As a matter of fact, if the Jews, those Syrians who still maintain the ancient form of animal sacrifice, were to urge us to adopt their method, we should probably find the practice repellent. Their system is the following: they do not eat of the sacrificial flesh, but burn all of it at night, after they have poured a great deal of honey and wine upon it. The sacrifice they seek to complete rather rapidly, so that the All-Seer may not become a witness of pollution. Throughout the entire time, inasmuch as they are philosophers by race, they discuss the nature of the Deity among themselves, and spend the night in observing the stars, looking up at them and invoking them as divine in their prayers. As Reinach points out,[82] there is scarcely a correct word in this description considered as an account of actual Jewish sacrificial rites. If we have a correct, or even approximately correct, version of Theophrastus’ report, he or his informant was curiously misinformed. This informant obviously could not have been a Jew. No Jew could have been so ignorant of the customs of his people. Nor did his statement come directly from any one who had actually witnessed, from the Court of the Gentiles, even a small part of a Jewish sacrifice. It may well be that we have before us an inextricable confusion between Jewish and other Syrian rites. We are left to wholly uncontrolled speculation, if we are bent on knowing whence Theophrastus derived the assertions he makes here. The important words of the passage are found in the casual phrase ἅτε φιλόσοφοι τὸ γένος ὄντες, “inasmuch as they are philosophers by race.” The phrasing indicates that this aspect of the Jews is not wholly new. Word had come to Theophrastus, and to others before him, of a Syrian people not far from the coast, whose ritual in some respects—though the transmission is confused as to what respects—differed from that of their neighbors, but whose customs were strikingly different in one particular, that part of their divine observance was some form of theologic discussion. That, as we know, was a fact, since “houses of prayer”—we may call them synagogues—already existed. This reference to them is the one kernel of observed fact in this whole description, however indirectly obtained.