“It is certain,” says Professor Smith again, “that the original altar among the Northern Semites, as well as among the Arabs, was a great stone or cairn, at which the blood of the victim was shed.” There is no difference, he declares, between the Hebrew altar and the Arabian standing stone. “Monolithic pillars or cairns of stone are frequently mentioned in the more ancient parts of the Old Testament as standing at Sanctuaries, generally in connexion with a sacred legend about the occasion on which they were set up by some famous patriarch or hero. In the biblical story, they usually appear as mere memorial structures without any definite ritual significance; but the pentateuchal law looks on the use of sacred pillars as idolatrous. This is the best evidence that such pillars held an important place among the appurtenances of Canaanite temples; and as Hosea speaks of the pillar as an indispensable feature in the sanctuaries of Northern Israel in his time, we may be sure that by the mass of the Hebrews the pillars of Shechem, Bethel, Gilgal, and other shrines were looked upon, not as mere memorials of historical events, but as necessary parts of the ritual apparatus of a place of worship.... From these evidences, and especially from the fact that libations of the same kind are applied to both, it seems clear that the altar is a differentiated form of the primitive rude stone pillar. But the sacred stone is more than an altar, for in Hebrew and Canaanite sanctuaries the altar, in its developed form as a table or hearth, does not supersede the pillar; the two are found side by side at the same sanctuary, the altar as a piece of sacrificial apparatus, and the pillar as a visible symbol or embodiment of the presence of the deity, which in process of time comes to be fashioned and carved in various ways, till ultimately it becomes a statue or anthropomorphic idol of stone, just as the sacred tree or post was ultimately developed into an image of wood.”
In spite of much obvious groping in the dark in this and other passages of the Religion of the Semites, it is clear that the learned professor recognised at least one central fact—“the sacred stone at Semitic sanctuaries was from the first an object of worship, a sort of rude idol in which the divinity was somehow supposed to be present.” Again, he notes that “Jacob’s pillar is more than a mere landmark, for it is anointed, just as idols were in antiquity, and the pillar itself, not the spot on which it stood, is called ‘the house of God,’ as if the deity were conceived actually to dwell in the stone, or manifest himself therein to his worshippers. And this is the conception which appears to have been associated with sacred stones everywhere. When the Arab daubed blood on the nosh, his object was to bring the offering into direct contact with the deity; and in like manner the practice of stroking the sacred stone with the hand is identical with the practice of touching or stroking the garments or beard of a man in acts of supplication before him.” Elsewhere he says: “So far as evidence from tradition and ritual goes, we can only think of the sacred stone as consecrated by the actual presence of the godhead, so that whatever touched it was brought into immediate contact with the deity.” And he quotes a line from an Arab poet in which the Arabian gods are expressly described as “gods of stone.”
It is thus clear that sacred stones were common objects of worship with the Semites in general, and also with the Hebrew people in particular. But after the exclusive worship of Jahweh, the local Jewish god, had grown obligatory among the Jews, it became the policy of the “Jehovist” priests to Jehovise and to consecrate the sacred stones of Palestine by bringing them into connexion with the Jehovistic legend and the tales of the Patriarchs. Thus Professor Cheyne comments as follows upon the passage in Isaiah where the prophet mocks the partizan of the old polytheistic creed as a stone-worshipper—“Among the smooth stones of the valley is thy portion: They, they are thy lot: Even to them hast thou poured a drink offering: Thou hast offered a meat offering: “The large smooth stones referred to above were the fetishes of the primitive Semitic races, and anointed with oil, according to a widely spread custom. It was such a stone which Jacob took for a pillow, and afterwards consecrated by pouring oil upon it. The early Semites and reactionary idolatrous Israelites called such stones Bethels.... i.e., houses of El (the early Semitic word for God) *.... In spite of the efforts of the ‘Jehovist’ who desired to convert these ancient fetishes into memorials of patriarchal history, the old heathenish use of them seems to have continued especially in secluded places.”
* Say rather, “for a god.”
Besides the case of the stone at Bethel, there is the later one (in our narrative) when Jacob and Laban made a covenant, “and Jacob took a stone, and set it up for a pillar. And Jacob said unto his brethren, Gather stones; and they took stones and made an heap: and they did eat there upon the heap.” So, once more, at Shalem, he erects an altar called El-Elohe-Israel; he sets a pillar upon the grave of Rachel, and another at the place at Luz where God appeared to him. Of like import is the story of the twelve stones which the twelve men take out of Jordan to commemorate the passage of the tribes. All are clearly attempts to Jehovise these early sacred stones or local gods by connecting them with incidents in the Jehovistic version of the ancient Hebrew legends.
