CANAANITISH CULTURE AND RELIGION

We have already learned from the annals of Thothmes III. how high was the state of civilization and culture among the merchant princes of Canaan in the age of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty. Artistically finished vases of gold and silver, rich bronzes, furniture carved out of ebony and cedar, and inlaid with ivory and precious stones such were some of the manufactures of the land of Palestine. Iron was excavated from its hills and wrought into armour, into chariots, and into weapons of war; while beautifully shaped vessels of variegated glass were manufactured on the coast. The amber beads found at Lachish point to a trade with the distant Baltic, and it is possible that there may be truth after all in the old belief, that the Phoenicians obtained their tin from the isles of Britain. The mines of Cyprus, indeed, yielded abundance of copper, but, so far as we know, there were only two parts of the world from which the nations of Western Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean could have procured the vast amount of tin needed in the Bronze Age the Malayan Peninsula and Cornwall. The Malayan Peninsula is out of the question there are no traces of any commercial intercourse so far to the East; and it would seem, therefore, that we must look to Cornwall for the source of the tin. If so the trade would probably have been overland, like the amber trade from the Baltic.

Canaan was marked out by Nature to be a land of merchants. Its long line of coast fronted the semi-barbarous populations of Asia Minor, of the AEgean, and of the northern shores of Africa, while the sea furnished it with the purple dye of the murex. The country itself formed the high-road and link between the great kingdoms of the Euphrates and the Nile. It was here that the two civilizations of Babylonia and Egypt met and coalesced, and it was inevitable that the Canaanites, who possessed all the energy and adaptive quickness of a commercial race, should absorb and combine the elements of both. There was little except this combination that was original in Canaanitish art, but when once the materials were given, the people of Palestine knew how to work them up into new and graceful forms, and adapt them practically to the needs of the foreign world.

If we would realize the change brought about by this contact of Canaan with the culture of the stranger, we must turn to the rude figures carved upon the rocks in some of the valleys of Phoenicia. Near Tyre, for example, in the Wadi el-Qana we may still see some of these primitive sculptures, in which it is difficult even to recognize the human form. Equally barbarous in style are the early seals and cylinders made in imitation of those of Babylonia. It seems at first sight impossible to believe that such grotesque and child-like beginnings should have ended in the exquisite art of the age of Thothmes III.

At that period, however, Canaan already had behind it a long civilized past. The country was filled with schools and libraries, with richly-furnished palaces, and the workshops of the artisans. The cities on the coast had their fleets partly of merchantmen, partly of warships, and an active trade was carried on with all parts of the known world. The result was that the wealth of Palestine was enormous; the amount carried away by Thothmes is alone sufficient to prove it. Apart from the natural productions of the country corn, wine, and oil, or the slaves which it had to furnish immense quantities of gold, silver, and precious stones, sometimes in their native state, sometimes manufactured into artistic forms, were transported into Egypt. And in spite of this drain upon its resources, the supply seems never to have failed.

The reciprocal influence of the civilizations of Canaan and Egypt one upon the other, in the days when Canaan was an Egyptian province, is reflected in the languages of the two countries. On the one hand the Canaanite borrowed from Egypt words like tebah “ark,” hin “a measure,” and ebyon “poor,” while Canaan in return copiously enriched the vocabulary of its conquerors. As the Travels of a Mohar have shown us, under the nineteenth dynasty there was a mania for using Canaanitish words and phrases, similar to that which has more than once visited English society in respect to French. But before the rise of the nineteenth dynasty the Egyptian lexicon was already full of Semitic words. Frequently they denoted objects which had been imported from Syria. Thus a “chariot” was called a merkabut, a “waggon” being agolta; hurpu, “a sword,” was the Canaanitish khereb, just as aspata, “a quiver,” was ashpah. The Canaanitish kinnor, “a lyre,” was similarly naturalized in Egypt, like the names of certain varieties of “Syrian bread.” The Egyptian words for “incense” (qadaruta), “oxen” (abiri), and “sea” (yum) were taken from the same source, though it is possible that the last-mentioned word, like qamhu, “wheat,” had been introduced from Syria in the earliest days of Egyptian history. As might have been expected, several kinds of sea-going vessels brought with them their native names from the Phoenician coast. Already in the time of the thirteenth dynasty the larger ships were termed Kabanitu, or “Gebalite”; we read also of “boats” called Za, the Canaanite Zi, while a transport was entitled qauil, the Phoenician gol. The same name was imported into Greek under the form of gaulos, and we are told that it signified “a Phoenician vessel of rounded shape.”

