tribes in general "slew their children in their sacrifices, used secret ceremonies, and made revellings of strange rites."" The same practices prevailed among the Hebrews according to the testimony of their own prophets. "They did not destroy the nations concerning whom the Lord commanded them, but were mingled among the heathen, and learned their works. They served their idols, which became a snare unto them; yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils, and shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and of their daughters, whom they sacrificed unto the idols of Canaan; and the land was polluted with blood." 28 The 16th and 23rd chapters of Ezekiel attest the similarity of the worship of the Hebrews to that of idolatrous nations, and the prophet expressly declares that the similarity continued. "When ye offer gifts, when ye make your sons pass through the fire, ye pollute yourselves with your idols even unto this day." Not only did the Hebrews share the abominations of the tribes who burned sons and daughters in the name of religion 30, but they committed if possible more infamous excesses, so that even Samaria and Sodom were righteous by comparison ". The inhabitants of Palestine had from of old been anthropophagous like the Læstrygones and Cyclops ""; their Israelitish successors continued the loathsome defilement, causing God to pour out his fury to punish them. But the prophet consoles his native country under the execrations of its conquerors by announcing that these horrors would take place no more. Yet if in the time of the captivity the Israelites mixed up cannibalism with their idolatry, it becomes more than probable, notwithstanding 33 27 Wisd. xii. 4; xiv. 23. Zech. ix. 7. 29 Ezek. xx. 31. 31 Ezek. v. 6; xvi. 20. 47. 51. 33 Numb. xiii. 32. 29 32 28 Psal. cvi. 34. 30 Deut. xii. 31. 32 Ezek. xvi. 52. 35 Ezek. xxxvi. 13. "Because men say of thee thou art a man-destroyer, and hast made thy people childless; therefore thou shalt no more eat men nor be a cannibal to thy children; I will no more hear the reproach of thee among the heathen." "36 the anxiety of their annalists to represent the past as it ought to have been rather than as it was, that the propensity existed in a still more frightful degree in those early times when every man "did what was right in his own eyes." It was then thought necessary to restrict the Hebrews from eating the carrion which the wild beast rejected 37, nor was the misdemeanor considered even in later times a serious one 38. "Fear ye not," says Joshua, in answer to the formidable account of the spies respecting the indigenous cannibals of Palestine "", "fear not the inhabitants of the land, for they are bread for us (i. e. instead of our being bread for them); their defence is gone from them, but Jehovah is with us; fear ye not." "Behold," says Balaam," the people shall ride up as a lion, as a young lion; he shall not lie down until he eat of the prey, and drink the blood of the slain. He shall eat up the nations that are his enemies, and gnaw their bones; their arrows shall he trample on."40 There is more in these words than a mere poetical figure. Palestine was indeed a country "which eat men, and made its people childless." "Draw near," exclaims the prophet"1, ye sons of the sorceress, spawn of the adulterer and the whore". Against whom do ye sport yourselves; against whom make ye a wide mouth, and draw out the tongue? Are ye not children of transgression, a brood of lies, who inflame yourselves with idols under every green tree, slaying children in the valleys, under the clefts of the rocks?— And thou wentest to the king' (Moloch) with ointment, and didst increase thy perfumes, and didst send thy messengers afar off, debasing thyself even unto hell." Although Hebrew 66 36 Judg. xvii. 6. Deut. xii. 8. 37 Exod. xxii. 13. Lev. vii. 24. 39 Numb. xiv. 9. 42 38 Lev. xvii. 15; xxii. 8. 4 Isa. lvii. 3. 9; hx. 3. Comp. Ezek. xviii. 6; xxii. 3; xxxiii. 25; xxxvi. 18. 12. e. of a false god and renegade people. The words are addressed to the idolatrous exiles or 66 transgressors," but Ewald supposes the passage to be an extract from an older prophet and to have originally described Palestinian superstition. cannibalism with the religious practices allied to it afterwards became less frequent, it is admitted to have occasionally recurred; and the language which to our modes of thinking appears only a figurative illustration becomes collateral evidence of a fact when we recollect that the types and symbols of ancient poetry were not the arbitrary choice of imagination, but were placed in its way, and in a sense forced upon it, by cotemporary circumstances and usages. When Zechariah describes the victorious Jews, under guidance of Jehovah, as eating their enemies' flesh, and drinking their blood as it were with the riot of winebibbers; nay, as gorging themselves with blood, not only like the vessel filled within, but like the corners of the altar gory without", it might