ABSTRACT
The peoples among whom these Hebrew clans dwelt were wanting in unity. There may have been a kinship of race, but religion was not among them, as among the Hebrews, the same unifying force. Not one Baal but many Baalim kept them apart as cities and separated them from the people of Yahweh. They might come together when the growth of the Hebrews seemed to imperil them; there might at least be formed now and then a confederacy of a few cities, and in a campaign like that under Sisera's leadership they might seek to humble these foreign clans, while their commercial affairs might keep them from isolating themselves from one another. Even their common worship of the various local Baalim might beget similar sentiments and might make it possible for them as individuals to feel at home in one another's cities. But as there was no national life in the true sense of the term, so there was no national God; indeed, we may say, there was no national life, because there was no one God around whom their sentiments could crystallise. The Baal of a city and its dependencies seems to have been the recognised God of the people of that particular group; as such he was worshipped as the Lord of husbandry, upon whom they depended for their crops as agriculturalists. In the cultivation of field and vineyard he was the power back of nature who had it in his hands to give or to withhold, and inasmuch as they depended largely upon husbandry, their worship as a people was chiefly a worship of Baal and his associate Astarte. Life was, for the most part, summed up in terms of service to these; especially was the thought of generation associated with them and their worship. The fruitfulness of field and beast and man depended upon their being propitious. All this opened the way for licentious rites and ceremonies which at first as instituted may have been designed to further the very ends desired and sought, but which in time may have led, and apparently did lead, to carnivals of lust.
