Some heresies dealt with

Front matter

SOME HERESIES

DEALT WITH.

o

Contents

CHAP. PACK I. HEBREW PASSINGS-OVER " HARMLESS RITES," AS

HELD BY MR. ANDREW LANG .... I

II. TATTOO MARKS, CUTS, AND SEXUAL SELECTION, AS

I

And, to carry out this programme, let us look in due order first at the Law, and then at the Prophets, and finally at the Poetical Books.

I. Our Authorised Translation is apt to be misleading on some of these points. Look at Exodus xiii. 12. There the Hebrew is rnnjb ann "it??-^? n-Q^rn, which is not " Thou shalt set apart," but " Thou shalt passover to Jahwe," &c. If this was originally a merely "harmless rite," what about all the machinery of redeeming ? — a machinery, by the way, which soon

B 2 came to be complicated by devices of priests and Levites to gain greater revenue to the sanctuary. But it is evident that this redeeming was an afterthought, for Sir John Lubbock has well referred to Lev. xxvii. 28 and 29, where it is written :

" 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 to the Lord.

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

And Sir John rightly drew the conclusion from this (see " Origin of Civilisation ") that there were human sacrifices and passings-over to Jahwe among the Hebrews.

It is true that at Exod. xiii. 2 a different word is used, which is perhaps rightly enough translated "'sanctify." It is ttftft, but in the light of other things it can only indicate one fact : "Sacrifice unto me all the firstborn, whatsoever openeth the womb among the children of Israel, of man and of beast : it is mine."

At Lev. xviii. 21, we read (and surely Moses or another must have been an arrant fool to legislate against what had no existence, according to Mr. Andrew Lang, who quotes this passage with a turn to it) :

" Thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Moloch " ; and, strangely enough, in ordinary reference Bibles, a reference is given to i Kings xi. 7 : " Then did Solomon build an high place for Chemosh [literally from E7D3, to burn — that

WORD FOR BURNT USED. 5

is, the burner] , the abomination of Moab, . . . and for Molech, the abomination of the children of Ammon. And likewise did he for all his strange wives, which burned incense and sacrificed to their gods."

Now did Solomon do this with those clear words from Leviticus and Deuteronomy before him ? Let Mr. Andrew Lang and the Editor of the " Contemporary " answer that — it has a very direct bearing on our chief point.

Here is another fine specimen of the way in which the Hebrews in their own book are said to have followed the strange gods and the strange customs :

" The Sepharvites burnt their children in fire to Adrammelech and Anammelech, the gods of Sepharvaim. So they feared Jahwe, and made unto themselves of the lowest of them priests of the high places, which sacrificed for them in the houses of the high places."1

The word for burnt here is burnt — that is, ^7^ — undoubtedly burnt.

The idea of ransom or redeeming was at the best a mere expedient — the claim and the right of the god remained as a matter of principle. When a Jewish father offered a lamb instead of his son, his thoughts, if he thought at all, must have led to his picturing his god as an exactor of blood, of life ; and substitution, redemption, and ransom after all tell inevitably of something that went before, as the ram Abraham offered told of Isaac.3 But listen to what

1 2 Kings xvii. 31, 32. Read also vv. 15-17.

3 I lay no weight here on what Von Bohlen, Ewerbeck, and Ghillany have said of substitutionary elements in circumcision and its correspondent substitute, though they were scholars and

Keil — even Keil — has said about the way the priests turned the redeeming business to their own profit :

" The firstlings of unclean animals are to be redeemed according to the valuation of the priest, with the addition of a fifth of the value, and, if this be not done, then it is to be sold according to the valuation. Hereby the earlier law which ordered that an ass should be redeemed with a lamb or else killed (Exod. xiii. 13, xxxiv. 20) is modified in favour of the income of the sanctuary.

