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.

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    image or symbol accompanies the host to battle. When the ark was brought into the camp of Israel, the Philistines said, “ Gods are come into the camp; who can deliver us from the hand of these mighty gods?”1 They judged from their own practice, for when David defeated them at Baal- perazim, part of the booty consisted in their idols which had been carried into the field.2 When the Carthaginians, in their treaty with Philip of Macedon,3 speak of “ the gods that take part in the campaign,” they doubtless refer to the inmates of the sacred tent which was pitched in time of war beside the tent of the general, and before which prisoners were sacrificed after a victory.4 Similarly an Arabic poet says, “ Yaghuth went forth with us against Morad”;5 that is, the image of the god Yaghuth was carried into the fray. You observe how literal and realistic was the conception of the part taken by the deity in the wars of his worshippers. When the gods of the several Semitic communities took part in this way in the ancestral feuds of their worshippers, it was impossible for an individual to change his religion without changing his nationality, and a whole community could hardly change its religion at all without being absorbed into another stock or nation. Religious like political ties were transmitted from father to son; for a man could not choose a new god at will; the gods of his fathers were the only deities on whom he could count as friendly and ready to accept his homage, unless he forswore his own kindred and was received into a new 1 1 Sam. iv. 7 sqq. 2 2 Sam. v. 21. 3 Polybius, vii. 9. 4 Diodorus, xx. 65. 5 Yacut, iv. 1023. A survival of the same idea is seen in the portable tabernacle of the Carmathians (Ibn al-Jauzi, ap. De Goeje, Carmathcs [1886], pp. 180, 220 sq.), from which victory was believed to descend. De Goeje compares the portable sanctuary of Mokhtar (Tabari, ii. 702 sqq.) and the 'otfa still used by Bedouin tribes (Burckhardt, Bed. and Wah. i. 115 ; uady Anne Blunt, Bedouin Tribes, ii. 146 ; Doughty, i. 61, ii. 304).