26o THE ETHICAL KINSHIP 



be the sacred and central city of the world, and 

 heaven itself only a new and idealised edition of 

 their metropolis. Every Jew was bound to every 

 other Jew by high-wrought ceremony and obliga- 

 tion. But all non-Jews were ' Gentiles,' chaff-like 

 * pagans,' who possessed no rights which a 'child 

 of Abraham ' was bound to respect. Their tribal 

 god is said to have been so indulgent toward them 

 as his * chosen people ' that he allowed them to 

 exact usury from foreigners, to sell them diseased 

 meats, and to borrow jewels from them and after- 

 wards run away with them. He even permitted 

 them to make war upon weak peoples and dis- 

 possess them of their lands. * Whomsoever the 

 Lord our God shall drive out from before us, 

 them will we possess' (Judg. xi. 24). 



The kings of the ancient Assyrians were so 

 accustomed to cruelties upon non-Assyrians, and 

 were so proud of these cruelties, that they recorded 

 them in stone as a claim to immortality among 

 men. Assurbanipal, in speaking of the conquered, 

 says : * I pulled out their tongues and cut off their 

 limbs, and caused them to be eaten by dogs, bears, 

 eagles, vultures, birds of heaven.' Assur-natsir-pal, 

 another wonderful fellow, boasts similarly : * I 

 flayed the nobles and covered the pyramid with 

 their skins, and their young men and maidens I 

 burned as a holocaust.' ' Their carcasses covered 

 the valleys and the tops of the mountains,' says 

 Tiglath-Pileser in his account of the slain Mus- 

 kayans ; and Sennacherib mforms us proudly that 

 he drove his chariot over the dead bodies of his 



