[1061] Isaiah, xlvii. 13.
[1062] Gen. xxxi. 10-13; Judges, vii. 13.
[1063] Petrie, op. cit., p. 49.
[1064] Cf. the custom at certain Greek temples, whereby every person, who paid the fee and complied with the rules laid down, was allowed to sleep in or near the sanctuary for the purpose of receiving omens in a dream. The men slept in the east, the women in the west of the dormitory. Frazer, op. cit., II. 44. A good monograph on the subject is by Miss M. Hamilton, Incubation, London, 1906. Oneiromancy was highly esteemed in Israel, as in Egypt and elsewhere. Joseph’s skill (Gen. xl. and xli.) no doubt aided his rapid advancement by Pharaoh.
[1065] “Sacred stones or monoliths were regular features of Canaanite or Hebrew sanctuaries: many of these have been excavated in modern times.” Some of these Bethel stones are described “as uttering oracles in a whistling voice, which only a wizard was able to interpret.” Frazer, op. cit., II., p. 59 and p. 76.
[1066] T. Davies in Magic Divination and Demonology among the Hebrews, etc., 1898, especially in chs. ii. and iii., has much of interest on these subjects.
[1067] Cf. R. Campbell Thompson, Semitic Magic, p. 18. Not analogous but not unakin seems the passage in Theocritus (Idyll, II. 28-9) of the love-slighted maiden melting the wax, “so that Delphis may be soon wasted by my love.” Diaper (in his Nereides or Sea Eclogues) imitates the scene, but for the waxen image of the lover and its wasting, substitutes a poor dog-fish, which is pierced so as to torture Phorbas by proxy. Cf. Virgil, Ecl., VIII. 80.
[1068] J. G. Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament (London, 1918), 520 ff.
[1069] R. Campbell Thompson, Semitic Magic (London, 1908), pp. 74-75.
[1070] Annals of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1797), III. Appendix 1, pp. 1-21; Le Droit du Seigneur (Paris 1864), 191 ff., 232-243, and 276 ff. As to the supposed exception owing to the mythical law by that mythical king, Evenus or Eugenius, by the provisions of which according to Boece (who in his History of Scotland, published in 1527, seems to have been the first to resurrect or create the law, and the monarch) landlords were permitted to “deflower the virgin brides of their tenantry,” see Cosmo Innes’s Lectures on Legal Antiquities, 1872, “in Scotland there is nothing to ground a suspicion of such a right,” and J. G. Frazer, op. cit., vol. I. pp. 485-493.