The first “Amorite” city at Gezer was coeval with the earliest city at Lachish--the modern Tel el-Hesy, where the Amorite settlers had no neolithic predecessors. At Gezer their sanctuary has been discovered. It was a “high place” formed of nine great monoliths running from north to south, and surrounded by a platform of large stones. The second monolith, polished with the kisses of the worshippers, was possibly the central object of veneration, the _bœtylos_ or _beth-el_, as it was termed.[125] This _beth-el_, or “house of God,” takes us back to Semitic Babylonia. The veneration of isolated stones was common to all branches of the Semitic race; it may have come down to them from the days when their ancestors wandered over the desert plains of Arabia, where the solitary rocks assumed fantastic shapes that appealed to their imagination and excited feelings of awe, while their shadows offered a welcome retreat in the heat of noon-day. In the historical age, however, it was not the rock itself that was adored, but the divinity whose home it had become by consecration with oil. The brick-built temple was called by the Babylonians a _bit-ili_, _beth-el_, or “house of God,” and the name was easily transferred to the consecrated stones, the worship of which was coeval with the beginnings of Semitic history. But though the worship of stones was primitive, the belief that the stone was not a fetish, but the shrine of divinity, belonged to an age of reflection and points to a Babylonian source. The first Amorite city at Gezer was succeeded by a second, in which the high place underwent enlargement and was provided with a temenos. Under its pavement have been found memorials of the grim rites performed in honour of its Baal--the bones of children and even adults who had been sacrificed and sometimes burnt and then deposited in jars. Similar sacrifices, it would seem, were offered when a new building was erected, since children’s bones have been disinterred from under the foundations of houses, both at Gezer and at Taanach and Megiddo. The bones were placed in jars along with lamps and bowls, which, it has been suggested, were intended to receive the blood of the victim. The old sacred cave of the neolithic race was now brought into connection with the high place of the “Amorite” settlers, and the skeleton of a child has been found in it resting on a flat stone.