The language of Canaan was practically that which we call Hebrew. Indeed Isaiah (xi speaks of the two dialects as identical, and the so-called Phoenician inscriptions that have been preserved to us show that the differences between them were hardly appreciable. There were differences, however; the Hebrew definite article, for instance, is not found in the Phoenician texts. But the differences are dialectal only, like the differences which the discovery of the Moabite Stone has shown to have existed between the languages of Moab and Israel.

How the Israelites came to adopt “the language of Canaan” is a question into which we cannot here enter. There have been other examples of conquerors who have abandoned the language of their forefathers and adopted that of the conquered people. And it must be remembered, on the one hand, that the ancestors of Israel had lived in Canaan, where they would have learnt the language of the country, and, on the other hand, that their original tongue was itself a Semitic form of speech, as closely related to Hebrew as French or Spanish is to Italian.

The Tel el-Amarna tablets have told us something about the language of Canaan as it was spoken before the days when the Israelites entered the land. Some of the letters that were sent from Palestine contain the Canaanite equivalents of certain Babylonian words that occur in them. Like the Babylonian words, they are written in cuneiform characters, and since these denote syllables and not mere letters we know exactly how the words were pronounced. It is an advantage which is denied us by the Phoenician alphabet, whether in the inscriptions of Phoenicia or in the pages of the Old Testament, and we can thus obtain a better idea of the pronunciation of the Canaanitish language in the century before the Exodus than we can of the Hebrew language in the age of Hezekiah.

Among the words which have been handed down to us by the correspondents of the Pharaoh are maqani “cattle,” anay “a ship,” susi “a horse,” of which the Hebrew equivalents, according to the Masoretic punctuation, are miqneh, oni, and sus. The king of Jerusalem says anuki, “I,” the Hebrew anochi, while badiu, the Hebrew b’yado, and akharunu, the Hebrew akharono, are stated to signify “in his hand,” and “after him.” “Dust” is ghaparu, where the guttural gh represents the Canaanitish ayyin (’); “stomach” is batnu, the Hebrew beten; while kilubi, “a cage,” corresponds with the Hebrew chelub, which is used in the same sense by the prophet Jeremiah. Elsewhere we find risu, the Hebrew rosh, “a head,” har “a mountain,” samama “heaven,” and mima “water,” in Hebrew shamayim and mayim, which we gather from the cuneiform spelling have been wrongly punctuated by the Masoretes, as well as khaya “living,” the Hebrew khai, and makhsu, “they have smitten him,” the Hebrew makhatsu.

It was the use of the definite article ha(n) which mainly distinguished Hebrew and Phoenician or Canaanite one from the other. And we have a curious indication in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, that the same distinction prevailed between the language of the Canaanites and that of the Edomites, who, as we learn from the Old Testament, were so closely related to the Israelites. In the letter to the Pharaoh, in which mention is made of the hostilities carried on by Edom against the Egyptian territory, one of the Edomite towns referred to is called Khinianabi. Transcribed into Hebrew characters this would be ’En-han-nabí, “the Spring of the Prophet.” Here, therefore, the Hebrew article makes its appearance, and that too in the very form which it has in the language of Israel. The fact is an interesting commentary on the brotherhood of Jacob and Esau.

If the language of Canaan was influenced by that of Egypt, still more was it influenced by that of Babylonia. Long before Palestine became an Egyptian province it had been a province of Babylonia. And even when it was not actually subject to Babylonian government it was under the dominion of Babylonian culture. War and trade alike forced the Chaldaean civilization upon “the land of the Amorites,” and the Canaanites were not slow to take advantage of it. The cuneiform writing of Babylonia was adopted, and therewith the language of Babylonia was taught and learned in the schools and libraries which were established in imitation of those of the Babylonians. Babylonian literature was introduced into the West, and the Canaanite youth became acquainted with the history and legends, the theology and mythology of the dwellers on the Euphrates and Tigris.

