Lectures on the Religion of the Semites

by William Robertson Smith

This Elibron Classics edition is a facsimile reprint of a 1894 edition by Adam and Charles Black, London.

Genres: Religion, Anthropology, Nonfiction

530 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1889

About the author

Rev. Prof William Robertson Smith DD FRSE LLD was a Scottish orientalist, Old Testament scholar, professor of divinity, and minister of the Free Church of Scotland. He was an editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica and contributor to the Encyclopaedia Biblica. He is also known for his book Religion of the Semites, which is considered a foundational text in the comparative study of religion.

Smith's writing approached religious topics without endorsing the Bible as literally true. The result was a furore in the Free Church of Scotland, of which he was a member as well as criticism from conservative parts of America. As a result of a heresy trial, he lost his position at the Aberdeen Free Church College in 1881 and took up a position as a reader in Arabic at the University of Cambridge, where he eventually rose to the position of University Librarian, Professor of Arabic and a fellow of Christ's College. It was during this time that he wrote The Old Testament in the Jewish Church and The Prophets of Israel (1882), which were intended to be theological treatises for the lay audience.

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

W. Robertson Smith is one of the great figures of Anglo-American anthropology in the 19th century. He was perhaps less influential than Frazer, but still exercised tremendous influence. This book is a collection of lectures delivered over a couple of years that he expanded upon and published. The topic is the sacrificial cult in ancient Israel. He uses a comparative method to put the sacrificial cult into its ideological context. He attempts to determine what the sacrificial cult meant to the ancient practitioner.

He refutes the standard explanation of sacrificial cults as either gift-giving to a god or as god's partaking of a meal. Instead he ties the sacrificial cult to a prehistoric time when the western Semites were nomadic and organized not around a central cult and polity, but instead had tribal deities. The sacrifice of a totemic animal was a means of entering into a blood covenant with the god, just as blood-brothers exchange blood.

His theory is novel, although not well supported in the textual and archaeological record. He was working with comparative materials from primarily Arabia in late antiquity and making an assumption that southern Semites were culturally similar to northwestern Semites and that they were just a more primitive example of Semitic culture. Those assumptions may in fact be incorrect.

[Lewis · Rating 2 out of 5]

The conversational style of this book simply made it impossible for me to finish. Smith appeared to constantly say what he planned to say later on. Perhaps listening, it would be an effective tool to help one make connections, stay focused, etc. Reading it though, it felt circular and unending. Interesting ideas but just impossible for me to follow all the way through.

[Taylor Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

His conclusions are conjectural but he writes authoritatively and gives the reader food for thought, presenting the question of the origin of Judaic ritual, which he posits to have come from the broader culture. The Ancient Israelites and their Jewish descendants did not invent their rituals out of thin air, and neither did Yahweh command something entirely novel. Rather, religious leaders repurposed and gave new explanations for practices they had inherited from their ancestors and neighbors.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

still woriing on it. wish I knew enough to say where it is outadated or retrograde 19th cnetury , never read Frazer's Gold Bough either. But some very well worked out analysis from a Scotman who was not an archologist or travler in the Near East. what's down the well beelew the montheistic rligions that origiated there.