at Shechem.* Each of such still existing objects probably had a history of its own, connecting it inseparably with some far-off event in the local annals. * The heap of stones at Galeed, in Aramaic _Jegar- Sahadutha_, "the heap of witness," marked the spot where Laban and Jacob were reconciled; the stele on the way to Ephrata was the tomb of Rachel; the altar and stele at Bethel marked the spot where God appeared unto Jacob. [Illustration: 235.jpg TRANSJORDANIAN DOLMEN] Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph. [Illustration: 238.jpg A CROMLECH IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF HESBAN, IN THE COUNTRY OF MOAB] Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph. Most of them were objects of worship: they were anointed with oil, and victims were slaughtered in their honour; the faithful even came at times to spend the night and sleep near them, in order to obtain in their dreams glimpses of the future.* * The menhir of Bethel was the identical one whereon Jacob rested his head on the night in which Jehovah appeared to him in a dream. In Phoenicia there was a legend which told how Usoos set up two stellae to the elements of wind and fire, and how he offered the blood of the animals he had killed in the chase as a libation. Men and beasts were supposed to be animated, during their lifetime, by a breath or soul which ran in their veins along with their blood, and served to move their limbs; the man, therefore, who drank blood or ate bleeding flesh assimilated thereby the soul which inhered in it. After death the fate of this soul was similar to that ascribed to the spirits of the departed in Egypt and Chaldaea. The inhabitants of the ancient world were always accustomed to regard the surviving element in man as something restless and unhappy--a weak and pitiable double, doomed to hopeless destruction if deprived of the succour of the living. They imagined it as taking up its abode near the body wrapped in a half-conscious lethargy; or else as dwelling with the other _rephaim_ (departed spirits) in some dismal and gloomy kingdom, hidden in the bowels of the earth, like the region ruled by the Chaldaean Allat, its doors gaping wide to engulf new arrivals, but allowing none to escape who had once passed the threshold.* * The expression _rephaim_ means "the feeble"; it was the epithet applied by the Hebrews to a part of the primitive races of Palestine. There it wasted away, a prey to sullen melancholy, under the sway of inexorable deities, chief amongst whom, according to the Phoenician idea, was Mout (Death),* the grandson of El; there the slave became the equal of his former master, the rich man no longer possessed anything which could raise him above the poor, and dreaded monarchs were greeted on their entrance by the jeers of kings who had gone down into the night before them.