Such literary contact naturally left its impress on the language of Canaan. Words which the Sémites of Babylonia had borrowed from the older Sumerian population of the country were handed on to the peoples of Palestine. The “city” had been a Sumerian creation; until brought under the influence of Sumerian culture, the Semite had been contented to live in tents. Indeed in Babylonian or Assyrian the language of the Semitic inhabitants of Babylonia and Assyria the word which signified “tent” was adopted to express the idea of “city” when the tent had been exchanged for city-life. In Canaan, on the other hand, the Sumerian word itself was adopted in a Semitic form, ’Ir, ’ar, or uru, “city,” was originally the Sumerian eri.

The Canaanitish hekal, “a palace,” again, came from a Sumerian source. This was e-gal, or “great house.” But it had passed to the West through the Semitic Babylonians, who had first borrowed the compound word under the form of ekallu. Like the city, the palace also was unknown to the primitive Semitic nomads. It belonged to the civilization of which the Sumerians of Chaldaea, with their agglutinative language, were the pioneers.

The borrowing, however, was not altogether one-sided. Palestine enriched the literary language of Babylonia with certain words, though these do not seem to have made their way into the language of the people. Thus we find words like bin-bini, “grandson,” and inu, “wine,” recorded in the lexical tablets of Babylonia and Assyria. Doubtless there were writers on the banks of the Euphrates who were as anxious to exhibit their knowledge of the language of Canaan as were the Egyptian scribes of the nineteenth dynasty, though their literary works have not yet been discovered.

The adoption of the Babylonian system of writing must have worked powerfully on the side of tincturing the Canaanitish language with Babylonian words. In the age of the Tel el-Amarna tablets there is no sign that any other system was known in the West. It is true that the letters sent to the Pharaoh from Palestine were written in the Babylonian language as well as in the Babylonian script, but we have evidence that the cuneiform characters were also used for the native language of the country. M. de Clercq possesses two seal-cylinders of the same date as the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, on one of which is the cuneiform inscription “Hadad-sum, the citizen of Sidon, the crown of the gods,” while on the other is “Anniy, the son of Hadad-sum, the citizen of Sidon.” On the first, Hadad-sum is represented standing with his hands uplifted before the Egyptian god Set, while behind him is the god Resheph with a helmet on his head, a shield in one hand and a battle-axe in the other. On the seal of Anniy, Set and Resheph again make their appearance, but instead of the owner of the cylinder it is the god Horus who stands between them.

When the cuneiform syllabary was superseded in Palestine by the so-called Phoenician alphabet we do not know. The introduction of the new script was due probably to the Hittite invasion, which separated the Sémites of the West from the Sémites of the East. The Hittite occupation of Carchemish blocked the high-road of Babylonian trade to the Mediterranean, and when the sacred city of Kadesh on the Orontes fell into Hittite hands it was inevitable that Hittite rather than Babylonian influence would henceforth prevail in Canaan. However this may be, it seems natural to suppose that the scribes of Zebulon referred to in the Song of Deborah and Barak (Judges wrote in the letters of the Phoenician alphabet and not in the cuneiform characters of Babylonia. As long, indeed, as the old libraries remained open and accessible, with their stores of cuneiform literature, there must have been some who could read them, but they would have been rather the older inhabitants of the country than the alien conquerors from the desert. When the Moabite Stone was engraved, it is clear from the forms of the letters that the Phoenician alphabet had long been in use in the kingdom of Mesha. The resemblance of these letters to those found in the earliest of the Greek inscriptions makes it equally clear that the introduction of the alphabet into the islands of the AEgean must have taken place at no distant period from the age of the Moabite Stone. Such an introduction, however, implies that the new alphabet had already taken deep root among the merchants of Canaan, and driven out before it the cumbrous syllabary of Chaldaea. It was in this alphabet that Hiram and Solomon corresponded together, and it is probable that Moses made use of it. We may even conjecture that the Israelitish settlement in Palestine brought with it the gift of the “Phoenician” alphabet.

As we have already seen, the elements of Babylonian art were quickly absorbed by the Canaanites. The seal-cylinder was imitated, at first with but indifferent success, and such Babylonian ornamental designs as the rosette, the sacred tree, and the winged cherub were taken over and developed in a special way. At times the combination with them of designs borrowed from Egypt produced a new kind of artistic ornament.

