The lesson which the Carthaginians learned from contact with the Greeks had been taught the ancestors of the Hebrews by the Lord. The Law and the Prophets alike protested against the old belief, hard as it was to eradicate it from the Semitic mind. The sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter stands alone, even in the troublous period of the Judges; the sacrifice of his eldest son by the king of Moab (2 Kings iii. 27), though it stayed the Israelitish attack, was the act of one who did not acknowledge Yahveh of Israel as his God; and the Jewish children who were burnt in the fire to Moloch were offered by renegades from the national faith. Israelitish law and history bear upon them the traces of the old Semitic custom, but they are traces only. The story of Abraham’s sacrifice is an antitype of the future history of the religion of Israel. The firstborn, indeed, belonged to Yahveh, if He chose to claim them; but, unlike the gods of the heathen, He did not claim them when they were the firstborn of man. Once again we have a picture of Abraham; but this time it is not as the shêkh who conforms to the beliefs and practices of Canaan, but as a foreign prince who acquires land in the country of his adoption. Sarah is dead, and Abraham accordingly buys a field at Machpelah in the close neighbourhood of Hebron. The field included a portion of the limestone cliff which overlooked the city, and was pierced then, as now, by numerous cavities, partly natural, partly excavated by the hand of man. They were the burying-places of the inhabitants of the town, the chambered tombs in which the dead were laid to rest. That Abraham should choose Hebron as the future home and resting-place of his family was perhaps natural. It was here that he had lived when he first came, as an immigrant, into ‘the land of the Amorites’; it was here that he had been confederate with its Amorite chieftains, and had led his forces against the invading host of the king of Elam. Moreover, Hebron was one of the old centres of Canaan. It had been built seven years before Zoan in Egypt (Numb. xiii. 22), perhaps in the age when the Hyksos kings first conquered Egypt and rebuilt Zoan, making it the capital of their new kingdom. The sanctuary of Hebron rivalled that of Jerusalem in sanctity and fame, at all events in the years immediately succeeding the Israelitish conquest, and it was at Hebron that David first established his power and his son Absalom matured his rebellion. In the age of Abraham the city had not yet received its later name of Hebron, the ‘Confederacy.’ It was still known as Kirjath-Arba, and the district in which it stood was that of Mamre. Amorites and Hittites dwelt there side by side. Arba, we are told, was ‘a great man among the Amorite Anakim’ (Josh. xiv. 15), but it was from ‘the sons of Heth’ that the field of Machpelah was bought.