or Gilgals, with the pillar or gravestone, from which, as Major Conder suggests, {197}the hypæthral temples of Byblos and Baalbek are finally developed. That Jahweh himself in his earliest form was such a stone god, the evidence, I think, though not perhaps exactly conclusive, is to say the least extremely suggestive. I have already called attention to it in a previous chapter, and need not here recapitulate it in full; but a few stray additions may not be without value. Besides the general probability, among a race whose gods were so almost universally represented by sacred stones, that any particular god, unless the contrary be proved, was so represented, there is the evidence of all the later language, and of the poems written after the actual stone god himself had perished, that Jahweh was still popularly regarded as, at least in a metaphorical sense, a stone or rock. “He is the Rock,” says the Deuteronomist, in the song put into the mouth of Moses; “I will publish the name of Jahweh; ascribe greatness unto our god.” “Jahweh liveth, and blessed be my rock,” says the hymn which a later writer composes for David in the Second Book of Samuel: “exalted be the god of the rock of my salvation.” And in the psalms the image recurs again and again: “Jahweh is my rock and my fortress”; “Who is a god save Jahweh, and who is a rock save our god?”; “He set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings”; “Lead me to the rock that is greater than I”; “Jahweh is my defence, and my god is the rock of my refuge”; “O come, let us sing to Jahweh; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.” And that the shape of this stone was probably that of a rounded pillar, bevelled at the top, we see in the fact that later ages pictured to themselves their transfigured Jahweh as leading the Sons of Israel in the wilderness as a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by daytime.