336 THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY vm 



Total [the god whom he had evoked], to exert all your in- 

 fluence with the other gods that I alone may suffer all the 

 punishment they desire to inflict (vol. i. p. 354). 



So when the king of Israel has sinned by 

 " numbering the people," and they are punished 

 for his fault by a pestilence which slays seventy 

 thousand innocent men, David cries to Jah- 

 veh : 



Lo, I have sinned, and I have done perversely : but these 

 sheep, what have they done ? let thine hand, I pray thee, be 

 against me, and against my father's house (2 Sam. xxiv. 17). 



Human sacrifices were extremely common in 

 Polynesia ; and, in Tonga, the " devotion " of a 

 child by strangling was a favourite method of 

 averting the wrath of the gods. The well-known 

 instances of Jephthah's sacrifice of his daughter 

 and of David's giving up the seven sons of Saul to 

 be sacrificed by the Gibeonites " before Jahveh/' 

 appear to me to leave no doubt that the old 

 Israelites, even when devout worshippers of 

 Jahveh, considered human sacrifices, under certain 

 circumstances, to be not only permissible but 

 laudable. Samuel's hewing to pieces of the 

 miserable captive, sole survivor of his nation, 

 Agag, " before Jahveh," can hardly be viewed in 

 any other light. The life of Moses is redeemed 

 from Jahveh, who "sought to slay him," by 

 Zipporah's symbolical sacrifice of her child, by the 

 bloody operation of circumcision. Jahveh expressly 

 affirms that the first-born males of men and beasts 



