Lectures on the religion of the Semites. First series, The fundamental institutions / by the late W. Robertson Smith.

  • Smith, W. Robertson (William Robertson), 1846-1894.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on the religion of the Semites. First series, The fundamental institutions / by the late W. Robertson Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    130/536 (page 110)
    to local Baalim, was unknown; but this impression is not accurate. From the Coran (vi. 137) and other sources we have sufficient evidence that the settled Arabs paid to the god a regular tribute from their fields, apparently by marking off as his a certain portion of the irrigated and cultivated ground.1 Thus as regards the settled Arabs the parallelism with the other Semites is complete, and the only question is whether cults of the Baal type and the name of Baal itself were not borrowed, along with agriculture, from the northern Semitic peoples. This question I am disposed to answer in the affirma- tive ; for I find nothing in the Arabic use of the word bo'l and its derivatives which is inconsistent with the view that they had their origin in the cultivated oases, and much that strongly favours such a view. The phrase “ land which the Baal waters ” has no sense till it is opposed to “ land which the hand of man waters,” and irrigation is certainly not older than agriculture. It is questionable whether the idea of the godhead as the permanent or immanent source of life and fertility—a very different ] All the evidence on this point has been confused by an early misunder- standing of the passage in the Coran : ‘ ‘ They set apart for Allah a portion of the tilth or the cattle he has created, and say, This is Allilh’s—as they fancy—and this belongs to our partners (idols); but what is assigned to idols does not reach Allah, and what is assigned to Allah really goes to the idols.” It is plain that the heathen said indifferently “this belongs to Allah,” meaning the local god (cf. Wei 111. Haul. p. 185), or this belongs to such and such a deity (naming him), and Mohammed argues, exactly as Hosea does in speaking of the homage paid by his contemporaries to local Baalim, whom they identified with Jehovah, that whether they say “Allah” or “Hobal,” the real object of their homage is a false god. But the traditional interpretation of the text is that one part was set aside for the supreme Allah and another for the idols, and this distortion has coloured all accounts of what the Arabs actually did, for of course historical tradition must be corrected by the Coran. Allowance being made for this error, which made the second half of the verse say that Allah was habitually cheated out of his share in favour of the idols, tho notices in Ibn Hisham, p. 53, Sprenger, Lcb. Moll. iii. 358, Pocock, Specimen, p. 112, may be accepted as based upon fact. In Pocoek’s citation from the Nazm al-dorr it appears that irrigated land is referred to.