THE HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF

THE HOLY LANDPLATEIL

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Lonion; JtacLcLei* and StougAton.THE

HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY

OF THE

HOLY LAND

ESPECIALLY IN RELATION TO THE HISTORY
OF ISRAEL AND OF THE EARLY CHURCH

BY

GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D.

* * <

PROFESSOR OF HEBREW AND OLD TESTAMENT EXEGESIS
FREE CHURCH COLLEGE, GLASGOW

WITH SIX MAPS

LONDON

HODDER AND STOUGHTON
27 PATERNOSTER ROW
1894Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to Het MajestyMY FATHERCORRECTIONS AND ADDITIONS

On Plate V. delete 1 Brook Cherith. ’

On Plate VI., on the surface of the Lake of Galilee, for 1 882 feet below the
Mediterranean Sea ’ read ‘ 682 feet.’

Page ix, line 4, for ‘ 1892 ’ read ‘1891.’

Page 182 n. l,for ‘rrj apxv’ read ‘rrj apXTi.’
Page 346 n. 1, line I, for ‘ for ’ read ‘ from.’

Since page 637 was printed off I have seen, through the kindness of Professor
Ramsay of Aberdeen, a proof of the inscriptions copied by the Rev.
W. Ewing. They contain two Greek inscriptions, of dates later than
the Moslem invasion. No. 153 records the laying of the foundation
of a church of St. George at El Kufr in 652 a.d. ; and No. 150
the building from the foundation of another church at the same place,
in what seems to be the year 720.

Page 680, for ‘ Kefr Suba ’ read ‘ Kefr Saba.’
Page 684, for ‘ Segoi ’ read ‘ Segor. ’

,, for ‘ Sephalha’ read ‘ Sephathah.’
Page 685, for ‘ Singil ’ read ‘ Sinjil.’

Page 686, for ‘ Tekoah ’ read ‘ Tekoa.’PREFACE

THERE are many ways of writing a geography of Palestine,
and of illustrating the History by the Land, but some are
wearisome and some are vain. They do not give a vision
of the land as a whole, nor help you to hear through it the
sound of running history. What is needed by the reader
or teacher of the Bible is some idea of the main outlines of
Palestine—its shape and disposition ; its plains, passes and
mountains ; its rains, winds and temperatures ; its colours,
lights and shades. Students of the Bible desire to see a
background and to feel an atmosphere—to discover from
‘ the lie of the land ’ why the history took certain lines and
the prophecy and gospel were expressed in certain styles
—to learn what geography has to contribute to questions
of Biblical criticism—above all, to discern between what
physical nature contributed to the religious development
of Israel, and what was the product of purely moral
and spiritual forces. On this last point the geography
of the Holy Land reaches its highest interest. It is
also good to realise the historical influences by which
our religion was at first nurtured or exercised, as far
as we can do this from the ruins which these have left
in the country. To go no further back than the New
Testament—there are the Greek art, the Roman rule,viii The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

and the industry and pride of Herod. But the remains of
Scripture times are not so many as the remains of the
centuries since. The Palestine of to-day, as I have said
further on, is more a museum of Church history than of
the Bible—a museum full of living as well as of ancient
specimens of its subject East of Jordan, in the in-
destructible basalt of Hauran, there are monuments of
the passage from Paganism to Christianity even more
numerous and remarkable than the catacombs or earliest
Churches of Rome ; there are also what Italy cannot give
us—the melancholy wrecks of the passage from Christianity
to Mohammedanism. On the west of the Jordan there
are the castles and churches of the Crusaders, the im-
pression of their brief kingdom and its ruin. There is the
trail of the march and retreat of Napoleon. And, then,
after the long silence and crumbling of all things native,
there are the living churches of to-day, and the lines of
pilgrims coming up to Jerusalem from the four corners of
the world.

For a historical geography compassing such a survey,
the conditions are to-day three—personal acquaintance
with the land ; a study of the exploration, discoveries and
decipherments, especially of the last twenty, years ; and
the employment of the results of Biblical criticism during
the same period.

i. The following chapters have been written after two
visits to the Holy Land. In the spring of 1880 I made a
journey through Judaea, Samaria, Esdraelon, and Galilee :Preface

IX

that was before the great changes which have been produced
on many of the most sacred landscapes by European
colonists, and by the rivalry in building between the Greek
and Latin Churches. Again, in 1892,1 was able to extend
my knowledge of the country to the Maritime Plain, the
Shephelah, the wilderness of Judaea, including Masada and
Engedi, the Jordan Valley, Hermon, the Beka‘, and espe-
cially to Damascus, Hauran, Gilead, and Moab. Unfor-
tunately—in consequence of taking Druze servants, we
were told—we were turned back by the authorities from
Bosra and the Jebel Druz, so that I cannot write from
personal acquaintance with those interesting localities, but
we spent the more time in the villages of Hauran, and
at Gadara, Gerasa and Pella, where we were able to add
to the number of discovered inscriptions.

2. With the exception of the results of early geographers,
admirably summarised by Reland, the renewal of Syrian
travel in the beginning of this century, and the great work
of Robinson fifty years ago—the real exploration of Pales-
tine has been achieved during the last twenty years. It
has been the work of no one nation ; its effectiveness is due
to its thoroughly international character. America gave the
pioneers in Robinson, Smith, and Lynch. To Great Britain
belong, through the Palestine Exploration Fund—by
Wilson, Warren, Drake, Tristram, Conder, Kitchener,
Mantell, Black and Armstrong—the splendid results of
a trigonometrical survey of all Western, and part of
Eastern, Palestine, a geological survey, the excavations atX

The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Jerusalem and Tell el Hesy, very numerous discoveries
and identifications, and the earliest summaries of natural
history and meteorology. But we cannot forget that this
work was prepared for, and has been supplemented in
its defects, both by French and Germans. The French
have been first in the departments of art and archaeology
—witness Waddington, Renan, De Vogti6, De Saulcy,
Clermont-Ganneau, and Rey. In topography, also, through
Guerin and others, the French contributions have been
important. To Germany we owe many travels and re-
searches, which, like Wetzstein’s, have added to the geo-
graphy, especially of Eastern Palestine. The Germans
have also given what has been too much lacking in Britain,
a scientific treatment of the geography in the light of
Biblical criticism : in this respect the work of Socin, Guthe,
and their colleagues in the Deutsches Palastina-Verein, has
been most thorough and full of example to ourselves. The
notes in this volume will show how much I have been
indebted to material provided by the journals of both the
British and German societies, as well as to other works
issued under their auspices. I have not been able to use
any of the records of the corresponding Russian society.
Recent American literature on Palestine is valuable, chiefly
for the works of Merrill, Trumbull and Clay.

But the most distinctive feature of the work of the last
twenty years has been the aid rendered by the European
inhabitants of Syria. Doctors and missionaries, the chil-
dren of the first German colonists and of the earlierPreface

xi

American missionaries, have grown into a familiarity with
the country, which the most expert of foreign explorers
cannot hope to rival. Through the British and German
societies, Chaplin, Schumacher, Schick, Gatt, Fischer of
Sarona, Klein, Hanauer, Baldensperger, Post, West and
Bliss have contributed so immense an amount of topo-
graphical detail, nomenclature, meteorology and informa-
tion concerning the social life of the country, that there
seems to lie rather a century than a score of years between
the present condition of Syriology and that which pre-
vailed when we were wholly dependent on the records of
passing travellers and pilgrims.

During recent years a very great deal has been done
for the geography of Palestine from the side of Assyrian
and Egyptian studies, such as by the younger Delitzsch,
Maspero, Sayce, Tomkins, and especially W. Max Muller,
whose recent work, Asien u. Europa nach den alt-dgypti-
schen Denkmdlern, has so materially altered and increased
the Egyptian data. I need not dwell here on the informa-
tion afforded by the Tell-el-Amarna tablets as to the
condition of Palestine before the coming of Israel.

On the Roman and Greek periods there have appeared
during recent years the works of Mommsen, Mahaffy,
Morrison, Neubauer, Niese’s new edition of Josephus,
Boettger’s topographical Lexicon to Josephus, the collec-
tion of Nabatean inscriptions in the Corpus Inscriptionum
Semiticarum, and Schiirer’s monumental History of the
Jewish People, in the Time of Christ. I have constantlyxii The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

referred to the latter on the Maccabean and Herodian
periods; and where I have ventured to differ from his
geographical conclusions it has always been with hesitation.

The last fifteen years have also seen the collection and
re-publication of the immense pilgrim literature on Pales-
tine, a more thorough research into the Arab geographies,
of which Mr. Guy Le Strange’s Palestine under the
Moslems affords the English reader so valuable a sum-
mary, and a number of works on the Crusades and the
Frank occupation and organisation of Palestine, of which
the chief are those of Rey, Rohricht and Prutz. The
great French collection of the Historians of the Crusades,
begun as far back as 1843, largely falls within this
generation.

From one source, which hitherto has been unused, I
have derived great help. I mean Napoleon’s invasion of
Syria and his conduct of modern war upon its ancient
battle-fields. It is a great thing to follow Napoleon on
the routes taken by Thothmes, Sennacherib, Alexander,
Vespasian, and the Crusaders, amidst the same difficulties
of forage and locomotion, and against pretty much the
same kind of enemies; and I am surprised that no
geographer of the country has availed himself of the
opportunity which is afforded by the full records of
Napoleon’s Asiatic campaign, and by the journals of the
British officers, attached to the Turkish army which fol-
lowed up his retreat.

Of all these materials I have made such use'as con-Preface

xm

tributed to the aim of this work. I have added very few
original topographical suggestions. I have felt that just
at present the geographer of Palestine is more usefully
employed in reducing than in adding to the identifications
of sites. In Britain our surveyors have been tempted to
serious over-identification, perhaps by the zeal of a portion
of the religious public, which subscribes to exploration
according to the number of immediate results. In Ger-
many, where they scorn us for this, the same temptation
has been felt, though from other causes, and the Zeitschrift
des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins has almost as many rash
proposals as the Quarterly Statement, and Old and New
Testament Maps, of the Palestine Exploration Fund. I
have, therefore, ignored a number of identifications and
contested a number more. If the following pages leave
the reader with many problems stated rather than solved,
this has been done of purpose. The work of explorers
and critics has secured an enormous number of results
which cannot be reasonably doubted. But in many other
cases what has been achieved is simply the collection of
all the evidence that exists above-ground—evidence which
is conflicting, and can be settled only by such further
excavations as Messrs. Flinders Petrie and Bliss have so
happily inaugurated at Tell-el-Hesy. The exploration, of
Western Palestine at least, is almost exhausted on the
surface, but there is a great future for it under-ground.
We have run most of the questions to earth : it only
remains to dig them up.XIV'

The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

3. But an equally strong reason for the appearance at this
time of a Historical Geography of Palestine is the recent
progress of Biblical Criticism. The relation of the geo-
graphical materials at our disposal, and the methods of
historical reconstruction, have been wholly altered by Old
Testament science, since, for instance, Dean Stanley wrote
his Sinai and Palestine. That part of criticism which
consists of the distinction and appreciation of the various
documents, of which the Books of Scripture are composed,
has especially contributed to the elucidation and arrange-
ment of geographical details in the history of Israel, which
without it had been left by archaeology in obscurity. I
heartily agree with most of what is said on the duty of
regulating the literary criticism of the Bible by the
archaeology of Syria and the neighbouring countries, but
we must remember there is a converse duty as well. We
have had too many instances of the embarrassment and
confusion into which archaeology and geography lead
us, apart from the new methods of Biblical Criticism.
And to those among us who are distrustful of the latter, I
would venture to say that there is no sphere in which the
helpfulness of recent criticism, in removing difficulties and
explaining contradictions, has been more apparent than
in the sphere of Biblical Geography. In this volume I
have felt forced by geographical evidence to contest some of
the textual and historical conclusions of recent critics, both
in this country and in Germany, but I have fully accepted
the critical methods, and I believe this to be the first geo-Preface

xv

graphy of the Holy Land in which they are employed.
In fact, at this time of day, it would be simply futile to
think of writing the geography of Palestine on any other
principles.

It is as a provisional attempt to collect old and new
material from all these sources that I offer the following
pages. I have not aimed at exhausting the details of the
subject, but I have tried to lay down what seem to me
the best lines both for the arrangement of what has been
already acquired, and for the fitting on to it of what may
still be discovered. There are a few omissions which the
reader will notice. I have entirely excluded the topo-
graphy of Jerusalem, the geography of Phoenicia, and the
geography of Lebanon. This has been because I have
never visited Phoenicia, because Lebanon lies properly
outside the Holy Land, and because an adequate topo-
graphy of Jerusalem, while not contributing to the general
aim of the volume, would have unduly increased the size
of a work which is already too great. I was anxious to
give as much space as possible to Eastern Palestine, of
which we have had hitherto no complete geography.

Portions of Chapters VII, VIII, XII-XIV, and XX, most
of Chapters X, XV-XVII, XIX, and xxi, and all Chapter
XVIII, have already appeared in The Expositor for 1892-93.

With regard to maps, this volume has been written
with the use of what must be for a long time the finest
illustration of the geography of Palestine—the English

bxvi The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Survey Maps, both the large map of Western Palestine, on
the scale of an inch to the mile, and the reduced map of
all Palestine on the scale of three-eighths of an inch to
the mile. The latter, in its editions of 1891 ff., though over-
crowded by ‘identifications,’ is by far the most useful map
ever published for students or travellers : one might call it
indispensable. Mr. Armstrong has lately put this map
into relief; the result is a most correct, clear and impres-
sive reproduction of the shape and physical varieties of
the land. If students desire a cheap small map, brought
down to date, they will find it in Fischer and Guthe’s ad-
mirable map of Palestine, published by the German society.

The six maps for this volume have been specially
prepared by the eminent cartographer, Mr. John George
Bartholomew, of Edinburgh, and my hearty thanks are
due to him for the care and impressiveness with which
he has produced them. The large map and the three
sectional ones (the latter on the scale of four miles
to an inch) have this distinction, that they are the
first orographical maps of Palestine, representing the
whole lie and lift of the land by gradations of colour.
The little sketch-map on p. 51 is to illustrate the chapter
on the form and divisions of the land: while the map of
the Semitic World has been prepared, under my directions,
to illustrate Syria’s place in history, and her influence
westwards. Through the courtesy of the engineers, Mr.
Bartholomew has been able to indicate the line of the new
Acca-Damascus Railway.Preface

XVII

During my work on this volume, I have keenly felt the
want, in English, of a good historical atlas of the Holy
Land. I have designed one such, containing from thirty
to forty maps, and covering the history of Syria from the
earliest epochs to the Crusades and the present century;
and preparations are being made by Mr. Bartholomew
and myself for its publication by Messrs. Hodder and
Stoughton.

In conclusion, I have to thank, for help rendered me at
various times, both in travel and in study, Dr. Selah
Merrill; Rev. W. Ewing, late of Tiberias, whose collec-
tion of inscriptions is promised by the Exploration
Fund; Dr. Mackinnon and Rev. Stewart Crawford of
Damascus ; Rev. Henry Sykes of the Church Missionary
Society at Es-Salt; Rev. C. A. Scott of Willesden ; and
Professors Ramsay and Kennedy of Aberdeen. I have
been greatly assisted by two collections of works on the
Holy Land: that made by Tischendorf, now in possession
of the Free Church College, Glasgow; and that made
by the late Mr. M‘Grigor of Glasgow, now in the Library
of Glasgow University.

My wife has revised all the proofs of this volume, and,
with a friend, prepared the Index.

GEORGE ADAM SMITH.

28th April 1894.CONTENTS

PAGE

PREFACE,.................................................... vii

LIST OF PLATES, ......	xxii

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE,.......................................xxiii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS, Etc...................................xxv

Book I.—THE LAND AS A WHOLE

■ CHAP.

I.	The Place of Syria in the World’s History, .	i

1.	The	Relation of Syria to Arabia, ...	7

2.	The	Relation of Syria to the Three Continents, .	11

3.	Syria’s Opportunity Westward, .	.	.	21

4.	The	Religion of Syria, ....	28

II.	The Form of the Land and its Historical Con-
sequences, ......	43

III.	The Climate and Fertility of the Land, with

their Effects on its Religion,	.	.	61

1.	The Climate, .	.	.	.	61

2.	The Fertility, ......	76

IV.	The Scenery of the Land, with its Reflection in

the Poetry of the Old Testament, .	.	90

V.	The Land and Questions of Faith,	.	.	105

VI.	The View from Mount Ebal,	.	.	.	117

xixXX

Contents

Book II.—WESTERN PALESTINE

CHAP.	PAGE

VII. The	Coast,	125

VIII. The	Maritime	Plain,	.	145

IX. The Philistines and their Cities, .	167

X. The Shephelah, .	.	199

XI.	Early Christianity in the Shephelah,	237

XII.	JuDiEA and Samaria — The History of their

Frontier,	.	.	.	245

XIII.	The Borders and Bulwarks of Jud.*a, .	257

1.	East: The Great Gulf with Jericho and Engedi—The

Entrance of Israel,	....	261

2.	The Southern	Border	: The Negeb, .	278

3.	The Western Border: The Defiles, .	.	286

4.	The Northern Border: The Fortresses of Benjamin, 289

XIV.	An Estimate of the Real Strength of Jud,*a, .	295

XV.	The Character of Judaea,	303

XVI. Samaria, .	321

XVII.	The Strong Places of Samaria,	343

XVIII.	The Question of Sychar,	365

XIX. Esdraelon,	377

XX. Galilee, .	411

XXI.	The Lake of Galilee, .	437

XXII.	The Jordan Valley,	465

XXIII. The Dead Sea, .	497Contents

xxi

Book III.—EASTERN PALESTINE

CHAP.	PAGE

XXIV.	Over Jordan : General Features, .	517

XXV.	The Names and Divisions of Eastern Palestine, 531

1.	The Three Natural Divisions,	.	534

2. The Political Names and Divisions To-day, .	535

3. In the Greek Times : the Time of Our Lord,	538

4.	Under the Old Testament, .	548

XXVI.	Moab and the Coming of Israel, .	555

XXVII.	Israel in Gilead and Bashan,	573

XXVIII.	Greece over Jordan: The Decapolis,	593

XXIX.	Hauran and its Cities,	609

XXX. Damascus,	639

APPENDICES

I.	Some Geographical Passages and Terms of the

Old Testament,	■	651

II.	Stade’s Theory of Israel’s Invasion of Western

Palestine, .	.	.	659

III.	The Wars against Sihon and Og, .	662

IV.	The Bibliography of Eastern Palestine,	665

V.	Roads and Wheeled Vehicles in Syria, .	667

INDEX OF SUBJECTS,	673

INDEX OF AUTHORITIES,	688LIST OF PLATES

I. General Map of Palestine,.................Frontispiece

II. Map of the Semitic World, .	.	.	to face page i

III.	Physical Sketch Map,......................on page 51

IV.	Jud/EA, the Siiephelah, and Philistia,	. to face page 167

V.	Samaria,......................................... 321

VI.	Esdraelon and Lower Galilee, ....	,,	377

XCHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

Entrance of Israel into Palestine,	.	.	.	circa	B.C.  1300
Deborah and her Song, ) Gideon,	)	before	I IOO
Saul anointed,	.	.	.	circa	1075
David, King, ....		1050
Solomon, King,	.....	>5	1020
Disruption of the Kingdom and invasion by Shishak,	>>	970
Elijah, .......		870
Israel comes into touch with Assyria : Battle of Karkar,		854
Elisha, .......		850-800
First Writing Prophets : Amos, Hosea,	circa	750
fUzziah dies, .....		740
IsaiahNorthern Israel falls, .		721
^Deliverance of Jerusalem,		701
/•Discovery of Book of Law,		621
1 Death of Josiah at Megiddo,		608
Jeremiah J Fall of Assyria : Rise of Babylonia,		606
j f I First Great Captivity of Jerusalem,		597
ZC 16 (ASecond „	„	„		587
/"Fall of Babylonia : Rise of Persia, . ^ saialf j Return °f Jews from exile, .		538
		536
(.Temple Rebuilt,	....		5i5
Ezra and Nehemiah, .....		457-440
Erection of Temple on Gerizim,	.	.		360
Alexander the Great in Syria, ....		332
Beginning of Seleucid Era, ....		312
Kingdom of Parthia founded, ....		250
Rome defeats Antiochus the Great at Magnesia,		192

xxiiiXXIV

Chronological Table

The Maccabees,	....		B.C.  166-135
John Hyrcanus,	....		r35-i°5
Alexander Janneus, ....		104-78
Arrival of Pompey : Roman Province of Syria,		64
Parthians invade Syria,		40
Battle of Actium,	....		3i
Herod the Great,	......  His kingdom divided among Archelaus, Herod Antipas,		37-4
and Philip,	....		4
Archelaus banished : Judaea under Roman Procurator,		A.D.  6
Death of Philip,	....		34
Banishment of Antipas,		39
Agrippa i.,	....		37-44
Agrippa II.,		50-100
Jewish Rebellion against Rome,		66
Siege of Jerusalem,	....		70
Formation of Roman Province of Arabia by Trajan,		106
Final overthrow of the Jews under Bar Cochba by Hadrian,		135
Origen in Palestine, ....	circa	218
Decian Persecution, ....	J)	250
Diocletian’s Persecution,	on from	303
Eusebius, Archbishop of Caesarea,		315-318
Constantine the Great,		323-336
Final overthrow of Paganism in Palestine, .	circa	400
The Hejra	.....		622
Death of Mohammed, ....		632
Moslem conquest of Syria,		634-638
Omeyyade Khalifs make Damascus their capital,		661
Invasion of Seljuk Turks,	1070-1085	
First Crusade and Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem,	1098-1187	
Battle of Hattin won by Saladin,		1187
Third Crusade, Richard of England, .		1191
Sultan Bibars, and overthrow of the Franks,	circa	1270
Mongol Invasions, the last by Timur,	1240, 1260, 1400	
Napoleon in Syria,	.	.	.	.		1799ABBREVIATIONS

Baudissin, Stud. = Studien zur Semitischen Religionsgeschichte.

Boha-ed-Din, Vit Sal., ed. Schult= Vita Saladinis, with excerpts from the
geography of Abulfeda, ed. Schultens. See p. 17, n. 2.

Budde, Ri. u. Sa, or Richt. Sam. = Die Bucher Richter u. Samuelis.

C.I.S. = Corpus Inscriptionum Semitic arum, cf. p. 15, n. I.

Conder, T. W. = Tent Work in Palestine.

De Saulcy, Num. de la T.S. = Numismatique de la Terre Sainte.

Geog. Gr. Min. = Geographi Graeci Minores, edd. Hudson and Muller. See
p. 16.

Hend. Pal. = The Historical Geography of Palestine, by Rev. A. Henderson,
D.D. 2d ed. In ‘ Handbooks for Bible Classes. ’ Clark, Edinburgh.
Josephus, Antt. = Antiquities.

,, Wars - Wars of the Jews.

K.A. T. = Schrader’s Keilinschriften u. das Alte Testament.

Neubauer, Geog. Tal.=La Geographie du Talmud, Paris, 1868.

P.E.F. Mem. — Memoirs of the Palestine Exploration Fund.

P.E.F. Q. = Quarterly Statement of Palestine Exploration Fund.

P.E.F. Red. Map=Reduced Map of Palestine Exploration Fund, edd. 1890 f.
P.P.T. = Palestine Pilgrims Text Society’s Series of Publications.

Robertson Smith, O.T.J.C. = Old Testament in the Jewish Church, ed. 2,
1892.

Robinson, B.R. or Bib. Res.= Biblical Researches, London, 1841.

,,	L.R.= Later Researches, London, 1852.

Siegfried-Stade = Siegfried and Stade’s HandwSrterbuch.

Stade, G. V.I. or Gesch. = Geschichle des Volkes Israel.

Wadd. =Le Bas and Waddington, Inscriptions Grecques et Lalines recuillies
en Grice et en Asie Mineure. See p. 15, n. 1.

Wetz. = Wetzstein.

Z.A. T. W. — Zeitschrift fur Alt-testamentliche Wissenschaft.

Z.D.M. G. — Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft.

Z.D.P. V.=Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina Vereins.

In the transliteration of Hebrew and Arabic words ’Aleph is usually ren-
dered by a light, ‘Ayin by a rough, breathing; but in well-known names
they are sometimes omitted ; Qoph by K; Sade usually by S.

In ancient names Gimel is rendered by G (hard), in modern names by J.

xxvBOOK I

THE LANE AS A WHOLE

CHAPTER I

THE PLACE OF SYRIA IN THE WORLD’S
HISTORY

AFor this chapter consult Map //THE PLACE OF SYRIA IN THE WORLD’S
HISTORY

"O ETWEEN the Arabian Desert and the eastern coast
-L' of the Levant there stretches—along almost the
full extent of the latter, or for nearly 400 miles—a. tract
of fertile land varying from 70 to 100 miles in breadth.
This is so broken up by mountain range and valley, that
it has never all been brought under one native govern-
ment ; yet its well-defined boundaries—the sea on the
west, Mount Taurus on the north, and the desert to east
and south—give it a certain unity, and separate it from
the rest of the world. It has rightly, therefore, been
covered by one name, Syrian Like that of The Names
Palestine, the name is due to the Greeks, but of the Land-
by a reverse process. As ‘ Palestina,’ which is really
Philistina, was first the name of only a part of the
coast, and thence spread inland to the desert,1 so Syria,
which is a shorter form of Assyria, was originally
applied by the Greeks to the whole of the Assyrian
Empire from the Caucasus to the Levant, then shrank
to this side of the Euphrates, and finally within the
limits drawn above. The Arabs call the country Esh-
Sham, or ‘ The Left,’ for it is really the northern or
north-western end of the great Arabian Peninsula, of

1 See p. 4.4 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

which they call the southern side El Yemen, or ‘The
Right.’1

The name Palaistine, which Josephus himself uses only
of Philistia, was employed by the Greeks to distinguish
all Southern Syria, inclusive of Judaea, from Phoenicia and
Coele-Syria.	They called it Syria Palaistine, using the

word as an adjective, and then Palaistine, the noun
alone. From this the Romans got their Palestina, which
in the second century was a separate province, and later
on divided into Palestina Prima, • Secunda, Tertia. It
still survives in the name of the Arab gund or canton—
Filistin.2

These were foreign names : the much older and native
name Canaan is of doubtful origin, perhaps racial, but

1 Syria, as a modern geographical term, is to be distinguished from the
Syria and Syrians of the English version of the Old Testament. The
Hebrew of these terms is Aram, Arameans, a northern Semitic people who
dwelt in Mesopotamia, Aram-Naharaim, and west of the Euphrates—as far
west as the Phoenician coast, and south to Damascus. Some, however, hold
that Aram-Naharaim was on this side the Euphrates. The Roman Province
of Syria extended from the Euphrates to Egypt. Its eastern boundary was
a line from the head of the Gulf of Suez past the south-eastern end of the
Dead Sea, the east of Gilead and the Hauran and Palmyra, to the Euphrates.
East of this line was Arabia (see chap. xxv.).

a The full history of the word is this:—Philistines,	or

is rendered by the LXX. in the Hexateuch <f>vXiffrielfi; cf. I Macc. iii. 24,
Sirach xlvi. 18. From this Josephus has the adjective <pvXi<sTivos, i. Antt.
vi. 2. But his usual form is iraXaioTivos. He also knows the noun
H Ha\ai<TTtvr), and uses it himself of Philistia, xiii. Antt. v. 10: ‘ Simeon
traversed Judah Kai ttjv IlaXaurtIvtjv up to Askalon.’ Cf. i. Antt. vi. 2 :
‘ The country from Gaza to Egypt . . . the Greeks call part of that country
Palestine. ’ But in Contra Apion, i. 22, he quotes Herodotus as using the
name in the wider sense inclusive of Judaea. Herodotus, who describes
Syria as extending from Cilicia to Mount Carius, distinguishes the Phoenicians
from the Ztf/uot ol iv rfj HaXaiaTlvT), or ol UaXaiCTlvoi Ka.Xe6fj.evoi (ii. 104 ;
iii. 5, 91 ; vii. 89), and defines it as rijs ^uplrjs tovto t6 xwpt°v Kcd
/J-iXP1 Slyvirrov irav HaXaicrTlvT) KaXelrai. Arrian (Anabasis, ii. 25) speaks
of 7] ’Zvpii) JlaXaiffrlvT). Syria was divided into S. Palestina, S. Punica, and
S. Coela ; Herod, i. 105. Palestine was made a separate province, 67 A.D.Syria s Place in History

5

more probably geographical and meaning ‘ sunken ’ or
‘ low ’ land. It seems to have at first belonged to the
Phoenician coast as distinguished from the hills above.
But thence it extended to other lowlands—Sharon, the
Jordan valley, and so over the whole country, mountain
as well as plain.1

\/The historical geography of Syria, so far as her rela-
tions with the rest of the world are concerned, may be
summed up in a paragraph. Syria is the summary of
northern and most fertile end of the great Geo^raphyCof
Semitic home—the peninsula of Arabia. But syria-
the Semitic home is distinguished by its central position
in geography—between Asia and Africa, and between
the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, which is
Europe ; and the role in history of the Semitic race has
been also intermediary. ^The Semites have been the
great middlemen of the world. Not second-rate in war,
they have risen to the first rank in commerce and reli-
gion. They have been the carriers between East and
West, they have stood between the great ancient civilisa-
tions and those which go to make up the modern world ;
while by a higher gift, for which their conditions neither
in place nor in time fully account, they have been mediary
between God and man, and proved the religious teachers
of the world, through whom have come its three highest
faiths, its only universal religions. Syria’s history is her

1 Land of Canaan is applied in the Tell-el-Amarna Correspondence of the
14th cent. B.c. (Tab., Berlin, 92) to the Phoenician coast, and later by Egyp-
tians to all W. Syria. Acc. to Jos. xi. 3, there were Canaanites east and west
of the land ; acc. to Jud. i. 9, all over, in the Mount, Negeb, and Shephelah
and (ver. 10) in Hebron. It was the spread of the Canaanites that spread
the name. In Isa. xix. 18, the lip of Canaan is the one language spoken in
Palestine, of which Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite, etc., were only dialects.
In Zech. xiv. 21, probably Canaanite=Phoenician=merchant.6 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

share in this great function of intermedium, which has
endured from the earliest times to the present day.

/ To put it more particularly, Syria lies between two con-
tinents—Asia and Africa ; between two primeval homes of
men—the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile ; between
two great centres of empire—Western Asia and Egypt:
between all these, representing the Eastern and ancient
world, and the Mediterranean, which is the gateway to
the Western and modern world. [/Syria has been likened
to a bridge between Asia and Africa—a bridge with the
desert on one side and the sea upon the other; and, in
truth, all the great invasions of Syria, with two ex-
ceptions, have been delivered across her northern and
southern ends. But these two exceptions—the invasions
of Israel and Islam—prove the insufficiency of the bridge
simile, not only because they were but the highest waves
of an almost constant tide of immigration which has
flowed upon Syria from Arabia, but because they repre-
sent that gift of religion to her, which in its influence on
her history far exceeds the influence of her central posi-
tion. VJ^yria is not only the bridge between Asia and
Africa : she is the refuge of the drifting populations of
Arabia. She has been not only the highroad of civilisa-
tions and the battle-field of empires, but the pasture and
the school of innumerable little tribes. uShe has been not
merely an open channel of war and commerce for nearly
the whole world, but the vantage-ground and opportunity
of the world’s highest religions. In this strange mingling
of bridge and harbour, of highroad and field, of battle-
ground and sanctuary, of seclusion and opportunity—ren-
dered possible through the striking division of her surface
into mountain and plain—lies all the secret of Syria’sSyria's Place in History

7

history, under the religion which has lifted her fame to
glory. As to her western boundary, no invasion, save of
hope, ever came over that. Even when the nations of
Europe sought Palestine, their armies did not enter by
her harbours till the coast was already in their posses-
sion. But across this coast she felt from the first her
future to lie ; her expectation went over the sea to isles
and mainlands far beyond her horizon ; and it was into
the West that her spiritual empire—almost the only
empire Syria ever knew—advanced upon its most glorious
course.

In all this there are four chief factors of which it will
be well for us to have some simple outline before we go
into details. These are—Syria’s Relations to Arabia, from
which she drew her population ; her position as Debate-
able Ground between Asia and Africa, as well as between
both of these and Europe ; her Influence Westwards ; her
Religion. These outlines will be brief. They are meant
merely to introduce the reader to the extent and the
interest of the historical geography which he is beginning,
as well as to indicate our chief authorities.

I. The Relation of Syria to Arabia.

We have seen that Syria is the north end of the
Arabian world, that great parallelogram which is bounded
by the Levant with Mount Taurus, the Euphrates with the
Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and the Red Sea with the
Isthmus of Suez. ^Within these limits there is a wonderful
uniformity of nature : the mass of the territory is high,
barren table-land, but dotted by oases of great fertility,
and surrounded by a lower level, most of which is also8 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

fertile.1 The population is all Semitic. It is very nume-
rous for so bare a land, and hardy and reproductive. But
it is broken up into small tribes, with no very definite
territories. These tribes have gone forth united as a
nation only at one period in their history, and that was
the day of Islam, when their dominion extended from
India to the Atlantic. At all other times they have
advanced separately, either by single tribes or a few
tribes together. Their outgoings were four—across the
Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb into Ethiopia, across the Isthmus
of Suez into Egypt, across the Euphrates into Mesopo-
tamia, across the Jordan into Western Syria. Of these,
Syria became the most common receptacle of the Arabian
drift. She lay, so to speak, broadside-on to the desert;
part of her was spread east of the Jordan, rolling off unde-
fended into the desert steppes ; she was seldom protected
by a strong government, like Egypt and Mesopotamia;
and so in early times she received not only the direct
tides of the desert, but the backwash from these harbours
as well. Of this the Hebrews were an instance, who
came over to her, first from Mesopotamia and then
from Egypt. The loose humanity of the Semitic world
has, therefore, been constantly beating upon Syria, and
The Arabian almost as constantly breaking into her. Of
immigrations. tiie tribes who crossed her border, some flowed
in from the neighbourhood only for summer, and ebbed
again with autumn, like the Midianites in Gideon’s day,
or the various clans of the ‘Aneezeh in our own. But

1 The coast of the Indian Ocean open to the monsoons, with part of the
coasts of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, Syria, the slopes of Taurus, and the
Euphrates valley, are fertile. The rest of the Persian Gulf and Red Sea
coasts, the Isthmus of Suez, and forty miles of the coast of the Levant, are
desert.Syria's Place in History

9

others came up out of the centre or from the south of
Arabia—like the Beni Jafn, for instance, who migrated
all the way from Yemen in the first Christian century,
and, being made by the Romans wardens of the eastern
marches of the Empire, founded in time a great dynasty
—the Ghassanides. And others came because they had
been crowded or driven out of the Nile or the Euphrates
valley, like the Syrians, the Philistines, and the Children
of Israel.

Thus Syria was peopled. Whenever history lights up
her borders we see the same process at work: when
Israel crosses the Jordan ; when the Midianites follow
and oppress her; when, the Jews being in exile, the
Idumeans come up on their seats ; when the Decapolis
is formed as a Greek league to keep the Arabs out; when
the Romans, with their wonderful policy, enrol some of
the immigrants to hold the others in check ; especially
at the Moslem invasion ; but also during the Latin king-
dom of Jerusalem, when various nomadic tribes roaming
certain regions with their tents are assigned to the
Crown or to different Orders of Chivalry;1 and even
to-day, when parts of the Survey Map of Their Cease-
Palestine are crossed by the names of the lessness-
Beni Sab, the Beni Humar, the ‘Arab-el-‘Amarin, and so
forth, just as the map of ancient Palestine is distributed
among the B’ne Naphtali, the B’ne Joseph, the B’ne
Jehudah, and other clans of Israel. All these, ancient
and modern, have been members of the same Semitic
race. Some of them have carried Syria by sudden war;
others have ranged for a long time up and down the

1 Prutz, Z.D.P. V., x. 192, mentions so many ‘ tents’ or ‘tribes ’ as assigned
to the Order of St. John, and argues that the rest belonged to the king.io The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Syrian border, or settled peacefully on the more neglected
parts of the land, till gradually they were weaned from
their pastoral habits, and drawn in among the agricultural
population. To-day you do not see new tribes coming
up from the centre or other end of Arabia to invade
Syria; but you do see a powerful tribe like the Ruwalla,
for instance, ranging every year between the Euphrates
and the Jordan ; or smaller clans like the Ta'amirah of the
Judaean wilderness, or the ‘Adwan of Moab, after living
for centuries by extorting blackmail from the fellahin,
gradually themselves take to agriculture, and submit to
the settled government of the country.1

From all this have ensued two consequences:—

First. The fact that by far the strongest immigration
into Syria has been of a race composed of small inde-
Syria's Popu- pendent tribes, both suits and exaggerates the
lation tribal tendencies of the land itself. v/Syria, as we
shall see in the next chapter, is broken up into a number
of petty provinces, as separated by desert and mountain
as some of the Swiss cantons are by the Alps. These
little clans, which swarmed out of Arabia, fitted the little
shelves and corners of Syria, so that Syria was tribal both
by her form and by the character of her population. It is
partly this, and partly her position between great and hostile
races, which have disabled her from political empire.

Second. The population of Syria has always been essen-
tially Semitic. There are few lands into which so many
divers races have come: as in ancient times
and Semitic. phiiistjnes and Hittites ; then in very large

numbers, Greeks ; then with the Crusades a few hundred
thousands of Franks ; then till the present day more
1 For the present successful policy of the Turks in this, see ch. xxiv.Syria's Place in History

11

Franks, more Greeks, Turks, Kurds, and some colonies
of Circassians. But all these have scarcely even been
grafted on the stock;1 and the stock is Semitic. The
Greek has been the one possible rival of the Semite ; but
Greeks have inhabited only cities, where the death-rate
exceeds the birth-rate, and, were they not renewed from
abroad, they would disappear in the general mass of the
Arab or Syrian population.2

II. Syria’s Relation to the three Continents.

When the Arabian tribes came up from their desert
into Syria, they found themselves on the 'edge of a great
highroad and looking across a sea.') The highroad is that
between Asia and Africa : the sea is that which leads
from the East to Europe. From one of the most remote
positions on the earth they were plunged into the midst of
the world’s commerce and war. While this prevented
them from consolidating into an empire of their own, it
proved the opportunity and development of the marvel-
lous gifts which they brought with them from their age-
long seclusion in the desert.

'"Syria’s position between two of the oldest homes of the

1	In face of the fair hair and blue eyes you often meet in Bethlehem and in
the Lebanon, it is too much to say with Socin (Art. ‘Syria,’ Encyc. Brit.)
‘ that every trace of the presence of Greeks, Romans, and Franks has
completely disappeared.’

2	‘ In Eastern cities the death-rate habitually exceeds the birth-rate, and the
urban population is maintained only by constant recruital from the country,
so that it is the blood of the peasantry which ultimately determines the type
of the population. Thus it is to be explained that after the Arab conquest of
Syria the Greek element in the population rapidly disappeared. Indeed, one
of the most palpable proofs that the populations of all the old Semitic lands
possessed a remarkable homogeneity of character is the fact that in them, and
in them alone, the Arabs and Arab influence took permanent root.’—Robertson
Smith, Religion of the Semites, 12, 13.12 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

human race made her the passage for tjie earliest inter-
course and exchanges of civilisation. ^There is probably
no older road in all the world than that which is still
used by caravans from the Euphrates to the Nile, through
Damascus, Galilee, Esdraelon, the Maritime
Asia and Plain, and Gaza. It is doubtful whether his-
tory has to record any great campaigns—as
distinguished from tribal wars—earlier than those which
Egypt and Assyria waged against each other across
the whole extent of Syria, and continued to wage down
to the sixth century before Christ. But more distant
powers than these broke across this land from both
Asia and Africa. The Hittites came, south from Asia
Minor over Mount Taurus, and the Ethiopians came
north from their conquest of the Nile.1 Towards the
end of the great duel between Assyria and Egypt, the
Scythians from north of the Caucasus devastated Syria.2
When the Babylonian Empire fell, the Persians made her
a province of their empire, and marched across her to
Egypt. At the beginning of our era, she was overrun
by the Parthians.3 The Persians invaded her a second
time,4 just before the Moslem invasion of the seventh
century ; she fell, of course, under the Seljuk Turks in
the eleventh ;5 and in the thirteenth and fourteenth the
Mongols thrice swept through her.6

Into this almost constant stream of empires and races,
which swept through Syria from the earliest ages, Europe

1	2 Chron. xiv. 9.

2	Alluded to Zepli. ii.; Jer. i. 14 ff. Cf. Herodotus i. 104 ff.

8 40 B.c.	4 612-616 A.D., under Chosroes II.	8 1070-1085.

6 In 1240 Syrians and Crusaders stood together to beat back the Khares-
mians; a second Mongol invasion took place in 1260, and a third in 1400
under Timur, which repeated the exportations of early Assyrian days, and
carried off the effective classes of Damascus and other towns to Samarcand.Syria s Place m History

13

was drawn under Alexander the Great; and now that the
West began to invade the East, Syria was found to be as
central between them as between Asia and Between Europe
Africa, ^he was Alexander’s pathway to andtheEast-
Egypt, 332 B.C. She was scoured during the following
centuries by the wars of the Seleucids and Ptolemies,
and her plains were planted all over by their essentially
Greek civilisation. ^Pompey brought her under the Roman
Empire, B.C. 65, and in this she remained till the Arabs
took her, 634 A.D.^ The Crusaders held her for a century,
1098-1187,'and parts of her for a century more : coming
to her, not, like most other invaders, because she was the
road to somewhere else, but because she was herself, in
their eyes, the goal of all roads, the central and most
blessed province of the world, and yet but repeating upon
her the old contest between East and West. Napoleon the
Great made her the pathway of his ambition towards
that empire on the Euphrates and Indus whose fate was
decided on her plains, 1799. Since then, Syria’s history
has mainly consisted in a number of sporadic attempts
on the part of the Western world to plant upon her both
their civilisation and her former religion.

Thus Syria has been a land in which history has very
largely repeated itself; and if we believe that history
never repeats, without explaining, itself, we shall see the
value of all these invasions from Asia, Africa, and Europe
for illustrating that part of Syrian history which is more
especially our interest. What, then, are our authorities
for them all ?

Many of these invasions have left on the land no trace
which is readable by us, but others have stamped their
impression both in monuments, which we can decipher,14 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

and in literature. Of monuments, Hittites,1 Assyrians, and
Egyptians have each left a very few—upon stones north
of the Lebanon, on the rocks by the old coast
and1Assyrian road at the mouth of the Dog River,2 on a
solitary stone near the highroad across the
Hauran,3 on a clay tablet found the other day at Lachish,4
and in some other fragments. But in the Egyptian and
Assyrian annals we have itineraries through Syria, and
records of conquest, most profuse and informing.5 The
only records left by the Antiochi and Ptolemies, besides
the names of certain towns, with a few inscriptions, are
coins, still occasionally picked up by the traveller.6 On the
other hand, Greece and Rome have left their monuments
over the whole land, but especially on the
plains and plateaus : in Lebanon solitary Greek
temples, with inscriptions to the gods of Greece and the
native gods; but across Jordan whole cities, with all the
usual civil architecture of theatres, amphitheatres, forums,
temples, baths, and colonnaded streets. Yet you will see
none earlier than the time Rome threw her shield between

Greek and
Roman.

1	Wright, Empire Of the Hittites ; Conder, Heth and Moab; Sayce’s
Races of the Old Testament; Leon de Lantsheeres, De la race et de la langue
des Hittites, Bruxelles, 1891 ; V. Luschan, etc., Ausgrabnngen in Sendschirli,
1. Einl. v. Inschriften, Berlin, 1893 (not seen). •'

2	Robinson, Later B. R., 618 ff. ; Layard, Discov. in Nineveh, etc., 211 n. ;

Conder, Syrian Stone Lore, 56, 124.	3 Z.D.P. V. xii.

4 Conder, Tell-el-Amama Tablets. P.E.F.Q., 1893, Jan.

6 Lepsius’ Denkmdler aus Aegypten; Records of the Past, esp. Second
Series, with Sayce on Tell-el-Amama Tablets; Tomkins on Campaigns of
Thothmes in. ; recent papers on these subjects in the P.E.F.Q. and Trans,
of the Society of Biblical Archceology ; Conder, Tell-el-Amarna Tablets, 1893.
Above all, W. Max Muller, Asien u. Europa n. altagyp. Denkmiiler, 1893.

6 The authorities on these are :—Gough’s Coins of the Seleucidce, with
Historical Memoirs, London, 1803 ; Gardner, Catalogue of Coins in the
British Museum ; The Seleucid JCings of Syria, London, 1878; De Saulcy
in Melanges de Numismatique (pp. 45-64); and, of course, the relevant
sections in Eckhel, Doc/rina numorum veterum, and in Mionnet.Syrians Place in History

15

the Greek civilisation and the Arab drift from the desert.
There are Roman pavements, bridges, and milestones ;
tombstones of legionaries and officials; imperial and provin-
cial edicts; ascriptions of glory and deity to the emperors.1
The ruins of the buildings of Herod the Great which sur-
vive at Samaria, Caesarea, and elsewhere are all of Greek
character, and must be added to the signs of Western
influence, which found so strenuous an ally in that extra-
ordinary Idumean. Coins also abound from this period
—imperial coins and those of the free Greek cities.2

Through all these ages the contemporary Hebrew,
Greek, and Latin literatures supplement the monuments.
The historical books of the Old Testament, in the form in
which we have them, were composed some centuries after
the earliest events of which they treat; but, so far as their
geography is concerned, they reflect with wonderful accu-
racy the early invasions and immigrations into The Evidence
Syria, which we have other means of following. of the Blble>
In the Hebrew prophets we have contemporary evidence

1	The fullest collection of inscriptions is found in vol. iii. of Le Bas and
Waddington, Inscriptions Grecques et Latines, recueillies en Grece et en
Asie Mineure; text in pt. i., transcriptions and expositions in pt. ii. Cf.
Wetzstein, Ausgewdhlte Griech. u. Lat. Inschriften gesammelt auf Reisen
in den Trachonen u. um das Haurangebirge, from the Transactions of the
Royal Acad, of Sciences, Berlin, 1863, with a map; Clermont-Ganneau,
Recueil d'Archeologie Orientale, Paris, 1888, and various papers in the
P.E.F.Q.', Mordtmann in the Z.D.P.V. vii. 119-124; Allen, ‘On Various
Inscriptions discovered by Merrill on the East of the Jordan,’ in the
American foumal of Philology, vi.; Rendell Harris, Some recently Dis-
covered Inscriptions', my own paper in the Critical Review, Jan. 1892, on
‘Some Unpublished Inscriptions from the Hauran,’ twelve in all, which I
have republished in the end of this book. For any relevant Semitic in-
scriptions, see the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, Paris, 1881 ff.
Cf. Mommsen, Provinces of the Roman Empire.

2	These are still being found in considerable numbers. The authorities
are:—F. de Saulcy, Numismatique de la Terre Sainte, Paris, 1874 5
Madden, Coins of the fews (in part); Eckhel, and Mionnet.16 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

of the Assyrian, Egyptian, Scythian, Babylonian, and
Persian invasions: to all these the pages of prophecy
are as sensitive as the reed-beds of Syria are to the
passage of the wind and the flood. Later books,
like Daniel and Ecclesiastes, and fragments of books,
like some Psalms, betray by their style of thought,
and by their language, that Israel has felt the first
Greek influences. The books of the Maccabees and
Josephus trace for us the course of Greek and Roman
advance, the long struggle over plain and mountain—the
Hellenisation of the former, the final conquest of the
latter by Rome. The Gospels are full of signs of the
Roman supremacy—publicans, taxesv Caesar’s superscrip-
tion on coins, the centurions, the incubus of the Legion,
the authority of Caesar. The Acts tell us how upon the
west of Jordan Rome defended Christianity from Judaism,
as upon the east she shielded Hellenism from the desert
barbarians. In Pagan literature we have by this time
many histories and geographies with large information
about the Graeco-Roman influence in Syria up to the
Fall of Jerusalem.1

For the first six centuries of our era Syria was a province
of the Empire, in which, for a time, Hellenism was more at
E^iy Chris- home than in Hellas itself, and Christianity
tian Records. was first persecuted and then established by
Western edicts and arms. The story of this is told
by the Syrian and Greek historians of the Church, the

1 Polybius passim ; Diodorus Siculus; Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander, ii.;
Quintus Curtius, iv. ; Strabo’s Geography, especially xvi. 2, and Ptolemy’s;
Geographi Greed Minores (edd., Hudson, Oxford, 1698-1712, and Muller,
Paris, 1855-61); Pliny’s Hist. Nat., v. 13-19; Tacitus. In English, cf. Gibbon;
Mommsen’s Provinces of the Roman Empire; Schiirer’s Hist, of the Jewish
People in the Time of Christ, Eng., 1890 ff. ; Morrison’s The Jews under
Roman Rule, 1890; Mahaffy, The Greek World under Roman Sway, 1890.Syria s Place in History

17

lives of some saints, and some writings of the Fathers.1
It is supplemented by the Christian remains (especially
east of the Jordan), churches, tombs, and houses, with
many inscriptions in Greek and Aramaeic.2 The latest
Greek inscription in Eastern Palestine appears to be from
a year or two after the Moslem invasion.

The next European settlement in Syria was very much
more brief. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem de facto
lasted from 1099 to 1187—not ninety years ; Authorities on
and the coast was Western a century longer. the Crusades-
All the more are we astonished at the impression left on
the land. In their brief day, these few hundred thousands
of colonists and warriors, though the sword was never out
of their hand, organised the land into a feudal kingdom as
fully assigned, cultivated, and administered as any part of
contemporary France or England. Their chroniclers3 do
justice to their courage and exploits on the field, as well
as to their treachery, greed, and lust: but to see how truly
they made Syria a bit of the West, we need to go to that
wonderful work, the Assises of ferusalem, to the documents

1 Eusebius, History of the Church and Life of Constantine. The History
was continued by Socrates for the years 306-439, by Sozomen largely in imita-
tion of Socrates, and by Theodoret and Evagrius to 594. Stephanus Byzan-

tinus (probably in Justinian’s reign) wrote the ’EQvuca, of which we have
only an epitome. The history of Zosimus is that of the Roman Empire
from Augustus to 410. Jerome’s Letters and his Commentaries, passim.
The lives especially of Hilarion, by Jerome, and of Porphyry in the Acta
Sanctorum. See ch. xi.	2 See ch. xxviii.

3 The best are William, Archbishop of Tyre (1174-1188?), Historia rerum
in partibus transmarinis gestarum a tempore successorum Mahumeth usque
ad a.d. 1184; Geoffrey Vinsauf, Ltinerarium Regis Anglorum Richardi;
Bongars’ Gesta Dei per Francos ; Jacques de Vitry ; De Joinville’s Meiiioirs
of Louis LX. From the Saracen side, Boha-ed-Din’s Life of Saladin, with
excerpts from the History of Abulfeda, etc., ed. Schultens, 1732 ; and Mad-
ed-Din, El-Katib el Isfahani; Conquete de la Syrie et de la Palestine, publie
par le Comte Carlo de Landberg : 1., Texte Arabe. Leyden, 1888.18 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

of the great Orders of Chivalry,1 and to the buildings
they have scattered all over the land.2

The pilgrim literature, which, apart from trade, repre-
sents the sole connection between the West and Syria in
Pilgrims and the centuries between the Moslem invasion
Traders. and Qrusa(jes and between the Crusades
and last century, is exceedingly numerous. Most of it, too,
is accessible in modern translations.3 After the Crusades
the Venetians and Genoese continued for a century or
two their factories on the Phoenician coast, by which the
products of the Far East came to Europe.4

1	The authorities here are :— E. Rey, Les Colonies Franques deSyrie, aux
xiimt et xiiitne Steeles, Paris, 1883 ; Prutz, Evjwickelung v. Untergang des
Tempcl-Herrett Ordens, Berlin, 1888 (not seen); Prutz’s and Rohricht’s papers
on the Charters, Papal Bulls, and other documents referring to the Orden der
Deutsch Herren and other Orders in Z.D.P. V., vols. viii. and x. See also
Conder’s papers in the P.E.F.Q., vols. 1889 ff. The best edition of the
Assizes of Jerusalem, by John d’lbelin, is Beugnot’s in Recueil des Historiens
des Croisades (Paris, 1841-1881). On the Crusades generally, cf. Gibbon;
Cox’s little manual in the Epochs of History ; Sybel, Gesckichte der Kreuzziige;
Karlen u. Plane zur Paldstina-kunde aus dent 7 bis 10 Jahrhundert, by
Bernhold Rohricht, i., ii., and iii., in Z.D.P. V., vols. xiv. and xv. ;
Rohricht’s Regesta Regni Hierosolymitani, 1893 (not seen).

2	On Crusading masonry, see Conder in the P.E.F. Mem., Samaria under
Caesarea, and Judaea under Ascalon. On the fortresses, see Rey, op. cit.
ch. vii., with plans and views. On the churches, De Vogue, £glises de la
Terre Sainte ; cf. his Architecture civile et religieuse de la Syrie.

3	In Bohn’s Early 7ravels in Palestine; the translations of the Palestine
Pilgrims’ Text Society ; Tobler’s Itineraria Hierosolymilana; the French
Archives de la Sociiti d'Orient Latin; Carmoly’s Itineraires de la Terre
Sainte des xiiime-xviime slides, Bruxelles, 1847. I have also found it useful
to consult Reyssbttch des heiligen Landes, das ist eine grundtliche Be-
schreibung aller u. jeder Meer u. Bilgerfahrten zum heyl. Lande, etc. etc.,
Franckfort am Mayn, mdlxxxiii. ; the indispensable Quaresmius, Historica,
Theologica et Moralis Terras Sandce Elucidatio, Antwerp, 1639 ; and Pietri
Della Valle’s Reisebeschreibung, translated from the Italian, Genflf, 1674, but
only a few of his ‘ Sendschreiben ’ refer to Syria.

4	Besides Rey, who treats of the commerce of the Crusades (op. cit. ch. ix.),
the only authorities I know of are Heyd, Geschichte des Levantehandels im Mit-
telalter, Stuttgart, 1879, 2 vols. ; in French, much enlarged, Leipzig, 1885-86,
2 vols; and Discorsosopra il CommerciodegliItaliani nelsec. xiv., Roma, 1818.Syria s Place hi History

19

Of Napoleon’s invasion we have very full information,
which not only illustrates the position of Syria as debatable
ground between the East and the West, but is Napoleon's
especially valuable for the light it throws upon Invasion.
the military geography of the Holy Land. One cannot
desire a more comprehensive, a more lucid, outline of the
relations of Syria to Egypt, to Asia, to Europe, than is
given in the memoirs of his campaigns, dictated by
Napoleon himself while the accounts of his routes and
the reasons given for them, his sieges, his losses from
the plague, and his swift retreat, enable us to understand
the movements of even the most ancient invaders of the
land. Napoleon’s memoirs may be supplemented by the
accounts of the English officers who were with the Turkish
forces.2

vThe European invasion of Syria, which belongs to our
own day, is already making its impression on the land.
Nothing surprised the writer more, on his

Present Influ-

return to the Holy Land in 1891, after an ence of Europe
interval of eleven years, than the great in- onSyna’
crease of red and sloping roofs in the landscape. These
always mean the presence of Europeans : and where they
appear, and the flat roofs beloved of Orientals are not
visible, then the truly Western aspect of nature in the Holy
Land asserts itself, and one begins to understand how
Greeks, Italians, and Franks all colonised, and for cen-
turies were at home in, this province of Asia. The Temple
Christians from Wiirttemberg have perhaps done more to
improve the surface of the country than any other Western

1	Gtierre de V Orient: Campagnes d' Egypte et de Syrie. Memoires dictees
par Napoleon lui-meme et publiees par General Bertrand, Paris, 1847.

2	Walsh, Diary of the late Campaign, 1799-1801; Wittman, M.D., Travels
in Syria, etc., 1799-1801, . . . in company with the Turkish Army.20 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

agency.1 A Roman Catholic colony has been planted on
the shores of the Lake of Galilee. There is an agricultural
settlement for Jews near Jaffa, another colony at Artuf,
and the Rothschild settlements above Lake Huleh. The
Plain of Esdraelon is in the hands of a Greek capitalist.
Other Western settlers are scattered over Palestine and
Lebanon, and almost everywhere the cultivation of the
vine and the silk-worm is spreading rapidly under Euro-
pean care. Large Circassian colonies, planted by the
Turkish Government itself near Caesarea and east of Jordan,
must in time considerably affect both the soil and the
population about them.2 But the most important material
innovation from the West is the railway. The line just com-
pleted between Jaffa and Jerusalem will be useful, it seems,
only for pilgrims. Much more effect on the future of Syria
may be expected from the line which follows the natural
routes of commerce and war through the land from Haifa
to Damascus.3 Not only will it open up the most fertile
parts of the country, and bring back European civilisation
to where it once was supreme, on the east of Jordan ;
but if ever European arms return to the country—as, in
a contest for Egypt or for the Holy Places, when may they

1	On these interesting colonies see their journal, Die Warte des Tempels ;
papers in recent volumes of the Z.D.P. V. ; and the account of them in Ross,
Cradle of Christianity, London, 1891.

2	Their three chief colonies are Caesarea, Jerash, and Rabbath Ammon,
the last two of which I visited in 1891. The Government plays them and
the Beduin off against each other. They are increasing the area of cultivated
land, and improving the methods of agriculture. Perhaps the greatest change
is their introduction of wheeled vehicles, which have not been seen in Palestine
since the Crusades, except within the last twenty years, when they have been
confined to the Jaffa-Jerusalem and Beyrout-Damascus roads and the Temple
colonies. See Appendix on ‘ Roads and "Wheeled Vehicles.’

3	Across Esdraelon, over the Jordan by Bethshan, round the south-east
corner of the Lake of Galilee to opposite Tiberias, then up the gorge of File
to the plateau of the Hauran, and so to Damascus.Syria s Place in History

21

not return ?—this railway running from the coast across
the central battle-field of Palestine will be of immense
strategic value.1

III. Syria’s Opportunity Westward.

In the two previous sections of this chapter we have
seen Syria only in the passive state, overrun by those
Arabian tribes who have always formed the stock of her
population, and traversed, conquered and civilised by the
great races of Asia, Africa, and Europe. But in the
two remaining sections we are to see Syria in the active
state—we are to see these Arab tribes, who have made
her their home, pushing through the single opportunity
given to them, and exercising that influence in which
their glory and hers has consisted. It will be best to
describe first the Opportunity, and then the Influence
itself—which, of course, was mainly that of religion.

In early times Syria had only one direction along which
she could exercise an influence on the rest of the world.
We have seen that she had nothing to give Syria's single
to the great empires of the Nile and Euphra- °Penln&*
tes on either side of her ; from them she could be only
a borrower. Then Mount Taurus, though no barrier to
peoples descending upon Syria from Asia Minor, seems
always to have barred the passage in the opposite direc-
tion. The Semitic race has never crossed Mount Taurus.

1 The European missionary and educational establishments fall rather under
the section of Religion.22

The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Practically, therefore, early Syria’s only opening lay sea-
wards. If she had anything to pour forth of her own, or
of what she had borrowed from the civilisations on either
side of her, this must be the direction of outflow. So some
of her tribes, whose race had hitherto been known only as
land traders, voyagers of the desert, pushed out from her
coasts upon the sea. They found it as studded with
islands as the desert is studded with oases, and by means
of these they gradually reached the very west of Europe.

The first of these islands is within sight of Syria.
Cyprus is clearly visible from the hills of northern Syria

immediately opposite to it, and at certain sea-

The Mediter-	J vr .	»

ranean	sons of the year may even be descried from

Islands.	'

Lebanon above Beirut.1 From Cyprus the
coast of Asia Minor is within reach, and the island of
Rhodes at the beginning of the Greek Archipelago;
whence the voyage was easy, even for primitive naviga-
tion, to the Greek mainland, Sicily, Malta, the African
coast, Spain and the Atlantic, or north by Italy to Sar-
dinia, Corsica and the coast of Gaul. Along those islands
and coasts the line of Phoenician voyages can be traced
by the deposit of Semitic names, inscriptions and legends.2

1 See ch. vii., on the Coast.

a For the Phoenician inscriptions in Cyprus, Rhodes, Sicily, Malta,
Carthage, Sardinia, Spain, and Marseilles, see the Corpus Inscriptionum
Semiticarum, vol. i. part i. For names, take the following as instances:—
Kition, in Cyprus, is the Hebrew Chittim (see ch. vii.). Mount Atabyrus,
in Rhodes, is Mount Tabor, a Semitic term for height. Here Diodorus tells
us Zeus was worshipped as a bull, evidently a trace of the Baal-Moloch
worship. On many ZEgean islands the worship of Chronos points to the
same source. The Cyprian Aphrodite herself is just Ashtoreth ; and her
great feast was at the usual Semitic festival season in the beginning of April,
her sacrifice a sheep (Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 387). One
proof of Phoenician influence is the presence of Beri/Xai ( = Beth-el), or sacred
stones, conical or ovoid pillars. One was in the temple of Aphrodite atSyria s Place in History

23

It is not surprising that the early Greek civilisation, which
they did so much to form, should have given the Phoeni-
cians the fame of inventors. But they were Phoenician
not much more than carriers. At this early Influence-
stage of her history Syria had little to give to the West
except what she had wholly or partly borrowed. Her
art was Egyptian ; the letters she introduced to Europe
were from Egyptian sources ; even the commercial terms
which she brought into the Greek language from Asia may
not have been her own. But quite original were other
droppings of her trade on Greece—names of the letters, of
vegetables, metals, and some wares,1 and most, though not
all, of the religion she conveyed. The exact debt of Greek
religion to Phoenicia will never be known, but the more
we learn of both races the more we see how big it was.
Myths, rites, morals, all spread westwards, and formed
some of the earliest constituents of Greek civilisation.
The most of the process was probably over before history
begins, for Tarshish was in existence by 1100 B.c.; and

Paphos (Tacitus, Hist. ii. 3). In Sicily a Carthaginian coin has been dis-
covered with the legend ‘BARAT’=‘the wells,’ the Phoenician name for
Syracusa. Farther west, Carthage is Qarta Hadasha, ‘ the New City ’; Cadiz,
or Gades, is Gadira, from ‘gadir,’ a fenced place (see Bloch’s Phoenician
Glossary). Tarshish is also of Semitic formation, but of doubtful meaning.
Port Mahon, in Minorca, is from the Carthaginian general, Mago. Among
the legends are, of course, those of Perseus and Andromeda, Cadmus (from
‘Kedem,’ the East), Europa, etc.

1 The following are some of the Phoenician loanwords in Greek :—The
names of the letters Alpha, Beta, etc. ; commercial terms, appafiwv, interest

= j)2“iy; fiva, weight or coin = i13D; Ki^aWrjs, pirate, from	booty.

The name of at least one animal, f>DJ = the camel; names of vegetables,
like v<r<rw7ros = D1IN; j3a\oaju.ov = Dt^l; tempos, Lawsonia alba = “IDJ ; \ij3avos,
frankincense tree = 1133^ ; Kama = HJPVp, etc. etc. ; of other objects, xiTWV =

HJDD (?) ; kXw{3os, bird-cage = 3)^3, etc. The religious term Beru\ai=sacred
stones, is the Semitic Beit-el, or Bethel.24 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

perhaps the Phoenician migration and establishment of
colonies in the West was connected with the disturbances
in Syria in the fourteenth century. Another important
emigration took place five centuries later. About 800,
some fugitives from Tyre founded near an old
Carthage. Phoenician settlement on the coast of Africa,
opposite Sicily, another colony called Qarta Hadasha.
That is almost good Hebrew for ‘the New City/ and
has been corrupted by the Greeks into Carchedon, and
by the Romans into Carthago. In the sixth century
Carthage obtained the sovereignty over her sister colonies
in the West;1 and in the fifth century, while the Northern
East under Persia assailed Greece across Asia Minor, the
Semitic portion of the East twice assailed Greece across
Sicily under the leadership of Carthage.2 The second
assault was led by one whose name was Hannibal, and
whose title, like that of all Phoenician magistrates, was
Shophet. But Shophet is pure Hebrew, the title of
Israel’s rulers from Joshua to Samuel. And Hannibaal
is just ‘ the grace of Baal.’ Put Jah for Baal, and you have
the Hebrew Hananiah ; or reverse the word, and you have
Johanan, the Greek Ioannes and our John.3 The Greek
colonies in Sicily held their own—held their own, but did
not drive the invaders forth. It was reserved for another
power to do this and keep the Semite out of Europe.

The first Punic—that is, Poinic, <f>olvuco<;, Phoenician—
War, in which Rome engaged, was for Sicily, and Rome
Her Defeat won it, expelling the Syrian colonists from
by Rome. the island. In revenge, Hamilcar crossed
the Straits of Gibraltar in 237 ; and by 218 his son,

1 Freeman’s Sicily (Story of the Nations series), p. 56.

- 480-473, and again 413-404.	3 Cf. Freeman, op. cit., p. 21.Syrians Place in History

25

Hannibal the Great, had conquered Spain, and crossed the
Alps into Italy. But again it was proved that Europe
was not to be for the Semites, and Hannibal was driven
back. By 205 the Romans had conquered the Iberian
peninsula, passed over into Africa, and made that a
Roman province.1 How desperate was the struggle,
how firmly the Syrians had planted themselves in the
West, may be seen from the fact that seven hundred years
after the destruction of Carthage men still talked Punic
or Phoenician in North Africa; the Bible itself was trans-
lated into the language,2 and this only died out before its
kindred dialect of Arabic in the eighth century of our era.

During the glory of Carthage the Phoenician navies,
crowded out of the eastern Mediterranean by the Greek
and Italian races, pushed westward through
the Straits of Gibraltar to the Canary Isles,3 to Phoenician
a strange sea of weeds which may have been
the same Columbus met towards America,4 to the west of
Gaul, the Scilly Isles,5 and therefore surely to Britain ;
while an admiral of Tyre, at the motion of Pharaoh Necho,
circumnavigated Africa in 600 B.c.,6 or 2000 years before
Vasco da Gama.

After the fall of Carthage—the fall of Tyre had hap-
pened a hundred years before—the Phoenician genius
confined itself to trading, with occasionally a Later
little mercenary war. Under the Roman Em- Phoemc,a-
pire, Phoenicians were to be found all round the Mediter-
ranean, with their own quarters and temples in the large

1	Fifty years later they were interfering in the affairs of the real Phoenicia,
and one hundred and fifty later they had reduced Syria to a province also.

2	Augustine.	3 Diodorus Siculus, v. 19-20.

4	Scylax, Periplus, 112, in the Geographi Grceci Minores (ed. Muller, i. 93).

5	Cassiterides, or tin islands (Strabo, iii. v. 11).	0 Herodotus, iv. 42.26 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

towns. When Rome’s hold on the East became firm at
the beginning of our era, Syrians1 flowed into Italy—as
Juvenal puts it, the Orontes into the Tiber. There were
a few good rhetoricians, grammarians, poets and wits
among them, but the mass were slave-dealers, panders
and mongers of base superstitions.

During all this time—from the thirteenth century of the
old era to the first of the new—there had stood upon the
highlands immediately behind Phoenicia a nation speaking
almost identically the same dialect; and this nation had
heard the Phoenician tales of those western isles and coasts:
Israel and °f Chittim, that is, Cyprus, and of Rodan, that
Phoenicia. jSj Rhodes; Javan, or the Ionians; Elissa,
some farther coast of Sicily or Italy ; and Tarshish, which
was the limit in Spain. And though this tribe had no
port of their own, nor were in touch with the sea at all,
their imagination followed the Phoenician voyages, but
with a nobler ambition than that of gain, and claimed
those coast-lands, on which the gross Semitic myths had
caught, for high ideals of justice, mercy, and the know-
ledge of the true God.2 When one has learned the
impressionableness of the early Greek to the religion
which Syria sent him by the Phoenicians, and remembers
how closely Israel stood neighbour to Phoenicia in place,
in language, in political alliance, one’s fancy starts the
question, What if Phoenicia had also been the carrier of
Israel’s faith, as of Egypt’s letters, Babylon’s wares and
the wild Semitic myths! It was impossible. When
Phoenicia was still a religious influence in the West, Israel
either had not arrived in Palestine, or was not so expert
in the possibilities of her own religion as to commend it

1 Also Nabateans, cf. C.I.S., P. i. tom. ii. 183 ff.	2 Isaiah xlii.Syria's Place in History

2 7

to other peoples—though those were her neighbours and
kinsmen according to the flesh; and when Israel knew
herself as God’s servant to the whole world, and con-
ceived Phoenician voyages as means of spreading the
truth westward, the Phoenicians were no longer the cor-
respondents, but the enemies, of every other race upon the
northern and western shores of the Mediterranean. Take,
for instance, the time of Elijah, when Israel In the time
and Phoenicia stood together perhaps more
closely than at any other period. The slope of religious
influence was then, not from Israel to Phoenicia, but from
Phoenicia to Israel. It is the attempt to spread into
foreign lands the worship of Baal, not the worship of
Jehovah, that we see. It is Jezebel who is the mission-
ary, not Elijah; and the paradox is perfectly intelligible.
The zeal of Jezebel proceeded from these two conceptions
of religion: that among the same people several gods
might be worshipped side by side—Phoenician Baal in the
next temple to Jehovah of Israel; and that religion was
largely a matter of politics. Because she was queen in
Israel, and Baal was her god, therefore he ought to be one of
Israel’s gods as well. But it is better not to be a mission-
ary-religion at all than to be one on such principles; and
Israel’s task just then was to prove that Jehovah was the
one and only God for her own life. If she first proved
this on the only true ground—that He was the God of
justice and purity—then the time would certainly come
when He would appear, for the same reason, the God of the
whole earth, with irresistible claims upon the allegiance of
Phoenicia and the West. So, with one exception, Elijah
confined his prophetic work to Israel, and looked seaward
only for rain. But by Naboth’s vineyard and other matters28 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

he taught his people so well the utter difference of Jehovah
from other gods—being as He was identical with righteous-
ness, and therefore supreme—that it naturally followed
that Israel should see This was the Deity whose interests,
whose activity, whose dominion were universal. But that
carries us into the heart of our next subject, the Religion
in the later °f Syria—the inquiry, why Israel alone of
Prophets. Syrian tribes came to so pure a faith, and so
sure a confidence of its victory over the world. Let us
finish this section by pointing out that when the prophets
of Israel did rise to the consciousness of the universal
dominion of their religion, it was to Phoenician means—
those far Phoenician voyages we have been following—
that they looked for carrying it into effect. To the
prophets Phoenicia and her influence are a great and a
sacred thing. They exult in her opportunities, in her
achievements. Isaiah and Ezekiel bewail the destruction
of Tyre and her navies as desecration. Isaiah cannot
believe it to be final. He sees Phoenicia rising purified
by her captivity to be the carrier of true religion to the
ends of the earth.1

IV. The Religion of Syria.

We have seen that Syria, Esh-Sham, is but ‘ the north ’
end of the Semitic world, and that from the earliest times
her population has been essentially Semitic. By this it
was determined that her role in history should be predomi-
nantly the religious. The Semites are the religious leaders
of humanity. The three great monotheisms have risen

1 Isaiah xxiii. ; Ezekiel xxvi. ff.Syria s Place in History

29

among them ; the grandest prophets of the world have
been their sons. For this high destiny the race were
prepared by their age-long seclusion in Arabia.

In the deserts of Arabia, life is wonderfully temper of the
tempered. Nature is monotonous, the dis-
tractions are few, the influence of things seen is as weak
as it may be in this universe; the long fasts, necessary
every year, purge the body of its grosser elements, the soul
easily detaches itself, and hunger lends the mind a curious
passion, mixed of resignation and hot anger. The only
talents are those of war and of speech—the latter culti-
vated to a singular augustness of style by the silence of
nature and the long leisure of life.1 It is the atmosphere
in which seers, martyrs, and fanatics are bred. Conceive
a race subjected to its influences for thousands of years!
To such a race give a creed, and it will be an apostolic
and a devoted race.

Now, it has been maintained that the desert did furnish
the Arab with a creed, as well as with a religious tempera-
ment. M. Renan has declared that the Semite, living
where nature is so uniform, must be a monotheist;2 but
this thesis has been disproved by every fact Not naturally
discovered among the Semites since it was Monotheists.
first promulgated. The Semitic religions, with two excep-
tions (one of which, Islam, is largely accounted for-by the

1	Our chief authorities for life in Arabia in ancient and modern times are
such travellers as Ludovico Varthema, who went down with the Haj to Mecca
in 1503 (Hakluyt Society’s publications); Burckhardt, Burton, and especially
Doughty (Arabia Deserla, 2 vols., Cambridge, 1887), who knows the
Bedawee, ‘ the unsophisticated Semite,’ as never Western did before. Cf.
Wellhausen, Skizzen, etc., iii., Reste des Arabischen Heidentums ; Robertson
Smith, Marriage and Kinship in Arabia and The Religion of the Semites.

2	Histoire des langues semitiques, ed. 3, 1863; ‘De la part des peuples
semitiques,’ Asiatic Review, Feb. and May 1859 ; and, in a modified form,
in his Histoire d'Israel, vol. i.30 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

other, Judaism), have not been monotheistic. Introduced
to the Euphrates valley, or to Syria, where the forces of
nature are as complex and suggestive of many gods as
any part of the Aryan world itself, the Semite has gone
the way of the Aryans—nay, has preceded them in this
way, not only developing a polytheism and mythology
of great luxuriance, but proving its missionary to the
Greeks. The monotony of the desert, however, counts
for something; the desert does not tempt to polytheism.
Besides, all Semitic religions have been distinguished by
a tendency which makes strongly for unity. Within
each tribe there was but one tribal god, who was bound
up with his people’s existence, and lyho was their only
lord and head. This belief was favourable to monotheism.
It trained men to reduce all things under one cause, to
fix their attention on a sovereign deity; and the desert,
bare and monotonous, conspired with the habit.

We may, then, replace Renan’s thesis, that the Semite
was a born monotheist, by this: that in the Semitic
religion, as in the Semitic world, monotheism

An Oppor-	.	■

tunity for had a great opportunity. There was no neces-
Monotheism. sary creed in Arabia, but for the highest form

of religion there was room and sympathy as nowhere else
in the world to the same degree.

Of this opportunity only one Semitic tribe took advan-
tage, and the impressive fact is that the advantage was
taken, not in Arabia, but in Syria herself—that

Uniqueness

of Israel's is to say, on the soil whose rich and complex

Monotheism. r	0	f

forces drew all other Semitic tribes away irom
the austerity of their desert faith, and turned them into
polytheists of the rankest kind. The natural fertility of
Syria, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, intoxicatedSyria s Place in History

3i

her immigrants with nature-worship; the land was
covered, not by one nation with its one god, but by
many little tribes, each with its patron and lord ; while,
to make confusion worse confounded, the influence of the
powerful idolatries of Egypt and Mesopotamia met and
were combined upon her. Yet Syria, and not the Desert
of Arabia, was the cradle of monotheism. The period
in which this became manifest was, no doubt, one when
her history for the first time counteracted to some degree
the variety of her natural charms, the confusion of her
many faiths. Israel’s monotheism became indisputable
in the centuries from the eighth to the sixth B.C., the
period of the great Assyrian invasions described in Sec-
tion II. of this chapter. Before the irresistible Assyrian
advance the tribal gods of Syria—always identified with
the stability of their peoples—went down one after another,
and history became reduced to a uniformity analogous to
that of nature in the Semitic desert. It was in meeting
the problems, which this state of affairs excited, that the
genius of Israel rose to a grasp of the world as a whole,
and to faith in a sovereign Providence. This Providence
was not the military Empire that had levelled the world ;
He was not any of the gods of Assyria. He was Israel’s
own tribal Deity, who was known to the world but as the
God of the few hills on which His nation hardly main-
tained herself. Fallen she was as low as her neighbours ;
taunted she was by them and by her adversaries to
prove that Jehovah could save her any more than the
gods of Hamath or Damascus or the Philistines had saved
them :1 yet both on the eve of her fall, and in her deepest
abasement, Israel affirmed that Jehovah reigned ; that He

1 Isaiah x. 8-11 ; xxxvi. 18-20; xxxvii. 12, 13.32 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

was Lord of the hosts of heaven and earth; that Assyria
was only a tool in His hand.

Why did Israel alone rise to this faith ? Why did no
other of the gods of the Syrian clans, Baals and Molochs,
take advantage of the opportunity ? Why should the
people of Jehovah alone see a universal Providence in
the disasters which they shared, and ascribe it to Him ?

The answer to these questions is the beginning of Syria’s
supreme rank in the religious history of mankind. It is
writ, beyond all misreading, in the prophets

The reason of	.	,	r	, . ,

Israel's Mono- of the time and in the history of Israel which

theism.	preceded the prophets. To use their own

phrase, the prophets saw Jehovah exacted in righteousness.
And this was not their invention : it had been implicit in
Israel’s conception of Jehovah from a very early age. In
what are confessedly ancient documents, Jehovah is the
cause of Israel’s being, of the union of their tribes, of their
coming to Palestine, of their instinct to keep separate from
other peoples, even when they do not seem to have been
conscious of a reason why. But from the first this influ-
ence upon them was ethical. It sifted the great body of
custom and law which was their common heritage with all
other Semitic tribes ; it added to this both mercy and
justice, mitigating the cruelty of some laws, where innocent
or untried life was in danger, but strenuously enforcing
others, where custom, greed or tyranny had introduced
carelessness with regard to the most sacred interests of
life.1 We may not always be sure of the dates of these
laws, but it is past all doubt that the ethical agent at

1 As, for instance, in the matter of homicide. The contrast of Israel’s laws
on this with the prevailing Semitic customs, is very significant of the ethical
superiority of Israel.Syria s Place in History

^ *
00

work in them was at work in Israel from the beginning,
and was the character, the justice, the holiness of Jehovah.
But at first it was not in law so much as in the events of
the people’s history that this character impressed them
They knew all along that He had found them, chosen
them, brought them to the land, borne with them, forgiven
them, redeemed them in His love and in His pity, so
that, though it were true that no law had come to them
from Him, the memory of all He had been to them, the
influence of Himself in their history, would have remained
their distinction among the peoples. Even in that rude
time His grace had been mightier than His law.

On such evidence we believe the assertion of the
prophets, that what had made Israel distinct from her
kinsfolk, and endowed her alone with the solu-

Revelation.

tion <pf the successive problems of history and
with her high morality, was the knowledge of a real Being
and intercourse with Him. This is what Revelation means.
Revelation is not the promulgation of a law, nor the predic-
tion of future events, nor ‘ the imparting to man of truths,
which he could not find out for himself.’ All these ideas
of Revelation are modern, and proved false by the only
true method of investigation into the nature of Revela-
tion, viz., a comparison of Scripture with those heathen
religions from which the religion of Israel sprang, but was
so differentiated by the Spirit of God. Such a comparison
shows us that the subject of Revelation is the character
of God Himself. God had chosen the suitable Semitic
temper and circumstance to make Himself known through
them in His righteousness and love for men. This alone
raised Israel to her mastery of history in the Assyrian
period, when her political fortunes were as low, and her

C34 The Historical Geography of the Holy Lcihd

extinction, humanly speaking, as probable as that of her
kindred. This alone preserved her in loyalty to her God,
and in obedience to His law, during the following centuries,
when the other Syrian peoples gave way to the inrush of
the Hellenic spirit, and Zeus, Athene, Apollo, Aphrodite
and the goddesses of Fortune and Victory, displaced, or
were amalgamated with, the discredited Semitic deities.

Having solved with the prophets the problem set to
her faith by the great Oriental empires, Israel entered—
Israel and upon the same floor of Syria—on her struggle
Hellenism.	^e stranger forces of the West, with the

genius of Hellenism, and with the dominion of Rome. It
is interesting, but vain, to speculate on what would have
happened if the Maccabean age had produced a mind like
Isaiah’s or Jeremiah’s, or had met Greece with another spirit
than that of Ecclesiastes, or of the son of Sirach. As it was,
the age fell far below that of the prophets in insight and in
faith. The age of the Maccabees is a return to that of the
Judges and Saul, with the Law as a new inspiration. The
spiritual yields to the material, though the material is fought
for with a heroism which makes the period as brilliant as
any in the history of Israel. For a few years the ideal
borders of Israel are regained, the law of Moses is imposed
on Greek cities, the sea is reached, and the hope of Israel
looks westward from a harbour of her own.1 The conflict
with Hellenism intensifies the passion for the Law, the
conflict with Rome, the passion for the land and political
independence. In either case it is the material form which
becomes the main concern of the people. Nevertheless, as
Paul has taught us to see in his explanation of history,2
this devotion to the letter of Law and Prophecy was a
1 Sec p. 136.	a Cf. Robertson Smith, O.T.J.C., 315 ff.Syria's Place in History

35

discipline for something higher. By keeping the command-
ments, and cherishing the hopes, in however mechanical a
way, Israel held herself distinct and pure. And, therefore,
though she felt the land slipping from under her, and con-
soled herself, as her hold on this world became less sure,
with an extraordinary development of apocalypse—visions
of another world that are too evidently the refuges of her
despair in this—she still kept alive the divinest elements
in her religion, the gifts of a tender conscience, and of the
hope of a new redemption under the promised Messiah.

He came in Jesus of Nazareth. He came when the
political estate of Israel was very low. He was born into
the Empire : He grew up within fifteen miles

Jesus Christ.

of the great port by which Rome poured her
soldiers and officials upon His land. His youth saw
Herod’s embellishment of Palestine with Greek archi-
tecture. The Hellenic spirit breathed across all the land.
Jesus felt the might and the advantage of these forces,
which now conspired to build upon Syria so rich a monu-
ment of Pagan civilisation. When He had been endowed
by the Spirit with the full consciousness of what He could
be, He was tempted, we are told, to employ the marvellous
resources of Greece and Rome. The Devil taketh Him up
into an exceeding high mountain and showeth Him all the
kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them. In that day
such a vision was nowhere in the world so possible as in
Syria. But He felt it come to Him wedded to apostasy.
A ll these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and
worship me. And He replied from the Hebrew Scriptures
with a confession of allegiance to the God of Israel : Get
thee behind me, Satan, for it is written, Thou shalt worship
Jehovah thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve. Also36 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

on other occasions He made an absolute distinction
between Israel and the Gentiles : Not as the Gentiles, He
His view of the said, for after all these things do the Gentiles
Gentile world. seep^ }jUt y0ur heavenly Father knoweth that ye

have need of these things. Ye zv or ship ye knozv not what, we
knozv zvhat we zvorship, for the salvation is from the Jews.
I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

But within Israel and her Scriptures Jesus made great
distinctions. He said that much of Scripture was tem-
His judgment porary, given at the time because of the hard-
of Israel. ness	pe0pie’s hearts, laws and customs

that had passed away with the rise to a new stage in God's
education of the world. The rest He confirmed, He used
for feeding His own soul, and for teaching and leading
others to God. Within the nation, also, He distinguished
between the true and the false Israel. He insisted that,
especially of late, Judaism had gone astray, laying too much
emphasis on the letter of the law, nay, adding intolerably
to this, and wrongly, foolishly, desiring the external king-
dom. He insisted on the spiritual as against the external,
on the moral as against the ceremonial, on grace as above
law. So the religious authorities were moved against Him.

But their chief cause of offence—and it has ever since
been the stumbling-block of many who count His ethical
His claims teaching supreme—was the claim He made
for Himself. for Himself. He represented Himself not only
as the Messiah, but as indispensable to the race ; He not
only read the whole history of Israel as a preparation for
Himself, but, looking forward, He claimed to inspire, to
rule, and to judge all history of men for all time to
come. A little bit of Syria was enough for His own
ministry, but He sent His disciples into the whole37

Syria s Place in History

world. Morality He identified with obedience to Himself.
Men’s acceptance by God He made dependent on their
acceptance of His claims and gifts. He announced the
forgiveness of sins absolutely, yet connected it with His
own death. He has given the world its highest idea of God,
yet He made Himself one with God. He predicted His
death, and that He should rise again : and to His disciples
not expecting this He did appear, and, in the power of their
conviction that God had proved His words and given Him
the victory over death, He sent them into the whole
world—the whole world to which every port in Syria, on
sea or desert, was at that time an open gateway.

To the story of His life and death, to the testimony
of His resurrection, to His message from God, the Greek
world yielded, which had refused to listen to Judaism. All
the little frontiers and distinctions of Syria melted before
Him. For the first time, without the force of arms, the
religion of Israel left the highlands, in which it had been
so long confined, and flowed out upon the
plains. With the Book of Acts we are on the spread of
sea-coast and among Greek cities ; Peter is the Gospe1'
cured of his Judaism in Caesarea, and the Holy Ghost
descends on the Gentiles; the chief persecutor of the
Church is converted on pagan soil, at Damascus ; the faith
spreads to Antioch, and then bursts westward along the
old Phoenician lines, by Cyprus, the coasts of Asia Minor,
the Greek isles and mainland, to Italy, Africa, and Spain.

But Christianity had not yet left Syria. As we shall
see when we come to visit the Maritime Plain and the
Hauran, there are no other fields in the world Christianity
where the contest of Christianity and Paganism and Pasanism'
was more critical, or has left more traces. The histories38 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

of Eusebius and his followers, the lives of such saints as
Porphyry and Hilarion, relate in full the missionary
labours, the persecutions, the martyrdoms, and the am-
biguous political triumphs of the Church in Philistia and
the Shephelah.1 In the indestructible basalt of Hauran
there are monuments of the passage from Paganism to
Christianity even more numerous and remarkable than
the catacombs and ruins of ancient Rome. There are

Christianity a^so w^at Italy cannot give us—the melan-

and Islam. choly wrecks of the passage from Christianity
to Mohammedanism. This passage was accomplished
within a few years. The Mohammedan era began in
622, Damascus fell in 634, Jerusalem in 637, Antioch in
638. The last Greek inscription in Hauran is about 640,
and has no emperor’s name, but simply, ‘ Christ being
King.’2 The reasons of this rapid displacement of the one
religion by the other are very clear. When they met and
fought for Syria, Christianity was corrupt, and identified
with a political system that was sapped by luxury and rent
asunder by national strifes ; Mohammedanism was simple,
austere, full of faith, united, and not yet so intolerant as
it afterwards became. Many Christians accepted with
joy the change of ruler ; few believed that, in the end, he
would enforce a change of faith as well. But afterwards
the persecution settled steadily down. The Christians
were driven to the heights of Lebanon, or were suffered
to remain only about Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Damascus,
and a few other localities.

Then came what we have already glanced at in our
catalogue of Western influences on Syria, the impression

1 For ihe Hauran monuments, see p. 13; for Eusebius and other his-
torians, p. 15.	2 See ch, xxviii.Syria’s Place in History

39

made by the Crusades. Seen across the shadow of their
great failure, the Crusades shine but a gleam of chivalry
and romance. Only when you visit Syria do you learn
with what strenuous faith, with what an infinite purpose,
those ventures of a mistaken Christianity were waged.
Syria was settled, organised, and built over

The Crusades.

almost as fully as any part of contemporary
England. The reason that the remains of Greek civilisa-
tion are so meagre on the west of the Jordan is the
activity of the Crusaders. Large cities which were famous
in ancient times, like Askalon and Caesarea, bear now in
their ruins few but Crusading marks. How firmly they
were built! To-day the mortar in them is harder than
the stone it binds. But it is not by these coast fortresses,
nor by the huge castles crowning the heights far inland,
that the Crusades impress you, so much as by the ruins of
lonely churches and cloisters, which are scattered all over
the land, far from the coast and the shelter of the great
Frankish citadels.1 After this interval of Christian rule
comes the long period of silence and crumbling, and then
we see the living churches of to-day, the flourishing
missions and schools of nearly every sect in Christendom,
and the long lines of pilgrims coming up to Jerusalem
from the four corners of the world.2

1	For authorities on the Crusades, see pp. 17, 18.

2	The chief native churches of Syria are (1) the orthodox Greek, with two
patriarchates in Syria—Antioch and Jerusalem ; the patriarchs are nominally
subject to the Patriarch at Constantinople, and to the Synod there. (2) The
Maronites (from John Maro, their first bishop) were originally Monothelites,
but in 1182, as a result of dealings with Rome, they were received into com-
munion with the latter, giving up their Monothelite doctrines, but retaining
the Syriac language for the mass, and the marriage of their priests. They
have one ‘Patriarch of Antioch and all the East,’ elected by bishops and
archbishops, and confirmed by the Pope. There is a college for them, con-
ducted by Jesuits, near the Nahr el Kelb. The best account of them is40 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

In all this the Palestine of to-day is much more a
museum of church history than of the Bible—a museum
full of living as well as ancient specimens of its subject
The present state of Christianity in Syria is very
interesting, showing almost all the faults, as well as vir-

session of holy places, real and feigned. They have dis-
figured the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, and threaten to
cover the most of the land with rival sanctuaries, planted
side by side as they are even at Gethsemane.1 Behind
all the Churches move, as of old, -political interests, com-

that by Mr. Bliss in the P.E.F.Q. vols. for 1892-3.	(3) In the seven-

teenth century Roman missions succeeded in detaching a large number of the
Greek Church, allowing the mass in the vernacular, Arabic or Greek com-
munion in both kinds, and marriage of the clergy; but insisting on recognition
of the Pope, adoption of the Filioque, and observance of Latin Easter. These
are now the Melchites, or Greek Catholics, who own one ‘ Patriarch of
Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria,’ elected by bishops, confirmed by the
Pope. (4) Fragments of the old Syriac Church still exist in the land.

Protestant missionaries came to the land in the beginning of the century,
via Cyprus, where their earliest tombstones are. The American Presbyterians
have worked longest and most powerfully—their two greatest works the
College and its Press at Beyrout, and their translation of the Bible into Arabic.
The Irish Presbyterian Church labours in Damascus and round about; Church
of Scotland Missions to the Jews in Beyrout; Free Church of Scotland’s
Medical Missions at Shweir in Lebanon, at Tiberias and Safed ; Anglican
Missions all over Palestine, with bishop in Jerusalem; Jewish Missionary
Societies of Church of England in Jerusalem, Damascus, and elsewhere;
Quaker and other missions here and there. Independent societies are also at
work, schools at Nazareth, Jaffa, etc., and especially Edinburgh Medical
Mission at Damascus, and British Syrian Schools organisation, which pretty
well covers Lebanon. East of Jordan are the Church Missionary’s church and
schools at Es-Salt and other places, and an independent mission at Kerak.

1 The bitter feeling between the two Churches which this rival building of
ecclesiastical show-places has stirred may be seen in the title of a paper in
the Roman Catholic Das Heilige Land for 1890, pp. 137-148. It runs, Die
jungsten Gewaltthaten der schism atischen Griechen in Jerusalem.

Christianity
in Syria
to-day.

tues, which have been conspicuous in church
history from the beginning. Greeks and Latins
are waging with each other a war for the pos-Syria’s Place in History

4i

plicating and further debasing the quarrel. The native
Christians, partly excusable by the long oppression they
have suffered, feel that they hold no mission to Moham-
medanism, and, it would appear, hardly believe that a
Mohammedan can be converted. The Protestant missions
have also, in present political conditions, found it impose
sible to influence any but individual Moslems; but they
have introduced the Bible in the vernacular, and this has
had important effects on the native Churches. It is all
very well to say, as certain have said in the recent con-
troversy within the Anglican Church, that the Western
Churches are in Palestine for other purposes than building
rival conventicles to the Eastern ; but once the Bible was
introduced in the vernacular, and studied by the common
people, secession was morally certain from the native
Churches, and for this the Western missionaries were
bound, whether willing or no, to provide congregations
and pastors. It is by a native church whose mother tongue
is Arabic that the Moslems will be reached, though we
do not yet see whether this is to take place through
the older bodies, that give evidence of new life, or
through the new congregations of the Western missions.
Meantime two things are coming home to the Moslem :
opportunities of education of a very high kind are within
reach of all portions of the population, and even the
Moslems of Damascus are waking up to the real meaning
of Christianity, through that side of her which represents
perhaps more vividly than any other, the Lord’s own love
and power to men—medical missions.CHAPTER II

THE FORM OF THE LAND AND ITS
HISTORICAL CONSEQUENCES

43For this chapter consult Maps /., //., III.THE FORM OF THE LAND AND ITS
HISTORICAL CONSEQUENCES

\ T J E have seen that Syria’s closest relations are with
* » the Arabian peninsula, of which, indeed, it forms
the north end. That Syria is not also Arabian in char-
acter—that the great Arabian Desert does not sweep on
to the Mediterranean except at the extreme south-east
corner—is due not only to the neighbourhood of that sea,
but much more to the peculiar configuration of the land
itself. The Arabian plateau ceases nearly ninety miles
from the Mediterranean, because an immense triple barrier
is formed against it. Parallel to the coast of the Levant,
and all the way from Mount Taurus to the neighbourhood
of the Red Sea, there run two great mountain ranges with
an extraordinary valley between them. These ranges shut
out the desert, and by help of the sea charge the whole
climate with moisture—providing rains and Syria’s barriei
mists, innumerable fountains and several large t0 the desert
rivers and lakes. They and their valley and their coast-
land are Syria; Arabia is all to the east of them. The
Syrian ranges reach their summits about midway in the
Alpine heights of the Lebanons. The Lebanons are the
focus of Syria. Besides the many streams which spring
full-born from their roots, and lavish water on their46 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

immediate neighbourhood, four great rivers pass from the
Lebanons across the length and breadth of the province.
The Orontes flows north, and waters most of northern
Syria, creating Antioch ; the Aba.na, or Barada, flows
east, and reclaims for Syria a large portion of what would
otherwise be desert, creating Damascus ; the Litany rushes
west in a bed too deep and narrow for any work save
that of intersecting the land ; and the Jordan flows
south, forming three lakes, and otherwise intensifying the
division between the two ranges. Of these rivers, only
the Orontes and Litany reach the open sea ; the Jordan
comes to an end in the Dead Sea, and the Abana dies out
in combat with the desert. The^fate of the latter is a
signal proof of how desperately Syria has been rescued
from Arabia, and a symbol of the profound influence
which the surrounding, invading desert has had upon all
her culture and civilisation.

The part of Syria with which we have to do is all to
the south of the summits of the Lebanons. On their

a triple western slope the gorge of the Litany may be

barrier. taken as the most natural limit, though we
shall sometimes pass a little beyond it. On the eastern
slope we shall not go north of the Abana and Damascus.
We have first to survey the great triple barrier against the
desert, and we commence with its most distinctive feature
—the valley between the two great ranges.

South of the Lebanons, this valley, with the young
Jordan in its embrace, begins to sink below the level of
the sea. At the Lake of Huleh it is just seven feet above
1. The Jordan that level; at the Lake of Galilee, ten miles
valley.	farther south, it is 680 feet below, and so for

sixty-five miles more it continues to descend, till at theThe Form of the Land

47

Dead Sea it is 1290 feet below. From here it rapidly
rises to a height of nearly 300 feet above the sea, and
thence slowly sinks again to the Gulf of Akabah, which
forms its southern continuation. For this unique and
continuous trench from the Lebanons to the Red Sea
there is no single designation. By using two of its names
which overlap each other, we may call it the Jordan-
‘Arabah Valley. From the Lake of Galilee to the south
of the Dead Sea it is called by the Arabs the Ghor, or
Depression.1

On either side of this run the two great Syrian ranges.
Fundamentally of the same formation, they are very diffe-
rent in disposition. The western is a long, deep 2 The west_
wall of limestone, extending all the way from ern ranse-
Lebanon in the north to a line of cliffs opposite the
Gulf and Canal of Suez—the southern edge of the Great
Desert of the Wandering. In Lebanon this limestone is
disposed mainly in lofty ranges running north and south ;
in Upper Galilee it descends to a plateau walled by
hills ; in Lower Galilee it is a series of still less elevated
ranges, running east and west. Then it sinks to the plain
of Esdraelon, with signs of having once bridged this
level by a series of low ridges.2 South of Esdraelon it
rises again, and sends forth a branch in Carmel to the
sea, but the main range continues parallel to the Jordan
Valley. Scattering at first through Samaria into separate
groups, it consolidates towards Bethel upon the narrow
table-land of J udaea, with an average height of 2400 feet,
continues so to the south of Hebron, where by broken and
sloping strata it lets itself down, widening the while, on
to the plateau of the Desert of the Wandering. This

1 See more fully ch. xxii.	2 At Shekh Abrek and Lejjun.48 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Western Range we shall call the Central Range, for it,
and not the Jordan Valley, is historically the centre of
the land. The watershed lies, not down the middle of
the range, but nearer the east. The western flank is long
and gentle, falling on to a maritime plain of very varying
breadth, a few hundred feet above the sea ; but the eastern
is short and precipitous, dragged down, as it were, by the
fissure of the Jordan Valley to far below the sea-level.
The effect of this appears in the sections given on the
large map accompanying this volume.-

Down the eastern side of the Jordan Valley the range
is even more continuous than that down the west. Sink-
3 The east- inS swiftly from Mount Hermon to 2000 feet
ern range. above the sea, it preserves that average level
southward across the plateau of Hauran to the great
cleft of the river Yarmuk ; is still high, but more broken
by cross valleys through Gilead ; and forms again an
almost level table-land over Moab. Down the west
of Hauran, on the margin of the Jordan Valley, the
average level is raised by a number of extinct volcanoes,
which have their counterparts also to the south and east
of Damascus, and these have covered the limestone of
the range with a deep volcanic deposit as far as the
Yarmuk. South of the eastern line of volcanoes runs
the Jebel Hauran, or Druze Mountain, as it is called
from its latest colonists, and forms the boundary in that
direction—the eastern boundary of Syria. Farther south
the range has no such definite limit, but rolls off imper-
ceptibly into the high Arabian Desert. Here we may
take for a border the great Haj Road, past the Upper
Zerka to Ma‘en.

We see, then, that Palestine is disposed, between theThe Form of the Land

49

Sea and the Desert, in a series of four parallel lines or
bands running north and south :1—

The	The	The	The

Sea. Maritime Central Jordan Eastern Desert.

Plain.	Range.	Valley.	Range.

Now, were there no modifications of these four long
bands between the Sea and the Desert, the geography of
Palestine would indeed be simple, and in con-

Modifications

sequence the history of Palestine very different of the four
from what has actually been. But the Central
Range undergoes three modifications which considerably
complicate the geography, and have had as powerful an
influence on the history as the four long lines themselves.
In the first place, the Central Range is broken in two, as
we have seen, by the Plain of Esdraelon, which
unites the Jordan Valley with the Maritime
Plain. Again, from Judaea the Central Range does not
fall immediately on the Maritime Plain, as it does farther
north from Samaria. Another smaller, more open range
comes between—the hills of the so-called The
Shephelah. These are believed to be of a ShePhelah-
different kind of limestone from that of the Central Range,
and they are certainly separated from Judaea by a well-
defined series of valleys along their whole extent.2 They
do not continue opposite Samaria, for there the Central
Range itself descends on the plain, but, as we shall see,
they have a certain counterpart in the soft, low hills which
separate the Central Range from Carmel. And

The Negeb.

thirdly, south of Judaea the Central Range
droops and spreads upon a region quite distinct in char-
acter from the tableland to the north of Hebron—the

1 This is the division adopted by Robinson in his Phys. Geog., p. 17, and
by Henderson, Palestine, pp. 15-21.	2 See p. 205.

D50 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Negeb, or South Country as it is translated in our English
version. As all of these three regions—Esdraelon, the
Shephelah and the Negeb—have also proved their distinct-
ness from the Central Range, as from the Maritime Plain,
by their greatly differing histories, we add them to our
catalogue of the ruling features of the land, which we now
reckon as seven. From the West these lie as follows :—

1.	The Maritime Plain.

2.	The Low Hills or Shephelah.

3.	The Central Range—cut in two by

4.	Esdraelon, and running out into

5.	The Negeb.

6.	The Jordan Valley.

7.	The Eastern Range.

In addition there are the Lebanons and Carmel. For
some reasons the Lebanons ought to be at the head of the
The Lebanons above list, because the four long strips flow
and Carmel. fr0m and are dominated by them. But the
Lebanons are too separate, and stand by themselves.
Carmel, on the other hand, is not separate enough. Geo-
graphically a branch of the Central Range, though cut off
from it by a district of lower and softer hills like the
Shephelah, Carmel has never had a history of its own, but
its history has been merged either in that of the coast or
in that of Samaria.1 Carmel, however, was always held
distinct in the imagination of Hebrew writers, as, with its
bold forward leap to the sea, it could not but be ; nor
will any one, who desires to form a vivid picture of the
country, leave this imposing headland out of his vision.

The whole land may then be represented as on the
opposite page.

1 See ch. xx.PHYSICAL SKETCH MAP

Bartholomew. Edinf52 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

In the summary descriptions of the Promised Land
in the Old Testament we find all these features men-
tioned,—with the exception of Esdraelon, which falls
under the general designation of valley-land, and with
the addition sometimes of the slopes or flanks 1 of both
ranges, which are distinct in character, and often in popu-
lation, from the broad plateaus above them. An account
of these passages, and of all the general geographical
terms of the Bible, will be found in an appendix. Here
it is enough to give a few of the* proper names. We
have mentioned that for the Jordan Valley, the ‘Arabah ;
that for the Low Hills, the Shephelah ; and that for the
South, the Negeb. The Maritime Plain between Carmel
and Joppa was called in Hebrew Sharon, probably mean-
ing the Level, but in Greek the Forest, from a great oak
forest which once covered it.2 To the south the name for it
was Pelesheth, Philistia, or, poetically, the Shoulder of the
Philistines, from its shape as it rises from the sea.3 The
Hebrew word darom or daroma,4 meaning south, was
applied by the Jews shortly before our era to the whole
of the Maritime Plain southwards from Lydda:5 in Chris-
tian times Daroma extended inland to the Dead Sea, and
absorbed both the Shephelah and Negeb.6 The Arabs
confined the name to a fortress south of Gaza—the Darom
of the Crusaders.7 What we know as Esdraelon was, in its

1 Ashdoth=171*1	2 See pp. 147, 148.	3 Isa. xi. 14.

4 Dm, or with the Aramaic definite article ND1YT.

* Neubauer, Giog. du Talmud, p. 62.

6	In the Onomasticon, not only is Eshtemoa in Dan said to be in the
Daroma, and Ziklag and other towns of Simeon, far south of Beit-Jibrin ;
but Maon and Carmel on the Judcean table-land, and Gadda imminens mari
mortuo. There was a Daroma Interior (see Art. ‘ Jether ’).

7	Now Deir el Belah. Will. Tyre, xx. 19, derives Darom from Deir-Rum,
Convent of the Greeks, but the other is the probable derivation.The Form of the Land

53

western part, the Open Plain of Megiddo, but, on its eastern
slope to the Jordan, the Vale of Jezreel.1 Neither of
the two great ranges was covered in its whole extent by
one proper name. The Central was divided, according
to the tribes upon it, into Mount Judah, Mount Ephraim
or Israel,2 and Mount Naphtali. In the English version
mount is often rendered by hill-country,3 but this is mis-
leading. With their usual exactness, the Hebrews saw
that these regions formed part of one range, the whole of
which they called not by a collective name, but singularly
—The Mountain—just as to-day the inhabitants of the
Lebanons speak of their double and broken range also in
the singular, as El-Jebel. Before the Israelites came into
the land they knew the Central Range as the Mount of
the Amorite.4 The Eastern Range was known under
the three great divisions of Bashan to the north of the
Yarmuk; Mount Gilead to the south of that;5 and to the
south of that across Moab, Ha-Mish6r, The Level, or
The Plateau par excellence. Another name applied to the
northern end of the Moab mountain-wall, as seen from the
west, the Mount or Mountains of the ‘Abarim 6—that is,
Those-on-the-Other-Side—was applicable, as indeed it was
probably applied, to the Eastern Range in its entire extent.7

Viewing, then, all these modifications of the great
parallel lines of the land, we see that this fourfold division,
fundamental as it is, is crossed, and to some Mountain
extent superseded, by a simpler distinction and Plaln>
between mountain and plain, or, to speak more exactly,

1 See ch. xix.	3 See pp. 325, 338.

3 Hill-country of Judaea, Luke i. 39, 65; Josh. xxi. 11; but always Mount
Ephraim.	4 Deut. i. 7.

6	But see ch. xxv.	B Numb, xxvii. 12.

7	Traces of this in Ezek. xxxix. 11, where read54 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

between hilly country and level country. This is obvious
geographically: it has been of the utmost importance
historically, for the mountain was fit for infantry warfare
only, but the plain was feasible for cavalry and chariots ;
and, as Palestine from her position was bound to be crossed
by the commerce and the war of the two great continents
on either side of her, her plains would bear the brunt of
these, while her mountains would be comparatively remote
from them. All the Central Range, and the centre of the
Eastern Range, was mountain, fit for infantry only. The
Maritime Plain, Esdraelon, and the Jordan Valley, along
with the great plateaus of the Eastern Range, Hauran
and Moab, were plains, bearing the great trunk roads,
and feasible for cavalry and chariots. Now, it is of the
greatest importance to observe that all the mountain-land,
viz., the Central Range and Gilead, represents Israel’s
proper and longest possessions, first won and last lost
—while all the valley-land and table-land was, for the
most part, hardly won and scarcely kept by Israel; but at
first remained for long in Canaanite keeping, and towards
the end/was the earliest to come under the great invading
empires. Not only the course of Assyrian and Egyptian
war but the advance of Greek culture and of Roman
conquest is explained (as we shall see in detail) by this
general distinction between hilly and level land, which,
especially on the east of Jordan, does not correspond to
the distinction of mountain range from Jordan Valley and
Maritime Plain. Enisled by that circuit of lowland—the
Gh6r, Esdraelon, and the Maritime Plain—the Central
Range in Judah and Ephraim formed Israel’s most con-
stant sanctuary, and Gilead was generally attached to it.
But, from the table-land of Hauran, Israel were drivenThe Form, of the Land

55

by the chariots of Syria ; they held Moab only at inter-
vals ; the Canaanites kept them for long and repeated
periods out of the Upper Jordan Valley and Esdraelon ;
and, except for two brief triumphs in the morning and in
the evening of their history, the Philistines kept them out
of the Maritime Plain. So, when the Greeks came, the
regions they covered were the coast, the Jordan Valley,
the Hauran, the eastern levels of Gilead, and Moab ; but
it is noticeable that in Gilead itself the Greek cities were
few and late, and in the Central Range not at all. And
so, when the Romans came, the tactics of their great
generals, as may be most clearly illustrated from Ves-
pasian’s campaign, were to secure all the plains, then
Samaria, and, last of all, the high, close Judaea.

But this distinction between mountain and plain, which
accounts for so much of the history of the land, does not
exhaust its extraordinary variety. Palestine is almost as
much divided into petty provinces as Greece, and far
more than those of Greece are her divisions intensified by
differences of soil and climate. The two ends of the
Jordan are not thirty miles away from those Brokenness of
parts of the Maritime Plain which are respec- theland-
tively opposite them, yet they are more separate from
these than, in Switzerland, Canton Bern is from Canton
Valais. The slopes of Lebanon are absolutely dis-
tinct from Galilee; Galilee is cut off from Hauran, and
almost equally so from Samaria. From Hauran the
Jebel Druz stands off by itself, and Gilead holds aloof to
the south, and again Moab is distinct from Gilead. On
each of the four lines, too, desert marches with fertile
soil, implying the neighbourhood of very different races
and systems of civilisation. Upon the Central Range56 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

itself Judah is bare, austere, secluded—a land of shepherds
and unchanging life: Samaria is fertile and open—a land
of husbandmen, as much in love with, as they were liable
to, foreign influences. These differences of soil are in-
tensified by differences of climate. In Palestine there is
every climate between the sub-tropical of one end of the
Jordan Valley and the sub-Alpine .above the other end.
There are palms in Jericho and pine forests in Lebanon.
In the Ghor, in summer, you are under a temperature of
more than ioo° Fahrenheit, and yet you see glistening the
snow-fields of Hermon. All the intermediate steps between
these extremes the eye can see at one sweep from Carmel
—the sands and palms of the coast; the wheat-fields of
Esdraelon ; the oaks and sycamores of Galilee ; the pines,
the peaks, the snows of Anti-Lebanon. How closely these
differences lie to each other! Take a section of the
country across Judaea. With its palms and shadoofs the
Philistine Plain might be a part of the Egyptian Delta;
but on the hills of the Shephelah which overlook it, you
are in the scenery of Southern Europe; the Judaean
moors which overlook them are like the barer uplands of
Central Germany, the shepherds wear sheepskin cloaks
and live under stone roofs—sometimes the snow lies deep ;
a few miles farther east and you are down on the desert
among the Bedouin, with their tents of hair and their cotton
clothing; a few miles farther still, and you drop to torrid
heat in the Jordan Valley; a few miles beyond that and
you rise to the plateau of the Belka, where the Arabs say
‘the cold is always at home.’ Yet from Philistia to the
Belk& is scarcely seventy miles.

All this means separate room and station for a far
greater variety of race and government than couldThe Form of the Land

57

have been effected in so small a land by the simple
distinction of Mountain and Plain. What is said of the
people of Laish, in the north nook of the Jordan Valley, is
very characteristic of the country. And the five men of
Dan came to Laish, and saw the people who were hi its
midst, peaceful and careless, possessing riches, and far
from the Phoenicians, and without any relation with the
Arameans} Laish is only twenty-five miles

.	Its con-

from the Sidonian coast, and about forty from sequences

Damascus, but great mountains intervene on inhlstory-
either side. Her unprovoked conquest by the Danites
happened without the interference of either of those
powerful states. From this single case we may under-
stand how often a revolution, or the invasion or devasta-
tion of a locality, might take place without affecting other
counties of this province—if one may so call them, which’
were but counties in size though kingdoms in difference
of race and government.

The frequent differences of race in the Palestine of
to-day must strike the most careless traveller. The Chris-
tian peoples, more than half Greek and partly Frank, who
were driven into the Lebanon at various times by the
Arab and Turk, still preserve on their high sanctuary
their racial distinctions. How much taller and whiter
and nobler are the Druses of Carmel than the fellahin of
the plain at their feet!2 How distinct the Druses of
Jebel Hauran are from the Bedouin around them ! The

1	Judges xviii. 7 : according to Budde’s separation of the two narratives
intertwined in this chapter (Bucher Richter etc., p. 140).

2	To a less extent the same contrast prevails between the peasants of the
Ghuta round Damascus and the finer peasants of Hauran, but the population
of Hauran is, in many cases, so very recent an immigration (see cli. xxiv.),
that it is difficult to appreciate the causes of this difference.58 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Greeks of Beyrout are half the world away from the
Arabs of Damascus. On the Central Range, within Judaea
itself, the desert has preserved the Bedouin unchanged,
within a few miles of that medley of nations, Jerusalem.
And, finally, within the Arab family there are differences
that approach racial degree. The tropical Gh6r has
engendered a variety of Arab, the Ghawarineh, whose
frizzled hair and blackened skin contrast vividly with the
pure Semitic features of the Bedouin of the plateaus
above him—the ‘Adwan or the Beni Sakhr.

Therefore, while the simple distinction between mountain
and plain enabled us to understand the course of the in-
vasions of the great empires which burst on Syria, these
Palestine a more intricate distinctions of soil, altitude, and
Land of Tubes. ciimate explain how it was that the minor
races which poured into Palestine from parts of the world
so different as Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Egypt,
and the Greek islands, sustained their own characters in
this little crowded province through so many centuries.
Palestine has never belonged to one nation, and probably
never will. Just as her fauna and flora represent many
geological ages, and are related to the plants and animals of
many other lands,1 so varieties of the human race, culture
and religion, the most extreme, preserve themselves side
by side on those different shelves and coigns of her surface,
in those different conditions of her climate. Thus when
history first lights up within Palestine, what we see is a con-
fused medley of clans—all that crowd of Canaanites, Amo-
rites, Perizzites, Kenizzites, Hivites, Girgashites, Hittites
sons of Anak and Zamzummim—which is so perplexing

1 For the extreme diversity, see Tristram’s various works : Merril’s East of
the Jordan ; and the summary in Henderson’s Palestine.The Form of the Land

59

to the student, but yet in such thorough harmony with the
natural conditions of the country and with the rest of the
history.1 Again, if we remember the fitful nature of all
Semitic warfare—the great rush, and if that be not wholly
successful at first, the resting content with what has been
gained—then we can appreciate why, in so broken a land,
the invasion of the Hebrew nomads was so partial, and
left, even in those parts it covered, so many Canaanite
enclaves. And within Israel herself, we understand why
her tribes remained so distinct, why she so easily split into
two kingdoms on the same narrow Highlands, and why
even in Judah, there were clans like the Rechabites who
preserved their life in tents and their austere desert
habits, side by side with the Jewish vineyards and the
Jewish cities.

Palestine, formed as it is, and surrounded as it is, is
emphatically a land of tribes. The idea that it can ever
belong to one nation, even though this were the Jews, is
contrary both to Nature and to Scripture.

1 Some of these undoubtedly represent various races like Amorites, Hittites,
and probably Zamzummim. Others get their name from their localities or the
kind of life they lead.CHAPTER .III

THE CLIMATE AND FERTILITY OF THE
LAND, WITH THEIR EFFECTS ON
ITS RELIGIONFor this chapter consult Map I.THE CLIMATE AND FERTILITY OF THE
LAND/ WITH THEIR EFFECTS ON
ITS RELIGION

TI 7"E have already seen some of the peculiarities of

» » the climate and soil of Palestine. We are able to
appreciate in some degree the immense differences both of
temperature and fertility, which are due, first, to the unusual
range of level—from 1300 feet below the sea with a tropical
atmosphere to 9000 feet above it with an Alpine, and,
second, to the double exposure of the land—seawards, so
that the bulk of it is subject to the ordinary influences
of the Mediterranean basin, and desert-wards, so that part
of it exhibits most of the characteristics of desert life.
Within these ruling conditions we have now to look more
closely at the details of the climate and fertility, and then
to estimate their social and religious influence.

I. Climate.

The ruling feature of the climate of Syria is the division
of the year into a rainy and a dry season.1 Towards the

1 On the climate of Palestine, besides works of travel or residence which
furnish meteorological statistics, see Lynch’s Narrative and Official Reports,
and Barclay’s City of the Great King; consult especially Robinson, Phys.
Geog. of the Holy Land, ch. iii. ; P.E.F.Q., especially for 1872; 1883,
Chaplin, Obs. on Climate of Jerus. ; 1888-1893, Glaisher on Meteoro. Obs.
at Sarona; 1893-4, lb. at ferns. ; Anderlind, Z.D.P.V., viii. 101 ff. : Der
Einfluss der Gebirgswaldungen in Nordl. Palastina auf die Vermehrung der
wasserigen Niederschlage daselbst; Id. xiv. ; Ankel, Grundzuge der Landes-
natur des Westjordanlandes, iv, Das Klima ; Wittmann, Travels, 561-570.6\ The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

end of October1 heavy rains begin to fall, at intervals, for
a day or several days at a time. These are what the
English Bible calls the early or former rain,

The rains.

literally the Pourer.2 It opens the agricultural
year ; the soil hardened and cracked by the long summer
is loosened, and the farmer begins ploughing.3 Till the
end of November the average rainfall is not large, but
it increases through December, January, and February,
begins to abate in March, and is practically over by the
middle of April. The latter rains of Scripture are the
heavy showers of March and April.4 Coming as they do
before the harvest and the long summer drought, they are
of far more importance to the country than all the rains of
the winter months, and that is why these are passed over
in Scripture, and emphasis is laid alone on the early and
the latter rains. This has given most people the idea that
there are only two intervals of rain in the Syrian year, at
the vernal and the autumnal equinox ; but the whole of
the winter is the rainy season, as indeed we are told in the
well-known lines of the Song of Songs :

Lo, the winter is past,

The rain is over and gone.

During most winters both hail and snow fall on the hills.

Hail is common, and is often mingled with
rain and with thunderstorms, which happen at
intervals through the winter, and are frequent in spring.

1	In Lebanon often a month earlier.

2	HIV, Deut. xi. 14, Jer. v. 24, Hos. vi. 3. miO, Joel ii. 23, Ps. Ixxxiv. 7
(E. V. 6). Cf. James v. 7. On rains and seasons generally see Book of Enoch.

3	The ecclesiastical year of the later Jews began in spring with the month
Nisan.

*	Besides the references in the last note but one, cf. Prov. xvi. 15,

Jer. iii. 3, Zech. x. 1. Rain generically = *lt3D. A burst of rain=The Climate and Fertility of the Land 65

The Old Testament mentions hail and thunder together.1
On the Central Range snow has been known to reach a
depth of nearly two feet, and to lie for five days or even
more, and the pools at Jerusalem have sometimes been
covered with ice. But this is rare : on the Central Range
the ground seldom freezes, and the snow usually disappears
in a day.2 On the plateaus east of Jordan snow lies regu-
larly for some days every winter, and on the top of Hermon
there are fields of it through the summer. None has ever
been seen to fall in the tropical Ghor. This explains the
feat of Benaiah, who zvent down and slezv a lion in the
midst of a cistern in the day of the snow? The beast had
strayed up the Judaean hills from Jordan, and had been
caught in a sudden snowstorm. Where else than in Pales-
tine could lions and snow thus come together?

In May showers are very rare, and from then till
October, not only is there no rain, but a cloud seldom
passes over the sky, and a thunderstorm is a miracle.4
Morning mists, however, are not uncommon—in mid-
summer, 1891, we twice woke into one as chill and dense
as a Scotch ‘haar’5—but they are soon dispersed. In
Bible lands vapour is a true symbol of what is frail and
fleeting—as it cannot be to us northerners, to whose coasts
the mists cling with a pertinacity suggestive of very oppo-
site ideas. On the other hand, the dews of Syrian nights
are excessive ; on many mornings it looks as if there had
been heavy rain, and this is the sole slackening of the
drought which the land feels from May till October.

1	Ps. xviii. etc.

2	On snow in Jerusalem, P.E.F.Q., 1883, 10 f. Robinson, Phys. Gcog.,

p. 265.	3 2 Sam. xxiii. 20.	4 I Sam. xii. 17, 18.

3	At Ghabaghib in Hauran on 19th, and Irbid in Gilead on 25th, June,
temp. 48°. On mists and dews, cf. Book of Enoch lx.

E66 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Throughout the summer prairie and forest fires are not
uncommon. The grass and thistle of the desert will blaze
for miles, driving the scorpions and vipers from their holes
as John the Baptist describes in one of his vivid figures j1
and sometimes, as the prophets tell us, the air is filled with
the smoke of a whole wood.2

The winds of Syria are very regular, and their place

obvious in the economy of her life. He maketh His

ministers of winds? They prevail from the
The Winds. ■	J	v

west, and, with the help of the sea, they fulfil

two great functions throughout the year. In the winter
the west and south-west winds, damp from the sea, as they
touch the cold mountains, drop their moisture and cause
the winter rains. So our Lord said : When ye see a cloud
rise out of the west, straightway ye say, There cometh a
shower, and so it is? In summer the winds blow chiefly
out of the drier north-west, and meeting only warmth do
not cause showers, but greatly mitigate the daily heat.5
This latter function is even more regular than the former,
for it is fulfilled morning by morning with almost perfect
punctuality. Those who have not travelled through a
Syrian summer can scarcely realise how welcome, how
The Summer unfailing, a friend is the forenoon wind from
west wind. the seEj h0w ]ie js strongest just after noon,
and does not leave you till the need for his freshness passes
away with the sunset. He strikes the coast soon after
sunrise; in Hauran, in June and July, he used to reach

1 Luke iii. 7.	2 Isa. v. 24 ; ix. 18 ; Joel i. 19 f. ; ii. 3.

3 Ps. civ. 4 ; Book of Enoch lxxvi.	4 Luke xii. 54.

6 Ankel, op. cit., pp. 84 flf, gives a number of figures for Jerusalem. From
May to October dry winds blow from NW. 78'8 days ; from W. 27^5 ; from
N. 26'5. In the rainy months W. and SW. winds blow for an average of 607
days, from NE.,E.,and SE., 67'4. For wind at Sarona see P.E.F.Q., 1892.The Climate and Fertility of the Land 67

us between 10 and 12 o’clock, and blew so well that the
hours previous to that were generally the hottest of our
day. The peasants do all their winnowing against this
steady wind, and there is no happier scene in the land than
afternoon on the threshing-floors, when he rustles the
thickly-strewn sheaves, and scatters the chaff before him 1

The other winds are much more infrequent and irregular.
From the north wind blows chiefly in October, and brings
a dry cold.2 The name Sherkiyeh, our Sirocco, literally
‘ the east/ is used of all winds blowing in from

The Sirocco.

the desert—east, south-east, south, and even
south-south-west. They are hot winds : when ye see the
south-wind blow, ye say, There zvill be heat, and it cometh to
pass? They come with a mist of fine sand, veiling the sun,
scorching vegetation, and bringing languor and fever to
men. They are most painful airs, and if the divine eco-
nomy were only for our physical benefit, inexplicable, for
they neither carry rain nor help at harvest. A dry wind of
the high places in the wilderness toward the daughter of My
people, neither to fan nor to cleanse.4 They blow chiefly in
the spring, and for a day at a time. The following extracts,
from our diary in 1891, will give some impression of what
these hot sandy winds make of the atmosphere. It will

1	The explanation of this daily wind is, of course, that the limestone of
Syria heats up under the sun far more quickly than the sea, but after sunset
cools again more rapidly, so that the night breezes, after an interval of great
stillness just following sunset, blow in the opposite direction from the day
ones. Ankel (op cit., p. 85) rightly emphasises the importance of those daily
winds. Robinson, Phys. Geog., p. 278, remarks on their regularity. From June
3 to 16 they had the north-west wind ‘ from the time we left the Ghor till we
arrived at Nazareth. The air was fine and mostly clear, and, although the
mercury ranged from 8o° to 96°, the heat was not burdensome. ’ Yet at Ekron,
under the same wind, the thermometer rose to 105°, and in the sun only to 108°.

2	Job xxxvii. 9. Cf. Ankel, op. cit., p. 86.	3 Luke xii. 55.

4 Jer. iv. 11. Cf. Ezek. xvii. 10; xix. 12; Hos. xiii. 15.68 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

be noticed how readily they pass over into rain, by a slight
change in the direction, from SSW. to full SW.:—

Edh-Dhoheriyah, Saturday, April 25 (in the Negeb, four hours
south of Hebron), 8 p.m.—Night dark and clear, with moon in
first quarter. Temp. 58° Fahr. ; n p.m. 62°, moon hazy.

Sunday.—8 a.m. 78°. Hot wind blowing from south, yet
called Sherkeh or Sherkiyeh, i.e. east wind, by our men.
Temperature rapidly rises to 88° at 10, and 90° at 12. Sky
drumly all forenoon, but the sun casts shadows. Atmosphere
thickening. At 1.45 wind rises, 930 ; 2.30, gale blowing, air
filled with fine sand, horizon shortened to a mile, sun not
visible, grey sky, but still a slight shadow cast by the tents.
View from tent-door of light grey limestone land under dark grey
sky, misty range of hills a mile away, and one camel visible;
3.40, wind begins to moderate, temp. 930; 4.40, strong wind,
half-gale, 83°; 5 p.m., wind SSW., temp. 78°. Wind veers
round a little further W. in the course of the evening; 6 p.m.
temp. 720; sunset, 68°; 10.30 p.m., 63°. A slight shower of
rain, stormy-looking night, with clouds gathering in from many
quarters. The grey town’s eastern face lit up by the moon, and
very weird against the clouds, which are heaped together on the
western sky, and also reflect the moonlight.

Monday, April 27.—Rain at intervals through the night, with
high SW. wind endangering the tents ; 5.45 a.m. temp. 58°.
Distant hills under mist, with the sun breaking through. Scud-
ding showers, grey clouds, no blue sky. Impression of land-
scape as in Scottish uplands with little agriculture. Left camp
6.30. Most of the day dull and windy. Cleared up towards
evening, with sunshine.

Here is another Sherkiyeh nearly three weeks later, in
Samaria, between Sebastiyeh and Jenin :

May 11.—At Sebastiyeh at sunrise the temperature was only
48° with a slight west wind. Towards noon, under the same
wind, it rose to 8o°i But then the wind changed. A Sherkiyeh
blew from SSE., and at 2 p.m., at our resting-place, Kubatiyeh,
which is high and open, it was 920. Sun veiled, afternoon dull.The Climate and Fertility of the Land 69

At 5, at Jenin, ‘En-gannim, it was 88°, with more sunshine. At
10, it was still 84°. A few hours later we were wakened by cold.
The wind had changed to the West, the temperature was 72°.
At sunrise it was 68°.

These two instances—and between them we experienced
two others at Jerusalem, one of which lasted for two days
—will give the reader some idea of what is the east wind,
or sirocco. It will be seen from them that in Palestine
this wind does not inflict on men more than great dis-
comfort, with a strong possibility of fever. In the desert,
where the sand is loose, it is different: there have been
cases in which whole caravans were overwhelmed by the
sirocco between Egypt and Palestine ; but once on the
fertile hills, there is no danger to life from the sand-clouds,
and the farther north they travel, the less disagreeable
does their haze become.1

Yet sometimes the east wind breaks with great violence
even on the coast. Tents may be carried away by wicked
gusts.2 It was to an east wind that Jeremiah likened the
scattering of Israel, by an east wind that Ezekiel saw
the ships of Tyre broken, and the Psalmist the ships of
Tarshish.3

We have seen, then, how broken the surface of Palestine
is ; how opposite are its various aspects, seaward and
towards the desert; how suddenly changing and how
contrary its winds. All this will have prepared us for
the fact_Jhat its differences of temperature are also
very great — great between one part of the

Temperature.

country and another, great between summer

and winter, but relatively greater between day and night

1 Cf. Robinson, Phys. Geog., pp. 279, 280.	2 Lynch, Official Report, p. 74.

3 Jer. xviii. 17 ; Ezek. xxvii. 26 ; cf. xix. 12 ; Ps. xlviii. 7.70 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

and between one part of the day and another. Here are
some instances : On one of his journeys, Robinson ex-
perienced in May, in the mountains of Judaea, a pleasant
temperature of from 8o° to 96° under a fresh west wind ;
but at Ekron in the plain, though the wind was the same,
the heat had risen to 105°, and the sultry air had all the
characteristics of a sirocco. Coming down from the
plateau of Moab to the Jordan, on July 7th, we found
the temperature at Heshbon at 9 A.M., when the sun was
near his full strength, only 76°; but on the edge of the
Ghor at noon it was 103°; on Jordan, at 2.30 P.M., ioi° ;
and at Jericho throughout the night not less than 89°.
On the heights of Gadara, from the afternoon of the
23rd to the forenoon of the 27th June, the mid-day
temperature had ranged under the west wind from 82°
to 90°, the evening temperature (between 6 and 10 P.M.)
from 70° to 76°, while the lowest morning temperature just

before sunrise was 650. But at the sulphur

Its extremes.

baths of Hammath, just below Gadara, the
mid-day temperature on the 24th of June was ioo°, and at
3 P.M. still 96° ; while at Pella, near the Jordan Valley,
on the 28th and 29th June, we had a mid-day tempera-
ture from 98° to ioi°, a sunrise temperature of 74°, and
at 10 P.M. 78°. Yet after we rose, on the evening of the
29th, to the Wady Yabis in Gilead, at 10 P.M., it was
only 69°, and next mid-day at Ajlun 86°, and at 10 P.M.
64°, and at sunrise next morning 58°. These are changes
between different localities, but even at the same spot
the range in temperature is great. We have seen that
caused by the sirocco—in one instance from 48° at sun-
rise to 920 by 2 P.M. But take an instance when there
was no sirocco. On the 23rd of April, at Beit-Jibrin atThe Climate and Fertility of the Land 71

sunrise, the thermometer stood at 420; from 11 to 3 it
ranged over 85°. At Laish it sank, in a storm of wind
and rain, from 88° to 720 in very little over a quarter
of an hour; but changes as sudden, and even more
extreme, are not uncommon down the whole of the
Jordan Valley.1

But these extremes of heat which in summer surround
the Central Range of Palestine, and these ample changes
of temperature must not be allowed to confuse our minds
with regard to the temperate and equable climate which
this part of the land, Israel’s proper territory, enjoys
throughout the year. In all the world there are few
healthier homes. The mean annual temperature varies
from 62° to 68°. Except when the sirocco blows, the
warmest days of summer seldom exceed 90°, and the
cold of winter still more seldom falls to freezing-point,
February is the coldest month, with a mean temperature
of about 46°. Through March and April this rises from
540 to 6i°; in May and June from 65° to 740; July and
August, 76°; September and October, 750 to 68°. After
the rains there is a fall in November to about 6o°, and in
December to 520. The snows, the less sunshine, and the
cold north-east winds, are sufficient to account for the
further fall in January to 490.2

We have now carefully surveyed the rains, winds, and
temperatures of Palestine. For the mass of the land
lifted from 1000 to 2000 feet above the sea, the result is a
temperate climate, with the annual seasons perhaps more

1	Lynch’s Narrative; cf. Daily Range, Sarona, P.E.F.Q., 1891; Jerus.,
id., 1893.

2	These figures are arrived at after a comparison of Barclay’s for the years
1851 to 1855 (City of the Great King, p. 428), and those given by Chaplin,
P.E.F.Q., 1883, and Glaisher, id., 1893-4. Cf. Wittmann, 561-570.72 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

regular, but the daily variations of heat certainly much
greater, than is the case throughout the most of the tem-
Raciai effect perate zone. On her hills and table-lands
of the climate. israei enjoyed all the advantages of a healthy
and bracing climate, with the addition of such stimulus
and strain as come from a considerable range of the daily
temperature, as well as from the neighbourhood of extreme
heat, in the Jordan Valley and in the Western Plain, to
which the business of their life obliged most of the nation
very frequently to descend. Some tribes suffered these
changes of temperature more regularly than others. Most
subject to them were the highlanders of Mount Ephraim,
who had fields in the Jordan Valley, and the Galileans,
whose province included both the heights of Naphtali and
the tropical basin in which the Lake of Galilee lies. In
their journeys through this land—from the Jordan to
Cana, from Nazareth to Capernaum, from Capernaum to
the highlands of Cfesarea Philippi—our Lord and His
disciples, often with no roof to cover their heads at night,
must have felt the full range of the ample Syrian tem-
perature. But these are the conditions which breed a
hardy and an elastic frame of body. The national type,
which was formed in them for nearly two millennia, was
certain to prove at once tough and adaptable. To the
singular variety of the climate in which the Jewish nation
grew up we may justly trace much of the physical per-
sistence and versatility which has made Jews at home in
every quarter of the globe. This is something very different
from the purely Semitic frame of body, which has been
tempered only by the monotonous conditions of the
desert. The Arab has never proved himself so successful
a colonist as the Jew. And we have in these times anotherThe Climate and Fertility of the Land 73

instance of the educating power of the climate of Palestine.
The emigration of Syrians from the Turkish Empire is
steadily proceeding, and the Syrians are making good
colonists in America and in Australia.

There is one other effect of the climate of the Holy
Land which is quite as important. It is a climate which
lends itself to the service of moral ideas.

In the first place, it is not mechanically regular. Unlike
that of Egypt, the climate of Syria does not depend upon
a few simple and unfailing phenomena—upon

r	r	r Climate not

one great instrument like the Nile to whose mechanically
operations man has but to link his own and the regular'
fruits of the year are inevitable. In the Palestine year
there is no inevitableness. Fertility does not spring from
a source which is within control of man’s spade, and by
which he can defy a brazen and illiberal heaven. It comes
down from heaven, and if heaven sometimes withholds it,
there is nothing else within man’s reach to substitute for
it. The climate of Palestine is regular enough to pro-
voke men to methodical labour for its fruits, but the regu-
larity is often interrupted. The early rains or the latter
rains fail, drought comes occasionally for two years in
succession, and that means famine and pestilence. There
are, too, the visitations of the locust, which are said to be
bad every fifth or sixth year; and there are earthquakes,
also periodical in Syria. Thus a purely mechanical con-
ception of nature as something certain and inevitable,
whose processes are more or less under man’s control, is
impossible ; and the imagination is roused to feel the pre-
sence of a will behind nature, in face of whose interrup-
tions of the fruitfulness or stability of the land man is
absolutely helpless. To such a climate, then, is partly74 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

In Deutero-
nomy.

due Israel’s doctrine of Providence. The author of the
Book of Deuteronomy, to whom we owe so much insight

into the religious influences of the Promised

The Climate	,	.	, .	,	,	,

and Provi- Land, emphasises this by contrasting the land

with Egypt. For the land, whither thou goest
in to possess it, is not like the land of Egypt, whence ye came
out, where thou sowedst thy seed, and zvateredst it zvith thy
foot, as a garden of herbs—that is, where everything is so
much under man’s control, where man has all
nature at his foot like a little garden, where
he has but to link himself to the mechanical processes
of nature, and the fruits of the year are inevitable.
But the land, whither ye are passing over to possess it, is a
land of hills and valleys, of the rain of heaven it drinketh
ivater: a land which Jehovah thy God Himself looketh
after; contmually are the eyes of Jehovah thy God upon it,
from the beginning of the year, even to the e7id of the year.
That is, the climate of Egypt is not one which of itself
suggests a personal Providence, but the climate of Pales-
tine does so. And it shall be, if ye indeed hearken to my
commandments, which I am commanding you to-day, to love
Jehovah your God’ to worship Him with all your heart, and
with all your soul, that then I will give the rain of the land
in its season—early rain and latter rain,—and thou shalt
gather thy corn and thine oil. And I will give grass in thy
fields for thy cattle, and thou shalt eat and be full. Take
heed to yourselves, lest your heart be beguiled, and ye turn
aside and worship other gods and bow dow7i to them ; and
the wrath of Jehovah grow hot against you, and He shut up
the heaven, that there be 710 rain, and the ground yield not
her increase ; and ye perish off the good land which Jehovah
is giving you (Deut. xi.).The Climate and Fertility of the Land 75

Two remarkable passages in the prophets give us in-
stances of this general principle. Through Amos Jehovah
reminds His people of recent drought, famine, mildew and
blasting, pestilence and earthquake, and reproaches them
that after each of these they did not return to In Amos
Him :1 yet have ye not returned unto Me, saith and Isaiah*
Jehovah. And Isaiah, perhaps alluding to the same series
of climatic disturbances, speaks in a different order, of
earthquake, drought with forest fires and a famine, and
complains that, in spite of them, the people are still im-
penitent : for all this His anger is not turned away, but
His hand is stretched out still?

It was a moral Providence, then, which the prophets read
in the climate of their land. Now, there were features in
this which of themselves might suggest such a reading.
The hardness of man’s life even in the best of seasons, for
Palestine needs persistent toil to be fruitful, the uniqueness of
presence of the desert, the drought, the earth- {^neof Provi-
quake,the locusts—these spontaneously suggest dence-
a purpose at work for other than material ends. But Israel
could not have read in them the high moral Providence
which she did read, with a God of another character than
Jehovah. Look at her neighbours. They experienced
the same droughts, thunderstorms and earthquakes; but
these do not appear to have suggested to them any other
ideas than the wrath of the Deity, who had therefore to
be propitiated by the horrible sacrifices of manhood,
feminine purity and child life, which have made their

1	Amos iv. 6-11.

2	Isaiah v. 25, ix. 8-21, v. 26-30. These passages are connected by the
same refrain, they belong to the same series, and must originally have stood
together. We need not suppose that either prophet was bound to follow the
real sequence. Amos puts famine before drought.76 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

religions so revolting. Israel also felt God was angry,
but because He was such a God, and had revealed
Himself as He had done in the past, they knew that He
punished them through their climate, not to destroy, but
to warn and turn, his rebel folk. The Syrian year and
its interruptions play an equal part in the Phoenician
religions and in the Hebrew prophets’ doctrine of Provi-
dence. But while in the former they lead to mutilation
and horrible sacrifices, in the latter they are the reminder
that man does not live by the bread of the year alone :
they are calls to conscience, to ' repentance, to purity.
And what makes the difference on that same soil, and
under those same heavens, is the character of Israel’s
God. All the Syrian religions reflect the Syrian climate ;
Israel alone interprets it for moral ends, because Israel
alone has a God who is absolute righteousness.

Here, then, is another of those many points at which
the Geography of Syria exhausts the influence of the
material and the seen, and indicates the presence on the
land of the unseen and the spiritual.

II. The Fertility of the Land.

The long rainy season in Palestine means a consider-
able rainfall,1 and while it lasts the land gets a thorough
soaking. Every highland gorge, every low-

Winter rains ,,,,,,	,	r i

and Summer land valley-bed—nearly every one of those

drought. wadies which are dry in summer, and to the

traveller at that season seem the channels of some ancient

and forgotten flood—is filled annually with a roaring

1 Annual rainfall at Nazareth is about 61 centimetres ; at Jerusalem, 57 ;
while at Athens it is 40; Constantinople, 70; Vienna, 44; London, 58; Paris,
50; Rome, 80.—So Anderlind, Z.D.P.V, viii. 101 ff. Cf. P.E.F.Q. 1894.The Climate and Fertility of the Land 77

torrent, while many of the high meadows are lakes, and
plains like Esdraelon become in part quagmires. But
the land is limestone and very porous. The heavy rains
are quickly drained away, the wadies are left dry, the
lakes become marshes, or dwindle to dirty ponds,1 and
on the west of Jordan there remain only a very few short
perennial streams, of which but one or two, and these
mere rills, are found in the hill-country. At the foot of
the hills, however, there burst forth all through the summer
not only such springs as we have in our own land, but
large and copious fountains, from three to twenty feet in
breadth, and one to three feet in depth—some with broad
pools full of fish, and some sending forth streams strong
enough to work mills a few yards away. These fountain-
heads, as they are called,2 are very characteristic features
of the Syrian summer; in the midst of the dust and rust
of the rest of the land they surprise you with their wealth
of water and rank vegetation. They are chiefly found at
the foot of Hermon, where three of them give The Summer
birth to the Jordan, along both bases of the welIs’
Central Range, in the Jordan Valley and the Western
Plain, and in Esdraelon at the foot of Gilboa and of the
Samaritan hills. There are smaller editions of them
among the hills of Galilee and Samaria, but in the table-
land of Judaea the springs are few and meagre, and the
inhabitants store the winter rain in pits, partly natural,
partly built On the plains water may be got in most
places by boring and pumping.3

1	Very occasionally'these winter lakes will be large through the whole
summer. The Merj el Ghuruk, when we passed it in May 1891, was a very
extensive lake. So with Buttauf in Galilee.

2	Ras el ‘Ain.

3	The presence of ‘Ain, well or spring, in place-names is very common,78 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

On the east of the Jordan water is much more plentiful.
There are several long perennial rivers draining the eastern
Water East desert, and watering all the plateaus between
of Jordan.	an(j jor(jan Valley, the eastern half of

which might easily be irrigated by them in its entire extent.
Springs are more frequent, and, although streams are fewer
to the north of the Yarmuk than to the south, the soil on
the north is deep volcanic mould on a basalt basis, and
holds its winter moisture far longer than the limestone.

The distribution of water, then, unequal as it is, is
another factor in heightening the complexity of this land
of contrasts. Take it along with the immense
d?sTnUbution°f differences of level and temperature, with the
differences of aspect, seaward and to the
desert, and you begin to understand what a mixture of

but we must not infer from this that living water is present. It is not so at
‘Ain Shems ; at ‘Ain Sina there is only ablr, or cistern of rain-water (Robin-
son, Phys. Geog., 219, 220). At the foot of the hills the chief large fountains
that are characteristic of Syria are the following :—On the Western Plain,
between Tyre and Akkah at Ras el ‘Ain, at ‘Ain el Musheirifeh, at El-
Kabireh, at Birweh, and at Tell Kurdany, the source of the Belus. Along
north base of Carmel the Kishon is fed by copious springs. South of Carmel
we have the sources of the Zerka, Subbarin and Umm-esh Shukaf, whence
aqueducts went to Ccesarea, and some other spots at the roots of the
Samarian hills, like Ras el ‘Ain, whence the ‘Aujeh flows. In the Shephelah
there are several wells ; water can always be got by boring on the Philistine
plain; Askalon and Gaza are noted for their wells, and the wadies near the
sea have fresh water for most of the year. The streams in the Negeb are
only winter streams (Psalm cxxvi.); the wells are few. Along the western
base of the J udaean range are some copious fountains, chiefly at faults in the
strata in the gorges leading up to the plateau, e.g. ‘Ain el Kuf, in the W.
el Kuf. In a cave in a gorge off W. en Najil I found abundance of water in
May. The Judaean plateau has many cisterns and pools, but few springs,
and almost no large ones. There are two springs between Edh-Dhoheriyah
and Hebron—perhaps the upper and nether springs of Caleb (Josh. xv. 19);
twelve small springs about Hebron, and over thirty have been counted
within a radius of ten miles from Jerusalem, but only those at King
Solomon’s Pools yield a considerable quantity of water. Samaria is moreThe Climate and Fertility of the Land 79

soils Palestine is, and how her fauna and flora range
along every degree between the Alpine and tropical, be-
tween the forms of the Mediterranean basin and those of
desert life, while she still cherishes, in that peculiar deep
trench down the middle of her, animals and plants related
to those of distant lands, with which in previous geological
periods she had closer relations.

As to soils, every reader of the Bible is made to feel
how near in Palestine the barren lies to the fruitful.
Apart from the desert proper, which comes up

The Soil.

almost to the gates of the Judaean cities, how
much land is described as only pasture, and this so dry
that there is constant strife for the wells upon it? How
often do we hear of the field, the rough, uncultivated, but
not wholly barren, bulk of the hill-country, where the

favoured, especially at Khan Lubban, the W. Kanah, Salim, Nablus (where
the deep vale between Gerizim and Ebal has running water all the year
round), Fendakumieh, Jeba, Tell Dothan, Lejjun, and Jenin. On the
northern base of Gilboa there are ‘Ain Jalud and three other fountains,
making a considerable stream. In Galilee there are springs at Shunem,
Khan el Tajjar (two, one large), Ilattin (large), Nazareth, Seffurieh (large),
Gischala, Tibnin, Kedesh (two, both large), and other places. Along the
eastern base of the Central Range, in the Ghor, are many large and very
copious fountains—most of them more or less brackish and warm—opposite
Merom, ‘Amudiyeh, Belateh, Mellahah, all copious, with streams; the last
two very large, then the smaller Mughar and Kuba'a. On the eastern
shore of the Lake el Tabighah, a fount with stream, ‘Ain et Tineh and
Mudawarah, with large pools; ‘Ain el Baridah, with small pools; the hot
springs at the Baths of Tiberias; about Beisan many springs and thence
down the Jordan at frequent intervals, especially at Sakut, W. Malih (salt
and warm), Kerawa, Fusail, ‘Aujeh, ‘Ain Duk, ‘Ain es Sultan (near Jericho),
‘Ain Hajla, out on the plain. And along the coast of the Dead Sea JeMir,
Feshkhah (both brackish and warm), Ghuweir (small), Terabeh, ‘Ain Jidy,
and ‘Areijeh, whose streams are copious, produce thickets and fields, but are
lost even before the sea is reached. Of longer streams from the west the
Jordan receives the Jalud at Bethshean, the Fari'ah, and the Kelt—the
first two perennial, the last almost so. The waters on the Eastern Range
will be treated further on.8o The Historical Geography of tke Holy Land

The Field.

Woodland.

beasts of the field, that is, wild beasts, found sufficient room
to breed and become a serious hindrance, from first to
last, to Israel’s conquest of the land.1 This field is a great
element in the Old Testament landscape, and
we recognise it to-day in the tracts of moor-
land, hillside and summit, jungle and bare rock, which
make up so much of the hill-country, and can never have
been cultivated even for vines. How much of this field
was forest must remain a debateable question. On the
one hand, where there are now only some fragments of
wood, writers, even down to the Crusades, describe large
forests like that of Northern Sharon ; the word
for wood occurs in place-names, where there
are now few trees, as in Judaea and Jaulan ; you see
enormous roots here and there even on the bare plateau of
Judaea ; palm groves have disappeared from the Jordan
Valley, and elsewhere you may take for granted that
the Turk has not left the land so well wooded as he
found it. On the other hand, copse and wood cover
many old clearings as on Carmel ; on the Central
Range, the Old Testament speaks only of isolated large
trees, of copses and small woods, but looks for its ideal
forests to Gilead, Bashan, and Lebanon; and there is
very little mention of the manufacture of large native
wood.2

The truth is, that the conditions for the growth of such
large forests as we have in Europe and America, are not
present in Palestine : the Hebrew word we translate forest

1	Field, rnt^> is used not only for this wild moorland and hillside, but also
for cultivated soil, and for the territory belonging to a town.

2	Isaiah ix. io. For the temple cedar was imported from Lebanon. The
Israelites do not appear to have used coffins, 2 Kings xiii. 21 ; cf. Ankel,
op. cit., p. 104.The Climate and Fertility of the Land 81

ought to be woodland, and perhaps only copse or jungle}
and we may safely conclude that the land was never very
much more wooded than it is to-day. The distribution of
woodland may have been different, but the woods were
what we find the characteristic Palestine wood still to
be—open and scattered, the trees distinguished rather for
thickness than height, and little undergrowth when com-
pared with either a northern or a tropical forest.2 Here
and there groves of larger trees, or solitary giants of their
kind, may have stood conspicuous on the bare landscape.
The chief forest trees are several varieties of oak, including
the ilex, of terebinth,3 and carob, and box that ,
grows to a height of twenty feet, with a few
pines and cypresses, and by water plane trees. All these
were trees of God, that is, planted by Him and not by
man. The only others of equal size were the walnut,
mentioned by Josephus as numerous above the Lake of
Galilee, and the sycomore, used for both its fruit and its
timber.4 But these were cultivated. The acacia or shittim-
wood is common towards the desert.

Next to the woods of Palestine, a high thick bush forms
one of her sylvan features. It consists of dwarf oak,
terebinth and pine, dwarf wild olive, wild vine, B
arbutus and myrtle, juniper and thorn. This
mixture of degraded forms of forest and fruit-trees repre-
sents both the remains of former woods and the sites of

1	"iyi. The corresponding Arabic wa'ar is rocky ground.

2	Yet Richard’s army found the undergrowth very difficult in the forest of
Sharon. Vinsauf, Itin. Ricardi, iv. 12.

3	It is often impossible to tell whether oak or terebinth is meant in the Old

Testament. There are four words, and	and |i^N.

