Ter´aphim were tutelar household gods, by whom families expected, for worship bestowed, to be rewarded with domestic prosperity, such as plenty of food, health, and various necessaries of domestic life.
We have most remarkable proofs that the worship of teraphim co-existed with the worship of Jehovah even in pious families; and we have more than one instance of the wives of worshippers of Jehovah not finding full contentment and satisfaction in the stern moral truth of spiritual worship, and therefore carrying on some private symbolism by fondling the teraphim.
We find in , that Rachel stole the images (teraphim) belonging to her father without the knowledge of her husband, who, being accused by his father-in-law of having stolen his gods, answered, 'With whomsoever thou findest thy gods, let him not live.' Laban searched, but found not the images (teraphim).
Among the ancient Israelites the worship of Jehovah was frequently blended with that of a graven image or teraphim, but on every revival of the knowledge of the written revelation of God the teraphim were swept away together with the worse forms of idolatry ().
The teraphim were consulted by persons on whom true religion had no firm hold, in order to elicit some supernatural omens similar to the auguries of the Romans (; ).
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John Kitto was an English biblical scholar of Cornish descent.Born in Plymouth, John Kitto was a sickly child, son of a Cornish stonemason. The drunkenness of his father and the poverty of his family meant that much of his childhood was spent in the workhouse. He had no more than three years of erratic and interrupted education. At the age of twelve John Kitto fell on his head from a rooftop, and became totally and permanently deaf. As a young man he suffered further tragedies, disappointments and much loneliness. His height was 4 ft 8 in, and his accident left him with an impaired sense of balance. He found consolation in browsing at bookstalls and reading any books that came his way.
From these hardships he was rescued by friends who became aware of his mental abilities and encouraged him to write topical articles for local newspapers, arranging eventually for him to work as an assistant in a local library. Here he continued to educate himself.
One of his benefactors was the Exeter dentist Anthony Norris Groves, who in 1824 offered him employment as a dental assistant. Living with the Groves family, Kitto was profoundly influenced by the practical Christian faith of his employer. In 1829 he accompanied Groves on his pioneering mission to Baghdad and served as tutor to Groves's two sons. In 1833 Kitto returned to England via Constantinople, accompanied by another member of the Groves mission, Francis William Newman. Shortly afterwards he married, and in due course had several children.
A London publisher asked Kitto to write up his travel journals for a series of articles in the Penny Magazine, a publication read at that time by a million people in Britain, reprinted in America and translated into French, German and Dutch. Other writing projects followed as readers enquired about his experiences in the East amidst people living in circumstances closely resembling those of Bible times.
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