"The devoted human being shall be put to death. According to the sound of v. 28 (Lev. xxvii.), it stood free for any Israelite to devote, not only out of his cattle and fields, but even out of human beings that belonged to him, such as slaves or children. E^rrn, * devote,' signifies to dedicate to Jehovah in an irredeemable manner, as E?n, which word denotes what is removed from the use and abuse of men, and given over to God in an irrevocable and irredeemable manner, so that human beings were killed, while cattle and other things fell for ever to the sanctuary or were also destroyed for the honour of Jehovah. The last, without doubt, happened only in the case of property of idolaters ; at least, it is only commanded for the complete punishment of idolatrous towns (Deut. xiii. 13). Hence, however, it follows that the vow to ' devote ' could only be suspended over persons who obstinately resisted that sanctification of the life to which they were pledged, and that it did not stand free for any one according

thoughtful writers. And to see how real a matter this redeeming of the firstborn was, one has only to read the last section (vv. 44-51) of the iii. chap, of Numbers.

DEVOTING— ITS MEANING. 7

to his pleasure to ' devote ' a person. Otherwise the practice might have been misused."1

It is a very remarkable fact that both this Hebrew word Dnri and the Greek word anathema — Way^/xa and 'avdOcpa — do not originally mean to curse, to execrate, but to devote, to give up, to set up, to offer in sacrifice. Both forms of the Greek word are from 'avartOrjiJu., to lay up, to set up as a votive gift. The Hebrew word D^O more especially illustrates this. It is closely related indeed to the word E1>n, high or devoted ; the idea of being lifted up is essential to it. What inference can possibly be drawn from this? Nothing less than this, that the idea of devoting, or lifting up in sacrifice — that is, passing through the fire to the god — by degrees became the very process by which the displeasure of the god was shown. " The lifting up, the devoting, the hanging up in the sun " before Jahwe as curse, as punishment, was simply the same process, only with a perverted motive, as the hanging up in the sun or the passing through the fire of those who had been devoted to him. And the question arises — a question I would fain have Mr. Lang to answer — how far does this really imply that here we have, as is universally found, when you trace honestly and independently far enough backward, that gods uniformly are developed out of demons rejoicing in such sacrifices, whether they are expiatory as being devoted to the god, or signs of his displeasure and cruelty, really two sides of the same character — where the actual facts beautifully correspond with the developments of language ?

In the one case you have a cruel death to expiate the god's anger, or to appease it, or keep it away ; in the other, you have it expressed a craving satisfaction in pain, death, punishment. "Anathema maranatha " (Wnw. "HE) may mean either blessing from the Lord or cursing from the Lord, as you care to read it, wherever it appears. It may well be said of others besides the manes or gods of the Romans that the people, ascribing to them a love of blood, duly ministered to this love of blood, and they did it from both sides at once, signified above. We are clearly told that Ahaz and Manasseh " burned their sons in the fire," and that the great majority of the Hebrew monarchs followed the evil example of their fathers. Solomon, said by some divines — Dr. Fairbairn for one — to share with David the honour of exhibiting monotheism at its best and loftiest, anew set up the fires of Tophet in the valley of Hinnom — Ge-Hennom, that is, Gehenna — and Tophet comes from *)V1, to burn. Jehu, we read, served the Lord and destroyed Baal and the priests of Baal by a stratagem, and yet he sacrificed to the golden calves (bulls) that were in Dan and Bethel, and we know all too well what that worship implied — the offering up of the firstborn. Here we have the dreadful observance on the part of an enemy of Baal and of the priests of Baal. The explanation, perhaps, is that there were two Baals : the Syrian Baal, with which in too many points the earlier Jahwe* was identified ; and the Tyrian Baal — points which have been ably dealt with by Dr. Oort in his reply to Professor Dozy, mainly about the religion of the Simeonites who settled at Mecca. He points out that while Elijah put to death 450 priests of the Tyrian Baal, he left untroubled the 400 priests of the

THE PROPHETS. 9

Syrian Baal who, we read, sat or ate at Jezebel's table.

