The Land of Promise

I now finish the notes of my eastern journey. They are the same in kind as those of the former volume.

I have been short in describing well-known places, and longer in my notes of those not so often visited. Hence the sea-plain, from Sidon southward, has been briefly noticed; while Beersheba, the Interior of the great Mosque at J erusalem, the Quarries underneath the city, and the Mounds of ashes outside, have been taken up more at length. Some topographical discussions, which would have broken up the narrative, have been cast into an Appendix. The list of Books and the Index I meant to have made fuller, but have been staid by the unlooked-for growth and size of the volume.

Lest I should be thought to have but written over again what has been better done already by others, I may say this, that Palestine bears to be often visited, and can afford to be spoken of for the hundredth time without iv

yielding less to one that may come after. Each new study of its history or geography, if rightly guiding itself,’will lay open new formations, and take us down into new deposits. Its great events have not erased each other, as is often the case in other histories. They have not come like wave on wave, or like the ripple on the sand, effacing all that has been before. They have formed so many separate strata, each of which remains for ever, ready to give up its story to any one that will search. Nor in getting possession of these fossils, do we handle dead matter or useless relics. Each of them, so soon as touched, seems to come alive again, and to speak to us with its own fulness and energy and greatness. These old facts are all charged with divine thoughts; and that which is divine cannot die; or if it pass into that state which men call age or death, it yet fails not to retain the vitality of unforgotten youth; and he that casts himself upon it receives into his soul the pulse and quickening of its mighty life, as the dead Israelite when he touched the bones of the buried prophet.

Kelso, December 1. 1857.

Bir-es-Seba, February 15. 1856. — We have crossed the rough bed of the dried-up stream which bounds the desert on the north, and we now pass from “the desert of Beersheba” to Beersheba itself.* This was Israel’s nearest way into “the land,” just as it was ours; but they were “led about” through the borders of Edom and

* I do not understand the position which Lieut. Van de Velde assigns to Beersheba, nor do I recognise, in his description, the wells which we saw. He says, “at nine we reached the wells of Beersheba... they are five in number, narrow at the opening and deep.. they form a group of wells in the shallow dry bed of a stream called Wady-es-Seba” (Syria and Palestine, vol. ii. p. 136). These Jive small wells in the bed of the wady, are quite different from the two large wells, on the bank above the wady, and visible from a considerable distance. Lieut. Van de Velde must have crossed the wady further down, and so missed the real Bir-es-Seba. See Strauss’ Sinai and Golgotha, p. 144; Fisk’s Pastor’s Memorial, p. 213; Robinson’s Biblical Researches, vol. i. p. 204; and lastly, Dr Stewart’s recent work, The Khan and the Tent, p. 214. Eugene Roger, the Jesuit missionary, says of “Bersabee,” est appelle des Arabes El-bit BEEHSHEBA.

Moab, with the swollen Jordan to cross at last, instead of this shallow wady, over which the old man might have gone with his staff, and the little child have passed with ease, holding by the hand of its mother.

What may be the state of this river when in flood, or how long it may retain its waters, we have no means of knowing. It looks more like a genuine river-bed than any Sinaitic wady, and I have seen some of our northern brooks almost as thoroughly summer-dried as this. There is little sand in it, and the well-rounded stones, which pave its entire width, indicate a process of rolling and smoothing, which could hardly be effected by the hasty rush of a three days’ flood from these heights on our east. We leap or scramble down the southern bank, cross the bed, and mount the opposite side, in a fewminutes. The rise of its banks is only a few feet; but they are in some places sharply cut away by the force of the stream as it finds its way westward, through Wadyes-Suny to the Mediterranean. It may have been somewhat widened and deepened since Abraham and Isaac used to cross and recross it; but it has not been much

Abouna Calib, le puy de nostre pere Abraham, autrement nomme le puy de jurement.” Is Calib a misprint for Calilov Khalil? (La Terre Saincte, ou description topographique tres particulier des saincts lieux, &c.,p. 159.) He makes Beersheba four leagues east from what he calls Ziklag, and Ziklag five leagues from Gaza, — in all, nine leagues from Gaza or twenty-seven miles, the exact distance given by Dr Kitto. “The site of the wells is nearly midway between the southern end of the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean at Raphaea, or twenty-seven miles S.E. from Gaza, and about the same, S. by W., from Hebron.”

Abraham’s grove. changed otherwise, I suppose, or if it did change in the day s of Israel or the Romans, it has now gone back to its old state, so that we see it now just as it was when the patriarchs first pitched their tents upon its margin.

All is now bare, with only a few low shrubs to relieve the tameness. It was no doubt this bareness that led Abraham to plant the “grove” mentioned in Genesis, “where he called on the name of Jehovah the everlasting God” (xxi. 33).* As a shadow from the heat he planted it; and to one who had no temple with roof or wall or porch to shelter him, such a shade was needful,

* The word does not strictly mean “a grove.” The expression is, “Abraham planted an eshel” — that is, a tree or trees of that name. It wa3 under an eshel that Saul abode “in Gibeah, in Raman” (or “in Gibeah on a height”), 1 Sam. xxii. 6. It was under an eshel in Jabesh that the burned bones of Saul and his sons were buried (1 Sam. xxxi, 13). The eshel must have been a lofty branching tree, fit for shade, and therefore chosen by Abraham and Saul. It seems to have been not so suitable for the lower and warmer regions of the desert as for the high places of the land. So that it could not be a tar/a (or tamarisk) which Abraham brought up from the desert, but some much larger tree which he had brought down from the higher regions around Mamre where he had already known its shade. Do Saulcey mentions a wady on the south-east of the Dead Sea, called Wady-el-Esal, which he says takes its name from “the thorn-trees and bushes” which cover it (Journey round the Dead Sea, vol. i. p. 294, 480). The likeness between the Hebrew Eshel and the Arabic Esal is worth the noticing, as suggesting that the former was some thorny tree, and inviting us to ask whether it might not just he the prickly oak so common around Hebron and the hill country of the south, the same as is still pointed out as Abraham’s oak. If the tamarisk of -Egypt and the desert be the myrica of the classics, the contrast between it and the eshel of Scripture will strike forcibly those who remember the “humilesmyricse’’ of Virgil, the “fragiles” and “tenues myricae” of Ovid.

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