THE RELATION OF SEMITICS TO RELIGION 75 



The prevailing idea of a primitive monotheism is one that has come 

 down to us through the church. It has found, and finds, its advocates 

 among theologians, and also among archaeologists, and philosophers. 

 The theological view of it is derived from supposed explicit and final 

 statements in the Old Testament, especially in the opening chapters 

 of Genesis. In early times, during the Middle Ages, and, indeed, 

 down to a period not far removed from our own times, it was supposed 

 and held that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. This is not to be won- 

 dered at in view of the almost universal ignorance of clergymen not 

 only of Hebrew but also of general Semitic literature. In the field in 

 which they are supposed to be masters they are, as a rule, lamentably 

 uninformed. So ran the teaching the history of his own times 

 Moses wrote from personal knowledge, the period of the patriarchs 

 he learned from tradition, and the history of creation and the earlier 

 experience of man in Paradise he got from the highest authority, 

 the Creator himself. This view so fixed itself in the minds of theolo- 

 gians that even scholars like Dillmann thought it necessary to combat 

 it in his last edition of Genesis. This one God, it was said, revealed 

 himself to mankind at its start, and this primitive monotheism was 

 handed down from the beginning through the line of Adam, Seth, 

 Noah, Abraham, the Prophets, and Jesus. The simplicity of the 

 idea diverted attention from its astonishing naivete". 



The philosophical view approached this doctrine from another 

 side. To cite only one writer, let me take Creuzer, in his work Sym- 

 bolik und Myihologie. To him all old myths are theological. Almost 

 all of the myths of the Greeks were derived from the Orient. From 

 the Oriental point of view these myths stand for comprehensive 

 conceptions, and the myth is but the development of the religious 

 teachings of the priesthood. He holds that between the different 

 mythologies a close relation exists and that there is an original unity 

 of thought toward which the various mythologies point, and that 

 this unity presupposes, as its original type, a pure monotheism. 

 We shall say nothing about the logical, or better, the illogical leaps by 

 which he reaches his conclusion. This original monotheism, although 

 in the process of time it was corrupted into polytheism, yet never 

 wholly disappeared, but was preserved even in the priestly traditions 

 of the anthropomorphic systems of Greece. So long as the race was 

 a unit, this original monotheism, he claims, could and did maintain 

 itself, but the breaking up of the original stock into separate peoples 

 resulted also in the breaking up of the one-God idea a suggestion 

 which sounds much the same as the one by which the origin of lan- 

 guage is explained in the eleventh chapter of Genesis, in which we 

 have a sound religious teaching based upon a popular and worthless 

 etymology of the word Babel. We can understand how one lan- 

 guage could give rise to a number of different though cognate Ian- 



