and its outpouring by the priest upon the earth, mingled with wine. From that same fountain, during the same period of Israel’s history, it was the rule to draw all water that was used at Jerusalem for purification with the water of separation, especially for those who came to the annual feasts. To this, Zechariah alludes in his prophecy of that day when “there shall be a fountain opened to the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and for uncleanness.”—Zech. xiii, 1. By her great High Priest, was to be dispensed to Israel and through her to all the earth, the Spirit’s grace, conveying to the nations of the Gentiles the virtue of the blood of Calvary. Jerusalem and the temple were to be the source of those healing waters which were to flow to the east and to the west, “toward the former sea, and toward the hinder sea,” to gladden the world. (Zech. xiv, 8.)
After the close of Old Testament prophecy, the conquests of Alexander of Macedon, the consequent diffusion of the Greeks, and the favor which that prince and his successors showed to the Jews, introduced an intimate intercourse between them and the Greeks. By him Alexandria in Egypt was founded, designated by his own name, and intended to be the western capital of his empire. In this new Greek capital, its founder assigned the Jews an extensive section, and equal privileges with the Macedonians. After the death of Alexander, and the subdivision of his empire, the Ptolemies, the Greek kings of Egypt, continued to favor the Jews, treating them on terms of equality with the Greeks. During the same period, the persecutions suffered by the Jews of Palestine from the kings of Syria, drove multitudes into exile, many of whom were attracted to Egypt, so that the Jewish population of Alexandria was at one time estimated at nearly a million of souls, occupying two of the five districts of the city; and at least, for a time, governed by their own ethnarch, or superior magistrate. Among these Jews, and those elsewhere scattered in the Greek colonies, their own language was gradually superseded by the Greek, into which, at length, the Old Testament Scriptures were translated, in a version known as the Septuagint. Of the precise time and circumstances in which this version was made, there is no reliable information, except that it was done in Alexandria, within the first quarter of the third century before Christ. In the time of Christ, the Greek had become the language of literature and of commerce for the civilized world. Among the Jews dispersed everywhere, it was prevalent, and was extensively used even in Palestine itself, and thus became the divinely prepared channel for communicating the gospel to all nations.
But the language thus employed—the Greek of the Septuagint, the Apocrypha and the New Testament—was not what is known as classic Greek. The Jews did not learn it in the schools of Greece, nor from a study of her poets, orators, and philosophers. It was the product of social and business contact and intercourse of the one people with the other, in a land foreign to both.
Already the purity of the Attic had been lost, by the commingling of the Macedonians with the various tribes of Greece proper and her dependencies, in the armies from which Alexander’s colonists were taken; and still further by the mixed multitude which flocked to their new settlements. In the process of adaptation to the expression of Jewish thought, it was inevitably subjected to further modifications, in definition, in syntax, in order and construction—in the very tone and spirit which pervade the whole. By these modifications, the language, which had grown up as the native and coeval expression of the idolatrous religion, the arts and philosophy of pagan Greece, was adapted to become a repository for the system of divine and saving truth, contained in the Scriptures. Those Jews who resided in Alexandria and other Greek cities, who spake this Greek language, and were more or less conformed to the manners of the Gentiles among whom they lived, were known among their brethren, as Hellenists, that is, Greek Jews, and hence, the Greek dialect used by them has acquired the designation of Hellenistic Greek.
The authors of the New Testament adopted this as the language of their writings, and, in their references to the Old Testament, their quotations are mostly made, not from the Hebrew, but from the Septuagint, or Hellenistic version. It was ordinarily used by the Lord Jesus himself in his discourses. It thus appears as the source and standard of the language of the New Testament.
Together with these Greek Scriptures of the Old Testament, there have been transmitted to us several other Jewish documents of the same period, written in the same Hellenistic Greek. They are invaluable for the light which they shed upon the history, customs, and modes of thought and language of the Jews of that time; although the attempt of the church of Rome, to exalt some of them to an equal authority with the Scriptures, has tended to fix a stigma on them, as known to us under the name of Apocrypha. Incautious recourse to the rules and definitions of classic Greek is liable to deceive and mislead us in the critical study of the New Testament. But conclusions intelligently deduced from the language of the Septuagint and of the other Jewish writers of that age, are to be respected as of the highest authority on all questions of the New Testament language. On the subject of our present investigation, these authorities shed a flood of light. In them, we first find the verb, baptizo, used to designate rites of religious purifying. Once in the Septuagint, and twice in the Apocrypha, it is applied to Hebrew rites of this nature.
That the use of the word to designate religious observances is peculiar to the Hellenistic, as contradistinguished from classic Greek, is indisputable; and it is worthy of consideration, how it came to be selected from the Greek vocabulary for this purpose. The Hebrews of Egypt, in their exile from the land of their fathers, had not abandoned but rather augmented their zeal for the institutions of Moses. A circumstance in their own history, which at first might have seemed to threaten a dissolution of the ties that bound them to the temple at Jerusalem, operated in fact to renovate and strengthen them. This was, the erection by some of their number, of a temple at Onias in Egypt, in imitation of that at Jerusalem. Here, the Levitical rites were punctually observed under priests of the Aaronic line and Levites of the sacred tribe. For this they claimed warrant from the prophecy of Isaiah, xix, 19.—“In that day, shall there be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt.” The adherents of this movement do not seem to have been numerous, and its effect was rather to increase the devotion of the people to the temple at Jerusalem, and the ordinances there maintained. Among them, was developed the same disposition which was prevalent in Judea to give undue importance to multiplied rites of purifying; and hence an increased and constant necessity of finding, in the Greek language which they were now adopting, some word suitable to designate these rites. In that language was the verb, bapto, meaning (1) to dip; (2) to wet by dipping; (3) to wet, irrespective of the manner; (4) to dye by dipping, and thence, to dye, without respect to mode—even by sprinkling. But, as we have seen, the rites in question were not dippings, nor were they dyeings, and the word was never used by the Jews to designate them. From this root, the Greeks derived the verb baptizo. (1.) Its primary meaning, as used by them, was,—to bring into the state of mersion. This meaning had no respect to the mode of action, whether by putting the subject under the fluid, pouring it over him, or in whatever manner. In other words, it expressed not immersion, but mersion,—not the mode of inducing the state, but the state induced,—that of being embosomed in the mersing element. From this primary signification, was derived a secondary use of the word. As any thing that is mersed is in the possession and control of the mersing element, the word was hence used to express the establishing of a complete possession and controlling influence. As we say that a man is drowned,—immersed,—overwhelmed, in business, in trouble, in drunkenness, or in sleep; having, in these expressions, no reference whatever to the mode in which the described condition was brought about; so the Greeks used the verb baptizo. They spoke of men as baptized with grief, with passion, with business cares. An intoxicated person was “baptized with wine,” etc. In such use of the word, the essential idea is that of the action of a pervasive potency by which the subject is brought and held in a new state or condition. On this subject, no authority could be better or more conclusive than that of the Rev. Dr. T. J. Conant, a scholar of unquestioned eminence and whose researches on this subject were undertaken at the request of the American (Baptist) Bible Union. The result of his investigations he thus states. “The word, baptizein, during the whole existence of the Greek as a spoken language, had a perfectly defined and unvarying import. In its literal use, it meant, as has been shown,—to put entirely into or under a liquid, or other penetrable substance, generally water, so that the object was wholly covered by the enclosing element. By analogy it expressed the coming into a new state of life or experience, in which one was, as it were, inclosed and swallowed up, so that temporarily or permanently, he belonged wholly to it.”[29] Dr. Dale has been at the trouble to list and enumerate no less than forty different words which Dr. Conant employs in his translations of this word of “perfectly defined and unvarying import.” It is, however, enough for our present purpose, that this distinguished scholar here expressly admits with Italic emphasis, that “by analogy,” the word “expressed the coming into a new state of life or experience, in which one was, as it were, inclosed and swallowed up, so that temporarily or permanently he belonged wholly to it.”
