Even though the dead may not be lifted over the threshold altar, the dead may be buried underneath it. In both the far East and the far West, burials under the threshold are known. And in Christian churches of Europe, a grave underneath the altar is an honored grave for saint or ecclesiastic. In the Apocalypse the seer beheld “underneath the altar the souls of them that had been slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held: and they cried with a great voice, saying, How long, O Master, the holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?”[65] 3. THRESHOLD COVENANTING IN THE MARRIAGE CEREMONY. Marriage customs in various parts of the world, in ancient and modern times, illustrate this idea of the sacredness of the threshold as the family altar. In portions of Syria, when a bride is brought to her husband’s home, a lamb or a kid is sacrificed on the threshold, and she must step across the outpoured blood.[66] This marks her adoption into that family. Among the wide-spreading ʾAnazeh Bed´ween, the most prominent and extensive tribe of desert Arabs, whose range is from the Sinaitic Peninsula to the upper Desert of Syria, “when the marriage day is fixed, the bridegroom comes with a lamb in his arms to the tent of the father of his bride, and then, before witnesses, he cuts its throat. As soon as the blood falls upon the earth [and the earth is the only threshold of a tent], the marriage ceremony is regarded as complete.”[67] “In Egypt, the Copts sacrifice a sheep as the bride steps into the bridegroom’s house, and she is compelled to step over the blood which flows upon the threshold in the doorway.”[68] It is evident, moreover, that this custom is not confined to the Copts.[69] Blood on the threshold, as an accompaniment of a marriage, is still counted important among Armenian Christians in Turkey. After the formal marriage ceremony at the church, the wedded pair, with their friends, proceed to the bridegroom’s home. “At the moment of their arrival a sheep is sacrificed on the threshold, over the blood of which the wedding party steps to enter the house.”[70] In the island of Cyprus, a bridegroom is borne to the house of his bride on the wedding morning, in a living chair formed by the crossed hands of his neighbor friends. Dismounting at her door, “as he is about to pass in, a fowl is brought and held down by head and feet upon the threshold of the door; the bridegroom takes an axe, cuts off the head, and only then may he enter.”[71]