RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Alsace-Lorraine Altar
is usually taken to mean a raised structure; but etymology and history are against this. " Altar " is the rendering in the Old Testament of mizbeah (Aram, madhbah), " place of sacrifice," and in the New Testament of thusiasterion, having the same meaning. The Greek word bomos indeed means a raised structure; but the possession of two words by the Greek suggests development i. Altar not and differentiation. The Latin ara Necessarily means the seat or resting-place, not a Raised " of the victim " (so Andrews, Latin Structure. Lexicon, s.v.), but of the deity; and on that account the word was avoided by the Fathers. The word " altar " has its ultimate root in the actual purport of the early sacrifice (q.v.), viz., a meal of worshipers and worshiped. So far from the place of sacrifice being invariably a raised structure, it was sometimes a trench (e.g., in the celebrated sacrifice of Ulysses described in Odyssey, id.), while in the famous tombs at Mycenae there were depressions connected by small shafts with the graves, and generally explained as the places of deposit of offerings to the dead. At the present day the African places his offering of oil to the tree spirit not on an altar, but on the ground. To understand the development of the altar it must be recalled that, as is generally conceded, religion has passed through the animistic stage. That is to say, man in his primitive state might regard any object — tree, rock, mountain, fountain, stream, sea, etc. — as the seat of divine power. His mental processes then led him to approach whatever he regarded as divinity as he approached human superiors, namely with gifts, which he applied directly to the objects of his worship, casting his offerings into fountain, stream, sea, or fire, laying them at the foot or on the top of the mountain, or smearing oil or fat, or pouring blood or wine on the divine stone. In other words, these objects were both divinity and altar.
The best Biblical example of this primitive mode of thinking and acting is in the passage Gen. xxviii. 11-18. Jacob had pillowed his head on a stone, and there resulted his dream of the ladder. In accordance with the mental processes of his time, on awakening he conceived the cause of this dream to be the divinity in (or of) the stone — note his exclamation, " this is a Bethel" (a " place or house of God ") — and he " poured oil upon 2. Altar and the stone." In this he paralleled the Divinity custom of the pre-Mohammedan Arabs, One. as proved by W R. Smith {Rel. of Sem., Lecture v.) and Wellhausen (Heidentum, pp. 99 sqq.). The passages referred to in these two authors demonstrate that such a stone was more than an altar; it was the visible embodiment of the presence of deity. The same might be shown in the customs of other peoples, as for example, the Samoans (cf. Turner, Samoa, London, 1884, pp. 24, 281). This anointing of sacred stones is a custom followed by the Samoyeds to this day, and was known in Russia and in the west of Ireland in the early part of the last century. The custom is entirely on a par with the superstitious practise, only recently abandoned, in remote parts of Wales and Cornwall, of putting pins and other trifles in
wells and springs reputed to have healing qualities, doubtless in pagan times the seat of worship (cf. Folk-Lore, in which many examples are given). The Greek and Roman custom of pouring a libation to Neptune into the sea at the beginning of a voyage will occur to the reader as a survival from the time when the sea was a deity and not merely the domain of one.
The stone (in the Old Testament the word is often rendered '' pillar," q.v.) and cairn " or witness " (Gen. xxxi. 45-54; cf. Josh. xxiv. 26-27 with xxii. 26-27) were almost certainly such embodiments of the presence of deity (note the words, Gen. xxxi. 52, " This heap be witness and this pillar [stone] be witness," and, in Josh., " It [this stone] hath heard "); the covenant and oath were under the protection of the deity there present (cf . Baal-berith = " Baal [protector] of the covenant," Judges viii. 33, and El-berith= "God [protector] of the covenant," Josh. ix. 46, R. V., and the Greek Zeus orkios = " Zeus [protector] of the oath "). In the Genesis passage the covenantmaking feast, at which the clan and the deity were commensals, followed the appeal to the covenantguarding object. And while the fact is not expressly stated, that the pillar of Jacob and Laban was anointed hardly admits of question, in view of the custom attending the holding of such a feastsacrifice. At least in early times, then, the same object was sometimes both divinity and altar.
The next step shows the differentiation between the two. The later Arabic term for altar is nusb from the same root as the Hebrew mazzebah {" pillar "). It has been shown by W- R. Smith and Wellhausen in the works already cited that the ansab (pi. of nusb) were stones, the objects of worship, and later merely altars. This shows a development in conception. A similar unfolding took place in Hebrew practise (see II., below), where stones are shown to have been used 3. Altar and as altars. But often among the He- Divinity brews the stone pillar was retained, Differen- an altar was erected, and the two tiated. stood side by side (Hos. iii. 4; Isa. xix. 19). Then the pillars came to be more or less ornate (cf. the Greek Hermce and the two pillars in Solomon's Temple, 1 Kings vii. 15-22, which last are hard to explain except as a transference to the Temple of the pillars customary at shrines). That the mazzebah represented deity is now generally granted. The old custom of applying the sacrifice to the monolith had become outworn; it was no longer deity but only deity's representative, and the altar was provided on which to place (or, in the case of fire-sacrifices, to consume) the offerings.
That the altars were rude at first, and that the elaborate ones of later times were the product of developed esthetic perceptions, is as clear from archeological investigations as is the development of the house and temple from the simple cave or booth dwellings, and of the elaborate ritual from the simple worship of primitive ages.
The location of altars is implicitly indicated in the foregoing. Wherever deity indicated its presence either by some such subjective manifestation
Altar