Now, here was the very word required to designate the Mosaic rites of purifying. Of dippings and immersions, Israel had none; and, if these had been found in their ritual, the verbs, bapto, to dip, and kataduo, to plunge into, to immerse, and the nouns, baphē and katadusis,—a dipping, an immersion, were at hand and specific in meaning. But they did want words to express that potency by which the unclean were, in the words of Dr. Conant, introduced into “a new state of life,”—a state of ritual cleanness, typical of the spiritual newness of life in Christ Jesus which God’s people receive, by the baptism of the Spirit. To express the working of that change, they appropriated the word baptizo, to baptize; that is, to cleanse, to purify. Then, to give name to the rites by which that change was accomplished, they formed from it the two sacred words, baptisma and baptismos, words wholly unknown to classic Greek literature. They are, as to etymology and meaning identical. By grammarians, the termination, mos, is said generally to indicate the act signified by the verb, while ma indicates its effect. But the rule is neither absolute nor universal; and the sacred writers do not maintain the distinction. By them baptisma is used alike to signify the act of baptizing, and the effect, the new state produced by it. In their writings, the distinction seems to consist in the employment of baptismos generically, as designating divers kinds of purifying rites; while baptisma is specifically applied to the baptism of John and of Christ. It is found in no other writings of that or preceding ages. Outside the Scriptures, baptismos occurs once, in the works of Josephus, who thus designates John’s baptism.[30]
In the Septuagint or Greek Scriptures, baptizo first appears in the account of the healing of Naaman. “Elisha sent a messenger unto him saying, Go and wash in Jordan seven times, and thy flesh shall come again to thee, and thou shalt be clean.... Then went he down, and dipped himself seven times in Jordan according to the saying of the man of God.”—2 Kings v, 10, 14. It is asserted that here is clearly an immersion.—“He went down and dipped himself seven times.” Respecting the question thus raised, it is, in the first place, to be distinctly noticed, that the decision, whatever it be, can not in any way neutralize or diminish the force of the argument already developed from the divers baptisms of the epistle to the Hebrews. Were we to allow that Naaman was immersed, that fact would constitute no reply to the demonstration that no immersions were “imposed on Israel,” although divers baptisms were imposed. But, that there was no immersion in this case, will appear in what follows.
1. The word upon which the immersion argument here rests, is the Hebrew tābal, which is translated, “he dipped.” As to its meaning in this place, there are several available sources of information. First, is the manner in which the word is employed elsewhere in the Scriptures. It occurs, in all, but fifteen times. It is evident, that while these places are sufficient to establish the fact that the word was used as they illustrate, they are wholly insufficient to constitute a basis for the assumption that it was never used in a sense not there found, or in a sense not there doubly illustrated. For example, Gesenius gives, “to immerse,” as one of the meanings, and appeals to the text of Naaman as the only example. Without pretending to emulate the learning of that great scholar, I venture to assert that, although the definition be not illustrated by other examples, there is abundant and various evidence that the word is here used as the equivalent of rāhatz, to wash, according to the proper sense of that word as already ascertained. The primary and essential idea of tābal appears to be contact by touch, a contact which may be of the slightest and most superficial kind, as when the priest was directed to dip the finger of his right hand in a few drops of oil held in the palm of his left hand (Lev. xiv, 15, 16), and when those who bore the ark dipped the soles of their feet in the brim or edge of Jordan and the waters instantly fled away. (Josh. iii, 13, 15.) Again, it is used to describe the staining or smearing of Joseph’s coat with the blood of the kid. (Gen. xxxvii, 31.) In this case, there can have been no immersion, since the blood of a kid would have been wholly insufficient, and the uniform stain thus induced would have detected the fraud of Joseph’s brothers, as the violence of a wild beast would not have produced such a result. How the word, in this place was understood by the rabbins of Alexandria, is shown by the Greek of the Septuagint, in which it is represented by moluno, to soil, to stain, to smear. “They stained or smeared his coat with the blood.” The same is no doubt the meaning of Job, when he says to God, “Yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch and mine own clothes shall abhor me.”—Job ix, 31. Not the mode of action, but the soiling contact, was the thought present to Job’s mind. The usage of the word in the Scriptures does not justify the belief that it is ever employed in the energy of meaning expressed by “plunge.” “Yet shalt thou soil me in the ditch.”
Another source of information is the direction given to Naaman by Elisha. He dipped himself seven times “according to the saying, of the man of God.” What was that saying? Did Elisha direct him to be immersed seven times? Elisha sent to him, saying “Go, wash in Jordan seven times.” The verb, rāhatz, to wash, we have examined. It means, to perform ablution with water applied to the person. It does not mean, to immerse, nor can the action expressed by it be accomplished by immersion. It is, moreover, observable, that, as though to emphasize the employment of this word, it is twice repeated in the narrative. Upon receiving Elisha’s message, Naaman exclaims,—“Abana and Pharpar.... May I not wash in them and be clean?” And his servants reply,—“If he had bid thee do some great thing, ... how much rather, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean.” Manifestly, the thing which the Syrian was commanded, was not, to immerse, but, to wash himself. And when to the meaning of that verb, we add the facts already developed as to the customs of ablution in those lands, the conclusion is manifest. Naaman was not directed to dip or immerse himself, but expressly, to wash; and if he was in fact dipped, it was not “according to the saying of the man of God,” but in express contravention of it. It may be objected, that a sprinkling is not a washing. But the Psalmist gives a different testimony. “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.” Here, the word, “Wash,” which is made parallel and equivalent to “Purge me with hyssop,” is not rāhatz, but the yet stronger term, kābas, scour me. The very designation of “the unclean,” for whose “cleansing” those rites were appointed is conclusive on the point. That the sprinklings thus ordained were, in the law everywhere, viewed as washings, is undeniable; and in fact, to wash with water applied, which is the meaning of rāhatz, is the very action of sprinkling. Moreover, in Ezek. xvi, 9, the cleansing of the defilement of nidda, for which sprinkling was the ritual remedy, is described as a washing of the most vigorous and thorough nature. “Then (rāhatz) washed I thee with water; yea (shātaph), I thoroughly washed away thy blood from thee.” How the sprinkling of water can be expressive of such thorough cleansing, we have already seen. It is very strikingly illustrated by the language of the Lord to Israel by Ezekiel. “Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you and ye shall be clean; from all your filthiness and from all your idols will I cleanse you.”—Ezek. xxxvi, 25.
