It has been denied, indeed, that ancestor-worship pure and simple ever existed among the Semitic races. A clear contradiction of this denial is furnished by M. Lenormant, who comments thus on sepulchral monuments from Yemen: “Here, then, we have twice repeated a whole series of human persons, decidedly deceased ancestors or relations of the authors of the dedications. Their names are accompanied with the titles they bore during life. They are invoked by their descendants in the same way as the gods. They are incontestably deified persons, objects of a family worship, and gods or genii in the belief of the people of their race.” After this, we need not doubt that the teraphim were the images of such family gods or ancestral spirits.
It is not surprising, however, that these domestic gods play but a small part in the history of the people as it has come down to us in the late Jehovistic version of the Hebrew traditions. Nowhere in literature, even under the most favourable circumstances, do we hear much of the _manes_ and _lares_, compared with the great gods of national worship. Nor were such minor divinities likely to provoke the wrath even of that “jealous god” who later usurped all the adoration of Israel: so that denunciations of their votaries are comparatively rare in the rhapsodies of the prophets. “Their use,” says Kuenen, speaking of the teraphim, “was very general, and was by no means considered incompatible with the worship of Jahweh.” They were regarded merely as family affairs, poor foemen for { 184}the great and awesome tribal god who bore no rival near his throne, and would not suffer the pretensions of Molech or of the Baalim. To use a modern analogy, their cult was as little inconsistent with Jahweh-worship as a belief in fairies, banshees, or family ghosts was formerly inconsistent with a belief in Christianity.
This conclusion will doubtless strike the reader at once as directly opposed to the oft-repeated assertion that the early Hebrews had little or no conception of the life beyond the grave and of the doctrine of future rewards and punishments. I am afraid it cannot be denied that such is the case. Hard as it is to run counter to so much specialist opinion, I can scarcely see how any broad anthropological enquirer may deny to the Semites of the tenth and twelfth centuries before Christ participation in an almost (or quite) universal human belief, common to the lowest savages and the highest civilisations, and particularly well developed in that Egyptian society with which the ancestors of the Hebrews had so long rubbed shoulders. The subject, however, is far too large a one for full debate here. I must content myself with pointing out that, apart from the _a priori_ improbability of such a conclusion, the Hebrew documents themselves contain numerous allusions, even in their earliest traditional fragments, to the belief in ghosts and in the world of shades, as well as to the probability of future resurrection. The habit of cave-burial and of excavated grotto-burial; the importance attached to the story of the purchase of Machpelah; the common phrase that such-and-such a patriarch “was gathered to his people,” or “slept with his fathers”; the embalming of Joseph, and the carrying up of his bones from Egypt to Palestine; the episode of Saul and the ghost of Samuel; and indeed the entire conception of Sheol, the place of the departed--all alike show that the Hebrew belief in this respect did not largely differ in essentials from the general belief of surrounding peoples. The very frequency of allusions to witchcraft and necromancy { 185}point in the same direction; while the common habit of assuming a priestly or sacrificial garment, the _ephod_, and then consulting the family teraphim as a domestic oracle, is strictly in accordance with all that we know of the minor ancestor-worship as it occurs elsewhere.