Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/215

Rh appear that about the time of the exodus the Israelites were organized on the basis of families or clans tracing through female lines, and named Hezir (swine), Achbor (mouse), Aiah (kite), Arod (wild ass), Shaphan (coney), and so on. Each of the clans refrained from eating the totem animal, or only ate it sacramentally. As the totemic organization declined, the origin of the abstinence would be lost, but the custom lasted, and when the legislation was codified it was incorporated in the code. The hypothesis would explain certain anomalies in the list—e.g., coney, or rock badger, for which no other explanation deserving attention has been given. The division into clean and unclean food by the two tests of cloven foot and rumination was a later induction from the animals regarded as tabu. This is confirmed by the want of any systemization in the list of birds given in Leviticus.

It would accord with other examples in totemism that animal names connected with the animal worship before mentioned should be adopted by clans, and by individual men among the Israelites. There is some evidence that men, bearing a common animal stock name, though in different tribes or nations, recognized a unity of stock. Our most definite information on the subject is derived from Ezekiel viii, which indicates that the head of each house acted as priest, the family or clan images, which are the objects of idolatry, being those of "unclean" reptiles or quadrupeds—i.e., those which are prohibited from use as food. Although the whole inference of Prof. Smith on this subject is not admitted by Dr. Jacobs, his objection is to the survival, not to the early existence, of the cult.

No satisfactory explanation of the Israelite division between clean and unclean animals, apart from that afforded by the totemic system, has hitherto been made. No rational motive can be assigned for the avoidance of certain animals, in themselves hygienically good. The explanation that swine's flesh was liable to bring disease, and therefore was prohibited for a sanitary reason only, covers but a small part of the subject and is not in itself satisfactory. The meat of the hog is, in fact, as wholesome in Syria as it is in Cincinnati, and the discovery of trichinosis had certainly not been made in the times under consideration. The avoidance of all meat, indeed of all food, for purposes of fasting and producing ecstasy, is in a different category and has already been mentioned.

Marriage.—The laws of marriage in the stage of barbarism are intricate, but attention may be directed to a few points which strongly distinguish them from the marriage laws of civilization. Their most general characteristic is the regulation of marriage within strict limits of conventional kinship.