Note 32 — Chapter II · THE CENTRAL MYTH

There is nothing peculiar to the Semites either in the general or in the particular usage, both being once nearly universal; but it is with the Semites that we are here specially concerned. The story of Abraham and Isaac, to say nothing of that of Jephthah’s daughter, is a finger-post in the evolution of religion, being inferribly a humane myth to promote the substitution of animal for human sacrifice. And the Phœnician myth of “Ieoud,” the “only-begotten” son of King Kronos, “whom the Phœnicians call Israel,” sacrificed by his father at a time of national danger, after being dressed in the trappings of royalty,32 points towards the historic roots of Christianity. Again and again we meet the conception of the “only-begotten” “Son of the Father”—Father Abraham, Father Kronos, Father Israel, the Father-King—as a special sacrifice in Hebrew and other Semitic history. Kronos is a Semitic God; and in connection with the Roman Saturnalia we have the record of a Greek oracle commanding to “send a man to the Father”—that is, to Kronos.33