+398+. The evidence that has been adduced for a cult of the phallus among Semitic peoples is of a doubtful nature. No ithyphallic images or figures of gods have been found. Religious prostitution there was in all North Semitic lands,[723] but this is a wholly different thing from a phallicistic cult. It is supposed, however, by not a few scholars that descriptions and representations of the phallus occur in so many places as to make some sort of cult of the object probable. In a passage of the Book of Isaiah, descriptive of a foreign cult practiced, probably, by some Jews, the phallus, it is held, is named.[724] The passage is obscure. The nature and origin of the cult referred to are not clear; it is not elsewhere mentioned. The word (_yad_, usually 'hand') supposed to mean 'phallus' is not found in this sense elsewhere in the Old Testament or in later Hebrew literature. But, if the proposed rendering be adopted, the reference will be not to a cult of the phallus but to sexual intercourse, a figurative description of idolatry. +399+. A distinct mention of phalli as connected with religious worship occurs in Pseudo-Lucian's description of the temple of a certain goddess at Hierapolis.[725] He gives the name to enormously high structures standing in the propylæa of the temple, but mentions no details suggesting a phallic cult. Twice a year, he says, a man ascends one of them, on the top of which he stays seven days, praying, as some think, for a blessing on all Syria--a procedure suggesting that the pillar was simply a structure consecrated to the deity of the place (probably Atargatis, who is often called "the Syrian goddess")[726]. However, if there was a phallic cult there (the phallus being regarded as a symbol of the productive function of the deity), it is not certain that it was Semitic. Hierapolis had long been an important religious center in a region in which Asiatic and Greek worships were influential, and foreign elements might easily have become attached to the worship of a Semitic deity. The cult of the Asian Great Mother (whom the Greeks identified with their Leto) had orgiastic elements. Lucian's reference to a custom of emasculation suggests Asian features at Hierapolis.[727]