Fig. 177 it is adored by the king and his son or successor, with their attendant genii. The kings present towards it a well-known symbol of life and good fortune, the fist with the forefinger extended, or "the phallic hand." Here, then, we have evidently the Asherah, or Ashtaroth-symbol, the female Baal, the life-producer, "the door" whence life issues to the world. As such the goddess is here symbolised as an arched door-way. In the Phonician alphabet, the fourth letter, daleth, = a door, has the shape of a tent-door, as on the Moabite stone, A, and also in the Greek [------] But another form, perhaps as ancient, is D, which, when placed in its proper position, would be [--], the very form of the Asherah.* In the plural, this word stands for the labia pudendi, [--------], "because it shut not up the doors of the womb," Job iii. 10.** We infer from Numbers xxv. 6-8, that in the rites of Baal-peor, the Kadeshoth, or women devoted to the god, offered themselves to his worshippers each in a peculiar bower or small arched tent, called a qubbah. The part also through which Phinehas drove his spear (see Num. xxv. 8), the woman's vulva, is also called qobbah, the one word being derived from the other, according to Onkelos, Aquila, and others. Qubbah means, according to Fuerst, Heb. Lex., "something hollow and arched, an arched tent, like the Arabic El. Kubba, whence the Spanish Al-cova, and our Alcove." In the Latin also, the word fornix, a vault, an arch, meant a brothel, and from it was derived fornicatio. Qubbah is translated by the LXX., kaminos, "an oven or arched furnace" (Liddell and Scott); but it meant also the female parts. See Herodotus v. 92 (7). Thus, then, the Alcove was itself a symbol of woman, as though a place of entrance and emergence, and whence new life issues to the world. And when the male worshipper of Baal entered to the kadeshah, the living embodiment of the goddess, the analogy to the Asherah became complete, as we shall now show. * The first letter, Aleph, = an ox, is, even on the Moabite stone, written thus, and has become the modern A. In the earlier hieroglyph it must have been thus V. The Egyptian hieroglyph for ten is Compare the Greek [--] and Latin Decem. ** The first of the Orphic Hymns is addressed to the goddess Artemisias (Prothnraia) or the Door-keeper, who presided over childbirths, like the Roman Diana Lucina.