According to these writings, Abraham, the eponymic father of the Israelites, was tested in his loyalty to Yahweh by being told to take his son Isaac into the land of Moriah, a district in Palestine, and there sacrifice him as a burnt offering. In the land of Canaan at the time the Jahvist and the Elohist wrote of this temptation, the ceremony of sacrificing the first-born of a living thing was still practised; among the neighbouring peoples—the Phœnicians on one side and the Sabeans on the south-east—children were still sacrificed. The Elohist therefore was anxious to show that a thousand or more years back, in the time of the founder of their race, it was not the custom of the tribe to sacrifice children and that it was only done when the Lord gave the especial command. [Illustration: ABRAHAM AND ISAAC (FROM A PAINTING BY J. S. COPLEY, R. A.)] With Abraham the command, while painful, was apparently not surprising. He went about the execution in a businesslike way, only to find when he was about to sacrifice the boy, that the Lord was satisfied with his display of zeal and did not intend the command to be carried out. Then “Abraham lifted up his eyes, and behold, behind him a ram caught in the thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.”[232] Here was the first case of substitution, in which the early writer testifies that not only was the substitution satisfactory to the deity, but the human sacrifice was forbidden and an animal providentially provided that the ceremony of sacrifice might be gone through without loss of human blood. However strong the popular inclination to accept the bloody rites of the religion of the surrounding tribes, from that time there was a fixed standard to which the prophets and true believers of Israel held—human sacrifice had been stopped by the Lord himself. Among the Assyrians also, father Orhan was represented as having substituted an animal for human beings, the Assyrian patriarch being represented as a man of benevolent aspect, seated in an armchair without any sort of military pomp or circumstance.[233] To make the substitution of an animal for a human being more effective, and more popular, Abraham entered into a covenant with Yahweh by which the deity was still given the blood of humans without a life being sacrificed. The rite of circumcision is the substitution commanded by Yahweh himself: “This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and thee, and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised.”[234]