4	Amos vii. 14; Isaiah ix. 9 (E. V. 10); 1 Kings x. 27 ; 1 Chron. xxvii.
(xxviii.) 28; 2 Chron. i. 15 ; Luke xix. 4.

F82 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

abandoned cultivation. In the bush the forest and the
garden meet half way. Sometimes old oil and wine-
presses are found beneath it, sometimes great trees, sur-
vivors of old woods, tower above it. A few wadies in
Western Palestine, and many in Eastern, are filled with
oleanders, ribbons of pink across the landscape. Willows
are common, so are cane-brakes where there is water. The
rank jungle of the Jordan and the stunted flora of the
desert fall to be separately described.

If Palestine be not a land of forests, it is a land of
orchards. Except chestnuts, which singularly enough
are not found here, all the fruit-trees of the

Fruit-trees.

temperate zone flourish in Syria. The most
common are the apricot, ‘ to Syria what the fig is to
Smyrna and Ephesus,’ figs themselves, the orange, citron,
pomegranate, mulberry, pistachio, almond, and walnut.1
The sycomore, which is very easily grown, is cultivated for
its timber and its rough tasteless figs, which, as well as the
carob fruit, are eaten by the very poor.2 The date-palm
used to be cultivated in large groves both on the Maritime
Plain and in the Jordan Valley, where it might still be
cultivated. Near Jericho, large balsam groves were farmed
J down to Roman times.3 But the two chief
fruit-trees of Palestine are, of course, the olive
and the vine, the olive certainly native to Syria, and the
vine probably so. The cultivation of the former has been

1	Tristram, Natural History of the Bible. Cf. Anderlind, Die Frucht-
biiume in Syrien insbeso?idere Paldstina, Z.D.P. V. xi. 69. Plums, pears,
and apples are seldom found in Palestine proper. Cherries are only lately
introduced.

2	Amos was a gatherer of sycomore figs, vii. 14 ; the carob fruit was the
food of the Prodigal, Luke xv. 16.

3	Balsamodendron Gileadense, still growing in Southern Syria. Cf.
Jer. viii. 22.The Climate and Fertility of the Land 83

sustained to the present day, and was probably never much
greater than it is now. That of the vine is being greatly
revived. The disappearance of vineyards and not of
forests is the difference with which we have to reckon
in the landscape of Palestine. Innumerable hillsides, not
capable of other cultivation, which were terraced with green
vineyards to their summit, now in their ruin only exag-
gerate the stoniness of the land.1 But the Germans on
Mount Carmel and in Judaea, some French firms, and the
Jesuits in the Bek'a between the Lebanons are fast chang-
ing all this. At Salt there has always been, as there is
now, a great cultivation of grapes for manufacture into
raisins.

The cultivation of grain was confined to the lower
plateaus, the broader valleys, and the plains. At this day
the best wheat-fields are Philistia, Esdraelon,

Grain.

the Mukhneh to the east of Nablus, and
Hauran. The wheat of the latter, springing from volcanic
soil, is famed throughout the East.2 Barley, given to
horses and other beasts of burden, was the despised food
of the poorer peasants, or of the whole nation when the
Arabs drove them from the plains to the hills. It was in
the shape of a poor barley cake that the Midianite dreamt
he saw Israel rolling down from the hills and overturning
his camp on Esdraelon.3 Oats were not grown, but millet
was common in ancient times, and maize is now. Beans,
pulse, and lentils were largely grown. Garden vegetables
thrive richly wherever there is summer irrigation—tomatoes,
onions, cucumbers, pumpkins, and melons chiefly in the
plains, but we received all these fruits from the peasants

1	See the chapter on Judaea.

2	See the chapter on Hauran.

Judges vii. 13.84 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

of Gilead and the Bedouin of Moab.1 It is doubtful

whether the sugar-cane was known.2

There is, of course, no turf in Palestine, and very little

grass that lasts through the summer. After the rains, the

field springs thick with grasses and wild grains
Pasture.	.	,

of many kinds,3 some clover, lupins, many

succulent plants, aromatic herbs, lilies, anemones, and hosts

of other wild-flowers, but early summer sees much of this

withered away. Lupins, clover and other plants are

sometimes cultivated for fodder; but cattle and sheep

alike must trust to the wild pasture, over whose meagre

and interrupted vegetation their range has to be very large.

Only by the great fountains and pools can they find rich

unfading grass throughout the year.

Such, then, is the fertility of the Holy Land in forest,

orchard, and field. To a western eye it must, at certain

seasons of the year, seem singularly meagre and unin-

fluential—incapable of stirring the imagination,or enriching

the life of a people. Yet come in, with the year at the

flood, with the springing of the grain, with the rush of

colour across the field, the flush of green on the desert, and

in imagination clothe again the stony terraces with the

vines which in ancient times trailed from foot to summit of

many of the hills—then, even though your eye be western,

you will feel the charm and intoxication of the land. It is

not, however, the western eye we have to consider. It is the

1	The potato, I think, has just been introduced to Syria.

2	Isaiah xliii. 24 ; Jeremiah vi. 20. Eng. Sweet Cane ; but, according to
most authorities, identical with the Calamus (Exod. xxx. 23 ; Ezek. xxvii. 19),
a kind of spice, probably imported.

3	Three Hebrew words are translated grass : pi', Jerek, which means any
green herb : NBH, Deshe, which is our grass proper ; WCl, Hassir, which is
cut grass or hay.The Climate and Fertility of the Land 85

effect of this fertility on the desert nomads from whom,
as we have seen, the population of Syria was chiefly
drawn. If even at the season of its annual

Effect of the

ebb the fertility of the whole land affords Syrian fertility

on the Nomad.

a certain contrast to the desert—how much
more must its eastern forests, its immense wheat-fields,
its streams, the oases round its perennial fountains, the
pride of Jordan, impress the immigrant nomad. If he
settles down among them, how wholly must they alter
his mode of life !

The fertility of the Holy Land affected immigrants from
the desert, among whom Israel were the chief, in two ways.
It meant to them at once an ascent- in civilisation and a
fall in religion.

1. It meant a rise in civilisation. To pass from the
desert into Syria is to leave the habits of the nomadic life
for those of the agricultural. The process may A rise in
be gradual, and generally has been so, but the civilisation,
end is inevitable. Immigrant tribes, with their herds and
tents, may roam even the Syrian fields for generations,
but at last they settle down in villages and townships.
The process can be illustrated all down the history of
Syria : it can be seen at work to-day. Israel also passed
through it, and the passage made them a nation. From a
series of loosely-connected pastoral clans, they became a
united people, with a definite territory, and _

A 1	'	Israel s passage

its culture as the means of their life. The from the

nomadic stage

story is told in two passages of such great to the agricul-
tural.

beauty that I translate the whole of them.

The first is from the Song of Moses, and the other from
the Blessing of the Tribes—in chapters xxxii. and xxxiii.
of the Book of Deuteronomy. It is to be noticed that86 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

neither of them carries the origin of Israel further back than
the desert. Neither of them even hints at the sojourn of
the people in Egypt. Israel is a purely desert tribe, who
by the inspiration of Jehovah are stirred up to leave their
desert home, and settle as agriculturists in Palestine:

‘ Remember the days of old,

Consider the years of generation on generation.

Ask thy father and he will show thee,

Thine elders and they will tell thee.

When the Highest gave nations their heritage,

When He sundered the children of men.

He set the border of the tribes
By the number of the children of Israel.

For the portion of fehovah is His people,

Jacob the measure of His heritage.

He found him in a land of the desert,

In a waste, in a howling wilderness.

He encompassed him, He distinguished him,

He watched him as the apple of His eye.

As an eagle stirreth his nest,

Fluttereth over his young,

Sfreadeth abroad his wings, taketh them,

Beareth them up on his pinions,

Jehovah alone led him

And no strange god was with him.

He made him to ride on the Land's high places,

And to eat of the growth of the field.

He gave him to suck honey from the cliff,

And oil from the flinty rock.

Cream of ki?ie and milk of sheep,

With latnbs? fat and rams’,

Breed of Bashan and he-goats,

With fat of the kidneys of wheat;

And the blood of the grape thou drankest in foam ! ’

How could the passage from the nomadic life to the
agricultural be more vividly expressed than by this figure
of a brood of desert birds stirred to leave their nest by the
father bird ! The next poem is full of the same ideas—
1 Lit., peoples.The Climate and Fertility of the Land 87

that it was in the wilderness Jehovah met the people, that
their separate tribes first became a nation by their settle-
ment in Canaan, and the new habits which its fertility
imposed on them :

1 Jehovah from Sinai hath come,

And risen from Seir upon them ;

He shone from Mount Paran,

And broke from Meribah of Qadesh}

From the South2 3 4 fire ... to them.

Also He loved His people,

All His saints were in thy hand (?),

They pressed to thy feet (?),

They took of His words.2

Law did Moses command us,

A Domain had the congregation of facob,—

So he became king in Jeshutun,

Whefi the heads of the people were gathered,

When the tribes of Israel were one.
*******

There is none like the God of Jeshurun,

Riding the heavens to thy help,

And the clouds in His highness !

A refuge is the everlasting God,

And beneath are the arms of eternity.

And he drove from before thee the foe,

And he said—Destroy /

So Israel dwelt in safety,

Secluded was Jacob's fount.

In a land of corn and wine,

Also His heavens dropped dew.

Happy thou, Israel! Who is like unto thee /

People saved by Jehovah,

The shield of thy help,

Yea, the sword of thy highness;

And thy foes shall fawn on thee*

And thou—on their heights shalt thou march !1

1	Text slightly altered (partly after the LXX.) gives this true parallel to the
other lines.

2	Reading very corrupt. I suggest the south as a parallel to the other lines.

3	LXX., these lines are very uncertain.

4	To adopt the happy translation of Mr. Addis.88 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

2. But this rise from the nomadic level to the agricul-
tural, which the passage from the desert into Syria implied,
this ascent in social life, meant at the same time almost
inevitably a descent in religion.

It is very intelligible. ^ The creed of the desert nomad is
simple and austere—for nature about him is monotonous,
silent, and illiberal. But Syria is a land of

Religious con-	y

sequences of the lavish gifts and oracles—where woods are

fertility.

full of mysterious speech, and rivers burst
suddenly from the ground, where the freedom of nature
excites, and seems to sanction, the passions of the human
body, where food is rich, and men drink wine. The spirit
and the senses are equally taken by surprise. No one can
tell how many voices a tree has who has not come up to
it from the silence of the great desert. No one may
imagine how ‘possessed’ a landscape can feel—as if singled
out and endowed by some divinity for his own domain
and residence—who has not, across the forsaken plateaus
of Moab or Anti-Lebanon, fallen upon one of the sudden
Syrian rivers, with its wealth of water and of verdure.

But with the awe comes the sense of indulgence, and
the starved instincts of the body break riotously forth.
It is said that Mohammed, upon one of his journeys out of
Central Arabia, was taken to look upon Damascus. He
gazed, but turned away, and would not enter the city.
‘ Man,’ he said, ‘ can have but one Paradise, and mine is
above.’ It may be a legend, but it is a true symbol of the
effect which Syria exercises on the imagination of every
nomad who crosses her border.

All this is said to have happened to Israel from almost
their first encampment in Canaan. Israel settled in Shittim,
and the people began to commit zvhoredom with the daughtersThe Climate and Fertility of the Land 89

of Moab . . . Israel joined himself to Bactf-peor. And
still more, when they settled on the west of the Jordan
among the Canaanites, and had fully adopted the life of the
land, did they lapse into polytheism, and the Israel.s fall inl0
sensuous Canaanite ritual. In every favoured Polytheism-
spot of the land their predecessors had felt a Ba'al, a Lord
or Possessor, to whom the place was Be'ulah, subject or
married, and to these innumerable Ba'alim they turned
aside. They went astray on every high hill, and under
every green tree} . . . they did according to all the abomina-
tions of the nations which the Lord cast out before the chil-
dren of Israel? The poem which we have already quoted
directly connects this lapse into idolatry with the change
from the nomadic to the agricultural life. These next
lines follow on immediately to the lines on p. 86 :

‘ And Jeshurun waxedfat, and struck out

—Thou art fat, thou art thick, thou art sleek /—

And cast off the God that had made him,

And despised the Rock of his salvation.

They moved him to jealousy with strange gods,

With abominations provoked Him to anger.

They sacrificed to monsters undivine,

Gods they had known not,

Novelties, lately come in,

Their fathers never had them in awe.

Of the Rock that bare thee thou wast unmindful,

Andforgattest the God who gave thee birth?

All this makes two things clear to us. The conception
of Israel’s early history which prevails in Deuteronomy,
viz., that the nation suffered a declension from a pure and
simple estate of life and religion, to one which was gross and

1 The worship of the host of heaven did not become general in Israel till
the ninth and eighth centuries.

- 1 Kings xiv. 23, 24. Cf. 2 Kings xvii. 9-12 ; Hos. ix. 10.90 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

sensuous, from the worship of their own deity to the wor-
ship of many local gods, is justified in the main—I do not
say in details, but in the main—by the geographical data,
and by what we know to have been the influence of these
at all periods in history. And, secondly, this survey of the
fertility of Syria, and of its social and religious influences,
must surely have made very clear to us how

The marvel of

monotheism in unlikely a soil this was for monotheism to
Syna	spring from. We must feel that it has brought

out into relief the presence and the power of those spiritual
forces, which, in spite of the opposition of nature, did create
upon Syria the monotheistic creed of Israel.CHAPTER IV

THE SCENERY OF THE LAND
AND ITS REFLECTION IN THE
BIBLE

01THE SCENERY OF THE LAND AND ITS
REFLECTION IN THE BIBLE

T T has grown the fashion to despise the scenery of
Palestine. The tourist, easily saddle-sore and miss-
ing the comforts of European travel, finds the picturesque
landscape deteriorate almost from the moment Palestine-
he leaves the orange-groves of Jaffa behind him, and
arrives in the north with a disappointment which Lebanon
itself cannot appease. The Plain is commonplace, the
glens of Samaria only ‘ pretty,’ but the Judaean table-land
revolting in its stony dryness, and the surroundings of the
Lake of Galilee feverish and glaring. Now it is true that
the greater part of Palestine, like some other countries
not unknown for beauty, requires all the ornament which
cultivation can give it, and it has been deprived of this.
The land has been stripped and starved, its bones pro-
trude, in parts it is very bald—a carcase of a land, if you
like, from some points of view, and especially when the
clouds lower, or the sirocco throws dust across the sun.
Yet, even as it lies to-day, there are, in the Holy Land,
some prospects as bold and rich as any you will see in
countries famed for their picturesqueness. There is the
coast-line from the headland of Carmel—northwards the
Gulf of Haifa, with its yellow sands and palms, across
them brown, crumbling Acre, and in the haze the white94 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Ladder of Tyre: southwards Sharon with her scattered
forest, her coast of sand and grass, and the haggard ruins
of Athlit—last foothold of the Crusaders : westwards the
green sea and the wonderful shadows of the clouds upon
it—grey when you look at them with your face to the
sun, but, with the sun behind you, purple, and more like
Homer’s ‘ wine-coloured ’ water than anything I have
seen on the Mediterranean. There is the excellency of
Carmel itself: wheat-fields climbing from Esdraelon to the
first bare rocks, then thick bush and scrub, young ilex,
wild olives and pines, with undergrowth of large purple
thistles, mallows with blossoms like pelargoniums, stocks
of hollyhock, golden broom, honeysuckle and convolvulus
—then olive-groves between the shoulders of the moun-
tain, their dull green mass banked by the lighter forest
trees, and on the flanks the broad lawns, where in the
shadow of great oaks you look far out to sea. There is
the Lake of Galilee as you see it from Gadara, with the
hills of Naphtali above it, and Hermon filling all the
north. There is the perspective of the Jordan Valley as
you look up from over Jericho, between the bare ranges
of Gilead and Ephraim, with the winding ribbon of the
river’s jungle, and the top of Hermon like a white cloud
in the infinite distance. There is the forest of Gilead,
where you ride, two thousand feet high, under the boughs
of great trees creaking and rustling in the wind, with all
Western Palestine before you. There is the moonlight
view out of the bush on the northern flank of Tabor, the
leap of the sun over the edge of Bashan, summer morn-
ing in the Shephelah, and sunset over the Mediterranean,
when you see it from the gateway of the ruins on Samaria
down the glistening Vale of Barley. Even in the barestThe Scenery of the Land

95

provinces you get many a little picture that lives with you
for life — a chocolate-coloured bank with red poppies
against the green of the prickly pear hedge above it, and
a yellow lizard darting across; a river-bed of pink
oleanders flush with the plain ; a gorge in Judaea, where
you look up between limestone walls picked out with
tufts of grass and black-and-tan goats cropping at them,
the deep blue sky over all, and, on the edge of the only
shadow, a well, a trough, and a solitary herdsman.

And then there are'those prospects in which no other
country can match Palestine, for no other has a valley
like the Ghor, or a desert like that which falls from
Judaea to the Dead Sea.1 There is the view from the
Mount of Olives, down twenty miles of desert hill-tops to
the deep blue waters, with the wall of Moab glowing on
the further side like burnished copper, and staining the
blue sea red with its light. There is the view of the Dead
Sea through the hazy afternoon, when across the yellow
foreground of Jeshimon the white Lisan rises like a pack
of Greenland ice from the blue waters, and beyond it the
Moab range, misty, silent, and weird. There are the
precipices of Masada and Engedi sheer from the salt
coast. And, above all, there is the view from Engedi
under the full moon, when the sea is bridged with gold,
and the eastern mountains are black with a border of
opal.

But, whether there be beauty or not, there is always on
all the heights that sense of space and distance which
comes from Palestine’s high position between the great
desert and the great sea.

1 De Saulcy calls the Dead Sea, ‘ le lac le plus imposant et le plus beau
qui existe sur la terre.’—Voyage autour de la Mer Morte, i. 154.96 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Of all this, such use was made by Israel as served the
expression of her high ideals, or was necessary in the
description of her warfare. Israel was a nation of prophets
and warriors. But prophets, like lovers, offer you no
more reflection of nature than as she sympathises with
their passion ; nor warriors, except as they wait
in Israel's	impatiently for her omens, or are excited by

gS	her freshness and motion, or lay down their

tactics by her contours. Let it be when thou hearest the
sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees, that then
thou bestir thyself \ for then shall fehovah have gone out
before thee to smite the host of the Philistines}

‘ The torrent of Kishon swept them away,

That torrent of spates, torrent Kishon.2,

My God, make them like a whirl of dust,

Like the stubble before the wind;

Asa fire burneth a wood

And as flame setteth the mountains afire?

And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove,

I wouldfly away and be at rest!

I would hasten my escape

From the windy stonn and tempest?

The God of my rock; in Him will I trust :

My shield, and the horn of my salvation,

My high tower and my refuge.

He matcheth my feet to hinds3 feet ;

He setteth me upon my high places.

Thou hast enlarged my steps under me;

So that my atikles swerved not?

Of the brook shall he drink by the way:

Therefore shall he lift up the head.16

1 1 Chron. xiv. 15.
4 Ps. lv. 6-8.

2 Judges v. 21.

5 2 Sam. xxii. 3, 34, 37.

3 Fs. lxxxiii. 13, 14.
6 Ps. cx. 7.The Scenery of the Land

97

‘ The gazelle, Israel, Is slain on thy heights,

How fallen are the heroes / ’1

‘ When the Almighty scattered kings on her,

It was as when it snoweth on Salmon2

How vividly do these cries from Israel’s mountain-war
bring before us all that thirsty, broken land of crags and
shelves, moors and gullies, with its mire and its rock, its
few summer brooks, its winter spates and heavy snows ; the
rustling of its woods, its gusts of wind, and its bush fires ;
its startled birds, when the sudden storms from the sea
sweep up the gorges, and its glimpses of deer, poised for
a moment on the high sky-line of the hills. The battle-
fields, too, are always accurately described—
the features of the Vale of Elah, of Michmash,
of Jezreel, and of Jeshimon can be recognised to-day from
the stories of David and Goliath, of Jonathan and the
Philistine host, of Saul’s defeat and Gideon’s victory, and
Saul’s pursuit of David.3

The little details, which thus catch a soldier’s ear and
eye, are of course not so frequent with the prophets as the
long lines of the land, and its greater natural phenomena.

‘ He that sitteth on the circle of the earth,

And the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers ;

That stretcheth the heavens as a curtain,

And spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell ini4

Men who looked at life under that lofty imagination did

1 2 Sam. i. 19.	2 Ps. Ixviii. 14.

3 The most careful study of these battle-fields is that given by Principal Miller
in The Least of all Lands, and accurate plans accompany the vivid descrip-
tions. See also Major Conder’s identification of the scene of the story of
David and Goliath, and his description of Mount Hachilah in Jeshimon.—
Tent Work, pp. 277 and 244.	4 Isaiah xl. 22.

G98 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

not notice closely the details of their country’s scenery.
What infected them was the sense of space and dis-

thunderstorms sweeping the length of the land, and the
earthquakes. For these were symbols of the great pro-
phetic themes: the abiding justice and mercy of God,
the steadfastness of His providence, the nearness of His
judgments to life, which lies between His judgments as the
land between the Desert and the Gi'eat Deep; His power
to bring up life upon His people as spring rushes up
on the wilderness ; His awful last judgment, like morn-
ing scattered on the mountains, when the dawn is crushed
upon the land between the hills and the heavy clouds,
and the lurid light is spilt like the wine-press of the
wrath of God. And if those great outlines are touched
here and there with flowers, or a mist, or a bird’s nest,
or a passing thistledown, or a bit of meadow, or a quiet
pool, or an olive-tree in the sunshine, it is to illustrate
human beauty, which comes upon the earth as fair as her
wild-flowers, and as quickly passeth away, which is like
a vapour that appeareth for a moment on the hillside
and then vanisheth; or it is to symbolise God’s provision
of peace to His people in corners and nooks of this
fiercely-swept life of ours :

where the effect is of liquid light, when the sun breaks

The Scenery
in the
Prophets.

tance, the stupendous contrasts of desert and
fertility, the hard, straight coast with the sea
breaking into foam, the swift sunrise, the

‘ He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters1

They looked unto him, and were lightened; ’2

1 Psalm xxiii. 2.

2 Psalm xxxiv. 5, Massoretic text.The Scenery of the Land

99

through the clouds, rippling across a wood or a troubled
piece of water.

‘ But I am like a green olive-tree in the house of God.'1

I will be as the dew unto Israel:

He shall blossom as the lily, and strike forth his roots like Lebanon:

His branches shall spread,

His beauty shall be as the olive-tree, and his smell as Lebanon.’2

Bring up man and the animals on the scene, and
you see those landscapes described by Old Testament
writers exactly as you will see them to-day—the valleys
covered with corn, the pastures above clothed with
flocks, shepherds and husbandmen calling to each other
through the morning air, the narrow high-banked hill-
roads brimming with sheep, the long and stately camel
trains, the herds of wild cattle,—bulls of Bashan have com-
passed me about. You see the villages by day, with the
children coming forth to meet the traveller; 3 the villages
by night, without a light, when you stumble on them in
the darkness, and all the dogs begin barking,—at evening
they return and make a noise like a dog, and go round about
the city. You see night,

‘ Wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth,

The sun ariseth, they shrink together,

And lay them down in their dens.

Man goeth forth unto his work,

And to his labour till the evening.’

You see those details which are so characteristic of every
Eastern landscape, the chaff and rolling thorns blown be-
fore the wind, the dirt cast out on the streets ; the broken
vessel by the well ; the forsaken house; the dusty grave.

Let us pay attention to all these, and we shall surely

1 Psalm lii. 8.	2 Hosea xiv. 5,6.	3 2 Kings vi.; Mark x. 13.ioo The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

feel ourselves in the atmosphere and scenery in which
David fought, and Elisha went to and fro, and Malachi
saw the Sun of Righteousness arise with healing in his
wings.

There are three poems in the Old Testament which give
a more or less comprehensive picture of the scenery of
Palestine : the Twenty-Ninth Psalm, the Song of Solomon,
and the Hundred and Fourth Psalm.

The Twenty-Ninth Psalm describes a thunderstorm
travelling the whole length of the land, rattling and strip-
ping it: so that you see its chief features

Psalm xxix.	.

sweeping before you on the storm. Enough
to give the translation of verses 3-9, which contain
the description. It begins among the thunder-clouds :

‘ The voice of Jehovah is upo7t the waters,

The God of Glory thundereth ;

Jehovah is upon great waters.

The voice of Jehovah with power,

The voice of Jehovah with ?najesty,

The voice of Jehovah breaketh the cedars;

Yea, Jehovah breaketh the cedars of Lebanon.

He maketh them also to skip like a calf;

Lebanoti and Sirion like a wild ox in his youth.

The voice ofJehovah heweth out flames of fire.

The voice of Jehovah maketh the wilderness whirl;

Jehovah maketh the wilderness of Kadesh to whirl.

The voice of Jehovah maketh the hinds to travail,

And strippeth the forests;

In His palace every one sayeth, Glory.'1

Here all the scenery flashes before us, as in flashes of
lightning, from the storm-clouds that break on the peaks
of Lebanon, down Lebanon’s flanks to the lower forests
where the deer lie, and so out upon the desert. In the

1 Psalm xxix. 3-9.The Scenery of the Land

IOI

last verse there is a wonderful contrast between the agita-
tion of the earth at one end of the storm, and the glory
of the heavenly temple at the other.1

In the Song of Songs we have a very different aspect of
the country: springtime among the vineyards songof
and villages of North Israel, where the poem Songs*
was certainly composed. The date does not matter for
our purpose :

‘ For, see, the winter has passed,

The rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear in the land;

The time of singing is come,

And the turtle dove's murmur is heard in our land.

The fig-tree is reddening her figs,

And blossoming vines give forth their scent? 2

‘ Come, my beloved, let us forth to the field,

Let us lodge in the villages,

Let us early to the vineyards,

Let us see if the vine flourish,

If the vine blossom have opened,

The pomegranates bud.

There will I give thee my loves,

The mandrakes are fragrant,

And about our gates are all rare fruits,—

I have stored them for thee, my beloved?

Lebanon is in sight and Hermon :

‘ Come with me fro7n Lebanon,

My bride, with me from Lebanon,

Look from the top of Amana,

From the top of Shenir and of Hermon?

And the bracing air from snow-fields and pine-forests
wafts down

‘ The scent of Lebanon?

There are the shepherds’ black tents, the flocks of goats

1 I feel no reason to depart in this verse from the Massoretic text. But see
Cheyne in loco, who reads oaks for hinds.	2 Song ii. 11-13 ; vii. 12.102 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

that swarm from Mount Gilead, the sheep that come up
from the shearing and washing, and the strange pomp
which now and then passes by the high road across
North Israel from Egypt to Damascus—royal litters,
chariots, and regiments with banners, heralded by clouds
of dust.

‘ I have likened thee, O my love,

To a horse among the chariots of Pharaoh?1

‘ What is this coming up from the wilderness
Like pillars of smoke ?

Behold / it is Solomon's palanquin;

Threescore mighty men are around it,

Of the mighty of Israel;

All of them grasping the sword,

Experts in war.

Every man has his sword on his thigh,

Against the alarms of the night?2

‘ Who is she that looketh forth like the dawn,

Fair as the moon, pure as the sun,

Glorious as bannered hosts ?13

‘ I went down into the garden of nuts,

To see the fruits of the valley;

To see whether the vine flourished,

The pomegranates budded.

Or ever I knew,

My soul had brought me on the chariots of my willing people?4

The text of the last verse is evidently corrupt, but the
sense is clear. The country girl has gone down into
the valley, where she thinks herself alone with the nut-
trees and pomegranates, when suddenly a military troop,
marching by the valley road, surprise her. We shall see,
when we come to Galilee, that the character of that pro-
vince is to be a garden, crossed by many of the world’s

1 Song i. 9.

- iii. 6-8.

3 Imposing.

4 vi. 10-12.The Scenery of the Land

103

Psalm civ.

high-roads. Nothing could better illustrate this character
than the procession and pomp, the chariots and banners,
which break through the rural scenery of the Song of
Songs.

We have no space here for the Hundred and Fourth
Psalm, and must refer the reader to the Revised Version
of it. He will find a more comprehensive
view of the Holy Land than in any other
Scripture, for it embraces both atmosphere and scenery,—
wind, water and light, summer and winter, mountain,
valley and sea, man and the wild beasts.

Before we pass from the scenery, it may be well to
draw the reader’s attention to one feature of its descrip-
tion in the Old Testament. By numerous little tokens,
we feel that this is scenery described by Highlanders:
by men who, for the most part, looked down upon their
prospects and painted their scenes from above. Their
usual word for valley is depthx—something below them ;
for terror and destruction some of their com-
monest names mean originally abyss? God’s a Highland
unfathomable judgments are depths, for the
narrow platform of their life fell eastward to an invisible
depth ; their figure for salvation and freedom is a wide or
a large place? Their stage slopes away from them, every
apparition on it is described as coming up. And there is
that singular sense, which I do not think appears in any
other literature, but which pervades the Old Testament,
of seeing mountain-tops from above. Israel treadeth upon
his high places, as if mountain-tops were a common
road ; and Jehovah marcheth upon His high places, as if
it were a usual thing to see clouds below, and yet
2y^n nnaetc.	3

nmo-104 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

on the tops of hills. Joel looks from his high station
eastward over the tops of the mountains that sink to the
Dead Sea, and speaks of morn above the mountains broken
and scattered upon them by the heavy thunder-clouds.
And, finally, we owe to the high station of Israel, those
long approaches and very distant prospects both of war
and peace: the trails of armies across the plains in fire
and smoke, the land spreading very far forth, and, though
Israel was no maritime people, the wonderful visions of
the coast and the sea.CHAPTER V

THE LAND AND QUESTIONS OF FAITHTHE LAND AND QUESTIONS OF FAITH

'TT'HESE questions have, no doubt, already suggested
-4* themselves to the reader, and will do so again and
again as he passes through the land—How far does the
geography of Palestine bear witness to the truth and
authenticity of the different books of the Bible ? How far
does a knowledge of the land assist our faith as Chris-
tians in the Word of God and Jesus Christ His Son?
It may be well for us, before we go through the land, to
have at least the possibilities of its contribution to these
arguments accurately defined, were it for no other reason
than that it is natural to expect too much, and that a
large portion of the religious public, and of writers for
them, habitually exaggerate the evidential value of the
geography and archaeology of Palestine, and by emphasis-
ing what is irrelevant, especially in details, miss altogether
the grand, essential contents of the Land’s testimony to
the divine origin of our religion.

We have seen how freshly the poetry and narrative of
the Bible reflect the natural features of Palestine both in
outline and in detail. Every visitor to the land has felt this.
Napoleon himself may be quoted: ‘When camping on
the ruins of those ancient towns, they read aloud Scripture
every evening in the tent of the General-in-Chief. The

analogy and the truth of the descriptions were striking:

107io8 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

they still fit this country after so many centuries and
changes.’1 This is not more than the truth, yet it does

else were the Book of Judith the truest man ever wrote,
instead of being what it is, a pretty piece of fiction.
Many legends are wonderful photographs of scenery.
And, therefore, let us at once admit that, while we may
have other reasons for the historical truth of the patriarchal
narratives, we cannot prove this on the ground that their
itineraries and place-names are correct. Or, again, that
the Book of Joshua, in marking tribal boundaries, gives us
a detailed list of towns, the most of which we are able to

time. Again, that Israel’s conquests under Moses on
the east of the Jordan went so far north as described, is not
proved by the discovery in these days of the various
towns mentioned. In each of these cases, all that is proved
is that the narrative was written in the land by some one
who knew the land, and this has never been called in
question. The date, the accuracy of the narrative, will
have to be discussed on other grounds. All that geography
can do is to show whether or not the situations were pos-
sible at the time to which they are assigned, and even
this is a task often beyond her resources.

1 ‘ En campant sur les ruines de ces anciennes villes, on lisait tous les soirs
l’Ecriture Sainte a haute voix sous la tente du general en chef. L’analogie
et la v£rit£ des descriptions etaient frappantes ; elles conviennent encore a
ce pays apres tant de siecles et de vicissitudes.’—Campagnes d'£gypte et de
Syrie, dictces par NapoUon Ini-m2 me, vol. ii. (see p. 19 of this vol.).

not carry us very far. That a story accu-

Geographical

accuracy of	not necessarily

Scripture mean that ft ft a reai transcript of history—

Scripture

not proof of

historical

accuracy.

identify, does not prove anything about the
date or authorship of these lists, nor the fact of
the deliberate partition of the land in Joshua’sThe Land and Questions of Faith

109

Battle-fields.

At the same time, there are in the Old Testament
pictures of landscape, and especially descriptions of the
geographical relations of Israel, which we cannot help
feeling as testimonies of the truth of the narratives in
which they occur. If, for instance, you can to-day follow
the description of a battle by the contours, features, and
place-names of the landscape to which it is assigned, that
surely is a strong, though not, of course, a
final, proof that such a description is true. In
this connection one thinks especially of the battles of the
Vale of Elah, Michmash, and Jezreel. And certainly it is
striking that in none of the narratives of these is there
any geographical impossibility. Again, nothing that the
Pentateuch tells us about the early movements of the
Philistines and the Hittites disagrees with the Earjy
other evidence we possess from geography and mi£ratlons-
archaeology;1 while Israel’s relations to the Philistines,
in the record of the Judges and early Kings, contrasted
with her relations to the same people in the prophetic
period, is in exact accordance with the data of the his-
torical geography of Syria.2

As to questions of authorship, the evidence of geography
mainly comes in support of a decision already settled by
other proofs. In this matter one thinks especially of the
accurate pictures of the surroundings of Jerusalem given
in the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah, both of them
her citizens, contrasted with the very different
geographical reflection on the earlier pro- arfdliuhen-
phecies of Ezekiel, or the second half of the tlclty'

Book of Isaiah. Geography, too, assists us in the analysis
of the composite books of the Old Testament into their
1 See chapter on the Philistines, p. 172.	2 Ibid. p. 178.i io The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

various documents, for in the Pentateuch, for instance,
each document has often its own name for the same
locality, and as has just been said, the geographical reflec-
tion on the first half of the Book of Isaiah is very different
from that on the second half.1 But in the Old Testament
geography has little contribution to make to any question
of authenticity, for, with the exceptions stated above, the
whole of the Old Testament is admitted to have been
written by natives of Palestine, who were familiar with
their land.

It is different, however, with the New Testament, where
authorship outside Palestine is sometimes a serious possi-
bility. Here questions of authenticity are closely bound
up with those of geographical accuracy. Take the case
of the Gospel of St. John. It has been held that the
writer could not have been a native of Palestine, because
of certain errors which are alleged to occur in his descrip-
tion of places. I have shown, in a chapter on the Ques-
tion of Sychar, that this opinion finds no support in the
passage most loudly quoted in its defence.2 And, again,
the silence of the synoptic Gospels concerning cities on
the Lake of Galilee, like Tiberias and Taricheae, which
became known all over the Roman world in the next
generation, and their mention of places not so known, has
a certain weight in the argument for the early date of
the Gospels, and for the authorship of these by contem-
poraries of Christ’s ministry.3

But if on all such questions of date, authorship, and
accuracy of historical detail, we must be content to admit

1 Duhm thinks he can make out that part of Isaiah, xl.-lxvi., was composed

in Lebanon.	2 Ch. xviii.

3 See chapter on the Lake of Galilee, ch. xxi.The Land and Questions of Faith

111

that geography has not much more to contribute than a
proof of the possibility of certain solutions, it is very dif-
ferent when we rise to the higher matters of Higher
the religion of Israel, to the story of its origin questlons-
and development, to the appearance of monotheism, and
to the question of the supernatural. On these the testi-
mony of the historical geography of the Holy Land is
high and clear.

For instance, to whatever date we assign the Book
of Deuteronomy, no one who knows the physical consti-
tution of Palestine, and her relation to the

Deuteronomy

great desert, can fail to feel the essential and the
truthfulness of the conception, which rules in Prophets'
that book, of Israel’s entrance into the land as at once a
rise in civilisation from the nomadic to the agricultural
stage of life, and a fall in religion from a faith which the
desert kept simple to the rank and sensuous polytheism
that was provoked by the natural variety of the Paradise
west of Jordan.1 Or take another most critical stage of
Israel’s education : no one can appreciate the prophets’
magnificent mastery of the historical forces of their time,
or the wisdom of their advice to their people, who has
not studied the relations of Syria to Egypt and Mesopo-
tamia or the lines across her of the campaigns of these
powers.

But these are only details in larger phenomena. In the
economy of human progress every race has had its office
to fulfil, and the Bible has claimed for Israel The training
the specialism of religion. It represents Israel ofIsrael-
as brought by God to the Holy Land—as He also carried
other peoples to their lands—for the threefold purpose of
1 See chapter iii., especially pp. 89, 90.I I 2

The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

being preserved through all the changes of ancient his-
tory, of being educated in true religion, and sent
forth to the world as apostles and examples. But how
could such a people be better framed than by selec-
tion out of that race of mankind which have been most
distinguished for their religious temperament, and by
settlement on a land both near to, and aloof from, the
main streams of human life, where they could be at once
spectators of history and yet not its victims, where they
could at once enjoy personal communion with God and
yet have some idea also of His providence of the whole
world ; where they could at once gather up the experi-
ence of the ancient world, and break with it into the
modern ? There is no land which is at once so much
a sanctuary and an observatory as Palestine: no land
which, till its office was fulfilled, was so swept by the
great forces of history, and was yet so capable of pre-
serving one tribe in national continuity and growth : one
tribe learning and suffering and rising superior to the
successive problems these forces presented to her, till
upon the opportunity afforded by the last of them she
launched with her results upon the world. It is the
privilege of the student of the historical geography of
Palestine to follow all this process of development in
detail. If a man can believe that there is no directing hand
behind our universe and the history of our race, he will, of
course, say that all this is the result of chance. But, for
most of us, only another conclusion is possible. It may
best be expressed in the words of one who was no theo-
logian but a geographer—perhaps the most scientific
observer Palestine has ever had. Karl Ritter says of
Palestine : ‘ Nature and the course of history shows thatThe Land and Questions of Faith

ii 3

here, from the beginning onwards, there cannot be talk of
any chance.51

But while the geography of the Holy Land has this
positive evidence to offer, it has also negative evidence to
the same end. The physical and political con-

Geography

ditions of Israel’s history do not explain all its and moral

forces.

results. Over and over again we shall see the
geography of the land forming barriers to Israel’s growth, by
surmounting which the moral force that is in her becomes
conspicuous. We shall often be tempted to imagine that
Israel’s geography, physical and political, is the cause of
her religion ; but as often we shall discover that it is only
the stage on which a spirit—that, to use the words of the
prophets, is neither in her mountains nor in her men—
rises superior alike to the aids and to the obstacles which
these contribute. This is especially conspicuous in the
case of Israel’s monotheism. Monotheism was born not,
as M. Renan says, in Arabia, but in Syria.

And the more we know of Syria and of the
other tribes that inhabited her, the more we shall be
convinced that neither she nor they had anything to
do with the origin of Israel’s faith. For myself, I can
only say that all I have seen of the land, and read of
its ancient history, drives me back to the belief that the
monotheism which appeared upon it was ultimately due
to the revelation of a character and a power which carried
with them the evidence of their uniqueness and divine
sovereignty.

But the truth and love of God have come to us in their

Monotheism.

1 ‘ Die Natur und der Hergang der Geschichte zeigt uns dass hier von
Anfang an von keiner Zufalligkeit die Rede sein kann.’—K. Ritter, Ein
Blick anf Paldstina u. seine christliche Bevolkerung.

H114 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

highest power not as a book, even though that be the
Bible, nor as a doctrine, even though that be the mono-
The incar- theism of the Bible, with all its intellectual and
nation. moral consequences, but as a Man, a native
and a citizen of this land : whose education was its history,
whose temptation was some of its strongest political forces,
who overcame by loyalty to its distinctive gospel,1 who
gathered up the significance of its history into Himself, and
whose ministry never left its narrow limits. He drew His
parables from the fields its sunshine lights, and from all
the bustle of its daily life ; He prayed and agonised for us
through its quiet night scenes ; He vindicated His mission
to mankind in conflict with its authorities, and He died for
the world on one of its common places of execution. For
our faith in the Incarnation, therefore, a study of the his-
torical geography of Palestine is a necessary discipline.
Besides helping us to realise the long preparation of his-
tory, Jewish and Gentile, for the coming of the Son of God,
a vision of the soil and climate in which He grew up and
laboured is the only means of enforcing the reality of His
manhood. It delivers us, on the one hand, from those
abstract views of His humanity which have so often been
the error and curse of Christianity ; and, on the other
hand, from what is to-day a more present danger—the
interpretation of Christ (prevalent with many of our
preachers to the times) as if He were a son of our own
generation.

The course of Divine Providence in Syria has not been
one of mere development and cultivation, of building and
planting. It has been full also of rebuke and frustra-
tion, of rooting up and tearing down. Judgment has
1 See pp. 35-37.The Land and Questions of Faith 115

all along mingled with mercy. Christ Himself did not
look forward to the course of the history of the kingdom
which he founded as an unchecked advance to universal
dominion. He took anything but an optimistic view of
the future of His Church. He pictured Himself not
only as her King and Leader to successive victories,
but as her Judge: revisiting her suddenly, and finding
her asleep ; separating within her the wise from the
foolish, the true from the false, the pure from the cor-
rupt, and punishing her with sore and awful calamities.
Ought we to look for these visitations only at the end
of the world ? Have we not seen them already fulfilled
in the centuries? Has not the new Israel been punished
for her sin, as Israel of old was, by the historical powers
of war, defeat, and captivity ?

It is in the light of these principles of Christ’s teach-
ing that we are to estimate the mysterious victory of
Mohammedanism over Christianity on the Christianity
very theatre of our Lord’s revelation. The and Islam-
Christianity of Syria fell before Islam, because it was
corrupt, and deserved to fall. And again, in attempting
by purely human means to regain her birthplace, the
Church was beaten back by Islam, because she was divided,
selfish, and worldly. In neither of these cases was it
a true Christianity that was overthrown, though the true
Christianity bears to this day the reproach and the
burden of the results. The irony of the Divine Judg-
ment is clearly seen in this, that it was on the very land
where a spiritual monotheism first appeared that the
Church was first punished for her idolatry and mate-
rialism ; that it was in sight of scenes where Christ
taught and healed and went about doing good with116 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

His band of poor, devoted disciples, that the envious,
treacherous, truculent hosts of the Cross were put to
sword and fire. They who in His name sought a
kingdom of this world by worldly means, could not hope
to succeed on the very fields where He had put such
a temptation from Him. The victory of Islam over
Christendom is no more an obstacle to faith than the
victory of Babylonia over Israel upon the same stage.
My threshing-floor, said God of these mountains, and so
they proved a second time. The same ethical principles
by which the prophets explain the overthrow of Israel
account for the defeat of Christianity. If the latter teach us,
as the former taught them, the folly of making a political
kingdom the ambition of our faith, the fatality of seeking
to build the Church of God by intrigue and the sword, if
it drive us inward to the spiritual essence of religion and
outward to the Master’s own work of teaching and healing,
the Mohammedan victory will not have been in vain any
more than the Babylonian. Let us believe that what
Christ promised to judge by the visitations of history is
not the World, but His Church, and let us put our own
house in order. Then the reproach that rests on Palestine
will be rolled away.CHAPTER VI

THE VIEW FROM MOUNT EBAL

117For this Chapter consult Maps I. and III.THE VIEW FROM MOUNT EBAL

T T may assist the reader to grasp the various features of
J- the Holy Land, which we have been surveying in the
last four chapters, if he be helped to see it with his own
eyes as it lies to-day. The smallness of Palestine enables
us to make this view nearly complete from two points.

First let us stand off the land altogether, and take its
appearance from the sea. As you sail north from Jaffa,
what you see is a straight line of coast in alter- Palestine from
nate stretches of cliff and sand, beyond this a the sea-
plain varying from eight to thirty miles in width, and then
the Central Range itself, a persistent mountain-wall of
nearly uniform level, rising clear and blue from the slopes
which buttress it to the west. ' How the heart throbs as
the eye sweeps that long and steadfast sky-line! For
just behind, upon a line nearly coincident with the water-
parting between Jordan and the sea, lie Shechem, Shiloh,
Bethel, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron. Of only one
of these does any sign appear. Towards the north end of
the range two bold round hills break the sky-line, with
evidence of a deep valley between them. The hills are
Ebal and Gerizim, and in the valley—the only real pass
across the range—lies Nablus, anciently Shechem.

That the eye is thus drawn from the first upon the

119120 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

position of Shechem—and we shall see that what is thus
true of the approach from the west is also true of that from
the east—while all the other chief sites of Israel’s life lie
hidden away, and are scarcely to be seen till you come
upon them, is a remarkable fact, which we may emphasise
in passing. It is a witness to the natural, and an explana-
tion of the historical, precedence which was enjoyed by
this northern capital over her more famous sister, Jeru-
salem.

But now let us come on to the land itself, and take our
second point of view at this, its obvious centre. Of the
two hills beside Shechem, Gerizim is the more

The view

from Mount famous historically, but Ebal is higher, and has

Ebal.

the further prospect. The view from Ebal
virtually covers the whole land, with the exception of the
Negeb. All the four long zones, two of the four frontiers,
specimens of all the physical features, and most of the
famous scenes of the history, are in sight. No geography
of Palestine can afford to dispense with the view from the
top of Ebal. In detail it is this:

Looking south, you have at your feet the pass through
the range, with Nablus ; then over it the mass of Gerizim,
with a ruin or two ; and then twenty-four miles of hill-tops,
at the back of which you dimly discern a tower. That
is Neby Samwil, the ancient Mizpeh. Jerusalem is only
five miles beyond, and to the west the tower overlooks
the Shephelah. Turning westwards, you see—nay, you
almost feel—the range letting itself down, by irregular
terraces, on to the plain ; the plain itself flattened by the
height from which you look, but really undulating to
mounds of one and two hundred feet; beyond the plain
the gleaming sandhills of the coast and the infinite blueThe View from Mount Ebal

I 2 I

sea. Joppa lies south-west thirty-three miles; Caesarea
north-west twenty-nine. Turning northwards, we have the
long ridge of Carmel running down from its summit,
perhaps thirty-five miles distant, to the low hills that
separate it from our range ; over the rest of this the hollow
that represents Esdraelon ; over that the hills of Galilee in
a haze, and above the haze the glistening shoulders of
Hermon, at seventy-five miles of distance. Sweeping
south from 'Hermon, the eastern horizon is the edge of
Hauran above the Lake of Galilee, continued by the edge
of Mount Gilead exactly east of us, and by the edge of
Moab, away to the south-east. This line of the Eastern
Range is maintained at a pretty equal level, nearly that on
which we stand,1 and seems unbroken, save by the incoming
valleys of the Yarmuk and the Jabbok. It is only twenty-
five miles away, and on the near side of it lies the Jordan
Valley—a great wide gulf, of which the bottom is out of
sight. On this side Jordan the foreground is the hilly
bulwark of Mount Ephraim, penetrated by a valley coming
up from Jordan into the plain of the Mukhneh to meet
the pass that splits the range at our feet.

The view is barer than a European eye desires, but soft-
ened by the haze the great heat sheds over all. White
clouds hang stagnant in the sky, and their shadows crouch
below them among the hills, as dogs that wait for their
masters to move. But I have also seen the mists, as low
as the land, sweep up from the Mediterranean, and so
deluge the range that, in a few hours, the valleys which
lie quiet through the summer are loud with the rush of
water and the rattle of stones ; and though the long trails
of cloud wrap the summits, and cling about the hillsides,
1 Ebal is .2309 feet.12 2 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

the land looks barer and more raw than in the sunshine.
The hills are brown, with here and there lighter shades,
here and there darker. Look through the glass, and you
see that the lighter are wheat-fields ripening, the darker
are olive groves, sometimes two miles in extent, not thickly
planted like woods in our land, but with the trees wide of
each other, and the ground broken up beneath. Had we
looked west even so recently as the Crusades, we should
have seen Sharon one oak forest from coast to mountain.
Carmel is green with its carobs and oak saplings. But
near us the only great trees are the walnuts and sycomores
of Nablus, immediately below. In valley-beds, or on the
brow of a steep slope, but mostly occupying the tops of
island-knolls,' are the villages. There are no farmsteads,
villas, or lonely castles, for the land is still what it has
been from Gideon’s and Deborah’s time—a disordered
land, where homes cannot safely lie apart. In all the
prospect the one town, the most verdant valley, lie at our
feet, and the valley flows out, on the east, to a sea of yellow
corn that fills the plain below Gerizim. Anciently more
villages would have been visible, and more corn, with
vineyards where now ruined terrace walls add to the stoni-
ness of the hills. In Herod’s day the battlements of
Caesarea and its great white temple above the harbour
would have flashed to us in the forenoon sun ; behind
Ebal the city of Samaria would have been still splendid
and populous; a castle would have crowned Gerizim;
there would have been more coming and going on the
roads, and the sound of trumpets would have risen oftener
than it does to-day from the little garrison below. In
Christian times we should have seen the flat architecture
of the villages, which you can scarcely distinguish from theThe View from Mozuit Ebal

123

shelves of the mountains, break into churches, with high
gables, cupolas, and spires. For the century of the feudal
kingdom at Jerusalem, castles were built here and there,
and under their shelter cloisters and farmsteads dared
to be where they never could be before or since. That
must have been one of the greatest changes the look of
the land has undergone.

But during all these ages the great long lines of the land
would be spread out exactly in the same way as now—the
straight coast, and its broad plain; the range that rolls
from our feet north and south, with its eastern buttresses
falling to the unseen bottom of the Jordan Valley, and
across this the long level edge of the table-land of the
East.

It is on Ebal, too, that we feel the size of the Holy
Land—Hermon and the heights of Judah both within
sight, while Jordan is not twenty, nor the coast thirty
miles away—and that' the old wonder comes strongly
upon us of the influence of so small a province on the
history of the whole world. But the explanation is also
within sight. Down below us, at the mouth of the glen,
lies a little heap of brown stones.1 The road comes up to
it by which the patriarchs first entered the land, and the
shadow of a telegraph post falls upon it. It is Jacob’s
well: Neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem shall ye
worship the Father; but the time cometh, and now is, when
true worshippers shall zvorship the Father in spirit and in
truth.

1 Or did when the writer was there in 1891 ; but the Greek Church have
begun to build over it.BOOK II

WESTERN PALESTINE

CHAPTER VII

THE COASTFor this Chapter consult Maps /., II., IV, V., VI.THE COAST

‘ Ante importuosas Asceloni ripas.’

| "VERY one remembers, from the map, the shape of
J—^ the east end of the Levant. An almost straight line
runs from north to south, with a slight inclina-

&	Phoenicia.

tion westward. There is no large island off
it, and upon it no deep estuary or fully sheltered gulf. North
of the headland of Carmel nature has so far assisted man
by prompting here a cape, and dropping there an islet, that
not a few harbours have been formed which have been, and
may again become, historical. When we remember that
the ships of antiquity were small, propelled by oars and
easily beached, we understand how these few advantages
were sufficient to bring forth the greatest maritime nation
of the ancient world—especially with the help of the
mountains behind, which, pressing closely on the coast,
compelled the population to push seaward for the means
of livelihood.

South of Carmel the Syrian coast has been much more
strictly drawn. The mountains no longer come so near to
it as to cut up the water with their roots. But South of
sandhills and cliffs, from thirty to a hundred Carmel-
feet high, run straight on to the flat Egyptian delta, with-
out either promontory or recess. A forward rock at
‘Athlit, two curves of the beach at Tanturah, twice low

127128 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

reefs—at Abu Zaburah and Jaffa—the faint promise of a
dock in the inland basin of Askalon, with the barred mouths
of five or six small streams1—such are all the possibilities
of harbourage on this coast. The rest is merely a shelf for
the casting of wreckage and the roosting of sea-birds. The
currents are parallel to the coast, and come north laden
with sand and Nile-mud, that helps to choke the few faint
estuaries and creeks.2 It is almost always a lee-shore ;
the prevailing winds are from the south-west.

Of this natural inhospitality two consequences followed
in the history of the land. In the first place, no invader
ever disembarked an army south of Carmel, till the country
behind the coast was already in his power. Even invaders
from Europe—the Philistines themselves (if indeed they
No natural came from Crete),3 Alexander, Pompey, the
harbours.	first crusa(jerSj and Napoleon—found their way

into Palestine by land, either from Egypt or from Asia
Minor. Other Crusaders disembarked farther north, at
Acre or Tyre, and in the Third Crusade, Richard, though
assisted by a fleet, won all the coast fortresses south of
Carmel from the land.4 But again, this part of the coast
has never produced a maritime people. It is true that the
name Phoenicia once extended as far south as Egypt;5 6

1	The mouth of the Rubin is seventy yards across, and six feet deep, yet
by the bar, amoncellement du sable, it can be forded : Guerin, Judee, ii. 53.

2	Admiralty Charts, 2633, 2634. Cf. Otto Ankel, Grundziige der Landes-

natur des JVestjordanlandes, 32, 33. Thus the Nile has not only created

Egypt, but helped to form the Syrian coast.	3 See pp. 170 f.

. 4 Richard had come to Acre by Cyprus. Philip Augustus and Konrad
landed at Acca. Frederick II., in 1228, came by Cyprus to Bolerin, south of
Tripoli. In the Middle Ages the galleys leaving Venice or Genoa touched at
Corfu, Crete, Rhodes, and Cyprus, from which they made for Jaffa as the
nearest port to Jerusalem. See Felix Fabri (in P.P. T. Series), vol. i.

6 So Strabo. Josephus xv. Antt. ix. 6 ; Pliny, Hist. Nat. v. 14, speaks
of Joppa of the Phoenicians.The Coast

129

Phoenician masonry has been uncovered at Tanturah, the
name of ’Arsuf is probably derived from the Phoenician
god Reseph,1 and we have records of Sidonian supremacy
at various times over Dora and Joppa, as of Tyrian over
Joppa and Askalon.2 But the Phoenicians cannot be said
to have been at home south of Carmel. Phoenicia proper
lay to the north of that headland ; from Carmel to Egypt
the tribes were agricultural, or interested in the land trade
alone. It was not till a seafaring people like the Greeks
had planted their colonies in Sharon and Philistia that
great harbours were seriously attempted. Of this a striking
illustration is given by the generic name of the landing-
places from Gaza to Caesarea. This is not Semitic but
Greek: El-mineh, by a very usual transposition of the
vowel and consonant of the first syllable, is the Greek
Limen ; 3 Leminah is still in the Talmud the name for the
port of Caesarea.4 The other name for harbour on this
coast, Maiumas, has not yet been explained.5

1	See Survey Memoirs, ii. p. 137 ff. Clermont-Ganneau, Recueil
<TArcheologie Oriental. It is M. Ganneau who has proposed the interesting
identification of Horns, Reseph, Perseus, and St. George. The myths of
Perseus and St. George were both born on this coast, see p. 162. A stone
hawk, which he maintains is the symbol of Horus, was found at ’Arsuf. He
adds that Reseph was probably equivalent to Apollo, and in Egypt Apollo
and Horus were equal. But the classical name of ’Arsuf, Apollonia, cannot be
used to assist this identification. It was probably conferred by Apollonius, son
of Thraseas, who governed Ccele-Syria for Seleucus Antipater, 1 Macc. x. 69 ff.
It was rebuilt byGabiniusin 57 B.c., in the Crusades it was besieged by Godfrey,
taken by Baldwin, again by Richard; Louis restored the fortifications, and it
was finally destroyed by Bibars in 1265.

2	Inscription of Eshmunazar, 11. 18, 19, in the C./.S., i. 19, 20, which

records the grant of Dora and Joppa to Sidon. Scylax (Geographi Grceci
Minores, ed. Muller, i. 79} assigns Dora to the Sidonians and Askalon to the
Tyrians during the Persian period. For Phoenician trade with Joppa, cf.
Jonah i. 3, 2 Chron. iv. 16. But the name of Joppa is not inserted in the
parallel passage in I Kings v.	3 Like ’Arsuf from Reseph.

4	Talmud Jerus. Gittin, i. 1. Cf. Conder, Tent Work, p. 283.

0 Conder makes it equivalent to watering-place.

Ir30 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

But the failure even of these attempts to establish
permanent ports for deep-sea vessels is a yet stronger
Wrecked proof of the inhospitable character of the coast,
harbours. ^et us take them in series from the north.
‘Athlit has twice been held against all the rest of Palestine.
In 130 A.D. it was the last stronghold of Jewish independ-
ence : in the thirteenth century it was the last fortress of
the Cross.1 Yet seaward‘Athlit is unsheltered. The blunt
foreland suggests the only kind of harbour possible on the
Syrian shore—a double port facing north and south, whose
opposite basins might compensate for each other’s ex-
posure ; yet no such harbour seems to have been attempted.
The Crusading ruins at ‘Athlit are numerous and solid ;
there is a castle, a church, and remains of a mighty sea-
wall. Yet the men who built these built out into the sea
nothing but a jetty that is now covered by the waves.
Farther south at Tanturah, the ancient Dor, Merla, or La
Merle of the Crusaders,2 there are also great buildings
and the suggestion of a double harbour. If this was
ever achieved, it has disappeared, and only a few coasting
vessels now put in to the unprotected rock. Caesarea had
a great port; yet nothing but part of its mole remains.
Within the reefs at Minet ’Abu Zaburah the inhabitants of
Nablus used to keep a few boats, but little masonry is
visible.3 At ’Arsfif,4 there is a tiny harbour, yawning thirty
feet between a jetty and a reef; it is used by fishermen.
Every one knows the open roadstead at Jaffa, with the reefs
that are more dangerous in foul weather than' they are

1 It was known then as Castellum Peregrinorum.

- On Dor see further, ch. xix. On La Merle, cf. Geoffrey de Vinsauf,
Ilineraritim Kicardi, iv. 14.

3	The famous water-melons of Mukhalid are exported from here.

4	See p. 129.The Coast

131

useful in fair.1 In olden days Jamnia had a Limen at the
mouth of the Nahr Rubin, but the Minet Rubin, as it is
now called, is a little way off this, and by a few rocks
with some masonry provides only a landing-place for small
boats.2 The Limen of Ashdod is now the Minet-el-Kulah,
with a landing-place between reefs ‘ at which ships occa-
sionally touch.’3 At Askalon there are visible at low water
two shallows of crescent shape, which are perhaps remains
of ancient moles, and at the bottom of the rocky basin, in
which the mediaeval city was confined, explorers think they
can trace the lines of a little dock ; but the sand, which
drifts so fast up the coast, has choked the dock, and in the
sea there is only a jetty left.4 The Limen of Gaza was
once a considerable town, if we may judge from the ruins
that still break from the sand, but the beach is now straight
and low, and the roadstead as unsheltered as Jaffa.

Thus, while the cruelty of many another wild coast is
known by the wrecks of ships, the Syrian shore south of
Carmel is strewn with the fiercer wreckage of harbours.

I have twice sailed along this coast on a summer after-
noon with the western sun thoroughly illuminating it, and I
remember no break in the long line of foam where land
and sea met, no single spot where the land gave way and
welcomed the sea to itself. On both occasions the air
was quiet, yet all along the line there was disturbance.
It seemed as if the land were everywhere saying to the
sea: I do not wish you, I do not need you. And this
echoes through most of the Old Testament. Here the
sea spreads before us for spectacle, for symbol, for music,

1 Pliny’s description (H.N., v. 14) suits the Jaffa of to-day: ‘ Insidet
collem prsejacente saxo.’	2 Guerin, ii. 54.

3	P.E.F. Mem. i., all signs of a harbour are covered with drifting sands.

4	Z.D.P. Vii. 164, with a plan. Guerin, Judee, ii. 155.132 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

for promise, but never for use—save in one case, when
a prophet sought it as an escape from his God.1 2 * In the
The coast Psalms the straight coast serves to illustrate

m Scripture.	irremovable limits which the Almighty

has set between sea and land. In the Prophets its roar
and foam symbolise the futile rage of the heathen beat-
ing on Jehovah’s steadfast purpose for His own people:
Ah l the booming of the peoples, the multitudes—like the
booming of the seas they boom ; and the rushing of the
nations, like the rushing of mighty waters they rush ; nations
—like the rushing of many waters they rush. But He
checketh it, and it fleeth far away, and is chased like chaff
on the mountains before the wind, and like swirling dust
before a whirlwind?

As in the Psalms and the Prophets, so also in the His-
tory the sea was a barrier and not a highway. From the
first it was said : Ye shall have the Great Sea for a border?
Throughout the language the sea is a horizon : the Hebrew
name for the West is the Sea. There were three tribes,
of whom we have evidence that they reached the maritime
frontier appointed for them : Dan, who in Deborah’s time
was remaining in ships? but he speedily left them and his
bit of coast at Joppa for the far inland sources of Jordan ;
and Asher and Zebulon, whose territory was not south
but north of Carmel. Even in their case no ports are
mentioned, the word translated haven, in the blessing of
Zebulon and in the blame of Asher,5 being but beach, land
washed by the sea, and the word translated creeks meaning

1	Though in another they, that go dtnon to the sea in ships and do
business in great waters, are Hebrews, worshippers of Jehovah, Ps. cvii.

23, 24.

2	Isa. xvii. 12, 13.

4 Judges v. 17. See p. 174.

3 Num. xxxiv. 6.

5 Gen. xlix. 13 ; Judges v. 17.The Coast

133

no more than just cracks or breaks. Again, when the
builders of the second temple hire Phoenicians to bring
timber from Lebanon to Joppa, it is not written ‘ to the
harbour or creek of Joppa,’ but to the sea of Joppa3 So
that the only mention of a real harbour in the Old Testa-
ment is in the general picture of the storm in Psalm cvii.,
where the word used means refuge. Of the name or idea
of a port, gateway in or out, there is no trace ; and, as
we have just seen, in the designation for the port of
Caesarea in the Talmud, Leminah, and in the name still
given to some landing-places on the Philistine coast, El-
Mineh, it is no Semitic root, but the Greek Limen which
appears. In this inability of their coast-line to furnish
the language of Israel with even the suggestion of
a port, we have the crowning proof of the peculiar
security and seclusion of their land as far as the sea is
concerned.

We can now appreciate how much truth there is in the
contrast commonly made between Palestine and Greece.
In respect of security the two lands do not paiesiineand
much differ ; the physical geography of Greece Greece-
is even more admirably adapted than that of Palestine
for purposes of defence. But in respect of seclusion
from the sea, and the world which could be reached
by the sea, they differed entirely. Upon almost every
league of his broken and embayed coast-line, the ancient
Greek had an invitation to voyage. The sea came far
inland to woo him : by island after island she tempted him
across to other continents. She was the ready means to
him of commerce, of colonising, and of all that change and
adventure with other men, which breed openness,originality

1 Ezra iii. 7.134 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

and subtlety of mind. But the coast-line of the Jew was
very different, and from his high inland station he saw it
only far off—a stiff, stormy line, down the whole length
of which as there was nothing to tempt men in, so there
was nothing to tempt them out.1

The effect of a nation’s physical environment upon their
temper and ideals is always interesting, but can never be
more than vaguely described. Whereas of even greater
interest, and capable too of exact definition, because
abrupt, imperious and supreme, is the manner in which a
nation’s genius, by sheer moral force and Divine inspiration,
dares to look beyond its natural limits, feels at last too
great for the conditions in which it was developed, and
appropriates regions and peoples, towards which nature
has provided it with no avenue. Such a process is
nowhere more evident than in the history of Israel; we
find the history not only as in other lands, moulded by
the geography, but also breaking the moulds, and seeking
imperiously new spheres. The first instance of this meets
us now. In the development of the religious consciousness
of this once desert tribe, there came a time when her eyes
were lifted beyond that iron coast, and her face, in the
words of her great prophet, became radiant and her heart
large with the sparkle of the sea: for there is turned upon
thee the sea’s flood-tide, and the wealth of the nations is
coming unto thee. Who are these like a cloud that fly, and
like doves to their windows ? Surely towards me the isles
are stretching, and ships of Tarshish in the van, to bring
thy sons from afar, their silver and their gold with them to

1 Hull (P.E.F,Memoir on Geology, etc., of Arabia Petma, Palestine, etc.)
proves that, at no very remote date, the sea washed the foot of the hills. Had
this lasted into historical times the whole history of Judaea and Samaria would
have been utterly different.The Coast

l3 5

the name of Jehovah of Hosts and to the Holy of Israel, for
He hath glorified thee. Isles here are any lands washed by
the sea, but what the prophets had chiefly in view were
those islands and coasts of the Mediterranean which were
within physical sight of the Greek, but to the Hebrew
could be the object only of spiritual ambition. Six of
them at least are named in the 01,d Testament.

The nearest is Cyprus, whose people are called
Kittim, from the ancient town of Kti or Kition.1 Cyprus
is not, of course, in sight of any part of the territories of
Israel, but its hills can be seen at most times from those
hills of northern Syria that are immediately opposite to
them, and even from southern Lebanon above Beyrout,
during a few weeks about midsummer, when the sun sets
behind Mount Troodos, the peak of that mountain comes
out black against the afterglow.2 It was these glimpses of
land in the setting sun, which first drew the Phoenicians
westward, and from the Phoenicians the Israelites had their
knowledge. Beyond Cyprus is Rhodes, and that was
called Rodan among the Hebrews and its people Rodanim.3
Crete was known to them under the name Kaphtor.4
These, the only three islands of the Mediterranean men-
tioned in the Old Testament, were evidently the line of
Phoenician progress westward : they are also the three
that occur in nearly every mediaeval voyage from Syria to
Europe.5 Beyond them loomed to the Hebrews, farther and

1	C.I.S., i. 137 : cf. Gen. x. 4 ; Numbers xxiv. 24 ; Isaiah xxiii. 1, 12.

2	So Dr. Carslaw of Shweir and I saw it in July 1891 from a hill in front of
Shweir, six hours from Beyrout, and 5000 feet above the Mediterranean.

3	In Ezek. xxvii. 20, for Dedan read |11 Rodan, and in Gen. x. 4,
for D'Jll Dodanim read D'Jll Rodanim, where the LXX. have'PoStoi.

4	This is more probable than that Kaphtor should be Kaft-ur, an Egyptian

name for the Delta. See notes on p. 170.	s Cf. p. 128, n. 4.136 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

more uncertain coasts. The name Javan came from the
Ionians or Iafones, on the Asiatic shores of the Aegean,1
but is used of all Greeks down to Alexander the Great.2
Tubal and Meshech, often mentioned with Javan,3 were
tribes in the interior of Asia Minor. Beyond Javan were
the coasts of Elisha,4 that was perhaps Sicily, and Tar-
shish, the great Phoenician colony in Spain. To all of
these ships traded from Tyre and Sidon and Accho and
Joppa. Their outward cargoes were Syrian wheat, oil,
and balm, with Oriental wares, and they brought back
cloth, purple and scarlet, silver, iron, tin, lead, and brass.5
Sometimes they carried west Hebrew slaves6 and outlaws,7
forerunners of the great Dispersion.

The isles shall wait for His law ; let them give glory to
Jehovah, and publish His praise in the isles : unto Me the
Joppa and the isles shai1 hoPe• When, at last, the Jews got
Maccabees. their first and only harbour,8 it was such a
prophecy as this which woke up within them. Of Simon
Maccabeus the historian says : ‘With all his glory he took
Joppa for an haven, and made an entrance to the isles of
the sea.’9 The exultation of this statement—the glad

1 Isa. lxvi. 19 ; Ezek. xxvii. 13, 19. In the last verse, for Deni also read
Vedan, which is unknown.	2 Daniel viii. 21 ; xi. 2.

3	Gen. x. 2; Ezek. xxvii. 13. Tubal was the Tebarenians; Meshech the
Moschoi of Herodotus. Schrader, K.A.T., 82-84.

4	Gen. x. 4, Elisha, son of Javan ; 1 Chron. i. 7 ; Ezek. xxvii. 7.

5	Ezek. xxvii. 6, 12, 13, 17.	6 Amos ii. 9.	7 Jonah i. 3.

8	Eziongeber was probably only held for them, and we are speaking now
of the western coast.

9	I Macc. xiv. 5: Kal fiera iracnjs tt)s do^yjs atirov Ckafie tt)v 'Ihirirqv eh
\iliiva. Kal lirohjfftv ttaodov rats vr)<?ois Trjs 6a\d<rcnr)s. This was about 144 B.C.
Jonathan Maccabeus had captured Joppa in 148 (1 Macc. x. 76), and in 145
he had made Simon lord of the coast from the Ladder of Tyre to the Border
of Egypt. But this lordship was only nominal, till the next year, when the
Greek natives of Joppa being about to revolt, Simon occupied it with a force,
and then, a few years later (about 141), fortified it.The Coast

lo7

‘At last!’ that is audible in it—was very natural; and
we sympathise with it the more when we learn that this
was not a mere military operation of Simon’s, but, accord-
ing to his light, a thoroughly religious measure. In those
great days, when Jews took a town within the promised
boundaries, they purged it of the heathen and their idols,
and settled in it ‘ such men as would keep the Law.’1 The
Law, then, was at last established on the sea, with an open
gate to the isles, and the people of Jehovah had more
reason to be rapturous than at any time since the prophecies
of their western progress were first uttered. Their hopes,
however, were defeated by the rigour of the measures they
took to fulfil them. In every town the Hellenised popu-
lation 2 rose against this fanatic priest from the rude high-
lands, with no right to the sea, and intrigued for the
return of Antiochi or Ptolemies, who allowed them to
worship their own gods. It was the old opposition between
Philistia and Israel, on the old ground. Twice the Syrians
retook Joppa, twice Hyrcanus (Simon's successor) won it
back. Then, after twenty years of Jewish possession,
Pompey came in 63 B.C., and decreed that, with the other
coast towns, it should be free.3 But in 47 Caesar excepted
Joppa, ‘which the Jews had originally,' and decreed ‘it
shall belong to them, as it formerly did; ’4 and later
Augustus added it, with other cities, to Herod the Great’s

1	So Simon did at Gazara, I Macc. xiii. 47, and, we can understand, in
Joppa also, though in a sea-town full of foreigners the task would be more
difficult, and not so perfectly accomplished.

2	In all the coast towns at this time, though the bulk of the common people
were from the old stocks of the country, and spoke Aramaic, the upper classes
were Greek, and Greek was the official language ; and the native deities were
amalgamated with their Greek counterparts.

3	Josephus xiv. Anlt. iv. 4; i. Wars, vii. 7 : ‘He restored to their own

citizens.’	4 Josephus xiv. Anit. x. 6.138 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

kingdom.1 Joppa was therefore Jewish as no other town
on the coast or Maritime Plain became, and so it con-
tinued till the campaign of Vespasian in 68 A.D. And it
was violently Jewish. Though Joppa was tributary to
Herod he never resided there, or tried to rebuild it, or to
plant heathen features upon it. Alone of the chief cities
of the region, it had no Greek or Latin name attached to
it. In close commerce with Jerusalem, Joppa was infected
with the fanatic patriotism of the latter ; as there were rebels
and assassins there, so there were rebels and pirates here.
The spirit of disaffection towards Rome passed through the
same crises in the coast town as in the capital. In the
terrible outbreak of 66, when every other town of the
Maritime Plain was divided into two camps,2 and Jews
and Hellenised Syrians massacred each other, Joppa alone
remained Jewish, and it was Joppa that Cestius Gallus
first attacked on his march to Jerusalem.3 In the years
before the Jews thus took to arms Joppa had doubtless
been distinguished by the more peaceful exercises of the
same Judaistic spirit. On ground which was free from
heathen buildings and rites, the Pharisees must have
imitated as far as possible the rigorous measures of the
Maccabees, and cherished the ancient and noble hopes
which the sea inspired in their race, along with many
petty precautions against the foreigners whom it drifted to
their feet. This was the state of affairs when Peter came
down from Jerusalem to Joppa, and dreamt of things clean
and unclean, on the housetop overlooking the harbour.4

If now we turn to the neighbouring Caesarea, we see as
great a contrast as was possible on the same coast. Was

1 Josephus xv. Antt. vii. 3 ; ii. Wars, vi. 3.	2 ii. Wars, xviii. 2.

3 lb. 10.	4 Acts x.The Coast

139

Joppa Jewish, national, patriotic, Caesarea was Herodian,
Roman in obedience, Greek in culture. At first the
Herodian strongholds had all lain on the east

Caesarea.

of Palestine, and for the most part in wild,
inaccessible places, like Machaerus and Masada, as best
became a family not sure of its station, and sometimes
chased from power by its enemies. But when Herod won
the favour of Augustus, and time made it clear that the
power of Augustus was to be permanent, Herod came
over the Central Range of Palestine, and on sites granted
by his patron built himself cities that looked westward.
He embellished and fortified both Jerusalem and Samaria.
Then he looked for a sea-port. On the coast Augustus
had given him Gaza, with Anthedon, Joppa and Straton’s
Tower.1 He chose the last—Josephus says because it
was more fit to be a sea-port than Joppa. But this
was not so. The reasons of his choice were political.
We must suppose, it was more important for Herod to
have a harbour suited to Sebastd than to Jerusalem, for
Sebastd itself was nearer the sea and more in his own
hands than the Holy City. Besides, Joppa, as we have
seen, was national rather than Herodian in spirit. Straton’s
Tower was virtually a fresh site. Here Herod laid the
lines of ‘a magnificent city,’ and spent twelve years in
building it.2 He erected sumptuous palaces and large
edifices for ‘containing the people,’ a temple on raised
ground, a theatre, and an amphitheatre with prospect to
the sea. There were also a great number of arches, cellars,
and vaults for draining the city, ‘which had no less of
architecture bestowed on them than had the buildings

1	i. Wars, xx. 3.

2	Josephus xv. Anti. ix. 6; but in xvi. Antt. v. i., ‘ten years.’140 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

above ground.’ But the greatest work of all was the
haven. A breakwater 200 feet wide was formed in twenty
fathoms depth by dropping into the waves enormous
stones. The half of it was opposed to the course of the
waves, so as to keep off those waves which were to break
upon it, and so was called Procymatia, or ‘ first breaker of
waves,’ while the other half had upon it a wall with several
towers. There were also a great number of arches, where
the sailors lodged, and before them a quay, which ran
round the whole haven, and ‘ was a most pleasant walk for
such as had a mind to that exercise.’ The entrance of the
port was on ‘the north, on which side was the gentlest of
all the winds in this place.’ On the left of the entrance
was a round turret, made very strong in order to meet the
greatest waves, while on the right stood two enormous
stones upright and joined together, each of them larger
than the turret opposite.1 To-day the mole is 160 yards
from shore, and the mouth of the harbour measures 180.2
This immense haven had a name to itself—Sebastos Limen
—which even dwarfed the name of the city, Caesarea.3
In later times the latter is called The Caesarea beside the
August Harbour,4 and Jews also, as we have seen, spoke of
the Leminah by itself; for it was the harbour—the first,
the only real port upon that coast. Caesarea speedily
became, and long continued to be, the virtual capital of
Palestine—the only instance of a coast town which ever

1 Josephus xv. Antt. ix. 6, abridged.	2 P.E.F. Mem. ii.

8 Kaurapda 2e/3acnj: Kaiaapela HapaXios, Kaicrapela 7] M daXarri].
Caesarea Stratonis, Caesarea Palestinae, and, after Vespasian’s time, Colonia

Prima Flavia Augusta Caesarea. The last name in Pliny, Natural History,
v. 69, and in a Latin inscription discovered in the neighbourhood.

4 On a coin of Nero : KAI2APEIA H IIP02 2EBA2Tfl AIMENI. The
coin is given in De Saulcy’s Numismatique de la Terre Sainte, p. 116.The Coast

141

did so. ‘Caesarea Judaeae caput est,’ says Tacitus,1 but
he means the Roman province of that name. Judaean, in
the true sense of the word, Caesarea never was. The
gateway to Rome, the place was already a piece of Latin
soil.2 The procurator had his seat in it, there was an
Italian garrison, and on the great white temple that shone
out over the harbour to the far seas, stood two statues—of
Augustus and of Rome.3 It was heathendom in all its
glory at the very door of the true religion ! Yes, but the
contrast might be reversed. It was justice and freedom
in the most fanatical and turbulent province of the world.
In seeking separation from his people, and an open door
to the West, Herod had secured these benefits for a nobler
cause than his own, to which we now turn.

Peter came to the Joppa which has been described, and
it is interesting to note that he came by Lydda—in those
days another great centre of Jewish feeling. peterat
It was Joppa, Lydda, and Jerusalem which Joppa.
Cestius Gallus singled out as the centres of the national
revolt.4 To Jewish Joppa Jewish Peter came; and we
can understand that as he moved about its narrow lanes,
leading to the sea, where his scrupulous countrymen were
jostled by foreign sailors and foreign wares, he grew more
concerned than ever about the ceremonial law. While
food was being prepared—observe the legal moment—he
saw, above this jealous bit of earth, heaven opened, and a
certain vessel descending as it had been a great sheet—
perhaps the sail of one of these large Western ships in the
offing—let down by the four corners to the earth, wherein

1	Hist. ii. 78.

2	The Jews called Cassarea the daughter of Edom—their symbolic name
for Rome. Talmud. Babyl. Megillah, 6a.

3	Josephus as above.	4 ii. Wars, xviii. 10.142 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

And at
Caesarea.

were all the four-footed beasts of the earth, and wild beasts,
and creeping things, and fowls of the air. A nd there came
a voice to him, Rise, Peter, kill and eat! But Peter said,
Not so, Lord, for I have never eaten anything that is common
or unclean. To his strict conscience the contents had been
a temptation. A nd the voice said unto him a second time,
What God hath cleansed call not thou common! This was
done thrice, and the vessel was received up into heaven again.

The vision took place in Joppa, but the fact
was fulfilled in freer Caesarea. Here, on what
was virtually Gentile soil, and amid surroundings not very
different from those of Paul’s sermon on Areopagus,1 Peter
made his similar declaration, Of a truth I perceive that God
is no respecter of persons ; but in every nation he that feareth
Him and worketh righteousness is accepted with Him. Here,
in a Roman soldier’s house, in face of the only great port
broken westward through Israel’s stormy coast, the Gentile
Pentecost took place, and on the Gentiles was poured out
the gift of the Holy Ghost?

Again, in the narrative of Paul’s missions, Caesarea is
the harbour by which he reaches Syria from Ephesus,
Paul at and from which he sails on his last voyage for
Caesarea. Italy.3 More significant still were his removal
to Caesarea from Jerusalem, and the anxiety of the Jewish
authorities to get him brought back to Jerusalem.4 In the
Holy City they would not give him a fair hearing ; his life
was in danger, they lay in wait to kill him. In Caesarea
he was heard to the end of his plea ; but for his appeal to
Caesar, he would have been acquitted, and during two

1 Josephus says that the Limen of Caesarea was like the Piraeus; and the

great temple and court of justice stood hard by.	2 Acts x.

3 Acts xviii. 22 ; xxvii. 1.	4 Acts xxv. 3.The Coast

143

whole years in which he lived in the place, receiving his
friends, and enjoying a certain amount of liberty—though
the place had many Jewish inhabitants1—no one ventured
to waylay him. There were only some sixty miles between
Caesarea and Jerusalem, but in the year 60 Caesarea was
virtually Rome.

The subsequent history of Herod’s harbour repeats what
we have already learned of it. As long as the land was
held by men with interests in the West, the „

'	Caesarea in

town triumphed over the unsuitableness of subsequent

history.

its site ; but when Palestine passed into the
hands of an Eastern people, with no maritime ambitions,
it dwindled, and was finally destroyed by them. Caesarea
was Vespasian’s head-quarters, equally opportune for
Galilee, Samaria and Judaia, and there he was proclaimed
Emperor in 69. He also established close by a colony
under the title Prima Flavia Augusta Caesarea. Very early
there was a Christian bishop of Caesarea, who became
Metropolitan of Syria. Origen fled here, and Eusebius
was Archbishop from 315-318. When the Moslems came,
Caesarea was the head-quarters of Sergius, the Byzantine
general: in 638 it was occupied by ’Abu ‘Obeida. Under
the Arabs its importance, of course, sank. The town
continued opulent, but famous only for its agricultural
products,2 and Herod’s splendid harbour must have fallen
into decay. The town was left alone by the first Crusaders,
but King Baldwin took it in 1102, and thus passing once
more into the hands of seafarers it was rebuilt, so that the
ruins of to-day are mostly of Crusading masonry.3 Saladin

1	ii. Wars, xiv. 4.

2	Mukaddasi in the tenth, and Nasir-i-Khusrau in the eleventh, both

quoted by Le Strange, Pal. under Mos/ems, 474.	3 P.E.F. Mem. ii.144 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

won it in 1187, and reduced it.1 Richard took it back in
1191, and built it again. Louis of France added fortifica-
tions. And then Sultan Bibars, consummating the policy
of his race by that destructive march of his in 1205, on
which every coast fortress was battered down, laid Caesarea
low, and scattered its inhabitants. It is said that he
himself, pick in hand, assisted at its demolition.2

When we come to deal with the strongholds of Samaria,
we shall see how Sebast6, which is only some twenty-five
miles inland from Caesarea, and has the same western
exposure, has suffered the same changes of fortune
according as an Eastern or a Western race dominated
the country.

1 Boha-ed-din, Life of Saladin, ch. 35.	2 Makrizi.CHAPTER VIII
THE MARITIME PLAIN

KFor this Chapter consult Maps /., IV., V. and VI.THE MARITIME PLAIN

T3 EYOND the forbidding coast there stretches, as you

-L' look east, a prospect of plain, the Maritime Plain—
on the north cut swiftly down upon by Carmel, whose
headland comes within 200 yards of the sea, but at
Carmel’s other end six miles broad, and thence gradually
widening southwards, till at Joppa there are twelve miles,
and farther south there are thirty miles between the far
blue mountains of Judaea and the sea. The Maritime
Plain divides into three portions. The north corner
between Carmel and the sea is bounded on the south by
the Crocodile River, the modern Nahr-el-Zerka, and is
nearly twenty miles long. From the Crocodile River the
Plain of Sharon, widening from eight miles
to twelve, rolls southward, forty-four miles to
the mouth of the Nahr Rubin and a line of low hills to
the south of Ramleh. This country is undulating, with
groups of hills from 250 to 300 feet high. To the north
it is largely wild moor and marsh, with long tongues of
sand running in from the coast. The marshes on the Zerka
are intricate, and form the refuge of Arabs who keep them-
selves free from the requisitions of the Turkish Govern-
ment. There is one large oak-wood in the very north, and
groves of the same tree scatter southward. These are the
remains of a forest so extensive, that it sometimes gave its

147148 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

name to the plain. The Septuagint translates Sharon by
Drum os} Josephus describes it as the ‘ place called the
Forest,’2 or ‘The Forests,’3 and Strabo calls it ‘a great
Forest.’4 It is the same which the Crusaders named
the Forest of Assur;5 Tasso the Enchanted Forest,6 and
Napoleon the Forest of Miski.7 Scattered and ragged as
it now is, like all the woodland of Palestine, it must origin-
ally have swept all the way from the heights of Carmel to
Ajalon. Besides the streams mentioned, the northern part
of Sharon is crossed by a few other perennial waters—the
Mufjir or Dead River of the Crusaders,8 the Iskanderuneh
or their Salt River, and the Falik or their Rochetaille.9
In the southern half of Sharon, south of the ‘Aujeh and in
front of the broad gulf of Ajalon, there is far more culti-
vation—corn-fields,fields of melons,gardens, orange-groves,
and groves of palms, with strips of coarse grass and sand,
frequent villages on mounds, the once considerable towns
of Jaffa, Lydda, and Ramleh, and the high road running
between them to Jerusalem. To the south of the low hills

Philistia or that bound Sharon, the Plain of Philistia rolls
Daroma. on to the river Gf Egypt, about forty miles,
rising now and again into gentle ranges 250 feet high, and
cut here and there by a deep gully, with running water.
But Philistia is mostly level, nearly all capable of cultiva-
tion, with few trees, and presenting the view of a vast
series of corn-fields. Wells may be dug almost anywhere.

1 Isaiah xxxv., xxxvii. 24, lxv. 10.	2 i. Wars, xiii. 2.

3 xiv. Antt. xiii. 3.	4 xvi.: Spvfibs p-iyas tis.

5	Vinsauf, Itin. Ricardi, iv. 16. One of the feudal manors of the neigh-
bourhood was called Casale de la Forest. Rohricht, Studien zur niittelalt.
Geog. u. Topogr. Syr ten's Z.D.P. V. x. 200.

6	Gerusaletnvte Liberata, ii. and xiii.

7	From the present village of Miskieh.

8	But see Rohricht as above, p. 251.	9 Vinsauf, Itin. Ric. iv. 17.The Maritime Plain

149

The only difficulty to agriculture is the drifting sand,
which in some places has come two and a half miles
inland.

The whole Maritime Plain possesses a quiet but rich
beauty. If the contours are gentle the colours are strong
and varied. Along almost the whole seaboard runs a strip
of links and downs, sometimes of pure drifting sand, some-
times of grass and sand together. Outside this border
of broken gold there is the blue sea, with its fringe of
foam. Landward the soil is a chocolate brown, with
breaks and gullies, now bare to their dirty white shingle
and stagnant puddles, and now full of rich green reeds
and rushes that tell of ample water beneath. Over corn
and moorland a million flowers are scattered—poppies,
pimpernels, anemones, the convolvulus and the mallow,
the narcissus and blue iris—roses of Sharon and lilies
of the valley. Lizards haunt all the sunny banks. The
shimmering air is filled with bees and butterflies, and with
the twittering of small birds, hushed now and then as the
shadow of a great hawk blots the haze. Nor when dark-
ness comes is all a blank. The soft night is sprinkled
thick with glittering fireflies.

Such a plain, rising through the heat by dim slopes to
the long persistent range of blue hills beyond, presents
to-day a prospect of nothing but fruitfulness openness of
and peace. Yet it has ever been one of the thePlain-
most famous war-paths of the world. It is not only level,
it is open. If its coast-line is so destitute of harbours, both
its ends form wide and easy entrances. The southern
rolls off upon the great passage from Syria to Egypt ;
upon those illustrious, as well as horrible, ten sandy
marches from Gaza—past Rafia, Rhinocoloura, ‘ the150 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Serbonian Bog,’ and the sands where Potnpey was stabbed
to death—to Pelusium and the Nile. Of this historical
highway between Asia and Africa, along which Thothmes,
Ramses, Sennacherib, Cambyses, Alexander, Pompey,
Titus, Saladin, Napoleon and many more great generals
have led their armies—of this highway the Maritime Plain
of Palestine is but the continuation.

Nor is the north end of the plain shut in by Carmel, as
the view from the sea clearly shows. . P'rom the sea the
The passage sky-line of Carmel, running south-east, does not
by Carmel, sustain its high level up to the Central Range.
It is bow-shaped, rising from the sea to its centre, and
drooping again inland. At the sea end, under the head-
land, a beach of 200 yards is left, and southwards there
is always from a mile to two miles between the hill-foot
and the shore. But this passage, though often used by
armies—by Richard, for instance, and by Napoleon on his
retreat—is not the historical passage round Carmel, and
could not be. It is broken by rocks, and extremely
difficult to force if defended, so that the Crusaders called
part of it the House of the Narrow Ways, Les Destroits,
and Petra Incisa.1 It is at the other, the inland, end of
Carmel that the historical passage lies. Here a number
of low hills, with wide passes, and one great valley—the
Valley of Dothan—intervene between Carmel and the
Central Range, and offer several alternative routes from
the Maritime Plain to Esdraelon. Napoleon, who followed
one of these routes on his northern march, has stated
his reasons for doing so in words which emphasise the
very points we are considering: ‘ Carmel se lie aux

1 Vinsauf, Itiner. Ricardi, iv. 12, 14. Les Destroits survives in Khurbet
Dustrey.The Maritime Plai?i

151

montagnes de Nablouse, mais elle en est separde par un
grand vallon ’—that is, the low hills of softer formation,
whose subdued elevation seems as a valley between the
harder heights of Carmel and Samaria. ‘ On a l’avantage
de tourner Mont Carmel par la route qui suit la lisiere de
la plaine d’Esdrelon ’—that is, after it reaches the water-
shed—‘ au lieu que celle qui longe la mer arrive au detroit
de Haifa ’—that is, the sea-pass which the Crusaders
called Les Destroits—‘passage difficile a forcer s’il £tait
defendu.’1 The route Napoleon chose, to the east of
Carmel, was of the three which are usually followed the
most westerly, for his goal was Acre. From the north
end of Sharon it strikes due north, past Subbarin, and,
descending to the east of the Muhrakah, reaches Esdraelon
at Tell Keimun. It is the shortest road from Sharon and
Egypt to the Phoenician cities, and is to-day followed
by the telegraph wire. Another route leaves Sharon
at Khurbet es-Sumrah, strikes north-east up the Wady
‘Arah to the watershed at ‘Ain Tbrahim, and thence
descends to Lejjun, from which roads branch to Naza-
reth, Tiberias, and by Jezreel to Jordan. A third, and
more frequented route, leaves Sharon still farther south,
and, travelling almost due east by a long wady,2 emerges
upon the Plain of Dothan, and thence descends north-east
to Jenin, in Esdraelon. This road is about seventeen
miles long, but for Beisan and the Jordan Valley, it is
much shorter than the route by Lejjun, and is, no doubt,
the historical road from Egypt to the east of the Jordan
and Damascus. It was on this road near Dothan that
Joseph’s brethren, having cast him into a pit, lifted up their

1 Campagnes cTEgyple et de Syrie Memoires . . . dictees par lui-mhne,
ii. 55.	2 W. ’Abu-Nar, afterwards W. el Ghamik and W. Wesa.15 2 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

eyes, and behold, a company of Ishmaelites came from Gilead,
with their camels, bearing spicery and balm and myrrh,
going to carry it down to Egypt}

To this issue of Sharon into Esdraelon, which is hardly
ever noticed in manuals of sacred geography, too much
its historical attention cannot be paid. Its presence is felt
drect.	by ap j-be history of the land. No pass had

more effect upon the direction of campaigns, the sites of
great battles, or the limitation of Israel’s actual possessions.
We shall more fully see the effects of it when we come
to study the Plain of Esdraelon. Here it is enough to
mention such facts as illustrate the real continuity of
Esdraelon and Sharon. In ancient Egyptian records of
travel and invasion,2 names on Esdraelon and the Jordan
are almost as frequent as those on the Maritime Plain,
and a journey is recounted which took place in a chariot
from the Lake of Galilee to Egypt. On this Bethshan
and Megiddo, which is Lejjun, and Joppa were all
stations. In the Bible the Philistines and Egyptians are
frequently represented in Esdraelon. It must surprise the
reader of the historical books, that Saul and Jonathan

1	Gen xxxvii. 25.

The following are the levels relative to these routes: The headland of
Carmel is some 500 feet above the sea; thence the ridge rises, in rather over
eleven miles, to 1810 feet; thence suddenly sinks to 800 or 1000, the height
of the pass by Subbarin to Tell Keimun. Then come, almost at right angles
to Carmel, the series of lower ranges—for eight miles the Belad er-Ruhah,

‘ a district of bare chalk downs, with an average elevation of 800 feet ’
(P.E.F. Mem. ii.), fertile, but treeless, except on the western slope; then
eight or ten miles of higher hills, some of which reach 1600 feet; then
Dothan, and then the hills of Samaria. The watershed at ‘Ain ’Ibrahim,
where the Lejjun road crosses, is as high as 1100 feet. Dothan is 700.
Sharon, at its margin, is 200, and this may be taken as the level also of
Esdraelon, though Lejjun is over 400 and Jenin over 500.

2	Travels of an Egyptian, I. R.P., ii. 107 ff. ; Annals of Thothtnes ///,,

ib. p. 39 ff. Cf. W. Max-Miiller, Asirn mid Evrofa, p. 195 ff.The Maritime Plain

153

should have come so far north as Gilboa to fight with
Philistines, whose border was to the south of them, and
that King Josiah should meet the Egyptians at Megiddo.
The explanation is afforded by the easy passage of Sharon
into Esdraelon. The Philistines had come by it, either to
make the easier entrance into Israel from the north, or to
keep open the great trade route to Gilead ; the Egyptians
had come by it, because they were making for Damascus
and the Euphrates.

Between these, its open ends, the Maritime Plain was
traversed by highways, which have followed, through all
ages, pretty much the same direction. Coming The roads of
up from Egypt, the trunk road crossed the -he Plain-
Wady Ghuzzeh near Tell el ‘Ajjul—Calf’s Hill—a favour-
ite Saracen camp,1 and continued through Gaza and past
Mejdel to Ashdod, avoiding the coast, for the sand on
the Philistine coast comes far inland, and is loose. After
Ashdod it forked. One branch struck through Jamnia
to Joppa, and thence up the coast by ’Arsuf and Caesarea
to Haifa,2 with Roman bridges over the streams. The
other branch, used in the most ancient times, as well as
by the Romans and Saracens, and still the main caravan
road between Egypt and Damascus, strikes from Ashdod
farther inland, by Ekron to Ramleh, and thence travels
by Lydda and Antipatris to the passes leading over to
Esdraelon.' This road was joined by roads from the hills
at Gaza, Ashdod, Ramleh—where the Beth-horon road
from Jerusalem, and another from Beit-Jibrin, through the
Shephelah, came in,—at Antipatris,—where the road from
Jerusalem to Caesarea, by which Paul was brought down,

1	It was Saladin’s twice.

2	According to Brugsch, the royal Egyptian road.154 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

crossed it,1 and near Gilgal and Kakon, where passes
descended from Shechem and Sebastd The inland high-
road was also joined by a cross-road from Joppa near
Antipatris. All these roads were fairly well supplied with
water.

The natural obstacles were few, and easily turned. The
inland road avoided the streams and marshes which the

coast road had to traverse, and which do not

Its defences.

seem to have been bridged till the Romans
came. Some fortresses, as in the south the Philistine
cities, and in the north ’Arsfif and Caesarea, might form
bases or flanks for long lines of defence, but they stood
by themselves, and could be easily turned, as Geoffrey
turned Caesarea in the First Crusade. Strong lines were
drawn across the plain at only two places that we know of.
The deep, muddy bed of the ‘Aujeh tempted Alexander
Janneus to build a wall from Kapharsaba to the sea at
Joppa, with wooden towers and intermediate redoubts ;
but ‘ Antiochus soon burnt them, and made his army pass
that way to Arabia.’2 And, again, Saladin’s army, with
its left on the strong fortress of 'Arsuf, and its right on the
Samarian hills, strove to keep Richard back, but were
dispersed after two heavy battles.3 Napoleon’s march is
the one we know in most detail. He was under the
necessity of taking two fortresses—Gaza and Joppa—and
was attacked by a body of Samarians from Nablus as
he passed Kakon. His experiences may be fairly taken
as those likely to have happened to most invaders from
north and south, except that when it was the Jews who

1 The part of this road through the hill-country was traced by Ely Smith
in 1840, but the level part from Antipatris to Ctesarea has still to be
recovered.	2 Josephus, xiii. Antt. xv. 1. Cf. i. Wars, iv. 1.

3 Vinsauf, Hitter. Ricard. iv. 14-24.The Maritime Plain

155

opposed the invader, they came down Ajalon, and flung
themselves across his path from Lydda, Gezer, and Joppa.

We now see why the Maritime Plain was so famous a
war-path. It is really not the whole of Palestine which
deserves that name of The Bridge between Asia

The cam-

and Africa; it is this level and open coast- paigns of the
land along which the embassies and armies pla'n’
of the two continents passed to and fro, not troubling
themselves, unless they were provoked, with the barren
and awkward highlands to the east. So Thothmes passed
north to the Hittite frontier and the Euphrates. So
Rameses came. So, from 740 to 710, Tiglath-Pileser,
Shalmaneser, and Sargon swept south across Jordan and
Esdraelon to the cities of the Philistines, entering Samaria,
whose open gateways they found at Jenin and Kakon,1
but leaving Judah alone. So, in 701, Sennacherib marched
his army to the borders of Egypt, and detached a brigade
for the operations on Jerusalem, which Isaiah has so
vividly described. So Necho went up to the border of
Assyria, and Nebuchadnezzar came down to the border
of Egypt. So Cambyses passed and left Judaea alone.
So Alexander the Great passed between his siege of Tyre
and that of Gaza, and passed back from Egypt to Tyre,
entering Samaria by the way to punish the inhabitants of
Shechem.2 So the Antiochi from Syria and the Ptolemies
from Egypt surged up and down in alternate tides, carrying
fire and rapine to each other’s borders. From their hills
the Jews could watch all the spectacle of war between
them and the sea—the burning villages, the swift, busy
lines of chariots and cavalry—years before Jerusalem

1 Genin on Esdraelon, Kakon on Sharon.

- The account of his march into Jerusalem is fictitious.156 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

herself was threatened.^ When Judas Maccabeus burnt
the harbour and ships at Jamnia, ‘the light of the fire
was seen at Jerusalem, two hundred and forty stadia off.’ 1 2
In Roman times legions marched and countermarched too
often to mention ; and they made great roads, and bridged
the streams with bridges, some of which last to this day.

In the first Moslem assaults the Maritime Plain bore less
of the brunt than the eastern parts of the land, but in the
European invasions of the eleventh to the thirteenth cen-
turies it was again, as in Greek and Roman times, scoured
by war. While Geoffrey and the First Crusade passed
unhindered from Plaifa to Ramleh,3 Richard and the Third
Crusade had to skirmish every league of the way with
an enemy that harassed them from the Samarian valleys,
and to fight one great battle under Arsuf, and another on
the cast of Joppa.4 In the Philistine Plain innumerable
conflicts, sieges, and forays took place, for while the Latin
kingdom of Jerusalem lasted, it met here the assaults of
the Egyptian Moslems, and when Richard came he had
here at once to repel the sallies of the Moslem from
Jerusalem, and intercept the aid coming to them from
Egypt. In 1265 Bibars came north, and one by one de-
molished the fortresses so thoroughly, that some of them,
like Askalon and Caesarea, famous for centuries before,
have been desolate ever since. But perhaps this garden of
the Lord was never more violated than when Napoleon, in
the springof 1799,brought up his army from Egypt,orwhen,
in the heat of summer, he retreated, burning the towns
and harvests of Philistia and massacring his prisoners.5

1 Isa. v. 10.	2 2 Macc. xii. 9. The real distance is about 300 stadia.

3 William of Tyre, vii. 22.	4 Vinsauf, I tin. Ricardi, as above.

B Op. cit. ii. 109. Wittmann, Travels, pp. 128, 136.The Maritime Plain

157

It was not only war which swept the Maritime Plain.
The Plague also came up this way from Egypt. Through-
out antiquity the ncrrth-east corner of the ^ „

M J	'	The Plague.

Delta was regarded with reason as the home
of the Plague. The natural conditions of disease were
certainly prevalent. The eastern mouth of the Nile then
entered the sea at Pelusium, and supplied a great stretch
of mingled salt and fresh water under a high temperature.1
To the west there is the swampy Delta ; and on the
Asiatic side sand-hills, with only brackish wells. Along
the coast there appear to have been always a number of
lagoons, separated from the sea by low bars of sand, and
used as salt-pans.2 In Greek and Roman times the largest
of these was known as the Serbonian Bog or Marsh.3 It
had a very evil repute. The dry sand blowing across it
gave it the appearance of solid ground, which was sufficient
to bear those who ventured on it, only till they were
beyond flight or rescue, and it swallowed part of more than
one unfortunate army.4 In Justinian’s time, the ‘Bog’
was surrounded by communities of salt-makers and fish-
curers ; filthy villages of under-fed and imbecile people,
who always had disease among them.5 The extremes of
temperature are excessive. It was a very similar state of
affairs to that which has been observed in connection with
the recent outbreak of plague in Astrakhan.6 Now all

1	Always accompanied by fevers, as round the Gulf of Mexico.

2	Cf. Martin Baumgarten’s Travels (1507) in Churchhill’s Collection, i.410.

3	XlfjLvr} Heppwvls, Strabo, vii. 59, and Diod. Sic. ; Serbonis Lacus, Pliny,
Nat. Hist. v. 13. Cf. Ptol. iv. 5, § 12, 20. It lay parallel to the sea, and was
about 200 stadia by 50.

4	Diod. Sicul. gives a graphic account of this. Artaxerxes Mnemon lost

part of his army here in 350.	5 Gibbon.

6 On the Outbreak of Plague in Astrakhan, 1878-79, by Dr. Giovanni
Cabriadus, Transactions of the Epidemiological Society, vol. iv., pt. iv. 449.
Cf. on the same subject the Reports of the German and English Commissions,
ib. vol. iv. 362, 276.158 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

armies coming from the north reached these unhealthy
conditions, exhausted by an arduous march across the
desert. Coming from the south, armies picked up the
infection, with the possibility of its breaking out after
the heat of the desert was passed, in the damper climate
of Syria. Their camps, their waste and offal, with an
occasional collapse of their animals in a sandstorm, were
frequent aggravations.1

Relevant instances are not few in history. Here Senna-
cherib’s victorious army was infected by pestilence, and
melted northwards like a cloud ; here in Justinian’s time
the Plague started more than once a course right across the
world ; here a Crusading expedition showed symptoms of
the Plague ; here, in 1799, Napoleon’s army was infected
and carried the disease into Syria : while the Turkish force
that marched south, in 1801, found the Plague about Jaffa
and in the Delta.2

These facts probably provide us with an explanation of
two records of disease in the Old Testament. The Philis-
tines, who occupied the open door by which the infection
entered Syria,3 were struck at a time they were in camp

1	Baumgarten in 1507 saw such a collapse : ‘ 10,000 sheep and asses and
other creatures lying on the ground rotten and half consumed, the noisome
smell of which was so insufferable that we were obliged to make all haste ; ’ it
was a collection of herds which the Sultan of Egypt had caused to be seized
in Syria in default of the Syrian tribute. Cf. the similar tribute which Isaiah
describes as going down to Egypt through the same dangers, xxx. 6 : Oracle
of the beasts of the Negeb. See Wittmann, as below, pp. 122 f.

2	On Sennacherib, see the author’s Isaiah i. On the Plague in Justinian’s
time, Evagrius, xxix. ; Gibbon, xliii. ; on Napoleon, the Memoirs of Cam-
paigns already cited ; Walsh, Journal of the late Campaign in Egypt, 1803, p.
136; especially Wittmann, Travels, chs. viii., x., xi. on Plague and Ophthalmia
in Maritime Plain. Volney, who says (Travels, i. 253) that the Plague
always appears on the coast, and is brought from Greece and Syria, is giving
a mistaken account of the fact that its home is in NE. comer of the Delta.

• 3 All the Commissioners of Inquiry on the Plague of Astrakhan were notThe Maritime Plain

159

against Israel by two strong symptoms of the Plague—
tumours in the groin and sudden and numerous deaths.1
Among the Israelites, again, the only country which gave
its name to a disease was Egypt. All the sore sicknesses
of Egypt of which thou art afraid\s a curse in the Book of
Deuteronomy, which is eloquent of the sense of frequent
infection from that notorious quarter. One of these sick-
nesses is specified as the Boil or Tumour of Egypt? That
it occurs in the singular number may, of course, be due to
its being a continuous eruption on the body, but it seems
rather to mean a solitary tumour, and it is interesting that
in recent instances of the pestilence, the tumours have
generally been one on each person, while in India a local
name for the Plague is The Boil.3

However this may be, it seems certain that Israel was

equally convinced as to whether the infection can be carried by clothes, but
the Germans had no doubt that this outbreak was caused by the carriage to
the district of spoil of war. — Trans, of Epidem. Soc. iv. 376 ff., Report of
German Commission ; cf. The Account of the Endemic Plague in India, ib. p.
391, where it is said that it is traders who are mostly attacked.

1	The name of the thing with which they were smitten, □ vBJJ l5pholim,
means swellings or boils, 1 Sam. v. 6, 9, 12 ; and the offerings made to avert
the calamity were not only golden boils but golden mice, the symbol of the
Plague, ib. vi. 5. Cf. Herodotus’ account of the disaster to Sennacherib,
in which mice play a part, ii. 1. The disease with which Napoleon’s army
was attacked in Philistia was precisely the same—a very fatal fitvre h bubons.

2	All the sore sicknesses of Egypt, Deut. vii. 15, xxviii. 60; pestilence
in the way, or after the manner, of Egypt, Amos iv. 10. The Boil
(= jTIP Shehin) is applied both to a single tumour like a carbuncle, as in
2 Kings xx. 7, and to an extensive eruption and swelling of the skin, as in
Job ii. 7, where it is supposed to be elephantiasis. In Deut. xxviii. 35 it
means some extensive disease of the skin.

3	Trans, of the Epidem. Soc., iv., pt. i. 129 ff. On Plague and Typhus
Eever in India, .Surgeon-General Murray. On solitary tumours, see ib.
Report of German Commission on the Astrakhan Plague, p. 376, and the cases
specified by Dr. Cabriadus in the same Transactions, iv., pt. iv. p. 449, and
Surgeon-Major Colville’s Notes on Plague in Province of Baghdad, ib. iv.,
pt. i. p. 9, where in many the sign of Plague was an enlargement of glans in
groin or armpit.160 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

sometimes attacked by epidemics, which, starting from the
north-east corner of Egypt, travelled by the short desert
route to Syria, and passed up the avenues of trade from
the Maritime Plain. The Philistines, as traders, would
stand in special danger of infection.

These, then, were the contributions of the Maritime Plain
to the history of Israel. It was a channel always busy
with commerce, and often scoured by War and the Plague.

The positions of the cities of the Maritime Plain are of
extreme interest. We have surveyed those on the coast.

Those inland arrange themselves into two

Cities of the

Maritime groups. Coming from the north, we find no
inland town of any consequence til' the ‘Aujeh
is passed, and then all at once the first group appear at
the mouth of the Vale of Ajalon. The second group are
separated from these by the low hills on the Nahr Rubin,
and consist of the towns of Philistia.

It is, of course, the incoming Vale of Ajalon that explains
the first group—Ramleh, and Lydda and her sisters, with,
Valley of the Perhaps, Antipatris. Lydda, or Lod, with Ono,
Smiths. a little farther out on the plain, and Hadid,
on the edge of the hills behind, formed the most westerly
of the Jewish settlements after the Exile. The returned
Jews naturally pushed down the only broad valley from
Jerusalem till they touched the edge of the great thorough-
fare which sweeps past it. The site of their settlements
here is described as the Ge-haharashim—the Valley of the
Smiths or Craftsme?i. It is surely a recollection of the
days when there was no harash in Israel, but the Hebrews
came down to the Philistine border to get their plough-
shares and their mattocks sharpened.1 The frontier posi-
1 I Sam. xiii. 19. Lod, Ono, and Hadid are not given in Joshua (only inThe Maritime Plain

161

tion of Lydda — according to Josephus, ‘a village not
less than a city’—made it the frequent subject of battle
and treaty between the Jews and their succes-
sive enemies.1 Like all the other inland towns Lydda’
of Sharon, it appears never to have been fortified. It was,
as we have seen, one of the centres of Jewish feeling
throughout Roman times, and after the destruction of
Jerusalem it formed a refuge of the religious leaders of
Judaism. After one or other of those revolts of despair,
into which the Jews burst during the second and third
centuries, Lydda was emptied of everything Jewish, and
made pagan, under the name of Diospolis.2 Judaism
disappeared/but Christianity survived, and finally got the
upper hand. There was a Bishop of Diospolis in the
fourth century, and a Synod of Diospolis, at which Pela-
gius was tried, early in the fifth.3 The chief Christian

i	Chron. viii. 12); but Ezra ii. 23 implies that they were Jewish towns before
the exile, cf. Neh. vii. 37. Neh. xi. 35 relates their rebuilding, and gives
us the name of the district, D'tJHnn '3—LXX., 777’Apaaci/j.. Conder suggests
that Harashim ‘survives in the present Hirshah,’ P.E.F.Q., 1878, 18.

1	Especially between the Syrians and the Jews, and the Romans and the
Jews. It was confirmed by Ptolemy to Jonathan Maccabeus, I Macc. xi. 34,
and by Caesar,'with the right to make it thoroughly Jewish, xiv. Antt. x. 6.
It was the capital of a toparchy, iii. Wars, iii. 5. For its adherence to the
national side, witness its occupation by Cestius Gallus (see p. 138), as also by
Vespasian, iv. Wars, vi. That the latter met with no opposition was due to
the town’s want of fortification.

2	This is usually supposed to have happened as early as Hadrian’s time,
when Jerusalem was desecrated. But Schlatter, Zur Topographie u. Geschichte
Paldstinas, No. 2, sets the change of name under Septimius Severus about
the year 202 A.D., when Beit-Jibrin also was put under a Greek name. The
earliest coins that have been found of Diospolis bear the legend ‘ L. Septimia
Severa Diospolis.’ Eusebius and Jerome still know it under that name,
though, strange to say, neither Diospolis nor Lydda is the subject of a
special article in the Onomasticon, but the name Diospolis occurs only in
fixing the position of towns like Arimathea, Addara, Adithaim, etc.

3	415. He got off, to the wrath of Jerome : Dialogi adv. Pel,

L162 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

interest of Lydda, however, centres round her St. George.
There is no hero whom we shall more frequently meet
in Palestine, and especially east of Jordan.

st. George. jncjee(^ among ap the saints, there has been

none with a history like this one, who, from obscure origins
became not only the virtual patron of Syrian Christendom,
and an object of Mohammedan reverence, but patron as
well of the most western of all Christian peoples. St.
George of Lydda is St. George of England ; he is also a
venerated personage in Moslem legend. For this triple fame
he has to thank his martyrdom on the eve of the triumph
of Christianity (to the early Church George is Megalo-
martyr and Tropaiophoros); the neighbourhood of his
shrine to the scene of a great Greek legend ; the removal
of his relics to Zorava, in Hauran, where his name
spread with great rapidity; and the effect of all this, his
Syrian reputation, first upon the Moslems before they
became impervious to Christian influences, and then on
the Crusaders at a crisis in their first invasion. The
original George was a soldier of good birth, and served
as a military tribune under Diocletian. In 303 he was
martyred. According to some, Lydda was the scene of
his martyrdom ; others place there the property of his
family, but say that he suffered in Nicomedia.1 In either
case Lydda received his relics; through the following
centuries pilgrims visited his tomb in the town,2 and there

1	Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. viii. 5> tells of ‘ a certain man of no mean origin,
but highly esteemed for his temporal dignities,’ who, in Nicomedia, tore down
Diocletian’s edicts against Christianity, and then heroically met death.

2	Antonini Placentini Itinerarium (cir. 57°)> c. 25 : ‘ Diospolis ... in
qua requiescit Georgius martyr. ’ The same sentence confounds Diospolis with
Ashdod and Caesarea. Arculf, before 683, Willibald, 728, and Bernard, 865,
also mention the tomb. The church does not appear to have been dedicated
to St. George; travellers quote'only the monastery and the tomb.The Maritime Plain

163

was a monastery dedicated to him. A church had stood
in Lydda from the earliest times, but it was destroyed
on the approach of the First Crusade. A new cathedral
was built by the Crusaders over the tomb, and partly
because of this, but also in gratitude for the supernatural
intervention of the saint in their favour at Antioch, they
dedicated it to him. It was a great pile of building,
capable of being used as a fortress. So, on the approach
of Richard, Saladin destroyed it. Richard, who did more
than any man to'identify St. George with England,1 is said
to have rebuilt the church ; but there is no record of the
fact, and it is much more likely that the great bays which
the traveller of to-day admires are the ruins that Saladin
made.2 By Crusading times the name of the saint had
displaced both Diospolis and Lydda, and the town might
have been called St. George till now but for the break in
Christian pilgrimage from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
centuries.3 The Arabs have perpetuated the Hebrew name
Lod in their Ludd.

The connection of St. George with a dragon can be
traced to the end of the sixth century. It was probably
due to two sources—to the coincidence of the

St. George

rise of the martyr's fame with the triumph of and the
Christianity over paganism, and, as M. Clermont Drag011,
Ganneau has forcibly argued, to the conveyance to St.
George of the legend of Perseus and Andromeda. It was

1	It was under Edward ill. that St. George became patron of England.

2	Vinsauf is silent. Robinson’s reasons against Richard’s building seem
conclusive, Bib. Res. iii. 54 f.; De Vogiie, Les £glises de la Terre Sain/e,
363 fF. with plans. Cf. Phocas, 39; Bohaeddin, ch. 121.

3	So in Crusading documents (Z.D.P. V. x. 215J, but even as late as in 1506,'
in Die Jerusalemfahrt des Caspar von Mulinen : ‘ Und reit der Herre fon
Ramen und der Herre fon Sant Joergen unc^ gon Jaffen’ (Z.D.P.V'.
xi. 195).164 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

in the neighbourhood of Lydda—at Arsuf or Joppa—that
Perseus slew the sea-monster which threatened the virgin ;
and we know how often Christian saints have been served
heir to the fame of heathen worthies who have preceded
them in the reverence of their respective provinces. But
the legend has an even more interesting connection. The
Mohammedans, who usually identify St. George with the
prophet Elijah—El Khudr, the forerunner of Messiah—at
Lydda confound his legend with another about Christ
Himself. Their name for Antichrist is Dajjal, and they
have a tradition that Jesus will slay Antichrist by the gate
of Lydda. This notion sprang from an ancient bas-relief
of St. George and the Dragon on the Lydda church. But
Dajjal may be derived, by a very common confusion
between n and /, from Dagon, whose name two neighbouring
villages—Dajhn and Bet Dajon—bear to this day, while
one of the gates of Lydda.used to be called the Gate of
Dagon.1 If the derivation be correct, then, it is indeed a
curious process by which the monster, symbolic of heathen-
ism conquered by Christianity, has been evolved out of the
first great rival of the God of Israel. And could there
be a fitter scene for such a legend than the town where
Hebrew touched Philistine, Jew struggled with Greek, and
Christendom contested with Islam? To-day the popula-
tion is mostly Mohammedan, and the greater part of the
cathedral a mosque; but there is still a Christian con-
gregation in Lydda, who worship in the nave and an aisle ;
and once a year, on the anniversary of their great saint,
whom even the Moslems reverence, they are permitted to
celebrate Mass at the high altar over his tomb.2

1	Clermont Ganneau, P.E.F. Mem. ii.

2	For such details of the above as are not in M. Clermont Ganneau’s papers
I am indebted to Guerin’s Judee, i.The Maritime Plain

165

About 700 Lydda suffered one of her many overthrows.
The Arab general1 who was the cause saw the necessity
of building another town in the neighbourhood
to command the junction of the roads from the
coast to the interior with the great caravan route from
Egypt to Damascus. He chose a site nearly three miles
from Lydda, and called the town Ramleh, ‘the sandy,’
and, indeed, there is no other feature to characterise it.
Like the cathedrals of the plains of Europe, the mosque of
Ramleh has a lofty tower, from which all the convergent
roads may be surveyed for miles. Ramleh was once
fortified. It suffered the varying fortunes of the wars of
the Crusades, and since it became Mohammedan, in 1266,
its Christian convent has continued to provide shelter to
pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem.2

From Ramleh it is a long way back in time to Anti-
patris. Antipatris was one of the creations of Herod, and
appears to have been built not as a fortress,

.	Antipatris.

but as a pleasant residence. Its site was
probably not where Robinson placed it, at the present
Kefr Saba, but southward, near the present El-Mir. Here
is all the wealth of water which Josephus describes, as well
as sufficient ruins to demonstrate that the site was once a
place of importance.3

1	Suleiman, son of the Khalif fAbd-el-Melek, according to Abulfeda.

2	Pilgrims used to wait here till the frequently delayed permission was
granted them to go on to Jerusalem. Felix Fabri, i., etc., etc.

3	See Robinson, Bib. Res. ii. 45-47. The credit of the discovery of the
other site is due to the P. E.F. Survey under Conder (see P.E.F. Mem.
ii. 258 ff.). Though in one passage Josephus says Antipatris was on the site
of Kefr Saba (xvi. Anti. v. 2), in another he describes it more generally as in
the Plain of Kefr Saba (ii. Wars, xxi. 9).JUDEA. THE SHEPHELAH AND PHILIST1A

PLATE

i

Hie Edinburgh. Geographical Institute

J. G. Baxtholomew, F.B- G-S.

Lona on; liodder and Stough-ion.CHAPTER IX

THE PHILISTINES AND THEIR CITIES

167For this Chapter consult Maps I. and IP.THE PHILISTINES AND THEIR CITIES
HE singularity and importance of the Palestine towns

demand their separation from the rest of the Mari-
time Plain, and their treatment in a chapter by them-

The chief cities of the Philistine League were five—
Gaza, ‘Askalon,’Ashdod, ‘E^ron, and Gath; but Jamneh,or
Jamniel, is generally associated with them. Only one—
‘Askalon—is directly on the sea; the others dominate the
trunk-road which, as we have seen, through Philistia keeps
inland. None of them lie north of the low hills by the
Nahr Rubin. These two facts, with the well-known dis-
tinction of the Philistines from the Canaanites or Phoeni-
cians, point to an immigration from the south and an
interest in the land trade.

This is confirmed by all that we know of the history of
this strange people. In the LXX. the name Philistines
is generally translated by Allophuloi (Vulg. The name
aliegence) ‘ aliens ’; and it has suggested a Phlllstines-
derivation from falash, a Semitic root,‘to migrate.’1 In
the Old Testament there is a very distinct memory of

1 The name was not given by the Semites, Hebrews, or Canaanites. That
it was the Philistines’ name for themselves appears from its use by all other
peoples who came into connection with them. In the Egyptian inscriptions
it is Purasati; in the Assyrian inscriptions it is Pulistav and Pilista; Schrader,
K.A.T., 102, 103, where there is an interesting argument to show that by

selves.

169170 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

such a migration : O children of Israel, saith Jehovah, have
I not brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the
Philistines from Kaphtor, and the Syrians from Kir ? The
Kaphtorim, which came forth from Kaphtor, destroyed the
Avim, which dwelt in open villages as far as Gaza> and
dwelt in their stead} Where the Philistines came from,
and what they originally were, is not clear.

Their origin.	.

That they moved up the coast from Egypt is
certain ;2 that they came from Kaphtor is also certain.
But it by no means follows, as some argue, that Kaphtor
and Egypt are the same region.3 On the contrary, Kaphtor
seems to be outside Egypt;4 and as the Philistines are

Pilista the Assyrians meant Judah as well as the Philistine cities—a remarkable
precedent for what, happened in Greek times, when the name of Philistia was
extended across the whole country behind. Pelesheth has a Semitic appear-
ance which Pclishtim, showing the root to be quadriliteral, has not. The
name is supposed to survive in the names of several localities in the Shephelah
hills—at Keratiyeh el Fenlsh by Beit-Jibrin, Arak el Fenish, Bestan el
Fentsh—also at Latrfln, Soba, Amwas, and Khurbet Ikbala. All these places
are on the borderland of ancient Philistia, and the name does not occur else-
where. See Conder in P.E.F. Mem. vol. iii. 294.

1 Amos ix. 7 ; Deut. ii. 23.

3 From the unlikelihood of their landing on the coast, from the traces in
the Old Testament of their settlement to the south of Gaza before they occu-
pied it (the stories of the patriarchs and Book of Joshua), and from Gen. x. 14,
whether you read the clause in brackets where it stands, or at the end of the
verse. The Pathrusim and Casluhim are practically Egypt; out of whom
should be whence. But some take this clause as a gloss.

3	Egyptologists like Ebers {/Egypten u. die Bucher Mosis) and Sayce
(Races of the O.T., 53-54, 127, a popular statement) assert that Kaphtor is
Kaft-ur, ‘the greater Phoenicia,’ applied to the Delta by the Egyptians.
But see p. 197. Before this Reland (p. 74) had placed Kaphtor ‘in ora
Maritima iFgypti contra Pelusium,’ and ‘ suspected’ a connection between the
names Pelusium and Pelesheth. Cf. Plutarch’s De Isiet Osiri, xvii., which
speaks of a youth, Pelusius or Palsestinus, after whom Iris names Pelusium.

4	I cannot think that if Kaphtor had been part of the Delta, it would have
been given as distinct from Egypt, in Amos ix. 8. On the other hand, the
reason given by Dillmann (on Gen. x. 14), that 'X is applied to Kaphtor in
Jer. xlvii. 4, is not conclusive, for is also applicable to the Delta coast.The Philistines and their Cities

171

Kaphtor.

also called Kerethim,1 and the connection between Egypt
and Crete was always a close one, and certain traditions
trace the inhabitants of Palestine to Crete, it
appears more safe to identify Kaphtor with that
island.2 But to have traced the Philistines to Crete is not to
have cleared up their origin, for early Crete was full of tribes
from both east and west.3 The attempt has been made
to derive the name Philistine from the Pelasgians, or from
a Pelasgic clan called Peneste, and to prove in detail that
Philistine names and institutions are Aryan.4 But Crete
shows signs of having been once partly colonised by
Semites, and it is possible that some of these, after a long
contact with Greek tribes, returned eastward.5 In that
case their natural goal, as with the eastward-faring Greeks,
would be, not the harbourless coast of South Syria, but the
mouths of the Nile. Now, the little that we know of the
Philistines, while not, indeed, proving such a theory, does

1	Zeph. ii. 5; Ezek. xxiv. Cf. l Sam. xx. 14.

2	That Kaphtor is not mentioned in Gen. x. 4, with other Mediterranean
islands, as a son of Javan, is due to the fact that Crete was regarded as con-
nected, not with the north, but with the south coast of the Mediterranean.
It is scarcely necessary now to say that the arrangement in Gen. x. is not
ethnological, but mainly geographical. The traditions referred to in the text
are the connection which the inhabitants of Gaza alleged between their god
Mama and the Cretan Jove, and the statement in Tacitus, Hist. v. 2 :
‘Judseos Creta insula profugos, novissima Libyae insedisse, memorant, qua
tempestate Saturnus vi Jovis expulsus cesserit regnis.’ He seeks to explain
this tradition by the analogy between Idaei, from Mount Ida, and Judaei. It
must be kept in mind that these late traditions may have arisen from a con-
nection between Crete and the Philistine coast in Hellenic times—i.e. after
Alexander the Great. Gaza especially had then great trade with the west.

3	Cf. Odyssey, xix. l7off. Achaeans, Kydonians, Dorians, Pelasgians, and
aboriginal Cretans—ire6Kpr]Toi.

4	Hitzig, Urgeschichte u. Mythologie der Philistaer, where the most extra-
ordinary Sanscrit analogies are suggested. The argument has been still more
overdone by the article in Schenkel’s Bibel-Lexicon.

5	Knobel’s opinion (Volkertafel Gen. x.) was that the Philistines were
Egyptians who had sojourned in Crete.172 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

not contradict it. Take them as a whole, and the Philis-
tines appear a Semitic people, with some non-Semitic
habits, institutions, and words. Putting aside

Racial char-	.

acterof the names of their towns, which were pro-
bably due to their Canaanite predecessors,1 we
find a number of their personal names also to be Semitic.2
Their religion seems to have consisted of the thorough
Semitic fashion of reverencing a pair of deities, masculine
and feminine. Dagon had a fish-goddess by his side,
and the names Dagon and Beelzebub are purely Semitic.
Nor is this evidence counterbalanced by the fact that the
Philistines did not practise circumcision, for they may have
abandoned the custom during their western sojourn, as
the later Phoenicians did in contact with the Greeks.
But even when we have admitted the Semitic features,
it is still possible to argue that the Philistines received
these from the civilisation which they succeeded and
absorbed. ‘This is certain in the case of their towns, and
of the names of the giants among them, who belonged to
the remains of the Canaanite population.3 Indeed, with
the exception, perhaps, of Abimelech, there is no Philistine
name of a Semitic cast of which this may not be true. It
is quite possible that neither Delilah nor Obed-edom the
Gittite was a pure Philistine.4 As for language, there is
little argument either way ; but if, as there is some reason

1	This disposes of part of Stade’s argument, Gesck. des V. Israel, i. 142.

2	Abimelech, Delilah, Obed-edom. But see below. Perhaps also Ishbi,
Saph, Goliath, Raphah.

Achish,	son of Maoch, TVO, king of Gath, 1 Sam. xxvii. 2.

Achish, son of Maachah, king of Gath, nDJlO 1 Kings ii. 39. W. Max
Muller {Asien u. Eur., 389) gives a name Bi-d-ira.

3	Josh. xi. 21, 22. Cf. xv. 13, 14.

4	Gath was so near the Israel border, and so often under Israel, that Obed-
edom may have been a Hebrew, though this is not likely from his name.The Philistines and their Cities

173

to .suppose, incoming Israel acquired theirs from the
Canaanites, it is not impossible for the Philistines to have
done the same.1 As for religion, if in antiquity the religion
of a province was usually adopted by its invaders, and if
even Israel fell so frequently under the power of Canaanite
worship, as only with difficulty to escape from permanently
succumbing to it, how much more likely were the Philis-
tines, who had not the spirit of Israel, to yield to the
manner of the gods of the land? The case, therefore, is very
complex. As to the non-Semitic elements in Philistinism,
some maintain that they are Greek, or at least Aryan.3
Now, it would indeed be interesting if we were sure that
in the early Philistines Israel already encountered that
Hellenism with which she waged war on the same fields
in the days of the Maccabees. But we cannot affirm more
than that this was possible ; and the above ambiguous
results are all that are afforded by the present state of our
knowledge of this perplexing people.

The Philistines appear to have come into the Maritime
Plain of Syria either shortly before or shortly after Israel
left Egypt. In the Tell-el-Amarna Letters from
South Palestine, in the beginning of the four- pearance in
teenth century B.C., they are not mentioned ;
and in the latter half of that century the monuments of
Rameses II. represent the citizens of Askalon with faces
that are not Philistine faces.4 Now, this agrees with the

1	Nothing can be argued about the speech of the early Philistines, from
the fact that in Aramaic times the Philistines, as witnessed by two coins of
Ashdod, spoke a dialect of Hebrew.

2	2 Kings xvii. 26.

3	The article in Riehm’s Handworterbuch says of the Philistines: ‘ Sie
sind mit Griechischen, bestimmter Karischen, Elementen, stark versetzten
Semiten, aus Kreta. In Isa. ix. 11, for Philistines the LXX. have"EXX7;vey.

They are probably Hittite.—Brugsqh.174 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

traditions in Genesis, one of which places the Philistine
centre still to the south of Gaza,1 while another states that
the Canaanites once held all the coast from Gaza north-
wards;2 as well as that of Deuteronomy,3 that the Caph-
torim had to expel the Avim, who dwelt in open villages, as
far as Gaza. This northern advance of the Philistines
may have been going on at the very time that the Israel-
ites were invading the Canaanites from the east. But if
so, it cannot have been either powerful or ambitious, for of
the various accounts in the books of Joshua and Judges of
the first Hebrew conquests, none bring the Hebrews even
into conflict with the Philistines.4 Still later, by Deborah’s
time, the tribe of Dan had touched the sea, and when
afterwards they were driven back to the hills, the pressure
came not from Philistines, but from Amorites.5 Very soon

1	In Gerar—Gen. xx. and xxvi. Gerar can hardly be the Umm-el-Jerar
for which it is generally taken ; for this is too far north for the verse in
which it occurs to agree with the clause immediately before it, Gen. xx. I ;
and the Onomasticon puts it twenty-five Roman miles south of Beit-Jibrin.

2	Gen. x. 19.	3 ii. 3.

4 Josh. xi. and xiii. ; Judges i., especially verse 18, where, with the LXX.
and most authorities, we should insert the word ‘not.’ Josh. xiii. 2 says
expressly, This is the land that yet remaineth—all the Gelilotk, or circuits, of
the Philistines.

0 Judges v. 17 : Dan abideth in ships. Judges i. 34 : The Amorites forced
the children of Dan into the mountains, for they would not suffer them to come
down into the valley, i.e. of Ajalon, where according to the next verse, the
Amorites settled till they were subdued by Ephraim. [I cannot agree with
Budde {Biicher Richter u. Samuel, p. 17) that Mount Heres = Beth-shemesh,
the present ‘Ain Shems, in the Vale of Sorek (read siidlich for nordlich in
Budde). Mount Heres must be in the Vale of Ajalon, where Ephraim would
naturally come, as he would not into Sorek.] The two statements can hardly
be reconciled, for if the Amorites succeeded, according to Judges i. 34, in
preventing Dan from even coming down into the valley, how could it be said
that (Judges v. 17) Dan ever got to the sea, and remained in shipsl This is
just one of the difficulties that meet us almost everywhere in the accounts of
Israel’s occupation of the land. I have ventured (in opposition to Stade,
Budde, and Kittel) to adopt the statement that Dan did reach the sea, for
Judges v. 17 belongs to one of the best-assured-parts of the Song of Deborah,The Philistines and their Cities

175

afterwards, however, the Philistines, adding to their effective
force the tall Canaanites1 whom they had subdued, and
strengthened, perhaps, by the addition of other clans from
their earlier seats—for, like Israel, they had several tribes
among them2—moved north and east with irresistible
power. Overflowing from what was especially known as
their districts, the Geliloth Pelesheth,3 they seized all the
coast to beyond Carmel, and spread inland over Their contact
Esdraelon. It was during this time of expan- Wlth Israel-
sion that they also invaded the highlands to the east of
them, and began that conflict with Israel which alone has
given them fame and a history.

We cannot have followed this history without being
struck by the strange parallel which it affords to the
history of Israel—the strange parallel and Parallel -
the stranger difference. Both Philistines and p^^nes16
Hebrews were immigrants into the land for and ^raehtes.
whose possession they fought through centuries. Both
came up to it from Egypt. Both absorbed the populations
they found upon it. Both succeeded to the Canaanite
civilisation, and came under the fascination of the Canaan-
ite religion. Each people had a distinctive character of its
own, and both were at different periods so victorious that
either, humanly speaking, might have swallowed up the
other. Indeed, so fully was the Philistine identified with
the land that his name has for ever become its name—a

and is not to be put aside simply because it conflicts with another state-
ment.

1	Sons of Anak.

2	Kaphtorim, Philistines, Kerethim, etc.

3	One of the few instances of the use of Gelil, or Gelilah, apart from Galilee
(ch. xx.). It was, of course, a name applied by the foreign Hebrews, and
one might be tempted to see a trace of it in the Galilea of the Crusaders, east
of Caesarea, and the modern Jelil, north-east of Jaffa. See p. 413.176 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

distinction which Israel never reached. Yet Israel survived
and the Philistine disappeared. Israel attained to a destiny,
equalled in the history of mankind only by Greece and
Rome, whereas all the fame of the Philistine lies in having
served as a foil to the genius of the Hebrews, and to-day
his name against theirs is the symbol of impenetrableness
and obscurantism.

What caused this difference between peoples whose
earlier fortunes were so similar? First, we may answer,
their geographical position, and Second, the spirit which
was in one of them. The same Hand1 which brought in
Israel from the east brought up the Philistine from the
south. It planted Israel on a rocky range of mountain,
aloof from the paths of the great empires, and outside their
envy. It planted the Philistines on an open doorway and
a great thoroughfare, amidst the traffic and the war of two
continents. They were bent now towards Egypt, now
towards Assyria, at a time when youthful Israel was
growing straight and free as one of her own forest trees.
They were harassed by intrigue and battle, when her
choicest spirits had freedom for the observation of the
workings of an omnipotent and righteous Providence;
and when, at last, they were overwhelmed by the streams
of Greek culture which flowed along their coast in the
wake of Alexander the Great, she upon her bare heights
still stubbornly kept the law of her Lord. Yet, to ascribe
this difference of destiny to difference of geographical
position were to dignify the mere opportunity with the
virtue of the original cause; for it was not Israel’s geo-
graphical position which prevented her from yielding to
the Canaanite religion, or moved her, being still young
1 See Amos viji. 9,The Philistines and their Cities

177

and rude, to banish from her midst the soothsayers and
necromancers, to whom the Philistines were wholly given
over.1 But from the first Israel had within her a spirit, and
before her an ideal, of which the Philistines knew nothing,
and always her prophets identified the purpose—which
they plainly recognised—of her establishment on so iso-
lated and secure a position with the highest ends of
righteousness, wisdom, and service to all mankind.

It is outside the purpose of this work to follow in detail
the history of the relations of the two peoples, but it may
be useful to define the main periods into which that history
falls, with their relevant portions of geography.

There was first a period of military encounters, and
alternate subjugation of the one people by the other. This
passed through its heroic stage in the times Reiat;onsof
of Samson, Saul, and David, entered a more pS]!^gtf£[ld
peaceful epoch under Solomon, and for the i.Tob.c. 800.
next three centuries of the Hebrew monarchy was distin-
guished by occasional raids from both sides into the heart
of the enemy’s country. The chief theatre of the events of
this period are the Shephelah hills and the valleys leading
up through them upon Judah and Benjamin.2 At one
time the Philistines are at Michmash, on the very citadel
of Israel’s hill-country, and at another near Jezreel, by its
northern entrances.3 * In both of these cases their purpose
may have been to extend their supremacy over the trade
routes which came up from Egypt and crossed the Jordan ;
but it seems as probable that, by occupying Michmash
and the Plain of Esdraelon, they sought to separate the

1	Cf. 1 Sam. xxviii. 3 with Isa. ii. 6.

2	See next chapter.

3	1 Sam. xiii., xxix., and xxxi.

M178 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

tribes of Israel from one another.1 Occasionally Philis-
tines penetrated to the neighbourhood of Jerusalem,2 or
the Israelite raids swept up to the gates of Gaza;3 but
neither people ever mastered the other’s chief towns.

The second period is that of the centuries from the eighth
to the fourth before Christ, when the contests of the two

n B c nations are stilled before the advance upon

800-400. Syria of the great world-powers—Egypt, As-
syria, Babylon and Persia. Now, instead of a picture of
forays and routs up and down the intervening passes,
Philistine and Hebrew face to face in fight, we have the
gaze of the Hebrew prophets looking down on Philistia
from afar, and marking her cities for destruction by the
foreign invader. It is, indeed, one of the many signs of
the sobriety of the prophets, and of their fidelity to histori-
cal fact, that they do not seek to revive within Israel at
this time any of her earlier ambitions for the victory of her
own arms over her ancient foe. The threats of prophecy
against Philistia are, with one exception, threats of destruc-
tion from Egypt and Mesopotamia. Isaiah, Jeremiah,
Zephaniah, Zechariah, speak of the Philistine cities, not
hotly, as of enemies shortly to be met in battle, but piti-
fully, as victims of the Divine judgment, which lowers over
Philistia and Israel alike.4 * *

1	This seems the more likely idea in the case of Michmash, for although
there was a trade route from the east of the Jordan by Jericho and Michmash
to the coast, which was much used by the Crusaders (see p. 250), a garrison
at Michmash could not have kept it open while Saul had his camp at Gilgal,
and commanded the Jordan.

2	2 Sam. v. 22 flf.	8 2 Kings xviii. 8.

4 Isa. xiv. 29-32; Jer. xlvii. ; Zeph. ii. ; Zech. ix. The one exception is

Isa. xi. 14, where it is said Judah and Ephraim shall swoop upon the shoulder

of the Philistine towards the sea. This is a passage which some maintain is

not Isaiah’s. But, as far as our present subject is concerned, there was suffi-The Philistines and their Cities

179

A change of attitude and temper came with the third
period, from the third century before Christ to the close of
the Jewish revolts against Rome, in the third m. b.c. 300-
century after Christ. With Alexander’s inva- A,D‘ 300,
sion the Philistine coast and cities were opened to Greek
influence. There was traffic with Greece through the
harbours, such as they were ; there were settlements of
Greek men in all the cities, Greek institutions arose, the
old deities were identified with Greek gods, and, though the
ancient Philistine stubbornness persisted it was exercised
in the defence of civic independence, according to Greek
ideas, and of Greek manners and morals. But it was just
against this Hellenism, whether of Syria or of the half-free
Philistine cities, that the sacred wars of the Maccabees
broke out. The aloofness of the prophetic period was
over, and Israel returned to close quarters with her ancient
foes. Their battles raged on the same fields; their routs
and pursuits up and down the same passes. Did Samson
arise in the Vale of Sorek, and David slay Goliath in the
Vale of Elah, both of them leading down into Philistia?—
then the birthplace of the Maccabees was in the parallel
Valley of Ajalon, at Modin, and their exploits within sight
of the haunts of their predecessors a thousand years before.
So, through the literature of this time, and of the times
leading up to it, we miss the wide prophetic view, and in
psalms that exult in the subjugation of the Philistines to
Israel, and triumph over Philistia} we seem to breathe

cient historical occasion for it in Isaiah’s days, in the expeditions of Uzziah
and Ilezekiah up to the gates of Gaza.

1 Psalm lx. (cviii.), lxxxiii., etc. Of course, it is always possible historically
that such Psalms are of earlier dale, for Hezekiah carried fire and sword into
Philistia while Isaiah was alive—a strong reminder to us of how impossible it
is to be dogmatic on the date of any Psalm, simply because it reflects the main
feeling of the literature of the time to which we assign it.180 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

again the ruder and more military spirit of the times of
Samson and of Saul. This hostility and active warfare
persisted till the last Jewish revolts under the Roman
emperors. Then the Jews gave way, withdrawing into
Galilee, and Christianity succeeded to the heritage of the
war against Hellenism.

The slow conquest of heathenism by the Church forms
the fourth period of the history of Philistia, from the first
iv in Chris-to beginning of the fifth century after
nan Times. Christ It is typical of the whole early progress
of Christianity, and as full of pathos and romance as this
was in any other part of the world. In Philistia Chris-
tianity rose against a Hellenism proud of its recent vic-
tories over the Jews. There were flourishing schools and
notable philosophers in every city. The gods, identified
with the deities of Greece and Rome, were favoured equally
by the common people and by the governing classes.
The Marneion, or Temple of Marna, at Gaza was regarded
as a stronghold of heathendom'only second to the Serapeum
at Alexandria.1 Beside so elaborate a paganism the early
Christians of Philistia, though they were organised under
many bishops, were a small and feeble folk. Like the
Church of Pergamos, they dwelt by Satan s seat, and like
her, in consequence, they had their martyrs.2 Next neigh-
bours to the Church of Egypt, they imitated the asceticism
of Antony, and avowed the orthodoxy of Athanasius. The
deserts of Egypt sent them monks, who, scattered over the
plain and the low hills of Shephelah, gradually converted
the country people, with a power which the Hellenism of
the cities had no means to counteract.3 It is their caves

1	Jerome ad Laetam, ep. vii., and Commentary to Isaiah, c. xvii.

2	Rev. ii. 13. For martyrs see Eusebius, HE. viii. 13, Sozomen, passim.

8 Jerome, Life of Hilarion. Sozomen’s History, vi. 31.The Philistines and their Cities 181

and the ruins of their cloisters which we come across
to-day in the quiet glens of the Shephelah, especially in
the neighbourhood of Beit-Jibrin.1 For a little, Constan-
tine’s favour gave them a freer course in the cities, but this
was closed by the following hostility of Julian ; and it was
not till 402, under the influence of Theodosius, and at the
hands of the vigorous Bishop Porphyry of Gaza,2 that the
Cross triumphed, and idolatry was abolished. Then the
Marneion was destroyed, almost on the same site on which
Samson drew down the Temple of Dagon fifteen hundred
years before. But this was only the climax of a process of
which the country monks must get the credit. In the
same glens where the early peasants of Israel had beaten
back the Philistine armies with ox-goads,3 and David, with
his shepherd’s sling, had slain the giant, simple monks,
with means as primitive, gained the first victories for
Christ over as strenuous a paganism.

After this, life in Philistia is almost silent till the
Crusades, and after the Crusades till now.

This rapid sketch of the four periods of Philistine
history will prepare us both for our review of the great
Philistine cities in this chapter, and of the Shephelah in
the next. The five Philistine cities we take now from the
south northwards.

Gaza may best be described as in most respects the
southern counterpart of Damascus. It is a site of abun-

1	See ch. xi. The labours of these monks were especially numerous in the
v&/xos of Eleutheropolis : Eusebius.

2	Life of Porphyry, by Marcus the Deacon, in the Acta Sanctorum.

3	The story of Shamgar and his slaughter of 600 Philistines with an
ox-goad (Judges iii. 31) is no doubt, as many have suggested, a typical
instance of the fact above stated.182 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

dant fertility on the edge of a great desert1—a harbour
for the wilderness and a market for the nomads; once,
as Damascus is still, the rendezvous of a great
pilgrimage; and as Damascus was the first great
Syrian station across the desert from Assyria, so Gaza is
the natural outpost across the desert from Egypt. This,
indeed, is to summarise her position and history.

Gaza lies to-day where she lay in the most ancient times,
on and around a hill, which rises ioo feet above the plain,
Gaza and at three miles’ distance from the sea. Fifteen
the Desert. wej]s Qf fresh water burst from the sandy soil,
and render possible the broad gardens and large popula-
tion.2 The Bedouin from a hundred miles away come
into the bazaars for their cloth, weapons, and pottery. In
the days when the pilgrimage to Sinai was made rather
from Syria than from Egypt, the caravans were organised
in Gaza for the desert march.3 The inhabitants were
characterised as ‘ lovers of pilgrims,’ whom, no doubt, like
the Damascenes, they found profitable. As from Damascus,
so from Gaza great trade-routes travelled in all directions—
to Egypt, to South Arabia, and in the times of the Naba-

1 iwl tti apxv tt}s ip/ifjLov. Arrian, Anabasis ii. 26. For Damascus see ch. xxx.
a Arrian, Anab. Alex. ii. 26, reckons Gaza at twenty stadia from the sea.
The hill is not extensive. The gardens spread about it four miles north and
south by two and a half east and west. The population is said to be 18,000
at present, and, except when ruined, the town was described by writers of all
ages as large, splendid, and opulent. For detailed descriptions see P.E.F.
Mem. iii.; Z.D.P. V. viii., but especially xi., with a good plan of the town
by Gatt, p. 149.

3 Rather than at Hebron, even when the pilgrimage was to or from Jeru-
salem, for the Bedouin still avoid Hebron, but come readily to Gaza: Robin-
son, B.R. i. Cf. Anton. Placen. Itiner. (570 a.d.), which describes (ch.
xxxiii.) the Gazans as ‘ homines honestissimi, omni liberalitate decori, amatores
peregrinorum.’ Antoninus took eighteen or nineteen days on the way to Sinai.
Antonius de Cremona says: ‘De monte Synay usque ad Gazam fuimus xv.
diebus in deserto.’ Cf. also Bernhard, de la Brocquerie (1432).The Philistines and their Cities

183

tean kingdom to Petra and Palmyra.1 Amos curses Gaza
for trafficking in slaves with Edom.2 When the descriptions
of Strabo and Pliny reach Gaza, almost the only fact they
find relevant is her distance from Elath, on the Gulf of
Akaba.3 From all those eastern depots, on sea and desert,
Gaza, by her harbour, in Greek times forwarded the riches
of Arabia and India across the Mediterranean, as Acca did
by the Palmyra-Damascus route. The Crusaders alone do
not appear to have used Gaza for commerce, because this
part of Palestine was never so securely in their hands as
to permit them to dominate the roads south and east for
any distance, and they tapped the eastern trade by the
route Moab, Jericho, Jerusalem, Joppa.4 But through
Moslem times the stream has partly followed its old
channel. To this day caravans setting out from Gaza
meet the Damascus Hajj at Ma'en with pilgrims and
supplies.5 Their common interest in those routes has gene-
rally kept the people of Gaza and the Bedouin on good
terms. Bates, the Persian who defended Gaza against
Alexander the Great, employed Arab mercenaries;6 in
the military history of Judah, Arabians are twice joined
with Philistines ;7 the excursions of the Maccabees against
the Philistine towns were usually directed against the
‘ nomads ’ as well;8 and, on the eve of her desolation by
Alexander Janneus, Gaza was looking wistfully across the

1 Pliny, Hist. Nat. v. 12. Cf. ch. xxix.	2 Amos i. 6.

® Strabo, vi. 20; Pliny, Hist. Nat. v. 12, cf. 14.

4	Rey’s Les Colonies Franques dans le xii. et xiii. silcles, ch. ix.

5	Burckhardt’s Travels in Syria, pp. 436, 658 ; Doughty’s Arabia Deserta,
I. p. 133, where it is said that caravans also come from Hebron to Ma'en.

6	Arrian, Anab. ii. 26, 27 ; Quintus Curtius, iv. 6.

7	In bringing tribute to Jehoshaphat, 2 Chron. xvii. 11, and in invading
Jehoram, 2 Chron. xxi. 16.

8	1 Maccabees.184 The Historical Geography of the Holy La%d

desert for King Aretas, the Arabian, to come to her help.1
In the Moslem invasion Gaza was one of the first points
in Syria which Abu Bekr’s soldiers struck,2 and the Byzan-
tine army was defeated in the suburbs. After that the
Mohammedans called Gaza Dehliz el Moulk, ‘ the Thresh-
old of the Kingdom.’

But Gaza has even closer relations with Egypt. The
eight days’ march across the sands from the Delta requires

Gaza and that if an army come up that way into Syria,

Egypt- Gaza, being their first relief from the desert,
should be in friendly hands. Hence the continual efforts
of Egypt to hold the town. Alike under the Pharaohs of
the sixteenth to the fourteenth centuries, and the Ptolemies
of the third and second, we find Gaza occupied, or bitterly
fought for, by Egyptian troops.3 Alexander, invading
Egypt, and Napoleon, invading Syria, had both to capture
her. Napoleon has emphasised the indispensableness of
Gaza, whether in the invasion or the defence of the Nile
Valley.4 Gaza is the outpost of Africa, the door of Asia.

Gaza never lay within the territories of early Israel,5

1	Josephus xiii. Antt. xiii. 3.

2	By the most southerly of the three brigades—that of Amr Ibn el Assi—
Gaza seems to have been taken in 634.

3	The Annals of Thothmes III.; The Tell-el-Amama Letters of the fifteenth
century ; the records of Ramses’ conquests in the fourteenth. Sayce supposes
the Philistines were planted by the Egyptians in Gaza and her sister cities as
outposts of Egypt (Races of the 0. 71, p. 54), yet Egypt is always represented
as hostile to them, Muller, Asien u. Enropa, 388 ff. Cf. Jer. xlvii. From
323, when Ptolemy Lagos took it (Diod. Sic. xix. 59), Gaza frequently passed
from the Ptolemies to theAntiochi, and back again, till 198 B.c. (Polybius, v.),
when it fell to Antiochus the Great, and remained part of the Syrian kingdom
for a century.

