30 REY. J. LESLIE PORTER, D.D. 
gradually degenerated into a degrading Pantheism, which 
deified the whole hosts of heaven, and personified and wor- 
shipped with licentious rites the forces of nature. The 
homage paid by the Pheenicians to Astarte, the deity whoin 
Jeremiah (xliv. 18) calls the ‘Queen of Heaven,” beguiled 
the Hebrew women, and brought disgrace and misery upon 
them and their country. Its chief seat was on the brow of 
Lebanon, where the ruins of the temple now lie, beside the 
great fountain of the River Adonis, which issues from a cavern 
in the hillside. The well-known lines of Milton refer to the 
shameful rites :-— 
.. ». Thammuz came next behind, 
Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured 
The Syrian damsels to lament his fate 
Tn amorous ditties all a summer day ; 
While smooth Adonis from his native rock 
Ran purple to the sea, supposed with blood 
Of Thammuz, yearly wounded. 
Astarte was supposed to represent the moon, and’ she is 
figured as a female with the crescent on_her forehead. Ske 
was also supposed to symbolise the planet Venus, and she is 
therefore spoken of by Jewish commentators as the “ Star 
of Heaven.”? It may be that the ‘‘ Crescent and Star,” the 
standard of Islam, is a relic of the old Syrian deity. 
JEWISH AND PHeNICIAN TomMBs. 
Among the most remarkable and interesting of Jewish 
monuments are tombs, and in these also we find some striking 
points of resemblance to those of Phoenicia and Greece. From 
the earliest ages the Jews selected with much care, secured as 
far as possible from violation, and also to a considerable extent 
decorated, the abodes of their dead. The tombs were usually 
caves, sometimes natural, but often hewn in the rock at great 
expense. Here the bodies were laid in state, and, in the case 
of nobles and princes, gold and jewels were not unfrequently 
placed beside them. In the Book of Job, probably among the 
oldest in the Bible, this practice is referred to, where the 
Patriarch, speaking of his own mournful state, and his wish 
that he had died in infancy, says: ‘ Now should I have lain 
down and been quiet .... then had I been at rest, with 
kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places 
[rock-tombs]| for themselves, or with princes that had gold, 
who filled their houses with silver” (iti, 13-15). So, also, the 
prophet Isaiah was commissioned to denounce the pride of 
