The name of the reputed father of Abraham, Terah, signifies “a maker of images.” In Amos 5: 26 it is said that the Hebrews in the wilderness worshipped a deity known by a name signifying “God of the Pillar,” as is shown by the name Baal Tamar, which means the “fructifying god.” The Semitic custom of giving sanction to an oath or sacred pledge by what the Hebrews called the “putting of the hand under the thigh” is explained by the Talmudists to be the touching of that part of the body which is sealed and made holy by circumcision. The translations of the Jewish Scriptures through motives of delicacy are full of these euphemisms. Professor Joseph P. Lesley, in his _Man’s Origin and Destiny_, suggests that phallicism converted all the older Arkite symbols into illustrations of its own philosophical conceptions of the mystery of generation, and thus gave to the various parts of the human body those names which constitute the special vocabulary of obscenity of the present day. Every scholar knows it to be a fact that certain words and names now never spoken except by the vulgar abound in the original Jewish writings, and are partly concealed by the convenient methods of euphemism. When Abraham called his servant to take a solemn oath, he required him to lay his hands upon his parts of generation as the most sacred and revered parts of his body (Gen. 24:2), and Jacob, when dying, made his son Joseph take the same form of oath (Gen. 47: 29). This was but little more than the equivalent of the modern custom of laying the hand upon the heart as a token of sincerity. The proper translation of what the servant of Abraham was required to do is given in the margin of Bagster’s _Comprehensive Bible_ thus: “In sectione circumcisionis meæ.” We have in this form of phallic oath an important suggestion as to the origin, or at least the use, of the words _testimony, testament, testify_, and their cognates (_testis_, a witness), which cannot fail to occur to the learned reader, but which cannot here be fully explained. “_Caute lege_” (read carefully) was a warning of a secret or concealed meaning which esoteric writers anciently put in the margin of their books when they would call the special attention of the initiated to what is now called “reading between the lines.” Until our readers comprehend this hint they will not be able to understand what is really meant by the “testimony” mentioned in connection with the “ark of the covenant,” as it occurs in Ex. 16: 34, before any laws, or even altars, were known in Sinai or its thunders heard of. In this hint may also be found the true explanation of David’s nude dance before the ark, and of the attending circumstances. Scores and scores of proofs could here be furnished from the Old-Testament Scriptures, showing that the use of phallic emblems was the rule rather than the exception for centuries among the Jews; and the idols stolen by Rachel (teraphim) need no longer