4	Op. cit. 11. cli. vii.

B A later addition to Josh, xv., viz. vv. 45-47, sets Gaza within the ideal
borders of Judah ; but this has no confirmation, and, indeed, is contradicted
by the true reading of Judges i. 18, where a not should be inserted from the
LXX. The Gaza of I Chron. vii. 28 is another Gaza, near Shechem.The Philistines and their Cities

185

though Israel’s authority, as in Solomon’s time,1 and tem-
porary conquests, as in Hezekiah’s,2 might extend to her
gates ; and this is to be explained by the pres- Gaza and
tige which Egypt, standing immediately behind, IsraeL
cast upon her. Under the Maccabees, as we have seen,
Jewish armies carried fire and sword across Philistia.
Ekron and Ashdod were taken, Askalon came to terms,
and, after Jonathan had burnt her suburbs, Gaza was
forced to buy him off.3 It was not till 96 B.C. that Jews
actually crossed her walls, but in that year the pent-
up hatred of centuries burst in devastation upon her.
Alexander Janneus, taking advantage of the withdrawal
from Syria of the Egyptian troops, invested Gaza. After
a year’s siege, in which the whole oasis was laid waste, the
town itself was captured by treachery, its buildings burned,
and its people put to the sword.4 Gaza, to use the word
that is echoed of her by one writer after another for the
next century, lay desert.5 In 62, Pompey took Gaza—now
called a maritime city, like Joppa—from the Jews, and
made it a free city.6 In 57, Gabinius rebuilt it,7 certainly
on a new site, and possibly close to its harbour, which all
through the Greek period had been growing in importance.
In 30, Gaza, still called ‘ a maritime city,’ was granted by
Caesar to Herod,8 but at the latter’s death, being Greek, as

1	1 Kings iv. 24. Azza, or rather ‘Azza, is the more correct spelling of Gaza.

2	2 Kings xviii. 8.

3	Josephus xiii. Anti. xv. 5 ; 1 Macc. xi. 60. In xiii. 4, read Gazara for Gaza.

4	Josephus xiii. Antt. xiii. 3.

5	iroXiv xpt>vov epyp-ovs, Josephus xiv. Antt. v. 3; pivovza tpypos, Strabo
xvi. 2. 30; and i) tpypos Tafa, the anonymous Greek geographer in Hudson’s
Geographic veter. script. Grcci Minores, iv. p. 39.

6	Josephus xiv. Antt. v. 3.

7	Josephus xiv. Antt. iv. 4; i. IVars, vii. 7. In both of these passages
Gaza is separated from the inland towns, and called Maritime.

8	Josephus xv. Antt. vii. 3.186 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Josephus says, it was again taken from the Jews, and added
to the Imperial Province of Syria.1 ‘ New’ Gaza flourished

Gaza which exceedingly at this time, but the Old or Desert

is Desert. Gaza was not forgotten, probably not even
wholly abandoned, for the trunk-road to Egypt still travelled
past it. In the Book of Acts, in the directions given to
Philip to meet the Ethiopian eunuch, this is accurately
noted : Arise, and go toward the south, unto the way that
goeth down from Jerusalem to Gaza ; this is desert? Most
authorities connect the adjective, not with Gaza, but with
the way; yet no possible route from Jerusalem to Gaza
could be called desert, and this being so, and several
writers of the period immediately preceding having used
the phrase of the town itself, it seems that we are not only
encouraged, but shut up, to the same reference here. If
New Gaza, as is probable, lay at this time upon the coast,
then we know that the road the Ethiopian travelled did
not take that direction, and in describing the road it was
natural to mention the old site—Desert, not necessarily in
reality, but still in name—which was always a station upon
it. That Philip was found immediately after at Ashdod
suggests that the meeting and the baptism took place on
the Philistine Plain, and not among the hills of Judaea,
where tradition has placed them. But that would mean
the neighbourhood of Gaza, and an additional reason for
mentioning the town.3

1 Josephus xvii. Antt. xi. 4 ; ii. Wars, vi. 3. Also the earliest imperial
coins of Gaza date from a year or two after this (De Saulcy, Numismatique
de la Terre Sainte, p. 213).	2 Acts viii. 26.

3 My only difficulty in coming to this conclusion is that so many autho-
rities are against it; but it seems to me so impossible to describe any route
from Jerusalem to Gaza as desert—whether it be that by Beit-Jibrin, which
Robinson {B.P. ii. ; Phys. Geog. 108, 109) selects, or the longer one by
Hebron, which Raumer and Guerin prefer (Judee, ii. p. 204), Guerin sup-The Philistines and their Cities

187

The subsequent history of Gaza is identified, as we have
seen, with the struggle of Christianity against heathendom.
In the second and third centuries Gaza Gaza and
became a prosperous centre of Greek com- Chnstianily-
merce and culture. Her schools were good, but her
temples were famous, circling round the Marneion, or House

porting his choice by the unfounded remark that fewer people took this route,
and therefore it might be distinguished as tpypios from the other—that I feel
we are shut up to taking ipt)p.os as referring to Gaza. Now, had Acts viii.
been a document of the first century B.c., there could have been no doubt
about the reference, for Gaza was then left ‘desert,’as explicitly stated by
Josephus xiv. Antt. iv. 4, and remained desert, as witnessed by Strabo xvi.
2. 30, and by the Anonymous Geographical Fragment in Geogr. Grcec.
Minores, ed. Hudson, iv. p. 39. This Fragment gives a list of towns from
south to north, and says that after Rinocoloura, i] ved Tctfa xetrat, 7r6\iy oCcra
Kal avT^i, elff r/ ^prjp,os Tafa, elra 17 AaKd\ov 7r6\ty. Diodorus Siculus (xix. 80)
had also spoken of an Old Gaza (rj iraXaia Tafa) as the town where Ptolemy
Lagos, in 312, defeated Demetrius Poliorcetes, as if to distinguish it from the
New Gaza (which he does not name) of his (Diodorus’) own time. Schiirer,
Hist. Div. 11. vol. ii. 71, holds that the New Gaza was not the port, but
another town lying inland, and, according to the Anonymous Fragment,
to the south of Old Gaza ; but there is no evidence of this. The New Gaza
of the Fragment might as well be a coast town as Askalon ; and Josephus’
statement that the Gaza Pompey enfranchised in 62 was not an inland city,
like Ashdod and Jamnia, but a maritime, like Joppa and Dora (Josephus xiv.
Antt. iv. 4; cf. Josephus xv. Antt. vii. 3, where again it is ‘maritime,’ like
Joppa) seems to make it probable that the Gaza which Gabinius rebuilt (id.
v. 3) was on the coast. If this be so, then it lay off the road to Egypt, which
still passed by the desert Gaza. It is not necessary to suppose that this latter
was absolutely deserted even in Philip’s time. The fertile site and neighbour-
hood of the great road would attract people back ; but, even though it were
largely like its old self again, the name "Eprjfios might stick to it. Gaza is
said to have been demolished by the Jewish revolt of 66 a.d. (ii. Wars, xvii. 1),
and if this had been true, we might have had a new reason why the author of
Acts viii. added the gloss ‘ this is desert ’ to his description of Gaza ; but, as
Schiirer remarks, we have coins of the years immediately following, which
testify to the city’s continued prosperity (cf. De Saulcy, Num. de la T.S., p.
214). However this may be, the process of the return of the city to its old
site, which may have begun, as I say, before Philip’s time, was completed in
the following centuries, and the reason of it is clear. The land trade was
always likely to prevail over the sea trade on such a coast, and the old site
had, besides the road, its fertility and fifteen wells. In 363 a.d. the Gazans188 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

of the city’s god, Marna. Marna, Lord or our Lord,1 was
the Baal of Gaza, Lord of Heaven and sun and rain, whom
it was easy to identify with Zeus. A statue, discovered a
short time since at Tell-el-‘Ajjul, is supposed to be the
image of Marna, and it bears resemblance to the Greek
face of the Father of gods and men.2 Around him were
Zeus Nikephorus, Apollo, Aphrodite, Tyche, Proserpina,
Hecate—nearly the whole Syrian pantheon. Truly the
Church of Gaza dwelt, like the Church of Pergamos, where
Satan’s seat is : and like her she had her many martyrs.3
Constantine, finding the inland Gaza’s authorities obdur-
ately pagan, gave a separate constitution to the sea-town,
or Maiumas, which he entitled Constantia, and there was
a bishop of this besides the Bishop of Gaza. But Julian
took these privileges away. For generations the rival
cries ‘ Mama,’ ‘ Jesus,’ rent the streets and circuses. How
the Church in 402 finally won the political victory under
Theodosius and her famous Bishop Porphyry we have
already seen.4 After this the schools of Gaza in philosophy
and rhetoric grew more and more distinguished. Students,
it is said, left Athens to learn the Attic style in Philistia,
and even Persia borrowed her teachers.5 We get a glimpse
of the citizens in the close of the sixth century, ‘ very
honest, beautiful with all liberality, lovers of pilgrims.’6
But in 635 Gaza became Moslem, and, for obvious
reasons, gradually declined to the rank of a respectable

believed themselves to be on the same site as Old Gaza, and the temples
destroyed in 402, and the churches built in their stead, occupied the site of
the city to-day which agrees with the description of the site of Gaza taken
by Alexander the Great (Arrian, Anab. ii. 26). Jerome’s statement in the
Onomasticon is too vague to be taken into account.

1 Cf. Mapat> add. of I Cor. xvi. 22.	2 P.E.F.Q., 1882.

3 Euseb. H.E. and Sozomen passim.	4 P. 180 f.

6 For details see Stark, pp. 631-645.	6 See p. 182 n. 3.The Philistines and their Cities

189

station of traffic. Even with the Crusaders her military-
importance did not revive. They found her almost deserted,
and they took no trouble to fortify her. Their chief for-
tress in Philistia was Askalon, and their southern outpost
was Daroma, now Deir-el-Belat, on the Wady, three hours
south of Gaza.

Near Gaza there was a town, Anthedon,1 which occurs
in Josephus, and is mentioned by Pliny, Ptolemy, and
Sozomen. Alexander Janneus took it when he took
Gaza: it was rebuilt and enfranchised under the Romans,
and in Christian times had a bishop.2 Near this town, then
called Tadun, the Moslems defeated the Byzantines in
635. The site was lost till the other day, when Herr Gatt
heard the name Teda given by a native to some ruins
twenty-five minutes north of Gaza harbour, and near the
sea.3 Anthedon must have been virtually a suburb of Gaza.

We take next Askalon, or as the Hebrews called it,
’Ashkelon. The site, which to-day bears the name,4 has
been already described : it is a rocky amphi-

Askalon.

theatre in the low bank of the coast, and filled
by Crusading ruins.5 Since the fortifications, as at Caesarea,
are bound together by pillars of Herod’s time, it is certain
that the Askalon, which Herod embellished,6 stood here

1 Josephus xiii. Antt. xiii. 3; xv. 4 ; i. Wars, iv. 2 ; Pliny, Hist. Nat. v.
14; Ptol., Geogr. v. 16.	2 Acta Conciliorum.

3	This proves that Pliny was wrong in putting Anthedon inland from Gaza,
and Ptolemy right in calling it a coast town. For an account of Gatt’s dis-
covery, see Z.D.P.V. vii. 5 ff. ; cf. 140, 141. It contains the following
beautiful summary of tradition. After asking the name of the place and hear-
ing it was Teda, Gatt said to his informant: ‘ Whence knowest thou that? ’
‘ From those who have lived before me have I heard it. Is it not with you
as with us—some are born and others die, and the old tell the young what
they know ? ’

4	In Arabic ‘Askulan, with initial ‘Ayin instead of Aleph.

5	See description by Guthe, with plan by Schick, Z.D.P. V. ii. 164 ff.

6	i. Wars xxi. 11.190 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

also, though extending farther inland : and there is no hint
in Josephus that Herod’s Askalon occupied any other site
than that of the old Philistine city. If this be so, then of
all the Philistine Pentapolis, Askalon was the only one
which lay immediately on the sea.1 This fact, combined
with distance from the trunk-road on which Gaza, Ashdod,
and Ekron stand, is perhaps the explanation of a certain
singularity in Askalon’s history, when compared with that
of her sisters. The town has no natural strength, but is
very well watered.

Take her in her period of greatest fame. During the
Crusades Askalon combined within herself the significance
Askalon in	°f	fortresses of Philistia, and proved the

the Crusades. j-ey	south-west Palestine. To the Arabs

she was the ‘ Bride of Syria,’ ‘ Syria’s Summit.’2 The

1	Doubt upon this point has arisen solely from these facts, that in the Acts
of the Council of Constantinople, 536, there are mentioned both a Bishop of
Askalon and a Bishop of the Port or Maiumas of Askalon, and that Antoninus
Placentinus (c. 33), A. D. 570, and Benjamin of Tudela mention two Ascalons
from which Pusey dreAv the conclusion that the Philistine city lay inland
(P.E.F.Q., 1874). These data are important, but cannot counterbalance
the positive assertions of Josephus that Herod’s Askalon, which was the
Crusader’s Ascalon on the coast, was an ancient city (iii. Wars, ii. 1), and 520
stadia from Jerusalem, too great a distance for any but a coast town.
Josephus nowhere describes Askalon as maritime (in the passage just quoted
he says it was walled about), unless in i. Wars, xxi. 11, the clause which de-
scribes the Laodiceans as dwelling on the sea-shore covers also the inhabitants
of Askalon in the next clause. It is possible that ancient Askalon spread far
inland : the hollow by the sea is very small, the Crusading town there was
little more than a fortress, and ancient ruins, of what must have been large
edifices, lie far inland (cf. Guerin, fudee ii. 134.) The harbour town may have
been definitely separated from the town behind. Conder’s suggestion that a
Khurbet Askalon in the Shephelah may be the Askalon of the Acts of the
Council of Constantinople, has nothing to support it but the name (P.E.F.
Mem.). Guerin’s idea that the inhabitants tried to create a better port than
that at their feet, either north or south, may be the solution of the difficulty.
He found no traces of such ; but it is noteworthy that the next stream to the
south bears the name among others of the Nahr ‘Askulan.

2	Le Strange, Palestine under the Moslems.The Philistines and their Cities

191

Egyptians held her long after the Crusaders were settled
in Jerusalem. She faced the Christian outposts at Ramleh,
resisted many assaults, and discharged two expeditions up
to the walls of Jerusalem, before she was captured by
Baldwin III. in 1154. The scene of two more battles
Askalon was retaken by Saladin in 1187, and dismantled
five years later when he retired upon Jerusalem. The
Christians tried to rebuild the fortress, but the truce came,
one of the articles of which was that the town should be
fortified by neither party, and it was finally demolished by
Bibars in 1270. This fierce contest and jealousy between
powers occupying respectively Syria and Egypt, the
plains and the hills, amply certify the strategical importance
of the old Philistine site. That through all the Crusades,
Askalon should have enjoyed chief importance, while Gaza
had hardly any is certainly due to the situation on the
coast. Both Moslems and Christians had fleets which from
time to time supplied and supported Askalon from the
sea.

It may have been this same touch with the sea which
proved Askalon’s value to its ancient masters, especially if
it be here that the Philistines were reinforced by

Askalon in

direct immigration from Crete.1 Jeremiah con- the History
nects it with the sea-shore.2 In David’s lamen-
tation over Saul, it is not Gath and Gaza, but Gath and
Ashkelon which are taken as two typical Philistine cities.
Publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon : it may be that these
were bazaars ;3 and there is a sound of trade, a clinking of

1	Hence the Cherethim, but see p. 169 ff. As we have seen, Askalon was a
fortress in Ramses ii.’s time, before the Philistines came : taken by Ramses 11.
from the Hittites, cf. Brugsch, Geogr. Inschr. altaegyptischer Denkmdler ii.

2	xlvii. 7.	3 2 Sam. i. 20, cf. 2 Kings xx. 34.192 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

shekels, about the city’s very name.1 Askalon was always
opulent and spacious.2 The Assyrian flood covered all
things, and Askalon suffered from it as much as her neigh-
bours.3 But in the times of the Maccabees she recovered
her distinction. She was not so bitter to Judaism as the
other Hellenic towns, and so escaped their misfortunes at
the hands of Jonathan.4 When Alexander Janneus devas-
tated Gaza, Askalon kept her peace with that excitable
savage. She was the first in Philistia to secure the pro-
tection of Rome, and enjoyed her freedom earlier and more
continuously than the rest. Through Roman and Byzan-
tine times she was a centre of Hellenic culture, producing
even more grammarians and philosophers than her neigh-
bours.5

If Askalon takes her name from trade, Ashdod, like
Gaza, takes hers from her military strength.6 Her citadel
was probably the low hill, beside the present
village. It was well watered, and commanded
the mouth of the most broad and fertile wady in Philistia.
It served, also, as the half-way station on the great road
between Gaza and Joppa, and, as we have seen, the inland
branch broke off here for Ekron and Ramleh. The ruins
of a great khan have outlived those of the fortresses from
which the city took her name. Ashdod also, like her
sisters, had suffered her varying fortunes in the war
with Israel, and like them suffered for her position in

1	Ashkelon, from shakal, to weigh, or to pay. Hence shekel or shekel.

2	For Herod’s time, cf. Josephus iii. Wars ii. I, etc. ; Under the Moslems,
Le Strange, op. cit.

3	Cf. Conquests of Sargon and Sennacherib : Records of the Past.

4	1 Macc. x. 86 ; xi. 60.

5	P.E.F.Q., 1888, 22-23, describes two statues found at Askalon. Reinach

(Revue des Etudes Juives, 1888) ascribes them to the first century B.c. They
are Victories.	6 1 Sam. iv. ; 2 Chron. xxvi. 8.The Philistines and their Cities

193

the way between Assyria and Egypt. Sargon besieged
and took her, as related in Isaiah ;1 Sennacherib besieged
and took her,2 but her most wonderful siege, which
Herodotus calls the longest in history, was that for twenty-
two years by Psammetichus.3 Judas Maccabeus cleared
Ashdod of idols in 163, and in 148 Jonathan and Simon
burnt her temple of Dagon.4 But, like Askalon, Ashdod
was now thoroughly Greek, and was enfranchised by
Pompey.

Ekron, the modern ‘Akir, as Robinson discovered, won
its place in the league by possession of an oracle of
Baal-zebub, or Baal of the Flies,5 and by a site
on the northern frontier of Philistia, in the Vale
of Sorek, where a pass breaks through the low hills to
Ramleh. That is to say, like so many more ancient cities,
Ekron had the double fortune of a sanctuary with a
market on a good trade route. Ekron was nearer the
territory of Israel than the other Philistine towns, and from
this certain consequences flowed. It was from Ekron that
the ark was returned to Israel, by the level road up the
Sorek valley to Beth-shemesh, only ten miles away. Amos
uses a phrase of Ekron as if she were more within reach than
her sister towns :6 she was ceded to the Maccabees by the
Syrians ;7 and, after the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jews
readily came to her, for, like Lydda, she was in a valley that
led down from Jerusalem. To-day the Joppa-Jerusalem
railway travels past her. With Ekron we may take a town
that stood very near in rank to the first' Philistine five—
Jabneh, or Jabneel,8 with a harbour at the mouth of the

1 Isa. xx.	2 1 Rec. of Past. v.

Herod, ii. 157.	4 1 Macc. v. 68; x. 83, 84.

,r> 2 Kings i. 2.	fi Amos i. 8.	7 1 Macc. x. 89.

8 That is, God buildeth, Josh. xv. 11.

N194 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Rubin, famous in the history of the Jews for their fre-
quent capture of it,1 and for the settlement there of the
Jewish Sanhedrim and a school of Rabbinic theology
after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus. Yebna, as
the town is now called, lies in a fertility of field and
grove that helps us to understand the repute of the district
for populousness.2 The ruins are those of churches built
by the Crusaders, who called the place by a corruption
of its full name, reversing / and n as usual, Ibelin for
Jabniel.

Now, where is Gath? Gath, the city of giants, died out
with the giants. That we have to-day no certain knowledge
of her site is due to the city’s early and absolute
disappearance. Amos, about 750 B.C., points
to her recent destruction by Assyria as a warning that
Samaria must now follow. Before this time, Gath has
invariably been mentioned in the list of Philistine cities,
and very frequently in the account of the wars between
them and Israel. But, after this time, the names of the
other four cities are given without Gath—by Amos himself,
by Jeremiah, by Zephaniah, and in the Book of Zechariah3
—and Gath does not again appear in either the Old
Testament,4 or the Books of the Maccabees, or those
parts of Josephus which treat of centuries subsequent to
the eighth. This can only mean that Gath, both place
and name, was totally destroyed about 750 B.C. ; and
renders valueless all statements as to the city’s site
which are based on evidence subsequent to that date—as,

1	1 Macc. v. 58.

2	Strabo, vii. 18. 2. Philo in his account of his embassy to Caligula.

3	Amos i. 6-8 ; Jer. xlvii. ; Zepli. ii. 2-7 ; Zech. ix. 5-7.

4	Micah i. 10 : Tell it not in Gath is hardly an exception, for the expres-
sion is proverbial.The Philistines and their Cities

195

for instance, that of the Onomasticon, on which so much
stress has been laid by recent writers on this question,1
or that of the Crusaders, who identified Gath with the site
of Jabneh.2

When we turn to the various appearances of Gath in
history, before the time of Amos, what they tell us about
the site is this : Gath lay inland, on the borders of Hebrew
territory, and probably in the north of Philistia. When
the ark was taken from Ashdod, it was brought about, that
is inland, again to Gath.3 Gath was the Philistine city
most frequently taken by the Israelites, and, indeed, was
considered along with Ekron as having originally belonged
to Israel :4 after taking Gath, Hazael set his face to go up
to Jerusalem.5 * All this implies an inland position, and
hence nearly all writers have sought Gath among the
hills of the Shephelah or at their junction with the plain
—at the south-east angle of the plain,0 at Kefr Dikkerin,7
at Deir Dubban,8 and at Beit-Jibrin, or ‘home of big men.’
The only argument for so southerly a position is Gath’s

1	Onomasticon, art. Te9, ‘ and it is even now a village as you go from
Eleutheropolis (Beit-Jibrin) to Diospolis (Lydda), about the fifth milestone
from Eleutheropolis.’ Robinson, Conder, Guerin, all make much of this
valueless tradition.

2	Will, of Tyre, xv. 24.	3 1 Sam. v. 8.

4	Gath was taken under Samuel (1 Sam. vii. 14), and is then described as

originally Israelite. Taken also by David (2 Sam. viii. 1), where, according
to Wellhausen’s emendation and the parallel text, 1 Chron. xviii. 1, Metheg-
ammah should be Gath-ammah, i.e. Gath the mother ox metropolis, cf. in the
parallel passage Gath and her daughters. Taken also by Uzziah (2 Chron.
xxvi. 6), this must have been early in his long reign. But the statement, in
2 Chron. xi. 5-8, that Gath was among the cities rebuilt by Rehoboam may,
if Gath be the true reading (Josephus viii. Antt. x. 1 substitutes Ipa or
Ipan), mean, from the other towns mentioned, another Gath, near Beit-Jibrin.

5	2 Kings xii. 7.

fi Trelawney Saunders, Introduction to Survey, etc.

7 Guerin, Judee.	8 Robinson.196 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

connection with Ziklag in the story of David and Achish,1
and this is scarcely conclusive. On the other hand, Gath is
mentioned between Askalon and Ekron,2 several times with
Ekron, and especially in the pursuit of the Philistines from
the Vale of Elah.3 In a raid of Uzziah, Gath is coupled
with Jamnia and Ashdod.4 None of this prevents us from
fixing on a site much favoured by modern writers, Tell-es-
Safiyeh, which commands the entrance to the Vale of
Elah and looks across Philistia to the sea. Steep limestone
scarps rise boldly from the plain to a broad plateau, still
known by the natives as the Castle. During the Crusades,
King P'ulke fortified it, it was destroyed by Saladin, and is
said to have been restored by Richard. They called it
Blanchegarde, from its white frontlet. It is altogether too
important a site to have been neglected by either Israel
or the Philistines, and this lends the argument in its
favour some weight. But it is not enough for proof.
Tell-es-Safiyeh may have been Libnah, the White,5 or the
Mizpeh of the Shephelah.0 Gath has also been placed at
Beit-Jibrin, the ‘home of big men,’ both because this
might well have served as a by-name for the city of
the giants,7 and is in the neighbourhood of Mareshah,8 and
because Beit-Jibrin has not been identified with any other
great town of antiquity. But Beit-Jibrin is too far south,
and does not lie on the line of the rout of the Philistines
after the battle of Shocoh.9 We must look farther north
and towards Ekron. The first Book of Chronicles mentions
a Gath convenient to Ajalon and the hills of Ephraim,10 but

1 1 Sam. xxvii. 2-6.	2 1 Sam. v. 8.

3 Ibid. xvii. 52.	4 2 Chron. xxvi. 6.

5 Josh. x. 29, 31 f.; 2 Kings viii. 22, etc. 0 Josh. xv. 38.

" 2 Sam. xxi. 22.	8 Cf. Moresheth-gath, Mic. i. 14.

1 Sam. xvii. 52.	10 1 Chron. vii. 21 ;	viii.	13.The Philistines and their Cities

197

this may be Gath-rimmon, which lay towards Joppa. The
case is made more difficult by the fact that Gath is a
generic name, meaning ‘ winepress,’ and was applied, as we
might have expected, to several villages, usually with
another name attached.1 Remarkably enough, like their
great namesake, they have all disappeared, and in that
land of the vine almost no site called after the wine-
press has held its name.

This, then,—that Gath lay inland, on the borders of
Israel, probably near to Ekron, and perhaps in the mouth
of a pass leading up to Jerusalem,—is all we know of
the town which was once so famous, and which wholly
vanished 2500 years ago.2 Gath perished with its giant
race.

FURTHER NOTE ON THE ORIGIN OF THE PHILISTINES.

Since this chapter was in the printer’s hands, I have seen the passages on
the Philistines in W. Max Muller’s Asien u. Europa nach den alt-dgyptischen
Denkmalern (Leipzig, 1893). His statements on pp. 361, 387 ff., amount to
this. Among the pirates from Asia Minor whom Ramses III. (cir. 1200)
attacked were Pu-ra-sa-ti, ‘from the midst of the sea,’ Danona, Ta-k-ka-ra,
etc., with European features and some of the costume of Asia Minor. They
may have been Ancient-Lycian tribes from the east of the Aegean (p. 388);
the theory is not impossible that they were pre-Hellenic inhabitants of the
Greek Isles, perhaps the ’Erei/cpT/res of Od. xix. 176, thrown into movement
by the Greek advance westward (Danona and Ta-k-ka-ra, perhaps Aavaoi

1	Cf. Gath-ha-hepher, the birthplace of Jonah, in Galilee, Gath-rimmon
near Joppa : Gath-rimmon in Eastern Manasseh, Joshua xxi. 25.

2	For Gath, in the Egyptian records, see 2 R.P. v. 48, Nos. 63 and 70;
ii. 64, 65. The Assyrian lists mention a Gunti or Guntu near Ashdod,
which some have identified as Gath. Guntu may be the Egyptian Ka-na-ti
given in Thothmes’ list (Muller, Asien u. Europa, etc., 161). Muller (Id.
p. 159 and p. 393) suggests Kn-tu of Shishank’s list as one of the many
Gaths of Palestine.198 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

and Tei5/c/)ot ? ?). The Pu-ra-sa-ti are ihe chief tribe ; they are the Philistines.
In 1200 Ramses ill. represents them as unsettled. The Papyrus Golenischeflf
describes the other tribe Ta-k-ka-ra as settled in Dor by 1050. The
Philistine invasion of the Maritime Plain from Gaza to Carmel, mentioned in
Deut. ii. 23, Muller dates from a little before this. He supposes the sudden
decline of their power in David’s reign to be due to an invasion of the
Maritime Plain by Egypt. Shishank’s list of conquests (circa 980 B.c.)
excludes the Philistine cities as if already Egyptian.

W. Max Muller argues against Ebers’ theory that Kaphlor is the Kaft-vere
= Greater Phoenicia = the Delta, denying that Kft is Phoenicia. He takes
Kfte or Kfto as the name of Western Asia Minor, and holds that the
assonance with Kaphtor is more than accidental, though the r in the latter
is not explainable.CHAPTER X

THE SHEPHELAHFor this Chapter consult Maps 1. and 1V.THE SHEPHELAH

f~\ VER the Philistine Plain, as you come up from the
coast, you see a sloping moorland break into
scalps and ridges of rock, and over these a loose gathering
of chalk and limestone hills, round, bare and featureless,
but with an occasional bastion flung well out in front of
them. This is the so-called Shephelah—a famous theatre
of the history of Palestine—the debatable ground between
Israel and the Philistines, between the Maccabees and the
Syrians, between Saladin arid the Crusaders.

The name Shephelah means low or lowland} The Sep-
tuagint mostly renders it by plain? and even in very recent
works3 it has been applied to the Plain of Philistia. But the
towns assigned by the Old Testament to the Shephelah

1 A feminine form from the verb in the well-known passage, every moun-
tain shall be made low. It occurs with a like meaning in Arabic, and has
been suggested as the same root as we find in Seville (Gesenius, Thesaurus,
sub voce).	2 t6 ttcSIov or i] ireSivri.

3 Stanley, Sin. Pal., Kittel, Gesch. i. 14, Sieg. Stade, Worterbuch, where
Shephelah = Kiistenebene. Stade, Gesch. i. 157, commits the opposite error
of calling the Shephelah the ‘ westliche Abdachung,’ as the Negeb is the
‘ siidliche Abdachung ’ of the Judaean mountain range. This is to recognise
correctly the distinction of the Shephelah from the Maritime Plain ; but it is
to overlook the .great valley between it and the Judaean range, which pre-
vents it from being the mere slope or ‘ glacis ’ of the latter. Knobel and Dill-
mann, on Josh. xv. 33, are more correct, but still fail to appreciate the break
between the Judaean range and the hills of the Shephelah. On this see
p. 205

201202 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

are all of them situated in the low hills and not on the
plain.1 The Philistines are said to have made a raid on the
cities of the Shephelah, which, therefore, must have stood
outside their own territory, and indeed did so;2

The Shephelah	J	’

=The Low and in another passage 3 the time is recalled
when the Jews inhabited the Shephelah, yet it is
well known they never inhabited the Maritime Plain. In
the First Book of the Maccabees, too, I notice that the town
of Adida is described in one passage as ‘ in the Shephelah,’
and in another as ‘ over against the Plain ; ’ 4 while in the
Talmud the Shephelah is expressly distinguished from the
Plain, Lydda, at the base of the Low Hills, being marked
as the point of division.5 We conclude, therefore, that
though the name may originally have, been used to include

1	Joshua xv. 33, 2 Chronicles xxviii. 18. Ajalon in its vale, and Gimzo to
the west of it; Zorah, Eshtaol and Beth-shemesh in the Vale of Sorek ;
Gederah to the north, and En-gannim, Zanoah, and Jarmuth within three
miles to the south of Sorek : Adullam and Shocoh up the Vale of Elah (W. es
Sunt) : Tappuahin the W. el ’Afranj ; Mareshah, Lachish, and Eglon to the
south-west of Beit-Jibrin. The others given have not been properly identi-
fied. Vv. 45-47 of Joshua xv., which give Philistine towns in the Plain,
are probably a later addition. Eusebius describes the Shephelah as all the
low country {iredivt)) lying about Eleutheropolis (Beit-Jibrin) to the north
and the west. It is about Beit-Jibrin that Clermont Ganneau and Conder
claim to have re-discovered the name, in its Arabic form, Sifla (Tent
Work, 277).

2	2 Chronicles xxviii. iS ; cf. Obad. 19.	3 Zechariah vii. 7.

4	I Macc. xii. 38, xiii. 13. ev rj?	and Kara irpbaunrov toO ireSiov.

Hadid was a town of Benjamin, Ezra ii. 33. It occurs in the lists of
Thothmes in. as Hadita ii. A\P. 48.

5 Talmud, Jer. Shebiith ix. 2. The passage runs : pDlMl	“lit PI

rron\3. ‘ In Judah there are mountain, Shephelah, and valley land,’ or
‘ plain.’ And a note to the Mishna on the country from Beth-horon to the
sea runs : 1W piM fP3D p»]n	in HD KM liy pin' 1 1»X

poy DM Ijn Tlta rtalD' 1l!? im D1NDND in D1KIDK, which is: ‘ R.
Johanan said also, In that region there are Mountain, Shephelah, and Plain.
From Beth-horon to Emmaus is Mountain, from Emmaus to Lydda is
Shephelah, from Lydda to the sea is Plain.’The Shephelah

203

the Maritime Plain,1 and this wider use may have been
occasionally revived, yet the Shephelah proper was the
region of low hills between that plain and the high Central
Range.2 The Shephelah would thus be equivalent to our
‘ downs,’ low hills as distinguished from high, did it not
also include the great amount of flat valley land, which is
as characteristic of this broken region as the subdued
elevation of its hills. The name has been more fitly
compared to the Scottish ‘ Lowlands,’ which likewise are
not entirely plain, but have their groups and ranges of
hills.

How far north did the Shephelah run ? From the sea,
and across the Plain, low hills are seen buttressing the
Central Range all the way along. Now the

Only those

name Shephelah might be correctly applied to south of
the whole length of these low hills ; but with Ajalon‘
one exception—in which it is probably used for the low hills
that separate Carmel from Samaria 3—it does not appear
ever to have extended north of the Vale of Ajalon. All the
towns mentioned in the Old Testament as in the Shephe-
lah are south of this ; and if the identification be correct
of ‘ Adida in the Shephelah ’4 with Haditheh, four miles

1	There is no positive proof of this in the Old Testament ; but it perhaps
occurs in Eusebius (see previous page, note 1).

2	It is easy to see why, if it had once extended to the coast, it shrank to the
low hills, for the Plain had a name of its own, Philistia, while the Jews
required to distinguish the low hills from the Central Range.

3	In Joshua xi. 16, after the Mount, the Negeb, the Arabah are men-
tioned, conies the phrase, and the Mount of Israel and its Shephelah. As I
have elsewhere pointed out, this can only be that part of the Central Range
which fell within the kingdom of North Israel, and the low hills between it
and Carmel, cf. Josh. xi. 2. The Jer. Talmud gives an application of the name
Shephelah across Jordan (quoted by Reland, ch. xlvii. p. 308), {HtST!

4	1 Macc. xii. 38 : Kal 'Zlfiuv (pKoS6/j.rjcre tt]v ’Adidk iv 7-77	—evidently

as a cover-to the road from Joppa which he had won for the Jews. The
identification is due to Major Conder.204 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

E.N.E. of Lydda, then this is the most northerly instance
of the name. Roughly speaking, the Shephelah meant
the low hills south of Ajalon, and not those north of
Ajalon. Now, very remarkably, this distinction corre-
sponds with a difference of a physical kind—in the rela-
tions of these two parts of the low hills to the Central
Range. North of Ajalon the low hills which run out on
Sharon are connected with the high mountains behind
them. You ascend to the latter from Sharon either by
long sloping ridges, such as that which to-day carries the
telegraph-wire and the high road from Jaffa to Nablus ; or
else you climb up terraces, such as the succession of
ranges closely built upon one another, by which the
country rises from Lydda to Bethel. That is, the low
hills west of Samaria are (to use the Hebrew phrase)
Ashedoth or Slopes of the Central Range, and not a separate
group. But south of Ajalon the low hills do not so hang
upon the Central Range, but are separated from the
mountains of Judaea by a series of valleys, both wide and
narrow, which run all the way from Ajalon to near Beer-
sheba ; and it is only where the low hills are thus flung off
the Central Range into an independent group, separating
Judaea from Philistia, that the name Shephelah seems to
have been applied to them.1

This difference in the relation of the low hills to the
Central Range, north and south of Ajalon, illustrates two
important historical phenomena. First, it explains some
of the difference between the histories of Samaria and
Judah. While the low hills opposite Samaria are really

1 This is also true of the only other application of the name west of the
Jordan, which I have suggested in n. 3 on the previous page. The low
hills between Carmel and Dothan are flung off the Central Range in the same
way as the Shephelah proper is.The Shephelah

205

only approaches, slopes and terraces of access to Samaria’s
centre, the southern low hills—those opposite Judah—
offer no furtherance at all towards this more

Consequent

isolated province: to have conquered them difference

between

is not to have got footing upon it. And Samaria and

T udsea

secondly, this division between the Shephelah
and Judah explains why the Shephelah has so much more
interest and importance in history than the northern low
hills, which are not so divided from Samaria. It is inde-
pendent as they are not; and debatable as they cannot
be. They are merged in Samaria. The Shephelah has a
history of its own, for while they cannot be held by them-
selves, it can be, and was, so held at frequent famous
periods of war and invasion.

This division between the Shephelah and Judaea is of
such importance in the history of the land that it will be
useful for us to follow it in detail.

As we ride across the Maritime Plain from Jaffa towards
the Vale of Ajalon by the main road to Jerusalem, we
become aware, as the road bends south, of get- The division
ting behind low hills, which gradually shut out Ihephekh*6
the view of the coast. These are spurs of the and Judaea.
Shephelah : we are at the back of it, and in front of us are
the high hills of the Central Range, with the wide gulf in
them of the Vale of Ajalon. Near the so-called half-way
house, the road to Jerusalem enters a steep and narrow
defile, the Wady Ali, which is the real entrance to the
Central Range, for at its upper end we come out among
peaks over 2000 feet high. But if, instead of entering this
steep defile, we turn to the south, crossing a broad low
watershed, we shall find ourselves in the Wady el Ghurab,
a valley 'running south-west, with hills to the east of us206 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

touching 2000 feet, and hills to the west seldom above
800. The Wady el Ghurab brings us out upon the broad
Wady es Surar, the Vale of Sorek, crossing which we find
the mouth of the Wady en Najil,1 and ride still south
along its straight narrow bed. Here again the mountains
to the east of us are over 2000 feet, cleft by narrow and
tortuous defiles, difficult ascents to the Judaean plateau
above, while to the west the hills of the Shephelah seldom
reach 1000 feet, and the valleys among them are broad
and easy. They might stand—especially if we remember
that they have respectively Jerusalem and Philistia behind
them—for the narrow and broad ways of our Lord’s
parable. From the end of Wady en Najil the passage is
immediate to the Vale of Elah, the Wady es Sunt, at the
spot where David slew Goliath, and from there the broad
Wady es Sur runs south, separating by two or three miles
the lofty and compact range of Judaea on the east from
the lower, looser hills of the Shephelah on the west. The
Wady es Sur terminates opposite Hebron :2 and here the
dividing hollow turns south-west, and runs between peaks
of nearly 3000 feet high to the east, and almost nothing
above 1500 to the west, into the Wady esh Sheria, which
finds the sea south of Gaza, and may be regarded as the
southern boundary of the Shephelah. I have ridden
nearly every mile of this great fosse that has been planted
along the ramparts of Judaea, and have described from my
own observations the striking difference of its two sides.
All down the east, let me repeat, runs that close and lofty
barrier of the Central Range, penetrated only by difficult
defiles,3 its edge turreted here and there by a town, giving

1 All g’s are soft in the modern Arabic of Palestine ; gh is like the French
grin grasseyS.	2 Near Terkumieh.	3 Seech, xii., ec. 3.The Shephelah

207

proof of a table-land behind ; but all down the west the
low scattered ranges and clusters of the Shephelah, with
their shallow dales and softer brows, much open ground
and wide passes to the sea. Riding along the fosse
between, I understood why the Shephelah was always
debatable land, open equally to Israelite and Philistine,
and why the Philistine, who so easily overran the Shephe-
lah, seldom got farther than its eastern border, on which
many of his encounters with Israel took place.1 r'

From this definition of its boundaries—so necessary to
our appreciation of its independence alike of plain and
of mountain—let us turn to a survey of the Shephelah
itself.

The mountains look on the Shephelah, and the She-
phelah looks on the sea,—across the Philistine Plain. It

curves round this plain from Gaza to Jaffa like

_	J	General

an amphitheatre.'2 But the amphitheatre is cut aspect of the

by three or four great gaps, wide valleys that

come right through from the foot of the Judaean hills to

the sea. Between these gaps the low hills gather in

clumps and in short ranges from 500 to 800 feet high, with

one or two summits up to 1500. The formation is of

limestone or chalk, and very soft—therefore irregular and

1	The geology of this district has not yet been accurately studied ; but the
distinction between the Central Range and the Shephelah seems to be coinci-
dent with the border between the Nummulite limestone on the west and
the cretaceous on the east. Cf. also Hull on p. 63 of the Geological Memoir
of the P.E.F. : ‘ The calcareous sandstone of Philistia,’ as Hull designates it,
is ‘ the key to the physical features of this part of Palestine, and accounts for
the abrupt fall of the table-land of Central Palestine along the borders of
Philistia, and along a line extending to the base of Mount Carmel; as the
harder limestones dip under and pass below the comparatively softer forma-
tion of which we are now speaking, and which has been more deeply
denuded than the former.’ See also p. 64.

2	Trelawney Saunders, Introduction, p. 249.2o8 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

almost featureless, with a few prominent outposts upon the
plain. In the cross valleys there are perennial, or almost
perennial, streams, with broad pebbly beds ; the soil is
alluvial and red, with great corn-fields. But on the slopes
and glens of each hilly maze between the cross valleys the
soil is a grey white ; there are no perennial streams, and
few springs, but many reservoirs of rain-water. The corn-
fields straggle for want of level space, yet the olive-groves
are finer than on either the plain below or the range above.
Inhabited villages are frequent; the ruins of abandoned
ones more so. But the prevailing scenery of the region is
of short, steep hillsides and narrow glens, with a very few
great trees, and thickly covered by brushwood and oak-
scrub—crags and scalps of limestone breaking through,
and a rough grey torrent-bed at the bottom of each glen.
In the more open passes of the south, the straight line of
a Roman road dominates the brushwood, or you will see
the levelled walls of an early Christian convent, and
perhaps the solitary gable of a Crusaders’ church. In the
rocks there are older monuments—large wine and oil
presses cut on level platforms above ridges that may
formerly have been vineyards ; and once or twice on a
braeside a huge boulder has well-worn steps up it, and on
its top little cuplike hollows, evidently an ancient altar.
Caves, of course, abound—near the villages, gaping black
dens for men and cattle, but up the unfrequented glens
they are hidden by hanging bush, behind which you
disturb only the wild pigeon. Bees murmur everywhere,
larks are singing; and although in the maze of hills you
may wander for hours without meeting a man, or seeing
a house, you are seldom out of sound of the human voice,
shepherds and ploughmen calling to their cattle and toThe Shephelah

209

each other across the glens. Higher up you rise to moor-
land, with rich grass if there is a spring, but otherwise,
heath, thorns, and rough herbs that scent the wind. Bees
abound here, too, and dragon-flies, kites and crows ;
sometimes an eagle floats over from the cliffs of Judaea.
The sun beats strong, but you see and feel the sea ; the
high mountains are behind, at night they breathe upon
these lower ridges gentle breezes, and the dews are very
heavy.

Altogether it is a rough, happy land, with its glens and
moors, its mingled brushwood and barley-fields ; frequently
under cultivation, but for the most part broken and thirsty,
with few wells and many hiding-places ; just the home for
strong border-men like Samson, and just the theatre for
that guerilla warfare, varied occasionally by pitched battles,
which Israel and Philistia, the Maccabees and the Syrians,
Saladin and Richard waged with each other.

The chief encounters of these foes naturally took place
in the wide valleys, which cut right through the Shephelah
maze. The strategic importance of these

S	V	The Valleys

valleys can hardly be overrated, for they do of the

Shephelah.

not belong to the Shephelah alone. Each of
them is continued by a defile into the very heart of Judaea,
not far from an important city, and each of them has at
its other end, on the coast, one of the five cities of the
Philistines. To realise these valleys is to understand the
wars that have been fought on the western watershed of
Palestine from Joshua’s time to Saladin’s.

1. Take the most northerly of these valleys. The
narrow plain, across which the present road to Jerusalem
runs, brings you up from Lydda, to opposite the high
Valley of Ajalon. The Valley of Ajalon, which is really2io The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

part of the Shephelah,1 is a broad fertile plain gently-
sloping up to the foot of the Central Range, the steep
wall of which seems to forbid further passage.

Ajalon.	r c,

But three gorges break through, and, with
sloping ridges between them run up past the two Beth-
horons on to the plateau at Gibeon, a few flat miles north
of Jerusalem.2 This has always been the easiest passage
in the Old from the coast to the capital of Judaea—the
i estamcnt. m0st natural channel for the overflow of Israel
westwards. In the first settlement of the land, it was down
Ajalon that Dan pushed and touched for a time the sea ;3
after the exile, it was down Ajalon that the returned Jews
cautiously felt their way, and fixed their westmost colonies
at its mouth on the edge of the plain.4 Throughout
history we see hosts swarming up this avenue, or swept
down it in flight. At the high head of it invading Israel
first emerged from the Jordan Valley, and looked over the
Shephelah towards the Great Sea. Joshua drove the
Canaanites down to Makkedah in the Shephelah on that
day when such long work had to be done that he bade the

1 Tims the towns of Ajalon and Gimzo were in the Shephelah (2 Chron.
xxviii. 18), and we have seen, according to the Talmud, the Shephelah
extended from Emmaus to Lydda.

- The three roads from the Vale of Ajalon to Jerusalem are these : (1) On
one of the sloping ridges between the gorges, you rise rapidly from the W.
Selman S18 feet, byBeit-Likia 1600, Beit-Anon 2070, el Kubeibeh 2570, and
sj along the ridge by Biddu and Beit-Ikra 2525, across W. Beit-Hanina to
Kh. el Bedr 2519, and thence to Jerusalem. (2) Or you may follow the W. es
Selman itself from 818 feet to 1157, 1610, 1840, till it brings you out at its head
on the plateau of El-Jib 2400 feet, about five miles north of Jerusalem. (3) Or
you may take the more famous Beth-horon road, which rises from Beit-Sira
S40 feet on a spur to the lower Beth-horon 1240 feet, and thence traverses a
ridge with the gorges of W. Selman to the south, and W. es Sunt and W. el
Imeish to the north, to the upper Beth-horon (1730), and still following the
ridge, comes out on the plateau of El-Jib a little to the north of No. 2.

3	Chapter iii.

4	Lydda, Ono, Ifadid on the Ge-Haharashim, pp. 160 if.The Shephelah

211

sun stand still for its accomplishment;1 down Ajalon the
early men of Ephraim and Benjamin raided the Philis-
tines;2 up Ajalon the Philistines swarmed to the very
heart of Israel’s territory at Michmash, disarmed the
Israelites, and forced them to come down the Vale to get
their tools sharpened, so that the mouth of the Vale was
called the Valley of the Smiths even till after the exile ;3
down Ajalon Saul and Jonathan beat the Philistines from
Michmash,4 and by the same way, soon after his accession,
King David smote the Philistines—who had come up about
Jerusalem either by this route or the gorges leading from
the Vale of Sorek—from Gibeon until thou come to Gezer,5
that looks right up Ajalon. Ages later this rout found a
singular counterpart. In 66 a.d. a Roman army under
Cestius Gallus came up from Antipatris—on the ‘Aujeh—
by way of Ajalon. When they entered the gorges of the
Central Range, they suffered from the sudden attacks of
the Jews ; and, although they actually set Jerusalem on fire
and occupied part of it, they suddenly retreated by the
way they had come. The Jews pursued, and, as far as
Antipatris itself, smote them in thousands, as David had
smitten the Philistines.6 It may have been be- With the
cause of this that Titus, when he came up to Romans-
punish the Jews two years later, avoided Ajalon and the
gorges at its head, and took the higher and less covered
road by Gophna to Gibeah.7

The Vale of Ajalon was also overrun by the Egyptian

1 Joshua x. io. Makkedah is identified by Warren as el-Mughar to the
south of Ekron, but this is very doubtful.

- I Chron. vii. 21 ; viii. 13.

3	1 Sam. xiii. 19. See p. 160 for the origin of the name, Ge-Haharashim.

4 1 Sam. xiii., xiv. ; ap. xiv. 31.	5 2 Sam. v. 25 ; I Chron. xiv. 16.

u Josephus, ii. Wars, xix.	7 v. Wars, ii.212 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

invasions of Palestine. Egypt long held Gezer at the
mouth of it, and Shishak’s campaign included the capture
of Beth-horon, Ajalon, Makkedah, and Jehudah, near
Joppa.1

But it was in the time of the Maccabean wars and in the
time of the Crusades that this part of the Shephelah was
most famously contested.

We have already seen that the Plain of Ajalon, with its
mouth turned slightly northwards, lay open to the roads
down the Maritime Plain from Carmel. It was, therefore,
the natural entrance into Judaea for the Syrian armies who
came south by the coast; and Modein, the home of the
With the Maccabees, and the origin of the revolt against
Maccabees. Syria, lies on the edge of Ajalon by the very
path the invaders took.2 Just as at Lydda, in this same
district, the revolt afterwards broke out against the
Romans in 66 A.D., so now in 166 B.c. it broke out against
the Hellenising Syrians.3 The first camps, both Jewish
and Syrian, were pitched about Emmaus, not far off the
present high road to Jerusalem.4 The battles rolled—for

1 On Gezer, I Kings ix. 15-17. On ‘ Shishak’s Campaign:’ Maspero in
Transactions of Victorian Institute; W. Max Miiller, Asien 11. F.ur. nach.
altiigypt. Denkm., 166 f. The town of Ajalon is mentioned, in the Tell-el-
Amarna Tablets, as one of the first to be taken from the Egyptian vassals.

- 1 Macc. ii. I, 15, 23, 70; xiii. 25, 30; xvi. 4; 2 Macc. xiii. 4, MwdeLv
or hlwSedv. Variants, MuSed/i, 1 Macc. ii. 23 ; ix. 19; xiii. 25, 30; MwSaefyu,
xvi. 4 ; Mw5idfi, 2 Macc. xiii. 14. In Josephus, MwSeefyi or MwSeel, xii. Antt.
vi. 1, xi. 2; xiii. Antt. vi. 5; MwSedv, i. lVa?-s i. 3. Onomast. Euseb.
MT/Sftiyu, Jerome, Modeim. Evidently a plural word, now in the Hebrew
form, now in the Arameeic. So Talmud, Modi'im	: but also Modi'ith

rpymo (Neubauer, Geog. Talm., § 99). Either of these would give the pre-
sent Medieh or Midieh, a village seven miles ESE. of Lydda (Neubauer), which
suits Eusebius’ statement that Medieh was near Lydda, and 1 Macc. xiii. 29,
that the monument of the Maccabees could be seen from the sea. Forner had
also proposed Medieh, Le Monde, 1S66 (Guerin). Robinson takes Latrun,
and in Judie, i. 311, Guerin inclines to this.

3 1 Macc. ii.

4 Ibid. iii.The Shephelah

213

the battles in the Shephelah were always rolling battles
—between Beth-horon and Gezer, and twice the pursuit
of the Syrians extended across the last ridges of the
Shephelah to Jamnia and Ashdod.1 Jonathan swept
right down to Joppa and won it.2 But the tide sometimes
turned, and the Syrians mastering the Shephelah fortresses,
swept up Ajalon to the walls of Jerusalem ;3 though they
preferred on occasions to turn the flank of the Jews by
coming through Samaria,4 or gaining the Judaean table-
land at Bethsura by one of the southern defiles.3

Now, up and down this great channel thirteen centuries
later the fortune of war ebbed and flowed in an almost
precisely similar fashion. Like the Syrians—	In the

and, indeed, from the same centre of Antioch Crusades.
—the Crusaders took their way to Jerusalem by Tyre,
Acre, and Joppa, and there turned up through the She-
phelah and the Vale of Ajalon. The First Crusaders
found no opposition ; two days sufficed for their march
from Ramleh, by Beth-horon, to the Holy City. Through
the Third Crusade, however, Saladin firmly held the
Central Range, and though parties of Christians swept up
within sight of Jerusalem, their camps never advanced
beyond Ajalon. But all the Shephelah rang with the
exploits of Richard. Fighting his way, as we have seen,
from Carmel along the foot of the low hills, with an
enemy perpetually assailing his flank, Richard established
himself at Joppa, opposite the mouth of Ajalon. Thence

1 1 Macc. iii., iv., vii., ix.	2 Ibid. x. 75, 76.

3	In Judas’ lifetime, but when he was absent the Jews were pursued ‘ to
the borders of Judaea,’ Ibid. v. 57-61. And again in the campaign in which
Judas was slain, Ibid. ix. ; and the battle between Jonathan and Bacchides,
when the latter took Emmaus and Gezer, Ibid. ix. 50, 52.

4	Probably the line of Bacchides’ advance, Ibid. ix. 1-4.

s Ibid. iv. 29, vi. 31, 49, 50, ix. 52, etc.2 14 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

he pushed gradually inland, planting forts or castles—on
the plain, Plans and Maen ; on the edge of the Shephelah,

and Emmaus (now Amwas) on the other side of the present
road to Jerusalem—till he reached Betenoble, far up the
vale, and near the foot of the Central Range.1 But Richard
did not confine his tactics to the Vale of Ajalon. Like
the Syrians, when he found this blocked, he turned south-
wards, and made a diversion upon the Judaean table-land,
up one of the parallel valleys of the Shephelah, and then,
when that failed, returned suddenly to Betenoble.2 All

1 The sites of most of these Crusading strongholds are uncertain. Both
Plans and Maen lay east of Joppa, but not east of Ramleli (Vinsauf, Itiner.
Ricard. iv. 29). So Maen cannot be El-Burj or Deir Ma'in (Guerin, Jud.
i. 337), and of Conder’s two suggestions {Syr. Stone Lore, 398) the second is
the correct one. Plans has not been found.—The only difficulty in accepting
Conder’s identification of Mirabel with the present El-Mirr, near Ras-el-Ain,
north-east of Joppa, is that the latter is on the plain, whereas Vinsauf says the
Turks whom Richard scattered fled to Mirabel, that is, if El-Mirr be Mirabel,
north-west and towards the plains which the Christians held.—On Montgisard
(Rey), or Mont Gisart (Cl. Ganneau), see pp. 215-218.—Chateau d’Arnauld is
described by William of Tyre as ‘ in descensu montium, in primis auspiciis cam-
pestrium, via qui itur Liddam. ’ The site is uncertain—El-Burg (De Saulcy),
Kharubeh (Guerin). — Latrun derived by medisevals from Latro, and supposed
to be the den Boni Latronis of the Good Thief, Dimna (Quaresm. Elite. Terr.
Sanct. ii. 12) is really El-Atrun. This maybe from either (1) old French
touron or ti/ron, an isolated hill, for in 1244 Latrun was called Turo Militum
(Rey, Colon. L'ranqnes, 300, 413), and Turon might easily become, according
to a well-known law in the Arab adoption of foreign words, Atron, like itfa
from tafa ; or (2) Arabic Natrun, post of observation, with article En-Natrun,
that might as easily become El-Latrun, or the present Arabic El-Atrun. Cf.
Noldeke, Z.D.P. V. vii. 141.—Betenoble : ‘ Near the foot of the mountains,’
Vinsauf, iv. 34. Betenoble is philologically liker Beit Nabala, on the edge
of the Maritime Plain, four miles north-east of Lydda, than Beit Nuba, which
is at the other end of the Vale of Ajalon, near Yalo. But other references
in Vinsauf, though not conclusive (v. 49, vi. 9), imply that it was well inland
from Ramleh,	2 Vinsauf, v. 46-48.

Richard 1.
and the
Shephelah.

Mirabel and Montgisard ; and up the Vale of
Ajalon, the Chateau d’Arnauld, perhaps the pre-
sent El-Burj; Turon (now Latrun) on one side,The Shephelah

2I5

this cost him from August 1191 to June 1192. He was
then within twelve miles of Jerusalem as the crow flies,
and on a raid he actually saw the secluded city, but he
retired. His funds were exhausted, and his followers
quarrelsome. He feared, too, the summer drought of
Jerusalem, which had compelled Cestius Gallus to with-
draw in the moment of victory. But, above all, Richard’s
retreat from the foot of the Central Range illustrates what
I have already emphasised, that to have taken the She-
phelah was really to be no nearer Judaea. The baffled
Crusaders fell back through their castles in the Shephelah
to the coast. Saladin moved after them, occupying Mont
Gisart, and taking Joppa; and though Richard relieved
the latter, and the coast remained with the Crusaders for
the next seventy years, the Shephelah, with its European
castles and cloisters, passed wholly from Christian pos-
session.

We have won a much more vivid imagination of the
far-off campaigns of Joshua and David by following the
marches of Judas Maccabeus, the rout of the Roman
legions, and the advance and retreat of Richard Lionheart
—the last especially described with so much detail. The
natural lines, which all those armies had to follow, remained
throughout the centuries the same: the same were the
difficulties of climate, forage and locomotion ; so that the
best commentaries on many chapters of the Old Testament
are the Books of the Maccabees, the Annals of Josephus,
and the Chronicles of the Crusades. History never repeats
itself without explaining its past.

One point in the Northern Shephelah, round which these
tides of war have swept, deserves special notice—Gezer, or
Gazar. It is one of the few remarkable bastions which the216 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Shephelah flings out to the west—on a ridge running
towards Ramleh, the most prominent object in view of the
Gezer traveller from Jaffa towards Jerusalem. It is
Mont Gisart. high and isolated, but fertile and well watered
—a very strong post and striking landmark. Its name
occurs in the Egyptian correspondence of the fourteenth
century, where it is described as being taken from the
Egyptian vassals by the tribes whose invasion so agitates
that correspondence.1 A city of the Canaanites, under a
king of its own—Horam—Gezer is not given as one of
Joshua’s conquests, though the king is ;2 but the Israelites
drave not out the Canaanites zvho dwelt at Gezerl and in the
hands of these it remained till its conquest by Egypt,
when Pharaoh gave it, with his daughter, to Solomon,
and Solomon rebuilt it.4 Judas Maccabeus was strategist
enough to gird himself early to the capture of Gezer, and
Simon fortified it to cover the way to the harbour of
Joppa, and caused John, his son, the captain of the host,
to dwell there.5 It was virtually, therefore, the key of
Judsea at a time when Judaea’s foes came down the coast
from the north ; and, with Joppa, it formed part of the
Syrian demands upon the Jews.6 But this is by no means
the last of it. M. Clermont Ganneau, who a number of
years ago discovered the site,7 has lately identified Gezer

1	See 2 R.P. 74, 78; Conder’s Tell-el-Amarna Tablets, 122, 134-138, 147.
Conder, as has been said already, holds that these invaders are the Hebrews,
but this is not certain from the tablets themselves, nor does it agree with the
now generally-received date of the Exodus.

2	Josh. x. 33.	3 Josh. xvi. 3, 10; Judges i. 19.

■* 1 Kings ix. 15-17. See W. Max Muller, op. cit. 160, 390.

5 1 Macc. xiii. 43 (where Gaza should read Gazara, cf. Josephus xiii. Atitt.

vi. 7 ; i. IVars. ii. 2) and 53.	fi 1 Macc. xv. 28.

7 By finding upon it two stones, evidently dated from the time of the

Maccabees, P.E.F.Q., 1875.The Shephelah

217

with the Mont Gisart of the Crusades.1 Mont Gisart was
a castle and fief in the county of Joppa, with an abbey of
St. Katharine of Mont Gisart, ‘whose prior was one of the
five suffragans of the Bishop of Lydda.’ It was the scene,
on 24th November 1174, seventeen years before the Third
Crusade, of a victory won by a small army from Jerusalem
under the boy-king, the leper Baldwin IV., against a very
much larger army under Saladin himself, and, in 1192,
Saladin encamped upon it during his negotiations for a
truce with Richard.2

Shade of King Horam, what hosts of men have fallen
round that citadel of yours ! On what camps and columns
has it looked down through the centuries, since first you
saw the strange Hebrews burst with the sunrise across the
hills, and chase your countrymen down Ajalon—that day
when the victors felt the very sun conspiring with them to
achieve the unexampled length of battle. Within sight of
every Egyptian and every Assyrian invasion of the land,
Gezer has also seen Alexander pass by, and the legions
of Rome in unusual flight, and the armies of the Cross
struggle, waver and give way, and Napoleon come and
go. If all could rise who have fallen around its base—
Ethiopians, Hebrews, Assyrians, Arabs, Turcomans, Greeks,
Romans, Celts, Saxons, Mongols—what a rehearsal of the
Judgment Day it would be! Few of the travellers who
now rush across the plain realise that the first conspicuous
hill they pass in Palestine is also one of the most thickly
haunted—even in that narrow land into which history has
so crowded itself. But upon the ridge of Gezer no sign of
all this now remains, except in the name Tell Jezer, and
in a sweet hollow to the north, beside a fountain, where lie
1 Recueil d'ArchioU OrientParis, 1888, pp. 351-92.	2 Ibid. p. 359.218 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

the scattered Christian stones of Deir Warda, the Convent
of the Rose.

Up none of the other valleys of the Shephelah has
history surged as up and down Ajalon and past Gezer, for
none are so open to the north, nor present so easy a
passage to Jerusalem.

2. The next Shephelah valley, however, the Wady es
Surar, or Vale of Sorek, has an importance of its own, and,

instead of being carried up Ajalon, turns south at Ramleh
by the pass through the low sandhills to Ekron, and thence
runs up the Wady es Surar and its continuing defile
through the Judaean range on to that plain south-east of
Jerusalem, which probably represents the ancient Vale of
Rephaim. It is the way the Philistines used to come
up in the days of the Judges and of David ; there is no
shorter road into Judaea from Ekron, Jamnia, and perhaps
Ashdod.1 Askalon would be better reached—as it was
by the Crusaders when they held Jerusalem—by way of
the Wady es Sunt and Tell-es-Safiyeh.

Just before the Wady es Surar approaches the Judaean
range, its width is increased by the entrance of the Wady
Ghurab from the north-west, and by the Wady en Najil
from the south. A great basin is thus formed with the low
hill of Artuf, and its village in the centre. Sura‘, the ancient
Zorah, and Eshua*,2 perhaps Eshtaol, lie on the slopes to

1 By the Wady es Surar Jerusalem is some twenty-eight miles from Ekron,
thirty-two from Jamnia, thirty-eight from Ashdod, forty-five from Askalon.

- Sura'a	is without doubt the Hebrew njDV. It is 1100 feet above

the sea, say 8co above the valley. Eshua* <• , is far in sound from Eshta‘ol

but the shrinkage in the name is possible, and the village lies near

The Vale
of Sorek.

remarkably enough, is to be the future road
to Jerusalem. The new railway from Jaffa,The Shephelah

219

the north ; Ain Shems, in all probability Beth-shemesh, lies
on the southern slope opposite Zorah. When you see this
basin, you at once perceive its importance. Fertile and
well-watered—a broad brook runs through it, with tribu-
tary streamlets—it lies immediately under the Judaean
range, and at the head of a valley passing down toPhilistia,
while at right angles to this it is crossed by the great line
of trench, which separates the Shephelah from Judaea.
Roads diverge from it in all directions. Two ascend the
Judaean plateau by narrow defiles from the Wady en Najil,
another and greater defile, still under the name Wady es
Surar, runs up east to the plateau next Jerusalem, and
others north-east into the rough hills known to the Old
Testament as Mount Jearim, while the road from Beit-
Jibrin comes down the Wady en Najil, and continues by a
broad and easy pass to Am was and the Vale of Ajalon.
As a centre, then, between the southern and northern
valleys of the Shephelah, and between Judaea and Philistia,
this basin was sure to become important. Immediately
under the central range it was generally held by Israel,
who could swiftly pour down upon it by five or six different
defiles.1 It was also open to Philistia, and had easy

Sura'a. Guerin says he heard at Beit Alab ‘ an old tradition ’ that Eshua* was
originally Eshu‘al or Eshthu'al. This is interesting, and deserves confirma-
tion,—if possible.

1 Of the two roads to the south of the main defile the more southerly leaves
Ain Shems, crosses the Wady en Najil, enters a defile to the south of Deir
Aban, and reaches the plateau at Beit Atab, 2052 ft : thence over the stony
moorland to El-Khudr, on the Jerusalem-Hebron road : a bare road, with no
obstacles after you are out of the defile, it may be shortened by cutting across
to Bittir. The other road is almost parallel to this one ; it rises to the
plateau at Deir el Hawa, crosses to Er Ras, and so by Milhah to Jerusalem.
The road up the main defile follows it till Khurbet El Loz is reached, then
leaves it and crosses to the Jerusalem-Jaffa road. Another road crosses from
Zorah to the foot of Mount Jearim, and traverses this to Soba, and another
follows the Wady el Ghurab to, like the last, the Jerusalem high road.220 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

passage to the Vale of Ajalon, whose towns are often
classed with its own.1

On the northern bank of this basin the homeless tribe
of Dan found a temporary settlement. The territory,

The Camp which the Book of Joshua assigns to Dan,2 lies
of Dan. down the two parallel valleys that lead through
the Shephelah to the sea, Ajalon and Sorek, and the Song
of Deborah seems to imply that they reached the coast,—
why did Dan abide in ships ? 3 But either Deborah speaks
in scorn of futile ambitions westward, which were stirred
in Dan by the sight of the sea from the Shephelah, and Dan
never reached the sea at all ; or else the tribe had been
driven back from the coast, for now they lay poised on the
broad pass between their designated valleys, retaining only
two of their proper towns, Zorah and Eshtaol. It was a
position close under the eaves of Israel’s mountain home,
yet open to attacks from the plain. They found it so in-
tolerable that they moved north, even to the sources of the
Jordan ; but not without stamping their name on the place
they left, in a form which showed how temporary their hold
of it had been. It was called the Camp of Dan. Here, in
Zorah, either before or after the migration, their great
tribal hero, Samson, was born.4

1 Zorah and Ajalon are also coupled in one of the Tell-el-Amarna Letters,
137, in the Berlin collection ; Conder, Tell-el-Amarna Tablets, 156. Josh,
xix. 40-48 : the towns assigned to Dan. 2 Chron. xi. 10, Zorah and Ajalon,
fortified by Rehoboam.	2 Josh. xix. 40-48.

3 Judges v. 17. But see Budde’s reading of this, Richt. Sam., p. 16, n. 2.

1 In Judges the camp of Dan is twice mentioned, in the life of Samson,
which forms part of the body of the Book, where it is placed between Zorah
and Eshtaol, xiii. 25; and in the account of the Danite migration, which
forms one of some appendages to the Book, where it is said to have been the
muster-place of the soldiers of Dan when they came tip from Zorah and
Eshtaol, and to have lain in Kiriath fearim in Judah, xviii. 12, 13 ; and a
clause adds, lo, it is behind, i.e. west of, Kiriath fearim. Now the sameThe Shephelah

221

It is as fair a nursery for boyhood as you will find in all
the land—a hillside facing south against the sunshine, with
corn, grass, and olives, scattered boulders and winter
brooks, the broad valley below with the pebbly stream and
screens of oleanders, the south-west wind from the sea
blowing over all. There the child Samson grew up ; and the
Lord blessed him, and the Spirit of the Lord began to move him
in the camp of Dan between Zorah and Eshtaol.

Across the Valley of Sorek, in full view, is
Beth-shemesh, now ‘Ain Shems, House and Well of the
the Sun, with which name it is so natural to connect his
own—Shimshon, ‘ Sun-like.’ Over the low hills beyond is
Timnah, where he found his first love and killed the young
lion.1 Beyond is the Philistine Plain, with its miles upon
miles of corn, which, if as closely sown then as now, would
require scarce three, let alone three hundred foxes, with
torches on their tails, to set it all afire. The Philistine
cities are but a day’s march away, by easy roads. And so
from these country braes to yonder plains and the highway

place could not have lain between Zorah and Eshtaol, and away from both in
Kiriath Jearim. We have evidently, therefore, two different narratives, and
in fact they are distinguished by critics on other, textual, grounds. (Budde,
Richt. Sam., assigns the former to the Jahvist, the latter to the Elohist, 138 if.)
In this case the clause on xviii. 12, it is west of Kiriath Jearim, is probably
a gloss added to modify what precedes it, and bring it into harmony with
xiii. 25, for the locality between Zorah and Eshtaol may be described as lying
west of Kiriath Jearim, and that, whether the latter be the present Kuriet
Einab or Khurbet ‘Erma. Again, since xviii. 11-13 is part of the appendix to
the Book of Judges, and therefore is not in chronological sequence from the
earlier chapters, it is difficult to say whether Dan’s migration came before or
after the events of Samson’s life. If before, then some Danite families had
stayed behind in Zorah and Eshtaol, which is very likely, and the theory
becomes possible, though not probable, that the name Camp of Dan, being
given, as described in xviii. 13, to a particular spot in Kiriath Jearim, had
gradually extended to the whole district, which the temporary settlement of
Dan had covered. The one thing certain is, that we have two documents.

1 See pp. 79 f.222 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

of the great world—from the pure home and the mother
who talked with angels, to the heathen cities, their harlots
and their prisons—we see at one sweep of the eye all the
course in which this uncurbed strength, at first tumbling
and sporting with laughter like one of its native brooks,
like them also ran to the flats and the mud, and, being
darkened and befouled, was used by men to turn their
mills.1

The theory that the story of Samson is a mere sun-myth,
edited for the sacred record by an orthodox Jew, has never
received acceptance from the leading critics, who have all
been convinced that though containing elements of popular
legend, its hero was an actual personage. Those who
study the story of Samson along with its geography must

1 The other scenes of Samson’s life have not been yet satisfactorily identified.
For the rock ‘Etam and its cleft Conder proposes (so also Henderson, Pal.,
p. 109) a peculiar cave at Beit ‘Atab (b and m being interchangeable) on the
Judsean plateau. But the cave at Beit ‘Atab (I have visited the place) is too large
to be described as a cleft, and if ‘Etam had been so high up the narrative would
not have said (Judges xv. 8) that Samson went down to it. Coming up from
Zorah to Beit ‘Atab on a summer day, one feels that strongly. Schick, Z.D. P. V.
x. 143, proposes more plausibly (Guthe thinks correctly) the Arak Isma'in
a cave in a rock on the north of Wady Isma'in. Lehi he finds, in Khurbet es

Siyyagh < ^1 in the Name Lists, P.E.F. Mem.), ruins at mouth of

W. en Najil. Aquila and Symmachus, and Jos. (v. Anti. ix. 8, 9) translate
Lehi Ziaywv, and Schick reports E. of Siyyagh an ‘Ain Nakura. But Siyyagh
could have come from Siagon only through Greeks and Christians, and is
therefore a late and valueless tradition. Conder suggests for Ramath-Lehi
and En-hakkore, the ‘Ayun Abu Meharib, ‘founts of the place of battles,’
sometimes called ‘Ayun Kara, ‘ founts of a crier,’ near Kesla, where there is
a chapel dedicated to Sheikh Nedhir, ‘ the Nazarite chief,’ and a ruin with
the name Ism Allah, which he suggests is a corruption of Esm'a Allah,
‘God heard.’ This is interesting, but also inconclusive. See Ilend., Pal.
no, who suggests the serrated appearance of W. Ismain as originating the
name Lehi : Hashen, the tooth, occurs up it. Guerin heard the Weli Sh.
Gharib called by the name Kabr Shamshun, but this may be a very recent
legend. He puts these scenes at ‘Ain el Lehi, north-west of Bethlehem
(Jud. ii. 317 flf., 396 fif.).The Shephelah

22 3

feel that the story has at least a basis of reality. Unlike
the exploits of the personifications of the Solar Fire in
Aryan and Semitic mythologies, those of Samson are con-
fined to a very limited region. The attempts to interpret
them as phases or influences of the sun, or to force them
into a cycle like the labours of Hercules, have broken down.1
To me it seems just as easy and just as futile to read the
story of this turbulent strength as the myth of a mountain-
stream, at first exuberant and sporting with its powers, but
when it has left its native hills, mastered and darkened by
men, and yet afterwards bursting its confinement and
taking its revenge upon them. For it is rivers, and not
sunbeams, that work mills and overthrow temples. But
the idea of finding any nature-myth in such a story is far-
fetched. As Hitzig emphasises, it is not a nature-force
but a character with whom we have to deal here, and, above
all, the religious element in the story, so far from being a
later flavour imparted to the original material, is the very
life of the whole,2

The head of the Vale of Sorek has usually been regarded
as the scene of the battle in which the Philistines took the
ark.3 The place, as we have seen, was convenient both to
Israel and Philistia, and it has been argued that in after-
wards bringing back the ark to Beth-shemesh,4 the Philis-
tines were seeking to make their atonement exact by

1	Goldziher, Hebrew Mythology. E. Wietzke, Der Biblische Simson der
.Egyplische Horus Ra : Wittenberg, 1888. The etymologies of this work
are an instance of the length that men will go when hunting for myths.

2	This point is well put by Orelli, Herzog’s Real-Encycl. Cf. Hitzig,
Ewald, Stade, Kittel, in their histories of Israel. All deny the myth, admit
legend, and allow that the hero was historical. Budde, Richt. Sam. 133,
holds to Kuenen’s position that the narrator knew nothing of a myth, but
says ‘ the legendary nature of the narratives is selbsl verstdndlich.’

3	1 Samuel iv.	4 1 Samuel vii.224 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

restoring their booty at the spot where they had cap-
tured it ; and that the stone on which they rested the Ark
may have been the Eben-ezer, or Stone of Help,

Eben-Ezer,

near which they had defeated the Israelites,
and the Israelites are said (in another document)1 afterwards
to have defeated them. But these reasons do not reach
more than probability. The name neither of Eben-ezer
nor of Aphek has been identified in the neighbourhood, and
on the data of the narratives Eben-ezer may just as probably
have lain farther north—say at the head of Ajalon.2

The course of the ark’s return, however, is certain.
It was up the broad Vale of Sorek that the untended
Beth-shemesh kine Beth-shemesh dragged the cart behind
and the Aik. them with the ark upon it, lowing as they
went, and turned not aside to the right or to the left, and
the lords of the Philistines went after them unto the borders
of Beth-shemesh. And Beth-shemesh—that is to say, all
the villagers, as is the custom at harvest-time—were in
the valley—the village itself lay high up on the valley’s

1 I Samuel vii.

- The argument stated above for the identity of the great stone by Beth-
shemesh (i Samuel vi. 14, 18) with Eben-ezer (iv. I, v. 1, and vii. 12) is
M. Clermont Ganneau’s (P.E.F.Q., 1874, 279: 1877, 154 (f.). Wilson
thinks Deir Aban too remote from Shiloh and Mizpeh. Certainly it does not
suit the topography of 1 Samuel vii. 11, 12, which, by the way, is from
another document than chapters iv., v., and vi. According to the Hebrew
text of vii. II, 12, Ebenezer is under Beth-car, perhaps but not certainly the
present ‘Ain Karim, and between Mizpeh and Hashen, the tooth; but
according to the LXX. under Beth-Jashan, between Mizpeh and Jashan or
Jeshanah, that is, ‘Ain Sinia north of Bethel (as M. Clermont Ganneau
himself suggests), and therefore on a possible line of Philistine advance.
Chaplin (P.E.F.Q. 1888, 263 ff.) suggests Beit Iksa for Ebenezer ; Conder,
Deir el Azar, near Kuriet el Enab, and finds the name Aphek in Merj
Fikieh, near Bab el Wad. See also Milner, P.E.F.Q., 1887, iii. The
Aphek marked on the P.E.F. Red. Survey Map (i89i)atKh. Beled el Foka,
south of Beth-shemesh, is one of the too many identifications which impair
the clearness and usefulness of this fine map.The Shephelah

225

southern bank—reaping the wheat harvest, and they lifted
np their eyes and saw the ark, and came rejoicing to meet it}
And the cart came into the field of foshua the Bethshemite
and stood there, and a great stone zvas there, and they clave the
wood of the cart, and the kine they offered as a burnt-offering
to fehovah—certainly upon the stone. And the five lords of
the Philistines saw, and returned to Ekron the same day. . .
And the great stone whereon they set down the ark ofJehovah
is a witness thereof in the field of Joshua the Bethshemite.

In the Shephelah, however, the ark was not to remain. The
story continues that some of the careless harvesters, who had
run to meet the ark, treated it too familiarly—gazed at it
—and Jehovah smote of them threescore and ten men} The
plague which the ark had brought upon Philistia clung
about it still. As stricken Ashdod had passed it on to
Gath, Gath to Ekron, and Ekron to Beth-shemesh, so Beth-
shemesh now made haste to deposit it upon Jehovah’s
own territory of the hills : To whom shall he go up from
us f The nearest hill-town was Kiriath	Kiriath

Jearim, the Town of the Woods.3 This must	Jeanm.

have lain somewhere about Mount Jearim, the rugged,
wooded highlands, which look down on the basin of Sorek
from the north of the great defile. But the exact site is
not known with certainty. Some think it was the present
Kuriet ‘Enab to the north of Mount Jearim, and others
Khurbet ‘Erma to the south, near the mouth of the great
defile. Each of these, it is claimed, echoes the ancient
name ; each suits the descriptions of Kiriath Jearim in the
Old Testament. For the story of the ark Khurbet ‘Erma
has the advantage, lying close to Beth-shemesh, and yet in

1	So the LXX.

2 Most authorities omit the previous fifty thousand.	3 Jer. xxvi. 20,226 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

the hill-country. Leaving the question of the exact site
open, we must be satisfied with the knowledge that Kiriath
Jearim lay on the western border of Benjamin ; once the
ark was set there, it was off the debatable ground of the
Shephelah and within Israel’s proper territory. Here, in
the field of the woods,1 it rested till David brought it up to
Jerusalem, and that was probably why Kiriath Jearim was
also called Kiriath Baal, or Baal of Judah, for in those
times Baal was not a name of reproach, but the title
even of Jehovah as Lord and Preserver of His people’s
land.2

3. The third valley which cuts the Shephelah is the
Wady es Sunt, which, when it gets to the back of the low
hills, turns south into the Wady es Sur, the

Vale of Elah.	,	.

great trench between the Shephelah and
Judah. Near the turning the narrow Wady el Jindy curves
off to the north-west to the neighbourhood of Bethlehem.
The Wady es Sunt is probably the Vale of Elah.3 Its

1 Psalm cxxxii. 6.

- Robinson suggested K. ‘Enab, and this suits the data of the Onomasticon,
which places Kiriath Jearim at the ninth milestone from Jerusalem towards
Lydda. It lies also convenient to the other towns of the Gibeonite League
to which it belonged, Gibeon, Chephirah, and Beeroth (Joshua ix. 17 ; cf.
Ezra ii. 25) ; it suits the place of Kiriath Jearim on the borders of Judah and
Benjamin (Joshua xv. 9, xviii. 14), and it can be reached by an easy road
from Beth-shemesh. Ivhurbet ‘Erma was first suggested by Henderson, and
then examined and accepted by Conder (see Henderson’s Palestine, 85, 112,
210). The name has the consonants of Je'arim (exactly those in Ezra ii. 25,
where the name is ‘arim), but it also means ‘ heaps of corn,’ and may not be
derived from the ancient name. The site may be fitted into the line of the
borders of Benjamin and Judah. The site is ancient, with a platform of rock
that has all the appearance of a high-place or shrine (Conder, P.E.F. Q., 1881,
265). But it is very far away from the other members of the Gibeonite
league. On Baal-Jehudah, see 2 Samuel vi. 2.

3 Sunt is the terebinth. Elah is any large evergreen tree, like ilex or tere-
binth (Baudissin, Stud. ii. 185, n. 1). The Vale of Elah, 1 Samuel xvii. 2,
19 Jixxi. 9.The Shephelah

227

entrance from the Philistine Plain is commanded by the
famous Tell-es-Safiyeh, the Blanchegarde of the Crusaders,
whose high white front looks west across the

, .	.	..	a 1 1	1	1	1 Tell-es-Safi.

plain twelve miles to Ashdod. Blanchegarde
must always have been a formidable position, and it is
simply inability to assign to the site any other Biblical
town—for Libnah has no satisfactory claims—that makes
the case so strong for its having been the site of Gath.
Blanchegarde is twenty-three miles from Jerusalem, but
the way up is most difficult after you leave the Wady es
Sunt. It is a remarkable fact that when Richard decided
to besiege Jerusalem, and had already marched from Aska-
lon to Blanchegarde on his way, instead of then pursuing
the Wady es Sunt and its narrow continuation to Beth-
lehem, he preferred to turn north two days’ march across
the Shephelah hills with his flank to the enemy, and to
attack his goal up the Valley of Ajalon.1

An hour’s ride from Tell-es-Safi up the winding Vale of
Elah brings us through the Shephelah, to where the Wady
es Sur turns south towards Hebron,2 and the narrow Wady
el Jindy strikes up towards Bethlehem. At the junction
of the three there is a level plain, a quarter of a mile broad,
cut by two brooks, which combine to form the stream
down Wady es Sunt. This plain is probably Davidand
the scene of David’s encounter with Goliath ; Gollath-
for to the south of it, on the low hills that bound the
Wady es Sunt in that direction, is the name Shuweikeh,
probably the Shocoh, on which the Philistines rested their
rear and faced the Israelites across the valley.

The ‘ Gai,’ or ravine, which separated them has been

1	Vinsauf, I tin. Ric. v. 48. See p. 214.

2	The Wady es Sur and the Wady es Sunt are parts of the same Wady.228 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

recognised in the deep trench which the combined streams
have cut through the level land, and on the other side
there is the Wady el Jindy, a natural road for the Israel-
ites to have come down from their hills. Near by is Beit
Fased, probably an echo of Ephes-Dammim, and on the
spot where we should seek for the latter. It is the very
battle-field for those ancient foes : Israel in one of the
gateways to her mountain-land ; the Philistines on the low
hills they so often overran ; and between them the great
valley that divides Judah from the Shephelah. Major
Conder and Principal Miller have given detailed descrip-
tions of the battle and its field.1 Only the following needs
to be added : Shocoh is a strong position isolated from the
rest of the ridge, and it keeps open the line of retreat down
the valley. Saul’s army was probably not immediately
opposite, but a little way up on the slopes of the incoming
Wady el Jindy, and so placed that the Philistines, in
attacking it, must cross not only the level land and the
main stream, but one of the two other streams as well, and
must also climb the slopes for some distance. Both posi-
tions were thus very strong, and this fact perhaps explains
the long hesitation of the armies in face of each other,
even though the Philistines had the advantage of Goliath.
The Israelite position certainly looks the stronger. It is
interesting, too, that from its rear the narrow pass goes
right up to the interior of the land near Bethlehem ; so
that the shepherd-boy, whom the story represents as being
sent by his father for news of the battle, would have
almost twelve miles to cover between his father’s house
and the camp.

1 Conder, P.E.F.Q., 1876, 40; T.W., 279. Miller, Least of all Lands,
ch. v., with a plan of the field. Cf. Cheyne, Hallowing of Criticism.The Shephelah

229

If you ride southwards from the battle-field up the Wady
es Sur, you come in about two hours to a wide valley
running into the Shephelah on the right. On

Adullam.

the south side of this there is a steep hill, with
a well at the foot of it, and at the top the shrine of a
Mohammedan saint. They call the hill by a name ‘Aid-el-
ma, in which it is possible to hear ‘Adullam, and its posi-
tion suits all that we are told about David’s stronghold. It
stands well off the Central Range, and is very defensible.
There is water in the valley, and near the top some
large low caves, partly artificial. If we can dismiss the
idea that all David’s four hundred men got into the cave
of Adullam—a pure fancy for which the false tradition,
that the enormous cave of Khareitun near Bethlehem is
Adullam, is responsible—we shall admit that this hill was
just such a stronghold as David is said to have chosen. It
looks over to Judah, and down the Wady es Sunt; it
covers two high-roads into the former, and Bethlehem,
from which David’s three mighty men carried the water
he sighed for, is, as the crow flies, not twelve miles away.
The site is, therefore, entirely suitable ; and yet we cannot
say that there is enough resemblance in the modern name
to place it beyond doubt as Adullam.1

1 The tradition that Adullam is the great cave of Khareitun (i.e. Saint
Chariton, d. 410), SE. of Bethlehem, cannot be traced behind the Crusaders.
It is probably due to them. The Adullam of the Old Testament lay off the
Central Range altogether, for men from the latter went down to it (Gen.
xxxviii. 1; 1 Sam. xxii. 1 ; 2 Sam. xxiii. 13). The prophet Gad bids David
leave it and go into the land of Judah (1 Sam. xxii. 5) ; and it is reckoned with
Shocoh, Azekah, Gath, Mareshah, and other towns in the Shephelah west of
Hebron (Joshua xv. 35, in the list of towns in the Shephelah, v. 33 ;
Nehemiah xi. 30; Micah i. 15 ; 2 Chronicles xi. 7 ; cf. 2 Macc. xii. 38).
So great a mass of evidence is conclusive for a position somewhere in the
Shephelah. It is not contradicted in the two passages (2 Samuel xxiii. 13 ;
1 Chronicles xi. 15) describing how water was brought to David in Adullam230 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

The only other famous site up the Wady es Sur is that
of Ke'ilah, or Kegilah. It is probably the present Kela,
a hill covered with ruins on the Judaean side of
the valley. When David returned from Adul-
lam to Judah, he heard that the Philistines were besieging
Ke'ilah, a fenced town with bolts and bars}	In obedience

to the oracle of Jehovah, he and his men attacked the
Philistines, and relieved it. But Saul heard he was there,
and hoped, with the connivance of the inhabitants, to catch
him in a trap. David, therefore, hurriedly left Ke'ilah,
and for a time the whole Shephelah, for the wilderness on
the other side of Judah.2

4. The fourth of the valleys that cut the Shephelah is

from the well at Bethlehem, twelve miles from the nearest site on the
Shephelah. Stade (G. V.I. i. 244) reads 1 Samuel xxiii. 3, as ascribing to
Adullam a position in Judah, but he manages this only by reading xxii. 5 as
a gloss, and for this there are no real grounds. Retain xxii. 5, which tells
how David went back from Adullam to Judah, and xxiii. 3, though probably
from another document than xxii., follows on correctly. Finally, there is no
reason for separating the cave from the city Adullam (so Birch, P.E.F.Q.,
1884, p. 61 ; 1886, p. 31). Adullam, then, being proved to be on the
Shephelah, the next question is the exact site. And as to this, it is safest to
say that, while many sites are possible, ‘Aid-el-ma is the preferable. It is the
only one that possibly has an echo of the old name, and, lying as it does on
the east of the Shephelah, it suits Adullam’s frequent association in the Old
Testament with Shocoh and Azekah, while it is only some seven miles from
Mareshah, with which Micah joins it. Deir Dubban, suggested by V.
de Velde (Reise, etc., ii. 155 ff.), is on the west slope of the Shephelah, and has
really no point in its favour but its caves. Clermont Ganneau is the dis-
coverer of ‘Aid-el-ma. The Onomasticon need not be taken into account.
It confounds Adullam and Eglon.

1	I Sam. xxiii.

2	The site Khurbet Kela was proposed by Gudrin,Jnd. iii. 341. In Josh,
xv. 43, 44, it is mentioned with Nesib, and this is probably the neighbouring
Beit-Nasib. It is mentioned in the Tell-el-Amarna Tablets, Conder, pp. 143,
144, 151-155, and Nasib 157. It is practically on the Shephelah (this against
Dillmann). The Onomasticon confounds, and puts KeetXd on Hebron and
Beit-Jibrin road at seven (or seventeen) miles from Hebron. This is evi-
dently Beit-Kahil, which is not in the Shephelah, but on the mountains of
Judah.The Shephelah

231

that now named the Wady el ’Afranj, which runs from
opposite Hebron north-west to Ashdod and the coast. It is
important as containing the real capital of wady el
the Shephelah, the present Beit-Jibrin.1 This 'Afranj.
site has not been identified with any Old Testament name,2
but, like so many other places in Palestine, its permanent
importance is illustrated by its use during Roman times,
and especially during the Crusades. It is not
a place of any natural strength, and this is
perhaps why we hear nothing of it, so far as we know,
during the older history; but it is the converging point of
many roads, and the soft chalk of the district lends itself
admirably to the hewing of intricate caves—two facts
which fully account for its later importance. Indeed, these
caves have been claimed as proof that the Horites, or
cave-dwellers, of the early history of Israel, had their centre
here,3 but none of them bear any mark older than the
Christian era. The first possible mention of Beit-Jibrin is
in an amended passage of Josephus, where he describes it
as a stronghold of the Idumaeans, who overran the She-
phelah in the last centuries before Christ, and as taken by
Vespasian when he was blockading the approaches to Jeru-
salem.4 The Romans built roads from it in all directions,

1	Ptolemy, xv. ‘ Betogabra ; ’ Tab. Peut. ‘Betogubri.’ Nestle, Z.D.P. V.

i. 222-225,	it to be the Aramaic	ITU—‘ House of the Men,’ or

‘ Strong Men ’—and shows its identity with Eleutheropolis from a Syrian ms.
of the third century. Robinson, B.R. ii. 61, had already put this past doubt.
In the same paper Nestle, on good grounds, places Elkosh, the birthplace of
Nahum, close by.

2	Thomson, L. and B., proposes it as the site of Gath, but see p. 194 f.

3	Talm. Bereshith Rabba, xlii. describes Eleutheropolis as inhabited by
Horites, and derives the name Free-town from the fact that the Horim chose
these caves that they might dwell there in liberty ! So also Jerome, Comm,
in Obadiam.

4	.iv. Wars, viii. 1, by reading (3riya(3pis for /3ijrapis.232 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Roman Roads.

the high straight lines of which still dominate the brush-
wood and corn-fields of the neighbouring valleys. About
200 A.D. Septimius Severus refounded it, and its name was
changed to Eleutheropolis.1 It was the centre of the
district, the half-way house between Jerusalem and Gaza,
Hebron and Lydda, and the Ononiasticon measures from
it all distances in the Shephelah.

Many times, as our horses’ hoofs strike pavement on the
Roman roads of Palestine, and we lift our eyes to the
unmistakable line across the landscape, we
pilgrims from the far north are reminded
that these same straight lines cross our own island,
that by our own doors milestones have been dug up
similar to those which lie here, and we are thrilled with
some imagination of what the Roman Empire was, and
how it grasped the world. But by Beit-Jibrin this feeling
grows still more intense, for the Roman buildings there
are mostly the work of the same emperor who built the
wall on the Tyne, and hewed his way through Scotland
to the shores of the Pentland Firth.

There are early Christian remains at Beit-Jibrin, both
caves and churches, but we shall take them up afterwards in
speaking of the rise of Christianity throughout
and the the Shephelah. The Crusaders came to Beit-
Jibrin, or Gibelin as they called it, and thought
it was Beersheba.2 They made it their base against Aska-
lon, and Fulke of Anjou built the citadel. It was in charge
of the Knights of St. John, and they attempted to colonise

1	The date is fixed by the earliest coins of the city, with its new name and
the name of Severus, of the years 202, 203 a.d.

2	Gibelin, also Begibelinum and Bersabe Judaeae. Rohricht, Z.D.P. V.
x. 240.The Shephelah

233

the neighbourhood in 1168.1 The monuments they have
left are some ruins of a beautiful Gothic church, some
thick fortifications, and their name in the Wady el ’Afranj,
or ‘Valley of the Franks.’

Not two miles from Beit-Jibrin lies Mer‘ash, the Mare-
shah or Moresheth-gath of the Old Testament,2 and
birthplace of the prophets Eliezer and Micah.

Marshall.

In the reign of Asa an army of Ethiopians,
under Zerah, came up this avenue through the Shephelah,
but by Mareshah Asa defeated them, and pursued them
to Gerar.3 In 163 B.c. Judas Maccabeus laid Mareshah
waste in his campaign against the Idumaeans.4 John
Hyrcanus took it again from their hands in no, and
Pompey gave it back to them.5 Mareshah was one of
the towns Gabinius rebuilt, but the Parthians, in 40 B.C.,
swept down on it,6 and thereafter we hear no more of it
till Eusebius tells us it is desert.7 Thus it was an impor-
tant and ‘a powerful town’8 as long as Beit-Jibrin was
unheard of; when Beit-Jibrin comes into history, it dis-
appears. Can we doubt that we have here one of those
frequent instances of the transference of a community to a
new and neighbouring site? If this be so, we have now
full explanation of the silence of the Old Testament about
Beit-Jibrin ; it was really represented by Mareshah.

1 Will, of Tyre, xiv. 22. On the colony see Prulz, Z.D.P. V. iv. 113.

2 Josh. xv. 44; 2 Chron. xi. 8 ; xiv. 9, 10; xx. 37 ; Micah i. 1, 15 ; Jer.
xxvi. 18; 2 Macc. xii. 35.

3	2 Chron. xiv. 9ff. The Massoretic Text places the battle in the Valley of
Sephathah (nnQ¥ 'J) at Mareshah, LXX. gives north of Mareshah. Robin-
son, Bib. Jits. ii. 31, compares Sephathah with Tell-es-Safiyeh.

4	163 B.c., as he went from Hebron to Ashdod, Josephus xii. Antt. viii. 6.
In I Macc. v. 66, read Mdpt<r<ra for Za/xapela.

5	Josephus, xiii. Antt. ix. I ; xiv. Antt. iv. 4.

6	lb. xiii. 9.	7 OnotH. Md/njcra.	8 So Josephus.234 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Wady el Hesy.

5. The last of the valleys through the Shephelah is
Wady el Hesy, or Wady el Jizair, running from a point
about six miles south-west of Hebron to the
sea, between Gaza and Askalon. This valley
also has its important sites ; for Lachish, which used to be
placed at Umm Lakis, on the slopes to the south, is now,
by the English survey and excavations, proved to have
been Tell el Hesy, a mound in the bed of the valley, and
Eglon—the present ‘Ajlan—is not far off. These two
were very ancient Amorite fortresses. Eglon disappeared
from history at an early period, but Lachish endured,
always fulfilling the same function, time after time suffering
the same fate. Her valley is the first in the Shephelah
which the roads from Egypt strike, and Gaza

Lachish.

stands at its lower end. Lachish has therefore
throughout history played second to Gaza, now an outpost
of Egypt, and now a frontier fortress of Syria. In the
Tell-el-Amarna Letters we read of her in Egyptian hands.
She is the farthest city Egyptwards which Rehoboam
fortifies.1 Sennacherib must take her before he invades
Egypt.'2 During the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, her
successor at Umm Lakis is held by the Order of the
Hospitallers,3 for the same strategical reasons.4 Again,
some five miles above Lachish, at the Wells of Qassaba, or
‘ the Reeds,’ there is usually wealth of water, and all the
year round a stream. Latin chronicles of the Crusades
know the place as Cannetum Esturnellorum, or ‘ the Cane-

1	2 Chron. xi. 9.

2	2 Kings xviii. 14, 17 ; xix. 8 ; Isa. xxxvi. 2 ; xxxvii. 8 ; 2 Chron. xxxii. 9.

3	Their name for Lachish, Malagues or Malaques (cf. Rohricht, Z.D.P. V.
x. 239)—that is, Umm Lakis—is a good instance of what the unfortunate
names of this country have suffered at the mouths of its conquerors.

4	On Lachish excavated see Petrie, Tell el Hesy, 1891; Bliss, P.E.F. Q. 1892 f.The Shephelah

235

brake of the Starlings : ’ and Richard twice made it a base
of operations—once on coming up the Wady el Hesyfrom
the coast, when he advanced on Beit-Jibrin, and once again
when he came south to intercept, in the Wady esh Sheria, a
rich caravan on its way from Egypt.1 2 Through all these
ages, then, Lachish was an outpost, and, as we should now
say, a customs-station, between Judaea and Egypt. War
and commerce both swept past her. But this enables us to
understand her neighbour Micah’s word about her. In his
day Judah’s sin was to lean on Egypt, to accept Egyptian
subsidies of horses and chariots. So Micah mocks Lachish,
playing on the assonance of her name to that for a horse :
Yoke the wagon to the steed, O inhabitress of Lachish; begin-
ning of sin is she to the daughter of Zion, for in thee are
found the transgressions of Israeli1

I have now explained the strategic importance of the
Shephelah, and especially of the five valleys which are the
only possibilities of passage through it for great armies.
How much of the history of all these centuries can be
placed along one or other of them ; and, when we have
placed it, how much more vivid that history becomes!

There is one great campaign in the Shephelah which we
have not discussed in connection with any of the main
routes, because the details of it are obscure—	^ -b

Sennacherib’s invasion of Syria in 701 B.c. in the
But the general course of this, as told in the shephelah-
Assyrian annals and in the Bible, becomes plain in the
light of the geography we have been studying. Sen-
nacherib, coming down the coast, like the Syrians and

1	-Vinsauf, Itin. Ricard, v. 41 ; vi. 4. On the identification of Qassaba
with the Cannetum Esturnellorum, see Clermont Ganneau, Recueil, etc., 378.

2	Micah i. 13.236 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Crusaders, like them also conquered first the towns about
Joppa. Then he defeated an Egyptian army before Al-
teku, somewhere near Ekron, on the Philistine Plain,1 and
took Ekron and Timnah. With Egypt beaten back, and
the Northern Shephelah mastered, his way was now open
into Judah, the invasion of which and the investment of
Jerusalem accordingly appear next in the list of Sen-
nacherib’s triumphs. These must have been effected by a
detachment of the Assyrian army, for Sennacherib himself
is next heard of in the Southern Shephelah, besieging
Lachish and Libnah, no doubt with the view of securing
his way to Egypt. At Lachish he received the tribute
of Hezekiah, who thus hoped to purchase the relief of the
still inviolate Jerusalem ; but, in spite of the tribute, he
sent to Hezekiah from Lachish and Libnah two peremp-
tory demands for her surrender. Then suddenly, in the
moment of Zion’s despair, the Assyrian army was smitten,
not, as we usually imagine, round the walls of Jerusalem,
for the Bible nowhere implies that, but under Sennacherib
himself in the main camp and headquarters. Either these
were still in the Southern Shephelah—for Sennacherib’s
own annals do not carry him south of Lachish, and Egypt
often sent her plagues up this way to Palestine 2—or, if we
may believe Herodotus, they had crossed the desert to
Pelusium, and were overtaken in that pestiferous region,
which has destroyed so many armies.3

1	Alteku, the Eltekeh of Josh. xix. 44, cannot be where the P.E.F. Red.
Map (1891) makes it, at Beit-Likea, far up Ajalon—for how could an Egyp-
tian and Assyrian army have met there?—but was near Ekron, on the road
to Egypt. Here Kh. Lezka is the only modern name like it.

2	1 R.P. 1.; Schrader, K.A. T. 1. p. 218 ff.; Stade, Gesck. i. 620 ff. ; Isaiah,

Exp. Bible, 1. chaps, xix. to xxiii. Schrader wrongly makes the crisis at the
battle of Eltekeh.	3 Seep. 158 f.CHAPTER XI

EARLY CHRISTIANITY IN THE SHEPHELAH :
ITS CAVES AND CHURCHES

237For this Chapter consult Map IV.EARLY CHRISTIANITY IN THE SHEPHELAH :
ITS CAVES AND CHURCHES

/~\UR study of the Shephelah has covered only the
campaigns and battles which have ranged over its
very debatable ground. But the region had its victories of
peace as well as of war, and throughout it you find
to-day ruins of cloisters and of churches, and caves with
Christian symbols. Many of the former are, no doubt,
ruins of Crusaders’ buildings ; but some go back to the
Byzantine period, and the caves with the crosses marked
on their walls are probably early Christian. Christianity
conquered the Shephelah almost before any other part of
Palestine, and the story of the conquest is a heroic one.1

Among the crowds who followed our Lord at the
beginning of His ministry were many from Idumaea.2
Idumaea was then practically the southern

Idumaea.

Shephelah, with the Negeb. The Edomites
had come up on it during the Jewish exile, and after the
return of the Jews they continued to hold the greater part
of it. Judas Maccabeus temporarily conquered their ter-
ritory,3 but John Hyrcanus brought them under the law
and circumcised them.4 By the Law the third generation

1 It is told in the histories of Eusebius, Socrates and Sozomen, in Jerome’s
Letters, and in his Life of Hilarion. Stark’s Gaza, etc., § 16, takes it up at
points.	2 Mark iii. 8.	3 See p. 233.

4 About 125 B.c. Josephus xiii, Antt. ix. 1 ; i. Wars ii. 6.

230240 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

of Edomites were admitted to the full privileges of Israel,1
so that in our Lord’s time Idumaea was practically a part
of Judaea, with a Jewish population.2 Many out of
Idumaea heard Him, and it is probable that Idumaeans

Christians at Lydda, influences might easily pass across
the whole region by the high-road to Beit-Jibrin. Philip
met the Ethiopian somewhere in the southern Shephelah,
and was afterwards found at Ashdod.3 Very early, then,
little communities of Christians must have been formed
among these beautiful glens and moors. Tradition assigns
one of the Twelve, Simon Judas, to Beit-Jibrin.4 When
times of persecution came, we can understand how
readily this land of caves, where David and his men had
hid themselves from Saul, would be used by Christian
fugitives from the Greek cities of the coast. The habits
of the ascetic life also spread here from Egypt. Monks
and hermits settled first to the south of Gaza,5 then came
up the Wady el Hesy to the district round Beit-Jibrin,
and found among the villages of the Shephelah a far
nobler work to do than their brother monks of the Libyan
and Arabian deserts. With a persistence and success,
the proof of which appeared in the aid rendered by the
country districts to the Christians of the cities in the
struggles of the fourth century, they converted the
peasants and built them up in the faith. Here the contrast

1	Deut. xxiii. 8, 9 (Heb. but Eng. Version, 7, 8).

2	How violently Jewish may be seen from the part they took to themselves

in the Jewish revolt of 66 a.d.—Jos. iv. Wars, iv. 4.	3 Acts viii. 39.

4 Stark’s Gaza, etc., p. 613—after the De LXX. Domini discipulis.

6 Jerome’s Lift of Hilarion.

The Apostles
in the
Shephelah.

were present on the day of Pentecost. Apostles
and evangelists went down into the Shephelah.
Peter we have seen at Lydda, and from theEarly Christianity in the Shephelah 241

which was seen all over the rest of the world was reversed,
and ‘ urban ’ might have been taken as the synonym of
idolater, but ‘ heathen ’ and ‘ pagan ’ as the by-names of
the Christians. Even so early as the Decian persecutions,
and still more in those which the Church suffered under
Diocletian and Maximin, many confessors were brought in
‘ from the country ’ to martyrdom at Caesarea,

11	1-1	-ii	1 The Martyrs

or sent back to their glens mutilated and of the
branded.1 Some have been named for us. Shephelah-
Romulus, a sub-deacon of the Church at Lydda, was one
of six young men who, first binding their hands, went to
the amphitheatre of Caesarea, where some of their brethren
were being thrown to the beasts, and boldly declared
themselves to the governor as Christians.2 They were
beheaded. Zebina of Beit-Jibrin was one of three who
defied the Governor of Caesarea, when he was sacrificing
to idols. They were executed.3 Petrus Asketes, a youth
from Anea in the borders of Beit-Jibrin, was burned to
death in the same city.4 The Shephelah lay at the very
doors of that slaughter-house, into which the fury of
Maximin had converted the whole Syrian coast from
Egypt to Cilicia ; and during the eight5 years of the
great persecution its Christian communities must have
been constantly thrilled by the stories of heroism, martyr-
dom, and miracle which came up to them from the sea-
board. Lying in caves, the mouths of many of which look
out over the plain upon Gaza and Askalon, they were told
how the gates of these cities were beset by spies, and
Christians were caught as they came in from the country
or were travelling between Cilicia and Egypt; how some

1 Euseb. H.E. viii. passim.
Ib. 10.

2 Ib. 3.	3 Ib. 9.

5 So ib. 13 ; but ‘ ten years,’ ib. 15.

Q242 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

were found in the towns reading the Scriptures, and
dragged before the prefect; how some were burned, and
all were tortured ; how some were thrown to the wild
beasts, and some were trained for pugilistic combats to
make a Roman holiday; how human heads and limbs
were sometimes scattered about the gates to terrify the
peasants as they came in ; and how a strange dew once
broke out on all the buildings of C?esarea, and people
said that the very stones must weep at cruelties so terrible.
And men wanting a foot, or a hand, or an eye, or seared
across the face, or with their sides torn by hooks, would
come up to these caves to die; and some country youths,
emulous of martyrdom, would rush off to Caesarea and
defy the governor himself in the great theatre. These
things are told by Eusebius, who lived through them, and
is a sober and accurate writer.1

The most intricate caves of the Shephelah are those about
Beit-J ibrin—that is, the very district of whose Christianity
The Caves of vve hear most. The yellow chalk of the ridges
Beit-jibrm. there js eaSy to carve, and hardens on exposure.
Some of the old caves, which had probably been used from
time immemorial,2must have latelybeen enlarged as quarries
for the building of Eleutheropolis ; others had been used by
the Jews as tombs. But by the Christians they were
greatly increased. There is in them, as they now lie, no
such wealth of inscriptions as in the Roman catacombs,
but that their present form is due to the early Christians
seems proved by these facts: that the chambers have in
many cases been run through Jewish tombs ;3 that almost
the only ornament is the Cross, and that the only Moslem

1	History, Bk. viii., cf. Theodoret iii. 7 ; Evagrius i. 21, etc.

2	See p. 231.	3 P.E.F. Mem. Judoea, 268.Early Christianity in the Shephelah 243

inscriptions yet discovered are very early ones in the Cufic
character.1 A few notes, taken on the spot, will perhaps
give a vivid idea of the caves about Beit-J ibrin :—

. . Down a steep grass gully to some rough steps—
evidently not the original entrance, but one broken by the fall
of the rock—and so, lighting our candles, into a large chamber.
Thence we crept, by a passage as high as my walking-stick, to a
larger room, of elegant shape, with a pillar in the centre, 2 ft.
thick each way. Climbing to the top of some rubbish, we found
a hole in the wall, and passed through into a great bell-shaped
chamber, round which there descended a spiral staircase with a
balustrade. We went down to the bottom, 50 steps. Returning,
half-way up we found a door into another series of chambers,
which we penetrated for about 200 feet; they went on further.
We came back to the staircase, and passed by it out of the solid
rock into a narrow vaulted passage choked with rubbish, at what
seemed to be the proper entrance to the labyrinth.’

This describes but a part of one series of caves in one
district. Elsewhere round Beit-Jibrin there are other
series, in which you may wander for hours through cells,
rooms, and pillared halls with staircases and long cor-
ridors, all cut out of the soft yellow chalk. There is
almost no ornament, nor trace of ornament having been
removed. Where the walls are preserved, they have no
breaks in them save niches for. holding little lamps.
The low passages, along which you have to creep,
suggest their origin in times of terror; and the natural
mouths of many, hidden by bush, and overlooking all the
plain to the sea, are splendid posts of observation for the
sentinels of hunted men. But the vaulted masonry of
other entrances speaks of more peaceful days ; and all the
chambers are dry, and in summer delightfully cool. While,

1 Robinson (and Eli Smith), R.R. ii. Guerin, Jud. ii.244 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Deir-Dubban.

then, some of these caves about Beit-Jibrin may have been
inhabited, or even first formed, during the great persecu-
tions, the bulk of them are probably due to the monks
and hermits who came up here from Egypt.
The caves at Deir-Dubban, to the north of
Beit-Jibrin, have also a few crosses, and what look like
Cufic inscriptions high up on the walls. They, too, there-
fore, are to be assigned to the Byzantine period.1

When the Christianity of the Shephelah came above
ground again, it built some noble churches. Close by the
caves just described stands the ruin Sandhanneh,

The Churches

of the	the Church of Sancta Anna, mother of the

shephelah. yjrgjn js the east en(] Qf a Greek basilica,

and with the foundations, which can still be traced for the
rest of the building, implies a church as great and beautiful
as the Basilica of Justinian in Bethlehem. It probably
dates from the same age, when the famous Marcian, who
built the churches of Gaza, was bishop there, and his
brother was Bishop of Eleutheropolis.2 Byzantine remains
have been recognised in other parts of the Shephelah, as
at Deir-el-Bedawiyeh, Deir-el-Botur, and Deir-el-Mohallis
or Convent of the Saviour.3 Some of the untraceable
ruins, which are so thickly strewn across these hills, must
belong to the same period; but other ecclesiastical
remains, such as the chapel within the citadel at Beit-
Jibrin, are French architecture of the thirteenth century,
and the scattered stones to the north of Tell Jezer are
also, we know, the work of the Crusaders.4

1 Guerin, Jud. ii. 105, 106.	2 Stark, Gaza, etc., p. 625.

3 Guerin, Jtid. ii. 27, 97, 98.	4 See p. 217.CHAPTER XII

JUD^A AND SAMARIA—

THE HISTORY OF THEIR FRONTIER

246For this Chapter consult Map VJUDAEA AND SAMARIA—THE HISTORY
OF THEIR FRONTIER

/^~\VER the Shephelah we advance upon the Central
Range. Our nearest goal is that part of the range
which is called the Hill-country, or Mount, of Judah. But
it is necessary first to look at the range as a whole, and
see how, and why, its short extent was divided first into
the two kingdoms of Northern Israel and Judah, and then
into the provinces of Samaria and Judaea.

We have seen 1 that a long, deep formation of limestone
extends all the way from Lebanon in the north to a line
of cliffs opposite the Gulf and Canal of Suez in
the south. Of this backbone of Syria the part Range south
between Esdraelon and the Negeb is histori-
cally the most famous. Those ninety miles of narrow
highland from Jezreel to Beersheba were the chief theatre
of the history of Israel. As you look from the sea they
form a persistent mountain wall of nearly uniform level,
rising clear and blue above the low hills which buttress it
to the west. The one sign of a pass across it is the cleft we
have already noticed,2 between Ebal and Gerizim, in which
Shechem, the natural capital of these highlands, lies.

But uniform as that persistent range appears from the
1 P. 47.	2 P. 119.

247248 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Its division.

coast, almost the first thing you remember as you look at
it is the prolonged political and religious division of
which it was capable—first into the kingdoms
of Northern Israel and Judah, and then into the
provinces of Samaria and Judaea. Those ninety narrow
miles sustained the arch-schism of history. Where did the
line of this schism run ? Did it correspond to any natural
division in the range itself?

A closer observation shows that there was a natural
boundary between northern and southern Israel. But its
ambiguity is a curious symbol of the uncertain frontier of
their religious differences.

We have seen, first, that the bulk of Samaria consists of
scattered mountain groups, while Judaea is a table-land ;
Three natural and, secondly, that while the Samarian moun-
frontiers. tains descend continuously through the low
hills upon the Maritime Plain, the hill-country of Judaea
stands aloof from the Shephelah Range, with a well-
defined valley between.1 Now, these two physical differ-
ences do not coincide : the table-land of Judaea runs farther
north than its isolation from the low hills. Consequently,
we have an alternative of frontiers. If we take the differ-
ence between the relations of the two provinces to the
Maritime Plain, the natural boundary will be the Vale of
Ajalon, which penetrates the Central Range, and a line
from it across the water-parting to the Wady Suweinit,
the deep gorge of Michmash, which will continue the
boundary to the Jordan at Jericho. If we take the dis-
tinction between the scattered hills and the table-land,
then the natural boundary from the coast eastwards to the
Jordan will be the river ‘Aujeh, the Wady Deir Balut, the
1 See p. 205 f.The History of a Frontier

249

Wady Nimr, a line across the water-parting to the Wady
Samieh, and so down this and the Wady ‘Aujeh to the
Jordan, eight miles above Jericho.1 For it is just where
this line crosses the water-parting, about the Robber’s
Well on the high-road from Jerusalem to Nablus, that
travellers coming north find the country change. They
have descended from the plateau, and their road onward
lies through valleys and plains, with ridges between. This
second natural border is easily remembered by the fact
that it begins and ends with streams of the same name—
‘Aujeh, ‘the crooked ’—and that, while the western stream
reaches the sea a little above Joppa, the eastern falls into
the Jordan a little above Jericho. Somewhat farther
north, however, than this second line, there is a third and
even more evident border, which leaves the Wady Deir
Balut by the Wady Ishar, and runs north-east, deep and
straight to ‘Akrabbeh. Still farther north there is a fourth
line, which leaves the western ‘Aujeh by the Wadies Ishar
and Kanah—the latter probably the Brook Kanah, the
frontier between Ephraim and Manasseh—but this fourth
line we need not take into our reckoning.

Thus we have not one, but three possible frontiers
across the range: south of Bethel, the line from the head
of Ajalon to the gorge of Michmash ; north of Bethel, the
change from table-land to valley, with deep wadies running
both to Jordan and to the coast; and, more northerly
still, the Wady Ishar. None of these is by any means a
‘ scientific frontier,’ and their ambiguity is reflected in the
fortunes of the political border.

The political border oscillated among these natural
borders.

1 Trel. Saunders, Introd. to Survey of IV. Palestine, p. 229.250 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Take the most southerly—the line up the Wady Suweinit,
across the plateau south of Bethel, and down Ajalon.

This was a real pass across the range. Not
political only did Israel by it first come up from the
Jordan on to the table-land, and by it sweep
down towards the sea, but it was in all ages a regular route
for trade.1 Its use, and the close connection into which it
brought the Maritime Plain with the Jordan Valley, could
not be more clearly proved than by the presence of the
name Dagon at its eastern as well as its western end. A
little way north of Jericho there was, down to the times of
the Maccabees, a fortress called by the name of the Philis-
tine god.2 In Saul’s days the Philistines were naturally
anxious to hold this route, and, invading Israel by Ephraim,
they planted their garrisons upon its northern side at
Ramallah 3 and Michmash, while Saul’s forces faced them
from its southern side.4 This is the earliest appearance of
this natural border across the Central Range in the char-
acter of a political frontier. The next is a few years
later: while David was king only of Judah, his soldiers
sat down opposite those of Abner at Gibeon,5 6 on a line
between Ajalon and Michmash. After the disruption the
same line seems to have been the usual frontier between
the kingdoms of Northern Israel and Judah ; for Bethel,0 to

1	The Crusaders used it. See p. 183.

2	Josephus, xiii. Antt. viii. It is probably the same as Docus (i Macc.
xvi. 15), which name is preserved in ‘Ain Duk, to the north of Jericho.

3	1 Samuel x. 5. The hill of God is probably the present Ramallah,
south-west of Bethel.

4	I Samuel xiii. xiv. Seneh, so called from the thorns upon it (Jos. vide
i. Wars, ii. i), lay on the south side of the Michmash gorge. Bozez, the
shining, for it lay facing the south, was opposite to Seneh on the north.

5	2 Samuel ii. 13.

6	1 Kings xii. 29, 2 Kings x. 29; Amos iii. 14, iv. 4, vii. 10, 13; Hosea x. 15.The History of a Frontier

251

the north of it, was a sanctuary of Israel, and Geba, to the
south of it, was considered as the limit of Judah.1 But
though the Vale of Ajalon and the gorge of Michmash
form such a real division down both flanks of the plateau,
the plateau itself between these offers no real frontier, but
stretches level from Jerusalem to the north of Bethel.
Consequently we find Judah and Israel pushing each other
up and down in it, Israel trying to get footing south, and
Judah trying to get footing north, of Michmash. For
instance, Baasha, king of Israel, went up against Judah,
and built, or fortified, Ramah, the present er-Ram, four
miles north of Jerusalem, that he might not suffer any to go
out or come in to Asa, king of fudah ;2 but, Asa having
paid the Syrians to invade Israel from the north, he left off
building Ramah, and Asa made a levy throughout Judah,
and they took away the stones of Ramah thereof wherewith
Baasha had builded, and King Asa built, or fortified, with
them Geba of Benjamin and Mizpeh? And conversely to
Baasha’s attempt on Ramah we find the kings of Judah
making attempts on Bethel. Soon after the disruption,
Abijah won it for Judah,4 but it must have quickly reverted
to the north. Similarly to the Bethel plateau, the Jordan
valley offered no real frontier between Judah and Northern
Israel, and consequently we find Jericho, though a Judaean
city, in possession of the northerners.5 On the west, North-
ern Israel did not come south of the Vale of Ajalon, for in
that direction the Philistines were still strong.6

1	The formula, from Dan to Beersheba, which meant united Israel, seems
to have been replaced by the formula, from Geba to Beersheba (2 Kings
xxiii. 8 ; cf. 1 Kings xv. 22).

2 I Kings xv. 17.	3 Ibid. 21, 22.

4 2 Chronicles xiii. 19.	5 1 Kings xvi. 34, 2 Kings ii. 4 ff.

a 1 Kings xvi. 15 ff., where we find Gibbethon, on the borders of Ephraim,
to the north of Ajalon, in Philistine possession.252 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

When the kingdom of Northern Israel fell, Jericho and
Bethel both reverted to Judah ; but Bethel was a tainted
place, and Josiah destroyed it,1 and still in his

The Frontier .

from 721 j?.c. time Geba was the formal limit of Judah.2

Exile. Qnjy formal, however, for Bethel and other
villages to the north must have been rebuilt and occupied
by Jews. Men of Bethel returned in Zerubbabel’s com-
pany from exile along with men of Ai, Michmash, Gibeon,
Anathoth, Azmaveth, Beeroth,- Ramah, and Geba,3 on
the plateau ; Lydda, Hadid, and Ono in Ajalon ; and
Jericho and Senaah 4 in the Jordan Valley. All these are
either upon or south of the line from Michmash to Ajalon,
except Bethel, which is a little to the north. It is to be
noted that Beth-horon, which was also on the line, but
belonged to Ephraim,5 is not mentioned among them.
All this proves that, after the northern kingdom fell, Judah
had only slightly pushed her frontier northwards. She got
Jericho back, and a little place to the north of it, and
Bethel, but she did not get Beth-horon.

Except, then, for the northward bulge at Bethel, the
political frontier between Judah and Israel was down
to the Exile the most southerly of the three natural
borders.

During the Exile the Samaritans must have flowed
south into the vacant or weakened Jewish cities, but the
only evidence we have of this concerns Lod, or Lydda,
and its neighbourhood. Long after Lod’s reoccupation
by the Jews, the district was still nominally a Samaritan

1 2 Kings xxiii. 4, 15.	2 Ibid. 8.

3	Ezra ii. 20 ff., Neh. vii. 25 ff.

4	Probably five miles north of Jericho ; cf. Ononi., Megdalsenna.

8 Joshua xvi. 3, 5, xxi. 22.The History of a Frontier

253

toparchy.1 When the Jews returned they found the frontier
obliterated; their countrymen who had not gone into exile
were fallen into idolatrous practices, and the After the
Samaritans came up to Jerusalem itself and Exile-
offered to join them in building the Temple. The offer was
rejected; but after the Temple was finished in 516, the
Jewish exclusiveness gave way, and such intercourse was
held with the Samaritans, by marriage and other relations,
as must have scattered many Jews northwards across the
old frontier.2 Then under Ezra and Nehemiah (460-432),
when the Samaritans were again excluded, they seem to
have overthrown the walls of Jerusalem, and at the rebuild-
ing of these they appeared in force.3 All this time it is
evident there was no real frontier north of Jerusalem.
Soon after, as Nehemiah intimates, the Jews were again
settled in the frontier towns of Geba, Michmash, Aija,
Beth-el, Ramah, and down Ajalon in Hadid, Lydda, and
Ono, and even at Neballat, to the north-west of Lydda.4

1	Lydda was a Samaritan vo^bs up to the time of Jonathan Maccabeus
(about 145 B.C.), I Macc. xi. 34, Josephus xiii. Antt. iv. 9. Another proof
that the neighbourhood of Lydda is Samaritan is found in the fact that
Sanballat asks Nehemiah to meet him there (Neh. vi. 2).

2	Ezra ix. 2 ; Neh. xiii. 23 ff., especially 28.

3	Neh. iv. 2, either in the Massoretic or the LXX. reading, which latter,
to my mind, makes the belter sense : Is this the power of Samaria, that
these Jews can build their city ? But see Ryle, in loco (Camb. Bible for
Schools) ; he thinks LXX. fails to throw any light.

4	Neh. xi. 31-36. The other towns north of Jerusalem which are men-
tioned are Anathoth, Nob, Ananiah (Beit Hanina), Hazor (Hazzur), all
near Jerusalem ; Gittaim and Zeboim, unknown. Schlatter (Zur Topog.
u. Gesch. Paldstinas, 53) has tried to prove that this list refers to pre-
exilic times, and is out of date in Nehemiah. He holds Neh. xi. is
taken from 1 Chron. ix., which belongs to the Books of the Kings of
Judah. But, in consistency with his usual method of special pleading,
he omits to say that the very verses he is dealing with in Neh. xi., viz.
25 ff., do not appear in the document on 1 Chron. ix., which invalidates his
whole argument. There is no reason to believe that Neh. xi. 25 ff. is not254 The Historical Geography of the Holy Lana

As before the Exile, Beth-horon is not mentioned among
the Jewish towns ; and Sanballat, the Samaritan, is called
the Horonite.1 For one hundred and sixty years we hear
no more of the frontier, except that in a time of the Jews’
distress the Samaritans cut off their lands ;2 and then
under Judas Maccabeus Beth-horon is suddenly mentioned
as a town of Judaea.3 Proofs multiply that since Nehemiah’s
time the Jews were pushing steadily northwards. In 161
B.C., Beth-horon, Bethel, and even Timnath Pharatho, in

Under the the interior of the old Samarian territory,4

Maccabees. are described as cities of Judaea.5 By 145 the
Jews demand from the Syrian king the transference of the
Samaritan toparchies, Apharema, Lydda, and Ramathaim,
to Judaea.6 Lydda we know, Apharema is the city of
Ephraim, five miles north-east of Bethel; the exact site of
Ramathaim is doubtful, but it also lay within Mount
Ephraim.7 Taken along with the capture of Joppa, which
happened about the same time, this addition of Samarian

authentic ; while the Jewish occupation of at least Lod and Ono is put past
all doubt by their later history. None of those who helped Nehemiah in
building the walls came from the north of Gibeon, Meronoth (?), Mizpeh
(Neh. iii.).

1	Schlatter {op. cit. 4, IVar Beth-horon der Wohnort Sanballat's ?) seeks to
prove, but without success, that Sanballat was neither a Samaritan nor of
Beth-horon.

2	Josephus xii. Anti. iv. 1.

3	Id. vii. 1. That this is not an anachronism on Josephus’part is seen from
xiii. Antt. i. 3.

4	On any theory as to its site, see p. 355.

5	1 Macc. ix. 50 ; Josephus xiii. Antt. i. 3.

6	1 Macc. xi. 28, 34 ; Josephus xiii. Antt. iv. 9.

7	On the city of Ephraim, see p. 352. Ramathaim, 'Pa/xadl/x, is doubt-
less the Ramathaim or Ramah which was Samuel’s city in Mount Ephraim
(1 Samuel i. 1 ; other passages in which it is mentioned in I Samuel throw
no light on its position). It has been identified with Beit-Rima, thirteen
miles north-east of Lydda, which agrees with the description in the Onomasticon,
art. 'ApfiaOlfi 2«0a, where it is identified with the Arimathea of Joseph.The History of a Frontier

255

territory shifted the frontier of Judaea to the line of the
‘Aujeh and Wady Deir Ballut, or the second of the three
natural borders.1 John Hyrcanus (i 35-105) overran
Samaria ; in 64 Pompey separated it again ;2 in 30 it fell
to Herod the Great ; in 6 A.D. it was taken with Judaea
from Archelaus, and put under a Roman procurator.3 In
41 Claudius gave it, with Judaea, to Agrippa. During all
that time, therefore, there was no real political Undei. the
frontier between Judaea and Samaria. The Ronians-
great religious difference, however, kept them apart as
much as ever, and the necessity which was felt by the
scrupulous Judaism of the time to distinguish heathen
from holy soil ensured a strict drawing of their frontier.
Josephus4 puts the boundary at the Acrabbene toparchy,
and again at the ‘ village Anuath, which is also named
Borkeos,’ and the English Survey have identified these
with Burkit and Akrabbeh.5 This gives the frontier along
the most northerly of the natural borders, the Wady Ishar.
On the Maritime Plain the Jewish Judaea ceased at the
‘Aujeh,6 though, of course, the Roman province of Judaea
covered the plain to the north of that, as it covered
Samaria, and indeed had its chief town there in Caesarea.
On the eastern side, again, the border between Samaria

1	Unless it was that Timnath Pharatho was really Judaean, and lay at the
head of the Wady Farah ; in that case the frontier was already at the most
northerly of the three borders.

2	Josephus, xiv. Antt. iii. 4, speaks of Pompey’s arrival at Corea, ‘ which
is the first entrance to Judaea when one passes over the midland countries ; ’
but it is uncertain whether Josephus speaks of his own or Pompey’s time, nor
are we sure where Corea was. See p. 353.

3	Samaritans were enrolled in the Roman forces, and probably formed
part of the garrison in Jerusalem. See Schtirer, Jewish People in the Time
of Christ, i. ii. p. 51.

4	iii. Wars, iii. 4, 5-	0 P-E.F.Q. 1881, p. 48.	6 Tahn.256 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

and Judaea probably ran down the Wady Farah to the
Jordan, just north of Kurn Surtabeh.1 The northern
boundary of Samaria was the edge of Esdraelon.

These were practically the limits of Samaria during our
Lord’s ministry. Samaria extended from the edge of
in the time Esdraelon to the Wady Ishar and Wady Farah,
of Christ. ancj from the Jordan to the edge of the Maritime
Plain, where it touched heathen territory. To go through
Samaria, therefore, our Lord and His disciples had only
some twenty-three miles to cover ;2 while if they wished to
avoid Samaria and all other unclean soil in passing from
Galilee to Judaea, they had to cross the Jordan north of
Bethshan, come down through the hot Jordan valley, and
recross by one of the fords at the Wady Farah, or between
this and Jericho.3 The city of Ephraim, to which our Lord
retired, was, and had been since the times of Jonathan
Maccabeus, a city of Judaea.4

1	Conder, Handbook, 310, 311. Talmud (Bab. Guittin, 76a) counts
all heathen soil between Kefr Outheni, on the edge of Esdraelon, and
Antipatris.

2	That is, by the present highroad from the Wady Ishar, past Sychar tc
Jenin or Engannim ; cf. Luke ix., John iv. See also Josephus, xx. Antt
vi. 1, for a quarrel between Galilean pilgrims and Samaritans.

3	Cf. Mark x.	4 John xi. 54.CHAPTER XIII

THE BORDERS AND BULWARKS OF JUDAiA

RFor this Chapter consult Maps /. and IV.THE BORDERS AND BULWARKS OF JUD^A

TT7E now reach the stronghold and sanctuary of the

» * land, Judaea, physically the most barren and awk-
ward, morally the most potential and famous The Seclusion
of all the provinces of Syria. Like her annual of Jud3ea>
harvests, the historical forces of Judaea have always ripened
a little later than those of Samaria. She had no part in
Israel’s earliest struggles for unity and freedom—indeed,
in the record of these she is named only as a traitor 1—nor
did the beginnings either of the kinghood or of prophecy
spring from her. Yet the gifts which her older sister’s
more open hands were the first to catch—and lose, were
by her redeemed, nourished and consummated. For this
more slow and stubborn function Judaea was prepared by
her isolated and unattractive position, which kept her for a
longer time than her sister out of the world’s regard, and,
when the world came, enabled her to offer a more hardy
defence. Hence, too, sprang the defects of her virtues—
her selfishness, provincialism and bigotry. With a few
exceptions, due to the genius of some of her sons, who
were inspired beyond all other Israelites, Judaea’s character
and history may be summed up in a sentence. At all
times in which the powers of spiritual initiative or ex-
pansion were needed, she was lacking, and so in the end

1 Deborah’s Song does not mention Judah. It was men of Judah who
betrayed Samson to the Philistines.

250260 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

came her shame. But when the times required concentra-
tion, indifference to the world, loyalty to the past, and pas-
sionate patriotism, then Judaea took the lead, or stood alone
in Israel, and these virtues even rendered brilliant the
hopeless, insane struggles of her end. Judaea was the seat
of the one enduring dynasty of Israel, the site of their
temple, the platform of all their chief prophets. After their
great Exile they rallied round her capital, and centuries
later they expended upon her fortresses the last efforts of
their freedom. From the day when the land was taken
in pledge by the dust of the patriarchs, till the remnant of
the garrison of Jerusalem slaughtered themselves out at
Masada, rather than fall into Roman hands, or till at
Bether the very last revolt was crushed by Hadrian, Judaea
was the birthplace, the stronghold, the sepulchre of God’s
people. It is, therefore, not wonderful that they should
have won from it the name which is now more frequent
than either their ancestral designation of Hebrews or their
sacred title of Israel.

For us Christians it is enough to remember, besides, that
Judaea contains the places of our Lord’s Birth and Death,
with the scenes of His Temptation, His more painful
Ministry, and His Agony.

Judaea is very small. Even when you extend the sur-
face to the promised border at the sea, and include all of it

that is desert, it does not amount to more than

Her smallness.	...

2000 square miles, or the size of one of our
average counties.1 But Judaea, in the days of its indepen-
dence, never covered the whole Maritime Plain ; and even

1 Aberdeenshire is 1955 square miles; Perth, 2528; Cumberland, 1516;
Northumberland, 2015 ; Norfolk, 2017 ; Essex, 1413 ; Kent, 1515 ; Somerset,
1659 ; and Devon, 2015.The Borders and Bulwarks of Judcea	261

the Shephelah, as we have seen, was frequently beyond it.
Apart from Shephelah and Plain, Judaea was a region
55 miles long, from Bethel to Beersheba, and from 25 to
30 broad, or about 1350 square miles, of which nearly the
half was desert.

It ought not to be difficult to convey an adequate im-
pression of so small and so separate a province. The
centre is a high and broken table-land from two to three
thousand feet above the sea, perhaps thirty-five miles long
by twelve to seventeen broad.1 You will almost cover it
by one sweep of the eye. But surrounding this centre
are borders and bulwarks of extraordinary Her
variety and intricacy ; and as it is they which borders-
have so largely made the history of the land and the
culture of its Inhabitants, it will be better for us to survey
them, before we come to the little featureless plateau,
which they so lift and isolate from the rest of the world.
We begin with the most important of them—the Eastern.

I. East.—The Great Gulf with Jericho and
Engedi. The Entrance of Israel.

You cannot live in Judaea without being daily aware of
the presence of the awful deep which bounds it on the
east—the lower Jordan Valley and Dead Sea. The Dead Sea
From Bethel, from Jerusalem, from Bethlehem, Valley-
from Tekoa, from the heights above Hebron, and from
fifty points between, you look down into that deep : and

1 From the centre of the Wady Ali to the eastern base of the Mount of
Olives (1520 feet above the sea) is fourteen miles. From the Wady en Najil
on the Shephelah border to the descent from the plateau east of Mar Saba is
about seventeen miles ; and a line across Hebron from edge to edge of the
plateau gives about fourteen miles.262 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

you feel Judaea rising from it about you almost as a sailor
feels his narrow deck or a sentinel the sharp-edged platform
of his high fortress. From the hard limestone of the range
on which you stand, the land sinks swiftly and, as it seems,
shuddering through softer formations, desert and chaotic,
to a depth of which you cannot see the bottom—but you
know that it falls far below the level of the ocean—to the
coasts of a bitter sea. Across this emptiness rise the hills
of Moab, high and precipitous, and it is their bare edge,
almost unbroken, and with nothing visible beyond save a
castle or a crag, which forms the eastern horizon of Judaea.
The simple name by which that horizon was known to the
Jews—The Mountains of the Other-side, or the Mountains
of Those-Across 1—is more expressive than anything else
could be of the great vacancy between. The depth, the
haggard desert through which the land sinks into it, the
singularity of that gulf and its prisoned sea, and the high
barrier beyond, conspire to produce on the inhabitants of
Judaea a moral effect such as, I suppose, is created by no
other frontier in the world.

It was only, however, when we had crossed into Moab that
we fully appreciated the significance of that frontier in the
history of God’s separated people. The table-

Judaea and

Moab—a	land to the east of the Dead Sea is about the

same height as the table-land of Judaea to the
west, and is of almost exactly the same physical formation.
On both of them are landscapes from which it would be
impossible for you to gather whether you were in Judaea
or in Moab—impossible but for one thing, the feeling of
what you have to the east of you. To the east of Judaea
there is that great gulf fixed. But Moab to the east rolls

1 Dnay nn or -in.The Borders and Bulwarks of Judcea	263

off imperceptibly to Arabia: a few low hills, and no river
or valley, are all that lies between her pastures and the
great deserts, out of which, in every age, wild and hungry
tribes have been ready to swarm. Moab is open to the
east; Judah, or Judaea, with the same formation, and im-
posing the same habits of life on a kindred stock of men,
has a great gulf between herself and the east. In this fact
lies a very large part of the reason why she was chosen as
the home of God’s peculiar people.

The Wilderness of Judaea, which is piled up from the
beach of the Dead Sea to the very edge of the Central
Plateau, may be reserved for later treatment.

Passes through

Here it is only needful to ask what passes the wilderness
break up through it to the centre of the pro- of Judaea-
vince ? The answer is, that passes, strictly so called, do
not exist. There are many gorges torn by winter torrents
—between Jericho and Jebel Usdum at the south end of
the Dead Sea there cannot be fewer than twenty—but all
are too narrow and crooked to carry roads. Of real gate-
ways and roads into Judaea there are on this border only
five : and these are obviously determined not by lines
of valley, but by another feature which in this region is far
more indispensable to roads. That is the presence of an
oasis. The roads from the east into Judaea have to cross,
for from five to eight hours, a waterless desert; it is neces-
sary, therefore, that they start from the few well-watered
spots on its eastern edge. There are practically only
three of these : Jericho, ‘Ain Feshkah, some ten miles
south, and ‘Ain Jidi, or Engedi, eighteen miles further.
From Jericho there start into Judaea three roads, from
‘Ain Feshkah one, and from Engedi one.

The roads from Jericho—north-west to Ai and Bethel,264 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

south-west to Jerusalem, and south-south-west to the Lower
Kedron and Bethlehem—do not keep to any line of valley ;
Roads up for, as has been said, this flank of Judaea is
from Jericho. cut on]y by deep gorges, but for the most part
they follow the ridges between the latter. The most
northerly of these three routes into Judaea1 ascends behind
Jericho to the ridge north of the Kelt, follows it to Mich-
mash, and so by Ai to Bethel. This is evidently an ancient
road, and was probably the trade route between the Lower
Jordan and the coast, both in ancient and mediaeval times.2
It is the line of Israel’s first invasion, described in the
seventh and eighth chapters of Joshua ; and its fitness for
that is obvious, for it is open, and leads on to a broad
plateau in the centre of the country. The middle route of
the three is now the ordinary road from Jerusalem to
Jericho. It is impossible to think that an invading army
fearing opposition ever attempted its higher end.3 But it
is the shortest road from Jericho to Jerusalem, and there-
fore the usual pilgrim route in both directions. Pereans
and Galileans came up to the Temple by it : it was the path
of our Lord and His disciples, when He set His face stead-
fastly towards ferusalem ; and from then till now it has
been trodden in the opposite direction by pilgrims from all
lands to the scene of His baptism. When taken upwards,
a more hot and heavy way it is impossible to conceive—
between blistered limestone rocks, and in front the bare
hills piled high, without shadow or verdure. There is no

1 More northerly still a road goes up from Jericho by the first pass into the
more open Mount Ephraim. Its course is marked by Roman pavement past

‘Ain ed Duk, round Umm Sirah, and up the Wady Taiyibeh to et Taiyibeh, the
Biblical city of Ephraim. Seep. 352.	2 Seep. 177.

3 Pompey may have come this way, but more probably approached Jeru-
salem from the north : Josephus, xiv. Ant(. iv. 1.The Borders and Bulwarks of Judcea	265

water from Jericho till you reach the roots of the Mount of
Olives.1 Curious red streaks appear from time to time on
the stone, and perhaps account for the sanguinary names
which attach to the road—the present Red Khan, the
Chastel Rouge of the Crusaders, and the Tala‘at ed Dumm
or Ascent of Blood 2—but the crimes committed here make
these doubly deserved. The surrounding Arabs have
always found the pilgrims a profitable prey. The third
road3 from Jericho leaves the ‘Arabah about five miles
south of Jericho, and, coming up by El Muntar, crosses the
Kedron near Mar Saba. Thence one branch strikes north-
west to Jerusalem, and another south-west to Bethlehem ;
before they separate they are joined by a road from ‘Ain
Feshkah, the large oasis ten miles south of Road from
Jericho, on the Dead Sea coast. We are not cer- ‘Ain Feshkah.
tain of any invasion of Judaea by these avenues, unless Judah
and Simeon went up by one of them at the first occupation
of the land.4 But one or other was undoubtedly the road by
which Naomi brought Ruth, and down which David took
his family to the King of Moab.5 This double connection
of Bethlehem with Moab comes back to you as you ride
along these roads with the cliffs of Moab in sight. Moab
is visible from Bethlehem : when Ruth lifted her eyes from

1	‘Ain Haud or ‘Ain Shems, the Enshemesh of Josh. xv. 7.

2	Khan el Ahmar, the traditional site of the Inn of the Good Samaritan
(St. Luke x. 34). Tala'at ed Dumm is applied to a hill and fortress north-east
of the Khan, and to the wady which the road pursues thence towards Jericho.
It is doubtless the ancient Ma‘aleh Adummim (Josh. xv. 7, xviii. 17) on
the border between Judah and Benjamin. The fortress was the Crusaders’
Chastel Rouge (Murray’s Guide wrongly Tour Rouge, which stood near
Caesarea), or Citerne Rouge, built by the Templars for the succour of pilgrims,
and also called la Tour Maledoin. Rey, Colonies Pratiques, 387.

3	There is really a fourth between our second and third, which passes the
Mohammedan place of pilgrimage, Neby Musa.

4	Judges i. 3 ff,	5 I Sam, xxii, 3, 4,266 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

gleaning in the fields of Boaz, she saw her native land over
against her.

These roads then debouch from the Judaean hills, and
join at a little distance above the end of the Dead Sea.

Fords of Opposite their junction two fords cross the

Jordan. Jordan,1 which are by no means so easy as the
numerous fords opposite Mount Ephraim, yet are passable
for most of the year, and on the other side meet highways
from Gilead and Moab. A road also comes down the
‘Arabah on the west of Jordan, and another from Mount
Ephraim by ‘Ain ed Duk.

Follow these roads, passes, and fords to where they meet
at the foot of the Judaean hills; observe the streams breaking
from the hill-foot at their junction, and render-
ing possible an elaborate irrigation. Then,
where now but a few hovels and a tower on the edge of a
swamp mock your imagination, you will see a strong and
stately city rise in the midst of a wonderful fertility of
grove and garden. Jericho was the gateway of a province,
the emporium of a large trade, the mistress of a great palm
forest, woods of balsam, and very rich gardens. To earliest
Israel she was the City of Palms;2 to the latest Jewish
historian ‘a divine region,’ ‘fattest of Judaea.’3 Greeks
and Romans spread her fame, with her dates and balsam,
all over the world, and great revenue was derived from
her.4 Her year is one long summer ; she can soak herself

1	The Makhadet el Hajlah (near El Hajlah, the ancient Beth-hoglah,
Josh. xv. 6, xviii. 19, 21) and the Makh. el Henu.

2	Deut. xxxiv. 3 ; Judges i. 16, iii. 13 ; 2 Chron. xxviii. 15.

3	Josephus, iv. Wars, viii. 3 ; i. Wars, vi. 6. Cf. iv. Antt. vi. 1 ; xiv. Anti.
iv. 1 ; xv. Antt. iv. 2 ; i. Wars, xviii. 5.

4	Strabo, xvi. 2. 41. According to this, the palm forest was a hundred
stadia. Diod. Siculus, ii. 48. 9 ; cf. xix. 98. 4. Pliny, Hist. Nat. xiii. 4, who
says that the finest dates are those of Jericho, and notes that they are grownThe Borders and Bulwarks of Judcea 267

in water, and the chemicals with which her soil is charged
seem to favour her peculiar products. Like Bethshan, she
can make a swamp about her ; five miles in front is a river,
which, if she oppose, cannot be crossed ; and immediately
behind are her own hills, with half a dozen possible citadels.
Jericho is thus a city surrounded by resources. Her
Yet in war she has always been easily taken. weakness.
That her walls fell down at the sound of Joshua’s trumpets

in salt soil. Other Greek and Latin writers mention Jericho and its fruits;
cf. Horace, Epistles, ii. 2. 184 : ‘ Herodis palmetis pinguibus.’ Mark Antony
had given the region to Cleopatra, and Herod farmed it of her (xv. Anlt. iv. 2 ;

i.	Wars, xviii. 5); but in 30 B.c., by gift of Augustus, he got it to himself
(xv. Antt. vii. 3 ; i. Wars, xx. 3). He built there a palace, which Archelaus
rebuilt, baths and theatres. He fortified a citadel on the hill behind the city,
and called it Kypros, after his mother (xvi. Antt. v. 2 ; i. Wars, xxi. 4, 9 ;

ii.	Wars, xviii. 6). It is probably the present ruin Beit-Gubr or Qubr. Herod
lived much and died in Jericho. In our Lord’s time, Jericho was directly
under the Romans, who farmed its revenues. See Pressel’s Priscilla an
Sabina, a book in the form of letters from a Roman lady in Jericho, on the
imperial farms, to her friend at home, which gives a very vivid idea of the
country at that time. Zaccheus was either connected with the imperial farms,
or sat in this border town at receipt of custom—more probably the former,
since he proposed to restore the money he had exacted, a task impossible to a
mere toll-keeper with a passenger constituency. In Josephus’ time, as we
have seen, the region still flourished. In the fourth century there were many
palms (‘Descriptio Orbis Totius,’ Muller, Geogr. GraciMinores, ii. 5I3)- The
Christian population was mainly of monks and anchorites, with keepers of
inns for pilgrims; and under these influences cultivation seems to have
declined. In the seventh century Adamnan, and in the eighth another,
still saw palm groves; but at the Moslem invasion the town was deserted.
The Saracens revived the culture, and introduced sugar, which the Crusaders
found growing (Rey, Col. Franques, etc., 248). There are ruins still called
Tawahin-ez-Zukker, ‘sugar-mills,’ not far from the fount of Elisha. The
revenues were great (Will, of Tyre, xv. 27) at the time of the Latin kingdom.
There were still palms. From the Crusades onwards, the place was more
and more neglected, till it was reduced to its present pitiful condition. The
last palm was seen by Robinson in 1838 ; it is now gone. The present village
occupies the site neither of the Old Testament nor of the New Testament
Jericho. The former lay round ‘Ain es Sultan ; the latter to the south of
this, on the Wady Kelt. Robinson, Bib. Pes. i. Cf. Zschokke, Topographie
der west lichen Jordans'au, Jerusalem, 1866.268 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

is no exaggeration, but the soberest summary of all her
history. Judaea could never keep her. She fell to Northern
Israel till Northern Israel perished.1 She fell to Bacchides
and the Syrians.2 She fell to Aristobulus when he advanced
on his brother Hyrcanus and Judaea.3 She fell without a
blow to Pompey,4 and at the approach of Herod and again
of Vespasian her people deserted her.5 It is also interesting
to note that three invaders of Judaea—Bacchides, Pompey,
and Vespasian—took Jericho before they attempted Jeru-
salem, although she did not lie upon their way to the
latter, and that they fortified her, not, it is to be supposed,
as a base of operations, so much as a source of supplies.
This weakness of Jericho was due to two causes. An
open pass came down on her from Northern Israel, and
from this both part of her water supply could be cut off,
and the hills behind her could be occupied. But besides
this, her people seem never to have been distinguished for
bravery; and, indeed, in that climate, how could they ?
Enervated by the great heat, which degrades all the
inhabitants of the Ghor, and unable to endure on their
bodies aught but linen,6 it was impossible they could be
warriors, or anything but irrigators, paddlers in water and
soft earth. We forget how near neighbours they had been
to Sodom and Gomorrah. "No great man was born in
Jericho; no heroic deed was ever done in her. She has
been called ‘the key’ and ‘the guardhouse’ of Jud;ea ; she
was only the pantry. She never stood a siege, and her
inhabitants were always running away.

1 See last chapter.	2 i Macc. ix. 50-53 ; xiii. Antt. i. 3.

3	xiv. Antt. i. 2 ; cf. xiii. ; ib. xvi. 3.

4	xiv. Antt. iv. I.	5 xiv. Antt. xv. 3 ; iv. Wars, viii. 2, ix. I.

6 iv. Wars, viii. 3.The Borders and Bulwarks of Judcea	269

The next road from the East into Judah is that which
leads up through the wilderness from Engedi.1 The oasis
of Engedi itself is the cause of this road, for

The Pass

there are other gorges breaking upwards from
the Dead Sea, which are not so difficult as the rocky stair
that climbs from it. Here again we see what we saw at
Jericho, and to a less degree at ‘Ain Feshkah—that on this
side of Judaea the presence of water and of gardens is more
necessary to a road than any open pass.

He who has been to Engedi will always fear lest he
exaggerate its fertility to those who have not. The oasis
bursts upon him from one of the driest and and 0asjs
most poisoned regions of our planet. Either ofEnsedl-
he has ridden across Jeshimon, seven hours without a
water-spring, three with hardly a bush, when suddenly,
over the edge of a precipice, 400 feet below him, he sees a
river of verdure burst from the rock, and scatter itself,
reeds, bush, trees and grass, down other 300 feet to a
broad mile of gardens by the beach of the blue sea ; or he
has come along the coast, through evil sulphur smells,2
with the bitter sea on one side, the cliffs of the desert on
the other, and a fiery sun overhead, when round a corner
of the cliffs he sees the same broad fan of verdure open
and slope before him. He passes up it, through gardens
of cucumber and melon, small fields of wheat, and -a
scattered orchard, to a brake of reeds and high bushes,
with a few great trees. He hears what, perhaps, he has
not heard for days—the rush of water ; and then through

1	‘ The well of the wild goat; ’ modern name, ‘Ain-Jidi.