That such stones, however, were worshipped as deities in early times, before the cult of Jahweh had become an exclusive one among his devotees, is evident from the Jehovistic narrative itself, which has not wholly succeeded in blotting out all traces of earlier religion. Samuel judged Israel every year at Bethel, the place of Jacob’s sacred pillar: at Gilgal, the place where Joshua’s twelve stones were set up; and at Mizpeh, where stood the cairn surmounted by the pillar of Laban’s covenant. In other words, these were the sanctuaries of the chief ancient gods of Israel. Samuel himself “took a stone and set it between Mizpeh and Shem and its very name, Eben-ezer, “the stone of help,” shows that it was originally worshipped before proceeding on warlike expeditions, though the Jehovistic gloss, “saying, Hitherto the Lord hath helped us,” does its best, of course, to obscure the real meaning. So at Peran, in New Guinea, Mr. Chalmers saw “a large peculiarly-shaped stone,” by name Ravai, considered very sacred. Sacrifices are made to it, and it is more particularly addressed in times of fighting. “Before setting forth, offerings are presented, with food,” and the stone is entreated to precede the warriors into battle. Wherever a stone has a name, it is almost certainly of mortuary origin. It was to the stone-circle of Gilgal, once more, that Samuel directed Saul to go, saying, “I will come down unto thee, to offer burnt-offerings, and to sacrifice sacrifices of peace-offerings.” It was at the cairn of Mizpeh that Saul was chosen king; and after the victory over the Ammonites, Saul went once more to the great Stonehenge at Gilgal to “renew the kingdom,” and “there they made Saul king before Jahweh in Gilgal; and there they sacrificed sacrifices of peace-offerings before Jahweh.” This passage is a very instructive and important one, because here we see that in the opinion of the writer at least Jahweh was then domiciled at Gilgal, amid the other sacred stones of that holy circle.
Observe, “however, that when Saul was directed to go to find his father’s asses, he was sent first to Rachel’s pillar at Telzah, and then to the plain of Tabor, where he was to meet “three men going up to God [not to Jahweh] at Bethel,” evidently to sacrifice, “one carrying three kids, and another carrying three loaves of bread, and another carrying a bottle of wine.” These and many other like memorials of stone-worship lie thickly scattered through the early books of the Hebrew Scriptures, sometimes openly avowed, and sometimes cloaked under a thin veil of Jehovism.
On the other hand, at the present day, the Palestine exploration has shown that no rude stone monuments exist in Palestine proper, though east of the Jordan they are common in all parts of the country. How, then, are we to explain their disappearance? Major Conder thinks that when pure Jehovism finally triumphed under Hezekiah and Josiah, the Jehovists destroyed all these “idolatrous” stones throughout the Jewish dominions, in accordance with the injunctions in the Book of Deuteronomy to demolish the religious emblems of the Canaanites. Jahweh, the god of the Hebrews, was a jealous God, and he would tolerate no alien sacred stones within his own jurisdiction.
And who or what was this Jahweh himself, this local and ethnic god of the Israelites, who would suffer no other god or sacred monolith to live near him?
I will not lay stress upon the point that when Joshua was dying, according to the legend, he “took a great stone” and set it up by an oak that was by the sanctuary of Jahweh, saying that it had heard all the words of Jahweh. That document is too doubtful in terms to afford us much authority. But I will merely point out that at the time when we first seem to catch clear historic glimpses of true Jahweh worship, we find Jahweh, whoever or whatever that mystic object might have been, located with his ark at the Twelve Stones at Gilgal. It is quite clear that in “the camp at Gilgal,” as the later compilers believed, Jahweh, god of Israel, who had brought his people up out of Egypt, remained till the conquest of the land was completed. But after the end of the conquest, the tent in which he dwelt was removed to Shiloh; and that Jahweh went with it is clear from the fact that Joshua cast lots for the land there “before Jahweh, our God.” He was there still when Hannah and her husband went up to Shiloh to sacrifice unto Jahweh; and when Samuel ministered unto Jahweh before Eli the priest. That Jahweh made a long stay at Shiloh is, therefore, it would seem, a true old tradition—a tradition of the age just before the historical beginnings of the Hebrew annals.