But the vision was more than a mere dream. God appeared in it to the
patriarch, and repeated to him the promise that had been made to his
fathers. Through Jacob, the younger of the twins, the true line of
Abraham was to be carried on. When he awoke in the morning the fugitive
recognized the real character of his dream. He took, accordingly, the
stone that had served him for a pillow, and setting it up as an altar,
poured oil upon it, and so made it a Beth-el, or "House of God,"
Henceforward it was a consecrated altar, a holy memorial of the God
whose divinity had been mysteriously imparted to it.

The Semitic world was full of such Beth-els, or consecrated stones. They
are referred to in the literature of ancient Babylonia, and an English
traveller, Mr. Doughty, has found them still existing near the Tema of
the Old Testament in Northern Arabia. In Phoenicia we are told that they
abounded. The solitary rock in the desert or on the mountain-side seemed
to the primitive Semite the dwelling-place of Deity; 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
Ashêrah. 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