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110
LECTURES ON THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION.
Confining ourselves to the more immediate object of our researches, we see without difficulty, that the Semitic, like the Aryan languages, possess a number of names of the Deity in common, which must have existed before the Southern or Arabic, the Northern or Aramaic, the Middle or Hebraic branches became permanently separated, and which, therefore, allow us an insight into the religious conceptions of the once united Semitic race long before Jehovah was worshipped by Abraham, or Baal was invoked in Phoenicia, or El in Babylon.
It is true, as I pointed out before, that the meaning of many of these names is more general than the original meaning of the names of the Aryan gods. Many of them signify Frwerful, Venerable, Exalted, King, Lord, and they might seem, therefore, like honorific titles, to have been given independently by the different branches of the Semitic family to the gods whom they worshipped each in their own sanctuaries. But if we consider how many words there were in the Semitic languages to express greatness, strength, or lordship, the fact that the same appellatives occur as the proper names of the deity in Syria, in Carthage, in Babylon, and in Palestine, admits of one historical explanation only. There must have been a time for the Semitic as well as for the Aryan races, when they fixed the names of their deities, and that time must have preceded the formation of their separate languages and separate religions.
One of the oldest names of the deity among the ancestors of the Semitic nations was Él. It meant Strong. It occurs in the Babylonian inscriptions as