priestly or sacrificial garment, the _ephod_, and then consulting the family teraphim as a domestic oracle, is strictly in accordance with all that we know of the minor ancestor-worship as it occurs elsewhere. Closely connected with the teraphim is the specific worship at tombs or graves. “The whole north Semitic area,” says Professor Robertson Smith, “was dotted over with sacred tombs, Memnonia, Semiramis mounds, and the like; and at every such spot a god or demigod had his subterranean abode.” This, of course, is pure ancestor-worship. Traces of still older cave-burial are also common in the Hebrew Scriptures. “At the present day,” says Professor Smith, “almost every sacred site in Palestine has its grotto, and that this is no new thing is plain from the numerous symbols of Astarte-worship found on the walls of caves in Phoenicia. There can be little doubt that the oldest Phoenician temples were natural or artificial grottoes.” We are fairly entitled to conclude, then, I believe, that a domestic cult of the _manes_ or _lares_, the family dead, formed the general substratum of early Hebrew religion, though as in all other cases, owing to its purely personal nature, this universal cult makes but a small figure in the literature of the race, compared with the worship of the greater national gods and goddesses. Second in the list of worshipful objects in early Israel come the sacred stones, about which I have already said a good deal in the chapter devoted to that interesting subject, but concerning whose special nature in the Semitic field a few more words may here be fitly added.