s of his
son-in-law, "Wherefore hast thou stolen my Elohim?" which Rachel, who
must be assumed to have worshipped Jacob's God, Jahveh, had carried off,
obviously because she, like her father, believed in their divinity. It
is not suggested that Jacob was in any way scandalised by the idolatrous
practices of his favourite wife, whatever he may have thought of her
honesty when the truth came to light; for the teraphim seem to have
remained in his camp, at least until he "hid" his strange gods "under
the oak that was by Shechem" (Gen. xxxv. 4). And indeed it is open
to question if he got rid of them then, for the subsequent history of
Israel renders it more than doubtful whether the teraphim were regarded
as "strange gods" even as late as the eighth century B.C.

The writer of the books of Samuel takes it quite as a matter of course
that Michal, daughter of one royal Jahveh worshipper and wife of the
servant of Jahveh _par excellence,_ the pious David, should have her
teraphim handy, in her and David's chamber, when she dresses them up in
their bed into a simulation of her husband, for the purpose of deceiving
her father's messengers. Even one of the early prophets, Hosea, when
he threatens that the children of Israel shall abide many days without
"ephod or teraphim" (iii. 4), appears to regard both as equally proper
appurtenances of the suspended worship of Jahveh, and equally certain
to be restored when that is resumed. When we further take into
consideration that only in the reign of Hezekiah was the brazen serpent,
preserved in the temple and believed to be the work of Moses, destroyed,
and the practice of offering incense to it, that is, worshipping it,
abolished--that Jeroboam could set up "calves of gold" for Israel to
worship, with apparently none but a political object, and certainly with
no notion of creating a schism among the worshippers of Jahveh, or of
repelling the men of Judah from his standard--it seems obvious, either
that the Israelites of the tenth and eleventh centuries B.C. knew not
the second commandment, or that they construed it merely as part of the
prohibition to worship any supreme god other than Jahveh, which precedes
it.

In seeking for information about the teraphim, I lighted upon the
following passage in the valuable article on that subject by Archdeacon
Farrar, in Ritto's "Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature," which is
so much to the purpose of my argument, that I venture to quote it in
f