The incalculable importance of the symbolism of the phylacteries, in the estimation of the Lord’s people, has been recognized, as a fact, by both Jewish and Christian scholars, even after their primary meaning has been lost sight of--through a strange dropping out of sight of the primitive rite of blood-covenanting, so familiar in the land of Egypt and in the earlier and later homes of the Hebrews. The Rabbis even held that God himself, as the other party in this blood-covenant, wore the phylacteries, as its token and memorial.[487] Among other passages in support of this, they cited Isaiah 49 : 16: “Behold I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands”; and Isaiah 62 : 8: “The Lord hath sworn by his right hand, and by the arm of his strength.” Farrar, referring to this claim of the Rabbis, says, “it may have had some mystic meaning”;[488] and certainly the claim corresponds singularly with the thought and with the customs of the rite of blood-covenanting. To this day many of the Syrian Arabs swear, as a final and a most sacred oath, by their own blood--as their own life;[489] and in making the covenant of blood-friendship they draw the blood from the upper arm, because, as they explain it, the arm is their strength.[490] The cry of the Egyptian soul to his god, in his resting on the covenant of blood, was, “Give me your arm; I am made as ye.”[491] It is not strange, therefore, that those who had the combined traditions of Egypt and of Syria, should see a suggestion of the covenant of blood-friendship in the inspired assurance: “The Lord hath sworn by his right hand, and by the arm of his strength.” It is by no means improbable, indeed, that the universal custom of lifting up the arm to God in a solemn oath[492] was a suggestion of swearing by one’s blood, by proffering it in its strength, as in the inviolable covenant of sacred friendship with God. So, again, in the “striking hands” as a form of sacred covenanting[493]; the clasping of hands, in blood.