FOREWORD TO PART III

In this division of the study we turn to our central theme, the social process through which the religion of the Bible came into the world.

CHAPTER IX

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF THE DEVELOPMENT

The religion of the Hebrews acquired its distinctive character through a long struggle.-The religion of the Bible was born amid a great warfare. The Hebrew nation was the arena of a mighty struggle whose echoes have resounded through the ages. When we go behind the scenes, and begin to consider the circumstances amid which, and through which, the Bible religion came into the world, we are thrown back upon a local, definite, concrete situation of great interest. Yahweh emerges into distinction through a struggle against the Baal-worship which was derived from the Amorite side of the nation's ancestry. We do not connect him with warfare against Marduk of Babylon, or Amon of Egypt, or any other far-away deity. It is the Baal-idea that serves as the foil against which the Yahweh-idea takes on its distinctive character; and even in the New Testament period the opposition to Yahweh is condensed in Baal-zebub, the prince and leader of all the devils.

The Bible-idea of God arose in connection with social movements. Sociological study of the Bible is not concerned with the question how religion in general came into the world. It does not undertake to show how the idea of the gods arose. Suffice it to know that all the ancient peoples, including the Hebrews, actually did have gods and religions. Sociological study of the Bible sets out with the idea of the gods as one of its presuppositions-one of the facts, or categories, to be taken for granted at the beginning of the discussion. Religion was in the world many ages before the Hebrew nation was

born. Our problem is not, How did religion arise? but, How did Bible religion arise?

This religion took form around the idea of "Yahweh." We shall never know how the worship of Yahweh first became current, any more than we can trace the steps by which the Greeks got the worship of Zeus, the Egyptians that of Osiris, or the Babylonians that of Marduk. But there is no evidence that the worship of Yahweh stood at first upon any different footing than did the other cults of the ancient world. To anticipate the argument, we shall see that the Bible religion came into existence by the sifting of ancient religious ideas through the peculiar national experience of the Hebrews. This national experience was unlike that of any other ancient people; and it set the Hebrew mind at work in channels different from those that opened before their contemporaries. We cannot, of course, box the truth within the compass of mere words and phrases. The terms "evolution" and "natural development" are attractive; but they do not solve the problem before us. The problem of the Bible is that of the connections between certain facts. What the facts are, we shall see in due course. The religion of the Bible took form gradually through a series of emergencies, or crises, in which the idea of Yahweh passed from stage to stage. The epochs in this process have left their marks in the Bible as clearly as the various geological periods have left their traces in the strata of the earth.

CHAPTER X

THE CONFLICTING STANDPOINTS

The struggle that convulsed the ancient Hebrews was a conflict between the standpoints of nomadism and civilization.— There is a fundamental difference between the standpoint of nomadism and the standpoint of civilization. This difference is involved in the general contrast between society in motion and society at rest. It is concretely illustrated by the treatment of property in land; for manifestly, one of the distinctions between society in motion and society at rest is in the attitude taken up with reference to external nature.

The very circumstances of nomadic life make it impossible to reduce the earth itself to private or individual property. In the wandering clan, a given territory or district belongs to all in common. Although two clans may, by agreement, respect each other's rights to wander in certain parts of the wilderness, each clan or tribe holds its territory as a common possession. Thus it was among the American Indians, who knew nothing about private property in land before the European settlement; and so it is among all the wandering races of mankind. With reference to the Indians of New England before the coming of the English, we read:

The Indian did not need much government, and his manner of life did not admit of his being much subjected to its control. . . . . Personal ownership of land was a conception which had not risen on his mind.. For the protection of life and of hunting-grounds against an enemy, it was necessary that there should be unity of counsel and of action in a tribe. The New England Indians had functionaries for such

purposes; the higher class known as sachems, the subordinate, or those of inferior note or smaller jurisdiction, as sagamores.1

The good fortune

The primitive group moves about in search of food, and holds together for purposes of defense. The welfare of the individual is merged in that of the clan. of the clan is necessarily the good fortune of all its members; and in the same way, the suffering of the clan is felt by all its members. Although a clan may attack and plunder another group, its very breath of life is justice between its own people. Thus, the English traveler Doughty says of the desert Arabs, among whom he lived:

. .

The nomad tribes we have seen to be commonwealths of brethren. They divide each other's losses. . . . . The malicious subtlety of usury [interest] is foreign to the brotherly dealing of the nomad tribesmen. . . . . Their justice is such, that in the opinion of the next governed countries, the Arabs of the wilderness are the justest of mortals. Seldom the judges and elders err, in these small societies of kindred, where the life of every tribesman lies open from his infancy and his state is to all men well known."

Since the territory over which the clan roams is regarded as the common storehouse of provision for everybody in the group, the clan's ideas about "justice" and "right" come to be insensibly and subtly bound up with its relation to the soil. There is, of course, no direct and conscious connection in the group mind between justice and common property in the land. Yet these ideas hang together in a way which the individual member of the group may not be able to state clearly, but which he feels instinctively and profoundly.

1 Palfrey, History of New England (Boston, 1858), Vol. I, pp. 36, 37, 38; (italics ours), except last two words; cf. Vol. III, p. 138; Vol. IV, pp. 364, 419; cf. Morgan, Ancient Society (New York, 1878), p. 530. Most of the contentions and troubles arising between Indians and white men have turned around land cases, in which the rights of the two races have been the subjects of dispute. Cf. Reports of the Indian Rights Association (Philadelphia, Arch St., various dates), passim.

2

Doughty, Arabia Deserta (Cambridge), Vol. I, pp. 345, 318, 249.