Die Religion der Semiten

William Robertson Smith (1846-1894) was a Scottish theologian of the Free Church of Scotland and a professor of Old Testament. He was an exponent of ecclesiastical liberalism and was friends with James George Frazer (1854-1941). Since 1881, he served as a professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge. Robertson Smith's most famous work is considered to be the publication of his lectures on "The Religion of the Semites" - a classic in comparative religious studies. Out of ethnological interest, Robertson Smith traveled for several months to Egypt, Syria, and Palestine in 1878 and 1879. Subsequently, he published an essay in 1880 titled "Animal Worship and Animal Tribes among the Arabs and in the Old Testament." In this essay, he argued that the biblical tribes possessed totems. Furthermore, he observed that exogamy and polyandry were prevalent among the biblical tribes, concluding that Israel had not managed to rise above the lowest forms of paganism. At the end of the 19th century, there was a growing interest in William Robertson Smith's work, as his approach of deriving an understanding of fundamental social structures from the study of the historical conditions of scriptural religions gained increasing acceptance. This is a reprint of the original edition from 1899.