Moses.

Until within the last forty years the Old Testament has been practically a sealed book.

It found interpreters, no doubt—two great groups.

The first group pointed to its useless and arbitrary edicts, and pronounced them the inventions of priests inspired by fraud and greed.

The second group practically admitted the arbitrary and useless nature of most of the edicts, but maintained that they were given by the All-wise, in a book penned by His finger, to miraculously prepare a nation distinct from the other nations of the earth, for a special purpose. They were "types" of a higher revelation, a "better covenant."

Practically, with both of these interpreters Mosaism was a pure comedy.

But comparative mythology, unborn yesterday, is telling a different story. It shows that the religion of the Jews, far from having been a distinct religion miraculously given to a peculiar people, had the same rites and gods as the creeds of its Semitic neighbours. It shows us these Semites, or descendants of Shem, in two great groups, differing much in language and religion. It shows us the southern Semites, the Arabs, the Himyarites, the Ethiopians. It shows us the northern group, the Babylonians or Chaldeans, the Assyrians, the Arameans, the Canaanites, the Hebrews. It shows us their gods, El and Yahve, and Astarte of Sidon; and going a step back shows how the Semites borrowed from an earlier civilisation, that of the Acadians, the yellow-faced Mongols who seem to have preceded the white races everywhere. "The Semite borrowed the old Acadian pantheon en bloc," says Professor Sayce ("Ancient Empires," p. 151).

But the work of the archÆologist and the anthropologist has been still more important.

The former has suddenly revealed to us chapters in the history of human experience hitherto undreamt of. He has allowed us to peer far, far into the past, to see man at an incalculable distance.

Thousands and thousands of years before Cain and Abel we see the palÆolithic man, "dolichocephalic and with prominent jaws," pursue the great migrations of urus, reindeer, mammoth, and the thick-nose rhinoceros from Cumberland to Algeria, and Algeria to Cumberland, passing dry-shod to France, and from Sicily to Africa. He is naked. He is armed with a javelin with a flint head. He is an animal, struggling for survival with other animals. He eats his foes as wolves eat vanquished wolves. To extract the marrow from their bones he cracks them with his poor flint "celt" or "langue du chat;" and these cracked human bones 240,000 years afterwards are found in caves and in beds of gravel and sand, and brick earth, and tell their story. Some are charred, which proves that the notion of sacrifice to an unseen being was due to him.

To this poor savage our debt is quite incalculable.

1. He invented the missile. This made the monkey dominant in the animal world. He became a man.

2. He invented religion.

Here the valuable work of the anthropologist chimes in. He has collected the records of ancient and modern savages, and compared them with the records of caves and beds of gravel. In this way he has allowed us to peer into the mind of the stone-using savage, who lived at least 240,000 years ago. And the Bible of the Jews, from being a text-book for sermons which bewildered the moral sense even of children, has become, for the study of the great evolution of religion, one of the most valuable books in the world. It bridges the gap between the neolithic or polished-stone-using man and Christ and Mahomet.

Before we go further, let us say a word about the authorship of the Old Testament.

The Books of Moses were compiled by Ezra, at the date of Artaxerxes, the King of the Persians.

It is to be observed that this is not an extravagant guess of German theorists. It is stated authoritatively by Clement of Alexandria. (Strom. i. 22.) IrenÆus, Tertullian, Eusebius, Jerome, and Basil give the same testimony. But a greater authority is behind. It is known that Christ and His disciples, and the early fathers, used the Septuagint or Greek version of the Bible, and Dr. Giles goes so far as to say that there is no hint amongst the latter of the knowledge of even the existence of the Hebrew version. In this Bible (2 Esdras xiv.), it is announced distinctly that the "law was burnt;" and that Ezra, aided by the Holy Ghost and "wonderful visions of the night," wrote down "all that hath been done in the world from the beginning which was written in thy law."

Let us write down a few dates from the accepted chronology.

