to repeat that with
which we set out, that gods are worshipped whose relations to their
worshippers are borrowed from existing forms of society. The god is
the father or the master or the champion, of the circle of
worshippers; he is of their kindred, he is their greatest and
strongest clansman, he belongs to them and to none but them. This,
whether it is derived--as Professor Robertson Smith thinks--from the
ideas of totemism or not, leads to a religion which is exclusive and
intense, and cannot be trifled with. The god who is a man's master,
and the head of his clan, stands in a more imperative position
towards him than the god of the sky, or than a departed ancestor. He
does not change with the seasons or the weather, nor is there any
doubt as to his intentions and demands. Semitic religion, even at
this stage, is a very real thing, and may easily, in favouring
circumstances, become a force of overmastering energy.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

Hommel, _Die Semitischen Voelker und Sprachen_.

"Semites," by McCurdy, in Hastings' _Bible Dictionary_, vol. v.

Cumont, _Les Religions orientales dans la Paganisme Romain_, 1907.

CHAPTER XI
CANAANITES AND PHENICIANS

When the Children of Israel crossed the Jordan and settled in
Palestine, they found that country inhabited by a race of men who
spoke the same language as themselves, and who were much further
advanced than they in civilisation. The letters of El-Amarna which
belong to this period show Syria to have been full of small
theocratic states, all pervaded, though now under the power of Egypt,
by Babylonian culture, each with a god and a settled worship of its
own. The Israelites of a later time regarded the Canaanites with such
disdain that they reckoned them (Genesis x. 6, 15) as belonging to an
inferior race; but the two peoples belonged to the same race, and had
many common ideas and practices. In religion they resembled each
other, or Israel could never have been tempted so strongly, and for
so long a period, to adopt the rites of the people they conquered.

The Israelites were not the only people who invaded the land of the
Canaanites and stayed in it. Three such invasions took place: those
of the Phenicians, of the Philistines, and of the Hebrews--the first
and third being Semitic peoples, and perhaps the second also. The
Philistines, settling on the south-eastern corner of the
Mediterranean, had a Semitic religion, of which the fish-god Dagon,
the F