unto you out of the midst of the fire: ye
heard the voice of the words, but saw no similitude; only
ye heard a voice. . . . Take ye therefore good heed unto
yourselves; for ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that
the Lord spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire:

"Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the
similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female. . . .
And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou
seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host
of heaven, shouldst be driven to worship them, and serve them,
which the Lord thy God hath divided unto all nations under the
whole heaven."

We know what the "similitude" of the sun and the moon were like among
the surrounding nations. We see their "hieroglyphs" on numberless seals
and images from the ruins of Nineveh or Babylon. That of the sun was
first a rayed star or disc, later a figure, rayed and winged. That of
the moon was a crescent, one lying on its back, like a bowl or cup, the
actual attitude of the new moon at the beginning of the new year. Just
such moon similitudes did the soldiers of Gideon take from off the
camels of Zebah and Zalmunna; just such were the "round tires like the
moon" that Isaiah condemns among the bravery of the daughters of Zion.

The similitude or token of Ashtoreth, the paramount goddess of the
Zidonians, was the _ashera_, the "grove" of the Authorized Version,
probably in most cases merely a wooden pillar. This goddess, "the
abomination of the Zidonians," was a moon-goddess, concerning whom
Eusebius preserves a statement by the Phoenician historian,
Sanchoniathon, that her images had the head of an ox. In the wars in
the days of Abraham we find Chedorlaomer, and the kings that were with
him, smiting the Rephaim in Ashteroth Karnaim, that is, in the
Ashtoreths "of the horns." It is impossible to decide at this date
whether the horns which gave the distinctive title to this shrine of
Ashtoreth owed their origin to the horns of the animal merged in the
goddess, or to the horns of the crescent moon, with which she was to
some extent identified. Possibly there was always a confusion between
the two in the minds of her worshippers. The cult of Ashtoreth was
spread not only among the Hebrews, but throughout the whole plain of
Mesopotamia. In the times of the Judges, and in the days of Samuel, we
find continuall