Serapis gave instruction on agriculture; Anubis taught sciences; Horus advised upon psychic and spiritual matters; Isis was consulted on the rising of the Nile, and so on.(444) This historical fact, furnished by one of the ablest and most erudite among the Jesuits, is unfortunate for the prestige of the “Lord God of Israel” with regard to his claims to priority and to his being the _one_ living God. Jehovah, on the admission of the _Old Testament_ itself, conversed with his elect in no other way, and this places him on a par with every other Pagan God, even of the inferior classes. In _Judges_, xvii., we read of Micah having an ephod and a teraphim fabricated, and consecrating them to Jehovah (see the _Septuagint_ and the _Vulgate_); these objects were made by a founder from the two hundred shekels of silver given to him by his mother. True, King James’ “Holy Bible” explains this little bit of idolatry by saying: In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes. Yet the act must have been orthodox, since Micah, after hiring a priest, a diviner, for his ephod and teraphim, declares: “Now know I that the Lord will do me good.” And if Micah’s act—who Had an house of Gods, and made an ephod and teraphim and consecrated one of his sons to their service, as also to that of the “graven image” dedicated “unto the Lord” by his mother—now seems prejudicial, it was not so in those days of one religion and one lip. How can the Latin Church blame the act, since Kircher, one of her best writers, calls the teraphim “the holy instruments of primitive revelations;” since _Genesis_ shows us Rebecca going “to enquire of the Lord,”(445) and the Lord answering her (certainly through his teraphim), and delivering to her several prophecies? And if this be not sufficient, there is Saul, who deplores the silence of the ephod,(446) and David who consults the thummim, and receives oral advice from the Lord as to the best way of killing his enemies. The thummim and urim, however—the object in our days of so much conjecture and speculation—was not an invention of the Jews, nor had it originated with them, despite the minute instruction given about it by Jehovah to Moses. For the priest‐hierophant of the Egyptian temples wore a breastplate of precious stones, in every way similar to that of the high priest of the Israelites. The high‐priests of Egypt wore suspended on their necks an image of sapphire, called _Truth_, the manifestation of truth becoming evident in it. Seldenus is not the only Christian writer who assimilates the Jewish to the Pagan teraphim, and expressed a conviction that the former had borrowed them from the Egyptians. Moreover, we are told by Döllinger, a preëminently Roman Catholic writer: The teraphim were used and remained in many Jewish families to the days of Josiah.(447)