At first sight the difficulty seems overwhelming. But we must remember that nothing is said in the narrative about the place being desert and remote from men, nor even that it was not within the walls of a city. And we must further remember that the temple of Solomon itself was built on what had been the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite. Before the age of Solomon, therefore, the place must have been open and free from buildings; it must, too, have been a level platform of rock on the summit of the hill where the winds could freely play and scatter the chaff when the grain was threshed. Such open spaces are not infrequent in Oriental cities, and the visitor sometimes finds himself suddenly emerging out of close and crowded lanes into a growth of rank brushwood and weeds. It is true that in the books of Samuel, where we are told how the threshing-floor of the Jebusite came to be chosen as the site of the temple, no allusion is made to Abraham’s sacrifice. Another reason is assigned for the choice of the spot. But Oriental modes of writing history are not the same as ours, and the so-called argument from silence is worthless when applied to them. Archæological discovery has shown, time after time, that facts and references are passed over in silence by the writers of ancient Oriental history, not because the writers did not know them, but because their conception of history was different from ours. Mount Moriah, then, may well have been the scene of that temptation of Abraham when, in accordance with the fierce ritual of Syria, he believed himself called upon to offer up in sacrifice his only son. At all events, the belief that it was so can be traced back to an early date among the Jews. The very fact that the Samaritans transported the place of sacrifice to Mount Gerizim proves that it had already been associated with the site of the temple, and the transference of the site was necessary in support of the claim that the true centre of Hebrew worship was at Samaria and not in Jerusalem. Light has been cast on the substitution of a ram for the human victim by an acute observation of M. Clermont-Ganneau.[63] We know that human sacrifice occupied a prominent place in the ritual of Phœnicia and Carthage; and yet in the so-called sacrificial tariffs which have been discovered at Carthage and Marseilles, and in which the price is stated of each of the offerings demanded by the gods, there is absolute silence in regard to it. The place of the human victim is taken by the _ayîl_, the ‘ram’ of the book of Genesis.[64] The tariffs of Carthage and Marseilles belong to that later period of Phœnician religion, when contact with the Greeks had introduced Western ideas of the value of human life, and a truer conception of what the gods required. The merchants of Carthage had learned that Baal would be satisfied with a victim less costly than man, and would accept instead of him the blood of rams.