ne great day in the Jewish
religious year called the Day of Atonement, when a special ritual was
gone through and special offerings made to God on account of the sins
of the people as a whole. The ceremonial was very elaborate and the
occasion was observed with great solemnity by the whole nation. As
described in the Old Testament the prescriptions for this Day of
Atonement, the Good Friday of the Levitical system as it has been
called, probably owe a good deal to Babylonian influences. It should
be remembered that the outstanding event in later Jewish history was
the carrying away of the flower of the nation by Nebuchadnezzar into
Babylon, where they remained for more than two generations. It is
quite likely that, in spite of their exclusiveness and their hatred of
their conquerors, the Jews may have borrowed some of their religious
ritual from the Babylonians, but, whether they did or not, the ideas
underlying their respective modes of worship were much the same.
Primitive religious sacrifice among Semitic peoples appears to have
been mainly of a joyous character; worship and sacrifice went hand in
hand. The worshippers were accustomed to offer to their gods
sacrifices of everything which the votaries themselves valued,--the
fruits of the earth, their material possessions, their flocks and
herds, the prisoners they had taken in war, and occasionally even the
children of their own body. It was only on great and solemn occasions,
such as the necessity for staying a pestilence, or averting defeat in
war, that the offering of the more terrible kinds of sacrifice was
made. It would be instructive, therefore, for us to inquire what were
the underlying ideas assumed in Semitic religious sacrifice.

+Underlying ideas in Semitic sacrifice. 1. The solidarity of man with
God.+--In the first place there was the idea of community of life
between the worshipper and his god. It is doubtful how far this can be
pressed, but it is clear that in the Semitic mind there was always a
conviction that the deity of the clan or tribe was the giver as well as
the sustainer of its life. This did not apply to the minor divinities,
the demons of wood and stream, but to the tribal deities, the Chemosh
of Moab, the Dagon of the Philistines, the Jehovah of Israel. Probably
the Philistines were not Semites, but no doubt ancient worship in
general took for granted this community of life between any particular
people and their deity. In the