.
Regarded as an historic account of a real transaction, this story of the attempted sacrifice of a beloved son by a venerable father is shocking in the extreme, dishonoring alike to G.o.d and to Abraham. A good G.o.d could not have done such an unnatural and cruel thing. He had no occasion to try Abraham to find out how much faith he had. He knew that already. Regarded as an astrological allegory, it is ingenious and contains a moral lesson, to wit: obedience to the voice of G.o.d and the hope of deliverance in the hour of extreme emergency. The defect in the story is, that G.o.d could trifle with a loving child, and pretend to require him to break one of his own commandments, ”Thou shalt not kill,”
and subject him to its own penalty, ”Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” It would not have availed Abraham to plead that G.o.d told him to murder his son, any more than it availed the Poca.s.set crank when he pleaded that G.o.d had directed him to murder his little daughter. The State of Ma.s.sachusetts sent the semi-lunatic to a safe place of confinement. This story of Abraham and Isaac has led to scores and scores of murders of children by their fathers, just as the pa.s.sage in the Old Testament, ”Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,”
has been pleaded in justification of the cool, deliberate murder of mult.i.tudes of men, women, and children on the charge of witchcraft.
The literal interpretation of what is called infallible Scripture has been the most bitter curse to deluded, priest-ridden humanity. It is the ”stock in trade” of ignorant and selfish ecclesiastics to-day.
Let us look a little more closely at this Abraham-and-Isaac myth.
Abraham was the personification of Saturn, the G.o.d of Time, while Isaac was the personification of the Sun. Abraham took Isaac up to Hebron-which means _union or alliance_, and clearly indicates a union of the ecliptic and equinoctial line-the very point at which the Ram of the vernal equinox pa.s.sed by, or, as might be poetically said, was caught in a cloud or bush; so that the whole story was written long ages before in the celestial heavens, and emblazoned in the skies at the return of each vernal equinox. Writers on astro-theology point out details at great length to support the symbolic interpretation, but it is enough for pur purpose to merely give the keynote. Let the fact be specially noted that the names of the patriarchs have an astrological meaning,
and that the twelve sons of Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, who became the heads of the twelve tribes of Israel, have distinctly astrological characters, fully indicated in Jacob's dying blessing on his sons (Gen.
49) and in the corresponding ”Song of Moses” (Deut. 33), on the banner carried by the different tribes in their mythical march from Egypt to Canaan; and that on the breastplate of the officiating high priest the jewels correspond to the celestial signs of the solar zodiac; and although Jacob had children by several different women and was a first-cla.s.s Mormon, his twelve sons are made to correspond with the twelve months of the year and the twelve signs of the zodiac. This fact is admitted by the orthodox author of _The Gospel in the Stars_. His daughters are not considered worthy of notice, as that would have spoiled the riddle. The philology and etymology of the name _Jacob_ has suggestions of the serpent; and from his history he must have been a snaky fellow from the first to the last. He was born with his hand upon his brother's ”heel,” and he managed to cheat him out of his share of his mother's affections, and lied to his father, and conspired with his mother to rob Esau, his brother, of his ”blessing.” The stories of Laban and Leah and Rachel all conform to the symbolic rather than the literal hypothesis, as well as Jacob's vision of the ladder, and his wrestling-match with the angel, when he openly obtained the astrological name of the children of Saturn-Israel. It must be admitted that the allegorical hypothesis relieves the patriarchs of the charge of many mean things, such as the heartless manner in which Abram treated Hagar when Sarah got jealous, and the manner in which he treated Sarah herself when he lied to the king through a selfish cowardice and gave his wife over to the l.u.s.ts of the monarch Abimelech, who was (or one bearing his name) deceived by Isaac in regard to Rebekah by a similar trick (Gen.
26:1). Lot, the nephew of Abraham, was guilty of a meaner and more unmanly act when he himself proposed to give over his two virgin daughters to the worse than beastly l.u.s.ts of a howling mob, to protect two angels who were guests at his tent (Gen. 19:1-11).
But theologians will never willingly admit that the Abraham of Genesis was a myth. They well know the logical conclusion. They would have to give up the ”Abrahamic covenant,” which is the basis of sacerdotalism.
When Professor Driver, of the orthodox University of Oxford, recently admitted only by implication that Abraham may have had no real personal existence, and claimed that such hypothesis would not be injurious to religion, his article was rejected and suppressed by the editor of an orthodox paper in Philadelphia as dangerous. But to a.s.sume that all the princ.i.p.al actors of Genesis and some other books were impersonations, not persons, would not destroy the good things they are alleged to have said and done. It is no more necessary to insist upon the real personality of Abraham than to insist upon the literal existence of Faithful and Great-Heart and other impersonations in _Pilgrim's Progress_. n.o.body insists that the characters in the parables accredited to Jesus must be taken in a literal sense. And yet it may be admitted that the fictions of Scripture may have been suggested by some persons and facts, just as in modern novels there generally is some person who stands for the original of the story. This is eminently so in the novels of d.i.c.kens and D'Israeli. Nevertheless, it is difficult to doubt that the princ.i.p.al characters of the Old Testament are mythical, pure and simple, as we find the originals in the older scriptures of different nations, confessedly founded upon the solar and other forms of Nature-wors.h.i.+p. The feet is, that the only rational way to explain the marvellous stories of the Hebrew Scriptures is by the well-known methods of ancient symbolism.
