It is true that, still, in some instances, all money payment for blood is refused; but the avowed motive in such a case is the holding of life as above price--the very idea which the Mosaic law emphasized. Thus Burton tells of the excited Bed´ween mother who dashes the proffered blood-money to the ground, swearing “by Allah, that she will not eat her son’s blood.”[564] And even where the blood of the slayer is insisted on, there are often found indications that the purpose of this choice rests on the primitive belief that the lost life is made good to the depleted family by the newly received blood.[565] Thus, in the region of Abyssinia, the blood of the slayer is drunk by the relatives of the one first slain;[566] and, in Palestine, when the goel has shed the blood of an unlawful slayer, those who were the losers of blood by that slayer dip their handkerchiefs in his blood, and so obtain their portion of his life.[567] In short, apart from the specific guards thrown around the mission of the goel, in the interests of justice, by the requirements of the Mosaic law, it is evident, that the primal idea of the goel’s mission was to restore life for life, or to secure the adjusted equivalent of a lost life; not to wreak vengeance, nor yet to mete out punishment. The calling of the goel, in our English Bible, a “revenger” of blood, is a result of the wide-spread and deep-rooted error concerning the primitive and Oriental idea of blood and its value; and that unfortunate translation tends to the perpetuation of this error. 8. THE PRIMITIVE RITE ILLUSTRATED. Because the primitive rite of blood-covenanting was well known in the Lands of the Bible, at the time of the writing of the Bible, for that very reason, we are not to look to the Bible for a specific explanation of the rite itself, even where there are incidental references in the Bible to the rite and its observances; but, on the other hand, we are to find an explanation of the biblical illustrations of the primitive rite, in the understanding of that rite which we gain from outside sources. In this way, we are enabled to see in the Bible much that otherwise would be lost sight of. The word for “covenant,” in the Hebrew, _bereeth_ (בְּרִית), is commonly so employed, in the sacred text, as to have the apparent meaning of a thing “cut,” as apart from, or as in addition to, its primary meaning of a thing “eaten.”[568] This fact has been a source of confusion to lexicographers.[569] But, when we consider that the primitive rite of blood-covenanting was by cutting into the flesh in order to the tasting of the blood, and that a feast was always an accompaniment of the rite, if, indeed, it were not an integral portion of it, the two-fold meaning of “cutting” and “eating” attaches obviously to the term “covenant”; as the terms “carving,” and “giving to eat,” are often used interchangeably, with reference to dining; or as we speak of a “cut of beef” as the portion for a table.