THE THRESHOLD COVENANT 8 re a THE BEGINNING OF RELIGIOUS RITES SS HY CLAY TRUMBULL Author of “ Kadesh-bernea,” “The Blood Covenant,” “Studies in Oriental Social Life,” etc. SECOND EDITION. NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1896PREFACE. This work does not treat of the origin of man’s religious faculty, or of the origin of the sentiment of religion ; nor does it enter the domain of theological discussion. It simply attempts to show the beginning of religious rites, by which man evidenced a belief, however obtained, in the possibility of covenant rela- tions between God and man; and the gradual devel- opment of those rites, with the progress of the race toward a higher degree of civilization and enlighten- ment. Necessarily the volume is not addressed to a popular audience, but to students in the lessons of primitive life and culture. In a former volume, “The Blood Covenant,” I sought to show the origin of sacrifice, and the signifi- cance of transferred or proffered blood or life. The facts given in that work have been widely accepted as lying at the basis of fundamental doctrines declared in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and have also been recognized as the source of perverted views which have had prominence in the principal ethnic re- ligions of the world. Scholars of as divergent schools of thought as Professors William Henry Green of iiiiv PREFACE. Princeton, Charles A. Briggs of New York, George E. Day of Yale, John A. Broadus of Louisville, Samuel Ives Curtiss of Chicago, President Mark Hopkins of Williams, Rev. Drs. Alfred Edersheim of Oxford and Cunningham Geikie of Bournemouth, Professor Fréd- eric Godet of Neuchatel, and many others, were agreed in recognizing the freshness and importance of its investigations, and the value of its conclusions. Pro- fessor W. Robertson Smith, of Cambridge, in thanking me for that work, expressed regret that he had not seen it before writing his “Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia.” He afterwards made repeated mention of the work as an authority in its field, in his Burnett Lectures on the “ Religion of the Semites.” This volume grew out of that one. It looks back to a still earlier date. That began as it were with Cain and Abel, while this begins with Adam and Eve. It was while preparing a Supplement for a second edition of that volume that the main idea of this work assumed such importance in my mind that I was led to make a separate study of it, and present it independently. The special theory here advanced is wholly a result of induction. The theory came out of the gathered facts, instead of the facts being gathered in support of the theory. Of course, these facts are not new, but it is believed that their synthetic arrangement is. It has been a