But it was in the realm of religion that the influence of Babylonia was most powerful. Religion, especially in the ancient world, was inextricably bound up with its culture; it was impossible to adopt the one without adopting a good deal of the other at the same time. Moreover, the Sémites of Babylonia and of Canaan belonged to the same race, and that meant a community of inherited religious ideas. With both the supreme object of worship was Baal or Bel, “the lord,” who was but the Sun-god under a variety of names. Each locality had its own special Baal: there were, in fact, as many Baals, or Baalim, as there were names and attributes for the Sun-god, and to the worshippers in each locality the Baal adored there was the supreme god. But the god resembled his worshipper who had been made in his image; he was the father and head of a family with a wife and son. The wife, it is true, was but the colourless reflection of the god, often indeed but the feminine Baalah, whom the Semitic languages with their feminine gender required to exist by the side of the masculine Baal. But this was only in accordance with the Semitic conception of woman as the lesser man, his servant rather than his companion, his shadow rather than his helpmeet.

The existence of an independent goddess, unmarried and possessing all the attributes of the god, was contrary to the fundamental conceptions of the Semitic mind. Nevertheless we find in Canaan an Ashtoreth, whom the Greeks called Astarte, as well as a Baal. The cuneiform inscriptions have given us an explanation of the fact.

Ashtoreth came from Babylonia. There she was known as Istar, the evening star. She had been one of those Sumerian goddesses who, in accordance with the Sumerian system, which placed the mother at the head of the family, were on an equal footing with the gods. She lay outside the circle of Semitic theology with its divine family, over which the male Baal presided, and the position she occupied in later Babylonian religion was due to the fusion between the Sumerian and Semitic forms of faith, which took place when the Sémites became the chief element in Babylonia. But Sumerian influence and memories were too strong to allow of any transformation either in the name or in the attributes of the goddess. She remained Istar, without any feminine suffix, and it was never forgotten that she was the evening-star.

It was otherwise in the West. There Istar became Ashtoreth with the feminine termination, and passed eventually into a Moon-goddess “with crescent horns.” Ashtoreth-Karnaim, “Ashtoreth with the two horns,” was already in existence in the age of Abraham. In Babylonia the Moon-god of ancient Sumerian belief had never been dethroned; but there was no Moon-god in Canaan, and accordingly the transformation of the Babylonian goddess into “the queen of the night” was a matter of little difficulty.

Once domesticated in Palestine, with her name so changed as to declare her feminine character, Ashtoreth soon tended to lose her independence. Just as there were Baalim or “Baals” by the side of Baal, so there were Astaroth or “Ashtoreths” by the side of Ashtoreth.

The Sémites of Babylonia themselves had already begun the work of transformation. They too spoke of Istarat or “Istars,” and used the word in the general sense of “goddesses.” In Canaan, however, Ashtaroth had no such general meaning, but denoted simply the various Ashtoreths who were worshipped in different localities, and under different titles. The individual Ashtoreth of Gebal was separate from the individual Ashtoreth of Bashan, although they alike represented the same divine personality.

It is true that even in the West Istar did not always become the feminine complement of Baal. Here and there the old form of the name was preserved, without any feminine suffix. But when this was the case, the necessary result was that the female character of the deity was forgotten. Istar was conceived of as a god, and accordingly on the Moabite Stone Ashtar is identified with Chemosh, the patron-god of Mesha, just as in Southern Arabia also Atthar is a male divinity.

The worship of Ashtoreth absorbed that of the other goddesses of Canaan. Among them there was one who had once occupied a very prominent place. This was Asherah, the goddess of fertility, whose name is written Asirtu and Asratu in the tablets of Tel el-Amarna. Asherah was symbolized by a stem stripped of its branches, or an upright cone of stone, fixed in the ground, and the symbol and the goddess were at times confounded together. The symbol is mistranslated “grove” in the Authorized Version of the Old Testament, and it often stood by the side of the altar of Baal. We find it thus represented on early seals. In Palestine it was usually of wood; but in the great temple of Paphos in Cyprus there was an ancient and revered one of stone. This, however, came to be appropriated to Ashtoreth in the days when the older Asherah was supplanted by the younger Ashtoreth.

We hear of other Canaanitish divinities from the monuments of Egypt. The goddess Edom, the wife of Resheph, has already been referred to. Her name is found in that of the Gittite, Obed-Edom, “the servant of Edom,” in whose house the ark was kept for three months (2 Sam. v. Resheph, too, has been mentioned in an earlier page. He was the god of fire and lightning, and on the Egyptian monuments he is represented as armed with spear and helmet, and bears the titles of “great god” and “lord of heaven.” Along with him we find pictures of a goddess called Kedesh and Kesh. She stands on the back of a lion, with flowers in her left hand and a serpent in her right, while on her head is the lunar disk between the horns of a cow. She may be the goddess Edom, or perhaps the solar divinity who was entitled A in Babylonian, and whose name enters into that of an Edomite king A-rammu, who is mentioned by Sennacherib.

