THE ARCANE SCHOOLS - Fort Myers Beach Masonic Lodge No. 362

the
dwelling of God, "when he had placed the celebrated Stone of
Foundation,
on which the sacred name was mystically engraven, with solemn
ceremonies,
in that sacred depository on Mount Moriah, along with the foundations
of
Dan and Asher, the centre of the Most Holy Place, where the ark was
overshadowed by the shekinah of God." [217] The Hebrew Talmudists, who
thought as much of this stone, and had as many legends concerning it as
the masonic Talmudists, called it _eben shatijah_[218] or "Stone of
Foundation," because, as they said, it had been laid by Jehovah as the
foundation of the world; and hence the apocryphal book of Enoch speaks
of
the "stone which supports the corners of the earth."
This idea of a foundation stone of the world was most probably derived
from that magnificent passage of the book of Job, in which the Almighty
demands of the afflicted patriarch,--
"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.