* There appears to be no doubt that the conception of Para- dise with its four rivers is borrowed from Eastern (? Babylonian) myths, and that the description of the rivers (Gn 210-14) is a later insertion in the early narrative. With regard to this insertion [not to the whole myth] Stade may be right in holding (art. ‘Der Mythos vom Paradies, Gn 2. 3, und die Zeit seiner Einwanderung in Israel’ in ZAT'W, 1903, p. 172 ff.) that it was not adopted prior to the middle of the 8th cent. B.c. The de- scription of Paradise possesses religious interest only in so far as it Serves as a preparation for the story of the Fall (see below) : for our present purpose everything else may be left out of account.
| 668 RELIGION OF ISRAEL
RELIGION OF ISRAEL
phasis which is laid in the Biblical record on the fateful significance of sin and its worst conse- quence—exclusion from the Garden of Eden, 2.¢. from communion with God. Here we have not only—as happens elsewhere so frequently in myths —forebodings, but actual perceptions of a profound religious character, to which cognate myths of other nations present no parallel.
(6) We remarked above that questions as to the nature and destiny of man are far below the horizon of individual reflexion in the primeval history of a people, and arise only when a higher stage of development has been reached. One ex- ception, however, must be made. This relates to the question, What befalls man at last after the death of the body? Hitherto we have only touched lightly upon this question, in speaking of possible survivals of Animism in the pre-Mosaic religion of Israel. We there (see above, p. 614%) found that the belief in the existence of shades or ‘spirits of the dead’ must have found strong and peculiar support in the appearances of the dead in dreams. But here we have to do with the whole circle of conceptions that centre about Shé’ol* or the under world, the place of assembly of the dead. The reason why we have not discussed these earlier is simply because it is not till the period with which we are dealing that the mention of Sh#6l is de- monstrable, and because we have no sure ground for attributing the Shé’ol-belief to the Mosaic, not to speak of the pre- Mosaic, period. There is nothing impossible in the supposition that it was found as early as that, but the view is equally open to us that this whole circle of conceptions was first encountered by Israel upon Canaanitish soil and thence taken over by them. Support for this view might be found in the circumstance that necromancy, which stands in the closest connexion with the Sh@6l-belief, also came under the notice of the Israelites for the first time, to all appear- ance, in Canaan. This does not prevent our tracing its origin in the last resort to Babylon. +
Now, it cannot be proved that the Babylonian influence first made itself felt, as is so often asserted at present, in the time of Sulomon. On the contrary, the earliest notices of Shé’ol (Gn 37% 42°8 [in almost identical terms in 442% 31], Nu 16%- 33, all probably J) certainly leave the impression that we have here to do with a conception universally familiar, and hence requiring no more precise de- scription. From the early passages nothing more can be gathered than that Shé’dl is thought of as a subterranean space, for one ‘goes down’ to it. Yet it cannot be doubted that the other two con- stant characteristics of Shé’dl—the thick dark- ness which prevails there, and the impossibility of returning thence—were connected from the first with its conception.{ But detailed descriptions belong one and all to later times, even to the latest of all,§ and it is difficult to say whether (as,
* Regarding the etymology of biny, it may suffice here to remark that it is impossible to accept either the derivation from the root sha@’al, ‘ask,’ ‘demand’ (as the place that claims all living for itself), or that from shd‘al with the assumed mean- ing of ‘to be hollow’ (so that Shé62 would be the ‘hollow’ or ‘cayern’). Rather is it from a root shi, which includes the notions of wide gaping and deep sinking. Hence the idea underlying the Heb. Sh€6l is that of a subterranean cavity. This does not exclude the supposition that the form Shé6J in this sense is due to the Hebraizing of a foreign word—according to Zimmern (ap. Beer, ‘ Der biblische Hades,’ p. 15), of the Bab. shil{djam, ‘west’; cf. Enoch 221, where also Shé'dl is situated in the West.
t On the undeniable points of contact between the Babylonian and the Israelitish Shé’l-belief, cf, especially A. Jeremias, Die bab.-assyr, Vorstellungen vom Leben nach dem Vode (Leipzig, 1887), and Hédlle wnd Paradies bei den Babyloniern 2 (Leipzig, 1903).
t We here leave out of account the calling up of spirits of the dead by necromancers, which was an article of the popular faith, but outside the pale of Jahwism.
§ Of the very copious literature on this subject we note
for example, in the bold picture of Is 14°, or the approach to a distinguishing of a Tartarus within the under world in Ezk 32?3, Is 14, also (?) Hos | 13'4) they are to be set down to the account of foreign influence or of independent poetic imagina- tion. The decision between these two possibilities is all the harder because of the way in which the conception of Shé’l is constantly mixed up with pictures derived from the rest of the grave. But this does not justify the view that by Shé’ol—at least originally—nothing more was meant than the grave. No doubt, the idea of a place of as- sembly of the dead would derive ever fresh nour- ishment from the contemplation of the roomy cave-tomb in which perhaps a whole tribe of contemporaries were buried.* It was all too natural to think of those who had been united in life as still holding converse with one another there. But passages like Gn 37® exclude the thought of any fellowship in the grave.