But, like Istar, a considerable number of the deities of Palestine were borrowed from Babylonia. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets the god of Jerusalem is identified with the warlike Sun-god of Babylonia, Nin-ip, and there was a sanctuary of the same divinity further north, in Phoenicia. Foremost among the deities whose first home was on the banks of the Euphrates were Arm and Anat, and Rimmon. Anu, whose name is written Anah in Hebrew, was the god of the sky, and he stood at the head of the Babylonian pantheon. His wife Anat was but a colourless reflection of himself, a grammatical creation of the Semitic languages. But she shared in the honours that were paid to her consort, and the divinity that resided in him was reflected upon her. Anat, like Ashtoreth, became multiplied under many forms, and the Anathoth or “Anat” signified little more than “goddesses.” Between the Ashtaroth and the Anathoth the difference was but in name.

The numerous localities in Palestine which received their names from the god Rimmon are a proof of his popularity. The Babylonian Rimmon or Ramman was, strictly speaking, the god of the air, but in the West he was identified with the Sun-god Hadad, and a place near Megiddo bore the compound title of Hadad-Rimmon (Zech. xi. His naturalization in Canaan seems to belong to a very early period; at all events, in Sumerian he was called Martu, “the Amorite,” and seal-cylinders speak of “the Martu gods.” One of these has been found in the Lebanon. The Assyrian tablets tell us that he was also known as Dadu in the West, and under this form we find him in names like El-Dad and Be-dad, or Ben-Dad.

Like Rimmon, Nebo also must have been transported to Palestine at an early epoch. Nebo “the prophet” was the interpreter of Bel-Merodach of Babylon, the patron of cuneiform literature, and the god to whom the great temple of Borsippa the modern Birs-i-Nimrud was dedicated. Doubtless he had migrated to the West along with that literary culture over which he presided. There his name and worship were attached to many localities. It was on the summit of Mount Nebo that Moses died; over Nebo, Isaiah prophesies, “Moab shall howl;” and we hear of a city called “the other Nebo” in Judah (Neh. vi.

Another god who had been borrowed from Babylonia by the people of Canaan was Malik “the king,” a title originally of the supreme Baal. Malik is familiarly known to us in the Old Testament as Moloch, to whom the first-born were burned in the fire. At Tyre the god was termed Melech-kirjath, or “king of the city,” which was contracted into Melkarth, and in the mouths of the Greeks became Makar. There is a passage in the book of the prophet Amos , 26), upon which the Assyrian texts have thrown light. We there read: “Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? Yet ye have borne Sikkuth your Malik and Chiun your Zelem, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves.”

Sikkuth and Chiun are the Babylonian Sakkut and Kaivan, a name given to the planet Saturn. Sakkut was a title of the god Nin-ip, and we gather from Amos that it also represented Malik “the king.” Zelem, “the image,” was another Babylonian deity, and originally denoted “the image” or disk of the sun. His name and worship were carried into Northern Arabia, and a monument has been discovered at Teima, the Tema of Isaiah xx, which is dedicated to him. It would seem, from the language of Amos, that the Babylonian god had been adored in “the wilderness” as far back as the days when the Israelites were encamping in it. Nor, indeed, is this surprising: Babylonian influence in the West belonged to an age long anterior to that of the Exodus, and even the mountain whereon the oracles of God were revealed to the Hebrew lawgiver was Sinai, the mountain of Sin. The worship of Sin, the Babylonian Moon-god, must therefore have made its way thus far into the deserts of Arabia. Inscriptions from Southern Arabia have already shown us that there too Sin was known and adored.

