cal features, since they exercised an important influence upon the history of the chosen people. But first as to its name.

2

The name of the "Holy Land," which has been most fre quently used to designate the country from the Middle Ages down to our own time, occurs but once in Scripture. The name of "Palestina" or "Palestine," which was applied to the country soon after the Christian era, is used in Scripture as equivalent to "Philistia," or the land of the Philistines.' The ordinary names by which the land is designated in the Bible are the following:

(1.) During the Patriarchal Period, the Conquest, and the Age of the Judges, and also where those early periods are referred to in the later literature, it is spoken of as " Canaan," or more frequently "the land of Canaan," meaning thereby "the country west of the Jordan, as opposed to the land of Gilead" on the east."

In

(2.) During the Monarchy the name usually, though not frequently, employed, is "the land of Israel. It is Ezekiel's favorite expression. The pious and loyal aspirations of Hosea find vent in the expression " land of Jehovah." Zechariah it is, as we have already seen, the Holy Land ;' and in Daniel" the glorious land." Occasionally it appears to be mentioned simply as the land;" as in Ruth i. 1;

2 Zech. ii. 12.

3 'Palestina and Palestine occur in the Authorized Version but four times in all, always in poetical passages: the first in Ex. xv. 14, and Is. xiv. 29, 31; the second, Joel iii. 4. In each case the Hebrew is Pelêsheth, a word found, besides the above, only in Ps. lx. 8, lxxxiii. 7, lxxxvii. 4, and cviii. 9, in all which our translators have rendered it by "Philistia" or "Philistines." The apparent ambiguity in the different renderings of the A. V. is in reality no ambiguity at all, for at the date of that translation "Palestine" was synonymous with "Philistia." Thus Milton, with his usual accuracy in such points, mentions Dagon as

"Dreaded through the coast Of Palestine, in Gath and Ascalon, And Accaron and Gaza's frontier hounds"(Par. Lost, i. 464),

66

66

4 Ps. cv. 11.

998

5 Thus: "Our little ones and our wives shall be here in the cities of Gilead. but we will pass over armed into the land of Canaan " (Num. xxxii. 26-32), and see xxxiii. 51: “Phineas returned from the children of Reuben and the children of Gad out of the land of Gilead into the land of Canaan to the children of Israel" (Josh. xxii. 32. See also Gen. xii. 5, xxiii. 2, 19, xxxi. 18, xxxiii. 18, xxxv. 6, xxxvii. 1, xlviii. 4, 7, xlix. 30; Num. xiii. 2, 17, xxxiii. 40, 51; Josh. xvi. 2; Judg. xxi. 12).

6 1 Sam. xiii. 19; 2 K. v. 2, 4, vi. 23; 1 Chron. xxii; 2 Chron. ii. 17. Of course this must not be confounded with the same appellation as applied to the northern kingdom only (2 Chron. xxx. 25; Ex. xxvii. 17). 7 Hos. ix. 3; comp. Is. lxii. 4, etc. and indeed Lev. xxv. 23, etc.

8 Zech. ii. 12.

9 Dan. xi. 41.

Jer. xxii. 27: 1 Macc. xiv. 4; Luke iv. 25, and perhaps even xxiii. 44.

12

(3.) Between the Captivity and the time of our Lord the name Judæa" had extended itself from the southern portion to the whole of the country, even that beyond Jordan.1 In the Book of Judith it is applied to the portion between the plain of Esdraelon and Samaria," as it is in Luke;12 though it is also used in the stricter sense of Judæa proper,' that is, the most southern of the three main divisions west of Jordan. In this narrower sense it is employed throughout the 1st Book of Maccabees.

14

13

(4.) The Roman division of the country hardly coincided with the biblical one, and it does not appear that the Romans had any distinct name for that which we understand by Pal

estine.

§ 2. The Holy Land is not in size or physical characteristics proportioned to its moral and historical position, as the theatre of the most momentous events in the world's history. It is but a strip of country about the size of Wales, less than 140 miles in length, and barely 40 in average breadth, on the very frontier of the East, hemmed in between the Mediterranean Sea on the one hand, and the enormous trench of the Jordan Valley on the other, by which it is effectually cut off from the main-land of Asia behind it. On the north it is shut in by the high ranges of Lebanon and Ante-Lebanon, and by the chasm of the Litány. On the south it is no less enclosed by the arid and inhospitable deserts of the upper part of the Peninsula of Sinai.