Another point. There are the very best grounds for holding that the account of Abraham's intended sacrifice of Isaac in Gen. xxii. was written in David's age, and written for a purpose — written with a view, indeed, of discouraging the practice, but yet commending it, as emanating from a holy and divine impulse, and certainly not condemning it,1 just as Mr. Farnell proves that the divine and human in sacrifice are involved in each other.

This is a most important matter, as proving by another class of evidence that even in the time of David human sacrifices and " passings through the fire " were common, so as to call for this kind at once of indirect justification, apology, and commendation of substitution.

II

The point, whether or not there were passings-over to Jahwe or Baal in the time of the Prophets, is not left by any means to inference. Ezekiel is full of it —the horror of it seems literally to have possessed him. His book is red with blood as, according to him, the land was — of human blood, of the blood of children sacrificed — -passed through the fire. Read the gth, i6th, i8th, 2Oth, 23rd, 32nd, and 36th chapters, more especially the I3th to i8th verses of the lastnamed chapter. The translators have done their level best to hide the enormities of it ; but the truth, the dreadful truth, they could not hide. Turn to chapter xvi. 20, 21 : " Thou hast taken thy sons and

1 Colenso, Pent. v. 178.

ID SOME HERESIES DEALT WITH.

thy daughters, . . . and these hast thou sacrificed unto them to be devoured [devour]. Thou hast slain my children, and delivered them to cause them to pass through the fire for them."

Again, take this: "Because men say of thee that, thou art a man-eater (TIN CIS nbpS), and hast made thy people childless, I will no more bear the reproach of thee among the nations [heathen]" (xxxvi. 13, 14).

And here, most assuredly, we have the funniest perversion for a purpose ever effected by translation on any book. The translators in first clause translated by us above insert the word " land " — " Thou land " — where in the original there is not the least suggestion of land in any form, and in some editions with marginal references a reference is given to Numbers xiii. 32, where the spies report on the land as eating up men (!). But a change of subject is indicated in the Hebrew here by the space or sign of new paragraph, which is more marked indeed than it is even at verse 16, of which the Authorised Version translators take no notice. In truth, the change from apostrophising the land to addressing the people begins at verse 13, and not at verse 16, as the Authorised Version would fain make out, and the connection of ideas with verse 17 is clear: "When the house of Israel abode in their own land, they defiled it by their own way and by their doings : their way was before my face as the uncleanness of a woman removed. Wherefore I poured my fury upon them, for the blood that they had shed upon the land (it was in this sense that the land figuratively ate men), and for their idols with which they had polluted it. Therefore I scattered them among the heathen." As though

WORD FOR IDOLS. n

the land was blighted and barren because of the curse brought on it by their uncleanness and idolatry. The word for "idols" here, by-the-bye, is a^bsfea, the essential idea of which is something round — that is, rounded stone, or pole or pillar, as here. To our mind there is no suggestion in the Hebrew to justify the reference to Numbers, as is surely proved by the words: rft-^ann fo^ T'fcl Tfo ^wrto DIS •qb, which is most literally: "Thou shalt not eat men any more, nor be any more cannibal to thy corpses [or bodies] ." 1

The Revised Translation, sad to say, here follows and perpetuates the blunders of the Authorised Version, which is not to be wondered at in a body of men that could change " Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel " to " Thou shalt not attain to any

1 In unpointed Hebrew the plurals of the words D^12 and would be very like each other, though D^2 could hardly be mistaken tor 7p12, and certainly Q^'12 (bodies), which is identical, pointed, with Qvia (peoples, nations, bodies corporate), might very easily be confounded, while in various forms of the words afterwards mistakes might, in pointing, very easily have arisen, not to speak of mistakes in translation — in part, at all events, dictated by preconceptions. (Myers1 idea of consciously Christianising Mosaism largely to blame ; see " Catholic Thoughts.")

