Page:History of Art in Sardinia, Judæa, Syria and Asia Minor Vol 1.djvu/137

 History of the Israelites and their Religion. 119 to Hebrew and Phoenician. If in after days the Israelites, in setting up their genealogies, excluded them all from the glorious family of Sem and made them descend from Cham, such a pro- scription must be regarded as the outcome of national and religious pride or animosity. 1 Such lists, moreover, were made in an age of great inward ferment, when the Israelites strove with might and main for unity ; eliminating from their midst usages and rites that had scarcely differentiated them from the surrounding nations — so as to become emphatically a peculiar people. To make the separation more complete and to mark the contemptuous estima- tion in which the Canaanites were held, they gave them, as fore- father, a worthy prototype of such unclean idolaters. 2 This was natural ; but has unfortunately given rise to erroneous ethnological theories, which are however contradicted by other passages in the Bible and epigraphs. Thus local and proper names, whether of men or gods, met with over the vast area stretching from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Syrian waste are Semitic, whilst at either end of this territory Phoenician inscriptions, as that of Mesha, king of Moab, for example, are so akin to Hebrew that Phoenician and Moabite may well be called dialects of the same. 3 The Canaanites were few in number, and agriculturists ; amply provided with the necessaries of life, whilst their amicable intercourse with the dwellers of the coast had contributed not a little towards a certain degree of culture. Besides numerous straggling villages, they were possessed, not of townships in our sense, but of fortified boroughs seated on steep and precipitous cliffs ; they wrought their domestic and war implements, and some tribes or clans had even chariots. 4 From their vantage ground, they must have viewed with contemptuous disdain the nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoral tribes confining to their domain ; such as the Amalekites, Midianites, Ishmaelites, and Edomites inhabit- ing the Sinaitic peninsula, together with the Moabites and Ammonites beyond the Dead Sea and Jordan ; albeit all were, like themselves, of the Semitic race. Jewish tradition admits for most of them this community of origin. It could not well be 1 Sem (S/iem), means " glory," hence the children of Sem are the exalted, noble, lords (Stade, Geschichte, torn. i. p. no). 2 Gen. x. 6. s Josh, vi., xi. 4. 4 The Moabite stone and the Siloam inscription show us the Phcenician-like "character" of an earlier age. This character was originally common to Moabite, Phoenician, and Israelite — " Heth and Moab " (C R. Conder). — Editor.