I have just said be true, we have to get behind even the language of
scripture and ask how the writers of the Old and New Testaments came to
use these particular symbols and what they originally meant. The word
"atonement" is not an exact translation of any one Old Testament term,
but connotes a group of related religious ideas. In its Christian use
other elements enter into it from Greek thought which are not to be
found in the Old Testament. But the Old Testament source of the ideas
as well as the term is much older than the Greek, and therefore we are
right in looking to the Old Testament for the origin of the doctrine
which has taken such an important place in Christianity. But here
again modern research has opened up an enormous field of investigation.
Israel was a member of a vast family of nations all of which had sprung
from one stock, and of which the Babylonians and Assyrians were the
most powerful representatives. The Israelites were, politically
speaking, a comparatively insignificant folk surrounded by mighty
empires which had attained a high degree of civilisation. The
excavations which are now proceeding in oriental lands, especially the
territories occupied by ancient Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt, are
bringing much valuable and interesting matter to light. We find that
the civilisation of these peoples was much older than up to now
scholars have believed. The communities inhabiting the land of Canaan,
for example, had developed a complex political and commercial
organisation long before the Israelitish invasion; Canaan was in fact
the highway along which passed the commerce of Egypt with the mighty
nations to the north. The painstaking efforts of expert explorers are
bringing vast forgotten literatures to light and reconstituting for us
the religious ideas and modes of life of these people of the ancient
world. One result of these researches has been to prove that Hebrew
religious ideas were closely allied to those of other Semitic peoples,
and even the way in which they were expressed owed not a little to
older civilisations. In nothing was this more clearly the case than
with the ideas included afterward in the doctrine of Atonement. The
word translated Atonement in our version of the Old Testament
scriptures played an important part in the Old Testament sacrificial
system, and this again was closely connected with Semitic modes of
worship in general.

+The Day of Atonement.+--There was o