2	South of Engedi we failed to find Tristram’s hot sulphur springs where
they are marked on the Survey Map, but the sulphurous smell was very appa-
rent, and the gravel badly stained. Heat 940 in shade of thorn-bush, in spite
of a strong breeze.2 70 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land,

the bush he sees the foam of a little waterspout, six feet
high and almost two broad, which is only one branch of a
pure, fresh stream that breaks from some boulders above
on the shelf at the foot of the precipices. The verdure and
water, so strange and sudden, with the exhilaration of the
great view across the sea, produce the most generous
impressions of this oasis, and tempt to the exaggeration
of its fertility. The most enthusiastic, however, could not
too highly rate its usefulness as a refuge, for it lies at the
back of a broad desert, and is large enough to sustain an
army. Its own caves are insignificant, but in the neigh-
bourhood there is one‘vast grotto.’1 More obvious are
the sites of ancient ‘ strongholds,’ such as David built; and
over the neighbourhood of the stream are scattered the
ruins of masonry—remains of the town which Solomon
perhaps fortified,2 which was the centre of a toparchy
under the Romans,3 still a large village in the fourth
century,4 and during the Crusades gathered round a con-

1	Guided by a negro slave of the Rushaideh Arabs, who own and cultivate
the oasis, I searched for caves. There is a tiny one on the terrace, where the
water springs, and three more lower down, almost on the level of the plain.
According to my guide, these were all the caves. None of them was large
enough to have been the scene of such a story as I Sam. xxiv. The strong-
holds of David (xxiii. 29, and xxiv. 22) must have lain by the water, and the
cave is described below them (xxiv. 22). Tristram (Land of Israel, p. 286)
describes ‘ a fairy grotto of vast size.’

2	In 1 Kings ix. 18, the Hebrew text reads Tamar, while the Hebrew
margin and 2 Chron. viii. 4 read Tadmor. The latter is evidently not correct,
for the town is described as in the wilderness in the land. Tamar, therefore,
must be sought for somewhere in the wilderness of Judsea, and where more
suitably than in this frontier village of Hazazon Tamar ? Perhaps the Tamar
of Ezek. xlvii. 19, xlviii. 28, is the same place.

3	Josephus, iii. Wars, iii. 5, but omitted by Pliny in his list of the toparchies,
Hist. Nat. v. 14. 70.

4	Eusebius, Onomast., art. ’E7-ya55i: teal vvv lari KUfiT] fieylary) 'lovSaluv.
Both Eusebius and Jerome place it vaguely in the wilderness, in the Aulon,
or Plain of Jericho, and on the Dead Sea. Cf. Ptolemy, v. 16. 8.The Borders and Bulwarks ofJtides a	271

vent, with vineyards celebrated all through Syria.1 In
ancient times Engedi was also famous, like Jericho, for its
palms and balsam.2 From the former it derived one of
its names, Hazazon-Tamar—‘ Hazazon of the Palm’—but
this tree has now disappeared as wholly as the vine. If
we thus feel the fitness of Engedi for a refuge, we can also
appreciate why it should rank only second to Jericho as a
gateway into Judaea and a source of supplies for the march
through the wilderness behind. The way up from it is
very steep. It is not a pass so much as a staircase, which
has had partly to be hewn and partly to be built over the
rocks.3 When you have climbed it, you stand on a rolling
plateau. The road breaks into two branches, Roads iniand
both of them covered in parts with ancient from Engedl>
pavement. One turns away north-west by the Wady
Husaseh—in which name the first part of Hazazon-Tamar,
perhaps, survives—to Herod’s castle of Herodeion, Beth-
lehem and Jerusalem. It is a. wild, extremely difficult
road, and almost never used by caravans.4 The other
branch turns south-west to Yuttah and Hebron.5 This
is the proper route from Engedi into Judaea. As the roads
from Jericho make for Bethel or Jerusalem, so this from
Engedi makes for Hebron. Hebron and Engedi have

1	Rey, Colonies Franqices, 384. It was under Hebron. ‘J’y ai retrouve
en 1858,’says Rey, ‘ des restes de constructions meduevales.’ Scott, it will
be remembered, places here one of the episodes of the Talisman.

2	Josephus, ix. Anti. i. 2.

3	This staircase is only some 500 feet, but, owing to its steepness and
narrowness, which allow the animals of a caravan to convey up it only a
fraction of their usual burdens, our mules took two hours to bring, our
baggage up.

4	The salt-carriers from Jebel Usdum to Jerusalem seem, from answers
they made to our inquiries, to prefer to go on further north, before turning
up to Jerusalem.

5	For a full description, see Robinson, Bib. Res. ii. pp. 209 ff.272 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

always been closely connected. David came down to
Engedi from the Hebron neighbourhood, and the Crusad-
ing convent of Engedi was under the Bishop of Saint
Abraham.1

In the reign of Jehoshaphat, the Moabites and Ammon-
ites, with other allies, invaded Judaea by Engedi2—a route
The Valley which they chose, not necessarily because they
of Blessing. had come round the south of the Dead Sea,
but because Jericho at this time belonged not to Judaea
but to Israel. From Engedi they followed neither of the
roads just described, but struck up between them, through
the wilderness of Tekoay towards the village of this name.
It is not a difficult route for an army—certainly less steep
than any other part of the approach to the Central Plateau
from the desert.3 They came by the ascent of Ziz. Jeho-
shaphat went out to meet them in the wilderness of Jeruel,
but found them already slaughtered and dispersed in a
valley, which was therefore called by the relieved Judaeans
Berachah, or ‘ Blessing.’ All these places are as unknown
as the agents of the mysterious slaughter. The latter is
said to have been effected by arnbushments, and truly, in
that tangle of low hills and narrow water-courses, enough
men might hide to surprise and overcome a large army.
The Bedouin camps are unseen till you are just upon
them, and the bare banks of a gully, up the torrent-bed
of which a caravan is painfully making its way, may be
dotted in two minutes with armed men.4 It was probably

] The Crusaders’ name for Hebron. See Rey, loc. cit.

2	2 Chron. xx.

3	We followed it, for the sake of our mules, in preference to the rough road
towards Bethlehem.

4	We had experience of this on our way from Engedi to Tekoa. In the
afternoon we were coming up a long winding gully, with no living creature inThe Borders and Bulwarks of Judcsa	273

some desert tribes which thus overcame Jehoshaphat’s
enemies before he arrived. The narrative is very obscure,
but through it we can clearly see the characteristics of this
region—the tangled hills, the ambushes, the sudden sur-
prise, the bare valley strewn with the slain and their spoil.

South of Engedi, on the dreary desert as it falls to the
precipices of the Dead Sea, the traveller still comes across
traces of a great military road. We found Theroad
these fragments in a line making straight for from Masada-
the edge of the precipice above Masada, but how they had
been continued down the cliff we could not discover. It
had been a road suitable for wheeled vehicles, but now
even mules can scarcely descend to Masada. This road
has for our present task no importance. It was not an
entrance to the land, but a purely inland passage con-
necting the Herodian fortresses of Masada and Herodium.

I have purposely refrained till now from touching upon
Israel’s entrance into Western Palestine, which The incoming
took place across this border. But, after what of Israe1,
we have just seen, we are in a position to judge how far
the geography of the latter corresponds to the narratives
in Joshua and Judges. These narratives are compiled
from several sources, which, on some points, differ in
their testimony.1 But they agree as to their main facts :

sight save a shepherd on a height at a distance. He gave a cry, which was
answered from a farther hill, and, in an incredibly short time, we were sur-
rounded by armed and yelling Arabs, on foot and horseback. They belonged
to the Rushaideh tribe, and the cause of their anger was that we had taken as
guides through their land some of the Jahalin. We invited the chiefs to
dinner at Tekoa, paid two dollars for toll, and were not further troubled.

1 For instance, as to the origin of the name Gilgal. On the other hand, it
is an open question whether we find such a difference, amounting to a contra-
diction, between Josh. vi. 24-27, which belongs to the great document of
the Hexateuch, J E, and relates how Israel burnt Jericho and all that was

S274 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

that Israel’s invasion of Western Palestine was effected
by the nation as a whole, and under the leadership of
Joshua; that it was an invasion by siege and battle, that
the crossing of the Jordan took place near Jericho, that
Jericho was the first town taken from the Canaanites, that
Joshua set the central camp at Gilgal, and that thence
Israel divided into two branches, one of which—Judah and
Simeon with the Kenites—attacked Central and Southern
Judaea, but the other, the House of Joseph under Joshua,
went up to Ai, Bethel, and Mount Ephraim.

The truth of this narrative of Israel’s invasion has been
denied in almost every particular by Stade, who maintains
Stade’s that ah Israel did not invade Western Palestine
Theories. one tjm6j that Joshua did not lead them,
that they did not wage war on the Canaanites, and that
they did not cross in the region of Jericho. There will be
found, in an Appendix to this volume, an attempt to show
the baselessness of the presuppositions from which Stade
starts this theory,—so singularly opposed to the only
traditions we possess on the subject,—and there will also
be found detailed objections to his arguments.1 Here it is
sufficient to point out how the evidence of the geography
we have just been surveying is—as far as it can go—

therein, and Joshua cursed the rebuilder of it (a curse of which I Kings xvi.
34 narrates the fulfilment), and Judges iii. 13, from a different document,
which tells how Eglon of Moab smote Israel and possessed the City of Palm-
trees. Of course, it is possible to attempt to solve this apparent contradic-
tion by emphasising the fact that Jericho has changed its site more than once;
and that Judges iii. 13 speaks of a Jericho which had risen on another site
from that cursed by Joshua. But there is no sign of this, and, on the data
before us, it seems more probable that the writer of Judges iii. 13 was un-
acquainted with the facts in Joshua vi. 24-27.

1 See Appendix 11. Joshua’s historical reality is supported by the fact that
he is mentioned not only in Document E, as Stade avers, but in Document J
as well.The Borders and Bulwarks ofJudes a	275

against Stade’s theory, and in harmony with the main lines
of the biblical narrative. Let us bear in mind the limits
of geographical evidence. It cannot absolutely prove a nar-
rative to be correct, but if its data agree with the line the
narrative takes, especially if the narrative (like the one
before us) has come down along several lines of tradition,
it must create a great presumption in favour of the narra-
tive. Again, it may prove other and rival versions of the
events, which the narrative describes, to be improbable or
even absurd, and in that case, of course, it lends the
narrative itself additional support. This is what geo-
graphy does in the issue between Stade’s theory and the
biblical account of Israel’s invasion of Western Palestine.
Stade’s theory fits the geographical conditions neither on
the east bank nor on the west bank of Jordan.

Stade declares that Israel cannot have crossed at Jericho,
because the Plain of Shittim opposite Jericho then be-
longed to Moab ; but it is generally admitted, And the
even by critics most in sympathy with Stade,1 Ge°sraPhy-
that Moab was at the time south of the Arnon, and that
Israel occupied all to the north of this. It is true that later
on Moab did hold the country opposite Jericho, but this
proves that the tradition that Israel crossed there could
not have arisen at the late date to which Stade assigns it.
Again, when he maintains that Israel could not have
beaten the Canaanites in war on the Plain of Jordan, we
must point to the singular fact we have already shown,
that Jericho never did stand a siege all down her history.
But the strongest argument against Stade’s theory lies in
the double direction which the invasion is said to have
taken from Jericho. All agree that Israel won a footing
1 E.g., Wellhausen, Hist. p. 5.276 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

on two parts of the Central Range—Mount Ephraim and
the part opposite the Dead Sea—between which there lay
for some time a belt of Canaanite country. But from
what centre except Jericho could these separate positions
be equally reached ? Certainly not from the Jabbok ; it is
almost inconceivable that if Judah crossed at the Jabbok,
as, according to Stade, the rest of the tribes did,1 she
fought her wars so far south as the Negeb of Judaea.

On the other hand, the main lines of the biblical narra-
tive are in harmony with the geographical data. The
The Biblical crossing of Jericho is a possible and a likely
andrh^Geo- tMnt>:2 the quick conquest of Jericho is in
graphy. harmony with all we have learned of that city’s
physical characteristics and her failure throughout history
to stand any siege;3 the double direction of the sub-
sequent invasion, north-west and south-west, agrees
absolutely with the position of the standing camp of Israel
near Jericho at Gilgal, and with the lines of road which we
have been following from Jericho to the interior; while,
finally, the return of Joshua to Gilgal after the first con-
quests on the Central Range,4 and the authority which, it
is to be presumed, Israel continued to exercise from
Gilgal upon the Central Range, has an interesting analogy

1	It has been thought by some that Judah did not enter Palestine across
the Jordan with the rest of the tribes, but, along with the Kenites, came up
from Kadesh through the Negeb. Stade will not allow more than a perhaps
to this theory (Gesck. 132; he says nothing of it in his account of Judah
157-160). Oort has adopted it in his Atlas. But every geographical indication
goes to show that Judah entered her territory from the north, her first seats
being Bethlehem and Baal-Judah (Kiriath Jearim), and that only later did she
come south to Hebron.

2	Meyer, whose analysis of the Documents (Z A T W, I.) is unsparing,
firmly believes in this part of the narrative.

3	The bulk of Joshua iv., describing the fall of Jericho, belongs to the two

oldest documents J E.	4 Josh. x. 43.The Borders and Bulwarks of Judeea	277

in the description (from the same source)1 of the district of
Gilgal, as a centre of Canaanite authority over the Central
Range before Israel’s time; while both facts are seen to
be perfectly possible in face of the open passes that lead up
from this part of the Jordan Valley into Mount Ephraim.

The route by which Judah and Simeon went up to their
lots 2 cannot, of course, be definitely traced by us. But we
may notice that two of the most ancient settle-

The entrance

ments of Judah—Bethlehem and Hebron3— of Judah and

Simeon.

correspond to the two great routes from the
Jordan Valley into Central Judaea, by ‘Ain Feshkah and
Engedi. With them went up the nomadic tribe which at
Sinai had attached itself to the fortunes of Israel. And
the sons of Hobab, the Kenite, brother-in-law of Moses, went
up out of the Town of Palms with the children

r	.	TheKenites.

of fudah into the wilderness of Judah at the

going down of Arad, and they went and dwelt with the

Amalekite.4 That is to say, while the main Judaean stock

1	Deut. x(. 30, which is from the same hand as Josh. x. 43.

2	Judges i. Meyer and Budde have shown the true course and connection
of this chapter (mainly from J). See Budde, Ri. u. Sam. 1-24, 84-89.

* Judges i. 3-11.

4 Judges iii. 16. The corrupt Hebrew text must be amended in some such
way as above. See Meyer and Hollenberg (Z A T W, 1.). Budde, Ri. u. Sam.
9-11 and 86, Kittel, Gesch. 242, 243. There is no reason to omit sons of as
Budde does ; it is justified by different LXX. sources, and the passage, from
the plural verb in the first clause to the singular verbs in the second, need give
no trouble. That a proper name has fallen out of the Hebrew text is obvious.
Brother-in-law needs it, and LXX. mss. give us a choice of two, of which
Hobab is to be preferred in this J Document. Kittel is right in rejecting
Meyer’s suggestion of and Qain. The going down of Arad, LXX. (Vatican
text) is to be preferred to the Massoretic Negeb or south of Arad, for, as Budde
says, if Arad is in the wilderness of Judah, it cannot be connected with the
Negeb. In v. 17, Budde and Kittel rightly retain Arad. All agree with
Hollenberg that DJ1H people must read	‘Amalek or Budde more cor-

rectly 'ptayn, the Amalekite. The LXX. has ‘Amalek, and the reading is in
conformity with I Sam. xv. 5 ff.278 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

settled on the arable ground, and in cities, and inter-
married with the Canaanites, the Kenites, true to their
nomadic origin, turned into the wilderness of Judah, and
dwelt with the Amalekites. The going down of Arad is
the south-eastern buttress of the Judaean plateau, at the
head of the gorge which runs up from Masada, the Wady
Seyyal. The name Arad still exists there seventeen miles
south-east of Hebron. The rocky dwelling of the Kenite,
visible from Nebo,1 cannot be strictly identified. It is
probably not the heights of Yekin, to which it has been
assigned,2 for those are not sufficiently in the desert.
Engedi itself is possible. The stronghold and oasis must
have been in possession of somebody : to-day they are
owned and cultivated by the Rushaideh, a Bedawee tribe
like the Kenites.

II. The Southern Border: the Negeb.

The survey of the southern border of Judaea leads us
out upon a region of immense extent and of great historical
interest—the Negeb, translated The South in our version,8

1	Num. xxiv. 21 ff.

2	P.E.F. Red. Map, 1891. Henderson, p. 71. The name has no real
similarity.

3	E.g., Gen. xiii. 1 ; I Sam. xxx. 1 ; Ps. cxxvi. 4. The Negeb extended

from the Arabah to the coast, and was variously named according to the
people on the north of it. There was the TllDn 3, or the part to the south
of Philistia ;	"j, south of the Shephelah ; 3^3 *3, south of Hebron

(there is a W. el Kulab about ten miles south-west of Hebron); the !H)rP '3 or
min'^ which covered the same central portion, and the '3j5n *3 which
was the eastmost part to the south of the seats of the Kenites (1 Sam. xxvii.
10, xxx. 14, 2 Sam. xxiv. 7). It is once used for Judah, Ezek. xxi. 2 f. (Heb.);
in the Book of Daniel it stands for Egypt, viii. 9, xi. 5 ff. As D' Sea is used in
Palestine for the West, so Negeb came to be used generically for the South;
the south border, Josh. xv. 2, 4, xviii. 19; south of Gennesareth, Josh. xi. 2,
cf. Zech. xiv. 10. The name occurs several times on the Egyptian monu-
ments : W. Max Miiller, Asien u. Europa nach. altagypt. Detiktn., 148.The Borders and Bulwarks of Judcea	279

but literally meaning the Dry or Parched Land. The
character and the story of the Negeb require a separate
study: here we are concerned with it only as the southern
border of Judaea.

From Hebron the Central Range lets itself slowly down
by broad undulations, through which the great Wady
Khulil1 winds as far as Beersheba, and then,

Between

as Wady es-Seba, turns sharply to the west, Hebron and

.	Beersheba.

finding the sea near Gaza. It is a country
visited by annual rains, with at least a few perennial
springs, and in the early summer abundance of flowers
and corn. We descended from Hebron to Dhaheriyah,
probably the site of Kiriath Sepher, over moors and
through wheat-fields, arranged in the narrower wadies in
careful terraces, but lavishly spread over many of the
broader valleys. A thick scrub covered most of the
slopes. There were olive groves about the villages, but
elsewhere few trees. We passed a stream and four
springs,2 two with tracts of marshy ground, and, though it
was the end of April, some heavy showers fell. South of
Dhaheriyah—which may be regarded as the frontier town
between the hill-country and the Negeb3—the soil is more

1	El-Khulil, ‘ the friend,’ that is, of God, a title of Abraham, is also the
modern name of his city, Hebron, near which the Wady starts.

2	On either side of the Seil el Dilbeh is a spring; on the north, the ‘Ain
Hegireh, with a shadoof for irrigation, and on the south the ‘Ain Dilbeh, a
square pool covered with weeds. These have been supposed to be the upper
and nether springs granted by Caleb to his daughter, to compensate for the
dryness of her domain in the Negeb (Judges i. 14, 15). It is a very fertile
valley here, and the hills can feed many flocks. But there are springs farther
south than these two, and a stream running in April in the Wady Hafayer.

3	Edh-Dhaheriyah is probablyDebir, known also as Kiriath Sepher (Josh. xv.
15), which LXX. translate ir6\is ypafifidruv, city of scribes. Moore (quoted in
Siegfr. Stade) suggests “ISD JYHp, or Border-town. But why not Pay-town, or

Toll-town? (after ISD payment, 2 Chron. ii. 16, Heb. ; 17, Eng.) It lies280 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

bare, but travellers coming up from the desert delight in
the verdure which meets them as soon as they have
passed Beersheba and the Wady es-Seba.1 The disposi-
tion of the land—the gentle descent cut by the broad
Wady—and its fertility render it as open a frontier, and
as easy an approach to Judaea, as it is possible to conceive.
But it does not roll out upon the level desert. South of

South of Beersheba, before the level desert is reached

Beersheba. ancj region Qf rQads from Arabia to Egypt
and Philistia, there lie sixty miles of mountainous country,
mostly disposed in ‘steep ridges running east and west,’2
whose inaccessibleness is further certified by the character
of the tribe that roam upon it. Wilder sons of Ishmael
are not to be found on all the desert.3 The vegetation,
even after rain, is very meagre, and in summer totally
disappears. ‘ No great route now leads, or ever has
led, through this district; ’4 but the highways which
gather upon the south of it from Egypt, Sinai, the Gulf of
Akabah, and Arabia, are thrust by it either to the east up
the Wady ‘Arabah to the Dead Sea, or to the west towards
Gaza and Philistia. Paths, indeed, skirt this region, and

on a high-road. Another name is HDD ITHp Kirialh Sannah (Josh. xv. 49),
thorn-town (?), perhaps only a misreading of Kiriath Sepher, since LXX. still
have rr6\ts ypa/ifiiruv. It is at least worth noting that the Hebrew common
noun of the same spelling as the name of the town, Til or Debir, means
the back-part,, or part behind ; while Dh&heriyah may mean that also. The
town must have lain in the neighbourhood of Hebron, and on the hills
(Josh. xi. 21 ; xv. 48). It had been a chief town of the Canaanites (xii.
13), and was set apart for the priests (xxi. 1, 15), but might also be said to be
on the Negeb, xv., cf. v. 15 with v. 19 (though this does not necessarily
follow). Now Dhaheriyah does suit this double designation. It is on the
hills, but at the back of them, when coming from Judah, and just over the
edge of the very fertile country.

1 Robinson, B.K. i. 305, 306.	- lb. 275.

3	The Azazimeh ; cf. Trumbull’s Kadesh Barnea.

4	Robinson, B.R. i. 275.The Borders and Bulwarks of Judcea 281

even cross its corners, but they are not war-paths. When
Judah’s frontier extended to Elath, Solomon’s cargoes
from Ophir,1 and the tribute of Arabian kings to Jehosha-
phat,2 were doubtless carried through it. When any one
power held the whole land, merchants traversed it from
Petra to Hebron or Gaza,3 or skirted it by the Roman
road that ran up the west of it from Akabah to Jerusalem ;4
and even whole tribes might drift across it in days when
Judah had no inhabitants to resist them. When the
Jews came back from exile, they found Edomites settled
at least as far north as Hebron. But no army of invasion,
knowing that opposition awaited them upon the Judaean
frontier, would venture across those steep and haggard
ridges, especially when the Dead Sea and Gaza routes lie
so convenient on either hand, and lead to regions so much
more fertile than the Judaean plateau.

Hence we find Judaea almost never invaded from the
south. Chedorlaomer’s expedition, on its return from
the desert of Paran, swept north by the The Negeb
‘Arabah to the cities of the plain, sacking as a frontier-
Engedi by the way, but leaving Hebron untouched.5
Israel themselves were repulsed seeking to enter the
Promised Land by this frontier;6 and, perhaps most
significant of all, the invasion by Islam, though its chief

1 1 Kings ix. 26-28.	2 2 Chron. xvii. 11.

3	As they do to this day. See p. 183.

4	As shown in the Tabula Peutingeriana.	0 Gen. xiv.

6 The theory that either the whole tribes of Judah and Simeon, or the

Kenites, did not cross the Jordan like the rest of Israel, but came up through

the Negeb, has absolutely no evidence to support it beyond the fact that for
a time Judah was separated from the other tribes by a Canaanite belt crossing
the range in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem; and this is satisfactorily
explained, as we have seen, by the double and far-parting entrance into the
land at Jericho. See pp. 276 ff.282 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

goal may be said to have been the Holy City of Jerusalem,
and though its nearest road to this lay past Hebron,
swerved to east and west, and entered, some of it by Gaza,
and some, like Israel, across Jordan. The most likely
foes to swarm upon Judah by the slopes of Hebron were
the natives of this wild desert, the Arabians, or, as they
were called from the Red Sea1 to Philistia,2 the Amalekites ;
but it is to be remarked that though they sometimes
invaded the Negeb,3 they must have been oftener attracted,
as they still are, to the more fertile and more easily over-
run fields of the Philistines. It was nine furlongs from
famnia that Judas Maccabeus defeated in a great battle
the nomads of Arabia ;4 and the proper harbour of the
desert and emporium of Arabian trade was, as we have
seen, not Hebron but Gaza.5 The best defences of a road
or a frontier against these impetuous swarms of warriors
are strong towers, such as still protect the great Hajj road
from Syria to Mecca from the Bedouin,6 and of these Uzziah
built a number in the desert to the south and east of Judah.7
The symbolic use of towers in the Bible is well known.

The most notable road across this border of Judah was
the continuation of the great highway from Bethel, which
The roads kept the watershed to Hebron, and thence came
of the Negeb. ^own Beersheba. From here it struck due
south across the western ridges of the savage highland
district, and divided into several branches. One, the
Roman road already noticed, curved round the south of
the highland district to Akabah and Arabia; another,
the way perhaps of Elijah when he fled from Jezebel,8 and

1 Exod. xvii. 8.	2 I Sam. xxx. I.

3 i Chron. iv. 43.	4 2 Macc. xii. 11.

6	See p. 182 ff.	6 Cf. Doughty, Arabia Deserla, i. 13.

7	2 Chron. xxvi. 10.	8 1 Kings xix.The Borders and Bulwarks of Judcea	283

much used by mediaeval and modern pilgrims, crossed to
Sinai; while a third struck direct upon Egypt, the way to
Shur. By this last Abraham passed and repassed through
the Negeb ;1 Hagar, the Egyptian slave-woman, fled from
her mistress, perhaps with some wild hope of reaching her
own country ;2 and Jacob went down into Egypt with his
wagons.3 In times of alliance between Egypt and Judah,
this was the way of communication between them. So
that fatal embassy must have gone from Jerusalem, which
Isaiah describes as struggling in the land of trouble and
anguish, whence are the young lion and the old lion, the
viper and fiery flying serpent;4 and so, in the time of the
Crusades, those rich caravans passed from Cairo to Saladin
at Jerusalem, one of which Richard intercepted near
Beersheba.5 It is an open road, but a wild one, and was
never, it would seem, used for the invasion of Judaea from
Egypt.6 The nearer way to the most of Syria from
Egypt lay, as we have seen, along the coast, and, passing
up the Maritime Plain, left the hill-country of Judaea to
the east.

This, then, was the southern frontier of Judah, in itself
an easy access, with one trunk-road, but barred by the

1	Gen. xiii. I.

2	Gen. xvi. 7. The well was called Be'er Lahai Roi= The Well of the
Living One who seeth me, but it may be The Well called ‘ He that seetk me
liveth’ (Web), behold, it is between Kadesh and Bered (for the latter the
Targum Ps. Jonathan gives Khalutza, i.e. the present Khalasah, ruins thirteen
miles south of Beersheba). Twelve miles north-west of ‘Ain Kadis is ‘Ain el
Muweileh, which Rowlands says is pronounced Moilahhi by the Arabs, and
thus it is suggested, is Ma-lehayi-rai, or ‘water of the living one seeing’
(P.E.F.Q., 1884, 177).

3	Gen. xlvi. 1, 5 f.	4 Isa. xxx. 6.	5 See p. 235.

6 Unless Shishak came up this way. In his lists of conquests occur some

names in the Negeb, but not far enough south to prove that he took this road.

See Maspero in Trans. Viet. Inst. ; W. Max Muller, Asien u. Europa, 148.284 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

frontier—
real and
ideal.

great desert ridges to the south of it, and enjoying even
greater security from the fact of its more lofty and barren
The Southern position between two regions of such attrac-
tiveness to invaders as the Valley of the Jordan
and the Plain of Philistia. Before we leave
this region, it is well to notice that the broad barrier of
rough highlands to the south of Beersheba represents the
difference between the ideal and the practical borders of
the Holy Land. Practically the land extended from Dan
to Beersheba, where, during the greater part of history,
the means of settled cultivation came to an end ; but the
ideal border was the River of Egypt, the present Wady
el Arish, whose chief tributary comes right up to the foot
of the highlands south of Beersheba, and passes between
them and the level desert beyond.

Of all names in Palestine there are hardly any better
known than Beersheba. Nothing could more aptly illus-
trate the defencelessness of these southern
slopes of Judah than that this site which marked
the frontier of the land was neither a fortress nor a gateway,
but a cluster of wells on the open desert. But, like Dan,
at the other end of the land, Beersheba was a sanctuary.
These two facts—its physical use to their flocks, its holi-
ness to themselves—are strangely intermingled in the
stories of the Patriarchs, whose herdsmen strove for its
waters ; who themselves plant a tamarisk, and call on the
name of Jehovah, the everlasting God. The two great
narratives of the Pentateuch differ in describing the origin
of Beersheba. The one imputes it to Abraham, the other,
in very similar circumstances, to Isaac.1 The meaning of

Beersheba.

1 Gen. xxi. 22-32, which imputes it to Abraham, belongs to the Document
E ; but Gen. xxvi. 26-33, v- 33» which imputes it to Isaac, belongs to J.The Borders and Bulwarks of Judcea	285

the name as it stands might either be the Well of Seven
or the Well of (the) Oath, and in one passage both etymo-
logies seem to be struggling for decision,1 though the latter
prevails. There are seven wells there now, and to the
north, on the hills that bound the valley, are scattered
ruins nearly three miles in circumference. Beersheba was
a place of importance under Samuel ; his sons judged
there.2 Elijah fled to Beersheba.3 It was still a sanctuary
in the eighth century, and frequented even by Northern
Israel.4 During the separation of the kingdoms the for-
mula, from Dan to Beersheba, became from Geba to Beer-
sheba,5 or from Beersheba to Mount Ephraim.6 On the
return from exile, Beersheba was again peopled by Jews,
and the formula ran from Beersheba to the valley of
Hinnom? In Roman times Beersheba was ‘ a very large
village ’ with a garrison.8 It was the seat of a Christian
bishopric.9 The Crusaders did not come so far south,
and confused Beersheba with Beit-Jibrin.10

South of Beersheba, for thirty miles, the country,
though mostly barren, is sprinkled with ruins of old
villages, gathered round wells. They date mostly from
Christian times, and are eloquent in their testimony to

1	Gen. xxi. 22-31 a obviously implies the meaning to be the Well of Seven.
But 31^-32 more strongly says that it means the Well of the Oath. It
almost seems as if two accounts were here mingled ; and, though there is no
linguistic proof of this, all the passage from 22 to 32 belonging to E, one is
inclined to extend J back from 33, 34 to 31A Stade thinks the meaning
Seven Wells was the ancient Canaanite one (the form in that sense being
un-Hebraic), and that the Well of the Oath was what the Hebrews changed
it to in conformity with their syntax, Gesck. i. 127. LXX., Gen. xxi. 31, <ppiap
UpKicrfJLOv, xlvi. 1, r6 tppiap rod SpKov.

2 1 Sam. viii. 2.	3 1 Kings xix. 3.	4 Amos v. 5, viii. 14.

6 2 Kings xxiii. 8.	6 2 Chron. xix. 4.	7 Neh. xi. 27, 30.

8	Euseb. and Jerome, Onom. art. ~&t]pcra§e4t Bersabee.

9	Socrates, Hist. Eccl.	10 See p. 232.286 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

the security which the Roman Government imposed on
even the most lawless deserts. The only Old Testament
other towns s^es are important are the city of Salt1
of the Negeb. ancj Moladah;2 Zephath or Hormah and
Ziklag, all unknown ; Rehoboth is probably Ruheibeh.
The ascent of ‘Akrabbim was on the south-east corner
of Judaea, going up from the ‘Arabah valley, near the
end of the Dead Sea.3

One other thing we must note before we leave this
border of Judah. Just as on her eastern border Judah
was in touch with the Arab Kenites, so on the Negeb she
touched, and in time absorbed, the Amalekite or Edomite
clan of the Jerahmeelites.4

III. The Western Border.

The ideal boundary of Judaea on the west was the
Mediterranean, but, as we have seen, the Maritime Plain
was never in Jewish possession (except for intervals in
the days of the Maccabees), and even the Shephelah was
debatable ground, as often out of Judah as within it.
The most frequent border, therefore, of Judah to the west
was the edge of the Central Range. In the previous
chapter on the Shephelah it was pointed out in detail
how real a frontier this was. A long series of valleys
running south from Ajalon to Beersheba separate the low
loose hills of the Shephelah from the lofty compact range

1	Josh. xv. 62.

2	Josh. xv. 26, xix. 2 ; i Chron. iv. 28 ; Neh. xi. 26. Robinson places it
at Tell el Milh, which Conder, however, identifies with the city of Salt.

3	For the whole geography of this region, cf. Robinson, B.R. i., Trum-
bull’s Kadesh Barttea, Palmer’s Desert of the Exodus, Drake’s and Kitchener’s
reports, P.E.F.Q. ; also the relevant paragraphs in Henderson’s Palestine.

4	1 Sam. xxvii. 10, xxx. 29 ; 1 Chron. ii. 9. Stade, Gesch. 159.The Borders and Bulwarks of Judcea	287

to the east—the hill-country of Jud<za. This great barrier,
which repelled the Philistines, even when they had con-
quered the Shephelah, is penetrated by a The Western
number of defiles, none more broad than those defiles-
of Beth-horon, of the Wady Ali along which the present
high-road to Jerusalem travels, and of the Wady Surar up
which the railway runs. Few are straight, most of them
sharply curve. The sides are steep, and often precipitous,
frequently with no path between save the rough torrent
bed, arranged in rapids of loose shingle, or in level steps of
the limestone strata, which at the mouth of the defile are
often tilted almost perpendicularly into easily defended
obstacles of passage. The sun beats fiercely down upon
the limestone; the springs are few, though sometimes
very generous ; a low thick bush fringes all the brows,
and caves abound and tumbled rocks.1

Everything conspires to give the few inhabitants easy
means of defence against large armies. It is a country of
ambushes, entanglements, surprises, where large armies
have no room to fight, and the defenders can remain
hidden ; where the essentials for war are nimbleness and
the sure foot, the power of scramble and of rush. We see
it all in the Eighteenth Psalm : By thee do I run through a
troop, and by my God do I leap over a wall; the God that
girdeth me with strength and maketh my way perfect. He
maketh my feet like hinds' feet, and setteth me on my high
places. Thou hast enlarged my steps under me, and my feet
have not slipped.

1 I describe from my observation of the Wady el-Kuf from Beit-Jibrin to
Hebron, and of three defiles that run up from the W. en Najil to the plateau
about Beit Atab. So also Schick, Z.D.P.V. x. 131, 132, on the Wady
Ismain : ‘. . . dass das Thai viele und grosse Krummungen hat tief ein-
geschnitten und stets von steilen Boschungen eingeschlossen ist, undjkeine
Ortschaften tr'agt.’288 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Their

invaders.

Yet with negligent defenders the western border of
Judaea is quickly penetrated. Six hours at the most will
bring an army up any of the defiles, and then
they stand on the central plateau, within a few
easy miles of Jerusalem or of Hebron. So it happened in
the days of the Maccabees. The Syrians, repelled at
Beth-horon, and at the Wady Ali, penetrated twice the
unwatched defiles to the south, the second time with a
large number of elephants, of which we are told that
they had to come up the gorges in single file.1 What a
sight the strange huge animals must have been, pushing
up the narrow path, and emerging for the first and almost
only time in history on the plateau above! On both
occasions the Syrians laid siege to Bethsur, the strong-
hold on the edge of the plateau, which Judas had specially
fortified for the western defence of the country. The first
time, they were beaten back down the gorges; but the
second time, with the elephants, Bethsur fell, and the
Syrian army advanced on Jerusalem. After that all
attacks from the west failed, and the only other successful
Syrian invasion was from the north.2

Bethsur, the one fortress on the western flank of Judaea
south of Ajalon, is due to the one open valley on that
flank, the Vale of Elah, above the higher end
of which it stands. The need of it could not
be more eloquently signified than by the fact that it was
up the Vale of Elah that the Philistines, the Syrians in
the second century B.C., and Richard with the Third
Crusade, all attempted to reach the central plateau—the
Syrians and the Crusaders both choosing this entrance
after their attack by Ajalon had failed.

1 Josephus xii. Antt, ix. 4.	2 By Bacchides in 160.The Borders and Bidivarks of Jndcea	289

But if invaders came up these defiles to the plateau, we
may be sure that the settlers on the latter more easily
passed down them to the Shephelah. Over judah and the
the Shephelah Judah claimed, if she did not Canaanites-
always exercise, dominion ; and the claim did not rest so
much on conquest as on kinship. In the earliest times the
tribe had intermarried with the Canaanites of the Shephe-
lah, especially with those round about Adullam. This is
the meaning of the extraordinary adventures related in
Genesis xxxviii. : Judah ivent down from his brethren, and
turned in to a certain Adullamite tvhose name was Hirah.
To all lovers of the Bible this result of criticism must
surely come as a relief, that the following verses relate, not
the intercourse of individuals, but the intermarriage of
families. As Judah, then, had Arabian allies and kins-
folk on her eastern and southern borders, so here, on her
western, she mixed with the Canaanites.1

IV. The Northern Border: the Fortresses
of Benjamin.

The narrow table-land of Judaea continues ten miles to
the north of Jerusalem, before it breaks into the valleys
and mountains of Samaria. These last ten miles of the
Judaean plateau—with steep gorges on the one side to the
Jordan and on the other to Ajalon—were the debatable
land across which, as we have seen, the most accessible
frontier of Judaea fluctuated ; and, therefore, they became
the site of more fortresses, sieges, forays, battles and mas-
sacres, than perhaps any other part of the country. Their

1 Lagarde explains Tamar, or Palm, by Phoenicia, Zerali (mT = mTK
indigenous) by the aboriginal inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, and
Pharez by the Hebrews (Orientalia ii. 1880).

T290 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

appearance matches their violent history. A desolate and
fatiguing extent of rocky platforms and ridges, of moor-
land strewn with boulders, and fields of shallow soil thickly
mixed with stone, they are a true border—more fit for
the building of barriers than for the cultivation of food.
The territory They were the territory of Benjamin, in whose
of Benjamin,	at the time of the massacre of the tribe

by Judah,1 they received the baptism of their awful history.
As you cross them their aspect recalls the fierce temper of
their inhabitants. Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf, father
of sons who, noble or ignoble, were always passionate and
unsparing,—Saul, Shimei, Jeremiah, and he that breathed
out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the
Lord, and was exceeding mad against them? In such a
region of blood and tears Jeremiah beheld the figure of
the nation’s woe : A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation
and bitter weeping, Rachel weeping for her children : she
refuseth to be comforted for her children, because they are
not?

But it is as a frontier that we have now to do with
those ten northmost miles of the Judaean plateau. Upon
the last of them three roads concentrate—an

Bethel and

the incom- open highway from the west by Gophna, the
mg roads. grea|. north r0ad ~fr0m Shechem, and a road
from the Jordan Valley through the passes of Mount
Ephraim. Where these draw together, about three miles
from the end of the plateau, stood Bethel, a sanctuary
before the Exile, thereafter a strong city of Judah.4 But
Bethel, where she stood, could not by herself keep the
northern gate of Judaea. For behind her to the south

1 Judges xx. 35.
3 Jer. xxxi. 15.

2 Acts ix. 1, xxvi. 11.
4 1 Macc. ix. 50.The Borders and Bulwarks of J-udeea	291

emerge the roads we have already followed—that from the
Jordan by Ai and those from Ajalon up the gorges and
ridge of Beth-horon. The Ai route is covered by Mich-
mash, where Saul and Jonathan were entrenched against
the Philistine,1 and where the other Jewish hero who was
called Jonathan—the Maccabeus—held for a time his
headquarters.2 The Beth-horon roads were covered by
Gibeon,3 the frontier post between David and Saul’s house.4
Between Michmash and Gibeon there are six miles, and on
these lie others of the strong points that stood forth in
the invasion and defence of this frontier : Geba, The othei.
long the limit of Judah to the north ;5 Ramah, fortl'esses-
which Baasha, king of Israel, built for a blockade against
Judah;6 Adasa, where Judas Maccabeus pitched against
Nicanor, coming up from Beth-horon.7 These, with Mich-
mash and Gibeon, formed a line of defence that was valid
against the Ajalon and Ai ascents, as well as against the
level approach from the north.

The earlier invasions delivered upon this frontier of
Judah are difficult to follow. Before it was a frontier in
the days of Saul, the Philistines overran it either from
Ajalon, or from Mount Ephraim ; Saul’s centre was in
Michmash. Whether, in their attacks upon Jerusalem,8

1	1 Sam. xiii. In vv. 17, 18 the three direclions which the three foraging
bands of the Philistines took are all plain. N. to Ophrah, the city of
Ephraim, Et-Taiyibeh, W. to Beth-horon, SE. over the ravine of 7,eboim, i.e.
the Wady Abu Duba, running NE. into W. Farah, afterwards W. Kelt (cf.
Neh. xi. 35), down which there is the name Shukh ed Duba.

2 Josephus xiii. Antt. i. 6.	3 Josh. x. 1-12.	4 2 Sam. ii. 12, 13.

5 2 Kings xxiii. 8.	8 1 Kings xv. 17.

7 Josephus xii. Antt. x. 5 ; 1 Macc. vii. 40-45. Probably the present
Khurbet Adasa on the road north from Jerusalem. Schtirer (Hist. i. 1, 129)
prefers a site nearer Gophna, because Eusebius (Onom. ’AScurd) says it was
near Gophna. But he could so describe Khurbet Adasa, for it is on the
same road as Gophna.	8 2 Kings xiv. 8, xvi. 5.292 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Joash or Rezin and Pekah crossed it, it is impossible to
say ; probably the latter at least came up from the Arabah.

Isaiah pictures a possible march this way by

Invasions	.

from the the Assyrians after the fall of Samaria. He is
come upon Ai; marcheth through Migron, at
Michmash musters his baggage ; they have passed the Pass;
Let. Geba be our bivouac.’ Terror-struck is Ramah ; Gibeah
of Saul hath fled. Make shrill thy voice, 0 daughter of
Gallim. Listen Laishah, answer her Anathoth; in mad
flight is Madmenah; the dzvellers in Gebim gather their
stuff to flee. This very day he halteth at Nob ; he waveth
his hand at the mount of the daughter of Zion, the hill of
Jerusalem} This is not actual fact—for the Assyrian did
not then march upon Zion, and when he came twenty
years later it was probably by the Beth-horon or another
of the western passes—but this was what might have
happened any day after the fall of Samaria. The prophet
is describing how easily the Assyrian could advance by
this open route upon Zion; and yet, if he did, Jehovah
would cut him down in the very sight of his goal.2 All
the places mentioned are not known ; and of those that
are, some are off the high-road. How Nebuchadnezzar
came up against Jerusalem is not stated;3 but we can
follow the course of subsequent invasions. In the great
Syrian war in 160 B.C. Nicanor and Bacchides both
attempted the plateau—the former unsuccessfully by Beth-
horon, the latter with success from the north. In 64
Pompey marched from Beth-shan through Samaria, but
could not have reached Judaea, had the Jews only per-
severed in their defence of the passes of Mount Ephraim.4

1 Isaiah x. 28-32.	- Isaiah x. 32, 33.	3 2 Kings xxiv. 10.

4 But see p. 353, n. 5, on another possible route for Pompey.The Borders and Bulwarks of Judcea 293

These being left open, Pompey advanced easily by Koreae
and Jericho upon Bethel, and thence unopposed to the very
walls of Zion.1 In 37 B.c. Herod marched from the north
and took Jerusalem.2 In 66 A.D. Cestius Gallus came up
by Beth-horon and Gibeon to invest Jerusalem, but speedily
retreated by the same way.3 In 70, after Vespasian had
spent two years in reducing all the strong places round
about Judaea, Titus led his legions to the great siege past
Gophna and Bethel. It seems to have been by Pompey’s
route that the forces of Islam came upon Jerusalem ; they
met with no resistance either in Ephraim or Judah, and
the city was delivered into their hands by agreement,
637 A.D.

In 1099, the first Crusaders advanced to their successful
siege by Ajalon ; in 1187, Saladin, having conquered the
rest of the land, drew in on the Holy City from Hebron,
from Askalon and from the north.

1 xiv. Antt. iii. 3.

2 xiv. Antt. xvi.

s See p. 211.CHAPTER
AN ESTIMATE

XIV

OF

THE REAL STRENGTH OF JUD.EAFor this Chapter consult Maps /. and 1 V.AN ESTIMATE OE THE REAL STRENGTH
OF JUDAEA

T T AVING gone round about Judaea, and marked well
A A her bulwarks, we may now draw some conclusions
as to the exact measure of her strength— jud£Ea not
physical and moral. Judaea has been called miPresnable
impregnable, but, as we must have seen, the adjective
exaggerates. To the north she has no frontier; her
southern border offers but few obstacles after the desert
is passed ; with all their difficulties, her eastern and western
walls have been carried again and again ; and even the
dry and intricate wilderness, to which her defenders have
more than once retired, has been rifled to its farthest
recesses. Judaea, in fact, has been overrun as often as
England.

And yet, like England, Judaea, though not impregnable,
has all the advantages of insularity. It is singular how
much of an island is this inland province.

aii	but insular,

With the gulf of the Arabah to the east, with
the desert to the south, and lifted high and unattractive
above the line of traffic, which sweeps past her on the
west, Judaea is separated as much as by water from the
two great continents, to both of which she otherwise
belongs. So open at many points, the land was yet
sufficiently unpromising and sufficiently remote to keep

unprovoked foreigners away. When they were pro-

207298 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

voked and did come upon her, then they found the
waterlessness of her central plateau an almost insuperable
and difficult obstacle to the prolonged sieges, which the
to occupy, stubbornness of her people forced them to make
against her capital and other fortresses. And there was
this further difficulty. Judaea's borders may all be more
or less open, but they are of such a character as to
compensate for each other’s weakness. For an invader
might come over one frontier and make it his own ; but
the defeated nation could retreat upon any of the others.
In the intricacy of these or of the great desert, they
could find ground on which to rally and sweep back
upon the foe when he was sufficiently disheartened by
the barrenness of the plateau he had invaded. Hence
we never find, so far as I know, any successful invasion
but one of Judaea, which was not delivered across at
least three of her borders. The exception was the First
Crusade ; and there is sufficient to account for it in
the laxity of the defence which it encountered. It is
^	very significant that neither of the two greatest

of Vespasian invaders of Judaea, who feared a real defence of
and Saiadm. centrai plateau, ventured upon this till they

had mastered the rest of Palestine, and occupied the
strongholds round the Judaean borders. At the interval
of more than a millennium, the tactics of Vespasian and of
Saladin were practically identical. Vespasian not only
overran Galilee and Samaria, but spent nearly another
year in taking and refortifying Jamnia, Ashdod, and
Hadida in the west, Bethel and Gophna to the north,
Jericho to the east, and Hebron with other ‘ Idumaean
strongholds’ to the south, before he let slip his impatient
legions upon Jerusalem. His own officers, as well asThe Real Strength of Judcea

299

deserters from the city, urged him at once to march upon
it, but Josephus says that Vespasian ‘was obliged at
first to overthrow what remained elsewhere, and to leave
behind him nothing outside Jerusalem, which might inter-
rupt him in that siege ; ’1 and he closes the list of the
Roman conquests around Judaea with the remark, ‘now all
the places were taken, except Herodium, Masada, and
Machaerus, so Jerusalem was now what the Romans aimed
at.’ Similarly, in 1187, Saladin, even after his great victory
at Hattin, did not venture to attack Jerusalem till the
Jordan Valley, most of the Maritime Plain, with Askalon
and even Beit-Jibrin, had first fallen into his hands.
Nothing could more clearly prove to us that Judaea,
though not impregnable, was extremely difficult to take,
and that a swift rush across one of her borders, like that of
Cestius Gallus in 66 A.D., was sure to end in disaster. To
be successful, an invader must master at least three of her
frontiers, both to prevent the nation from rallying and to
secure sources of supplies.

To have followed these campaigns, the details of which
are known to us, is to understand more clearly what,
indeed, this province herself tells you by mute
eloquence of rock, mountain and desert,— of Judaea’s
her value to the great people for whom posiuon’
she was shaped by the Creator’s hands. Judaea was
designed to produce in her inhabitants the sense of
seclusion and security, though not to such a degree as to
relieve them from the attractions of the great world, which
throbbed closely past, or to relax in them those habits of

1 iv. Wars, vii. 3 ; on the capture of Jamnia and Ashdod, iv. Wars, iii. 2 ;
strongholds of Idumaea, viii. 1 ; Jericho, 2 ff. ; Jericho and Hadida, ix. 1 ;
Hebron with the unknown Kaphethra and Kepharabis, 9.The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

discipline, vigilance and valour, which are the necessary
elements of a nation’s character. In the position of Judaea
there was not enough to tempt her people to put their
confidence in herself; but there was enough to encourage
them to the defence of their freedom and a strenuous life.1
And while the isolation of their land was sufficient to con-
firm the truth of their calling to a discipline and a destiny
separate from other peoples, it was not so complete as to
keep them in barbarian ignorance of the world, or to release
them from those temptations to mix with the world, in
combating which their discipline and their destiny could
alone be realised.

All this receives exact illustration from both Psalmists
and Prophets. They may rejoice in the fertility of their
illustrated land, but they never boast of its strength.
Propheu and On contrary> °f the real measure of the
Psalms. latter they show a singularly sagacious ap-
preciation. Thus, Isaiah’s fervid faith in Zion’s inviolable-
ness does not blind him to the openness of Judah’s
northern entrance: it is in one of his passages of warmest
exultation about Zion that he describes the easy advance
of the Assyrian to her walls.2 Both he and other prophets
frequently recognise how swiftly the great military powers
will overrun Judah ; and when they except Jerusalem from
the consequences, it is not because of her natural strength,
but by their faith in the direct intervention of God Himself.
So at last it happened. In the great crisis of her history,
the invasion by Sennacherib, Judah was saved, as England
was saved from the Armada, neither by the strength of her

1	In the Least of all Lands, Principal Miller has some very valuable
remarks upon the influence of the physical geography of Palestine upon the
character of the people.

2	Isaiah x. 32. See p. 292 of this volume.The Real Strength of Judcea

301

bulwarks, for they had all been burst, nor by the valour of
her men, for the heart had gone from them, but because,
apart from human help, God Himself crushed her insolent
foes in the moment of their triumph.1 2

Of all this feeling, perhaps the most concise expression
is found in the Forty-Eighth Psalm, where, though beautiful
for situation is Mount Zion in the sides of the north? and
established for ever, it is God Himself who is known in her
palaces for a refuge; and when the writer has walked
about Zion and gone round about her, and told the towers
thereof marked ivell her bulwarks and considered her
palaces, it is yet not in all these that he triumphs, but this is
the result of his survey : this God is our God for ever and
ever, He ivill be our Guide even unto death. Judah was not
impregnable, but she was better—she was in charge of an
invincible Providence.

With their admission of the weakness of Judah’s position,
there runs through the prophets an appreciation of her
unattractiveness, and that leads them, and especially
Isaiah, to insist that under God her security lies in this
and in her people’s contentment with this. Though they
recognise how vulnerable the land is, the prophets main-
tain that she will be left alone if her people are quiet upon
her, and if her statesmen avoid intrigue with the powers of
the world. To the kings of Israel, to Ahaz, to Hezekiah’s
counsellors, to Josiah, the same warnings are given:3

1	See p. 236.	2 Kings xviii, xix. ; Isaiah xxxvii., and probably xxxiii.

2	Perhaps a phrase for the sacredness and inviolableness of the site; but it
is a remarkable fact that, owing to the strong sun (perhaps also to the geological
formation), the northern aspect of all hills in Western Palestine is more fruitful
and beautiful than the aspect towards the south; Ebal and Gerizim are an
instance of this.

3	Ahaz, cf. 2 Kings xvi. with Isaiah vii302 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Asshur shall not save us: we will not ride upon horses}
Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help, and stay on
horses and trust in chariots. In returning and rest shall
ye be saved: in quietness and in confidence shall be your
strength?

Thus we see how the physical geography of Palestine
not only makes clear such subordinate things as the cam-
paigns and migrations of the Old Testament, but signalises
the providence of God, the doctrine of His prophets, and
the character He demanded from His people. It was a
great lesson the Spirit taught Israel, that no people dwells
secure apart from God, from character, from common-sense.
But the land was the illustration and enforcement of this
lesson. Judaea proved, yet did not exhaust, nor tempt
men to feel that she exhausted, the will and power of God
for their salvation. As the writer of the Hundred and
Twenty-First Psalm feels, her hills were not the answer to,
but the provocation of, the question, Whence cometh iny
help ? and Jehovah Himself was the answer. As for her
prophets, a great part of their sagacity is but the true
appreciation of her position. And as for the character of
her people, while she gave them room to be free and to
worship God, and offered no inducement to them to put
herself in His place, she did not wholly shut them off from
danger or temptation, for without danger and temptation
it is impossible that a nation’s character should be strong.

1 Hosea xiv. 3, cf. xii. 1.

- Isaiah xxxi. 1, xxx. 15.CHAPTER XV

THE CHARACTER OF JUD^A

303For this Chapter consult Maps I. and IV.THE CHARACTER OF JUDAEA

\ T 7"E have seen how much of Judaea is borderland, and

» * how strongly this fact has determined her history.
But after all it is the plateau, which her bulwarks so lift
and isolate from the rest of Palestine, that remains the
most characteristic part of Judaea. Here lay all her chief
towns, and here her people were most distinctively
themselves. This plateau is little more than thirty-five
miles long, from Bethel to the group of cities south-
east of Hebron. The breadth varies from fourteen
to seventeen, when reckoned from the western edge,
above the valley that cuts off the Shephelah, to where
on the east the level drops below 1700 feet and into
desert.

The greater part of the Judaean plateau consists of stony
moorland, upon which rough scrub and thorns, reinforced
by a few dwarf oaks, contend with multitudes The judsean
of boulders, and the limestone, as if impatient Table-land-
of the thin pretence of soil, breaks out in bare scalps and
prominences. There are some patches of cultivation, but
though the grain springs bravely from them, they seem
more beds of shingle than of soil. The only other signs
of life, besides the wild bee and a few birds, are flocks
of sheep and goats, or a few cattle, cropping far apart in

U306 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

melancholy proof of the scantiness of the herbage. Where
the plateau rolls, the shadeless slopes are for the most part
divided between brown scrub and grey rock ; the hollows
are stony fields traversed by dry torrent-beds of dirty
boulders and gashed clay. Where the plateau breaks, low
ridge and shallow glen are formed, and the ridge is often
crowned by a village, of which the grey stone walls and
mud roofs look from the distance like a mere outcrop of
the rock ; yet round them, or below in the glen, there will
be olive-groves, figs, and perhaps a few terraces of vines.
Some of these breaks in the table-land are very rich in
vegetation, as at Bethany, the Valley of Hinnom, the
Gardens of Solomon and other spots round Bethlehem,
and in the neighbourhood of Hebron, the famous Vale of
Eshcol or Vine Cluster. And again between Hebron and
the wilderness there are nine miles by three of plateau,
where the soil is almost free from stones, and the fair, red
and green fields, broken by a few heathy mounds, might be
a scene of upland agriculture in our own country.1 This is
where Ma‘on, Ziph, and the Judaean Carmel lay with the
farms of Nabal, on which David and his men, like the

1 ‘ At 2.30 we left Hebron. Rough limestone country. Paths execrable,
slippery rock and rolling stones. In an hour we came out on the Ziph-
Maon-Carmel plateau, veiy like a bit of higher and less fertile Aberdeenshire
—rolling red ground, mostly bare, partly wheat and barley, broken by lime-
stone scalps partly covered by scrub, and honeycombed by caves. We came
on this at Tell Zif (Ziph), cantered across it one and a half hours to Kurmul,
with ruins of Crusaders’ Castle, large bright blue pool below. Black
Bedawee tents near. Thence a twenty minutes’ canter to Ma'an through barley-
fields. The view from Maon is very extensive. The fine plateau spreads
due N., higher hills sweep round two sides from SW. to NE. ; due N. at the
mouth of an opening through them is Hebron with its white buildings, the
mosque clear through a glass. WNW. Yuttah on a peak, NE. Beni Nain.
E. a decisive fall of about 400 feet from the cultivated land to the desert,
and thence Jeshimon, rolling hills and irregular ridges backed by the range
of Moab. ’—Extract from Diary.The Character of Judcea

307

Bedouin of to-day, levied blackmail from Horeshah in the
wilderness below.1

But the prevailing impression of Judaea is of stone—the
torrent-beds, the paths that are no better, the heaps and
heaps of stones gathered from the fields, the Its feature_
fields as stony still, the moors strewn with lessness-
boulders, the obtrusive scalps and ribs of the hills. In the
more desolate parts, which had otherwise been covered
with scrub, this impression is increased by the ruins of
ancient cultivation—cairns, terrace-walls, and vineyard
towers.

Now if you aggravate this stony appearance by two
other deficiencies of feature, you will feel to the full that
dreariness which most bring away with them as their whole
memory of Judaea. First, there is no water. No tarns
break here into streams and quicken the landscape, as they
quicken even the most desolate moors of our north, but at
noon the cattle go down by dusty paths to some shadow-
less gorge, where the glare is only broken by the black
mouth of a cistern with troughs round it. On the whole
plateau the only gleams of water are the pools at Gibeon,
Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, and I do not suppose that
from Bethel to Beersheba there are, even in spring-time,
more than six or seven tiny rills. No water to soothe the
eye, there are no great hills to lift it. The horizon has no
character or edge. Of course from the western boundary

1 ntrim: E. V. in the wood, 1 Sam. xxiii. 15. But this rendering implies both
a very unusual grammatical form, and a wood, or even thicket, if it existed in
these desert regions, would be too prominent to be used as a hiding-place. The
LXX. understood a proper name, though they spelt it differently (Josephus
follows LXX.). Conder discovered south-east of Ziph, and in the desert, the
Ruin Khoreisa and the Wady Abu Hirsh, in both of which he sees the name
Horeshah, T. W., 243 f.308 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

of the plateau you see the blue ocean with its border of
broken gold, and from the eastern boundary the Moab
Hills, that change their colours all day long above the
changeless blue of the Dead Sea. But, in the centre of
the hill-country of Judaea, there is nothing to look to past
the featureless roll of the moorland, and the low blunt
hills with the flat-roofed villages.

Was the land always like this? For answer, we have
three portraits of ancient Judah. The first is perhaps
the most voluptuous picture in the Old Testament

Bindmg to the vine his foal
And to the choice vine his ass's colt,

He hath washed in wine his raiment,

And in the blood of the grape his vesture:

—Heavy in the eyes from wine,

And white of teeth frotn milk.

This might be the portrait of a Bacchus breaking from
the vineyards of Sicily; but of Judah we can scarcely
believe it, as we stand in his land to-day. And

Old Testament

portraits	yet on those long, dry slopes with their ruined

of Judah.	terraces—no barer than the banks of Rhine

in early spring—and even more in the rich glens around
Hebron and Bethlehem, where the vine has been preserved,1 2
we perceive still the possibilities of such a portrait. Heavy
in the eyes from ivine, and he hath washed in wine his
raiment—but Judah has lost his eyes, and his raiment is
in rags. The Judaean landscape of to-day is liker the
second portrait which Isaiah drew in prospect of the

1	Gen. xlix.

2	Until the recent revival of vineyards by foreigners, Hebron and Bethle-
hem were almost the only places in the Holy Land where wine was made.
The grapes of Es-Salt have always been turned into raisins.The Character of Judcea

309

Assyrian invasion. In that day shall the Lord shave, with
a razor that is hired, the head and the hair of the feet and
the beard. A nd it shall be in that day, a man shall nourish
a young cow and a couple of sheep ; and it shall be, because
of the abundance of the making of milk, he shall eat butter,
—for butter and honey shall everything eat which is left in
the midst of the land. And it shall be in that day, that
every place in which there zvere a thousand vines at a
thousand silverlings—for briars and for thorns shall it be.
... And all the hills that were digged zvith the mattock,
thou shalt not come thither for fear of briars and thorns ;
but it shall be for the sending forth of oxen and for the tread-
ing of sheep} With the exceptions named above, this is
exactly the Judah of to-day. But we have a third portrait,
by the prophet Jeremiah,2 of what Judah should be after
the Restoration from Exile, and in this it is remarkable
that no reversion is promised to a high state of cultivation,
with olives and vines as the luxuriant features of the
country, but that her permanent wealth and blessing are
conceived as pastoral. . . . For I will bring again the
captivity of the land as in the beginning, saith fehovah.
Thus saith fehovah of Hosts : Again shall there be in this
place—the Desolate, zvithout man or even beast—and in all
its cities, the habitation of shepherds couching their flocks.
In the cities of the Mountain, or Hill-Country, of fudah,
in the cities of the Shephelah, and in the cities of the Negeb,
and in the land of Benjamin, and in the suburbs of Jeru-
salem, and in the cities of Judah, again shall the flocks pass
upon the hands of him that telleth them, saith fehovah.
Now, though other prospects of the restoration of Judah

1 Isa. vii. 20 ff.

- Jer. xxxiii. 12, 13. The passage begins with ver. 10.310 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

include husbandry and vine culture,1 and though the Jews
after the Exile speak of their property as vineyards, olive-
yards and cornland, along with sheep,2 yet the prevailing
aspect of Judah is pastoral, and the fulfilment of Jacob’s
luscious blessing must be sought for in the few fruitful
corners of the land, and especially at Hebron. As Judah’s
first political centre, Hebron would in the time of her
supremacy be the obvious model for the nation’s ideal
figure.3

But this has already brought us to the first of those
three features of Judaea’s geography which are most sig-
nificant in her history—her pastoral character,

Three char-	. , ,	,	,	,	,	,	,

acteristics of her neighbourhood to the desert, her singular

J udcCci

unsuitableness for the growth of a great city.
With these the rest of this chapter will be occupied.

i. If, as we have seen, the prevailing character of Judaea
be pastoral, with husbandry only incidental to her life, it
i a Land of ls not surprising that the forms which have
Shepherds. impressed both her history and her religion
upon the world should be those of the pastoral habit. Her

1	Micah iv. 4 and I Kings iv. 25 give the ideal state, as every man under
his awn vine and fig-tree. Jeremiah (xxxi. 24) in his picture of the future,
places husbandmen before them that go forth with flocks. Ilabakkuk puts
vines, figs, and olives before flocks, iii. 1J. Isaiah (lxv. 10) says, Sharon shall
he a fold of flocks, and the valley of Achor a place for herds to couch, for My
people that have sought Me; but in ver. 21, they shall plant vineyards, cf.
Isaiah lxi. 5, strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, and the sons of the
alien shall be your ploivmeu and vine-dressers.

2	Nehemiah v. Haggai speaks only of husbandry. Malachi sees both
flocks and vines. Joel catalogues corn, wine and oil, figs, pomegranates,
palms, and apples (chap. i.). With him cattle and herds are in the back-
ground. New wine and milk are the blessings of the future, iii. 18.

3	One is tempted to ask whether any inference as to the date of Gen. xlix.
can be drawn from its representation of Judah as chiefly a wine-growing
country ; but I do not think any such inference would be at all trustworthy,
as may be seen from a comparison of the passages cited in the above notes.The Character of jndcea

3 ii

origin ; more than once her freedom and power of political
recuperation ; more than once her prophecy; her images
of God, and her sweetest poetry of the spiritual life, have
been derived from this source. It is the stateliest shepherds
of all time whom the dawn of history reveals upon her
fields—men not sprung from her own remote conditions,
nor confined to them, but moving across the world in
converse with great empires, and bringing down from
heaven truths sublime and universal to wed with the
simple habits of her life. These were the patriarchs of
the nation. The founder of its one dynasty, and the first
of its literary .prophets, were also taken from following the
flocks} The king and every true leader of men was called
a shepherd. Jehovah was the Shepherd of His people,
and they the sheep of His pasture. It was in Judaea that
Christ called Himself the Good Shepherd, as it was in
Judaea also that, taking the other great feature of her life,
He said He was the True Vine.2

Judaea, indeed, offers as good ground as there is in all
the East for observing the grandeur of the shepherd’s
character. On the boundless Eastern pasture, so different
from the narrow meadows and dyked hillsides with which
we are familiar, the shepherd is indispensable. With us,
sheep are often left to themselves; but I do not re-
member ever to have seen in the East a flock of sheep
without a shepherd. In such a landscape as Judaea, where
a day’s pasture is thinly scattered over an unfenced tract
of country, covered with delusive paths, still frequented by
wild beasts, and rolling off into the desert, the man and
his character are indispensable. On some high moor,

1 2 Sam. vii. 8 ; Amos vii. 15.

- Stanley, Sinai and Palestine, xiii.312 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

across which at night the hyenas howl, when you meet
him, sleepless, far-sighted, weather-beaten, armed, leaning
on his staff, and looking out over his scattered sheep,
every one of them on his heart, you understand why the
shepherd of Judaea sprang to the front in his people’s
history; why they gave his name to their king, and made
him the symbol of Providence ; why Christ took him as
the type of self-sacrifice.

Sometimes we enjoyed our noonday rest beside one of
those Judaean wells, to which three or four shepherds come
down with their flocks. The flocks mixed with each other,
and we wondered how each shepherd would get his own
again. But after the watering and the playing were over,
the shepherds one by one went up different sides of the
valley, and each called out his peculiar call; and the sheep
of each drew out of the crowd to their own shepherd, and
the flocks passed away as orderly as they came. The
shepherd of the sheep, . . . when he putteth forth his own
sheep, he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him, for
they know his voice, and a stranger will they not follow. I
am the Good Shepherd, and know My sheep, and am known
of Mine. These words our Lord spake in Judaea.

2. With the pastoral character of the hill-country of
Judaea we may take its neighbourhood to the desert—the
2 Neighbour wilderness of Judaea. In the Old Testament
to the desert, this ]ancj js capecj the Jeshimon, a word mean-
ing devastation} and no term could better suit its haggard
and crumbling appearance. It covers some thirty-five
miles by fifteen. We came upon it from Maon. The

1 In Deut. xxxii. io, it is applied to the great Arabian Desert, front which
God brought Israel, the waste and howling wilderness, pD'E*' ^'1 VUT
See p. 86.The Character of Judcea

313

cultivated land to the east of Hebron sinks quickly to
rolling hills and waterless vales, covered by broom and
grass, across which it took us all forenoon to ride. The
wells are very few, and almost all cisterns of rain-water,
jealously guarded through the summer by their Arab
owners.1 For an hour or two more we rode up and down
steep ridges, each barer than the preceding, and then
descended rocky slopes to a wide plain, where The wilder.
we left behind the last brown grass and thistle ; ness of judsea.
the last flock of goats we had passed two hours before.
Short bushes, thorns, and succulent creepers were all that
relieved the brown and yellow bareness of the sand, the
crumbling limestone, and scattered shingle. The strata
were contorted ; ridges ran in all directions ; distant hills
to north and south looked like gigantic dust-heaps ; those
near we could see to be torn as if by waterspouts. When
we were not stepping on detritus, the limestone was
blistered and peeling. Qften the ground sounded hollow ;
sometimes rock and sand slipped in large quantity from
the tread of the horses ; sometimes the living rock was
bare and jagged, especially in the frequent gullies, that
therefore glowed and beat with heat like furnaces. Far
to the east ran the Moab hills, and in front of them we got
glimpses of the Dead Sea, the deep blue of which was a
most refreshing sight across the desert foreground. So we
rode for two hours, till the sea burst upon us in all its
length, and this chaos, which we had traversed, tumbled
and broke, down 1200 feet of limestone, flint and marl—
crags, corries and precipices—to the broad beach of the
water. Such is Jeshimon, the wilderness of Judaea. It

1 The P. E. F. Survey map shows that almost the only names in this part
of Judsea are compounded with Bir, ‘cistern.’314 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

carries the violence and desolation of the Dead Sea Valley
right up to the heart of the country, to the roots of the
Mount of Olives, to within two hours of the gates of
Hebron, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem.

When you realise that this howling waste came within
reach of nearly every Jewish child ; when you climb the
Mount of Olives, or any hill about Bethlehem, or the hill
of Tekoa, and, looking east, see those fifteen miles of
chaos, sinking to a stretch of the Dead Sea, you begin to
understand the influence of the desert on Jewish imagina-
tion and literature. It gave the ancient natives of Judaea,
as it gives the mere visitor of to-day, the sense of living
next door to doom ; the sense of how narrow is the border
between life and death ; the awe of the power of God,
who can make contiguous regions so opposite in character.
He turneth rivers into a wilderness, and zvatersprings into
a thirsty ground. The desert is always in face of the
prophets, and its howling of beasts and its dry sand
blow mournfully across their pages the foreboding of
judgment.

But this is not the only influence of the desert. Meteoric
effects are nowhere in Palestine so simple or so brilliant.
And there is the annual miracle, when, after the winter
rains, even these wastes take on a glorious green. Hence
the sudden rushes of light and life across the prophet’s
vision; it is from the desert that he mostly borrows his
imagery of the creative, instantaneous Divine grace. The
zvilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them : the
desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.

Two, at least, of the prophets were born in face of
the wilderness of Judaea—Amos and Jeremiah—and on
both it has left its fascination. Amos lived to the southThe Character of Judcea

3i5

of Jerusalem, at Tekoa. No one can read his book with-
out feeling that he haunted heights, and lived in the face
of very wide horizons. But from Tekoa you Amos and
see the exact scenery of his visions. The Tekoa-
slopes on which Amos herded his cattle show the mass of
desert hills with their tops below the spectator, and there-
fore displaying every meteoric effect in a way they could
not have done had he been obliged to look up to them.
The cold wind that blows off them after sunset; through
a gap the Dead Sea, with its heavy mists ; beyond the
gulf the range of Moab, cold and grey, till the sun leaps
from behind his barrier, and in a moment the world of
hill-tops below Tekoa is flooded with light—that was the
landscape of Amos. Loy He that formeth the mountains,
and createth the tvind, and declareth unto man what is his
thought; that maketh the morning darkness, and treadeth
on the high places of the earth, Jehovah, God of Hosts, is His
name ; that maketh the Seven Stars and Orion, and turneth
the shadow of death into morning, and maketh the day dark
with night; that calleth for the ivaters of the sea, and poureth
them out on the face of the earth—-Jehovah is His name.

Jeremiah grew up at Anathoth, a little to the north-east
of Jerusalem, across Scopus, and over a deep valley. It is
the last village eastward, and from its site the jeremiah and
land falls away in broken, barren hills to the Anathoth-
north end of the Dead Sea. The vision of that desert
maze was burnt into the prophet’s mind, and he contrasted
it with the clear, ordered Word of God. O generation, see
ye the ivord of the Lord: Have I been a wilderness unto
Israel, a land of darkness f1 He had lived in face of the
scorching desert air—A dry wind of the high places in the

1 Jer. ii. 31.316 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

wilderness toward the daughter of My people, not to fan
nor to cleanse. And in face of the chaotic prospect, he
described judgment in these terms : I beheld the earth, and
lo, it was without form and void ... I beheld, and lo, the
fruitful place was a wilderness ... at the presence of
Jehovah, by His fierce anger}

But the wilderness affected Judaea by more than its
neighbourhood. There can be little doubt but that the
more austere and fanatic temper of the Jew was begotten
in him by the absorption of such desert tribes as the
Kenites. Israel was everywhere a mixed race, but while
in Samaria and Galilee the foreign constituents were mostly
Canaanite, in Judaea they were mostly Arabian.2

The wilderness of Judaea played also a great part in her
history as the refuge of political fugitives and religious
solitaries — a part which it still continues,
ness as a The story of Saul’s hunt after David, and of

refuge.	.	• •

David’s narrow escapes, becomes very vivid
among those tossed and broken hills, where the valleys
are all alike, and large bodies of men may camp near
each other without knowing it. Ambushes are everywhere
possible, and alarms pass rapidly across the bare and silent
hills. You may travel for hours, and feel as solitary as at
sea without a sail in sight; but-if you are in search of any
one, your guide’s signal will make men leap from slopes
that did not seem to shelter a rabbit, and if you are
suspected, your passage may be stopped by a dozen men,
as if they had sprung from the earth.3

We cannot pass from the wilderness of Judaea without
remembering two more holy events of which it was the
scene. Here John was prepared for his austere mission,
1 Jer. iv. 11, 23, 26.	- Wellhausen, De Gentibus, etc. 3 See p. 272 f.The Character of Judcea

3i7

and found his figures of judgment Here you understand
his own description of his preaching—like a desert fire
when the brown grass and thorns on the more john Baptist
fertile portions will blaze for miles, and the aild Chnst-
unclean reptiles creep out of their holes before its heat:
O generation of vipers, tvho hath taught you to flee from the
zvrath to come? And here our Lord suffered His tempta-
tion. Straightway the Spirit driveth Him into the wilder-
ness. For hours, as you travel across these hills, you may
feel no sign of life, except the scorpions and vipers which
your passage startles, in the distance a few wild goats or
gazelles, and at night the wailing of the jackal and the
hyena’s howl. He was alone with the wild beasts.

3. But the most impressive fact about Judaea—at least
in face of her history—is her natural unfitness for the
growth of a great city.

All the townships of Judaea were either fortresses,
shrines, or country villages. The fortresses we have
already seen on the borders, chiefly on the judrea’s
west and north. And on the western border we {^growth*
have seen, one of the shrines—Kiriath Jearim, ofaclty-
or Baalath-Jehuda. The agricultural townships lay chiefly
on the east,—Tekoa and the group of cities on the fertile
plateau south-east of Hebron.1 But up the centre of the
plateau ran a road, and all the places of greatest import-
ance lay upon it—Beersheba, Kiriath Sepher, Hebron,
Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Bethel. Of these, Beersheba
(as we have seen), Hebron, and Bethel were
sanctuaries long before Israel entered the land;
and Jerusalem, from the earliest times, had been a
fortress and probably also a shrine. Hebron and Beth-

1 Eshtemoa*, Ma‘on, Carmel, Jutlah, Ziph, Januah, etc.

Hebron.318 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

lehem, the two earliest seats of Judah, have the greatest
natural possibilities. Ancient Hebron lay on a hill to the
north-west of the present site ; it commands an entrance
to the higher plateau, and it is within hail of the desert,
which means trade with Arabs. The valleys about it are
very fruitful. Like so many ancient towns, Hebron must
have combined the attractions of a market and a shrine.1

Beth-lehem-Ephratah was no shrine, but, as its double
name implies, it lies in the midst of a district of great

fertility, with water not far away.2 The posi-

Beth-lehem, .	.111	,	1

tion is one of considerable strength, and not
far from that citadel which Herod the Great made famous
under his own name. Beth-lehem, indeed, though too

1	The origin of Hebron is obscure. In the Hexateuch it is mentioned by
all the documents. First J informs us that its earlier name was Kiriath
Arba‘, and Kaleb drave from it three sons of 'Anak, Sheshai, Ahiman,
Tolmai (Judges i. 10, 20; Num. xiii. 22; cf. Josh. xv. 4. According to
Josh. xi. 21, Joshua had cut off the Anakim from Hebron). J also tells us
that Hebron was built seven years before Zoan (Num. xiii. 22), but which
building of Zoan ? J mentions the terebinths of Mature, but does not identify
them with Hebron (Gen. xiii. 18, xviii. 1). E confirms J : Hebron was earlier
called Kiriath (city of) 'Arba‘ : he was the mightiest man among the Anakim
(Josh. xiv. 15). A verse assigned to the Redactor calls Arba* the father of
Anak (Josh. xv. 13 ; cf. xxi. n). E also puts Vale of Eshcol. near Hebron
(Num. xiii. 23). P identifies Kiriath Arba' and Hebron (Gen. xxiii. 2,
Josh. xx. 7, a city of refuge; cf. xxi. 13); it also identifies Mamrc (the
sacred terebinths of which it does not mention) with Hebron (Gen. xxiii. 19,
etc., xxxv. 27. According to xxv. 9, xlix. 30, 1. 13, Macpelah lies in front
of Manure). In Gen. xxxv. 27, ’Arba* bears the article, City of the 'Arba1,
or of the Four, and so in Neh. xi. 25. In Gen. xiv. 13, 24, a chapter not
assignable to any of the documents, Mamre is called the Amorite and
brother to Eshcol and Aner. In Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Hebron is the
only name given to the city :—1 Sam. xxx. 31, 2 Sam. ii. I, etc. ; iii. 2, 32 ;
iv. 1-12, v. 1 -13 ; xv. 7, io, Absalom’s vow in Hebron, and his revolt there ;

1	Chron. ii. 42, Mareshah, father of Hebron, 43, Korah, Tappuah, Rekcm,
Shema, sons of Hebron; vi. 55, 57, Hebron given to sons of Aaron ;

2	Chron. xi. 10, fortified by Rehoboam; 1 Macc. v. 65, destroyed by Judas
in campaign against Edomites.

2	Mr. Tomkins (P.E. F.Q., 1885, 112) suggests that Beth-lehem was
originally the sacred place of Lakhmu, a Chaldean god of fertility (Smith,The Character of Judcza

319

little to be placed among the families of fudah, is the finest
site in the whole province.

Yet neither Beth-lehem nor Hebron, nor any other
part of that plateau, bears tokens of civic promise.
Throughout Judaea these are absolutely lacking. She has
no harbours, no river, no great trunk-road, no convenient
market for the nations on either side of her. In their
commerce with each other, these pass by Judaea, finding
their emporiums in the cities of Philistia, or, as of old, at
Petra and Bosra on the east of the Jordan. Gaza has
outdone Hebron as the port of the desert. Jerusalem is
no match for Shechem in fertility or convenience of site.
The whole plateau stands aloof, waterless, on the road to
nowhere. There are none of the natural conditions of a
great city.

And yet it was here that She arose who, more than
Athens and more than Rome, taught the nations civic

Chald. Genesis, 58, 60), and compares Lahmi (1 Chron. xx. 5). Lahmam,
the present El Lahm, was near Beit-Jibrin. Had Beth-lehem, however,
been originally a shrine, some trace of it must have survived in the Old
Testament, and there is none. ‘ House of Bread ’ is a natural name for so
fertile a site, and it has continued into Arabic, in which, however, the same
letters mean ‘house of meat.’ InJ E it is called Ephrath, that is B. (Gen. xxxv.
16, 19 ; cf. xlviii. 7 R). Ibzan, a minor judge, sprang from it (Judges xii.
8-10). In Judges xvii. 7, xix. 1, 2, etc., it is called B. in Judah ; in Ruth i.
1, etc., B. Judah, or B. alone. So in 1 and 2 Sam., passim. 1 Chron. xi. 16,
Jer. xli. 17, they came to the inn oj Kimham, which is by B., to go and to
enter into Egypt. Micah v. 2, B. Ephratah, though those be too small to be
among the families offudah. The natives were called Ephralhites (Ruth i. 2,
1 Sam. xvii. 12). But in Judges xii. 5, 1 Sam. i. 1, 1 Kings xi. 26,
Ephrathite = Ephraimite. Herod’s citadel near Beth-lehem was the Herodium,
now the Jebel Fureidis, or Frank Mountain, from its use by the Crusaders
after the capture of Jerusalem (Felix Fabri, ed. P.P.T. ii. 403 f.). Conder
suggests Fureidis = a corruption of Herodium (cf. Furbia= Ilerbia). Herod is
buried here. On the strong reasons for supposing that the Church of the
Nativity occupies the site of the inn, see Conder, T. IV. ch. x., Henderson’s
Palestine, p. 149.320 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

justice, and gave her name to the ideal city men are ever
striving to build on earth, to the City of God that shall
one day descend from heaven—the New Jerusalem. For
her builder was not Nature nor the wisdom of men, but
on that secluded and barren site, the Word of God, by her
prophets, laid her eternal foundations in righteousness, and
reared her walls in her people’s faith in God.SAMARIA.

PLATE TT

The Edinburgh. Geographical Institute

J. G. Bartholomew, F.R.G.S.

[londoo.; HorJ.de r and. St.o u.ghtoiCHAPTER XVI
SAMARIA

xFor this Chapter consult Maps V. and VPSAMARIA

T^ROM Judaea we pass to Samaria. Halves of the same
J- mountain range, how opposite they are in disposi-
tion and in history ! The northern is as fair

i	i	•	1111 Samaria and

and open as the southern is secluded and judasa—a

austere, and their fortunes correspond. To the contrast-
prophets Samaria is the older sister,1 standing nearer to
the world, taking precedence alike in good and evil. The
more forward to attract, the more quick to develop,
Samaria was always the less able to retain. The patri-
archs came first to Shechem, but chose their homes about
Hebron ; the earliest seats of Israel’s worship, the earliest
rallies of her patriotism, were upon Mount Ephraim,2 but
both Church and State ultimately centred in Jerusalem ;
after the disruption of the kingdom the first prophets and
heroes sprang up in the richer life of Northern Israel, but
the splendour and endurance both of prophecy and of
kingship remained with Judaea. And so, though we owe
to Samaria some of the finest of Israel’s national lyrics,
she produced no literature of patriotism, but the bulk of
the literature about her is full of scorn for her traffic with
foreigners, for her luxury and her tolerance of many idols.

‘ Pride, fulness of bread and prosperous ease,’ then rotten-

1	Jer. iii. ; Ezek. xvi. 46, and especially xxiii.

2	He blew a trumpet in Mount Ephraim, Judges iii. 27. Palm-tree of
Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in Mount Ephraim, iv. 5 ; cf. vi. n.

323324 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

ness and swift ruin, are the chief notes of prophecy con-
cerning her. And so to-day, while pilgrims throng on
either hand to Judaea and to Galilee, none seek Samaria
save for one tiny spot of her surface—that was neither
a birthplace nor a tomb nor a battle-field nor a city, but
the scene of a wayside saying by Him who used this land
only as a passenger.

But if hardly Holy Land—if hardly even national land—
there is no region of Syria more interesting and romantic.
The traveller, entering from Judaea, is refreshed by a far
fairer landscape. When he reaches the Vale of Shechem
he finds himself at the true physical centre of Palestine,
from which the features of the whole country radiate and
group themselves most clearly. Historical memories, too,
burst about the paths of Samaria more lavishly than even
those fountains, which render her such a contrast to Judaea
—the altars at Shechem and Shiloh, the fields round
Dothan, the palm-tree of Deborah, the winepress of Ophrah,
Carmel and Gilboa, the columns in Samaria, the vineyard
of Naboth, the gates of Jezreel and Bethshan, the fords of
Jordan ; the approach of the patriarchs, Elijah’s appari-
tions, Elisha passing to and fro, John baptizing at .Enon
near to Salim ; Ahab and Herod ; Gideon’s campaign,
Jehu’s furious driving, Judith and Holofernes, battles of
the Maccabees, the strategy of Pompey and of Vespasian.

It has been already shown how the southern frontier of
Samaria gradually receded from the Vale of Ajalon to the
The borders Wady Ishar and ‘Akrabbeh.1 The northern
of Samaria. was more fixed, and lay from the Mediterranean
to Tordan, along the south edge of Esdraelon, by the foot
of Carmel and Gilboa. If we shut off Carmel, the edge of

1 See pp. 249-256.Samaria

325

Sharon may be taken as the western boundary ; the eastern
was Jordan. These limits enclose a territory nearly square,
or some forty miles north and south by thirty-five east and
west—the size of an average English shire.1

The earliest name given to this section of the Central
Range (we exclude Carmel) was Mount Ephraim :2 3 just
as the whole table-land of Judah was called Mount
Mount Judah? When you stand off the country	Ephraim,

you see, as you do not when travelling within it, the pro-
priety of the singular name mount. Broken up as Samaria
is into more or less isolated groups of hills, yet when you
view her from Gilead, or from the Mediterranean, she pre-
sents the aspect of a single mountain massif ‘ with entrances
indeed, but apparently as compact as even the table-land
of Judaea.

Take first the western flank. Here from summits of
3000 feet, and an average watershed of 2000, Mount
Ephraim descends upon Sharon by uninterrupted ridges.

1	See p. 260. The exact distances are these. From Bethel to Jezreel, 42
miles ; from the edge of Sharon to Jordan varies between 33 and 36 miles ;
but from the point of Carmel to Bethshan is 40 miles ; and to the south-east
corner of the province (east of Bethel) about 67 miles. Without Carmel
Samaria is about 1400 square miles; Carmel represents about 180 or 200
more. Judaea, it may be remembered, was estimated at 2000 square miles, of
which only about 1400 were habitable.

2	D'iODN “lH, Josh. xvii. 15, xix. 50, etc. Judges iii. 27, iv. 5, etc. ;

I Sam. i. 1, ix. 4, etc. That the whole district known as Samaria is covered
by the name is proved by the fact that between Ramah and Bethel is styled
as being in Mount Ephraim (Judges iv. 5) ; also Shechem (1 Kings xii. 25 ;
Josh. xx. 7, etc.) ; and that in Jer. xxxi. 6, Mount Ephraim stands parallel
to Mountains of Samaria (v. 5)- Of course the name spread originally from
the hill-country immediately north of Benjamin’s territory, which fell to the
tribe of Ephraim, and in which we must seek for the site of the city called
Ephraim (2 Chron. xiii. 19, 2 Sam. xiii. 23, John xi. 54)—perhaps the
modern et-Taiyibeh.

3	Josh. xxi. 11, where it is translated hill-counlry of Judah.326 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

The general aspect of the slope is ‘ rocky and sterile ; ’
with infrequent breaks of olive-woods,1 fields, and a
The western few villages. This bareness is not because
flank.	of steepness; on the contrary, the descent,

which is unbroken, is also gradual—only some 1800 feet
in eighteen miles. The whole flank lies in contrast to the
border of precipices and defiles which runs down the west
of Judaea; and, whether you ascend by its valleys or by
its broad ridges, you find the way easy and open. That
little history was enacted upon this flank of Mount
Ephraim seems to be due to—besides the comparative
sterility of the soil—the impossibility of anywhere making
a stand, the uselessness of anywhere building a fortress.

On the water-parting, the one pass conspicuous from
the sea is that in which Shechem lies between Ebal and
The eastern Gerizim. It crosses to the eastern side of the
flank.	range, and is thence continued by a valley

with a strong southerly trend, the present Wady el Ifjim,
which runs out upon the Jordan below the Horn or
Promontory of Surtabeh, and divides the eastern flank of
Mount Ephraim into two distinct sections. South of the
Wady el Ifjim, Mount Ephraim presents to Eastern
Palestine a high bulwark of mountain closely piled, with
wild corries running up it—the most difficult corner of the
whole frontier. Seen from Nebo it looks inaccessible.
The descent is over 2800 feet in nine miles, or three times
the gradient of the western flank. But north of the Wady
el Ifjim and the Horn of Surtabeh, the flank of Mount
Ephraim opens, and a series of broad valleys descend
through it from the interior. From the water-parting the
level drops 2500 feet in ten miles. Opposite the centre of
1 Robinson, L.R., 135.Samaria

327

the province the hills fall close on Jordan, but farther
north they recede to a distance of five miles, and at Beth-
shan they turn away westward in the range of Gilboa,
leaving the valley of Jezreel to run up on the north of
them towards the Mediterranean.

Within these compact bulwarks Mount Ephraim sur-
prises us with the number of its plains, meadows, and
spacious vales. These begin from the north, The central
with the gap between Carmel and Gilboa, Plains-
through which a broad gulf of Esdraelon gapes for seven
miles to Jenin. Thence a succession of level spaces, more
or less connected, spreads southwards through the centre of
the province to within a few miles of its southern border.
First from Jenin is the Plain of Dothan,1 reached by an
easy pass through low hills; thence another easy pass
leads to a series of spacious meadows lying across the
country from the south end of Mount Gilboa to the range
of hills which bulwark the city of Samaria on the north ; 2
and thence another easy pass leads to a third series of
plains running south past the Vale of Shechem into the
great Sahel Mukhneh opposite Gerizim. Now upon this
succession of level lands running south from Esdraelon,
there emerge valleys,—both those that come up from
Sharon and those that come up from Jordan. Of the
former the chief is the broad Barley-Vale, Wady esh

1	The modern Sahel ‘Arrabeh. Robinson (Phys. Geogr., 122) describes it
as a bay or offset of the Plain of Esdraelon ; but it is separated from the
latter by low hills. Wellhausen (Hist. p. 39) describes it as merging into
Sharon, but a long pass connects them ; see p. 151.

2	Cf. P.E.F. Me>n. ii. Samaria, 38. Trel. Saunders, Introd. to Survey, 136.
The Plains of ‘Arrabeh, Selhab and Zebabdeh drain to the Mediterranean ;
the Merj el Ghuruk has no outlet. In May 1891, when we passed, it held a
great shallow lake; cf. Robinson, B.K. iii. 153. The Mukhneh drains to
Jordan.328 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Sha'ir, which sweeps up past Samaria upon Shechem. In
this direction, too, the gentle ridges offer almost everywhere
easy access from the coast. On the other side running
down into Jordan, there are the Wady Far‘ah, that winds
from a little south of Shechem to opposite the Jabbok,—
the trunk road to the east, and to-day partly the route of
the telegraph wire from Nablus to Es-Salt; farther north
the Bukeia, or Little-Dale ; then the Salt-Vale, or Wady
el Maleh, that issues at Abel-Meholah, and, lastly, the
Wady el Khashneh, with the ancient road from Shechem
to Bethshan, up which came, perhaps Pompey, and cer-
tainly Vespasian. All these are the outgoings of Mount
Ephraim? broad, fertile, and of easy gradients. But
besides these, and even where the mountains crowd most
thickly together, in the south-east corner of the province
there are frequent meadows and corn lands. Travellers
from Judaea will remember the open vales which they
crossed before they reached the Mukhneh; and of the less
visited country to the east, Robinson says: ‘It was a
matter of surprise to us. to find in this great break-down of
the mountains so much good land ; so many fine and
arable, though not large, plains.’I. 2

I. Therefore the openness of Samaria is her most
prominent feature, and tells most in her history. Few
,	~ invaders were successfully resisted. It is a

I. The Open- #	'

ness of singular fact that we have no account of the

Samaria.

invasion by Israel. Bethel falls, and after that
the tribe of Joseph, to whom the region is allotted, express
no fear, record no struggle, till they come to the Plain of
Esdraelon and the cities of the Canaanites at Bethshan

1 Josh. xvii. 18.

- L.A\, 296.Samaria

329

and Jezreel.1 Under the invasion of the Canaanites,
Israel’s native law could be administered only in the
extreme south-east, between Ramah and Bethel, where
stood the palm-tree of Deborah.2 In the days of Gideon
the Midianites swept south from the Plain of Esdraelon,
so that the use of the open threshing-floors was impossible
even at Ophrah.3 In Elisha’s time, the Syrians, by
apparently annual invasions, swept westward as far as the
citadel of Samaria, behind the watershed. The Assyrians
overwhelmed the land, and carried off the greater part of
the population. In the Book of Judith Holofernes is
represented as easily bringing in his army from Esdraelon
by the series of plains described above.4 Vespasian, seek-
ing to blockade Judaea, marched from Antipatris by
Shechem to Korea, and thence to Jericho and back again,
and then to Gophna, Ephraim and back again, incredible
as it seems, within a week.5 * And Titus came easily upon
Jerusalem from Caesarea past Gophna and Bethel.0 How
differently all this reads from the history of the invasion of
Judaea through her narrow defiles—the sallies from the
hills, the ambushes of the Wady ‘Ali, the routs down by
the two Beth-horons and Ajalon !

One very interesting effect of the openness of Samaria
is the frequency with which the chariot appears in her
history. In the annals of Judah chariots are chariot-
but seldom mentioned.7 All the long drives dnving-
of the Old Testament are in Samaria,—the race of Ahab

1 Josh. xvii. 14.	2 Judges iv. 5.

3	Perhaps Ferata, south-west from Shechem (Conder). Judges vi. 11.

4	Bethulia must be sought for somewhere about the Merj el Ghuruk.

See p. 356.	5 Jos. iv. JVars, viii., ix., x.	® Id. v. Wars, ii. I.

7 See Appendix, on Roads and Wheeled Vehicles in Syria from the earliest

limes to the present.330 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

against the storm from Mount Carmel to Jezreel;1 his
long funeral in his battle-chariot stained with his life-
blood, from Ramoth-Gilead to Samaria, and they ivashed
his chariot by the pool of Samaria, and the dogs licked up
his blood f the drive of Jehu from Ramoth-Gilead past
Bethshan and up the valley of Jezreel, and as he came
near, the watchman in Jezreel told, saying, . . . the driving
is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi, for he driveth
furiously ; and Joram said, Yoke, and they yoked his chariot,
and Joram king of Israel and Ahaziah king of Judah went
out each in his chariot to meet Jehu, and found him in the
portion of Naboth the Jezreelite\ the chariot race from there
between Jehu and poor Ahaziah by the way of the garden
house, the ascent of Gur, which is by Ibleam, where Ahaziah
was smitten, and Megiddo, where he died, and his servants
carried him in a chariot to Jerusalem ;3 Jehu’s drive again
from Jezreel to Samaria, and he lighted on Jehonadab the
son of Rechab coming to meet him, and he gave him his
hand, and took him up into the chariot, and said, Come with
me and see my zeal for the Lord;4 and the long drive of
Naaman from Damascus, across the level Hauran, over
Jordan and up Jezreel, with his horses and his chariots, to
the house of Elisha, presumably at Samaria, and the drive
back again, and the pursuit by Gehazi, and when Naaman
saw one running after him, he lighted down from his chariot
to meet him? Contrast all this with the two meagre
references to chariot-driving in Judaea—in the one case
the chariot carried a corpse, in the other a dying man 6—
and you get an	illustration	of the difference	between	the

1 i Kings xviii. 44	ff.	2	1 Kings xxii. 29 ff.

3 2 Kings ix. 16 ff.	4	2 Kings x. 12, 15 ff.

5 2 Kings v. 9 ff.	6	2 Kings ix. 28; 2 Chron.	xxxv. 24.Samaria

331

level stretches of Samaria, and the steep, tortuous roads
of her sister province. Perhaps the prophet intends to
emphasise this contrast in his verse : I will cut off the
chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem3

Far more important than chariots, more important even
than the easy invasion by enemies, is that effect of
Samaria’s openness, to which allusion was Precocityof
made in the beginningof this chapter. Judaea, Samana-
earning from outsiders little but contempt, inspired the
people, whom she so carefully nursed in seclusion from
the world, with a patriotism that has survived two thou-
sand years of separation, and still draws her exiles from
the fairest countries of the world to pour their tears upon
her dust, though it be among^ the most barren the world
contains. Samaria, fair and facile, lavished her favours on
foreigners, and was oftener the temptation than the dis-
cipline, the betrayer than the guardian, of her own. The
surrounding paganism poured into her ample life ; and
although to her was granted the honour of the first great
victories against it—Gideon’s and Elijah’s—she suffered
the luxury that came after to take away her crown.
From Amos to Isaiah the sins she is charged with are
those of a civilisation that has been ripe, and is rotten—
drunkenness, clumsy art, servile imitation of foreigners,
thoughtlessness and cruelty. For these she falls, and her
summer beauty is covered by the mud of a great deluge.
The crown of the pride of the drunkards of Ephraim is
trodden under foot, and the fading floiver of his glorious
beauty, which is on the head of the fat valley, shall be as the
first ripe fig before the summer, which when he that hath
caught sight of it, seeth it, while it is yet in his hand, he

1 Zech. ix. io.332 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

eateth it up} Poor province, she grew ripe and was
ravished before the real summer of her people !

II. The second characteristic of Samaria is her central
and dominant position. Jerusalem has acquired such

stupendous historical importance that we are
II. TheCen-	.	.	.	,	, ,

trai Position apt to imagine her as the natural head and

centre of the land. But nothing comes with
greater surprise upon the visitor to Palestine than to
discover that, with all her advantages of defence, Jerusalem
lies on a barren and awkward site, and that both natural
and historical precedence have to be given, not to Mount
Zion and the City of David, but to Mount Ebal and
Mount Gerizim, with Shechem between them.

We have noticed how this suggests itself even before we
touch the land. In the Central Range of Western Pales-
tine, as seen from the sea, the only sign of a
pass is that between Ebal and Gerizim, whose
summits so conspicuously rise above the general level of
the sky-line. It is the same on the other side of the land.
Seen from Moab, the Central Range runs unbroken, save
by the narrowest of corries. But stand farther north, on
the hills of Gilead, opposite Ephraim—on Jebel ‘Oshea,
above Es-Salt, or on the high castle of Er-Rubad, above
‘Ajlun—and there open to you across Jordan the mouths
of valleys which run up to the great plains in front of
Shechem. There is thus a pass right across Samaria, from
the coast to Jordan, and just where it pierces the water-

Shechem.

1 One interesting proof of how Samaria was permeable from the west is
shown in Beit Dejan, i.e. the House of Dagon, the name of a village six and
a half miles south-east of Shechem. Cf. also the name Amalek (Judges v.
14, xii. 15). This, however, is perhaps due to some Arab element which,
like the Kenites in the south of Judah, entered the land along with Israel.Samaria

333

shed, with Ebal on one side and Gerizim on the other,
Shechem lies at the parting of the waters, some of its
fountains flowing seawards, the rest towards Jordan. Joppa,
down an open incline, stands three or four miles nearer
than to Jerusalem. Caesarea is but thirty miles away ;
Jenin, the gateway to Esdraelon, eighteen ; Bethshan
twenty-five ; while none of the roads which fall directly to
the east take more than eighteen miles to reach the fords
of Jordan. We have also seen that from Mount Ebal all
the chief features and most of the borders of the land are
visible.1 There is one other token to add. To-day Shechem
is the seat of the government of the province, and—eloquent
homage of civilisation to its immemorial rank—it is the
connecting link of the telegraphic systems of the east and
west of Jordan.

It is therefore in full harmony with the geographical
data that the story of the patriarchs brings both Abraham
and Jacob, on their entrance into the Promised Historical
Land, at once to Shechem,2 and that the Book Proofs-
of Deuteronomy selects Ebal and Gerizim as the scene of
a great inaugural service by all Israel on taking possession
of the country—a service the performance of which the
Book of Joshua duly records. Both of these passages, in
Deuteronomy and in Joshua, are from the hands of a
writer, the Deuteronomist, whose ruling principle is the
centralisation of Israel’s worship in one sanctuary, and
that ostensibly Jerusalem. His mention of Ebal, there-
fore—and it is the only sacred site which he names—
stands out in all the greater relief, as a proof of the

1 Book i. ch. vi., The View from Mount Ebal.

a Abraham, Gen. xii. 6 (J); Jacob, Gen. xxxiii. 18 (P and probably also E,
cf. xxxiv.).334 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

natural attractiveness and central position of the district
of Shechem.1 2 After the disruption of Israel, these qualities
of Shechem were not found to atone for her weakness as
a fortress, and she soon ceased to be the capital of the
Northern Kingdom. It was to the Samaritans that the
district owed the revival of its claims to be considered the
religious centre of the land. But this was in the interest
of as narrow and exclusive a sectarianism as ever sought
to monopolise the liberal intentions of nature. The abuse
was gloriously atoned for. It was by this natural capital
of the Holy Land, from which the outgoings to the world
are so many and so open, that the religion of Israel rose
once for all above every geographical limit, and the charter
of a universal worship was given. Neither in this mountain,
nor yet at Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father ; but the
hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall
worship the Father in spirit and in truth?

1	Deut. xxvii. and Josh. viii. 30ff. The former is a very difficult chapter.
It breaks the connection between xxvi. and xxviii., and is evidently compiled
from several distinct narratives (Dillmann in loco, and Driver, Introd. 88).
But these all agree that a great national service was to take place at Shechem
soon after the crossing of Jordan, of which Josh. viii. 30ff. (Deut.) recounts
the performance in harmony with the Deuteronomist portions of Deut. xxvii.
That the only sanctuary mentioned by the Book of Deuteronomy should be
the capital of Samaria, is surely an element to be taken into consideration of
the question whether that book arose out of an agitation in favour of a central
sanctuary at Jerusalem. If it did, it is strange that Ebal is so honoured,
while Jerusalem is not once mentioned.

2	Among other assumptions, the Samaritans fixed on Gerizim as the site of
the offering of Isaac, and this is supported by Stanley (Sinai and Palestine,
note to ch. v.) on the ground that Gerizim is visible from a great distance, as
Mount Moriah in Jerusalem is not. Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the
place afar off (ver. 4). But the vagueness of the phrases the land of Moriah
and one of the mountains (ver. 2) prevents us from fixing on any definite hill;
while there is every reason to believe that Moriah is not the original reading,
but is a gloss of late origin, and inserted in order to give the Temple at
Jerusalem the credit of the patriarchal narrative. Cf. Baudissin, Stud. zz.Samaria

n ** C
30D

III. The third feature of Samaria is her connection with
Eastern Palestine. This connection has existed from the
earliest times, with the one great interruption ni Connec_
of the Samaritan schism, down to the present Eastern*1
day. Both Abraham and Jacob came from the Palestine-
East to Shechem. Israel, leaving to Ammon and Moab
the regions of Eastern Palestine which are opposite Judah,
herself occupied those which march with Samaria. In this
latitude, one tribe, Manasseh, was settled on both sides of
the river;1 another, Ephraim, gave its name not only to
the western mountains, but to a wood or jungle on the
eastern side;2 for a time in the days of the Judges,
Midianites, sons of the East, swept annually across Jordan,

Setnit. Religions-gesch. ii. 252; Dillmann on Gen. xxvii., and Henderson’s
Palestine, § 48.

1	See Chs. xxv. and xxvi. for the Eastern Conquests of Israel.

2	Forest or Jungle of Ephraim, in which the battle took place between
David and Absalom (2 Sam. xviii. 6). Reuss (in loco) insists that a forest
with the name Ephraim could have lain only west of Jordan. He claims that
this position agrees with the course of the narrative which represents the
bearer of the news to David, who was at Mahanaim, taking the direction of
the Jordan Valley, which he naturally would have done had he started from
the west of the river, and explains the absence of any mention of David’s force
recrossing the river to meet Absalom by supposing gaps in the narrative.
Putting aside this arbitrary hypothesis, by which one might prove anything, I
may point out that both messengers had to run from the scene of Absalom’s
defeat to David, and ask, if that was on the west of Jordan, how could it be
said that only one of the messengers ran from it by way of the plain (ver. 23) ?
This disposes of Reuss’ conjecture, and proves the forest to have been east of
the river. Lucian’s recension of the LXX. gives Maaivav (for D'jnO) instead
of Ephraim as the name of the forest. But this is just the kind of correction
Lucian would make to relieve a difficulty. And, indeed, why should it be
thought unlikely that the name Ephraim should have crossed the river, and
fastened on the eastern bank? In the course of the history of that tribe,
especially in the days of the Judges, a hundred adventures w'ere likely to occur
to cause the Ephraimites, who so frequently passed over, to leave their name
behind them when they w'ent back. Or a colony may easily have settled
there. And, in fact, we do read of Ephraimites settling in Gilead in such
large numbers that the western Ephraimites call the Gileadites fugitives from
Ephraim (Judges xii. 4).336 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

and up to the recesses of Mount Ephraim ; Gideon drove
them back, and the rout extended from Esdraelon to
Heshbon ; it was from a rendezvous in Ephraim that Saul,
though a Benjamite, marched to the relief of Jabesh Gilead.1
As before the disruption the trans-Jordanic provinces were
connected with the tribe of Joseph, so after it they fell to
that tribe’s successor, Northern Israel; as formerly the
Midianites made yearly incursions across the river, so now
the Syrians. Jeroboam, the first king, fortified Penuel after
fortifying Shechem,2 and Ramoth-Gilead was a garrison
and outpost under Ahab, from which chariots drove to
Jezreel and Samaria.3 Elijah, the . prophet of Samaria,
was from Tishbeh in Gilead; Elisha crossed Jordan to
anoint Jehu. After the exile, the impotence of the Samari-
tans naturally broke the connection of their territory with
the land over Jordan, and Perea, as the latter was now
called, formed the link between Galilee and Judaea.4
But in modern times the old relation has reasserted
itself, and the eastern table-land is again governed from
Nablus.

The reason of this immemorial connection is very clear.
We have seen that a number of valleys lead down through
Mount Ephraim upon Jordan, while the Plain
of Esdraelon, with its offsets into Northern
Samaria, presents a still more easy highway in the same
direction. Now, to Esdraelon and those passes the Jordan,
dangerous river as it is, offers an extraordinary number
of fords ; while farther south, where the passes into the
Western Range are few and more difficult, there are in

1	From Bezek, probably Khurbet Ibzik, thirteen miles north-east from
Shechem, on the road down to Bethshan.

2	1 Kings xii. 25.	3 1 Kings xxii. ; 2 Kings ix.

4 Though Bethshan went with Pecapolis.Samaria

337

Jordan hardly any fords.1 The passage, therefore, from
Samaria to Gilead was a comparatively easy one at many
points ; hence their frequent invasions of each other, and
their long political union. With this contrast the separation
of Judaea from the east by the great gulf of the Dead Sea.

In connection with the chariots above mentioned, Ahab’s,
Jehu’s, and Naaman’s, the question naturally rises, How
did they cross Jordan? Till the Romans came The fords
there were no bridges in Palestine. Like the of Jordan,
name for port, the name for bridge does not occur in the
Old Testament, probably because the thing itself was quite
unknown. It is unlikely that chariots were driven across
the river, for the shallowest ford is three feet deep, and the
bottom very muddy. Either the body of the chariot was
floated over, as baggage is still floated, by inflated skins,
or else such broad ferry-boats existed as Caesar found in
use on the rivers of Gaul.2

IV. The fourth feature of Samaria is her connection with
Carmel. To Samaria Carmel holds much the same place

1	On the Survey map not more than five fords are marked south of the Horn
of Surtabeh, but at least twenty-two north of this.

2	Bell. Gall. iii. 29. The depth of the fords on Jordan is very variable.
Burckhardt tells of one two hours south-east from Beisan, which was three feet
deep {Syria, 344, 345); Lynch, of one that a small donkey crossed with difficulty
{Narrative, 224). Three Hebrew forms from the same root, to cross—“QyjD

and m2]J; The first two mean both a ford (Gen. xxxii. 23, *lDyE >

Josh. ii. 7, and several other passages, mSJlD) and a pass (1 Sam. xiii. 23 ;
xiv. 4; Isa. x. 29). The third is used only in 2 Sam. xix. 18, and may be
either a ford or more probably, as in the Authorised Version, a ferry, as it is
nominative to the active verb caused to pass over. In the text of 2 Sam. xv.
28 and xvii. 16, the plural DVDy is used, and must mean as it stands, fords ;
but the Hebrew margin and LXX. read JTlTiy, or plains. In Rabbinic
Hebrew, fcOSyQ and miyO both mean a ferry. In Jer. li. 32, Hitz. transl.
mayo by‘bridge.’

Y338 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

on the west as Bashan or Gilead fills to the east. Seen
from Ebal or Jezreel, they stand on either hand of Mount
Ephraim, carrying the eye along the only high and
iv	sustained sky-lines within sight, and forming

nectionwith with Hermon the three dominant features of
the view. Both of them, too, have always been
better wooded than Mount Ephraim. And so, because
they thus stand out in similar relation and in similar con-
trast to Samaria, it does not surprise us to find them,
though at opposite sides of the Holy Land, frequently
mentioned together. Bashan and Carmel shake off their
fruits. Israel shall feed in Bashan and Carmel. Feed thy
people . . . in the forest in the midst of Carmel: let them
feed in Bashan and Gilead. Sometimes Lebanon is added :
Bashan languisheth, and Carmel and the flower of Lebanon
languisheth.

Though of the same rock as the Central Range, Carmel,
as we have seen, is separated from the latter by a softer
formation, in which the more denuded hills offer easy pas-
sages from Sharon to Esdraelon. These hills are the so-
called Shephelah of Israeli as debatable ground as the
Shephelah of Judah, but lying very much more openly
than the latter in the line of foreign traffic and war.
Carmel was, therefore, no integral part of the body politic
of Samaria. The kings, indeed, of Northern Israel held it
as they held Gilead. But, in the later history, Carmel lay
outside the province of Samaria—sometimes reckoned to
Galilee, sometimes taken by Tyre.2 Nor was Carmel a
threshold to the land : his isolated range could not be used
by Israel, as Gilead was, for the basis of foreign campaigns.
Indeed we have seen how all the campaigns of Syrian

1 Josh. xi. 16. See p. 20j.	2 Josephus, iii. Wars, iii. 1.Samaria

339

history treated Carmel on!}’ as a thing to be avoided,
sweeping past on either side of him. The ridge was so
well cultivated that the villages must have been many, but
there was neither site nor occasion for a large town. Car-
mel, therefore, had no political or military history. His
influences were all of another kind.

Throughout the Old Testament Carmel appears either as
a symbol or as a sanctuary. His bulk, visible from so many
quarters of the land, makes him the picture of

#	Carmel in

all that is fact and not dream : while his head- the Old

Testament.

long sweep seawards is the very token of what
will surely come and not fail. Pharaoh is but a rumour,
do they say ? As I live, saith Jehovah, surely like Tabor
among the mountains, and like Carmel by the sea, shall he
come ! The two hills stand at opposite ends of Esdraelon,
each separate from other hills, and imposing its bulk upon
the plain. But Carmel’s long sweep north-westward invests
him with the appearance of having come there. Some hills
suggest immovableness, and others, with their ‘ long grey-
hound backs,’ are full of motion. It is the peculiarity of
Carmel to combine these effects, and to impress those who
look upon him with the sense of one long stride over the
plain and firm foothold upon the sea. It is not, however,
only his shape that is symbolic. Sweeping seawards,
Carmel is the first of Israel’s hills to meet the rains, and
they give him of their best. He is clothed in verdure.
To-day it is mostly wild—fresh open jungle, coppices of
oak and carob, with here and there a grove of great trees.
But in ancient times most of the hill was cultivated. The
name means The Garden, and in the rock, beneath the wild
bush that now covers so much of it, grooved floors and
troughs have been traced, sufficiently numerous to be the340 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

proof of large harvests of grape and olive. The excellency
of Carmel was now the figure of human beauty,1 and now
the mirror of the lavish goodness of God ;2 that Carmel
should languish—Carmel in the very gateway of the rains
—is the prophets’ most desperate figure of desolation.

But it is as a sanctuary that the long hill is best
remembered in history. In its separation from other hills,

Carmel and its position on the sea, its visibleness from all

Elijah. quarters of the country;3 in its uselessness for
war or traffic ; in its profusion of flowers, its high platforms
and groves with their glorious prospects of land and sea,
Carmel must have been a place of retreat and of worship
from the earliest times. It was claimed for Baal ; but,
even before Elijah’s day, an altar had stood upon it for
Jehovah. About this altar—as on a spot whose sanctity
they equally felt—the rival faiths met in that contest, in
which for most of us all the history of Carmel consists.
The story in the Book of Kings is too vivid to be told
again ; but it is not without interest to know that the
awful debate, whether Jehovah or Baal was supreme lord
of the elements, was fought out for a full day in face of
one of the most sublime prospects of earth and sea and
heaven. Before him, who stands on Carmel, nature rises
in a series of great stages from sea to Alp : the Medi-
terranean, the long coast to north and south, with its hot
sands and palms; Esdraelon covered with wheat, Tabor
and the lower hills of Galilee with their oaks,—then over
the barer peaks of Upper Galilee, and the haze that is
about them the clear snow of Hermon, hanging like an

i Song vii. 5-	2 Isaiah xxxv. 2.

3 Carmel is visible not only from the hills of Samaria, from Jaffa, from Tyre,
from Hermon, from the hills of Naphtali, but also from the hills behind
Gadara, east of Jordan, and from many other points in Gilead.Samaria

34i

only cloud in the sky. It was in face of that miniature
universe that the Deity who was Character was vindicated
as Lord against the deity who was not. It was over all
that realm that the rain swept up at the call of the same
God who exposed the injustice of the tyrant and avenged
the wrongs of Naboth.

V. The last great feature of Samaria was the fortresses,
\vhich were necessitated by the peculiar formation of the
province, and which lay all around and across
her. But the number of them was so great, places of
and the part they played in her history so im-
portant,—repeating on several sites the function usually
discharged in a country by one capital city,—that the
description of them must be left for another chapter.CHAPTER XVII

THE STRONG PLACES OF SAMARIAFor this Chapter consult Maps /., V. and VI.THE STRONG PLACES OF SAMARIA

AST chapter closed with the designation of her many

fortresses as the fifth great feature of Samaria. It
is these which this chapter is to describe. The large
number of them was due to the openness of the land, and
to the fact that, unlike Judaea, Samaria had no central
position upon which her defence might be consolidated.
Her fortresses lay all around and across her, but chiefly,
as was natural, upon the passes which draw up to her
centre. They were mostly built on the high isolated
knolls, which are so frequent a feature of her scenery.

Of those strong places, the chief was that which was so
long the capital and gave its name to the whole kingdom.
The head of Ephraim is Samaria}

This is to dethrone Shechem, the earliest capital of the
land, the place to which the government has gravitated
again and again, and on which it rests to-day. weakness of
But Shechem is no fortress. The natural Shechem-
centre of the land, as we have seen, well furnished with
water, and attracting also by its sacred associations, the
site is, nevertheless, incapable of defence. This was dis-
covered by Jeroboam himself, for even in his reign we find
the court at Tirzah,2 a strong position by the head of one of
the eastern passes. Tirzah was retained by the following

1 Isaiah vii. 9.	2 1 Kings xiv. 17.346 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

dynasty, but when the next usurper, Omri, had time to
shape his policy, he turned westward, and chose him a

The city of virgin site in that valley which leads down

Samaria. fr0m Shechem to the coast, the present Wady
esh-Sha‘ir or Barley-Vale. Here, in a wide basin, formed
by a bend of the vale and an incoming glen, rises a
round, isolated hill over three hundred feet high. It
was not already a city, but was probably, as it is to-day,
covered with soil and arable to the top. Omri fortified
it and called it Shomeron, Wartburg, the Watch Tower.1
The name is obviously appropriate. Although the moun-
tains surround and overlook it on three sides, Samaria
commands a great view to the west. The broad vale
is visible for eight miles, then a low range of hills,
and over them the sea. It is a position out of the way
of most of the kingdom, of which the centre of gravity
lay upon the eastern slope; but it was wisely chosen
by a dynasty whose strength was alliance with Phoenicia.
The coast is but twenty-three miles away, the sea is in
sight. In her palace in Samaria, Jezebel can have felt
far neither from her home nor from the symbols of her
ancestral faith. There flashed the path of her father’s
galleys, and there each night her people’s god sank to his
rest in the same glory betwixt sky and sea, which they
were worshipping from Tyre.

But the position has other advantages than its western

1	for to watch, with the termination so frequent in Hebrew

place-names. The Aramaic is fHOU*, and it is from this that the Greek
Za/jidpeia and Latin Samaria are formed. But LXX. gives also Zffiepwv and
"Zofiopuv, and Josephus hep-apeuv (viii. Antt. xii. 5): Stade, in Z.A.T.W.,
1885, 165-175, Der Name der Stadt Samarien 11. seine Herknnft, disputes
the statement of 1 Kings xvi. 24, that Omri first gave the place its name, and
takes the original form to have beenThe Strong Places of Samaria

34 7

exposure. ‘ Though it would now be commanded from the
northern range, it must before the invention of gunpowder
have been almost impregnable.’1 The sieges

Its sieges,

of Samaria were therefore always prolonged.

In Elisha’s day there was the blockade by the Syrians ;
when, behold, they besieged it, until an ass’s head was sold
for fourscore shekels, and the fourth part of a kab of Dove’s
dung for five} Even the Assyrians did not capture the
town till after an investment of three years, 723-721. In
331, it yielded to Alexander the Great, who visited it on
his way back from Egypt, in order to punish the Samaritan
murderers of the Governor he had appointed over Coele-
Syria.3 Ptolemy Lagos deemed it dangerous enough to
have it dismantled before he gave over Coele-Syria to
Antigonus:4 and being rebuilt, it was again destroyed
fifteen years later.5 Fortified once more, it was able in
120 to resist the flood-tide of Jewish conquest under John
Hyrcanus for a year.6 He demolished the city, but, like
so many other places devastated by the Jews, it was rebuilt
by Gabinius, the successor of Pompey.7 And then as the
site had suited the Phoenician alliance of Ahab, so it fell

1 Major Conder, Tent Work.	2 2 Kings vi. 25.

3 Andromachus, whom they burnt alive. . Q. Curtius (ed. Lemaire) cf.
iv. 5, 9, with iv. 8, 9. Other writers add that Alexander also settled Mace-
donians in the town. Euseb. Chron. ii. 114, Syncell. i. 496, both quoted by
Schiirfer, Hist. Div. 11. vol. i. 123. Euseb. also speaks of Perdiccas as having
refounded the town.

4	Diodorus Siculus, xix. 93.

3 Demetrius Poliorcetes in his struggle against Ptolemy. Stark, Gaza, 361,
gives the authorities.

0 Josephus, xiii. Antt. x. 2, 3 ; i. Wars, ii. 7. The account of how Hyrcanus
demolished Samaria is very interesting : * He destroyed it utterly, and brought
streams to drown it, for he made such excavations as might let the waters run
under it; nay, he demolished the very signs that there had ever been so great
a city there.’ This can only mean that there was a good part of the city
below the hill.	7 Josephus, xv. Antt. xiv. 3 ; i. Wars, viii. 4.348 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

in with the Roman policy of Herod, and especially with
his plan of building a large port at Caesarea, and holding
the roads from the coast to the interior. Augustus gave
Samaria to Herod, who fortified and embellished it in
honour of his patron, and as upon some other high places
in Syria a temple to Caesar arose where there had been a
temple to Baal.1 Herod called it Sebaste, the Greek for
Augusta, and it is this name which has survived till now
with the remains of his splendid colonnades and gateways.
The Herodian town probably covered and overflowed the
large hill; it is said to have been not less than two miles
and a half in circumference.2 Herod settled in it a
number of veterans, and used it also as a recruiting-ground
for mercenary troops. The character of its population—
half Greek, half Samaritan—agreed with his policy of
building fortresses for himself on what was virtually pagan
soil; while the thoroughly Gentile character of the soldiers
whom he recruited, is proved by their subsequent desertion
to the Romans, in the great Jewish revolts.3 In spite of
its re-creation as a colonia under Septimius Severus,4
Sebaste dwindled to a small town,5 though the seat of a
bishop, and the centre of a large civil district. The

1	Cf. 1 Kings xvi. 32 with i. Wars, xxi. 2.

2	Josephus, xv. Antt. viii. 5 ; i. Wars, xxi. 3.

3	In Josephus, xvii. Antt. x. 3, Herod’s soldiers, and in 9, the city of
Samaria, are said to have gone over to the Romans. In ii. Wars, iii. 4, and
iv. 3, these same soldiers are called Sebastenes. The soldiers are called
Se/3a<rrijj'ol, cf. also ii. Wars, xii. 5, fxlav t\r)v Ka\ovp.hr)i> Se/JaoTJjj'uh'. These
passages prove that the opinion is wrong which takes the <nreipT) 2e/3a<rrri
of Acts xxvii. 1 for a cohort of soldiers enlisted at Sebaste. Had it been so,
its name would have run crireipr) Ka\ov/j.4vrj 2e(3a<STr)vu>i'. It is, of course, the
Augustan or Imperial cohort.

4	De Saulcy, Numis. de la Terre Sainte, p. 274, quotes from Ulpian (lib. i.
tit. 15), and p. 280 gives a coin of Caracalla inscribed COL. L. SEP.
SEBASTE.

8 The Onomasticon, sub 'Lop.tpuv, calls it a ttoXLxvt], in the fourth century.The Strong Places of Samaria

349

Crusaders restored the Episcopal See, with a great Gothic
cathedral, whose ruins stand by the columns of Herod.
But, since then, the town has sunk to a miserable village.
For as long as there ruled in the land a power with no
interests towards the coast and the sea, Samaria was forced
to yield again to the more central Shechem the supremacy
which Ahab and Herod, with their western obligations, had
stolen from Shechem to give her.

To-day, amid the peaceful beauty of the scene—the
secluded vale covered with corn-fields, through which the
winding streams flash and glisten into the hazy distance,
and the gentle hill rises without a scarp to the olives
waving over its summit—it is possible to appreciate
Isaiah’s name for Samaria, the crown of pride of Ephraim,
the flower of his glorious beauty which is on the head of the
fat valley} Only the more hard is it to realise how often
such a landscape became the theatre of war and of the
worst passions of tyranny and religious strife.

Sinister fate to have belonged both to Ahab and to
Herod ! There by the entrance of the gate Ahab drew
his sentence of death from the prophet of
Jehovah; and there they washed his blood Ahab and
from his chariot, when they had brought him
back to his burial.2 There Jezebel slew the prophets of
Jehovah and Jehu the priests of Baal.3 There Herod
married Mariamne, and when in his jealousy he had slain
her for nothing, there she haunted him, till his remorse
‘ would frequently call for her and lament for her in a most
indecent manner, and he was so far overcome of his passion
that he would command his servants to call for Mariamne,

1 Isa. xxviii. i.

3 i Kings xviii. 1352 Kings x. 17 (if.

I Kings xx.350 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

as if she were still alive and could still hear them.’1 There,
too, he strangled his two sons.2 Like most of Herod’s
magnificent palaces, Sebaste was but a family shambles.
It is not without fitness that a tradition, otherwise unjusti-
fied, should have localised in this place of blood the execu-
tion of John the Baptist. The church was dedicated to
him, and his tomb is still pointed out in the rock beneath.

On this western flank of Samaria there was no other
town of the first rank. But the passes as they emerged
upon Sharon must have been guarded by forts.

Other

Wes'.em Some hold that the present Fer'on due west of

Strongholds,	was pjr<athon,3 the birthplace of one of

the judges. A much more likely site of importance, both
in the attack and defence of the eastern border of Mount
Ephraim, is the present Kakon, that lies a little way out
upon the plain. Kakon commands the entrances to the
roads up to Sebaste, and through by Dothan to Esdraelon.
Kakon was always a frontier position. In the times of
the Crusades it is described as the limit of the territory of
Nablus ;4 and in March 1799 it was at Kakon that a force
from Nablus,coming down by the Wady esh-Sha‘ir and over
the low hills by Bela‘ and Shuweikeh, met Turkish cavalry
from Acre, and attempted to check Napoleon’s march
northward.5 If it be in Northern Sharon that we must
seek for the Aphek, at which the Philistines twice assem-
bled their forces—once before invading Israel, and once
before crossing to Esdraelon G—there is no more suitable
spot than Kakon.

1 Josephus, xv. Antt. vii. 7.	2 Id. xvi. Antt. xi. 7.

3	Judges xii. 15. But see p. 355.

4	Rohricht, Z.D.P. V., x. 246, at Kakon or Cacho, as it was then called,
the Knights of St. John had a Casale.

5	Guerre de t Orient: Campagnes d Egyple et de la Syr/e, ii.

u 1 Sam. iv. 1 ; xxix. 1. Bui, on the various Apheks, see p. 401.The Strong Places of Samaria

35i

On the road from Shechem to Joppa—part of which
runs along one of the natural frontiers between Samaria
and the south 1—there is no town of com- The shechem-
manding natural strength, except el Jit, and J°PPaioad-
none of the names either upon the road or near it has been
satisfactorily identified with any famous name of ancient
history.2 The other great road from Sharon up the southern
frontier of Samaria to Bethel, passes nothing of import-
ance,3 till at the junction with the Shechem Bethel road,
in the extreme south-west corner of Mount

The Bethel,

Ephraim lies Jufna. Though not mentioned Sharon road,
in the Gld Testament,4 it must at all times Gophna-
have played an important part in the defence or invasion
of Samaria. Jufna is, without doubt, the Gophna of
Josephus. It was head of a toparchy in Judeea.5 Judas
Maccabeus fell back on Gophna after his defeat by

1	The Wady Kanah, see p. 249.

2	On the whole road and its neighbourhood cf. Robinson, L.R., 133-141.
El Jit is probably the Tirruv or Tirdutv of early Christian writers, who give
it as the birthplace of the Samaritan, Simon Magus, Acts viii. 9; Just. Mart.
Apolog. II; Euseb. H.E. ii. 1, 13, etc. El Funduk is the Phondeka
of the Talmud, doubtless an ancient inn, iravdoKetov, by the wayside (cf.
Neubauer, Geog. Tahn. 172). Fer'ata, to the east of Funduk, has been sug-
gested both for Pir'athon (see above) and Gideon’s Ophrah. ‘ Ophra . . .
nicht zu weit von Sichem u. Tebes, wohl im sudosten des westmanassitischen
Gebietes zu suchen.’—Budde, Bii. Ri. u. Sa. 107. Kefr Thilth, on the Wady
Kanah, has been claimed as Baal Shalisha (2 Kings iv. 42), the last spur of
hill which the road descends is occupied by a village (Hableh), a good site,
unidentified ; and a little more than a mile out on the plain is Jiljfiliyeh,
doubtless an ancient Gilgal, but not (as Robinson suggests) the place men-
tioned in Joshua xii. 23, where with the LXX. we ought rather to read
Galilee.

3	Kibbiah, which lies to the south among the hills north-east from Lydda, is
probably Gibbethon, which Northern Israel sought to take from the Philistines
(1 Kings xv. 27). Timnath-heres (Judges ii. 9), Timnath-serah (Joshua xix.
50 ; xxiv. 30), the city of Joshua has been placed at Kefr Haris, nine miles
south of Shechem.

4	Unless it be the ‘Ophni of Benjamin (Joshua xviii. 24).

5	Josephus, iii. Wars, iii. 5.352 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Antiochus Epiphanes;1 and it was occupied both by
Vespasian in his blockade of Judaea and by Titus in
his advance upon Jerusalem. Whether Paul was taken to
Caesarea by this way or by Beth-horon is uncertain.2

The southern frontier of Samaria was defended, when it
lay so far south,3 by Bethel, and by the city of Ephraim or
Ephron,4 if the conjecture be correct that the latter is the
present strong village Et-Taiyibeh, on the road up from
Jericho. Behind these outposts, the avenues northward
Strongholds are covered by a series of strongholds, chiefly
Southern	on the tops high knolls, like Jiljilia, pro-

I'rontier.	bably the Gilgal of Elijah’s last journey,3

Sinjil, a Saint Giles of Crusading times,6 and Kuriyat,
one of the sites proposed for Korea,7 which Pompey occu-
pied on his march from Scythopolis to Jericho. Some-
where near Korea lay the Hasmonaean fortress of
Alexandrium—‘ a stronghold fortified with the utmost
magnificence, and situated on a high mountain.’ 8 Alex-
andrium played a frequent part in the civil wars of the
Jews, in the Roman invasions, and in Herod’s
life. Pompey occupied it. Gabinius besieged
it, during which siege Mark Antony greatly distinguished

Alexandrium.

1	Josephus, i. Wat's, i. 5.

2	Robinson, Bib. Res. iii. 77 ff. ; L.R., 138.	3 See p. 250 f.

• 4 2 Sam. xiii. 23 ; 2 Chron. xiii. 19, Hebrew text Ephron ; Hebrew margin
Ephraim, John xi. 54, the city to which our Lord retired before the pass-
over. It was the Aphairema of 1 Macc. xi. 34; xiii. Antt. iv. 9, one of
three toparchies taken from Samaria and added to Judaea (see p. 254), about
145 B.c. Cf. Schur. Hist. Div. 1, vol. i. 246. Schlatter, Z. Topog. u. Gesch.
Pal. 243-246, quotes Hecataus in support of opinion that it was Alexander
who ceded these districts to the Jews (?).

5	2 Kings ii. x.

6	Sinjil, a casale or manor of the Order of St. John, was presented to them
by a Robert of St. Giles, Prutz, Z.D.P. V. iv. 166. Hence its name : one of
the few which the Crusaders stamped on the land.

7	Robinson, Bib. Res. iii. 83.	8 Josephus, i. Wan, vi. 5.The Strong Places of Samaria

*y C
3D0

himself.1 Herod confined Mariamne within it,2 and buried
his two strangled sons there, ‘ where their uncle by their
mother’s side, and the greatest part of their ancestors had
been deposited.’ 3 Neither Korea nor Alexandrium has
been identified past doubt. If Kuriyat be Korea, Alex-
andrium, no resemblance of which name survives any-
where, may be the Mejdel Beni Fadl, from which a
Roman road went down to Phasaelis or Khurbet Bkt. el
Kusr farther south.4 But some recognise Korea in
Kurawa, a name at the mouth of the Wady Far'ah on
the Jordan Valley, and place Alexandrium above it on the
prominent Horn of Surtabeh. Till traces of the name
Alexandrium be discovered, the matter must remain
uncertain.5

We are now round upon the eastern flank of Samaria.
At no time do the passes penetrating this appear to have

1 Josephus, xiv. Anit. v. 2-4.	2 Id. xv. Antt. vii. 1.

3	Josephus, xvi. Antt. xi. 7.

4	Mejdel B. Fadl is 2146, Kh. Bkt. el Kusr 2906 feet above the sea.

5	Not Gildemeister, Z.D.P. V., 1881, p. 245 as Schiirer says {Hist. Div. I.
vol. 1. 320 n.), is the author of the proposal of Kurawa and Surtabeh; but
Zschokke, who made it in 1866 in Beitrdge z. Topogr. der wesll. Jordan's Ait
(Jerusalem, 1866). The case between the two proposed Koreas is this: (1)
Josephus says ‘ Pompey passed by Pella and Scythopolis, he came to Korea,
which is the first entrance into Judaea, when one comes through the inlands ’
(xiv. Antt. 3, 4). This suits both Kurawa and Kuriyat, for both are on what
was then the frontier between Samaria and Judaea. (2) Pompey took Korea
and Alexandrium on the way from Scythopolis to Jericho. His straightest
line of march would be down the Ghor, and therefore past Kurawa. But this
road down the Ghor was both dangerous and very warm : it was really not
longer to come up into Mount Ephraim as far as Korea, and then go down
to Jericho. (3) There is no city, village, or ruin called Kurawa ; but there
is a village at Kuriyat. (4) On Surtaba there are ruins, but not corre-
sponding to Josephus’ account of the size of Alexandrium. No other passage
in which the latter is mentioned throws any light on its locality. The
question is thus by no means so clear as Schiirer feels, who decides in
favour of Kurawa and Surtabeh.—Further on Alexandrium, see Strabo,
xvi. ii. 41.

Z354 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

been protected by fortresses, where they issued on the
Jordan Valley. The kings of Israel held both sides of the
The eastern Jordan> and built their fortresses to the east of
frontier. ft, like Jeroboam’s Penuel and Ahab’s Ramoth ;
while the towns which the Herodian dynasty built in
the Jordan Valley were not intended for military, but
Phasaeiis, f°r agricultural, purposes. Herod the Great
Archeiais. founded Phasaeiis, at the mouth of the Wady
Ifjim ; and the ‘village’ which his son Archelaus built
and called after himself, Archeiais, probably lay close by
it to the south. The district is very fertile, but had not
been cultivated before it was thus colonised. It became
one of the famous gardens of Syria, and its palm-groves
stretched till they met those of Jericho.1

But if the eastern passes of Mount Ephraim had no
fortresses by their mouths in the Jordan Valley, they had
several guarding their upper ends. Thus, there were Bezek

1 Josephus (xvi. Antt. v. 2; i. Wars, xxi. 9), Pliny (H.N. v. 15), and
other ancient writers speak of the palms of Jericho, Phasaeiis, Archeiais, and
Livias ; cf. Ptolemy, v. 16, 7. Herod left Phasaeiis to Salome (xvii. Antt.
viii. 1, ii. Wat's, vi. 3). She bequeathed Phasaeiis and Archeiais, ‘ where is a
great plantation of palm-trees’ (xviii. Antt. ii. 2), ‘ her plantation of palm-
trees that was in Phasaeiis’ (ii. Wars, ix. 1), to Julia, wife of Augustus.
Brocardus (twelfth century) mentions the village Phasellum in the Ghor, and
Eli Smith discovered the name Fusail attached to ruins, a great spring and
the wady. The position of Phasaeiis, therefore, is beyond doubt. But the
name of Archeiais has not been found. Josephus calls it a ‘ village ’ (xvii.
Antt. xiii. 1), and obviously puts it near Neara—probably Noopa.9 of the
Onom., five miles from Jericho. The I'abul. Peuting. fixes it on the Roman
road, twelve miles north of Jericho. If we take this figure as right (another,
stating that Archeiais is only twenty-four miles from Scythopolis, is wrong,
since the whole distance from Jericho to Scythopolis is forty-eight, not
fifteen, as Schiirer puts it, Div. 1. vol. ii. 41), that would bring us to a heap of
ruins, nearly two miles south of Phasaeiis, at the mouth of the W. Unkur edh
Dhib. The P.E.F. map places Archeiais at the mouth of the W. Far'ah,
and Boettger (Topogr. Hist. Lexicon zu den Schriflen des FI. Josephus) at
Buseiliyeh, in the same valley.The Strong Places of Samaria

355

on the high-road from Shechem to Bethshan, Tirzah (if
Tirzah be Teiasir, and not, as is more probable, Tulluzah)
at the junction of the Bethshan and Abel- Bezek Tirzah
Meholah roads, and Thebez at the top of the Thebez-
road down the Bukei'a. Some fortress must surely have
covered the top of the Wady Far‘ah—Pir'athon, I would
suggest, the name of which contains the same radicals as
Far'ah, and is probably the same as the Pharathoni that is
combined in First Maccabees with Thamnatha, another
name of which there are echoes in the district.1 At the top
of Wady el Ifjim stood Taanath-Shiloh.2

On the northern frontier the fortresses were of still

greater importance. We have seen that from the Plain of

Esdraelon there leads southward into the very

•	r	Strongholds

heart of the province a succession of open of the north-

, .	,11*	t, •	,1 ern frontier.

plains, connected by easy passes. It is the
widest avenue into both Samaria and Judaea,3 and has an
issue to Sharon as well as to Esdraelon. It was, there-
fore, sought not only by the invaders of Israel from the
north, but by those from east and west4 as well. The
writer of the Book of Judith, whether his book The Book
be real history or not, amply testifies to the of Judith,
strategical importance of this line of entrance into
Samaria. He calls its various steps the ‘ Anabaseis of
the hill-country, for by them is the entry into Judaea/ and

1	For Pir‘athon, pnjnD, see Judges xii. 13-15. T77V Oafivada, (papaduvi
(1 Macc. ix. 50) is evidently one place ; and the dafivadk, Timnah perhaps,
may be still recognised in the name Tamrnun, so common now at the head of
Wady Far'ah.

2	Josh. xvi. 6 : identified by Van de Velde with Ta’ana.

3	Even Judaea, as the Book of Judith emphasises.

4	So the Midianites penetrated Mount Ephraim so far as to make the
Israelites hide themselves even at Ophrah (Judges vi. 11) ; and the Philistines
appear to have come by this way (1 Sam. iv.).356 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Geba,

Dothan,

Bethulia.

says, ‘ it is easy to stop the invaders as they advance (the
pass being narrow) in double file at most.’1

Commanding the passes and plains are a series of
promontories and isolated knolls ; some of these were
Samaria’s northern fortresses. The Book of
Judith mentions three, of which the farthest
south was Geba, another Dothan, both still so
called, and a third Bethulia, whose name cannot be
recovered with any certainty—it may lurk in Meselieh
or Meithalun, or have been succeeded by Sanur.2

At the mouth of the pass which leads from Esdraelon lay
En-gannim, the present Jenin. This was never a fortress,
for it is strong only in water, but was known
as the frontier town between the later Samaria

Jenin.

and Galilee.3 Seven miles north of Jenin, across the
plain, on a cape of Gilboa, with a view that
sweeps Esdraelon east and west, stood Jezreel.
It was built by the same dynasty which built Samaria,

1	. . . rots avafiaaeis rijs opeivrjs ort Si’ alrruiv fy 77 etaoSos els tjjv ’IovSalai>,
Kal 9jv evxepws SiaKioXvaai alrrovsirpoafialvovTas, arevijs ttjs it poa fiats ews otiarjs isr’
dvdpas tobs ttdvras Sbo (Book of Judith iv. 7). The extract is from the letter
of the high priest charging the inhabitants of this neighbourhood to hold the
passes. The last remark is exaggerated.

2	Geba, Judith iii. 10. Dothan was a strong place in Elisha’s time,
2 Kings vi. 13 ; in Judith it is called Dothaim, iv. 6, vii. 3, 18, viii. 3.
Bethulia, the chief stronghold of Israel against Holofernes, iv. 6, vi. 10, 11,
14, vii. 1-20, etc., is placed at Meselieh by Conder, Handbook, p. 289 ;
Sanur, the fortress whiph in 1830 stood a long siege before it yielded, has
also been suggested with great probability ; it is certainly the chief fortress
on the line. Professor Marta (quoted in Z.D.P. V. xii. 117), on topographical
grounds, says Bethulia was near the modern el-Barid, N.W. of Jenin, and be-
lieves to have found in the present Kh. Haraik el Mellah, an Arabic repetition
of the name Beit-Falo, which stands for Bethulia in the Syriac translation.

3	In Old Testament only, Joshua xix. 21, xxi. 29. Josephus calls it Tsjpi,
ii. Wars, xii. 3, Ttj'ala, xx. Antt. vi. 1, iii. Wars, iii. 4. The two former
passages describe a bitter quarrel at G intea between the Galilean pilgrims to
Jerusalem and the Samaritans, which illustrates the feelings described in
Luke ix. 52 ff.The Strong Places of Samaria

357

and, like Samaria, lay convenient to their alliance with
Phoenicia. Jezreel also covered the highways from the
coast to Jordan and from Egypt to Damascus.1

As you look from Jezreel eastward, there is visible in the
distance down Esdraelon another fortress, Bethshan, the
position of which, and its peculiar relation to the province
of Samaria and to the whole of Western Palestine, demands
some description.

The broad Vale of Jezreel comes gently down between
Gilboa and the hills of Galilee. Three miles after it has
opened round Gilboa to the south, but is still
guarded by the northern hills, it suddenly drops
over a bank some three hundred feet high into the valley
of the Jordan. This bank, or lip, which runs north and
south for nearly five miles, is cut by several streams falling
eastward in narrow ravines, in which the black basalt lies
bare, and the water breaks noisily over it. Near the edge
of the lip, and between two of the ravines, rises a high,
commanding mound that was once the citadel of Bethshan,
the other quarters of which lay southward, divided by
smaller streams. The position, which may be further
fortified by scattering the abundant water till marshes
are formed,2 is one of great strength and immense pro-
spect. The eye sweeps from four to ten miles of plain all
round, and follows the road westward to Jezreel, covers
the thickets of Jordan where the fords lie, and ranges the
edge of the eastern hills from Gadara to the Jabbok. It

1	Jezre'el is the modern Zer'in. The first unambiguous references to it as
a town date from Ahab’s time (i Kings xviii. 45, 46; xxi. I, 23, etc.). All
previous instances of the name Jezreel (1 Sam. xxix. 1, 11 ; 2 Sam. ii. 9;
iii. 2 ; iv. 4 ; 1 Kings iv. 12) may just as well be referred to the plain. See
further on the name, p. 384 ff.

2	As the Byzantine army did against the Mohammedans in 634 A.D.358 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

is almost the farthest-seeing, farthest-seen fortress in the
land, and lies in the main passage between Eastern and
Western Palestine. You perceive at a glance the meaning
of its history. Bethshan ought to have been to Samaria
what Jericho was to Judaea—a cover to the fords of Jordan,
and a key to the passes westward. But there

The key of

western is this difference : while Jericho lies well up to

Palestine.

the Judaean hills, and has no strength apart
from them, Bethshan is isolated, and strong and fertile
enough to stand alone. Alone it has stood—less often
an outpost of Western Palestine than a point of vantage
against it. The one event by which this town becomes
vivid in the Old Testament—the hanging of the bodies of
Saul and Jonathan upon its walls—is but a symbol of the
standing menace and insult it proved to Israel, from its
proud position across the plain. In the earlier history,
Bethshan sustained an enclave of Canaanites in the midst
of Israel’s territory; in the later it belonged neither to
Samaria nor to Galilee, but was a free city, chief of the
league of Decapolis, with an alien and provoking popula-
tion.1 In all its long history, it was Jewish for only thirty
years,2 and gladly welcomed Pompey, who

Generally	.	.

in foreign made it free again.3 Many other successful

hands	•	. .

invaders, to whom it had willingly opened its
gates, used it as a base of operations against the land which
it ought to have defended—for example, Antiochus the

1	Josephus, ii. Wars, xviii. 3.

2	Judas Maccabeus had found it friendly in 164, but probably from fear or
policy (2 Macc. xii. 29-31), it yielded to John Hyrcanus in 107 (?) (Josephus
xiii. Antt. x. 3), and remained under Jewish rule till Pompey’s arrival in
64 B.c.

3	Jos. xiv. Antt. iii. 4. For its coins under the Empire, see De Saulcy,
Numis. de la Terre Sainte, 287-290: Plate xiv. 8-13. It was rebuilt by
Gabinius.The Strong Places of Samaria

359

Great1 and Vespasian.2 On the first occasion on which
Bethshan was seriously employed for the defence of
Western Palestine, the stupidity of her garrison rendered
her natural strength of no avail. In 634 A.D. The Day of
the Byzantine army having suffered a great Beisan-
defeat upon the Yarmuk,3 fell back across Jordan, fortified
the bank on which Bethshan stands, and scattered the
water into marshes. The Moslem found these impassable,
and sat down in blockade for some months, hoping that
summer would exhaust the streams. But before summer
came the Byzantines rashly attacked them on their own
ground, and suffered a second and decisive defeat. Beisan
surrendered soon after. The battle was called the battle
of Fahl, the Arabic name for Pella, which lies on the
opposite side of Jordan ; but in the history of Islam the
day lives as the Day of Beisan. It settled the fate of
Western Palestine.4

The only other serious defence of Bethshan was also
against Moslem attack, and was likewise rendered futile by
the stupidity of the defenders. The Crusaders

v Capture by

seem never to have paid to the town that Saiadin,
attention which its position invited, and the pre- Il8?’
sence across Jordan of the Moslem power ought to have ex-
torted from them. Their attempts at fortification on this
vulnerable portion of their frontier they concentrated on
the castle of Belvoir, high above Bethshan and the channel
through which the Moslems were certain to sweep. The

1	198 B.c., Polybius v. 70, who says that its cession to Antiochus was ko.6'
bjioKoyiav.

2	iii. iVars, ix. 7. Vespasian found it a good centre from which to operate,
both against Galilee and Judaea.

3	Others hold that this battle was fought at Yarmuth (Josh. x. 23).

4	Muir, Annals of the Early Caliphate. The Caliphate: its Rise, etc.,
104, 105.360 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

result proved their error. Bethshan, unwalled and weakly
garrisoned, gallantly repulsed the first onset of Saladin, but
within a year he had returned and destroyed her, with
Jezreel and another fortress in the neighbourhood called
Afarbala or Fourbelet.1 Belvoir held out for eighteen
months more—as, indeed, any well-manned fortress on
that height could not help doing—but to what purpose ?
The Christian banner at Belvoir waved a mere signal,
remote, ineffectual, above the flood of Mohammedanism
that speedily covered the whole land. The mistake was
to have neglected Bethshan. When the Crusaders left
Bethshan to its fate, they sealed their own.

These few campaigns will have shown us the strategical
importance of this remarkable town. But, from its position
Other history on the high-road between Damascus and Egypt,
of Beisan. Bethshan must have seen many other sights
and persons of great name in history. It can scarcely
have failed to fall in the way of Thothmes ill.,2 but the
earliest note of it in Egyptian literature occurs in the
fourteenth century B.C., in the travels of the Mohar, who
passed through it in his chariot: ‘ Represent to me Baita-
sha-al as well as Keriathaal: the fords of the Jordan—how
does one cross them ?—let me know the passage to enter
Mageddo.’3 The name does not seem to occur in the lists
of Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, but Holofernes

1	Boha-ed-Din, Life 0f Saladin, c. 24 (ed. Schultens, pp. 53, 54; cf.

William of Tyre, xxii. 26). Afarbala,	is doubtless the Crusaders’

Fourbelet, or Forbelet, a castle belonging to the Hospitallers, described as
not far from Jordan, and south of Beisan. Rey suggests the Kala'at Maleh
{op. cit. 427).

2	In the list of places conquered by him in Palestine is a Bathshal; but

neither Mr. Tomkins nor Professor Sayce identifies this with Bethshan.
11. Rec. of Past, v. 52. Muller {op. cit. p. 193) denies that Bet-sa-el = Beth-
shan.	3 1. Rec. of Past, ii. 112; cf. II. Id. v. 52.The Strong Places of Samaria

361

rested here, and if both he as well as Pompey and Saladin
—all three while advancing from Damascus to invade
Western Palestine — occupied Bethshan, then Tiglath
Pileser and Sargon, with the same line of march, very
probably did so too. An older Cleopatra visited Bethshan
when she made her treaty with Alexander Janneus ;1 and
Vespasian caused his legions to winter in its warmth.2
Josephus says that in his time Bethshan—then called
Scythopolis—was the largest city of the Decapolis.3 Its
territory was wide and rich.4 The ruins remaining attest
a high degree of wealth and culture. Several temples
have been traced, and there is a large amphitheatre, of
which so much is still preserved that it requires little
effort to summon up about you, as you stand in the arena,
the throng and passion of the city in its Greek days.
Twelve black basalt rows of benches for the citizens—
semicircles of nearly two hundred feet in diameter—rise
eastward just so high as to let the actors upon the arena
see, over the mass of faces, the line of the Gilead hills on
the other side of Jordan.5 No Christian can stand among
these ruins—the best preserved on the west of the Jordan—
—without remembering that during the persecutions of
Decius and Diocletian the amphitheatres of Syria were
used for the slaughter of the confessors of Christ. The
citadel frowned over all from the north.

1 Josephus, xiii. Antt. xiii. 2.

- iv. Wars, ii. 1. Bethshan lies 320 feet below the sea.

3	iii. Wars, ix. 7.

4	Polybius v. 70 ; Josephus, Life, 9. It bordered with Gadara.

5	There are fourteen entrances—for spectators, for actors, for wild beasts—
and behind these, beneath the seats, the passages and exits are still well
preserved. Half way up the benches are certain recesses, which are said to
have contained brass sounding tubes (cf. Irby and Mangles’ Travels, 301, 302 ;
Robinson, L.R. 318).362 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

In Christian times Bethshan was still a noble city,1 an
episcopal see,2 full of monks, and the birthplace of some
Christian literature.3 The fertile country around was well
cultivated in ancient times ; like Jericho, the town was sur-
rounded by palm groves. The linen of Scythopolis was
famed all over the world.4 Moslem war and waste swept all
this away. The Crusaders, as we have seen, did little to
revive the town, and, since Saladin finally dismantled it,
Beisan has been little more than the squalid village which
now gathers to the south of the unoccupied citadel. There
are few sites which promise richer spoil beneath their rubbish
to the first happy explorer with permission to excavate.
But meantime, under shadow of the high mound, where
the streams rattle down in the beds they have worn deep
for thousands of years, and Jordan lies in front, and
Gilead rises over Jordan, it is possible to dream very vivid
dreams of a past in which Saul and Judas Maccabeus,
Pompey, Cleopatra and Vespasian, the Byzantines and
first Moslem invaders, the Crusaders and Saladin, have all
played a part.