The usage of the Scriptures, as to words equivalent to tābal, will shed further light on the present question. The word is ordinarily represented in the Septuagint Greek, by bapto. Of this verb, we have already stated that it means to dip; to wet, by dipping; to wet in any mode; to stain or dye by dipping; to dye, even by sprinkling. In the Chaldee of the book of Daniel, the word equivalent to tābal is tzeba. It thrice occurs in the description of the calamity of Nebuchadnezzar, when he was cast out with the beasts of the field, and “his body was wet with the dew of heaven.”—Dan. iv, 23, 25, 33. In each of these places, the Septuagint has bapto, an illustration of the fact that the latter word, even, does not “always mean, to dip.” If tābal followed the analogy of these its Greek and Chaldee equivalents, we are to expect among its secondary meanings that of wetting by affusion. In the place concerning Naaman, the word by which tābal is translated into the Greek is baptizo. This fact of itself makes it certain that the Septuagint translators did not understand Naaman to have been dipped, or immersed; else they would have expressed the fact by bapto, or kataduo, instead of baptizo, which, in their vocabulary, as we shall presently show, was used to express purification by sprinkling with the water of separation; as we have already seen Paul to employ it in the same way.
2. While these facts, of themselves, make it certain that Naaman was not immersed, there remains evidence even more conclusive, in the relation which Elisha himself and this whole transaction sustained to the covenant law, as given to Israel at Sinai. In considering this case, there are certain fundamental facts to be held ever in view. (1.) Leprosy was, at once, a disease and a ritual uncleanness; and was distinctly recognized in these two several aspects, in the law of God; and hence the leper could not but be ritually unclean, whilst the mere healing of the disease left him still unclean. He must be purified as well as healed. (2.) The ritual law was not a scheme of arbitrary or unmeaning regulations, but a system of accordant symbols, each of which had its own distinct meaning, and all of which together constituted a complete and intelligible exposition of the doctrine of sin and redemption. Particularly had the ritual respecting leprosy a meaning at once manifest, impressive, and profound. So important was it, in the estimation of the divine Lawgiver of Israel, that the strict observance of all its requirements was enforced by a new and special admonition addressed to them on the banks of Jordan, after the forty years wandering in the wilderness. “Take heed, in the plague of leprosy, that thou observe diligently and do according to all that the priests the Levites shall teach you; as I commanded them, so ye shall observe to do. Remember what the Lord thy God did unto Miriam by the way, after that ye were come forth out of Egypt.”—Deut. xxiv, 8, 9. (3.) This law had now been in operation for six hundred years, whilst its regulations were such as to arrest and fix the attention of all observers. (4.) To Naaman, a Syrian, of a country immediately contiguous to the land of Israel, and belonging to a people of kindred blood, language, traditions, and customs, the Hebrew ideas on this subject, so interesting to him, can not have been unknown or strange. Even had he been otherwise ignorant, he could not but have been informed by the Hebrew maiden at whose suggestion he undertook his journey to the court of Israel, in quest of healing. That hers must have been a character of both intelligence and piety, is evident from the whole narrative, and especially from the fact that it inspired such confidence as led the Syrian, at her suggestion, to obtain from his king letters to the king of Israel, and to go to that court, in the hope of cure, bearing with him rich gifts, designed as tokens of gratitude. (2 Kings, v, 2-5.) (5.) The whole history shows this episode in the life of Elisha to have been any thing but a casual incident. It bears every mark of a special and extraordinary providence, designed to bring home to the Syrians and to Israel a signal testimony to the power and grace of the true God. The peculiar relation which Elijah and Elisha bore to the Syrians is illustrated by the fact that, at this very time, the latter held a commission from God through Elijah to anoint Hazael to be king of Syria, instead of the reigning king Benhadad; by Elisha’s subsequent presence in Damascus, in fulfillment of that commission, and by the application which Benhadad made to him, to inquire of the Lord as to the issue of the disease which was then upon him. (1 Kings xix, 15-17; 2 Kings viii, 7-13.)
3. Elisha treats the case of Naaman as typical in its nature, and as coming under the provisions of the law for the cleansing of leprosy. This is manifest from three things which appear in the very brief narrative. (1) In his message to Naaman, he distinguishes between the physical healing, and the ritual cleansing. “Thy flesh shall come again unto thee; and, thou shalt be clean.” Thus each is separately promised. (2.) He requires Naaman to “wash seven times.” The meaning of this seven times we have seen. It symbolized a radical cure of the evil of heart leprosy, the native corruption of sin—a cure by which the sinner will be presented pure and sanctified in the seventh, or judgment day. The mode of this cure was represented in the law by sprinkling seven times. The priest “shall sprinkle upon him that is to be cleansed from the leprosy seven times, and shall pronounce him clean.”—Lev. xiv, 7. (3.) He must wash in the river Jordan, and nowhere else. But why there? Because the cleansing of the leper, according to the law must be by sprinkling with “running water.”—Lev. xiv, 5, 6, 50-52. For the self-washing, no such prescription was given. The Jordan was appointed, because healing to the leper meant life to the dead. It meant the renewing grace of the Holy Spirit, and for this none but the water of life that flows in the river of the heavenly Canaan will suffice. And inasmuch as the land of Israel was typical of that better country, no water so proper for the present occasion as that which flowed in the one river of Israel. If Palestine was made a type of heaven, the one river of Palestine at once became the proper type of that “river of God, which is full of water.”
4. Naaman recognized the significance of the directions given by the prophet, and was offended at them.—“Behold, I thought, He will surely come out to me, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and strike his hand over the place, and recover the leper. Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? May I not wash in them and be clean? So he turned and went away in a rage.”—2 Kings v, 11, 12. Here (1.) Naaman sharply distinguishes between the healing and the cleansing. For the latter purpose, the waters of Abana and Pharpar were sufficient for him,—better than all those of Israel. All he wanted was, that the prophet should heal him; and for this he was ready to reward him liberally. But, instead of being treated with the consideration due to a lordly patron, he feels himself insulted, by being expected to take the position of an unclean and humble suppliant; and that, too, at the feet of the God of Israel. For, (2.) he indicates his understanding of what was meant by the prophet’s message. If Elisha had come out and healed the leprosy, as Naaman expected, it would have been perfectly consistent with the idolatrous religion of the Syrian to recognize Elisha as a great prophet, and the God of Elisha as one of the great gods; although entitled to no exclusive worship from the Syrians, whose tutelary deity was Rimmon. But, when the prophet, instead of this, sent him to Jordan to be cleansed, and that by washing seven times, the Syrian recognized that he was thus required to own allegiance to the God of Israel, and to humble himself, as utterly unclean in His sight, and look to him, as alone able to heal his leprosy, or cleanse his sins. In a word, he was, by the message of the prophet, brought face to face with the glad but humbling word of the gospel, as it spake so clearly in the rites of cleansing for leprosy. That, in the result, he accepted the good tidings thus announced, may not be asserted with confidence. But, that he professed to do so, the narrative assures us. “Behold, now, I know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel.”—vs. 15. By this profession of faith, and by his application to Elisha for two mules’ burden of the earth of Canaan, with which to make an altar to the God of Israel, the Syrian showed his intelligent appreciation of the issues involved in the observances required by Elisha, and of the typical meaning of the land and river of Israel. The purpose of the earth for which he asked was to make an altar, after the manner of those appointed in the law; which appear to have been frames or boxes filled with earth on which the fire was kindled. (Ex. xx, 24.)
