Stanley Arthur Cook

“ Although Palestine reappears as only a small fraction of the area dominated by the ancient empires of Egypt and Western Asia, the uniqueness of its experiences can be more vividly realised. If it is found to share many forms of religious belief and custom with its neighbours, one is better able to sever the features which were by no means the exclusive possession of Israel from those which were due to specific influences shaping them to definite ends, and the importance of the little land in the history of humanity can thereby be more truly and permanently estimated. ”

“ Life was simpler and less civilised than in Egypt, but not without excitement. He led the tribesmen to war, raiding pastures and wells, capturing the cattle, ravaging the hostile districts. Indeed, 'lions and Asiatics' were the familiar terror of Egyptian travellers, and the turbulence of the petty chieftains, whose intrigues and rivalries swell the Amarna letters, made any combined action among themselves exceptional and transitory. ”

“ Ikhnaton's deity {104} was the sole god, beside whom there was no other; the beginning of life, the creator of 'the countries of Syria, Nubia, the land of Egypt'; the maker of all mankind diverse in speech, and of all that is upon the earth and on high. It was a despotic and ill-timed monotheism. It introduced a cult which was too far from ordinary worship, one which threatened to overthrow the old-established deities. What was probably more important was the fact that the deity had not the forceful and dominating attributes of the old sun-god. ”

“ In like manner, the personal names of our period which denote kinship with a deity point to a belief in a physical relationship as natural as the conviction of the modern native when he refers to Allah in terms which imply that man is in every detail the literal image of the Almighty. A difference between human and superhuman is scarcely recognised at the present day. The women of the land continue to visit the holy sites to obtain offspring, and it is freely acknowledged that welis and spirits of the dead can be physical fathers. ”

“ Even at the present day there is no clear distinction between what we should call the natural and the supernatural; a demon or a saint can appear in human or animal form; and the marvel or miracle is that which happens to lie outside the intellectual horizon of the individual. ”

“ In a word, the land is one whose religion cannot be understood without an attentive regard to those factors which were unalterable, and to those specific external influences which were focussed upon it in the entire course of the Second {12} Millennium B.C. We touch the land at a particular period in the course of its very lengthy history; it is not the beginnings of its religion, but the stage it had reached, which concerns us. ”

“ The venerated shrines regularly found their justification in the traditions which encircled the illustrious occupant: to violate them was not merely an insult, it struck a blow at one of the centres of cult and prosperity. Unfortunately for the problem, by the side of the tendency to elevate an illustrious ancestor must be placed the very human and inveterate weakness of tracing for oneself a noble ancestry. ”

“ The religious life of the peasants is bound up with the shrines and saints. There they appeal for offspring, healing, and good harvests; there they dedicate the first-fruits, firstlings, and their children, and in their neighbourhood they prefer to be buried. No stranger may intrude heedlessly within the sacred precincts, and one may see the worshipper enter barefooted praying for permission as he carefully steps over the threshold. The saint by supernatural means is able to protect everything deposited in the vicinity of the tomb, which can thus serve as a store or treasure-house. ”

“ Unfortunately Palestine has furnished no funerary texts, and little direct evidence; the dead 'go to their fate,' the king of Mitanni fasts on the day he hears of the death of Amenhotep III., and Zakarbaal of Byblos offers to show Wenamon the tomb where the members of a former embassy sleep (lit. lie, or pass the night) . A people accustomed to the annual death and revival of nature might easily formulate theories of the survival of the dead, and care is accordingly taken to provide for the needs of the deceased (p. 35) . ”

“ The fields are like a wife without a husband through lack of sustenance. He himself is caught like a bird in a cage. Again, he is old and stricken with disease; the gods of Byblos are enraged, and the illness is very severe, but, he continues, 'I have opened (confessed) my sins to the gods.' He declares that since the day he received favour from the king his heart had not changed, his face is (fixed) to serve him; if the king's heart is for his city (or, elsewhere, if it is on his heart) let him send help. ”

“ The burial in a contracted or squatting position might naturally represent the usual crouched posture of the individual as he sat in life-time among his fellows; it might also point to a belief in the re-birth of the soul of the dead. The jar-burials, where the infant is inserted head downwards, are more suggestive of the latter, and evidence from Africa and Asia shows that provision is sometimes made for the re-birth of still-born or very young babes on the conviction that at some future occasion they will enter again into a mother's womb. ”

