ure Hebrew.[345] In a play of
Plautus[346] a Carthaginian is made to speak a long passage in his native
language, the Punic tongue; this is also very readable Hebrew. The black
basalt stele, lately discovered in the land of Moab, contains an
inscription of Mesha, king of Moab, addressed to his god, Chemosh,
describing his victory over the Israelites. This is also in a Hebrew
dialect. From such facts it appears that the Hebrews, Phoenicians, and
Canaanites were all congeners with each other, and with the Babylonians
and Assyrians.

But now the striking fact appears that the Hebrew _religion_ differed
widely from that of these other nations of the same family. The Assyrians,
Babylonians, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians all possessed a nearly
identical religion. They all believed in a supreme god, called by the
different names of Ilu, Bel, Set, Hadad, Moloch, Chemosh, Jaoh, El, Adon,
Asshur. All believed in subordinate and secondary beings, emanations from
this supreme being, his manifestations to the world, rulers of the
planets. Like other pantheistic religions, the custom prevailed among the
Semitic nations of promoting first one and then another deity to be the
supreme object of worship. Among the Assyrians, as among the Egyptians,
the gods were often arranged in triads, as that of Ann, Bel, and Ao. Anu,
or Cannes, wore the head of a fish; Bel wore the horns of a bull; Ao was
represented by a serpent. These religions represented the gods as the
spirit within nature, and behind natural objects and forces,--powers
within the world, rather than above the world. Their worship combined
cruelty and licentiousness, and was perhaps as debasing a superstition as
the world has witnessed. The Greeks, who were not puritans themselves in
their religion, were shocked at the impure orgies of this worship, and
horrified at the sacrifice of children among the Canaanites and
Carthaginians.

How then did the Hebrews, under Moses and the later prophets, originate a
system so widely different? Their God was above nature, not in it. He
stood alone, unaccompanied by secondary deities; he made no part of a
triad; he was not associated with a female representative. His worship
required purity, not pollution; its aim was holiness, and its spirit
humane, not cruel. Monotheistic in its spirit from the first, it became an
absolute monotheism in its development. Whence this wide departure in the
Hebrews from the religious tendencies and belief of t