§ 3. Its position on the map of the world-as the world was when the Holy Land first made its appearance in history-is a remarkable one. (1.) It is on the very outposton the extremest western edge of the East. On the shore of the Mediterranean it stands, as if it had advanced as far as possible toward the West, separated therefrom by that which, when the time arrived, proved to be no barrier, but the readiest medium of communication-the wide waters of the "Great Sea." Thus it was open to all the gradual influences of the rising communities of the West, while it was saved from the retrogression and decrepitude which have ultimately been the doom of all purely Eastern States whose connections were limited to the East only. (2.) There was, however, one channel, and but one, by which it could reach and be reached by the great Oriental empires. The only

13 John iv. 3, vii. 1.

10 Matt. xix. 1; Mark x. 1. 14 See espe 11 Judith xi. 19. 12 Luke xxiii. 5. cially ix. 50, x. 30, 38, xi. 34.

road by which the two great rivals of the ancient world could approach one another-by which alone Egypt could get to Assyria, and Assyria to Egypt-lay along the broad flat strip of coast which formed the maritime portion of the Holy Land, and thence by the plain of the Lebanon to the Euphrates. (3.) After this, the Holy Land became (like the Netherlands in Europe) the convenient arena on which, in successive ages, the hostile powers who contended for the empire of the East fought their battles.

§4. It is essentially a mountainous country. Not that it contains independent mountain chains, as in Greece, for example, but that every part of the highland is in greater or less undulation. But it is not only a mountainous country. The mass of hills which occupies the centre of the country is bordered or framed on both sides, east and west, by a broad belt of lowland, sunk deep below its own level. The slopes or cliffs which form, as it were, the retaining walls of this depression, are furrowed and cleft by the torrent beds which discharge the waters of the hills, and form the means of communication between the upper and lower level. On the west this lowland interposes between the mountains and the sea, and is the PLAIN OF PHILISTIA and of SHARON. On the east it is the broad bottom of the JORDAN VALLEY, deep down in which rushes the one river of Palestine to its grave in the Dead Sea. Such is the first general impression of the physiognomy of the Holy Land. It is a physiognomy compounded of the three main features already named-the plains, the highland hills, and the torrent beds: features which are marked in the words of its earliest describers, and which must be comprehended by every one who wishes to understand the country, and the intimate connection existing between its structure and its history. In the accompanying sketch-map (p. 285) an attempt has been made to exhibit these features with greater distinctness than is usual, or perhaps possible, in maps containing more detail.

16

85. About half-way up the coast the maritime plan is sud denly interrupted by a long ridge thrown out from the central mass, rising considerably above the general level, and terminating in a bold promontory on the very edge of the Mediterranean. This ridge is MOUNT CARMEL. On its upper side, the plain, as if to compensate for its temporary displacement, invades the centre of the country and forms an undula ting hollow right across it from the Mediterranean to the Jor

See §§ 15, 18.

16 Num. xiii. 29; Josh. xi. 16, xii. 8.

.

dan Valley. This central lowland, which divides with its broad depression the mountains of Ephraim from the mountains of Galilee, is the PLAIN OF ESDRAELON or JEZREEL, the great battle-field of Palestine. North of Carmel the lowland resumes its position by the sea-side till it is again interrupted, and finally put an end to, by the northern mountains which push their way out of the sea, ending in the white promontory of the Ras Nakhura. Above this is the ancient Phonicia. Behind Phoenicia-north of Esdraelon, and enclosed between it, the Litány, and the upper valley of the Jordan-is a continuation of the mountain district, rising gradually in occasional elevation until it reaches the main ranges of Lebanon and Ante-Lebanon (or Hermon), as from their lofty heights they overlook the whole land below them.

§ 6. The country thus roughly portrayed, and which, as before stated, is less than 140 miles in length, and not more than 40 in average breadth, is, to all intents and purposes, the whole land of Israel. The northern portion is GALILEE; the centre, SAMARIA; the south, JUDEA. This is the land of Canaan which was bestowed on Abraham; the covenanted home of his descendants. The two tribes and a half remained on the uplands beyond Jordan;" and the result was, that these tribes soon ceased to have any close connection with the others, or to form any virtual part of the nation. But even this definition might without impropriety be further circumscribed; for during the greater part of the Old Testament times the chief events of the history were confined to the district south of Esdraelon, which contained the cities of Hebron, Jerusalem, Bethel, Shiloh, Shechem, and Samaria, the Mount of Olives, and Mount Carmel. The battles of the Conquest and the early struggles of the era of the Judges once passed, Galilee subsided into obscurity and unimportance till the time of Christ.

§ 7. The highland district, surrounded and intersected by its broad lowland plains, preserves from north to south a remarkably even and horizontal profile. Its average height may be taken as 1500 to 1800 feet above the Mediterranean. It can hardly be denominated a plateau, yet so evenly is the general level preserved, and so thickly do the hills stand be hind and between one another, that, when seen from the coast or the western part of the maritime plain, it has quite the ap pearance of a wall. This general monotony of profile is, however, accentuated at intervals by certain centres of eleva

17 See pp. 209, 210.