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.

    98/536 (page 78)
    the god were not necessarily in a position of political dependence on his old worshippers, and the religious sense of the term ger became detached from the idea of social inferiority. But the relation of the new worshippers to the god was no longer the same as on the old purely national system. It was more dependent and less per- manent ; it was constituted, not by nature and inherited privilege, but by submission on the worshipper’s side and free bounty on the side of the god; and in every way it tended to make the relation between man and god more distant, to make men fear the god more and throw more servility into their homage, while at the same time the higher feelings of devotion were quickened by the thought that the protection and favour of the god was a thing of free grace and not of national right. How important this change was may be judged from the Old Testament, where the idea that the Israelites are Jehovah’s clients, sojourning in a land where they have no rights of their own, but are absolutely dependent on His bounty, is one of the most characteristic notes of the new and more timid type of piety that distinguishes post-exilic Judaism from the religion of Old Israel.1 In the old national religions a man felt sure of his standing with the national god, unless he forfeited it by a distinct breach of social law; but the client is accepted, so to speak, on his good behaviour, an idea which precisely accords with the anxious legality of Judaism after the captivity. In Judaism the spirit of legality was allied with genuine moral earnestness, as we see in the noble description of the character that befits Jehovah’s ger drawn in Ps. xv.; but among the heathen Semites we find the same spirit of legalism, the same timid uncertainty as to a man’s standing 1 Lev. xxv. 23; Ps. xxxix. 12 [Heb. 13]; Ps. cxix. 19; 1 Cliron. xxix. 15.