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s this that a stone came to be identified with the Magna Mater of Pessinus. When this stone was brought to Rome toward the end of the Second Punic War, the Roman leaders may have regarded it simply as a symbol of the goddess, but the people probably looked on it as itself a divine defense against Hannibal.[528] The Israelite ark, carried out to the battle against the Philistines,[529] appears to have contained a stone, possibly a meteorite, possibly a piece taken from the sacred mountain Sinai, itself divine, but in the Old Testament narrative regarded as the abode of Yahweh (a Sinaitic god), though it was probably of independent origin and only gradually brought into association with the local god of the mountain. +292+. Similar interpretations may be given of other stones identified or connected with deities, as that of Zeus at Seleucia,[530] that of Aphrodite at Paphos,[531] that of Jupiter Lapis,[532] and the black stone that represented the Syrian Elagabalos at Emesa.[533] The remark of Pausanias, after he has described the thirty sacred stones of Pherae, that the early Greeks paid divine honors to unhewn stones, doubtless expresses the traditions and beliefs of his time;[534] and it is probable that in antiquity there were many divine stones, and that these were frequently in later times identified with local gods. In many cases, however, there was no identification, only a collocation and subordination: the stone became the symbol of the deity, or a sacred object associated with the deity.[535] +293+. This seems to be the later conception of the character of the sacred stones mentioned in the Old Testament, as the one that Jacob is said to have set up as a masseba and anointed.[536] The Canaanite massebas, adopted as cultic objects by the Israelites,[537] were stone pillars standing by shrines and regarded as a normal if not a necessary element of worship; originally divine in themselves (as may be inferred from the general history of such objects), they came to be regarded as mere accessories; there is no indication in the Old Testament that they were looked on as gods, though they may have been so regarded by the people[538]--their presence at the Canaanite shrines, as a part of foreign, non-Yahwistic worship, sufficiently explains the denunciation of them by the prophets.[539] +294+. In the story of Jacob he is said to have given the name Bethel to the place where he anointed the stone. It does not appea
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