Thus the story of Adam in its present form was written down 3547 years after it had occurred. The story of Abraham was written down 1539 years after it occurred. The transactions between Yahve and Moses were written down 1114 years after they occurred.

To gauge the full significance of this, let us call to mind that the poet Tennyson a few years back compiled from old ballads and chronicles the story of Arthur, a king separated from him by about the same gap of time that parted Ezra and Moses. The poet was honest, according to our ideas of honesty, and sought to give a faithful picture of Arthur's court—with a success that is only moderate. But Ezra was not honest, that is, in our sense of the word. His nation had been a captive of the Babylonians, and had been released from slavery and the lash by Cyrus. In consequence, the molten bulls of the temples of the Jewish taskmasters stank in his nostrils, and led him to advocate the severe nakedness of the Persian fire-altar. And he proposed to do this, not so much by writing new books as by altering the old records and legends, and proclaiming his views through the mouths of the time-honoured patriarchs.

But all this involved a grotesque inference that he seems not to have anticipated. If Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Solomon, knew in their secret hearts that the one fierce hatred of Yahve was the graven image, their assiduous idolatry spread over 1500 years must have been a pure comedy, intended to insult Yahve, not to conciliate him.

What is the object of the religion of the savage? Anthropology has recently answered this question.

The religion of the savage is a slavish reign of terror. His rites and prohibitions are a vast apparatus of magic, to obtain food for the tribe, and safety from the plague and the foeman. In language borrowed from the New Zealander, it is a Great Taboo.

Early man found himself in the presence of the mighty forces of nature. The thunder roared. The lightning struck his rude shelter. A hurricane ruined his crops. The fever or the foeman came upon him. He had to guess the meaning of all this. Some dead chief, much feared in life, is seen in a dream, or his ghost appears. He is silent and looks very sad. What is the cause of his sorrow? Want of food. The early savage knows no other. A storm, a pestilence vexes the clan, and the chief appears again, looking angry. The two facts are connected together. Beasts are slaughtered, and perhaps human victims, and placed near his cairn. The pestilence ceases. In this way the Hottentots have made an ancestor, Tsui Goab, into their god. Indeed, ancestor worship is the basis of all religions. But by and by, to resume our illustration, new calamities vex the tribe. Tsui Goab is angry once more. Fresh efforts are made to soothe him. Soon the Taboo develops into a number of complicated superstitions.

"The savage," says Sir John Lubbock, "is nowhere free. All over the world his daily life is regulated by a complicated, and often most inconvenient set of customs (as forcible as laws), of quaint prohibitions and privileges.... The Australians are governed by a code of rules and a set of customs which form one of the most cruel tyrannies that has ever, perhaps, existed on the face of the earth." ("Origin of Civilisation," p. 304.)

"The lives of savages," says Mr. Lang, "are bound by the most closely-woven fetters of custom. The simplest acts are 'tabooed.' A strict code regulates all intercourse." ("Custom and Myth.," p. 72.)

Now, unless this system is clearly understood, Mosaism will remain a riddle. It is to be observed that Ezra, far from having relaxed the reign of terror of the Great Taboo of savage survival, had enlarged the number of petty faults and superstitions; and the Levites and Pharisees at the date of Christ, far from considering all this a comedy, were the most stiff-necked of believers. It results that a new religion that proposed to ignore the chief edicts of the Taboo must have come from some strong outside influence.

The two great foes of the savage, as Mr. Frazer shows in his able work, the "Golden Bough," were the ghost and the necromancer. The first was deemed all-powerful, and the second sought to use this power to help the tribe and injure its rivals. His art was that of the farmer, the warrior, the doctor—in fact, in his view, pure science. And the laws and ordinances were a Great Taboo, acts forbidden or enjoined to control the ghosts.

Let the Deuteronomist himself tell us what Israel was to expect if she kept these laws and ordinances.

Yahve, it is said, "will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee, and he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil, the increase of thy kine and the flocks of thy sheep.... The Lord will take away from thee all sickness, and will put none of the evil diseases of Egypt which thou knowest upon thee, but will lay them upon all them that hate thee.... Moreover, the Lord thy God will send the hornet amongst them, until they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed."