Dagon, again, was another god who had his first home in Babylonia. The name is of Sumerian origin, and he was associated with Ami, the god of the sky. Like Sin, he appears to have been worshipped at Harran; at all events, Sargon states that he inscribed the laws of that city “according to the wish of Anu and Dagon.” Along with Arm he would have been brought to Canaan, and though we first meet with his name in the Old Testament in connection with the Philistines, it is certain that he was already one of the deities of the country whom the Philistine invaders adopted. One of the Canaanitish governors in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence bears the Assyrian name of Dagon-takala, “we trust in Dagon.” The Phoenicians made him the god of corn in consequence of the resemblance of his name to the word which signifies “corn”; primarily, however, he would have been a god of the earth. The idea that he was a fish-god is of post-Biblical date, and due to a false etymology, which derived his name from the Hebrew dag, “a fish.” The fish-god of Babylonia, however, whose image is sometimes engraved on seals, was a form of Ea, the god of the deep, and had no connection with Dagon. Doubtless there were other divinities besides these whom the peoples of Canaan owed to the Babylonians. Mr. Tomkins is probably right in seeing in the name of Beth-lehem a reminiscence of the Babylonian god Lakhmu, who took part in the creation of the world, and whom a later philosophizing generation identified with Anu. But the theology of early Canaan is still but little known, and its pantheon is still in great measure a sealed book. Now and again we meet with a solitary passage in some papyrus or inscription on stone, which reveals to us for the first time the name of an otherwise unknown deity. Who, for instance, is the goddess ’Ashiti-Khaur, who is addressed, along with Kedesh, on an Egyptian monument now at Vienna, as “the mistress of heaven” and “ruler of all the gods”? The votive altars of Carthage make repeated mention of the goddess Tanit, the Peni or “Face” of Baal, whom the Greeks identified with Artemis. She must have been known in the mother-land of Phoenicia, and yet no trace of her worship there has as yet been found. There were “gods many and lords many” in primitive Palestine, and though a comprehensive faith summed them up as its Baalim and Ashtaroth they yet had individual names and titles, as well as altars and priests.

But though altars were numerous, temples were not plentiful. The chief seats of religious worship were “the high-places,” level spots on the summits of hills or mountains, where altars were erected, and the worshipper was believed to be nearer the dwelling-place of the gods than he would have been in the plain below. The altar was frequently some natural boulder of rock, consecrated by holy oil, and regarded as the habitation of a god. These sacred stones were termed beth-els, baetyli as the Greeks wrote the word, and they form a distinguishing characteristic of Semitic faith. In later times many of them were imagined to have “come down from heaven.” So deeply enrooted was this worship of stones in the Semitic nature, that even Mohammed, in spite of his iconoclastic zeal, was obliged to accommodate his creed to the worship of the Black Stone at Mekka, and the Kaaba is still one of the most venerated objects of the Mohammedan faith.

But the sacred stone was not only an object of worship or the consecrated altar of a deity, it might also take the place of a temple, and so be in very truth a beth-el, or “house of God.” Thus at Medain Salih in North-western Arabia Mr. Doughty discovered three upright stones, which an inscription informed him were the mesged or “mosque” of the god Aera of Bozrah. In the great temple of Melkarth at Tyre Herodotus saw two columns, one of gold, the other of emerald, reminding us of the two pillars, Jachin and Boaz, which the Phoenician architect of Solomon erected in the porch of the temple at Jerusalem (1 Kings vi. Similar columns of stone have been found in the Phoenician temple, called that of the Giants, in Gozo, one of which is still standing in its place.

While certain stones were thus regarded as the abode of deity, the high places whereon so many of them stood also received religious worship. The most prominent of the mountains of Syria were deified: Carmel became a Penu-el or “Face of God,” Hermon was “the Holy One,” and Mount Lebanon was a Baal. The rivers and springs also were adored as gods, and the fish which swam in them were accounted sacred. On the Phoenician coast was a river Kadisha, “the holy,” and the Canaanite maiden saw in the red marl which the river Adonis brought down from the hills the blood of the slaughtered Sun-god Tammuz.

The temple of Solomon, built as it was by Phoenician architects and workmen, will give us an idea of what a Canaanitish temple was like. In its main outlines it resembled a temple in Babylonia or Assyria. There, too, there was an outer court and an inner sanctuary, with its parakku or “mercy-seat,” and its ark of stone or wood, in which an inscribed tablet of stone was kept. Like the temple of Jerusalem, the Babylonian temple looked from the outside much like a rectangular box, with its four walls rising up, blank and unadorned, to the sky. Within the open court was a “sea,” supported at times on oxen of bronze, where the priests and servants of the temple performed their ablutions and the sacred vessels were washed.

