4 HEBREW LIFE AND CUSTOM
but combined together. A good example of this is found
in the anticipation that ‘com shall make the young men
flourish, and new wine the maids ,.1 The author certainly
did not hope that the young men should have all the com
and the maids all the new wine—a most undesirable
arrangement—but that com and new wine, signifying
the abundant satisfaction of physical needs, should make
the young men and maids flourish. Similarly the prophet’s
hope that the non-Jewish peoples should bring Zion’s sons
in their bosom and that her daughters should be carried
upon their shoulders,2 must not be understood to mean
that boys were carried in one way, and girls in another.
In connexion with the title of this course of lectures,
‘ Hebrew Social Life and Custom ’, it must be emphatically
stated that under this heading a considerable diversity of
usage will be included. Not only are the canonical Hebrew
Scriptures spread over a period at least as long as that
which has elapsed between the poet Chaucer and our own
time, a period during which more than one foreign influ-
ence must have made itself felt, but it must be recognized
that the Hebrew-speaking population of David’s kingdom
was composed of many ethnic elements representing differ-
ent stages of culture and of what is intimately connected
with culture, viz. religion.
Recent researches, among which may specially be
mentioned The Witch Cult in Western Europe, by Miss
Margaret Murray, have made us familiar with the extra-
ordinary vitality of pre-Christian rites and beliefs in our
own country, and heterogeneous as is the pedigree of the
‘true-born Englishman’, to use Daniel Defoe’s sarcastic
term, the subjects of King David were even more hetero-
geneous. Between the servile and totally illiterate peasantry
of Palestine, in the days of the Hebrew monarchy, and
the contemporary aristocracy—not necessarily rich—who
cherished the tradition of the higher religion of their for-
bears during the sojourn in the wilderness under the Ieader-
, Zech. ix. 17. , Isa. xlix. 22.
DIVERSITIES OF BELIEF AND PRACTICE 5
ship of Moses, there may well have been as great a differ-
ence, both in belief and practice, as there was between a
Richard Hooker or a George Herbert and the rabble who
assembled for their primitive pagan rites on All-Hallows
Eve or on May Day.
But as it is impossible rightly to reconstruct the social life
and custom of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in our
Owncountrywithout recognizing the diverse elements which
Mr. John Buchan has made to live in his novel Witch Wood,
so we cannot reconstruct the social history of Israel without
recognizing the presence in the population of elements
differing almost as widely in belief and practice as may
exist to-day in a country the inhabitants of which are in
the main illiterate pagans, though some have responded to
higher civilizing and religious influences.
Further, it must be recognized that when two streams
meet, the one clear, the other turbid and muddy, there
must of necessity be a certain amount of blending after
they have come in contact. The clear stream may to
some extent purify the muddy : but in so doing its own
volume of clear water must be diminished—with the
result that after the confluence of the two streams, while
on the one hand the mud gradually becomes less evident,
it is increasingly difficult to find water that is not to some
extent contaminated.
It is important therefore to emphasize the fact that
though it may be considered proved that certain very primi-
tive customs existed in Palestine during the period covered by
the Hebrew Scriptures, it does not follow that such customs
were observed by all who called themselves by the name of
Israel. It is just as Imreasonable to suppose that an Amos or
Hosea or Isaiah—not to mention the rest of the goodly
fellowship—practised some of the customs the existence of
which in their days is abundantly proved, alike by a careful
examination of the Hebrew Scriptures, and by archaeologi-
cal exploration, as it is to imagine that a Bishop Fisher or a
Thomas More took part in the orgies of witches’ sabbaths.