Lectures on the religion of the Semites. First series : the fundamental institutions / by W. Robertson Smith.
- Date:
- 1889
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Lectures on the religion of the Semites. First series : the fundamental institutions / by W. Robertson Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![prophet Malachi calls a heathen woman the daughter of a strange god. ^ These phrases are doubtless accommoda- tions to the language which the heathen neighbours of Israel used about themselves; they belong to an age when society in Syria and Palestine was still mainly organised on the tribal system, so that each clan, or even each complex of clans forming a small independent people, traced back its origin to a great first father; and they indicate that, just as in Greece, this father or dp'^r]yeT7]<; of the race was commonly identified with the god of the race. With this it accords that in the judgment of most modern enquirers several names of deities appear in the old genealogies of nations in the Book of Genesis. , Edom, for example, the progenitor of the Edomites, was identified by the Hebrews with Esau the brother of Jacob, but to the heathen he was a god, as appears from the theophorous proper name Obededom, worshipper of Edom. ^ The remains of such I Mai. ii. 11. = Bathgen, Beitrage zur Semitisclien Religionsg. p. 10, objects that not all names compounded with '^2V are theophorous. And it is true that on the Fabatsean inscriptions we tind names of this form in which the second element is the name of a king, but this is in a state of society where the king was revered as at least quasi-divuie, and where the apotheosis of dead kings was not unknown. Cf. Wellh. p. 2sq.; Euting, Nabat. Iiischr. p. 32 sq.; and especially Clermont-Ganneau, Rec. d'ArcUol. Or. i. 39 sqq. What Dnx means in G. I. 8. pt. i. pp. 365, 367, I do not, in the present state of the evidence, presume to guess; but I venture to say that I^D cannot in the context mean king of men. As examples of names in the genealogies of Genesis which reappear in other quarters as names of gods, I have elsewhere adduced Uz (Gen. xxii. 21, xxxvi. 28; LXX, n?, n, • and in Job i. 1, A</<r,T,s) ='Aud {Kinship, 261) and Yeush (Gen. xxxvi. 14) = Yaghiith. To the second of these identi- fications, objections of much force have been raised by Lagarde, Mitth. ii. 77, Bildung der Nomina, p. 124. The other has been criticised by Nbldeke, ZDMO. xl. 184, but his remarks do not seem to me to be conclusive. That the Arabian god is a mere personification of Time is a hard saying, and the view that 'awr/o or 'auda in the line of al-A'sha is derived from the name of the god, which Noldeke finds to be doch etwas bizarr, has at least the authority of Ibn al-Kalbi as cited by Jauhari, and more clearly iu the Lisdn.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21924120_0059.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
