Chapter 3: The Origin and Progress of Idolatry

OR CONCERNING THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY, OR OF WILL-WORSHIP.—CHAPTER 1.

The origins of idolatry most uncertain — Diversity of opinions concerning them — Reasons for a new investigation — Adamic idolatry in paradise — The apostasy and superstition of Cain — The Enoshian reformation of the church — Before the flood, no idolatry properly so called — The "golden age" after the flood — In it no traces of idolatry — From where men were called mortal — The time of the division of languages and the dispersion of the human race — The builders of the tower of Babylon, what sort of men they were — What purpose they had in building it — Among them the origins of idolatry are to be sought.

I. That no clear traces of the origins and occasions of idolatry remain, we have both seen before and the fruitless efforts of investigators have placed beyond controversy. That it did have an origin is evident from the outcome. But the times, the accounts, the causes, the authors, and all the beginnings of what arose must be investigated by conjecture. Here, indeed: —

Whoever conjectures best, consider him the truest prophet. — [Eurip. Frag. inc. 128.]

"Call him the best prophet who conjectures well." Thus Cicero renders that verse from Euripides. Some think that idolatry occupied the world before the flood. This is the view of most of the Jews, especially Maimonides, at the beginning of his work on the Worship of the Stars, whom Selden follows in the Prolegomena to his Syntagma on the Syrian Gods. Others think that when they came out of the ark, Satan first sprinkled this poison upon them. The Targumists specifically lay this crime upon Ham. To others it seems that no sure traces or express monuments of arbitrary and profane worship can be found before the building of the tower of Babylon, which the stubborn and proud descendants of Noah undertook in memory of their immortality. Here, therefore, we must pause for a moment, and investigate the sources of this Nile — most fertile of monsters — from which, indeed —

"And monsters of every kind of god, and barking Anubis"

180 THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY. [Book 2.] came forth — the sources must be investigated. This is a most fruitful field for surveying the records of ancient time; and although great intellects have cultivated it, yet, as commonly happens in investigating the most obscure origins of things, and of those concerning which —

"Scarce a faint breath of fame reaches us" — there remains here still much ground in which others may long and profitably exercise themselves. The reader will easily see from what we are about to present on this topic that, after the most abundant harvests of others, there has been no lack of reasons for bringing forth these gleanings of our own. For if we cannot bring new light to the things themselves — that is, to the origins of foreign worship, which are shrouded in more than sufficient darkness — yet we are led to some hope that we shall set forth at least what relation they bore to the worship of God, and by what deceits the most ancient impostor beguiled the human race and led it into error; and other things quietly passed over by learned men who have cultivated this topic with great erudition — things not unwelcome to the reader, lending some light to a most obscure truth. My intention is to touch only on the chief points of these matters, so that I may freely satisfy the work I have proposed and keep to the path I have set out.

II. We showed above that God instilled in man, created for His own glory, a law of obedience encompassing all those things that necessarily follow from his nature, condition, and ultimate end. He never permitted that law to be the complete rule and revelation of all divine worship. To it, in the state of creation before the entrance of sin, He added the ordinance concerning not eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In that act, with respect to the external deed, the rational creature made the beginning of defection from God. But the foundation of the defect was laid in moral worship. For by placing faith in the serpent against God's threatening, man held the serpent in God's place to that extent. And this was a certain species of idolatry — indeed the worst — which still flourishes among all those who, setting aside the authority of the divine promises and threatenings, make themselves obedient to Satan. Yet this is not that proper idolatry whose origins we are investigating.

III. After the entrance of sin, God restored natural theology enlarged by new revelations and the institution of sacrifices, and consecrated to new ends. In the worship thus instituted, sin was immediately committed again, preceded by unbelief. We have explained above the nature and outcome of that sin. We also showed that Cain, cursed by God, entirely abandoned His solemn worship. It is indeed probable that he, and the citizens of Enoch over whom he presided (Genesis 4), repudiated that worship — namely, of sacrifices — from which he had drawn the first stain of evil, and usurped new rites of his own devising, worshipping with self-chosen devotion. That he obtained for himself new gods, as the Scripture says (Judges 5:8), there are obstacles to our believing. For it was not possible for Cain to so strip off his humanity as to fabricate other gods for himself after that express and open communication which had passed between him and Jehovah, the Creator of all things.

IV. As time went on, and some of the Sethites had also lapsed into the ways of the Cainites, the pious Enoshians, together with a reformation of divine worship — so that it might be preserved more purely and for a longer time for duly calling upon the name of God — instituted separate assemblies, and from this they were called "sons of God." Genesis 4, at the end: "Then men began to call upon the name of the Lord." We also showed above that some falsely suppose those words to mark the origin of foreign worship. For the Holy Spirit indicates not a profanation of the divine name, but a reformation of the church.