“ Sacred trees were well known to early writers, and according to the Talmud there were some beneath which priests sat but did not eat of their fruit, remains of heathen sacrifice might be found there, and the Jew who sat or passed in its shade became ceremonially impure. It is unnecessary, however, to multiply examples of a feature to which the Old Testament also attests; popular belief has universally associated religious and superstitious ideas with those beneficent objects which appear {26} to be as much imbued with motion, animation, and feeling as man himself. ”

“ But Egypt, now in the Twentieth Dynasty, was fast losing its old strength, and the internal history of Palestine is far from clear. Apart from the sudden extension of the Assyrian empire to the Mediterranean under Tiglath-pileser I. (about 1100 B.C.) , no one great power, so far as is known, could claim supremacy over the west; and our period comes to an end at a time when Palestine, according to the Israelite historians, was laying the foundation of its independent monarchy. ”

“ When Baal and El were used as generic terms, their application was perfectly intelligible locally; and when they occur in forty or more place-names, and numerous old personal names {67} in Palestine, it is unnecessary to suppose that they represent two distinct and definite deities. From the old Palestinian names we learn that the deity is high, great and good; he opens, builds, heals, sows, gathers; he remembers, hastens, helps, protects, blesses, etc. [1] Such conceptions would be generally true of all; the power of each was not unlimited, but it extended to all that man usually desired. ”

“ The Land and People.—For practical purposes a distinction between Palestine and Syria is unnecessary, apart from the political results of their contiguity to Egypt and Asia Minor respectively. Egypt at the height of its power was a vast empire of unprecedented wealth and splendour, and the imported works of art or the descriptions of the spoils of war speak eloquently of the stage which material culture had reached throughout Western Asia. ”

“ Together with this combination it is to be noticed that while Khammurabi 'the Sun of Babylonia' calls himself the mighty bull who gores the enemy, old Egyptian scenes actually represent 'the strong bull' breaking down fortresses with its horns or expelling the inhabitants. The Pharaoh was symbolised by the bull, and even the Egyptian sun-god is styled 'the bull of the gods.' The animal is doubtless typical of generative force and of strength, while the union of the attributes of Shamash and Addu are intelligible since to the sun and weather man owed the necessaries of life. ”

“ Religious practice is always conservative, and once a place has acquired a reputation for sanctity, it will retain its fame throughout political and even religious vicissitudes. The history of Gezer, for example, goes back to the neolithic age, but the religious development, to judge from the archæological evidence, is unbroken, and although there came a time when the city passed out of history, Palestine still has its sacred stones and rock-altars, buildings and tombs, caves and grottoes, whose religious history must extend over untold ages. ”

“ The literature of Babylonia, Assyria, and often, too, of Egypt so frequently has analogies and parallels in the Old Testament, that we may assume that similar points of contact would be found, had we some of the religious writings of the Palestine of our period. Though we do not know how the Palestinian addressed his gods, the evidence whether direct or indirect partially enables us to fill the gap. Even the simplicity and poverty of Oriental pastoral life have never {103} been accompanied by a corresponding inferiority of expression or dearth of religious reflection. ”

“ It is obvious that one must allow for the direct influence exerted upon the religious conditions from a quarter of which very little is known as yet. The fact that Babylonian was used in Palestine and among the Hittite peoples clearly does not allow sweeping inferences. Indeed, so far from the script or language having been imposed from without, the people of Mitanni apparently borrowed the cuneiform script and adapted it to their own language; while, in the Amarna Tablets, the native tongue of Palestine and Syria has left a distinct impress upon the Babylonian. ”

“ Palestine has always been open to the roaming tribes from Arabia and the Syrian desert, tribes characteristically opposed to the inveterate practices of settled agricultural life. Arabia, however, possessed seats of culture, though their bearing upon our period cannot yet be safely estimated. But a temple with an old-established and contemporary cult, half Egyptian and half Semitic, has been recovered by Professor Petrie at Serabit el-Khadem in the Sinaitic Peninsula, and the archæological evidence frequently illustrates the results of the excavations in Palestine. ”

