“It is certain,” says Professor Smith again, “that the original altar among the Northern Semites, as well as among the Arabs, was a great stone or cairn, at which the blood of the victim was shed.” There is no difference, he declares, between the Hebrew altar and the Arabian standing stone. “Monolithic pillars or cairns of stone are frequently mentioned in the more ancient parts of the Old Testament as standing at Sanctuaries, generally in connexion with a sacred legend about the occasion on which they were set up by some famous patriarch or hero. In the biblical story, they usually appear as mere memorial structures without any definite ritual significance; but the pentateuchal law looks on the use of sacred pillars as idolatrous. This is the best evidence that such pillars held an important place among the appurtenances of Canaanite temples; and as Hosea speaks of the pillar as an indispensable feature in the sanctuaries of Northern Israel in his time, we may be sure that by the mass of the Hebrews the pillars of Shechem, Bethel, Gilgal, and other shrines were looked upon, not as mere memorials of historical events, but as necessary parts of the ritual apparatus of a place of worship.... From these evidences, and especially from the fact that libations of the same kind are applied to both, it seems clear that the altar is a differentiated form of the primitive rude stone pillar. But the sacred stone is more than an altar, for in Hebrew and Canaanite sanctuaries the altar, in its developed form as a table or hearth, does not supersede the pillar; the two are found side by side at the same sanctuary, the altar as a piece of sacrificial apparatus, and the pillar as a visible symbol or embodiment of the {119}presence of the deity, which in process of time comes to be fashioned and carved in various ways, till ultimately it becomes a statue or anthropomorphic idol of stone, just as the sacred tree or post was ultimately developed into an image of wood.”