5. The attempt of some writers to derive countenance to the idea of immersion, in this case, from the Levitical rites of purifying for leprosy, is wholly futile. They refer to the self-washings which were required of the cleansed leper, and assume, without a pretense of proof, that they were immersions. We have seen that they were not immersions, but affusions. But, that it was not to them, but to the sprinklings of the law that the directions of Elisha refer, is unmistakably indicated by the seven times required. The self-washings were to be performed but twice. On the first day, the seven sprinklings were administered, and the person was then, by the priest, officially proclaimed to be clean. (Lev. xiv, 7.) It was after this, that the man thus clean, was required to perform the first self-washing. This was repeated once only,—on the eighth day. This distinction between the sprinklings which cleansed the leper, and the self-washings which were required of him as being clean, is not casual, but essential, and intimately involved in the difference of meaning between them. By no system of interpretation, therefore, can seven supposed immersions of Naaman be identified with the two self-washings required by the law. To imagine the Syrian to have been directed to seek cleansing by means of the latter, and not by the seven sprinklings, would be to suppose him instructed by the prophet to seek to his own outward righteousness as the means of purging away his sins, and not to the virtue of the blood and Spirit of Christ, penetrating to his heart and renewing the inner man. Self-washing, as dependent upon and subordinate to the sprinkling of the water and blood, is beautifully significant of that evangelical obedience and holiness which believers cultivate, whilst resting wholly on the righteousness of Christ; and which is acceptable only thus. But a self-washing, without the sprinkling, or even magnified to equality with it, can mean nothing else than a disparagement and rejection of Christ’s blood and Spirit, and a trusting to our own works of righteousness,—to a cleansing and holiness self-attained. It would be a denial of the need of the Spirit’s renewing grace.
6. Israel and the ordinances given her were appointed to be a gospel beacon to the nations. In furtherance of this purpose, the rites and ordinances with which she was endowed were clothed in forms of transparent significance, selected by divine wisdom as best adapted to set forth the gospel for men’s instruction. To suppose Elisha, on this occasion, to have ignored or essentially modified those respecting leprosy, would imply him to have deliberately veiled the light which God had kindled for the Gentiles. If any ritual observances were required of Naaman, the alternative was inevitable, that they be those appointed in the law, or that by neglect these be dishonored. No motive for the supposed change can be suggested that will not imply a disparagement of the neglected rite.
7. The distinctive office successively filled by Elijah and Elisha was that of prophet to the separated kingdom of Israel, to whom they were sent to vindicate the repudiated covenant of Sinai against the apostasies and sins of that people. (1 Kings, xix, 8, 10, 14-18.) They were appointed to keep alive in Israel the knowledge and faith of the covenant God and King whose worship and ordinances at Jerusalem they had wickedly abandoned. In the extraordinary circumstances of Naaman the offerings which the cleansed leper was required to make at the temple on the eighth day after his purifying, may have been omitted. But the supposition that the rites proper to the purifying, itself, were changed without necessity or apparent motive, so that instead of being sprinkled seven times, Naaman was seven times immersed, would imply that Elisha not only thus publicly repudiated the authority of the Levitical law, but at the same time and in so doing gave direct sanction to the conduct of Israel, in separating themselves from the temple at Jerusalem and the ordinances and worship which, by divine command, were there observed. The rites of purifying were part and parcel of the system of ordinances given to Israel and concentrated at the sanctuary,—a system, in all its parts, congruous and interdependent; each shedding mutual light on all the rest. If Naaman was sprinkled seven times, according to the Levitical order, that fact would of itself have referred him to the Word and ordinances of God, for light and information, as to the vastly important questions suggested to him by the nature and manner of his disease and cleansing. But, if he was immersed, the observance was without authority in the law; without example in the Word, then possessed or afterward given to Israel; without point of contact or principle of congruity or connection with the system therein unfolded; without explanation anywhere, and without conceivable motive or meaning, unless it was, to repudiate the authority of the Levitical law. Instead, therefore, of the ordinance being a guide line, to lead Naaman to the Word and worship of the true God, the natural effect of such a change as is supposed would have been to deter him from any such inquiries. The facts would have certified him that the God of Elisha was not the same that reigned at Jerusalem;—that the doctrine of the one, set forth in the rite of sprinkling, was manifestly different from that of the other expressed by immersion,—and that, therefore, the Word and ordinances of the God who dwelt in Zion were likely to mislead him, rather than to shed a true light upon the character of the God of Elisha, by whom he had been healed. The snare thus presented to the mind of Naaman would have been the more insidious and fatal in proportion as he should still have recognized an intimate relation, or even a kind of identity, between the God of Israel and the God of Judah. It was a general characteristic of the ancient idolatries, that the same gods, as worshiped at different places, were supposed to be endowed with different attributes and affinities, and to require different rites of worship. Thus, Zeus Olympius, Jupiter Capitolinus, and Jupiter Amon, were looked upon as the same deity; but revealing one character, as on Olympus he was worshiped by the tribes of Greece; another, as, on the Capitoline hill he presided over the destinies of mighty Rome; and yet another to the dark tribes who assembled at his temple in Thebes in Upper Egypt. Such was the idolatry which the supposed rite would have tended to confirm in the mind of Naaman. To all this we are to add the fact that the very purpose of the miracle wrought by Elisha was to let the Syrian “know that there is a prophet in Israel.”—2 Kings v, 8. Not, certainly, that Elisha thus proposed to glorify himself: but to announce himself a prophet and witness, for the only living and true God, the God of Israel, whose sanctuary was in Zion. (Compare Ib. 15-18.)
8. The fact that no administrator is mentioned, but Naaman is said to have “baptized himself,” is no embarrassment to our position. The self-baptism implied by the phrase, in the English translation, is not required by the form of the Greek nor of the Hebrew. The same kind of expression is used, in the directions originally given as to the water of separation. “If he purify not himself the third day, then the seventh day he shall not be clean. Whosoever toucheth the dead body of any man that is dead, and purifieth not himself ... the water of separation was not sprinkled on him; he shall be unclean.... A clean person shall sprinkle on the unclean on the third day and on the seventh.”—Num. xix, 12, 13, 19. The form of expression is intended to emphasize the responsibility of the person in the matter of his own cleansing, and is equivalent in meaning to the phrase,—“cause himself to be sprinkled.” Although he can not cleanse himself, he is not therefore irresponsible. He must seek to the cleansing, if he would enjoy it. The same form is used by Paul, who speaks of Ananias as saying to him (Anastas, baptisai), “Rising, baptize thyself, and wash away thy sins.”—Acts xxii, 16. In the parallel account, we are told that “he arose and was baptized.”—Acts ix, 18.
