“Where wast thou, when I laid the foundation of the earth? 
    Declare, since thou hast such knowledge! 
    Who fixed its dimensions, since thou knowest? 
    Or who stretched out the line upon it? 
    Upon what were its foundations fixed? 
    And who laid its corner-stone,
    When the morning stars sang together,
    And all the sons of God shouted for joy?” [219]

Noyes, whose beautiful translation I have adopted as not materially differing from the common version, but which is far more poetical and more in the strain of the original, thus explains the allusions to the foundation-stone:  “It was the custom to celebrate the laying of the corner-stone of an important building with music, songs, shouting, &c.  Hence the morning stars are represented as celebrating the laying of the corner-stone of the earth.” [220]

Upon this meagre statement have been accumulated more traditions than appertain to any other masonic symbol.  The Rabbins, as has already been intimated, divide the glory of these apocryphal histories with the Masons; indeed, there is good reason for a suspicion that nearly all the masonic legends owe their first existence to the imaginative genius of the writers of the Jewish Talmud.  But there is this difference between the Hebrew and the masonic traditions, that the Talmudic scholar recited them as truthful histories, and swallowed, in one gulp of faith, all their impossibilities and anachronisms, while the masonic student has received them as allegories, whose value is not in the facts, but in the sentiments which they convey.

With this understanding of their meaning, let us proceed to a collation of these legends.

In that blasphemous work, the “Toldoth Jeshu” or Life of Jesus, written, it is supposed, in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, we find the following account of this wonderful stone:—­

“At that time [the time of Jesus] there was in the House of the Sanctuary [that is, the temple] a Stone of Foundation, which is the very stone that our father Jacob anointed with oil, as it is described in the twenty-eighth chapter of the book of Genesis.  On that stone the letters of the tetragrammaton were inscribed, and whosoever of the Israelites should learn that name would be able to master the world.  To prevent, therefore, any one from learning these letters, two iron dogs were placed upon two columns in front of the Sanctuary.  If any person, having acquired the knowledge of these letters, desired to depart from the Sanctuary, the barking of the dogs, by magical power, inspired so much fear, that he suddenly forgot what he had acquired.”

This passage is cited by the learned Buxtorf, in his “Lexicon Talmudicum;” [221] but in the copy of the “Toldoth Jeshu” which I have the good fortune to possess (for it is among the rarest of books), I find another passage which gives some additional particulars, in the following words:—­