s this that a stone came to be
identified with the Magna Mater of Pessinus. When this stone was brought
to Rome toward the end of the Second Punic War, the Roman leaders may
have regarded it simply as a symbol of the goddess, but the people
probably looked on it as itself a divine defense against Hannibal.[528]
The Israelite ark, carried out to the battle against the
Philistines,[529] appears to have contained a stone, possibly a
meteorite, possibly a piece taken from the sacred mountain Sinai, itself
divine, but in the Old Testament narrative regarded as the abode of
Yahweh (a Sinaitic god), though it was probably of independent origin
and only gradually brought into association with the local god of the
mountain.

+292+. Similar interpretations may be given of other stones identified
or connected with deities, as that of Zeus at Seleucia,[530] that of
Aphrodite at Paphos,[531] that of Jupiter Lapis,[532] and the black
stone that represented the Syrian Elagabalos at Emesa.[533] The remark
of Pausanias, after he has described the thirty sacred stones of Pherae,
that the early Greeks paid divine honors to unhewn stones, doubtless
expresses the traditions and beliefs of his time;[534] and it is
probable that in antiquity there were many divine stones, and that these
were frequently in later times identified with local gods. In many
cases, however, there was no identification, only a collocation and
subordination: the stone became the symbol of the deity, or a sacred
object associated with the deity.[535]

+293+. This seems to be the later conception of the character of the
sacred stones mentioned in the Old Testament, as the one that Jacob is
said to have set up as a masseba and anointed.[536] The Canaanite
massebas, adopted as cultic objects by the Israelites,[537] were stone
pillars standing by shrines and regarded as a normal if not a necessary
element of worship; originally divine in themselves (as may be inferred
from the general history of such objects), they came to be regarded as
mere accessories; there is no indication in the Old Testament that they
were looked on as gods, though they may have been so regarded by the
people[538]--their presence at the Canaanite shrines, as a part of
foreign, non-Yahwistic worship, sufficiently explains the denunciation
of them by the prophets.[539]

+294+. In the story of Jacob he is said to have given the name Bethel to
the place where he anointed the stone. It does not appea