nly one possible to him. Should he be
expelled from his clan he is driven away from his god, and he cannot
obtain access into another clan except by a formal adoption as a
stranger client. The link, on the other hand between the god and his
clansmen is of the strongest. He joins in all their enterprises,
after being consulted on the subject, and having a sacrifice offered
to him, which renews the union of the clansmen to him and to each
other. Their wars are his wars; when any of them is injured or slain
he joins in their necessary acts of retaliation; it is a religious
duty for each of them to be faithful to the others, and to keep up
the tribal customs, of which the god approves.

Thus the Semites have as many gods as they have clans; and these gods
do not greatly differ from each other. As long, moreover, as the
clans are at constant feud, no single god can grow very great. It is
only when one clan conquers others, that a king-god can arise to rule
over all alike as a monarch rules over his nobles and their
provinces. But in this type of deity the genius of Semitic religion
is already expressed. The god of the Semite is not a nature-power who
bears the same aspect to all men, but a member of a particular clan,
a person to whom the clansman occupies the same position of natural
subordination as he does to his father or his chief. The god takes
his name not from a part of nature but from a human relationship. He
is "Baal," master or owner, he is "Adon," lord; in later
circumstances he is "Melech," king. "El," mighty one, hero, is a more
generic term; like our "God," it is applied to any divine being.
These deities, it will be noticed, are all masculine; but it is not
to be supposed that the Semites had no goddesses. Not to speak of the
goddesses of Babylonia, mere doubles of the gods whose names they
bore (chapter vii.), the earliest Semites are believed by several
great scholars to have had a goddess but no god. The matriarchal
state of society, in which the mother alone ruled the family, came
before the patriarchal, and so the reign of the goddess came before
that of the god. Each community has its own Al-lat, "The Lady," as
she is called in Arabia, a strict and exacting lady, not to be
confounded with the licentious goddesses of later times; and in all
Semitic lands traces of her early prevalence are found.[2] As the
male god came to the front, the female became a less definite figure,
till she was generally a mere