y; it rose up
awe-striking and impressive in its solitary grandeur and venerable
antiquity; it was a shelter to him from the heat of the sun, and a
protection from the perils of the night. When his worship and adoration
came in time to be transferred from the stone itself to the divinity it
had begun to symbolize, it became an altar on which the libation of oil
or wine might be poured out to the gods, and on the seals of Syria and
the sculptured slabs of Assyria we accordingly find it transformed into
a portable altar, and merged in the cone-like symbol of the goddess
Asherah. The stone which had itself been a Beth-el wherein the Deity had
his home, passed by degrees into the altar of the god whose actual
dwelling-place was in heaven.

The Canaanitish city near which Jacob had raised the monument of his
dream bore the name of Luz. In Israelitish days, however, the name of
the monument was transferred to that of the city, and Luz itself was
called the Beth-el, or "House of God." The god worshipped there when the
Israelites first entered Canaan appears to have been entitled On,--a
name derived, perhaps, from that of the city of the Sun-god in Egypt.
Bethel was also Beth-On, "the temple of On," from whence the tribe of
Benjamin afterwards took the name of Ben-Oni, "the Onite." Beth-On has
survived into our own times, and the site of the old city is still known
as Beitin.

It is not needful to follow the adventures of Jacob in Mesopotamia. His
new home lay far away from the boundaries of Palestine, and though the
kings of Aram-Naharaim made raids at times into the land of Canaan and
caused their arms to be feared within the walls of Jerusalem, they never
made any permanent conquests on the coasts of the Mediterranean. In the
land of the Aramaeans Jacob is lost for awhile from the history of
patriarchal Palestine.

When he again emerges, it is as a middle-aged man, rich in flocks and
herds, who has won two wives as the reward of his labours, and is
already the father of a family. He is on his way back to the country
which had been promised to his seed and wherein he himself had been
born. Laban, his father-in-law, robbed at once of his daughters and his
household gods, is pursuing him, and has overtaken him on the spurs of
Mount Gilead, almost within sight of his goal. There a covenant is made
between the Aramaean and the Hebrew, and a cairn of stones is piled up
to commemorate the fact. The cairn continued to bear a doub