It has been shown already that, in the epistle to the Hebrews, baptismoi means the sprinklings ordained in the law for defilements of which leprosy was one. In our next section, it will appear that the sprinkling of the water of separation, upon those defiled by the dead, was familiarly known as a baptizing. And as to the case of Naaman, the considerations here presented render it certain that baptizo is there used in the same sense. He was not immersed, but sprinkled seven times, according to the law. Tābal is here used, not in a modal sense, but to express a cleansing, without defining the manner of it.
The book of Ecclesiasticus, or “The Wisdom of Jesus the son of Sirach,” is one of the Apochrypha. It was written by Joshua ben Sira ben Eliezer, a priest, at Jerusalem, about two hundred years before the coming of Christ. “The original Hebrew, with the exception of a few fragments in the Gemaras and Midrashim, is no longer extant, but we have translations in Greek, Syriac, and Arabic. The work has been always held in high esteem, by both Jews and Christians, and was judged by some of the Talmudists to be worthy of a place among the canonical Scriptures.”[31] In this work, the priestly author has written this proverb, “He that is baptized from the dead, and again toucheth the dead, what availeth his washing?”—Ecclus. xxxi, 30 (xxxiv, 25 of the English version). Here, it is unquestionable that reference is had to the cleansing of those who were defiled by the dead. Such persons were “baptized from the dead,” that is, purged from the defilement, incurred through the touch of the dead, by the sprinkling of the water of separation. It has been said, by Baptist writers, that the author of the proverb meant to designate the self-washing which was required of those who had been thus sprinkled. But, in the first place, we must again repeat it, the self-washings were not immersions. In the second, they were not the purification from the dead. On that point, the law was express. “The man that shall be unclean, and shall not purify himself, that soul shall be cut off from among the congregation, because he hath defiled the sanctuary of the Lord: the water of separation hath not been sprinkled upon him; he is unclean.”—Num. xix, 20. The self-washings are never called purifyings, nor alluded to by that name. Besides, as before remarked, on another point, the pre-eminence thus assigned to those washings, as compared with the sprinklings, is contrary to the whole spirit and tenor of the law, and would imply a preference given to our own righteousness, which the former symbolized, over the blood of sprinkling of the Lord Jesus, and his renewing Spirit, typified by the latter. Moreover, upon this view, we are to suppose that the author of the proverb, himself a priest, ignored that official sprinkling which must be performed by a clean person, acting in priestly capacity, and which, in his days, was performed almost invariably by the priests, and falsely attributed the consequent cleansing to the self-washing, which was a private personal duty of the cleansed. On the relative position of the two ordinances, the prayer of the Psalmist, in his deep sense of guilt and defilement is very significant. “Purge me with hyssop. Wash me.” He does not once think of self-washing, but looks up to the great High Priest for all. It was unquestionably of the sprinkled water of separation that this writer says, “He that is baptized from the dead, and again toucheth the dead what availeth his washing?” Here again we have an impregnable demonstration. We have before seen that Paul testifies that the sprinklings of the Mosaic system were baptisms. We now have the added voice of the son of Sirach certifying the same thing. By the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established. These witnesses are ignorant or false, or else baptizo does not here mean, to dip, to immerse.
This conclusion is yet farther confirmed by the light which the above proverb sheds upon a passage in the writings of Paul, which has greatly perplexed expositors. “Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?”—1 Cor. xv, 29. Paul is discussing the doctrine of the resurrection. As elsewhere in the epistle, so here, he assumes his readers to know the law of Moses. (Compare 1 Cor. ix, 8-10; x, 1-10.) To it, he, therefore, appeals.—“You know that there is in the law an ordinance for the ritual restoration of such as, by contact with the dead, have become ritually dead. But what means this rite? If the saints shall not really be raised up, to what intent is this ritual resurrection?” That such was the meaning of Paul, will hardly be questioned by any who consider, (1.) That the law of defilement by the dead, and of purification with the water of separation, was a statute of universal obligation to Israel, at home, and in foreign lands: (2.) That the ordinance and its observance were so familiar that, two hundred years before Christ, it was made the ground of the proverb above cited. As we shall presently see, it is mentioned by Philo and by Josephus as, in their days, universally observed: (3.) That it was known to Paul by the name of baptism: (4.) That it meant the giving of life to the dead: (5.) That, hence, whatever might be Paul’s allusion, it was a fact, throughout the dwellings of Israel, that, whenever death visited a house, it involved the consequent necessity of the baptism of the family and attendants,—a baptism which signified the resurrection of the dead. It is, therefore, beyond question that Paul meant to refer to that Levitical purification. Such were the facts that his readers could not but so understand him. Moreover, his expression here, and that which we have heretofore examined concerning the divers baptisms of the law, mutually illustrate each other and confirm all our conclusions on the subject.
Thus, starting with the “divers baptisms” of the epistle to the Hebrews, we have identified them with the seal of the Sinai covenant and the water of separation. We have traced the ordinance in the historical books, the Psalms and the prophets; have found it, in the time of the son of Sirach, familiarly known as baptism, and have recognized it in the New Testament itself, referred to by the same name, by that Hebrew of the Hebrews, the apostle Paul. We may add that the same apostle again refers to imitations of this ordinance in his dissuasive against “doctrines of baptisms.” (Heb. vi, 2.) Here, he alludes to those Pharisaic rites which under the same name were condemned by the Lord Jesus, who reproved them as “teaching for doctrines the commandments of men,” concerning their baptizings. (Mark, vii, 7, 8.)
Returning to the Apocrypha, the next example of baptism occurs in the book of Judith. The book dates from the period of the Maccabean kings of Judah, between one and two hundred years before Christ; is a historical fiction, and is designed to present, in the person of Judith, an ideal type of female piety, courage, and virtue, as conceived by the Jews of that age. According to the story, “Nabuchodonosor, the king of Nineveh,” being incensed against the Jews, had doomed them to destruction. He therefore sent Holofernes, with a large army to execute his vengeance. This army being re-enforced by the Ammonites and the sons of Esau, the mighty host, enters on the siege of Bethulia, a frontier city of Judah. Surrounding the city and filling the whole country, they seizeseize “the water and the fountain of waters,” upon which Bethulia depended for its supply. Soon, “all the vessels of water failed all the inhabitants of Bethulia, and the cisterns were emptied, so that they had not water, to drink their fill, one day; for they gave them drink by measure.”—Judith vii, 12-21.
In this extremity, the elders of the city yield to the clamor of the famished populace, and promise that if succor should not come within five days they will surrender the city to the Assyrians. It is now that the young and beautiful widow, Judith, appears on the scene. Rebuking the elders, for their lack of faith and courage, she decks herself and goes forth to beguile Holofernes, whom, in the sequel, she slays, in his drunkenness, with his own sword, and so delivers her nation. When she came to the Assyrians, “the servants of Holofernes brought her into the tent, and she slept until midnight, and she arose at the morning watch, and sent to Holofernes, saying, Let my lord now command that thy handmaid be allowed to go out for prayer. And Holofernes commanded his body-guard not to hinder her; and she remained in the tent three days, and went out nightly into the valley of Bethulia and baptized in the camp, at the fountain of water. And as she returned, she besought the Lord God of Israel to direct her way to the raising up the children of her people”—Jud. xii, 5-8.