V. God Himself complains that before the flood all flesh had corrupted its way. Nor is there any doubt that the apostates most openly declared war against God and religion. But that they were bound by this particular crime — namely, idolatry — there is no testimony, no foundation for making a probable conjecture. Since we have demonstrated this clearly with arguments above, I do not wish to go over ground already covered here. We therefore necessarily pass over the antediluvian ages in this inquiry. For the opinion of Justin Martyr does not please me; who interprets the sons of God, who, captivated by love for the daughters of men, united them to themselves, as angels; and that from them were born demons who immediately gave themselves to the promotion of idolatry: Apol. to the Roman Senate.

VI. What the Targumists and other Jews wildly imagine concerning Ham's idolatry and magical incantations, and the nature of that crime, does not belong here. That age which intervened between the flood and the Babylonic dispersion of the nations left very few traces, or none at all, in the surviving monuments of history. Whatever that span of time was, Noah, the great paterfamilias, held the entire human race descended from him under his godly and fatherly governance. That was the Golden Age, about which the ancient fabulists say a great deal.

Virgil, Georg. i. 125:—

«« Before Jupiter, no farmer broke up the fields; it was not even lawful to mark out or divide the plain with a boundary.

They sought all things in common; and the earth itself freely brought forth all things, no one demanding it. And Martial, Epigrams, book xii.:— "O great king of the ancient Pole, and of the former world, under whom there was lazy ease and no toil at all, no thunderbolt too regal, and no earth deserving the thunderbolt, nor cleft open to the shades, but rich with its own produce." Both of these refer to Saturn, drawing from Hesiod; for so he writes, Works and Days, 111:—

Those who lived in the time of Kronos, when he reigned over heaven; they lived like gods, with hearts free from care, apart from toil and sorrow—

"When Saturn, having taken possession of all things, held the empire of the heavens, men lived like gods," etc.

182 ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY. [Book 3.

And Tibullus, book 1.3:— How well they lived before under king Saturn, before the Earth was opened up for long roads.

No house had a door; no stone was fixed in the fields to mark the farmland with fixed boundaries.

The oaks themselves gave honey," etc.

Lucian has similar things in his work on the Kronia, chapter 7. He introduces Saturn speaking — and because of this he appointed times of rest, feasting, games, equality of all, both slaves and free men, for no one was a slave under him — all of which refers to Noah's fatherly governance and the undivided earth. Plutarch, in the Life of Numa, relates that from this the license of slaves during the Saturnalia among the Romans originated.

VII. For Noah was Saturn. He was the greatest herald of righteousness among the antediluvians (2 Peter 1:5), and the contempt shown to his warnings was followed by the dreadful destruction of the human race. Therefore, so long as his sons and grandsons either stood in awe of his authority or showed themselves obedient to his words and preaching, it is not equitable for us to suppose that they committed this crime against themselves. VIII. Most believe that the confusion of languages occurred in the one hundred and first or second year after the flood. Then men came to be called meropes and were so designated — a race of meropes among men, as Homer says in the Iliad, A. 250: "cities of men of varied speech." Meropes, that is, those who have their speech divided, or, as Didymus says, those whose voice is organized into syllables and articulate — that is, because men have their tongue divided and prepared for pronouncing syllables, or because they use articulate speech; whereas the sounds of other animals are inarticulate. Hesychius agrees with the scholiast: meropes are men, because their speech is divided or articulated. Eustathius likewise cites this same interpretation first; to which he adds the view of those more learned: that it was the common opinion of the ancient Christians that men were called meropes from that division of languages which they suffered in the building of the tower of Babylon, being scattered everywhere throughout the earth. John of Antioch, surnamed Malalas, has similar things: the languages were divided; and from this, men are called meropes, because their speech was divided into many tongues and voices; the languages were parceled out, and from this men are called meropes, Chron. Theol. Log. Deut. Now just as men were called meropes on account of the division of languages, so the place in which this punishment was inflicted on the rebels is called Babel, as if to say confusion came: or

The word Babel is used for Babylon, meaning "confusion," with the middle lamed dropped to avoid cacophony. Peleg was born in the one hundred and first year after the flood. That name was given to him, as (Genesis 10:25) states, "because in his days the earth was divided." And the verb is used elsewhere in the same sense, in (Psalms 55:10), "Divide their tongue." Most of the Jews affirm that this name was given to Heber's son by a spirit of prophecy. Cornelius a Lapide and Augustine Torniellus are of the same opinion: the former in his Commentaries on Genesis, the latter in his Annals at the year of the world 1931. Thus Noah's godly parents, in the naming of Noah, seem to have looked forward to things that would not be fulfilled until six hundred years later. The Jews, led by arguments not altogether inept, maintain that the Tower of Babylon was built in the two hundredth year of Peleg's life. Whatever pertains to understanding or rightly establishing this chronological dispute, the most distinguished Buxtorf the son set forth in a special dissertation on the origin of multiple languages. Seth Calvisius in his Chronology, Pererius, Pareus, Rivetus in his Commentaries and Disputations on Genesis; Torniellus in his Annals of the World; Masius in his Commentary on Joshua; Usher in his Sacred Chronology, and very many others, both theologians and chronologists, have woven the same web.

