At Beer-sheba Abraham planted a tamarisk, and “called on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God.”  Beer-sheba long remained one of the sacred places of Palestine.  The tree planted by its well was a sign both of the water that flowed beneath its soil and of its sacred character.  It was only where fresh water was found that the nomads of the desert could come together, and the tree was a token of the life and refreshment they would meet with.  The well was sacred; so also was the solitary tree which stood beside it, and under whose branches man and beast could find shade and protection from the mid-day heat.  Even Mohammedanism, that Puritanism of the East, has not been able to eradicate the belief in the divine nature of such trees from the mind of the nomad; we may still see them decorated with offerings of rags torn from the garments of the passer-by or shading the tomb of some reputed saint.  They are still more than waymarks or resting-places for the heated and weary; when standing beneath them the herdsman feels that he is walking upon consecrated ground.

It was at Beer-sheba that the temptation came to Abraham to sacrifice his first-born, his only son Isaac.  The temptation was in accordance with the fierce ritual of Syria, and traces of the belief which had called it into existence are to be found in the early literature of Babylonia.  Thus in an ancient Babylonian ritual-text we read:  “The offspring who raises his head among mankind, the offspring for his life he gave; the head of the offspring for the head of the man he gave; the neck of the offspring for the neck of the man he gave.”  Phoenician legend told how the god El had robed himself in royal purple and sacrificed his only son Yeud in a time of pestilence, and the writers of Greece and Rome describe with horror the sacrifices of the first-born with which the history of Carthage was stained.  The father was called upon in time of trouble to yield up to the god his nearest and dearest; the fruit of his body could alone wipe away the sin of his soul, and Baal required him to sacrifice without a murmur or a tear his first-born and his only one.  The more precious the offering, the more acceptable was it to the god; the harder the struggle to resign it, the greater was the merit of doing so.  The child died for the sins of his people; and the belief was but the blind and ignorant expression of a true instinct.

But Abraham was to be taught a better way.  For three days he journeyed northward with his son, and then lifting up his eyes saw afar off that mountain “in the land of Moriah,” on the summit of which the sacrifice was to be consummated.  Alone with Isaac he ascended to the high-place, and there building his altar and binding to it his son he prepared to perform the terrible rite.  But at the last moment his hand was stayed, a new and better revelation was made to him, and a ram was substituted for his son.  It cannot be accidental that, as M. Clermont-Ganneau has pointed out, we learn from the temple-tariffs of Carthage and Marseilles that in the later ritual of Phoenicia a ram took the place of the earlier human sacrifice.