SEMITIC DEVELOPMENT IN CANAAN—SACRIFICE OF THE FIRST-BORN PERSISTS—ORIGIN OF THE IDEA OF SACRIFICE—THE CUSTOM WORLD-WIDE AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES—ASSOCIATED WITH CANNIBALISM—THE FOUNDATION SACRIFICE—DISCOVERIES IN PALESTINE.

IN treating of the Semitic race—a race that gave to humanity the Bible and the Koran, a race that founded Judaism, Christianity, and Islamism—its attitude will be better understood if we approach it through the tribes whose religions and humanitarian ideas were eventually to become the religions and humanitarian ideas of the civilized world.

The beginning of the nation of Israel was the result of the frequent immigration into Palestine of Semites who fused with the aborigines and formed the Phoenician or Canaanitish people. From the time of Lugalzaggisi (about 4000 B. C.) there were successive Babylonian immigrations also, and from 1500 B. C. onward there were added to this mixture the Aramean tribes that had previously inhabited the highlands between the Mesopotamian Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. Originally pure nomads, the Israelites after settling in Canaan became excellent agriculturists,192 and there developed the worship of Yahweh—“the worship of no other god contributing to the sum of humanity’s ethical ideas and spiritual conceptions a tithe of the value of that contributed by the worshippers of Yahweh.”193

These nomadic Semites when they settled in Palestine about 1000 B. C., after years of wandering, had many of the characteristics of a highly cultivated people but they also had the habits of the nomadic people that had originally come out of Arabia. Many too were the lapses into the ways of primitive people during the four hundred years of their wandering after their life in Goshen.194

If, as has been said, three generations without education would reduce the civilized peoples of today to savagery, the proneness of the Semites to fall back into godless ways may be well understood; so too one may well understand the protests and lashings of the prophets who saw their people retrograding.

When the Israelites began to write their own history they were a highly developed race in which there were few traces of early savagery, but the habit of sacrificing the firstling was a remnant of earlier economic stress that had passed into their religion. In order to understand the Israelite branch of the Semitic race and how it was possible for it to produce, on the one hand, the humanitarian ideas that rule the world today, when at practically the same time its leaders were protesting against savage sacrifices, but a step removed from cannibalism, one can do no better than to quote the eloquent and learned Chwolson, though his theory of the innate quality of a race is open to serious objections.

Commenting on the fundamental causes of the peculiarities of a people, one of which he says is the nature of “its heart and nervous system,” he thus describes the disposition of the Israelites195:

“In reference to the disposition (Gemueth) and organization of the nervous system: the Semite possesses a deep, easily excitable disposition, and is capable of mighty feelings; he is, therefore, lively, mobile, easily excited, passionate, quickly enthused for an idea, active and enterprising, flexible and adapting, easily finding himself at home in strange relations and circumstances, accommodating himself to them without difficulty, without, however, allowing of being absorbed by them.”

While, therefore, some of the Israelites developed in humanitarianism and poetry and religion, under the favourable conditions in Canaan, others, under various other influences, reverted to former practices. Among these practices was that of sacrificing the first-born child.

To understand better how the people who gave to the world the Child’s Friend retained so late the habit of sacrificing children, the scope of the custom must be understood.

The sacrifice of human beings to the gods, says Grimm,196 rested on the supposition that human food was agreeable to the gods and not until man had advanced did the idea come that substitutes might be offered. In the cannibalistic stage of development these sacrifices were eaten by the sacrificers, thus establishing a connecting link between the humans and the invisible gods whom they hoped to appease.

The whole theory of sacrifice will be better understood if we grasp the fact that it was born of fear. When a nation sacrificed out of gratitude or in apparent joyous exultation, it was in memory of days when they suffered and their gratitude was as much a propitiation as anything else. Born in fear, the next step in the development of sacrifice was to economize “without impairing efficiency.”197 The result of this second effort is seen in ingenious devices by which the burden on the worshipper is lightened by his substituting something less valuable than what he is supposed to offer, or what the god is supposed to want, but which the worshipper believes will be acceptable. These substitutions are always made when the forces of nature are treating man more kindly and when his attitude toward his gods is less fearful, for the mind of man in time of plenty and security has always presupposed that time to be when the gods are more or less drowsy.

With some primitive peoples, the sacrifice began as an offering of a meal to the ancestor who had gone before, but as with all primitive peoples the determining factor in religion is fear rather than affection, it became a method of soliciting favours for the future, and such were the sacrifices among the Greeks and Romans, the Hebrews, the Aryans, and the Chinese.198

Primitive man, when unwelcome children were born, found easy excuse for getting rid of them by offering them as a sacrifice to the impatient and fearful gods. That at some stage in the development of the parental instinct the excuse that the gods must be propitiated was needed to quiet the awakening mother love, is more than likely. And surely, no more crushing answer could there be to the request to allow a child to live than that the gods were angry and had to be propitiated.

