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Muhammad in the Bible David Benjamin KeldaniEdited & Annotated by: Prof. Dawud M. R. Alhanbali & Prof, Dr. Kaseb A. Albadran ( 19 )or haghagh4 when it orders the festival ceremonies to be performed. The word signifies to compass a building, an altar or a stone by running round it at a regular and trained pace with the purpose of performing a religious festival of rejoicing and chanting. In the East, the Christiansstill practice what they call higga either during theirfestival days or at weddings. Consequently, this word has nothing to do with pilgrimage, which is derived from the Italian Pellegrino, and this from the Latin peregrinus — meaning a “foreigner.”Abraham (pbuh) during his sojourns frequently used to build an altar for worship and sacrifice at different places and on particular occasions. When Jacob (pbuh) was on his way to Padan Aram and saw the vision of that wonderful ladder, he erected a stone there, upon which he poured oil and called it Bethel, i.e. “the house of God”; and twenty years later he again visited that stone, upon which he poured oil and “pure wine,” [!] as recorded in Genesis xxviii. 10-22; xxxv. A special stone was erected as a monument by Jacob (pbuh) and his father-in-law upon a heap ofstones calledGal’ead in Hebrew, and Yagharsahdutha by Laban in his Aramaic language, which means “a heap of witness.” But the proper noun they gave to the erected stone was Mispa (Gen. xxxi. 45-55) , which I prefer to write in its exact Arabic form, Mispha, and this I do for the benefit of my Muslim readers.Now this Mispha became later on the most important place of worship, and a centre of the national assembliesin the history of the people of Israel. It was here that Naphthah —a Jewish hero— made a vow “before the Lord,” and after beating the Ammonites, he is supposed to have offered his only daughter as a burnt offering (Judges xi.). It was4 Unlike the Arabs, both the Hebrew as well as the Aramaic peoples have no j sound intheir alphabet; their third letter, gamal, when hard has g sound and when soft or aspirate becomes guttural and sounds gb. (The author).