This was the religion of Moses. The ghostly head of the clan would give abundant flocks and fertile ground to those who fed him with burnt-offerings, but failing these, would send "the blotch, the itch, the scab" (Deut. xxviii. 27), the victorious foeman—and change the fertilising rain to the "powder and dust" of the desert.

"It must be admitted that religion," says Sir John Lubbock, "as understood by the lower savage races, differs essentially from ours. Thus their deities are evil, not good. They may be forced into compliance with the wishes of man. They require bloody, and rejoice in human sacrifices. They are mortal, not immortal; a part not the author of nature. They are to be approached by dances rather than prayers, and often approve what we call vice rather than what we esteem as virtue." ("Origin of Civil.," p. 133.)

In point of fact, the savage believes that sickness, death, thunder, and other human ills come not from nature, but the active interference of the god. He looks upon every one outside his tribe as an enemy. The west coast negroes represent their deities as "black and mischievous, delighting to torment them in various ways." The Bechuanas curse their deities when things go wrong. All this throws light on the god of the Hebrews. Professor Robertson Smith, in the new "EncyclopÆdia Britannica," describes him as immoral, but perhaps it would be more correct to say that he has the gang morality of a savage chief. He counsels the Jews to borrow the poor silver bangles of the Egyptian women, and then to treacherously carry them off (Exod. iii. 22), because gang morality recognises no rights of property outside the gang. All through the early books, stories of cheating and lying are popular.

Palestine is a narrow strip of land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, surrounded by deserts. To it, from a city named Ur, in Chaldea, 1996 years B.C., came Abraham and the Hebrews, or "Men from Beyond." These little Semite clans were like the modern Bedouins. They did not live in towns; they pitched their tents in the country. The soil of Palestine, even in Abraham's day, was quite unable to support these teeming hordes, for the sons of Abraham went several times to Egypt to escape famine. In similar fashion, ten or twelve thousand Arabs from Tripoli and Bengazi lately left their own country to reach Egypt.

All this must be borne in mind. It has been debated whether the earliest god of Israel was a sun-god or a moon-god, and whether his name was El or Yahve. In point of fact, his name was Starvation, and the Jewish Taboo a great food-making apparatus. This accounts for the extreme ferocity with which the struggle for the land flowing with milk and honey was carried on by the rival tribes.

"When thou comest nigh to a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace to it.

"And it shall be, if it make thee an answer of peace and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee.

"And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it:

"And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thy hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword;

"But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself: and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the Lord thy God hath given thee.

"Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations."

The "cities that are very far off" mean, in reality, those that are nearer to Moses in the desert than the cities of the promised land, but the writer, composing imaginary laws for Moses in Jerusalem, some hundred years after his death, overlooked this. These are not pretty ones. These cities have to choose at once between slavery or extinction.

"But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.

"But thou shalt utterly destroy them, namely the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee." (Deut. xx. 10-17.)

It accounts, too, for the ferocity of the punishments for the infringement of the Taboo. Death was the penalty. The man who fails to pour dust on the blood of a pigeon that he has knocked down with an arrow, the man who picks up sticks upon the Sabbath, the perfumer who imitates a temple smell, the man who roasts the smallest particle of fat or blood, the labourer who has an abscess and fails to take two turtle doves as a "sin offering" to the priest at "the door of the tabernacle of the congregation" (Levit. xv. 15), may all be cut off. Every one may be stoned for infringing the Taboo.

Sir John Lubbock has pointed out that the god of the savage is of limited power and intelligence, and that the Taboo was designed to control rather than conciliate him. He cites the "Eeweehs" of the Nicobar Islands, who put up scarecrows to frighten their gods, and the inhabitants of Kamtschatka, who insult their deities if their wishes are unfulfilled. He cites also the Rishis and heroes of the Indian epics, who are constantly overcoming the gods of the Indian pantheon. Certainly the early god of the Jew was not deemed all-powerful. When the Jews fought against Askelon it is recorded:—

"The Lord was with Judah, and he drove out the inhabitants of the mountain, but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron." (Judges i. 19.)