Another reason given for offering children was that, having just come from the other world, they were nearer to the gods and freer of sin and therefore more acceptable. Such reasoning argues a stage far in advance of the cannibal who ate his own children under the idea that he was propitiating an angry god. “The institutions of man develop with considerable uniformity all over the globe, although as races advance, they naturally diverge more or less under the influence of different climate, food, and other conditions.”199 Cannibalism was one of the earliest stages to which we are able to trace many of the customs even of today, and the idea of sacrifice of children undoubtedly had its origin in primitive cannibalistic feasts, “ceremonies that were softened by the rise of civilization as well as migration to more fertile land and an abundance of food sufficient to make the substitution of an animal for a human possible.”200

Among primitive people the sacrifice of children is common. In most cases there is some specific result that is desired when the child is sacrificed. In the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific, the sacrifice of the child is called nawgia and strangling is the method adopted, whenever it is found that the ordinary cures do not affect some sick parent. It is said that the natives watch the ceremony of strangling with much pity but that they feel it is better “to sacrifice a child who is at present of no use to society, and perhaps may not otherwise live to be,” than to allow a sick chief to die.201 On one occasion when the gods had been offended the native priests decreed that the child of Toobo Toa, the chief, should be sacrificed, “on such occasions the child of a male chief being always chosen as being worthier than others,” and a two-year-old child was strangled against the protests of its mother, who tried to conceal it.202

That the health of the Ynca also led to sacrifice of children is stated by Acosta:

“They vsed in Peru to sacrifice yong children of foure or six yeares old vnto tenne; and the greatest parte of these sacrifices were for the affaires that did import the Ynca, as in sickness for his health, and when he went to the warres for victory, or when they gave the wreathe to their new Ynca, which is the marke of a King, as heere the Scepter and the Crowne be. In this solemnitie they sacrificed the number of two hundred children, from foure to tenne yeares of age, which was a cruell and inhumane spectacle. The manner of the sacrifice was to drowne them and bury them with certaine representations and ceremonies; sometimes they cutte off their heads, annointing themselves with the blood from one eare to another.”203

Acosta also declared that when an ordinary man was sick and believed he would die, his own son was sacrificed to the Sun or to Virachoca.

Francisco de Jerez says that the Peruvian Indians sacrificed their own children and tinted the doors of their temples and the faces of their idols with the blood.

“They sacrifice each month their own children, and with their blood smear the faces of the idols and the doors of the temples, and sprinkle the blood over the graves of their dead.”204

It is certain, according to the story of Sieur le Moyne de Mourgues, that “in that part of Florida which is near Virginia,—and where the French are under the leadership of Sieur le LaudonniÈre—the people of this country regard their chiefs as sons of the Sun and, for this reason, they pay them divine honours, sacrificing to them their first-born.”205

“Their custom is,” according to Le Moyne, “to offer up the first-born son to the chief. When the day for the sacrifice is notified to the chief, he proceeds to a place set apart for the purpose, where there is a bench for him on which he takes his seat. In the middle of the area before him is a wooden stump two feet high and as many thick, before which a mother sits on her heels, her face covered in her hands, lamenting the loss of her child. The principal one of her female relatives or friends now offers the child to the chief in worship, after which the women who have accompanied the mother form a circle and dance around with demonstrations of joy, but without joining hands. She who holds the child goes and dances in the middle, singing some praises to the chief. Meanwhile, six Indians, chosen for the purpose, take their stand in a certain place in the open area; and midway among them the sacrificing officer, who is decorated with a sort of magnificence, and holds a club. The ceremony being through, the sacrificer takes the child and slays it in honour of the chief, before them all, upon the wooden stump. This offering was, on one occasion, performed in our presence.”206

“It was the Custom in Peru, to sacrifice Children from four to ten Years of Age, which was chiefly done when the Inga was sick, or going to War, to pray for Victory, and at the Coronation of those Princes they sacrific’d two hundred Children. Sometimes they strangl’d, and bury’d them, and other times they cut their Throats, and the Priests besmear’d themselves with the Blood from Ear to Ear, which was the Formality of the Sacrifice. Nor were the Virgins (Mamaconas) of the Temple exempt from being sacrific’d and, when any Person of Note was sick, and the Priest said he must die, they sacrific’d his son, desiring the Idol to be satisfied with him, and not take away his Father’s life. The Ceremonies us’d at this Sacrifice were strange, for they behav’d themselves like mad Men. They believ’d that all Calamities were occasion’d by Sin, and that Sacrifices were the Remedy.”207

