ANANI

ANAKI.— A son of Elioenai (1 Ch 3").

AirANIAH.— 1. Neh 3'K the father of Maaseiah, and grandfather of Azariah, who took part in rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. 2. A town inhabited by Ben-jamites after the Captivity (Neh 11'^). Possibly the modern Beit Hanina, a village 2 miles N. of Jerusalem.

AIUDIAS. — This name occurs several times in the Apocrypha: in 1 Es Q^'- ^s- «■ '8 (representing 'Hanani' and 'Hananiah' of Ezr lO^"- 2', 'Anaiah' and 'Hanan' of Neh 8<- ') and in To S'"-, Jth 8'. It is the name of three persons in NT. 1 . The husband of Sapphira, who in the voluntary communism of the early Church sold 'a possession' and kept part of the price for himself, pretending that he had given the whole (Ac 6'^). The sudden death of husband and wife, predicted by St. Peter, was the signal proof of God's anger on this Judas-like hypocrisy. 2. A 'devout man according to the law' at Damascus, a disciple who instructed and baptized Saul of Tarsus after his conversion, restoring to him his sight by imposition of hands; he had been warned by the Lord in a vision (Ac 9"'"'- 22™). 3. The high priest at the time when St. Paul was arrested at Jerusalem (Ac 232"), a Sadducee, son of Nedebaeus, and a rapacious oppressor. He had been in trouble at Rome, but was acquitted, and was now at the height of his power. He pressed the prosecution against St. Paul at Csesarea (Ac 2V^). In the Jewish war he was murdered by his countrymen in Jerusalem, out of revenge for his pro-Roman tendencies. A. J. Maclean.

ANANIEL.— One of the ancestors of Tobit (To l').

ANATH.— The father of Shamgar (Jg S'l 5=). 'Anat is the name of a goddess worshipped in Pal. (cf. Jg 1", Jos 15", Is 102°); it is found on Egyptian monuments from the 18th dynasty.

ANATHEMA.— See Ban.

ANATHOTH.— 1. A town in Benjamin given to the Levites (Jos 21'8); the modern ' Anata, 2i miles N. of Jerusalem, an insignificant village with considerable ruins. It was the home of Abiathar (1 K 2^*) and of Jeremiah (Jer 1'); re-occupied after the exile (Neh 7" 10"). 2. ABenjainite, sonof Becher(lCh7»).

W. EWING.

ANCESTOR -WORSHIP. —Every people whose re-ligious beliefs have been investigated appears to have passed through the stage of Animism, the stage in which it was believed that the spirits of those recently dead were potent to hurt those they had left behind on earth. The rites observed to-day at an Irish wake have their origin in this fear that the spirit of the dead may injure the living. There are several traces of a similar belief in the OT. When a death took place in a tent or house, every vessel which happened to be open at the time was counted unclean (Nu 19'5). It remained clean only if it had a covering tied over it. The idea was that the spirit of the dead person, escaping from the body, might take up its abode in some open vessel instead of entering the gloomy realms of Sheol. Many mourning customs find their explana-tion in this same dread of the spirit but lately set free from its human home. The shaving of the head and beard, the cutting of the face and breast, the tearing of the garments — apparently a survival of the time when the mourner stripped off all his clothes — are due to the effort of the survivor to make himself unrecog-nizable by the spirit.

But to admit that the OT contains traces of Animism is not the same as to declare that at one stage the Israelites practised Ancestor-worship. Scholars are divided into two groups on the subject. Some (Stade, GVI i. 451; Smend, AUtest. Relig. 112 f.) affirm that Ancestor-worship was of the very substance of the primitive religion of Israel. Others do not at all admit this position (Kautzsch, in Hastings' DB, Extra Vol. 614»; W. P. Paterson, ib. ii. 4451"). The evidence

ANCHOR

adduced for Ancestor-worship as a stage in the religious development of Israel proceeds on these lines:

(a) Sacrifices were offered at Hebron to Abraham, and at Shechem to Joseph, long before these places were associated with the worship of Jehovah. When a purer faith took possession of men's hearts, the old sacred spots retained their sanctity, but new associations were attached to them. A theophany was now declared to be the fact underlying the sacredness; and the connexion with the famous dead was thus broken. In the same way sacred trees and stones, associated with the old Canaanitish worship, had their evil associa-tions removed by being linked with some great event in the history of Israel. But this existence of sacred places connected with the burial of a great tribal or national hero does not at all prove Ancestor-worship. It is possible to keep fresh a great man's memory without believing that he can either help or hinder the life of those on earth.

(6) Evidence from mourning customs. It is held that the cutting and wounding (Jer 16' 41'), the cover-ing of the head (Ezk 24", Jer 14'), the rending of the garments (2 S 1" 3'i), the wearing of sackcloth (2 S 21", Is 15'), are to be explained as a personal dedication to the spirit of the dead. But all this, as we have seen, can be explained as the effort so to alter the familiar appearance that the spirit, on returning to work harm, will not recognize the objects of its spite. Then the customs that had to do with food, the fasting for the dead (1 S 31", 2 S 3'')— the breaking of the fast by a funeral feast after sundown (Hos 9«, 2 S 3'*, Jer 16'), the placing of food upon the grave (Dt 26") — do not prove that Ancestor-worship was a custom of the Hebrews. They only show that the attempt was made to appease the spirit of the dead, and that this was done by a sacrifice, which, Uke all primitive sacrifices, was afterwards eaten by the worshippers themselves. When these funeral rites were forbidden, it was because they were heathenish and unfitting for a people that worshipped the true God.

(c) The terapMm, it is said, were some form of house-hold god, shaped in human form (1 S 19"- "), carried about as one of the most precious possessions of the home (Gn 31), consulted in divination (Ezk 21"), presumably as representing the forefathers of the family. But nothing is known with certainty regarding the teraphim. That they were of human form is a very bold inference from the evidence afforded by 1 S 1913. 15. The variety of derivations given by the Jews of the word teraphim shows that there was complete ignorance as to their origin and appearance.

(.d) In 1 S 28" the spirit of Samuel, called up by the witch of Endor, is called elohim. But it is very pre-carious to build on an obscure passage of this kind, especially as the use of the word cIoMm is so wide (appUed to God, angels, and possibly even judges or kings) that no inference can be drawn from this passage.

(c) It is argued that the object of the levirate marriage (Dt 25'«) was to prevent any deceased person being left in Sheol without some one on earth to offer him worship. But the motive stated in v.s, ' that his name be not put out in Israel,' is so sufflcient that the con-nexion of the levirate marriage with Ancestor-worship seems forced.

The case for the existence of Ancestor-worship among the Hebrews has not been made out. As a branch of the Semitic stock, the Hebrews were, of course, heirs of the common Semitic tradition. And while that tradition did contain much that was superstitious with regard to the power of the dead to work evil on the living, it does not appear that the worship of ancestors, which in other races was so often associated with the stage of Animism, had a place in Hebrew religion. R. Bkucb Taylob.

ANCHOR.— See Ships and Boats.

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