With regard to the names of this town, it is well known
that it had two, and not so well known that, for a period, it
had also a third. In the Old Testament it is Bethsha’an
or Bethshan.5 In the Septuagint, the Second Maccabees,

1	Euseb. Onom. Bethsan, eiricnjfios.

2	For a list of its bishops (the bishop of the time was present at Nice) see

Reland, Palcest., under Sjythopolis.	2 Basilides and Cyril.

4	On the palms, Sozomen, H.E. viii. 13 (in 1891 there was one young
palm thirty feet high); on the linen, Tolins Orbis Descriptio (anonymous,
fourth century), in Geogr. Grceci min., ed. Muller, ii. ; cf. Marquardt, Das
Privatleben der Romer, ii. 466.

5	n'i, Josh. xvii. 11, 16 ; Judges i. 27 ; I Kings iv. 12 ; 1 Chron. vii.
29—from which verse we see that Bethshaan was a district as well as a town.
But |t^ rra, I Sam. xxxi. 10, 12 ; 2 Sam. xxi. 12.The Strong Places of Samaria ' '	363

Josephus, and all Greek and Latin literature, it is called
Scythopolis.1 But it claimed also, as so many other
towns did, to have been Nysa, where the infant

The names

Bacchus was nursed by the nymphs; and this Bethshan and
name appears both on the town’s coins and in Scythopol's'
classical writers.2 Both Bethshan and Scythopolis were
extant till the Crusades,3 since which an Arabic contrac-
tion of Bethshan, Beisan, has prevailed. Beth-sha’an, in
the longer of the two forms in which it is given in Hebrew,
means the House of Security, or Tranquillity, or even, in a
bad sense, Self-confidence ; any of which would be appro-
priate to the natural strength and fertility of so self-con-
tained a site, while the last might well have been bestowed
by the Hebrews upon a city which so long defied them.
This, however, is uncertain ; and it is possible that we have
here simply the name of some deity, as in Beth-Dagon and
Beth-Peor. The origin of the name Scythopolis, or Scyto-
polis, is as obscure. The most obvious derivation of course
is that explicitly made in one or two occurrences of the
name as X/cvdwv ttoXis, or, City of the Scythians, who are
said by Herodotus to have invaded Palestine in the reign
of Psammetichus.4 Bethshan lies on the line of such an
invasion. It has also been suggested that Scythopolis is

1	ir6\is, LXX., Judges i. 27; Judith iii. 10; 2 Macc. xii. 29;
Polybius v. 70. But 2,Kv66iro\is, Josephus xii. Antt. viii. 5 ; xiii. id. vi. 1 ;
Pliny, H.N. v. 16 (18), etc. But Scytopolis, Totins Orbis Descriptio in Geogr.
Gnc. min., ed. Muller, ii.

2	Pliny, H.N. v. 16 (18): Scythopolim antea Nysam. So also Stephen
Byzanlinus. For the coins, De Saulcy, PI. xiv. 8-13, No. io, NT2A-IEPA;
No. II, NT2-2KT0O-IEPA. Others have a figure supposed to be the nymph
suckling Bacchus. The coins date from Nero to Gordian.

3	Fetellus (circa 1130) gives both.

4	Herod, i. 103, 105. Pliny, H.N. v. 16 (18), says Bacchus himself settled
the Scythians there ! It is useless to quote on this point Syncellus, a historian
of the eighth century.364 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Succothopolis 1—the name Succoth occurring in the neigh-
bourhood—but Robinson rightly objects to the proba-
bility of such a hybrid, the like of which indeed does not
elsewhere occur. It may, however, easily have happened
that the Greek colonists, hearing some Semitic name in the
district, should have wrongly supposed it to be the same as
‘ Scythian.’ This Semitic name may have been Succoth ;
or it is just possible that it was that word of similar radicals
to Succoth, which is used in the Old Testament as a
synonym for the second syllable of Beth-sha’an, if Beth-
sha’an be really the House of Security.2

1	By Reland, with whom Gesenius agrees : Thesaurus, sub voce JT3-

2	D3D, to be still or silent, is related to	sh’k’t, which is synonymous

with	It is used like of land as well as men. See Judges iii. 11

and parallel passages. The two words occur together in Ter. xxx. 10 and
xivi. 27:	open.CHAPTER XVIII
THE QUESTION OF SYCHAR

365For this Chapter consult Maps /. and V.THE QUESTION OF SYCHAR

r V ''HE identification of Sychar would be a small matter,
-L if it were not that its difficulty, as well as that of
the whole topography of the Fourth Chapter of John, has
been made the ground, by some for doubting, by others
for denying, that the author of the Gospel was personally
acquainted with the geography of Palestine. A well-
known writer has said bluntly that there was no such place
as Sychar, and that the Gospel commits a blunder.1 And
recently another writer2 has stated a number of difficulties
in the way of accepting the Fourth of John as the account
of an eye-witness. The time has come for a revision of the
whole argument. I hope, by pointing out some material
things that have hitherto been overlooked, to meet the
difficulties, and if not to place the identification of Sychar
beyond doubt, at least to adduce sufficient evidence in
its support to prove the charge of mistake unfounded and
even absurd.

The objections made to the topography of Fourth John
are three :—i. Sychar is not known to us as a city of
Samaria. 2. Even if Sychar be proved to be either
Shechem or the present El ‘Askar, no woman seeking water
would have come from it to Jacob’s Well. 3. Exposi-

1 Supernatural Religion, ii. 427.

3 Mr. Cross, Critical Review for July 1892.

367368 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

tions, based on the accuracy of the narrative, involve an
error concerning the direction of the main road through
Samaria to Galilee.

1. Supernatural Religion holds it evident that there was
no such place as Sychar, and that ‘ a very significant
mistake’ has been committed by the author of John’s
Gospel—significant, that is, of his ignorance of Pales-
tine.

Now, to begin with, let us remember that the writer of
the Fourth Gospel is admitted to have been a man well
acquainted with the Old Testament, and that in the Old
Testament the position of the locality in question, the
parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph, is more
than once carefully fixed. In Genesis xxxiii. 19 it is
described as in Jace of, or to the east of, the city of Shechein ;1
and in Joshua xxiv. 32 as in Shechein. It is inconceivable
that, with these passages before him, any student of the
Old Testament would, in mere error, have substituted
Sychar for Sychem—for Xvye/M. But the point
goes further. Had the writer of the Gospel possessed only
that knowledge of the locality which the Old Testament
gave him, it is most probable that like Stephen 2 he would
have used the name 2u%e/i. That he introduces another
name, is surely a sign that he employed another source of
information. All now agree that Sychar is not a copyist’s
error.3 If, then, the author himself wrote it, he did so in
spite of two well-known passages in the Old Testament—
with which his familiarity is evident—and, therefore, it may

1 That is, if we adopt the rendering which takes Shalem adverbially, in

p:ace.	2 Acts vii. 16.

3 This was Jerome’s way out of the difficulty.The Question of Sychar	369

safely be presumed, because of his acquaintance with Sychar
as a name in the topography of Samaria.

In that topography Sychar can have stood—either as a
second name for Shechem, or as the name of another place
in the neighbourhood of Shechem.

For the first of these alternatives a good deal has been
said, but all in the way of hypothesis. It is within the
bounds of possibility, that, by their favourite habit of play-
ing upon names, the Jews may have called Shechem
Sheqer, false, or Shikor, drunken} But we have absolutely
no proof of their ever having done so, and it is to be noted
that the passage in Isaiah xxviii., which is quoted in sup-
port of the second, and etymologically the only possible,
derivation for Sychar, does not describe Shechem at all,
but the city of Samaria, or Sebaste, six miles away.
Trench’s idea, that John, in his habit of symbolising, was
himself the author of the nickname, is too far-fetched.2

We turn, therefore, to the second possibility, that Sychar
was the name of a place other than Shechem, but, like
Shechem, in the neighbourhood of the parcel Evidence for
of ground which Jacob bought. For this the sep iraicS a
first evidence we get is in the beginning of the lown-
fourth century, when two visitors to the land, Eusebius and
the Bordeaux Pilgrim (the latter about A.D. 333), both
mention a Sychar, distinct from Shechem,—	Ear]y

lying, says the former, before Neapolis, the pre- Christian,
sent Nablus,3 and the latter adds that it was a Roman mile

1	“IpCV, falsehood, was applied to idols (Hab. ii. 18). In Isaiah xxviii. re-
ference is made to drunkenness,	as the notorious sinners of Samaria.

2	Studies in the Gospels, 86.

3	From which Eusebius also distinguishes Shechem, describing the latter
as in the suburbs of Neapolis, and holding Joseph’s tomb. (Euseb., Ono-
masticon.)

2 A370 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

from Shechem. Jerome, it is true, asserts that Shechem
and Sychar are the same ; but he says so without evidence
except such as all now agree to be unfounded,1 and his
negative assertion cannot stand against the other two, who
say that they saw this Sychar distinct from Shechem—the
less so, that in translating Eusebius Jerome adopts his
Sychar without question. The next traces of a separate
Sychar are found in mediaeval writers. The Abbot Daniel
(1106-1107) speaks of ‘the hamlet of Jacob

Mediaeval.

called Sichar. Jacobs well is there. Near
this place, at half a verst away, is the town of Samaria
. .. . at present called Neapolis.’ Fetellus (1130) says:

‘ A mile from Sichem is the town of Sychar, in it is the
fountain of Jacob, which however is a well.’ John of
Wurzburg (1160-1170) says: ‘Sichem is to-day called
Neapolis. Sichar is east of Sichem, near to the field
which Jacob gave to his son, wherein is the well of Jacob,
at which place a church is now being built.’2 Again in
the Samaritan Chronicle, the latest possible date of which
is the fourteenth century, there occurs the name of a town
‘ apparently near Shechem, which is spelt Ischar,’ with
initial Aleph, which is merely a vulgar pronunciation of
Sychar.3 Quaresmius, who wrote about 1630,4 reports that
Brocardus (1283) saw ‘a certain large city deserted and in
ruins, believed to have been that ancient Sichem, to the
left’ or north ‘of Jacob’s well :’ ‘the natives told me the

1	Viz., the confusion by some copyist of Sychar with Sychem.

2	I quote Daniel (who very curiously confounds Neapolis with Sebaste),

Fetellus, and John of Wurzburg, frm the translations of the Palestine
Pilgrims’ Text Society.	3 Conder, Tent Work, 41.

4 ‘ Elucidatio Terra Sancta,' Lib. vii., Peregr. i. Cap. ix. That it is the
report of Brocardus which Quaresmius gives, and not his own, is clear from
the next paragraph, where he says: ‘ Fateor me non vidisse nisi Neapolem,
nec vetus Sychar,’ etc.The Question of Sychar

37i

Modern.

place is now called Istar by them.’ Then the traveller
Berggren found the name ‘Askar or ‘Asgar, with initial
‘Ain, given both to a spring ‘Ain el ‘Askar, which he
identifies with Jacob’s well, and—which is
much more important for our question—to the
whole plain below, the Sahil el ‘Askar.1 And, finally, the
name still attaches to a few ruins and hovels at the foot of
Mount Ebal, about one mile and three-quarters east north-
east from Nablus and little over half a mile north from
Jacob’s well.2 The question is, Can ‘Askar be derived
from Sychar through Ischar? Robinson says no: ‘the
fact that ‘Askar begins with the letter ‘Ain

.	The names

excludes all idea of affinity with ,the name Sychar and

Sychar.’3 But Robinson is wrong. Though Askar-
the tendency is the other way, there are cases known in
which ‘Ain has displaced Aleph. Conder says that the
Samaritans themselves in translating their chronicle into
Arabic call Ischar ‘Askar.4 And it has hitherto been over-
looked that among the place-names of Palestine we have
a strictly analogous case. Ascalon in Hebrew begins with
an Aleph, but in Arabic this has changed to an initial
‘Ain. The case, therefore, for ‘Askar, so far from being
barred by the rules of the language, comes through this
last test in all its strength. And its strength, in short, is
this. That in the fourth century two authori-
ties independently describe a Sychar distinct
from Shechem ; that in the twelfth century at least three
travellers, and in the thirteenth at least one, do the same,
the latter also quoting a corrupt but still possible variation

Conclusion.

1	Reise, ii. 267.

2	First described by Canon Williams and since with greatest detail by
Major Conder, Tent Work, 40-42.

3	Later Researches, 133.	4 Tent Work, 41.372 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

of the name ; that in the fourteenth the Samaritan
Chronicle mentions another form of the name ; and that
modern travellers find a third possible variation of it not
only applied to a village suiting the site described by the
authorities in the fourth century, but important enough to
cover all the plain about the village. All this is perhaps
not conclusive, but at least very strong, proof for the
identification of ‘Askar with Sychar. Certainly there is
enough of it to expose the dictum of Supernatural
Religion, that it is ‘ evident ’ there was no such place as
Sychar, and that the writer of the Gospel made ‘ a mis-
take.’ The ‘ evidence,’ so far as it goes, is all the other
way.

Of course it may be said that the name Sychar was
fastened on the district by the Christian pilgrims and
sacred-site jobbers of the fourth century—who were forced
to find a place for it since it occurred in the Gospel. But
to this the answer is obvious. For many centuries after
the fourth it was taken for granted that Jerome was right,
and that Shechem and Sychar were the same place.1 That
all this time, in spite of ecclesiastical tradition, the name
Sychar should have continued to exist in the neighbour-
hood, and solely among the natives, is a strong proof of
its originality—of its having been from the first a native
and not an artificial name.

1 By, among others, Arnulf, 700 ; Saewulf, apparently, 1102 ; Theoderich,
1172; Sir J. Maundeville, 1322; Tuchem of Nurnberg, 1480. A curious
opinion is offered by the Graf zu Solms (1483) that ‘on the right hand of
this well’ of Jacob, that is, to the south of it, ‘ ist ein alter grosser Fleck
aber ode, dass ich meyne die alte Statt Sichem seyn gewesen, dann gross alt
Gebaw da ist. Und liget von dem abgenanten Brunnen Jacob zwen stein-
wiirff weit, gar an einer lustigen Stett, allein dass es Wasser mangelt.’ But
from Neapolis the well was two bow-shots off, so that ‘ some say Napolis is
Thebes.’The Question of Sy char

373

2. This still leaves us with the second difficulty.
Granted that Sychar is either Shechem, the present
Nablus, or ‘Askar, is it likely that any woman 2 Jacob's
from them, seeking water, should have come Wel1,
past streams in their immediate neighbourhood to the
more distant, the deep and scanty well of Jacob? There
is a copious fountain in ‘Askar: and a stream, capable of
turning a mill, flows down the valley only ‘a few rods’1 from
Jacob’s well. This the woman, if coming from ‘Askar, must
have crossed, while,.if coming from Shechem, she must have
passed near it and many other sources of water. Jacob’s well
itself is over one hundred feet deep,2 and is often dry.

Now in answer to this, it may be justly said that the
real difficulty is not why the woman should have come to
the well, but why the well should be there at all. That
any one should have dug so deep a well in the immediate
neighbourhood of so many streams is most perplexing,
unless indeed in those far away summers the surface
streams ran dry, and the well was dug so deep that it
might catch their fainting waters below the surface.3 Be
that as it may, the well is there—a fact testifying past all
doubt the possibility of the fact of the woman’s use of it.
Specially dug for man’s use by man, how impressively
among the natural streams around does it explain the
intensity of the woman’s words : Our father Jacob gave us
the well. Of course—it was given, not found. The signs of
labour and expense stand out upon it all the more patheti-

1	Robinson.

2	‘Thirty-five yards,’ Maundrell ; ‘ one hundred and five feet,’ Holmes.

3	Robinson indeed suggests that an earthquake may have changed the
whole disposition of the waters in the Vale of Shechem since the time of the
narrative. Possible, for on that high pass very little could tilt the watershed
to the west, but in an argument like this we do not dare to count on it.374 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

cally for the freedom of the waters that come rattling down
the vale; and must, one feels, have had their share in
increasing the fondness of that tradition which, possibly,
was the attraction that drew Jacob’s fanatic children to its
scantier supplies.1

It is impossible to say whether the well is now dry, for
many feet of it are choked with stones. Robinson says
there is a spring in it,2 Conder that it fills by infiltration.
If either of these be correct, then we can understand the
double titles given to it in the narrative, both of which our
version renders by well. It is Jacob's fountain, 7^777 (v. 5) ;
but the pit, to (f>peap, is deep (v. 11) ; and Jacob gave us the
pit (v. 12). It is by little touches like these, and by the
agreement of the rest of the topography—Mount Gerizim,
and the road from Judaea to Galilee—(as well as by the
unbroken traditions of three religions), that we feel sure
that this is the Jacob’s well intended by the writer, and
that he had seen the place.

Thus, then, the present topography, so far from contra-
dicting, justifies the narrative. The author knew the place
about which he was writing.

3. By Jacob’s well the great north road through
Samaria forks, and the well lies in the fork. One
3 The roads branch turns eastward up the vale past

by Sychar. Shechem, and so on round the west of Ebal
to Sebaste, and Jenin. The other holds north across
the mouth of the vale and past ‘Askar. Now ex-
ception has been taken3 to Lightfoot’s and Stanley’s
speaking of this second road as the main road to

1	Porter mentions a favourite well outside Damascus which drew the
inhabitants a mile away from their own abundant waters.

2	Lat. Res. 108.	3 By Mr. Cross, Critical Review, July 1892.The Question of Sychar

37 5

Galilee. He says the latter has always gone by Shechem
and Sebaste, and that the road which holds across the
mouth of the vale turns north-east into the Jordan Valley
at Bethshan, and leads not to Upper Galilee, where our
Lord was going, but to Tiberias and the Lake. He is
correct when he says the Shechem road is the ordinary
road, but wrong in saying there is not a road across the
mouth of the vale and so on to Jenin. As he admits,
Robinson was told of such a road ; and I have to report
that in 1891, being anxious to avoid the road by Sebaste,
which I had already traversed, I was informed by my
muleteers that I could reach Jenin by following the
Bethshan road, and, when it struck east, keeping due
north. Moreover, this is a much more natural direction
for the trunk road to the north to follow than round by
Shechem and Sebaste. For if any one will take the
Survey Map, he will see this direction to be on the line
of that series of plains which come right down from
Esdraelon to opposite the Vale of Shechem ;1 while the
road round by Sebaste has to climb a great barrier of
hills. Besides, such a road would be preferred by our
Lord, avoiding as it did both Shechem and Sebaste, two
large towns, one Greek, the other Samaritan, close to which,
if He turned up the valley, He must needs have passed.

So that Lightfoot and Stanley are probably correct ;
but the point is a small one, and does not affect the nar-
rative in John. Upon the data given there, our Lord and
His disciples, after their rest at Jacob’s well, may have
intended to take any one of the three roads ; and that
whether the city to which the disciples went to buy bread
was Shechem or was ‘Askar.

1 See p. 327 f.srr: nr,/'. j/

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ESDRAELON AND LOWER GALILEE

PLATE VI

REFERENCE TO COLOURING

CONTOURS SHOWING HEIGHT OF LANI

TOURS SHOWING HEIGHT OF LAND
A^.\ Above 3000 feet



London; CCodcLeT and Stougliton.CHAPTER XIX
ESDRAELON

377For this Chapter consult Maps /., III. and VI.ESDRAELON

T N our survey of Samaria we have already found our-
-L selves drawn out upon the great Plain of Esdraelon.
The plain has come up to meet us among the Esdraeion
Samarian hills. Carmel and Gilboa encompass and Samaria'
it; half a dozen Samarian strongholds face each other
across its southern bays. Nature has manifestly set
Esdraelon in the arms of Samaria. Accordingly, in the
Old Testament times they shared, for the most part, the
same history ; in tribal days, though Esdraelon was
assigned to Zebulun and Issachar, Manasseh, the keeper
of the hills to the south, claimed towns upon it;1 in the
days of the kingdom, the chariots of the Samarian kings,2
the footsteps of the Samarian prophets, traversed Esdraelon
from Carmel to Jordan.3 But after the Exile the Samari-
tan 2 Schism—confounder of so many natural arrangements
—divorced the plain from the hills which embrace it, and
Esdraelon was counted not to the province of Samaria,
but to that of Galilee, the southern frontier of which was
coincident with its own southern edge.4 More interesting,
however, than the connection of either north or south with
Esdraelon, is the separation which this great plain effects
between them, the break it causes in the central range of

1 Josh. xvii. II ff. ; xix. 10-23.	2 See p. 330.

3 1 Kings xviii. 44-46; 2 Kings iv. 9.	4 Josephus, ii. B.J. iii. 4.

379380 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Palestine, the clear passage it affords from the coast to the
Jordan. This has given Esdraelon a history of its own.

Esdraelon is usually regarded as one plain under one
name from sea to Jordan. In reality, however, it is not

The three one> severa^ plains, more or less divided by

sections of the remains of ridges, which once upon a time
the plain.	&	r

sustained across it the continuity of ‘ the back-
bone of Palestine.’ Thus, nine miles from the sea, near
Tell el Kasis,1 the traditional site of the slaughter of the
priests of Baal, a promontory of the Galilean hills shoots
south to within a hundred yards of Carmel, leaving only
that space for the Kishon to break through. Eight or
nine miles farther east, at Lejjun, probably the ancient
Megiddo, low ridges run out from both north and south, as
if they had once met, and again leave Kishon but a narrow
pass. And once more, between Jezreel and a spot west of
Shunem, about twenty-four miles from the coast, there is
a sudden fall of level eastwards, which visibly separates
Esdraelon proper from the narrower valley sloping towards
Jordan and is perhaps evidence of a former connection
between Gilboa and Moreh. It should be added, that to
north and south of the plain the geological formation is
the same.

If we overlook the rising ground at Lejjun, which is
not very prominent, we thus get, upon this great opening
Plain of Acre, across Palestine, three divisions—to the west
Descenfto10, Maritime Plain of Acre, bounded by the
Jordan.	low	near Tell ej Kasis • jn the centre a

large inland plain ; and upon the east, running down from
it from Jordan, the long valley between Gilboa and Moreh.
Of these the Central Plain lies as much athwart, as on a

1 i.e. the Mound of the Priest.Esdraelon

38i

line with, the other two, spreading to north and south with
a breadth equal to its length. In shape the Central Plain
is a triangle. The southern side or base is twenty miles
from Tell el Kasis by the foot of Carmel and the lower
Samarian hills south to Jenin. The other two sides are
equal, fifteen miles each ; the northern being the base of
the Nazareth hills from Tell el Kasis to the angle between
them and Tabor, the eastern a line from Tabor to Jenin.
This side is not so bounded by hills as the other two, but
has three breaks across it eastward—one between Tabor
and Moreh, a mere bay of the plain, with a narrow wady
down to the Jordan ; one between Moreh and Gilboa, the
long valley aforesaid running to the Jordan at Bethshan ;
and one between Gilboa and the hills about Jenin, also a
bay of the plain, but without issue to Jordan. The general
level of the Central Plain is 200 feet above the sea-line,
but from this the valley Jordanwards sinks gently in
twelve miles to 400 feet below the sea, at Bethshan, where
it drops over a high bank on to the Jordan Plain.

This disposition of the land, with all that it has meant
in history, is best seen from Jezreel.

As you stand upon that last headland of Gilboa, 200 feet
above the plain, your eye sweeps from the foot of Tabor
to Jenin, from Tell el Kasis to Bethshan. The view from
great triangle is spread before you. Along the JezreeL
north of it the steep brown wall of the Galilean hills,
about 1000 feet high, runs almost due west, till it breaks
out and down to the feet of Carmel, in forest slopes just
high enough to hide the Plain of Acre and the sea. But
over and past these slopes Carmel’s steady ridge, deepening
in blue the while, carries the eye out to its dark promontory
above the Mediterranean. From this end of Carmel the382 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

lower Samarian hills,1 green with bush and dotted by
white villages, run south-east to the main Samarian range,
and on their edge, due south, seven miles across the bay,
Jenin stands out with its minarets and palms, and the
glen breaking up behind it to Dothan. The corresponding
bay on the north between Moreh and Tabor, and Tabor
itself, are hidden. But all the rest of the plain is before
you—a great expanse of loam, red and black,2 which in
a more peaceful land would be one sea of waving wheat
with island villages ; but here is what its modern name
implies,3 a free, wild prairie, upon which but one or two
hamlets have ventured forth from the cover of the hills
and a timid and tardy cultivation is only now seeking to
overtake the waste of coarse grass and the thistly herbs
that camels love. There is no water visible. The Kishon
itself flows in a muddy trench, unseen five yards away.
But here and there a clump of trees shows where a deep
well is worked to keep a little orchard green through
summer; dark patches of reeds betray the beds of winter
swamps ; and the roads have no limit to their breadth,
but sprawl, as if at most seasons one caravan could not
follow for mud on the path of another. But these details
sink in a great sense of space, and of a level made
almost absolute by the rise of hills on every side of it. It
is a vast inland basin, and from it there breaks just at
your feet, between Jezreel and Shunem, the valley Jordan-
wards,—breaks as visibly as river from lake, with a slope,

1	Which we have already identified as the Shephelah of Israel. See p. 338.

2	‘ Loose soil, mostly volcanic, which is very tiring to horses, and there-
fore unfitted for cavalry evolutions, and in winter boggy.’—P.E.F. Mem.
ii. 36.

3	Merj ibn Amir. ‘The meadow of the son of Amir,’ but meadow of a
wild, rough kind.Esdraelon

383

and almost the look of a current upon it. Away down
this, between Gilboa and Moreh, Bethshan shines like a
white island in the mouth of an estuary, and, across the
unseen depth of Jordan, rises the steep flat range of Gilead
—a counterpart at this end of the view to the long ridge
of Carmel at the other.1 2

From Jezreel you can appreciate everything in the
literature and in the history of Esdraelon.

I. To begin with, you can enjoy that happiest sketch of
a landscape and its history that was ever j The Blessing
drawn in half a dozen lines, Issachar1—to	ofissachar.

which the most of Esdraelon fell—

Issachar is a large-limbed ass,

Stretching himself between the sheeffolds :

For he saw a resting-place that it was good,

And the land that it was pleasant?

Such exactly is Esdraelon—a land relaxed and sprawling
up among the hills to north, south and east, as you will
see a loosened ass roll and stretch his limbs any day in the
sunshine in a Syrian village yard. To the highlander
looking down upon it, Esdraelon is room to stretch in and
lie happy. Yet the figure of the ass goes further—the
room must be paid for—

So he bowed his shoulder to bear
And became a servant under task-work.

The inheritors of this plain never enjoyed the highland
independence of Manasseh or Naphtali. Open to east

1	This ‘ antiphon ’ of Gilead and Carmel; in the view from Jezreel, further
illustrates the remark made on p. 338.

2	Gen. xlix. 14.384 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

and west, pleasantest stage on the highway from the
Nile to the Euphrates, Esdraelon was at distant intervals
the war-path or battle-field of great empires, but more
regularly the prey and pasture of the Arabs, who with
each spring came upon it over Jordan. Even when there
has been no invasion to fear, Esdraelon has still suffered :
when she has not been the camp of the foreigner she has
served as the estate of her neighbours. Ten years ago
the peasants got rid of the Arabs of the desert, only to be
bought up by Greek capitalists from Beyrout.

II. Another thing you see most clearly from Jezreel
is the reason of the names given to the Great Plain and
11. The two offshoots. These names are two : Vale, or
names. Deepening, and Plain or Opening ; the former
is connected with the name of Jezreel, the latter with that
of Megiddo.

(1) The Vale of Jezreel. The word for Vale, ‘Emeq,
literally deepening, is a highlander’s word for a valley as
(1) The Vale l°°ks down into it, and is never applied to
of Jezreel. any extensive plain away from hills, but always
to wide avenues running up into a mountainous country
like the Vale of Elah, the Vale of Hebron, and the Vale of
Ajalon.1 We should, therefore, expect the word, when
associated with Jezreel, to apply not to the great Central
Plain west of Jezreel, but to the broad deep vale east
of Jezreel, which descends to Jordan, between Moreh and
Gilboa. And in fact it is so applied in the story of
Gideon’s campaign. There it is said that the Midianites
when they passed over Jordan pitched in the Vale of
Jezreel? to the north of the well of Harod from the hill of
1 See Appendix, I.	2 Judges vi. 33.Esdraelon

385

Moreh into the vale ;1 and again that the camp of Midian
was in the valley beneath Gideon, who presumably occu-
pied, like Saul, the heights of Gilboa above the wells.
The same identification suits the other passages where
the Vale of fezreel is mentioned,1 2 and we conclude that
in the Old Testament it means only the valley down
which Jezreel looks to Jordan, and not the plain across
which Jezreel looks to Carmel.3 But in later times
it is this latter which is called after Jezreel—not in-
deed now the Vale of Jezreel, but the Great Plain
of Esdrelom, or Esdrelon.4 This name has survived
to the present day, not in the local dialect, but in
various Greek and Latin forms, as Stradela,5 or Istradela,6
Esdraelon.

(2) The Plain of Megiddo. While ‘Emeq means deepen-
ing, the word used here, Biq‘ah, means opening. From its
origin—a verb to split—one would naturally ^ The Plain
take it to be a valley more narrow than ‘Emeq, of MeElddo-
a cleft or gorge. But it is applied to broad vales like
that of Jordan under Hermon or at Jericho, though never
to table-lands nor to maritime plains like Sharon. The
Arabic equivalent is to-day the name of the vale between
the Lebanons, as well as of some other level tracts in
Syria surrounded by hills. A surrounding of hills seems
necessary to the name Biq'ah, as if it were to be transr
lated, land laid open, or lying open, in the midst of hills.
And this is just what the great Central Plain of Esdraelon

1 Judges vii. 1; cf. 12.	2 Joshua xvii. 16; Hosea i. 5.

3 So correctly the P.E.F. map, ed. 1890.

* Book of Judith i. 8, t6 filyd ireSlov ’E<rdpi}\ib/i; cf. iii. 9, iv. 6,

’EcrdprjXwv, but again with /j. in vii. 3.	6 The Jerusalem Itinerary.

6 Bordeaux Pilgrim, 333 a.d. ; another MS., Stradela, ed. P.P.T., 17.

In Fetellus (1130) Jezrahel.386 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

is,—girt by hills on all sides, laid open or gaping in the
midst of the main range of Palestine.1

The name of Megiddo has not survived, like that of
Jezreel, and there is controversy as to what site it repre-

Wherewas sents- On the base of the Central Plain just

Megiddo? opposite Jezreel is a place called Lejjun—the
Roman Legio, Legion. As Jezreel commands the mouth
of the valley towards the Jordan, so Legio guards the
mouth of the chief pass towards Sharon. It was, there-
fore, as important a site as Jezreel, and as likely to give its
name to the plain. In Roman times it did so. Jerome
calls the Great Plain both the Plains of Megiddo and the
Campus Legionis.2 Moreover, the only town definitely
named in the immediate neighbourhood of Megiddo—
Taanach upon the waters of Megiddo3—is undoubtedly
the present Tannuk, four miles from Lejjun ;4 and there
even seems a trace of the name in the name the Arabs
give to Kishon, the Muqutta‘. Omitting this last item,
we have enough of evidence to support Robinson’s identi-
fication of Lejjun with Megiddo, even against a plausible
rival which Major Conder has favoured in Mujedda', a
site with considerable ruins at the foot of Gilboa, above
the Jordan and near Beisan.5 I have put in a note what

1	See Appendix L

2	Plains of Megiddo, in his Pilgrimage of St. Paula, iv. ; Campus Legionis,
in the Onomasticon, where Eusebius, whom he translates, has tQ fieyaXip
ireSi'y TTjs Aeyeujvos, etc., artt. ’Ap^rjXi, Bcudaic&O, Ta.(3a6wv, etc.

8 Judges v. 19.

4 How names change! Legio is the Crusading Legio, Ligio and Lyon.
In a Bull of Alexander IV. (of 30th Jan. 1255), containing an inventory of
the possessions of the Abbey of St. Mary in the Vale of Jehoshaphat, we
find ‘ the Church of Ligio with parish and tithes,’ as well as ‘ the Manor of
Thanis,’ i.e. Taanuk.

8 Mujedda', both town and wady, are mentioned by Burckhardt, Travels
in Syria, etc., July 2, 1813,Esdraelon

387

seem to me sufficient answers to Major Conder’s argu-
ment against Lejjun, and need here only emphasise once
more what is so evident as you stand at Jezreel—the equal
right with Jezreel which Lejjun, commanding the other
great gate to the plain, has to bestow its name upon the
latter, as well as the fitness of calling that great triangle,
opened among the hills, the Biq‘ah, or Open-Ground of
Megiddo.1

1 Major Conder’s argument against Lejjun, and in favour of Mujedda*,
as the site of Megiddo, is threefold. He says (1) that Megiddo is as often
mentioned—save once—with Bethshan as with Taanach ; (2) that Muqutta*
is not a possible transformation of Megiddo ; and (3) that the site on the
Jordan Valley suits the narrative of the flight of Ahaziah (2 Kings ix.)
better than the site by Lejjun does. On each of these points I think he
fails to make out his case. Thus : (1) The phrase, Taanach by the waters
of Megiddo, seems to me to put the Mujedda' site out of the question;
Joshua xii. 21 sets Taanach and Megiddo next to Carmel and the coast (Dor,
i.e. the present Tanturah); no possible definition of locality can be taken
from the order of towns in Josh. xvii. 11, where the text is manifestly cor-
rupt, nor from that in Judges i. 27, which, beginning with Bethshan, leaps
over Gilboa to Taanach, then over Carmel to Dor, in the west, then back
to Ibleam (possibly the present Bir Bela'meh, near Jenin; cf. Black’s
Joshua, ‘ Sm. Camb. Bible for Schools,’ xvii. 11) and Megiddo. In 1 Kings
iv. 12 there is another confusion: Taanach, Megiddo, Bethshan, Abel-
meholah, then back to Jokneam on Carmel. In I Chron. vii. 29 the order is
Bethshan, Taanach, Megiddo, Dor, the correct order from east to west, if
Lejjun be Megiddo. (2) Major Conder objects to the identification of
Muqutta* with Megiddo, that the palatal t in the Arab name is never the
equivalent of the Hebrew d. Yet, in some cases, they have been inter-
changed (Wright’s Comparative Grammar, p. 53). The deep q and the
hard g are of course equivalents. There remains the ‘ain at the end of
Muqutta* which is not in Megiddo, but this iain is in Mujedda‘ as well, as
to which Conder says that it is an equivalent of the Hebrew n in the form
Megiddon. But it is not necessary to prove an equivalence between the
modern and ancient words. Muqutta' means ford, and it is not impossible
that Arabs should, in the case of a river, substitute it for a name so very
closely resembling it in sound, of which they did not know the meaning.
This has happened frequently in Palestine itself and elsewhere. (3) With
all deference to Major Conder, I think that Megiddo at Lejjun suits the
story of the flight of Ahaziah far better than Mujedda* does. Let it be
remembered that Jehu was driving up the Valley of Jezreel from Bethshan,3 88 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

III. Now when we have made out Lejjun or Megiddo
as a place of equal importance with Jezreel—each of them
hi. Esdraeion giving its name to the plain, as well as holding
and Sharon. a chief gateway into it—we are ready to mark

the next fact about Esdraeion which the view from Jezreel
towards Megiddo renders clear. This is, that the passage
which Esdraeion afforded across Palestine was not that
which seems at first the more natural, viz., from the Plain
of Acre by the glen through which Kishon breaks at Tell
el Kasis, but that which comes over from the Plain of
Sharon by the pass at Megiddo. Look from Jezreel, and
at once you see this to be possible. The Plain of Acre is
not more visible to you than the Plain of Sharon ; the
Galilean hills intervene, and rise almost as high and broad
between Esdraeion and Acre as the Samarian hills do

and that Ahaziah’s flight from him was, therefore, not so likely to be towards
Bethshan as in an opposite direction. We do not know where the ascent
of Gur was; Ibleam may be beside Jenin. Overtaken and wounded here,
on a path southward which Jehu afterwards pursued to Samaria, it was
natural for Ahaziah’s company to seek the only other route for chariots
from the plain southwards—that by the pass leading over from Lejjun to
Sharon. These objections against Robinson’s argument being repelled, I
think the case for Lejjun as Megiddo rests satisfactorily on these points :
(i) that it is close to Taanach ; (2) that the waters of Megiddo are
practically Kishon (Judges v. 19) ; (3) that Lejjun is as likely to give
its name to the plain as Jezreel is, and did so give it in the time of
Jerome.

Since the foregoing was published in the Expositor, I have read Mr.
Trelawney Saunders’ reasons against Conder’s theory (P.E.F.Q., 1880,
223-224), and find that he also suggests the possibility of the derivation of
Muqutta* from Megiddo. With Saunders agrees Socin (Z.D.P. V. iv.,
150, 151). Under the former’s note the Rev. Dr. Henderson cites one
strong argument for Mujedda', that in the Travels of the Mohar Megiddo is
presumably close to Jordan. But this cannot stand against the mass of evi-
dence which puts it near Taanach, and according to W. Max Muller, Asien
u. Europa, p. 195 f., the writer has confused Kishon with Jordan. Mtiller
also points out how often Megiddo is spelt with a ‘ t ’ on the Egyptian
monuments.Esdraelon

3%9

between Esdraelon and Caesarea. Look at the way Carmel
lies. You easily perceive that an army coming north by
Sharon, whether it was making for the south of the Lake
of Galilee at Bethshan, or for the north of the lake by the
plateau above Tiberias, would not seek to compass the
prolonged ridge of Carmel by the sea, and so enter
Esdraelon from the Plain of Acre, for that would be a
very roundabout road ; but it would cut across the Sama-
rian hills to the south of Carmel by the easy pass which
issues at Megiddo. And so, in fact, armies from the south
always came: the Philistines, when they shirked attacking
Israel on the steep flanks of Benjamin and Ephraim, and
camped by the most open gateway of the hill-country
opposite Esdraelon;1 Pharaoh Necho, when Josiah met
him at Megiddo, and was beaten when he met him, and was
slain, and the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the Plain of
Megiddo became a proverb in Israel;2 the Romans, who
set a great garrison in Megiddo, and called it Legion ;
Napoleon, in 1799, who, although he was making for Acre,
did not take the sea-path round Carmel, but also crossed
into Esdraelon by Subbarin and Tell Keimun. If other
proof be needed that in ancient times Esdraelon’s connec-
tion with the coast was south, and not north, of Carmel,
we find it in that singular list of towns so frequently given
in the Old Testament—Bethshan, Taanach, Megiddo,
Dor. These formed a strategical line of fortresses on the
one great avenue across country,3 yet that line did not
run north, but south of Carmel. Megiddo and Taanach,

1	al ava(3d<reis tt}s dpeivijs . . . tj eisoSos els tt]v ’lovSaiav. Judith iv. 6. See
above, p. 356.

2	2 Chron. xxxv. 22; Zech. xii. 11. Hadadrimmon (LXX. powv, a pome-
granate plantation) is perhaps Rummaneh, close beside Lejjun.

3	Josh. xvii. 11 ; Judges i. 27 ; 1 Kings iv. 12 ; 1 Chron. vii. 29.390 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

backed by Bethshan, were not in line with Acre or Haifa,
but with Dor, the present Tanturah, a few miles to the
north of Caesarea. Nothing could be clearer than this.
The break across Palestine which Esdraelon affords is a
break into Sharon, and not into the Plain of Acre. And,
indeed, the roads from Acre to the interior of the country,
whether making for Jordan above or below the lake,
travelled then, as they do now, through the long parallel
valleys of Lower Galilee. If any caravans entered Esdrae-
lon from Acre, it was in order to seek a gateway to Samaria
at Jenin, or to cross to Sharon by the pass of Megiddo.1
Few armies going north or south kept to the beach below
Carmel; if those of the Ptolemies and Antiochi did so, it
was because the Jews held the hills up to Carmel ; if
Richard, in the Third Crusade, did so,2 it was because
those hills were all in the possession of the Saracen.

IV. We have followed the natural avenues to Esdraelon
from the rest of the land, Let us now review the points
at which they enter the Great Plain ; for it is

IV. The Gate-	J	’

ways of from these, of course, that its various cam-
paigns were directed. The entrances are five
in number, and all visible from Jezreel. Three are at the
corners of the triangle—the pass of the Kishon at Tell el
Kasis, the glen between Tabor and the Nazareth hills, and
the valley southward behind Jenin. The first of these is

1	We have an incidental proof that travellers preferred this road ; in 382,
St. Paula, travelling from Ptolemais to Csesarea, did not keep to the sea, but
crossed the plains of Megiddo by the deathplace of Josiah. Jerome’s Life of
St. Paula, iv.

2	Vinsauf, Itiner. Ricard. iv. 12-14. Cestius also took the sea road,
Josephus, ii. Wars, xviii. So did Napoleon in his retreat, Guerre de
C Orient; Campagnes dCEgypte et de Syrie, ii. 104. The new railway from
the coast to Jordan keeps, of course, to the north of Carmel.Esdraelon

39i

the way of advance from the Plain of Acre ;1 Harosheth
of the Gentiles, from which Sisera advanced, lies upon it.
The second is the road down from the plateau above
Tiberias, and Northern Galilee generally ; it is commanded
by Tabor, on which there was always a fortress. The third is
the passage towards that series of meadows which lead up
from Esdraelon into the heart of Samaria—the Anabaseis
of the Hill-country.2 The other two gateways to the Great
Plain were, of course, Megiddo and Jezreel. Megiddo
guarded the natural approach of Philistines, Egyptians,
and other enemies from the south; Jezreel that of Arabs,
Midianites, Syrians of Damascus, and other enemies from
the east.

V. With our eyes on these five entrances, and remem-
bering that they are not merely glens into neighbouring

provinces, but passes to the sea and to the
v	v	V. The His-

desert—gates on the great road between the tory of

empires of Euphrates and Nile, between the
continents of Asia and Africa—we are ready for the arrival
of those armies of all nations whose almost ceaseless con-
tests have rendered this plain the classic battle-ground of
Scripture. Was ever arena so simple, so regulated for the
spectacle of war ? Esdraelon is a vast theatre, with its
clearly-defined stage, with its proper exits and entrances.
We will still watch it from Jezreel.

(1) Very significantly, the first of the historical battles
of Esdraelon was one in which Israel overcame not only a
foreign tyrant, but the use which that tyrant made of the

1	Though from Acre itself a more usual road lay farther north across the
slopes of the Galilean hills.

2	See above, pp. 356, 389.392 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

plain for the purpose of preventing Israel’s unity. On the
eve of Deborah’s appearance in Israel, Esdraelon, which
(i) Barak and had been assigned to Issachar, was still in
Slsera*	possession of the Canaanites, and scoured by

their chariots.1 This meant not only that the entrances to
the hill-country of Israel were in Canaanite hands, but
that the northern tribes, Zebulun and Naphtali, were wholly
cut off from the southern, Manasseh, Ephraim, Benjamin,
and the still ineffective Judah.2 The Canaanite camp was
at Harosheth, probably the present Harithiyeh, on the
Kishon pass, where it must have paralysed the maritime
tribes of Asher and Dan.3 The evil, therefore, was far
greater than the oppression of Issachar; it affected the
national existence of Israel, and its removal was the
concern of all her tribes. This is emphasised by both of
the two accounts of the revolt. The Song of Deborah,
without doubt a contemporary document, mentions every
tribe for praise or blame, according as it took part or did
not, except the tribe of Judah.4 The prose account, which
precedes the song,5 names only the northern tribes, but
describes the leaders as belonging to both ends of Israel—
Deborah to Mount Ephraim, near Bethel, and Barak to
Kedesh-Naphtali.6 With regard to the battle itself* the

1	Both Oort {Adas, iv.) and Guthe (in Droysen’s Hist. Hand Atlas) mark
a band of Israelite territory across Esdraelon, so as to include Jezreel. But
this is very improbable, for it shuts up the Canaanites, who were all-powerful
on the plain, in a little enclosure about Bethshan—a blockade which could
not have been maintained by the oppressed and weakened Israel. Cf. Budde,
Ri. u. Sa. 46.

2	Judah is not mentioned in Deborah’s Song, nor, of course, Levi.

3	See p. 174. They abode by their ships.

4	Machir stands for Manasseh, Gilead for Gad.	6 Judges iv.

6 When we have grasped the national significance of the crisis, we do not
feel the force of the objections brought against the distance which chapter iv.
puts between Deborah’s and Barak’s homes (see Budde, Ri. u. Sa. p. 105 ;Esdraelon

393

two accounts agree as to the chief actors, the help given
to Israel by Jehovah,1 the battle-field upon Kishon, the
total defeat of the Canaanites, and the murder of Sisera
by Jael. In addition, the prose narrative introduces Jabin,
king of Canaan, at Razor,2 names Harosheth as Sisera’s
camp, and Tabor as the tryst of the Israelites, and gives a
different account of the way in which Jael struck her fell
blow.3 With the first and the last of these we have
nothing to do here. The addition of Harosheth and
Tabor is in harmony with the geographical data, and it
was natural to introduce them in a prose narrative, where
more attention would be paid than in the song to tactical
details. Accepting, then, all the geographical contributions
of chapter iv. in supplement to the rapid sketch of the

Cooke, The Song and Hist, of Deborah, p. 11 ; Wellhausen, Proleg., Eng. ed.,
241). There was no reason for inventing it, and it is natural in the circum-
stances. Chapter v. implies that all the tribes which lay on the Central
Range were roused, and certainly does not indicate, as some have alleged
ver. 15 indicates, that both Deborah and Barak belonged to Issachar. On
chapter iv. see A. B. Davidson, Expositor, January 1889.

1	Wellhausen’s contrast between the two chapters on this point is manifestly
overdrawn. Proleg., Eng. ed., 241 f.

2	The song speaks of kings of Canaan (v. 19). Some have attributed the

insertion of Jabin’s name to an editor (Bertheau, Richter, 2nd ed. ; Dillmann
on Josh. xi. 1); but others, following Kuenen (Wellhausen, Budde, Cooke,
Driver), hold that the chapter is woven from two distinct narratives—one of
Sisera’s defeat by Deborah and Barak on Kishon, as in chapter v. ; the other
of a battle by Zebulun and Naphtali against Jabin on the northern Jordan.
This, however, is far from proved or probable, for (1) there is no reason why
two such stories should have got mixed (as Budde owns, p. 62). The appear-
ance of a Barak in both has been suggested as a reason, but a double Barak
would be as great a difficulty as a double Jabin (here and in Josh. xi.).	(2)

The attempt to distinguish the two narratives (Bruston, ‘ Les deux Jehovistes,’
in the Rev. de Theol. et Phil., 1886) has failed. (3) Chapter iv. as it stands
is a consistent account. On the alleged discrepancy between vv. 16 and 22,
see below, p. 396, n. 1. Even if the Jabin portion were detachable, this
would not affect the other divergences of chapter iv. from chapter v., especially
the mention of Harithiyeh and Tabor.

3	On this see Cooke, op. cit,; Robertson Smith, 0. T. /. C.394 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

fighting in chapter v., we may take the following as a
full account of the battle.

The hands of the prophetess of Mount Ephraim were
required to loosen the spring of the revolt, but the spring
The Battle of itself was found among the northern tribes :
the Kishon. them belonged the military leader, Barak,
and this determined the place of muster not in Gilboa
where Gideon and Saul, southern chiefs, afterwards
assembled their forces, but in the strong corner at Tabor,
where the main road enters the plain from Northern
Galilee. To this, in the loose disposition of Oriental war-
fare—compare Gideon’s and Saul’s traverse of the plain by
night in presence of the enemy1—it would be easy for the
southern tribesmen to cross, unless indeed we are to
imagine, and it is not unlikely, that the Canaanites were
attacked by Israel from both sides of the plain. It is not
necessary to suppose that Barak arranged his men high
up Tabor ; though Tabor, an immemorial fortress, was
there to fall back upon in case of defeat. The head-
quarters of the muster were probably in the glen, at Tabor’s
foot, in the village Deburieh—perhaps a reminiscence of
Deborah herself—which also in Roman times was occupied
by the natives of Galilee in their revolt against the
foreigner who held the Plain.2 Here in the northern
angle of Esdraelon, Barak watched till the lengthening
line of his enemy’s chariots drew out from the western
angle at Tell el Kasis and stretched opposite to him, with
Taanach and Megiddo behind them. They may even have
turned north towards the Hebrew position. Then Barak

1	Judges vii. and I Sam. xxix.

2	Josephus (ii. Wars, xxi. 3) speaks of a garrison at Dabaritta, as it was
called in his day, to ‘ keep guard on the Great Plain.’Esdraelon

395

gave them battle in a fierce highland charge : into the
valley his thousands rushed at his feet. It has been sup-
posed that with the charge a storm broke from the north,
for there was fighting from heaven, according to the poem,
and Kishon was in full flood

Torrent Kishon swept them away,

Torrent of spatestorrent Kishon !

This means that the plain must already have been in a
state in which it was impossible for chariots to manoeuvre.
As another great feature of the battle the poem remem-
bers the plunging of horses :—

Then did the horse-hoofs stamp,

By reason of the plungings, the plungings of their strong ones.

The highland footmen had it all their own way. Their
charge came with such impetuosity upon a labouring and
divided foe, that the latter—and this, too, shows how far
Canaan had advanced across the plain—were scattered
both east and west. The main flight turned back towards
Harosheth, and the slaughter and the drowning must have
been great in the narrow pass. But Sisera himself, who
doubtless was in the van of his army as he led it east,
seems to have fled eastward still, for according to the prose
narrative the tent of Heber the Kenite, where he sought
rest and found death, lay by the terebinth of Betsa'anim by
Kedesh on the plateau above the Lake of Galilee. It is
the same direction as the French military maps show the

1 An obscure expression. The word is plural. The LXX. render it of
ancient times or deeds—inappropriate in a song which celebrates the first of
these. Others take it of onsets, i.e. battles, from an Arabic application of the
root. But, from this same, it is possible to deduce the meaning of onrushings
of water, sudden floods ox spates, and this is the most natural. See Cooke,
op. cit., 48.396 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

flight of the Turks to have taken in 1799, when Kleber’s
small squares, reinforced by Napoleon, broke up vastly
superior numbers on the same field of Sisera’s discomfiture.1
. Barak’s was a strange victory, in which highlanders
had for once been helped, not hindered, by level ground.
But the victory won that day by the Plain over the
Canaanites was not so great as the victory won by Israel
over the Plain. Esdraelon is broad and open enough to
have been a frontier between two nations ; but the un-
selfish tribes had overcome this difference between them.
What in a century or two might have yawned to an
impassable gulf, they had bridged once for all by their
loyalty to the Ideal of a united people and a united
fatherland. And the power of that Ideal was feith in a

1 The above identification of the site of Kedesh is Major Conder’s (T. IV.).
Cooke, op. cit., 12 f., suggests Kedesh of Issachar (1 Chron. vi. 72, cf. 76 ;
Joshua xii. 22) between Taanach and Megiddo, with which he would identify
the Kedesh of Barak, counting it an error to call this latter Kedesh-Naphtali.
But Kedesh of Issachar was too near the battle and too much under the
hills of Manasseh for Sisera to flee there, and still less would he have gone
to it, if it had been Barak’s seat. The plain of Zaanaim, Eng. ver., is in
the original oak or terebinth of Besa'Snaim (D'JJlVIl ji^N, Q’ri	evi-
dently one word as LXX. take it, and because	is in the genitive

relation to "3), mentioned also in Josh. xix. 33 as Besa'Snanim, LXX.
(3e<refulv, a place on the border of Naphtali. This is an additional argu-
ment against identifying Kedesh with K. of Issachar. The LXX. 0eae/ulv
has suggested Kh. Bessum in the plateau west of the Lake, the name Kedesh
lies east below, and Damieh, perhaps the Adami of Josh. xix. 33, close by
north-west. Conder’s choice, therefore, is well supported. The only other
point is the alleged discrepancy between iv. 16, where Barak pursues the
Canaanites west to Harosheth, and 22 where he pursued Sisera to Kedesh,
i.e. east, if the above identification be correct. Now the double flight of the
Canaanites, west and east, was very probable, for in both directions lay
Canaanite towns. If so, Barak might despatch the main pursuit west,
while he himself turned east after Sisera. To read the narrative as if it
stated that Barak undertook in person both pursuits, is to treat it with
a rigour which would force inconsistencies upon any succinct historical
narrative.Esdraelon

397

common God. Well might Deborah open her song with
the Hallelujah:—

For that the leaders took the lead in Israel,

For that the people offered themselves willingly,

Bless ye Jehovah.

(2) The next invaders, whom Israel had to meet upon
Esdraelon, were Arabs from over Jordan, eastern
Midianites. This time therefore they drew ^ Gideon
to battle not upon Kishon and the western and Mldian-
watershed, but at the head of the long vale running down
to Bethshan ; and as Manasseh was now the heart of the
defence, the muster of Israel took place not at Tabor,
but at Gilboa. Gideon and all the people that were with
him pitched above the well of Harod, and the camp of
Midian was to the north of him from Moreh into the Vale.
That is to say, the Midianites took up practically the
same position about Shunem as we shall see the Philis-
tines occupy before their defeat of Saul.1 Due south
across the head of the Vale is the rugged end of Gilboa—
Jezreel standing off it—and on this Gideon, like Saul, drew
up his men. The only wells are three, all lying in the
Vale : one by Jezreel itself, one out upon the plain, and
one close under the steep banks of Gilboa. Gideon’s
The first and second of these lie open to the tactics,
position of the Midianites, and tradition has rightly fixed
on the third and largest, now called the ‘Ain Jalfid, as the
well of Harod.2 It bursts some fifteen feet broad and two

1	It is doubtful how far the name Moreh extended eastward, but if the
Belh-shittah of Judges vii. 22 be the present Shutta, then Moreh must be to
the west of that, and is probably, as put above, the hill above Shunem, now
known as Jebel Duhy.

2	See P.E.F. Survey large map. ‘Ain el Meiyiteh is under Jezreel. ‘Ain
Tuba'un, where Saladin camped in 1187 (‘Fons Tubania;’ Will, of Tyre,
xxii. 26), is on the plain. The name ‘Ainjaludis interesting. Boha-ed-398 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

deep from the very foot of Gilboa, and mainly out of it,
but fed also by the other two springs, flows a stream
considerable enough to work six or seven mills. The deep
bed and soft banks of this stream constitute a formidable
ditch in front of the position on Gilboa, and render it
possible for the defenders of the latter to hold the spring
at their feet in face of an enemy on the plain : and the
spring is indispensable to them, for neither to the left,
right, nor rear is there any other living water. Thus the
conditions of the narrative in Judges vii. are all present,
though it must be left to experts to say whether ten
thousand men could be deployed in the course of an
evening from the hill behind to the spring and the stream
that flows from it. Anybody, however, who has looked
across the scene can appreciate the suitability of the test
which Gideon imposed on his men. The stream, which
makes it possible for the occupiers of the hill to hold also
the well against an enemy on the plain, forbids them to be
careless in their use of the water; for they drink in face
of that enemy, and the reeds and shrubs which mark its
course afford ample cover for hostile ambushes. Those
Israelites, therefore, who bowed themselves down on their

Din (Vit. Salad, ch. xxiv.) calls it ‘Ain el Jalut or well of Goliath, with whose
slaughter by David the Jertisalem Itinerary connects Jezreel (Jerus. Itin.
ed. P.P.T,!, see Stradela). But Jalut and the association with Goliath
may both be due to a mishearing of Jalfid. And Jalud has a striking
resemblance to the Gile'ad of v. 3 of the story. It does not contain the
letter ‘ain, which the latter has, but we have many cases of ‘ain being
replaced by a long vowel. Major Conder, tempted by the name, has sug-
gested the ‘Ain el Jem‘ain, or Well of the Two Troops, at the foot of
Gilboa, near Bethshan, as the well of Harod. But, in a pass which has been
the scene of countless bivouacs and forays, it is futile to suppose that this
name may refer to Gideon’s two troops ; while if, as all are agreed, Shutta
represents Beth-shittah, we must suppose the Arab position and Gideon’s
camp to the south of it to lie west of Shutta, up the vale. Gile‘ad may be a
misreading for Gilboa.Esdraelon

399

knees, drinking headlong, did not appreciate their position
or the foe ; whereas those who merely crouched, lapping up
the water with one hand, while they held their weapons in
the other and kept their face to the enemy, were aware of
their danger, and had hearts ready against all surprise.
The test in fact was a test of attitude, which, after all, both
in physical and moral warfare, has proved of greater
value than strength or skill—attitude towards the foe and
appreciation of his presence. In this case it was parti-
cularly suitable. What Gideon had in view was a night
march and the sudden surprise of a great host—tactics
that might be spoiled by a few careless men. Soldiers
who behaved at the water as did the three hundred, showed
just the common-sense and vigilance to render such
tactics successful. First, however, Gideon himself ex-
plored the ground—two miles in breadth between his
men and the Arab tents; and heard, holding his breath
the while, the talk of the two sentries, which revealed to
him what stuff for panic Midian was. The rest is easily
told. It was the middle watch—that dead of the night
against which our Lord also warned His disciples.1 The
wary men, behind a leader who had made himself familiar
with the ground, touched without alarm the Arab lines.
They carried lights, as Syrian peasants do on windy
nights,2 in earthen pitchers, and they had horns hung upon
them.3 They blew the horns, brake the pitchers, flashed
their lights—that to the startled Arabs must have seemed
the torchbearers and pointsmen of an immense host—and

1	Judges vii. 19 f., Luke xii. 38.

2	Thomson, The Land and the Book.

3	If every man had a pitcher and a torch in it, he had no room in his
hands for a horn. Every man had a horn, and probably it is implied a light
and pitcher too (ver. 16),400 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

shouted, The sword ! for Jehovah and Gideon ! But no
sword was needed. Cumbered by their tents and cattle,
the Midianites, as in several other instances of Arab war-
fare, fell into a panic, drew upon each other,

The rout.

and finally fled down the Vale to Beth-shittah,
to Sereda near Bethshan,1 unto the lip of A belmeholah, the
deep bank over which the Vale of Jezreel falls into the
valley of the Jordan, above the now unknown Tabbath.2

(3) The next campaign on Esdraelon — that of the
Philistines against Saul—is more difficult to understand.
(3) Saul and the ^ ^ uncertain whether the narrative (1 Sam.

Philistines. xxviii.-xxxi.) runs in our Bibles in the proper
order; and we do not know where Aphek lay.

As the narrative now runs, the Philistines gather to war
against Israel (xxviii. 1), and camp at Shunem, whereupon
Order of the Saul gathers Israel, and camps on Gilboa (v. 4)
narrative. the Philistines then assemble at Aphek, and
Israel pitches by a fountain in Jezreel (xxix. 1); the
battle is joined, and Israel flee, and are slain in mount
Gilboa (xxxi. 1). This order implies that Aphek was
close to Shunem, on the line of the Philistine advance on
Gilboa ; and accordingly it has been sought for, both at

1	2 Chron. iv. 17, where it is described as in the Plain of Jordan. It is
the same as Sartan, 1 Kings vii. 46; cf. Josh. iii. 16; 1 Kings iv. 12.

2	In the above I have followed the plain course of the text, for it suits
throughout the geographical conditions. But the reader ought to know
that there are very great difficulties about parts of the narrative. Why
should the Ephraimites afterwards complain of being called out too late,
and Gideon represent that the work had been done by Abi'ezer alone
(viii. 1, 2), if vi. 35 assures us that Gideon had already summoned the four
tribes ? No doubt most of them were sent back after the test, but there is
no sign that those who passed the test were only Abi'ezrites. Because of
this some critics (cf. Budde, Ri. u. Sa. 111 ff.) strike out vi. 35, and the
story of the test vii. 2-8, and so leave the narrative to run as if Gideon
never had more than 300 men, all from Abi'ezer, till after the defeat of
Midian was achieved.Esdraelon

401

Fuleh on the Plain, where the Crusaders had a castle and
Kleber’s squares, in 1799, beat back the Turks ; and at
Fuku'a, on Gilboa itself, on the road from Jenin to Beth-
shan across the hill, as if the Philistines moved from
Shunem to the south-east of Saul’s position, and attacked
him from the rear, and upon his own level. But neither
of these sites has been proved to be Aphek.1

In the order of the Philistines’ advance, however, ought
not Aphek to be placed after Shunem ? Probably we
should rearrange the chapters of the narrative, so as to
put xxix.-xxx. between the second and third verses of
xxviii. Then the order of events would run : the Philis-
tine muster (xxviii. 1); their gathering to Aphek and the
encampment of Israel by the fountain which is in Jezreel
(xxix. 1) ; the Philistines’ advance towards Jezreel {id. 11) ;
their camp on Shunem and Israel’s on Gilboa (xxviii. 4) ;
the battle on Gilboa (xxxi. i).2 On this order, the uncer-
tainties are the position of Aphek and that of the fountain
which is in Jezreel. Some have placed Aphek in Sharon,
at the mouth of an easy pass into Samaria, identifying it
with the Aphek of the previous Philistine invasion, when
the ark was taken.3 But this has not been proved, and in

1	It is extremely unlikely that the Philistines should move from Shunem to
the present Fuleh, for the latter is farther off than Shunem from Gilboa. It
is Major Conder who suggests Fuku'a. We passed over the road from Jenin
to Beth-shan. From the plain up to Fuku'a the road is easy for chariots, and
about Fuku'a there is open ground. But the ground between that and the
part of Gilboa above the ‘Ain Jalud is broken by glens. Besides, there is no
affinity between the names Aphek and Fuku'a.

2	So Reuss, Budde, etc.

3	2 Sam. iv. i. See chs. x. and xvii. On the identification of the two
Apheks at which the Philistines pitched, see Wellh. Hist. Eng. Ed. p. 39,
and Robertson Smith, O. T.J.C. p. 435. They go farther and absorb in this
Aphek, the Aphek from which the Syrians attacked Samaria (1 Kings xx. 26).
This is quite out of the question.402 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

connection with the passage before us, it is hard to believe
that Saul’s advance to the Plain of Esdraelon, which is
given as simultaneous with the Palestine gathering at
Aphek, should have taken place while the Philistines were
still in Sharon, for that would have been to leave all Ben-
jamin and Ephraim undefended to their pleasure. Saul
must have followed the Philistines to Esdraelon ; and it is
almost impossible to think of him leaving Jenin, the great
entrance to the hill-country of Israel,1 and advancing to
Gilboa till he saw the Philistines move across the plain to
Shunem. In this case, while Aphek remains unknown,
we might take the fountain which is in Jezreel to be the
great fountain at Jenin, ‘Ain Gannim, Jezreel being in-
tended for the whole district. That would give us a
consistent story of the earlier stages of the campaign.2

However that may be, the rest is clear. The Philistines
had entered Esdraelon—doubtless by Megiddo. Had
The Battle of their aim been the invasion of the hill-country,
Mount Gilboa.	wouid have turned south-east to Jenin,

and Saul would have met them there. That, instead, we
find them striking north-east to Shunem, at the head of
the Vale of Jezreel, proves that at least their first intention
had to do with the Valley of the Jordan. Either they had
come to subjugate all the low country, and so confine
Israel, as the Canaanites did, to the hills, or else they
sought to secure their caravan route to Damascus and
the East, from Israel’s descents upon it by the roads
from Bezek to Bethshan and across Gilboa.3 In either

1	See p. 356.

2	The only other alternative, of supposing two differing narratives, one of
which assigns the Philistine muster to Aphek, the other to Shunem, is not so
probable.

3	This would afford a parallel to their occupation of Michmash (1 Sam. xiii. 5)Esdraelon

403

case Saul must not be permitted to remain where he was,
for from Gilboa he could descend with equal ease upon
Esdraelon and the Valley of the Jordan. Thoy attacked
him, therefore, on his superior position. Both the narra-
tive of the battle and the great Elegy in which the defeat
was mourned imply that the fighting was upon the heights
of Gilboa, and yet upon ground over which cavalry and
chariots might operate.1 The Philistines could not carry
Saul’s position directly from Shunem, for that way the
plain dips, and the deep bed of the stream intervenes and
the rocks of Gilboa are steep and high.2 But they went
round Jezreel, and attacked the promontory of the hill by
the easier slopes and wadies to the south, which lead up
to open ground about the village of Nuris, and directly
above the ‘Ain Jalfid. Somewhere on these slopes they
must have encountered that desperate resistance which
cost Israel the life of three of the king’s sons ; and some-
where higher up the gigantic king himself, wounded and
pressed hard by the chariots and horsemen, yet imperious
to the last, commanded his own death.3

on the trade-route from Ajalon to Jericho, and to the trace of Philistine
occupation which appears in the name Beth-Dagon near Shechem, on the
only other pass from east to west across the Central Range. On the Philis-
tines as traders, see ch. ix.

1 I Sam. xxxi. 1 ,fell down wounded on Mount Gilboa', 2 Sam. i. 6, upon
Mount Gilboa, behold, Saul leaned on his spear ; and, lo, the chariots and the
horsemen followed hard after him ; cf. in the Elegy, vv. 19, high places; 21,
Ye hills of Gilboa . . . for there the shield of the mighty is vilely cast away,
Saul’s shield; 25, 0 fonathan, slain on thy high places. 2 See p. 398.

3 The above view of the battle was formed on the ground, and I am glad
to find that in the main it is the same as that of so expert an observer as
Principal Miller, who surveyed the ground in detail, and gives both a gradual
description of the course of the fight and careful plans, that include not only
the contours of the ground, but what he believes to have been successive
positions of the hard-pressed Israelites. Principal Miller exposes the errors
in Dean Stanley’s account, in which the battle is described as on the plain,404 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

And David sang this dirge over Shdul and Jehona-
The Dirge, than his son ;* 1 Behold it is written in the
Book of the Brave?

Isrdel, the Beauty is slain on thy heights.

How fallen are the mighty /

Tell it not in Gath,

Publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon !

Lest they rejoice, the daughters of the Philistines ;

Lest they make triumph, the uncircumciseds daughters.

Hills of Gilboa,

Let not dew, let not rain be upon you,

Ye fields of discomfiture ! 3 4

For there thrown to rust is the shield of the mighty,

Shduls shield unanointed with oil?

From the blood of the slain,

From the fat of the mighty,

Bow of Jehonathan drew not back,

Nor sword of Shdul came home empty.

and only the flight on the hills. But surely he himself is not justified in de-
claring from xxix. n that the Philistines occupied the town of Jezreel before
the battle. He conceives Saul’s position on Gilboa to be due to his rash
designs of adding to his kingdom the whole of Northern Palestine—rash, for
so Saul left Benjamin and Ephraim undefended. This, however, is not
certain. The Least of all Lands, ch. vi. Plans on pp. 151 and 171.

1 Gloss : He bade them teach the children of fudah dirges or lamentations,

reading lTl3p for Dt^p.	2 IE?', the Upright, Valiant.

3	The text is	which is really unintelligible, as the Massoretes

divide it, but by a very little alteration reads JYlttinO '“lEH or	fields

of discomfitures, frustrations, wrecks. Other readings are Lucian’s DID '“in

hills of death, which Renan follows, taking '“lEM as a later variant that has
been wrongly brought into the text from the margin ; Stade’s DlOiy
nor field of sheaves ; Klostermann’s H'OT irflty. Another reading might
be iYlDfcO nriEr, cf. Prov. xxiv. 7 : Justi, Nationalgesdnge der Hebr. i. 72,
translates Hohes Schlachtfeld. Still another possibility is that D'0“li the word
for blood, is lurking among the last letters. This would be natural, for it is
a common Semitic idea that no rain or dew will bless the spot stained by the
blood of a slain man.

4	The parallelism show’s that the oil refers to the well-known practice of
rubbing shields with oil to preserve them, and not to Saul, translating as if
he were not the Anointed.Esdraelon

405

Sha'ul and Jehonathan, the lovely, the pleasant,

In their lives and in their death they were not divided:

Than eagles they were swifter,

Than lions more strong.

Daughters of Isrctel, weep for Sha'ul,

Who clothed you in scarlet with jewels;

Who brought up adorning of gold on your raiment.

How fallen are the mighty l
In the midst of the battle
Jehonathan, on thy heights, is slain !

Anguish is mine for thy sake, 0 my brother l
Jehonathan, thou wert very fair to me !

Thy love to me was wonderful,

Passing the love of women.

How fallen are the mighty,

And perished the weapons of war l

(4) Esdraelon was the scene of another lamentation for
another king in Israel. In Jeremiah’s time it had long been
prophesied that Egypt would come upon the josiah
land, but the people did not heed it, saying, and Egypt
Pharaoh is hut a rumour, the time appointed is past.
Jeremiah replied he should come, as surely as Tabor is
among the mountains, and as Carmel by the sea.1 And so he
did by Megiddo, till his host filled the plain between these
hills as solid and present a fact as either of them.2 Josiah,

1	Jer. xlvi. 18.

2	It is doubtful whether Pharaoh Necho came to Syria by the usual land
route, or, as Vespasian on one occasion sent his troops, by sea (Herod, ii. 158),
and Cheyne suggests Dor as his landing-place (Life and Time of ferem., 96).
But the only ground for the latter alternative is the conjunction in Herod,
of Necho’s ship-building with his campaign ; and, if he had come by sea, he
would surely have landed not at Dor, but at Acco, in which case, however, he
would not have marched so far south again as Megiddo. The battle at Megiddo
suits the land route. The Ma75aXos of Herodotus is no doubt a corruption of
Megiddon. ’M.evd-q, in Jos. x. Antt. v. 1., is a patent error, for VUD*
and an interesting proof of the terrible risks which the place-names of Palestine
have been subject to in seven or eight languages.406 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

who had no need to put himself in Pharaoh’s way, had
rashly ventured opposition at Megiddo. But his army was

The Battle routed, and himself mortally wounded as soon

of Megiddo. as they met.1 And Jeremiah made a dirge upon
Josiah, and all the singing-men and the singing-women speak
of Josiah in their dirges to this day. So they made them a
custom in Israel; and> lo, they are written among The
Dirges? And the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the Vale
of Megiddon became a proverb in Israel.3 The dirges of
Jeremiah have perished, and, indeed, he himself depre-
cated the extremes to which this national lamentation
was carried. Israel was approaching a greater calamity
which would require all her tears:

‘ Weep not for the dead\ nor bemoan him,

But weeping weep for him that goeth away,

For he shall never come back, nor see the land of his birth? 4

(5) The rest of the historical scenes of Esdraelon, there
is space only to enumerate. But perhaps the mere
succession of them will impress us, more than

Pageant of detailed accounts could do, with the constant

Esdraelon.	,	.	.	.	,

pageant of commerce, war, and judgment,
which throughout the centuries has traversed this wonderful
arena. From Jezreel you see the slaughter-place of the
priests of Baal; you see Jehu’s ride from Bethshan to the
vineyard of Naboth at your feet; you see the
enormous camp of Holofernes spreading from
the hills above Jenin, out to Kuamon in the plain ;5 you

1	2 Kings xxiii. 29, as soon as he had seen him.

2	2 Chron. xxxv. 24, 25.	3 Zech. xii. 11.	4 Jer. xxii. 10.

5 Judith vii. 3. 'Kvaixuv — bean-field, has been identified with Tell Keimun
at the foot of Carmel; but some think to find it at Fuleh, which also means
bean. The description of Ktfa/rwi' which is opposite Esdraelon (name of plain
or of city?) suits both Keimun and Fuleh.Esdraelon

40 7

The Romans.

see the marches and counter - marches of Syrians,
Egyptians, and Jews in the Hasmonean days1—the
elephants and engines of Antiochus, the litters of Cleopatra
and her ladies. The Romans come and plant
their camps and stamp their mighty names for
ever on the soil, Legio and Kastra; Pompey, Mark
Antony, Vespasian, and Titus pass at the head of their
legions,2 and the men of Galilee sally forth upon them
from the same nooks in the hills of Naphtali from which
their forefathers broke with Barak upon the chariots of
Canaan.3 After the Roman war comes the Roman peace,
and for a great interval of centuries Esdraelon is no more
blotted by the black tents of the Bedouin ; but a broad
civilisation grows between her and Arabia, and Jordan is
bridged, and from the Greek cities of the Decapolis
chariots and bands of soldiers, officials, and Earjy
provincial wits on their way to Rome, pass to Chnstians-
the ports of Caesarea and Ptolemais.4 In the fourth
century Christian pilgrims arrive, and cloisters are built
from Bethshan to Carmel.5 Three centuries
of this, and then through their old channel the
Desert swarms sweep back, now united by a common faith,

The Moslem.

1	1 Macc. xii. 41-52, recounting Trypho’s treacherous capture of Jonathan
Maccabeus, which added another to the woes and lamentations of this tragic
plain. Jos. xiii. Antt. ix. 3: Demetrius II., defeated by Alexander Zabinas, falls
back on Ptolemais (Acre). Ibid. x. 2, Hyrcanus moves between Sebaste and
Scythopolis. Ibid, xii., Alexander Janneus takes Ptolemais, and fights with
the Egyptian forces between that and Jordan, cir. 103 B.c. lb. xiii. Cleopatra,
mother of Ptolemy Lathurus, besieges Ptolemais, and meets Alexander Janneus
in Bethshan. Ib. xiv. 1: So Demetrius Eucherus went up to Shechem at the
call of the Pharisees, xv. 2: So Aretas must have come from Damascus to
Adida.

2	See references on p. 410.	3 Jos. ii. Wars, xxi. 3.

4 Cf. Mommsen’s Provinces of the Roman Empire, Eng, Ed. II. ch. x.

6 For authorities, see p. 17.408 The Historical Geogi'aphy of the Holy Land

and with the vigour of a new civilisation ; you see before
them the rout of the Greek army up the Vale of Jezreel.1
The Arabs stay for nearly five hundred years, obliterating
the past, distorting the familiar and famous names. Then
the ensigns of Christendom return. Crusading castles
rise—on the Plain Sapham and Faba2 under

The Crusades	1

’ the black and white banner of the Templars,
and high up on the ridge north of Bethshan—so high
and far that it is called by the Arabs Star-of-the-
Wind—Belvoir under the Red Cross of the Hospitallers.3
Cloisters are rebuilt, and thriving villages, for justice and
shelter given them, bring their tribute to the Abbey of
Mount Tabor; pilgrims throng from all lands, and the
holy memories are replanted—not always on their proper
sites.4 Once more by Bethshan the Arabs break the line

Return of °f Christian defence, and Saladin spreads

the Moslem, hjs camp where Israel saw those of Midian and
the Philistines;5 through a long hot summer the castles
of the Cross yield one by one, till Belvoir holds out alone,
flying the Red Cross for eighteen months over a Saracen
country. Finally, after two last forlorn hopes—one of
Andrew of Hungary, who carried the Cross to the top of
Tabor, and was beaten down again,6 and one of Saint

1 See p. 359.

,a ‘The Bean:’ also called La Feve and La Fene, Rey, Col. Fr. 439;
Rohricht, Z.D.P. V. x. 231, 232. Known to the Saracens as El-Fulah =
‘The Bean.’ Boha-ed-din Saladin, ch. 24., Abulfeda Ed. Schultens, p. 41.

3	Arabic, Kaukab-el-FIawa; called by Franks also Delehawa: Prulz,
Z.D.P. V p. 168.

4	Rohricht, op. cit. on p. 17.

5	At the fountain of Tubania, a little way out on the plain north of Jezreel,
cf. p. 397 n. 2. This was in 1186 when Saladin had to retire, but he returned
and won the decisive battle of Hatlin on 14th June 1187, and occupied Acre
9th July, took Jerusalem 1188, but Belvoir did not fall till Jan. 1189.

6	Andrew in 1217, the Sixth Crusade; Louis in 1270, the Eighth Crusade.Esdraelon

409

Louis of France, who marched to Jordan and back—
Esdraelon is closed to the arms of the West, till in 1799
Napoleon with his monstrous ambition of an

Napoleon.

Empire on the Euphrates, breaks into it by
Megiddo, and in three months again, from the same
fatal stage, falls back upon the first great Retreat of his
career.

What a Plain it is ! Upon which not only the greatest
empires, races, and faiths, east and west, have contended
with each other, but each has come to The Battle of
judgment—on which from the first, with all Armaseddon-
its splendour of human battle, men have felt that there
was fighting from heaven, the stars in their courses zvere
fighting—on which panic has descended so mysteriously
upon the best equipped and most successful armies, but
the humble have been exalted to victory in the hour of
their weakness—on which false faiths, equally with false
defenders of the true faith, have been exposed and
scattered—on which since the time of Saul wilfulness and
superstition, though aided by every human excellence,
have come to nought, and since Josiah’s time the purest
piety has not atoned for rash and mistaken zeal. The
Crusaders repeat the splendid folly of the kings of Israel;
and, alike under the old and the new covenant, a degene-
rate church suffers here her judgment at the hands of the
infidel.

They go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole
world to gather them to the battle of the great Day of God
Almighty . . . and He gathered them together unto a place
called in the Hebrew tongue Har Megeddon.410 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

NOTE TO PAGE 407.—REFERENCES TO THE ROMANS
ON ESDRAELON.

Pompey, 64 B.c., xiv. Antt. iii. 4, iv. 5, Mark Antony under Gabinius,
in the campaign under Gabinius, 57-55, Ibid. v. Caesar, in 47 B.c., visited
Syria by sea, Ibid. viii. 3 and 6, by sea to Cilicia, ix. 1 ; but we do not
know where he touched (cf. Sueton. Julius, 35). Antony was again in Syria
in 40 B.c., Ibid. xiii. 1 and from 36-33 partly, with Cleopatra in xv.Antt. iv.,
i. Wars, xviii., Plutarch, Anton. 36-51. Vespasian reached Ptolemais in 67
A.D. iii. Wars, ii. ff. Titus joined him, Ibid. iv. For these operations in
Esdraelon and Lower Galilee, Ibid. vi. ff., cf. Sueton. Vespasian, 5. Tacitus,
Hist. iv. 51.CHAPTER XX
GALILEE

411For this Chapter consult Maps I. and VIGALILEE

HIS name, which binds together so many of the

most holy memories of our race, means in itself
nothing more than The Ring. Galil, as the , Gamee 0f
easily slipping letters testify, is anything that 1he Gcntlles'
rolls, or is round.1 2 Like our circle, or circuit, it was
applied geographically to any well-defined region, as, for
example, the region east of Jerusalem, which Ezekiel calls
the Eastern Galilee, or to the Galilees of the Jordan, or to
the Galilees of the Philistines? How it came to be the
peculiar title of one district, and take rank among the
most significant names of the world, was as follows.
Gelil ha-Goim—Ring or Region of the Gentiles, a phrase
analogous to the German Heidenmark—was applied to the
northern border of Israel, which was pressed and permeated

1	(cf. the Greek KvX-ivSpov), is used of balls, cylinders or rings (Esther
i. 6 ; Cant. v. 14), or the leaf of a door turning on its hinge (1 Kings vi. 34).

2	But in all these cases it was the feminine. iUOTpn	the region

to the east of Jerusalem (Ezek. xlvii. 8). Plural pTH	the circles of

Jordan (Josh. xxii. 10, 11); cf. ‘ links of Forth.’	ITl^J (Joel iv. 4),

circles of the Philistines (cf. Josh. xiii. 2). This name may possibly survive
in the Crusaders’ Galilaea, name of a casale, and ‘ tota Galilea,’ name of a
district in the neighbourhood of Caesarea. Prutz, Besitzungen des Johanniter-
ordens in Pal. u. Syr. Z.D.P. V. iv. 157 ff. with map. Prutz refers it to
Kalkilye, but it is more probably the present Jelil, in the same neighbour-
hood.

413414 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

from three sides by foreign tribes. Thence the name
gradually spread, till in Isaiah’s time it was as far
south as the Lake of Gennesaret.1 By the time of the
Maccabees it had reached the Plain of Esdraelon, and
covered the whole of the most northerly of the three
provinces into which, after the Exile, the land west of
Jordan was divided.2

The population remained far more Gentile than before.
The Jews who settled in Galilee after the Return from
Galilee of Babylon were few, and about 164 B.C. Simon
the jews. Maccabeus had to bring them all back to
Judaea.3 But the extension of the Jewish state under
John Hyrcanus, 135-105, must have enabled many Jews
to return to the attractive province without fear of per-
secution, and either that monarch or his successor added
Galilee to his domains, and sought to enforce the law
upon its inhabitants.4 Very soon afterwards, in 104,
Galilee had developed a loyalty to the Jewish state suffi-
cient to throw off a strong invader.6 From this time

1	Isa. ix. 1 (Heb. viii. 23).

2	In 1 Macc. the boundaries are indefinite. Galilee was still, in a sense,
distinct from the Great Plain, xii. 47, 49; but it covered the neighbourhood
of Ptolemais (Acre), v. 55.

3	1 Macc. v. 23. SchUrer {Hist. i. 1, 192) rightly corrects Keil on this
verse.

4	SchUrer (Hist. i. 1, 294) thinks that the Jewish conquest of Galilee was
not made till Aristobulus 1. 105-104 b.c. But the conquest of Ituraean terri-
tory N. E. of Galilee, which is mentioned by Josephus (xiii. And. xi, 3) as
the only triumph of the brief reign of Aristobulus, could hardly have been
undertaken without the previous conquest of Galilee by his predecessor ; and
with this agrees the ambiguous statement that Hyrcanus had his son Alex-
ander brought up in Galilee {ib. xii. 1). In the opening of next reign,
Alexander Janneus (104-78), we find Galilee so thoroughly Jewish that
Ptolemy Lathurus has difficulty in his siege of Asochis, and is unable to take
Sepphoris {ib. 4, 5). This seems to require, for the Judaising of Galilee, an
earlier date in the reign of John Hyrcanus.

5	See previous Note.Galilee

4i5

onwards it was, therefore, natural to drop out of her name
the words, of the Gentiles., which were before this time not
always used, but the definite article was retained, and
throughout the New Testament she was known as The
Galilee. It was, we can understand, pleasing to the
patriotism of her proud inhabitants to call their famous
and beautiful province, The Region.1

The natural boundaries of Galilee are obvious. South,
the Plain of Esdraelon (and we have seen why this
frontier should be the southern and not the

The Bound-

northern edge of the plain2); north, the great aries of

Galilee.

gorge of the Litany or Kasimiyeh,3 cutting off
Lebanon ; east, the valley of the Jordan and the Lake of
Gennesaret; and west, the narrow Phoenician coast. This
region coincides pretty closely with the territories of four
tribes—Issachar, Zebulun, Asher, and Naphtali. But the
sea-coast, claimed for Zebulun and Asher, never belonged
either to them or to the province of Galilee : it was always
Gentile. On the other hand, owing to the weakness of
the Samaritans, Carmel was reckoned to Galilee when it
was not in the hands of the men of Tyre ;4 and the eastern

1 (Josh. xx. 7, xxi. 32 ; 1 Chron. vi. 76).	(1 Kings ix. nj.

D'Un (Isa. viii. 23). In 2 Kings xv. 29, n^JiTTlK, it is not the
feminine form, but the masculine, with il paragog., that is used. The
feminine	is not applied in Hebrew to Galilee (for its uses see p. 413,

n. 1.) But the LXX. render ^ TaXtXala. In Isa. viii. 23 (LXX. and
Eng. ix. 1) TaXiXaia tQv &0vG>v. In the Apocrypha it is TaXiXaLa ’AXX6<f>vXuv
(cf. 1 Macc. v. 15, etc.). The definite article is omitted only in 1 Macc.
x. 30. And so in the N.T. it is i] TaXiXaia, the definite article being
omitted only twice.	2 See p. 379.

3	Too readily assumed to be the Lion River, Leontes (Atovros irord/ioi
itcpdXdi) of Ptolemy, v. 15, which he places between Sidon and Beyrout,
and which, if he was right, may be the Botrenus, the present Nahr el Awleh.
There is no connection between the names Litany and Leontes.

4	Josephus, iii. Wars, iii. 1. See p. 338.416 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

shores of Gennesaret also fell within the province.1 Ex-
clusive of these two additions, Galilee measured about
fifty miles north to south, and from twenty-five to thirty-
five east and west. The area was only about 1600 square
miles, or that of an average English shire.

From the intricacy of its highlands, the map of Galilee
seems at first impossible to arrange to the eye. But,
The divisions wlth a little care, the ruling features are dis-
of Galilee. tinguished, and the whole province falls into
four divisions. There is the Jordan Valley with its two lakes,
that singular chasm, which runs along the east of Galilee,
sinking from Hermon’s base to more than 700 feet below
the level of the ocean.2 From this valley, and corresponding
roughly to its three divisions,—below the Lake of Tiberias,
the lake itself, and above the lake,—three belts or strips
run westward : first, the Plain of Esdraelon ; second, the
so-called Lower Galilee, a series of long parallel ranges, all
below 1850 feet, which, with broad valleys between them,
cross from the plateau above Tiberias to the maritime
plains of Haifa and Acre; and third, Upper Galilee, a
series of plateaus, with a double water-parting, and sur-
rounded by hills from 2000 to 4000 feet.3 As you gaze

1	Thus, Judas who led the revolt against them in 6 a.d. is called the
Galilean, avyp TaXtXaios (Josephus ii. Wars, viii. i), although he belonged
to Gamala in Gaulanitis (xviii. Antt, i. i). Just in the same way at this day
‘thewhole coast district is under the administration of the Kada Tubariya.’
(Schumacher, The Jauldn, p. 103.) It is the most convenient arrangement.

2	Opposite Bethshan.

3	The division between Upper and Lower Galilee is very evident on the
map. It runs, roughly speaking, from the north end of the Lake of Galilee
(or to the south of Safed), by the Wady Maktul leading up from the Plain of
Gennesaret, thence by the level ground between Kefr Anan and er Rameh
due west towards Acre. South of this line there is no height of over 1850
feet, the peaks run from 1000 to 1850, with Jebel es Sih 1838, and Tabor
1843. But north of this line the steep constant wall of the northern plateau
rises almost immediately, and figures from 2000 to 3000 are frequent on theGalilee

417

north from the Samarian border, these three zones rise in
steps above one another to the beginnings of Lebanon;
and from the north-east, over the gulf of the Jordan, the
snowy head of Hermon looks down athwart them.

The controlling feature of Galilee is her relation to
these great mountains. A native of the region has aptly
described it in the picture he gives of God’s TheLebanons
grace. I will be as the dew unto Israel; he andGalllee-
shall blossom as the lily, and cast forth his roots like
Lebanond Galilee is literally the casting forth of the roots
of Lebanon. As the supports of a great oak run up above
ground, so the gradual hills of Galilee rise from Esdraelon
and Jordan and the Phoenician coast, upon that tremen-
dous northern mountain. It is not Lebanon, however,
but the opposite range of Hermon, which dominates the
view. Among his own roots Lebanon is out of sight;
whereas that long, glistening ridge, that stands aloof,
always brings the eye back to itself. In summer, hot
harvesters from every field lift their hearts to Hermon’s
snow; and the heavy dews of night they call his gift.
How closely Hermon was identified with Galilee, is seen
from his association with the most characteristic of the
Galilean hills : Tabor and Hermon rejoice in Thy name?

To her dependence on the Lebanons Galilee owes her

map. The Talmud marks this line of division as follows: ‘ Upper Galilee
above Kefar Hananyah, a country where sycomores are not found; Lower
Galilee below Kefar Hananyah, which produces sycomores.’ Kefar Hananyah
is no doubt the present Kefr Anan. Josephus gives the breadth of Lower
Galilee (north and south) as from Xaloth, at the roots of Tabor, to Berseba,
which has not been identified, but which may be the present Kh. Abu esh
Sheba in the immediate neighbourhood of Kefr Anan.

1	Hosea xiv. 5.

2	Psalm lxxxix. 12. How far they believed its influence to travel may
be seen from that other psalm : ‘ The dew of Hermon that cometh down on
the mountains of Zion ’ (Psalm cxxxiii.).

2 D418 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

water and her immense superiority in fruitfulness to both

Judaea and Samaria. This is not because Galilee has a

greater rainfall—her excess in that respect is
Water.	.

slight,1 and during the dry season showers are

almost as unknown as in the rest of Palestine. But the
moisture, seen and unseen, which the westerly winds lavish
on the Lebanons, are stored by them for Galilee’s sake, and
dispensed to her with unfailing regularity all round the
year. They break out in the full-born rivers of the Upper
Jordan Valley, and in the wealth of wells among her
hills. When Judaea is dry they feed the streams of Gen-
nesaret and Esdraelon. In winter the springs of Kishon
burst so richly from the ground, that the Great Plain about
Tabor is a quagmire ; even in summer there are fountains
in Esdraelon, round which the thickets keep green ; and
in the glens running up to Lower Galilee the paths cross
rivulets and sometimes wind round a marsh. In the long
cross valleys, winter lakes last till July,2 and farther north
the autumn streams descend both watersheds with a music
unheard in Southern Palestine. In fact, the difference in
this respect between Galilee and Judaea is just the differ-
ence between their names—the one liquid and musical
like her running waters, the other dry and dead like the
fall of your horse’s hoof on her blistered and muffled rock.

So much water means an exuberant fertility. We have
seen what Esdraelon is, and we may leave for separate
treatment the almost tropic regions of the Jordan

1	The figures are few for Nazareth (we owe them to Dr. Vartan). Com-
paring them with those for Jerusalem by Dr. Chaplin, Anderlind makes out
a difference of 4’i6 centimetres in the annual rainfall; Jerusalem, 57-01 ;
Nazareth, 6i '17. Jerusalem is 2300 feet above the sea, Nazareth, about 1000.

2	So the Plain of Buttauf was in that month still partly a lake.—Conder’s
Tent Work,Galilee

419

Valley. But take Lower and Upper Galilee, with their
more temperate climate. They are almost as well wooded
as our own land. Tabor is covered with bush,
and on its northern side with large, loose groves Fertlllty’
of forest trees. The road which goes up from the Bay of
Carmel to Nazareth winds, as among English glades, with
open woods of oak and an abundance of flowers and grass.
Often, indeed, as about Nazareth, the limestone breaks out
not less bare and dusty than in Judaea itself, but over the
most of Lower Galilee there is a profusion of bush, with
scattered forest trees—holly-oak, maple, sycomore, bay-
tree, myrtle, arbutus, sumac and others—and in the valleys
olive orchards and stretches of fat corn-land. Except for
some trees like the sycomore, Upper Galilee is quite as
rich. It is ‘an undulating table-land, arable, and every-
where tilled, with swelling hills in view all round, covered
with shrubs and trees.’1 Above Tyre there is a great
plateau, sloping westwards. It is ‘all cultivated, and
thronged with villages.’ To the south of the Wady el
Ma the country is more rugged, and cultivation is now
pursued only in patches;2 yet even here are vines and
olives. Round Jotapata Josephus speaks of timber being
cut down for the town’s defence.3 Gischala was Gush-
halab, ‘ fat soil,’4 and was noted for its oil. Throughout
the province olives were so abundant that a proverb ran,

‘ It is easier to raise a legion of olives in Galilee than to
bring up a child in Palestine.’5 Even on the high water-

1	Robinson, L.R. See also P.E.F. Mem. Survey, iii.

2	P.E.F. Mem. iii., Galilee.

3	iii. Wars, vii. 8; cf. vi. 2.	4 Neubauer, GSog. du Talvmd.

5 Talmud, quoted by Neubauer, p. 180. The abundance of oil in Galilee is

well illustrated in the use made of boiling oil by the defenders of Jotapata,
who poured great quantities of it on the Roman soldiers (iii. Wars, vii. 28).420 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

parting between Huleh and the Mediterranean, the fields
are fertile, while the ridges are covered with forests of
small oaks. To the inhabitants of such a land, the more
luxuriant vegetation of the hot plains on either side spreads
its temptations in vain.

‘ Asher, his bread is fat,

And heyieldeth the dainties of a king.

Blessed be Asher above children,

And let him dip his foot in oil l
O Naphtali, satisfied with favour,

Andfull of the blessing of Jehovah? 1

But it is luxury where luxury cannot soften. On these
broad heights, open to the sunshine and the breeze, life is
free and exhilarating.

‘ Naphtali is as a hind let loose? 2

This beautiful figure fully expresses the feelings which are
bred by the health, the spaciousness, the high freedom
and glorious outlook of Upper Galilee.

To so generous a land the inhabitants, during that part
of her history which concerns us, responded with energy.

Culture and ‘Their soil,’ says Josephus, ‘is universally rich

Population. ancj fruitful, and full of the plantations of trees
of all sorts, insomuch that it invites, by its fruitfulness, the
most slothful to take pains in its cultivation. Accordingly
it is all cultivated by its inhabitants, and no part of it lies

1	Gen. xlix. 20 ; Deut. xxxiii. 23, 24.

2	Gen. xlix. 21. Another reading, partly suggested by the LXX., is
adopted by Ewald, Dillmann, and others, Naphtali is a slender terebinth
giving forth goodly boughs. Other ancient versions, however, support the
Massoretic text; and while, as we have seen, the figure of a tree is not
inapplicable to the mountains of Naphtali, that of a slender tree is quite
absurd. The ordinary reading is, as shown above, beautifully suited to a
people in the position of Naphtali.Galilee

421

idle.’1 The villages were frequent, there were many forti-
fied towns, and the population was very numerous. We
may not accept all that Josephus reports in these respects
—he reckons a population of nearly three millions—but
there are good reasons for the possibility of his high
figures;2 and in any case the province was very thickly
peopled. Save in the recorded hours of our Lord’s praying,
the history of Galilee has no intervals of silence and lone-
liness ; the noise of a close and busy life is always audible ;
and to every crisis in the Gospels and in Josephus we see
crowds immediately swarm.

One other national feature of Galilee must not be passed
over. The massive limestone of her range is broken here
and there by volcanic extrusions—an extinct volcanic
crater, for instance, near Gischala,3 dykes of elements-
basalt, and scatterings of lava upon the plateau above the
lake. Hot sulphur springs flow by Tiberias, and the
whole province has been shaken by terrible earthquakes.4
The nature of the people was also volcanic. Josephus
describes them as ‘ ever fond of innovations, and by nature
disposed to changes, and delighting in sedi- The Gamean
tions.’ 5 They had an ill name for quarrelling. temper-
From among them came the chief zealots and wildest
fanatics of the Roman wars.6 We remember two Galileans

1	iii. Wars, iii. 2.

2	See those given by Dr. Selah Merrill in his valuable monograph on

Galilee in the Time of Christ. ‘ Bypaths of Bible Knowledge ’ Series,
London, 1891.	3 Sahel-el-Jish.

4	The most recent was that in 1837, which overthrew the walls of Tiberias,
and killed so large a number of the population of Safed and other towns.

5	Life, xvii. ; xvii. Anlt. x. 5; xx. id. vi. I ; i. Wars, xvi. 5 ; ii. id. xvii. 8 ;
Tacitus, Ann. xii. 54.

6	Judas, the Galilean from Gamala, in Jaulan, A. D. 6 (xviii. Antt. i. I ; ii.
Wars, viii. 1). His sons, James and Simon, were executed by Tiberius Alex-422 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

who wished to call down fire from heaven on those who
were only discourteous to them.1 Yet this inner fire is
an essential of manhood. It burns the meanness out of
men, and can flash forth in great passions for righteous-
ness. From first to last, the Galileans were a chivalrous
and a gallant race.

‘ Zebulun was a people jeoparding their life to the death,

And Naphtali on the high places of the field? 2

With the same desperate zeal, their sons attempted the
forlorn hope of breaking the Roman power. ‘ The country,’
says Josephus proudly, ‘hath never been destitute of men
of courage.’ 3 Their fidelity, often unreasoning and ill-
tempered, was always sincere. ‘The Galileans,’ according
to the Talmud, ‘were more anxious for honour than for
money ; the contrary was true of Judaea.’4 For this cause
also our Lord chose His friends from the people; and it
was not a Galilean who betrayed Him.

When we turn from the physical characteristics of this
province of the subterranean fires and waters to her poli-
tical geography, we find influences as bold and

Political

Geography inspiring as those we have noted. We may
select three as the chief—the neighbourhood
of classic scenes of Hebrew history; the great world-
roads which crossed Galilee; the surrounding heathen
civilisations.

ander (xx. Antt. v. 2); his grandson, Manahem, was prominent in the revolt of
66 (ii. Wars, xvii. 8, 9), and a descendant, Eleazar, was captain of the Sicarii,
and so led the defence of Masada in 73 (ii. Wars, xvii. 9; vii. ib. viii. 1).
Cf. Schiirer, Hist. Div. I. vol. I. p. 81, n. 129. John of Gischala, a very
passionate patriot (Josephus, Life, x., xiii., etc. ; ii. Wars, xxi. I, 2, etc.).
Cf. the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices (Luke
xiii. 1).

1 Luke ix. 54. Cf. Jos. xx. Antt. vi. 1.	2 Judges v. 18.

3 iii. Wars, iii. 2.	4 Quoted by Neubauer, Glog. du Talm. 18 r.Galilee

423

I. It is often taken for granted that the Galilee of our
Lord’s day was a new land with an illegitimate people—
without history, without traditions, without x Galilee—
prophetic succession. The notion is inspired Ho'y Land-
by such proverbs as, Search and see, for out of Galilee
cometh no prophet. Can any good come out of Nazareth ?
But these utterances were due to the spitfire pride of
Judaea, that had contempt for the coarse dialect of the
Galileans,1 and for their intercourse with the heathen.
The province, it is true, had been under the Law for only
a little more than a century.2 Her customs and laws,
even on such important matters as marriage and inter-
course with the heathen, her coins and weights, her dialect,
were all sufficiently different from those of Judaea to excite
popular sentiment in the latter, and provide the scribes
with some quotable reasons for their hostility. Do we
desire a modern analogy for the difference between Judaea
and Galilee in the time of our Lord, we shall find one in
the differences between England and Scotland soon after
the Union. But then Galilee had as much reason to
resent the scorn of Judaea as Scotland the haughty toler-
ance of England. Behind the Exile, Galilee had tradi-
tions, a prophetic succession, and a history almost as
splendid as Judah’s own. She was not out of the way
of the great scenes of famous days. Carmel, Kishon,
Megiddo, Jezreel, Gilboa, Shunem, Tabor, Gilead, Bashan,
the waters of Merom, Hazor and Kadesh, were all within
touch or sight. She shared with Judaea even the exploits
of the Maccabees. By Gennesaret was Jonathan’s march,
by Merom the scene of his heroic rally, when his forces
were in flight, and of his great victory; on the other side,
1 The Galileans confounded the gutturals.	2 See p. 414.424 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

at Ptolemais, was his treacherous capture, the beginning
of his martyrdom.1 Galilee, therefore, lived as openly as
Judsea in face of the glories of their people. Her latent
fires had everywhere visible provocation. The foot of the
invader could tread no league of her soil without starting
the voices of fathers who had laboured and fought for her
—without rewaking promises which the greatest prophets
had lavished upon her .future. As in the former time he
brought into contempt the land of Zebulun, and the land of
Naphtali, so in the latter time hath he made them glorious,
the way of the sea, across fordan, Galilee of the Gentiles.
The people ivhich walked in darkness have seen a great
light; dwellers in the land of darkness, on them hath the
light shined.

It is not necessary to enlarge upon the preparation
which all this must have effected for the ministry of our
Lord. That the Messianic tempers were stronger in
Galilean than in any other Jewish hearts is most cer-
tain.2 While Judaea’s religion had for its characteristic
zeal for the law, Galilee’s was distinguished by the nobler,
the more potential passion of hope. Therefore it was to
Galilee that Jesus came preaching that the Kingdom of
Heaven is at hand; it was the Galilean patriotism which
He chose to refine to diviner issues.

But we usually overlook that Galilee was vindicated also
in the affections of the Jews themselves. It is one of the
The Jewish most singular revolutions, even in Jewish his-
Renascence. tory, that the province, which through so many
centuries Judaea had contemned as profane and heretical,

1	I Macc. ix., xi., xii.

2	See p. 421 f., on the number of Galilean leaders in the revolt against
Rome.Galilee

425

should succeed Judaea as the sanctuary of the race and
the home of their theological schools—that to-day Galilee
should have as many holy places as Judaea, and Safed and
Tiberias be reverenced along with Hebron and Jerusalem.
The transference can be traced geographically, by the
movements of the Sanhedrim. After the defeat of the last
Jewish revolt at Bettir (134 A.D.), the Sanhedrim migrated
north from Jabneh in the Philistine plain to Oshah just
north of Carmel, and thence gradually eastward across
Lower Galilee to Shaphram, to Beth She'arim, to Sep-
phoris—nay, to the unclean and cursed Tiberias itself.
Here the last Sanhedrim sat, and the Mishna was edited.
You see the tomb of Maimonides in Tiberias, and most of
the towns of Lower and some of those of Upper Galilee
have a name as the scenes of the residence or of the
martyrdom of famous Rabbis. It is curious to observe in
the Talmuds the reflection of a state of society in Galilee
of the third century more strict in many respect^ than
that of Judaea. But, in the history of Israel, the last is
ever becoming the first.1

II. The next great features of Galilee are her Roads.
This garden of the Lord is crossed by many of the world’s
most famous highways. We saw that Judaea n Theroads
was on the road to nowhere; Galilee is of GallIee-
covered with roads to everywhere—roads from the har-
bours of the Phoenician coast to Samaria, Gilead, Hauran

1 For the above details, see Neubauer, Giog. du Talmud, 177-233. A most
valuable picture of Galilee, but it draws too much on the Talmud’s picture of
Galilee for illustration of the very different state of affairs in our Lord’s time.
The towns mentioned above will all be found on the map of theT.E.F.
Osha is Kurbet Husheh, Shaphram Shefa ‘Amr, only two miles away. Beth
She'arim has not been identified.426 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

and Damascus ; roads from Sharon to the valley of
the Jordan; roads from the sea to the desert; roads
from Egypt to Assyria. They were not confined to
Esdraelon and the Jordan Valley. They ran over Lower
Galilee by its long parallel valleys, and even crossed the
high plateau of Upper Galilee on the shortest direction
from Tyre and Sidon to Damascus. A review of these
highways will immensely enhance our appreciation of
Galilee’s history. They can be traced by the current
lines of traffic, by the great khans or caravanserais which
still exist in use or in ruin, and by the remains of Roman
pavements.

From the earliest times to the present a great thorough-
fare has connected Damascus with the sea. Its direction

has varied from age to age according to poli-

Their routes. .	.

tical circumstances. The port of Damascus
was sometimes Tripoli, sometimes Beyrout, sometimes
Sidon or Tyre, sometimes Acca with Haifa. But between
Damascus and the three first of these rises the double
range of Lebanon ; the roads have twice over to climb
many thousands of feet.1 To Tyre again the road must
first compass Hermon to Banias or Hasbeya, and then
cross the heights of Naphtali.2 Acca alone is the natural
port for Damascus, and the nearest ways to Acca run
through Lower Galilee. Leaving Damascus, the highway

1	The road from Damascus to Tripoli went via Baalbek and B’sherreh ; that
to Beyrout by the present diligence route; that to Sidon went from Rama,
past the present Kula'at esh Shukif, the Crusading castle of Belfort.

2	After Banias the road traverses the Jordan Valley by Tell el Kady,
passes the Hasbany branch by an old bridge ; thence over the first watershed
to the north of Rubb Thelathin, through the valley near Abrikha, where
there are remains of pavement, and over the second watershed by Burj
Alawei to Tyre. It is commanded by two Crusading castles—Hunin, at a
distance of two miles, Tibnin at more.Galilee

427

kept to the south of Hermon upon the level region now
called Jedur,1 and crossed the Jordan midway between the
Lakes of Merom and Gennesaret at the present Bridge of
the Daughters of Jacob. Thence it climbed to the Khan,
now called ‘ of the Pit of Joseph/ and divided. One
branch held west past Safed, by the line of valley between
Lower and Upper Galilee, and came down by the present
Wady Waziyeh upon Acca.2 Another branch went south
to the Lake of Gennesaret at Khan Minyeh—one of the
possible sites for Capernaum—and there forked again.
One prong bent up the Plain of Gennesaret and the
present Wady Rubadiyeh to rejoin the direct western
branch at Rameh. Another left the Plain of Gennesaret
up the famous Wady el Hamam by Arbela3 to the plateau
above Tiberias, and thence passing the great Khan or
market, now called et Tujjar,‘of the merchants,’ defiled
between Tabor and the Nazareth hills upon Esdraelon,
which it crossed to Megiddo, on the way to Sharon, to
Philistia, to Egypt. A third branch from Khan Minyeh
continued due south by the Lake and Tiberias to Beth-
shan, from which the traveller might either ascend
Esdraelon and rejoin the straight route to Egypt, or go
up through Samaria to Jerusalem, or down Jordan to
Jericho. But at Bethshan, or a little to the north of
it, there came across Jordan another great road from
Damascus. It had traversed the level Hauran, and come
down into the valley of the Jordan, by Aphek 4 or by
Gamala, and it went over to the Mediterranean either by
Bethshan and Esdraelon or up the Wady Fejjas to the

1	By S'asa and el Kuneitra.

2	Schumacher, P.E.F.Q., 1889, pp. 79, 80.

3	Modern Irbid. See 1 Macc. ix., Hosea x. 14.

4	The present Fik, opposite Tiberias.428 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

plateau above the Lake, and thence by the cross valley
past Cana and Sepphoris to Acca. This was also the way
over Galilee from Gilead and the Decapolis.1

The Great West Road from Damascus to the Mediter-
ranean, in one or other of its branches, was the famous
The Way of Way of the Sea. It may have been so called
the Sea. by jsajah when he heard along it the grievous
march of the Assyrian armies, by way of the sea, over
Jordan, Galilee of the nations. But we cannot be certain,
for the phrase is ambiguous in both its terms ; we do not
know whether the sea is Gennesaret or the Mediterranean,
and whether the way be really a road or only a direction.
If the two latter alternatives be taken, the phrase means
no more than westward—a rendering suitable to the
context.2 However this be, later generations applied

1	In Roman times there were two bridges, one just below the lake, the
other the present Jisr el-Mujamia. The route—Damascus, Nawa, Beth-
shan, and Esdraelon—is the line of the new Damascus Haifa railway. It
crosses the Jordan just below the Lake. See Maps 1. and vi.

2	Isa. viii. 22 (Eng. version ix. 1) DSH 7|*V1 The Way of the Sea. (1)

The usual interpretation is that Gennesaret is meant (m33"D\ Num. xxxiv.

11), and the way of the sea, along with the following words |3"Vn

over Jordan, is taken to mean a district to the east of the Lake of Galilee.
But the tribes mentioned—Zebulun and Naphtali—had their territories to the
west of Jordan ; and UP'n is applicable to either side of the river. The

march of the Assyrians, which is here described, swept westward. But (2)
does way mean an actual highway ? I am inclined to think that it means no
more than direction, and that we ought to take D'H, or sea, in its general

sense of the West, so that the phrase in analogy to !13iQ¥ ’ijTJ (Ezek. viii. 5,
xxi. 2, xl. 6) would mean simply westward. In that case it would be equiva-
lent to the phrase iHS11 pnsn “I3J13 (Josh. v. 1, etc.) across the Jordan

westwards. It is true, however, that in these last cases the particle of direc-
tion towards is used ; whereas in our verse sea is used in the genitive case
with the definite article, a construction that would point to its being the title
of a real road rather than the description of a direction. Yet not necessarily
bo, for (with the article) in the sense of the west also occurs, Josh. xix. 11,Galilee

429

Isaiah’s words to the great caravan route between
Damascus and the sea, and throughout the Middle Ages
it was known as the ‘ Via Maris.’ The Romans paved it,
and took taxes from its traffic; at one of its tolls, in
Capernaum, Matthew sat at the receipt of custom} It was
then the great route of trade with the Far East, and
it continued to be so. From the eleventh to the four-
teenth centuries the products of India coming from the
Persian Gulf by Baghdad and Damascus were carried along
it to the factories of Venice, Genoa, and Marseilles in Acca
and Tyre, and thence distributed through Europe.2 The
commerce of Damascus has at present an easier way to
Beyrout by the splendid Alpine road which the French
engineers built across the Lebanons ; but the Via Maris is
still used for the considerable exports on camel-back of
grain from Hauran.3

The Great South Road, the road for Egypt, which
diverged from the Via Maris at the Lake of Galilee, was
used equally for traffic and for war from the The Great
days of the patriarchs down to our own. One South Road-
afternoon in 1891, while we were resting in the dale at the
foot of Tabor, there passed three great droves of unladen
camels. We asked the drivers, ‘ Where from ? ’	‘ Damas-

cus.’ ‘And where are you going?’ ‘Jaffa and Gaza;
but, if we do not get the camels sold there, we shall drive

Ezek. xlii. 19. But if a definite sea be meant, then it is more probable that
the Mediterranean—the goal of the road—would give its name to the latter,
than that the Lake of Gennesaret, along which only one of the road’s
branches passed, would do so.	1 Mark ii. 14.

2	Rey, Les Colonies Franques de Syrie an xiieme et xiiieme slides,
ch. iii., Les Communes Commerciales, and ch. ix. La Commerce. Heyd,
Die Ltalienischen Handels-colonien in Paldstina. See above, p. 18.

3	In harvest the passage of camels across the Jisr-Benat-Jakoob never
ceases.430 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

them down to Egypt.’ How ancient a succession these
men were following ! From Abraham’s time, every year
that war was not afoot, camels have passed by this road
to Egypt. Armies sometimes marched along it, as, for
instance, the Syrians when Jonathan Maccabeus went out
against them in the defiles by Arbela above Gennesaret.1
But the open road by Hauran and across the Jordan
below the Lake seems to have been the more usual line
of invasion. So the Syrians came in Ahab’s time,2 and
probably also the Assyrians when they advanced by
Damascus.

The Great Road of the East (as we may call it) from
Acre across Lower Galilee to Bethshan, and over the

The Great Jordan into Gilead, was the road for Arabia.

East Road. Up it have come through all ages the Midian-
ites, the children of the East. In the Roman period it
connected the Asian frontier of the Empire with the
capital. Chariots, military troops, companies of officials
and merchants, passed by this road, between the Greek
cities east of Jordan, and Ptolemais, the port for Rome.

Of all things in Galilee it was the sight of these imme-
morial roads which taught and moved me most—not
because they were trodden by the patriarchs,

These roads	3	s	r	>

and the Para- and some of them must soon shake to the
bles of Jesus.	.

railway train, not because the chariots of As-
syria and Rome have both rolled along them—but because
it was up and down these roads that the immortal figures
of the Parables passed. By them came the merchantman
seeking goodly pearls, the king departing to receive his
kingdom, the friend on a journey, the householder arriving

1 i Macc. ix. 2. So also came some of Saladin’s army, in 1187, to the
Battle of Hattin.	2 1 Kings xx., xxii.Galilee

43i

suddenly upon his servants, the prodigal son coming back
from the far-off country. The far-off country ! What a
meaning has this frequent phrase of Christ’s, when you
stand in Galilee by one of her great roads—roads which
so easily carried willing feet from the pious homes of Asher
and Naphtali to the harlot cities of Phoenicia—roads which
were in touch with Rome and with Babylon.

III. Her roads carry us out upon the surroundings
of Galilee. In the neighbourhood of Judaea we have
seen great deserts, some of which come up

,	1	r	.	, ,	.	HI. TheEn-

almost to the gates of the cities, and have 1m- vironmentof

Galilee

pressed their austerity and foreboding of judg-
ment upon the feelings and the literature of the people.
The very different temperament of the Galilean was
explained in part by his very different environment. The
desert is nowhere even visible from Galilee. Instead of
it, the Galilee of our Lord’s time had for neighbours the
half Greek land of Phoenicia, with its mines and manu-
factures, its open ports, its traffic from the West ; the
fertile Hauran,1 with its frequent cities, where the Greek
language was spoken, and the pagan people worshipped
their old divinities under the names of the Greek gods ;
and Gilead, with the Decapolis, ten cities (more or less) of
stately forums, amphitheatres, and temples.2 We shall feel
the full influence of all this upon Galilee when we go down
to the Lake. Meantime let us remember that Galilee was
not surrounded by desert places haunted by demoniacs,
which is all that the few traces in the Gospels suggest to
our imagination ; but that the background and environ-
ment of this stage of our Lord’s ministry was thronged and

1 The ancient Auranitis. See ch. xxix,	2 See ch. xxviii.43 2 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

very gay—that it was Greek in all that the name can
bring up to us of busy life, imposing art and sensuous
religion. The effect upon the Galilean temperament is
obvious.

These then are the influences which geography reveals
bearing upon Galilee. Before we go down to the Lake,
let us focus them upon the one town away from the Lake,
which is of supreme interest to us—Nazareth.1

Nazareth is usually represented as a secluded and an
obscure village. Many writers on the life of our Lord have
emphasised this, holding it proved by the
silence of the Gospels concerning His child-
hood and youth. But the value of a vision of the Holy
Land is that it fills the silences of the Holy Book, and
from it we receive a very different idea of the early life of
our Lord than has been generally current among us.2

The position of Nazareth is familiar to all. The village
lies on the most southern of the ranges of Lower Galilee,
and on the edge of this just above the Plain of Esdraelon.

1	On Nazareth, see Guerin’s Galilee ; Merrill, of>. cit. ; Conder's Tent
Work, ch. v. ; Schumacher, Dasjetzige Nazareth, Z.D.P. V. xiii. 234. The
population is now 7500. Some travellers have found them turbulent.
Schumacher calls them pleasant and hospitable. They form a ‘ Sprachinsel
in gewissem Sinne ; ’ for while the surrounding towns either pronounce q
(k) fully or miss it, the Nazareth people pronounce it as k : u they pronounce
ii, as in Turkish. There is a want of water, the well of Mary being the only
well. There is a market for the neighbourhood.

2	It is a great merit of Dr. Merrill’s monograph on Galilee, that it has dis-
proved this error in detail. See also a very striking passage on Galilee in
Mr. Walter Besant’s Lecture on the Work of the Pal. Expl. Fund, in The
City and the Land, 114 f. : ‘ Palestine was not an obscure country . , , He
who wandered among the hills and valley of Galilee was never far from some
great and populous city . . . It was not as a rustic preaching to rustics that our
Lord went about . . . He went forth in a part [of the Roman Empire] full of
Roman civilisation, busy and populous, where, at every turn, He would meet
with something to mark the empire to which He belonged.’Galilee

433

You cannot see from Nazareth the surrounding country,
for Nazareth rests in a basin among hills ; but the moment
you climb to the edge of this basin, which is everywhere
within the limit of the village boys’ playground, what a
view you have ! Esdraelon lies before you, with its twenty
battle-fields—the scenes of Barak’s and of Gideon’s vic-
tories, the scenes of Saul’s and Josiah’s defeats, the scenes
of the struggles for freedom in the glorious days of the
Maccabees. There is Naboth’s vineyard and the place of
Jehu’s revenge upon Jezebel; there Shunem and the house
of Elisha ; there Carmel and the place of Elijah’s sacrifice.
To the east the Valley of Jordan, with the long range of
Gilead ; to the west the radiance of the Great Sea, with
the ships of Tarshish and the promise of the Isles. You
see thirty miles in three directions. It is a map of Old
Testament history.

But equally full and rich was the present life on which
the eyes of the boy Jesus looked out. Across Esdraelon,
opposite to Nazareth, there emerged from The boyh00(i
the Samarian hills the road from Jerusalem, of Jesus,
thronged annually with pilgrims, and the road from Egypt
with its merchants going up and down. The Midianite
caravans could be watched for miles coming up from the
fords of Jordan ; and, as we have seen, the caravans from
Damascus wound round the foot of the hill on which
Nazareth stands. Or if the village boys climbed the
northern edge of their hollow home, there was another
road within sight, where the companies were still more
brilliant—the highway between Acre and the Deca-
polis, along which legions marched, and princes swept
with their retinues, and all sorts of travellers from all
countries went to and fro. The Roman ranks, the Roman434 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

eagles, the wealth of noblemen’s litters and equipages
cannot have been strange to the eyes of the boys of
Nazareth, especially after their twelfth year, when they
went up to Jerusalem, or visited with their fathers famous
Rabbis, who came down from Jerusalem, peripatetic among
the provinces. Nor can it have been the eye only which
was stirred. For all the rumour of the Empire entered
Palestine close to Nazareth—the news from Rome, about
the Emperor’s health,1 about the changing influence of the
great statesmen, about the prospects at court of Herod,
or of the Jews; about Caesar’s last order concerning the
tribute, or whether the policy of the Procurator would be
sustained. Many Galilean families must have had relatives
in Rome; Jews would come back to this countryside to
tell of the life of the world’s capital. Moreover, the
scandals of the Herods buzzed up and down these roads ;
pedlars carried them, and the peripatetic Rabbis would
moralise upon them. The customs, too, of the neigh-
bouring Gentiles—their loose living, their sensuous wor-
ship, their absorption in business,2 the hopelessness of the
inscriptions on their tombs, multitudes of which were
readable (as some are still) on the roads round Galilee
—all this would furnish endless talk in Nazareth, both
among men and boys.

Here, then, He grew up and suffered temptation, Who
was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin.
The perfection of His purity and patience was achieved
not easily as behind a wide fence which shut the world
out, but amid rumour and scandal with every provocation
to unlawful curiosity and premature ambition. The pres-

1 As in the days when Vespasian was encamped in Galilee. See both
Josephus and Tacitus on this.	2 Matt. vi. 32.Galilee

435

sure and problems of the world outside God’s people must
have been felt by the youth of Nazareth as by few others ;
yet the scenes of prophetic missions to it—Elijah’s and
Elisha’s—were also within sight.1 A vision of all the
kingdoms of the world was as possible from this village
as from the mount of temptation. But the chief lesson
which Nazareth teaches to us is the possibility of a pure
home and a spotless youth in the very face of the evil
world.

1 Luke iv. 25 ff.CHAPTER XXI

THE LAKE OF GALILEE

437For this Chapter consult Maps I., III. and VI.THE LAKE OF GALILEE

T N last chapter the dominant features of Galilee were
J- shown to be seven. First, a close dependence on
Lebanon. Second, an abundance of water,

The seven

which Lebanon lavishes on her by rain, mists, features of

Galilee

wells, and full-born streams. Third, a great
fertility : profusion of flowers, corn, oil and wood. Fourth,
volcanic elements : extinct craters, dykes of basalt, hot
springs, liability to earthquakes. Fifth, great roads: high-
ways of the world cross Galilee in all directions—from
the Levant to Damascus and the East, from Jerusalem to
Antioch, from the Nile to the Euphrates. Sixth, in result
of the fertility and of the roads, busy industries and com-
merce, with a crowded population. And seventh, the
absence of a neighbouring desert, such as infects Judaea
with austerity, but in its place a number of heathen
provinces, pouring upon Galilee the full influence of their
Greek life.

Now all these seven features of Galilee in general were
concentrated upon her lake and its coasts. The Lake of
Galilee was the focus of the whole province. The Lake
Imagine that wealth of water, that fertility, the focus-
those nerves and veins of the volcano, those great highways,
that numerous population, that commerce and industry,
those strong Greek influences—imagine them all crowded

439440 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

into a deep valley, under an almost tropical heat, and
round a great blue lake, and you have before you the
conditions in which Christianity arose and Christ Himself
chiefly laboured.

We do not realise that the greater part of our Lord’s
ministry was accomplished at what may be truly called the
bottom of a trench, 680 feet below the level of the sea. As
you go down into it by the road which our Lord Himself
traversed between Nazareth and Capernaum, there come
up to meet you some signals of its wonderful peculiarity.
By two broad moors,1 the grey limestone land falls from
the ranges of Lower Galilee to a line of cliffs overlooking
The way t^ie take, and about 300 feet above it. These
d°wn. terraced moors are broken by dykes of basalt,
and strewn with lava and pumice-stone. There are hardly
any trees upon them ; after rain the shadeless streams
soon die, and the summer grass and bush crackle to tinder.
The memories of these moors match their appearance ; his-
tory and legend know them only as the scenes of flight and
thirst and exhaustion. Across their southern end Sisera
fled headlong, and sought drink for his parched throat in
the tent of Jael.2 By the aspect of the northern end, the
imagination of the early Church was provoked to fix upon
it as the desert place where, when the day was far spent
and the exhausted multitudes at some distance from their
villages, our Lord brought forth a miracle to feed them.3
And there, in Crusading times, the courage of Christendom
was scorched to the heart, so as never to rally in all the
East again. Where the heights of Hattin offer neither

1	Now the plateau of Sha'ara and the Sahel el-Ahma.

2	See p. 395.

3	Beyond the sterile aspect of the place, there is nothing to justify this
tradition.The Lake of Galilee

441

shade nor springs, the Crusaders, tempted, it is said, by
some treachery, came forth to meet Salad in. A hot July
night without water was followed by a burning
day,1 to add to the horrors of which the enemy of Hattin—
set fire to the scrub. The smoke swept the 1187 A,D'
fevered Christians into a panic; knights choked in their
hot armour ; the blinded foot-soldiers, breaking their ranks
and dropping their weapons, were ridden down in mobs by
the Moslem cavalry ; and though here and there groups of
brave men fought sun and fire and sword far on into the
terrible afternoon, the defeat was utter. A militant and
truculent Christianity, as false as the relics of the ‘True
Cross’ round which it was rallied, met its judicial end
within view of the scenes where Christ proclaimed the
Gospel of Peace, and went about doing good.

Through such memories, enforcing the effect of the arid
landscape, you descend from the hills of Galilee to her
lake. You feel you are passing from the

Atm°sphere

climate and scenery of Southern Europe to the of the Lake
climate and scenery of the barer tropics. The
sea-winds, which freshen all Galilee and high Hauran
beyond, blow over this basin, and the sun beats into it
with unmitigated ardour.2 The atmosphere, for the most
part, hangs still and heavy, but the cold currents, as they
pass from the west, are sucked down in vortices of air, or

1	5th July 1187. The battle is described from the Crusading side by
Bernard the Treasurer; from the Saracen by Boha-ed-Din (Life of Saladin,
ch. xxxv.). Robinson, B.R. iii. 245-249, gives an admirable summary of
these accounts.

2	Detailed statistics of the meteorology of the Lake of Galilee are unknown
to me. For scattered notes of the temperature, winds and storms, see
Robinson, B.R. iii.; Merrill, East of for dan; Frei, Z.D.P.V. ix. ioo f;
Tristram’s various writings; Macgregor, Rob Roy on the Jordan, etc. See
below, p. 449 f.442 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

by the narrow gorges that break upon the lake. Then
arise those sudden storms for which the region is noto-
rious—

‘ The wind, the tempest roaring high,

The tumult of a tropic sky.’

In such conditions a large population and all industry
would have been as impossible as at the other end of the
The functions Jordan, but for two redeeming features—the
of the Lake. jake itself and the wealth of fountains and
streams which feed it from Lebanon. In that torrid basin,
approached through such sterile surroundings, the lake
feeds every sense of the body with life. Sweet water,1
full of fish,2 a surface of sparkling blue, tempting down
breezes from above, bringing forth breezes of her own, the
Lake of Galilee is at once food, drink and air, a rest to the
eye, coolness in the heat, an escape from the crowd,3 and a
facility of travel very welcome in so exhausting a climate.
Even those who do not share her memories of Christ feel
enthusiasm for her. The Rabbis said: ‘Jehovah hath
created seven seas, but the Sea of Gennesaret is His
delight.’

The lake lies, in shape, like a harp, with the bulge to
the north-west. It is nearly thirteen miles long,4 and its
greatest breadth is eight.5 The wider northern end is the

1 Some travellers have found in the water ‘a slight brackish taste’ (so
Robinson’s companions, but not Robinson himself, B.R. iii. 261). But this
approaches unpleasantness only in the shallow waters near the larger saline
springs. Elsewhere the words of Josephus, iii. Wars, x. 7, are not exag-
gerated, ykvKeid re 8/xus lari Kal it or i/iuraTi].

- See p. 462.	3 Mark vi. 32, etc.

4 On the large Survey Map, from the influx of Jordan to the village of
Semakh.

6 The greatest depth is 250 metres at the northern end. Lortet, Dragages
exicuties dans le Lac de Tibiriade en Alai, 1880; Comptes Rendus Hebdom.
des seances de l’Academie des Sciences, Tome xci., Paris, 1880, pp. 500-502.The Lake of Galilee

443

more open. The Jordan, escaped from a long gorge,
enters quietly through a delta of his own deposits. To
the west of this delta is thorny, thistly moor-

The shape

land, sloping northwards to a height which of the Lake
leaves over it only Hermon visible, though the
basin of Merom lies between. North-west this moorland
steepens, rising to the bulk of the hills about Safed, and
then, as the coast of the lake trends more rapidly south-
wards, it drops upon the level Ghuweir—or ‘little Ghor’—
almost certainly the land of Gennesaret, which is four miles
broad.1 South of the Ghuweir the hills close in upon the
lake, with a valley breaking through them from the plateau
above. South of this valley they leave but a ribbon of
coast, along part of which Tiberias lies, commanded by its
black castle. In contrast to the green open slopes of the
north, these dark, imprisoning cliffs, with their black debris,

Lortet thinks that the Lake of Galilee was once connected with the Mediter-
ranean. But this has been disproved by Hull. See p. 470. On the peculiar
fishes of the lake, see Tristram, and Merrill, East of the Jordan, p. 441.

1 Gennesaret Tevvyoapir, the Land of Gennesaret, Matt. xiv. 34; Mark
vi. 53, Lake of Gennesaret, Luke v. 1. The earliest use of the name is in
I Macc. xi. 67, Td USosp Tepp^oap (in the same verse, for Naawp read ’Acrwp =
Hazor, cf. Josephus, xiii. Antt. v. 7). Josephus gives Tepprjodp, T. Xlfivr), or
iiSup and 77 Tevvr)<rapiTis. The later Hebrew (Targums and Talmud) give
"ID'JJ* "ID1JJ, and	The Targums identify the name with the Chin-

nereth of the Old Testament (m33> Deut. iii. 17; m33) Josh. xix. 35 ;

nh33, Josh. xi. 2; rri33-^3> 1 Kings xv. 20), which is applied both to the
lake and a town on the lake, while in the last passage it perhaps covers the
whole of the northern Jordan Valley. Scholars have accepted this identi-
fication (Dillmann on Josh. xix. 35; the P.E.F. Map, Ed. 1891, etc.), but
it is improbable. The LXX. transliterate n"03 by xevePe@ and xevePu^-
Even this can scarcely have been Tewrjaap,	or “IDU'J. The latter

form points rather to a compound of K’J or }3* Chinnereth has been derived
from "1133, ‘ harp,’ as if through the shape of the lake. Talvt. Bab. Meg. 6a :
‘Chinnereth, i.e. Genesar, and wherefore is it called Chinnereth? Because
its fruit is sweet like the artichoke, NIJ'SS ’ (not as Neub., Geog. du Talm.
215, ‘ sweet as voice of a harp ’).444 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

impose upon this part of the coast a sombre and sinister
aspect, not unsuited for its association with the name of
the gloomy tyrant, that, by a strange irony of fate, has
been stamped on a landscape from which the name of
Jesus has altogether vanished.1 As the south end of the
lake approaches, the ribbon of coast widens, and the Jordan
cuts through it, striking at first due west, and then south
by the foot of the hills. Four miles broad, the Jordan
Valley leaves a wide prospect from the lake southward,
that is closed only by the cliffs of the gorge to which it
narrows twenty miles away. From the east the Yarmuk
Valley breaks in just below the lake, distending the Ghor
to the dimensions of a great plain ; and to the south of
the Yarmuk rise the heights of Gadara, commanding this
plain, and looking up the lake to Tiberias and the north
end. From the Yarmuk northwards up all the eastern
side of the lake runs a wall of hills, the edge of the plateau
of Jaul&n2 or Gaulanitis. This is a limestone plateau, but
topped by a vast layer of basalt. You see the curious
formation as you ascend the gorges which lead upwards
from the lake, for first you pass the dirty white lime strata,
and then the hard black rocks of the volcanic deposit.
Some of the gorges—like that of Fik, opposite Tiberias,
where Hippos stood—are open and gradual enough to
have been easily used as high-roads in all ages ; but others
farther north are wild and impassable.3 The wall which

1	Lamartine (Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Eng. Ed. i. 269) speaks of
‘ avalanches of black stones,’ the ‘ black, naked hill,’ ‘ the sombre and funereal
character of the landscape about Tiberias.’

2	The Hebrew or Golan, is in classic Arabic pronounced Gaulan, but

with the natives of the district it has shortened to the same first syllable as
in Hebrew, though, of course, with soft g—gS, or jd. See Schumacher’s
The Jaulan.

3	Like the Wady Jeramaya described in Schumacher’s The Jaulan, 253.The Lake of Galilee

445

the plateau presents to the lake is higher and more
constant than the hills down the western side, but it does
not come so close to the beach. Except at Khersa, the
eastern coast is about half a mile broad, well watered and
fertile.

The view which the whole basin presents has been
likened to one of our Scottish lochs. This would need to
be one of the least wooded. Few lochs in Theaspect
Scotland have surroundings so stripped of trees t0-day-
as those of the Lake of Galilee are to-day. Except for
some palms lingering in Gennesaret, a scattering of thorn
bushes all round the coast, brakes of oleander on the
eastern shores, and small oaks up the gorges to the Jaulan
plateau, trees are not to be seen. The mountain edges are
bare, and so are the grey slopes to the north, lifted towards
Hermon as a Scottish moor to a snowy Ben. Only one
town is visible, Tiberias, now a poor fevered place of less
than 5000 inhabitants ; besides this there are not more than
three or four small villages round all the coast. There
are no farmsteads,1 or crofts, such as break the solitude
of our most desolate Highland lochs. The lights which
come out at night on shore and hill are the camp-fires of
wandering Arabs. It is well known, too, how seldom a
sail is seen on the surface of the Lake.

How very different it was in the days when Jesus came
down from Nazareth to find His home and His disciples
upon these shores ! Where there are now no trees there
were great woods; where there are marshes, there were
noble gardens ; where there is but a boat or two, there
were fleets of sails; where there is one town, there were

1 Except those of the new German colony near ‘Ain et Tabghah, whose red
roofs indicate their western builders.446 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

nine or ten. We know this from Josephus, who fully
describes the province he governed and fought over only
thirty-four years after our Lord’s ministry—too short a
time for the country to have changed.

The Plain of Gennesaret had ‘ soil so fruitful, that all
sorts of trees would grow upon it, for the temper of the air
is so well blended, that it suits those many

The Lake in	’	}

our Lord’s sorts, especially walnuts, which require the

colder air ’ (that is relatively to the rest), ‘ and
flourish there in great plenty. There are palm trees also,
which grow best in hot air ; fig trees also and olives grow
near them, which require an air more temperate.’ This
conjunction was due to the steep slope of the Galilean
hills, which fall from as high as 4000 feet above the
sea, north of Safed, to 680 below at Gennesaret. In the
days of the pride of the land, what a plunge through
nature it must have been, when one came down from oaks,
through olives, sycomores and walnuts, to palms that had
their roots washed by the Lake. ‘ One may call this place
the ambition of Nature, where it forces those plants that
are naturally enemies to one another to agree together:
it is a happy contention of the seasons, as if each of them
laid claim to this country, for it not only nourishes dif-
ferent sorts of autumnal fruits beyond men’s expectation,
but preserves them a great while. It supplies men with
the principal fruits—grapes and figs continually during
ten months of the year, and the rest of the fruits, as they
ripen together through the whole year.’1 Even now one
sees proof of that luxuriance in the few rich patches of
garden upon Gennesaret, in the wealth of flowers on the
surrounding slopes, and in the glory of maidenhair fern

1 Josephus, iii. Wars, x. 8.The Lake of Galilee

447

that springs up wherever there is a stream to give it water
and a ruin to give it shade.1 About Tiberias, the land
was probably as bare as now, but from the foot of the
Lake to Bethshan was cultivated for wheat, and the in-
coming valley from Tabor2 still holds oleanders deep
enough to cover a regiment of horse. The eastern plateau,
bare to-day, was certainly well wooded down even to a
recent time, for the place-names imply the presence of
forest and copse,3 while some of the wadies by which you
descend to the Lake, have large oaks, terebinths, planes
and carobs, and others are full of bush and brake.4

There were nine cities round the Lake, each said to have
had not less than 15,000 inhabitants, and some probably
with more. Of these the sites of Tiberias and _

The cities

Magdala on the western shore, and of Gadara round the

Lake.

and Hippos on the eastern hills are certain.

Bethsaida and Capernaum were at the north end, though
where exactly, who can tell? Taricheae is still a matter of
controversy, and so is Chorazin. But this we do know,
that whatever be the sites to which these names were
originally attached, their towns formed round the now
bare Lake an almost unbroken ring of building.

Tiberias is said to occupy the site or neighbourhood of
Rakkath, an ancient town of Naphtali,5 and as Rakkath

1	The gardens about Irbid, on the plateau above the Lake, are beautiful.
On the Wady el Hamam, which, true to its name, shelters numberless wild
blue-grey doves, see Schumacher, Z.D.P. V. xiii. 67.

2	Wady Fejjas.	3 Schumacher, The Jaulan, 15, 17, 22, 23.

4 There were thick woods round the Lake even in Arculfs time, a.d. 700.

6 Talm. Jer. Meg. 2b. But Tahn. Bab. Meg. 6a gives other identifica-
tions. When the foundations were being laid, quantities of human bones were
discovered. The site, therefore, cannot have exactly coincided with that of
an old town, but may have covered the cemetery adjoining this. Neubauer
(Giog. du Talm. 209) quotes from Tal. Bab. Sank. 12 a proof that in the
fourth century Tiberias was called Rakkath.448 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

probably means strip, or coast, this may be. The Herods
did not raise their artificial cities from virgin sites, but
generally rebuilt some old town. Why Herod
chose this site is very clear. There would
have been great difficulty in adapting to his designs for a
capital, towns so full of commerce asTaricheae and Caper-
naum ; he must have preferred a site dominated by a hill,
where he could build a castle, yet be near the shore, and
no doubt he found an advantage, perhaps a pecuniary one,
in the neighbourhood of the Baths, then famous throughout
the Roman world.1 In what year the building was begun
or finished, is uncertain, but at the earliest not more than
five or six years before our Lord began His ministry on the
Lake.2 Herod’s plans were large. Ruins still indicate a
wall three miles long.3

1 Cf. Pliny, H.N. v. 15, ‘ Tiberiade aquis calidis salubre.’

a Or from 20-22 a.d. But Lewin, Fasti Sacri, n. 1163, and Schiirer (Hist.
Div. 11. vol. i. 144) fix on 26 a.d. on the ground that Josephus does not men-
tion the building of Tiberias till after the accession of Pilate to the Procurator-
ship of Judaea (xviii. Antt. ii., cf. 3 with 2). This, however, is too late, for

(a)	a coin of Tiberias under the Emperor Claudius (De Saulcy, Numis. de la
Terre Sainte, 334), is dated in the thirty-third year of the city, and Claudius
died in 54 ; if this coin be really of Claudius, then it drives us back to 21 ;

(b)	two coins of Tiberias under Trajan (Ibid. 335) bear 80 and 81 of the city :
as he began to reign in 98 they forbid us going further back than 18 a.d.;

(c)	but on a third coin under Trajan (Ibid. 336, No. 4, PI. xvii.), with the
date 81 of the city, the emperor is called only Germanicus, and not also
Dacicus, which second title he won in 103 A.D. This gives us 22 a.d. for an
upper limit. The evidence of this coin is, of course, to be preferred to that
of another (whetner we read TEPM or TEP. A) mentioned by Schiirer, 145.
These facts are surely stronger than the ambiguous evidence of Josephus, by
which alone Schiirer fixes the date as 26. The interest of the question, of
course, lies in the fact that Tiberias is mentioned in no gospel but the Fourth.

3 Schumacher’s Survey in P.E.F.Q., 1887, 85 ff. The walls included the
citadel of Herod, but not the baths, as Furrer maintains, Z.D.P. V. ii. 54.
Josephus’ expression that the baths were iv Ttj3ept(£5t, Life, 16 ; ii. Wars xxi. 6,
must therefore be interpreted, as Schiirer says, ‘ in the district of Tiberias.’
According to xviii. Antt. ii. 3 ; iv. Wars, i. 3, the baths were outside the
city, ’E^taoDs or ’AfifiaoOs = flDDITThe Lake of Galilee

449

Besides the imposing citadel there were a palace, a
forum, and a great synagogue.1 But the buildings were
the best of the town. No true Jew would set foot
on a site defiled at once by the bones which had been
uncovered in digging the foundations, and by the great
heathen images which stared down from the castle walls.
Failing to get respectable citizens, Herod swept into his
city the scum of the land. Non abfuerat omen : he had
already called it after Tiberius.

These things—that the city was so new, artificial and
unclean—partly explain its absence from the records of
Christ’s ministry on the lake. Our Lord our Lord and
avoided the half-Greek cities, and among Tlbenas-
courtiers and officials He would have been less at home
than He was among the common people of the country.
But the surroundings of Tiberias, too, were repellent.2
The city, a long strip like its predecessor, the Ribbon, was
drawn out on the narrowest part of the coast. The line of
its volcanic environment was as of rusty mourning, and the
atmosphere was more confined than on the north of the
lake. The fresh westerly breezes which blow throughout
the summer strike the lake well out upon its surface, and
leave the air inshore below the cliffs stagnant and close.3
Tiberias is very feverish. Capernaum and Bethsaida must
have been more healthy, and through them besides ran

1	The palace was on the Acropolis, Jos. Life, 12, described by Schu-
macher, P.E.F.Q. 1887, pp. 87 ff. Josephus destroyed it. The Forum was
often used during Josephus’ occupation of the city: lb. 17, etc. The syna-
gogue or Hpo<revxr) was a /xtyurrou otK7j/j.a, lb. 54.

2	Schtirer is here quite incorrect: ‘ the most beautiful spot in Galilee,’ Hist.
i. ii. 19 ; ‘ a beautiful and fertile district,’ lb. ii. 143.

3	The Rev. W. Ewing, late of Tiberias, informs me that this is correct.
Many travellers have noticed it : cf. Robinson, Macgregor, etc. Tiberias lies
full in face of the hot south winds blowing up the Ghor, cf. Frei in Z.D.P. V,
ix, 100 f.450 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

the greatest of the Galilean thoroughfares, the Via Maris,
pouring a steady stream of busy life. Life, both physical
and mental, was more in current in the cities of our Lord’s
choice than in that of Herod’s. Nevertheless, while Beth-
saida and Capernaum have passed away, Tiberias endures ;
and the name of the morbid tyrant still stamps a region
from which that of Jesus has vanished. The obvious
reason is the black acropolis above Tiberias.1 Capernaum,
where Matthew sat at custom, depended on the great road,
and faded when commerce took a new direction. But
Tiberias, the only defensible site, being at once on the
lake and on a hill, necessarily became the seat of the
government of the province, which, in time of course, took
from it its designation. That is why the name of the
foreign emperor, first embalmed here in a most sordid
flattery, is still buried in this obscurity and silence. But
Christ went up these roads to rule the world.

The Baths of Tiberias lie a mile from the south end of
the ancient city wall. Amidst all the wreckage of fortune
The Baths and name with which this coast is strewn,
of Tibenas. t-hese springs, ministering to the changeless
sorrows of humanity, have alone preserved their reputa-
tion and their name. Hammath they were in the Old
Testament, Emmaus when the Greeks came, and to-day
Hummam.2 Patients come to them from all parts of
Syria, chiefly in June and July, when the neighbourhood

1	When Saladin took Tiberias in 1187, the citadel did not yield to him till
after the battle of Ilattin.

2	There are four springs with a temperature of about 1440: ‘ The deposit
consists chiefly of carbonate of lime with a very small proportion of muriatic
salts,’ quoted by Robinson, B.R. iii. 259, 260. Merrill, East of Jordan, men-
tions a cave filled with steam at a temperature of 86°, on the hill on which
the castle stands.The Lake of Galilee

451

is crowded. Like all medicinal baths in the East, they
heal also the feuds and quarrels of the population. The
peninsula on which the baths of Gadara stand is, as we
shall see, considered neutral ground by rival tribes around
it. So was it wont to be here. When Josephus and John
of Gischala divided Galilee into rival camps, the latter,
pretending sickness, requested from Josephus a safe-con-
duct that he might visit the baths at Emmaus, and it
was granted to him.1 It was no doubt the existence of
these wells which reconciled the Jews to Tiberias, and
changed that banned and cursed site into one of the four
sacred cities of the Jews, with thirteen synagogues. The
baths were famed across the whole ancient world. Pliny
speaks of Tiberias ‘ calidis aquis salubris : ’2 and on a coin
of Tiberias under Trajan, there is a figure of Hygeia, feed-
ing the serpent of Aesculapius, and sitting on a rock from
beneath which breaks a spring.3 Our Lord paid no visit
to this spring as He did to the pool of Bethesda, but the
patients that were brought to it from all parts of Syria
doubtless swelled the great numbers who were laid at
his feet. There are now in Tiberias, for His sake, a
physician and a hospital, who enjoy the same oppor-
tunities.4

Of equal importance with Tiberias was Taricheae, for
according to Pliny,5 in his day it gave its name to the
whole lake; it had a large population in 52 B.C., when
we first hear of it;0 it was a centre of industry and

1 ii. Wars, xxi. 6.	- H.N. v. 15.

De Saulcy, Numis. de la Ten-e Sainte, 335, Trajan, 1, 2 : Plate xvii. 9.

4 The Medical Mission of the Free Church of Scotland under Dr.
Torrance.	0 H.N. v. 15.

(i xiv. Antt. vii. 3. Then Cassius visited it again in 43, writing to Cicero

‘ex castris Taricheis,’ Cic. ad Faniiliares xii. II. The next mention of it is45 2 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

commerce, and in Josephus’ time a greater stronghold of
Jewish patriotism than almost any other town in Galilee.

But there is a great mystery about Taricheae.

Taricheae.

The name is neither mentioned in the Gospels
nor found upon the lake to-day. Till some definite proof

be discovered, the site will continue a matter

Its position.

of controversy, for the evidence we have is
so balanced on either side that the leading authorities
have changed their opinions more than once.1 We have
one certain datum,2 that Taricheae was thirty stadia, or
three and three quarter miles from Tiberias; the question
is, was it north or south of Tiberias, was it at Kerak at
the issue of the Jordan from the lake, or at Mejdel on the
Plain of Gennesaret ? Pliny says south,3 but his evidence as
to some other towns is not correct, and we cannot depend
on him here. The classic passage is the description by
Josephus of Vespasian’s advance from Scythopolis on

not till nearly a century after, when Nero gave it along with Tiberias to
Agrippa n. (xx. Ault. viii. 4; ii. JVars, xiii. 2).

1	The question of the site of Tarichete was discussed first by the officers
of the English Survey: P.E.F.Q., 1877, 10 ffi, Wilson, originally in favour
of the southern site at Kerak, here fixes on Mejdel; 121, Kitchener fixes
on Kh. el Kuneitriyeh, two miles north of Tiberias; 181, Conder quotes
Pliny. In 1878, p. 79, H. K. K. ; 190 ff., Conder argues fully for Kerak.
In Germany, Ebers and Guthe (Piilastina i. 317 f. 501), and Socin (Bddeker's
Guide, 1876) favour the northern site, Mejdel. A discussion continues
through the Z.D.P.V. viii. 95, Spiers (Mejdel); ix. 104 ff. Frei (do.);
x. 120, Jakob; xi. 216 ff., van Kasteren seeks to remove the objections to
Kerak from Vespasian’s advance on Tiberias, by taking the latter not along
the coast, but by the plateau above; xii. 145 ff., Furrer argues at length
against Kerak and for a northern site, both for Tarichem and the Emmaus of
Vespasian’s camp; 178, Dechent, against this second Emmaus; xiii. 140,
Buhl, who answers objections to Kerak, and fixes Vespasian’s camp at el
Ilummam ; 194, Furrer, who replies for Mejdel; 281, Guthe, who sums up
in favour of Kerak, thus changing from his former position. Schiirer {Hist.
1. i. 224) also favours the southern site.

2	Josephus, Life, 32.

:1 H.N. xv. 3.The Lake of Galilee

453

Tiberias first and then on Taricheae. It is argued that this
proves Taricheae to the north of Tiberias,forVespasian could
scarcely have left it on his flank while attacking the latter,
nor could the fugitives from Tiberias have fled, as they are
described to have done, to Kerak, for that would have been
in the face of the Romans’ advance up the coast. Mejdel
has, therefore, been fixed upon, and as Josephus tells us
that Vespasian’s camp lay between Tiberias and Taricheae
at Emmaus, where there were hot springs,1 these have been
recognised in some wells two miles north of Tiberias, at
the mouth of the Wady ‘Amwas or ’Abu el ‘Amis.2 The
advocates of Kerak maintain that Emmaus can only be
the baths to the south of Tiberias, that the mention of a
plain between Tiberias and Taricheae precludes Mejdel,
while they seek to turn the objections to Kerak which rise
from Vespasian’s advance by understanding the latter to
have taken place not along the coast past Kerak, but by
the plateau above. To this statement of the discussion
there are only three points to be added. Kerak is not
overhung with hills from which arrows could be shot
into it, as Josephus describes Taricheae to have been.3
Josephus, on one occasion, speaks of going to Arbela from
Tiberias through Taricheae,4 which implies that the latter
lay north of Tiberias. On the other hand, the only possible
echo of the name of Taricheae in later times is found
on the south of the lake.5 The second point has been

1	Josephus, iii. Wars, x. I : cf. iv. Wars, i. 3.

2	W. ‘Amwas, Frei, Z.D.P.V. ix. 104 ff. : W. Abu el ‘Amis on the
English map.

3	irrrdpetos, iii. Wars, x. I.	Life, 59 and 60.

5 In the Jichus ha-Sadikim (of the end of the sixteenth century, which
mentions next to the Baths of Tiberias a.npKID, that looks very like a cor-
ruption of Taricheae). See p. 386 of Carmoly’s Itineraires de la Terre Sainle
des xiii°-xviic siecles.— Conder’s identification of Taricheae with Takar or454 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

mentioned, but has not received its proper emphasis: the
third has been overlooked. On opposite sides, they leave
the question on the same delicate balance as the rest of
the evidence. A more decisive discovery would be the
presence of brine in any considerable quantity at some
point on the coast: failing that, the southern end of the
lake as nearest to the Dead Sea, would be the most con-
venient position for such curing-yards as formed the staple
industry of Taricheae.1 Kerak, too, lies on a peninsula,
just where the Jordan issues from the Lake, and is the
only position on the coast which now suits Josephus’
description of Taricheae as washed on more than one side
by the sea.

