wn or village, either
on a natural eminence or on a mound artificially made for the
purpose; these are the "high places" of the Old Testament; originally
Canaanite places of worship, they drew to themselves also the worship
of Israel. The apparatus of worship at these shrines is of a very
simple nature. An upright stone represents the god; it is not a
statue of him, being unhewn and having no resemblance to the human
figure. He was supposed to come to the stone when meeting with his
worshippers; and in the earliest times of Semitic religion this stone
served the purpose of an altar: the gifts, which were not originally
burned, were laid upon it, or the blood of the victim was applied to
it. But besides the altar and the upright stone or _massebah_ the
Canaanite shrine had another piece of furniture. A massive
tree-trunk, fixed in the ground and with some of its branches perhaps
still remaining, represented the female deity who is the invariable
companion of the Baal. This is the Ashera of Canaan, a word which in
the Authorised Version is translated "grove," after an error of the
Vulgate, but which in the Revised Version is rightly left
untranslated. (Judges iii. 7, vi. 25; 2 Kings xxiii. 6, there is one
in the Temple at Jerusalem; etc.) The word Ashera is in such passages
the designation of the tree which stood to represent the goddess;
whether it is ever the proper name of the goddess herself is
doubtful. At any rate Ashera, like Baal, is not the name of one
historic deity, but a name applied to the goddess of each place all
over the country.

The character of Canaanite religion is clearly revealed in its
apparatus of worship. We saw that the Babylonians added to many of
the gods of their country a female counterpart, turning the name of
the god into a feminine form (chapter vii., also chapter x.). In
Canaan we find that Semitic worship is addressed to pairs of deities;
there is a god and a goddess at each shrine. While it would be wrong
to regard this as the general type of Semitic religion,--our chapter
on that subject points to a different conclusion, and the great gods
of Phenicia, of Moab, and of Israel are solitary beings,--we must
recognise that the worship of god and goddess was widespread in
Semitic peoples. In Canaan it is not difficult to understand it. We
have here the worship of an agricultural community; and as the Baal
is the lord of the soil and the author of its fertility, who is
entitled to receive