“ In a Babylonian myth the royal ornaments lay before the supreme god awaiting the monarch; in Egypt the king is the god's ka, his first-born; chosen, created and crowned by the divine father. The kings stood in the closest relationship to the gods; they were not only the heads of the state, they were also (in early Assyria) priest-kings, and in Egypt theoretically all offerings for the living and the dead were made by the Pharaoh. ”

“ Asiatic conquerors in Egypt appear to have been less tolerant. The Hyksos ruled 'in ignorance of Re,' and their god (Sutekh) was planted in the land; and, later, during the brief period of anarchy when a Palestinian or Syrian chief held Egypt until his overthrow by Setnakht, the upstarts 'made the gods like men and no offerings were presented in the temples.' We may assume then that the religion of our land remained practically unchanged during Egyptian supremacy except in so far as this involved the official recognition of the Egyptian national god and his representative upon the throne. ”

“ The abode of the dead being one of the centres of the religion of the living, the tomb always possesses sanctity. The internal arrangements, with platforms or hewn benches, will often suggest some burial-ritual. The cup-marks, which frequently appear near or even in the tomb itself, like those still to be seen upon Palestinian dolmens, could serve for sacrifices or libations, {36} or to collect the refreshing rain for the soul of the deceased. ”

“ On the Egyptian side are Amon, the sun-god, Sutekh (here an Egyptian deity, see p. 83) , the male and female gods of the mountains and the rivers of Egypt, of the heavens, the soil, the great sea, the wind and the storms. The treaty also bore a representation of the king of the Kheta and his queen embraced respectively by Sutekh the ruler of the heavens, and a goddess whose name is lost. To the gods of Palestine there is no reference; Palestine did not enjoy political independence. ”

“ The mere capture of the gods was sometimes enough to lead to overtures for peace. But an Assyrian king would even repair the dilapidated captive deities, and having inscribed upon them the 'might' of his god and {81} the 'writing of his name' would restore them to a trusted vassal. In Palestine the petty rulers enjoyed considerable freedom provided they paid their tribute, and supported their suzerain. We do not learn that Egypt sought to amalgamate subdued peoples and make of them 'one folk' (lit. mouth) , as was claimed by Tiglath-Pileser I. and other Assyrian kings. ”

“ But there is a general tendency in religion to soften crude rites, save when a particularly efficacious offering is felt necessary in the midst of some grave crisis, and of the changes in that background of cult which has survived throughout the history of Palestine, the substitution of the animal for the human victim is the most significant. ”

“ The conviction that man was made in the likeness of the gods (who are therefore anthropomorphic) implies certain conceptions of their nature, the development of which belongs to the history of religion, and in turning next to the spirit-world of Ancient Palestine it is necessary that we should be prepared to appreciate a mental outlook profoundly different from our own. ”

“ Among the Amarna Tablets were Babylonian mythological texts which had been carefully studied or used for reading-exercises in Egypt. One, the myth of Eresh-ki-gal and Nergal, narrating the descent of the latter into Hades, recalls the story of Persephone. Another, the myth of Adapa, tells how the hero who refused the food and water of life in heaven was denied the gift of immortality. It is inconceivable that Palestinian speculation did not turn to the mysteries of life and death, or that a people should acknowledge Nergal—or any other deity—without some formal beliefs. ”

“ A holy thing is one which has been set aside, dedicated, or restricted; it is charged with supernatural influence which is contagious; everything {47} that comes in contact with it also becomes holy. In some cases it is provided that this inconvenient sanctity may be purged; in others, the thing has to be destroyed. When the Talmud says that a Canonical Book of the Old Testament 'defiles' the hand, it means that the very sanctity of the book demands that the hand should be ceremonially purified or cleansed before touching anything else. ”

“ He is supreme over a local area; he is ready even to fight for his followers against the foe; for all practical purposes he is virtually the god of the district. Some of the shrines are sacred to a woman who passes for the sister or the daughter of a saint at the same or a neighbouring locality. Even the dog has been known to have a shrine in his honour, and the animal enters into Palestinian folk-lore in a manner which this unclean beast of Mohammedanism hardly seems to deserve. ”