Taricheae is a Greek word, and means ‘pickling places,’
and Strabo says that ‘at Taricheae the lake supplied the

best fish for curing.’2 The pickled fish of

Its Industries.

Galilee were known throughout the Roman
world : not only were large quantities taken up to Jeru-
salem at the season of the yearly feasts for the multi-

Takar-Aar of the Mohar’s travels (Handbook, p. 279) cannot be thought of for
Taricheae is a Greek name. Nor is Neubauer’s identification of Taricheae
with the Talmudic ITT1 IT'S, which he supposes to have been corrupted to
mn, at all likely; though lYl' TVIl is placed near Sinnabris, probably by
the issue of the Jordan (Geog. du Talmud, p. 216, cf. with p. 31). Kerak he
supposes to be a corruption of (TV *Vp = m*1 JVi. But this is equally
unlikely. More probable is the hypothesis that Kerak is a reminiscence of
Rakkath.

1 Seetzen (Reisen) reports the name Mellaha, ‘salt,’ as heard by him near
Kerak. Robinson (B.R. iii. 263) suspects a confusion with ‘Ain Mellaha on
Lake Huleh ; but Frei reports that, while he missed the name Sinn-in-Nabra,
Mellaha was given him as the name of a place to be sought for on the hill
slopes, and Kasteren heard the coast-level called Mellaha (for these references
see n. 1, p. 452), and Guerin reports the name Khurbet el Mellaha. If this
name be really there, it would go far towards fixing the southern site.

- xvi. ch. ii. § 45. Pickled fish (Taplxv) were much known in the Roman
and Greek world. Many places on the Egyptian coast had the name
The Galilean port is called Tapixtai, Tapixo-icu, and TapixaLa.The Lake of Galilee

455

tudes which gathered there, but barrels of them were
carried round the Mediterranean. Josephus describes
Taricheae as full of materials for ship-building, and with
many artisans.1 The harbour could shelter a fleet of
vessels. That so important a place, and moreover one
not like Tiberias, official and foreign, but thoroughly
Galilean, as Josephus testifies, and a centre of the disciples’
own craft, should never be mentioned in the Gospels is
remarkable.2 The reason may be that, at this date,
Taricheae was still Greek—the name implies that its
industry was at least of foreign introduction. But if the
town really lay at the south-west corner of the lake, we
must remember that this district never seems to have
been visited by our Lord and His disciples. Perhaps it
was out of the way of those main roads which they
selected for their journeys, and yet not solitary enough to
afford them a retreat. It is not only Taricheae that is
omitted from the Gospels ; nothing south of Gennesaret is
mentioned, neither Tiberias nor the Baths, nor Sinnabris,
nor Taricheae, nor Homoncea, nor Scythopolis.3

North of Tiberias lay Magdala, the present Mejdel on
the Plain of Gennesaret,4 and Capernaum, Bethsaida, and

1	iii. Wars, x. 6.

2	Large draughts of fish, such as we read of in the Gospels, must have been
carried to Taricheae to be cured. They could not be otherwise used in that
tropical climate.

3	How little is to be inferred from the silence of the Gospels about places
mentioned in Josephus is to be seen from the reverse case of the silence of
Josephus about Nazareth. He agitated and fought pretty well all over
Galilee, he mentions many villages as obscure as Nazareth, and yet he is silent
about the latter. Homonoea (Joseph. Life, 54), '0fiovoLa, thirty stades from
Tiberias, ’Ard el Hamma (Furrer, Z.D.P.V. ii. 52), or Umm Jiinia as on
P.E.F. Map, 1891. On the absolutely lost city of Philoteria, which lay to the
jouth of the Lake of Galilee, Polybius v. 10, cf. Schiirer I. i. 196.

4	Migdal el, cf. Josephus.456 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Chorazin upon sites which will probably always remain
matters of dispute. Chorazin might be Khersa on the
eastern shore, but is more probably the present

Magdala.

ruins1 of Keraseh northwards from Tell-Hum.
Capernaum has been assigned both to Tell-Hum, a mile
east of the issue of the Jordan and Khan
Minyeh on the southern edge of Gennesaret;
but the evidence is greatly in favour of the latter site,2
and one may fix the house of Jesus, as Mark
calls it, the birthplace of the Gospel, at that
north-east corner of fair Gennesaret, where the waves
beat now on an abandoned shore, but once there was a

Chorazin.

Capernaum.

1 With which both Arculf, about 670 a.d., and Willibald, 723-726, identify it.

■ 2 Capernaum was Kephar-Nahum, the village of Nahum. A strong Chris-
tian tradition from the sixth century onward has fixed it at Tell-Hum, and
this site is preferred by such authorities as Wilson, Furrer, and Socin (Bded.
ed. 3, 258 ; also Schiirer, 11. ii. p. 71). Christian tradition has erred in regard
to other sites, e.g. Sychar, as we have seen. Tell-Hum is an impossible con-
traction from Kephar-Nahum. There is no Tell at the place, and Guerin
(Galil. i. 279) is right in deriving the name from Tanhum, a Jewish Rabbi buried
here (cf. the Jichtis ha-Abot in Carmoly, Itiner, etc., des xiiie-xviie si'ecle,
449, 478. But the Jichus ha-Sadikim, ib. 385, sets there the tombs both of
Nahum and Tanhum). Tell-Hum is on the great road, and so near the
frontier that it suits Capernaum’s character as a custom’s city, but it is a water-
less site, with no such fountain as Josephus describes in Capernaum, iii. Wars,
x. 8, nor near enough to Gennesaret to suit Josephus’ description.

For Khan Minyeh the tradition is nearly as old. Arculf (670) found
Capernaum here, and in 1334 Isaac Chilo (Lcs Chemins de Jerus., in Carmoly
259), who arrives at Kefar Nahum, says that here aforetime dwelt Minim, or
sorcerers, a name given by Jews to all early converts to Christianity. The
Talmud defines sinners, or Minim, as ‘ sons of Kefar Nahum.’ Conder and
others therefore see the survival of Minim in Minyeh. Furrer (Z.D.P. V. ii.
58 ff.) objects that a nickname would scarcely survive where the real name
had died, and Gildemeister (ib. iv. 194 ff.) says Minyeh, which he spells from
old authorities cl-mitnja, is the Arabic word (common in Egypt and Spain),
derived from the Greek /lovij and = mansio, villa, steading, small village.
Here, in the eleventh century, lay a place called Munjat Hischam (Kazwini’s
Lexicon). Hischam was dropped ; in 1430 El-Munja is mentioned as a large
village, after which even the whole lake is called (El-Munja is the frequent
Spanish Almunia). Tristram, Israel, gives the form Miniyeh ; so DelitzschThe Lake of Galilee

457

quay and a busy town, and the great road from east to
west poured its daily stream of life. With regard to
Bethsaida, it has been supposed by most that the refer-
ences in the Gospels require us to conceive of two places
of that name. Of one of these there can be no doubt,
Bethsaida, Fisher-Home, was the name of a

Bethsaida.

village on the east bank of Jordan, and near
the river’s mouth, which the tetrarch Philip rebuilt and
named Julias, in honour of the daughter of Augustus.1
This is the Bethsaida to which Jesus withdrew on hearing
of the Baptist’s death,2 and near which zvas the desert place*
described by John4 as on the other side of the Sea of
Galilee, where the five thousand, who had followed Him
on foot by the fords over Jordan,5 were miraculously fed.
The level plain on the east of the Jordan, the Butaiha, so
fertile that some have claimed it for Gennesaret, still helps
us to understand how there was much grass in the place?
When the meal was over, Jesus, we are told, constrained
His disciples to go to the other side before tozvards Bethsaida.

derives the name from Mineh, harbour. However this may be, Khan Minyeh
suits generally the description of Josephus, iii. Wars, x. 8 ; while he might as
easily be brought here when wounded on the Jordan {Life, 71-73) as to Tell-
Hum. The references in the Gospels to Capernaum all suit Khan Minyeh.
There are ruins, Quaresmius ii. 568, both on the plain, Robinson and Merrill
{E. of Jordan 301 f.) who found a city wall, and on the hill, Schumacher,
{Z.D.P.V. xiii. 70 : place-names Tell el ‘Oreme, dahr es sillam, ard es
sikiumm Je’ade[?]). Robinson,L.R. 348-358 ; Conder {Handbook and T. W.);
Henderson {Pal. 158 f.); Keim’s Jesus, Eng. Ed. ii. 367 ff.; Stanley, Sin.
and Pal. 384, etc.

1	xviii. Antt. ii. 1; ii. Wars, ix. 1. On its position cf. xviii.Anti. ii. 1,
which fixes it on the lake with Life, 72, near Jordan ; cf. ii. Wars, xiii. 2,
across Jordan, though this may be the other Julias of Herod Antipas.

2	Luke ix. 10.	3 Mark vi. 31 ; Matt. xiv. 13.	4 John vi. 10.

5	One is now two miles from the mouth, P.E.F. Large Map.

6	John vi. 10. They sat down on the green grass, Mark vi. 39 : on the grass
Matt. xiv. 19.458 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Does this oblige us to admit another Bethsaida on the
western coast? Some, however unwillingly,1 conclude
that it does, and have found the second Bethsaida either as
a suburb of Julias on the west bank of Jordan,2 or farther
along the coast at ‘Ain Tabigha.3 But when Jesus urges
His disciples to go across to Bethsaida, this does not imply
a crossing to the west, for Josephus speaks of ‘ sailing
over from Tiberias to Taricheae,’ though these towns lay
on the same side of the lake.4 And in this case it would
be natural for Jesus to wish to return from the scene of
the miracle, which we may place some way down the
eastern- coast, to Bethsaida-Julias, for, according to Luke,
He had just fled there from Herod’s jurisdiction in the
west. The Fourth Gospel, it is true, speaks of Bethsaida
in Galilee,5 but this need not mean that it lay west of the
Jordan, for, as we have seen, the province of Galilee ran
right round the lake, and included most of the level coast-
land on the east.6 It is not, therefore, necessary to
demand more than one Bethsaida.7 Wherever these three
—Capernaum, Bethsaida and Chorazin—may have been,
the well-nigh complete obliteration of all of them is
remarkable in this, that they were the very three towns
which our Saviour condemned to humiliation.

Down the east coast the city of Gergesa has been
identified with the ruins known as Khersa, at the only

1	Reland (653-655), who feels himself very unwillingly shut up to two
Belhsaidas. Henderson, Pal. 156, 157.

2	Thomson, Land and Book.	3 Fiirer v. Haimendorf, 1566.

4 Life, 89.	5 xii. 21.

(i As the Kad’at Tubariyeh does to-day (cf. ii. JVars, xx. 4). Even Judas of
Gamala is sometimes called Galilean, xviii. Antt. i. 6. Ptolemaus, 140 A. l).,

reckons Julias to Galilee, but by that time it had been definitely attached to

the latter (84 A.D.).

7 So also Iloltzman, Jahrb. fiir Prot. Thcol. 1878, No. 2. 383 f.The Lake of Galilee

459

portion of that coast on which the steep hills come down
to the shore.1 Farther south there is the gorge of
Fik, or Aphek, up which the great road ran ^
from Scythopolis to Damascus. On a long
camel’s-neck of hill, which fills the middle of this gorge,
the Kula'at el Hosn, Gamala has been placed, but not
past doubt.2 Hippos, however, was certainly Gamala and
the present Susiyeh, above the same gorge.3 Hippos-
Aphek lay a little higher up on the plateau, the present
village of Fik. And Gadara looked up the
lake from the heights immediately south of the
Yarmuk.4 Below Gadara, in the Ghor, there must have
been villages, some by the lake, like the present Semak,
and some at the foot of the hills, where ruins now lie.5

This catalogue of the towns on the Lake of Galilee, if it
fail to fix for us the sites of many of them, cannot but
force our imagination to realise the almost a girdle of
unbroken line of buildings by which the lake towns-
was surrounded. Of this her coasts still bear the mark.
As the Dead Sea is girdled by an almost constant hedge
of driftwood, so the Sea of Galilee is girdled by a scarcely
less continuous belt of ruins—the drift of her ancient
towns.6 In the time of our Lord she must have mirrored

1	Gergesa is the reading supported by the documents. Gerasa is impos-
sible. Keim, Jesus, has argued strongly for Gadara.

2	See, for the arguments between this and Gamli, Schiirer, Hist. ii. I.

3	Clermont Ganneau was the first to suggest that the name Susiyeh, the

Arabic equivalent of Hippos, might be found here, and the discovery was made
by Schumacher, P.E.F.Q. 1887, 36 ff. ; The Jaulrfn, 244; Neubauer, Geo.
du Taint. 238 f.	4 For a description of Gadara see ch. xxviii.

5 Over the present road, down the Ghor, south-west from Gadara, and just
at the foot of the hill.

u ‘ These accumulated fragments, the multitude of towns, and the mag-
nificence of the constructions of which they were proofs, recalled to my
mind the road which leads along the foot of Vesuvius from Castellamare460 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

within the outline of her guardian hills little else than
city-walls, houses, synagogues, wharves and factories.1
Greek architecture hung its magnificence over her simple
life : Herod’s castle, temple and theatres in Tiberias ; the
bath-houses at Hammath ; a hippodrome at Taricheae ;
and, farther back from the shore, the high-stacked houses
of Gamala ; the amphitheatre in Gadara, looking up
the lake with the Acropolis above it, and the paved
street with its triumphal archway; the great Greek villas
on the heights about Gadara ; with a Roman camp or
two, high enough up the slopes to catch the western
breeze, and daily sending its troops to relieve guard in
the cities. All this was what imposed itself upon that
simple open-air life on fields and roads and boats, which
we see in the Gospels, so sunny and so free. Amid the
sowing and reaping, the fishing and mending of nets, the
journeying to and fro upon foot, all the simple habits of
the native life, do we not catch some shadows of that
other world, which had grown up around it, in the crowds
that are said to grind on one another in the narrow lanes,
like corn between millstones ;2 in the figures of the cen-
turion, the publican, and the demoniac crying that his
name was Legion ; in the stories of the pulling down of
barns and the building of greater ; of opulent householders
leaving their well-appointed villas for a time with every
servant in his place, and the porter set to watch ; of
market-places and streets, as well as lanes ;3 in the com-
parison of the towns on the lake to great cities—Sodom

to Portici. As there, the borders of the Lake of Gennesarelh seem to have
borne cities instead of harvests and forests.’—Lamartine.

1 There were tanneries and potteries by the present ‘Ain et Tabighah.

- Mark v. 24 : <rvvid\ifiov avrbv ; cf. Luke viii. 42 : crvviirviyov aurov.

3 Go ye out into the streets and lanes.The Lake of Galilee

461

and Gomorrah, Tyre and Sidon and Nineveh ; in the
mention of the sins of a city,1 and of Mammon and all the
things after which the Gentiles seek, and in the acknow-
ledgment that Galilee was a place where a man might
gain the whole world}

Twice it has seemed to me that I saw the lake as it
lay in those thronged days. One of these occasions was
among the tombs of Gadara. Some peasants
had just dug up the gravestone of a Roman of'ourgLord’sS
soldier, whose name was given—P . . . Aelius,
and that he had lived forty years, and served nineteen ; but
it also said that he was of a Legion, the Fourteenth.3 * As
I read this last detail—and the word is still stamped on
other stones in the neighbourhood—I realised how familiar
that engine of foreign oppression had been to this region,
so that the poor madman could find nothing fitter than it
to describe the incubus upon his own life. My name is
Legion, he said, for we are many. The second occasion
was at Fik, as I looked across the site of Gamala and

1 Luke vii. 37.	2 Luke ix. 25.

3 The whole inscription read as follows :

DM

P . AEL . . .

BI......

.......IOB

MILES LEG XIIII
G ANO XL
STIP XIX ER
VDES INSTIT
VTI M GAI
VS ET RVFI .

US PROCV
RAVERVNT

Publius (?) Aelius ... A soldier of the Fourteenth Legion, Gemina, in his
fortieth year, and nineteenth of service; the heirs designate, Marcus Gaius
and Rufinus (?), saw to everything.462 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

down the gorge, on the lake and the houses of Tiberias
opposite—their squalor glorified in the mid-day sun. I
saw nothing but water and houses, and the sound came
over the hill of a bugle of a troop of Turkish horse. It
was a glimpse and an echo of that time when Greek cities
and Roman camps environed the lake. Yet only a
glimpse ; for Gamala should have been stacked with her
high houses, and the lake dotted with sails, and on the
air there should have been the hum of tens of thousands
of a population crowded within a few square miles. The
only sound I heard, save the bugle, was of bees. The
scene differs from what it was as much as a wood in
winter from a wood in summer, or a bay at ebb from a
bay near full tide, when the waters are rushing and the
boats are sailing to and fro.

The industries of the Lake of Galilee were agriculture
and fruit-growing ; dyeing and tanning, with every depart-
ment of a large carrying trade ; but chiefly fishing, boat-
building and fish-curing. Of the last, which spread the
lake’s fame over the Roman world before its fishermen
and their habits became familiar through the Gospel,
there is no trace in the Evangelists. The fisheries them-
selves were pursued by thousands of families. They were
no monopoly ; but the fishing-grounds, best at the north
end of the lake, where the streams entered, were free to
all. And the trade was very profitable.1

It was in the ranks of those who pursued this free and
hardy industry that Christ looked for His disciples. Not

1 See above on Tarichese, pp. 451-455. Frei reports that, in one cast of
the net from the shore, he saw a fisherman secure twenty-eight, and he
rightly infers from that an enormous wealth of fish in the lake, Z.D.P.F.
ix. 102. On the kinds of fish, see Hasselquist’s Travels-, Tristram, The Land
of Israel; Merrill, Fast of Jordan, i. 41. They are chiefly a kind of mullet.The Lake of Galilee

463

wealthy, they were yet independent, with no servile tem-
pers about them ; and with no private or trade wrongs
disadjusting their consciences. This was one of the
reasons for which our Lord chose them. In that age it
would have been easy to gather, as David did into the
Cave of Adullam, all that were in debt, or in distress or
discontented, or had run away from their masters. But
such would not have been the men to preach a spiritual
gospel, the coming, not of a national, but of a universal
kingdom. Men brought up, however justly, to feel the
wrongs of their class or of their trade before anything else,
would have been of no use to Christ. Just as futile would
those ‘ innovators ’ have proved, whom Josephus describes
to have so largely composed the population of Galilee.
Christ went to a trade which had no private wrongs : and
called men, not from their dreams, but from work they
were contented to do from day to day till something
higher should touch them. And so it has come to pass
that not the jargon of the fanatics and brigands in the
highlands of Galilee, but the speech of the fishermen of her
lake, and the instruments of their simple craft, have become
the language and symbolism of the world’s religion.CHAPTER XXII

THE JORDAN VALLEYFor this Chapter consult Maps L, III., IV., V. and VI.THE JORDAN VALLEY
MONG the rivers of the world the Jordan is unique

by a twofold distinction of Nature and History.
There are hundreds of other streams more ,Nalurai and
large, more useful, or more beautiful ; there is u^queness
none which has been more spoken about by of the Jordan,
mankind. Other rivers have awakened a richer poetry
in the peoples through whom they pass,— for the refer-
ences to Jordan in the Bible are very few, and, with two
or three exceptions, prosaic,—but of none has the music
sounded so far, or so pleasantly, across the world. There
are holy waters which annually attract to themselves a
greater number of pilgrims, but there is none to which
pilgrims travel from such various and distant lands. In
influence upon the imagination of man, the Nile is perhaps
the Jordan’s only competitor. He has drawn to his valley
one after another of the greatest races of the world ; his
mystery and annual miracle have impressed the mind
equally of ancient and of modern man. But the Nile has
never been adopted by a universal religion. To the
fathers of human civilisation, that silent flood, which cut
their land in two, across which their dead were ferried,
and the Lord Sun himself passed daily to his death
among the desert hills, was the symbolic border of the
next world. But who now knows this, who feels it,

4C7468 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

except as a fact of very ancient history ? Whereas, still
to half the world, the short, thin thread of the Jordan is
the symbol of both great frontiers of the spirit’s life on
earth—the baptism through which it passes into God’s
Church, and the waters of death which divide this pilgrim
fellowship from the promised land.

The Nile and the Jordan, otherwise so different, are
alike in this, that the historical singularity of each has
behind it as remarkable a singularity of physical forma-
tion. Both valleys were laid open by the same geological
disturbance,1 and it left them equally monstrous and
unique. Every one knows the incomparableness of the
Nile—that solitary and stupendous river which, unfed for
a thousand miles by any tributary or by rain from heaven,
has sustained of his own resource the civilisation of a
mighty empire, and still, by his annual flood, bestows on
the desert a fertility not excelled in any country, which
has all the fountains of heaven and of the great deep in
its fortune. In its own way the Jordan is as solitary and
extreme an effect of natural forces. There may be some-
thing on the surface of another planet to match the
Jordan Valley : there is nothing on this. No other part
of our earth, uncovered by water, sinks to 300 feet below
the level of the ocean.'2 But here we have a rift more

1 Mull, P.E.F. Survey Memoirs, Geology, 108; Dawson, Mod. Science in
Bible Lands, 588. See below.

- The other depressions of the surface of the continents below ocean-
level are :—Asia : the level of the Caspian Sea is more than 80 feet below
that of the Black Sea ; and part of the Caspian coasts, a depression be-
tween Lake Elton and the Ural, in which a lake used to lie, but it is now
dry, is 151 feet below the Black Sea. In Africa there is the Fayum, part
of which is a few feet—5 to 20 feet—under sea-level; and the Shott Melr’ir
marshes and salt fields in the Sahara, which are from 95 to 279 feet below
the Mediterranean.The Jordan Valley

469

than one hundred and sixty miles long,1 and from two to
fifteen broad, which falls from the sea-level to as deep as
1292 feet below it at the coast of the Dead Sea, while the
bottom of the latter is 1300 feet deeper still. In this
trench there are the Jordan, a river nearly one hundred
miles long ; two great lakes, respectively twelve and fifty-
three miles in length ; large tracts of arable country, espe-
cially about Gennesaret, Bethshan and Jericho, regions
which were once very populous, like the coasts of the
Lake of Galilee ; and the sites of some famous towns—
Tiberias, Jericho, and the ‘Cities of the Plain.’ Is it not
true that on the earth there is nothing else like this deep,
this colossal ditch ?

Geologists2 tell us that these regions, being covered
with water, from which the granite peaks of Sinai alone
protruded, great deposits of limestone were

Formation of

laid upon the ocean-bed. Under pressure the Jordan

Valley.

from east and west the limestone rose above
the water in long folds, running north and south.3 Two of
these folds are now the ranges on either side of the Jordan
Valley, but the latter is due, not only to their elevation, but
to a violent rupture of the strata between them. This
1 fault ’ is not confined to that portion of the valley which
is beneath sea-level: it extends all the way from Northern
Syria, through between the Lebanons, down the Jordan

1	From just below Lake Huleh, where the dip below sea-level begins,
to the point on the Arabah south of the Dead Sea, where the valley rises
again to sea-level.

2	Hull, P.E.F. Mem. Geo1. Pt. IV. ch. i. 108 ff. ; Dawson, Mod. Science
in Bible Lands, ch. viii. and App. iv. ; Lartet, La Mer Morte ; Conder,
T. W. 217 ff.

3	‘ Early in the Miocene epoch, ... by tangential pressure of the earth’s
surface due to contraction, . . . the contraction being due to the secular
cooling of the crust.’—Hull, p. 108.470 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

and along the Wady ‘Arabah to the Gulf of ‘Akaba, or
three hundred and fifty miles.1 Had the two long-folds
risen in complete isolation from each other, the valley
would to-day have been an arm of the Red Sea stretching
to the foot of Lebanon, and in such a case how changed
the whole history of Palestine must have been ! But the
two folds were not absolutely disconnected. As they rose
from the waters there rose between them, near their
southern end, a diagonal ridge of limestone, which is still
visible about forty-five miles to the north of the Gulf of
‘Akaba, in the present water-parting between ‘Akaba and
the Dead Sea.'2 This not only shut out the Red Sea, but
shut in a part of the old ocean-bed with a large quantity
of salt water.3 There then followed a period of great
rains, with perpetual snow and glaciers on Lebanon,
during which the valley was filled with fresh water to an
extent of two hundred miles,4 or one long lake from the
Sea of Galilee to some fifty miles south of the present end
of the Dead Sea. How the valley passed from that con-
dition to its present state is not clear. Some think the
change of climate—great decrease of rain with the dis-
appearance of the glaciers—sufficient to account for the
gradual shrinking of the one large lake to the limits of
two smaller ones/’1 There are, however, traces of various

1 Dawson, p. 442.

- ‘ The water-parting which here crosses the valley has doubtless con-
tinued as such ever since the whole region emerged from the ocean.’—
Hull, ibid. 20.

3	Hull, p. 109 (also 120). Hull accounts for the peculiar fauna and flora
of the Lake of Galilee and of Jordan by their original connection with the
ocean, 109, no. They suffered the change experienced elsewhere on the
earth’s surface, c.g. on the Caspian Sea, of the passage from salt to fresh
water.

4	Hull, 15, 113, with sketch-map, p. 72, showing the lake ; Dawson, 444.

® Hull, 115.The Jordan Valley

47i

sea-beaches so distinct, and in some cases so far apart,
that it has been inferred that the confinement of the
water successively within these must have been caused as
much by sudden convulsions, for which the region has
always been notorious, as by gradual desiccation. This
inference is supported by the fact that, within the obser-
vation of man, the Dead Sea has not become smaller,
but has rather increased.1 Volcanic disturbances on a
very large scale took place in the Jordan Valley within
comparatively recent times.2

In this long rift from the Lebanons to the Red Sea
there are six distinct sections : the Beka'a, or valley
between the Lebanons ; the Upper Jordan,

Sections of

from its sources at the foot of Hermon the Jordan

Valley.

through Lake Huleh to the Lake of Galilee ;
this Lake itself; the Lower Jordan to its mouth at Jericho ;
the Dead Sea ; and, thence to the Gulf of ‘Akaba, the
Wady ‘Arabah. Of these, the first and the last fall outside
our area, and we have already visited the Lake of Galilee ;
so that there only remain to be described the Upper
Jordan, the Lower Jordan, and the Dead Sea.

I. The Upper Jordan.

The great valley of Palestine, as it runs out from between
the Lebanons, makes a slight turn eastward round the
foot of Hermon, so that Hermon not only Thesources
looks right down the rest of its course, but is of the Jordan-
able to discharge into this three-fourths of the waters

1 Conder, T. W7. 210, 220.

2 Notling, Z.D.P. V. 1885472 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

which gather on his high and ample bulk. By these and
the streams, which break from the rest of the surrounding
hills, the floor of the valley is soaked in moisture. Once,
probably, it was all a lake. To-day this has shrunk to its
lower end—the so-called Lake of Huleh, and the rest is
marsh and fat meadow, with a fewr mounds and terraces
covered by trees. Four streams, which unite before enter-
ing the lake, contest the honour of being considered as
the source of the Jordan. The only one which does not
spring upon the eastern watershed is the Nahr Bareighit,
which comes down the Merj ‘Ayun from a source very
slightly separated from the valley of the Litany. It is
the smallest. The next one, the Nahr Hasbany, springs
half a mile to the north of Hasbeya, from a buttress of
Hermon, and comes south between Hermon and the Jebel
Dahar. This is the longest of the four, and most in the
line of the Jordan itself, but it has much less water than
either of the other two—the Nahr Leddan, which is the
heaviest but the shortest, springing from Tell-el-Kadi, in
the bosom of the valley itself; and the Nahr Banias,
which has the most impressive origin of all four, in the
very roots of Hermon, and gathers to itself the largest
number of tributaries. It is these two which have gene-
rally been regarded as the sources of Jordan.1

1 No ancient writer mentions any sources of the Jordan but these two last
at Dan and Banias. Josephus styles the stream which springs from Dan
‘ the so-called Little Jordan,’ iv. Wars, i. I, cf. viii. Antt. viii. 4 ; again,

‘ the Lesser Jordan,’ v. Antt. iii. 1. The source at Banias he calls the
reputed fountain of Jordan, i. Wars, xxi. 3 ; iii. ibid. x. 7. It is in the
latter passage that he tells his story of Lake Phiala as the ultimate source,
from which he says it had been proved, by throwing chaff into it, that the
fountains at Banias were fed. Phiala, ‘ 120 stadia on the way to Trachonitis,’
is probably Birket er Ram, Robinson, B.R. iii. 614 ff.

The Onomasticon, sub Aetcra (Laisa), gives Paneas as the source. From
Arculf (700) onwards through Willibald (722), and through the entire seriesThe Jordan Valley	473

Travellers usually arrive first at the source of the
Leddan. It is a mound, perhaps a hundred yards long,
and rising some sixty feet above the plain

..	^ Tell-el-Kadi.

before the plain rises to Hermon. Draped by
trees and bush, it is plumed and crested by a grove of
high oaks. On the western side, through some huge
boulders, whose lower half its rapid rush has worn bare, a
stream, about twelve feet broad by three deep, breaks
from the bowels of the earth ; while another, more shallow
and quiet, appears higher up in a jungle of reeds and
bushes. This opulent mound is called Tell-el-Kadi, and
Kadi means the same as Dan. It is, therefore, supposed
to be the site of Laish or Leshem, which the Danites took
for their city.1 But this might also be fixed at Banias, and
with even more probability,2 for Banias is a better site
than Tell-el-Kadi for the capital of the district, and we
cannot conceive any tribe to have been able to hold
Tell-el-Kadi who did not also hold Banias.'3

Paneas lies scarcely an hour to the north of Tell-el-
Kadi. From the latter you pass a well-watered meadow,
covered by trees, and then a broad terrace,
with oaks, like an English park, till you come
to the edge of a deep gorge, through which there roars a

of pilgrim narratives and chronicles in Crusading times (e.g. Saewulf, Fetellus,
Benjamin of Tudela, De Joinville, etc. etc.), and later writers like Maunde-
ville (1322), Felix Fabri (1480)—the story runs that Jordan springs from two
sources, Jor and Dan, at the foot of Lebanon, near Banias. (But Daniel
(1106) calls the two issues from the Lake of Galilee, Jor and Dan.) How
the names arose is evident. Dan was known to have lain there, and they
took the second syllable in the name of the river to be its name. This left
Jor, which, it was easy to suppose, was the name of the other fountain. But
the ancients and mediaevals located Dan, not at Tell-el-Kadi, but at Paneas,

1 See p. 57. In Josephus’ time, when it was called Daphne, there was ‘a
temple of the golden calf,’ iv. Wars i. I.

- Ononiasticon, art. Aaaa.

3 See p. 481.474 Historical Geography of the Holy Land

headlong stream, half stifled by bush. An old Roman
Bridge takes you over, and then through a tangle of trees,
brushwood and fern you break into sight of a high cliff of
limestone, reddened by the water that oozes over its face
from the iron soil above.1 In the cliff is a cavern. Part
of the upper rock has fallen, and from the debris of
boulders and shingle below there bursts and bubbles
along a line of thirty feet a full-born river. The place is
a very sanctuary of waters, and from time immemorial
men have drawn near it to worship. As you stand within
the charm of it—and this is a charm not uncommon in
the Lebanons—you understand why the early Semites
adored the Baalim of the subterranean waters even before
they raised their gods to heaven, and thanked them for
the rain.2 This must have been one of the chief dwellings
of the Baalim—perhaps Baal-gad of the Book of Joshua.3
When the Greeks came in later times they also felt the
presence of deity, and dedicated the grotto, as an inscrip-
tion still testifies, to Pan and the Nymphs.4 'Hill, cavern,
and fountain were called the Paneion,5 and the town and
district Paneas.r* In 20 r>.C. Herod the Great received the

1 The cliff is ‘ from a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet,’ Robinson,
L.R. 106.

- Robertson Smith, Religion of ihe Semites, 97, etc.

:1 Joshua xi. 17, xii. 7, xiii. 5. There was also a Baal-Hermon. Judges
iii. 3, the Mount of Baal-Hermon.

4	IlaH T€ Kal Nv/j.<t>ais is the first line of an inscription on the rock of the
grotto.

5	Josephus calls the whole ‘place’ t6 ndpeioi', xv. Antt. x. 3, i. Wars,
xxi. 3. In iii. Wars, x. 7, he gives the name to the fountain. Eusebius,
H.E. vii. 17, gives it to the hill. In Josephus’ time the cave, he says, over-
hung an unfathomable pool.

0 See Schtirer’s note, Hist, of fesvish People, II. i. 133. Ilcmris or Ilaredj,
properly an adjective, designates both the country (xv. Antt. x. 3, etc.; cf.
Fliny, H.N v. 18) and the (own (xviii. Antt. ii. 1).The Jordan Valley

475

whole district from Augustus,1 and built to him a temple
of white marble, setting the bust of Caesar hard by the
shrine of Pan.2 Philip, the tetrarch of this region, C£Ecarea
embellished the town and called it Caesarea,3 Phlhpp1,
and it came to be known as his Caesarea—Caesarea Philippi
—to distinguish it from his father’s on the sea-coast.4 The
official designation was altered by Agrippa II/’ to Neronias,
which was used along with the name Caesarea even under
Marcus Aurelius,6 but then died out. Caesarea lasted a
little longer in conjunction with Paneas,6 till Paneas sur-
vived alone, and has survived to the present day, only
that Arabs, with nop upon their lips, spell it Banias.7

The extraordinary mixture of religious and political
interests which gathered upon this charming site during
the first centuries of our era may be seen at a
glance, in all its rich confusion, upon the pageful
of the town’s coins which De Saulcy has reproduced.8
Here, on one coin, we have the syrinx or pipe of Pan ;
on a second Pan leaning on a tree and playing a flute ; on
a third the mouth of the sacred cavern, with a railing in
front of it, and Pan within, again leaning on a tree and
playing the flute; on others the laurelled head of Apollo,
a pillared temple, and inside the figure of Poppaea, Nero’s
wife, whom he first kicked to death and afterwards raised
to divine honours ; various emperors with their title Divus,

1	On the death of Zenodorus, the previous lord of these parts, xv. And.
x. 3 ; i. Wars, xxi. 3.

2	xviii. And. ii. 1.	3 xviii. And. ii. I ; iii. Wars, ix. 7, etc.

4	xx. And. ix. 4.

5	De Saulcy, Nnmismatique de la Terre Sainte, 315, 316 : Plate xviii., cf.

No. 7 with No. 8.	6 'ibid.

7	(jjjljdlj. The tradition of its Greek origin was strong among the Arabs,
only they took its founder to have been Balnias, i.e. Pliny.

8	Op. cit. Plate xviii.476 The Histoi'ical Geography of the Holy Land

and the town’s own title, ‘ Caesarea—August, Sacred and
With Rights of Sanctuary—under Paneion.’1 This proves
that the two systems of religion were carried on together,
and that Pan was worshipped in the grotto, whose niches
still bear his name, while divine honours were paid to
Caesar in the white temple that stood perhaps on the cliff
above,2 the site of the present Mohammedan shrine of
Sheikh Khudr, or St. George.3

While both these sanctuaries were open, and men thus
worshipped side by side the forces of nature and the
Icsus in the incarnation of political power, Jesus came with
coasts of	His disciples to the coasts of Caesarea Philippi.

Philippi.	Never did the place better earn its title of

Asylos, or shelter nobler fugitives. The journey of our
Lord and His disciples was, in the first instance, a retreat
from Jewish hostility to the neutrality of Gentile ground.
But it became also the occasion of His resolution to
return to meet the Jews, and the death which lay ready
for Him in their hate. From this farthest corner of the
land Jesus set His face steadfastly to Jerusalem. The
scenery had already been consecrated by the
crisis and turning of a soul, by the hope which
another exile had seen break through his drenching sorrow,
like as the sun breaks through the mists and saturated
woods of tlie hills around.

Psalm xlii.

‘. . . From the land of Jordan,

And the Hermans, fro?n the hill Mislar,

Deep unto deep is calling at the noise of thy waterfalls:

All thy breakers and billows are gone over me.

1 Ibid. 8. KAIC .CEB. IEP. KAI. AC . Til. IIANH2. AC . is for dcruXoy,
with lights of asylum or sanctuary.

' The exact position of Herod’s temple is unknown. Hewn stones are
scattered all over the place.	3 See p. 162.The Jordan Valley

4 77

With a breaking in my bones mine enemies reproach me,
While they say u&to me all the day, Where is thy God ?

Why art thou cast down, O my soul ?

And why art thou disquieted upon me ?

Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise Him,

Health of my countenance, and my God.’1

This Psalm, amidst its own sympathetic scenery, may
well have come into the hearts of these fugitives, and
accomplished its due ministry to Him, who at all such
crises in His life, summoned no other angel to His aid
than some such winged and ready word of Scripture.
Yet even these high matters cannot have absorbed the
disciples’ attention, where so many pagan sanctuaries broke

1 Psalm xlii-xliii. The Land of fordan usually means in the Old Testa-
ment the land across Jordan. The plural Hermons (not Hermoniles) must
refer to the triple peaks of Hermon. If these two identifications hold,
then the standpoint of the Psalmist is fixed in the corner between Hermon
and Jordan—the corner where Banias stands. To the two localities men-
tioned, a third, the Hill Mis'ar, “lyyD, is placed in apposition. It may

mean, as it stands in the text, Hill of Littleness. But it may also be a
proper name ; and it is at least remarkable that in the same neighbour-
hood there should be two or three names with the same or kindred radicals.
These are (i) Za'ura,	> ¥ often weakens to j (Wright’s Comp.

Grammar, etc., pp. 58, 61); (2) Wady Za'arah,	above Banias ; (3)

Khurbet Mezara,	I suggest that these may be a reminiscence of the

name of a hill in this district, called Mis'ar ; and surely none other would
have been put by the Psalmist in apposition to the Hermons. Cheyne
says: ‘To me this appendage to “Hermonim” seems a poetic loss.
Unless the little mountain has a symbolic meaning I could wish it away.’ I
cannot see this; the symbolic meanings suggested for Hermonim and
Mis'ar are all forced, and even if we got a natural one, it would be out of
place after the literal land of fordan. To employ all as proper names is
suitable to a lyric. Baethgen’s interpretation (following Smend) of the Hill
of Littleness as equal to Mount Sion in contrast to Mount Hermon, and of
the three factors, Jordan, Hermon, Sion, as an equivalent to the Holy Land ;
and his translation, I remember those far from the land of Jordan, and the
Hermons, far from the little hill, are also forced and very improbable.478 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

the native beauty of the scene with their insolent chal-
lenge, to all that was best in the Jewish heart. That a
mere man, however exalted, should have a temple built

chii't and *° an^ especially by a Jewish prince, had

the worship filled Jewry with indignation. The little com-

of Augustus.

pany of wayfarers must surely have talked of
this obtrusive sanctuary. It is, therefore, very striking
that just there and then they emphasised their own
Master’s claims upon the faith of mankind, and that the first
clear confession of Christ’s divine Sonship was made near
the shrine in which men already worshipped a fellow-man
as God. These were the two religions which were shortly
to contest the world—the marble temple covering the
bust of an Emperor, the group of exiles round the leader,
whom His own people had rejected. They appeared to
have this in common, that they were centred in indivi-
duals, that they both responded to the longing of the age
for some embodiment of authority, that each of them paid
divine homage to a‘man. Yet, even on that single point
of resemblance, there was this distinction between them.
He in the temple was only an official, the temporary
symbol of a great power, to-day’s dispenser of its largess,
who to-morrow would be succeeded by another. But the
little band of fugitives outside clung to their Leader for
His own eternal sake. He was the Kingdom, He was the
Religion, everything lay for ever in His character and His
love. Herod built the temple to Augustus for the same
reason for which he had paid previous homage to Caesar
and Antony, or for which his children afterwards ascribed
divine honours on this same spot to Claudius and Nero—
because each of these for the moment had all things in his
gift. But it was because they counted all things but lossThe Jordan Valley

479

for His sake that the disciples turned there and then to
Christ, with a love and allegiance that could never be
transferred to another, any more than God Himself might
be imagined to yield to a successor in the faith of His
creatures. And again, while the emperor compelled allegi-
ance by his rank, his splendour, his power, Christ turned
that very day from the symbol of all this to seek His king-
dom by the way of sacrifice and death. Ye know that the
rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and the great impose
their authority upon them. . . . The Son of Man came not
to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a
ransom for many. This was a contrast on which Christ
often dwelt: nowhere can we better value the alternative
which it presented to that generation, than here at Caesarea
by the sources of Jordan, where we see the apotheosis of
the Gentile spirit in the temple raised to an Augustus by
the flattery of a Herod, and Christ with His few disciples
turning from it to His Cross and Sacrifice.

Before we leave this end of the Jordan Valley, we must
notice one great function which it has performed through-
out history. Running up into the Lebanons,

in*.	Military his-

tlns long hollow is the gate from the north toryofthe
into Palestine, and Banias, which was a for- uPPerJordan-
tress as well as a sanctuary, is the key of the gate. It is
true that the entering in of Hamath, the other end of the
pass through the Lebanons, is sometimes spoken of as if
it were the northern entrance into Palestine, but it is
really only the approach. Here in Dan lay the limit of
the land of Israel. Beyond were rugged indefensible
mountain ranges. If we may compare the region with
one much more extensive,—the Lebanons were to Israel,
for military purposes, what the mountains of Afghanistan480 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

are to India, and the great fortress at Banias below
Hermon, on the roads to Damascus and up the Beka‘, has
a position not unlike that of Peshavvur, near the entrance
to the Khyber—though by the Syrian fortress there
flows no river like the Indus. Did an invader come south
between the Lebanons ? He had to fight here : the battle
by which Antiochus the Great won Palestine from the
Ptolemies took place near Paneas.1 Nor could the
masters of Palestine hold the Upper Jordan Valley except
at the same time they held Banias. During the Latin
Kingdom of Jerusalem the fortress was fiercely contested
by PYank and Saracen. Did the Franks take it—then the
rich valley was all theirs. Did the Saracens win it back,
then the Franks 2 in their castle of Hunin, on the opposite
hills of Naphtali, were obliged to arrange with them for a
division of the deep pastures and fields between. And
in the Ninth Crusade, when an expedition of Louis of
France conquered all the Jordan Valley, they were
obliged to retire from it, because they failed to capture
also the castle of Banias.:{

It is these frequent illustrations, taken from all parts
of history, of the impossibility of holding the meadows and
springs of the Upper Jordan, without also hold-

l’aneas = Dan.	.

ing Banias and its castle, which make it seem
probable that Leshem or Dan was the present Banias,
and not (in spite of the name) Tell-el-Kadi. If there be
in this latter name, which is doubtful, some reminiscence

1 198 B.c. Polybius xvi. 18 ; xxviii. i.

- ‘ The lands in the plain belong half to the Franks and half to the
Moslem, and here is the boundary, called “The Boundary of Dividing.”’
Ibn Jubair (1185 AD.) in Le Strange, Pal. under Moslems. 418.

:1 1253 A.D. De Joinville, Memoirs of Louis /X., Pt. 11. One of the most
stirring accounts in all the Chronicles of the Crusades.The Jordan Valley

481

of the synonymous Dan,1 then it is possible to suppose
that we have here, what we have in so many other cases,
the transference of a name, a few miles from its original
site. On all other appearances than the shadowy name,
Banias, and not Tell-el-Kadi, is the ancient capital of the
Danites, the northern limit of the land of Israel.

The rest of this plain is of little interest. The Lake
of Huleh is, without doubt, the Lake Semechonitis of
Josephus,2 and probably also the waters of

•	Lake Huleh,

Merom of the Book of Joshua.3 The open
water is thickly surrounded by swamps and jungles of the
papyrus reed.4 From the lower end of the lake, the
Jordan enters the Great Rift below the level of the sea.
It descends a narrow gorge in one almost continuous
cascade, falling 680 feet in less than nine miles, and then
through a delta of its own deposits glides quietly into
the Lake of Galilee. Six miles above the lake it is
crossed by the Bridge of the Daughters of Jacob, on
the high road between Damascus and Galilee.5

1	Kadi = Dan = Judge.

2	v. Anti. v. I ; iii. Wars, x. 7 ; iv. Wars, i. 1.

3	Josh. xi. 5, 6. The name ‘The Height’ is suitable for a lake so far
above the Lake of Galilee ; the neighbourhood is possible for chariots.
The word ‘waters,’ however, scarcely suits a lake, and we have really no
means of identifying the scene of Joshua’s victory. The Onomasticon puts
the water of Meppav near Dothan, twelve Roman miles from Sebaste. The
origin of the name Huleh is unknown. The Lake might be easily drained ;
almost as easily it might be extended, as it seems once to have been, to
the limits of the plain; cf. Quaresmius, Elncid. Terr. Sand. 11. vii. ch. xii.
fob 872. Huleh is the same name as Ulatha (see p. 541), and the ND'

of the Talmud, Neubauer, Geog. du Talmud, 24, 27 flf.

4	The best account of the lake and its surroundings is in Macgregor’s/W
Roy on the Jordan.

5	See p. 427. For the country between Huleh and the Lake of Galilee
see Schumacher, Z.D.P. V. xiii.48 2 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

II. The Lower Jordan: The Ghor.

From the Lake of Galilee to the Dead Sea the Jordan
Valley is sixty-five miles long. Down the west are the
mountains of Galilee and Samaria, with the

Divisions and	,	,	T _

names of the great break between them of the Vale of

Jezreel. They stand from 800 to 1500 feet
above the valley floor, with higher ranges behind. On
the other side run the hills of Gilead, their long flat
edge some 2000 feet .above Jordan, and broken only by
the incoming valleys of the Yarmuk and Jabbok. Be-
tween these two ranges the valley varies in breadth from
three to fourteen miles. For thirteen miles south of the
lake the breadth is hardly more than four, then it ex-
pands to six or seven in the Plain of Bethshan, which rises
by terraces towards the level of Esdraelon. Ten miles
south of Bethshan the Samarian hills press eastward,
and for the next thirteen the river runs closejy by their
feet, and the valley is three miles wide. Again the
Samarian hills withdraw, and the valley widens first to
eight miles and then gradually to fourteen, which is the
breadth at Jericho. What we have, therefore, between
Galilee and the Dead Sea is a long narrow vale twice
expanding—at Bethshan and Jericho—to the dimensions
of a plain. The Old Testament bestows on it both of
the Hebrew names for valley—Deep and Opening.1
Greek writers call it the Aulon or Hollow,2 and Arabs

1	pQV of the southern end, Josh. xiii. 27 ;	of the north end under

Hermon, Josh. xi. 17 (LXX, tleSla) ; Josh. xii. 7 (LXX. IleSfoj'), and of the
southern end at Jericho, Deut. xxxiv. 3.

2	At’Awv. So, e.g. Diod. Sic. ii. 48. 9; xix. 98. 4; Theophrastus, Hist,
Plant. ii. 6. 8; ix. 6. 1; Dioscorides i. 18,The Jordan Valley

483

El-Gh6r, or the Rift.1 But Josephus twice gives it the
name of the ‘ Great Plain/ which he also applies to
Esdraelon.2

A large part of this valley is of exuberant fertility, and,
as we shall presently see, the whole of it might be culti-
vated. The Jordan itself runs in too deep a Fertility of
channel to be easily useful for irrigation, but the Gh°r-
a number of its affluents from both sides offer abundant
moisture during the greater part of the year. Some of
these springs and brooks, rising far below the level of
the ocean, and in soil impregnated with chlorides and
sodium, are bitter and often warm. In many parts there
are mounds and ridges of grey marl, salt and greasy, with
stretches of gravel, sand, clay, and other debris of an old
sea-bottom, that assume the weirdest shapes, and give a
desolate aspect to the vale. But notwithstanding all this
poison, vegetation is extremely rank, especially in spring.
The heat is of a forcing-house. Wherever water comes,
the flowers rise to the knee, and herbage often to the
shoulder.3 The drier stretches are covered by broom or
intricate thorn-bush ; by all the streams there are brakes
of cane and oleander. The streams dash violently down to
the Jordan, tearing up the surface of the country by their
spring floods and heaping across flowers and grass the

2 Once in its whole extent, iv. Wars, viii. 2 : rb (itya weSlov KaXelrai airb
Ku/jLTjs Tivvafipiv (at the south end of the Lake of Galilee) Sitjkov ptxp1- rfs
’A<r0aXr/n5os \ifivr]s; and once at Jericho, iv. Antt. vi. 1, M rbv ’lopSdvrjv
Kara rb p.iya irebiov ’lepixovvros dvTucp'u. It is probably to the Jordan Valley
that the same name refers in 1 Macc. v. 52, though it may be the beginning
of Esdraelon that is meant. It was, perhaps, in such an ambiguity that the
name was transferred from Esdraelon, which it wholly suits, to the Jordan
Valley, that is not so accurately described by it. In 1 Macc. xvi. n, rb

irediov ‘Iepixw.	3 Conder, T. W. 225-228,484 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

loosened marl and the ruin of cane-brake. Swamps
abound, and there is much malaria. Towards Jericho
the vegetation grows less and less rank—a plain of thorn-
groves with a swamp or two, and then the ground breaks
away, discoloured or crusted with salt, and bearing only
a few succulent plants, to the shingly beach and blue
waters of the Dead Sea. Although there is so much
fertility, the stretches of sour soil, the unhealthy jungle,
the obtrusive marl, and the parched hillsides out of reach
of the streams, justify the Hebrew name of the ‘Arabah
or Desert.1 In the New Testament also the Valley is
called a Wilderness.2

Down this broad valley there curves and twists a
deeper, narrower bed—perhaps 150 feet deeper,3 and
from 200 yards to a mile broad. Its banks are mostly

The Pride w^ite marl, and within these it is packed

of Jordan. wjth tamarisks and other semi-tropical trees
and tangled bush. To those who look down from the
hills along any great stretch of the valley, this Zor, as it
is called, trails and winds like an enormous green serpent,
more forbidding in its rankness than any open water
could be, however foul or broken. This jungle marks the
Jordan’s wider bed, the breadth to which the river rises
when in flood. In the Old Testament it appears as the
Pride of Jordan, and always as a symbol of trouble and
danger. Though in a land of peace thou be secure, what
wilt thou do in the Pride of Jordan ? He shall come up like
a lion from the Pride of Jordan.4 It was long supposed
that this referred to the spring floods of the river, and it

1 rmy also in the plural in connection with certain districts. The
‘Araboth of Moab and of Jericho.	2 Mark i. cf. 4 and 5.

3 Conder reckons 150 feet deeper at Beisan, T. W. 215 ; and 200 feet at
Jericho, ib. 216,	4 Jer. xii. 5; xlix. 19 ; 1. 44.The Jordan Valley

485

is given in the English version as sivelling, but the word
means pride, and as one text speaks of the pride of
Jordan being spoiled} the phrase most certainly refers to
the jungle, whose green serpentine ribbon looks so rich
from the hills above. In that case we ought to translate
it the luxuriance or rankness of Jordan. Though lions
have ceased from the land, this jungle is still a covert for
wild beasts, and Jeremiah’s contrast of it with a land of
peace is even more suitable to a haunted jungle than to
an inundation. But it is floods which have made the
rankness, they fill this wider bed of Jordan every year;1 2
and the floor of the jungle is covered with deposits of
mud and gravel, with dead weed, driftwood and the
exposed roots of trees.

Penetrating this unhealthy hollow you come soon to
the Jordan itself. Remember that it is but a groove in
the bottom of an old sea-bed, a ditch as deep The river_
below the level of the ocean as some of our bed-
coal-mines are, and you will be prepared for the uncouth-
ness of the scene. There is no yellow marl by the river
itself. Those heaps and ridges, which in higher parts of
the valley look like nothing but the refuse of a chemical
manufactory, have here all been washed away. But there
are hardly less ugly mudbanks, from two to twenty-five
feet high, with an occasional bed of shingle, that is not
clean and sparkling as in our own rivers, but foul with
ooze and slime. Dead driftwood is everywhere in sight.
Large trees lie about, overthrown : and the exposed roots
and lower trunks of the trees still standing are smeared

1	Zech. xi. 3.

2	Jordan overfloweth his banks all the time of harvest, i.e. in April, Josh,
iii. iv. ‘Abound as Jordan in the time of harvest,’ Ecclesiasticus xxiv. 26.486 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

with mud, except where they have been recently torn by
passing wreckage. There are, however, some open spaces,
where the river flashes to the hills above and an easy path
is possible to its edge. But in the lower reaches this is
mostly where the earth is too salt to sustain vegetation,
and so it may be said that the Jordan sweeps to the
Dead Sea through unhealthy jungle relieved only by
poisonous soil.

The river itself is from 90 to 100 feet broad, a rapid,
muddy water with a zigzag current. The depth varies
from 3 feet at some fords1 to as much as 10 or 12. In
the sixty-five miles the descent is 610 feet, or an average

Th . of 9 feet a mile—not a great fall, for the Spey,
and the Dee from Balmoral to Aberdeen both
average about 14 feet a mile. But near the Lake of
Galilee the fall is over 40 feet a mile,2 and this impetus
given to a large volume of water, down a channel in which
it cannot sprawl, and few rocks retard, induces a great
rapidity of current. This has given the river its name:
Jordan means the Down-comer. The swiftness is rendered
more dangerous by the muddy bed and curious zigzag
current which will easily sweep a man from the side into
the centre of the stream. In April, as we have seen, the
waters rise to the wider bed, but for the most part of the
year they keep to the channel of 90 feet. Here, with in-
frequent interruptions of shingle, mostly silent and black
in spite of its speed, but now and then breaking into praise
and whitening into foam, Jordan scours along, muddy

1 M. Le Strange ciossed after heavy rain at a ford near Beisan, where the
water ‘scarcely reached the bellies of the horses.’ A Ride through Ajlun,
etc., appended to Schumacher’s Across the Jordan.

a Conder, T. W. 215.The Jordan Valley

487

between banks of mud, careless of beauty, careless of life,
intent only upon its own work, which for ages by the
decree of the Almighty has been that of separation.

Most rivers, in valleys so wide and well watered, mean
the presence of great cities, or at least of much cultivation.
But the valley of the Jordan never seems

Fertility and

to have been a populous place.1 Some towns population of

the valley.

were built in it, and gardens were numerous.

Jericho, we have seen,2 was a very flourishing region,
especially in the hands of the Romans who knew how to
irrigate. There seems to have been a continuous forest of
palms all the way hence to Phasaelis.3 Farther up the
valley at Kurawa, there are fertile fields, and the richness
of the country round Bethshan is evident.4 The whole of
this side of the valley was famed, throughout the ancient
world, for its corn, dates, balsam,5 flax and other products.6
The early Christian pilgrims also lavish praise: the Arab
geographers of the eighth to the twelfth centuries imply
that there is still fertility in the Ghor. They speak
especially of the sugar of Bethshan and Kurawa ; and
the Crusaders found sugar growing in Jericho.7 On the
eastern side of the valley there was the large town of

1	Cf. Pliny, H.Ar. v. 15 : ‘accolis invitum se praebet.’

2	Ch. xiii. p. 266.	3 See p. 354.	4 Josephus.

5	Cf. Le Strange, op. cil. 270.

6	Polybius, v. 70, says that the district between Bethshan and the Lake

of Galilee could support an army, and there we know Vespasian settled
his Legions. On the balsam, Diodorus Siculus ii. 48. 9, xix. 98. 4.

Dioscorides i. 18. On the dates and general fertility of Jericho, Archelais
and Phasaelis, Pliny, H.N. v. 15 (14), Strabo xvi. ii. 41. For the linen of
Bethshan, etc., the anonymous Totius Orbis Descriptio in the Geogr. Gr.
minores, Ed. Muller, ii. 513 ff.

7	Cf. Le Strange’s Pal. under Moslem, 53. Rey, Les Colon. Franques,
p. 386. The name ‘sugar-mills’ still attaches to some ruins at Jericho.488 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Livias or Julias opposite Jericho,1 immediately north of
that some smaller towns, with the city of Adam perhaps
at the present Tell Damieh and Succoth at Tell Der'ala,
but after these, till the Yarmuk is reached, nothing except
some nameless villages,—unless Pella, which lay on the first
terraces above the Valley, be reckoned to the latter. The
great number of mounds, some of which have been found
to consist of sun-dried bricks,2 are probably the remains
not of cities but of old brick-fields. The clay of the Jordan
Valley was good for moulding, and Solomon placed in it
his brass foundries for the building of the Temple.3 But,
from this absence of cities on the east of the Jordan, it
must not be supposed that the land is not cultivable. Be-
tween the Yarmuk and Pella, sufficient streams break from
Gilead to irrigate the whole region, the remains of ancient
aqueducts are visible, and even, without elaborate irrigation,
the few small villages reap to-day good harvests of grain.4
All up the east of the river, you come across patches of
cultivation, the property of various Bedawee tribes on the

1	On the site of Beth-haram or Beth-haran (Josh. xiii. 27 ; Num. xxxii. 36)
the /9Tjda.p&n<p8a of Josephus (ii. Wars, iv. 2) where Herod had a palace;
(ir)dpdfi<pdi, according to Euseb. but Jerome spells Betharam (Onomasticon).
He says it was called Livias by Herod, i.e. Antipas, in honour of the wife of
Augustus, but Josephus states that its name was Julias (xviii. Antt. ii. 1 ; ii.
Wars, ix. 1). Livias was the older name, as the Emperor’s wife was re-
ceived into the gens Julia only by his testament (see Schtirer, Hist. II. i. 142).
Placidus, a lieutenant of Vespasian, held it in 68 f. (iv. Wars, vii. 6; viii. 2).
Theodosius, A. D. 530, De Situ Terrae Sanctae, 65 (P.P. 7. p. 14) describes it
as twelve miles from Jericho near warm springs. He also calls it Livias. It
is the present Tell er-Rameh.

2	By Sir Charles Warren. See Conder, T. W. 220,221.

3	This was, of course, in the west of Jordan at Zarthan, I Kings vii. 46.
|m¥ probably the Zarthan of Josh. iii. 16, beside the city of Adam.

4	We passed over this district in 1891, and were surprised at the many signs
of cultivation, the great piles of corn in the few villages, and the old aque-
ducts ; cf. Pella^ 18, 19.The Jordan Valley

489

highlands to the east.1 The dews are as heavy as in other
parts of the land : the heat is tropical. The ‘ Arabah, then,
in spite of its name, was once very largely cultivated, and
by simple methods of irrigation, drawn from the affluents
of the Jordan, might again become a rich and fruitful
land.2 The opening of the railway to Bethshan may
be the beginning of another era, like that in which the
fame of the fruits of the Jordan went out over the world.3
Under a good Government dates, rice, sugar, flax, cotton
and many more commodities might be grown in great
abundance.

Why, then, have towns always been so few in the
valley ? and why has it so much deserved the name of
wilderness? The reasons are three. From The great
early spring to late autumn the heat is intoler- heat>
able, and parches all vegetation not constantly watered.
At Pella and opposite Jericho we found the temperature
in July at 104°; it has been known to rise in August to
1180.4 The Arabs of the Ghor, the Ghawarineh, are a
sickly and degenerate race. It is not to be wondered at,
that the Israelites who possessed the hills on either side
should prefer to build their cities there, descending to the
valley only for the purposes of sowing and reaping their
harvests. This is what many Samarian villages now do,5 as
well as the Bedouin of Moab and the peasants of Gilead.

1	For the northern end, see Schumacher, The /auldn, p. 148. The ‘Advvan
cultivate, or have cultivated for them, some parts of the southern valley. When
we visited their main camp near Heshbon, ‘Ali Diab, their chief, with a
number of the men were absent securing their grain in the Jordan Valley.

2	Cf. Le Strange, op. cit. 270.

3	The present Sultan of Turkey has bought, for his private estate, a very
large part of the valley. We met his servants in several parts of it.

4	Conder, T,JV.

5	Cf. Robinson, L.R. So we found with the ‘Adwan Bedouin.490 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Again, in ancient times the valley was infested with wild
beasts. The extirpation of these formed one of the most
The wild serious difficulties in Israel’s conquest of the
beasts- country.1 But their covert and stronghold was
the jungle of the Jordan ; driven from the rest of the
land they were secure here, and bred so fast that, as soon
as any of the neighbouring provinces was deprived of its
population, they quickly overran it.2 Of these, lions are
the most often mentioned in the Old Testament.3 There
are no lions to-day,—the last of them was seen eight
hundred years ago,4—but wild boars abound, and there
are leopards and a kind of wolf.5

A still more serious hindrance to the settlement of
population in the Jordan Valley was the frequency with
which it was overrun by the Arabs. There
were no towns on the level of Esdraelon ; there
were none in the ‘Arabah, and in both cases for the same
reason, that no strong site existed in either of these
channels capable of resisting the desert swarms which
poured through them. Even the Herods did not attempt
to fortify Archelais or Phasaelis, which were only villages ;
and neither Jericho nor Bethshan ever successfully sus-
tained a siege.

We must, therefore, seek for the role of this valley in
history, in another direction than that along which its
possible fertility points us. We find it in two functions:
(i) The Jordan was a border and barrier. We have seen

The Arabs.

1 Deut. vii. 22; xxxii. 24; Lev. xxvi. 6, 22; cf. Gen. xxxi. 39, that

which was tom of beasts', Exod. xxii. 31; Lev. vii. 24; xvii. 15; xxii. 8;
Amos v. 19 ; Hosea ii. 18 ; xiii. 7 f. ; Isa. xi. 6 f., etc.

- 2 Kings xvii. 25.	3 Ibid.; Jer. xlix. 19.

4 Many early pilgrims speak of them ; the last was the Abbot Daniel,

1100.	6 Conder saw a wolf, T. W.The Jordan Valley

491

how the river itself tells us this by the depth of its
valley, its unuseful, unlovely course, its muddy banks
and their rank jungle. And so we find it appreciated in
literature. With few exceptions the references to Jordan
in the Old Testament are geographical and

.	*■	Jordan in the

prosaic ; the Psalmist hears in it no music ; Old Testa-
the prophet speaks only of its rankness and
danger ; it excites the ridicule of those who know its
sister Syrian rivers ;1 the exiles by Babel’s streams think
not upon Jordan’s rush of water but upon the arid
Jerusalem ; and when a symbol is needed of the water of
life the Psalmist ignores his country’s only river, and
floods for his purpose the dry bed of the Kedron.2 Jordan
was only a boundary, a line to traverse, and, in nearly all
of the texts in which the name occurs, it is governed by a
preposition, unto, over, across.3

It is difficult to estimate the military value of such a
frontier. Like other border rivers the Jordan has been
often and easily crossed, but, unlike them, there As a miiitary
do not appear to have been—below the Lake frontier-
of Galilee at least—any serious attempts to defend it.
In the time of the Judges the fords were watched to
prevent the escape of fugitives,4 and once the Maccabees
had a battle on the river.5 But, in the greatest invasion
of all, Israel crossed unopposed, and in her turn offered no

1	2 Kings iv.

2	There is a river whose streams do glad the city of our God, Ps. xlvi.

3	Jordan as a border, Gen. xxxii. io; Deut. iii. 20; xxvii. 4 ; Josh. i. 2;
Num. xxxiv. 10-12. It is Ezekiel’s border, xlvii. 18.

4	Judges vii. 24, by Ephraim against Midian ; xii. 5, by Gilead against
Ephraim.

5	Circa 160; 1 Mace. ix. 32-49. The tactics are not clear. The fight
seems to have been on the west bank, and the only use of the river was that
made by the Jewish troops in swimming it so as to escape from the Syrians.492 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

opposition on Jordan either to Syrians, who came over
just below the lake, or to Arabs or Moabites farther south.
David did not seek to check Absalom’s crossing, nor the
Byzantines that of the Arabs, nor the Crusaders that of
Saladin, nor Napoleon that of the Turks.1 Nor was the
Arab drift into Western Palestine ever checked by the
river, but only by a settled government to the east of
it. In short, at no period whatsoever has the eastern
defence of the land been laid down along Jordan ; nor
has the river been always a boundary between different
states. Northern Israel lay on both sides of it, and in
later days Perea was counted with Judaea. Is then the
frontier influence of Jordan entirely a reflection of the
spiritual symbolism to which subsequent events exalted
the river? This can hardly be said to be so in face of the
following facts. Moses dreaded the separation that Jordan
would cause between the tribes left to the east of it and
those who crossed.2 To early Israel the crossing of Jordan
was as great a crisis as the crossing of the Red Sea.3
When David was made King in Hebron, it was Eastern
Palestine which Abner chose for the rallying of Israel
round Saul’s house,4 and David himself fled there when
Absalom raised Judah against him.5 There are a hundred
other passages in the Old Testament, taken from the
everyday speech of the people, which prove how separating
an influence they felt in that deep gulf with its super-

1	That is below the Lake of Galilee. On the north, where the Turks had
crossed by the Jisr Benat Jakob and besieged Safed, Murat raised the siege
and drove them across the river again, and on the south all the fighting was
done west of Jordan, at the heights of Lubieh and then on Esdraelon. The
Turkish army, however, was cut off from Damascus after it crossed Jordan,
and found a new base at Nablus.

2 Num. xxxii. 6 ff.	3 Ps. cxiv. 3, etc.

4 2 Sam. ii. 8 ff.	5 Id. xv., xvi.The Jordan Valley

493

heated airs, its jungle and its rapid river.1 And we have
but to compare the Jordan with another river which
flows in a line with itself, the Orontes, to see that, from
whatever reason, the former was a real, effective frontier
between the nomad and the agriculturist, between east
and west, to a degree never reached by the latter. Perhaps
this effectiveness did not consist so much in shutting out
invaders from the East as in giving to such of them as
drifted over the river a visible and impressive reason why
they should not return. All down Israel’s history it is
certain that the people knew themselves to be cut off
from the East, that their land felt under them no more a
part of Arabia, and that they themselves trod it with the
consciousness of another and a higher destiny than that
of the Arab tribes from whom they finally broke away
when they passed over Jordan. In this moral effect upon
the national consciousness the Jordan and its strange
valley exerted an influence, beside which mere military
strength, if it had been present, would have been quite
insignificant.

(2) Jordan has not only been associated with the figures
of two of Israel’s greatest prophets—Elijah and John the
Baptist—but with the bestowal, at their hands, of the
Spirit upon their successors.

We are not to be surprised that as his end approached
Elijah should feel himself driven towards

,	,	,	Elijah and

that border, across which he had first burst Elisha on

so mysteriously upon Israel,2 and to which he Jordai1,

had withdrawn while waiting for his word to accomplish

1	The frequency of the phrase across Jordan, and such names as the
Mountains of the ‘Abarim, i.e. Those on the other side.

2	He was from Thisbe, undiscovered, in Gilead. In 1 Kings xvii. 1 read
with the LXX. and Hebrew text, Elijahtl the Tishbitefrom Tishbe of Gilead.494 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

itself.1 Stage by stage he came down from the high centre
of the land to its lowest, lonely, crumbling shelves.2 Tarry
here, I pray thee, for the Lord hath sent me to Beth-el ... to
Jericho ... to Jordan. But at each stage Elisha said,
As the Lord liveth, and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave
thee; and when the little communities of prophets came
out and said, Knowest thou that the Lord will take away thy
master from thy head to-day ? he answered, / also know it,
hold ye your peace. So these two, leaving the sons of the
prophets behind, passed down the falling land as the great
planets pass to their setting through the groups of lesser
stars. The mountains of The-Other-Side filled the view
ahead of them, and in these mountains lay the sepulchre
of Moses. He, who in his helplessness had already fled
for new inspiration to Horeb, could not fail to wonder
whether God was to lay him to rest beside his forerunner
on Nebo. In front there was no promised land visible—
nothing but that high sky-line eastward with the empty
heaven above it. Behind there was no nation waiting to
press into the future—nothing but that single follower
who persisted in following to the end. And so, the story
tells us, the end came. The river that had drawn back at
a nation’s feet, parted at the stroke of one man, and as he
suddenly passed away to the God from whom he had
suddenly come, it was one man whom he acknowledged
as his heir, and to whom he left his spirit. Realise these

1	i Kings xvii. 3, Turn thee eastward and hide thyself by the brook Kerith,
which is on face of Jordan. This last phrase, which in conformity with
Hebrew terms of orientation, we must translate east of Joi'dan, excludes the
Wady Kelt behind Jericho, and KSrith must be sought for in Gilead, where,
however, the name has not yet been discovered.

2	2 Kings ii. The Gilgal is not that beside Jericho, but that near the high
road between Bethel and Shechem, the present Jiljilia, 2441 feet above the
sea and over 3700 above Jordan.The Jordan Valley

495

two lonely figures standing in that unpeopled wilderness,
the state invisible, the Church left behind in impotent
gaze and wonder, and nothing passing between these two
men except from the one the tribute to personal worth,
and from the other the influence of personal spirit and
force—realise all this on the lonely bank of Jordan, and
you understand the beginnings of prophecy—the new dis-
pensation in which the instrument of the Most High was to
be not the State and its laws, not the army and its victories,
not even the Church and her fellowship, but the spirit of the
individual man. Not in vain does the story tell us that it
was with his mantle, symbol above all things of the Prophet,
that Elijah smote the waters, and that Elisha smote them
the second time on his return to his ministry. Jordan,
that had owned the People of God, owns now the Prophet.

Elisha is represented as the first in Israel to employ the
river for sacramental purposes. He said unto Naaman
the leper, Go and wash in Jordan seven times, and thy flesh
shall come again to thee, and thou shalt be clean. We do
not again read of Jordan being thus used.

(3) It must have been these two events which determined
John the Baptist’s choice of the theatre of his ministry.
He found here both of his requisites, solitude john the Bap.
and much water. He found also those vivid tlst 111 Jordan-
figures of his preaching—the slimy shingle, of which he said,
God is able to raise up of these stones children to A braham ;
the trees with the axe laid to their roots, for the Jordan
jungle was a haunt of woodcutters;1 and, on the higher
stretches of the valley, the fires among the dry scrub
chasing before them the scorpions and vipers.2 But chiefly

1	Cf. 2 Kings vi. 1 ff.

2	Cf. on some of these and others, Stanley, Sin. and Pal.496 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

must it have been the memories of Elijah and Elisha
which came upon John and the crowds that listened to
him. Israel’s only river had by these prophets been
consecrated to the two acts most symbolic of religion—
the washing by water and the gift of the Spirit And
now where Elisha bade Naaman bathe his leprosy away,
John called on Israel to wash and be clean : where Elijah
bequeathed his spirit, ere he was lifted from earth, John,
too, towards the close of his ministry, was to meet and
own his successor. But it was no Elisha who came to
take his sign from this second Elijah. There cometh He
that is mightier than I after me, the latchet of whose shoes
I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose. I indeed have
baptized you with zvater, but He shall baptize you with the
Holy Ghost. ... And fesus was baptized of John in Joi'dan,
and straightway coming up out of the water he saw the
heavens rending, and the Spirit, like a dove, descending upon
Him ; and there came a voice from heaven, Thou art My
beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased?

And so what was never a great Jewish river has become
a very great Christian one.

1 The place of our Saviour’s baptism is quite uncertain. The traditional
site is at the Makhadet Hajle. The Bethabara, where the Baptist is said
by some MSS. of the Gospel of John (i. 28) to have been baptizing about the
time that Jesus came to him, is placed by Conder at the ford ‘Abarah, just
north of Beisan (T. IV. 230). But it must be kept in mind that a name like
that, meaning ferry, or crossing, or ford (see p. 337), probably occurred
more than once down the river. The other, and more authentic reading,
Bethany, is offered by Conder as a proof of the nearness of the place of baptism
to Bashan. There is, however, no argument, only a suggestion. On the
other hand, the proofs which the author of Supernatural Religion bases on the
word Bethany against the Evangelist’s knowledge of Palestine only reveal
his own ignorance both of the possibilities of the country in which many
Bethanys may easily have lain, and of the rest of the Gospel, the writer
of which expressly states that he knew the other Bethany near Jerusalem
(xi. 18).CHAPTER XXIII

THE DEAD SEAFor this Chapter consult Maps I., Ill and IV,THE DEAD SEA

T)ERHAPS there is no region of our earth where
J- Nature and History have more cruelly conspired,
where so tragic a drama has obtained so awful a theatre.
In many other parts of the world the effect of historical
catastrophes has been heightened by their occurrence
amid scenes of beauty and peace. It is otherwise here.
Nature, when she has not herself been, by some volcanic
convulsion, the executioner of God’s judgments, has added
every aggravation of horror to the cruelty of the human
avenger or the exhaustion of the doomed. The history of
the Dead Sea opens with Sodom and Gomorrah, and may
be said to close with the Massacre of Masada.

The previous chapter has described the formation of the
Jordan Valley, by the enclosure of a bit of the ocean-bed,
between two great folds of the earth’s surface, TheDeadSea
and by a subsequent depression to the present valley*
great depth below the level of the sea. Of this extra-
ordinary Rift or Sink, as it might fitly be called, the Dead
Sea occupies the fifty-three deepest miles, with an average
breadth of nine to ten. The surface is 1290 feet below
the level of the Mediterranean, but the bottom is as deep
again, soundings having been taken to 1300 feet. This is
at the north-east corner, under the hills of Moab, and
not far from the entrance of the Jordan; thence the bed
shelves rapidly upwards, till the whole of the south end

400500 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

of the sea is only from 8 to 14 feet in depth.1 These
figures, however, vary from year to year, and after a very
rainy season the sea will be even as much as 15 feet deeper,
and at the southern end more than a mile longer.2

The Dead Sea receives, besides the Jordan, four or five
smaller streams, but has no issue or relief for its waters,
The saltness except through evaporation. This is raised
of the Sea. to enormous proportions by the fervent heat
which prevails in the sunken valley during the greater
part of the year. The extracted moisture usually forms
a haze impenetrable to the eye for more than a few miles,
but sometimes vast columns of mist rear themselves from
the sea, heavy clouds are formed above, and thunder-
storms, the more violent for their narrow confines, rage,
as the torn coasts testify, with lightning and floods of
rain. To the everlasting evaporation is due the bitter-
ness of the sea. All rivers contain some salts, and
all lakes without issue to the ocean become, in conse-
quence, more or less briny. But the streams which feed
the Dead Sea are unusually saline; they flow through
nitrous soil, and they are fed by sulphurous springs.
Chemicals, too, have been found in the water of the
sea, which are not traceable in its tributaries, and pro-
bably are introduced by hot springs in the sea bottom.3
Along the shores are deposits of sulphur and petroleum

1	The western side is, as a rule, much shallower than the eastern. A few
years ago the south end was fordable even as far north as the Lisan (Burck-
hardt, Travels', Robinson, B.R. ii.). This and the submergence of an old
jetty at the north end prove that for a long time the volume of the sea has been
increasing. (See p. 471.)

2	Robinson, B.R. ii. 672, says that after heavy rain the marshes at the south
end of the Dead Sea are covered by water to the extent of two or three miles.

8 E.g:, Bromine. Burckhardt was told that at the former ford across the
sea the bottom waters felt warm to the feet.The Dead Sea

501

springs. The surrounding strata are rich in bituminous
matter, and after earthquakes lumps of bitumen are so
often found floating on the water as to justify its ancient
name of Asphaltitis.1 At the south-east end a ridge of
rock-salt, 300 feet high, runs for five miles, elsewhere there
are deep saline deposits, and the bed of the sea appears
to be covered with salt crystals.2 To all these solid
ingredients, then, precipitated and concentrated by the
constant evaporation, the Dead Sea owes its extreme
bitterness and buoyancy. While the water of the ocean
contains from 4 to 6 per cent, of solids in solution, the
Dead Sea holds from 24 to 26 per cent., or five times as
much.3 The water is very nauseous to the taste and oily
to the touch, leaving on the skin, when it dries, a thick
crust of salt. But it is very brilliant. Seen from far
away no lake on earth looks more blue and beautiful.
Swim out upon it, and at a depth of 20 feet you can

1	Bitumen is petroleum hardened by evaporation and oxidation. Dawson,
Mod. Science in Bible Lands, 487 f. The bituminous limestone, which burns
like bright coal (cf. Burckhardt, Syria, 394), is the so-called Dead-Sea stone
from which articles are made and offered for sale in Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
The floating lumps probably are from petroleum springs in the sea-bed.
These springs were evidently more common in ancient times than now. Gen.
xiv. 10 says the Vale of Siddim was 7veils, wells, i.e. full of wells, of bitumen,

IDn DV1KZ1 nnjSIl. The Arabs still call the bitumen hommar,

Burckhardt, Syria, 394; Strabo xvi. 2. 42 ; Diod. Sic. ii. 48 ; xix. 98;
Josephus (iv. Wars, viii. 4) and Pliny (H.Nv. 16) describe the sea as eject-
ing bitumen or asphalt. See also the following modern travellers: Burck-
hardt, Syria, 394 ; Robinson, B.R. ii. 228-230. In the earthquakes of 1834
and 1837 large masses of bitumen were cast ashore; Lynch, Narrative, 303 ;
etc., etc.

2	The salt ridge is the Jebel, or Hashrn, Usdum, see Robinson, B.R. ii.
206 ff. 481. The Arabs take salt from this and from the Lisan on the other
side. All dredging brings up crystals of salts.

3	Hull (work cited below) gives for the Atlantic 6 lbs. of salt in 100 of water,
for the Dead Sea, 24'57. Cf. the sets of analyses in Robinson, B.R. ii. 224, by
Dr. Marcet, Gay-Lussac, etc., and by Hull, P.E.F. Survey Mem. Geol. p. 121.502 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

count the pebbles through the transparent waters. The
buoyancy of the Dead Sea is well known; it is difficult to
sink the limbs deep enough for swimming; if you throw
a stick on the surface, it seems to rest there as on a mirror,
so little of it actually penetrates the water. The surface
is generally smooth, the heavy water rises not easily;
but when in storm it does rise, the waves are immensely
powerful. Lieutenant Lynch describes them beating on
the bow of his boat like the blows of a sledge-hammer.1
No fish can exist in the waters, nor is it proved that any
low forms of life have been discovered.2

These bitter and imprisoned waters, that are yet so
blue and brilliant, chafe a low beach of gravel, varied by
The marl or salted marsh. Twice on the western

sea-beach. sjje	mountain cliffs come down to the

water’s edge, and on the eastern coast there is a curious
peninsula called El-Lis&n, or The Tongue, though the
shape is more that of a spurred boot. This is formed of
steep banks of marl, from forty to sixty feet high,3 that

1	On the water of the Dead Sea, seeP.E.F. Geolog. Memoir by Hull, pt. v.
cli. i.; Dawson, Mod. Science in Bible Lands, 472 ff.; Lartet, Le Mer
Morte; Lynch, Narrative.

2	On my first visit I found on the north shore some fish swimming in a
small pool that was separated from the sea only by a bar of gravel two feet
wide, and was almost indistinguishable in taste. Yet when they were put
into the sea they gasped a few times and turned over dead. Galen, deSimpl.
Med. iv. c. 19 (quoted by Reland): (palverai Iv eKeivtp t£ OSclti nr/Te foov
lyytyi>6/j.ev6v ti, fir/Te cpvrov. The story that birds cannot fly over the sea
(‘ neque pisces aut suetas aquis volucres patitur;’ Tacitus, Hist. v. 6), is, of
course, legendary. Robinson remarks that the absence of water-fowl is due to
the absence of fish, B. R. 226. The multitude of shells are not land-shells, and
cannot be explained as having all come down the Jordan and other streams.
Perhaps they date from the time that the sea was a fresh-water lake. See p. 470.

3	Lynch, Narrative, p. 297 : ‘ A bold, broad promontory, from 40 to 60
feet high, ... a broad margin of sand at its foot, incrusted with salt and
bitumen, the perpendicular face extending all round, and presenting the
coarse and chalky appearance of recent carbonate of lime. ’The Dead Sea

503

shine over the blue waters like the long white walls of an
iceberg. Everywhere else is the gravel, as clean and fair
in appearance as the waters which lave it. But the gravel
is crowned with an almost constant hedge of driftwood,
every particle of which is stripped of bark and bleached,
while much of it glitters with salt. You could not imagine
a more proper crown for Death. With this the brilliant
illusion of the Dead Sea fades, and everywhere beyond, to
the far heights of the surrounding hills, violence and deso-
lation reign supreme. If the coast is flat you have salt-
pans, or a briny swamp; if terraced, there is a yellow,
scurfy stretch of soil, with a few thorn-bushes and suc-
culent weeds. Ancient beaches of the sea are visible all
round it, steep banks from five to fifty feet of stained and
greasy marl, very friable, with heaps of rubbish at their
feet, and crowned by nothing but their own bare, crumbling
brows. Some hold that these gave the region its ancient
name, the Vale of Siddim j1 and in truth, it is they which
chiefly haunt one’s memory of the Dead Sea. Last crumb-
ling shelves of the upper world, there are not in nature
more weird symbols of forsakenness and desolation.

Behind these terraces of marl the mountains rise preci-
pitous and barren on either coast. To the east the long
range of Moab, at a height of 2500 to 3000 The surround-
feet above the shore, is broken only by the ing hllls-
great valley of the Arnon. The tawny limestone cliffs,

1 Conder, T. IV, p. 208, says the local name for these terraces is ‘sidd.’
From the meaning of the root TlB^to level, DV:lb> has been taken in the

sense of level fields (Aq. Onk, etc.). The LXX. confesses ignorance by
translating tpapayl; ij aAv/07). The Arabic in several forms means to level,
but also to obstruct. One derived noun, ‘sudd,’pi. ‘sidadat,’signifies a
‘hollow containing rocks, stones, and stagnant rain-water’ (Freytag), and
Gesenius takes the Hebrew to be something equivalent.504 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

capped with softer chalk, and streaked with marl, but
blotted here and there by an outcrop of basalt or black
limestone, stand near enough to the coast to be reflected
in the still water, and at sunset, losing their spots, glow
one uniform amethyst above the exceeding blue. In all
Judaea there is no view .like this one, as you see it across
the wilderness from the Mount of Olives. On the western
coast the hills touch the water at two points, but elsewhere
leave between themselves and the sea the shore already
described, sometimes a hundred yards in breadth, some-
times a mile and a half. From behind the highest terrace
of marl the hills themselves rise precipitously in cliffs
from 2000 to 2500 feet. No such valley cuts them as
Arnon cuts the opposite range, but every three or four
miles they are pierced by a narrow gorge, which continues
in a broad gully through the marl terraces to the sea.
These gorges are barren, except in their rocky beds, the
only ways of passage up them, where a few trees live on
the water that trickles out of sight beneath the grey
shingle. Otherwise, except at Engedi, the western range
is bare, unbroken, menacing; and there are few places in
the world where the sun beats with so fierce a heat.1
Beyond this rocky barrier stretches Jeshimon, or Devas-
tation, the wilderness of Judaea, which we have already
traversed.2

In this awful hollow, this bit of the infernal regions
come up to the surface, this hell with the sun shining into
History on the lt:> primitive man laid the scene of God’s most
Dead Sea. terrible judgment on human sin. The glare of
Sodom and Gomorrah is flung down the whole length of
Scripture history. It is the popular and standard judg-
1 For Engedi, see pp. 269 ff.	2 See pp. 312 ff.The Dead Sea

505

ment of sin. The story is told in Genesis; it is applied
in Deuteronomy, by Amos, by Isaiah, by Jeremiah, by
Zephaniah, in Lamentations, and by Ezekiel.1 Our Lord
Himself employs it more than once as the figure of the
judgment He threatens upon cities where the word is
preached in vain, and there we feel the flame scorch our
own cheeks.2 Paul, Peter, Jude, all make mention of it.3
In the Apocalypse the great city of sin is spiritually called
Sodom.4

The cities were five ; Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim,
and Bela or Zoar.5 They lay on the floor of the Jordan
Valley, after the name of which they were called The Cities of
Cities of the Kikkar, or Circled But exactly the Plain-
where, we cannot tell. Though the glare of this catastrophe
bums still, the ruins it left have entirely disappeared, and
there remains in the valley almost no authentic trace of
the names it has torn and scattered to infamy across the
world. There is a much-debated but insoluble question
whether the narratives in Genesis intend to place the cities

1	Gen. xix. ; Deut. xxix. 23, cf. xxxii. 32 ; Amos iv. 11 ;	Isaiah	i.	9	f.,	iii.

9, cf. xiii. 19 ; Jer. xxiii. 14, xlix. 18, 1. 40 ; Zech. ii. 9 ; Lam.	iv.	6	;	Ezek.

xvi. 46, 53, xlviii. 49, 55.

2	Matt. x. 15, x. 24 ; Mark vi. 11 ; Luke xi. 12, xvii. 29.

3	Rom. ix. 29, quoting Isa. i. 9 ; 2 Peter ii. 6 ; Jude 7.

4	Rev. xi. 8.

5	Gen. xiv. 2. Sodom = DHD, LXX. 265ojiia, in the Arab tradition

Gomorra = rnDy, Tifiojipa,	Admah = nO*JK, ’ASafia,

Zeboim = D^3¥, or	or D'KIIV,	, or

Zoar = "l'Vy or “1 J/1¥, Z777dip, 2byop, \jyfa.

6	In our English version Cities of the Plain, but "133 = circle. “133H is
used alone in Gen. xiii. 12, xix. 17, 29; Deut. xxxiv. ; 2 Sam. xviii. 23 ; but
the fuller phrase, pTH “133, the Circle of Jordan, in Gen. xiii. 10, 1 Kings
vii. 46, cf. Matt. iii. 5.506 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

to the north or to the south of the Dead Sea. For the
northern site there are these arguments—that Abraham
and Lot looked upon the cities from near Bethel,1 that
the name Circle of Jordan is not applicable to the south
end of the Dead Sea, that the presence of five cities there
is impossible,2 that the expedition of the Four Kings, as
it swept north from Kadesh-Barnea, attacked Hazezon
Tamar, which is probably Engedi, before it reached the
Vale of Siddim and encountered the King of Sodom and
his allies ;8 that the name Gomorrah perhaps exists in
Tubk ‘Amriyeh, near ‘Ain el Feshkah;4 and that the
name of Zoar has been recovered in Tell Shaghur.5

But, on the other hand, at the south end of the
Dead Sea there lay throughout Roman and Mediaeval
times a city called Zoara by the Greeks and Zughar by
the Arabs, which was identified by all with the Zoar of
Lot.6 Jebel Usdum is the ‘uncontested representative of

1 Gen. x. cf. v. 3 with v. 10.	2 Conder, P.E.F.Q., 1886, 139.

Suggested by Conder, but previously by De Saulcy.

4 Gen. xiv. 7, 8. But see below.

6	pointed out by Rev. W. F. Birch, and adopted by Conder,

Heth and Moab, 154. Merrill, East of Jordan, 235, prefers the site Ektanu,
Ilis argument that the Zoar of the Arab geographers lay to the north of the
Dead Sea is met by Le Strange, Pal. under Moslems, 286.

0 Zwapa and Zowp in Josephus, iv. Wars, viii. 4: ‘The Sea of Asphalt
reaches to Zoar in Arabia ; ’ cf. i. A nit. xi. 4, xiv. Antt. i. 4. Zuapd in the
Onomasticon, art. /9aXa : ‘ Still inhabited, lying on the Dead Sea, and holding
a garrison of soldiers ; the balsam and palm glow by it, proofs of its ancient
fertility.’ Zughar, spelt also Sughar and Sukar, is mentioned by a number of
Arab geographers, whose statements are collected by Le Strange, Pal. tender
Moslems, 286 ff. According to these, it was a station on the great trade
route between the Gulf of Akabah and Jericho, one degree of latitude south
of Jericho, ‘ a city of heat near the desert,’ ‘ on the shore of the overwhelming
lake. . . . The mountains overhang the town.’ ‘Near A1 Karak, three
days’ march from Jerusalem, on the Higgas border.’ ‘The lake is called
after it;’ ‘the neighbouring people call the town Sakar, i.e. Hell; its
water is execrable ; no place equal to it in evil climate ; its people areThe Dead Sea

507

Sodom.1 Hazezon Tamar may be not En-gedi, but the
Tamar of Ezekiel, south-west of the Dead Sea.2 The
name Kikkar may surely have been extended to the
south of the Dead Sea, just as to-day the Ghor is con-
tinued for a few miles to the south of Jebel Usdum ;3
Jewish and Arab traditions fix on the south ; and, finally,
the natural conditions are more suitable there than on the
north to the descriptions of the region both before and
after the catastrophe, for there is still sufficient water
and verdure on the eastern side of the Ghor to suggest a
garden of the Lordf while the shallow bay and long

black-skinned and thick-set; its waters are hot, even as though the place
stood over hell-fire. Its commercial prosperity is, like Buzrah, on a small
scale, and its trade very lucrative ;5 ‘ much arable land there ; ’ ‘ the trade
of the place is considerable, and its markets greatly frequented.’ The
Arab writers identify it with Lot’s Zoar. Crusaders knew the place as
Segor, but themselves called it Palmer (Will, of Tyre, xxii. 30). M.
Clermont Ganneau, P.E.F.Q., 1886, 20, thinks the site maybe discovered
not far from the Tawahin es Soukhar, on the Ghor es Safieh ; and here
Major Kitchener, P.E.F.Q., 1884, 216, with plan, found remains of buildings
of great antiquity, but none like temples, with the name Khurbet Labrush.

1	The phrase is Clermont Ganneau’s, P.E.F.Q., 1886, 20. Usdum,

from Sodom, by that common change which has turned Resef

into Arsuf, etc. De Saulcy also reports ruins with the name Khurbet
Usdum. But we have other proofs that the name Sodom existed here in
comparatively recent times. Galen, Bk. iv. De simplicium medicamen-
tonim facultatibus, calls certain salts ‘ salts of Sodom ’ from ‘ the mountains
surrounding the lake, which are called Sodom (2odo/xa).’ At the Council
of Nice there was present a Bishop Severus Sodomorum (Ada Cone.
Nic.) ; if this reading be correct, then we must suppose that the district
south of the Dead Sea still held the name which was there in Galen’s time,
and is still found. This is so likely, that we can dispense with the explanation
offered by Reland, p. 1020.

2	Knobel, in Gen. xiv. 7 ; cf. Ezek. xlvii. 19, xlviii. 29.

3	Robinson, B.R. ii. 490, states that the exact point of division between

El Ghor and El ‘Arabah is a line of white cliffs which crosses the valley
obliquely beyond the flat marshland to the south of the Dead Sea. From
there south to Akabah is the ‘Arabah ; but north to the Lake of Galilee,
the Ghor.	4 Gen. xiii. 10.508 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

marshes may, better than the ground at the north end of
the sea, hide the secret of the overwhelmed cities.1 2

Such is the evidence for the rival sites. We can only
wonder at the confidence with which all writers dogmatic-
ally decide in favour of one or the other.

And Jehovah rained upoti Sodom and upon Gomorrah
sulphur and fire—from Jehovah, from the heavens—and He
overturned those cities, and all the Circle, and all

The Overthrow

of Sodom and the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew
upon the ground. And Lots wife looked back as
they fled to Zoar and became a pillar of salt. And A braham
looked down upon Sodom and Gomorrah, upon all the land of
the Circle, and saiv, and, behold, the smoke of the land went
up like the smoke of a furnace?- Some have identified
these words as the description of such an eruption as that
of Vesuvius upon Pompeii.3 But there is no need to invoke
the volcano, and those are more in harmony with the nar-
rative, who judge that in this heavily bituminous soil there
took place one of those terrible explosions and conflagra-
tions, which have sometimes broken out in the similar

1	Robinson, B.R. ii. 489, describes the Ghor at the south end of the Dead
Sea as ‘ wholly unsusceptible of cultivation,’ except on the eastern side,
‘which is covered with shrubs and verdure, like the Plain of Jericho.’ The
bay is very shallow, and was fordable a few years back (on the ford, see
Robinson, B.R. ii. p. 234 f.; Lynch, Narrative, p. 304 n.). There is nothing
to prevent the theory that this end of the Dead Sea was formed much later
than the Dead Sea itself. See Robinson, B.R. ii. 604.

2	Gen. xix. 24-28.

3	Most recently, Fritz Notling, Das Todte Meer u. der Untergang von
Sodom u. Gomorra, in the Deutsches Montagsblatt, x. Jahrg. Nos. 27, 31, 33
(quoted Z.D.D.V. xi. 126), seeks for the cities in the Wady Zerka Ma'in
in Moab, and accounts for their overthrow by the eruption of a volcano.
In support of this he points to, what he himself has proved, the compara-
tively recent date of the lava streams on the east of Jordan. But towns
in the Wady Zerka Ma'in could not be called cities of the Kikkar, and the
phenomena described do not agree with a volcanic eruption.The Dead Sea

509

geology of the oil districts of North America.1 In such
soil great reservoirs of oil and gas are formed, and sud-
denly discharged by their own pressure or by earthquake.
The gas explodes, carrying high up into the air masses of
the oil which fall back in fiery rain, and are so inextinguish-
able that they will float afire on water. Sometimes brine
and saline mud are ejected, and over the site of the reser-
voirs there are tremors and subsidences. Such a pheno-
menon accounts for all the statements of the narrative.

The reality of the narrative, however, has been questioned
by many. They have argued that it is simply one of the
many legends of overturned or buried cities,

Historical

with the addition of the local phenomena of character of

the narrative.

the Dead Sea, and of a very much grander
moral than has ever been attached to any tale of the kind.
But statements of this argument have hitherto been
vitiated by three faults. They have been based upon facts
that are irrelevant, they have omitted some that are
relevant, and they have supposed that critics who maintain
the historical truth of the narrative have some subjective
or dogmatic reason for doing so. For instance, they
appeal to the ease with which legends spring up every-
where of cities sunk beneath lakes or the ocean. But this
is not relevant to our narrative, for the striking thing is
that, though the presence of the Dead Sea offers every
temptation for the adoption of such a legend, it is nowhere
in the Bible even suggested that the doomed cities are
at the bottom of the sea, but we hear of this first from

1 Robinson (B.R. ii. 606 ff., Letter to Leopold von Buch) suggested the
coincidence of volcanic and earthquake action, the stuff from the volcano
setting on fire the bitumen released by the earthquake. It is Dawson, Mod.
Science in Bible Lands, 488 ff., who gives the theory described above.510 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Josephus.1 This is surely a proof of the sobriety of the
biblical tradition. Again, the arguments against the latter
fail to deal with the fact that the phenomena it describes
have all happened elsewhere in similar geological forma-
tions, and yet are so singular that it is not probable they can
have been invented. And, thirdly, so far from its being a
dogmatic interest which alone holds some to a belief in the
narrative, the facts of the existence of the cities and of their
overthrow in the manner described are accepted both by
authorities in natural science and by critics of the Old
Testament, who have obviously no such interests to serve.
The effort to prove the story wholly legend may therefore
be said to have failed.2

1 The one verse through which this notion of submergence could be forced
on Scripture, only through a wrong interpretation, is Gen. xiv. 3, the Vale of
Sidditn, which is the Salt Sea. But, first, these words do not necessarily
identify the Vale and the Sea as coincident; and, second, the verse only gives
the Vale of Siddim as the battle-field, not as the site of the cities. Nowhere
else in Scripture is there the slightest suggestion of submergence. On the con-
trary, the site of Sodom is regarded not as sea-covered, but as salt-covered and
infertile, soil. It is interesting that, in their allusions to the catastrophe, neither
Strabo (xvi.) nor Tacitus {Hist. v. 7.) speaks of submergence. All the more
surprising is it that accurate scholars like Siegfried and Stade should twice have
stated that the cities are sunk in the Dead Sea. Handworterbuch, artt. DTD
and mOJh On Cheyne, see next note.

- In the above paragraph I have had chiefly in view a learned article by
Canon Cheyne in the New World, vol. i., 1892, pp. 236-245, which seems
to me to have all the three faults I have instanced. Canon Cheyne
dwells much on the parallel afforded by the stories of cities sunk beneath the
ocean, which, as I have shown, are relevant to this argument only for point-
ing out how free the Bible story is from such an exaggeration, even though
the Dead Sea must have suggested it from the first. Canon Cheyne also does
not mention the scientific evidence. He is so sure, however, of his argument,
that he ascribes any belief in the described facts to an uncritical orthodoxy
and purely doctrinal interests. This may be easily disproved by citing, from
among scientists, Notling, who both gives a site for the towns and a reason
for their overthrow, and, from among critics who cannot be charged with a
dogmatic bias, Knobel, who, on Gen. xix. 28, says : ‘ Dem Bericht liegt ohne
Zweifel eine Thatsache zu Grund.’ It is a pity for criticism that such totalThe Dead Sea

5”

It is in accordance with the grace of God, making that
first which was last and that last which was first, that this
awful vale of judgment, to which its inhabitants

Ezekiel's

sometimes gave the name of Hell, should be vision of the

T~)Pa d SCeL

the scene of one of the most lively and stupen-
dous hopes of prophecy. To the north of Jerusalem
begins the torrent-bed of the Kedron. It sweeps past the
Temple Mount, past what were afterwards Calvary and
Gethsemane. It leaves the Mount of Olives and Bethany
to the left, Bethlehem far to the right. It plunges down
among the bare terraces, precipices and crags of the
wilderness of Judaea—the wilderness of the Scape-goat.
So barren and blistered, so furnacelike does it become as
it drops below the level of the sea, that it takes the name
of Wady-en-Nar, or the Fire Wady. At last its dreary
course brings it to the precipices above the Dead Sea, into
which it shoots its scanty winter waters ; but all summer
it is dry. The imagination of a prophet who always
haunted the austere and weird, Ezekiel, filled the Wady of
Fire with water from under the threshold of the temple,
water that came up to the ankles, and then to the knees, and
then to the loins, and then became waters of swimming, a
torrent that could not be crossed. And the bare banks, that

rejection of any narrative should be made without exhaustive review of the
evidence, or that those who still hold to the fact in it should be described
as doing so for purely subjective reasons, when there is still so much evidence
for it as fact. For myself I do not feel that it matters anything to faith,
whether the story be historical or not. But there is much evidence for it.
The various narratives belong as follows: ch. xiii., describing Lot’s settle-
ment in Sodom, is from the Jehovist, except vv. 6, n and 12, which are
probably from the Priestly Writing; ch. xiv., the defeat of the five kings,
is from an unknown source outside the chief documents, and by some held
to be of date contemporary with its events ; and ch. xix. 1-28 is from the
Jehovist, but v. 29 from the Priestly Writing. The ghastly story, 30-38, is
probably from some other source.512 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

the sun blisters, had very many trees on the one side and on
the other. And these waters went down to the ‘Arabah,
and went into the soar waters, and the waters were to be
healed. And the Dead Sea was to swarm with fish, and it
shall come to pass, the fishers shall stand upon it from En-
gedi to En-eglaim. But in the midst of the vision there is
a curious reservation of a utilitarian kind, the fens and the
marishes thereof shall not be healed, they shall be given for salt,
—salt which under the Old Covenant the Dead Sea ever sup-
plied, for house or temple, meat or sacrifice, and still sends
up to Jerusalem by the long camel trains you see travers-
ing the coast from Usdum to En-gedi. But the vision opens
out again. And by the torrent upon the bank thereof \ on
this side and on that side, shall come up all trees for food,
whose leaf shall not fade, neither shall the fruit thereof be con-
sumed : it shall bring forth new fruit according to his months,
because their waters issued out of the Sanctuary, and the
fruit thereof shall be for food, and the leaf thereoffor bruises
and sores.1 So there is nothing,—nothing too sunken, too
useless, too doomed,—but by the grace of God it may be
redeemed, lifted and made rich with life.

Passing over several of Herod’s cruelties and his own
awful end, which happened at Jericho within the Dead
Sea region, we come to the last historic scene on these
bitter coasts—the Massacre of Masada.

Masada, or Sebbeh, as it is called to-day, lies on the
coast, five hours to the south of En-gedi. Seen from the
north it is an immense rock, half a mile long

MuSiidci

by an eighth broad, hewn out of the range
that runs down the coast, and twisted round so as to
point boldly north-east across the sea. It is isolated,

1 Ezek. xlvii. I-12.The Dead Sea

5i3

precipitous on every side and inaccessible except in two
places, where winding paths, half-goat tracks half ladders,
may be followed by men in single file.1 On the west this
stronghold falls only some 400 feet upon a promontory
that connects it with the range behind. Everywhere else
it shows, at least, 1300 feet of cliff, but seaward as much as
1700. The fortresses are very few that match this one in
natural strength. But it is only when you come to it, as
those who would attack it had to come, through the water-
less wilderness of Judaea, that you feel its awful remoteness,
its savage height, its fitness to turn whole armies of besiegers
into stony despair. Masada is the Gorgon’s head magni-
fied to a mountain. After six hours’ ride through the
falling chaos of Jeshimon,2 we found faint traces of a mili-
tary road,—our Arabs called this Karossa el Khufeiriyeh,
—only to lose them on the edge of a cliff. Leading our
horses down this cliff by a path, each turn of which was
visible only when we came to it, we struck the bed of the
Wady Safsaf, and followed it towards the great bulk
of rock which shut out the Dead Sea from our view,
and soon towered above us. This was Masada, bare,
brown, inaccessible, except for a narrow bank reared
against it at a steep angle, and in its white colour very
distinct from the rock itself. The bank rose from the
neck of land which connects the rock with the wady behind.
We climbed it on foot. Half way up we struck to the right
along the almost precipitous rock, and then turned left by
another sloping shelf, which brought us to a gateway with

1 Josephus notices these two approaches. One of them he calls the Snake.
De Saulcy says he has flattered it. ‘ C’est une escalade sans interruption.’—
Voyage autour de la Mer Morte.

- See p. 312 f.

2 K514 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

a pointed arch. A few more steps placed us on the
summit. It is a plateau almost 700 yards long, and in
breadth varies from 180 yards at the north end to 250 at
the south. The view is magnificent, and at first dazzled
our eyes to the interesting ruins at our feet. We saw the
Dead Sea in its whole length. En-gedi was clear to the
north, the Jebel Usdum clear to the south. The penin-
sula, El-Lisan, lay brilliant white on the brilliant blue of
the water. Behind it ran the long wall of Moab, and over
the top of this we discerned plainly the position of Kerak.
Only westward was the view confined, and yet it had its
own fascination, for here rise the jagged cliffs of Jeshimon,
with the uncouth valley running up through them.
Immediately below is the neck of land coming out to
Masada from this valley, the dizzy depths of the gorges
on either side, and eastward the broad flat beach of
the sea.

The ruins on Masada are the gateway already noticed,
the debris of a wall running right round the edge of the
The build- plateau, and on the latter, cisterns and tombs,
ings' the remains of a castle and of a great palace,
a chapel with the apse still standing, and curious mosaics
on the walls. The pointed arch of the gateway and the
chapel are certainly Byzantine or later. The rest of the
ruins are Herodian. It is with them that the real history
of Masada is bound up.

Jonathan Maccabeus was the first to build a fortress on
the rock.1 Herod fled to it with his bride Mariamne in
42 B.C., when the Parthians took Jerusalem ; and eight
years later he elaborately built upon it. He enclosed the
plateau by a wall seven furlongs in circumference with
1 Hence the name	= fortress.The Dead Sea

515

towers. He built a richly-furnished palace on the west,
and floored it with stones of several colours—the mosaic
still found. The top of the hill, which was of fat soil,
he reserved for cultivation ; he hewed many and great
reservoirs for rain, and laid up in caverns immense quan-
tities of wine, oil, pulse and dates. It is said that these
stores were still in good condition a century later, when
Masada, along with Machaerus and Hyrcaneum, fell into
the hands of the Sicarii—the most fanatic and delirious of
all the Jewish patriots in the war of Independence. In
70 A.D. when Jerusalem fell, a band of them, The massacre
being the last survivors of the garrison, fled of Masada-
with Eleazar to Masada. They might well have thought
themselves secure in a fortress so remote, and standing so
well furnished in the midst of so waterless a country. But
they had Rome to deal with. Now Palestine is stamped all
over with proofs of the power of the Romans, yet nowhere
are you so forced into admiration of their genius as when
you stand on that Dead Sea coast below Masada, between
their two camps, or mark the wall they built around the
rock, or the white ramp they raised against it. They laid
a road across a waterless desert, brought their siege-
engines down cliffs, and fought for months, miles away
from their water and their forage. The General was
Flavius Silva, a lieutenant of Titus. On the earthen bank
on the promontory he raised another bank of stones, and
on that a great tower plated with iron. This brought the
battering-ram on a level with the edge of the plateau, and
it breached Herod’s wall. The defenders built an inner
wall, that was but a great trough of wood packed with
earth, and the blows of the ram only made this more com-
pact. Silva set it on fire. At first the flames were blown5 16 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

on the besiegers, but, the wind changing, the fire coursed
through the whole wall. The Romans let it burn, and
retired to their camps for the night. Next morning they
planted their ladders and prepared for the assault. But
no one met them, and on all the plateau nothing moved
except the still smouldering fire. The first of the storming
party stood still on the tops of their ladders and sent across
the silence a great shout. Then two women with some
children came out of a cave, and told that when the inner
wall took fire, Eleazar gathered his men and urged them,
rather than fall into Roman hands, or let their wives and
children so fall, to kill the latter, and then to slay each
other. Moved by his words into a great fury, not one
drew back or scrupled, but, kissing them with tears, each
slew those who were dearest to him. Then by lot ten of
the men were chosen to fall upon the others, who received
their death-blows lying stretched upon their families. And
of those ten one was chosen who slew the other nine, and,
setting fire to all their property that had been gathered
together for burning, he fell upon his own sword. The two
women who now met the Romans had hidden themselves
with five children, and these were the only survivors of a
garrison of nearly one thousand.BOOK III

EASTERN PALESTINE

CHAPTER XXIV

OVER JORDAN: THE GENERAL FEATURES

517For this Chapter consult Maps I. and III.OVER JORDAN: THE GENERAL FEATURES

‘ ATT HO,’ says Dean Stanley, ‘that has ever travelled
» * in Palestine has not longed to cross the Jordan
Valley to those mysterious hills which close every east-
ward view with their long horizontal outline, their over-
shadowing heights, their deep purple shade?’ He justly
calls them ‘ the most novel feature of the Holy Land,’
‘ the elevating and solemn background of all that is poor
and mean in the scenery of Western Palestine.’ Now
only part of their impressiveness is due to their height,
enhanced as it is by the unusual depression of the Jordan
Valley below them ; they derive by far the most of their
fascination from their sustained line of elevation. As you
see this from afar, you feel in it the promise of a fresh
and spacious country behind—high, healthy areas of life,
an open and a richly furnished stage for history.

This promise is amply fulfilled when you cross Jordan
and climb the range of Eastern Palestine. The country
is about 150 miles long from Hermon on the Theeastern
north to the south end of the Dead Sea; its plateau-
breadth, from the edge of the Jordan Valley to the edge
of the desert, varies from thirty to eighty. Yet through-
out this great extent the average elevation must be
nearly 2000 feet above the level of the sea, or 2800 above
the average level of Jordan. The consequence is a

519520 -The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

temperate climate lifted above the almost tropic heats
which surround it to west and south. In winter the
snow lies for days at a time;1 even in November and
March there are frosts ;2 and the temperature falls low
enough to explain the old Arab saying that the cold has
one of its homes in the Belka‘.3 Throughout summer
there seems to be more rain, mist, and cloud than upon
the other side of Jordan,4 and the days are swept by
breezes from the west with the freshness of

Its health.	TT

the sea upon them. The Jaulan and Hauran
were called by the Romans ‘ Palestina Salutaris; ’ and
Oliphant says that ‘cool-blowing’ is an epithet Arab
poets are fond of applying to the Nukra, or southern
end of Hauran.5 6 We traversed Eastern Palestine during
twenty-two days of midsummer,0 and were therefore
able to test the climate. We had thrice dense mists,7
and several very cold evenings. Every morning about
ten a breeze sprang up from the west, and lasted till
sun-down, so that although the noon temperature in the
Jordan Valley, as often as we entered it, was at least
103°, on the table-land above we seldom had it over 900.8
Whether upon the shadeless plain of Hauran, where the

1	Seetzen (Reiscn, vol. i.) had during February very deep snow.

2	Burckhardt {Travels in Syria, 92) reports strong hoarfrosts in Novem-

ber in Hauran. Merrill (East of Jordan, 358) found ice in the heart of
Gilead on March 18th with a temperature in the air of 38°.

■' The portion of the F.astern range from Arnon to Jabbok.

J Burckhardt, id. passim. Buckingham, Travels, etc., chaps, xviii.-xxiv.,
Post, P.E.F.Q., 1888, pp. 191, 203-205.

6	Land of Gilead, 102.

e 16th June to 7th July 1891.

7	At Ghabaghib, Irbid (see p. 65), and Wady Yabis.

8	At the same time, in the gorges by which the table-land is cut the heat
was generally stifling; cf. Burckhardt’s experience in the Arnon on July 14th-
— Travels, etc., 373.Over Jordan : the General Features	5 21

ripe corn swayed like the sea before the wind,1 or upon
the ridges of Gilead, where the oak branches rustled and
their shadows swung to and fro over the cool paths,2
most of the twelve hours were almost as bracing as the
dawn, and night fell, not, as in other parts of Palestine,
to repair, but to confirm, the influences of the day.
Eastern Palestine is a land of health. This was our
first impression, as we rose to Hauran by the steppes
south of Pharpar, the wind blowing over from Hermon,
and this was our last impression, when we regretfully
struck our tents on the pastures of Moab, where the dry
herbage makes the breezes as fragrant as the heather the
winds of our own Highlands. Victory and Good Fortune
were the favourite deities of the later Pagans of this
region, but their temples might more fitly have been
dedicated to the goddess Hygeia.

But Eastern Palestine does more than fulfil its promise
of fresh air. Broad and breezy as it looks from afar, it
also looks barren, and when you come upon it

.	_	_ The waters

surprises you by its fertility. Next to its air, of Eastern

Palestine.

its waters are its most charming feature. West
of the Jordan no rivers run, and only a few perennial
streams, but here are at least four rivers—Yarmuk, ‘Arab,
Jabbok and Arnon, of which the Yarmuk, with its great
falls, is as large as Jordan.3 These rivers drain the whole
country and the desert behind. They run in deep gorges,
below the average level of the plateau, but they are fed
by numerous springs and streams, which, with the winter
snow and rains, sufficiently water the higher lands.4

1	See ch. xxix.

2	Post also speaks of ‘ the cool air of the uplands of Gilead.’—P.E.F.Q.,

1888, 200.	3 i.e. before Jordan receives Yarmuk.

4 Only on the heights of the Belka‘ the water is insufficient.522 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Luxuriant vegetation is, therefore, almost universal, and
all agriculture prosperous. In the most northerly of
the three divisions of the country, from Hermon to the
Jabbok, a large part of the surface, being of a rich

volcanic soil, is tilled for wheat, and the rest

I he fertility.

is covered by a thick herbage.1 This is
Hauran, the granary of Syria, and the hilly district to
the west of it was once thickly wooded. The middle
region, Gilead, between the Yarmuk and the Jabbok, has
its ridges covered by forests, under which you may march
for the whole day in breezy and fragrant shade;2 the
valleys hold orchards of pomegranate, apricot and olive,
there are many vineyards, on the open plains are fields of
wheat and maize,3 and the few moors are rich in fragrant
herbs.4 5 6 Gilead bore perfume and medicine for the whole
Eastern world. They who first break out of her into
history are a company of Ishmaelites with their camels
bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down
to Egypt? It became a proverb, Is there no balm in
Gilead, is there no physician there ! and again, Go up into
Gilead and take balm!* In the third division, south of
the Jabbok, the forests gradually cease, and Ammon arid

1 See chap. xxix.

■ Cf. Burckhardt, Travels, etc., 348. ‘Grateful shade of fine oak and
pistachios, with a scenery more like that of Europe than any I had yet seen
in Syria.’—Post, P.E.F.Q., 1888, p. 200. Oliphant {Land of Gilead, 160)
aptly quotes 2 Sam. xviii. 8: the wood devoured more people that day than the
sword. Of the valley in which ‘Ajlun lies he says justly that it was ‘ a view
such as one would expect to find in the Black Forest.’ On the fertility of
Gilead, cf. 129, 130.

a Like the Beka'a and the plateau above it near Salt.

4	On the botany see especially, Post, P.E.F.Q., 1888.

5	Gen. xxxvii. 25.

6	Jer. viii. 22; xlvi. 11. The substance is known to botany as the Bal-
samum Gileadense.Over Jordan : the General Features 523

Moab are mostly high, bare moors, with a few jungles of
bush. They are occasionally cultivated for wheat and
once bore the vine.

More famous than the tilth of Eastern Palestine is her
pasture. We passed through at the height of the shep-
herd’s year. From the Arabian deserts the The pastures
Bedouin were swarming to the fresh summer and herds>
herbage of these uplands. We should never have be-
lieved the amount of their flocks had we not seen, and
attempted to count them. One Sunday afternoon which
we spent at Edrei, the ‘Aneezeh tribe,1 that roams from
Euphrates to Jordan, drove their camels upon the plain
to the north of the town, till we counted nearly a thousand
feeding, and there was a multitude more behind. Next
day we passed their foes, the Beni Sahr, one of whose
camel-herds numbered four hundred, and another two
hundred. We looked south-east from the hills above
Amman, and there were hundreds more of the Sherarat
Arabs from Ma‘an. Profusion of camels shall cover thee,
camels of Midian and Ephah, all of them from Sheba shall
comer The Bedouin had also many sheep and goats.
The herds of the settled inhabitants were still more numer-
ous. In Moab the dust of the roads bears almost no marks
but those of the feet of sheep. The scenes which throng
most our memory of Eastern Palestine, are (besides the
threshing-floors of Hauran) the streams of Gilead in the
heat of the day with the cattle standing in them, or
the evenings when we sat at the door of our tent near
the village well, and would hear the shepherd’s pipe far
away, and the sheep and goats, and cows with the heavy
bells, would break over the edge of the hill and come down

1 Or a branch of it—the Oulad *Ali.	J Isa. lx. 6.524 The Historical Geography of .the Holy Land

the slope to wait their turn at the troughs. Over Jordan
we were never long out of the sound of the lowing of
cattle or of the shepherd’s pipe.

And so one understands why so large a part of the
annals of this country is taken up with the multiplying
of cattle, tribute in sheep and wool,1 and the taking
of spoil by tens of thousands of camels, and hundreds
of thousands of sheep.2 The bulls of Bashan and the
fat kine of Bashan are proverbial throughout the Old
Testament. ‘ Thou canst not,’ runs an Arab saying,

‘ find a country like the Belka‘ ’ for cattle and sheep.3
When Moses overcame Midian the spoil was reckoned at
more than half a million of sheep, 72,000 beeves, and
61,000 asses.4 When the children of Reuben and of Gad,
who had a very great multitude of cattle, saw the land of
fazer and Gilead, they asked it for themselves, for the
place was a place for cattle.5 When Reuben lingered in
his own country and would not cross Jordan to the help
of the Lord against the mighty, Deborah taunted him :—

'‘By the water-courses of Reuben great were the resolves!

Why then didst thou abide among the sheep-hurdles,

To listen to the bleating of the flocks ?

By the water-courses of Reuben there were great resolves of heart! ’6

The king of Moab is called a sheepmaster, and the
tribute he gave the king of Israel is set at 100,000 lambs,
and 100,000 rams with the wool.7 Thus flocks and pas-
tures have ever been the wealth, the charm, the temptation
of Eastern Palestine.

1 jpChron. v. 9 ; 2 Kings iii. 4.	Chron. v. 21.

3	Burckhardt, 369.

4	One cannot, of course, vouch for the truth of these numbers.

5	Num. xxxii. 1.	B Judges v. 16.	7 2 Kings iii. 4.Over Jor dan : the General Features 525

The third general feature of Eastern Palestine is its
openness to the desert. Bashan, Gilead, and Moab all
roll off, with almost no intervening barrier, Exposure to
upon the great Arabian plateau. Consequently the desert-
they have been exposed in all ages to the invasion of the
hungry nomads, some of whom swarm upon them every
year for pasture, while others have settled down into
more permanent occupation:1 living in movable camps,
but cultivating the soil. These are the Ishmaelites and
Midianites of the Old Testament ; children of the East,
who made Gilead their basis of operation against Western
Palestine. It was the sons of Ishmael whom Balak called
to help him against Israel. Their sheikhs went with the
elders of Moab to bring Balaam from the farther east to
curse the people of Jehovah,2 and the last war Moses
undertook was to avenge Jehovah upon Midian.3 Again
in the days of the Judges they swarmed across Jordan, and
every spring, pitching their black tents in Jezreel, swept
off the harvests from the valleys of Ephraim. But Gideon
beat them back across the river, and finally broke them
upon Moab. He took the two kings of Midian, Zebah
and Zalmunnah, and discomfited all the host} The Day of
Midian was very decisive.5 But though, for many cen-
turies to come, Israel had nothing to fear Action of the
on this frontier from. Arabia, the tides rose Arabs-
again in the close of her history,6 and even till now
they have flowed and ebbed unceasing. You stand

1	The Arab tribes of Eastern Palestine are clearly distinguishable into
one or other of these classes: (i) Bedouin, whose range lies wholly within
Eastern Palestine, like the ‘Adwan, Beni Sahr, etc.; (2) those who come in
every year from Arabia like the ‘Aneezeh, Sherarat, etc.

2	Num. xxii. 6.	:) Num. xxxi.	4 Judges viii. 12.

5 Isa. ix. 4 (Eng. Vers.).	11 Josephus, xiii, Antt. xiii. 3,526 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

to-day on one of the Moab hills, and looking east you
see nothing but a tossed and weary land, as destitute
of signs of life as mid-ocean. Yet as irresistibly and
almost as regularly as ocean is drawn upon great
tides by the moon, so have these trackless wastes been
swept by tides of men, drawn on by hunger and the
hope of spoil. Successive civilisations—Semitic, Greek,
Roman, and Turkish—have kept them back for a time,
but as these decayed, they have swept in again with the
regularity and remorselessness of the sea. Scattered
across Hauran and Gilead were great Greek cities, the
military roads of the Roman Empire, large castles and
towers of the Turks. But to-day those are all in ruins,
and the names of many of them forgotten. Whereas the
Bedawee pitches his camps about them, herds his sheep in
their courts, and calls himself by the very names which his
ancestors bore there in the days of Gideon. A Zeeb still
leads a Midianite tribe in Moab.1 The Beni-Mesaid pitch
their summer camp where an inscription of 214 A D. re-
cords the presence of a nomad tribe of the same name.2
They extort the same blackmail; if it is withheld, they
sweep off the harvests in the same ruthless fashion.3 We
found Arab tents pitched near the flourishing town of
Irbid, and in the tents a Bedawee chieftainess, to whom
the Irbid people, in spite of having a Turkish lieutenant-
governor and a troop of soldiers in their midst, pay
annual tribute for the security of their crops. The tax is
called by a euphemism Brotherhood, and the town which
yields it is known as the sister of the tribe that makes the

1	‘Ali Di‘ab = Zeeb = wolf, the chief of the ‘Adwan.

2	Waddington, 2287 : 01A17 MoftueSfjvwv.

n Or burn them, Burckhardt, Trai'els, etc.Over Jordan: the General Features 527

demand. It is so established a custom that Government
allows it, and even takes a percentage of their spoil from
the nomads.1 But it was among the ruins of an ancient
city that we felt most the force of these desert tides upon
Eastern Palestine. At Pella, overlooking the Jordan,
there was once a great town, with a castle, colonnades,
mausoleums, pagan temples, and a noble Christian cathe-
dral. You can now distinguish these only by their base-
ment lines and a few pillars. Scarcely one stone stands
upon another. But close beside them, when we were
there, stood the tents of a large Bedawee tribe. Frail
houses of hair, they were here four thousand years ago,
ere civilisation had left the Nile and the Euphrates, and
they flowed in again upon the decay of one of her most
powerful bulwarks. For the Arabs have been like the
wild ocean, barred off for a time, yet prevailing at last over
the patience and virtue of great empires.

We have now discovered the secrets of the confusing
history of Eastern Palestine. Here is a land which is
blessed more than most with health and fer- Resuit—a
tility, but its health is paralysed by its danger, |ence°afndPU
its fertility has ever been checked and blasted insecunty-
by the floods of human barbarism to which it lies so
exposed. And hence the mingled brilliance and ineffec-
tiveness of the history of this province—the civilisation
which sprang so quickly and so richly from its soil, the
ruins which everywhere cover it to-day. No land possesses
greater power of recuperation, but except for the first
five centuries of our era its enemies have never given its
wounds time to heal. Israel planted on the east of Jordan

1 ‘Brotherhood,’ Iluwe; ‘Sister,’ Ahwat. Burckhardt describes the
whole system as it prevails in Hauran. — Travels, etc., 300 fF.528 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

tribes as valiant and righteous1 as those which she brought
to the west, and in a richer soil. Yet they had no part
in the greatness of the nation, and the Kingdom and
Church of God were built upon Western Palestine.
Ammon and Moab were wealthier than Judah and
Ephraim, yet they never reached even the merely political
achievements of the latter. We read of many cities in
Eastern Palestine in early times, but which of them
became famous? We know the sites of only a very few.
The land of Uz has been identified with various parts of
Eastern Palestine ; and indeed one could not get a better
summary of the whole history of the region than the story
of the substance of Job and of the disasters which swept
it away. But two other proofs may be given of the same
insecurity of so fertile a province.

One is the existence of subterranean fortresses and
towns, and of towns which are of the next degree to
Underground subterranean, being built in the heart of these
ernes. intricate mazes of lava which have spread and
cracked open in the north-east of the region.2

The careful and elaborate architecture of these refuges

1 Gen. xlix. ; Deut. xxxiii.

- Of subterranean towns the most famous is that of Edrei, on which see
later, p. 576. In an inscription in Kanawat (Wadd. 2329) Agrippa 1.
blames the inhabitants for dwelling in caves and bids them build houses, cf.
Joseph, xiv. Antt. xv. 5, xv. Antt. x. I, xvi. Antt. ix. 1. Strabo (xvi. 2. 20)
mentions great caves in the Trachons (he wrongly says in mountains beyond
the Trachons), one of which could hold 4000 robbers; cf. Wetzstein, Reise-
bericht iiber llauran it. die Trachonen, 36 ff. ; also what he says of the caves
in Zumle and Es-Suet, pp. 46 f. ; mentioned also by William of Tyre, xxii.
21, as the ‘ Cavea Roob.’ In Gilead caves are only less numerous. Oliphant
{Landof Gilead, pp. 147, 161 f.) was told both by his guides and the Turkish
officials of an underground village in Gilead, Belvola, but did not find it.
lie thinks it near the Jebel Kafkafa. He also heard of vast subterranean
dwellings at a place Rehab, east of the Kala'at ez Zerka (p. 218). On the
great caverns at Arak-el-Emlr, see Conder’s Heth and Moab, pp. 169 ff. ; alsoOver Jordan : the General Features 529

testifies at once to the high culture of the inhabitants and
to the frequency of the barbaric invasions against which
they took such formidable precautions. History corrobo-
rates ; from Strabo to Wetzstein we read again and again
of how the population was run to earth,1 and to-day
travellers tell us that whole cityfuls of men, in order to
avoid some new line of Arab invasion, will migrate in a
single night to some other city which had lain empty for
years from a similar cause.2 This sudden transference of
large numbers of the settled inhabitants is extraordinary ;
no two travellers, between whose visits ten years have
elapsed, will give you the same account of the cultivation
or populousness of the same district.

But this strange combination of opulence and insecurity,
which is the chief feature of Eastern Palestine, is perhaps
most clearly illustrated by the fortunes upon The Greeks
her of Greek civilisation. These healthy and and Rome-
fertile plateaus were early discovered and occupied by the
Greeks. Veterans of Alexander the Great founded cities ;
the Syrian and Egyptian dynasties in turn attempted to
organise the region. Yet in spite of all this there was
achieved in Eastern Palestine no permanent civilisation
till the coming of the Romans. Across Jordan Greek
remains of the Seleucid age are the merest fragments;3

P.E.F. Mem. on Eastern Palestine ; for cities in the great lava mazes, cf.
Wetzstein, op. cit. Porter, Five Years in Damascus, ii. The Lejjah is
covered with ruins. The remains of one town, Musmieh, are three miles in
circumference, and so situated that ‘ it was necessary to cut a road through
the lava bed in order to reach the city, which no doubt enjoyed immunity
from attack, since the rock fields about it are almost impassable.’—Merrill,
East of Jordan, p. 16.

1	See especially Wetzstein, Reisebericht, etc., p. 46.

2	Burckhardt, Travels. Post, op. cit.

3	One or two inscriptions may date from the Seleucids ; cf. those given by
Burckhardt, Travels in Syria.530 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

nor does history record there any real progress. It
required nothing less than the genius of Rome, the power
of the Legions, the organisation of the Empire, to build
a bulwark between Syria and the desert; and e.ven those
enormous powers took nearly two centuries to their task.
We shall follow the interesting details later on. Here it
is only necessary to state that Pompey brought the first
Legions to Eastern Palestine in 64 B.C. ; that from that
year the Greek cities date their civic eras, as if previously
they had had no real history; that Greek coins and inscrip-
tions begin to multiply; that the underground cities are
abandoned, and that Greek art and letters abundantly
flourish. About 106 A.D. Trajan creates another province
between Syria and the eastern borders of the Empire,
thus removing her even from touch with the desert. Then
follows the splendid rule of the Antonines. Eastern
Palestine is covered with roads ; her fields are cultivated
for some centuries in peace, and her cities permitted to
multiply to such an extent that to-day the astonished
traveller, as he passes across her once more Arab-swept
surface, can stand almost nowhere but the sites of two
or three of them are in his view.

That £0 power but Rome has ever held Eastern Pales-
tine secure against the desert, is the crowning feature of
the strange history of this land.CHAPTER XXV

THE DIVISIONS AND NAMES OF
EASTERN PALESTINE

531For this Chapter comult Maps I. and III.THE DIVISIONS AND NAMES OF EASTERN
PALESTINE

| "ASTERN Palestine may be said to stretch from
' Hermon to the south end of the Dead Sea. To
form a clear idea of its provinces we must The dividing
note the three large rivers which cut it at right nvers-
angles to the Jordan—the Arnon, the Jabbok, and the
Yarmuk. Of these the Arnon has nearly always formed
the political boundary to the south.1 The other two, the
Jabbok and the Yarmuk, divide Eastern Palestine into
three separate provinces. The southern face of Hermon—
continued eastwards by the Jebel ’Aswad—is properly the
northern boundary ; but round on the east of Hermon
there is room for the territory of Damascus. Separated
by Anti-Lebanon from the west and the north, Damascus
is thrown upon Eastern Palestine. But its slope to the
desert, while all the rest of the country drains to the
Jordan, as well as the low line of hills to the south of it,
sufficiently distinguish the territory of Damascus from the
three provinces which form Eastern Palestine proper.
These we now take from north to south. Physically they
are quite distinct.

1 Israel’s territory never went south of Arnon, and to-day the Arnon is the
practical boundary of the Turkish province of the Belkab

533534 'Hie Historical Geography of the Holy Land

I. The Three Natural Divisions.

Across the most northerly division, from Herrnon to
Yarmuk, the limestone which forms the basis of the

(1)	North of country is covered by volcanic deposits. The
the Yarmuk. sj-one js t>asalt, the soil is rich, red loam

resting on beds of ash, and there are vast ‘ harras ’ or
eruptions of lava, suddenly cooled and split open into the
most tortuous shapes. Down the edge of the Jordan
valley, and down the border of the desert run rows of
extinct volcanoes. The centre of this northern province
is a great plain, perhaps fifty miles long by twenty broad,
scarcely broken by a hill, and almost absolutely treeless.
This is Hauran proper. To the west of this, above the
Jordan, is the hilly and once well-wooded district of
Jaulan ; to the east the ‘harras’ and extinct volcanoes
already noticed ; and in the south-east the high range
of Jebel Hauran or Jebel ed-Druz. All beyond is desert
draining to the Euphrates.

South of the Yarmuk the volcanic elements almost
entirely disappear and the limestone comes to the surface.

(2)	Between We experienced an interesting proof of the
andThenUlk suddenness of the change. In every village
jabbok. 0f Hauran we had found ancient inscriptions,

still legible in the hard black basalt; but when we crossed
the Yarmuk we found almost no inscriptions and very
little carving—the limestone is not a material to have
preserved them.1 Between the Yarmuk and Jabbok the

1 In the towns south of the Yarmuk the few inscriptions we came across
were nearly all in basalt. This is true of Gadara, on the border of theDivisions and Names of Eastern Palestine 535

country is mainly disposed in high ridges, fully forested ;
eastward there are plains.1

South of Jabbok the ridges and forests alike diminish,
till by the north end of the Dead Sea the country assumes
the form of an absolutely treeless plateau, in (3) Between
winter bleak, in summer breezy and fragrant. anVtheb°k
This plateau is broken only by deep, wide, Arnon-
warm valleys like the Arnon, across which it rolls south
beyond our present survey. Eastward it is separated
from the desert by low rolling hills.

These three sections, then, are physically distinct
from each other and from the territory of Damascus
to the north. It is unfortunate that through ancient
history we do not find the same definiteness of poli-
tical division and nomenclature. In Eastern Palestine
names are everywhere adrift. We are best able to fix
those of the present day, and from them we can work
backwards into the past.

II. The Names and Divisions of To-day.

To-day the chief line of political division is the Jabbok.
By this the whole of Eastern Palestine, except Damascus;
is divided into two Mutasserafliks or Provinces.

South of the Jabbok, and comprising the ridges
and table-land to the Arnon, is the Belka‘. The Belka' is
administered from Nablus, but has its own local capital at
*

volcanic region. In Gerasa both basalt and limestone were used. Between
Yarmuk and Jabbok there are one or two extinct craters and some outcrops
of basalt.

1 See p. 578.536 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Jaulan.

Es-Salt.1 North of the Jabbok, and as far as the territory
Larger of Damascus, extends the Mutasseraflik of
Hauran. Hauran,2 with its capital at El-Merkez.3 It is
divided into the following districts :—Between the Jabbok
and the Yarmuk lies the wooded district of
Ajhm. <Ajlun, administered from Irbid. North of the
Yarmuk, along the Jordan Valley to the slopes of Hermon
runs Jaulan;4 it is divisible into a southern and
more arable, and a northern and more rocky
half; the whole is administered from El-Kuneitrah. The
eastern border is the river‘Allan, a tributary of the Yarmuk,
and the Wady Rukkad. But still east of this lies the town
Sahem ej-Jaulan, and in Porter’s day the Jaulan extended
to the Hajj Road. Other divisions of the Mutasseraflik of
Hauran, each under a Kaimakam, are the Jebel ed-Druz,
administered from es-Suweda, Dera'at, and Busr-el-Hariri.5

The great plain to the east of Jaulan is called Hauran
in the narrower but popular sense of the name. It
Hauran	stretches north and south from the territory of

proper.	Damascus to the district of ‘Ajlun, from the

Jebel ’Aswad to the Wady Shelaleh or Upper Yarmuk.0
The southern end of it is called En-Nukra, ‘the hollow
hearth ’ of the Bedouin, for it lies low7 between the hilly

1 Strictly speaking, the southern border is the Arnon, but practically the
Belka* extends farther south.	2 Sic, and not * The Hauran.’

s The early Arab geographers called all the country from Damascus to the
Belka1, Saouad of Damascus (Rey, Col. Franques, p. 434). Those quoted
by Le Strange (Pal. under Moslems, p. 34) make the territory of Damascus
extend to the borders of the Belka*, and mention as districts within it:
Jaidur, Jaulan, Hauran with its capital Busra, El-Bathanieyyah with its
capital Edrei, or Adhra'ah.

4	Surveyed and described by Schumacher, The Jaulan, London, 1888,
translated from Z.D.P. V. for 1886. Its extent is about 560 square miles.

5	Hartmann (Z.D.P. V. xiii. 61) says that at present Es-Salt is also under

Hauran.	6 Schumacher.

7 See p. 552 for a proposed derivation of Hauran.Divisions and Names of Eastern Palestine 537

Jaulan on the west, the Lejjah and more distant Jebel
Hauran on the east, and the ridge of Zumleh behind
Edrei on the south. The name Hauran extends vaguely
towards the desert, but the features are so varied as to be
separately designated. To the east of the plain there is
the Lejjah—the long, low flood of lava, ‘ the tempest in
stone ’—twenty-four miles by ten to twenty.1 East of this
is another plain, the Wady Liwa or Nimreh, the upper part
of which is called ’Ard el Beteniyeh ;2 while to the south
of this is the Jebel Hauran or Druz, on which Druse Sheikhs
hold themselves half independent of the Government.

From Damascus the Hajj Road traverses the Hauran
plain to Muzeirib, on the sources of the Yarmuk, and
thence the desert to the east of ‘Ajlun and the The Hajj
Belka‘.2 It is a very ancient line of traffic to road-
the Gulf of Akaba; but in early Arab history a more
frequented route into Arabia was that which held east-
ward through Bosra, and in those days Bosra, or Eski-
Shem, disputed with Damascus the front rank among
cities in this region.

With these divisions and names of to-day before us,
we can now go back to the disposition of the land as it
was in the Greek period and at the time of Christ, and
then to its arrangement in Old Testament history.3

1	Length from Burak to Tell Dubbeh ; breadth in the south at Shuhbah
twenty miles, but tapering gradually to a round headland on the north.

2	So in Stubel’s chart, and Fischer and Guthe’s map.

2 The arrangement of Eastern Palestine at the time of the Crusades would
only disturb our study of its ancient divisions, so I put as much as we know
of it in this note.

The Crusaders called Eastern Palestine Oultre Jourdain. To the south the
Seigneurie of Krak and Montreal extended from the Arnon Eastern pa]es
to Mount Sinai (Rey, Colonies Franqties, p. 393). The tine and the
territory of Suete, or Suhete, was the Jaulan, and was under Crusades,
the Principality of Galilee (Ibid. 434). The name is either the same as538 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

III. Divisions and Names in the Greek Period:
the Time of Christ.

In the Greek period the general name for all Eastern
Palestine was Coele-Syria.1 This had at first been be-
stowed upon the hollow between the Lebanons,2

Coele-Syria.	11,

and was thence loosely stretched over the whole
of Southern Syria except Phoenicia.3 But before the
Romans came it seems to have been restricted again to
the east of the Jordan, and by officially separating it
from Phoenicia and Judaea, the Romans confirmed this
restriction.4 To Josephus, Coele-Syria is all Eastern Pales-
tine,5 and the only town west of the Jordan which be-
longed to it was the capital of the Decapolis, Beth-Shan.c

Thus restricted to Eastern Palestine, Coele-Syria con-
sisted, to the south of the Yarmuk, of Peraea and the
Divided bv interlaced region of Decapolis, and, to the
the Yarmuk. north Gf the Yarmuk, of the various provinces
which in the time of Christ made up the tetrarchy of

the Suwade of the Arab geographers or the modern El-Suet = 1	„

mentioned by Wetzstein (Rcisebcricht, p. 46). Gilead the Crusaders do not
appear to have held. Baldwin I. took tribute about Es-Salt in 111S (Rey,
p. 435). Two expeditions reached Bosra in 1113 and 1119. In 1125 and
1129 they did not advance beyond Suete.

I	KoiXij Ziipia.

- To which it is perhaps still confined in 1 Esdr. iv. 48.

3	‘ Coele-Syria and Phoenicia,’ I Esdras ii. 17, 24, 27 ; vi. 29 ; vii. 1 ; viii. 67 ;
1 Macc. x. 69; 2 Mace. iii. 5, 8, where Jerusalem is given as one of its
towns; 2 Macc. iv. 4 ; viii. 8 ; x. 11. Polybius, v. 80, and Diodorus Siculus,
xix. 59, include the Philistine coast. Even Josephus once uses it in this general
sense, xiv. Anti. iv. 5 : ‘ Coele-Syria as far as the river Euphrates and Egypt.’

4	In 47 B.c. they gave the military charge of it to Plerod, xiv. Antt. ix. 5.
ffrpaTTjybs rijs KolXrjs Zupias, i. Wars, x. 8. In this passage Coele-Syria is dis-
tinct from Samaria (8), Galilee (5), and, of course, Judrea; cf. Pliny, H.N., v. 9.

6 xiii. Antt. xiii. 3, including Moab and Ammon ; cf. i. Antt. xi. 5,

II	xiii. Antt. xiii. 2.

Divisions and Names of Eastern Palestine 539

Philip,—Gaulanitis, Auranitis, Batanea, Trachonitis and
Ituraean land. That is to say, while to-day the Jabbok is
the principal line of division, and the Yarmuk subsidiary,
in Greek days it was the Yarmuk which was the chief
frontier with the Jabbok subsidiary.

Peraea was properly identical with the modern Belka‘,
or the region between Jabbok and Arnon. In one passage
Josephus says that it stretched from Pella, or
just south of the Jabbok, to Machaerus, or just
north of the Arnon, and from the Jordan to Philadelphia.1
But the name, which simply means the land across, must
have been used also in a wider sense, for elsewhere
Josephus calls Gadara, on the very banks of the Yarmuk,
the capital of Peraea.2 North of the Yarmuk Peraea did
not stretch. By Herod’s will, confirmed by Augustus,
Peraea was assigned with Galilee to Antipas. Geo-
graphically this was an awkward conjunction, for Galilee
is the district with which Peraea has the slightest natural
connection, while it was thus cut off from the regions
immediately opposite, across the Yarmuk and the Jordan.
There were, however, reasons, both racial and religious,
for the arrangement. North of the Yarmuk the inhabi-
tants were mainly Greek, and across the Jordan Samaria
was Samaritan ; but in Peraea, as in Galilee, Jews formed
the bulk of the population ;3 and, narrow as the strip
must have been which connected the two provinces, it
formed an easy and convenient passage. The Jews
always regarded Peraea, Galilee, and Judaea as the three

1	iii. Wars, iii. 3.

2	iv. Wars, vii. 3. Schlatter, however (Zur Topographie u. Geschichte
Paliistinas, 48 tT.), insists that another Gadara or Gadora, probably F.s-Salt,
is here meant.

3	Josephus, xx. Anit. i. 1 ; iv. Wars, vii. 4-6.540 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Jewish provinces ;1 and when the Galilean pilgrims came
up to the feasts at Jerusalem by Peraea, they felt they had
Jesus in travelled all the way on Jewish soil. When
Peraea. Mark says, Christ cometh into the borders of
Judcea and over Jordan, it is Peraea that he means by
the latter.2 Here Christ met with Jewish doctors, who
tempted Him, with a Jewish ruler who knew the law, and
with Jewish mothers who brought their children to Him,
that He might lay His hands upon them.

North of the Jabbok Peraea intermingled with ‘the
region of Decapolis.’ 3 Only in a vague way can Deca-
polis be called a geographical quantity. It was really the
part of Eastern Palestine in which lay the cities of that
famous league, their suburbs and the considerable terri-
tories over which they exercised rights of property and
influence. These cities lay mostly south of the Yarmuk,
but there were at least four to the north of that river.
As we are to discuss them separately, more need not
be said here.

When we come north of the Yarmuk, the definition of
boundaries and names in the Greek period is much more

Philip's difficult. Our starting-point is Philip’s legacy

Tetrarchy. under the will of Herod, confirmed by Augustus
in 4 B.C. According to this, Philip’s tetrarchy comprised
Gaulanitis, Batanea, Trachonitis, Auranitis, and a certain
‘ part of the house of Zenodorus ’ about Paneas, or practi-
cally all the territory from Hermon to the Yarmuk and
the frontier of Nabatea, which ran to the south of Kanatha

1	So frequently on the Mishna. Neubauer, Geog. du Tahmid.

2	Mark x. i., according to Westcott and Hort’s reading: ra rijs
’IouSalas Kal irtpav toC ’IopSdi'ov.

3	Fliny, H.N. v. 16 : Decaf olitana Regio. Note his words, ‘has urbes
intcrcursant.Divisions and Names of Eastern Palestine 541

(a) Gaulanitis.

and Hebran, but to the north of Bosra and Salkhat.1 2 The
same is defined by the authorised version of Luke as
Iturcea and the region of Trachonitis, or, as some prefer to
render it, the region Iturtzan and of Trachonitisr

There can be no doubt about Gaulanitis. That pro-
vince must have been practically the same as the present
Jaulan, or all the country along the Jordan
Valley between the Yarmuk and Hermon,with
an uncertain eastern border along perhaps the river ‘Allan.
Like Jaulan, Gaulanitis was divided into an Upper and
a Lower Department,3 and, just as to-day, the eastern
coast of the Lake of Galilee was cut off from it, and
administered from Tiberias.4 The northern end of the
Gaulanitis seems also to have been known by the names
of Ulatha5 and the district of Paneas.

Nor is there much difficulty about Auranitis. The
name is the same as Hauran. We have nowhere a defini-
tion of its limits, but probably, like Hauran
to-day, it was properly the great plain east of
Jaulan,6 with the same loose extension south to the

(6) Auranitis.

1	xvii. Anti. viii. I, Gaulanitis, Trachonitis, and Paneas; xi. 4, Batanea,
Trachonitis, Auranitis, and a certain part of the house of Zenodorus ; xviii.
Antt. iv. 6, Trachonitis, Gaulanitis, and the nation of the Bataneans;
ii. Wars, vi. 3, Batanea, Trachonitis, Auranitis, and certain parts of Zeno’s
house about Jamnia, for which read Paneas. In iii. Wars, iii. 5 : The
region of Gamala, and Gaulanitis, and Batanea, and Trachonitis are given
as the parts of the kingdom of Agrippa. ‘ This country begins at Mount
Libanus,’ i.e. Anti-Lebanon or Hermon, ‘and the fountains of Jordan, and
reaches breadthway to the Lake of Tiberias,’ i.e. the south end, ‘and in
length extends from a village called Arpha,’ unknown, ‘ as far as Julias,’ i.e.
Bethsaida on the Jordan. ‘ Its inhabitants are Jews and Syrians mixed.’ For
the frontier between Philip’s tetrarchy and Nabatea, see pp. 617, 619, 621.

2	Luke iii. I : ttjs ’Irovpalas xal Tpax^vlnSos x&Pa*-

3	Josephus, iv. Wars, i. I.	4 See p. 416, n. 1.

5 Perhaps the same name as the modern Lake Huleh. Josephus, xv.

Antt. x. 3. See p. 481.	6 See p. 536.542 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Nabatean border,1 and south-eastwards to the Jebel
Hauran, the Mons Alsadamus or Asalmanos of Ptolemy.2

Our difficulties begin with Batanea. Batanea was the
Greek form of the ancient Bashan,3 and was originally
applied, like the latter, in a general way, to all

(c) Batanea.

the country north of the Yarmuk. But in a
special sense Batanea was distinguished from Trachonitis
and Auranitis as only a part of Philip’s tetrarchy.4 It
bordered on Trachonitis,5 that is, the territory round the
Lejjah ; the road by which Jewish pilgrims came from
Babylon to Jerusalem passed across it,6 and it seems to
have been near to the territory of Gamala in Gaulanitis.7
Most probably, therefore, Batanea lay between the Lejjah
and Gilead, in the present En-Nukra.s Certainly the
name was still here in the fourth century9 and in the
tenth ;10 but it has now drifted, as we have seen, round to
the east of the Lejjah.11 Very doubtful is the suggestion
that we should recognise Batanea in the Bethany beyond
Jordan, where John was baptizing}-

1	This is probable from the fact that Zenodorus wished to sell Auranitis
to the Nabateans, xvii. Antt. x. 2.

2	Wetzstein, p. 90 : ’AotXda/ios, ’AoaXfiavos, ’AXoaXa/xos.

3	So Josephus, iv. A nit. vii. 4; ix. Antt. viii. 1 ; and so the Onomasticon,
art. Haaav: atiri) Ba<ra«'ms ij vvv KaXovfjdvrj Baravala.

4	xv. Antt. x. I : i. Wars, xx. 4. In his Life, 11, Josephus talks of
‘ the Trachonites in Batanea.’ Ecbatana, in this section, should probably
be read Badvpa, see p. 618.

B xvii. Antt. ii. 1 : ‘ the loparchy called Batanea, which country is
bounded by Trachonitis.’	6 Ibid. 2.

7 This is to be inferred from Josephus, Life, 11.	8 See p. 536.

9	Eusebius, Onomasticon, places Astaroth and Edrei or Adraain Batanea.

10	Idrisi (quoted by Wetzstein, Reisebericht, 87) places Edrei in Betheniyeh.

11	See p. 537.

12	John’s Gospel, i. 28, according to the best reading (Westcott and Hort).
The suggestion is Conder’s ( T. W.). Bethany must be the name of a town,
defined as across Jordan, to distinguish it from the other Bethany. Batanea
would have stood without such definition.Divisions and Names, of Eastern Palestine 543

Trachonitiswas the territory which contained theTrachon
or Trachons. These are described by Strabo as * the two
so-called Trachones’ lying ‘behind Damascus.’1

rru	, 1	, r ,	,, (rf) Trachonitis.

1 he name, the only Greek one among those
we are discussing, corresponds exactly to the two great
stretches of lava, ‘ the tempests in stone,’ which lie to the
south-east of Damascus—the Lejjah and the Safa.2 Each
of these is called by the Arabs a Wa'ar, a word meaning
rough, stony tract, and thus equivalent to Trachon. The
latter, beyond the reach of civilisation, was little regarded,
and the Lejjah became known as the Trachon par excel-
lence, as is proved by two inscriptions at either end of it—
in Musmi'eh, the ancient Phaena, and at Bereke, each
of which is called a chief town of the Trachon.3 Now the
Trachonitis was obviously the Trachon, plus some terri-
tory round it.4 In the north it extended westward from
the borders of the Lejjah to the districts of Ulatha and
Paneas in the northern Jaulan;5 and in the south it
bordered with Batanea,6 but also touched Mons Alsa-
damus, the present Jebel Hauran.7 Philo uses the name
Trachonitis for the whole tetrarchy of Philip.8

1	Strabo xvi. 2. 20. Tpaxuv=a rough, stony place.

2	Wetzstein, Reisebericht, 36 IT.

3	That in Musmieh is given by Burckhardt, p. 117, and Wadd., 2524;
date about 225 A.D. That in Bereke is given by Wadd., 2396. The
word used is finirpoKU/jua, which, since it is used twice, can scarcely be
metropolis, as Merrill (East of Jordan, p. 20) translates, but is chief town of
a group of villages.

