Semitic religions

“ But the Assyrians had a pure strain of that Semitic blood which has done so much to systematize religions ancient and modern. The Semite cannot content himself with half-truths. It is essential to his very life, that he must feel himself upon sure religious ground. He hates doubt and despises the doubter. At an early time in his ancient career he had so securely systematized religion as to supply the earliest instances of pure dogma. ”

“ No other Sat has even a right to exist.
All these Semitic religions have their basic tenet as Bible, or Koran and its un-changeability and acceptance of Moses, Jesus or Mohammed as the prophet as a bedrock of their philosophy. The basic postulates in the societies from the West have been codified in those books, namely Bible or Koran or Talmud. All of them accept God and the individual as distinct duality. ”

“ I grant that religious fanaticism has been powerful elsewhere, and particularly where there has been a strong priestly class, as in India; but for the Semitic religions, fanaticism is characteristic. Among the Persian priests of the Sásánian period it first became powerful under Semitic influence and in conflict with Semitic religion. The same trait is conspicuous in Islam. There, indeed, it is more deeply rooted, and of stricter inward necessity, than in Christianity, though it has seldom risen to such heights of atrocity as it has sometimes reached in the latter. ”

“ Among the six religions of the Aryan and Semitic world, there are three that are opposed to all missionary enterprise—Judaism, Brahmanism, and Zoroastrianism; and three that have a missionary character from their very beginning—Buddhism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity.
The Jews, particularly in ancient times, never thought of spreading their religion. Their religion was to them a treasure, a privilege, a blessing, something to distinguish them, as the chosen people of God, from all the rest of the world. ”

“ When we find certain gods invested with solar functions it does not follow that they were originally sun-gods—such functions may be a necessary result of their preëminence. Out of the great mass of Babylonian and Assyrian deities we may select a few whose cults illustrate the method of development of the religious conceptions. As non-Semitic (Sumerian) religious and other ideas and words appear to have been adopted by the Semitic Babylonians, it is not always easy to distinguish between Semitic and non-Semitic conceptions in the cults as known to us. ”

“ It is only where the Semitic spirit has been met and checked by the influence of another race that this is not the case; the high place retained by the woman in Babylonian society would of itself have been a proof that Semitic culture had here been engrafted on that of an older people, even if the monuments had not revealed to us that such was indeed the fact. ”

“ The materials for the study of their institutions and population are abundant, but lend themselves to discussion rather than to a summary of admitted facts. In the early history of south-western Asia the Semites form the most important ethnic group, which is primarily linguistic but also shares other remarkable characteristics. Two of the greatest religions of the world, Christianity and Islam, are Semitic in origin, as well as Judaism. ”

“ The religion of Arabia has made its people fanatics, although according to Nöldeke, “fanaticism is characteristic of all Semitic religions.” But he forgets the real distinction between intolerance of another religion on ethical grounds as in the case of Judaism, and the infinitely hard, one-sided, crude exclusiveness of Islam.
The Arabs rarely have the power of taking in complex unities at a glance; the talent for arrangement is absent. An Arab carpenter cannot draw a right angle, nor can an Arab servant lay a tablecloth square on the table. ”

“ Robertson Smith in his valuable work, The Religion of the Semites, mentions that in his view Semitic religion does not differ so fundamentally from the other types of world religion as many writers on the subject appear to think. But the longer one considers it the greater do the barriers between Semitic and other religions appear and the more clearly marked their lines of demarcation. The prolonged isolation to which the Semitic peoples seem to have been subjected appears to have greatly affected their manner of religious thought. ”

“ The great economic movement starting at the beginning of our era which produced the colonization of the Latin world by Syrian slaves and merchants, not only modified the material civilization of Europe, but also its conceptions and beliefs. The Semitic cults entered into successful competition with those of Asia Minor and Egypt. They may not have had so stirring a liturgy, nor have been so thoroughly absorbed in preoccupation with a future [199] life, although they taught an original eschatology, but they did have an infinitely higher idea of divinity. ”

“ If we leave out of consideration those vague and varying forms of faith and worship which 239 we find among uncivilized and unsettled races, among races ignorant of reading and writing, who have neither a literature nor laws, nor even hymns and prayers handed down by oral teaching from father to son, from mother to daughter, we see that the number of the real historical religions of mankind amounts to no more than eight. The Semitic races have produced three—the Jewish, the Christian, the Mohammedan ”

“ The Semitic Baal was a lord or king of human shape and passions. He thus stood in marked contrast to the Sumerian ghost or spirit; and, as we have seen, the gulf between them is too deep and broad to be spanned by the doctrine of evolution. For the Sumerian the world outside man was peopled with spirits and demons; for the [pg 496] Semite it was a human world, since man was made in the image of the gods. The triumph of the gods of light and order over the monsters of chaos symbolised not only the birth of the present creation, but also the theological victory of the Semite over the Sumerian. ”

“ It is usually the fashion to ascribe this concentration of religion upon the present world, with its repellent views of Hades and limitation of divine rewards and punishments to this life, to the inherent peculiarities of the Semitic mind. But for this there is no justification. There is nothing in the Semitic mind which would necessitate such a theological system. It is true that the sun-god was the central object of the Semitic Babylonian faith, and that to the nomads of Arabia the satisfaction of their daily wants was the practical end of existence. ”

“ Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, all teaching the strict unity of God, have all aimed at becoming universal. Judaism failed because it sought proselytes instead of making converts. Islam, the religion of Mohammed (in reality a Judaizing Christian sect) failed because it sought to make subjects rather than converts. Its conquests over a variety of races were extensive, but not deep. To-day it holds in its embrace at least four very distinct races,—the Arabs, a Semitic race, the Persians, an Indo-European race, the Negroes, and the Turks or Turanians. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nothing could show more plainly its essentially Semitic origin, and the little hold it possessed upon the non-Semitic part of the population. The king was a god only so long as he was a Semite, or subject to Semitic influence and supremacy.
The apotheosis of the king is thus coeval with the rise of Semitic domination in Babylonia. In the older Sumerian epoch we look in vain for any traces of it. Man was not yet divine, for the gods were not yet human. There was as yet no Semitic Bel, and En-lil of Nippur was but a “lord of ghost (s) .” ”

“ The Jews belonged to what has been called the Semitic race. This family, the only historic rival of the Japhetic (or Aryan) race, is ethnologically composed of the Assyrians and Babylonians, the Phoenicians, the Hebrews and other Syrian tribes, the Arabs and the Carthaginians. It is a race which has been great on land and at sea. In the valley of the Euphrates and that of the Tigris its sons carried all the arts of social life to the highest perfection, and became mighty conquerors and warlike soldiers. ”

“ All the better instincts of the human mind were either suppressed or perverted by the influence of a principle equally foreign to the philosophy of the pagan moralists and the ethics of the Semitic religions—so foreign, that the attempt to amalgamate its doctrines with the manful monotheism of the Hebrew lawgiver is the chief cause of those mysterious inconsistencies which have so often frustrated the zeal of its propagandists: a benevolent Allfather, who yet frightfully and eternally tortures a vast plurality of his children ”

“ The belief, finally, in generation as a motive force was part of the religious heritage that was common [pg 397] to the Semitic race. Semitic religion centred in a divine family which corresponded to the family of the worshipper on earth; the gods were fathers and mothers, and begat children like the human parents, after whom they were modelled. In so far, therefore, as the universe was divine, it too must have been evolved in the same fashion ”

“ The ideas attached to the Semitic nêsu were not those which had once clustered around the Zi. On the lips of the Semite even the word Zi itself meant “life” and little more. When [pg 280] Pur-Sin ii. of Ur, a century or two before Abraham, addresses a dedication in Sumerian to the moon-god, he calls himself “the divine Zi of his country”220—in other words, a “god who gives life to his land.” There is no question here of a vital force which is the counterpart of a man or god; we have, on the contrary, the Semitic conception of a divine father from whom his people derive their life. ”

“ Even theft was not unknown among them; a legend tells us, for instance, how the god Zu stole the tablets of destiny which were hung like the Urim and Thummim on the breast of “father Bel,” and therewith acquired for awhile the right and power to control the fate of the universe. As far back as we can trace the history of Semitic religion, whether in Babylonia, in Canaan, or in Arabia, its fundamental conception is always the same; the gods are human, and men are divine. ”

“ But they belonged to the primeval world of chaos; they were the brood of Tiamât, the dragon of lawlessness and night, the demons who had been banished into outer darkness beyond the world of light and of god-fearing men. Like the devils of medieval belief, they were the divine beings of an alien faith which the gods of the new-comers had exiled to the limbo of a dead past. Even the subterranean Hades of Semitic Babylonia recognised them not. The gods worshipped by the Semite were Baalim or “Lords,” like the men whom they protected, and whose creators they were believed to be. ”

“ Each has overpassed all the boundaries of race. Christianity, beginning among the Jews, a Semitic people, passed into Europe, and has become the religion of Greeks, Romans, Kelts, Germans, and the Slavic races of Russia, and has not found it impossible to convert the Africans, the Mongols, and the American Indians. So too the Mohammedan religion, also beginning among the Semitic race, has become the nominal religion of Persia, Turkey, Northern Africa, and Central Asia. Monotheism, therefore, includes a tendency to catholicity. ”

“ Semitic theistic myths differ from Indo-European in that they are almost wholly without the element of personal adventures of gods.1410 Since all known genuine Semitic myths seem to have their original home in Babylonia, and Babylonian mythical material bears marks of Sumerian influence, the question has been raised whether we have any genuinely Semitic mythical biographies of gods. ”

“ Paucity of myths and the other features mentioned above accord with the later rôle of Semitic, especially Hebrew, theism—the tendency to conceive of the deity as on the one hand aloof and transcendent, and on the other hand standing in close social relations with man as his lord and protector. ”

“ But the poet of Babylon remained true to his Semitic point of view; for him creation is a process of generation rather than of emanation; and though the divine or superhuman beings of the old mythology have become mere primordial elements, they are still male and female, begetting children like men and gods.
To find the elemental deities or principles that could thus form links in the chain of evolution, it was necessary to fall back on the spirits or ghosts of the early [pg 390] Sumerian cult who were essentially material in their nature, and had nothing in common with the Semitic Baal. ”

“ We can trace it to the time when the Sumerian first began to be affected by Semitic influence. The sukkal or “angel”-minister plays a prominent part in primitive Babylonian theology, but it is noticeable that he is usually a son of the god whose messages he conveys to gods and men. Asari or Merodach is at once the son and the minister of Ea; Nin-ip, of En-lil. The fact points to an age when Sumerian animism had already been succeeded by Semitic Baalism; the spirit or ghost had become a god in human shape, who begat children and required an envoy. ”