But Jahweh was an object of portable size, for, omitting for the present the descriptions in the Pentateuch, which seem likely to be of late date, and not too trustworthy, through their strenuous Jehovistic editing, he was carried from Shiloh in his ark to the front during the great battle with the Philistines at Ebenezer; and the Philistines were afraid, for they said, “A god is come into the camp.” But when the Philistines captured the ark, the rival god, Dagon, fell down and broke in pieces--so Hebrew legend declared--before the face of Jahweh. After the Philistines restored the sacred object, it rested for a time at Kirjath-jearim, till David, on the capture of Jerusalem from the Jebusites, went down to that place to bring up from thence the ark of the god; and as it went, on a new cart, they “played before Jahweh on all manner of instruments,” and David himself “danced before Jahweh.” Jahweh was then placed in the tent or tabernacle that David had prepared for him, till Solomon built the first temple, “the house of Jahweh,” and Jahweh’s ark was set up in it, “in the oracle of the house, the most holy place, even under the wings of the cherubim.” Just so Mr. Chalmers tells us that when he was at Peran, in New Guinea, the peculiarly-shaped holy stone, Ravai, and the two wooden idols, Epe and Kivava, “made long ago and considered very sacred,” were for the moment “located in an old house, until all the arrangements necessary for their removal to the splendid new dubu prepared for them are completed.” And so, too, at the opposite end of the scale of civilisation, as Mr. {124}Lang puts it, “the fetish-stones of Greece were those which occupied the holy of holies of the most ancient temples, the mysterious fanes within dark cedar or cypress groves, to which men were hardly admitted.”