4	Josephus gives Tpaxuv in xv. Antt. x. I (cf. xvi. Antt. iv. 6), but in the
parallel passage, i. Wars, xx. 4, IpaxuviTts.

5	xv. Antt. x. 3. The Lejjah itself could scarcely be described as bordering

with Ulatha.	6 Josephus, xvii. Antt. ii. 1, 2.

7	Ptolemy (v. 15. 4) speaks of the Tpax^vlrai "A/Spa(3es under the Mons
Alsadamus.

8	Legat. ad Cajum, 41. In the fourth century Eusebius places Tracho-
nitis north-east of Bosra, south of Damascus, and in the desert.544 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

The portion of Philip’s tetrarchy most difficult to define
is the Ituraean. Did this cover or overlap Trachonitis, or
was it a separate province ? Luke’s referenc^1
is ambiguous, and we have no modern echo of
the name to guide us.2 In ancient times much is said of the
Ituraei, a vigorous,emphatic breed of men,famous as archers.
They are sung by Virgil and Lucan;3 they fight with Caesar
in Africa ;4 they rattle with their arrows through the
Forum itself, a defiant bodyguard for Mark Antony, till
Cicero cries out against the insult to the Senate.5 They
were wild border-men between Syria and Arabia, to both
of which they were reckoned by ancient writers. They
were of an Ishmaelite stock,6 like the Nabateans, and
Strabo speaks of them as mixed with Arabs, and as in-
habiting the same inaccessible highlands as the Arabs.7 It
is probably because of their semi-nomadic character that
for long there was no region definitely called Ituraea; except
once by Tacitus, the name is not used as a noun before
the fourth century of our era, and doubtfully even then.8

1 Luke iii. I. See p. 541, n. 2.

- Jetlur,j|j JOc*-, the name of the plain to the north of Hauran, has been
quoted by many as equivalent to Ituraea (Robinson, Conder, etc.), but on
what grounds it is impossible to see. The words are utterly different.

3	Georg, ii. 448 ; Pharsalia, vii. 230, 514. Reland also quotes Vibius
Sequester, de Gcntibus : ‘ Ithyrei usu sagittae periti.’

4	Bell. Afric. 20.

5 ‘ They ’—“the barbarians,” as he calls them—‘ filled these very benches.’
—Philippics, ii. 19, 112; xiii. 18.

6	They are no doubt the same as the Tits'1, Jetur, of Gen. xxv. 15, men-
tioned with other Ishmaelite tribes of Arabs. Cf. 1 Chron. i. 30, v. 19.

7	xvi. ii. 18 : rd p.kv obv dpeiva Uxovoi iravra ’IrovpcLiot re Kal “Apaj3es.
20 : iireira 71756s ra 'Ap&f3wv pipr) Kal tuv ’iTovpaltov avap.1^ 6pr) dbopAra.

8	Professor W. M. Ramsay, Expositor for January, February, April 1894.
The only Greek passage in which Ituraea appears before the fourth century
is Josephus xiii. Antt. xi. 3, according to the older editions : rtoXe/njo-as
’Irovpalav. But this should be as in Niese’s edition ’Iroi/pcdovs, which is
given in some codices, and is more suitable to the grammar. SeeDivisions and Names of Eastern Palestine 545

But the tribe had a more or less distinct territory, on which,
following the example of many other nomads of the Syrian
border, they settled for a time, as a kingdom with a capital.
Schurer has proved this territory to have been in the main
Anti-Lebanon, their capital Chalcis in the Beka‘; for a time
the sway of their ruler extended over Lebanon also.1 In
105 B.C. their territory bordered with Galilee,2 and Schurer
thinks their name covered also a part of Galilee ; but this
is improbable. If the name thus spread down the slopes
of Anti-Lebanon westwards to Galilee, it may also have ex-
tended down the same hill south-eastwards upon the dis-
tricts of Paneas, and eastwards towards Trachonitis. The
Ituraeans were Arabs, and Strabo’s statement that they
inhabited inaccessible highlands along with Arabs must
refer to districts east of Anti-Lebanon. We gather, then,
that the Ituraeans extended a good deal farther east than
Schurer seems willing to admit. At the same time Strabo
carefully distinguishes the two Trachons from the parts occu-
pied by Ituraeans and Arabs together. We may therefore

Expositor for March 1894, p. 236. This altered reading removes the last
Greek precedent for interpreting rfjs 'Irovpaias in Luke iii. 1 as a noun.
Schurer still speaks of Ituraea as a noun, quoting Josephus, xiii. Antt.
xi. 3 according to the reading ’Irovpaiav.

1 Schurer, History of the Jewish People, Eng. ed., div. i. vol. ii., Appen-
dix i. : ‘The History of Chalcis, Ituraea, and Abilene.’ His evidence for
Anti-Lebanon is fourfold. (1) Josephus, xiii. Antt. xi. 3, places the Ituraean
country in the north of Galilee, in 105 B.C. (2) On an inscription of about
6 a.D. (alluded to by Prof. Ramsay, p. 147) Q. Aimilius Secundus relates
that being sent by Quirinius ‘ adversus Ituraeos in Libano monte castellum
eorum cepi ’ (Ephemeris Epigraphica, 1881, 537-542).	(3) Dion Cassius

(xlix. 32) calls Lysanias king of the Ituraeans, and the same writer (lix. 12)
and Tacitus (Ann. xii. 23) call Soemus governor of the same ; but Lysanias
ruled the Lebanon district from the sea to Damascus, with his capital at
Chalcis, and Soemus was tetrarch at Lebanon (Josephus, Vita, xi.).	(4)

Above all, Strabo puts the Ituraeans in Anti-Lebanon (xvi. ii. 16) : tt\v
’Irovpalwv dpelvrjv. # 18 : riva. ical dpeiva ev oh Xa\kIs tixnrep aicpiiro\is rod
Matrtruov(i.e. the Beka‘).	2 xiii. Antt. xi. 3. See p. 414.

2 M546 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

conclude that the Ituraeans, though scattered towards the
Trachonitis, occupied a distinct territory. About 25 B.C.,
however, part of the Ituraean domains on the south of
Hermon was under the same ruler as Trachonitis, Zeno-
dorus by name.1 Again, in 20 B.C., that same part of
the Ituraean territory and Trachonitis were both under
Herod ; and from 4 B.C. to 34 A.D. they were both under
Philip.2 Now, it is not impossible that the names of terri-
tories which bordered each other and were under the same
ruler should have overlapped. As a fact, we have seen that
Philo called all Philip’s tetrarchy by the name of Tracho-
nitis. Conversely, did the name ‘ Ituraean ’ spread across
Trachonitis ? We have no evidence that it did during the
first century. But the fact is possible. Within the last few
years the Druzes emigrating from Lebanon have bestowed
their name on the Jebel Hauran, which is as often called the
Jebel Druz. The Ituraeans might have effected a similar
transference of their name to the Trachonitis, especially
in 6 A.D., when the Romans captured their seats in Anti-
Lebanon.3 At the same time Strabo, writing after this
event, still keeps the Ituraean territory and Trachonitis
quite distinct. The questions, therefore, whether Luke
meant to signify by his words two distinct portions of
Philip’s tetrarchy, or two equivalent or overlapping names
for it; and whether, on either'of these interpretations
of his words, he was correct—are questions to which the
geographical data of the first century supply us with no

1	xv. Anti. x. 1 ; i. IVars, xx. 4. ‘Zenodorus, who had leased the house
of Lysanias, king of the Ituraeans ’ (Dion Cassius, xlix. 32), which included
Ulatha and Paneas and the country round about.

2	In whose tetrarchy ‘ a certain part of the house of Zenodorus ’ represents
the Itunean region south and south-east of Hermon.

3	See previous page, note 1, No. (2).Divisions and Names of Eastern Palestine 547

certain answer. It is quite true that Eusebius in the fourth
century makes Ituraea and Trachonitis equivalent; but
the name Ituraea was dead by his day, and his evidence
cannot be ranked with that of the first century.1

Behind Ituraea, on the Upper Abana or Barada, lay
Abilene, which Luke gives as the tetrarchy of Lysanias,2
and in the Beka' Chalcis, but these are beyond our limits.

In New Testament times the whole region to the east
and south of Eastern Palestine was known as Arabia.
The population were an Arab tribe or tribes «Arabia’_Tiie
known as the Nabateans,3 who at the beginning Nabateans-
of the third century before Christ had settled down partly
to agriculture and partly to commerce. About 100 B.C.
they became a powerful kingdom. Their capital was
Petra,4 but their influence extended all round Syria, from
Damascus, which fell into their hands in 87 B.C., after they
had defeated the Syrians,5 to Gaza,6 and far in to the
centre of Arabia.7 Their inscriptions are scattered over
all Eastern Palestine, where they had many settlements,
and in Arabia, but have even been discovered in Italy,
proving the extent of their trade.8 Their relations with
Rome we shall follow later on.9

1	This is abridged from my article in the Expositor for March 1894. See
further, p. 554.

2	Luke iii. I. The capital of Abilene was Abila, the ruins of which are still
to be found at Suk on the Barada.

3	Identified by some with the Nebaioth of the Old Testament.

4	Josephus, xiv. Antt. iv. 5 ; xvii. Antt. iii. 2, etc. etc.; i. Wars, vi. 2,
etc. ; Strabo xvi. ii. 34 ; iv. 2, 18 ; especially 21 ff.; Pliny, H.N. vi. 28.

5	Josephus, xiii. Antt. xv. 2 ; i. Wars, iv. 7.	6 Ibid. xiii. Antt. xiii. 3.

7	At Hejra, or Medain-es-Salih, on the Hajj route to Mecca, there are
great numbers of Nabatean tombs and inscriptions. Doughty, Arabia

Deserta, vol. i. Corpus Inscript. Setniticarum, Pars II. tom. i. 183 ff.

8	C.I.S., as in previous note ; also for the Greek ones, Waddington.

” Chapters xxvi. and xxix.548 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

IV. In Old Testament Times.

When we pass back into the Old Testament we again
find Eastern Palestine, now known as Over-Jordan or
‘Abarim,1 divided into three parts. But the lines of
division are not now Yarmuk and Jabbok, but
Yarmuk and that line twenty-five miles to the south of Jab-
bok, which divides the table-land of Moab from the ridges to
the north of it.2 All on the south of this to the Arnon is
Mishor or Table-land ; all to the north of it, as far as the
Yarmuk isGilead; and all to the north of Yarmuk is Bashan.3

The Mishor,4 or Table-land, covered the southern half
of the Belka‘. It was sometimes called the
<i) The Mishor'Mishor of Medeba,5 which town on a high
mound is conspicuous across the whole of it. It was also
the Sharon of Eastern Palestine.0

The rest of the Belka‘, from Heshbon to the Jabbok,
formed the southern half of Gilead ;7 the other

(2) Gilead.	^ between Jabbok and Yarmuk,8 and

was therefore equivalent to the modern district of ‘Ajlun.9

1 *]*n' sometimes with the addition of fimTO, or eastward. Dv12y =
men or regions on the other side.

- Practically coincident with the Wady Hesban.

:t For these three divisions, see Deut. iii. 10; iv. 43 ; cf. Josh. xx. 8 ;
xiii. 9.

4 “lUy'Dil, Auth. Eng. Ver., plain country, or plain; Rev. Ver., plain’,
margin, table-land.	5 Josh. xiii. 9, 16.

6	Sharon, from the same root as TICK'D, 1 Chron. v. 16. Neubauer, Geog.
du Talmud, 47 ft.

7	Deut. iii. 12: half Mount Gilead. Josh. xii. 2 : half Gilead even to the
river fabbok.

8	Deut. iii. 13 : the rest of Gilead. Josh. xii. 5, cf. I Kings iv. 19.

9	P. 536. The Yarmuk was the northern border, for (1) the country of
Gad, which was practically Gilead, ran up to the Sea of Galilee (Deut. iii. 16);
and (2) Gilead marched with Geshur and Maachah (Josh. xiii. 11). These
two probably lay in the Jaulan.Divisions and Names of Eastern Palestine 549

The whole region was called Gilead, the Land of Gilead,
and Mount Gilead,1 the last of which names still survives
upon the long ridge south of the Jabbok, the Jebel Jela'ad.2
On one occasion Gilead is used for Gad.3 But with that
singular elasticity which characterises all names across
Jordan, Gilead is at least twice used of all Eastern Pales-
tine to Dan.4 This seems to be the sense of the word in
the books of Maccabees ;5 Josephus uses it with both the
narrower and the wider application.6

Bashan, or The Bashan,7 had its eastern border on
Salcah, the present Salkhat, the nearest town
of any importance to the Arabian desert,8 and
included Edrei,9 Ashtaroth,10 the present Tell-Ashtar, and

1	In the Hexateuch JE uses all three names. Gilead, Num. xxxii. 26
(J); Land of Gilead, Num. xxxii. I (JE), Josh. xvii. 5, 6 (JE) ; Mount
Gilead, Gen. xxxi. 21 (E), 25 (J). D always uses Gilead (Deut. ii. 36, iii.
15, 16, xxxiv. 1 (D or R?) ; Josh. xii. 2, 5, xiii. 11), except once, when it
uses Mount Gilead (Deut. iii. 12). P uses both Gilead (Josh. xiii. 25, 31)
and Land of Gilead (Num. xxxii. 29; Josh. xxii. 9, 13, 15, 22).

2	Burckhardt, Syria, 348.

3	Judges v. 17, cf. 1 Sam. xiii. 7.

4	Deut. xxxiv. 1 ; Josh. xxii. 9, 13, 15, 32.

5	TaXadS, I Macc. v. 1, 17, etc. FaXaadins, v. 20. It excludes Ammon
and Jazer to the south, but includes part of Hauran, cf. xiii. 22; Judith i.
8; xv. 5.

6	i. Antt. xix. II. The hill Gulad, the country ra\a57;j/77; iv. Antt. v. 3;
vi. Antt. v. I ; ix. Antt. viii. 1 : TaXaaSins, so also LXX.; xii. Antt. viii. 2,

3 ; in 3 for ‘ Galilee ’ read ‘ Gilead ’; xiii. Antt. xiii. 4.

7 The article is used in all historical statements defining the kingdom of
Og, who is always king of the Bashan (Num. xxi. 33 ; Deut. i. 4, etc. ; even
Psalms cxxxv. 11, cxxxvi. 20), or the territories of Manasseh (Josh. xvii. 1,
xxi. 6, etc.) except 1 Chron. v. 23 ; also sometimes in poetry (Deut. xxxiii.
20), and in prophecy (Isa. ii. 13; Jer. xxii. 20; 1. 19; Amos iv. 1). But
more often in prophecy and poetry it is omitted. Psalm xxii. 13 (Eng. 12);
lxviii. 17, 23 (Eng. 16, 22) : Isa. xxxiii. 9 ; Ezek. xxvii. 6, xxxix. 18;
Micahvii. 14 ; Nahum i. 4; Zech. xi. 2.

8	Deut. iii. 10; Josh. xii. 4, xiii. 11 ; 1 Chron. v. 11.

9	Deut. iii. 10; Josh. ix. 10.

10	Deut. i. 4 ; Josh. ix. io, xii. 4, xiii. 12, 31.550 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Golan.1 That is to say, Bashan proper covered the land
known in Greek times as Batanea, the southern end of the
great plain of Hauran.2 In this narrower application
the name does not appear to have come west to Jordan,
for between it and that river lay Geshur and Maachah.3
But in a wider sense Bashan extended to Hermon, and
covered all the land north of Gilead.4 The long high edge
of mountain to the east of the Lake of Galilee is the
Bashan which the prophets so often couple with Carmel.
Dan, says a poet, is a lion's whelp ; he leapeth from
Bashan/’ This carries the name to the very foot of Her-
Hiiisof mon- Whether Hermon itself was known as
Bashan. {-he mount Gr mountains of Bashan, or whether
the latter name designates the whole of that eastern range,
is uncertain. The poet says, mountains of bold heightsG are
the mount of Bashan. This epithet, not applicable to the
long, level edge of the table-land, might refer either to the
lofty triple summits of Hermon,7 or to the many broken
cones that are scattered across Bashan, and so greatly
differ in their volcanic form from the softer, less imposing
heights of Western Palestine.8

I	Deut. iv. 43 ; Josh. xx. 8, xxi. 27.

- 1 Chron. v. 23 seems to limit Bashan to the south of this plain.

:: Josh. xii. 4, xiii. 11, 13, where it is implied that Geshur and Maachah
were west of Bashan,—probably occupying the present Jaulan. Cf. Guthe,
7,.D.P. J\ xii. 232.

4 Deut. iv. 43 ; 2 Kings x. 33.	3 Deut. xxxiii. 22.

II I’salm lxviii. 17.	D'MJZIJ, protuberances, bulgings, humps ; *33, hump-
backed, Lev. xxi. 23. In the Targums	is a hill-top, 'J'33, eyebrows.

7 So Olshausen, and recently Baethgen; cf. p. 477.

3 So Delitzsch. Wetzstein compares J1J23 with the Syriac gabnun and
the Arabic gabulun, ‘ a roof with a gable end.’ He is doubtless wrong when
(followed by Cheyne) he confines the general term mount=range, or moun-
tains of Bashan, to the Jebel Hauran, even though it should be true that the
Hill of Salmon, quoted in the previous verse, be the same as the name Ptolemy
gives to that hill, the Mons Asalmanos (v. 15). Cf. Guthe, Z.D.P. V. xii. 231.Divisions and Names of Eastern Palestine 551

'Argob.

Havoth-Jair.

Within Bashan lay ’Argob, probably equivalent to our
word ‘ Glebe.’1 It bordered on Geshur and Maachah,2 and
contained threescore fortified cities. Some-
times ’Argob seems equivalent to the king-
dom of Og in Bashan, and sometimes to all Bashan.
But the name which is always given it, of The Measured
L,ot3 of Argob, implies that it was some well-defined
district within Bashan.4 For the same reason many5
have thought it to be the Lejjah, which lies so well
marked off from the surrounding country, but for such an
identification there is no further evidence. Nor was the
Argob identical with the Havoth-Jair, or
Tent-villages of Jair.6 Of the latter we have
two different accounts : one that they were camps taken
by Jair, the son of Manasseh, in the days of Moses ;7 the
other that they were thirty cities belonging to the thirty
sons of Jair, a Gileadite, one of the minor Judges.8 The
first of these accounts has been mixed with the account of
the conquest of Argob in a verse in Deuteronomy, which
bears proof of having been deliberately altered to effect
this.9 Argob and Havoth-Jair were not the same ; Argob

1 3131N or mjlXn, probably from 21H, a clod.	2 Deut. iii. 14.

3	^ari-

4	It is always given as in Bashan. Deut. iii. 4, 13 f.; 1 Kings iv. 13.

5	So Porter, Conder, Henderson, P.E.F. map.

s

a “PK' JTin. mn is probably the same as the Arabic	hiwa’, pi.

s

’Ahvvtyat, the Bedawee goat hair-lent, applied also to a collection
of houses. Freytag, sub voce. Hence probably the Hivites, ^fl, got their

7	Num. xxxii. 41. From an uncertain source, perhaps E.

8	Judges x. 3, 5.

9	Deut. iii. 14. I do not think we can say with Dillmann and others that
this verse is a sheer insertion (along with the two following); for a sheer
insertion would not bear marks of having been altered from something else,552 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

was a region full of walled and gated cities ; the Havoth-
Jair were a collection of Bedouin camps. But the absolute
proof of their difference is that a passage in the First
Book of Kings expressly separates them, placing the camps
of Jair in Gilead, and Argob and its cities in Bashan.1

The only other Old Testament name in Eastern Pales-
tine which it is necessary to mention is Hauran or
Hauran- Havran of Ezekiel, which he gives, along with
• Hollow.’ Damascus and Gilead, as comprising Eastern
Palestine.2 There is little doubt that this is the same
name as we have in Auranitis and the modern Hauran,
which also, like the Hebrew, is a proper name, and ought
not to have the definite article attached to it. It is at
least worth noting that a district lying so hollow between
mountains, and to part of which the Arabs at the present
day give the name of their hollow hearth, en-Nukra, should

as this verse does. It tells us that Jair took the Hebei of Argob, singular,
and called them plural. This must mean that a plural noun originally stood
in place of the Hebei or lot of Argob (them, of course, cannot possibly be
explained by the coasts of the intervening clause). This can only have been
the tent-villages of Gilead, or some such expression. How clumsily the
change has been made is seen from the fact that Bashan, fBGnVIN, has

not been inserted in its proper place, which is earlier in the sentence, but
now stands where it is quite ungrammatical. But even if either the above
explanation or any other that has been given of the origin of this verse be
not correct, the text is so evidently confused that we could not possibly
prefer it to the clear evidence of verse 4 in the same chapter, which says
the towns of Argob were not Havoth, tent-villages, but walled and gated
cities; or to 1 Kings iv. 13, which separates Argob from Havoth-Jair,
reckoning the former to Bashan, the latter to Gilead. But if for this
reason we must put aside Deut. iii. 14, we must also strike out at least
the last clause of Josh. xiii. 30, which calls the tent-villages of Jair cities,
and, in contradiction to 2 Kings iv. 13, puts them in Bashan. Josh. xiii.
30 is from P.

1	I Kings iv. 13. Here, however, it is only right to say that some
regard the words, the villages of Jair the son of Manasseh in Gilead, as an
insertion. Still we know from other passages that the Havoth-Jair were in
Gilead, but Argob is always placed in Bashan.

2	Ezek. xlvii. 16, 18, pin.Divisions and Names of Eastern Palestine 553

have a title capable of being split up into Havr or Hawr,
meaning a hole, and -an, a common termination of place-
names.

These, then, are the greater divisions of Eastern Pales-
tine, with their names respectively to-day, at the Crusades,
in New Testament times, and in Old Testament times. We

may sum them up in the following comparative table :—

Name To-day.	At the Crusades.	In New Test. Times.	In Old Test. Times.
	WHOLE TE	RRITORY.	
	Oultre-Jourdain.	Coele-Syria.	/ Over-Jordan. \Abarim.
	{a) DAM	ASCUS.	
El-Ghuta (geogr.)	...		
Liwa of Damascus	...	V- Damascus.	Aram of Damascus.
(administrative).	{b) NORTH OF	1  THE J ARM UK.	
Hauran (Mutas-	...	Tetrarchy of	All Bash an.
seraflik of).		Philip (+ De-	(+ Half-Gilead).
		capolis, etc.).	f Geshur (?).
(1) Jaulan.	Suwete	Gaulanitis.	-| Ma'achah (?).
	or		[ The town Golan.
(2) Hauran	Suhete.	Auranitis.	Hauran (Ezekiel).
(3) Lejjah.		Trachon(itis).	(?)
(4) A r d - e 1 - Betheniyeh.		j-Batanea (?).	Bashan, in narrower sense
(5) En-Nukra.			Argob (?)
(6) Jebel Haur-		Mount A<TaX/J-avos.	Mount Bashan (?)
an or Druz.			
(0	BETWEEN JAR	MUIC AND JAB	BOK.
(7) ‘Ajlun.	...	Region of Deca-	Half-Gilead.
		polis, with part of Pertea.	
			
(d)	BETWEEN JAB	BOK AND arn	ON.
The Bei.ka'.		Persea.	J Half-Gilead. \ The Mishor.
	(<f) SOUTH	OF ARNON.	-
Practical continua-	Seigneurie of	Nabatean terri-	Moab.
tion of the Belka*.	Krak and Mon-	tory.	
	treal.		554 Tke Historical Geography of the Holy Land

FURTHER NOTE ON THE ITURzEANS AND TRACHONITIS
—IN REPLY TO PROFESSOR RAMSAY.

(To continue n. I on p. 547).

Professor Ramsay has done me the honour to reply to my Expositor article
(March 1894) in a kind article (April 1894, pp. 288 n. 1, 298-302). In reply
I have space only for the following :—

1.	In answer to his note on p. 288,—I am his ally in so far as I have pro-
duced some evidence for the possibility of his theory of the overlapping of
Trachonitis and the Ituraean name (see above, p. 546).

2.	I repeat that (leaving the disputed Luke iii. 1 aside) there is no evidence
of the fact of such an overlapping in the first century, except Eusebius. In
his reply Professor Ramsay has not attempted to supply such evidence.

3.	My objection to Eusebius is not so much to his errors as a geographer for
his own day (Ramsay, 301) as that his date in the fourth century makes his
testimony about the first century inferior to that of a first century writer like
Strabo, who carefully distinguishes the Trachons from the ‘ parts of the
Iturreans.’

4.	I cannot but think that Professor Ramsay has been led to extend the
Ituraeans as far east as over the Trachon by his theory (which, on p. 300, he
wrongly imputes to me) that ‘ the Ituraei were the one warlike tribe of the
whole region.’ Most certainly they were not. To the east were other Arabs
distinct from them, but partly mixed with them (Strabo xvi. ii. 18, 20). And
there were the Nabateans (if these be distinct, which is doubtful, from Strabo’s
Arabs) in possession, when the Romans were not, of Damascus, and in
alliance with the Arabs of the Trachon (see below, p. 617).

5.	When Professor Ramsay says that ‘ the true home of such a race (i.e. as
the Ituracans) is, he ventures to think, not the long-settled and well-governed
land between Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon,’ he ignores {a) how often in Syria
such a land has been seized and governed by such a tribe ; and (b) what
abundant evidence we have that Ituraeans did settle on Anti-Lebanon and in
the Beka‘, with Chalcis as their capital. On this Schiirer seems to me to be
absolutely correct (see above, p. 545, especially n. 1).CHAPTER XXVI

MOAB AND THE COMING OF ISRAEL

555For this Chapter consult Maps /. and 111.MOAB AND THE COMING OF ISRAEL

* I ’HE passage of the Arnon brings Israel clearly into
light upon Eastern Palestine. We have the names
of the stations of their journey before this, but

Israel's

the sites of these are not now discernible,1 and Passage of
even the Brook Zered, which is given as the theAinon'
limit of the wilderness, did not mark the beginning of the
Promised Land.2 The Arnon is afterwards drawn as the
southern frontier of Israel on this side of Jordan. Aroer
on its banks was the Beersheba of the East,3 and accord-
ingly we find Israel, as soon as they cross it, entering upon
their warfare for their heritage.

That Israel’s fighting began after the passage of the
Arnon, was due to a recent change in the political dis-
position of Eastern Palestine. Properly all sihon’s
the country from Jabbok to Arnon belonged, Conquests.
northwards to Ammon, southwards to Moab. But shortly
before Israel’s arrival, Sihon, an Amorite king from Western

1	Num. xxi. io f. Oboth, somewhere on the flinty plateau to the east of
Edom, the Ard Suwwan or Flint Ground, Arabia Petroea; see Doughty,
Arabia Deserta, i. 28, 29. Ije-Abarim (so called to distinguish it from the Iim
of Judah, Jo. xv. 29), in the wilderness in front of Moab towards the sunrising.

2	The Zered cannot be the great wady rising east from the south end of the
Dead Sea to the Hajj Station, Kula't el Jarahy, as marked on the P.E.F.
red. map, 1890 ; but must have lain nearer Arnon, either in the W. ‘Ain
Feranjy, or the Seil S'aideh, a branch of the Arnon (so Dillmann). But all
sites in this region are problematical.

:! Deut. ii. 36, iii. 8, 16 ; Josh. xiii. 16.

557558 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Palestine, had crossed the Jordan, and driving Moab
southwards over Arnon, and Ammon eastwards to the
sources of the Jabbok, had founded a kingdom for himself
between these two rivers. Israel had come up the eastern
border of Moab, but, in order to reach Jordan, was forced
to strike westward across Sihon’s territory. Moses sent
and asked for rights of passage. Sihon refused, and
Israel prepared to fight him. They were now upon some
branch of the Arnon, but high up it. Their route had
perhaps followed the present Hajj road.1

The Arnon is the present Wady Mojib, an enormous
trench across the plateau of Moab. It is about 1700 feet
The Arnon deep, and two miles broad from edge to edge
as a frontier. ^-jie cijfifs which bound it, but the floor of the
valley over which the stream winds is only forty yards
wide.2 About thirteen miles from the Dead Sea the
trench divides into two branches, one running north-east,
the other south-south-east, and each of them again divid-
ing into two. The whole plateau up to the desert is thus
not only cut across, but up and down, by deep ravines,
and a very difficult frontier is formed. You see at once
why the political boundary of Eastern Palestine has
generally lain here,3 and not farther south. The southern
branch, the present Seil Sa‘ideh, called also Safiah, is the
principal one,4 but all the branches probably carried the
name Arnon from the main valley right up to the desert.
It is not the valley but the valleys of Arnon, which are

1 Num. xxi. 21, where the embassy to Sihon for permission to journey

through his land is related after the list of the stations on the journey; the
Deuteronomist (ii. 26) states that the embassy was sent from the wilderness
of Kedemoth.	2 Burckhardt, Syria, 372.

3	Except in the time of the Crusades.

4	Burckhardt, p. 373. It carries the name Mojib up to the desert.Moab and the Coming of Israel

559

named in the ancient fragment of song celebrating Israel’s
passage :—

‘ Waheb in Sufah [we passed] and the valleys of Arnon,

And the cliff of the valleys, which stretches to An’s seat,

And leans on the border of Moab.'1

The first words are obscure. Sufah may survive in
Safiah.2 The cliffs or declivities of all these Moab valleys
are impressive, and every traveller speaks of them.3 ‘Ar is
not Rabbath Moab,4 which lies far south of the Arnon, but
‘Ar, or Tr, of Moab, now indiscoverable, which stood on
Moab’s border.5 On the north bank, just before the valley
divides, stand the ruins of ‘Ar'ar, the Aroer on the lip of
the valley of Arnon, which we have already called the
Beersheba of Eastern. Palestine.6

From the Upper Arnon, then,—the Deuteronomist calls
the place the Wilderness of Kedemothl—Israel sent to
Sihon for permission to cross his territory, and Thewar
Sihon refusing came out to offer them battle wlth Slhon-
at Jahaz, a strong place in the neighbourhood of Kede-
moth,8 that is, in the south-east corner of Sihon’s territory.
The result was the total defeat of Sihon, and the occu-

1 Num. xxi. 14, 15. For Waheb (in the accusative case) LXX. read Swo/3.

3	Cf. especially Burckhardt, pp. 400, 401. Clift'is a singular not else-
where found, but in the plural nnt^K, frequently used for the declivities of hills.

4	As in P.E.F. red. map, 1890, and Murray’s Guide.

5	So also Dillmann. It may be the Mehatit el Haj.

u P- 557-	7 Deut. ii. 26, 27.

8 Jahaz, ^iT1, Num. xxi. 23 ; Deut. ii. 32 ; Isa. xv. 4 ; Jer. xlviii. 34 ; but
Jahzah, nVIT1, Josh. xiii. 18; xxi. 36 ; Judges xi. 20 ; Jer. xlviii. 21 ; and X
Chron. vi. 63—is mentioned twice with Kedemoth, Josh. xiii. 18 ; xxi. 36 f.,
which since the wilderness is called after it must have lain east ; twice seems to
be mentioned as a limit of Moab, distant from Heshbon, Isa. xv. 4; Jer. xlviii.
34 ; and once is placed on the plateau of Moab, lb. v. 21. On the Moabite
Stone, lines 19, 20, the name is spelt like the shorter Hebrew form, and the
place is given as a fortress and seemingly near Daibon.560 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

pation of his country by the Israelites. Wherefore they
that sing taunt-songs say,—the following ‘ mashal ’ opens
with the taunt ^of the victorious Israel to the Amorites to
return and rebuild their city (ver. 27), then (vv. 28, 29)
describes how the Amorites had come to be there, namely,
by previously taking the country from Moab, and returns
(ver. 30) to the keynote of Israel’s own victory—

‘ 27 Come ye to Hcshbon!

Let the city of Sihon be built and set up again !

28	For fire had1 gone forth from Heshbon,

Flame from the fortress of Sihon,

Had devoured lAr of Moab,

And consumed2 the high places of Arnon.

29	Woe to thee, Moab /

Thou art undone, people of Chemosh !

He hath given up his sons to be runaways,

His daughters to captivity,

To the king of the Amorites, Sihon !

30	But we shot at than, Heshbon was undone—unto Daibon,
And we laid waste unto Nobah (?) which lies 071 the desertl3

The war against Sihon has been declared by some
critics to be unhistorical, and they refer the song to a con-

Is it	quest of Moab by Israel in the ninth century.

historical? Their reasons are that the war is narrated in
only one of the documents of the Pentateuch, that the

1	The verb, from its position in the clause, must be rendered by the
pluperfect.

2	So LXX. Ka.Ta.me as if n?}D. Hebrew text reads vJD : Baals or Lords
of the high places of Arnon.

3	The text is here very uncertain. The above rendering is that of Dill-
mann, based on the Peschito. Daibon is the proper spelling, as we see from
pH of the Moabite Stone. Nophah is unknown (there is a Naifeh south-east
of Ma‘in), but there was a Nobah to the north-east of Heshbon near Jogbehah
(Judges viii. u). This, of course, would be inconsistent with the words,
KXTD ly “IK'K, for Medeba lies south of Hesbon. But the Peschito reads
*1T1D bv “IKW, which is on the desert. LXX. read the last line xai at
yvoatKes In ttpooaverav irvp eirl Mua/9.Moab and the Coming of Israel 561

song traces an invasion from north to south, not from south
to north, and that if the words king of the Amorites,
Sihon,1 be omitted, the whole reads clearly as the account
of an invasion by Israel of Moab, beginning at Heshbon
and extending to the Arnon. But the document which
tells the story is the oldest of all the documents ; its date,
at the latest in the eighth century, forbids that its authors
could have confused a war in the ninth century with one
in the fourteenth; and it is not contradicted by anything
in the other documents. Moreover, such an invasion of
Eastern Palestine by the Amorites of the west was
possible ; while it is impossible to understand, if the facts
were not as stated, any motive for the invention of the tale.2

Sihon being defeated, and Heshbon overthrown, the
country was now clear for the advance of the great
camp of Israel from the Arnon. Their goal
was the Jordan, at the north end of the Dead sagefof ^the
Sea, and their nearest way lay first over the Plateau'
treeless Plateau, which stretches northward from Arnon,
and then down one of the numerous glens which break
from the west of Heshbon into the ‘Arabah. The Plateau
is without springs, and Israel’s stations upon it would
be determined by the three water-courses which cut it
between the Arnon and Heshbon. One itinerary gives
us four stations : Be’er, where Israel had to dig for water,
and sang the Song of the Well, some undiscovered spot
near the Upper Arnon;3 Mattanah;4 Nahaliel, or the

1 Num. xxi. 29.	2 See Appendix on ‘ The Wars with Sihon and Og.’

3	Num. xxi. 16-18. In i8£ read (with the LXX.) from Be'er instead of
from the wilderness, Be’er cannot be Daibon, Conder, P.E.F.Q. 1882, p.
86; for Israel would not need to dig water there, and seems to have passed
to the eastward.

4	The only names to-day even remotely echoing this name are Umm
Denieh and Butmah, the name of the upper course of the Wady Waleh.562 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Valley of God, which is not an unfit name for the Wady
Zerka Ma'in with its healing springs ;1 Bamoth,2 or High
Places, which may be represented by any of the ancient
cromlechs and altars about the Wady Jideid.3

At this point Israel were about to exchange the desert
view, which had been their horizon during forty years, for
the first full sight of the Promised Land. In the itinerary
we have been following the next station is given as the
glen that is in the field of Moab, by the headland of Pisgah,
which looketh out over feshimon.

During their journey over the Table-land, Israel had
no outlook westward across the Dead Sea. For westward
The edge of the -Plateau rises a little and shuts out all view,
‘the Plateau. bUt on the other side of the rise it breaks up
into promontories slightly lower than itself, which run
out over the ‘Arabah and Dead Sea Valley, and afford
a view of all Western Palestine. Seen from below, or
from across Jordan, these headlands, rising three or four
thousand feet by slope and precipice from the valley,
stand out like separate mountains. But eastward they
do not rise • from the Moab Plateau—they are simply
projections or capes of the latter, and you ride from it
on to them without experiencing any difference of level,
except, it may be, a decline of a few feet. Israel, passing

Neboand Bamoth, had arrived at the inland end of

Pisgah. one these headlands—almost certainly that
which breaks from the Plateau half way between Heshbon
and Medeba, and runs out, under the name of Neba, nearly

1	Conder, ibid.

2	Not Bamoth in the valley, as the P.E.F. Red. Map, 1890, calls it (also
Conder, P.E.F.Q., 1882, p. 86), following the mistaken rendering of the
English version of Num. xxi. 20. Read from Bamoth to the glen or ravine.

:I Conder, P.E.F.Q., 1886, pp. 85 ff. ; Heth and Moab, 145 ff.Moab and the Coming of Israel

563

opposite the north end of the Dead Sea. The ridge is
about two miles long, and its level top perhaps half a
mile broad. It is of flinty limestone, mostly barren, yet
where it breaks from the Plateau, fertile, and, on the July
day we crossed, this end of it was covered with yellow
corn and reapers. Before you descend from the rising
ground, which alone divides it from the Plateau, you
instinctively seek the nearest high mound for a last view
backwards. There is the great plain of Moab, south-
ward broken only by the eminence of Medeba and the
hollow of Arnon, but in front of you it rolls away un-
broken, unvaried, save by the shadows of a few clouds on
the featureless hillocks, into the infinite East. You turn
westward, descending through the corn-fields, and traverse
the long flinty ridge to the limestone knoll upon it, which
bears the name of Ras, or Head, of Neba. You have lost
the eastern view, but all Western Palestine is in sight ;
only the hither side of the Jordan Valley is still invisible,
and north and south the view is hampered by the near
hills. Follow the ridge to its second summit, the Ras
Siaghah, and you find yourself on a headland, which,
though lower than Ras Neba, stands free of the rest of
the range. The whole of the Jordan Valley is now open
to you, from Engedi, beyond which the mists become
impenetrable, to where, on the north, the hills of Gilead
seem to meet those of Ephraim. The Jordan flows
below: Jericho is visible beyond. Over Gilead, it is
said, Hermon can be seen in clear weather, but the heat
hid it from us. The view is almost that described as the
last on which the eyes of Moses rested, the higher hills of
Western Palestine shutting out all possibility of a sight
of the sea. It is certainly the position described in the564 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

itinerary : the head of the Pisgah, which looketh down or
over upon the face of feshimon, whether this latter be the
wilderness of Judtea immediately across the Dead Sea,
or the long stretch of waste-land on the east of Jordan,
just below our point of view.1

It was probably the well-watered glen on the north of
the Neba-Siaghah ridge, the present Wady ‘Ayun Musa,

•TheWeils which Israel descended and camped in. It

of Moses. Would depend on the season of the year
whether the host stayed for some time about its plentiful
waters, now called the ‘ Wells of Moses,’ or at once
descended to the warm plains of Shittim beside the
Jordan. One thing is certain ; this journey, though it is
described in the Book of Numbers before the war with
Sihon, must have come after the latter. No host, so
large and cumbered as this, could have ventured down

1 Looketh down or over upo>i —	a verb used of God looking down

from heaven, Ps. cii. 20 (19); and of men especially, looking out of, and down
from, a window, 2 Sam. xxiv. 20 ; Gen. xxvi. 8 ; Song vi. 10. The chief
idea seems to be not looking forth, but looking down, and, if this be so, then
the Jeshimon of our present passage will not be the wilderness of Judaea, but
the long tract of barren land east of Jordan, north of the Dead Sea, in which
niDtJ'' JV3 lay, Josh. xii. 3; xiii. 20; Ezek. xxv. 9. Cf. Dillmann ad locum.

Pisgah is always used with the article, either in the connection K’frO
nJDQil, summit of the Pisgah (Num. xxi. 20 ; xxiii. 14 (JE) ; Deut. iii. 27 ;
xxxiv. 1), or as njDQH nnt^N or mt^N, slopes of the Pisgah (Deut. iii.
17 ; iv. 49 ; Josh. xii. 3, a Deuteronomic passage ; and Josh. xiii. 20, pro
bably from the Priestly Writing). The EWl is described as looking down on
Jeshimon, over against Jericho, and commanding a view of Shittim. With
regard to the etymology of the word it is plain that the name Siaghah, now
attached to the foreland, has no connection with Pisgah, the letters of which,
or their equivalents, are found in the name Ras Feshkah, a headland exactly
on the other side of the Dead Sea. The name Mount Nebo, 133 “Iii, is
found only in two passages, both of them probably Deuteronomic : Dt. xxxii.
49, where it is given as one of the Abarim range, over against Jericho, and
Dt. xxxiv. I, where it is said to be the same as Pisgah, LXX. Xa/3aO. The
town of Nebo is given in Num. xxxii. 3, 38; xxxiii. 47; Isa. xv. 2; Jer.
xlviii. 1, 22 ; 1 Chron. v. 8, generally next to Baal-Meon.Moab and the Coming of Israel

565

any of the glens from the Plateau to the Jordan before
their own warriors had occupied Heshbon, for Heshbon,
standing above them, commands these glens.

To*Nebo, again, the sacred story brings Moses to close
his life—again to that long platform where the host,
which he had guided through the desert for The burial
forty years, first lost their desert horizon, and ofMoses-
saw the Promised Land open before them. And some-
where below the platform the Lord buried Moses—in a
valley in the land of Moab, over against Beth Peor, but no
man knoweth of his sepulchre to this day. Between the
streams that in these valley bottoms spring full-born
from the rocks, and the merry corn-fields on the Plateau
of Moab above, there are some thousand feet of slopes and
gullies, where no foot comes, the rock is crumbling, and
utter silence reigns, save for the west wind moaning through
the thistles. Here Moses was laid. Who would wish to
know the exact spot ? The whole region is a sepulchre.

Nebo and the neighbouring hills were also the stations
and altars of Balaam. Balak brought him from the
Arnon, and first they took up their position The stations
at Bamoth-Baal, which must have lain back ofBalaam'
from the edge of the hills, for Balaam could see from it
only the farther edge of Israel’s camp in the plain below.1
The seer’s second station was in the field of Zophim, or
the Gazers, which is given as on the head of Pisgah,2 where
seven altars were built. The third station was the head
of Peor that looketh down on feshimon—the same index
as is given for Nebo itself, yet probably a point still

1 Nura. xxii. 41. Bamoth-Baal was perhaps identical with Bamoth the
station of Israel, xxi. 19. On the whole subject of Balaam’s altars see
Conder, P.E.F.Q. 1882 ; and Heth and Moab.

- Num. xxiii. 14.566 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

nearer to the plain of Shittim.1 The places at which
Balaam took his stand and looked for omens were all
probably sanctuaries. The range is covered with the
names of deity—Baal, Nebo, Peor. Nor could there be
more suitable platforms for altars, nor more open posts
for observing the stars or the passage of clouds, or the
flight of birds across the great hollow of the ‘Arabah.2
The field of Gazers was rightly named. To-day the hills
have many ancient altars and circles of stones upon them.3
Besides the distant campaign against Og, king of
i hc war Bashan,4 Israel waged war—impossible to
with Michan. avoi<j jn those desert - bordering regions—
with the Midianites.5 No geographical data are given.

The rest of the geography of Moab carries us into the
period of the kings and prophets.

The territory of Sihon between the Arnon and the Jab-
bok, and as far east as Jazer, the border of the children of
Reuben and Ammon, was divided between the two tribes
GacK of Reuben and Gad. These high, fresh moors,
the dust of whose paths still bear no foot-marks save
those of sheep and cattle, had attracted the two tribes,
which, not crossing the Jordan, failed, like the others, to
rise from the pastoral to the agricultural stage of life.
They asked Moses for the land, and he divided it be-
tween them. The division is hard to define : we have

1 TIJ7B, a mountain of this name is not elsewhere found. TlJlBIVD, Josh,
xiii. 20, is given with Ashdoth Pisgah and Beth-Jeshimoth, which means
probably that it lay well down towards the plain. Onomasticon gives 6pos
<t>oyd)p by the ascent from Livias (Tell Rame) and BeOQoywp, six Roman miles
east from Livias.

- Cf. Num. xxiii. 23, where enchantment and divination should be omens,
as of birds and clouds (cf. xxiv. I, he went not, as at other times, to seek for
omens), and soothsaying by watching arrows or looking into entrails.

3 Conder, of. t it.	4 See pp. 575 ff.	5 Num. xxxi.Moab and the Coming of Israel 567

two accounts. In one1 the cities of the Reubenites cluster
about Heshbon, while Gad’s cities are both south on the
Arnon and north of all Reuben’s. In the other,2 which
belongs to a different document, Reuben has all to the
south of Heshbon, Gad all to the north, the Wady
Hesban probably being the boundary. Neither of these
accounts is early, and the former probably represents the
distribution of the two tribes at a period when Reuben
was dwindling.3 All we know is that both tribes must
have had constant warfare with Moab, who would not
be kept south of the Arnon, and that, in course of that
warfare, Reuben disappeared from among the tribes of
Israel. The Moabite inscription of the middle of the
ninth century mentions the men of Gad, and

Mesha and

places them immediately to the north of ‘The Moabite
Arnon, but does not know of the men of
Reuben.4 Towards the beginning of the ninth century
Moab was as far north as Medeba,5 but Omri drove him
back across the Arnon, and he was tributary to Israel all
Omri’s days and all Ahab’s.6 Then he revolted, and

1	Num. xxxii. 34 ff. (E). Gad had Daibon, Ataroth (modern Attarus), Aroer,
Ateroth-Sophan unknown, Jezer and Jogbeha in the north, near Jabbok,
Beth-Nimra unknown, and Beth-IIaran, see p. 488. Reuben had Heshbon,
Elealeh, now El-Al, to the north of Heshbon, Kiriathaim, now Kureiyat, south
of Wady Zerka Ma'in, Nebo, Baal-Me‘on, and the unknown Shibmah.

2	Josh. xiii. 15 ff. (P ?).

3	Cf. Stade, Gesch. 148. But Stade is surely wrong when he maintains
that, at the time of the crossing of the Jordan, Reuben had no territory about
Heshbon, and that he only came there later. There is no trace of this, and
Stade himself owns not to be able to discover where Reuben’s seat could be
before it was Hesbon.

4	1. 10 : ‘ men of Gad had dw'elt in the land of Ataroth from of old.’

5	Or Mehedeba, Moabite Stone, 11. 7 and 8.

0 2 Kings i. 1 ; iii. 5. Mesha puts his revolt in the middle of Ahab’s
reign, 1. 8. We might correct the Bible narrative by this contemporary
document; but the death of a king was the usual moment chosen for a revolt
such as Mesha’s.568 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

sweeping north, took and rebuilt, he tells us, all the towns
we already know between the Arnon and Nebo.1 It is
interesting that he does not profess to have taken Ilesh-
bon. The kings of Judah, Israel and Edom contrived to
defeat Moab,2 but without result. Mesha or his successors
must have pushed their conquests farther north, for in
the time of the great prophets we find Moab, except for
a short interval, in possession of all their ancient territory
even north of the Wady Hesban.3 From the Moabites
the land passed to Arabs and Nabateans.4

It was the Hasmoneans who won back for Israel these
ancient seats of Reuben. That curious personage, the

The Hasmo Jew*s^ Priest Hyrcanus, who was driven by

neansin his brothers across Jordan, had built the won-
derful castle and caves of Tyrus, now ‘Arak el
Emir, and established a kind of kingdom. But he killed
himself in 176 B.C.5 John Hyrcanus took Medeba,6 and
Alexander Janneus made the Moabites tributary.7 He

1	Aroer, Daibon, Jahaz, Kiriathaim, Beth-Bamoth, Baal-Me‘on, Mehedeba,
Beth-Diblalhen, and he destroyed ‘Ataroth and Nebo.

2	2 Kings iii.

3	Amos (vi. 14) sets the boundary of the kingdom of Jeroboam 11. at the brook
of the ‘Arabah. If this, as is generally supposed, means some water-course at
the south end of the Dead Sea, Jeroboam II. had again reduced Moab, which
is very probable. Isaiah xv. xvi. speaks of Hesbon, Elealeh, and Jazer as
Moabite. In Jer. xlviii. 45 Hesbon seems to stand outside Moab. In
Ezek. xxv. 9, Medeba is Moab’s.

4	1 Macc. ix. 35 ff.: tous Navaraloi/y, the viol ’lap-ftpl Ik Mr)5aj3d, in this
passage may be compared with the name Ia'meru VnDJP in the Nabatean
inscription from Umm-er-Resas, C./.S. ii. 195, and with the ’Ap.apa.Lov
iralSts of Josephus xiii. Antt. i. 2 ; Clermont Ganneau, Journal Asiatique,
1891, p. 542.

B Josephus xii. Anti. iv. 11. The best accounts of ‘Arak el Emir are
Merrill’s East of Jordan, 106 ff.; Tristram, Land of Israel, 520; and Conder,
Heth and Moab, 168 ff.

0 xiii. Antt. ix. 1. About 127 B.c.

7 Ibid. xiii. 5. Before 90 B.c.- Moab and the Coming of Israel

569

built as the Jewish bulwark to the south the great
fortress of Mekawar,1 in Greek Machaerus, to-day
Mkawr. It was given up to the Romans. r ,

°	Machaerus

and destroyed by Gabinius, but Herod re- and the

.	Herods.

built it, making another Masada.2 Pliny calls
Machaerus the second citadel of Judaea.3 It lay on the
border of Peraea, or the tetrarchy of Herod Antipas ;
to the south of it were the domains of Aretas, Herod’s
father-in-law, king of the Nabateans.4 When, for the
sake of Herodias, Herod intrigued to divorce the daughter
of Aretas, she begged to be sent to Machaerus, and
Herod having let her go, she easily escaped from it to
one of her father’s camps on the Arnon.5 It is interest-
ing that we have two inscriptions from about this date
of the strategi or commanders of these camps.6 Aretas,
like Herod, was a vassal of Rome, but instead of appeal-
ing to his suzerain to right the wrong done to his

1	TDD or TlDD. Some readings in the Talmud and Targums insert a
v or b (Lightfoot, Opera, Ed. Leusden ii. 582; Levy, Neuhebraisches
Worterbuch, sub voce *"I1DD). Josephus gives MaxatpoDr; Pliny, Machaerus.
For its building by Alexander Janneus see Josephus, vii. Wars, vi. 2.

2	Josephus, xiv. Antt. v. 2; vi. I ; vii. Wars, vi. 2; i. Wars, vii. 2.

3	H.N. v. 16.	4 Josephus, xviii. Antt. v. I.

5	Ibid. Josephus cannot possibly have meant to say what some words of
this passage, as they now stand, imply, viz., that Machaerus belonged at this
time to Aretas. Hitherto there had been no reason either of peace or war
for Herod’s surrender of this fortress; the rest of this passage implies that
Herod let his wife go to a fortress still his own, and it is only after she
reaches Machaerus that Josephus talks of her coming ‘into Arabia,’ and
under the charge of her father’s generals. The clause, therefore, assigning
Machaerus to Aretas must be corrupt. See next note as to the frontier.

6	One inscription at Umm-er-Resas, the other at Medeba. Corpus Inscrip.
Semit., Pars ii. tom. ii. Nos. 195, 196. The former is 39 a.d., the latter
37. The latter does not prove the possession of Medeba in that year by the
Nabateans, for it is not in situ, and it may have been brought from a dis-
tance. In any case, the position of the Jews and Nabateans in Moab in 37,
tells us nothing upon the question of the previous note, as to their frontier
a few years before, when Aretas’ daughter fled from Herod.570 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

daughter, he prepared himself to go to war against Herod.
Herod moved south to Machaerus to meet him, bringing
his new wife, Herodias, and her daughter Salome. Aretas
lingered, and in the respite Herod turned to deal with
another foe, whom his scandalous conduct had aroused
within his own domains.1 John the Baptist, preaching in
Peraea, had denounced the marriage of Herodias. and
Herod arrested him, and cast him into the

of John the dungeons, which Machaerus held beneath its

Baptist. r0yai palace. Here the revelry of the king’s
birthday took place, and in the same moments, within
the same walls, the murder of the prophet.2 Machaerus
overlooks the Dead Sea—it was another of those awful
tragedies, for which nature has furnished here so sym-
pathetic a theatre.3 But it was not the last of them.
Like Masada Machaerus formed one of the refuges of
the Jewish zealots, who escaped from the overthrow of
Jerusalem. Though unable to take it by storm, the
Romans compelled its surrender through sheer menace,
slaughtered a large part of the garrison and razed the
walls.4

We cannot pass on without noticing that Moses and
John, the first and the last of the prophets, thirteen

1 Matt. xiv. 3 fl'.

- Josephus (xviii. Anit. v. 2) is our only authority for the imprisonment and
murder of the Baptist in Machaerus. Matthew (xiv. 3 ff.) and Mark (vi. 17 ff.)
mention no place. Keim’s observation (Jesus of Nazara, iv. 217) that
Mark vi. 21 implies Tiberias is utterly gratuitous, and an answer, if needed, is
supplied by himself (lb. 218, note 1), when he points out that Galilee, as in
Mark’s account, is often used by Josephus of the whole tetrarchy of Antipas.
Wieseler’s theory, that the banquet took place in Livias, the execution in
Machaerus, is impossible.

3	See p. 499.

4	Josephus, vii. IVars, vi. 2 f. On the present condition of the site see
Burckhardl, Tristram, Conder, and other travellers.Moab and the Coming of Israel

57i

centuries between them, closed their lives almost on the
same spot. Within sight also is the scene of the trans-
lation of Elijah.

The only other sites in this neighbourhood famed in
those times were Heshbon, then Essebon, which gave its
name to the district of Sebonitis,1 and Callirrhoe, probably
the hot springs of the Wady Zerka Ma‘in.

1 Josephus, ii. Wars, xviii. I, Se/Sowns; xii. Antt. iv. 11, ’Eaire^uviTis ;
xv. Antt. viii. 5, ,E<re(3ui'iTis. The LXX. spell the name of the town
’Ecre/3wi', ’E<r/3ouy, which latter is also given by Eusebius and Jerome in the
Onomasticon. In the Christian era it was the seat of a Bishop.CHAPTER XXVII

ISRAEL IN GILEAD AND BASHAN

573For this Chapter consult Maps /., III. and V.ISRAEL IN GILEAD AND BASHAN

T T 7"E now proceed to what, through so many centuries,
V V was Israel’s only proper territory east of Jordan
—the Land of Gilead. Gilead, let us remember, extends
from the edge of the plateau of Moab to the Yarmuk,
and is cut into halves by the Jabbok. Israel’s defeat of
Sihon had given them the southern half, and brought
them to this river. But the Sacred Narrative carries Israel
in the days of Moses across the northern half of Gilead
and up to Bashan. To the story of Sihon it adds the
story of Og.

We are not offered the same evidence in this case as
in the previous. No song has been preserved that illus-
trates the war against Og, and the story is og, king of
confined to the Deuteronomic documents. Bashan>
Accordingly, even critics, who believe in the reality of
Sihon and of his overthrow by Israel, have doubted
whether Og ever existed or Israel made so early an
advance so far north as Bashan.

I have given elsewhere1 detailed answers to these doubts,
and here need only emphasise the geographical probability
of Israel’s advance towards Bashan before they crossed
the Jordan. Israel, it seems certain, were settled for some
time in Moab, the country to the north was attractive, no
1 Appendix, on the Wars against Sihon and Og.

575576 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

obstacle like Jordan shut it off, and, besides, a chief, such
as Og is represented to be, was not likely to be quiescent
before so strong an invader on his own side of the river.
No other invader of Syria from the south-east has crossed
Jordan without conquering Eastern Palestine, sometimes
even as far as Damascus.1 Og is represented as govern-
ing the country to the Jabbok. But there is no record
of Israel’s advance from the Jabbok to the Yarmuk.
Og met them at Edrei, east of the source of the latter
river. Edrei, the present ’Adhra'a,2 is a very strong
position, on the south of the gorge that forms the southern
boundary of the plain of Hauran. The gorge winds, and
Underground with a tributary ravine isolates the present
Edre1,	city on all but the southern side, by which it

can be approached on the level. But the citadel is com-
pletely cut off, upon a hill which stands forward on the
gorge, and probably with the caves below it held the
whole ancient town. These caves are one of the wonders
of Eastern Palestine. They form a great subterranean
city, a labyrinth of streets with shops and houses on either
side, and a market-place.3 How old the whole is we
cannot say. The Bible makes no mention of so great a
marvel, which is, therefore, probably to be dated from
later times. Bashan was full of cities 4 besides Edrei, as

1 One thinks especially of how the Nabateans pushed their conquest up to
Damascus, even in face of Greek powers, and how the Mohammedans took
Damascus before they took Jerusalem.

Modern Arabic orthography is Dara'at, but the Bedouin preserve
the most ancient pronounciation ’Azra'at. The Greeks spelt it ’ASpaa.

3	Wetzstein, Reiscbericht, 47 f. Porter, Five Years in Damascus. From
the entrance in the gorge, we penetrated for fifty yards, and were stopped by
a great and recent fall of the rock. Our guides told us the passage had been
blown up by the Kaimakam to prevent the labyrinth being used by fugitives
from military service and justice.

4	Deut. iii.Israel in Gilead and Baskan

577

it is to-day, but almost none of the present ruins go back
beyond the Christian era.

Less clear than Israel’s conquest of Og is their occupa-
tion of his land, for the accounts of it differ, and many hold
that the interpretation of them is, that Manas- Half-tribe of
seh’s settlement in Half Gilead (north of the Manasseh>
Jabbok) and in Bashan took place not before Israel’s pas-
sage of the Jordan, but from Western Palestine, and after
the settlement of the tribe to the north of Ephraim. There
are, however, reasons against this, and in favour of the earlier
settlement: so that, on our present evidence, the matter
must remain uncertain.1 But at whatever period Hebrew
tribes first settled in Gilead, Gilead thereafter

Gilead,

continued to be the peculiar domain of Israel Israel’s pro-

. per territory.

on the east of Jordan. The reasons for this,
with all the consequent movements of history in Gilead, are
as clear as the questions of her various localities and sites
are obscure. Gilead is still only a half-explored country.

1 Num. xxxii. i, JE states that only Reuben and Gad asked Moses for
land east of Jordan. It is other sources which add to their settlement there
the settlement of the half-tribe of Manasseh (Deut. and Num. xxxii. 33,
assigned by most to the redactor). Deborah’s song seems to speak of Machir as
a western clan (Judges v. 14). The story of how Machir, son of Manasseh, took
Gilead, and Jair, the son of Manasseh, took its camp-villages and called them
Havoth-Jair, is attached by an earlier document (J) to the story of the settlement
of Eastern Palestine under Moses (Num. xxxii. 39 ff.). But Judges xii. assigns
Havoth-Jair to Jair a Gileadite in the days of the Judges {see p. 551). Well-
hausen says {Hist. 2nd ed. p. 33) that this makes ‘ probable ’ the invasion of
Gilead by Manasseh after the conquest of Western Palestine. Stade {Gesch.
163) thinks it happened when Reuben and Gad, whom he supposes to have
first settled in Gilead, pushed south to Moab. But, as we have seen, p. 275,
Reuben and Gad were in Moab from the first, and Stade gives no date, proof,
or trace of proof, for the movement he imputes to them. Budde {Richt u. Sam,
pp. 32 ff.), by an able and ingenious argument, points out that the children of
Joseph could not (Josh. xvii. 14-18) have complained to Joshua that they had
only one lot, if besides their western territory they had already from Moses a
territory east of Jordan, and he proposes by inserting ‘Gilead’ in ver. 1$, to578 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Why Gilead constituted the eastern domain of Israel
may be understood from her formation. Gilead is the only
Reasons Part Eastern Palestine which corresponds to
for this.	territories of Israel in* the West. Gilead

is mountain or hill-country between the two great
plateaus of Moab and Hauran. Hauran was swept by
the Arameans or Syrians, a people with chariots ; north
of the Yarmuk Israel seldom got footing. Moab south,
and the level country east of Gilead, were swept by the
Arabs and Ammonites. But neither Aram from the
north, nor Ammon from the south, though they sometimes
carried fire and sword across Gilead, was able to drive the
Hebrews from those high-wooded ridges between Moab
and the Yarmuk, which formed almost as integral a
portion of Israel as the hill-country of Judah, or the hill-
country of Ephraim. Gilead was also, we must remember,
in close communication with Western Palestine, as neither
Bashan nor Moab could ever be.

Accordingly, we find in Gilead, from the earliest times to
the Assyrian captivity, Hebrew communities, centres and
rallying-places for Hebrew dynasties, Hebrew character and
heroism, with prophecy, the distinctive glory of Hebrew

make this the new lot which Joshua granted them. But there is no evidence
in the passage of ‘ Gilead ’ having fallen out of the text, or of its being meant
by Joshua. Nor could it have helped the House of Joseph against the
Canaanites of Western Palestine (ver. 18) to have occupied Gilead. And, as
Stade observes (Gesch. 163), it is not clear that Joshua did grant them a
second lot. The arguments to prove the invasion of Northern Gilead from
Western Palestine, are, therefore, inconclusive. Note, on the other side,
that Gilead is said to be father of Abiezer and Shechem (Num. xxvi. 29 f. P ;
Josh. xvii. 2, JE), and therefore older in Manasseh’s history than these
western towns of the tribe, and that while Judges xii. 4 (a narrative probably
from the period of the early Kings) speaks of some Gileadites as late immi-
grants into their territory, it assumes that Manasseh had previously occupied
this,Israel in Gilead and Baskan

579

life. Deborah’s song actually substitutes Gilead for Gad
as the name of a tribe in Israel.1 In his pursuit of the
Midianites Gideon finds in Gilead two com- Gilead and
munities, Succoth and Penuel, from which he Hstory^of
expects the same devotion to Israel as he Israel-
would from any towns in Ephraim.2 Two of the judges
are Gileadite. One of them, Jair, lives on the very east
of the province, on the border of the desert, where men
inhabit not cities but camps.3 The other is the imposing
figure of Jephthah, Israel’s champion against the Ammon-
ites, who occupied the fertile land on the waters of the
Upper Jabbok. The story of Jephthah throbs with the
sense of common interest between Gilead and Ephraim.4
Mizpeh in Gilead was the gathering-place of all Israel
against Benjamin.5 Again, when the Ammonites threat-
ened the helpless Jabesh-Gilead, Saul proved his title as
king of All-Israel by succouring this Eastern city,6 a
service which its citizens remembered when they rescued
his body from insult at Bethshan, and gave it burial with
themselves.7 It was certainly with some thought of all this
that Abner vainly tried, in Gilead, to restore Saul’s dynasty.8

By his conquests over Ammon and Aram of Damascus
and Sobah, David was the first to bring all Eastern
Palestine under Israel’s suzerainty.9 So com- Eastern
pletely had David won the hearts of Eastern u^erDavid
Israel that when Absalom’s rebellion broke and Solomon,
out he sought a refuge in Gilead, and made his head-

1 Judges v. 17.	2 Judges viii.

3	Judges x. 3-5. See p. 575. Nobah went still farther east to Kanatha
in the Jebel Hauran, Num. xxxii. 42.

4	Judges x. ff.	6 Id. xx. I.	6 I Sam. xi.

7 I Sam. xxxi. 11-13.	8 2 Sam. ii.

9 2 Sam. viii. and x. The exact degree of the subjection of Aram to David
is left in doubt. Sobah lay to the north of Damascus.580 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

quarters Mahanaim, where Abner had crowned Ish-
bosheth. The great woods of Gilead live before us in
the story of the subsequent battle, when the rough wood-
land multiplied to devour more people than the sword, and
Absalom was hanged by his long hair in the oak.1
Solomon did not retain all the Eastern conquests of his
father, and in his day Damascus grew to that power
which made her, for the next three centuries, so formid-
able a foe to Israel.2 After the disruption Gilead remained
with the northern kingdom, opposite which it lay, and
with which it had easy communication by the fords of
Jordan.3 Jeroboam fortified Penuel, and, for a time, may
have made it his capital.4 * Soon afterwards Gilead gave
Elijah the to Israel a great personality. Elijah the Tish-
Tishbite.	breaks across Jordan from Tishbeh in

Gilead5 with the same suddenness as in the end he
disappears across the same river. In Gilead we must
also seek for the Brook Cherith, the scene of his retreat.6
During the reign of Ahab, Damascus and Israel fought
Aram and as a^ies against Assyria,7 but from this event
Samaria. onward they were foes. They met on Israelite
territory and Aram was beaten, met again at Aphek, on
Aramean territory above the Lake of Galilee, where the
great road still comes along from Damascus to the

1	2 Sam. xviii. 8, 10. On the name Ephraim (ver. 6) on that side Jordan
see p. 335.

2	The idea that Solomon built Tadmor or Palmyra must be abandoned.
For Tadmor in 1 Kings ix. 18 read Tamar, a town in Judah. See p. 270.

8 On the connection of Ephraim with Eastern Palestine see p. 335-

4 So it seems from the close connection between his abandonment of

Shechem and building of Penuel, 1 Kings xii. 25.

6 1 Kings xvii. 1; LXX.

6	It is described as before, i.e. to the east of, Jordan, 1 Kings xvii. 3, 5.

7	At Karkar in 854 B.c,Israel in Gilead and Bashan

58i

Jordan,1 and Aram was beaten once more. Later, the
Arameans took Ramoth in Gilead, and Ahab fell in the
effort to regain it.2 After some years, in which the
Arameans kept up war against Western Palestine,3 and
besieged Samaria,4 Joram, grandson of Ahab, won back
Ramoth-Gilead, but it was still contested by Aram,5 and
Jehu was serving in the garrison when he was anointed
to destroy the House of Omri. In Jehu’s reign, and
perhaps because of the internal troubles consequent on
his usurpation of the throne, Hazael of Damascus, sweep-
ing to the Arnon, was able to conquer all Israel’s posses-
sions east of Jordan.6 It is probably to the barbarities of
this campaign, in which Aram was joined by Ammon and
Moab, that Amos refers: For three transgressions of
Damascus, and for four, I will not turn it away ; for they
have threshed Gilead with threshing-sledges of iron. For
three transgressions of the children of Ammon, and for
four, I will not turn it away ; for they have ripped up the
mothers of Gilead—to enlarge their border /7 Bands of
Moabites used to invade Western Palestine at the coming
in of the year, and Hazael and Ben-Hadad, kings of Syria,
oppressed Israel all their days.8

During these evil times the prophet Elisha, genuine
borderman as he was (from Abel-meholah on Jordan),9

1	The present Fik. Wellhausen and Robertson Smith are surely wrong in
identifying this Aphek with that where the Philistines mustered. See pp.
204, 401. The narrative of the war between Israel and Aram, 1 Kings xx.

2	I Kings xxii.	3 2 Kings v. 2; vi. 8.

4 Id. vi. 24 ff. ; vii.	5 Id. ix. 1, 4, 14.

6 Id. x. 32.	7 Amos i. 3, 13.	8 2 Kings xiii. 2.

9 I Kings xix. 16, somewhere in Jordan, probably south of the great plain
of Bethshan, Judges vii. 22; 1 Kings iv. 12. Eusebius and Jerome, in the
Onomasticon, ’Af3e\/xae\al, place it in the Ghor, ten miles south of Bethshan,
at a spot called, in their day, BTjQfxcueXd. Conder suggests ‘Ain Helweh,
nine and a half miles south of Beth-shan.582 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Elisha.

expert in camp-life, ambush and scouting,1 inspired with
political foresight,2 had also been the moral stay and inspira-
tion of his broken people—altogether,3 through
those three long distracting reigns, the very
chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof!4 His bequest to
Israel was hope: dying, he prophesied that the young
Joash should thrice smite the Syrians at Aphek.5 And so it
came to pass. Joash recovered from Aram what Jehoahaz
had lost,6 and under the next, the long glorious reign of
Jeroboam II., Israel enjoyed supremacy up to her ideal
borders, Hamath and the Dead Sea, and probably occu-
pied part of the very territory of Damascus.7 This lasted
for fifty years. The prophet Hosea treats Gilead as if
it were as integral a part of the kingdom as Ephraim.8

But then came the flood which was to devas-
tate with equal thoroughness both Western
and Eastern Palestine. In 734 Tiglath-pileser, king of
Assyria, came and took Ijon and Abel-beth-maacah, and
Janoah, and Kedesh, and Hazor, and Gilead, arid Galilee, all
Gilead in die land of Naphtali, and carried them captive
the Prophets. tQ Assyria.9 The eastern territories of Israel
were left to the Ishmaelites. Isaiah does not once men-
tion Gilead. Micah has only a prayer that God’s flock may
pasture again in Bashan and Gilead, as in days of old}9

The captivity
of Gilead.

1	These practical qualities of Elisha, so different from those of Elijah, are
obvious, from all the marvellous narratives of 2 Kings iv. 3S ff. ; vi. 1-23 ;
especially 12 ; Elisha, the prophet that is in Israel, telleth the king of Israel
the words thoti speakest in thy bedchamber.

2	2 Kings viii. 7 ff. ; ix. 3.	3 Id. vi. 13-17.

4 Id. xiii. 14.	6 Id. xiii. 17.

6	Id. xiii. 25.

7	Id. xiv. 28, not necessarily Damascus itself.

8	Hosea vi. 8 ; xii. 11. Cf. Obad. 19.

9	2 Kings xv. 29.	10 Micah vii. 14.Israel in Gilead and Bashan

583

To Jeremiah, Gilead is only a figure and a proverb, whose
pathos is deepened by her abandonment by Israel; Is there
no balm in Gilead, no physician there ?1 But, in the days
of the great captivity, Zechariah names Gilead as a pro-
mise : I will bring them again out of the land of Egypt,
and gather them out of Assyria ; and I will bring them down
into the land of Gilead and Lebanon.2 The returned people
shall be so many that Gilead shall be needed, and even
Lebanon, for the overflow of them.

Such, then, is the history of Gilead, a history of con-
stant war, all the tangled lines of which become intelligible
when you recognise the position of this terri-
tory—high forest ridges between the river of sites
Jordan and the desert, between the two great
plateaus of Moab and Hauran. But when you come to
details, and seek to fasten names, and trace the scenery of
separate events, you are baffled. In all Syria sites are
nowhere less fixed than in Gilead. There is only one
identification which is certain ; there are, perhaps, two
more which are probable.

The certainty is the Jabbok or Yabbok. One has seen
this Jabbok from one’s childhood,—the midnight passage
of a ford, the brief section of a river gleam-
ing under torches, splashed and ploughed by
struggling animals, cries of women and children above the
noise; and then, left alone, with the night, the man and
the river,—for the narrative betokens some sympathy
1 Jer. viii. 22.

2 Zech. x. 10.584 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

between the two tortuous courses :1 the wrestle with God
beside the struggling stream, and the dawn breaking
down the valley on a changed life. Now, to-day there is
no river in Syria which you associate more with the height
of noon: groups of cattle standing to the knee in
water, brakes of oleanders soaked in sunshine, and a fair
array of fields on either side, scattered over with reapers
and men guiding water by ancient channels to orchards
and gardens. From first to last, the valley of the Jabbok
is of great fertility. The head-waters of the river rise
on the edge of Moab, only some eighteen miles from the
Jordan, yet to the east of the water-parting. So the river
flows at first desertwards, under the name of Amman,
past Rabbath-Ammon 2 to the great Hajj road. There it
turns north, fetches a wide compass north-west, cuts in
two the range of Gilead, and by a very winding bed flows
west-south-west to the Jordan. The whole course, not
counting the windings, is over sixty miles. The water is
shallow, always fordable, except where it breaks between
steep rocks, mostly brawling over a stony bed, muddy,
and, at a distance, of a grey-blue colour, which brings it
its present name of the Zerka. The best fields are upon
the upper reaches, where much wheat is grown, but almost
nowhere on the banks are you out of sight of sheep, or
cattle, or tillage. A great road from Jordan follows the
valley all the way to the desert, another runs from the
desert by Amman to the west.3 The river has always been
a frontier and a line of traffic. Some day the valley will

1	ph' Yabbok, and p3K\ Ye‘abhek = /^ wrestles. The narrative con-
nects the wrestling both with the river and with the place called Penuel.

2	See the next chapter, on the Decapolis.

8 Merrill, East of the Jordan, ch. xxx.: ‘ Exploration of the Jabbok.’Israel in Gilead and Bashan

585

be very populous and busy. Yet the highest fame of
Jabbok will ever be its first fame, and not all the sun-
shine, ripening harvests along its live length, can be so
bright as that first gleaming and splashing of its waters
at midnight, or the grey dawn breaking on Israel next
morning. The history of Gilead is a history of material
war and struggle, civilisation enduring only by perpetual
strife. But upon the Jabbok its first hero was taught
how man has to reckon in life with God also, and that
his noblest struggles are in the darkness, with the
Unseen.

The two sites in Gilead, whose identification is probable,
are both named in Gideon’s pursuit of the Midianites.
Succoth may be the present Tell Deir ‘Alla, a succothand
high mound in the Jordan Valley, about one J°sbehah-
mile north of the Jabbok.1 Jogbehah is surely echoed in
the present Jubeihah, Gubeihah, or ’Ajbehat, on the road
from Salt to Amman.2 Gideon zvent up by the zvay of
them that dwell in tents on the east of Nobah, unknown, and
fogbehah. This may mean the road up the Jabbok itself.
In any case, Gideon, going east, came from
Succoth to Penuel, as Jacob, going west, came
from Penuel to Succoth. Penuel was probably a promi-
nent ridge near the Jabbok, not necessarily to the south of

1 The identification is due to Merrill (East of the Jordan, pp. 385-388,
concurred in by Conder, Heth and Moab, p. 183), and has been won through
the statement of the Talmud (Shebiith ix. 2, Gemara) that the later name of
Succoth was i"6jrn, Dar'ala. Of course this leaves the matter only probable.
Psalm lx. 6 mentions the Vale of Succoth, between Shechem and Gilead.

2	Judges vifi. 11, cf. Num, xxxii. 35, 42. As far as I know this was
Conder’s suggestion. We visited the numerous ruins in 1891 ; our search
revealed nothing but some Greek carvings. The name ’Ajbehat, or ’Agbehat,
is in my diary as given me by some Arabs we met there. Tubeihat is on
the P.E.F. Map.586 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Mahanaim.

this, and above Succoth.1 We are equally ignorant of
Mahanaim. It lay presumably to the north of Jabbok,
and of the great gorge of Jordan, on the
border of Gad, and not far from Jordan ; and it
was an important city, fit for a capital.2 The other famous
names cannot be accurately fixed—Mizpeh, Ramath-
Ramaih- Mizpeh, Ramoth-Gilead, and the Land of Tob.
Ramoth^nd Mizpeh, the scene of Laban’s covenant with
Gilead. Jacob, has been placed by Conder at Sfif, a
place of dolmens and stone-circles between ‘Ajlun and
Jerash.3 This may be, but in the diversity of other
accounts of a Mizpeh in Gilead, one of which, Jephthah’s
story, places it on the border of Ammon,4 another implies
that it lay more to the west,5 another puts Ramath-

1	That Penuel was prominent is likely, from the analogy of the Phoenician
headland known as 6eov irpbawrov (Strabo xvi. 2, 15 f.). Gen. xxxii. 25-33,
implies that it was near Jabbok; Judges viii. 8-11, that it was above
Succoth. If Jacob came from the north, then Penuel was south of Jabbok ;
if from the east, then Penuel may have been on either bank, for the eastern
road down the Jabbok valley crosses the river more than once. Merrill
suggests the Tulul edh-Dhahab, round and between which the Jabbok forces
its way into the Jordan (pp. 390-392). Conder puts Penuel on the ridge of the
Jebel ‘Osha.

2	Gen. xxxii. 1-10 (vv. 4-143 of this chapter belong to J, vv. 1-3, 14^ ff. to
E) seems to put Mahanaim near Jordan, which would make Jacob’s approach
to Jabbok take place from the north (see previous note). Abner, after
crossing Jordan, came through the Bithron or Gorge (2 Sam. ii. 29), a name
which suits the narrow central portion of the Jordan Valley, to Mahanaim.
The Kikkar, across which Ahimaaz ran to Mahanaim (id. xviii. 23) is pro-
bably the Kikkar of Jordan (see pp. 335, 505). Conder (Heth and Moab,
185 ff.) places Mahanaim near the Bukei'a, to the east of Salt, a region not
likely to contain so important a town, and hardly on the border of Gad,
where Mahanaim is placed by Josh. xiii. 26. Merrill (p. 437) suggests Khurbet
Suleikhat, 300 feet above the Ghor, in the Wady ‘Ajlun ; cf. Kasteren
(Z.D.P. V. xiii. 205), on Kh.-Mahne. Visited by Seetzen, Reise, i. 385.

3	Gen. xxxi. 49. Conder, Heth and Moab, 181 f. ; Oliphant, Land of
Gilead, 209-216.

4	Judges x. 17 ; xi. 11, 29, 34.

6 Or it could hardly have been the gathering-place of all Israel, against
Benjamin, Judges xx. xxi.Israel in Gilead and Bashan

587

Mizpeh on the northern border of Gad,1 while another
speaks of a Maspha or Mizpeh in the far north-east2—
what certainty can we have that these are the same ? or,
if they are the same, what one site will suit them all ?
Ramoth-Gilead, which has been assigned to at least five
different places, probably lay north of them all, near the
Yarmuk, for it was on debatable ground be- The Land
tween Aram and Israel.3 The name of Land ofTob-
of Tob,4 which was north of Mizpeh, may survive in that
of the Wady and village of Taiyibeh, east of Pella.6

But while these ancient sites are uncertain, it ought to
be remembered that no province has at the present day
sites which, by nature and the part they have
played in modern history, are more definitely historical
stamped as likely to have been among the
famous sites of old. It is impossible for us to believe that
Es-Salt with its Jebel ‘Osha, ‘Ajlun with its equally
famous view-point and fortress in the Kula‘at-er-Rubaad,
Pella, Gadara, Irbid, Remtheh, were not famous in the
history of Israel in Gilead. Surely they were not unused.
It may only be the meagreness of geographical details in the
Old Testament which prevents us from identifying Mizpeh
with the far-seeing Kula'at-er-Rubaad, Mahanaim with so
worthy a capital for Gilead as ‘Ajlun, or with so historical a
site as Pella; or from placing Ramoth-Gilead at Reimun,6 or

1 Josh. xiii. 26.	2 Taken by Judas Maccabeus, I Macc. v. 35.

3	1 Kings xxii., 2 Kings ix.

4	And not, as Conder says, the district in which Mizpeh lay, for Jephthah
was summoned from it to come to Mizpeh, which the narrative places near
the territory of Ammon.

5	The n as given in the Syriac version of 1 Macc. v. 13, and in the
Greek of 2 Macc. x. 11, 17, is not a radical, but the Greek termination,
Tii/3iov or Toufliov, TW/Jojvoi. Hence the P.E.F. Red. Map% 1890, is wrong
n suggesting Tibneh to the south of Taiyibeh.

0 As Conder does.588 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

at Es-Salt, or at the Kula‘at-er-Rubaad, though, as already
said, it seems necessary, from what the Old Testament tells
us of the frequency with which Ramoth-Gilead was con-
tested by Aram and Israel, to put it farther north, near the
Yarmuk. Irbid and Ramtheh, on the north-east, are both
of them fairly strong sites ; the former is to-day the capital
of the district of ‘Ajlun, the latter a station on the Hajj
road, that immemorial line of traffic. Both of them must
have been prominent places in ancient times.

But all that can be done to-day is to state the topo-
graphical problems of Israel in Gilead, and leave their
solution till the discovery of fresh evidence.

After the return from exile the Jews spread themselves
across Eastern Palestine, and came into conflict, as we
The Macca- have seen them do in the Shephelah, with the
Eastern1	new race	Greek settlers who flowed in in

Palestine.	the wake of Alexander the Great. Hellenism

came to terms with the native paganism : the two were
amalgamated. But the Jews kept to themselves, they
were few and weak, and when the great religious war
broke out in the second century they were sorely pressed
in their various cities.1 Judas Maccabeus, who had pre-
viously conquered the Ammonites under a Greek leader,2
achieved a second victorious campaign,3 the course of
which is hard to trace, but it brought him as far east as
Bosra. He took that town, and next a place, Dathema,
or, according to another reading, Rametha, in which it is

1 1 Macc. v. 9.	2 i Macc. v. 6-8.

3 1 Macc. v. 24 ff. ; the wilderness into which he went three days’ journey
must be that to the east of Ammon and Gilead, whence he suddenly turned on
Bosra.Israel in Gilead and Bashan

589

possible to trace an echo of Ramoth of Gilead,1 and next,
Maspha,2 Casphon,3 Maged, Bosor,4 and other cities of the
country of Galaad. The heathen gathered a force at
Raphon,5 probably Raphana of the Decapolis on the
Yarmuk, but Judas defeated them and took Karnain,6
with its great temple to Atargatis. Then, gathering all
the Jews who would come back with him, he returned by
‘ a great and well-fortified ’ city called Ephron,7 which he
was forced to take before he could pass, and crossed the
Jordan at Beth-shan.

It was Alexander Janneus8 who again brought Gilead
within the territories of Israel. First he took Gadara, but
seems to have been repulsed from Amathus, Alexander
a very strong fortress just north of the Asternin
Jabbok, now Amatha.9 On a second cam- Palestine-
paign, after overcoming ‘ the Moabites and Gileadites,’ he
destroyed Amathus and its Greek defenders, but was
defeated on the Yarmuk by Obodas, the Arabian. ‘ He
was thrown by means of a multitude of camels into a deep
valley ’—a fate of singular likeness to that which the
Arabs inflicted on the Byzantine army in 634 A.D., forcing
them by sheer weight of numbers into a defile in the

1	1 Macc. v. 9 ; Greek, AaOepa; Syriac, Rametha. This would confirm
the northern position of Ramoth. See above, p. 5 7.

2	Not necessarily Mizpeh of Gilead. The_ Syriac reads Alim, Josephus
Malle.

3	XaiTipup (v. 26), or Xaatpwv, or Xa<r0w0 (v. 36).

4	Max^S and Bocr6p.

5	V. 37, Ya<pup iiciripav rod Xeipafipov. See next chapter.

e V. 26, Kapvdtv.	7 Vv. 46 ff. ’E<ppwv ; Syriac, Ophrah.

8	B.C. 104-78.

9	Josephus (xiii. Antt. xiii. 3; i. Wars, iv. 2) says that Amathus was

taken by Alexander, but mentions his repulse and departure to other fields
immediately afterwards. The Onomasticon places Amathus twenty-one miles
south of Pella.590 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

same neighbourhood.1 But Alexander, though a dissolute
man, was a very determined captain. He returned to
Eastern Palestine, and though it cost him a three years’
campaign, 84-81, he thoroughly reduced the country. In
Gilead he took Pella, Dion and Gerasa ; in Bashan, Golan,
Seleucia and Gamala.2

Thus all Gilead and Bashan with Moab were again
Israel’s, and this terrible debauchee repeated the triumphs
of a David and a Jeroboam II. Another Semitic power,
the Nabatean, held all to the East, and Damascus. The
Greek cities were Judaised. Hellenism lay prostrate.

So matters continued till the arrival of Pompey and the
Roman Legions in 64 B.C. They closed the dominion of
Israel in Bashan and Gilead, and opened a new period in
the history of Eastern Palestine, which we shall follow in
the next two chapters.

1	Josephus in xiii. Antt. xiii. 4 places the rout of Alexander’s army near
Gadara, but in i. Wars, iv. 4, near Gaulana, i.e. Golan. We must not sup-
pose this means that the two were the same place—though Gadara, which is
not mentioned in the Old Testament, nor identified with any Old Testament
name, is not a wholly impossible site for Golan, standing as it does on the
very border of Gaulanitis. More probably Golan lay north of the Yarmuk,
and the above passages prove it must have lain near the latter and Gadara.
Sahem ej Jaulan (see p. 536) is seventeen miles north-east of Gadara and
three miles from the Yarmuk.

2	Josephus, xiii. Antt. xv. 3, 4; i. Wars, iv. 8. For Pella, Dion, Gerasa
see next chapter. Pella was destroyed for the inhabitants would not accept
Judaism. On Golan see previous note and p. 550. Seleucia, 2e\ei/xe/a (to
be distinguished from the great Seleucia on the Tigris, Josephus xiii. Antt.
vii. 1 ; xviii. Antt. ix. 8, and other cities of the same name founded by
Seleneus Nicator), lay east of Lake Huleh (iv. Wars, i. 1) on an unknown
site. Josephus fortified it (ii. Wars, xx. 6 ; Life, 37), and it was a centre of
revolt against the Romans (iv. Wars, i. 1). For Gamala, see p. 459.CHAPTER XXVIII

GREECE OVER JORDAN : THE DECAPOLIS

691For this Chapter consult Maps I., III., V. and VI.GREECE OVER JORDAN : THE DECAPOLIS

REEK immigration, as we have seen, flowed into

Palestine in the wake of Alexander the Great
Numbers of his veterans settled in Northern Alexander
and Eastern Syria, while the dynasties, founded the Great-
by his generals at Antioch and in Egypt welcomed the
arrival of multitudes more of their countrymen. The
settlements of these immigrants assumed the characteristic
Greek form of civic communities, democratic in constitu-
tion, and always aiming at independence, but often sub-
ject to the great powers of the East, or to local tyrants.1
On the coast the Greeks absorbed the ancient Philistine
and Phoenician cities; east of the Jordan they more
frequently occupied positions which had not formerly
been historical.

The oldest Greek settlements in Eastern Palestine were
Pella and Dion, which, as their Macedonian

Earliest

names suggest, were probably founded by Greek cities
Alexander’s own soldiers.2 Nearly as old were overJordan-
Philadelphia, on the site of Rabbath-Ammon, Gadara, and

1	See pp. 588-590.

2	The Macedonian Pella was the birthplace of Alexander, and there was a
second Asiatic Pella in Northern Syria. The suggestion of Tuch (Qucestiones

de Fl.Josephi libris his tor ids, p. 18) that Pella is Greek for	equivalent

to the modern name Fahil, is not so improbable as Schiirer supposes (Hist.
ii. 1, 114), for it is impossible to understand how Fahil could have risen
from Pella. Dion was a town of Macedonia, and Stephanus Byzantinus
attributes the Syrian Dion to Alexander himself.594 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Abila, all of them grown to be important fortresses by
218 B.c.1 Bosra was a strong Greek centre in the time
of the Maccabees.2 Gerasa and Hippos are not mentioned
till later.3 Of none of these cities have inscriptions or
coins been found of a date earlier than the arrival' of the
Romans.4

The freedom of the Greek cities of Palestine was taken
from them by the Jewish princes ; it was Pompey who
‘restored them to their citizens,’5 and they

Greek cities

enfranchised date their civic eras from the year of his
by Pompey. gyrjan campaign> 64-63 B.C. The exact

measure of independence which they enjoyed is uncertain,
and must have varied much between the time of Pompey
and that of Trajan. They had communal
Greek cities freedom, their own councils,6 the right of coin-
‘ age, the right of asylum, the right of property
and administration in the surrounding districts, the right of
association with each other for defensive and commercial
purposes. But from the first they were ‘put under the
Province of Syria.’7 That is to say, their administration

1 Polybius v. 71 ; xvi. 39; Josephus, xii. Antt. iii. 3; Stark, Gaza, p.

381.

3 See p. 588.

3	Gerasa, when taken by Alexander Janneus. See p. 589. Hippos, when
freed by Pompey.

4	With the doubtful exception of a coin of Dion of 89-88 B.c., De Saulcy,
N-umis. de la T. S. pp. 378 ff. The next earliest seems to be one of Gadara

of 56 B.c. Ibid. p. 294.

6 Josephus (xiv. Antt. iv. 4; i. Wars, vii. 7) mentions Gadara, Hippos,
Pella, and Dion, as freed by Pompey, but Abila, Kanata, Kanatha, and
Philadelphia also dated their coins from 64-63 B.c., the so-called Pompeian
era. The era of Gerasa is uncertain. Only some of the coins of Scythopolis
are dated from Pompey. The coins of Gadara and Pella show that these
towns assumed the name ‘ Pompeian’ (De Saulcy, Numis. de la T. S., 293,
298, 299).

6 See p. 606.	7 Josephus as in note 5-Greece over Jordan : The Decapolis 595

of politics and law was subject to revision by the Governor,
they were taxed for imperial purposes, their coins bore
the image of Ccesar, they were liable to military service,1
and while they appear to have had no Roman garrison,2
Roman generals used them for the quartering of the
legions.3 The position at this time of the Greek cities in
Syria must not be compared to that of the Greek cities of
Europe. In Europe and in Asia the relations of Greece
and Rome were very different. In Europe Rome was the
conqueror, and might be regarded as the oppressor, of
Greece ; in Asia the Roman power was the indispensable
ally and safeguard of the Greeks, and their interests could
never be opposed. Therefore, even when the authority of
the Empire over these cities was vindicated by instances
so extreme as the gift by Augustus of some of them to
Herod,4 the inhabitants at first made no resistance, and,
indeed, in Herod they found an overlord of great
Hellenic sympathy.5

Confederacies of Greek cities were common under both
the Republic and the Empire,6 and were formed for
commerce and the cultivation of the Hellenic

•	. r	The Decapolis.

spirit against alien races, lheir most famous
Oriental instance was the Decapolis. The origin of this
League is nowhere mentioned, but to those familiar with

1	Josephus, ii. Wars, xviii. 19.

2	Except at the request of the citizens themselves on such an occasion, as
described by Josephus, iv. Wars, vii. 3, 4.

3	As Vespasian wintered the Legions v. and X. in Scylhopolis, iii. Wars, ix. 1.

4	On the east of Jordan, Hippos, Gadara; on the west, Gaza, Ashdod,
Joppa, Straton’s Tower, were given to Herod in 30 B.c. ; xv. Antt. vii. 3 ;
i. Wars, xx. 3.

5	Gadara alone appears to have had difficulties with Herod, xv. Antt.
X. 2, 3.

6	For Greece, cf. Mommsen, Prov. of the Roman Empire, Eng. Edition, i.
264, 265.596 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

the history of the period its reason will be obvious.
Between 64 B.C., when Pompey constituted the Province
of Syria, and 106 A.D., when at last Trajan succeeded in
making the Roman government effective up to the desert,
Eastern Palestine remained exposed and unsettled. The
Romans left the government to their Semitic vassals,
Zenodorus, Herod, and the Nabatean princes,1 but these
made little of the work. Bands of Arab robbers scoured
Eastern Palestine, and even in 40 A.D. the settlers in
Hauran were still driven underground.2 Now, it is this
period of unsettlement, in which the forces, both of order
and disorder, were Semitic, which is covered by the history
An Ami-Semi- t^ie Decapolis. We may therefore venture
tic League. ^q- rec0gnjse jn the latter a League of Greek

cities against the various Semitic influences east and west
of Jordan, from which Rome had freed them, but could
not yet undertake to give them full protection.3 As at
least two of the cities of the League, Hippos and Gadara,
were given by Augustus to Herod, it is possible that
the League did not arise till after Herod’s death in 4 B.C.,
when these cities regained their independence ; but it is
more probable that it had existed since the enfranchise-
ment of so many of the towns by Pompey, and the
necessity which existed even then for Greeks to support
each other against the Semites. The religion of the
Decapolis, as we shall see, was, in contrast to that of other
towns in Eastern Palestine, thoroughly Hellenic.

The Decapolis, according to its name, consisted at first

1 See especially Josephus, xv. Antt. x. i.

a An inscription of that year describes the population as living in caves and
underground cities, Waddington, 2329.

3 The name Decapolis does not occur before Pliny, Josephus, and the
Gospels of Matthew and Mark.Greece over Jordan: The Decapolis 597

of ten cities. Look at the sites of these ten, trace the
great roads which connect them, and you will recognise
the military and commercial policy of their confedera-
tion.

The Plain of Esdraelon gives open passage from the
coast to Jordan. At the inland end of this passage the
Ten Cities begin, and are scattered fanwise

...	The Geo-

along the mam routes of traffic across Jordan graphyofihe

to the desert. Scythopolis is the only member Decapolls-
of the League west of Jordan, but she was indispensable to
her eastern fellows by her command of their communica-
tions with the sea and with the Greek cities
of the coast.1 From Scythopolis three roads Scythopoh3,
cross Jordan and traverse Eastern Palestine. All the
other original members of the Decapolis lay either on
these roads, or on the road they run to join—the great
line of commerce between Damascus and Arabia along the
border of the desert. Immediately across Jordan and at
the beginnings of the three roads lay Pella,

Gadara,

Gadara, Hippos. The positions of these are Hippos,
undisputed—Pella on the southern, Gadara on
the central, Hippos on the northern, or Damascus, road.2
They stood just above the Jordan Valley; they were not
twenty-five miles apart, their territories touched, and thus
together they commanded the edge of the Eastern table-
land. Across this we now follow the three roads, to
which they held the entrance. The road from Pella
struck south-east over the hills of Gilead, and may be
traced both by the directions of Eusebius and by some
monuments, to which we were able to add by the fortunate

1	On Scythopolis (Bethshan), seepp. 357 fF.

2	Hippos had coins with horse, Pegasus, woman holding him : De Saulcy.598 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

discovery of a milestone.1 On this road lay three other
Dion, Gerasa, members of the Decapolis—Dion, on an un-
Phiiadeiphia. discovered site2 near Pella, and Gerasa and
Philadelphia, the farthest south. The central road, which

1 This road, of which Eusebius tells us in the Onomasticon, artt. " Apurud
and To/3eis TaXdlaS, was traced by Mr. Merrill past Miryamin, Kefr Abil,
Maklub, and Wady Mahneh to Ajlun (East of Jordan, p. 357 ; cf. Guy Le
Strange, Across the Jordan, p. 277). In Kefr Abil we confirmed this line by
the discovery of a Roman milestone, now used as a pillar in the mosque, the
inscription on which stands as on the left hand of these two columns, and may
be restored as on the right hand :—

MP

I..IVS
VSAVG
I A

I n ET

1VERVS

noos ib
ipili
POTES
PARTHICI
IVI

EPOTES

Imperator Caesar
M(arcus) Aurelius Ant
oninus Augustus
[Parthicus Maximus?]
Trib(unicia) Pot(estate) ? Co(n)s(ul) 11. et
Imperator Caesar
L(ucius) Aurelius Verus
Trib(unicia) Pot(estate) II. ? Co(n)s(ul) 11.

Divi Antonini Filii
Divi Hadriani Nepotes

Divi Trajani Parthici Pro- ______^

-nepotes Divi Nervae Ab-
-nepotes

2 Dion must have lain a little south-east of Pella, according to Ptolemy,
v. 15, who gives the following degrees of longitude and latitude : Scythopolis,
67° 20', 310 55'; Pella, 67° 40', 310 40'; Dion, 67° 30', 310 45'; Gerasa,
68° 15', 310 45'. The position marked in Mommsen’s map is, therefore,
wrong. It is mentioned by Josephus with Gerasa (xiii. Antt. xv. 3, for Essa
read Gerasa) and with Pella (xiv. Antt. iv. 4). It is not mentioned by
Polybius in the campaign of Antiochus, 218 B.c. (Pol. v. 70). The words
of Steph. Byzan. are ambiguous : Atov . . . Krla/xa ’A\e£av8pov 4 /cat
IIAXa fjs rb tidwp voaepbv. The reading, i] /cat IIAXa, is not certain, or it
would prove the identity of Pella and Dion. It is singular that the Excerpta
ex Grcrca Notitia Patriarchatuum, quoted by Reland, p. 215, should give,
under Palestina Secunda, the name of Pella in the plural, IIAXat, and no
Dion, but another list, p. 217, has no Pella, and reckons Dion with Gerasa
in Arabia. Also, Eusebius talks of Pella in the plural, Onomasticon, art.
Aip.a.6. Reland quotes an epigram on the bad water mentioned by Steph.
Byzan. : ‘ Sweet is the water of Dion to drink, but drink it and thou losest
thy thirst, and straightway thy life.’ De Saulcy says there is a well near
Kefr Abil, called by the Arabs ‘Ain el Jarim, or ‘ The Fatal Well.’ Merrill
(East of Jordan, 298) suggests ’Eidun for Dion, but that is too much to the
north-east. Dion will probably be found about Ba‘un or ‘Ajlun.Greece over Jordan : The Decapolis 599

travelled past Gadara, led towards Raphana, an original
partner of the League, whose site is unknown,1 and, after
passing some cities that joined the League Raphanaand
later, reached Kanatha, the most easterly of Kanatha-
the Decapolis at the foot of the Jebel Hauran.2 Some have
hesitated to place one of the earliest Greek cities so far
east, but there were many Greeks in the neighbouring
Bosra even in the time of Judas Maccabeus;3 Kanatha
had always been a place of importance, and now, with
Philadelphia and Gerasa, it represented the Decapolis
on the margin of the desert, and on the great route from
Damascus to Arabia which ran along the latter.

,	Damascus.

Damascus itself appears to have been an hono-
rary member of the league. These, then—Scythopolis ;
Pella, Dion, Gerasa and Philadelphia ; Gadara, Raphana
and Kanatha ; Hippos and Damascus—were the original
ten, from which the Decapolis received its name.4

But to these ten, others were added. Ptolemy gives a

1	Raphana was probably the Raphon of I Macc. v. 37-43 (see p. 589)
and of xii. Antt. viii. 4, near Astaroth-Karnaim, and on a wady—perhaps
the present Nahr el A wared, a tributary of the Yarmuk.

2	Kanatha is the Kenath of the Old Testament (Num. xxxii. 42 ; 1 Chron.
ii. 23 ; see p. 579, n. 3), now called Kanawat, but according to Wetzstein
(Reisebericht, p. 78) by the Bedouin always Kanawa. We were, unfor-
tunately, turned back by the authorities on our visit to Kanawat and Bosra.
Full accounts of the great ruins in Burckhardt, Syria, 83; Buckingham,
Travels among Arab Tribes, 242 ff. ; Porter, Five Years in Damascus, ch. xi.;
Merrill, East of the Jordan, 36-42. Inscriptions in Wadd. 2329-2363 ; Wetz-
stein, Ausg. Inschr. (see p. 15, n. 1), 188-193. For coins, De Saulcy (Numis.
de la T. S., 400 f.). Porter gives a long and adequate argument for the
identification of Kanatha with Kanawat. In the Peutinger Tables it is given
as thirty-seven miles (Roman) from Aena (Phsena), which is twenty-four from
Damascus. Kavuda and Kbvada were other forms of the name.

3	See p. 588.

4	They form the earliest list, given by Pliny, H.N. v. 16 (18). Damascus
must have been unknown to Josephus as an ordinary member of the League,
for he calls Scythopolis the greatest of the Decapolis.6oo The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

list with eighteen names, leaving out Raphana and
adding nine others, which it is interesting to note lay
mostly towards Damascus, and away from the

Kanata, Decapolitan region proper in North Gilead.1

Kapitoiias.	most important of the additions were three.

Abila lay about twelve miles east of Gadara, on a branch
of the Yarmuk.2 Kanata is distinguished from Kanatha
by the different spelling of its name on coins and inscrip-
tions, as well as by the fact that an aqueduct which one
inscription describes as running to Kanata started too low
to have carried water to Kanatha. On the strength of
another inscription, Wetzstein has placed Kanata at El-
Kerak, in the Nukra, but the neighbouring El-Kuniyeh
seems to have some echo of the name.3 Kapitoiias, which
from its Latin name appears to have been added to the
Decapolis only after Trajan had extended the Empire to
the desert,4 was either Beit-er-Ras, House of the Head-
land, a few knolls covered by remains of Greek carving
near Irbid, or some site farther north.5 Other towns of

1	See next page.

2	On a Palmyrene inscription (Reland, pp. 525 ff.), ’AfilXr) rij$ AeK<nr6\eos
(and to be distinguished from the Abila on the Abana, north-west of Damas-
cus, after which Abilene of Luke iii. 1 was named). It was first discovered
by Seetzen (Reiscn., i. 371 f.), 25th Feb. 1806, and the site and ruins are
fully described by Schumacher, Abila of the Decapolis ; cf. Onomasticon, art.
'A/3e\; De Saulcy, Numis. de la T. S., 308-312.

3	See Wadd. 2296 (the inscription about the aqueduct), 2329, 24120-9.
Wetzstein, Ausgewahlte Inschr., 183-1S6. De Saulcy, Numis. de la T. S.t
399 ff., plate xxiii., where on 8 is KANATHNfIN, a coin of Kanata, but on
IO KANA9-NQN, a coin of Kanatha.

4	It dated its era from 97 or 98, the accession of Trajan, De Saulcy, p. 305.
6 Beit Ras suits the position of Kapitoiias in the Peutinger Tables; but

not, as Schlirer points out {Hist. II. i. p. 106, n. 205), the data of the
Itinerarium Antonini, which requires a site farther north. We found no
inscriptions, but some beautiful Greek carving at Beit-Ras. Beit-Ras lies on
the direct road from Edrei to Gadara.Greece over Jordan: The Decapolis 601

this wider Decapolis were such as Edrei, Bosra, and some
of their neighbours.

Each of these cities of the Decapolis had not only its
suburbs, but commanded besides a large territory, with
villages.1 Round Hippos there was a Hippene,2
round Gadara a country of the Gadarenes.3 ofthebeca-
Gadara had a sea-board on the Lake of polls'
Galilee. Some of her coins bear the image of a trireme.
We did not, however, realise how far the property and
influence of the Greek cities extended till we followed the
great aqueduct which brought water to Gadara from as
far east as Edrei. Such long works as this prove that
the cities of the Decapolis possessed rights, and could
exercise authority at distances even greater than those
which separated them from each other. The Decapolitan
region, as Pliny calls it,4 the borders of the Decapolis, as it
is styled in the Gospels, was, therefore, no mere name, but
an actual sphere of property and effective influence. The
territories of Pella, Scythopolis, Gadara and Hippos,
which adjoined each other, alone represented a solid belt
of country along the Jordan.5 East and north-east from
this ran the aqueduct of Gadara for more than thirty
miles ; all Gilead itself was at one time called the region
of Gerasa.6 If, then, we omit Damascus, we may deter-
mine the ‘ region of the Decapolis ’ to have been most of
the country south-east of the Lake of Galilee across
Gilead to the desert, but Pliny’s words about it, that it

1	Josephus, Life, 65.

2	Id. iii. Wars, iii. 1.

3	Mark v. 1, according to one reading.

4	V. 15, Decapolita regio.

5	Query : Did it completely cut off Peraea from Galilee ?

6	So Jerome in the fourth century.6o2 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

was interpenetrated by the tetrarchies, forbid us to assume
that it was absolutely solid.1

From this investigation we turn now to a description
of these wonderful Greek cities, their sites, their buildings,
and the life which thronged them.

When the Greeks occupied new sites their choice was
mainly determined, of course, by questions of commerce
The sites of and defence. Thus Hippos has no water, but
the1 ten cities. jjes on a strong eminence just above the Lake

of Galilee, where the great road breaks north-east to
Damascus. Thus Gadara stood on a headland above the
Jordan Valley—a broad, fresh stage for city life, which
steep, deep slopes on three sides constituted a formidable
fortress. In spite of its feeble spring, this is so incomparable
a site, that even if it was not historical before the Greeks,
—which is so unlikely that one is inclined to fix here
The favourite Ramoth-Gilead,—the Greeks could not pos-
Greek site. sibly have neglected it. But the favourite
Greek site was different from these. It was a mound or
ridge by a shallow stream—one of the characteristic
Peraean brooks, ten to twelve feet wide, and a foot deep,
with a smaller mound, perhaps, on the other side, and
meadow and arable land in the neighbourhood. These
are the natural features common to Scythopolis, Pella,
Gerasa, Philadelphia, Abila and Kanatha—most of which
have besides a far and splendid view. The architectural
Thearchi- features were also similar. There were the
tecture. usual buildings of a Greek city of the Roman
period, the colonnaded street, the arch, the forum, the
temple, the theatre, the bath, the mausoleum, in florid

1 Pliny, H.N., v. 16. See above, p. 540.Greece over Jordan: The Decapolis 603

Doric and Corinthian, with the later Christian basilica
among them, and perhaps a martyrion, or martyrs’ monu-
ment. Approach any of these sites of the Decapolis, and
this is the order in which you are certain to meet with
their remains. Almost at the moment at which your eye
catches a cluster of columns, or the edge of an amphi-
theatre against the sky, your horses’ hoofs will clatter upon
pavement. You cannot ride any more. You must walk
up this causeway, which the city laid far out from its
gates. You must feel the clean tight slabs of basalt, so
well laid at first that most of them lie square still. You
must draw your hand along the ruts worn deep by the
chariot wheels of fifteen, eighteen centuries ago. If the
road runs between banks there will be tombs
in the limestone, with basalt lintels, and a bridges,

•	streets

Roman name on them in Greek letters, per-
haps a basalt or a limestone sarcophagus flung out on the
road by some Arab hunter for treasure. If it is a water-
less site like Gadara you will find an aqueduct running
with the road, the pipes hewn out of solid basalt, with a
diameter like our drain-pipes, and fitting to each other,
as these do, with flanges. But if it be the more char-
acteristic site by a stream, you will come to a bridge, one
of those narrow parapetless Roman bridges which were
the first to span the Syrian rivers, and have had so few
successors. You reach the arch, or heap of ruins, that
marks the old gateway. Within is an open space, probably
the forum, and from this right through the city you can
trace the line of the long colonnaded street. Generally
nothing but the bases of the columns remain, as in the
street, called Straight, of Damascus, or as at Gadara ; but
at Philadelphia ten or twelve columns still stand to their604 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

full height, and in the famous street of Gerasa nearly two
hundred. This last street was lined by public and private
buildings, with very rich fagades. At Gadara you can
still see a by-street with plain vaulted buildings, probably
stores or bazaars.

The best preserved buildings, however, are the amphi-
theatres, the most beautiful are the temples.

Some cities of the Decapolis had each two amphi-
theatres. Those ample, solid basins, with their high tiers
Ampiii- °f benches for spectators, were either built
theatres. above vaulted chambers that were used for
the actors, the victims and the wild beasts of the great
shows ; or else, as at Philadelphia, Kanatha and one of the
Gadara theatres, they rested on the hollow side of a hill.
They faced in all directions of north and west—the Phila-
delphian, the Gerasan two, and one of Gadara looked due
north, but the second Gadarene west, and those of Kanatha
and Scythopolis west or north-west. The largest was the
Philadelphian, which held perhaps seven thousand specta-
tors ; the rest must have varied from two to four thousand.
Over against the benches, in some theatres,the post-scenium
still rises, a high wall ornate with pillars, brackets, and
niches. Several cities contained another place of Greek
amusement. Where the stream, after passing through
The Nau- ^ie town, issues from the wall, you see, as at
machy. Gerasa, the stout banks of a Naumachia, with
remains of tiers of benches behind them. For, even on
the borders of the desert the wave-born Greeks built their
mimic seas, and fought their sham sea-fights. With all
these public stages, most of the cities had their annual
IIay/cpdria, or games in which every kind of athletic
exercise was exhibited.Greece over Jordan : The Decapolis 605

Some of the temples were very beautiful, as we may
still see from the well-preserved ruins at Kanatha and
Gerasa. Oblong in shape, their central hall

The temples

was usually from fifty to seventy feet by thirty
to fifty. They were peripteral, with a double row of
columns in the front. They did not stand on the highest
part of the town, but always on a platform approached by
stately steps. The religion of the Decapolis was thoroughly
Greek. In other towns of Eastern Palestine we find the
shrines of many of the Nabatean gods, either with their
own names, or thinly disguised under those of their Greek
counterparts. But in the Decapolis the gods And the gods
of Hellas were supreme. Alone of Semitic ofDecaPolls-
deities was Astarte worshipped, the tower-crowned Astarte,
but she was practically Hellenic. Each city worshipped
her, but had in addition its own Tvyr) or Civic Fortune,
sometimes unnamed. In Scythopolis the people were
chiefly devoted to Dionysus1 and Astarte, in Pella to Pallas,
in Gadara to Zeus, ‘ the most high Zeus,’ Pallas, Herakles
and Astarte, in Kapitolias to Astarte and Zeus, in Abila to
Herakles and Astarte, in Kanatha to Zeus and Pallas, in
Gerasa to Artemis—‘ Artemis of the Gerasenes,’ like ‘ Diana
of the Ephesians’—in Philadelphia to Pallas, but especially
to Herakles, ‘ the Good Fortune of the Philadelphians.’2

You will also find the ruins of the Ten Cities strewn
with reminiscences of their political constitution. The
ambiguous character of their freedom—muni- constitution
cipal independence3 subject to the revision ofthecities*
and patronage of the imperial authorities—could not be

1	See p. 363.

2	See the coins of these various cities in De Saulcy, Ntimis. de la T. S.

Edrei alone of cities within the Decapolis has a Semitic deity, Du-Sara, on
whom see next chapter : De Saulcy, p. 375.	3 See p. 594.606 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

better illustrated than by two fragments which I turned
up within a few feet of each other in a street in Gerasa.
One was the half of a tombstone of a member of the City
Council with his title still legible upon it—

BOTAETTH2

The other was two feet of basalt carved with enormous
letters, evidently from an inscription of honour to one
of the emperors—

av TOKPAT cop

Fragments like these may be found in almost every ruin
of the Decapolis, and they bear as decisive testimony as
any exhaustive political treatise to the double character
of the Decapolitan constitution. Tombs of Bouleutai
you will find everywhere.1 I append one we routed out
of the modern cemetery at Edrei, where it was doing
duty, upside down, as the headstone of a sheikh recently
deceased. It dates from ‘the fourth year of the Caesars
Marcus and Lucius ’ (Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus),
that is, 165 A.D.2 The Decapolis never forgot Pompey—
Gadara and Pella call themselves Pompeian. Nearly all
the emperors appear on their coins. Gadara has a very
full list from Augustus and Tiberias onward, but it
was with the Antonines, 130-180, that the Ten cities

1	Josephus gives the |9oiA?} of Tiberias at 600 members, ii. Wars, xxi. 9;
and that of Gaza at 500, xiii. Antt. xiii. 3. Those of Scythopolis, Gadara,
and Gerasa, can hardly have been less.

2	Copied at Edrei, June 21, 1891, from a small slab of basalt:—

TAIOC AOVKIOC

BACCOCBOVAEV

rHCEnOHCENo

EKToiNIAItoNTO

MNHMAetaKAICAP

N M APKOTK AT AoTKIO V.Greece over Jordan: The Decapolis 607

were most flourishing. The Antonines made the great
roads, and under them Gerasa put on her splendour.

On some of the ruins of the Decapolis there are still
visible carven epigrams, reflections on death, and some
longer pieces of Greek verse. These faintly

.	1.	. .	Greek litera-

witness to the great literary activity of the Ten ture in the
Cities at the beginning of our era. We have Decapo113,
already seen what famous centres of Hellenism were the
coast cities in those days. But the Decapolis had also its
personages in Greek literature. Gadara produced Philo-
demus the Epicuraean, a contemporary of Cicero, Meleager
the epigrammatist, Menippus the satirist, Theodorus the
rhetorician, the tutor of Tiberius,1 and others.2 Gerasa
also was a mother of great teachers.3

We may now touch again a subject we touched before
—the influence of all this Greek life on Galilee, and the
beginnings of Christianity. The Decapolis was

The

flourishing in the time of Christ’s ministry, polis and
Gadara, with her temples and her amphi- the Gospels<
theatres, with her art, her games and her literature, over-
hung the Lake of Galilee, and the voyages of its fisher-
men. A leading Epicuraean of the previous generation, the
founder of the Greek anthology, some of the famous wits
of the day, the reigning emperor’s tutor, had all been
bred within sight of the homes of the writers of the New
Testament. Philodemus, Meleager, Menippus, Theodorus,
were names of which the one end of the Lake of Galilee
was proud, when Matthew, Peter, James and John, were
working at the other end. The temples of Zeus, Pallas,

1	Strabo xvii. ii. 29 ; cf. Schiirer, Hist. ii. I, 29.

2	Reland, p. 775 ; Schiirer, p. 104.

8 Stephanus Byzantinus, under Tipaixa, mentions three, Ariston, Kerykos
and Plato. Cf. Schiirer, op. cit. pp. 29, 121.608 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

and Astarte crowned a height opposite to that which
gave its name to the Sermon on the Mount. Bacchus,
under his Greek name, ruled the territory down the
Jordan Valley to Scythopolis. There was another temple
to Zeus on the other side of Galilee, at Ptolemais, almost
within sight of Nazareth. We cannot believe that the
two worlds, which this one landscape embraced, did not
break into each other. The many roads which crossed
Galilee from the Decapolis to the coast, the many inscrip-
tions upon them, the constant trade between the fishermen
and the Greek exporters of their fish, the very coins—
everywhere thrust Greek upon the Jews of Galilee. The
Aramaeic dialect begins now to be full of Greek words.
It is impossible to believe that our Lord and His disciples
did not know Greek. But, at least, in that characteristic
Greek city overhanging the Lake of Galilee, in the
scholars it sent forth to Greece and Rome, we have
ample proof that the kingdom of God grew up in no
obscure corner, but in the very face of the kingdoms
of this world.CHAPTER XXIX

HAURAN AND ITS CITIESFor this Chapter consult Maps I. and III.HAURAN AND ITS CITIES

TI TE pass from the Decapolis to other cities of

» * Eastern Palestine, very different in origin and
character.

In the Decapolis, as we have seen, the life was Greek.
Rome gave the shelter, and the authority of the Empire
was supreme, but the arts, letters, manners, Thetwocivii-
and religion were of Greece. On those noble Decapolis"
stages of life the seeds of Hellenism had been and Hauran-
planted for three hundred years; as soon as Pompey
fenced them, there sprang up the characteristic forms of
Greek civilisation. With the cities of Hauran and the
Trachon it was different. Their civilisation mostly dates
from a century later than that of the Decapolis, and when
it appeared it was not pure Greek, but a mixture of Greek
and Semitic, still cast, however, in the great moulds of
the Empire. In the Decapolis Rome sheltered Greeks ;
in those other cities she disciplined half-Greek Syrians
and wild Arabs.

To understand this we must survey Hauran and the
story of its slow civilisation first by Roman vassals and
then by the emperors themselves.

Hauran, or ‘ Hollow,’1 is the name given to the great
plain which stretches south from Hermon, between Jaulan

1 See p. 552.

Oil6i2 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

and the Lejjah, and thence, between the mountains of
Gilead and the Jebel Hauran, runs out upon the Desert.
In a wider application the name covers also the Lejjah
and all fertile ground to the east.

To this great Plain you rise from Pharpar1 and the
lands of Damascus by a series of terraces, each from three
Description to f°ur miles broad. When you have shaken
of Hauran. some hius to the east you are out upon
Hauran proper, 2000 feet high, and the ground stretching
level before you to the horizon. Hermon shuts off a
quarter of heaven in the north-west, but round all the
rest of the circle you feel only the openness, the light,
the equal sweep of prairie air. Is it night—over the
free distance the bells of the camel-caravans reach your
ears an hour before the camels pass. Is it morning—
the mists as they lift have nothing higher than a tower
to tear themselves away from, and the great Hajj road
unrolls to the horizon. Is it noon—the heat does not
swelter above the shadeless soil, but the wind sweeps
fresh, as at sea, with the swing of fifty open miles upon
it. The surface of the plain is broken only by a mound
or two, by a few shallow watercourses, by some short
outcrops of basalt, and by villages of the same stone,
the level black line of their roofs cut by a tower or the
jagged gable of an old temple. All else is a rolling prairie
of rich, red soil, under wheat, or lying for the year fallow
in pasture. It is a land of harvests, and if you traverse
it in summer fills you with the wonder of its

Its harvests.

wealth. Through the early day the camels,
piled high with sheaves, five or seven swaying corn-stacks
on a string, draw in from the fields to the threshing-floors.

1 The present Nahr el ‘Awaj is probably Pharpar.Hauran and its Cities

613

These lie along the village walls, each of them some
fifty square yards of the plain, trodden hard and fenced
by a low, dry dyke. The sheaves are strewn to the depth
of two or three feet, and the threshing-sledges, curved
slabs of wood, studded with basalt teeth, are dragged up
and down by horses, driven by boys who stand on the
sledges and sing as they plunge over the billows of
straw. Poor men have their smaller crops trodden out
by donkeys driven in a narrow circle three abreast,
exactly in the fashion depicted on the old Egyptian
monuments. When the whole mass is cut and bruised
enough, it is tossed with great forks against the afternoon
wind, the chopped straw is stored for fodder in some
ancient vault that has kept the rain out since the days
of Agrippa or the Antonines ; but the winnowed grain
is packed in bags and carried on camels to the markets
of Damascus and Acre. The long lines of these ‘grain-
boats’ sail down all the summer roads; one evening at
Ghabaghib, our first station out of Damascus, we counted
187 pass our tent, and at the Bridge-of-the-Daughters-
of-Jacob, over Jordan the Way of the Sea, the train of
them has been known not to break all night through.
Hauran wheat is famous round the Levant. The failure
of the camel carriage to export an average crop—some
years part of it has to be left to rot unreaped—reconciles
one to the invasion of Hauran by the Acre-Damascus
railway.

The fertility of this Plain is not more striking than
its want of trees. Except the groves lately Its treeless_
planted round the governor’s seat at El- ness-
Merkez, there are practically no trees in Hauran.1 The

1 Though 011 the Jebel Hauran there are many oaks.614 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

people, therefore, use marvellously little timber. The
threshing-sledges, the yokes and ploughs, the long axles
on which the giant millstones are trundled from the
Lejjah to Damascus, in every village a few doors, stools,
and boxes—that is all. The rafters, the ceilings, most
of the doors, the lattices and window-bars, are of stone.
The originality to which this want of wood stimulated
the ancient architects of Hauran will be noticed further
on, but here we may linger for a little on the singular
and astonishing appearance which the unrelieved use of
the sombre basalt gives to towns built fifteen hundred
years ago, and in many cases still standing as the builder
left them. One remembers the weirdness of wandering
as a child through the Black Cities of the Arabian Nights;
one feels this weirdness again in the cities of Hauran.
Under the strong sun, the basalt takes on a sullen sheen
its black	like polished ebony ; the low and level archi-

cmt-s.	tecture is unrelieved even by threads of

mortar, for the blocks were cut so fine, and lie so heavy
on each other, that no cement was needed for the build-
ing ; there is, besides, an utter absence of trees, bush, ivy
and all green. This weirdness is naturally greatest where
the cities, emptied of their inhabitants more than a thou-
sand years ago, still stand tenantless. An awful silence
fills the sable ruins ; there is never a face, nor a flower, nor
the flutter of a robe in all the bare, black streets. But
the fascination is shared even by the towns into which
this generation has crept back, and patched their ruins
with bricks of last winter’s mud. In these, I have seen
the yellow sheaves piled high against the black walls, and
the dust of the threshing-floors rising thick in the sun-
beams, but the sunshine showed so pallid and ineffectualHauran and its Cities

615

above the sullen stone, that what I looked on seemed
to be, not the flesh and blood and labour of to-day,
but the phantasm of some ancient summer afternoon
flung magically back upon its desolate and irresponsive
stage. From such dreams one is always wakened by
the fresh Hauran wind, the breath and quickening of the
Plain.

This rich and healthy Plain is dominated by Hermon.
On Hauran you are never out of sight of Hermon.
Eighty miles away he is still visible, and Hauran and
even on the slopes of the Jebel Hauran the Hermon'
ancient amphitheatres were so arranged that over the
stage the spectators might have a view of the great hill.
It is a singular companionship of a noble mountain and
a noble plain.

‘There is right at the west end of Itaille,

Down at the root of Vesulus the cold,

A lusty plain abundant of vitaille,

Where many a tower and town thou mayest behold
That founded were in time of fathers old,

And many another delectable sight;

And Saluces this noble country hight.’

On the east the Plain is framed by a long low line of

blue. As you approach, the blue darkens, and stands

out an irregular bank of shiny black rock,

&	3 .	The Lejjah.

from thirty to forty feet high, split by narrow

crevasses as the edge of a mud-heap is split on a frosty day.
Climb it and you stand on the margin of a vast mass of con-
gealed lava, three hundred and fifty square miles in extent,
which has flowed out upon the Plain from some of the now
extinct craters in the centre of it, and cooling, has broken
up into innumerable cracks and fissures. Sometimes it616 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

looks like an ebony glacier with irregular crevasses.
Elsewhere it ‘ has the appearance of the sea, when in
motion beneath a dark, cloudy sky, and when the waves
are of good size, but without any white crests of foam.’1
Here and there the eddies of liquid lava have been caught
in the very swirl of them, or, as it broke in large bubbles
and curved over in sluggish waves, the viscous mass has
been fixed for ever to the forms of sharp-edged hollows
and caverns. This ‘ petrified ocean ’ is without neither
soil nor fresh water. Springs abound, there are even
a few small lakes, and there are many fields. The
ruins of villages are numerous, and a number of the
crevasses have been artificially widened to admit the
passage of roads.

This Lejjah, this Trachon, not high, but wild and very
intricate, almost bridges the quiet plain between Hermon
and the Jebel Hauran, and has at most periods enabled
the inhabitants of these two ranges to combine and
tyrannise over the peaceful populations of Hauran proper
and Damascus.

In the beginning of the first century before Christ
Hermon was held by the half-settled Ituraeans ; the
Western Hauran was under the Jew, Alexander

The coming of

the Romans Janneus, while the Nabateans occupied every-
thing else to the east, including Damascus, the
rest of Hauran, and the Lejjah.2 When the Romans came
in 64 B.C.,3 besides freeing the Greek cities of Gaulanitis
and Gilead from the Jews, they drove the Nabateans to
the southern edge of Hauran, where their northernmost

1 Merrill, East of Jordan, p. n.	2 See end of last chapter.

3 Pompey sent Scaurus with the first legions to Damascus in 65 B.c., and
himself followed in 64 ; when he went to Europe next year he left Scaurus
behind, who subdued the Nabateans.Hauran and its Cities

617

cities continued to be Bosra and Salkhat.1 But the
Romans did not then occupy Hauran itself.2 For the next
forty years the reports are meagre. In 25, Trachonitis
and Hauran were under the nominal rule of one Zeno-
dorus, who had also leased part of the Ituraean domains on
the slopes of Hermon.3 He did not protect the peaceful
inhabitants from the robbers of the Lejjah, and they ap-
pealed to Varro, the Governor of Syria. Augustus ordered
Varro to displace Zenodorus by Herod, who
had already conducted war in this region, and Great in
to whom Gadara and Hippos,4 on its western
borders, for the time belonged.6 Herod had great diffi-
culty with the Arab robbers of the Lejjah,6 and their
allies the Nabateans.7 It was only after he had put a

1	There is a Nabatean inscription in Bosra of the eleventh year of
Malchus 11. (not Malchus I. as designated by Schlirer, Hist. div. 1. vol. ii.
p. 335, for there was an earlier Nabatean Malchus known to us from coins
only, whom Schiirer omits from his lists), i.e. about 40 B.C., C./.S. II. i.
No. 174.

2	There was a Roman governor in Damascus at least from 44 to 42 B.c.
(xiv. Anti. xi. 7 ; xii. I ; i. Wars, xii. I, 2). Somewhere about 36 Mark
Antony gave Cleopatra ‘ Coele-Syria ’ (see p. 538) and parts of the Judsean and
Arabian territories (Josephus, xv. Antt. iii. 8, iv. 1, 2 ; i. Wars, xviii. 5).

3	xv. Antt. x. I ; i. Wars, xx. 4. That Zenodorus was ruler of Trachon-
itis is expressly said ; that he also ruled Auranitis is obvious from his attempt
to sell it to the Nabateans (xv. Antt. x. 2).

4	In 32 B.c. Herod had been defeated by Nabateans at Kanatha (i. Wars,
xix. 2 ; at Kana, xv. Antt. v. 1), but had afterwards subdued them.

0 Since 30 B.c. : xv. Antt. vii. 3 ; i. Wars, xx. 3.

e Varro himself had previously punished them, i. Wars, xx. 4.

7 First he routed the Trachonites, ‘procuring peace and quietness for the
neighbouring peoples ’ (xv. Antt. x. I ; i. Wars, xx. 4). But they, ‘obliged
to live quietly, which they did not like, and when they took pains with the
ground it bare but little,’ took advantage of his absence in Rome to revolt (xvi.
Antt. ix. 1). His troops subdued them, forty of their chiefs escaping to
Nabatea. On his return he slew some who remained in Trachon, whereupon
the forty fugitives had a blood-feud against him, and, in alliance with the
Nabateans, harassed his borders. Herod put a garrison of 3000 Idumseans
into Trachonitis. But, in taking the punishment of the Nabateans into his618 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

garrison of 3000 Idumaeans in Trachonitis, and called a
Jew named Zamaris from Babylonia, and built for him in
Batanea fortresses and a village called Bathyra,1 that he
was successful. Zamaris kept down the robbers of the
Lejjah,2 ‘ protected Jews coming up on pilgrimage from
Babylon,’ and, when Herod declared freedom from taxes,
‘ the land became full of people.’ 3 A few public buildings
were erected. A temple near Kanatha was built, in the
bulk of it, by Herod,4 and the ruins still contain an inscrip-
tion recording the erection of a statue to him. This is the
earliest Greek inscription discovered in these regions.5
Herod was evidently the pioneer of civilisation in Hauran.

At Herod’s death in 4 B.C., Philip, his son, received for
a tetrarchy Gaulanitis, Batanea, Trachonitis, Auranitis,

the son of Zamaris, who supplied him with cavalry.7 His
just and gentle reign has no annals ; the only account of
his kingdom is that of Strabo, who, writing of theTrachons
about 25 A.D., that is, when Christ was beginning to preach
in Galilee, says that ‘ the barbarians used to rob the mer-

own hands, he displeased Augustus. The Nabateans, in this, ‘refused to
pay for their pastures,’ i.e. overran Hauran, as usual every year, with their
own flocks. Then he called Zamaris as above (xvii. Antt. ii. 1-3).

1	xvii. Antt. ii. 1, 2. Does the name Bathyra survive in Busr-(el-Hariri)
on the south margin of the Lejjah ?

2	It is not asserted that he conquered the Lejjah itself.	3 Ibid.

4 It is at Seia, now Si‘a, half an hour from Kanawat, De Vogue, Syne
Centrale: Archit. Civile et Religieuse, vol. i. pi. I. It was to begin with a
Nabatean building. The inscription on the statue of Herod is given by Wadd.
2364. The erector was one Obaisatos.

8 The date of another monument and inscription at Suweda (Soada) of
Odairatos, the son of Annelus, is uncertain. It belongs to the first century
either before or after Christ. Wadd. 2320 ; De Vogue, as above, pi. 1.

8 See pp. 540 ff.	7 xvii. Antt. ii. 1-2.

Philip the
Tetrarch,
n.c. 4-A.IJ. 34.

and a ‘ certain part of the domain of Zeno-
dorus,’ or all the country from Hermon to the
Yarmuk.0 He was greatly helped by Jakim,Hcinran and its Cities

619

chants most generally on the side of Arabia Felix, but this
happens less frequently since the destruction of robber
bands under Zenodorus, by the good government of the
Romans, and as a result of the security afforded by the
soldiers stationed in Syria.’1 This means that though
Arab raids still happened, they were less frequent. In the
records of Christ’s ministry we never hear even a rumour
of Arabs, but we see bits of the big bulwark which, Strabo
says, was keeping them away—the Centurion, the Legion,
the superscription of Caesar. Something, however, of the
difficulties of communication, and of the insecurity which
prevailed in spite of the Romans, may be felt in such
parables as that of the binding of the strong man and
spoiling of his goods, or that of the wicked husbandmen
who slew their master’s heir.

At Philip’s death in 34 his tetrarchy was taken back
into the Province of Syria, but was allowed to administer
its own revenues.2 In 37 Caligula bestowed it
upon Herod Agrippa,3 who afterwards received Agrippa,
the rest of his grandfather’s domains. Agrippa’s A,D-37 44-
territory extended as far east as the further slopes of the
Jebel Hauran, where an inscription of his has been dis-
covered.4 But the Nabateans, under King Aretas, still held
Bosra and Salkhat, and for the time Damascus The Conver_
had been yielded to them by the Romans. slonofPaul-
Paul tells us that when he came back to Damascus from
Arabia, three years after his conversion, an ethnarch
under A retas the king5 held the city of the Damascenes ; G
and while we have imperial coins of Damascus under

1 Strabo xvi. 2, § 20.	2	xviii. Antt. iv. 6.

3 xviii. Antt. vi. 6-ro; ii. Wars, ix. 5.	4	At El-Mushennef, Wadd. 2211.

5 Aretas, iv., 9 B.C.-40 a.d.	6	2 Cor. xi. 32, cf. Acts ix. 23 ff.620 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Augustus and Tiberius down to 33 A.D., we have none
under Caligula or Claudius, or till the ninth year of Nero
in 63. How Damascus had come from the Romans into
the hands of Aretas we do not know ;1 and we are
equally ignorant of the reasons that led the Nabatean
ethnarch to take the side of the Damascus Jews, and
seek, on their request, to arrest Paul.2 Three years
earlier the synagogues of Damascus had presumably
sufficient independence and authority to give up to Paul
and his commission from the high priest such Jews as
had gone over to Christianity. On that occasion Paul’s
journey to Damascus from Jerusalem took him across
some part of Hauran. The Arabia into which he went
after his conversion was not Hauran, as some imagine,3
but either the lonely Harras to the east of the Lejjah or
Nabatea proper,—Bosra, Salkhat, Petra, and farther south,
perhaps, to Sinai.4 Agrippa found Hauran not yet per-
fectly civilised. In a proclamation of date 41 A.D. he
appears to exhort the inhabitants to leave off their

1	Some ihink he took it by war on the withdrawal of the troops of
Vilellius, when the death of Tiberius took place (xviii. Antt. v. 3). So
Neander, Planting and Training of the Christian Church, Eng. Ed. iii. 2 ;
Porter, Five Years in Damascus, i. 103. But that the Romans should let a
town like Damascus go by war seems incredible ; so Conybeare and Howson,
Life and Epistles of St. Paul, and Schiirer favour the theory that Caligula
gave Damascus to Aretas {Hist. i. ii. 357 f). Perhaps when Herod Agrippa
got Philip’s tetrarchy, it was felt by Caligula that the great foe of the
Herodian house should also get some territory. Aretas had defeated Herod
Antipas a few years before (Josephus, xviii. Antt. v. 3).

2	The Jews of Damascus were very numerous and powerful (ii. Wars, xx.

2 ; vii. Wars, viii. 7), but perhaps there had been under Caligula’s rearrange-
ment of Syria a new agreement of Aretas with Agrippa and the Jews.
Aretas had been the sworn foe of Herod Antipas.

3	E.g. Woldemar Schmidt, in Plerzog’s Peal Encyclopiidie (ed. 2) xi. 364.

4	Gal. i. 16, 17, cf. On Mount Sinai, iv. 25. Whether Paul preached in
Arabia is very doubtful. It does not necessarily follow, as Porter thinks,
from a comparison of ver. 16 with ver. 17 in Gal. i.Hauran and its Cities

621

beast-like manner of life in caves, and build themselves
houses.1 This proclamation breathes the confidence of
ability to protect the Hauranites, and has even been called
‘ the point of departure for the architectural history of the
country.’ 2 Certain it is that whereas from before this date
we possess only two Greek inscriptions3 from Hauran,
among many in the Nabatean language, Greek inscrip-
tions now rapidly multiply, and we have numerous records
in stone of the building of public edifices.

Agrippa died in 44, in the fashion described in the Book
of Acts,4 and as his son Agrippa was just seventeen, the
Romans resumed the administration of all

Interval of

Palestine by a Procurator under the Governor Roman rule,
of Syria.5 The only inscription from this period A'D’ 44 5°‘
is in Nabatean, at Hebran, south of Kanatha, ‘of the
seventh year of Claudius Caesar.’6 From this we ascer-
tain that the boundary between the Roman province (or
the kingdom of Agrippa) and the Nabatean kingdom, ran
south of Hebran, but north of Bosra and Salkhat, for these
latter were cities of the Nabatean kings.7

1	Wadd. 2329a, an inscription in Kanatha. But the inscription is frag-
mentary, and the above interpretation doubtful. In any case, the proclama-
tion cannot have been meant for Kanatha, which had been a free city with
coins since Pompey’s time.

2	De Vogue, Architecture Civile et Religieuse de la Syrie Centrale.

3	The one about the statue to Herod, see p. 618 ; and another on a monu-
ment at Suweda, ancient Soada, south of Kanawat, which is also given in
Nabatean. Wadd. 2320; De Vogue, op. cit. PI. 1.; C.I.S., Pars II. tom. i.
No. 162, where it is ascribed, because of the form of the Nabatean letters, to
the first century before Christ.

4	xii. 20 ff., cf. Josephus, xix. Antt. viii. 2 ; ii. Wars, xi. 6.

5	xix. Antt. ix. I, 2 ; ii. Wars, xi. 6.

0 “ID'pD'H^	; in C./.S., Pars ii. tom. I. No. 170. It records

the erection of a portal by Maliku, a priest of the goddess Allat.

7 For Bosra, see above, p. 617, n. 1. In Salkhat there are two inscriptions :
one of the seventeenth year of Malchus in. (not Malchus 11. as designated
by Schiirer, see p. 617 n. 1), i.e. about 65 A.n. ; the other of the twenty-fifth
year of Rab’el, i.e. 95 or 96 A.n.622 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

In 50, Agrippa II. received from Claudius the kingdom
of Chalcis in the Lebanon,1 and in 53 the old tetrarchies
Agrippa 11 °f Philip and Lysanias,2 so that once more
a d- 5O IO°- Hauran came under a Jewish prince. He was
the very worst of his line. This enthusiast for Nero, this
trifler with Paul, this pander to his sister’s shame, this
purveyor of Roman rejoicings at his people’s overthrow,
this royal camp-follower, this ape whom Titus led about,
has caused himself to be styled in his Hauran inscriptions
the Great King, Lover of Caesar, Pious, Lover of Rome.3
He called his first capital after Nero,4 through sore humilia-
tion he held to all the Flavian emperors, and it is perhaps
a sign of the same subserviency that the only inscription
which has been discovered recognising the three months’
reign of Otho is one upon Agrippa’s domains in Hauran.5
There are still extant several buildings from the second

1	The kingdom of his uncle Herod ; xx. Antt. v. 2 ; ii. Wars, xii. 1.

2	The latter included Abila and the Lebanon domains of Varus, which
stretched far north (xx. Antt. vii. I, note the curious order ; ii. Wars, xii. 8);
afterwards some parts of Galilee and Percea were added (xx. Antt. viii. 4 ;
ii. IFars, xiii. 2).

3	fiaaiXcbs p-lyas, (piXonalaap, eCnrePrjs teal <pi\opu)p.aios; on an inscription at
Si‘a, near Kanatha, Waddington, 2365.

4	See p. 475.

5	Discovered by us on the top of a straw-store at Tuffas, two hours north-
west of El-Muzeirib, on 19th June 1891 (see Critical Review, ii. 59). On the
death of Nero in 68, Agrippa II., and Titus, the latter sent by Vespasian, set
out from Syria to Rome to salute Galba, but heard on the way of Galba’s
death. Agrippa went on to salute Otho, but Titus returned to his father with
the news, and Vespasian’s legions, then on the east of the Lake of Galilee,
within a few hours of TufTas, took the oath to Otho. Here is the inscription
carved in curious oblong letters; the 0 being shaped like the Hebrew
letter shin :

L APTIIEPTHEATTOKRAI ....

CTOTMAPKOTOGfiNOEEOTHI ....

A0$ IHEAIOrENOTEIIATHPTI . .

ETO NETN AIEATEI'PAAIEIOIK. .

TK	EIAEXAPINT. .Hauran and its Cities

623

Agrippa’s reign, and numerous inscriptions : for instance,
the latest portions of the temple at Si'a,1 a temple at Es-
Sunamein, on the Hajj road south of Damascus, the
inscriptions there and elsewhere.2 Agrippa died in 100,
and his territories appear again to have fallen within the
Roman Province of Syria.

During this period the Nabateans continued to surround
Agrippa’s territories on the south, where they still occupied
Bosra and Salkhat;3 and on the east, where The new
they held a post even as far north as Admedera, ^r°Vb"ace of
the first station on the road from Damascus to A D- Io6-
Palmyra,4—Damascus itself had been taken back from
them by the Romans in the reign of Nero,5—but in 106
A.D., Trajan, by the hands of Cornelius Palma, Governor
of Syria, brought the whole Nabatean kingdom into the

1	See p. 618, n. 4.

2	We found the slab with the inscription at Es-Sunamein, serving as the
end of the village sheikh’s dust-box. I have reproduced it in the Critical
Revietv, ii. (1892), p. 56. I find it was previously given in Z.D. P. V. vii.
(1884), pp. 121 f. It records the dedication of-a portal, with little victories,
images, and little lions, to ‘ Zeus the Lord.’ The double date, ‘ the thirty-
seventh year, which is also the thirty-second of King Agrippa,’ I explained in
the Critical Review by the difference between Agrippa’s right to succeed his
father in 44-45 A.n. and his actual accession to a kingdom in 49-50. Schiirer
{Hist., Div. 1. vol. ii. pp. 194 f.) refers the smaller number to an era of
Agrippa 11. beginning in 61, and the greater to a supposed era beginning five
years earlier in 56. For this latter there is no evidence whatever. I think
De Saulcy is right in interpreting the former as an era, not of Agrippa
himself but of Caesarea-Philippi. I therefore hold to the interpretation which
I gave in the Critical Review.

3	There are two Nabatean inscriptions at Salkhat : one of the seventeenth
year of Malchus III. (not Malchus II., as Schurer designates him, see
p. 617), i.e. about 65 a.d. ; one of the twenty-fifth year of Rab’el, i.e.
95 or 96 A.D. ; besides a third of uncertain date ; C.I.S. Pars II. tom. 1.
No. 182-184.

4	The present Dmer or Maksurah, C./.S., Pars 11. tom. 1. No. 161. This
inscription also belongs to the reign of Rab’el, 71-106 a.d. : cf. Wadd. 2562 g.

5	53-68 A.D.624 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Empire, and created out of it the new Province of Arabia,
with Bosra as the capital.1

This was the most decisive step in the history of
Hauran. The fertile plain was no longer the ragged edge
Civilisation of civilisation, but an inner province of the
Hauran. Empire. Between the wilderness and herself
there was organised another Roman province, and the
wonderful Roman frontier. Therefore, with 106 A.D., the
often checked civilisation of Hauran may be said to have
got fairly under way. The Romans immediately instituted
public works. The aqueduct already mentioned from
El-Afine to Kanata was built by Cornelius Palma him-
self,2 and other great aqueducts and reservoirs are probably
to be assigned to about the same date. During the
second and third centuries, basilicas, temples, theatres,3
multiplied in the old cities: but a still more evident sign
of prosperity was the rise of a multitude of villages to the
rank of cities. Those ruins, so numerous, that as you
travel across Hauran you are never out of sight of some of
them, so strongly built of their basalt, that from many it
seems as though their inhabitants had fled but yesterday
—these are the shells of the Roman peace. In some
primeval tranquillity of man, ‘giant cities of Bashan’ may
have risen, as is alleged,4 on this margin of the desert; but
if so, these are not their ruins. With the exception of a
stray inscription to a Hebrew Herod and Agrippa, to a
Nabatean Malchus or Rab’el, themselves but Roman
vassals, there is in Hauran no written record of a life

1 Dio Cassius, lxviii. 14 : IlaX/uas ttjs Supias Apxwv tt)v ’Apafiiav tt\v
wpbt rrj Hirpq. ix.eipwffo.TO, Kal "PupaIwv virquoov iiroirjffCLTo. Cf. Reland ;
Mommsen, Prov. of the Roman Empire, 11.

2	Waddinglon, 2296-97 ; cf. 2301, 2308.	3 Like the one in Bosra.

4 Porter, Giant Cities of Bashan. Cf. Wetzstein, Reisehericht, pp. 81 f.Hauran and its Cities

625

earlier than the beginning of the Empire by Trajan.
Thereafter inscriptions abound. The letters are Greek,
the religion of which they speak may be Syrian, but the
civil power they acknowledge is Rome. The Legions have
left their stamp everywhere. In Bashan there is scarcely a
single ruin but it bears upon it the name of at least one of
the Emperors. As in Decapolis, so in Hauran, Its Roman
you stumble on bits of basalt with some of frame-
the syllables of Autokrator upon them : the letters are
Greek, but they only translate Imperator. The gods of
the temples bear Semitic names, or have received their
Greek equivalents, Zeus, Herakles, Athene, Tyche, and
so forth, but it is a Valens, a Caius, a Publius, a Lucilius,
an Ulpius, who are inscribed as benefactors of the temples.
It is Flavii, Bassi and Cornelii who are buried around
them. Where two generations are named together, the
name of the father is nearly always Semitic, the name of
the son is very frequently Latin, and never Greek—a
curious proof of the Latinising of the natives. "‘Farewell,
O Rufus, son of Ath! veteran, aged 75	‘®f Valens, son

of Aziz;’2 ‘Bassos, son of Zabd;’3 ‘Hadrian, son of
Malekh.’ 4 Seldom is this reversed, but we found a tomb-
stone, near Sheikh Miskin on the Hajj road, with the name
‘ Authos, son of Priscus.’5 Sometimes it is a native of

] Bapcr[e) 'Yovtpi “ABov overpavos ir{wv)ol, Wadcl. 2039-

* OuaXevros ’Afifou, Wadd. 2046.

3	/3a<nros ZapSov, Wadd. 2070 i.

4	At Khurbet el Araje, Wadd. 2196. ’ASpiavov tov /cat 2oa/5oi/ Ma\exou
edvapxov, ffrpaTTjyou vop-aSuv t6 p.vr)p.iov eruv \fi'. ’ASSos aSe\(pos irQv kj/.
Contemporary with the Emperor Hadrian. Cf. 1982, 2070 1., 2079, 2174.

5	AvBos Upeio-Kov try] ? Critical Review, ii. (1892). On the road to El
Merkez, a little way out of Sheikh Miskin, there is a cairn which the slab
with this inscription surmounts. The shepherds affirmed it to be the tomb of
Sheikh Mohammad el ‘Ajamy ; cf. Schumacher, Across Jordan, p. 118, for a
Sheikh el ‘Ajamy, whose tomb is shown at El ‘Ajamy on the Upper Yarmuk.626 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Germany or of Gaul, drafted here for service on the
Arabian border, whose epitaph tells you how he died
thinking of his fatherland : ‘. . . born (?) and a lover of his
country, having come from Germany and died in the
Agrippian troop, was taken back to his own.’1

It is, however, in her roads, and the records of her
The Roman frontier, that there survives fullest proof of
roads. Rome’s power. The Roman roads diverged
from Damascus—one skirting Hermon to Caesarea-Philippi;
two crossing Gaulanitis to the Jordan bridges above and
below the Lake of Galilee, one striking south through the
Lejjah to Bosra, and perhaps one down the east of the
Lejjah to Kanatha. At right angles to these ran others,
especially the Great Eastern road from Gadara to Edrei,
Bosra, Salcha, and thence boldly into the desert in the
direction of the Persian Gulf.2 ‘The Rasif, or Roman
road in these lands, is twelve paces broad, and is divided
by five rows of upright stones into three divisions of equal
breadth, the two outer rows are bordered by a ditch more
or less deep, according to the level.’3 When we pass out
on to the borders of the desert, we see how marvellous
was the line of the Roman defence. In the border villages,
rhe Roman or by the roads as they plunge into the waste
frontier. towards Palmyra or the Euphrates, marked
by rows of black stones, on some hillock with no view
but the desert, you read the official marks of the Legions,
and the rough graffiti which the soldiers scribbled through

1	. . . vtTOs Kai ipiKiirarpis dird Yep/xavlas aviXduv /cai ev eiXrj ’ Aypnnriavfi
iiTodavCi{v) els to. tSia p.edi)vtx6r], Wadd. 2121.

2	It is impossible to ascertain the exact dates of these. The roads through
the Lejjah may be as old as the conquest of the Lejjah by Varro in 23 n.c.
See p. 617, n. 6. The most of the milestones are of the Antonines.

:1 Wetzslcin, Reiscb.richt, 73.Hauran and its Cities

627

the tedium of their desert watch.1 Even more conspicuous
is the skill by which Rome won the nomads to her service
and fastened them down in defence of the border they
had otherwise fretted and broken. On chiefs of tribes
were bestowed the titles Phylarch, Ethnarch, and Strategus
of the Nomads.2

Behind this Roman bulwark there grew up a curious, a
unique civilisation talking Greek, imitating Rome, but at
heart Semitic. We have seen how overrun Tlie Semitic
with Arabs Hauran was before Rome came, elements-
how her earliest civilisers were themselves Semites,—a
Herod, a Philip, an Agrippa, ‘three thousand Idumaeans,'
a colony of ‘ Babylonian Jews;’ and we have seen how an
Arab civilisation, the Nabatean, grew up to the south of
Hauran. Nor did the Semitic influences upon Hauran
cease when Rome made her frontiers secure to the east of
it. The nomads continued to immigrate in even greater
numbers than before, yet they came not to rob but
to settle, and to add their own weight to the resistance
which Rome offered to the tides of the desert. Of these
immigrations the most distinguished was that of the Beni
Jafn, who left Yemen in 104 A.D., and towards the close
of the century settled within the borders of the Empire.3
But there were many who came with and after the
Beni Jafn, and the border garrisons seem to have been

1	At Namaia, for instance, a good day’s journey from the frontier villages
of Hauran into the desert. Among the graffiti Qaip.os 2L8p.ov and I’dSSos
8pop.e8api(o)s, Wadd. 2267 (on the dromedary troops, cf. Wadd. 1946, 2424) :
the names of the Second and Third Legions. Id. 2279, 2281.

