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Though Burton scarcely shines as an original writer, he had a keen eye for what was good in others, and he here showed for the first time that remarkable gift for annotating which stood him in such stead when he came to handle The Arabian Nights. Hans Stade's story is so amusing that if we did not know it to be fact we should imagine it the work of some Portuguese W. S. Gilbert.
Never were more grisly scenes or more captivating and facetious cannibals. When they told Stade that he was to be eaten, they added, in order to cheer him, that he was to be washed down with a really pleasant drink called kawi. The king's son then tied Stade's legs together in three places.
We have seen that it seemed to make no difference to Mr. Oxford whether Jehovah was a god of Moses's family or tribe or a Kenite god. The latter is Stade's.
Oxford next avers that 'the earliest form of the Israelite religion was Fetishism or Totemism. This is another example of Stade's logic. Finding, as he believes, names suggestive of Totemism in Simeon, Levi, Rachel, and so on, Stade leaps to the conclusion that Totemism in Israel was prior to anything resembling monotheism.
In the light of the Babylonian story of Eabani living with animals, Stade's suggestion receives a striking illustration. See Trumbull, The Threshold Covenant, p. 239. Kharimtu. In Arabic the word is likewise used for 'woman' in general. The temple at Uruk is meant.
We are told in Stade's Travels in Turkey, that, "near Constantinople in the migrating season, the sun is often nearly obscured by the prodigious flights of quails, which alight on the coasts of the Black Sea, near the Bosphorus, and are caught by means of nets spread on high poles, planted along the cliff, some yards from its edge, against which the birds, exhausted by their passage over the sea, strike themselves and fall."
Each is inconsistent with the other; Wellhausen's fancy is inconsistent with all that we know of religious development: Stade's is hopelessly inconsistent with Exodus iv. 24-26, where Moses's Kenite wife reproaches him for a ceremony of his, not of her, religion. Therefore the Kenite differed from the Hebrew sacra. The passage is very extraordinary, and is said by critics to be very archaic.
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