rescues him from the attack of Jahweh by cir- cumcising her son with a (sharp) stone (cf. also the stone knives of Jos 5°, a proof of the high antiquity of the practice), and touching the pudenda of Moses with the severed (and still bleeding) fore- skin, while she exclaims, ‘Thou art to me a bride- groom of blood.’ This can mean only that she transfers the efficacy of the child’s circumcision symbolically to the husband, and declares him to be what he ought to have been at marriage, namely a bridegroom consecrated by the blood of circumcision, and thus safe from the anger of the tribal god. Whether, perhaps in very early times, the blood shed in circumcision was employed in any other sacral transaction, is a question that must be left unsettled.
_ Another account of the origin of circumcision is found in the original text of Jos 5°", namely v.? without the harmonistic additions ‘again’ and ‘the second time,’ and vv.* 8% We are told that Joshua circumcised the Israelites with stone knives at the Hill of Foreskins, and that the place was hence called Gilgal, i.e. ‘rolling away’ of the reproach which arose from the impurity of the uncircumcised condition, and which called forth the contempt of the Egyptians. AsStade(ZATW, 1886, p. 132 ff.) has shown, we have here an ety- mological legend intended to explain the name Gilgal ; in reality the ‘ Hill of Foreskins’ derived its name from the circumstance that there, beside the ancient sanctuary of Gilgal, was the common place of circumcision for the neighbouring (Benjamite) youths, and that their foreskins were buried in that hill.
When, finally, the Priests’ Code (Gn 7108.) makes the introduction of circumcision as a sign of the covenant rest upon a command of God to Abraham, an explanation is thus offered of the circumstance that all Abraham’s descendants—the Arabs, Edomites, Moabites, and Ammonites—were circumcised (a condition of things that applied also, it is true, to the Egyptians and the Phe- nicians, although not to the Philistines).
Blood-revenge. — That this custom, which is assumed in Gn 4'4 3 as already existing amongst the earliest generations of men, actually took its rise in the pre- Mosaic period, is proved by its wide diffusion also among the heathen Semites and elsewhere. The originally religious character of the practice is supported, apart from other con- siderations, by the extraordinary tenacity with which it maintained itself—a tenacity which would be scarcely conceivable without religious motives. Tt is true that the precise bond of connexion is not now discoverable. In view of the above- discussed narrative, 2S 211* (cf. esp. v.9 § before Jahweh’), it would appear as if the putting of the murderer to death was originally regarded as a sacrifice by which the anger of the tribal god was appeased. According to the earliest notions, this anger is due less to moral causes (as came after- wards to be the established view, cf. e.g. Gn 9°) than to the damage sustained by the god through the loss of a life belonging to him; and, as the members of the tribe, in the first instance the family, are responsible for preserving the lives that are the property of the god, blood-guiltiness attaches to them until the guilt is atoned for by the death of the murderer. ‘The original absence of an ethical viewpoint is evident from the simple fact that no distinction is made between murder and unintentional manslaughter ; even in Dt 444 (a probable addition by P) and Nu 35: the right of blood-revenge in the latter case is still ideally re- cognized, although care is taken to make this right ineffective by providing an asylum for the man- slayer in one of the Cities of Refuge. Jahwism was thus able to give a milder form to this
deeply-rooted custom, but not to abolish it entirely. From the narrative of 2 8 14° (which is fictitious, indeed, but no doubt reflects the conditions of real life), where ‘the whole family’ demands that the fratricide be given up, we learn that occasionally the execution of blood-revenge might be prevented by the intervention of the king. At the same time, the language of the woman of Tekoa (v.°) contains the suggestion that by such intervention the king might bring guilt upon himself. Here, again, we see the mechanical way in which the matter was viewed by primitive rigid custom.
Summary.—Looking back now on the results which we have reached by examination of the pre-Mosaic period of the religion of Israel, we have been able in not a few instances to point to phenomena which contain the germ of similar appearances on the soil of Jahwism, and which are of the utmost importance for the understand- ing of the latter.
In the first place, as to the notion of God which prevailed in that period, it is only in a very restricted sense that we can speak of such a notion at all. The principal constituent of the yet rudi- mentary religious sense was fear of the constantly threatening but always incalculable influence of demonic powers. These powers are of very varied kinds, and it would be vain to try to reduce them to any system, or to assume that any reflexions re- garding their nature and treatment passed through the minds of men in the state of nature that then prevailed. Men believed in them upon the ground of custom inherited from birth, and acted towards them according to the ancient sacred usage fol- lowed by all members of the family and the tribe. These ‘demons’ are partly spirits of the dead, and, ~ above all, the spirits of the nearest kin of the family. Besides measures adopted to keep them off or to avert injury at their hands, there were acts prompted by dutiful affection towards them, but we have no perfectly clear traces that Animism in the narrower sense had already developed into Ancestor Worship.—A very important réle is played, again, by all the local nwmina (elim), whose presence appears as attached to sacred trees, stones, and springs. They are not identical with the latter in such a sense that we could speak here of a deification of nature, but they are locally so inseparable from these objects that they can be found and worshipped only at the particu- lar spots in question.—This ‘ Po ydemonism’ ad- vances a stage when such a numen loci comes to be regarded as the tutelary god of a family or clan, or even of a whole tribe. In place of simple gifts of homage or for propitiation, rites are now introduced whose object is to witness or to estab- lish a close connexion, nay a blood relationship, with the Deity. Even if Totemism cannot be