* The story of Abimelech gives us some idea of what the Canaanite temple of Baal-Berîth at Shechem was like.
** As to the regular organisation of Baal-worship, we possess only documents of a comparatively late period.
*** It is probable that the vintage festival, celebrated at Shiloh in the time of the Judges, dated back to a period of Canaanite history prior to the Hebrew invasion, i.e. to the time of the Egyptian supremacy.
In times of extraordinary distress, such as a prolonged drought or a famine, the priests were wont to ascend in solemn procession to the high places in order to implore the pity of their divine masters, from whom they strove to extort help, or to obtain the wished-for rain, by their dances, their lamentations, and the shedding of their blood.
*Cf., in the Hebraic period, the scene where the priests of Baal go up to the top of Mount Carmel with the prophet Elijah.
Almost everywhere, but especially in the regions east of the Jordan, were monuments which popular piety surrounded with a superstitious reverence. Such were the isolated boulders, or, as we should call them, menhirs, reared on the summit of a knoll, or on the edge of a tableland; dolmens, formed of a flat slab placed on the top of two roughly hewn supports, cromlechs, or, that is to say, stone circles, in the centre of which might be found a beth-el. We know not by whom were set up these monuments there, nor at what time: the fact that they are in no way different from those which are to be met with in Western Europe and the north of Africa has given rise to the theory that they were the work of some one primeval race which wandered ceaselessly over the ancient world. A few of them may have marked the tombs of some forgotten personages, the discovery of human bones beneath them confirming such a conjecture; while others seem to have been holy places and altars from the beginning. The nations of Syria did not in all cases recognise the original purpose of these monuments, but regarded them as marking the seat of an ancient divinity, or the precise spot on which he had at some time manifested himself. When the children of Israel caught sight of them again on their return from Egypt, they at once recognised in them the work of their patriarchs. The dolmen at Shechem was the altar which Abraham had built to the Eternal after his arrival in the country of Canaan. Isaac had raised that at Beersheba, on the very spot where Jehovah had appeared in order to renew with him the covenant that He had made with Abraham. One might almost reconstruct a map of the wanderings of Jacob from the altars which he built at each of his principal resting-places--at Gilead [Galeed], at Ephrata, at Bethel, and at Shechem.* Each of such still existing objects probably had a history of its own, connecting it inseparably with some far-off event in the local annals.