Among the Semitic peoples, always specially interesting to us from their genetic connexion with Judaism and Christianity, the worship of stakes usually took the form of adoration paid to the curious log of wood described as an _ashera_. What kind of object an _ashera_ was we learn from the injunction in Deuteronomy, “Thou shalt not plant an _ashera_ of any kind of wood beside the altar of Jahweh.” This prohibition is clearly parallel to that against any hewn stone or “graven image.” But the Semites in general worshipped as a rule at a rude stone altar, {136}beside which stood an _ashera_, under a green tree,--all three of the great sacred objects of humanity being thus present together. A similar combination is not uncommon in India, where sacred stone and wooden image stand often under the shade of the same holy peepul tree. “The _ashera_,” says Professor Robertson Smith, “is a sacred symbol, the seat of the deity, and perhaps the name itself, as G. Hoffmann has suggested, means nothing more than the ‘mark’ of the divine presence.” Those who have followed me so far in the present work, however, will be more likely to conclude that it meant originally the mark of a place where an ancestor lay buried. “Every altar,” says Professor Smith, again, “had its _ashera_, even such altars as in the popular preprophetic forms of the Hebrew religion were dedicated to Jehovah.” The Semitic sacred pole was treated in most respects like the other grave-stakes and idols we have hitherto considered; for an Assyrian monument from Khorsabad, figured by Rawlinson, represents an ornamental pole, planted beside an altar; priests stand before it engaged in an act of worship, and touch the pole with their hands, “or perhaps,” says Professor Smith, “anoint it with some liquid substance.” That the _ashera_ was also draped, like the logs of the Society Islanders, or Monigan’s Irish idol, we learn from the famous passage in Second Kings (xxiii. 7) where it is said that the women “wove _hangings_ for the _ashera_.” Dr. Robertson Smith illustrates this passage by the parallel of the sacred _erica_ at Byblus, which was “a mere dead stump, for it was cut down by Isis and presented to the Byblians wrapped in a linen cloth and anointed with myrrh like a corpse. It therefore represented the dead god” (Osiris, or rather in its origin Adonis). “But as a mere stump, it also resembles the Hebrew _ashera_.” So near may a man come to the perception of a truth, and yet so utterly may he miss its actual import.