That the different nations inhabiting the region around the Euphrates and Tigris, Syria and Arabia, belonged to one great race, is proved by the unimpeachable testimony of language.  The Bible genealogies trace them to Shem, the son of Noah.  Ewald,[342] who believes that this region was inhabited by an aboriginal people long before the days of Abraham,—­a people who were driven out by the Canaanites,—­nevertheless says that they no doubt were a Semitic people.  The languages of all these nations is closely related, being almost dialects of a single tongue, the differences between them being hardly greater than between the subdivisions of the German group of languages.[343] That which has contributed to preserve the close homogeneity among these tongues is, that they have little power of growth or development.  As M. Renan says, “they have less lived than lasted."[344]

The Phoenicians used a language almost identical with the Hebrew.  A sarcophagus of Ezmunazar, king of Sidon, dating from the fifth century before Christ, was discovered a few years since, and is now in the Museum of the Louvre.  It contains some thirty sentences of the length of an average verse in the Bible, and is in pure Hebrew.[345] In a play of Plautus[346] a Carthaginian is made to speak a long passage in his native language, the Punic tongue; this is also very readable Hebrew.  The black basalt stele, lately discovered in the land of Moab, contains an inscription of Mesha, king of Moab, addressed to his god, Chemosh, describing his victory over the Israelites.  This is also in a Hebrew dialect.  From such facts it appears that the Hebrews, Phoenicians, and Canaanites were all congeners with each other, and with the Babylonians and Assyrians.

But now the striking fact appears that the Hebrew religion differed widely from that of these other nations of the same family.  The Assyrians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians all possessed a nearly identical religion.  They all believed in a supreme god, called by the different names of Ilu, Bel, Set, Hadad, Moloch, Chemosh, Jaoh, El, Adon, Asshur.  All believed in subordinate and secondary beings, emanations from this supreme being, his manifestations to the world, rulers of the planets.  Like other pantheistic religions, the custom prevailed among the Semitic nations of promoting first one and then another deity to be the supreme object of worship.  Among the Assyrians, as among the Egyptians, the gods were often arranged in triads, as that of Ann, Bel, and Ao.  Anu, or Cannes, wore the head of a fish; Bel wore the horns of a bull; Ao was represented by a serpent.  These religions represented the gods as the spirit within nature, and behind natural objects and forces,—­powers within the world, rather than above the world.  Their worship combined cruelty and licentiousness, and was perhaps as debasing a superstition as the world has witnessed.  The Greeks, who were not puritans themselves in their religion, were shocked at the impure orgies of this worship, and horrified at the sacrifice of children among the Canaanites and Carthaginians.