Judith’s baptism, was evidently not one of those required by the law. It was performed statedly every night, as a preparation for prayer, and was, no doubt, one of those washings which Jewish tradition was, at that time, multiplying, and which were so rife in the days of our Savior. Judith’s maid was with her, and this baptism was no doubt performed in the ordinary mode of washing, with water poured on her hands. As to the place of her baptism, the language is explicit. It was (en) in the camp, but (epi) at and not in the fountain. Not only does the language thus forbid the supposition that she was immersed in the fountain, but the circumstances were equally conclusive. She was a young and beautiful woman, in the midst of a host of rude and licentious soldiers and followers of the army. They held the fountain with jealous care, both for the convenience of their own supply, and as the sure means of bringing Bethulia to surrender. Judith could not there be private for a moment, even at midnight, and such exposure as is imagined would have been an invitation to certain violence, even though there had been no question of defiling the very fountain whence the camp drew its supply of water.
Baptist writers, to prove that Judith, nevertheless, immersed herself, cite the fact that “as she went up (anebē), she besought the Lord God of Israel to direct her way to the raising up of the children of her people.” But Dr. Dale has pointed out the fact that the very same language occurs in a parallel place in the Septuagint Greek, where no one ever pretended to find an immersion. Rebekah “went down to the well, and filled her pitcher and went up (anebē).”—Gen. xxiv, 15, 16. The fountain of Bethulia was in the valley, to which Judith had to go down from the head-quarters of Holofernes, which would be in an elevated position, so as to command a view of the situation. To suppose the going up to be out of the water, would give her a time for prayer so brief and in circumstances so peculiar as to give the suggestion an air of ridicule.
It is well known that the impostor Mohammed was assisted in constructing his institutions by renegade Jews, who early became his proselytes. The following precept of the Koran will illustrate the practice of baptism before prayer: “O true believers, when ye prepare to pray, wash your faces and your hands unto the elbows; and rub your heads and your feet unto the ankles; and if ye be polluted ... wash yourselves (all over). But if ye be defiled, and ye find no water, take fine sand, and rub your faces and your hands therewith. God would not put a difficulty upon you. But he desireth to purify you, and to complete his favor upon you, that ye may give thanks.”[32] This regulation by Mohammed is remarkable in relation to that request of Peter,—“Lord not my feet only, but also my hands and my head.”—John xiii, 9. Both he and the prophet of Mecca would seem to have had in view the same custom of the scribes.
From the passages thus examined it appears that in Hellenistic Greek the word, baptizo was employed to designate two classes of cleansings,—the sacramental sprinklings of the law, and the self-imposed washings of tradition, the mode of which, whether performed by affusion or sprinkling, is not clear. As to the former: the proverb of the son of Sirach is clearly a reference to the sprinkled water of separation. To the same class, the arguments adduced entitle us to refer the baptism of Naaman. To the rites of self-washing the case of Judith is to be assigned,—not to those appointed by the law, but those imitations of the scribes which obscured the meaning of the ordinance, as appointed of God.
Philo, commonly called Judæus, was a Jew of Alexandria, who was cotemporary with the apostles. He thus expounds the laws of purification:—
“The law requires him who brings a sacrifice to be clean in body and soul;—in his soul, from all passions, disorder and vices, whether in word or deed; and pure in body, from such things as ritually defile it.[33] And it has appointed a purification for each of these; for the soul, by animals suitable for sacrifice;—for the body, by (loutrōn kai perirrhantēriōn) ablutions and sprinklings.... The body is purified, as I have said by washings and sprinklings; nor does the law allow a person washed and sprinkled once to enter immediately the sacred courts; but requires him to wait without, seven days; and to be sprinkled twice, on the third day and on the seventh; and after these, having washed himself, it admits him to enter and share the sacred rites. It is to be considered what judgment and philosophy there is in this. For, nearly all other people are sprinkled with mere water, the most drawing it from the sea; some from rivers, and others again out of vessels of water replenished from fountains. But Moses, providing ashes from sacrificial fire (and in what manner will be shown presently), directed that some of these should be put into a vessel, and water poured upon them; and then dipping twigs of hyssop in the mixture, to sprinkle those who were to be cleansed.
“It is now proper to explain the suitableness of these ashes. For they are not bare ashes of wood, consumed by fire, but of an animal suited to such purification. For it is required that a red heifer which has never borne the yoke be sacrificed outside the city, and that the high priest, taking some of the blood, shall seven times sprinkle with it toward the front of the temple, and shall then burn the whole animal with its hide and flesh, its viscera and dung. And when the flame declines, that these three things be cast into the midst of it;—a stick of cedar, a stick of hyssop, and a bunch of cummin. And when the fire has wholly expired, it is required, that a clean person collect the ashes and deposit them outside the city, in a clean place.”[34]
Josephus was a Jewish priest, who was made prisoner by Titus, in the war which ended in the destruction of Jerusalem. He afterward, at Rome, wrote his Jewish “Antiquities,” and his “History.” He thus describes the manner of purifying with the ashes of the heifer. “Any persons being defiled by a dead body, they put a little of these ashes and hyssop into spring water, and baptizing with these ashes in water, sprinkled them on the third day and on the seventh.”[35] This is a literal translation from the Greek of Josephus; but differs from the popular version of Whiston. He renders it,—“They put a little of these ashes into spring water with hyssop, and dipping part of these ashes in it, they sprinkled them with it,” etc. But this is a very incorrect translation, is incongruous to the ordinance as described by Moses, and converts the account into nonsense. According to it, the ashes are in the first place put into the water, and then part of them “dipped in it!” How they were recovered from the water, in order to the dipping, and how the ashes could be dipped in the water at all, we need not inquire, as the translation is incorrect. “Baptizing with these ashes-in-water,” truly represents the original.[36] “Baptizing,” was the action; the mixture of “ashes in water,” was the element; “sprinkling,” the mode; and “the third and seventh days,” the time. In fact, in using the water of separation, according to the law, there was no dipping of any sort, except of the hyssop bush, with which the water was sprinkled. The only action to which Josephus can refer,—that to which he does undoubtedly refer,—by the word, “baptizing,” is the purifying rite, of which he immediately states the form to have been a sprinkling.
To get rid of the force of this passage, Baptist writers have proposed an arbitrary alteration of the text, by the erasure of the entire clause (te kai—pēgēn) “with these ashes in water.” The change thus suggested is purely gratuitous. The reading which they propose is without the pretense of sanction from any manuscript of Josephus, and is sustained by no sound principles of criticism. Its only warrant is the necessities of the Baptist position. On the contrary, the rendering which we have given is, in some of the manuscripts of Josephus, enforced by the preposition (meta) with, after the word, “baptizing.” According to this version, the passage can be read no otherwise than as we have given it. “Baptizing with these ashes in water.”