We have a case in which both words occur at Psa. ex. : —

which Dr. Perowne thus translates :

41 He shall judge among the nations, He hath filled (them) with corpses, He hath smitten through heads over wide lands."

Bishop Perowne says on 3 fcv?73 : ' ' The second accusative is understood, DHS, 'He hath filled them [the nations] with corpses,'" the verb being transitive, as often. Others make of wba an adjective governing ftt*)J: "it (the field of battle or the land) is full of corpses."

excellency." They make uncalled-for alterations, and spoil the English ; where very serious alterations were wanted they simply let them slide, or trim and half-do, as very notably in the cases of the cn^ttf and D^anp.

And once more : " They have committed adultery, and blood is on their hands : with their idols they have committed adultery, and have also caused their sons whom they bare unto me to be passed through the fire and given them for food" (xxiii. 37).

That looks like "harmless rite," don't it ? — " given them for food " — eating human flesh, even though sacrificially ? Given them for food ! plainly set down. Does Air. Andrew Lang regard that as part of a harmless rite, eh, or does he boldly delete that ? Did not Pliny observe with regard to early Italian or Sicilian human sacrifices, that the difference is but small between sacrificing human beings and eating them ? and is this not likely to be true of the custom generally in East as well as in West ?

Before you have got over the first twenty verses of Isaiah you find he is on the same key, denouncing thus : " Your hands are full of blood " (i. 15) ; and the second Isaiah or another passes on to the very same thought : at chapter lix. 3, " Your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity." And again, showing clearly what so affected him (Ivii. 5), " Enflaming yourselves with idols under every green tree, slaying the children in the valleys under the clifts of the rocks."

Jeremiah is quite as definite. He cries out : "They have built the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire, for burnt offerings unto Baal, which I

FOR BURNT OFFERINGS. 13

commanded them not " (xix. 5). Here, be it noticed, they are not burnt in the fire, so that any cover could be given to a mere ceremonial passing or leaping through it, but "burned with fire,"1 and for burnt offerings. If there is any loophole here for Mr. Lang to crawl through, we can't see it. And, besides, what else can mean that prophecy of Jeremiah vii. 31-3 : " They have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the sons of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire ; which I commanded them not. . . . Therefore, behold, the days come when it shall no more be called Tophet, nor the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of slaughter " ?

The word for burn here is burn, *!?¥> and surely Jeremiah knew what that word meant, as well as what he meant to say : so at other parts in Jeremiah and elsewhere ; so also at xix. 5, just quoted, and there the word for burnt offerings is burnt offerings = mb's. It is exactly the same word, though with the modified spelling, which is used at Judges xi. 31, with reference to the sacrifice of

1 " It is plain from Jer. vii. 31, that the children were really burnt. Such sacrifices were offered to Baal and Molech (Jer. xix. 5, xxxii. 35), and were probably of Canaanite and Ammonite origin. But they were engrafted on the worship of Jahwe, as appears from Micah vi. 7, Jer. xix. 5, Ezek. xx. 25, 26. It is interesting to observe that, according to a view common among scholars, the traces of human sacrifice among the Greeks, e.g., in the Tauropolia at Halae, in Attica, may have been due to Canaanite, i.e., Phoenician influence." See Addis's Hexateuch, ii. p. 107. But we do not quite believe in the muchdwelt-on grafting, since the legislation itself shows such direct protest against practices native to the Hebrews themselves ; and there really can be no kind of reasonable question about this.

Jephthah's daughter, which will show that the practice was early as well as late. The Hebrew is plain ; it is, nVil? ^nvrb^n1] = and I will offer it a burnt offering.

And if Mr. Andrew Lang will kindly turn to Sir R. Burton's "The Jew, the Gypsy, and El Islam," he will find at p. ii that this fine Orientalist and daring traveller has no hesitation about the kind of offering which Jephthah made of his daughter in fulfilment of his vow. "Jephthah," he says, "'did with his daughter according to his vow ' ; that is, he burnt her to death before the Lord " — he passed her over to Jahwe through the fire. And surely Mr. Lang will admit that Sir R. Burton knew something about these things, though he asks what nation but the Jews could exult in a Jephthah for doing by his daughter according to his vow.

