hewn stone; for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it." And, certainly, the earliest practice of that nation was with deference to the precept (Joshua viii. 30—32): "Then Joshua built an altar unto the Lord God of Israel in Mount Ebal, as Moses, the servant of the Lord, commanded the children of Israel, as it is written in the book of the law of Moses: an altar of whole stones, over which no man hath lift up any iron." The law of the twelve tables at Rome had an injunction remarkably similar—Rogam asciâ ne polito; where the injunction, though only mentioning the funeral-pile, included all the component parts, of which the altars to the Lares and funereal gods were the principal; and as these customs or laws were a bequest from the primeval Etruscans, it may be questioned whether the precept was older in Palestine or in Italy.
That the original intention of placing stones was by designing them as objects to consecrate the place and make it holy, the earliest mention of them may prove. In Genesis xxviii., after Jacob had seen the glorious vision of the ladder, he exclaims, on awaking (v. 16, seq.), "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not; and he was afraid, and said: How dreadful is this place: this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for an altar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father's house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God; and this stone which I have set for a pillar shall be God's house."[1]
The transition was easy and natural from consecration
- ↑ This stone which I have set up for a pillar.—It must have been a very common practice amongst the Israelites to inaugurate their rulers at such stones. Their scanty annals give us some remarkable instances. Thus when Abimelech was made king (Judges ix. 6), it was "by the pillar which was in Sechem;" and of Josiah it is said (2 Kings xxiii. 3), "And the king stood by a pillar, and made a covenant before the Lord;" and of Joash, when proclaimed king by Jehoida (2 Chronicles xxiii. 11), "And Jehoida and his sons anointed him, and said, God save the king. Now when Athaliah heard the noise of the people running and praising the king, she came to the people into the house of the Lord, and she looked, and behold the king stood at his pillar at the entering in, and the princes and the trumpets by the king, and all the people of the land rejoiced."
It was a felicitous idea of Mr. J. H. Parker, F.A.S., of Oxford, in a paper read to the Architectural Society of that city in 1852, that Gilgal, Bethel, and Mizpeh were circles of stones for assembling the people at the regular circuits of the judges, similar to our assize-towns. He says the Hebrew word Gilgal (גִּלְגָּל) signifies literally a round stone, but in the opinion of Hebrew scholars may very well signify a circle of stones, and consequently be but the prototypes of Stonehenge, and the circle near Keswick, &c. The late periods to which assemblages were made within them in Britain and Brittany is also alluded to by Mr. Parker, referring to what Mr. Logan says of Crookem Tor, alias Parliament Arch, on Dartmoor, which has been used from time immemorial as a court of justice until quite recently; and seats are cut in the rock of the Tor for the judge and jury. At Pue Tor, near the village of Stamford Spunney, is a large square apartment hewn out of the rock, which seems to have been used for a similar purpose. Cambden, in mentioning the Swedish Morastone, says there is one at St. Buriens, in Cornwall, exactly similar.
In Ireland, stone-pillar worship was widely extended, and continued to a very recent date, on which Sir J. Emmerson Tennent has an express treatise; this I lament has not come under my notice. A very fine one, eight feet high, is called Olan's tomb, at Aghabullogue near Cork, and depicted in the "Dublin Penny Magazine" (vol. iii. p. 384), much venerated by the peasantry, but principally remarkable for an Ogham inscription at the junction of two sides, the angle serving as the branch line. This, if decipherable, might lead to important results. Others are mentioned in "Notes and Queries" (vol. viii. p. 413).—For England, the Devil's Arrows, at Boroughbridge, are well known; less is one in Holderness, nearly over-topping the church close to which it stands: it has given its name of Rudstone to a village in Holderness. One of the most curious will figure as a headpiece to a chapter of Mr. Hillier's valuable History of the Isle of Wight now in progress;—it is called the Long Stone Chest. The village of Mottistone, close to which it stands, proves its purposes and the antiquity of our ancient moot-halls, and of our language; evidently the centre of a præ-Romanic Wittenagemote.