Further evidence of the attitude of the Indians is given by the first secretary of the Colony of Virginia Brittania, who asserted that the Indians in Florida sacrificed the first-born male child. According to this writer, their Quiyoughquisocks, or prophets to the Indians, persuaded the warriors to resist the settlements of the white people because their Okeus, who was god of the tribe, would not be appeased by the sacrifice of a thousand children if they permitted the white people, who despised their religion, to dwell among them.208

In parts of New South Wales209 such as Bathurst, Goulburn, the Lachlan, or MacQuarie, the first-born of every lubra was eaten by the tribe as a part of the religious ceremony. Here, too, it was the male infant that was more desirable as a sacrifice, the female infants being sometimes allowed to live. In this connection, it is interesting to note that where children are killed without any other excuse than that they are a drain on the resources of their parents, it is the female children who are slaughtered. When, however, there is a so-called religious reason for the infanticide, it is the male child that suffers.

In India, as we shall see, children were frankly killed for economic reasons; but here too there are evidences of the sacrifice theory. Up to the beginning of the present century, the custom of offering a first-born child to the Ganges was common. A custom akin to this was that of the Ganga Jatra, the murder of sick relatives on the banks of the sacred river. As late as 1812, a mother and sister burned a leper at Katwa near Calcutta, their excuse being that by so doing he would be given a pure body in the next world.

Women, too, who had been long barren dedicated their first child, if one were given them, to Omkar Mandharta.210

Bathing in blood, especially the blood of children, in Northern India was regarded as a powerful remedy for disease. In 1870, a Mussulman butcher, losing his child, was told by a Hindu conjurer that in order to make the next child healthy, he should wash his wife in the blood of a boy, with the result that a child was murdered. At Muzaffar Nagar a child was killed and the blood drunk by a barren woman.211

In the city of Saugor in India, human sacrifices were offered up in the year 1800, when they were stopped by the local governor, Assa Sahib, although the Brahmin priests objected strenuously to the innovation. Outside the city, there was a spot where the young men sacrificed themselves in order to fulfil the vows of their mothers. The belief was that when a woman was without a child, she could overcome barrenness by promising her first-born, if a male, to the god of destruction, Mahadea. If a boy was born after this vow, she concealed from him the vow until he attained the age of puberty, when it was his duty to obey his mother’s call and throw himself, at the annual fair on the sandstone hills, from a perpendicular height of four or five hundred feet and be dashed to pieces upon the rocks below.212

Among the Banjarilu, a caste of travelling traders noted in “Bhadrachellam and Rekapalli Taluquas,”213 the custom in former years was, before starting off on a business journey, to procure a little child and bury it in the ground up to its shoulders. Then the traders would drive their loaded bullocks over the victim and in proportion as the bullocks “thoroughly trampled the child to death” was their belief in a successful journey increased. Probably very little credence can be given to their assertions that they have completely left off such cruelties.

The Chinese philosopher, Mih Tsze, who lived about the fourth century before Christ, wrote that there existed at one time in China a state called Kai-muh, where it was the custom to kill and devour the eldest brother as an offering to the gods.214

We come now to the results of recent excavations in Palestine.

There were discovered at Gezer, the bodies of adults that had been sacrificed at foundation rites and deposited with the corner-stones much as moderns deposit mementoes and newspapers. Mr. MacAlister, who had charge of the excavations at Gezer, says, however, that adult or adolescent victims were rare in comparison with the number of infants or very young children whose remains were found under the corners of houses. Such deposits were found in all the Semitic strata but were very rare in the Hellenistic stratum, showing that the practice died down when the Greeks came into control of the land. The children sacrificed at these foundation rites were deposited in the same manner as those found at the messobath or high place, where there was discovered a cemetery of jar-buried infants that went to show how general was the practice of sacrificing their new-born infants among the Canaanites.

“That these sacrificed infants were the first-born, devoted in the Temple, is indicated by the fact that none were over a week old. This seems to show that the sacrifices were not offered under stress or any special calamity, or at the rites attaching to any special season of the year. The special circumstance which led to the selection of these infants must have been something inherent in the victims themselves, which devoted them to sacrifice from the moment of their birth. Among various races, various circumstances are regarded as sufficient reason for infanticide—deformity, the birth of twins, etc.; but among the Semites the one cause most likely to have been effective was primogeniture.”215

In the vessels in which the infants were placed, were found by the excavators smaller vessels which were probably food vessels with a viaticum for the victim.

At Ta’Annek216 after the discoveries at Gezer, a cemetery containing some twenty infants, also buried in jars, was discovered about a rock altar, the age of the infants that had been sacrificed having been as much as five years. At Megiddo217 underneath a corner of a temple, there were found four jars with the bones of children and near them smaller jars and a bowl, which undoubtedly contained the food that children were supposed to need in the other world. Professor Sellin suggests that the bones found at Tell Ta’Annek may have been the bones of children that had died too young to be buried in the family sepulchres, but the burden of evidence suggests a different explanation. Here, then, we have a double reason for the sacrifice of the children, for the foundation sacrifices were—one might almost say are, so recently have there been instances of the practice—of a different order from the sacrifice of the first-born.