He wrestles with Jacob (Gen. xxxii. 29), and the superior wrestling of the man forces the god to give his blessing. He strives to kill Moses, but fails to do it. (Exod. iv. 24.) He is a purely local god, like Kemosh and other Semitic deities.

"Surely Yahve is in this place," said Jacob in Mesopotamia, "and I knew it not."

"David himself," says M. Soury, "who was not and could not have been the monotheistic king of tradition, David, who had teraphim in his house, as had Jacob in his time, does he not seem to restrict the kingdom of Yahve to the land of Israel when he complains that Saul has driven him out from abiding in the inheritance of Yahve, saying, 'Go, serve other gods'? Finally, many centuries afterwards the contemporaries of Ezekiel still believed that Yahve, having abandoned the country, could no longer see them." (Ezek. ix. 9.) (Soury, "Religion of Israel," c. v.)

Anthropology divides the early races who used stone implements into two groups, the palÆolithic or rough-stone-using man, and the neolithic man, who polished his implements. The editing of Ezra has burnished up the early Hebrew a little, but it is plain that he had not emerged from the stone age. His god is a stone. Jacob erected a menhir. A menhir is a piece of chipped rock, erect, huge, imposing, the neolithic man's first rude piece of sculpture, the neolithic man's god. Moses erected a circle of these stone monoliths. Joshua erected twelve stone gods on the Jordan, and sacrificed to them. (Josh. iv. 9.) Palestine abounds in such circles archÆologists tell us. These circles were the "high places" of scripture.

Some hold that the Yahve who travelled with Israel in the Ark was a stone. The mighty God of Jacob is called the "Stone of Israel." (Gen. xlix. 24.) We read of Eben-ezer, the "Stone of Help," when the Ark gives the victory to Samuel. (1 Sam. vii. 12.) Daniel's "stone cut out of the mountain without hands" brake in pieces the kings and the kingdoms. (Dan. ii. 45.) The "Shem Hamphoras," the stone in the Holy of Holies in Solomon's temple, was said to be the "Stone of Jacob."

Circumcision, a savage rite, was performed with "knives of flint." (Josh. v. 2.) Mr. Tylor ("Early History of Mankind," p. 216) shows us that even at the date of the Mishna, the beast at the altar was killed with the kelt of the neolithic man. Stones were the official weights in Israel, and also the instruments of execution. David used the sling, and perhaps the chipped stone missiles that we see in museums, and his singing and dancing naked before the fetish, and the very unpleasant scalps that purchased him a wife, savour a little of the latitude of Polynesia. And his hanging up the hands and feet of Rechab and Baanah remind us of the stakes crowned with sculls round the huts of the Dyaks of Borneo.

"At a late date," says M. Soury, "we perceive in Hebrew legislation the repression of monstrous habits and depraved tastes which are only found amongst the very lowest savages. They are forbidden to tattoo themselves, to eat insects, reptiles," etc. (Levit. xi. 31; xix. 28.)

I have still to record a quaint use of stones in Israel, another survival from the stone age. In Astley's "Collection of Voyages" (vol. ii., p. 674,) it is announced that the savages of West Africa consult their god with a sort of "Odd or Even!" with nuts. In Israel, the weightiest questions were settled by the same rude divination. "The pebble is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord." (Prov. xvi. 33.) By this odd or even Saul was chosen to be king and Jonah to be thrown overboard. By stones also malefactors were judged in the Holy of Holies, but the exact method of this is a secret that is lost.

