ure to these. If one wanted to get anything out of him, therefore,
the first step was to put him in good humour by gifts; and if one
desired to escape his wrath, which might be excited by the most trifling
neglect or unintentional disrespect, the great thing was to pacify
him by costly presents. King Finow appears to have been somewhat of a
freethinker (to the great horror of his subjects), and it was only his
untimely death which prevented him from dealing with the priest of a
god, who had not returned a favourable answer to his supplications,
as Saul dealt with the priests of the sanctuary of Jahveh at Nob.
Nevertheless, Finow showed his practical belief in the gods during the
sickness of a daughter, to whom he was fondly attached, in a fashion
which has a close parallel in the history of Israel.

If the gods have any resentment against us, let the whole
weight of vengeance fall on my head. I fear not their vengeance
--but spare my child; and I earnestly entreat you, Toobo Totai
[the god whom he had evoked], to exert all your influence with
the other gods that I alone may suffer all the punishment they
desire to inflict (vol. i. p. 354).

So when the king of Israel has sinned by "numbering the people," and
they are punished for his fault by a pestilence which slays seventy
thousand innocent men, David cries to Jahveh:--

Lo, I have sinned, and I have done perversely; but these sheep,
what have they done? let thine hand, I pray thee, be against me,
and against my father's house. (2 Sam. xxiv. 17).

Human sacrifices were extremely common in Polynesia; and, in Tonga, the
"devotion" of a child by strangling was a favourite method of averting
the wrath of the gods. The well-known instances of Jephthah's sacrifice
of his daughter and of David's giving up the seven sons of Saul to be
sacrificed by the Gibeonites "before Jahveh," appear to me to leave no
doubt that the old Israelites, even when devout worshippers of Jahveh,
considered human sacrifices, under certain circumstances, to be not only
permissible but laudable. Samuel's hewing to pieces of the miserable
captive, sole survivor of his nation, Agag, "before Jahveh," can hardly
be viewed in any other light. The life of Moses is redeemed from Jahveh,
who "sought to slay him," by Zipporah's symbolical sacrifice of her
child, by the bloody operation of circumcision. Jahveh expressly affirms
that the first-born males of men and beasts are devot