Two of the most extraordinary mistranslations on any book are to be found in the Authorised Version at Isaiah Ixv. n, where the word ^p is rendered number. Did this arise from a confusion of the Hebrew word with ]J3p, number, as found at Ezra vi. 17, or what ? It is the more surprising that the right word for number comes at the beginning of next verse. ^£ is not number, but either Meni, the Venus of Babylonia, or one of the Arabian triad of goddesses. Again, (2), because "t?b looks a little like "D with the b, they rendered it " that troop," and though "troop" is the meaning given of Gad in the Bible etymologically, that is not quite correct, any more than is the Bible etymology of Levi : it is rather "good fortune, luck," as in the common phrase "O S3. But it was really "ton, the (god of) good

CURIOUS ANALOGIES. 15

fortune, fate— that is, Baal.1 So that not only do modern divines exercise their ingenuity to refine away the real significance of many phrases in the Hebrew, but the translators do. And many maledictions do they get from me when, in virtue of an old old habit, I read my chapter in the Hebrew Bible of a Sunday afternoon, with the English at my elbow. To an ordinary reader it would not seem that a reference to the Baal rite, with its accompanying and inevitable human sacrifice, lurks in that sentence, but it does, as every Hebraist will admit, and, pace Mr. Andrew Lang, my point again is proved even there.

1 The process of evolution of this word or name, "T2, has a curious analogy with that of the Vedic vnr (B'aga), and Zend JUOASX (Baga).

The fundamental idea of both is to bestoiv, to give; and from them come the words expressing fortune, prosperity ; precisely as here. B'aga, the son of Aditi, is fortune, happiness, wealth, prosperity ; and hence the derivation b'agavat, adorable, and bagobak'ta, godgiven, bagodata, god-made, of which, indeed, Bagdad is but a slightly shortened form.

It is surely very remarkable, in connection with this, that f l^, the god Siva, and f?T^T, the wife of Siva, in the Sanskrit, are also "prosperous, fortunate."

Quite as remarkable it is that in Arabic S***j, Vahhab, in precisely the same sense, means Bestower, Prosperer, and is precisely the Semitic equivalent of the Aryan WT, B'aga, and has passed through precisely the same process.

" "T2 bp2, so called from the worship of Gad, that is, Fortune" (see Gesenius, ad loc.}. HIH is the ordinary Hebrew word for fortune, and rn3 "i^T is court of fortune.

Why, even in the American edition of Smith's Dictionary of the Bible we read under Baal-Gad, "T2 *?r?2 : " It was in all probability a Phoenician or Canaanite sanctuary of Baal under the aspect of Gad or Fortune" (i. 209).

Syriac, \n\> gado, fortune ; Arabic, j^, jad, fortune.

" But ye are they that forsake the Lord, that forget my holy mountain, that prepare a table for the Baal, and that furnish the drink offering unto Meni."

Baal's table — that was the offering-table, the altar ; so that the prophet's words have a very direct reference here. For nothing less than this would such curse have followed :

" Therefore will I number you to the sword, and ye shall all bow down to the slaughter, because when I called ye did not answer ; when I spake ye did not hear, but did evil before mine eye, and did choose that in which I had no delight." For they were "a people that provoked me to anger continually to my face ; that sacrificed in gardens, and burned incense upon altars of brick."

1%, in the sense of good fortune, appears in many proper names, some of them compounded with El, as in ^, vir$, V03, &c., &c.

The word for gardens in the above is ma.3, which is used mostly in later Hebrew, and as the more correct rendering of the word was grove, some confusion with Ashera may be presumed in the use of this word. Ashera also was used in the sense of grove, and is so translated, and very wrongly, in the Authorised Version.