2	‘ Phylarch,’ Wadd. 2404, etc.; for ‘ Ethnarch,’ ‘ Strategus of the nomads,’
see inscription on p. 625, n. 4. ; also Wadd. 2112, at El Hit, where Wadding-
ton thinks he found evidence of the presence of an Augustan band, Acts xxvii.
I ; the fragment is ffirupyjt Ae. . . .

a See p. 9; cf. Wadd. 2110, 2413 n.628 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

largely composed of Arab soldiers. The Greek and Latin
elements of the population, as in other Oriental provinces,
did not endure. Hauran must have remained essentially
Semitic. The Greek of the inscriptions is Greek written by
Semites : containing many blunders and barbarisms, and
betraying the influence of the Semitic phonology.1 We
have seen that in the families which rose to the position
of having an ornate tomb, or of being able to dedicate a
temple, the name of the father was nearly always Semitic
—a contrast to the monuments of the Decapolis, in which
Semitic names are very infrequent. Again, in the
temples of Hauran, the names of the gods are not alto-
gether Greek, as in the Decapolis, but we meet with
Baalsamin, Du Sara, Athi, Aziz, Aumos, Allat, Vagrah,
The Nabatean and t^le curi°us Theandrites. Herod's temple
deities.	at 3ia‘ js dedicated to Baalsamin, Baal of the

Heavens,- probably the Zeus Megistos Keraunios of the
Greek inscriptions. Du Sara was a Sun-God, giver of
fertility and joy, whom the Greeks identified with
Dionysus.3 His symbols, the vine and the wine-cup, still
ornament some lintels in many of the villages of Hauran ;
the chief centres of his worship were Petra and El-Hejr
in Central Arabia, but it is a proof of the distance to which
Nabatean commerce extended that we find two tablets

1	Wadd. 2081, ffevvorov : 2090, irbvruv Travruv : cf. 1916, 2049-53, etc.

2	contracted from pDtJ^JO, C.I.S., Pars n. tom. I. No. 163.

3	In Nabatean, fcOBTl,	Pars n. tom. 1. No. 157 at Puteoli; 160

at Rome; 190 Umm el Jemal, south of Bosra, frequently in the monuments
of El-Hejr, 197 ff. In Greek Aov<rapi]s, Wadd. 2023 ; 2312 with the epithet
6.vIkt)tos, also applied to'HXios in 2392. Cf. the proper name Aoucrapios, 1916.
Epiphanius (Haeres.) describes the feast at Petra at the winter solstice in honour
of Du Sara and his virgin mother. See also Tertullian, Apolog. 24. In
Z.D.M.G. xiv. 465, the name is derived from Sheraa, a chain of mountains
in Arabia, as if ‘ Lord of Shera.’ Cf. Baelhgen, Beitrage ztir Semitischen
Keligionsgeschichte, pp. 94-97.Hauran and its Cities

629

dedicated to him at Rome and Puteoli. Allat was ‘ the
mother of the gods, the goddess of Salkhat,’ which city
was specially sacred to her.1 Aziz, the Mighty, Athi and
Aumos were deities of lower rank.2 The Greek name
of Theandrios or Theandrites is as puzzling as it is
interesting: the Semitic original is unknown.3

In the architecture of Hauran native elements are no
less conspicuous. We have no more the mere imitations
of the great Greek orders which we found in

.	The archi-

the Decapolis; but the lines and the ornaments tecture of
of building are determined both by the habits Hauran'
of Oriental art and by the nature of the peculiar material
with which Hauran architects had to work. The oldest
building of all, the temple at Sia‘,4 was erected by Herod,
a prince already under the influence of Hellenic culture ;
but its unmistakable Greek lines are strongly modified
by Eastern ideas.5 De Vogiie thinks that in its ruins we
can see some reflection of the plan of the temple at
Jerusalem, which was not only contemporary but likewise

1	Pars II. tom. 1. Nos. 170, 171, 182, 183, 185; 182 runs: ‘this is
the house which Ruhu, son of Malkhu, son of Akhlibu, son of Ruhu, built to

Allat, their goddess (Diinn^N, a contradiction of Renan’s theory that the
expression ‘goddess’ was impossible in Semitic). In 185 Allat is associated
with Vagrah. Cf. Baethgen, Beitriige, etc., 98, 99.

2	Aziz, Wadd. 2314 (Suweida), identified on an inscription in Dacia with
Apollo; Athi on an inscription at Egla (El Ageilat) Batanea, Wadd. 2209 ;
Qeip avrwv ’E0dy worshipped at Palmyra under the name Till- To Afyios are
inscriptions at Deir el Leben, Wadd. 2392, 2394, on a large temple of 320
A. D., on the latter of which he seems identified with the Sun. Cf. 2463 and
2464 (Hauran in Trachonitis), on the latter of which the name Aumos belongs
to a Christian man.

3	Qedvdptos, Wadd. 1905 ; Qeavdpirris, 2046, 2481.	4 See p. 618.

5 On the principles of the architecture of Hauran, the chief authority is

De Vogiie, Syrie Centrale, Architecture Civile et Religieuse ; see especially,
for the information which forms the basis of the above paragraphs, the
Avant Propos of this excellent work.630 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

the work of Herod. It was, however, the peculiarity
of their building materials which chiefly influenced the
ancient architects of Hauran. Their country, as we have

seen, was practically treeless; they had to

Its originality.

construct entirely of stone, and the basalt
which was at their disposal not only served for masonry,
but allowed itself to be cut into beams, slabs, lattice-work,
and other shapes for which wood was usually employed.
Consequently the building of Hauran developed a style
of its own. This took the form of a series of parallel
arches, across which were laid long beams or rafters of
basalt,1 and again on these the slabs of the ceiling. Some
of these roofs are still solid ; above the rafters of others
there are scattered a number of big stones, so that you
have a trellis roof through which the sunshine is fretted
on the floor beneath.2 But frequently the roof took the
form of the cupola, and in this you see the ‘ first essays
towards the Byzantine style of architecture, and especially
towards putting the cupola on a square by means of
spherical pendentives.’3 The parallel arches, straining
outwards, required some exterior bulwark ; and, conse-
quently, along many of the public buildings of Hauran
you find solid buttresses running the entire length of the
walls, and built in the form of steps and stairs. They
are the favourite benches of the village school, when the
sun is not too fierce ; the bright children, scattered over
these ancient buttresses, compose a charming picture.
The elevation of the buildings is generally low, but never

1 De Vogue describes the slabs as laid directly on the arches, but in the
specimens I examined the long basalt beams intervene.

- As in the Menzil at Es-Sunamein and elsewhere.

3 De Vogue as above. The oldest extant specimen of the cupola is
Umm ez Zeitun, and it dates from 282 a.d.Hauran and its Cities

63T

mean ; the decorations few and simple. The basalt al-
lowed less carving than the limestone of Gilead, but it
has preserved the inscriptions better. It is a wonder to
see the carved stone lattices of the windows, and the
great stone doors turning on their stone hinges.

Most of the public buildings appear to have risen in
the times of the Antonines and of Septimius Severus,—
Temples, Basilicas, Theatres, and also those round towers,
which all civilisations have found indispensable in war-
fare with the Arabs.1

But there had entered Hauran a new force, which was
gradually to change both the religion and the art of the land.

The early course of Christianity across Jordan is ex-
tremely obscure. In Western and Northern Syria, in
Mesopotamia, and in Persia, we have com-
paratively full accounts of the organisation Christianity
of the Church, but in Eastern Syria and m Hauran‘
Arabia her early history is almost a blank. We know
of our Lord’s ministry in Decapolis and Peraea,2 and of
Paul’s conversion and the little band of disciples at
Damascus,3 and of Paul’s possible ministry in Arabia.4
The Christians of Jerusalem fled from the siege to Pella,5
where it is said that the Ebionite heresy first developed,0
and the Christianity of Eastern Palestine is described
more than once as of this Judaistic kind—enforcing the
Mosaic law, affirming the human birth of Christ, abjuring

1	Cf. Uzziah’s use of towers, 2 Chron. xxvi. 9, 10; and that of the Turks
to-day along the Hajj road. Doughty, Arabia Deserta, i. passim.

2	Mark v. 1 and x. 1.	3 Acts ix.; 2 Cor. xi.

4	Gal. i. 15-17 : But when it was the good pleasure of God... to reveal
His Son in me, that I might preach him amotig the Gentiles ... I went
away into Arabia, and again 1 returned unto Damascus.

5	Eusebius, H.E. iii. 5. There are no remains of this date.

0 Epiphanius, adv. Hceres. xxx. 2.632 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Paul as a heretic, and looking for the return of Christ to
found an earthly kingdom.1 But of all this there are no
remains, not even at Pella, and the earliest record we
have of an active Christianity in Hauran is of the estab-
lishment of a monastery in 180 A.D. by 'Amr I., a Ghas-
sanide prince. About 218 A.D. Origen paid two visits to
the east of Jordan ; the first on the call of the Governor
of Arabia to explain to him his doctrine,2 and the second
to an Arabian Synod, at which he overthrew

Origen and

the Synod the heresy of Beryllus, the Bishop of Bosra,
of Bosra. ancj propounded the eternal generation of the
Son.3 From Schuhba in Trachonitis came the first
Christian emperor. Philip, the Arabian, was the son of a
Bedawee chief, was at least a nominal Christian, and
occupied the Imperial throne from 244 to 24c).4 The
Christians of these regions must have suffered, like those
of the rest of Syria, in the persecutions under
tions and Decius and Diocletian,5 and it is perhaps owing
Martyrs.	the latter emperor’s order for the destruc-

tion of all Christian buildings that we have so very few
Christian remains earlier than his day. Traces of these
great persecutions are still eloquent in Hauran—one
cryptogram for Christ, the IX©T2 of the catacombs;0
another, XMT, found only here, and probably meaning,

1	East of the Dead Sea were gathered the sect of the Elkesaites—another
heretical sect, taking their name from 'D3 ^Tl, their title for the Holy Ghost,
which was also given to their sacred book. They practised many Mosaic
and Essene rites, and worshipped Christ as the Son of God ; Epiphanius,
Her. xix., xxx., liii.; Eusebius, H.E. vi. 38; Theodoret, Falmlamm Here-
ticanun, vii.

2	Eusebius, H.E. vi. 19.	3 Ibid. vi. 20, 33, 37.

4 Ibid. vi. 34 ; cf. Uhlhorn, Iierz. RealEncyc. xi. pp. 613 ff.; cf. Wadd. 2071 ff.

0 Decius, 249-251 A.D.; Diocletian began persecution in 303.

(i Wadd. 2362.Hauran and its Cities

633

‘ Christ born of Mary ; ’1 a possible allusion to Mary
herself, masked in heathen terms, Tiorvia	;2 above

all, many bits of basalt with the words, or syllables
of the words, Martyr and Martyrs’ Monument.3 These
latter meet you in almost every village, rendering its very
dust dear to your Christian heart. Even the nomads
raised monuments to the martyrs.4 One longer inscrip-
tion runs : ‘ For the Repose of the Martyrs who have
fallen asleep;’5 it reminds us of Stephen. The erection of
such memorials proves a day in which Christianity was able
to show itself in public, and there are others that record
its gradual triumph over paganism. Amid the names
of Zeus, Athene, Du Sara, Allat, which still Triumph of
stamp the ruins, you read that of our Lord Chnst-
carven with equal boldness in the face of the sun, as
thus—

IHS^OTX

or a proclamation of the ‘ One God ; ’c or the triumphant
words—7

+ XPI2 + T02 NIKA +

On these follow longer inscriptions : prayers, dedications,
quotations from Scripture, epitaphs. . At Umm el Jemal:
‘Prayer of Numerianus (and) John—From the womb of
(our) mother our God art thou ; forsake us not.’8 At
Salkhat, in wretched Greek, scribbled in an obscure
chamber, ‘Aouos, Moses, for the forgiveness of sins.’9 In

1 XpiiXTos €K Mdptas yevvqdeh, Wadd. 1936, 2145.	2 Wadd. 2145.

’M.aprvpiov. As these ‘martyries’ were used as chapels, and many
churches contained martyries, the words iKKXr/ala and paprOptov are some-
times used by early ecclesiastical writers as equivalent.

4	e.g. Wadd. 2464, where the MapTvptov was raised by a Phylarch.

5	'Tirkp rrjs avanavjeus twv KeKoipevuv Maprvpuv, Wadd. 1920.

8 Eis 0 . . Wadd. 2057, cf. 2066.	7 Wadd. 2253.

8 Ps. xxi. 11 ; Wadd. 2068.	9 Wadd. 2010.634 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

several places, ‘ Help, O Christ.’ On the lintel of a house
at Tuffas : ‘Jesus Christ be the shelter and defence of all
the family of the house, and bless their incoming and
their outgoing.’1 Sometimes the intercession of the saints
is sought, as at Sahwet El Khudr, in the Chapel of St.
George: ‘ Holy George, receive: also Scholasticius, the
offerer, do thou guard by thy prayers, and for Comes, his
brother, ask repose.’2 It is remarkable that the quota-
tions from Scripture are from the Old Testament in the
LXX. version, but sometimes, as in the prayer quoted,
they are adapted for application to Christ. ‘This is the
gate of the Lord, the righteous shall come in by it.’3	‘ If

the Lord watch not the city, in vain doth the watchman
keep awake.’4 On the portal of the Church of St. John,
now the Great Mosque in Damascus: ‘ Thy kingdom,
O Christ, is an everlasting kingdom, and thy dominion
cndureth from generation to generation.’5

Pagan and Christian inscriptions contrast in two im-
portant respects. The Pagans parade in every case the
contrast of names of the donors, offerers and dedicators.
chnstiand With a modesty, too strange to the liberality
inscriptions. Qf the modern Church, the Christian inscrip-
tions of Hauran nearly always omit the names, as thus :

‘ Remember, Lord, the founder, of whom Thou knowest
the name.’c But the most striking contrast is found

1	As I copied it, the inscription reads a little differently (see Critical
Rci'iew, ii. p. 60) from Schumacher’s copy, Across the Jordan, p. 21. The
quotations are from the Psalms : Ps. iii. 4; cxxi. Cf. Wadd. 2068, 2537.

2	Wadd. 1981, cf. 2126.	3 Ps. cxviii. 20; Wadd. 1961.

4	Ps. cxxvii. 6; Wadd. 2390, cf. 2501.

5	The unused portal above the roof of the silversmiths’ bazaar. The verse
is from Psalm cxlv.

0 Wadd. 2087, etc. Cf. the inscription on the font at Bethlehem. But
see 2249 for an instance of the name being given.Hauran and its Cities

635

among the tombs. The heathen epitaphs, whether in
Decapolis or Hauran, are almost without hope. The
Romans, in lawyer-like form, record only the name, the
rank, the age of the dead, and how the tomb was built.1
The Greeks indulge in sentiment and reflec-

•	a r Epitaphs.

tion, but are equally poor in hope. After
all things a tomb’ is inscribed on the lintel of a tomb at
Irbid.2 Kat %v, Even thou, is a common memento mori.
The Greek heart breaks on the stone ; the farewell is
final. ‘ Thou hast finished ’ is a common epitaph. ‘ Titus,
son of Malchus, farewell, thou hast finished untimely,
(thy) years twelve, farewell !’3 Or the dead are told that
theirs is the inevitable fate, there is nobody immortal. ‘ Be
of cheer, Helen, dear child, no one is immortal. I have
laid thee beside thy mother, Gavaia. . . .’4 This ouSei?
adavaros is very common. Perhaps its most striking
appearance is on a tomb on the Mount of Olives, over
against the Church of the Resurrection.5 Now, in contrast
to this Pagan hopelessness, there is in the Christian
epitaphs no exultation indeed, nor any vision of another
life, but a quiet confidence. The dead are spoken of as
‘ they that sleep; ’ the living pray for their repose, or offer

1	See the inscription we discovered at Gadara, p. 461 of this volume.

2	Merrill {East of Jordan, 293) reads Mera Uavra T(oOro); Clermont-
Ganneau (Recueil, etc., 17) reads T(d0oj). The latter is correct; my copy
shows a as the second letter of the word ; the rest is defaced.

3	On a pillar now in a stable in Gadara. Critical Review, ii. 61 ; cf.
Clermont-Ganneau, Recueil> p. 21.

4	Wadd. 2032, cf. 1986 ; e7rai'/aero Afidos. But 2247 (&p.a 0eoTs) and 2322
express hope.

5	Wadd. 1897 cf. 2429. There is a beautiful epitaph given by Wadd. 2322:

Tttvos ?xel <re> H-aK&Pt TroXv/ipare, die 2a/3ive
ral ws ijpws xal vhcvs owe eytvov.
eiideis 5’ (is tri fwv vtrb dtvdpeai aots ev T6p.((3ots)
ipvxcd yap £w<nv tQ>v Hyav evoefialuv.636 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

a prayer for themselves, as : ‘May the soul of Gerontius
be saved.’1

Other notable expressions of faith and feeling are : ‘ O
Christ, our God ‘ The Peace of Christ be to all; ’ ‘ Peace
be to all men + the Holy Catholic Church of the Lord.’2
The Church of Eastern Palestine was organised in the
second and third centuries, for in the beginning of the
Dioceses of fourth its bishops and metropolitans were
the Church. manyj as js witnessed by the Acts of the

Councils of Nice and Chalcedon. At the former Damascus
had a metropolitan with seven suffragans. Bosra was the
ecclesiastical, as well as the civil, metropolis of Hauran.
The diocese had its own theology, as we have seen, in
Origen’s time, and its synods. The town was a great
centre of trade, only second in importance to Damascus
—a tradition preserved in its present name of Old
Damascus. It was full of monks.

The buildings of the earliest Christianity were destroyed,
as we have seen, under Diocletian. They were probably
the martyries, little chapels built over a martyr’s grave.

After the victory over paganism the first
and other churches were the basilicas of the Antonines
buildings. ancj other emperors, and then imitations of
these. But during the fourth and fifth centuries there
developed the style known as Byzantine,—the dome
above the square chamber. The two finest churches
were that of St. George at Zorava, of date 514,3 and the
cathedral at Bosra of 512. St. George’s Church consists

1 Wadd. 2492.	2 Wadd. 2500, 2061, 2519.

:l Frobably on site of a temple to Theandrites, Wadd. 2569. The relics

of St. George appear to have been taken to Zorava in the beginning of the
6th century, Wadd. 2498.Hauran and its Cities

637

of two concentric octagons in a square that is crowned
by drum and cupola ; against the eastern face of the
exterior octagon is built the choir, terminating in an
apse ; each angle of the square outside the octagons holds
a smaller apse ; on the west side there are three portals ;
on the north and south one each. It is this church which
bears the famous inscription beginning, ‘ The assembly of
demons has become the house of the Lord.’ The cathedral
of Bosra was four-square and crowned by a dome, with a
longish apse to the east. An inscription in Bosra1 gives
a form of the Greek original of church, icvpiarcov, ‘ The
Lord’s house,’ tcvpi/cov, which is as nearly as possible the
same as the forms used at the other end of Christendom,
kerk and kirk.

The latest Christian buildings in Hauran are of the
middle of the seventh century. In the beginning of that
century the camel-driver, Mohammed, used, overthrow of
on his journeys from Arabia, to visit Bosra, Chrlstianity-
and it is said that he learned there, from the monk Hariri,
all he ever knew of Christianity.2 Mohammed died in 632.
By 634 the hosts whom his doctrines inspired had overrun
Hauran, defeated on the Yarmuk the Christian army, and
by 635 they had taken Damascus. Subsequent to this
we have only one Christian building in Hauran, the
monastery at Deir Eyoub, with the date 641,3 and one
Greek inscription at Salkhat of 665.* The Christianity
and the Hellenism of the province rapidly dwindled to
the merest fragments of their former selves. The vitality

1 Wadd. 1920.
a Wadd. 2413.

2 Yakut i. 64 ; the Mardsid i. 425, 441.
4 Wadd. 1997.638 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

of Hauran was blasted. We have no buildings worthy of
the name from the Mohammedan period ; the structures
of former days were mutilated and abused ; the theatre
at Bosra was made a castle ; the cathedrals and churches
were turned to mosques. Other barbarians have under-
stood, interpreted, developed the civilisations which they
conquered, and so did the Arabs themselves in other
parts of the world. But in the desert-bordering Hauran,
on which ruder and ruder swarms beat up as the
centuries went on, there was only abuse, neglect, decay ;
and the sole conservative elements, which have ensured
that at least we should have some ruins of the ancient
days, have been, on the one side, the hardness and weight
of the Hauran basalt, and, on the other side, the stupid
and superstitious reverence of the Arabs for inscriptions,
which they have treasured and employed—generally on
end, or wrong-side up,—as tombstones, and as charms
over the doors of their houses. Hauran has continued
fertile and full of villages down to the present day, but
the villages have known no security, have sheltered no
stable populations ; and the land has been scoured by
nomads.1 The great towns have become shells in which
little clans huddle for shelter. In Bosra to-day there are
not more than forty families.

The Crusaders made two expeditions to Bosra ; and
they besieged Damascus. But none of these adventures
effected anything, and though their coins have been found
in Hauran, they got no settlement there.2

1 See pp. 526-529.	- On the Crusaders over Jordan, see p. 537.CHAPTER XXX

DAMASCUS

C3'JFor this Chapter consult Maps /. and IIDAMASCUS

T->\AMASCUS—never claimed for Israel and never
' under a Hebrew prince 1—lies beyond the limits
of the Holy Land, and therefore of our present survey.
But she has always been the goal of all the roads of the
lands we have traversed, the dream and envy of their
peoples. We have met her fame everywhere. She has
seen the rise, felt the effect, and survived the passage of
all the forces which have strewn Syria with ruins. There
is not a fallen city we have visited but Damascus was old
when it was built, and still flourishes long after it has
perished. Amid the growth and decay of the races,
civilisations and religions, which have thronged Syria for
four thousand years, Damascus has remained the one
perennially great Syrian city. Before we cease our survey,
therefore, she demands our homage, with such apprecia-
tion as we may attempt of the secret of her eternal youth.
Beyond appreciation we need not go: we have already
recorded the main facts of her history.2

Damascus lies about seventy miles from the sea-board,
upon the east of Anti-Lebanon, and close in to the foot

1	For an apparent exception see p. 582.

2	For her roads to the sea, her place between the Mediterranean and the
far East, see chap. xx. ; for her connection with Israel, chap, xxvii. ; for her
relations to Eastern Palestine, chap. xxv. ; for her place in the Decapolis,
chap, xxviii. ; for her history under Rome and the Nabateans, chap. xxix.642 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

of the hills. You reach her from Beyrout by a strong
carriage-road which first climbs over Lebanon into ‘ Hollow
Situation of Syria/ and then by the easy passes of Anti-
Damascus. Lebanon crosses into the valley of the Abana,
with which it issues upon a great plain 2300 feet above
the sea, and in extent thirty miles by ten. This plain is
bounded on the west by Hermon, on the north by a low
eastern offshoot of Anti-Lebanon, on the east by a row
of extinct volcanoes, on the south by the river Awaj,
probably the Pharpar, and by another low range of hills
that shuts off Hauran.

Like the slopes of Anti-Lebanon behind it, this plain
would be as desert as all the rest of the country to the
Euphrates were it not for the river Abana.

The Abana.

The Abana bursts full born from the heart
of Anti-Lebanon, runs a course of ten miles in a narrow
gorge, and from the mouth of this flings itself abroad
in seven streams. After watering the greater part of
the plain, it dies away in a large marsh. Over the
green of this marsh you see from Damascus at sunset
low purple hills twenty-five miles off. They are the edge
of the Eastern desert : beyond them there is nothing but
a rolling waste, and the long ways to Palmyra and
Baghdad.

It is an astonishing site for what is said to be the oldest,
and is certainly the most enduring, city of the world.
The haven of ^or it is utterly incapable of defence; it is
the desert. remote from the sea and the great natural
lines of commerce. From the coast of Syria it is doubly
barred by those ranges of snow-capped mountains whose
populations enjoy more tempting prospects to the north
and west. But look east and you understand Damascus.Damascus

643

You would as soon think of questioning the site of New
York or of Sydney or of San Francisco. Damascus is
a great harbour of refuge upon the earliest sea man ever
learned to navigate. It is because there is nothing but
desert beyond, or immediately behind this site ; because
this river, the Abana, instead of wasting her waters on a
slight extension of the fringe of fertile Syria, saves them in
her narrow gorge till she can fling them well out upon the
desert, and there, instead of slowly expending them on
the doubtful possibilities of a province, lavishes all her
life at once in the creation of a single great city, and
straightway dies in face of the desert—it is because of all
this that Damascus, so remote and so defenceless, has
endured throughout human history, and must endure.
Nineveh, Babylon and Memphis easily conquered her—
she probably preceded them, and she has outlived them.
She has been twice supplanted—by Antioch, and she
has seen Antioch decay, by Baghdad, and Baghdad is
forgotten. She has been many times sacked, and twice
at least the effective classes of her population have been
swept into captivity, but this has not broken the chain of
her history. She was once capital of the world from the
Atlantic to the Bay of Bengal,1 but the vast empire
went from her and the city continued to flourish as before.
Standing on the utmost edge of fertility, on the shore
of the much-voyaged desert, Damascus is indispensable
alike to civilisation and to the nomads. Moreover, she is
the city of the Mediterranean world, which lies nearest
to the far East, and Islam has made her the western port
for Mecca.

The plain on which Damascus lies is called the Ghutah.

1 Under the Omeiyade Khalifs in the end of the seventh century.644 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Too high to be marshy, the Ghutah is shot all over by the
cold, rapid waters of the Abana, which do an equal service
in bringing life, and in carrying away corrup-
tion. Verdure springs profusely everywhere.
As you look down from one of the bare heights to the north
you see some hundred and fifty square miles of green—
thronging and billowy as the sea, with the white compact
city rising from it like an island. There is apparently
all the lavishness of a virgin forest, but when you get
down among it you find neither rankness nor jungle. The
cultivated ground is extensive, most of it in orchards and
plantations, but there are also flower gardens, parks and
corn-fields of considerable size—none, however, so spread
as to disturb the distant impression of close forest.

It is best to enter Damascus in summer, because then
everything predisposes you for her charms. You come
The approach down off the most barren flanks of Anti-
to Damascus. Lebanon> You cross the plateau of Sahra-ed-

Dimas, six shadeless miles that stretch themselves, with
the elasticity of all Syrian plains in haze, till you almost
fancy you are upon some enchanted ground rolling out
with you as you travel. But at last the road begins to
sink, and you come with it into a deep rut, into which all
the heat and glare of the broad miles behind seems
to be compressed. The air is still, the rocks blistered,
the road deep in dust, when suddenly a bank of foliage
bursts into view, with a white verandah above it. The
road turns a corner; you are in shadow, on a bridge, in
a breeze. Another turn and you have streams on both
sides, a burn gurgling through bushes on the left, on the
right not one stream but one banked over the other, and
the wind in the poplars above. You break into theDamascus

645

richer valley of the Abana itself. You pass between
orchards of figs and orchards of apricots. For hedges
there are the briar rose, and for a canopy the The gorge of
walnut. Pomegranate blossoms glow through the Abana-
the shade; vine-boughs trail across the briar; a little
waterfall breaks on the edge of the road. To the left the
river, thirty feet of dark green water with white curls
upon it, shoots down a steep, smooth bed. And all this
water and leafage are so lavish that the broken mud-walls
and slovenly houses have no power to vex the eye, exult-
ing in the contrast of the valley with the bare brown hills
that shut it in. For two miles more you ride between
trees, through a village, over a bridge, between high banks
of gardens—road and river together, flecked with light.
You come between two streams, one washing the roots of
aged fig-trees, past a quarry where the desert sinks in cliff
upon the road, beside an old aqueduct whose Roman
masonry trails with brambles. The gorge narrows, there
is room only for the aqueduct and river, with the road
between, but just as the cliff comes near enough to over-
hang the road the hills turn sharply away, and the relieved
river slackens and sprawls between islands. We are out
on the plain ; there are gardens and meadows ; men and
boys, horses, asses and geese loaf upon the grass and the
shingle ; great orchards, with many busy people gathering
apricots, stretch on either side. Still, there is no city
visible. A mile more of orchards, then through the
walnuts a crescent gleams, and the minaret it crowns.
You come out on a grassy level, cut by the river into two
parks. There is a five-arched bridge across it, and over
the bridge minarets and low white domes. You pass
some public gardens, cross the river, ride between it and646 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

another garden with lofty trees, and halt in a great square,
with the serai, the courts of justice, the prison, and the
barracks of the principal garrison of Syria. The river
has disappeared under the square by three tunnels, from
which it passes in lesser conduits and pipes to every house
and court in the city. By the northern walls a branch
breaks again into the open ; here the chiefest gardens are
spread beneath walnuts and poplars, and the water rushes
by them swift and cold from its confinement.

With the long gardens of Damascus, the paradise of the
Arab world, you must take the Bazaars of Damascus, in
The bazaars which many other worlds meet the Arab,
of Damascus. Travellers, it is true, are often disappointed with
both gardens and bazaars. It is not to be expected that we
Westerns should feel the charm of the waters of Damascus
as the desert Bedawee does. But if any one confesses
the bazaars dull, he has neither eye for colour nor wit to
read the city’s destiny in the faces she has gathered to
them from Nubia to the Caucasus. It is a perpetual
banquet of colour. There are blots upon it—Manchester
prints, cheap Paris clocks, second-hand carriages from
Beyrout, the dusty streets themselves, where they break
into the open glare. But in the long dusk tunnels, shot
by solid shafts of light, all else is beautiful—the old
walnut-wood, the brown tobacco bales, the carpets, the
spotted brown scones in the bakers’ shops, the tawny
sweetmeats, the golden Hauran wheat, the piles of green
melons, the tables of snow from Hermon, the armour and
rich saddle-bags, the human dresses, but especially the
human flesh—the pallid townsman, the mahogany fellah,
the Druze with mountain blood in his cheek, the grey Jew,
the black and blue-black negroes. Besides Turk andDamascus

647

Hebrew, the great racial types are three : the Bedawee
Arab, the Greek, and the Kurd. They are the token of
how Damascus lies between the Desert, the Levant, and
that other region of the world to which we are so apt to
forget that Syria has any avenue—the highlands of
Armenia. Saladin, her greatest Sultan, was a Kurd : the
Kurd sheep-masters every year send their flocks for sale
to the Lebanons, and Kurdish cavalry have always formed
the most vigorous part of the Damascus garrison.

But even the Bazaars of Damascus fail to exhaust the
significance of the city. To gather more of this you must
come out upon the three great roads which go The three
forth from her—west, south, and east. The greatroads-
western, or south-western, road travels by Galilee to the
Levant and the Nile. The southern, which leaves the city
by the f Gates of God/ takes the pilgrims to Mecca. The
eastern is the road to Baghdad. Egypt, Arabia, Persia,—
this city of the Khalifs lies in the midst of the three, and
the Mediterranean is behind her.

As for her relations to Syria, Damascus never had in these
but one rival, and this only so long as a European power
ruled in the East. Antioch was the creation of Damascus
the Greeks (330 B.C.), the capital of the Seleucid and Antl0ch-
dynasty, the residence of the Roman Legate in Syria,
and the centre of Eastern Christianity. During the
thousand years of European supremacy Damascus fell
second to Antioch, and her. history is obscure. But so
soon as the Moslem came (they took Damascus in 634,
Antioch in 635), the city on the Desert rose again to the
first rank, the city on the Levant began to decline. For
one hundred years, 650 to 750, Damascus had the
Khalifate under the Omayades ; and once for all she was648 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

bound to Mecca itself by the Hajj. Under Arab rule
Damascus has even absorbed the Christian fame of Antioch,
for though the Patriarch still takes his title from Antioch,
he resides in Damascus. The fortunes of the two cities
during the Crusades reflect the same relatipns. The
European forces made Antioch their centre, but they never
took Damascus.

In the history of religion, Damascus was the stage of
two great crises. She was the scene of the conversion of
the first apostle of Christianity to the Gentiles :

Religious

significance she was the first Christian city to be taken by
Islam. It was fit that Paul’s conversion, with
his first sense of a mission to the Gentiles, should not
take place till his journey had brought him to Gentile
soil. The great cathedral, which rose on the ruins of
the heathen temple, was dedicated not to Paul but to
John the Baptist. When the Moslem took Damascus in
634 this Church was divided between Mohammedans and
Christians. Seventy years later it was absorbed by the con-
querors, and was rebuilt to become one of the greatest, if
not the richest, of the mosques of Islam. The rebuilding
destroyed all the Christian features, except that which,
still above the south portal, preserves this prayer and
prophecy : Thy kingdom, O Christ, is an everlasting king-
dom, and Thy dominion endureth for all generations.APPENDICES

I.	Some Geographical Passages ani? Terms of the
Old Testament.

II.	Stade’s Theory of Israel’s Invasion of Western
Palestine.

III.	The Wars against Sihon and Og.

IV.	The Bibliography of Eastern Palestine.

V.	Roads and Wheeled Vehicles in Syria.

649APPENDIX I

SOME GEOGRAPHICAL PASSAGES AND TERMS IN THE
OLD TESTAMENT

Reference is made on p. 52 to several passages in the-Old
Testament which catalogue the chief physical features of
Palestine.

(a) The earliest of these seems to be Judges i. 9. Looking
west from the hills above Jericho the writer describes the tribe
of Judah as going down to fight the Canaanites who dwelt on the
Mount, the Negeb, and the Shephelah. In his masterly examina-
tion of the Book of Judges, Budde (.Bucher Richter u. Samuel)
argues that this verse does not belong to the original Jahvist
narrative on the ground that it contradicts ver. 19, Judah pos-
sessed the Mount, but could not drive out the inhabitants of the
Valley, because they had chariots of iron. But, in the first place,
ver. 9 only says that Judah went down to attack the Canaanites
in the Mount, the Negeb, and the Shephelah, while ver. 19 deals
with the result of that attack, viz., that it was successful only
so far as the mountainous territory was concerned. Secondly,
Budde seems to take Shephelah and ‘Emek or Valley as the
same thing. But Shephelah is the name of a well-defined
region, the low hills between Philistia and the Judaean range,
and including both hill and vale. ‘Emek, on the other hand, is
a kind of land—valley or plain-land, as distinct from hilly
country. I see no reason, therefore, for separating ver. 9 from
the section in which it occurs. Note, too, that it is said Judah
went down to the Mount, etc., which can only mean that in the
mind of the writer this tribe did not depart on its separate path
of conquest from the rest of Israel till after Israel had reached
the crest of the Central Range.

651652 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

The rest of the passages form a group in which it is possible
to identify one hand, or, at least, one style, that of the
Deuteronomist.

{b) In Deut. i. 7 Israel are ordered to take their journey to
the Mount of the Amorite, that is, the Central Range, as repre-
sentative of the whole land, and to all his neighbours. Then
the main features of the country are given as from the Jordan
westward—in the 1 Arabah, or Jordan Valley, in the Mount, or
the Central Range itself, in the Shephelah, in the Negeb, and on
the Coast of the Sea—the land of the Canaanite. Lebanon is then
added, and all the country north to the great river, the river
Euphrates, for that was the ideal border of the Promised Land.

(c) In Josh. x. 40 all the Land, as far as it was conquered by
Joshua, and therefore exclusive of the Maritime Plain, is defined
as The Mount, and the Negeb, and the Shephelah, and the Slopes
(Eng. Ver., springs).

(d.) In Josh. xi. 16 this is given more fully as the Mount, and
all the Negeb, and all the Land of Goshen—an unknown quantity
extending from Gibeon (Josh. x. 41; cf. xv. 51) southwards
across Judah, and out upon the Negeb, and to be distinguished
from that land of Goshen where Israel was settled in Egypt—and
the Shephelah, and the 1 Arabah, and the Mount of Lsrael—that is,
the Central Range within the limits of the northern kingdom of
Israel—and its Shephelah, probably the district of lower and
more open hills between the hills of Samaria and Carmel, which
present so many resemblances to the Shephelah opposite Judah.
No other interpretation seems feasible; but, if it be correct, then
the date of the passage can only be after the kingdom of Israel
was separated from Judah.

(e) In Josh. xii. 8 we find The Mountain, the Shephelah, the
‘Arabah, the Slopes, the Desert—on the skirts of the land—and
the Negeb. The Mountain or Central Range was named in its
various portions. The Mountain—English version, hill-country—
of Judah or Judcea,1 the Mountain of Ephraim,2 or (as we have
seen) of Lsrael, or, in the plural, the Mountains of Samaria, for
the range is scattered here; and in Galilee, the Mountain of
Naphtali.

1 Luke.

Authorised Version, Mount Ephraim.Appendix I

653

All these refer to Western Palestine. The divisions and names
of Eastern Palestine are given in chap. xxv. As in the west,
we have mount applied to the hills of Moab ; mountains of
‘Abarim, to Gilead and to Bashan. There is, besides, Mishor,
applied to the level plateau of Moab (Siegfried-Stade, Hand-
worterbuch, refer it in 1 Chron. xxvi. 10 to the Jordan Valley, but
incorrectly).

A few more words are necessary on some of the geographical
terms of the Old Testament. For hills or heights the Hebrews
had the following words: “in Har, applied either, as we have
seen, to a whole range, or hill-country (in this case also used in
the plural), or to a single great hill like Hor (Num. xx. 22), or
to smaller hills like the citadel of Jerusalem (Isa. xxii. 5) or
Samaria. LXX., mostly opos and opuvrj. nyiiJ Gibe'ah, is 1 hill?
properly as distinguished from mountain "in, but also interchange-
able sometimes with the latter, Isa. xl. 4; Job xv. 7 ; Prov. viii.
25. Like "in of Mount Zion, Isa. x. 32 ; Ezek. xxxiv. 26. But
it is never like "in used of a mountain range or hill-country. On
the other hand, in Song of Solomon iv. 6, it may be used of an
artificial high place. LXX. nearly uniformly j3ovvos.

HD3 Bamah, on the other hand, is in the singular used only
of artificial high places; but once or twice in the plural is meant
to be natural heights (e.g. Micah i. 3; Jer. xxvi. 18; Ezek.
xxxvi. 2; cf. 2 Sam. i. 19, 25).

‘~Ophel=swell, bank, or mound; as a common noun it is
used only for tumours on the body (cf. tumulus, from tumeo);
as a name with the article (except Isa. xxxii. 14 ; Micah iv. 8)
it was given to the rising ground south-east of the Temple,
cf. 2 Kings v. 24; Neh. iii. 26, etc. ; also to a part of Samaria,
2 Kings v. 24; also to a part of Dibon, on line 22 of the
Moabite Stone.

Ashedoth, as we have seen, are certainly slopes; and
so with rv6p3 as in "DPI "3, Josh. xix. 12; cf. Josh. xix. 18,
Modern Iksal. “TC Sadh=side, 1 Sam. xxiii. 26 ; 2 Sam. xiii. 34;
n3T Jarcah=thigh, Judges xix. i. 18, etc. ; itaf Sel‘a=rib, 2 Sam,654 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

xvi. 13; Shechem=back, Gen. xlviii. 22 , S]n3 Chatheph =
shoulder, Josh. xv. 8, 10; xviii. 10, of hills, but also to the sea
coast of Philistia as rising from the sea, Isa. xi. 14; Rosh,
Arabic, Ras = headland, foreland, or summit; and even niJTN
‘Aznoth = ears;*vnn ITOfN Josh. xix. 34, though it is impossible
to say to what exactly this refers. pp Keren = horn.

'SB* Shephi is a bare hill; HD3 Naphah is elevation, raised
land, only in Naphath Dor, the rise of Carmel behind Dor;

Tel (in composition Tell = Arabic, Tell) is the mound com-
posed of rubbish on which a village often stands, Josh. xi. 13 ;
Jer. xxx. 18; also the heap caused by the overthrow of a city,
Deut. xiii. 17, etc. As a place-name, it does not seem to have
occurred in ancient Palestine. The only instances of it in the
Old Testament refer to Babylonia, Ezek. iii. 15; Ezra ii. 59;
Neh. vii. 61. Other words for a height (geographical) are Dho
Marom (cf. non Rfimah, a place-name, 2 Kings xxiii. 36, and
the frequent non Ramah);	Misgab, Ps. xviii. 2. A summit

is B*N*i as above, or TON Isa. xvii. 6.

r6yo Ma‘aleh=ascent, used with many proper names, eg.
Akrabbim, or ‘the scorpions,’ Num. xxxiv. 4; Josh. xv. 3;
Judges i. 36; Adummim, Josh. xv. 7, see p. 265; Gur, 2 Kings
ix. 27, see p. 388 n. ; Ziz, 2 Chron. xx. 16, see p. 272; Luhith
in Moab, Isa. xv. 5 ; Jer. xlviii. 5 ; Beth-horon, Josh. x. 10; cf.
1 Macc. iii. 16. See also Judges viii. 13. T»D Morad is the
opposite, used of the descent from Ai to Jericho, Josh. vii. 5 ;
of the Beth-horon, Josh. x. 10; 1 Macc. iii. 24; of Horonaim,
Jer. xlviii. 5 = ascent of Luhith. Other words for ‘pass’ were
"Qyp mayo (see p. 337) and 2p3 Nekeb, a common word in
Arabic, which in the Old Testament is only used as a proper
name, Josh. xix. 33 ; 3j?j)n	LXX. ’Appe, Kal Na/?ok or

NaKe/3.

For Valley there are the following:—On ppy ‘Emek=</<?<?/-
ening, and nyp3 Bik‘ah=opening, see pp. 384 f.; for ‘Emek
LXX. gives mostly KotXas, also <j>apay£, 7reSiov, avAwv. Here we
may add that Elah (1 Sam. xvii. 2, 19), Hebron (Gen. xxxvii. 14),Appendix I

655

Ajalon (Josh. x. 12 ; cf. Isa. xxviii. 21), Jezreel (Josh. xvii. 16;
Judges vi. 33 ; vii. 1 ; Hosea i. 5) are the only places called
‘Emek which are identified past doubt. There were also the
Vales of Siddim (Gen. xiv. 3, 8); of Rephaim (Josh. xv. 8),
probably the vale to south-east of Jerusalem ; of Achor (Josh,
vii. 24), probably one of the passes from Jordan into Benjamin;
Shaveh (Gen. xiv. 17); Keziz (Josh, xviii. 21); Beth-rehob
(Judges xviii. 28), probably the north end of the Jordan Vale ;
Berachah (2 Chron. xx. 26); Baca (Ps. lxxxiv. 6); Succoth
(Ps. lx. 6 ; cviii. 7), again part of the Jordan Valley; Jehosha-
phat (Joel iii. 2, 12 ; cf. v. 14). Like nyp2, p»y is applied to
all parts of the Jordan Valley (Josh. xiii. 27 ; perhaps xviii. 28 ;
Ps. lx. 6). But unlike nyp3 it is never extended to any plain
so wide as that of the Euphrates, or like the central triangle of
Esdraelon (see p. 385). And like nypl it is used generically for
level valley-land, either ager, land that can be ploughed (Job
xxxix. 10; Ps. lxv. 14, Heb.) or campus, ground fit for military
manoeuvres (Job xxxix. 21 ; Josh. xvii. 16). Hence its extension
was natural to the whole Philistine plain (Jer. xlvii. 5). On
nyp2 see p. 385. It is applied to broad plains like Esdraelon,
or that of the Jordan under Hermon (Josh. xi. 17 ; xii. 7),
or at Jericho (Deut. xxxiv. 3), and even to the valley of the
Euphrates (Ezek. iii. 22 ; xxxviii. 1; Gen. xi. 2), and even to
the Maritime Plain. The LXX. render it by ireSCov. The Arabic
equivalent to-day is the name of the vale between the Lebanons,
as well as of some other level tracts surrounded by hills. For
example, the Beka, 1, or Bukei’a,	\, a plain on the

Belka‘, to the east of Salt, which we crossed in 1891 from the
Jabbok. It is a high secluded vale, about four miles by three,
with mountains all round it. Also the Bukei'a, east of Shechem,
and the Bukei'a, in Judah, above the north end of the Dead Sea.
A surrounding of hills seems necessary to the name Bik'ah, as if
land laid open in the midst of hills.

N'J or Gai (once N'J Isa. xl. 4; and N'J Zech. xiv. 4) is
nearer our word glen than valley. It is generally used for nar-
rower openings than nyp3 or poy- Identified sites to which it was
applied are the following : one of the gorges descending from the
Moab plateau (Num. xxi. 20, Deut. iii. 29, etc.); the valley of656 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Hinnom, Josh. xv. 8, etc., etc.; the valley of Jiphthah-el, Josh. xix.
14, 27, perhaps the Wady-el-Kurn in Galilee. In Ps. xxiii. 4 it
is used evidently of a narrow ravine, in Zech. xiv. 14 of a sudden
rent or cleft through a hill. In 1 Sam. xvii. 3 it is perhaps the
ditch of the stream which flows through the ‘Emek (see p. 228).
LXX. <f>dpay£ (usually) avXu>v, Kolkas, vdir-q, or translated yrj.

Other words are nity Shaveh, or level, English dale, Gen. xiv.
5, in Moab a proper name; Gen. xiv. 7,—ntafD,	Mesftlah

Mesolah=a deep, but only once of a valley bottom, Mesullah,
Zech. i. 8. nn5, ravine or abyss (2 Sam. xviii. 17; cf. Ezra. ii. 6,
etc.; Neh. vii. 11).	(see below) used both of a stream and

the valley through which it flows.

For Plains, besides poy and nyp3, there is IIB^D Mishor=
level, generally of the table-land, especially of Moab (Deut. iii.
10 ; Josh. xiii. 9, 16 ; Jer. xlviii. 21, see p. 548), but also of Bashan
(1 Kings xx. 23-35). In 2 Chron. xxvi. 10 it is referred by some
(e.g. Siegfried-Stade, Handworterbuch) to the Jordan Plain, but
even there it may be Moab. In Zech. iv. 7 it is opposed to 11-
From the same root is pity Sharon, but always as a proper name,
and except in 1 Chron. v. 16, where it refers to a region, east of
Jordan (cf. Neub. Geog. du Talmud, 47) always of the Maritime
Plain from Carmel to Joppa (see p. 147 f.). LXX. 8pvp.os (Isa.
lxv. 10, etc.) and ttcSiov (Song ii. 1; 1 Chron. xxvii. 29). On r6a$
not plain, but low hills (see fully, p. 201 ff.). Also ^>3N Abel, a
meadow always in composition, Abel-beth-maacah (1 Kings xv.
20, etc.) or Abel-maim, 2 Chron. xvi. 4, perhaps the present Abil-
el-Kamh (Rob. L.R.); Abel-ha-Shittim (of the acacias, Num.
xxxiii. 49) opposite Jericho; Abel-meholah (of the dance or the
whirls (?), see p. 581 n. 9); Abel-keramim (of vineyards, Judges
xi. 33); Abel-misraim (of Egypt, Gen. 1. 11). In 1 Sam. vi. 18
read pN for f>3K- For mjy field, see p. 79 f. 13 a watered field,
Isa. xxx. 23.	133, p. 505. p. 413. •

On 131D (German Trift from treibcn) from 131 to drive (i.e.
herds to pasture) according to Jer. xxv. 24 = land not soivn.
The English version renders it wilderness, or sometimes desert.
It is properly land roamed by nomads in opposition to landAppendix I

65 7

occupied by the settled tillers of the soil. DTiy ‘Arabah=desert-
steppe, is used generally as parallel to Midbar (Isa. xxxvi. 6, etc.;
Zech. xiv. 10, etc.). It is from the same root as Arabia and Arab.
But as a proper name with the definite article it is generally
confined to the Jordan Valley. Deut. ii. 8, etc., etc. (see p. 484).
pBBh Jeshimon, devastation, is a still stronger word. See p. 312,
for its application to the wilderness of Judah. In a general
signification, Deut. xxxii. 10; Isa. xliii. 19, 20; Ps. lxviii. 7, etc.

For River, the most comprehensive is "IIU stream, Ger.
Fluss, used for a river (Gen. ii. 10; Job xl. 23), but also of smaller
streams and even of artificial ones, canals (Ex. viii. 1 ; Ezek.
xxxi. 4; Ps. cxxxvii. 1). The River, “iron =the Euphrates, Gen.
xxxi. 21, etc., etc., but in Isa. xix. 5 singular, ver. 6 plural, the Nile.
The Naharaim of Aram-Naharaim are probably the Euphrates
and Chabiras {Z.A.T. iii. 307 f., Budde Urgeschichte, 445 f.).
"inj is also used of the sea, and in the plural of its currents or
tides (?), Ps. lxvi. 6, xxiv. 2 (but here probably of the great deep
under the earth.)

i>ro Nahal = Arabic Wady, Greek xeLti^PP00S> Bab fiumdra,
a winter-torrent and the valley through which it flows (eg.
cf. 1 Kings xvii. 3, hide in Nahal Kherith and ver. 4, drink of the
Nahat). Identified valleys of this kind to which it is applied in the
Old Testament, are Kedron, 2 Sam. xv. 23 ; El-Arish, the river of
Egypt, Num. xxxiv. 5; Josh. xv. 4, etc.; Eshcol, Num. xiii. 23, etc.;
Kanah, the present W. Kaneh, Josh. xvi. 8; Sorek W. es Surar,
Judges xvi. 4; Gerar, perhaps Wady Kibab, Gen. xxvi. 17, cf. 1
Sam. xv. 5. But is also used for large perennial streams like
Arnon (Num. xxi. 14 ; Deut. ii. 24, iii. 8), Jabbok (Gen. xxxii.
23 ; Deut. ii. 37). Other D^ro not identified are Zared (see
p. 557). Besor in north of Judah (1 Sam. xxx. 9, 10, 21); Gaash
in Mount Ephraim (Josh. xxiv. 30; Judges ii. 9, etc.; 2 Sam. xxiii.
30; 1 Chron. xi. 32); Cherith (see p. 580); Gad (2 Sam. xxiv. 5);
Shittim (Joel iii. 18). A perennial stream is jrVN f>ro» LXX.
generally translates by x€lP'l*PP00'i> even of Arnon and Jabbok;
but also by <f>apayg of Kishon (Josh. xix. 11); Arnon (Deut. ii.
24); Eshcol (Num. xiii. 23); and by7roTa/ids of El-Arish, 1 Kings
viii. 65 ; by va7rai, Num. xxvi. 6.658 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

"lifcO Ye’or= the Nile, Gen. xli. 1-3, etc.; plural,—Nile-canals, Ex.
viii. 1 ; Isa. vii. 18 ; Nahum, iii. 8; canals in general, Isa. xxxiii.
21 ; river in general, Dan. xii. 5-7. LXX. 7rora/ios, except in Isa.
xxxiii. 21,	xxxvii. 25 (crvvaywyrjv vSaros).	or

"line* or “iht? is parallel to “liK*1 for the Nile, Isa. xxiii. 3 ; cf. Jer.
ii. 18. In Josh. xiii. 3 it is either the Pelusiac branch of the Nile,
or the Wady el Arish.

Peleg is the Arabic Faleeg (cf. 7reAayos, fluctus)=stream,
Judges v. 15, 16; Ps. i. 3; xlvi. 4; lxv. 9, etc. taiN=river,
Dan. viii. 2, 3, 6. So also tars Jer. xvii. 8. (The text ta'D of
2 Sam. xvii. 20 is corrupt.) A canal or conduit is r6yri Te'alah
= bringing up (of Elijah’s trench, 1 Kings xviii. 32, etc.; of
Jerusalem conduits, 2 Kings xviii. 17; xx. 20; Isa. vii. 3), or r6&y
Shelah = (water) shoot, Neh. iii. 15. p'SK is river-bed, Ps. xviii,
16; stream, Ps. cxxvi. 4; Wadi, Ezek. vi. 3. Y1 hand=.river-side,
as we say Dee-side, Deut. ii. 37. neb' = lip, is bank or brink,
Josh.xi. 4, etc.; nv[5 = end, is either the mouth of a river, Josh. xv.
5 ; xviii. 19, or the edge of its waters, Josh. iii. 8, 15; nils = banks,
Josh. iii. 15, etc. Spates or floods are D'Dlp (probably, see
p.395); *19^ (Ps- xxxii. 6, etc.);	(Isa.xxvii. 12: cf. Judges

xii.); and perhaps Dnt» though this is rather the burst of rain that
makes the flood. “la^'o = breaker, was originally billow, 2 Sam.
xxii. 5 ; Jonah ii. 3; but in Ps. xlii. 7 it may be cataract. £>3
parallel to it in Jonah ii. 5 = heap or mass of water, hasp = The
Deluge.

On Wells and Springs (see pp. 7 7 ff.). Besides py and ")Na there
are pyo a collective of py, cf. Josh. xv. 9, etc.; D^y fountain-
head (Ps. cvii. 33, 35, etc., cf. Ras el ‘Ain, p. 77). YpD poetical
word for a spring that has been dug, Jer. Ii. 36, etc.; y33D pro-
bably = gushing, Isa. xxxv. 7; xlix. 10; irb) bubbling springs,
Josh. xv. 19 ; Judges i. 15.	1N3 or "lia is a dry "INS, cf. Gen.

xxxvii. 20 ; but also used for water, Jer. vi. 7, etc.

Cisterns, Lakes, Pools, and Ponds.—For Gennesaret andAppendix I

659

the Dead Sea the word is D' = sea ; a bay of this is jit^ = tongue
or (or harbour, see p. 132); its bed Amos ix. 3 ; n;na
is a pool or tank, 2 Sam. ii. 13, etc.; niptt a reservoir, Isa. xxii. 11;
DJN a pond of standing water, Ps. cvii. 35, etc.; 13=ditch, 2
Kings iii. 16 ; Isa. xxx. 14.

APPENDIX II

(See p. 274)

Stade’s theory of Israel’s invasion of Western Palestine
will be found in vol. i. pp. 133, 141 of his Geschichte des Volkes
Israel. It may bewilder the reader at first that it should be
necessary to seek, as Stade does, a theory so utterly different
from the biblical account, but Stade has evidently felt himself
compelled to this by his unwillingness to attribute to Israel any
but the most physical of impulses in crossing Jordan, and by his
belief that the Israelites could never have overcome the Canaan-
ites in war. We shall see how far justified, how far possible
of proof, are both of these presuppositions. After the death of
Moses (this is Stade’s theory) Israel continued to reside on the
east of the Jordan for a very long time, during which they passed
from the nomadic to the agricultural stage, and consequently in-
creased much in numbers. Eastern Palestine became too small for
them, and separate clans were forced to seek new homes across
the Jordan. About their passage into Western Palestine, Stade
asserts three things: First, that they did not cross at once as a
united body, but gradually, clan by clan. Joshua is an entirely
legendary personage, an Eponymus of Ephraim, one of the clans.
Second, they crossed peacefully, and won land west of Jordan by
purchase or treaty, not by war.	Third, they crossed not at

Jericho, for at that time opposite Jericho lay Moabite, and not
Israelite, territory, but farther north at Jabbok, where the Israelite
population east of Jordan was most dense. Such is Stade’s theory.
Its presupposition—that Israel had no impulse to cross Jordan
except a physical one, no memory of her forefathers’ possession
of the land, no consciousness of national unity, no impetus66o The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

derived from the long leadership of Moses, no desire for a
national territory on surer ground than the east of Jordan
afforded, nothing but the spilling over of her increasing numbers—
that is an absolute negative which it is simply impossible to prove,
even if it were not opposed, as it is, to the entire body of Israelite
tradition, and inconsistent with Israel’s subsequent history. Is
it possible that so ancient (for it is found in the earliest poems),
so widespread (for it occurs in every source) a tradition, as that
Israel was conscious of her unity and her leadership by Jehovah
in crossing Jordan, can be wrong? Is it possible that Israel,
which became what she did, had not already (especially after all
Moses did and taught) some sense of her national destiny, and
was not left to the mere unconscious drift of an increasing
population ? But to go on from this presupposition, which I think
groundless, to the three points deduced from it. First, that the
passage of Jordan was gradual, clans by clans, and that Joshua
was no real person. Stade bases his assertion that Joshua is
merely the personification of the clan Ephraim on the statement
that he is known to only one of the documents, the Ephraimite
E. But Kuenen (Onderzoek, sec. ed. § 13), Dillmann (in his
commentary), and Budde (Z.A.T. W. vii. 133; Ft. u. Sam.) have
all shown that Joshua was known also to the Judaean source J—
a fact of which Kittel rightly says, that ‘ it can hardly be doubted ’
(Gesch. i. 248). But if there be no reason to doubt that Joshua
was real, then we have a personal centre for the whole people
while crossing the Jordan and settling upon Western Palestine,
only less strong than that round which they had previously been
kept united, viz. Moses. Second, Stade supposes that Israel’s
occupation of the land was peaceful. In Western Palestine there
was much forest-land unoccupied on the hills. Part of this the
Canaanites, who had the towns and the valley-land, gladly sold
or gave away to various Israelite clans, in order to prevent
Israel’s military seizure of land (the possibility of which, observe,
Stade admits). His arguments for this are (a) that the Canaan-
ites were too strong for Israel to acquire land by force; (6)
that the Israelite occupation was only partial and for a long time
outside the chief houses; (c) that for a long time Israel lived on
peaceful relations, intermarriage, etc., with Canaan. But (a)Appendix II

661

is not true. It is probable (from extra-biblical evidence) that
Western Palestine at this time was inhabited by tribes that were
disunited and greatly weakened by previous wars. This was not
the only time in Syria’s history that Arab tribes in the flush of
their strength and hope defeated the degenerate, though better
equipped, settled populations. Stade himself admits both that the
Canaanites submitted to a peaceful occupation only under fear
of a military one, and that certain tribes of Israel (Dan, Simeon,
and Levi) did win their land by the sword. Again (b) is admitted
in the narrative, and is as compatible with a warlike as with a
peaceful invasion. A partial occupation by war is in harmony
with all we know of the methods of Semitic warfare—the fierce
rush at a territory, and if complete success does not follow,
exhaustion of energy, acquiescence with what has been gained.
Nor is (c) incompatible with a military invasion of the kind just
described. But turning from these reasons to the assertion itself
—if Stade be right that Israel won parts of Western Palestine
by treaty and purchase, why is there no trace in the narratives,
dealing with the time, of such transactions ? Why is the tradi-
tion of a military conquest so solid ?

It is in connection with this, and with Stade’s Third position,
that Geography comes in. He holds that Israel could not have
crossed at Jericho, for Eastern Palestine opposite Jericho was at
this time not Israelite but Moabite territory. Yet this is by no
means certain. What we do know is that in later times Eastern
Palestine opposite Jericho was in Moab’s hands ; but this surely
is a reason against supposing that the tradition of Israel’s crossing
at this place was a late tradition. Stade says that tradition
merely fixed on the Jordan at Jericho as a likely place; but
would this have seemed a likely place at a time when the Eastern
bank was in Moab’s hands ? The rise, therefore, of a tradition
of the passage of the Jordan just here became more and more
(as I have said, p. 275) improbable as the centuries went on.
Turning now to Western Palestine, we find the strong geo-
graphical reasons for the passage at Jericho which I have already
given (pp. 275 f.). In Western Palestine, as every one admits,
Israel was divided at first into two parts : the Joseph tribes were
settled in Mount Ephraim, and the tribe of Judah on the plateau662 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

to the south of Jerusalem, but in between them there were strong
Canaanite settlements.1 Now, what other point of entrance
better corresponds than Jericho does to this disposition of the
tribes ? Had Israel crossed at Jabbok, it is not easy to see how
some tribes got into Judah as well as some into Mount Ephraim,
unless you suppose, with some scholars (so Oort’s Atlas), that the
tribe Judah never crossed the Jordan, but came up into its settle-
ments through the Negeb: a supposition for which there is no
real evidence. But take the statement of the Book of Joshua (to
which more than one document contributes) that Israel crossed
as a whole by Jericho. Then how natural is the subsequent dis-
position of the tribe—for roads lead up from Jericho equally into
Mount Ephraim, the plateau of Benjamin, and the centre and
south of Judaea. Again, the easy capture of Jericho is a fact
which all the subsequent history of the town renders probable.
As we have seen (pp. 267 f.), Jericho never once stood a siege.
Finally, the existence of Israel’s central camp at Gilgal for a con-
siderable period, while the hill-country was being subdued
(Josh. x. 43), receives an interesting proof in support of its
possibility from the analogous case of the Canaanites who ruled
the hill-country from Gilgal as a centre (Deut. xi. 30).

APPENDIX III

ON THE WARS AGAINST SIHON AND OG
(See pp. 560 and 575)

The War against Sihon the king of the Amoriies.—
The unreality of this war, and the reference of the song (Num.
xxi. 27-30) to an invasion of Moab by Israel in the ninth
century, have been argued for by Meyer (Z.A.T.W., 1881, pp.
118 ff.); Stade (Gesch. i. 117 ff.); and after them Addis (Docu-
ments of the Hexateuch i. p. 174). Against them Dillmann (in

1 Although the tribe of Benjamin had already occupied its territory, as
Kittel has shown {Gesch. p. i. 265 f.). There is no reason for supposing that
the tribe Benjamin was not formed till after the settlement of Ephraim. It
was there from the first, and on the territory which the Book of Joshua
assigns to it,Appendix III

663

Numbers, etc., 2nd ed. pp. 128 ff.), Kuenen {Onderzoek, i. 13,
13), Wellhausen {Hist.), support the fact of the war. The
arguments may be summed up as follows : Reasons against the
historical character of the war against Sihon; (1) It is mentioned
only in E (Num. xxi.) and D (ii. 24 ff.: Judges xii. 13 is, according
to Budde, an insertion taken directly from E., Richter u. Sam.
p. 125); (2) Neither P nor J says anything about it; but (3) on
the contrary both represent Sihon’s land as if still in possession of
Moab, or at least with the name of Moab; e.g. in P there is Num.
xxii. 1, the Israelites encamped in Arboth-Moab, opposite Jericho,
and in JE (Num. xxii. 41 ; xxiii. 14, 28) Balak of Moab brings
Balaam to Bamoth as if it were his own territory.

To these reasons it may be replied, (1) E is the oldest docu-
ment ; (2) though neither P nor J mentions the war with Sihon,
they do not give a story nor any detail inconsistent with the
occurrence of such a war. For instance, they do not say that
Israel took the land between Arnon and Jabbok from Moab or
Ammon, which indeed would have been a contradiction of E.
On the contrary, the only trace of a war between Moab and
Israel is a fragment of E’s own in Josh. 24, 9; (3) though Moab
had been driven out by Sihon from her proper territory, her name
would more or less remain attached to it; so that though the
place Israel encamped on opposite Jericho was called Arboth-
Moab, that need not mean that Moab still possessed it. Dill-
mann, too, points out that Sihon’s conquest of Heshbon need
not be taken to mean that all the Moabites were banished.
Again, D, which gives the war with Sihon for the land between
Jabbok and Arnon, nevertheless calls the latter the land of
Moab (i. 5 ; xxviii. 69 ; xxxiv. 5).

There can be no objection to the story itself. There is nothing
incredible in it. If in later centuries all Israel under David, and
Northern Israel under Omri, crossed Jordan and occupied the
territory of Moab, the Amorites may well have done the same.
And, again, there was nothing to be gained by inventing the
story.

We come now to the song itself.

Those who believe that it does not refer to a war on the Amor-
ites, at Israel’s first entrance to the land, but to an invasion of664 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Moabite territory from the west of the Jordan, in the ninth century,
allege that the course of conquest it marks is from north to south,
the line of the latter invasion, but they have to omit the words, the
king of the Amorites Sihon in ver. 29, and take Sihon as a king of
Moab. But against ver. 29d there is no objection, apart from
the requirements of this theory. Leave it, and interpret the first
line of conquest traced in the poem (vv. 28, 29) as that of Sihon
over Moab, and you do not violate the geography.

To sum up: the theory of Meyer and Stade, that the war with
Sihon is unhistorical, and that the poem refers to a conquest by
Israel of Moab in the ninth century, can only be held by
sacrificing vv. 26 and 29^, against neither of which is there any
objection apart from this theory; while the story of the war
against Sihon as told by E is neither improbable in itself, nor
inconsistent with the data in J and P, nor likely to have been
invented.

2. The War with Og, king of Bashan.—This war has not
the same documentary evidence in its support. In Num. xxi. the
account of it is an insertion (vv. 33 ff.) obviously from the hand
of a Deuteronomic writer. No characteristic phrases of the
Deuteronomist occur in it. Nor, except perhaps in three cases, is
there any mention of this war in the Hexateuch, outside the well-
marked Deuteronomic passages, Num. xxi. 33 ff.; Deut. i. 4;
iii.; iv. 47 ; xxix. 7 ; Josh. xii. 4. The doubtful passages are
Num. xxxii. 33, which is assigned by Kautsch to a late edition ;
Josh. ix. 10, which Kautsch assigns to JE, but Dillmann
regards as an insertion, and Josh. xiii. 30, which is probably from
the Priestly Writing. The passage, 1 Kings iv. 19, is Deutero-
nomic. The story, therefore, we owe to the Deuteronomist, and
we have no such reminiscence of it as is left us of the war with
Sihon in the song. On this account, many who admit Sihon as
a historical reality, decline so to receive Og. It is one of those
cases where proof is absolutely impossible; and we must allow
that we have not the amount of evidence we had in Sihon’s case.
At the same time Og was indissolubly bound with Sihon in the
memory and tradition of the people, and it is difficult to see how
he can have been invented. There is no geographical obstacle
in the way of a campaign north of the Jabbok. Edrei would beAppendix III

665

as likely a place for Israel to fight with a king of Bashan as any
other, while the fact that no battles are mentioned farther north
towards Damascus, or on the east side of the Lake of Galilee,
where it would have been even easier for the popular memory to
have invented victories for Moses, is a proof that the tradition
was restrained by actual historical facts. Critics, who assign to
Israel a very long residence in the east of Jordan, should be
ready to admit of such an extension of their conquest north-
ward by the easiest route to places so attractive as those of
Bashan, before the crossing of Jordan was attempted.

APPENDIX IV

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF EASTERN PALESTINE

Authorities on the East of the Jordan are as follows (I mark
those I have not seen by an asterisk):—Volney, Voyage en Syrie,
etc., 1783-1785, 11. (Eng. Ed. 1812); Seetzen’s Reisen durch Syrien
in 1806 ; Burckhardt, Travels in Syria and the Holy Land in
1810-1812 (London, 1822); Buckingham, Travels in Palestine,
through the countries of Bashan and Gilead in 1816 (London, 1821);
Travels among the Arab tribes east of Syria, etc. (London, 1825);
Irby and Mangles’ Travels in Egypt, Syria, etc., 1817, 1818
(London, 1822); *Schubert (and Roth), in’sMorgenland, 1837
(the first to discover the great depth of the Dead Sea below the
Mediterranean); Robinson, Bib. Res. (made in 1838), especially
vol. ii., containing journey to Petra; Molyneux’s ‘Expedition to
Dead Sea in 1847,’ in Journal of Royal Geographical Society,
xviii. pp. 126 ff.; Lynch’s Narrative of U.S. Expedition in 1848,
including visit to Kerak; in 1852 Robinson visited Pella and Wady
Yabis (see Later Bib. Res., sec. viii. (London, 1856); Porter,
Five Years in Damascus, with Travels, etc., in Palmyra, Lebanon,
and the Hauran (London, 1855); *Roth in Petermann’s Mitthei-
lungen, 1857 and 1858, journeys about Kerak southward to
Akabah; *G. Rey, Voyage dans le Haouran et aux bords de la
Mer Morte in 1858 ; Wetzstein, Reisebericht ilber Hauran u. die
Trachonen (1858), (Berlin, i860); *Wetzstein’s and Dorgen’s666 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

expedition farther south in 1800, in Petermann’s MUtheil. 1866;
De Saulcy in 1863 visited Ammon, Hesban, etc., Voy. en Terre
Sainte, i., 1865 : *Duc de Luynes, Voy. <P exploration a la Mer
Morte, a Petra, et sur la rive ganche du Jourdain in 1864 (pub.
in 1874), vol. ii. contains Mavor’s and Sanvaire’s expedition to
Kerak, Shobek, etc.; Wilson and Anderson, 1866, in P.E.F.Q.,
vol. i.; Warren, Reconnaissance of fordan Valley, 1867; and in
P.E.F.Q., i. and ii.; Palmer and Drake, Desert of Tih and
Country of Moab in P.E.F.Q., 1871; the two Kieperts travelled
from Amman by Gadara to Muzeirib in 1870, *Zeitschrift der
Ges. fur Erdkunde (Berlin, v.); Northey’s Expedition East of
Jordan in 1871 {P.E.F.Q., 1872); Tristram’s journey of 1871 in
Land of Moab, 1874; Porter’s journey of 1874 in P.E.F.Q.,
1881 ; Kersten’s journey to Dead Sea and Moab, 1874, in
Z.D.P.V., ii.; Expedition of American Society in 1876, in
Merrill’s East of the Jordan (London, 1881); Schick’s journey to
Moab in 1877 is described with map in Z.D.P.V., ii.; in 1881
Langer made a short journey, reported in *Mitth. d. Geogr.
Ges. in Wien, 1882; Burton and Drake, Unexplored Syria;
Laurence Oliphant’s Land of Gilead, 1880. In 1881 Conder
and Mantell began that brave, skilful survey of Eastern Palestine,
which the Turkish authorities brought to so abrupt a conclusion.
For account of this survey, see P.E.F.Q., 1881, 1882; P.E.F.
Mem. on Eastern Palestine, and Conder, Heth and Moab, 1885.
In 1884, the English Geological Expedition, under Hull and
Kitchener, surveyed the south end of Dead Sea and regions
round about, P.E.F.Q., 1884, and Geolog. vol. in P.E.F. Mem.
In 1884 Guy Le Strange visited Pella, Ajlhn, and the Belka‘,
P.E.F.Q., 1885, also in Schumacher’s Across Jordan, in which is
given Oliphant’s Trip to N.E. of Lake Tiberias. Schumacher’s
very careful and important surveys and travels, from 1885
onward, are described in Across the Jordan, being an Exploration
and Survey of part of Hauran and Jaulan (London, 1886 : pub-
lished by P.E.F.; The Jaulan, surveyed for the D.P. V. (Eng.
Ed. 1888) ; Pella; Ajlun ; Abila of the Decapolis as supplement
to P.E.F.Q. 1889.

Other more recent works are Scharling, Hauran: Reisebilder
aus Paldstina (Bremen, 1890). In Z.D.P.V among others:—Appendix IV

.66 7

Stubel, Reise nach den Diret el Tubnl, etc., with map, xn.;
Van Kasteren, Journey in Gilead, xm.

In R.E.F.Q., Post, Narrative of a Scientific Expedition in the
Trans-Jordanic Region in the Spring 0/" 1886, vol. for 1888.

The volumes and articles on the inscriptions of Eastern
Palestine will be found given on p. 15.

APPENDIX V

ROADS AND WHEELED VEHICLES IN SYRIA
(See p. 329)

Judah’s progress in the matter of chariots is interesting. Joshua
houghed all horses and burnt all chariots taken in war (Josh,
xi. 6, 9). David houghed most of the horses, but kept a hundred
for himself (2 Sam. viii. 4). Solomon had 1400 chariots which
he placed in chariot cities, and also with the king at Jerusalem
(1 Kings x. 26). That is to say, there would be but few at
Jerusalem, where the ground was quite unsuitable for their
manoeuvre, and the depots of them were at cities in the ‘Arabah
or Shephelah, where they would be of more use. There was a
Beth Mercabhoth in the Negeb. The only instances of chariots
driving into Jerusalem are mentioned below. But see also
2 Sam. xvi., where Absalom is mentioned as having chariots,
whether in Jerusalem is uncertain ; and Isa. xxiii., where the
Assyrian chariots fill the valley of Jehoshaphat.

Wheeled vehicles drawn by oxen were used in agriculture from
the earliest times, 1 Sam. vi. 10; 2 Sam. vi. 3 (cf. Amos ii. 13,
here, perhaps, rather threshing-rollers). Asa nomadic race, who,
when they settled, settled in a rough hilly country, Israel would
not soon take to wheels; and the earliest carts or waggons
mentioned in the Bible came from Philistia or Egypt (1 Sam. vi.
10; Gen. xlv. 19, etc.). Chariots were introduced from Meso-
potamia, and later from Egypt (who herself had the chariot and
horse from Asia). The Syrians, with their flat country south of
Damascus, were strong in chariots, and Samaria lay on the
main road between Egypt and Damascus, which crossed her668 . The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

north-west corner, and was used by chariots (Travels of an
Egyptian, see p. 152).

Roads, in our sense of the term, were not necessary for these
waggons and chariots. In 1891, on the east of Jordan, we met
a number of Circassians driving bullock-carts all the way from
Damascus to Jerash and Rabboth-Ammon. But artificial roads
of some kind or other appear to have existed in Palestine from
the earliest times. The n^D», Authorised Version highway, is
literally heaped up, often only for temporary purposes, such as
the visit of royalty, cf. Isa. xlv., lxii. 10 (I have seen the like
on the visit of the Khedive Tewfik to Siout in Upper Egypt in
1880); but also for permanent use, Num. xx. 19; Judges xx.
31; 1 Sam. vi. 12; 1 Chron. xxvi. 16; Jer. xxxi. 21. Roads
were enjoined to be made to the cities of refuge (Deut. xix. 3).

In the New Testament, outside the visions of Revelation,
horses and chariots, except in one instance, do not exist, a
curious contrast to the Old Testament, and proof of the pacific
plebeian character of the kingdom of Him who came riding upon
an ass. The exception is the chariot of the treasurer of Queen
Candace (Acts viii. 28 ff.).

The Romans were the first to make great roads in Palestine,
and this not till the times of the Antonines in the second half of
the second century. The milestones are chiefly of Antoninus
Pius and Marcus Aurelius. The roads rendered driving easy
over all the land.

After the Moslem invasion the first Khalifs kept up the
Roman roads in Syria, with a service of stage-coaches and posts.
The Latin word mile was adopted, \ El-Mil. One Arab
milestone has been discovered on the road between Jerusalem
and Jericho, at Khan-el-Hatroura, inscribed as placed by ‘the
servant of God, Abd-el-Melik, prince of believers. May the
mercy of God be to him. From Damascus to this milestone is
109 miles.’ This was the Khalif Abd-el-Melek ibn Merwan,
65-86 of the Hejra, builder of the so-called mosque of Omar.
See Clermont-Ganneau, Recueil d'Archeologie Orientale, 201 ff.:
‘Une Pierre Milliaire Arabe de Palestine du iere siecle de l’hegire.’

In the times of the Crusades, ‘ the royal roads, which generally
replaced the ancient Roman ways, still appear to have beenAppendix V

66 9

used by wheeled vehicles. As for others, there is every cause
to think that they were only mule-paths.’1

The choice of all these great roads, and the disappearance of
wheeled vehicles from the land—till very recently—was due, of
course, to the conquest of Syria by nomad and desert tribes
whose only means of locomotion were animals. The few roads
and carriages now in existence are entirely of Frank or Circassian
origin. There is the splendid Alpine road from Beyrout to
Damascus, with branches, and good roads from Jaffa to Jeru-
salem, Jerusalem to Jericho and Hebron, Jaffa to Nablus (con-
structing), and Haifa to Nazareth; also one partly made from
Damascus along the Hajj route. Already one railway is opened
from Jaffa to Jerusalem, and another is in process of construction
from Haifa to Damascus.

1 Rey, Colonies Franques, 254.INDEX

671INDEX

Abana, see Barada, 46, 642 ff.

‘Abarim, Mountains of the, 53, 548,

553-

Abel. For names compounded with
Abel, see Appendix 1.

Abel-meholah, 581 n.

Abila of Decapolis, 594, 600, 602.

Abilene, Tetrarchy of Lysanias, 547.

’Abu Zaburah, 130.

Acca or Acre. See Ptolemais.

Acre, Plain of, 380.

’Admah, 505.

‘Adullam, 229.

’Adummim, 265.

‘Adwan, 10, 489 «., 526.

Agrippa 1., or Herod Agrippa, 619^

Agrippa II., 622 ff.

‘Ai, 252ff., 263.

‘Ain. For names beginning with
‘Ain see note on pp. 77-79.

’Ajalon, vale of, 210, 250ff.

‘Ajlun, district of, 536, 553.

----town of, 522 n. 2, 587.

Alexander the Great, 13, 179, 183^:,

347, 593-

Alexander Janneus, capture of Gaza,
185; in Galilee, 414 n. 4; con-
quest of Moab, 568; in Gilead,
589/.

Alexandrium, a stronghold of Samaria,
352 f-

Allat, a Nabatean deity, 628 f.

‘Amalek, in Ephraim, 332 n. ; in
Negeb, 277 n. 4.

Amalekites, 282.

Amathus, 589.

Ammon, 558, 579, etc. See Rabbath-
Ammon.

Amorite, Mount of the, 53, 652.

Amos and Tekoa, 315.

Ananiah, 253 n. 4.

Anathoth, 253 n. 4, 315.

‘Aneezeh, 8, 523, 525 n.

Anthedon, 189.

Antioch, spread of Faith to, 37 ; falls
to the Mohammedans, 38 ; created
by the Orontes, 46 ; and Damascus,
647.

Antiochi, records left by, 14.

Anti-Lebanon. See Lebanon.

Antipatris, 165, 256 n. 1.

Aphek, in Western Palestine, 224
11. 2, 350, 400 ff.

Aphek, East of Lake of Galilee, 427,
459, 580, 582.

‘Arabah, 47, 52, 484, 507 n. 3, 657.

‘Arab-el ‘Amarin, 9.

Arabians, 282.

Arabia, desert, 3 ; peninsula, 3 ;
boundaries of Arabian world, 7 ;
immigrations, 8 ; tribes, 8, 10.

Arabia, Roman Province of, 623 ff. ;
the Arabia of Paul, 547, 620;
Christianity in, 632 ff.

Arabs in Eastern Palestine, 525.

Arad, 277	278.

‘Arak el Emir, 568.

’Aram and David, 579 ; and Samaria,
580; defeat of, 581 ; of Damascus,
553-

’Arbela, in Galilee, lrbid, 427.

----in Gilead, lrbid, 526, 536, 587.

Archelais, 354.

Architecture of the Decapolis, 602 ;
roads, bridges, streets, 603 ; amphi-
theatres and temples, 604, 605;
Naumachia, a, 604; of Hauran,
614, 629; its originality, 630,
636.

’Ard-el Betheniyeh, 553.

Aretas, 184, 569

’Argob, 551, 553-

Aristobulus I., 414 n. 4.

Armageddon, Battle of, 409.

2 U674 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

’Arnon, the, 533, 534, 553; Israel’s
passage of, 557 ; as a frontier, 558.

‘Aro'er, the Beersheba of the East,

557, 559-

Arpha, in Eastern Palestine, 541 n.

‘Arrabeh, 327.

’Arsuf, 129, 130, 164.

Art of Syria, 23.

’Ashdod, harbour of, 131 ; the town,
192.

Asia Minor and Syria, 22, 26 ; spread
of Gospel to, 37.

‘Askalon, harbour of, 131 ; position
of, 189; during the Crusades, 190.

‘Askar, yj1 ff- $ee Sychar.

Assyria, Empire of, 3 ; relation to
Palestine, 6.

Assyrians, their remains in Palestine,
14; Sennacherib’s campaign, 235
ff. ; the Assyrian advance on Jeru-
salem, 292 ; Siege of Samaria,
347 ; in Galilee, 424, 430.

Ataroth, 567 n. 1, 568 it.

Athi, a Nabatean deity, 628 f.

Aumos, a Nabatean deity, 628 f. ;
man’s name, 629 n. 2.

Auranitis, 541, 553. See Hauran.

‘Athlit, 130.

Atabyrus Mount, 22 n.

‘Aujeh, the river near Joppa, divides
Sharon, 148; military value, 154;
as a frontier between Samaria and
Judah, 248 f. ; river near Jericho,
as a frontier, 249.

A vim, 174.

‘Awaj, river near Damascus, probably
Pharpar, 642.

‘Ayun Musa, 564.

Aziz, a Nabatean deity, 628.

Azmaveth, 252.

Azekah, 229 n. 1.

Baalim, worship of, 474.
Baal-Gad, 474.

Baal-Hermon, 474.

Baal-Judah. S/e Kirjath-Jearim.
Baal-Me‘on, 567 11. I.
Baal-Samin, 628.

Baal-Shalisha, 351 ». 2.
Baal-zebub, 193.

Balaam, stations of, $65/.
Balsam, 266, 487, 522 n. 6.
Barada, the, 46, 642.

Barak, 392	6, 393 n. 2.

Bashan, 53, 549, 553; Israel in, 575/.

Bashan, Hills of, 550.

Batanea, 541/, 553.

Bathyra, 618.

Battles and Battle-fields of Arsuf, 154,
156; in Ajalon, 210 ff.\ Gezer,
217 ; Eben-ezer, 224 ; Elah, 227 f;
Mareshah, 233 ; Eltekeh, 236 n. 1;
Bethsur, 288 ; in Benjamin, 290 ff.;
between Absalom and David, 335,
580; of Beisan or Pella, 359; of
the Kishon, 394 ff.; Well of Harod,
397 ff- 5 of Gilboa, 401 ff. ; of
Megiddo, 405 ff. ; Iiattln, 441 ;
on the Jordan, 491 ; of Siddim,
503 ; of the Yarmuk, 589.

Be’er, 563.

Be'er Lahai Roi, 283 n. 2.

Be'eroth, 252.

Beersheba, 284; meaning of the name,
285 ; history of the place, 285.

----country south of, 280.

Beisan, day of, 359. See Bethshan._

Beit Atab, 222 n.

Beit Dajun, 164.

Beit Dejan, 332 n.

Beit Jibrin, 231 ; and the Romans,
231 ; and the crusades, 232.

----caves of, 242 ff. ; martyrs of,

241 ff. ; churches, 244.

Beit Iksa, 224 n. 2.

Beit-Qubr, 267 n.

Beit-Rima, 254 «. 7.

Bela or Zoar, 505.

Belfort, 426 n. 1.

Belka‘, the, 535, 548, 553 ; climate
of, 56, 520.

Belvoir or Kaukab-el-Hawa, 359, 408.

Beni Humar, 9.

Beni Jafn, 9.

Beni Mesaid, 526.

Beni Sab, 9.

Beni Saf, 9.

Benjamin, territory of, 290.

Berachah, 272.

Berekeh in the Lejjah, 543.

Bes'Snantm, 396 n. 1.

Betenoble, 214.

Beth-abara, 496 n. 1.

Bethany, 306.

----beyond Jordan, 496 n. I; 542.

Beth-car, 224 n. 2.

Beth-Dagon, 403 n. See Beit Dejan.

Bethel, .119; as a frontier fortress,Index

675

25° ff-> 29° f- ; the incoming
roads, 290; a stronghold of
Samaria, 352.

Beth-haram or Beth-haran, 488 n. 1.

Beth-horons, Upper and Lower, 210
254, 291.

Beth-Jashan, 224 n. 2.

Bethlehem, 119, 318 f

Bethsaida, 457 f.

Bethshan, 357 ff.; or the key of
Western Palestine, 358 ; a menace
to Western Palestine, generally in
foreign hands, 358; capture by
Saladin, 358; a city of the De-
capolis, 360. See also ch. xxviii.;
on its names, 363.

Beth-She‘arim, 425.

Beth-shemesh, 193, 219; the ark, 224.

Beth-shittah, 397 n. 1, 400.

Bethsur, 288.

Bethulia, a stronghold of Samaria,

356.

Beyrout and Damascus, 426, 642.

Bezek, a stronghold of Samaria, 336

I, 354/

Bible, evidence of invasions of Pales-
tine, 15 ; geographical accuracy of
not necessarily proof of historical
accuracy, 108 ; authenticity of Bible
and geography, 109 f.

Bithron, 586 n. 2.

Blackmail, levied by David, 307 ; by
Bedouin in Esdraelon, 384; in
Eastern Palestine, 526f.

Boils and the Plague, 159.

Bosra, 594, 601, 617, 621, 623/:

Bozez, 250 n. 4.

Busr el Hariri, 536, 618 n 1.

Buttauf, 418 n 2.

C^sarea, from Mount Ebal, 121,
122; foundation and history, 138^

-----Philippi, foundation and history

of, 475 ; Je^us in the coasts of, 476.

Callirrhoe, 571.

Canaan, the'name, 4 f.

Canary Isles, 25.

Capernaum, 456; controversy as to
site, id. n. 2 ; on the Via Maris,
429.

Caphtor. See Kaphtor.

Carthage, foundation of, 24; fall of,

25.

Carmel, 50, 121, 122; passages by,

150 ; Napoleon on these, 151 ; their
historical effect, 152 ; description
of, 338 ff.; and Elijah, 340; view
from, 340.

Carmel in Judah, 306, 317.

Casphon in Eastern Palestine, 589.

Cavea Roob, 528, n. 2.

Central or Western Range of Pales-

tine, 47, 49, 50, 53, 119, 247, 279;
watershed on, 48; modifications of,
49 ; names of, 651 ff.

Chateau d’Arnauld, 214.

Chinnereth, 443, n. 1.

Chittim. See Cyprus.

Chorazin, 456.

Chosroes II., 12, n. 4.

Christianity, and the geography, 37,
114	; and Paganism, 37, 188,

241, 631-635; and Islam, 38, 114
ff. ; in Lydda, 161 ; in the Philis-
tine cities, 186, 187 f. ; in the
Shephelah, 239 ff. ; in Bethshan,
361 f. ; Esdraelon, 407/; Eastern
Palestine, 631 ff. ; in Syria to-day,
its churches and missions, 40 f.

Christians in Syria, persecution of,
16, 38, 241/, 361, 632.

Circassian colonies in Palestine, 11,

Cities of the Plain, the, 505 ff. ; his-
torical reality of their destruction,
S°9-

Climate, differences in, 56 ; (the rains,
64, 76; hail and snow, 64; mists
and dews, 65 ; drought, 65, 76;
winds, 66 ; summer west wind, 66;
Sirocco, 67 f; temperature, 69 ;)
effect of, 72; not mechanically
regular, 73; and Providence, 74;
in Deuteronomy, 74 ; in Amos and
Isaiah, 75 ; summer wells. 77.

Coast, the, 127-144; in Scripture,
132 ; in history, 133.

Coele-Syria, origin and history of the
name, 538, 553.

Coins, authorities on Syrian, 14. See
also under the various towns, espe-
cially Caesarea, Sebaste, Caesarea
Philippi, Tiberias, the Decapolis,
etc.

Crete, 135, 170. .SV^ Caphtor.

Crusades, 13; authorities on, 17;
their impression on Syria, 17, 39;
and the coast, 128; ‘Athlit, 130;676 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Caesarea, 144 ; passage of Carmel,
150 ; and St. George, 162f. ; in the
Shephelah, 213^., 227, 232 f. ; in
Samaria, 349, 352 ; on Esdraelon,
359 f., 408; Battle of Hattin, 440
f. ; on the Upper Jordan, 480; at
Zoar, 507, n. ; in Eastern Palestine,
537, n. 3; in Antioch'and Damas-
cus, 648.

Crusaders and the population of
Palestine, 10, 11.

Cyprus, 22, 26 ; spread of Gospel to,
37 ; ancient Chittim, 135.

Dabaritta, 394, 11. 2.

Dagon and the Dragon of St. George,
163,/:

Damascus, spread of Faith to, 37 ;
fall to Mohammedanism, 38;
created by the Abana, 46, 642 ; its
sea ports, 426; and Israel, 579-
582 ; in Decapolis, 599; and the
Nabateans, 619; and the Romans,
616, 617, n. 2, 620; chap. xxx.—
antiquity of, 641 ; situation of,
642 ; stability of, 643 ; approach
to, 644; bazaars of, 646; and
Antioch, 647 ; great roads from,
647 ; religious significance of, 648.

Dan, tribe of, in Vale of Sorek, 220 ;
Tell-el-Kady or Banias, 473, 480 f.

‘ Dan to Beersheba,’ 285.

Daphne or Tell-el-Kady, 473.

Darom or Daroma, 52.

Dathema, 588/.

David, in the Shephelah, 211, 215;
in Adullam, 229 ; in Ke'ilah, 230 ;
and Goliath, 227 ; in the wilderness
of Judaea, 306	316 ; his dirge,

404; in Eastern Palestine, 579 f.

Dead Sea, the, chap, xxiii.—valley
of, 261, 499; saltness of, 500;
beach of, 502 ; history on, 504 ;
Ezekiel’s vision of, 51 r ; end of the
Jordan, 46 ; Jordan valley at, 46.

Debir, 279.

Deborah, 392 ff.

Deburieh, 394.

Decapolis, the, chap, xxviii.—its
origin and date, 595 ; an Anti-
Semitic league, 596 ; geography of,
597 ; ‘region of,’ 553, 601 ; archi-
tecture of, 602 ; gods of, 605 ; con-
stitution of, 605, see a^so S94;

borders of, 601; Greek literature
in, 607 ; and the Gospels, 607 ;
intercourse between, and Jews,
608.

Deir Aban, 224, n. 2.

Deir Dubban, 244.

Deir-el-Bedawiyeh, 244.

Deir-el-Botur, 244.

Deir-el-Hawa, 219, n. 1.

Deir-el-Mohallis, 244.

Dews, 65.

Dibon or Daibon, 560 f, 568 n. 1.

Dion of the Decapolis, 593, 598, 599.

Diospolis. See Lydda.

Dirge on death of Saul and Jonathan,
404/.

D’mer, 623, n. 4.

Docus. See Duk.

Dor or Dora, 129 n. 2, 130, 389/.,
405 n. 2.

Dothan, Plain of, 151 ; stronghold
of Samaria, 356.

Drought, 65, 76.

Duk or Docus, 250 n. 2.

Du Sara, a Nabatean deity, 628.

Eastern Palestine, chaps, xxiv.-xxx.
—plateau of, 519 ; health of, 520;
waters of, 521 ; fertility of, 522;
pastures and herds of, 523; ex-
posure to desert, 525 ; a land of
j opulence and insecurity,527; under-
j ground cities of, 528 ; Greeks and
| Romans in, 530; divisions and
names of, chap. xxv. ; dividing
rivers of, 533 ; natural divisions of,
534; divisions and names of to-
day, 535^1 ; divisions and names
of Greek Period,'the time of Christ,
538 ff. ; divisions and names in Old
Testament limes, 548 ff. ; compara-
tive table of, 553; and Israel,
chaps, xxvi.-xxvii. ; under David
and Solomon, 579 ; Maccabees and,
588; under Alexander Janneus,
589; under the Romans, chaps,
xxviii.-xxix.; Greek settlements in,
593-

Eastern Range, 48, 49, 50, 53, 54,
chap. xxiv. ; 534, 550, 562.

Eben-ezer, 224.

Edh-Dhaheriyah, 279/. ■

Edrei, under ground, 528 n. 2, 576,
601.Index

677

Eglon, the place, 202 n. 1, 234; the
king, 274 n.

Egypt, centre of empire, 6, 8 ; home
of plague,

Ekron, 193, 218.

El-Ahma Plain, 440 n. 1.

Elah, Vale of, 226 ff.

El-burj, 214 11. 1.

Elealeh, 567 n. 1.

Eleazar or Eleasar, 422 n., 515/!

Eleutheropolis. See Beit Gibrin, 231.

El-Ghuta, 553, 643.

El-Jib. See Gibeah.

Elijah the Tishbite, 27, 340, 435,
580.

Elisha, 582.

Elkesites, 632 n. 1.

El-Mushennef, 619 n. 4.

Eltekeh, 236.

El Yemen, 4.

Emmaus, Amwas in Shephelah, 214.

----at Tiberias, 450.

En-Nukra, 536/, 553.

Engedi, 269 f, 512.

Ephraim, Mount, 53, 121, 652, chap,
xvi., xvii.; forest of, 335 n. 2;
city of. See Taiyibeh.

Ephrath, Ephrata, 318, 319 n.

Es-Salt. See Salt.J

Esdraelon, Plain of, 49, 50, 52, 54,
121, 379; and Samaria, ch. xix;
three sections of, 380 ; names of
the plain, 384; and Sharon, 388 ;
fortresses of, 389; gateways of,
390 ; history of, 391; Saul and Phi-
listines on, 400 ff. ; pageant of,
406; Syrians on, 406 ; Romans on,
407, 410; Early Christians on, 407;
Moslems on, 407, 408 ; Crusades
on, 408 ; Napoleon on, 409.

’Eshtaol, 218.

’Eshtemoa, 317 n.

Esh-Sham, 3.

Es-Su‘et, 528 11. 2, 537 «. 3.

Es-Sunamein, inscriptions, 623, 630.

Ethiopia, 8; Ethiopians, 12.

Euphrates, 3, 6, 7, 534, 642.

Europe, present influence upon Syria,
l9-

European settlements in Syria, 16,
17-

Ezekiel, Vision of Dead Sea, 511.

Fen1sh = Philistine, 170 ti.

Ferata, 329 it. 3, 351 11. 2.

Fer'on, a stronghold of Samaria, 350.

Fertility of Palestine, 76 ; effect on
nomads, 85 ; religious conse-
quences of, 88 ; civilising conse-
quences of, 85.

Feshkah, 263, 265, 277 ; and Pisgah,
546 n. 1.

Feudal kingdom of Jerusalem, 17,123.

I ‘ Field, The,’ 80.

Fik, 427, 581 11. 1.

Filistin, name, 4.

Fords of Jordan ; at Jericho, 266 ; in
Ephraim, 337; in general, 486;
near Beisan, 486 11. 1.

Forests, 80, 148 ; in Gilead, 522.

Fortresses of Samaria, 345 ff.

Fourbelet, or Afarbala, 360 11. 1.

Frontiers between Judaea and Samaria,
natural, 248 ; political, 250 ; from
721 B.C. to the Exile, 252 ; after the
Exile, 253; under the Maccabees,
255 ; under the Romans, 255 ; in
the time of Christ, 256.

---- in Eastern Palestine, chap.

XXV.

Fuleh, 401, 406 11. 5.

Fureidis, 319 n.

Gabinius, 129 71. I.

Gadara, 459 ff, 593, 597, 599, 602,
617.

Gad and Reuben, 566.

Galil, 413, 415.

Galilee, ch. xx., its name, 413 ; of the
Gentiles, 413 ; of the Jews, 414 ;
boundaries of, 415 ; divisions of,
416; and the Lebanons, 417 ;
water of, 418; fertility of, 419 ;
trees in, 419; culture of, 420; popu-
lation of, 420 ; volcanic elements
in, 421 ; political geography of,
422 ; history of, 423 f.; roads of,
425 ff- 5 ‘way of the sea,’ 428; envi-
ronment of, 431 ; lake of, chap,
xxi.; features of, 439. See Lake of
Galilee.

Gamala, 459, 590.

Gaulanitis, 541, 553.

Gath, 194; site of, 195/.

Gaza, 181 ff.‘, and the Desert, 182;
and Egypt, 184 ; and Israel, 185 ;

1 which is desert,’ 186 ; and Christi-678 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

anity, 187 (occupied by Alexander,
184 ; by Napoleon, 184).

Gazara. See Gezer.

Geba, a stronghold of Samaria, 356.
Gennesaret, origin of the name, 443
11. 1.

Geographical accuracy of Bible, 107 ;
and historical accuracy, 108 ; and
faith, 107 ff.

Geography and biblical narratives,
108, 276.

Geography and Stade’s theories, 274f
Geography and moral forces, 113, 134.
Gerasa, 594, 598, 599, 602, 604/!
Gergesa, 459.

Gerizim, 119, 120, 334. See also
chap, xviii.; not Moriah, 334 v. 2.
Geshur, 548 11. 9, 553.

Gezer, or Gazar, 215 f.\ or Mont
Gisart, 217.

Ghabaghib, 65, 520	7.

Ghassanides, 9, 627.

Ghor, the, 47, 54, 482 ; divisions and
names of, 482 ; fertility of, 483 ;
limits of, 507	3.

Ghuta, 643 ff
Gibbethon, 351.

Gibcon, 250ff., 210 n. 2.

Gideon on Esdraelon, 397.

Gilead, the name and territory, 548
f.; history and characteristics, chap,
xxvii.; Israel’s proper territory, 577;
and early history of Israel, 579 ;
captivity of, 582 ; in the Prophets,

582	; uncertainty of ancient sites,

583	ff.; later historical sites in, 587.
Gilead, Mount, 48, 53/, 549, etc.
Gilgal, near Jericho, 276 f.\ the

stronghold of Samaria, 352, 494
n. 2 ; a place-name on Sharon,
351 «• 2.

Gimzo, 202 n.

Golan, the town, 553. See Sahem
ej-Jaulan; Golan district. See
Jaulan.

Gomorrah, 5057".; overthrow of, 508.
Gophna, a stronghold of Samaria,
351 ; roads, 211, 290.

Gospel, first spread of the, 37.

Grain in Syria, 83 ; in Hauran, 612 f.
Greece and Palestine contrasted, 133.
Greece over Jordan, chap, xxviii.;
the Decapolis, settlements over
Jordan, 593.

Greeks, 10; region covered by, 55 ;
beginning of their immigration with
Alexander, 593.

Greek Church in Syria, 39 n.

Greek cities, enfranchised by Pompey,
594 > rights of, under Rome, 594 ;
administration of, 595; confeder-
acies of, 595. See Hellenism.

Hadad-rimmon, 389, 400.

Hadid, 160.

Hail, 64.

Hammath, 450.

Hajj road, 45, 537, 647/, etc.

Half-Gilead, 548, 553.

Ha-Mishor, 53, 548, 553.

Hannibal, meaning of name, 24 ; the
Great, 25.

Hamilcar crossed Straits of Gibraltar,
24.

Harbours of Syria, 128 ff; of Da-
mascus, 426.

Harithiyeh or Harosheth, 393.

Ha rod, well of, 397 f.

Harosheth, 393.

Hasmoneansin Moab, 568; in Gilead,

588^

Hatlin, battle of, 441.

Hauran, 536, 552; larger, 536 ;
proper. «n6, 553 ; Mutosseraflikof,
553; (Ezekiel), 552/.; and its
cities, chap, xxix; civilisation of
Hauran and Decapolis, 611; descrip-
tion of, 612 ; its harvests, 612 ; its
treelessness, 613 ; its black cities,
6i4;andHermon,6i5; comingofthe
Romans to, 616 ; Herod the Great
in, 617; history of, 618 ; Philip
the Tetrarch, 618 ; Herod Agrippa,
619; conversion of St. Paul, 619;
interval of Roman rule, 621 ;
Agrippa II., 622 ; the new Province
of Arabia, 623 ; Roman civilisation
in, 624 ff.; Roman roads in, 626 ;
Roman frontier, 626 ; Semitic
elements in, 627 ; Nabatean deities
in, 628 ; architecture of, 629; early
Christianity in, 38, 631 ; origin and
the Synod of Bosra, 632 ; persecu-
tions and martyrs, 632 ; triumph of
Christ in, 633 ; contrast of Pagan
and Christian inscriptions in, 38,
634 ; epitaphs in, 635 ; dioceses of
the church, 636; churches andIndex

679

other buildings in, 636 ; overthrow
of Christianity in, 637.

Havoth-Jair, 551/., 577 n.

Hazezon-Tamar, 271, 506 f.

Hazor, 393, 423.

Hebron, 119, 231, 271 /., 317.

Hellenism, at home in Syria, 16 ; and
Israel, 34 ; in time of Christ, 35 ;
in Philistia, 179, 188, 192 ; and
Christianity, chap, xi.; in Eastern
Palestine, chap, xxviii. f.

Herod the Great in Western Palestine,
138 f. 165, 192 n. 2, 266 n. 4, 293,
348#, 353./. 490, 512, 514/.; in
Eastern Palestine, 488, 569, 595,
617, 618.

Herod Agrippa. See Agrippa I.

Herod Anlipas, and Tiberias, 448 ;
and Machaerus, 569; murder of
John Baptist, 570.

Herodium, 273.

Hermon, 121; plural name Hermons,
476 f. n. 1 ; and the Ituneans,
544f.\ and the ‘Mount of Bashan,’
550 ; and Hauran, 615 ; and Da-
mascus, 642. See Appendix I.

Heshbon or Essebon, 571.

Hilavion, 239 n. 1, 240 n. 5, etc.

‘ Hill-country,’ 53.

Hippos, 459, 594, 597, 599, 602.

Historical geography of Syria, sum-
mary of, 5.

Hittites, 10, 12, 14.

Hivites, 58, 59.

Homoncea, 455 n. 3.

Horites, 221 ». 3.

Huleh, 481.

Idumea, 239 f.

Idumseans, 9.

Immigrations, 1; Arabian, 8 ; Syrian,
Philistine, Hebrew, 9 ; Greek, 593.

Incarnation, the, 114.

Inscriptions, authorities upon, 15 n.

I ; Greek and Latin in Eastern
Palestine, chaps, xxviii., xxix.; Na-
batean, chap. xxix.

Invasions, of Syria, 6, 7, 12, 13, 128 ;
their main directions, 6 ; value of,
13 ; ceaselessness, 9 ; impressions
on monuments, 13, 14 ; in litera-
ture, 14; of Eastern Palestine,

S?Sff

Irbid. See Arbela.

Isaac, sacrifice of, 334 11. 2.

Islands of Mediterranean, 22 ; spread
of gospel to, 37.

‘ Isles, the,’135/;

Israel’s, origin and calling, 82/!; in
the desert and in Syria, 85 ; in-
vasion of Eastern Palestine, chap.

xxvi.	; passage of the Arnon, 557 ;
war against Sihon, 560; passage of
‘ the Plateau,’ 561 ; war with
Midian, 566 ; war with Og, 575/.;
crossing of Jordan, 275 f.; settle-
ment on Western Palestine, 277 ff.;
relations to Philistia, 175 ; to
Phoenicia, 26; uniqueness of her
Monotheism, 30 ; its reason, 32 ;
revelation, 33 ; relations with Hel-
lenism, 34, chaps, xxviii., xxix.;
Israel in Gilead and Bashan, chap.

xxvii.

Issachar, blessing of, 383.

Isthmus of Suez, 7, 8.

Iturseans, 544 ff.

Iturrea, 544.

Jabbok, 121, 533/., 535, 539, 583.

Jabneh orjabniel, 193.

Jaffa. See Joppa.

Jacob’s Well, 123, 334, chap, xviii.

Jahalin Arabs, 273 n., etc.

Jahaz, 559.

Jarmuk. See Yarmuk.

Jarmuth, 202 n. 1.

Jaulan, 444 11. 2, 536, 553.

Javan, 136.

Jebel ‘Aswad, 533.

Jebel es Sih, 416 n. 3.

Jebel Plauran or Druz, 534, 536 /.
553, 613 n., 619, etc.

Jebel Jela'ad, 54.

Jebel Usdum, 507, 514.

Jedur, 427, 544.

Jelil, 175 n. See 413 and 415.

Jenin, 356, 374, 381 ff.

Jerusalem, 119/; approaches to, 161,
205, 210 ff., 218, 226 /., 263/;,
29° ff.', military strength, 297,
302 ; not a natural site for a great
city, 319; her greatness, 320; fall of,
to the Romans, 299; to Mohamme-
danism, 38, 299 ; modern pilgrims
to. 39; disfigurement of modern,
40 ; Latin kingdom of, 17, 123.

Jeruel, wilderness of, 272.68o The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Jerahmeelites, 278	286.

Jeremiah and the desert, 315.

Jericho, 266 ff.

Jesus Christ, Hellenism of the age in
which He lived, 35 ; His judgment
of Israel, 36 ; His claims for Him-
self, 36; His views of Gentile
world, 36; His gospel, 36 ; and the
worship of Augustus, 478; chaps,
xx. xxi.

Jeshimon, 513.

Jezreel, 356; view from, 381 ; Vale
of, 53, 384-

Jezebel, 27.

Jisr-Benat Yakob Bridge of the daugh-
ters of Jacob, 427, 429 ti., 492 11. 1.

Jisr-el-Mujamia, 428 n.

Jogbehah and Succoth, 585.

John Hyrcanus in Samaria, 347 n. 6 ;
Bethshan, 358 //. 2 ; conquest of
Galilee, 414.

John the Baptist, murder of, 570.

Jonathan, son of Saul, 291, 403^

Jonathan Maccabeus, 291, 423, 514.

Joppa, 121, \ ff> ff.\ and the Macca-
bees, 136.

Jordan, the, 47, 121 ; natural unique-
ness of, 467 ; historical uniqueness
of, 467 ; sources of upper, 471 ;
military history of upper, 479 ; the
pride of, 484 ; the river-bed, 485 ;
in the Old Testament, 421 ; as a
military frontier, 491 ; Elijah and
Elisha on, 493 ; John the Baptist
on, 495; fords of, 337; over Jor-
dan, chap. xxiv.

Jordan Valley, 5, 8, 46, 54, chap,
xxii.; formation of, 469 ; divisions
of, 471; the upper, 471; the lower,
482; fertility and population of,
487 ; heat of, 489 ; wild beasts of,
490 ; the Arabs in, 490.

Joshua, historical reality of, 274 «. 1.
See Appendix II.; in the Shephelah,
215 ; with Ephraim and Manasseh,
577 «• i-

Judah, mount, 53 ; entrance into
land, 277 ; and the Canaanites,
289.

Judaea, 4 ; borders and bulwarks of,
chap. xiii. ; seclusion of, 259 ;
smallness of, 260; her borders,
261 ; and Moab, a contrast, 262 ;
wilderness of, 263 ; western defiles,

287 ; invaders of, 288; western
boundary of, 286 ; northern border,
289; as a frontier, 290; fortresses
of, 291 ; invasions of, 291 ; real
strength of, 297 ; not impregnable
but insular, 297; difficult to occupy,
298; tactics of Vespasian and
Saladin, 298; moral effects of
position of, 299; illustrated from the
Prophets and Psalms, 300; table-
land, 305 ; featurelessness of, 307 ;
Old Testament pictures of, 308 ; a
land of shepherds, 310; neighbour
to the desert, 312 ; wilderness of,
313; wilderness of, as a refuge, 316 ;
unfitness for growth of a city, 317 ;
John the Baptist in, 317 ; our Lord
in, 317 ; no great roads in, 319.

Judaea and Samaria, their frontier,
247ff-', a contrast, 323.

Judaea and Galilee contrasted, 418.

Judas, the Galilean, 421 n. 6.

Judas Maccabeus in the Shephelah,
215 f; in Bethshan, 358 ; in
Eastern Palestine, 588	599.

Jufna. See Gophna.

Julias, Bethsaida-Julias, 457.

Julias, or Beth-Haram, 488.

Kakon, on the Maritime Plain, 154;
Napoleon’s battle there, id. ; a
stronghold of Samaria, 350.

Kanata, 600.

Kanatha, 599, 600 «. 2, 602.

Kaphtor, or Crete, 135 ; not the
Delta, 170, 198; original seat of
Philistines, 170 f., with notes ;
according to some, eastern coast of
Aegean, 198.

Kapitolias, 600.

Kaphethra, 299 11.

Kedemoth, wilderness of, 559.

Kefar Hananyah or Kefr Anan,
417 n.

Kefr Outheni, 256, n. 1.

Kefr Suba, 154, 165.

Ke‘ilah, 230.

Kenites, 277, 281, n. 6, 393.

Kephar-Nahum, 456, 11. 2.

Kepherabis, 299 11.

Kerak on Lake of Galilee, 452 ff.

Kerak or Krak, in Moab, 537, n. 3.

Khan el Ahmar, 265.Index

681

Khan-Minyeh, origin and meaning
of name, 456, n. 1 ; probably
Capernaum, 456.

Kharitun, 229, n. 1.

Kharesmians, the, 12, n. 6.

Kikkar of the Jordan, 505.

Kiriath Jearim, 225; Baal-Judah,
276, 317.

Kiriathaim, in Moab, 567, 11. I ; 568,
n. 1.

Kishon, 382, 387 n., 388 11. ; battle
of, 394-

Kition, 22 n., 135.

Korea or Kuriyat, a stronghold of
Samaria, 352 f.

Kuamon, 406.

Kuneitra, 427, n. 1., 536.

Kurds in Syria, 11 ; in Lebanon and
Damascus, 647.

Kypros, 267 n.

Labrush, Khurbet, 506, n. 6.

Lachish, 234.

Lake of Galilee, the, chap. xxi. ; the
focus of the province, 439; way
down to, 440; atmosphere of, 441 ;
functions of, 442; shape of, 443 ;
aspect of (to-day), 445; aspect of
(in 'our Lord’s time), 446; cities
round, 447 ; Jordan valley at, 46.

Lake Huleh, 481 ; Jordan valley at,
46.

Land of Tob, the, 587.

Latrun or Turon, 214.

Lebanons, focus of Syria, 45 ; refuge
of Christians, 38 ; rivers of, 46;
mountain ranges of, 47 ; distinct
from Galilee, 55, 50, 642.

Lebanon and Galilee, 417.

Legio, 407. See Lejjun.

Lejjah, 528, n. 2, 537 ; equal to
Trachon, 543; not Argob, 551,
553 ; description of, 615/; history,
6nff.

Lejjun, 151, 380, 386; and Megiddo,
387, n. 1. ; Josiah’s defeat, 405/.;
and the Romans, 407; and the
Crusaders, 386.

Limen and El Mineh, 129.

Levant, 3, 7, 45.

Lezka, Kh., 236 n.

Litany, 46.

Livias, 488 n. See Julias in Perea.

Lydda, 160 ff.

Lysanias, tetrarchy of, 547.

Ma’achah, 548 n. 9, 553.

Maccabees, devotion to the law, 34 ;
conflict with Hellenism, 34, 179 ;
in the Shephelah, 212f ; and the
Samaritans, 254 ; in Jericho, 268 ;
in the western defiles of Judah,
288; in Benjamin, 291 f. ; in
Samaria, 347 ; in Esdraelon, 407 ;
in Galilee, 423; on Jordan, 491 ;
on Masada, 514; in Moab, 568;
in Gilead and Bashan, 588 f.

Machaerus, fortress of, 569; and the
Herods, 569; and John’s murder,
570.

Machir, 392 n. 4.

Ma‘en, 183, 214.

Magdala, 456; is it Taricheae? 452
//. 1.

Maged, 589.

Mahanaim, 335 n., 586.

Makkedah, 211 //. 1.

Ma^surah, 623 «. 4.

Manasseh, half-tribe of, 577; their
settlement in Eastern Palestine,
577 «• i-

Maon, 306, 317.

Mareshah, 233.

Maritime Plain, the, 49, 50; or
Daroma, 52, 148, 54, 55, ch. viii. ;
its beauty, 149; openness to south,
149 ; to north, 150 ff. ; its roads,
153; defences, 154; campaigns,
155 ; openness to plague, 157 ; its
cities, 160 ff.

Marna, 180, 188.

Marneion, or House of Marna, 187.

Maronites, 39 n.

Masada, 273, 512 ff. ; position of,
512; history of, 514; buildings
on, 514 ; massacre of, 515.

Maspha, 589.

Mattanah, 561.

Mecca, 647 f.

Medeba, 567 n. 5 ; plateau of, 548.

Mediterranean, Syria’s gateway to
the west, 6, 21 ; islands and coasts
of, 22, 135, 170 »«. 3 and 4 ; and
Damascus, 426, 643 ; and Galilee,
428, 429.

' Megiddo town, 386; Lejjun and not682 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Mujedda, 387 n. 1 ; battle of, 406 ;
plain of, 53, 385 ; waters of, 386.

Mejdel. See Magdala.

Melchites or Greek Catholics, 40 n.

Mellaha, 454 n. 1.

Merla or La Merle, 130.

Merj el Ghuruk, 327.

Mesha and ‘ the Moabite Stone,’
567.

Meshech, 136.

Michmash, 178 n. 1, 250, 291.

Midianites, 8, 9 ; in Samaria, 329 ;
in Esdraelon, 385, 397 ff.\ in East-
ern Palestine, 525, 566 ; Gideon’s
pursuit of, 579, 585.

Mirabel, 214.

Mishor, the, 53, 548, 553.

Missions and Mohammedanism, 41 ;
in Syria, 39, 40, 41.

Mizar or Mis-‘ar, 476.

Mists, 65 ; frequency of morning
mists in Eastern Palestine, 520.

Mizpeh or Neby Samwil, 120.

Mizpeh of Gilead, 586, 589.

Moab and the coming of Israel, chap,
xxvi. ; mountain table-land of, 48,
53, 548 ; Hasmoneans in, 568.

Moabite Stone, the, geography of,
567.

Modein, 212.

Mohammedanism, rise of, 38; and
Christianity, 38, 115 ; and modern
missions, 41 ; extension in Eastern
Palestine, 637 ; to Damascus, 648.

Monotheism, not natural to Semites,
29; opporlunityfor, among Semites,
30; uniqueness of Israel’s, 30;
reason of, 32 ; marvel of, 90, 113.

Mons Aseldamus, 550, 553.

Mont Gisard, 214 f.

Moses, wells of, 564; burial of, 565.

Mount Bashan, 550.

Mount Ebal, view from, chap. vi. ;
central position, 332; mentioned in
Deuteronomy as central sanctuary,
333 f

Mount Ephraim, 47, 53, 247, 325,
652, 653 ; western flank of, 326 ;
eastein flank of, 326; central plains
of, 327.

Mount Gilboa, 397 n. 2; battle of,
402/;

Mount Gilead, 48, 53, 521, 549;
history, chap, xxvii.

Mount Hermon, head of Eastern
range, 48. See Hermon.

Mount Judah, 53, 652.

----Naphtali, 53, 652.

----of the Amorite, 53, 652.

----of the ‘Abarim, 53, 653.

----Atabyrus, 22 n.

----Tabor, 394, 408; and Hermon,

4*7-

----Taurus, 3, 7, 12, 45 ; a barrier,

21.

Mountains, 47 ; central range, 48 ;
eastern range, 48; Druz moun-
tain, or Jebel Druz, 48, 55; of
the ‘Abarim, 53 ; and plain, 53.

Mukhalid, 130 n. 3.

Mukhneh, the plain, 327.

Musmieh. See Phaena in the Lejjah.

Nabateans and Gaza, 184; their
territory, 547, 620 f, 623; con-
quer Moab, 568 ; relations to Mac-
cabees, 568 11. 4; to Herod Antipas,
569; to Decapolis, 596; to
Hauran, 616 ff. ; to Damascus,
619; to Philip’s tetrarchy, 619 ;
to kingdom of Agrippas, 621 f. ;
their inscriptions, 621, 624; their
deities, 628 ; their conquest by
Rome, 623.

Nablus, 119, 120; Shechem, 332f,
345 f. ; not Sychar, 368 ff. ; seat of
government for the Belka‘, 535.

Nahaliel, 561.

Naphtali, 53, 392, 420, 422, 424.
See Mount Naphtali.

Napoleon, invasion of Syria, 13, 19 ;
on the geographical accuracy of the
Bible, 107 ; capture of Gaza, 184;
passage of Carmel, 150 ff., 389;
description of Carmel and its mili-
tary value, 150 f. ; march over
Sharon, 154, 156 ; attacked hereby
the plague, 158, 159 n. 1 ; victory
of Mount Tabor, 395 f.; retreat from
Esdraelon, 409.

Native churches in Syria, 39 n.

Nazareth, 432 ; central position of,
432 ; boyhood of Jesus at, 433.

Nebaioth, probably the same as
Nabateans, 547 «■ 2.

Nebo, Mount, and Pisgah, 564^,567.

Nebo, Town, 564 v. 1, 567 n. I,
568 n. 1.Index

683

Neby Musa, 265 n 3.

Neby Samwil, 120.

Negeb, the, 49, 50, 52, 278/! ; the
name, 278; as a frontier, 281 ; its
main road, 282 ; its towns, 285/.

Nero, coin of, for Caesarea Philippi,

475 /

Neronias, title of Caesarea Philippi,

475-

Nile, 6; compared and contrasted
with Jordan, 467 ff. ; effect of Nile
mud on Syrian coast, 128.

Nob, 253 71. 4.

Nobah, north-east of Heshbon, 560

71, 3.

-----who took Kanalha, 579 11. 3.

Nysa, 363.

Og, King of Bashan, 575.

Olive, cultivation of, 81 f. ; in
Galilee, 419.

Ono, 160, 253.

‘Ophni. See Gophna.

Origen’s two visits to the East of
Jordan, Synod of Bosra, 632.

Orontes, 46 ; contrasted with Jordan,

493-

Oshah, 425.

Oultre-Jourdain, 537	3, 553.

Over-Jordan, 553.

Palestine, history of the name, 3 f ;
a sanctuary, 112; an observatory,
112 ; a land of tribes, 58 ; size of,
123; and Greece, 133; Eastern,
ch. xxiv.-xxx.

Palaistine, 4.

Palmer, 507 11.

Pan, worship of, 474 ; coins of, 475.

Paneas, 473.

-----to Dan, 480,

Parthians, 12, 514.

Pelesheth, 169 «. I, 52.

Pella, 593, 597, 599, 602.

Penuel, 585.

Peraea, 539, 553 ; Jesus in, 540.

Persian Gulf, 7.

Persian invasion of Palestine, 12.

Phaena or Musmieh, in the Lejjah,
529.

Philadelphia, 593, 598, 599, 602, 605.

Philistia, 4, 52, ch. ix. ; relations of
Israel and, 175 ; Greek influence
upon, 179 ; in Christian times, 180.

Philistine cities, ch. ix., 181 ff.\ their
league, 169.

Philistines, 10, 55, ch. ix.; name and
origin, 169 ff., 197 11. ; language,
172; religion, 173; appearance in
Canaan, 173 ; contact with Israel,
175 ; parallel between them and
Israelites, 175 ; difference, 176.

Philip the Tetrarch, 475, 618 f.

Philip, tetrarchy of, 540, 553, 618.

Philoteria, 455.

Phoenicia, 5 ; Israel and, 26, 127^

Phoenician voyages, 22, 25, 27 ;
emigrations, 23, 24; under the
Romans, 25; Greek loan-words,
23 71.

Pilgrims, literature, 18 ; and traders,
18 ; use of railroad, 20 ; 407.

Pisgah and Nebo, 562; the name,
564 71. 1; connection with Feshkah,
564 71. 1.

Plague, the, in Palestine, 157 ff. ;
origin in Egypt, i$T ff. ; historical
instances, 157 ff.

Plain, cities of the, 505^]

Plains, 54.

Plans, fortress of, 214.

Plateau, the, Israel’s passage of,
561 ; the edge of, 562.

Pompey, 13 ; capture of Jericho, 268;
capture of Jerusalem, 292 ; advance
through Samaria, 292, 353 71. 5 ;
in Damascus, 590,	616; and

Decapolis, 594, 596, 606.

Population of Syria, 8 ; tribal, 8;
Semitic, 10.

Porphyry, Bishop of Gaza, 181.

Protestant Missions, 40 71.

Ptolemies, wars of, 13; records left
by, 14, 184 7t. 3, 347, 407, 414.

Ptolemais or Acre, 380, 414 71. 2,
424, 433, 608.

Ptolemy Lathurus, 414	4.

Rabbath-Ammon, 20 11. 2, 593.
See Philadelphia.

Rafia, 149.

Railway, lines of, 20 ; up Sorek, 281;
across Esdraelon, 390 71. 2, 668.

Rains and rainfall in Palestine, 63^1;
early and latter rains, 64; rains in
the Negeb, 68; rainfall at Jerusalem
and Nazareth, 76 71.

Rakkath, 447.684 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Ramah, in Mount Ephraim, 254 n. 7.

Ramalh-Mizpeh and Ramolh-Gilead,
586.

Ramalhaim, 254 n. 7.

Rameh, 416 n. 3.

Rametha, 588 ff.

Ramleli, 165.

Ramoth-Gilead and Ramath Mizpeh,
586.

Raphana, 599.

Records, literature, 13 ; monuments,
13; coins, 15; Egyptian and
Assyrian, 14; of Anliochi and
Ptolemies, 14 ; Greek and Roman,
14 ; early Christian, 16.

Red Sea, 7.

Remlheh, 587.

Renan’sThesisabout Monotheism, 30.

Rephaim, Vale of, 218.

Rcseph, 129 mi. 1 and 3.

Revelation in the Old Testament, 33.

Reuben and Gad, their territories,
566.

Rhodes, 22, 135.

Richard I. of England, passage of
Carmel, 150; at Ccesarea, 144;
on the coast, 128; at Lydda, 163 ;
in the Shephelah, 213 ff., 227,
2347-

Roads, Roman, 232, 626 ; of the
Maritime Plain, 149-154; injudaaa,
263 ff.; from Jericho, 264; from ‘Ain
Feshkah, 265 ; from Engcdi, 269,
271 ; in Negeb, 282 ; in Samaria,
351 ; by Sychar, 374; in Esdrae-
lon, 388^!; of Galilee, 425; their
routes, 426 ; Way of the Sea, 428 ;
Great South Road, 429; Great East
Road, 430; and parables of Jesus,
430; in Eastern Palestine, 597 ff.,
626.

Rodan and Rodanim. See Rhodes.

Romans, tactics of, in Palestine, 55,
298 ; power of, 515 ; organisation
of the frontier, 623-628. See Roads.

Romish Missions in Syria, 40.

Rubin river, in Philistia, 128 n. 1,
131 ; harbour, 131.

Ruwalla, the, 10.

Saiiem-ej-Jaulan, 536.

Salkhat, 619, 626, 629, 637.

Salt, 308 11., 536 ; the Crusaders,

538 11. ; probably an ancient site,

587-.

Samaria, the Province and Kingdom,
contrast to Judsea, 323; their
frontier, 247 ff.; historical memories
of, 324 ; borders of, 324; openness
of, 328; chariot-driving in, 329;
precocity of, 331; central position
of, 332; connection with Eastern
Palestine, 335; connection with
Carmel, 337; fortresses of, 341,
345 ff. ; roads of, 351 ; western
strongholds in, 350 ; southern
strongholds in, 350; eastern frontier
of, 354 ; eastern fortresses of, 354 ;
northern fortresses of, 355.

Samaria, city of, 122 ; site and name,
346; its sieges, 347 ; the city of
Ahab and Herod, 348 ff.

Samson, 220 ff.

S‘asa, 427 n.

Saul and Philistines on Esdraelon,
400 ff.; death, 403; elegy on, 404/.

Scenery of Palestine, picturesqueness
of, 93 ; reflection in Israel’s litera-
ture, 96 to 104.

Scilly Isles, 25.

Scythopolis. See Belhshan, 361, 597,
599, 602 ; origin of name, 36

Sebaste. See Samaria, city of.

Segoi or Zoar, 507 n.

Seigneurie of Krak and Montreal,
537 ”•

Seleucids, wars, 13 ; on the Maritime
Plain, 154; in Judaea, 268, 28S ;
in Samaria, 347 ; on Esdraelon,
407 n. I ; in Galilee, 423 f. ; in
Eastern Palestine, 529, 538, 588,
593/.; in Damascus, 647; coins, 14.

Selhab, Plain, 327 n. 2.

Semechonitis, Lake, 481.

Semites, home, 5; commerce, 5 ; reli-
gion, 5, 28ff\ r$le in history, 5; out-
goings of, 8 ; religious leaders of
humanity, 28 ; temperament, 29.

Seneh, 250	4.

Sennacherib’s campaign in Shephelah,
235 f. ; army struck by plague, 158.

Sephatha, 233.

Septimius Severus and Lydda, 161
11. 2 ; and Eleutheropolis, 232;
roads, Appendix v.

Serbonian Bog, 157.

Settlements, European in Syria, 16,Index

685

17,	20 ; German, 20; Roman

Catholic, 20; Jewish, 20; Circassian
Greek, 20. See ch. xxviii.

Sha'ara, Plain, 440 n.

Shaphram, 425.

Sharon, Plain of, 5, 52, 122, 147 f.

Sharon in Eastern Palestine, 548.

Shechem, 119, 332. See Nablus.

----importance of, 330.

Shefa ‘Amr, 425 n. 1.

Shephelah, the, chapp. x., xii., 49 f.\
meaning of the name, 202 ; divi-
sion between, and Judaea, 205 ;
general aspect of, 207; valleys of,
209ff.', in the Old Testament, 210 ;
with the Romans, 211 ; with the
Maccabees, 212 f.\ in the Crusades,
213 f ; and Richard 1., 214, 235 ;
Joshua in, 215 ; David in, 211,
227 ff. ; Philistines in, 223 ; and
Sennacherib, 235 ; Christianity of,
239 ; Apostles on the, 240; mar-
tyrs of, 241 ; churches of, 244.

Shephelah of Israel, 338, 653.

Shiloh, 119, 224 n. 2.

Shishak, 283 n. 6.

Shocoh, 202 n. 1, 228/.

Shunem, 400.

Sicarii, 515.

Siddim, vale of, 503.

Sihon, conquests of, 557 ; war with,
559; is it historical? 560. App. in.

Silkworm, cultivation of, 20.

Simeon, entrance into land, 277;
territory in the Negeb, 278 ff.

Singil, St. Giles, a Crusader strong-
hold of Samaria, 352.

Sinnabris, 453 n. 5, 454; Ginnabris,
483 n. 2.

Snow in Western Palestine, 64 f.; in
Eastern Palestine., 520.

Sodom, S°5l > overthrow of, 508.

Soil in Palestine, 79.

Solomon’s dominion in Eastern Pales-
580; and Tamar, 270 n. 2, 488.

Sorek, vale of, 193 ; position of, 218;
settlement of tribe of Dan, 220;
battle of, 223.

Springs in Western Palestine, 77; in
Eastern Palestine, 521.

Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, 8.

Straits of Gibraltar, 24, 25.

St. Abraham, Crusaders’ name for
Hebron, 272.

St. George of Lydda and of England,
162; and the Dragon, 163;
Mohammedan legends of, 164; in
Zorava and E. Palestine, 634, 636 f.

Subbarin, 78 «., 151.

Succoth and Jogbehah, 585.

Su'ete. See Es-Su‘et.

Sugar, 267 n., 487.

Surtabeh, 353, n. 5.

Susiyeh or Hippos, 459.

Suwete or Suhete, 537 n. 3, 553.

Syria, invasions, by Israel, 6; by
Islam, 6, 12 ; by hope, 7 ; by Par-
thians, 12; by Persians, 12; by
Turks, 12 ; by Mongols, 12 ; popu-
lation, 8; tribal, 10; Semitic,
10; immigrations, 6, 9; hroken
into provinces, 10 ; disabled from
political empire, 10; relation to
the three continents, 11 ; oppor-
tunity, westward, 21 ; single open-
ing, 21 ; cradle of monotheism,
31 ; and Hellenism, 34 ; place in
history, chap. 1. ; boundaries, 3-7 ;
name, 3, 4 ; historical geography
of, 5 ; position, 6 ; spiritual em-
pire, 7 ; western outlook, 7 ; rela-
tion to Arabia, 7 ; debatable
ground between Asia and Africa,
and between these and Europe, 7 ;
influence westward, 7 ; religion, 7 ;
form of the land, 45 ; relation to
Arabia, 45 ; distinction from
Arabia, 45 ; barrier to the desert,
45 ; influence of desert upon, 46 ;
brokenness in land, 55.

Syriac church, 40.

Sychar, chap, xviii. ; position of,
367 ff ; name of, 368 ff

Ta'amirah Arabs, 10.

Taanach, by Megiddo, 386, 387 n. 1,

389-

Taanath - Shiloh, a stronghold of
Samaria, 355.

Tabariyah or Tuberiyah, official dis-
trict, 416 n. 1, 458 n. 6.

Tabigha, 458.

Tabor. See Mount Tabor.

Tadmor, 270.

Taiyibeh, the city of Ephraim, 256,
264 n. X, 325 n. 2, 352.

Tamar, 270.

Tanturah or Dor. See Dor.686 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Tappuah, 202 n. 1.

Taricheae, 451 ff.\ its position, 452 ;
its industries, 454.

Tekoah, wilderness of, 272 f.; Amos’
home, 314 ff. ; city of Judah, 317.

Tell Deir ‘Alla. See Succoth.

Tell el ‘Ajjul, 153.

Tell-el-IIesy. See Lachish.

Tell-el-Kady, 472, 473 ; probably not
Dan, 480.

Tell-el-Kasis, 380 ff.

Tell-el-Milh, 286 n. 2.

Tell-es-Safi, or Safiyeh, 227.

Tell-Keimun, 152	406 n. 5.

Temperatures in Palestine, 69 ff. ;
their extremes, 70; mean annual
temperature at Jerusalem, 71 ; some
temperatures at Dhoheriyah, 68;
in Eastern Palestine and on Jordan,
70, 489, 520.

Temple Christians, 19.

Telrarchy. See Philip and Herod
Antipas.

Thebez, a stronghold of Samaria,

355*

Tiberias, 447 ff. ; foundation of, and
dale, 447 ; position of, 447 ff. ;
reason of its endurance, 450 ; our
Lord and, 449 ; baths of, 450.

Tibnin. 426 n. 2.

Timnath Heres, 351, n. 3.

Tirzah, a stronghold of Samaria, 355.

Tob, the land of, 587.

Trachonitis, 543, 553, 616 ff.

Traders, 22 ; routes, 22.

Trees, 80 ff.

Tribes, Arabian, leave pastoral habits
for agricultural, 10; submit to
settled government, 10.

Tubal, 136.

Turks, 11.

Tyre, fall of, 25.

Umm el Jemai., 628 n. 3, 633.
Umm-er-Res-as, 568 ft. 4, 569 «. 6.
Umm-esh-Shukaf, 78 n.

Umm Sirah, 264 n. 1.

Umm Junia, 455 ft. 3.

Underground cities in Eastern Pales-
tine, 528, 576.

Vales, list of, in Palestine. See Ap-
pendix 1. ; also Elah, Jezreel,
Berachah, Ajalon, etc.

Valley of the Smiths, or the Crafts-
men, 161 «., 210 ti. 4.

----of Dead Sea, 261.

Vegetables in Palestine, 83.
Vespasian, campaign of, 55; his
tactics against Jerusalem, 298 f. ;
on the Lake of Galilee, 452 f.

Vine, cultivation of, 20, 81/.; in
Judah, 208 ff. ; in Eastern Pales-
tine, 522.

Volcanoes, extinct, 48.

Wady ’Abu Duba, 291 n. 1.

----’Abu Nar, 151 n. 2.

---- ‘Ali, 206, 261, 287.

---- ‘Amwas or ’Abu el ‘Amis, 453.

---- ‘Aujeh, 249.

----Deir Balflt, 249.

----el ’Afranj, 231.

----el Ghamik, 151 n. 2.

----el Ghurab, 205, 219 n. 1.

----el Hamam, 427.

----el Hesy, 234.

----el Ifiim, 326, 355.

----el Kuf, 287 n. i.

----en Najil, 206/., 219, 261 n 1.

----en Nar, 511.

----es Seba, 279.

----es Sunt, 206, 226.

----es Sur, 206.

----esh Sha'ir, 346.

----et Taiyibeh, 264 n. 1.

----Farah, in Samaria, 256; in

Judah, 291 n. 1.

----Ghuzzeh, 153.

----Hesban, 532.

----Ishar, 249.

----Ismain, 287 11. 1.

----Kaneh, 249, 657.

----Kelt, 494 n. 1.

----Khulil, 279.

----Maktul, 416 it.

----Mojib, 558.

----Nimr, 249.

----Samieh, 249.

----Sheria, 206.

----Surar, 218 f., 287.

----Waleh, 561.

----Waziyeh, 427.

----Wesa, 151 n. 2.

----Yabis, 520.

----Zerka Ma‘in, 562, 571.

Waheb, 559.

Water, inequality of distribution of,Index

78; west of Jordan, 78; east of
Jordan, 521.

Wells in Western Palestine, 78 ff.,
and Appendix 1.

* Wells of Moses,’ 564.

Wilderness of Judaea, 263.

----of Kedemolh, 559.

Winds, 66; west wind, 66 ; sirocco,
67; north wind, 67 : south wind,

67.

Woodland, 80, 81.

Yarmuk, the, 48, 533, 534, 536, 538,
548 ; valley of, 121 ; battles of,

589-

Yemen, 9.

Zamaris, 618.

Zanoah, 202 n.

Zarthan or Sarthan, 488.
Zebabdeh, plain of, 327, 11. 2.
Zeboim, 291 n. 1.

Zeboiim, a city of the Plain, 505.
Zenodorus, 475 n. I, 546 n.

617^

Zered, brook, 557.

Zerka. ^cjabbok.

----Ma'in, 562, 571.

Ziph, 306	307 it., 317 11.

Ziz, ascent of, 272.

Zoar, 505/.

Zorah, 218.

Zughar. See Zoar.INDEX OF AUTHORITIES

Abulfeda, i7, 408.

Account of Endemic Plague in India,

159-

Acta Sanctorum, 17, 180, 181.
Admiralty Charts, 128.

Allen, 15.

Anderlind, 63, 418.

Ankel, 63, 66, 67, 80, 128.

Annals of 'J hot hmes III., 152, 184,
202.

Antonins de Cremona, 182.

Antoninus Placentinus, 162, 182, 190.
Aquila, 222.

Archives de la Sociiti <f Orient Latin,
18.

Arculf, 162, 456, 472.

Amulf, 372.

Arrian, 4, 16, 182, 183, 188.

Asiatic Review, 29.

Assizes of Jerusalem, n. 17.

Augustine, 25.

Bacchides, 288.

Baethgart, 477.

Baelhgen, 550, 628, 629.

Barclay, 63, 71.

Baudissin, 334.

Baumgarten, 157, 158.

Benjamin of Tudela, 190, 473.
Bernard, 162, 441.

Bernhardt, 182.

Berthea, 393.

Bertrand, 19.

Besant, 432.

Beugnot, 18.

Birch, 230, 506.

Bliss, 40.

Boettger, 354.

Boha-ed-Din, 17, 144, 163, 360, 397,
408, 441.

Bohn, 18.

Bongars, 17.

Bordeaux Pilgrim, 385.

Brocardus, 370.

Brugsch, 153, 173, 191.

Buckingham, 520, 599.

Budde, 57, 174, 220, 221, 223, 277,
3Si» 392, 400, 401, 577.

Burckhardt, 29, 183, 337, 386, 500 f.,
$20f, 524, 526/, 529, 549, 558/.,
570. 599-

Burton, 29.

Cabriadus, Ur. Giovanni, 157,
*59-

Caesar, Bell. Gall., 337.

----Bell. Afr., 544.

Carmoly, 18, 453.

Cassius, 451.

Chaplin, 63, 71, 224, 418.

Chase, 546.

Cheyne, 101, 228, 405, 477, 510, 550.

C-lermont-Ganneau, 15, 129, 164, 202,
214, 224, 230, 235, 459, 507, 568,
635-

Colville, 159.

Commentary on Isaiah, 180.

Conder, 14, 18, 97, 129, 161, 165,
170,190, 195, 202 f., 214, 216, 220,
222, 224, 226, 228, 230, 256, 286,
307, 319. 346, 356, 369,37G 387/-,
394, 398, 401, 418, 432, 452 f,
456, 469, 471, 483 ff., 4S8 ff.,
496, 5°3» 544, 551» 561/, 565/-,
570, 581,	etc.

Conybeare and Hows on, 620.

Cooke, 393, 395, 396.

Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticart.i?n,
15, 22, 135, 547, 569, 628/.

Council of Constantinople, 190.

Council of Nice, 507.

Cox, 18.

688Index of Authorities

689

Critical Review, 622, 623, 625, 634,
635-

Cross, 367.

Davidson, Prof. A. B., 393.

Dawson, 468, 469, 470, 501, 509.

De Joinville, 17, 480.

Delitzsch, 550.

De Saulcy, 14, 15, 140, 186, 187,
214, 348, 363, 448, 451, 475,
506/, 513, 594, 597/., 600, 605,
623.

De Voglie, 18, 163, 618, 621, 629 f.

Dillmann, 170, 201, 334, 335, 393,
420, 443, 551, 557, SS9 /., 564,
664.

Diodorus Siculus, 16, 22, 25, 157,
184, 187, 266, 347, 482, 487, 501,
S38-

Dion Cassius, 545, 624.

Dioscorides, 482.

Discorso sopra il Commercio degli
Italiani nel sec. xiv., 18.

Doughty, 29, 183, 282, 547, 557, 631.

Drake, 286.

Driver, 233, 334, 393.

Duhm, no.

Eastern Palestine and the Cru-
sades, 537.

Ebers, 170, 197, 452.

Eckhel, 14.

Epiphanius, 631, 632.

Eusebius, 17, 38, 161, 162, 180, 181,

- 188, 202, 203, 212, 239, 241, 270,
285, 291, 347, 351, 362, 369, 386,
474, 488, 542 /., 546, 581, 598,

631/

Ewald, 223, 420.

Ewing, 449.

Felix Fabri, 128, 165, 319, 473.

Fetellus, 363, 370, 385, 473.

Fischer and Guthe, map, 537.

Freeman, 24.

Frei, 449, 452, 453, 454, 462.

Furrer, 448, 452, 455/., 458.

Galen, 502, 507.

Gardner, 14.

Gatt, 182, 189.

Geoffrey de Vinsauf, 17, 130, 148,
150. 154. 156, 163, 214, 227, 235,
388.

I Geographi Grceci Minores, xxiv, 16,

I 185, 187, 267, 362/., 487.

| Gerusalemme Liberata, 148.

Gesenius, 201, 364, 503, 506.

-Gibbon, 16, 157, 158.

Glaisher, 63, 71.

Goldziher, 223.

Gough, 14.

Guerin, 128, 131, 164, 186, 190, 195,
212, 214, 219, 222, 230, 243 f,
432> 454, 456.

Guthe, 189, 222, 392, 452, 550.

Haimendorf, 458.

Hasselquist, 462.

Henderson, 49, 58, 222, 226, 278,
286, 319, 33s, 388, 458, 551-

Herodotus, 4, 16, 25, 159, 288, 363.

Heyd, 18, 429.

Hitzig, 171, 223, 337.

Hollenberg, 277.

Holtzmann, 458.

Plolmes, 373.

Horace, 267.

Hull, 134, 207,468/;, 501.

Idrisi, 542.

Imad-ed-Din, 17.

Irby and Mangles’ Travels, 361.

Isaac Chilo, 456.

Jacques de Vitry, 17.

Jerome, 17, 161, 180, 188, 212, 231,
239/., 270, 285, 368, 388, 390,
488, 581, 601.

Jerusalem Itinerary, 385, 398.

John d’lbelin, 18.

John of Wurzburg, 370.

Josephus, 4, 128, 137 ff., 148, 154,
161, 165, 184/:, 189/, 192, 195,
211 f, 216, 222, 231, 233, 239 f,
25°, 253/:, 264, 266 ff., 270 /,
291, 293, 299, 329, 338, 346/:,
35°, 352 #, 353, 354, 356, 358,
359, 361, 363, 379, 390, 394, 405,
407, 414/:, 419, 421, 434, 442/.,
446, 448 /, 450/;, 471, 473, 481,
483, 488, 500, soi, 513, 525, 528,
538/, 54i ff-, 544/, 547, 568/:,
589, 594/, 598/, 601, 606, 617/;

Justi, 404.

Kasteren, 454.

Kautsch, 664.

2 X690 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Keim, 457, 570.

Kitchener, 286, 452, 507.

Kittel, 174, 201, 223, 277, etc.
Klostermann, 404.

Knobel, 171, 201, 507, 510.

Kuenen, 223, 393, 663, etc.

Lagarde, 289.

Lamartine, 444, 460.

Lartet, 442, 469, 502.

Le Bas, 15.

Leon de Lantsheeres, 14.

Le Strange, 143, 190, 192, 480, 486,
487, 488, 506, 536, 598.

Leusden, 569.

Levy, 569.

Lewin, 448.

Lightfoot, 569.

Lucian, 335, 404.

Ludovico Vartema, 29.

Lussac, 501.

Lynch, 63, 69, 71, 337, 501/, 508.

MACGREGOR, 44I, 449, 481.

Madden, 15.

Marcet, 501.

Marino Sanuto, 388.

Marta, 356.

Maspero, 212, 283.

Maundeville, Sir John, 372, 473.
Maundrell, 373.

Merrill, 15, 58, 421, 432, 443, 45°,
456, 462, 506, 520, 529, 543, 616,

Neubauer, 52, 351, 419, 422, 425,
443, 447, 454, 540, 547, etc.

Notling, 471, 508, 510.

Odyssey, 171.

Olshausen, 550.

Oliphant, 522, 528, 586.

Onomasticon, 52, 161, 174, 195, 212,
226, 230, 233, 252, 254, 348, 472,
473, 481, 488.

Oort, 276, 392.

Orelli, 223.

Palestine Exploration Fund
Memoir, 131, 140, 143,152,164/.,
182, 190, 222, 242, 327, 382, 419.

Palestine Exploration Fund Quar-
terly, 14, 40, 63, 65, 67, 71, 188,
190, 192, 216, 224, 226, 255, 283,
286, etc. etc.

Papyrus Golenischift', 197 or 198.

Peschito, the, 560.

Peutinger Tables, 281, 354, 599, etc.

Philippics, 544.

Philo, 194.

Phocas, 163.

Pietri Della Valle, 18.

Pliny, 16, 128, 131, 140, 157* 183,
189, 266, 358, 363, 448, 452, 474/.,
487, 5OI> 538, 54°, 547, 569, 596,
599, 602.

Plutarch, 170, 407.

Polybius, 16, 184, 359, 361, 455,

635-

Mesha, 567.

Meyer, 276, 277, 662.

Miller, 97, 228, 300, 403.

Milner, 224.

Mionnet, 14.

Mommsen, 15 /, 407, 595, 598,
624.

Moore, 279.

Mordtmann, 15.

Muir, 359.

Mukaddasi, 143.

Muller, W. Max, 152, 172, 197/, 212,
278, 283, 388.

Murray, Surg.-Gen., 159.

Murray’s Guide, 265.

Napoleon, 19, 108, 151, 158, 390.
Nasir-i-Khusra, 143.

Neander, 620.

Nestle, 231.

480, 487, 538, 594, 598.

Porter, 374, 529, 551, 576, 599, 620,
624.

Post, 521, 529.

Pressel, 267.

Prutz, 9, 18, 233, 408, 413.

Ptolemy, 16, 157, 189, 231, 270, 354,
415. 458, 543, 5S°> 598.

Pusey, 190.

Quaresmius, 18, 214, 370,
481.

Quintus Curtius, 16, 183, 346.

457,

Ramsay, 544, 554.

Raumer, 186.

Records of the Past, 14, 152, 192/.,
197, 216, 360.

Recueil ef Archiologie Orientale, 217.

See Clermont-Ganneau.

Reinach, 192.Index of A uthorities

691

Reland, 507, 544, 598, 6oo, 607, 624,
etc.

Renan, 404.

Rendell Harris, 15.

Reports of German and English Com-
missions to Astrakhan, 157, 159.

Reuss, 335, 401.

Rey, 18, 183, 214, 265, 267, 271/.,
360, 429, 487, 537, etc.

Rey land, 170, 362, 364, 458.

Reyssbuch des heiligen Landes, 18.

Riehm, 173.

Ritter, Carl, 113.

Robertson Smith, 11, 22, 29, 34,
393, 401, 474, 581.

Robinson, 49, 63, 65, 67, 69, 78,
163, 165, 182, 186, 195, 2x2, 226,
231, 233, 243, 267, 271, 280, 286,
326, 351/, 361, 373, 388, 419,
44i/-, 449/, 454, 456, 472, 474/,
488, 500, 507, 544, etc. etc.

Rohricht, 18, 148, 232, 234, 350,
408.

Ross, 20.

Rowlands,. 283.

Ryle, 253.

Saewulf, 372, 473.

Sayce, 14, 170, 184, 360.

Schenkel, 171.

Schick, 189, 222, 287.

Schlatter, 161, 253/., 352, 539.

Schmidt, Woldemar, 620.

Schrader, 136, 169, 236.

Schumacher, 416, 427, 432, 444, 447
/., 459, 486, 488, 536, 625, 634,
etc.

Schurer, 16, 18, 187, 255, 291, 347,
352, 353, 354, 414, 422, 448, 449,
452, 455, 456, 457, 474, 488, 545,
593, 600, 607, 617, 620/, 623, etc.

Scylax, 25, 129.

Seetzen, 454, 520, 586, 600.

Smith (Chald. Genesis), 319.

Smith, Eli, 243, 354.

Socin, 11, 388, 452, 456, etc.

Socrates, 17, 285.

Solms, Graf zu, 372.

Sozomen, 17, 180, 188, 239, 262.

Spiers, 452.

Stade, 172, 174, 201, 223, 230, 236,
274, 276, 285/., 346, 404, 567,
577f> etc., especially 659ff.

----Siegfried, 201, 279, 510.

Stanley, 201, 311, 334, 403, 457,
495-

Stark, 188, 239/, 244, 347, 594.

Stephanus Byzantinus, 17, 363, 593,
598, 607.

Strabo, 16, 25, 128, 157, 183/, 187,
193, 266, 353, 501, 510, 528, 543,
545, 547, 586, 607, 619.

Stubel, chart, 537.

Sybel, 18.

Symmachus, 222.

Syncellus, 363.

Tacitus, 23, 171, 407, 421, 434,
502, 510, 545.

Tahn, 255.

Talmud, 1^9, 141, 202 f, 210, 212,
256, 417, 419, 425, 443, 447, 454,
456, etc.

Targums, 443, etc.

Tertullian, 628.

Theodoret, 632.

Theodorich, 372.

Theodosius, 488.

Theophrastus, 482.

Thomson, 231, 399, 458.

Tobler, 18.

Tomkins, 14, 318, 360.

Transactions of Epidemiological
Society, 157, 159.

Transactions of the Society of Biblical
Archeology, 14.

Travels of an Egyptian, 152, 388 n,

Trelawney Saunders, 195, 207, 249,

I 327, 388.

! Tristram, 58, 269/., 441, 443, 456,
462, 570, etc.

Trumbull, 280.

Tuch, 593.

Tuchem, 372.

Uhlhorn, 632.

Ulpien, 348.

Vartan, 418.

V. de Velde, 230.

Volney, 158.

Waddington, 15, 526, 547, 596,
599/, 618/, 621, 624/, 632^,
636, etc.

Walsh, 19, 158.

Warren, 211, 488.692 The Historical Geography of the Holy Land

Wellhausen, 29, 195, 274, 316, 327,
393, 401, 577, 581, 663.

Wetzstein, 15, 528, 538, 542/., 550,
576, 599/•> 6?4» 626, etc.

Westcott and Hort, 540, 542.
Wieseler,'570.

Wietzke, 223.

William of Tyre, 17, 52, 156, 195,
214, 233, 267, 360, 528.

Williams, 371.

Willibald, 162, 456, 472.

Wilson, 224, 452, 456.	*

Wittenberg, 223.

Wittmann, 19, 63, 156, 158.

Wright, 14, 387, 477.

Zeitschrift alt-Testamentli-

1 CHER WlSSENSCHAFT, 276, etc.

Zeitschrift Deutsches Paldstinisches
| Verein, 14, 20, 63, 76, 131, 148,
163, 182, 189, 214, 222, 287, 346,
353, .413,	44i, 449, 623, etc.

etc.

Z. D. M. G., 628.

Zosimus, 17.

Zschokke, 267, 353.

See also Appendix IV. for Authorities
on Eastern Palestine.

Prinled by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press