The two daughters of Laban bore names which had a familiar sound to the ear of a herdsman. Rachel means ‘ewe’; Leah is the Assyrian _li’tu_, ‘a cow.’ It is needless to recount the well-known story of the wooing of the younger daughter, and of the efforts made by Laban to retain Jacob in his service and marry both the sisters to him. Craft was met by craft; but in the end the ancestor of Israel proved more than a match for the wily Syrian. His cattle and riches multiplied like the children who were born to him, and a time came when the sons of Laban began to view with envy the poor relative who was robbing them of their patrimony. So Jacob fled, before harm had come to him, carrying with him his wives and children and all the wealth he had accumulated. Laban pursued and succeeded in overtaking the heavily-weighted caravan at the very spot where the frontiers of Aram and Canaan met together. There the cairn of stones was raised in which later generations saw a memorial of the pact that had been sworn between Jacob and his father-in-law. Henceforth the tie with Aram was broken: the wives of Jacob forgot the home of their father and looked to Canaan instead of Aram as the native land of their race. Over the cairn of Gilead the forefathers of Israel forswore for ever their Aramæan ties. But Rachel had carried with her her father’s teraphim, those household gods on whose cult the welfare of the family seemed to depend. What they were like we may gather from the teraphim of David, which Michal placed on the couch of her husband, and so deceived the messengers of Saul (1 Sam. xix. 13-16). They must have had the shape of a man, and, at all events in the case of those of David, must have also been about a man’s size. Like the ephod and the Urim and Thummim, they were consulted as oracles (Zech. x. 2), and their use lingered among the Jews as late as the period of the Captivity. When Hosea depicts the coming desolation of Israel, he describes it as a time when ‘the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice, and without a sacred pillar, and without an ephod and teraphim’ (Hos. iii. 4). The final break between Jacob and the Aramæan portion of Terah’s family was marked by a change of name. From henceforth Jacob was to be distinctively the father of the children of Israel. He and his descendants were severed from the rest of their kinsmen whether in Padan-Aram, in Edom, or in the lands beyond the Jordan. Abraham had been the ‘father of many nations’; Jacob was to be the father of but one—of that chosen people to whom the character and worship of Yahveh were revealed.