Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/842

764 The religions of both nations were based on a feeling for the powers of nature, whether regarded as destructive and awful, as by the one, or as favourable and lovely, as by the other. Thus the one religion was stern and in tendency moral ; the other soft and iti tendency immoral : there was indeed a difference, but not a clear-cut distinction between them. To come to particulars, the chief object of Canaanitish worship was the dual-natured god of life and fruitfulness, viz., Baal, or rather the Baal, i.e., &quot; the lord,&quot; and his consort Asherah, i.e., &quot; the happy,&quot; and so &quot;happy-making, favourable&quot; (as in Assyrian, Salmanu- asir, &quot; Salman is favourable ). The masculine form is also probably a divine title, and has given its name to the tribe of Asher, as Gad (&quot;good fortune&quot;) to the Gadites. As Movers long ago pointed out, Asherah is not identical with Ashtoreth or Astarte, whose name is philologically different, and who belongs to another type of Semitic religion. Her symbol was the stem of a tree (Deut. xvi. 21; Judg. vi. 25), though this may have been sometimes carved into an image; that of the Baal probably had the form of a cone, arid represented the rays of the sun. It is these symbols which are referred to in the phrase, &quot; the Baals and the Asherahs&quot; (Judg. iii. 7) ; the &quot; groves &quot; of the authorized version is an evident mistranslation (see in the Hebrew or some accurate modern version, Judg. vi. 25 ; 1 Kings xv. 13 ; 2 Kings xxiii. G). The licensed harlotry which formed part of the worship of Asherah was profoundly obnoxious to the later Hebrew writers (Num. xxv. ; Deut. xxiii. 18), though, indeed, even the folk-lore of the Israelites shows traces of aversion to its attendant immorality. An illustration of this is furnished in the narrative of Sodom (Gen. xviii., xix.), which can only refer to the later Canaanites. Simi larly, another writer (Gen. xv. 16) describes &quot;the iniquity of the Amorites &quot; as the divine justification of the Israelitish conquest. It is also the subject of a threatening passage in the Levitical legislation (Lev. xviii.), which if composed during the Babylonian exile, as is held by Graf and Kalisch, is a remarkable evidence of the tenacity of pre-Israelitish customs. Another characteristic of Canaanitish religion, though far from peculiar to this, was soothsaying. After Israelite prophecy had broken its shell, and taken its daring flight into a more spiritual region, its first anxiety was to destroy that rival phenomenon which enslaved the minds of men to gross superstition. Hence the earnest dehortations of Isaiah (ii, 6), and of the writer of Deuteronomy (xviii. 10-14). There was only one relic of Canaanitish times which the disciples of prophetic religion could not or would not throw aside the old traditions. For it can hardly be doubted by uncompromising historical critics that some, perhaps many, of the narratives of Genesis .ire but purified versions of Canaanitish myths and legends. The most obvious examples will naturally be those stories which are attached to localities in Canaan, e.g., Luz and Beersheba. Of course the story of Melchizedek, &quot; the king of Salem,&quot; and &quot; priest of the most high God&quot; (Gen. xiv. 17-24), is not one of these, being out of harmony with all our other notices of the Canaanites. It is also easily separable from the rest of the narrative, and may possibly be as late as the Mac- cabean period, and written in honour of the temple and its priesthood, which are glorified by being, as it were, prefigured in the patriarchal age.

IV. The question has been asked of late, whether a remnant of the old PP u ^ at i n f Palestine may not still be in existence. 3 M. Clermont-Ganneau, following Prof. E. H. Palmer (His tory of the Jewish Nation, p. 64), answers it confidently in the affirmative. In the fellahin or peasants of the Holy Land he sees the descendants of the Canaanites, who, having been reduced to a state of serfdom, were contemDtuously over looked by the successive hordes of conquerors. Their strange superstitious customs have been remarked by every close observer, and are evidently survivals of some early form of religion. M. Ganneau also mentions some curious legendary parallels to Biblical narratives existing among them. Dr Thomson (The Land and the Book, pp. 226-8) holds a similar theory about the sect of the Nusairieh in northern Syria, who are equally bad Moslems, but more probably represent the debris of the later Syrian paganism.

V. We have yet to speak of the ethnological relation of Ethnology the Canaanites and the Israelites. The linguistic evidence points to a kinship as close as that of both to the Phoeni cians. Not only are the personal names of the Canaanites (Melchizedek, Adonibezek, Adonizedek, Oman or Aranyah, of which Araunah seems to be a corruption) pure Hebrew, but so too are the names of their cities, an evidence of still greater value, as given both in the Old Testament and in the lists of the places conquered by Thothmcs III. The latter have been discovered by Mariette-Bey on a kind of triumphal arch at Karnak ; they include 119 names belonging to Canaan, of which 75 have been identified with known Hebrew names of places (Mariette-Bey, in Comptes Rendus de I Acadcmie des Inscriptions, 1874, p. 243, &c.). The same Hebraic character is apparent in the names given in the &quot;Travels of a Mohar&quot; (see the Records of the Past, vol. ii. pp. 107-116), which have been illustrated, we understand, by the recent explorations of Lieutenant Conder. How, it has been asked, is this community of language to be accounted for 1 The problem is a real one to those who regard the Table of Nations (Gen. x.) as an ethnological authority, for in that docu ment the Canaanites are classed separately from the Hebrews among the descendants of Ham. From this, as we believe, antiquated point of view, it becomes necessary to assume that the Canaanites borrowed their language from some of the genuine descendants of Shem. From the Israelites ? But they spoke the language long be fore the Israelite immigration. From an aboriginal Semitic- speaking race 1 ? But there is no historical evidence for the existence of such a people. We are thus driven to accept the view that the Table of Nations is arranged not on an ethnological but on a geographical principle. The Canaanites will then be classed among the descendants of Ham as belonging, according to the compilers, to the southern terrestrial zone not, however, the Canaanitas, in our sense of the word, for these formed no part of the original Table (see ), but the Phoenicians. Apart from this mis understood document there is no difficulty in admitting the affinity of the three nations, the Israelites, the Canaanites, and the Phoenicians, who all appear to have migrated successively from a Babylonian centre (see ). The last to move westward were probably the Hebrews. They are generally supposed to have originally spoken an Aramaic dialect, but after entering Palestine to have adopted that of the more civilized Canaanites (see Introduc tions of Bleek and De Wette-Schrader). The only evidence, however, offered in support of this view is Gen. xxxi. 47, where the &quot; cairn of witness &quot; receives a Hebrew name from Jacob, an Aramaic from Laban. From this it is inferred that Laban ; s great-uncle Abraham must, according to tradi tion, have spoken Aramaic, as if Aramaic were as early a development as Hebrew, and as if the writer in Genesis had any thought of illustrating philological problems ! Of any such event in the history of the Hebrews we have simply no evidence whatever.

1em 