In the writings of Josephus there is another and very characteristic notice as to the use of the water of separation. Speaking of the funeral rites, he says, “Our law also ordains that the house and its inhabitants shall be purified after the funeral is over, that every one may thence learn to keep at a great distance from the thought of being pure, if he hath once been guilty of murder.”[37] We are not to suppose that the spiritual meaning of these rites had been so utterly lost by the Jews, that Josephus, a priest, a Pharisee, a man of extensive learning and reputation, imagined this to be a true account of the nature and meaning of the ordinance. But he was speaking in defense of Judaism, against the assaults of Apion, a Greek philosopher of Alexandria, at the bar of the pagan philosophy of Greece and Rome. He affects, for himself, a profoundly philosophic style and spirit, and aims to vindicate a similar character for the laws and institutions of Moses. Knowing that the truths of God as committed to Israel would be foolishness to the wise, to whose applause he aspired, he sets them aside in favor of his own “philosophic” inventions. He seems to have taken the suggestion from certain heathen observances, of which we shall see more further on.
The foregoing extracts not only illustrate the law as to the water of separation, and the use of the word, baptizo, with reference to it, but indicate the place held by the ordinance among the observances of Israel, down to the time of Jerusalem’s desolation.
Placed as was Israel in the very center of the civilization of the ancient world, and on the direct line of communication between its peoples and empires, her influence upon the institutions and religious rites of other nations must have been very great, and is traceable in every direction. There is reason to believe that Greece and its colonies in Italy, from which sprang the republic and empire of Rome, derived from Israel the first great impulses of their civilization, as well as continual subsequent contributions to its maintenance and growth. Israel had dwelt in the land of Canaan about three hundred years before the supposed era of the siege of Troy, and seven hundred before the reputed date of the great poems of Homer, from the silence of which it is evident that to him letters were wholly unknown. According to the earliest Greek tradition, Cadmus, “the man of the east,” coming with a colony of Phœnicians settled in Greece, bringing with him the art of alphabetic writing. But at what age he lived, or whether he was not, in fact, wholly a mythical character is a matter of conjecture. The tradition, however, distinctly points to Phœnicia as the land whence the art was introduced into Greece; and the circumstances accord with this supposition. That the Greek letters were derived from those called Phœnician is an undoubted fact. The extensive commerce maintained by the ships of Phœnicia was a constant and efficient means of disseminating the seeds of her advancing civilization; and besides, the sages of Greece were accustomed to travel to Egypt, Phœnicia, and the east, in search of knowledge; and returned thence with acquisitions of which all Greece was the beneficiary. About four hundred years before Christ, Plato himself was in Egypt in search of knowledge, a student of the priests of On. At this time, Egypt was full of Jews, and it is not to be imagined that such an inquirer would wholly fail to catch some glimpses of the light which shone in the institutions and literature of Israel.
Many things concur to show that neither Egypt nor Phœnicia was the original fountain of much that was thus disseminated to Greece. In some instances, the attendant circumstances, and in others the internal evidence, unmistakably indicate an Israelite origin. Phœnicia was a strip of sea-coast, ten or twelve miles wide, lying between the northern part of the land of Israel and the Mediterranean Sea. Tyre and Sidon, its two chief cities, were the only practicable sea-ports on the coast of Palestine. They were distant, the former, about one hundred and twenty miles, and the latter, one hundred, from Jerusalem. Their supplies were derived largely from the fields, the vineyards, and the olive groves of Israel. (2 Chron. ii, 10; Acts xii, 20.) Except slight provincial differences, the language of the two people was the same; and the intimacy of the relations is seen in the fact that the drift of dialect in the two closely coincided. Hiram king of Tyre, was David’s intimate friend, and Solomon’s faithful and efficient ally, in the erection of the temple and his own palace, in adorning Jerusalem, and in commercial enterprises. His relation with David, and his message of salutation to Solomon (2 Chron. ii, 12) argue him a professed worshiper of the God of Israel. Thus, whilst the Phœnician territory was a mask by which Israel was concealed from the Mediterranean countries, the Phœnicians, themselves, can not but have realized a profound impression from the wonderful system of religious rites and the testimonies of religious truth which were maintained in Israel and centered around that temple on Mount Sion, which was a monument of Phœnician skill in architecture and the mechanic arts. The ideas thus communicated and the impressions thus produced must have been borne abroad by every wind that filled a Phœnician sail, and disseminated to every land that was touched by a Phœnician prow.
The art of alphabetic writing is an illustration of this. It did not originate in Phœnicia, but, as internal evidence demonstrates,—with the Arameans, of whom Israel was a branch. The Phœnician characters were the same as the Old Hebrew. Once acquired by that maritime people, the art was diffused to Greece, to Rome, and the world. The Egyptians no less than the Phœnicians were idolaters, having lords many and gods many. When, therefore, the sages of Greece returned from their explorations, prepared to whisper to their confidential disciples the sublime doctrine of the divine unity, and even to erect an altar “To the Unknown God,”[38] we are justified in the conviction that at some point in the course of their travels, they had caught an echo of that voice which spake to the twelve tribes in the wilderness,—“Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord.”—Deut. vi, 4. To the same originals undoubtedly are to be referred many of the ceremonials of their religion. Of this, the rules of uncleanness, and rites of purifying are remarkable illustrations.
Of the various forms of purification among the Greeks, Plato makes an enumeration.—“The purifications (katharmoi) both according to medicine and vaticination, both the pharmacial drugs, (pharmakois), and the vaticinal fumigations (peritheiōseis) as also the washings (loutra) in such rites, and the sprinklings (perirrhanseis);—are not all these effectual to one end,—to render a man pure, both as to body and soul?”[39]
On this subject, the historian Grote makes some noteworthy statements.—“The names of Orpheus and Musaeus (as well as that of Pythagoras, looking at one side of his character), represent facts of importance in the history of the Grecian mind, ... the gradual influx of Thracian, Phrygian and Egyptian religious ceremonies and feelings, and the increasing diffusion of special mysteries, schemes for religious purification, and orgies (I venture to Anglicize the Greek word, which contains in its original meaning no implication of the ideas of excess to which it was afterward diverted), in honor of some particular god, distinct from the public solemnities, and from the gentile solemnities of primitive Greece.... During the interval between Hesiod and Onomakritus [B. C. 610-510], the revolution in the religious mind of Greece was such as to place both these deities [Dyonisus and Demeter, the Bacchus and Ceres of the Latins] in the front rank.... From all these countries [Egypt, Thrace, Phrygia and Lydia], novelties unknown to the Homeric men found their way into the Grecian worship; and there is one amongst them which deserves to be specially noticed, because it marks the generation of the new class of ideas in their theology. Homer mentions many guilty of private or involuntary homicide, and compelled either to go into exile, or to make pecuniary satisfaction; but he never once describes any of them to have either received or required purification for the crime. Now, in the times subsequent to Homer, purification for homicide comes to be indispensable. The guilty person is regarded as unfit for the society of men, or the worship of the gods, until he has received it; and special ceremonies are prescribed whereby it is to be administered. Herodotus tells us that the ceremony of purification was the same among the Lydians and the Greeks. We know that it formed no part of the early religion of the latter, and we may reasonably suspect that they borrowed from the former.... The purification of a murderer was originally operated not by the hands of any priest or specially sanctified man, but by those of a chief or king who goes through the appropriate ceremonies in the manner represented by Herodotus, in his pathetic narrative respecting Crœsus and Adrastus.[40] The idea of a special taint of crime, and of the necessity, as well as the sufficiency of prescribed religious ceremonies, as a means of removing it, appears thus to have got footing in Grecian practice subsequent to the time of Homer.”[41]
Again he says,—“Herodotus had been profoundly impressed with what he saw and heard in Egypt. The wonderful monuments, the evident antiquity, and the peculiar civilization of that country acquired such preponderance in his mind, over his own native legends, that he is disposed to trace the oldest religious names or institutions of Greece, to Egyptian or Phœnician original, setting aside, in favor of this hypothesis, the Grecian legends of Dyonisus and Pan.”[42]
In these statements, the eminent historian seems studiously to avoid a recognition of the direction to which all his facts so distinctly point. All the countries mentioned by him border on the Mediterranean, and were in constant and intimate communication with Egypt and Phœnicia, the relations of which with Israel are too well known to need emphasis. They were, in fact, the channels through which Hebrew ideas must ordinarily pass, in order to gain access to Greece and the continent of Europe. To whatever source the Greeks may have been immediately indebted for the novel ideas of a special stain or defilement, resulting from crime, and of ritual purifying from it, we know that they were incorporated in the laws and ritual of Moses ages before there is a trace of them in any of the countries mentioned. The disposition of Herodotus to refer them to Egypt and Phœnicia is therefore entitled to more respectful consideration than our author gives it. That the Gentile rites in question, however grossly corrupted, were derived from divine originals, must be manifest to any one who will compare the significance and beauty of the Scriptural rites as connected with the spiritual truths of revelation, which they symbolized, with the bareness and absurdity by which they are characterized, in their distorted Gentile forms, detached from the spiritual connection to which they natively belonged.