In writing thus, of course, I do not believe myself to be dealing with the actual neolithic period. Its survivals are tough. In India before the Mutiny I was employed with a force sent to put down the rebellion of the Santals. These, a branch of the Kolarias, represent the early races that the Arya displaced. And their institutions were singularly like those of the Jews. They worshipped in "high places" rude circles of upright monoliths. They worshipped in "groves;" and on one occasion we came across a slaughtered kid still warm, that under the holy Sal tree had been sacrificed to obtain the help of Singh Bonga against us. They had, like the Jews, twelve tribes. They believed, like them, that death ended consciousness. They had marriage by capture, softened down into a comedy, like other savage tribes. They believed that all diseases were due to the wrath of evil spirits, or the spell of a sorcerer. All through the night we could hear their war tom-toms sounding, the tuph of the Jews (whence "tympanum," according to Calmet). They fought with the bows and arrows and axes that are marked "aboriginal weapons" in the South Kensington Museum. When we met them in action a chief came forward like Goliath with gestures and shouts of defiance. Like the Jews they were stiff-necked in their conservatism. Buddhism and Buddha had risen in their very midst. Brahmins, Mussulmans, Christians, had ruled them and plied them with missionaries; but pious Hindoos, instead of converting them, had been persuaded to offer sacrifices to Bagh Bhut, a tiger god, all-powerful in Santal jungles. They recited at night their deeds of theft and pillage and slaughter, like the Sioux Indians or the early Jews.

Circumcision is another savage rite. We find it with the Papuans. We find it in Central America. We find it amongst the Australian aborigines. That it was performed in Israel with knives of flint (Josh. v. 4) argues a survival from the men of stone implements. Sanitary precautions have been suggested as the origin of the rite, but such an idea would be in advance of the filthy savages using it. The "EncyclopÆdia Britannica" holds that it was a sacrifice to Aschera, the goddess of generation, like a somewhat similar mutilation of females. Professor Sayce ("Ancient Empires," p. 199) shows that with young men a complete mutilation in honour of the Phoenician Ashtoreth was common.

Mr. Frazer ("Golden Bough," i. 169) explains another cruel law of Leviticus. The Maoris believe that if anyone touches a dead body, and then accidentally touches food, any one partaking of that food will join the dead man in the shades. This superstition about the power of the dead is the root idea of other practices, covering pictures and looking-glasses whilst the corpse is still in the house, shunning the graveyard at night when it is buried. It is treated as an enemy who might pass his soul into the picture and do mischief. The death penalty for touching Yahve's food (Levit. vii. 21) is probably the same superstition. When God is supposed to be walking about on earth in human form, as in the instance of a semi-divine savage chief, the danger of touching his food increases enormously. Mr. Frazer shows that the Mikado used to eat every day off new rude earthenware platters, which were at once broken and buried, that no one might lose his life by accidentally touching a particle of his food. ("Golden Bough," i. 166.) Mr. Frazer gives numerous instances, where the same fatality is believed to result from food contaminated by a menstruous woman.

In the view of M. Soury, the early Jew was a tattooed savage, who ate insects; but anthropology has shed an unexpected light on this. The families, and small clans of early savages, had each some animal as a Totem. They were tattooed with this for distinction, and it was everywhere ruled that cat could not marry cat, or fox fox. A young man tattooed as a fox would have to capture a lady with another crest, "stunning her first with a blow from his dowak" perchance, like the Australian savage described by Sir John Lubbock.

It has been shown by Professor Robertson Smith that the "unclean" animals of the Old Testament are these totems. "So I went in and saw, and behold every form of creeping things and abominable beasts and all the idols of the house of Israel pourtrayed upon the wall round about." (Ezek. viii. 10.) This accounts for the hare being "abominable" in Israel, and the beetle edible. It was meritorious to eat the totems of one's foes, but the totems of friendly tribes, and one's own totems, were tabooed. The origin of these ideas is much debated. The custom is believed to be closely connected with marriage by capture. Female infanticide was prevalent, as women only attracted ravishers. The story of the sons of Benjamin capturing the daughters of Shiloh is a frequent sort of story in savage annals. (Judges xxi.)

The sacrifice has puzzled the modern divine.