On these foundation sacrifices, Dr. Driver has made some interesting notes. We are all familiar with our own foundation ceremonies, which are really nothing more or less than a modification of these primitive ceremonies that consisted almost entirely of the sacrifice of a human being and in many instances of an infant, inasmuch as the infant, having just come into the world, was purer and nearer to god and therefore more acceptable. Traces of the custom of sacrificing a human life in order that some destructive god or demon might be propitiated and the lives of those about to occupy the building thereby made safer are found in India, New Zealand, China, Japan, Mexico, Germany, and Denmark.

The extent of these foundation sacrifices had been revealed by Dr. Trumbull in his Threshold Covenant, all going to show that different branches of the human family, though far removed, mounted much the same steps in their endeavour to achieve the truth about the world in which they lived.

Among the Danes, when the fortifications were first being built around Copenhagen many years ago, the walls, as they were built, kept sinking in, and it did not seem possible that they would ever stand firmly.

“The workmen finally took a little girl, placed her at a table, and gave her play toys and sweetmeats. Then, as she sat there enjoying herself, the masons built an arch over her and in this way the walls were made solid.”218

A similar story is told219 of a castle of Liebenstein. It was made fast and impregnable by buying a child from its mother and walling it in.

Slavensk, a Slavonic town on the Danube, had been devastated by the plague and when it was built anew the wise men of the town agreed that there must be a human victim. Messengers were sent out before sunrise to seize the first living creature they met. The victim was a child and it was buried alive under the foundation stone of the citadel, and from that time on, a citadel was called a Dyetinet, from Dyetina220, a child.

In Africa in Galam, Tylor says221 that a boy and a girl were buried alive before the gate of the city in order to make it impregnable. In other places, such as Great Bassam and Yarriba, such sacrifices were usual even when the foundation was only that of a house.

In some places, such as among the Tantis of Africa, the sacrifice was made at every new moon. In Sargos, a girl was offered up that there might be good crops. In Bonny, they sacrificed every year a beautiful virgin to Juju that the evil spirits might be kept away.

“The connection between cannibalism and human sacrifice,” says Dr. Waitz, “is manifest enough in the festivals of Dahomey.”222

There were two principal and solemn sacrifices among the Pipiles, a Maya people in Central America—one at the commencement of summer and one at the beginning of winter. Little boys of ten and twelve years of age were the victims, and their blood was sprinkled in the direction of the four cardinal points.223

Among the Milanau Dyaks when the largest house was being erected, a deep hole was dug and a slave girl was placed in it. An enormous timber was then allowed to descend on her and crush her to death.224

As late as 1843 in Germany, when a new bridge was being built at Halle, the common people fancied that a child was wanted to be walled into the foundations. According to Grimm, the tower called the Reichenfels Castle was built on a live child and a projecting stone marks the place. If that were pulled out, the wall, it is said, would tumble down.225

According to a Servian legend, three hundred masons laboured for three years at the foundation stones of Scutari, but what they built by day, the Vila tore down at night. At last she made known to the kings that the place would never be finished until two brothers or sisters “of like name” were built into the foundations. Nowhere could such be found. Then the Vila required that one of the wives of the kings should be walled up in the ground. The next day the consort of the youngest king, never dreaming of such a decree, brought out some dinner to the workmen; thereupon the three hundred masons dropped their stones around her and began to wall her in. At her entreaty, they left a small opening and there she continued to suckle her babe who was held up to her once a day.226

The foundation sacrifice is well known in India. At Madras, it has long been a tradition that when the fort was first built a girl was built into it to render it impregnable.227 A Raja was once building a bridge over the river Jargo at Chunar and when it fell down several times, he was advised to sacrifice a Brahman girl to the local deity. She has now become the Mari or ghost of the place and is regularly worshipped in time of trouble. In Kumaun, there are professional kidnappers known as Doqhutiya, or two-legged beasts of prey, who go about capturing boys that they may be used in foundation sacrifices.

Up to 1867, when a house was built among the Tlinkits tribe in Alaska, the relatives and friends of the chief or wealthy man were invited to appear on the spot that he had chosen for the site. Addressing them at great length, he referred with pride to the various deeds of his ancestors and promised to so conduct himself as to shed more lustre on the family name. The space for the house was then cleared, a spot for the fireplace designated, and four holes dug wherein the corner posts were to be set. A slave, or the descendant of a slave who had been captured in war, was then blind-folded and compelled to lie down face uppermost on the spot selected for the fireplace. A sapling was then cut, laid across the throat of the slave, and, at a given signal, the two nearest relatives of the house sat upon the respective ends of the sapling, thereby choking the wretch to death.228