The Revisers, in their attempts to put right, here as elsewhere compromise a bit, and only make confusion worse confounded. Indeed they do. They render the latter part of the verse and the first part of the next verse thus : " That prepare a table for Fortune, and fill up mingled wine unto Destiny : I will destine you to the sword, and ye shall bow down to the slaughter." And they put a reference at "TJ

FORTUNE OR DESTINY. 17

(Fortune) to Gen. xxx. n, where we have, " And Leah said: Fortunate ! and she called his name Gad." More utterly helpless, flabby, and misleading emendations were surely never penned. I do not lay any weight on the bad English — that is to be expected ; but the Revisers apparently fancied that "^Z? and VT3D were connected as noun and verb formed from it, the one being Destiny and the other to destine, while they are really nothing of the sort : the suggestion of a helplessly poor play on words being given, where surely it is much out of place. The truth is, the word W3» is connected with the root nap, to number, to divide out, and is thus associated with the nrrrc?, whereas ^ traces either to the Babylonian, or, it may be, to the Arabic $^*, their goddess of fate or death.1 Anyhow, the idea of Fortune and Destiny thus personified is utterly alien from the Jewish conception, and it is hardly conceivable that such a curse would have been pronounced on them as we have already partly quoted, for devotion to such mere generalised abstractions. No, no ; pace the Revised translators, Jahwe and his prophets sought grounds more relative — some deity actuallytaken over from some neighbouring people, and with more appeal to human weakness or perversion than merely generalised abstractions of their own invention, like Fortune or Destiny, could ever have. TfD^tt, besides, implies spicing of wine as well as mixing or

1 Conf. Sura liii. of Koran, where we have the words: "What think ye of .... Menah ? — that other third goddess " ; and in Sura iv. she is also referred to in the clause, " the infidels invoke beside him [God] only female deities."

H. C mingling — therefore more correctly " drink-offerings " than " mingled wine " — which is every way a bad and clumsy translation.

Hosea, too, in his dread declarations against Ephraim, at one place exclaims, " Ephraim, as I saw Tyrus, is planted in a pleasant place : but Ephraim shall bring forth his children to the murderer. ... All their wickedness is in Gilgal : for there I hated them" (ix. 13 and 15).

Now, what can this mean ? Who is the murderer to whom the children are to be brought out ? and why is their wickedness in Gilgal ? Our idea of it is that their sacrifice of their children was associated with the stone worship inseparable from the stonecircles which the phrase ba^an as distinctly intimates as does the Gaelic clachan. And there were great stones at many places, Gibeon for one.

Scores of other passages might be cited. The higher consciousness that had been developed in the Hebrew Prophets which led them to try to raise the people to the idea of Jahwe as pure and superior to service of sacrifices, struggled vainly against the use that had become a second nature. And it is clear that the Prophets had no notion of the existence of the so-called early codes of legislation, for they speak directly too often in face of what these codes lay down ; they do not seem to have any idea that in the passage we have already quoted Jahwe demanded that the firstborns should be passed over to him, and they draw no distinctions such as we can find available as between the service in this respect of Baal so called and Jahwe — a fact which, as we shall see, Mr. Montefiore, in his Hibbert Lectures, dwelt

UNEXPECTED UTTERANCES. ig

on and admirably illustrated. But it is abundantly clear that if, as Mr. Andrew Lang suggests, the passing through the fire was a " harmless rite " among the Hebrews, much in the Levitical and Deuteronomic legislation needs to be wiped out, and a very great deal in the Prophets demands such a gloss as to make it no less than a noisy " much ado about nothing ; " while, as we shall soon see, one Psalm at least wants to be deleted and some sentences in Numbers.

III

If any doubt can still remain, surely this unexpected utterance, or series of utterances, in that altogether noteworthy cvi. Psalm, would settle it. Listen :

"They joined themselves unto Baal-peor, and ate the sacrifices of the dead " (v. 28), which last clause is a correspondent to "given them for food." "And they served their idols which were a shame unto them. Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto the demons [devils]. And they 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" (vv. 37, 38) -1

1 Bishop Perowne thus translates this passage, leaving no doubt that he is no believer in harmless rites :