the first-fruits, so the Ashera is the fertile
matron who represents the principle of increase. The Old Testament
leaves us in no doubt as to the kind of worship which was carried on
at these shrines. The festivals were those of the farmer's calendar;
the Baal is presented with the first-fruits of corn and wine and oil,
in the midst of general feasting and boisterous merry-making. His
consort, on the other hand, is served with rites applying in the most
direct manner the principle she represents. The shrine has a staff of
female attendants for this part of the service of religion. The
rustic worship of Palestine thus shows us a side of the religion of
Western Asia which we know from other sources to have been widely
diffused. A female deity like the Babylonian Ishtar (chapter vii.),
is served with impure rites in great cities as well as in country
districts, and her worship spread westwards with other Eastern
products. She is found as Baalit, as Mylitta,[1] as Astarte; the
Greeks call her Aphrodite, and her horrid worship found entrance in
various Greek cities.

[Footnote 1: Herod. i. 199.]

To the Israelites the worship of Canaan proved a great temptation
(Numbers xxv.), but they gradually rose above it. The Phenicians also
came to have gods of a much higher character, and of these also we
must speak. The Phenicians were not original in their religion any
more than in their art; their religion began with the ordinary
Semitic notions as these had been applied by the older population in
Syria, and they improved it by borrowing from various parts of the
world with which they trafficked. So various were their borrowings
that it is impossible to draw up a consistent system of their gods.
One town has one set of gods, another town another, and the same
deity wears different and even opposite characters in different
places. All that can be done is to single out a few features which we
can see to have been on the whole characteristic of Phenician
religion, and to have enabled it to influence the worship of other
peoples.

The Phenicians were very much in earnest about the maintenance of
state and of religion. In their successive city-states of Sidon,
Tyre, and Carthage, we see them exhibiting an intense devotion to the
commonwealth, and very much under the influence of their priesthood.
Semitic religion tends to grow more sombre and intense as it
develops; and the Phenicians, while still holding the principle of a
god and