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Updated: May 28, 2025
The Prophets, recognising in the God of Sinai, their nation's God One to whom righteousness was infinitely dearer than even his Chosen People freed the conception of God from local ties, and made it overspread the world. Mr. Robertson Smith has pointed out, again, the manner in which the different political development of East and West affected the religion of Greece and of the Semites.
Why the Semites, in marked contrast with the Indo-Europeans and the Chinese, have shown a relatively feeble recognition of the physical heaven we are not able to say; possibly the tribal feeling referred to above may have led to a centering of devotion on those deities that lay nearer to everyday life, or in the case of Babylonia it may be that the city with which Anu was particularly connected lost its early importance, and its deity in consequence yielded to others.
Here the river as creator is sharply distinguished from the Flood; and we may conclude that the water of the Euphrates Valley impressed the early Sumerians, as later the Semites, with its creative as well as with its destructive power.
Our own remote ancestors both the Aryans and the Semites all the early ancestors of the white race so far as known, were pastoral or nomadic; and the Aryans of central Europe remained so until after the fall of Rome, when, for the first time, they became practically sedentary. This nomadic and pastoral life is a very great advance over the mere hunting and fishing stage.
But, at the same time, any difficulty of communication which might have arisen out of this circumstance was removed by the long pre-existing intercourse of other Semites, of every grade of civilisation, with the Egyptians.
On the east were the Elamites, with Susa for their capital; to the north of these were the warlike Kassites. The Sumerians, who preceded the Semites in the occupancy of Babylonia, were of an unknown stock. They were the founders of Babylonian culture. Even by them the soil was skillfully cultivated with the help of dikes and canals. They were the inventors of the cuneiform writing.
In its simplest form Islam was but an emphatic renewal of the immemorial creed of the Semites, and as long as a pure Semitic race is left in the world, the revelation of Mecca may be expected to remain a necessary link in their tradition.
The hatred of the Stoics was a religious hatred, which is the bitterest of all; the Stoics were the propagators of a rival religious system, which had originally been founded by Hellenized Semites and borrowed much from Semitic sources. They had their missionaries everywhere and aspired to found a universal philosophical religion.
The god of the Semites is generally a changeless being, who himself conducts and orders the changes of the seasons, but in Greece we find gods whom man can accompany in the tragedy of their fall and the triumph of their rise.
The Semites declared that man was created in the image of God, and we created God in our own image; while conscious of the power of the numina we confronted them boldly, and were ready to resist them. The Indian legends, and those of the Hellenes, the Scandinavians, and the whole Aryan race, are full of conflicts between gods and men.
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