It is urged that rites are necessary to religion, and that the sacrifice was an apparatus to train Israel to a deep sense of sin, and a necessity for a blood atonement. It is contended that it was merely a form, as only the useless portions of the carcase were given to Yahve. Those who talk like this libel the Jewish patriarchs. With savages the blood and the fat are considered the choicest morsels. To stone a poor Jew because he ate a little fat with his supper would have been infamous, if the whole affair was a harmless comedy. We have shown that the one thought of the Jew was a mighty terror, a Great Taboo. Starvation or rich harvests, victory or slavery, were due direct to Yahve; and the bloody sacrifice was the one and sole instrument by which he might be controlled.

As late as Leviticus it was believed that the burnt-offering actually provided food and drink to the Maker of the universe. It is called the "food of God" (Levit. xxi. 8), a phrase softened into "bread of God" in our version, as the "EncyclopÆdia Britannica" (article "Bible") has shown. It was believed also that God specially loved the smell. (Levit. viii. 21.) More important still, as pointed out by Sir John Lubbock in his "Origin of Civilisation," p. 272, human sacrifices are expressly ordered in Leviticus (xxvii. 28, 29):—

"Notwithstanding, no devoted thing that a man shall devote unto the Lord, of all that he hath, both of man and beast, and of the field of his possession, shall be sold or redeemed: every devoted thing is most holy unto the Lord.

"None devoted, which shall be devoted of men, shall be redeemed, but shall surely be put to death."

"There is indeed no doubt that human victims were offered to Yahve," says M. Soury. "The young of man belonged to Yahve, just as did the young of the animal and the fruit of the tree. All the gods of the Semites,—El, Schaddai, Adon, Baal, Moloch, Yahve, Kemosh,—were conceived in the likeness of Eastern monarchs. They had right absolute over all that was born and all that died in their realms. Man admits his vassalage. He adores the 'master,' and brings to his lord the first-fruits of his flock, his field, and his family." ("Religion of Israel," c. vi.)

The French author goes on to say that during their sojourn in Egypt the Jews sacrificed human victims. (Ezek. xx. 26.) "In all the history of religions there is no human sacrifice better established than that of the daughter of Jephthah to Yahve. In the time of the Judges, who does not know the story of Samuel and Agag? It is 'before Yahve,' at Gilgal, that Samuel kills his victim. David appeased the wrath of Yahve, who had afflicted the land with famine during three years, by delivering up to the Gibeonites seven men of Saul's blood. The seven victims being hanged 'on the hill before Yahve,' the deity was satisfied." (2 Sam. xxi. 1-14.)

This human sacrifice is, of course, a survival of cannibalism. The Australians, as Lumholtz ("Among Cannibals," p. 70) shows, consider "talgoro" (human flesh) the daintiest of food. At their watchfires they discourse upon the delicate fat round the kidneys as an alderman might talk of calipash.

What is all this leading up to? Simply to this, that we must put far away from us the theory of modern pulpits that the bloody sacrifice was a comedy of the priest, a comedy of the Almighty. The sacrifice was not a comedy at all. To the mind of the savage it was at once business and science. It was the bank, the war office, the bureau of agriculture, the college of physicians of the nation. By it alone could the blood-loving Semite gods be influenced to give harvests, shekels, victory; and the ferocious Taboo was pure science likewise. The archer, for instance, who killed a partridge without covering the blood with earth was killed in turn, because the Taboo was a mechanism that could only be kept in working order by a remorseless attention to its most minute rules. Writers like Kuenen and Lightfoot assure us that it is quite impossible that Christianity can be due to any influence outside Judaism, because it is such a very obvious development of Jewish thought. This is a startling statement. Christianity pronounced the slaughter of animals at the altar a piece of useless folly, and tore up the great ordinances of Taboo, the Covenant between Israel and the Maker of the Heavens. It proclaimed three Gods instead of one. It pronounced that the Jewish holy books were parables rather than a statement of actual facts. Such ideas were at this epoch current in the West, owing to the activity of the missionaries of an Eastern creed.

To them we will now turn.