Lectures on the Religion of the Semites

"This is a book by a Scottish scholar, William Robertson Smith, which originated as lectures given in Aberdeen at the end of the 1880s. It was published in the 1890s, not too long before Smith’s early death in 1894. Smith came out of the Free Church of Scotland, which was what we would now call a fundamentalist church. These people were highly literate, but highly suspicious of modern scholarship on the Bible. Smith got booted out of his job as professor of Hebrew at the Free Church’s theological college in Aberdeen and ended up, eventually, in Cambridge teaching Arabic. Smith had learned Arabic because he came to believe that there were strong parallels between the religions that became the religion of the Old Testament, and those of other ancient Semitic peoples. So The Religion of the Semites is an attempt to understand the origin of what he called the Old Testament religion, and eventually Christianity, by placing it in the context of this whole world of ancient religion. He develops a theory that ancient religion is fundamentally sociological in character. It is a way in which rituals — especially the sacrifice and the ritual meal that follows — bind together people who are living in a tribal society. This book is important in the evolution of philology because it helped to make acceptable, in the English-speaking world, some of the more deeply historical understandings of the origin of the Bible. It also laid the groundwork for the comparative study of religions, and particularly that part of the comparative study of religions that’s fundamentally sociological in character. It also became a founding text in what we would now call social and cultural anthropology. So you can see, in this text, that a deeply historical understanding of philology, of the humanistic study of the various civilizations, is beginning to split up into different disciplines. Yet all these disciplines have a kind of a fundamental unity, so that when Robertson Smith is writing The Religion of the Semites , he isn’t thinking, “Oh I’m writing anthropology” or “I’m writing comparative religion” or “I’m writing Biblical philology.” He’s doing all of those things, but he’s doing it as a single, unified enterprise. They are the peoples of what we now call the Middle East. They would include the Arabic-speaking peoples, the people of ancient Canaan — the various groups in the Old Testament that the Israelites are supposedly always battling against. It’s the peoples associated with the Semitic family of languages, of which the best-known representatives are Hebrew and Arabic. He’s quite a bit later. He was hugely controversial because most English-speaking Protestants were still deeply suspicious of an historical understanding of the Bible. Most English-speaking Protestants in the 19th century still wanted to think of the Bible as a direct divine revelation, in which all of the parts — ranging from the earliest books of the Old Testament, to the Christian gospels and epistles — were a single divine revelation. He’s saying that it’s much more complicated than that. He believes in a kind of revelation, but he doesn’t believe that the Bible is the verbal record of that revelation. He believes that it’s historical testimony to the way God has revealed himself in history, in interacting with the ancient Hebrews, the Jews of the centuries before Christ, and Christians. It’s an account, by fallible mortals, of God’s action in history. The idea that the Bible itself was a product of history and of particular cultures at particular times, that was still deeply offensive to most English-speaking Protestants in his lifetime. It did start to change, over the course of his life. By the time he died in 1894 you were starting to see, particularly in academic circles, much greater acceptance of the idea that the Bible is fundamentally historical."