IX. Those who assert that the division of languages occurred at the birth of Peleg, and that his name was given to him on account of that event, appear in some men's opinion to posit too short an interval from the flood — shorter than what would have been needed for the human population to grow to the multitude that set itself to building the tower; for, as we said, the birth of Peleg falls in the one hundred and first year after the flood. Those, on the other hand, who think that the name was given to Peleg by a spirit of prophecy, and who place the dispersion of the human race at the end of his life, are thereby forced to place the coming of Abraham into the land of Canaan in the year of the world 1996, eighty-eight years after that dispersion — a span that likewise seems too short for the erection of those kingdoms which sacred history reports to have been founded in those times. Buxtorf therefore denies that Peleg was the firstborn of Heber, or that he was born in the seventy-fourth year of his father's life, and instead pushes his birth, and consequently the division of languages, to a much later time. But Johannes Temporarius shows, in the second of his Chronological Demonstrations, that within 102 years of Noachic stock 1,554,420 males and females could have been born; Usher, in Sacred Chronology, book 5, accepts half that number, and there most learnedly refutes the madness and notorious audacity of Johannes Morin in rejecting the Hebrew chronology. Let us therefore grant that the building of the Tower of Babylon and the division of languages occurred in the year of the world 1757, 101 or 102 years after the flood. Up to that time, there remains nothing to testify that any traces, any monuments, any evidences of idolatry existed or had ever existed; at least no traces of it survive.

X. The Jerusalem Targum teaches that the builders of the Tower of Babylon had in their minds to place an image on the summit of that impious pile, which they intended to worship with religious devotion. "They said," it records, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower, whose top shall reach to the height of the heavens, and let us make for ourselves something to worship on its summit, and let us put a sword in its hand." Jonathan Ben Uzziel adds nearly the same story in almost the same words. It is the common opinion of learned men that this tower stood for a long time after the confusion of languages. And it appears to be none other than the structure which Herodotus describes at length under the name of the temple of Bel, in book 1, chapter 181. It consisted of eight towers placed one upon another (of which the first at least, if not each one, was a stade in height). Of the topmost he speaks as follows: "In the last tower there is a great shrine, and in the shrine a great couch is splendidly laid," etc. Thus, not long after the confusion of languages, that mad edifice was turned into a temple of an idol, that is, of the sun. But the Jews seek the origin of their interpretation elsewhere; they think that the words which Moses records, by which the builders exhorted one another to take up the work, hint at that design. "And let us make for ourselves a name" — meaning, they say, "an idol of great name." For they maintain that the word for any deity, true or false, is used absolutely in this way. The word does indeed signify "God" emphatically in some places (Leviticus 24:11); but "name" absolutely nowhere, nor does it mean "idol." If this were true, nowhere could anyone find a more illustrious document for the origin of idolatry among the nations. Nor would it be necessary to think that this crime crept upon the world gradually and by various degrees, seizing upon various occasions as pretexts; rather, a deliberate apostasy of the human race from God would have given it its origin. But this is a rabbinical delusion; and the words which the builders used plainly look in a different direction. Being mortal, and subject to various misfortunes, and especially to dispersion into the remote regions of the earth, they intended to achieve an immortal fame and glory. That intention of their minds they expressed in the words, "Let us make for ourselves a name" — that is, let us leave behind to our posterity a hereditary title of praise and glory. Nor is it credible that nearly all the families of the entire world conspired, as if in a single gust of wind, against the living God, and, casting off all reverence and worship of the Creator, simultaneously resolved to worship idols.

XI. No reason therefore persuades us that they built the tower with the mind and design of worshiping new gods; Scripture narrates that they had resolved on something altogether different. It is indeed probable that these builders were a class of men defiled by many crimes, who reckoned that the power they had obtained could not be held without injury and oppression of the weak and poor. We have shown above that they rejected the warnings and governance of Noah. Hence they were most fully given over to the dominion of Satan, and ready to carry out whatever their innate vanity of mind should suggest.

XII. After the speech of all was confused and divided, the commerce of new languages cast them into various groups. Reduced to that condition, God dispersed them by tribes and families over the entire surface of the earth. There were indeed among the ancient Christians those for whom it was considered a heresy to deny that Noah had distributed the world among his sons and grandsons, and had assigned to each family its own seats. For after the designation of heresies had begun to be made arbitrarily, there was scarcely anything said or written by anyone, however entirely true, that was not by some placed in that category. But Scripture shows, in (Genesis 11:8), that the sons of men occupied their new seats, and were carried to the various shores of the world, by divine arrangement, not by Noachic assignment. That any of the builders of the tower retained the primeval language without some significant change cannot be proved by testimonies or arguments. We grant that from it certain words remained in some use among nearly all nations; but these were very few, as Boxhornius rightly affirms in Origins of the Gauls, chapter 7. It is not improbable that along with the loss of the primeval language, they also fell into forgetfulness of many instructions concerning divine things. Among these men therefore — namely the builders of the Tower of Babylon, left to themselves, destitute of new revelations, forgetful of former ones, dispersed here and there and wandering — the beginnings of idolatry are to be sought.