Let us now merely glance at some other Old-Testament fables.
_Noah_ and his Deluge are mainly mythical, as this story is almost a literal copy of the Chaldean, though found substantially in the writings of many other nations. It readily fits the allegorical method of interpretation in almost every particular. The Chaldean account as written by Berosus, and found recently by the late George Smith of the British Museum on the clay tablets, is so much like the story in Genesis that the latter must have been copied from the former; and the slight variations in the two narratives are no greater than might have been expected as between Chaldea and Palestine. The Jews obtained it from Babylon, as there is no mention made of this miracle in any book of the Bible written before the Captivity. The books of Psalms, Proverbs, Chronicles, Judges, Kings, etc. are silent on this subject. Josephus defended the Noachian Deluge on the sole ground that an account of it was held by the Chaldeans, never pretending that the Chaldean account was taken from the Jewish record.
But it is useless to dwell on the story of a universal deluge of water.
It is in the light of modern science physically impossible and absurd; and such men as Buckland, Pye Smith, Hugh Miller, and Hitchc.o.c.k, with many other distinguished Christian scientists, give up the doctrine of a universal deluge while claiming a partial one. And here, again, the ancient astronomy comes in with an explanation of partial floods of waters by the natural results of the ”precession of the equinoxes,” in which, at certain periods during the change of the polar axis of the earth, great physical convulsions must follow, with wide eruptions of water, making a partial overflow and suggesting the idea of a universal deluge. Four such cataclysms must have occurred while the sun was making one journey through the twelve zodiacal constellations. Prof. Huxley has recently well said: ”But the voice of archaeology and historical criticism still has to be heard, and it gives forth no uncertain sound.
The marvellous recovery of the records of an antiquity far superior to any that can be ascribed to the Pentateuch, which has been effected by the decipherers of cuneiform characters, has put us in possession of a series once more, not of speculations, but of facts, which has a most remarkable bearing upon the question of the trustworthiness of the narrative of the Flood. It is established that for centuries before the a.s.serted migration of Terah from Ur of the Chaldees (which, according to the orthodox interpreters of the Pentateuch, took place after the year 2000 b. c.) Lower Mesopotamia was the seat of a civilization in which art and science and literature had attained a development formerly unsuspected, or, if there were faint reports of it, treated as fabulous.
And it is also no matter of speculation, but a fact, that the libraries of this people contain versions of a long epic poem, one of the twelve books of which tells the story of a deluge which in a number of its leading features corresponds to the story attributed to Berosus, no less than with the story given in Genesis, with curious exactnesss.
”Looking at the convergence of all these lines of evidence leads to the one conclusion-that the story of the Flood in Genesis is merely a version of one of the oldest pieces of purely fict.i.tious literature extant; that whether this is or is not its origin, the events a.s.serted in it to have taken place a.s.suredly never did take place; further, that in point of fact the story in the plain and logically necessary sense of its words has long since been given up by orthodox and conservative commentators of the Established Church.”
The only rational interpretation of the extraordinary stories of the Pentateuch and other scriptures is to regard them as mythical and allegorical, borrowed from the astrological systems of more ancient peoples. It is very difficult to present within the limits here allowed what has grown into ponderous volumes in elucidating the matter in hand.
The story of Jonah and the Fish, taken as a literal story, is incredible, though the notorious Brooklyn preacher thinks that it must be literally true, as that G.o.d might have so diluted the gastric juice in the stomach of the fish as to make Jonah quite indigestible! This whole story is found in earlier pagan writings, and is fully explained by the astronomical phenomena. The earth is a huge fish in the ancient mythology, and on December the 21st the sun (Jonah, the type) sinks into its dark belly, and after three days-to wit, December 25th-it comes forth. The Sun-G.o.d is on dry land again.
There is a Hindoo fable much like this. In Grecian fable Hercules was swallowed by a whale at Joppa, and is said to have lain three days in his entrails. The Sun was called _Jona_, as can be shown from many authorities. The nursery-tale of ”Little Red Riding-Hood” was also a sun-myth, mutilated in the English story, showing how the _Sun_ was devoured by the _Black Wolf_ (Night), and came out unhurt. Scores of similar sun-myths could be narrated.
But there are geographical inaccuracies which show its mythical character. Instead of Nineveh being ”three days' journey” from the coast where Jonah was vomited out, it is distant some four hundred miles of hill and plain, and the size of the city was not twenty by twelve miles, but more nearly eight by three miles. Moreover, the city showed no signs of decay till about two hundred and fifty years after the alleged warning of Jonah. It is truly astounding that intelligent men can be so blind. It was recently admitted by high Christian authority that there is not a particle of proof for this story except that Jesus had referred to Jonah as being ”three days and nights in the whale's belly.” If Jesus did say this, he used it as an ill.u.s.tration. He probably stated a current tradition, if he said it at all.
Let us now try our key in the closet-door of the Samson story.
According to the Bible account, Samson performed twelve princ.i.p.al exploits; and if you will turn to any good dictionary of mythology you will find a wonderful likeness to the twelve labors of Hercules in the Greek myth of the Sun. Time can be taken to examine only one-the cutting off of Samson's hair while reposing in the lap of Delilah, and the consequent loss of his strength. Professor Goldhizer says: ”Long locks of hair and a long beard are mythological attributes of the sun.”...