at first be supposed that the description is only an exaggerated rhetorical figure; but when we learn from history that the very same atrocities, instigated probably by the notion of the horrors which were immediately to precede the Messiah's advent, were literally enacted against their fellow-colonists by the Jews of Cyrene", some of whom were probably descended from ancestors who left Palestine before the improvements in the law introduced by Ezra and Nehemiah", and who, as we know from Jeremiah, had never been favourable to reform, it becomes exceedingly probable that these excesses were not unprecedented, but that as the realization of the prophecy was a fanatical outbreak of ancient barbarism, so the prophecy itself was conceived from the possible recurrence of habits not yet forgotten or obsolete. 43 Comp. the Psalmist, xvi. 4, 5. 44 Zech. ix. 15. 45 Dio. Cass. lxvii. 32. The murderers fed on the flesh of their victims and hung their entrails over their shoulders: 220,000 persons are said to have perished, and as many more in a similar cotemporaneous outbreak in Egypt and Cyprus. 46 Ghillany, u. s. p. 655. § 8. THE ANCIENT HEBREW GOD. 2 6 The Bible often speaks of a change in God's titles and relation to his subjects. His name Jehovah was unknown to the patriarchs', their " fathers served other gods.' Later writers3 disown those early monotheists who used idols and teraphim, and shifted their gods with their garments*. The same Being seems to have been God of the idolatrous Syrians', as also of Melchizedec and Abimelech, long before he entered into that league of reciprocal interest with Jacob and of political connection with Moses by which he became formally God of Israel; yet he thenceforth shows a marked jealousy of other gods, attesting thereby the proneness of the Israelites to worship them. But independently of Bible admissions respecting the earlier religion, the well-known idolatrous propensities in later times of a nation who so greatly venerated their ancestors would alone make it probable that those ancestors were themselves idolatrous; and it must at least be assumed that the Deity who prohibits the offering of human sacrifices under pain of death was, even if known in name, unknown in nature to the patriarch who believed in the authenticity of a divine command to murder his son. The compilers of the sacred books indeed found it necessary to make the commencement of idolatry cotemporaneous with the Judges'; since otherwise no sanction could have been derived from antiquity for a sound standard of doctrine, nor could they have referred to any orthodox ancestors from whom they inherited the promises which were the foundation of their faith. Accordingly the people who worshipped the calf in presence of the terrors of Mount Exod. vi. 3; iii. 6. 15, &c. 3 Psal. xcv. 10. Amos v. 25. Ezek. xxiii. 3. 4 Gen. xxxv. 2. • Gen. xxviii. 20, 21, 22. 2 Josh. xxiv. 2. 14. * Gen. xxxi. 24; xxxii. 53. 7 2 Kings xxiii. 22. 66 Sinai, who apostatized to Baal-Peor before the eyes of Moses, are said to have served the Lord faithfully all the days of Joshua", and during all the days of the elders cotemporary with Joshua who had witnessed the great works of the Lord for Israel;" afterwards there arose "another generation which knew not the Lord;" these did evil in the sight of the Lord, and served Baalim; "they forsook the Lord God of their fathers who brought them out of Egypt, and served Baal and Ashtaroth." At a time when real history was unknown this statement does not imply wilful misrepresentation; God being assumed to be changeless, the writer's faith doubtless appeared to be the genuine faith inherited from antiquity; he therefore treats Baal-worship as Mahomet did Arabian idolatry, as a falling-off or desertion of the true God, not absolute ignorance of him. Had the offence been committed ignorantly it could not have been penally visited as sin; nor could it have served to illustrate the moral of the intimate connection between human conduct and human weal. Jehovah was one God; he could not have two characters, or own two opposite kinds of service; and as to the prophets it was impossible that cotemporaneous abominations could be acknowledged as Jehovahworship", so the rites of the cruel God of early ages must have been apostacy to Baal, the ever-recurring cause of those disasters which the Judges were successively raised up by the true God to remedy. If it were asked what was the motive for such an apostacy, or how it was that the Israelites, unlike all other known nations, were so prone to change their faith, the most natural reply would be the short time during which the orthodox religion would seem according to their view to have existed. It commenced with Moses, and only outlasted the generation of Joshua. Even during that interval it suffered interruptions of unknown duration, and it eventually appears' s Josh. ii. 7. 9 Koran, ch. vi. pp. 109. 112. 10 Jer. vii. 11; xxiii. 11. Ezek. v. 11; xxiii. 38; xliv. 7. 11 |