Observe, “however, that when Saul was directed to go to find his father’s asses, he was sent first to Rachel’s pillar at Telzah, and then to the plain of Tabor, where he was to meet “three men going up to God [not to Jahweh] at Bethel,” {122}evidently to sacrifice, “one carrying three kids, and another carrying three loaves of bread, and another carrying a bottle of wine.” These and many other like memorials of stone-worship lie thickly scattered through the early books of the Hebrew Scriptures, sometimes openly avowed, and sometimes cloaked under a thin veil of Jehovism. On the other hand, at the present day, the Palestine exploration has shown that no rude stone monuments exist in Palestine proper, though east of the Jordan they are common in all parts of the country. How, then, are we to explain their disappearance? Major Conder thinks that when pure Jehovism finally triumphed under Hezekiah and Josiah, the Jehovists destroyed all these “idolatrous” stones throughout the Jewish dominions, in accordance with the injunctions in the Book of Deuteronomy to demolish the religious emblems of the Canaanites. Jahweh, the god of the Hebrews, was a jealous God, and he would tolerate no alien sacred stones within his own jurisdiction. And who or what was this Jahweh himself, this local and ethnic god of the Israelites, who would suffer no other god or sacred monolith to live near him? I will not lay stress upon the point that when Joshua was dying, according to the legend, he “took a great stone” and set it up by an oak that was by the sanctuary of Jahweh, saying that it had heard all the words of Jahweh. That document is too doubtful in terms to afford us much authority. But I will merely point out that at the time when we first seem to catch clear historic glimpses of true Jahweh worship, we find Jahweh, whoever or whatever that mystic object might have been, located with his ark at the Twelve Stones at Gilgal. It is quite clear that in “the camp at Gilgal,” as the later compilers believed, Jahweh, god of Israel, who had brought his people up out of Egypt, remained till the conquest of the land was completed. But after the end of the conquest, the {123}tent in which he dwelt was removed to Shiloh; and that Jahweh went with it is clear from the fact that Joshua cast lots for the land there “before Jahweh, our God.” He was there still when Hannah and her husband went up to Shiloh to sacrifice unto Jahweh; and when Samuel ministered unto Jahweh before Eli the priest. That Jahweh made a long stay at Shiloh is, therefore, it would seem, a true old tradition--a tradition of the age just before the historical beginnings of the Hebrew annals.