The Canaanitish altar was approached by steps, and was large enough for the sacrifice of an ox. Besides the sacrifices, offerings of corn and wine, of fruit and oil were also made to the gods. The sacrifices and offerings were of two kinds, the zau’at or sin-offering, and the shelem or thank-offering. The sin-offering had to be given wholly to the god, and was accordingly termed kalil or “complete”; a part of the thank-offering, on the other hand, might be carried away by him who made it. Birds, moreover, might constitute a thank-offering; they were not allowed when the offering was made for sin. Such at least was the rule in the later days of Phoenician ritual, to which belong the sacrificial tariffs that have been preserved.

In these sacrificial tariffs no mention is made of human sacrifices, and, as M. Clermont-Ganneau has pointed out, the ram takes in them the place of the man. But this was the result of the milder manners of an age when the Phoenicians had been brought into close contact with the Greeks. In the older days of Canaanitish history human sacrifice had held a foremost place in the ritual of Syria. It was the sacrifice of the firstborn son that was demanded in times of danger and trouble, or when the family was called upon to make a special atonement for sin. The victim was offered as a burnt sacrifice, which in Hebrew idiom was euphemistically described as passing through the fire.

Side by side with these human sacrifices were the abominations which were performed in the temples in honour of Ashtoreth. Women acted as prostitutes, and men who called themselves “dogs” foreswore their manhood. It was these sensualities practised in the name of religion which caused the iniquity of the Canaanites to become full.

It is pleasanter to turn to such fragments of Canaanitish mythology and cosmological speculation as have come down to us. Unfortunately most of it belongs in its present form to the late days of Greek and Roman domination, when an attempt was made to fuse the disjointed legends of the various Phoenician states into a connected whole, and to present them to Greek readers under a philosophical guise. How much, therefore, of the strange cosmogony and history of the gods recorded by Philon of Gebal really goes back to the patriarchal epoch of Palestine, and how much of it is of later growth, it is now impossible to say. In the main, however, it is of ancient date.

This is shown by the fact that a good deal of it has been borrowed directly or indirectly from Babylonia. How this could have happened has been explained by the Tel el-Amarna tablets. It was while Canaan was under the influence of Babylonian culture and Babylonian government that the myths and traditions of Babylonia made their way to the West. Among the tablets are portions of Babylonian legends, one of which has been carefully annotated by the Egyptian or Canaanite scribe. It is the story of the queen of Hades, who had been asked by the gods to a feast they had made in the heavens. Unable or unwilling to ascend to it, the goddess sent her servant the plague-demon, but with the result that Nergal was commissioned to descend to Hades and destroy its mistress. The fourteen gates of the infernal world, each with its attendant warder, were opened before him, and at last he seized the queen by the hair, dragging her to the ground, and threatening to cut off her head. But Eris-kigal, the queen of Hades, made a successful appeal for mercy; she became the wife of Nergal, and he the lord of the tomb.

Another legend was an endeavour to account for the origin of death. Adapa or Adama, the first man, who had been created by Ea, was fishing one day in the deep sea, when he broke the wings of the south wind. The south wind flew to complain to Anu in heaven, and Anu ordered the culprit to appear before him. But Adapa was instructed by Ea how to act. Clad in a garment of mourning, he won the hearts of the two guardians of the gate of heaven, the gods Tammuz and Gis-zida ("the firmly-fixed post"), so that they pleaded for him before Anu. Food and water were offered him, but he refused them for fear that they might be the food and water of death. Oil only for anointing and clothing did he accept. “Then Anu looked upon him and raised his voice in lamentation: ’O Adapa, wherefore atest thou not, wherefore didst thou not drink? The gift of life cannot now be thine.’” Though “a sinful man” had been permitted “to behold the innermost parts of heaven and earth,” he had rejected the food and water of life, and death henceforth was the lot of mankind.

It is curious that the commencement of this legend, the latter portion of which has been found at Tel el-Amarna, had been brought to the British Museum from the ruins of the library of Nineveh many years ago. But until the discovery of the conclusion, its meaning and character were indecipherable. The copy made for the library of Nineveh was a late edition of the text which had been carried from Babylonia to the banks of the Nile eight hundred years before, and the fact emphasizes once more the Babylonian character of the culture and literature possessed by Palestine in the Patriarchal Age.

