The family of Abraham, as Shemites, would have naturally followed the ancestral worship of their people in Babylonia, were it still separately practised, unless the influence of neighbouring idolaters of another race had imbued them with a tendency to some other system. In the family. names there is no trace of any idolatry, nor does their later history furnish any clue but that of Laban's teraphim, for the time of Job is too distant and his position too different to afford us any aid. Laban's idolatry being the next men tioned in Scripture, we may pass on to consider it for the illustration of our present subject.
When Jacob left Padan-aram, Rachel stole and carr;ed away her father Laban's teraphim. These teraphim Laban greatly valued, as we may judge from his determined search. He called them his gods (Gen. xxxi. 3o, 32), though he was not without a belief in the true God (24, 49-53). It has indeed been thought that the passage rendered The God of Abraham, and the God of Nahor, the God of their fathers, judge betwixt us. And Jacob sware by the fear of his father Isaac' (53)—might be read so as to illustrate Laban's idolatry ; but the seeming difference between Laban's oath and Jacob's dis appears if we compare the passage with that earlier one, where Jacob says, Except the God of my father, the God of Abraham, and the fear of Isaac, had been with me, surely thou hadst sent me away now empty' (42). There is, therefore, no warrant for reading the word rendered God in any occurrence or all occurrences in the passage first cited as a plural. Evidently, therefore, Laban's teraphim were not images of false gods, but were idols corruptly used by believers in the patriarchal religion. Yet it is probable on other grounds than any theories advanced in this article that these images were connected with ancestral worship : if so, they may have been relics of the Shemite idolatry from the midst of which Abraham was called away. And here it may be remarked that these corrup tions clung to the families or retainers of the He brew patriarchs, for Jacob, at a later time, com manded his household, and those that were with him, to put away strange gods (xxxv. 2).
We purposely reserve the discussion of the ido latry of Canaan for that later period when the iniquity of its people was full, and when the Divine warnings, as well as the sacred history, give us a more complete view of the idol-worship of the seven doomed nations. But it must be here ob served, that already in Abraham's time such a name as Ashteroth Karnaim (Ashteroth of the two horns) shows the existence of pagan worship. On
the other hand, the mysterious Melchizedek, seem ingly. a Canaanite, if not a Rephaite (like Adoni zedek of Joshua's time), is a witness that the true patriarchal belief was not yet overwhelmed by the corruptions of Canaan.
The sojourn in Egypt brings us again in contact with one of the great idolatrous systems of antiquity. There is some little evidence, but that little very curious and valuable, as to the adoption of a false religion by many of the Israelites in Egypt. At that time Egypt was not wholly in the hands of the Egyptians, not wholly even Egyptian. The Shepherd-strangers, if they did not rule the county for the whole period of their stay, were certainly long firmly planted .in its north-eastern provinces. From the Pathmetic, now the Damietta, branch to the eastern border, dwelt a Shemite or quasi-Shemite population. The marshes that skirt the Mediter ranean and the great lakes that feed them, after wards the last homes of Egyptian freedom, were then the haunts of the eastern enemies of Egypt, whose traits of person and character are still to be discerned, as they were long ago by Achilles Tatius, in the sturdy fishermen of Lake Alenzeleh. South ward, the pasture-lands of a long valley, the land of Goshen, through which a prudent ruler, whose name has perished through the lapse of ages, had cut a canal, more to water this fertile tract than to open a way from the Nile to the Erythran Sect, this long valley was the home of settled Arabs, the Israelites, and the mixed multitude, or Ereb, spoken of in Scripture. The names of several of the towns of north-eastern Egypt are either He brew, or known to us both in Hebrew and Egyp tian forms of the same signification. So marked is the distinction between true Egypt and Shernite Egypt, that the monuments of the great Shep herd-city Zoan, executed under the foreign rule, though Egyptian, have a distinctive character of their own. Thus we may expect to find two pagan religions prevailing in Egypt, one the religion of the Egyptians, the other that of such of the Shemite colonists as were idolaters. We would not deny that constant waves of Shemite immigra tion had produced their effect on the religion and physical characteristics of the Egyptians from that very first which gave the strong Shemite side to their moral and physical nature, but in the Shep herd-period foreign influence could no longer affect the essential part of the native religion, and any distinct system must have had a separate growth.