On the matters of which it treats, no authority is higher than Dr. Wm. Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. As to the present subject, it testifies that their purifyings, “in every case of which we have any certain knowledge were connected with sacrifices and other religious rites, and consisted in the sprinkling of water, by means of a branch of laurel or olive; and at Rome, sometimes by means of the aspergillum, and in the burning of certain materials the smoke of which was thought to have a purifying effect.”[43]
Of the Greek heroes the Abbe Barthelemi says,—“They shuddered at the blood they had spilt, and abandoning their throne and native land, went to implore the aid of expiation in some distant country. After the sacrifices enjoined them by the ceremony, a purifying water was poured upon the guilty hand, after which they again returned into society and prepared themselves for new combats.”[44]
Of the Romans, Ovid says:—“Our fathers believed purifications to be effectual for blotting out every crime and every cause of penalty. Greece was the source of the custom. She believes the guilty, when purified with lustral rites, to be freed from the guilt of their evil deeds. Thus Peleus purified the grandson of Actor; and thus Acastus, with the waters of Hæmus, cleansed Peleus himself, from the blood of Phocus.—Ah credulous people! who suppose that the dreadful crime of murder can be obliterated by (fluminea aqua), running waters.”[45]
The same poet describes the festival of Pales, the tutelary goddess of shepherds. Some days before her festival, cows were sacrificed and the unborn offspring torn from their bowels and burned with fire by the eldest of the Vestals, “that their ashes may purify the people on the day of Pales.” On the festival day he sings: “I am called to the Palilia.... Often, truly, have I carried in my full hand the ashes of the calf and the bean stalks, hallowed purifiers. Truly I have leaped over the fires kindled in three rows, and the dripping branch of laurel has scattered the water.... Go, ye people, seek the fumigation from the altar of the virgin! Vesta will give it. By the grace of Vesta, you shall be purified. The blood of a horse shall be your fumigatory, with the ashes of the calf, and third the empty husk of the hard bean. Shepherd, purify your full fed flocks in the early twilight. Water should first sprinkle them, and a twig broom should sweep the ground.”[46] Again, he tells of “a fountain of Mercury near the Capanian gate. If we choose to believe those who have tried it, it has a divine virtue. Hither comes the merchant with purse-girdled tunic, and being purified, draws water which he may carry away in a perfumed vase. In this, a branch of laurel is moistened, and with the wet laurel all things are sprinkled that are to have new owners. He sprinkles his own locks, also, with the dripping bush, and with a voice familiar with deceit offers his prayers. ‘Wash away my past perjuries,’ says he: ‘Wash away the falsehoods of the past day. Whether I have called thee (Mercury), to witness, or have called upon the great majesty of Jove, wishing him not to hear; or, if I have been false to any other god or goddess, let the swift zephyrs carry away my dishonest words, and let my perjuries be obliterated by to-morrow. Let not the superior powers give heed to what I may say.’”[47]
In Virgil, Æneas, preparing for flight from the overthrow of Troy, says to his father,—“Do you, my father, in your hand take the consecrated things and the ancestral gods? To me, just returned from such and so recent a battle and slaughter, it were sacrilege to touch them, until I shall have washed in a living stream.”[48] In another place the closing rites at the funeral pyre of Misenus are thus described,—“The same (Chorinaeus) passed thrice around his companions with water, sprinkling them with a gentle spray, and with a branch of the auspicious olive purified the men and uttered the parting words.”[49]
Of funeral lustrations at Rome, Adams in his Antiquities, gives this account: “When the remains of the dead were laid in the tomb, those present were, three times, sprinkled by a priest with pure water, from a branch of olive or laurel, to purify them.... The friends when they returned home, as a further purification, after being sprinkled with water, stepped over a fire.[50]... The house itself also was purified and swept with a certain kind of a broom.” The classic writers frequently refer to similar observances among the Greeks. Thus, in Euripides, the people are perplexed as to the death of Alcestis, king Admetus’ wife, because “they do not see the lustral water before the door, as is customary at the doors of the dead.”[51]
The census of the population of Rome was taken every five years, and was followed by a lustration of the city. From this custom the word lustrum (a lustration), came to signify a period of five years. There was also a lustration for new born infants, when their names were given. For boys it was usually on the ninth day after birth; for girls, by some, on the eighth day, and by others, on the fifth, or the third day, while some performed it on the last day of the week wherein the child was born. “On the lustral day, a feast was prepared, over which the goddess Nundina was supposed to preside. The assembled women handed the child backward and forward around the fire burning on the altar of the gods; after which they sprinkled it with water, in which were mingled saliva and dust.”[52]
Philo Judaeus, was a resident of the Greek colony of Alexandria. He was a man of learning, and especially versed in the religious doctrines and rites of the Gentiles, as well as of Moses, of which he wrote largely. We have seen that, in contrasting the purifying rites of other nations with those of Israel, he says that “nearly all other people are sprinkled with unmixed water, mostly drawing it from the sea, some from rivers and others again from vessels replenished from fountains.”[53] This preference of the water of the sea, probably originated in a desire to differentiate the Gentile imitations from the divine originals as observed by Israel. Of it an illustration appears in Euripides. Iphigenia speaks of Orestes and his companions, defiled with dreadful crimes,—“First would I (nipsai) imbue them with holy purifyings.”