It is now very generally admitted that stone-worship played an exceedingly large and important part in the primitive Semitic religion. How important a part we may readily gather from many evidences, but from none more than from the fact that even Mohammad himself was unable to exclude from Islam, the most monotheistic of all {186}known religious systems, the holy black stone of the Kaaba at Mecca. In Arabia, says Professor Robertson Smith, the altar or hewn stone is unknown, and in its place we find the rude pillar or the cairn, beside which the sacrificial victim is slain, the blood being poured out over the stone or at its base. But in Israel, the shaped stone seems the more usual mark of the ghost or god. Such a sacred stone, we have already seen, was known to the early Hebrews as a Beth-el, that is to say an “abode of deity,” from the common belief that it was inhabited by a god, ghost, or spirit. The great prevalence of the cult of stones among the Semites, however, is further indicated by the curious circumstance that this word was borrowed by the Greeks and Romans (in a slightly altered form) to denote the stones so supposed to be inhabited by deities. References to such gods abound throughout the Hebrew books, though they are sometimes denounced as idolatrous images, and sometimes covered with a thin veneer of Jehovism by being connected with the national heroes and with the later Jahweh-worship. In the legend of Jacob’s dream we get a case where the sacred stone is anointed and a promise is made to it of a tenth of the speaker’s substance as an offering. And again, on a later occasion, we learn that Jacob “set up a pillar of stone, and he poured a drink-offering thereon, and he poured oil thereon;” just as, in the great phallic worship of the linga in India (commonly called the _linga puja_), a cylindrical pillar, rounded at the top, and universally considered as a phallus in its nature, is worshipped by pouring upon it one of five sacred anointing liquids, water, milk, ghee, oil, and wine. Similar rites are offered in many other places to other sacred stones; and in many cases the phallic value assigned to them is clearly shown by the fact that it is usual for sterile women to pray to them for the blessing of children, as Hindu wives pray to Mahadeo, and as so many Hebrew women (to be noted hereafter) {187}are mentioned in our texts as praying to Jahweh.