It is fortunate for us in this matter that one of the most fully equipped scholars which the last century produced, Robertson Smith, devoted his studies for many years to The Religion of the Semites, and information on the points raised is to our hand; all I need do is to give as shortly as possible a statement of the various conclusions he had reached on the points to which our attention may in the first instance be confined. I quote from his book The Religion of the Semites.
The Semites include the Babylonians, who spoke a Semitic dialect, for there were Sumerian speaking peoples among them, Assyrians, Phœnicians, Hebrews, Arabs and Aramæans, who in ancient times occupied the fertile lands of Syria, Mesopotamia and Irak from the Mediterranean coast to the base of the mountains of Iran and Armenia. They also embrace the inhabitants of the great Arabian peninsula, which is believed to have been the centre of dispersion.
The ordinary artificial mark of a Semitic sanctuary was the sacrificial pillar, cairn, or rude altar (p. 183): it was a fixed point where, according to primitive rule, the blood of the offering was applied to the sacred stones; or where a sacred tree, as we shall see presently, was hung with gifts; the stones and tree being symbols of the God (p. 151).
Further, it is certain that the original altar among the northern Semites was a great unhewn[94] stone, or a cairn, at which the blood of the victim was shed (p. 185).
Monolithic pillars or cairns of stones are frequently mentioned in the more ancient parts of the Old Testament as marking sanctuaries; Shechem, Bethel, Gilead, Gilgal, Mizpah, Gibeon, and En-Rogel are referred to (p. 186).
There is evidence that in very early times the sanctuary was a cave (p. 183). The obvious successors of a natural cave are, (1) an artificial cave made in the earth like the natural one, and (2) a model or representation of a cave built of stone, with a small entrance which would be barred, and covered over with earth, thus protecting the priests from wild animals and the weather.
The dolmens and cromlechs which are found in the Semitic area where there are stones doubtless had this origin.
The use of a cave was probably borrowed both by the Egyptians and Greeks (there is a cave, for instance, at Eleusis) from the Semites.
In later times, when caves or their equivalents were no longer in vogue and temples were erected, they enclosed a Bit-ili or Beth-el, an upright stone, consecrated by oil.[95]
We next learn (pp. 170 and 183) that no Canaanite high place was complete without its sacred tree standing beside the altar.