We need not wonder, therefore, if it is to Babylonia that the cosmological legends and beliefs of Phoenicia plainly point. The watery chaos out of which the world was created, the divine hierarchies, one pair of deities proceeding from another and an older pair, or the victory of Kronos over the dragon Ophioneus, are among the indications of their Babylonian origin. But far more important than these echoes of Babylonian mythology in the legendary lore of Phoenicia is the close relationship that exists between the traditions of Babylonia and the earlier chapters of Genesis. As is now well known, the Babylonian account of the Deluge agrees even in details with that which we find in the Bible, though the polytheism of Chaldaea is there replaced by an uncompromising monotheism, and there are little touches, like the substitution of an “ark” for the Babylonian “ship,” which show that the narrative has been transported to Palestine. Equally Babylonian in origin is the history of the Tower of Babel, while two of the rivers of Eden are the Tigris and Euphrates, and Eden itself is the Edin or “Plain” of Babylonia.

Not so long ago it was the fashion to declare that such coincidences between Babylonian and Hebrew literature could be due only to the long sojourn of the Jews in Babylonia during the twenty years of the Exile. But we now know that the traditions and legends of Babylonia were already known in Canaan before the Israelites had entered the Promised Land. It was not needful for the Hebrew writer to go to Chaldaea in order that he might learn them; when Moses was born they were already current both in Palestine and on the banks of the Nile. The Babylonian colouring of the early chapters of Genesis is just what archaeology would teach us to expect it would have been, had the Pentateuch been of the age to which it lays claim.

Here and there indeed there are passages which must be of that age, and of none other. When in the tenth chapter of Genesis Canaan is made the brother of Cush and Mizraim, of Ethiopia and Egypt, we are carried back at once to the days when Palestine was an Egyptian province. The statement is applicable to no other age. Geographically Canaan lay outside the southern zone to which Egypt and Ethiopia belonged, except during the epoch of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, when all three were alike portions of a single empire. With the fall of that empire the statement ceased to be correct or even conceivable. After the era of the Israelitish conquest Canaan and Egypt were separated one from the other, not to be again united save for a brief space towards the close of the Jewish monarchy. Palestine henceforth belonged to Asia, not to Africa, to the middle zone, that is to say, which was given over to the sons of Shem.

There is yet another passage in the same chapter of Genesis which takes us back to the Patriarchal Age of Palestine. It is the reference to Nimrod, the son of Cush, the beginning of whose kingdom was Babel and Erech, and Accad and Calneh in the land of Shinar, and who was so familiar a figure in the West that a proverb was current there concerning his prowess in the chase. Here again we are carried to a date when the Kassite kings of Babylonia held rule in Canaan, or led thither their armies, and when the Babylonians were called, as they are in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, the Kassi or sons of Cush. Nimrod himself may be the Kassite monarch Nazi-Murudas. The cuneiform texts of the period show that the names borne by the Kassite kings were strangely abbreviated by their subjects; even in Babylonia, Kasbe and Sagarta-Suria, for instance, being written for Kasbeias and Sagarakti-Suryas, the latter of which even appears as Sakti-Surias, while Nazi-Murudas itself is found under the form of Nazi-Rattas. Similarly Duri-galzu and Kurigalzu take the place of Dur-Kurigalzi. There is no reason, therefore, why Nazi-Murudas should not have been familiarly known as Na-Muruda, more especially in distant Canaan.

Indeed we can almost fix the date to which the lifetime of Nimrod must be assigned. We are told that out of his kingdom “one went forth into Assyria,” and there “builded” Nineveh and Calah, The cuneiform inscriptions have informed us who this builder of Calah was. He was Shalmaneser I., who was also the restorer of Nineveh and its temples, and who is stated by Sennacherib to have reigned six hundred years before himself. Such a date would coincide with the reign of Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the Oppression, as well as with the birth-time of Moses. It represents a period when the influence of Babylonia had not yet passed away from Canaan, and when there was still intercourse between the East and the West. Ramses claims to have overcome both Assyria and Shinar, and though the Shinar he means was the Shinar of Mesopotamia and not Chaldaea, it lay within the limits of Babylonian control. The reign of Ramses II. is the latest period down to which, with our present knowledge, we can regard the old influence of Babylonia in Canaan as still continuing, and it is equally the period to which, if we are to listen to the traditional teaching of the Church, the writer of the Pentateuch belonged. The voice of archaeology is thus in agreement with that of authority, and here as elsewhere true science declares herself the handmaid of the Catholic Church.