Lectures on the Religion of the Semites The Fundamental Institutions

Abstract

THE volume before us contains the first series of lectures on “the primitive religions of the Semitic peoples, viewed in relation to other ancient religions, and the spiritual religion of the Old Testament and of Christianity,” which the Trustees of the Burnett Fund asked Prof. Robertson Smith to deliver at Aberdeen in the year 1887. As may be readily imagined, the selection Prof. R. Smith as lecturer on the subject which, of all men in England, he had made peculiarly his own, was approved of by Semitic scholars and by the more liberal-minded of the clergy of all denominations. There were and are, of course, many who will view the publication of these lectures in a book form with anything but favour still it is quite certain that they must, if honestly read and candidly thought over, bring many of this class over the view, which is gaining ground with great rapidity, that, if the Hebrew Scriptures are to be properly understood by us, and their value accurately gauged, we must bring to their consideration the same amount of commonsense, the same critical investigation, and the same weighing of evidence, which we should bring to bear upon any piece of general history. The Bible is a unique work, is the production of many writers who lived at different periods. In it we have a mixture of historical facts fused with legend, poetry, folk-lore, stories, and traditions, deeply devotional religious hymns, prophecies, and descriptions of scenes in the life and history of the sons and descendants of Abraham. Anyone who knows Oriental character will understand at once why the book is such a favourite with the Eastern Semites, and will see that it is precisely the kind of work which their writers could not help producing; it is the greatest mistake possible, however, to assume that the book could be the production of a certain branch of the Semitic race. This is what has been thought for centuries by clergy and laity alike, and as a result its value has been much underrated and its evidence only partly understood; for hundreds of years the value of the Hebrew text from the point of view of comparative philology was rendered useless because a powerful section of the Church declared that the vowel-points were an integral part of text itself, and not an addition to it made by the Rabbis of Tiberias because the true pronunciation of the language was dying out and was not generally understood. The Bible has lost nothing in the eyes of scholars because has been proved that the vowel-points are not fourteen hundred years old, and that the learned men who added points made mistakes themselves! It is hard to say what provoked the intense opposition of certain sects of Church a few years ago to historical research as applied to the New Testament. It may be that the manner in which the German philologists and commentators carried on their investigations, and expressed their opinions, caused the narrow-minded, and we may add unlearned, theologians of the English Church to abhor and detest all such works; nevertheless, we venture to believe that, in spite of all the so-called destructive criticism of Kuenen and Wellhausen, the Bible has gained more by the labours of the critical school, of which these two scholars are brilliant examples, than it has lost. It is but a few years since Prof. Robertson Smith defended his views on historical research as applied to the Old Testament before the courts of his Church, in which bigotry and ignorance of modern research were curiously blended, and in a very few years it will be difficult to believe that such a trial—the only result of which was the loss to his Church of its mostlearned member—ever took place.

Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. The Fundamental Institutions.

By W. Robertson Smith. (Edinburgh: Black, 1889.)