It must be confessed, however, that-a proper critical examination of the religious history of Israel has shown incontrovertibly that the above view of the primeval and the patriarchal religion became possible only by carrying back unreservedly to the centuries prior to Moses, up to the very commencement of all, the conceptions and the conditions of the Jahweh religion as these present themselves somewhere about the 9th cent. B.C. The picture thus drawn of the early history is therefore an extremely valuable authority for the period from which it emanates; but for the pre- Mosaic period we can.make use of it only with the utmost caution and with strict observance of complicated critical principles. We then discover that in various traditions found in Genesis as well as in those of many other books of the Bible a recollection has been preserved of the pre-Mosaic religious stage of Israel. It is true that this recollection is not infrequently so faint and so unintelligible to the narrators themselves that they take no offence at it, nay, believe it to be in perfect accord with the religion of Jahweh. In such instances the correct interpretation of the tradition may be confirmed or even discovered in two ways: (1) from other traces of the same tra- dition in the OT, even outside Genesis ; (2) from the analogies found in other, especially Semitic, religions,* which will be found not infrequently to supply a surprising amount of information about ritual customs which are strange, and which were no longer understood by Israel itself. There is a repetition here of a phenomenon whose occurrence may be noted almost all over the world: namely, the tendency of religious usages to maintain them- selves with the greatest tenacity even after they have come, in consequence of altered religious conceptions, to lose all real meaning. ‘Their retention is generally justified by giving them some new interpretation which renders them tolerable to the new religion (so, for instance, with circumcision in Israel), or they may continue to be practised simply through force of habit, without any attempt at explanation at all. The latter principle may be found to hold good, for instance, of all or at least the majority of mourn- ing usages. In all probability, the whole of these had their root in religious motives; but that this was understood we cannot assume except in those instances in which they were expressly prohibited by the Jahweh religion. For the most part they represent simply petrified custom, whose original meaning it is often very difficult to determine. At all events, the symbolical interpretations (for in- stance, that of the rending of the garments as an expression of utter indifference to one’s outward appearance, or even as a symbol of the rending of the heart with grief), which we meet with fre-
* On the subject of Semitic religion we possess such extremely valuable contributions as J. Wellhausen’s Reste arabischen Heidentums (Berlin, 1887; 2nd ed. 1897), and W. Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (London, 1889 ; 2nd ed. 1894; Germ, tr. by R. Sttibe, Freiburg i. B. 1899). Much valuable material is contained also in B. Stade’s Gesch. des Volkes Israel, Berlin, 1887 (Buch 7: ‘Israels Glaube und Sitte in vorprophetischer Zeit’), Bd. i. p. 358 ff. Cf. also Ch. Piepenbring, ‘La religion primitive des Hébreux’ (Rev. de ?Hist. des Religions, 1889, pp. 171-202); and ©. G. Montefiore, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Religron of the ancient Hebrews, London, 1892.
RELIGION OF ISRAEL
are foredoomed to rejection.
I. TRACES OF A PRE-MOoSAIC RELIGION OF ISRAEL.
Before we attempt now to collect the possible traces of a pre-Mosaic religion of Israel, there are two points that we must emphasize very strongly: (1) that in almost every instance we have here to deal with hypotheses and not with facts, so that our task will be in reality to deter- mine the greater or smaller degree of probability attaching to any hypothesis; (2) that everything which survived in Israel merely as a custom that was not understood, may claim an interest from the point of view of Archeology and the History of Religion in general, but has, strictly speaking, none so far as the Religion and Theology of the Bible are concerned. It appears tous that the effect is simply to lead one astray as to the correct understanding of the religion of Israel, when certain recent descriptions leave the reader in doubt whether all kinds of primeval customs were not practised in Israel with full consciousness of their original signification, and, when introduced into the frame- work of the Jahweh religion, so continued down to the latest times. The truth is that anything which was recognized by the Jahweh religion as of heathen origin, and whose meaning was under- stood by it, was declared unclean and accordingly prohibited absolutely, as, for instance, necromancy. Any one who notwithstanding addicted himself to such practices, set himself deliberately in oppo- sition to the requirements of his religion, The fact that this happened again and again gives us no more right to saddle the religion of Israel with these derelictions than we have to hold Christianity responsible for all the heathen superstition which still continues to prevail even in Christian nations.
i. CONCEPTION OF THE DEITY, ETC.—The most . important question which has to be dealt with by any one who undertakes to give an account of a particular stage of religion is that relating to the nature of the god or gods recognized.