GEOGRAPHY OF PALESTINE . See Palestine.

GEOLOGY OF PALESTINE I. Natural divisions. The land of Palestine (using the name in its widest sense to include the trans-Jordanic plateau and the Sinai Peninsula) is divided by its configuration and by natural boundary lines into five strongly contrasted divisions. These are (1) the Coast Plain, (2) the Western Table-land, (3) the Ghôr, (4) the Eastern Table-land, (5) the Sinai Peninsula. 1. The Coast Plain extends from the mouth of the Nile to Carmel (the political boundary line, the valley known as Wady el-’Arîsh , or the River of Egypt, is of no importance geologically). North of Carmel, Esdraelon and the narrow strip that extends as far as Beyrout is the continuation of the same division. It is characterized by sandhills along the coast, and by undulating ground inland. 2. The Western Table-land extends from Lebanon to the northern border of Sinai: the headland of Carmel is an intrusion from this division on to the preceding. It consists of a ridge of limestone with deep valleys running into it on each side, and at Hebron it attains a height of 3040 feet above the sea-level; it broadens out into the desert of the Tib (or of the ‘wanderings’) an almost barren expanse of an average level of 4000 feet. 3. The Ghôr is the line of a fault wherein the strata on the Eastern side have been raised, or on the western side depressed. It runs from the base of Lebanon to the Dead Sea, where it is 1292 feet below the level of the Mediterranean; thence it rises to 640 feet above the same plane at er-Rishi , whence it descends by a gentle slope to the Gulf of ‘Akabah. 4. The Eastern Table-land runs along the W. side of the Arabian desert from Hermon to the Gulf of ‘Akabah. It is chiefly volcanic in the character of its rocks. 5. The Sinai Peninsula is composed of Archæan rocks, which form bare mountains of very striking outline. Each of these divisions has special characters of its own. The Coast Plain is composed of sand, gravel, or calcareous sandstone, overlaid in many places with rich fertile loam. The Western Table-land has streams rising in copious springs of water stored in the limestone strata; these streams on the Eastern side have a very rapid fall, owing to the great depth of the Ghôr. The hills are generally bare, but the valleys, where the soil has accumulated, are very fertile. The surface of the Ghôr is for its greater part alluvial. The Eastern Table-land is composed of granite and other igneous rocks, overlaid towards the North by sandstones which are themselves covered by calcareous strata. To the South, however, it is entirely covered with basaltic lava sheets, through which the cones of extinct volcanoes rise. The Sinai Peninsula is characterized by its barrenness, vegetation being found only in the valleys. II. Geological formations. The geological formations of which the above regions are composed are the following. (1) Archæan (granitic gneiss, hornblende, diorite, etc.): the oldest rocks in this region, found only among the mountains of Sinai and Edom. (2) Volcanic (lavas, ash-beds, etc.): found in the Wady Harûn and Jebal esh-Shomar, east of the Dead Sea. (3) Lower Carboniferous (sandstone, blue limestone): found in Wady Nasb, and Lebruj, E. of the Dead Sea: sandstones below, and limestones containing shells and corals of carboniferous limestone species. (4) Cretaceous : lower beds of Nubian sandstone, which is found all along the Tib escarpment and along the Western escarpment from ‘Akabah to beyond the Dead Sea. It was probably a lake-deposit. It is overlaid by a great thickness of cretaceous limestone, amounting to nearly 1000 feet. This is the most important constituent of the rocks of Palestine. Good building stones are taken from it in the quarries of Jerusalem. (5) Lower Eocene : nummulite limestone, found overlying the cretaceous beds in elevated situations, such as Carmel, Nâblus, and Jerusalem. (6) Upper Eocene : a formation of calcareous sandstone on the surface between Beersheba and Jaffa. Its true position is uncertain. Prof. Hull assigns it to the Upper Eocene, but Dr. Blanckenhorn to a post-tertiary or diluvial origin. (7) Miocene Period . No rocks are assignable to this period, but it is important as being that in which the country rose from the bed of the sea and assumed its present form. This was the time when the great fault in the Jordan valley took place. (8) Pliocene to Pluvial Period . During this period a subsidence of about 220 feet took place round the Mediterranean and Red Sea basins, afterwards compensated by a re-elevation. The evidence for this remains in a number of raised beaches, especially in the valley of Sheriah, east of Gaza. A similar phenomenon has been found at Mokattam, above Cairo. (9) Pluvial to Recent Period . In the glacial epoch there were extensive glaciers in Lebanon, which have left traces in a number of moraines. At that time the temperature was colder, and the rainfall higher; hence the valleys, now dry, were channels of running water. Alluvial terraces in the Jordan valley-lake prove that the Dead Sea was formerly hundreds of feet higher than its present level. With the passing of the Pleistocene period the lakes and streams were reduced to their present limits. R. A. S. Macalister.

Hilarion (1), a hermit of Palestine (d. 371). Jerome wrote his Life in 390, quoting Epiphanius, Hilarion's disciple. Jerome certainly considered his Lives of the Hermits as historical ( Vit. Malchi, i.); but the marvels of the Life of Hilarion have induced some to believe it to be a mere romance (Israel in Hilgenfeld's Zeitschrift for 1880, p. 128, but see Zöckler's Jerome, 179). No attempt is made in this art. to separate fact from fiction. The Life of Hilarion in any case shews the ideal on which monasticism was nourished in the 4th cent. Hilarion was born at Thabatha, 5 miles S. of Gaza, c. 300, of heathen parents, who sent him for education to Alexandria. There he shewed great talents and proficiency in rhetoric, which then comprehended nearly the whole of a liberal education. He was of a disposition which made him beloved by all. He became a Christian, and, turning from the frivolous pleasures of the circus and theatre, spent all his leisure in the assemblies of the church. Hearing of the monastic retreat of Anthony, he became his disciple for a time, but found that the multitude who resorted to Anthony made life with him a city life rather than one of retirement. Though but fifteen years old, he determined to become a hermit. He returned to Palestine and found his parents dead, gave away his goods to his brothers and the poor, and went to live in a desert place 7 miles from the Christian city of Majoma near Gaza. The boy hermit was clad in a sackcloth shirt, which he never changed till it was worn out, a cloak of skins which Anthony had given him, and a blanket such as peasants wore. His daily sustenance was 15 carices (a sort of figs). He cultivated a little plot of ground and made baskets of rushes, so as not to be idle. His disordered fancy summoned up a thousand temptations of Satan, but he overcame them all by calling on the name of Christ. He dwelt 12 years in a little cabin made by himself of woven reeds and rushes; after that in a but only 5 feet high, still shewn when Jerome was in Palestine, and more like a sepulchre than a house. The fame of his sanctity spread rapidly and he was reputed to be a worker of miracles and an exorcist. Men of all ranks (whose names and abodes are circumstantially recorded) suffering from hysteric affections, then attributed to demons, were healed. An officer of Majoma, whose duty it was to rear horses for the Circensian games and who had been always beaten through a spell laid upon his chariot by the votaries of Marnas, the idol of Gaza, won the race when the saint had poured water upon his chariot wheels. Hilarion had many disciples, whom he formed into societies and went on circuits to visit them; and many stories were told of his shrewdness and penetration in rebuking their weaknesses. But the crowds who flocked about him made him feel no longer a hermit; and in his 63rd year, the year of the death of Anthony (which was miraculously made known to him), he resolved to set out on his wanderings. Men crowded round him to the number of 10,000, beseeching him not to depart. Business ceased throughout Palestine, the minds of men being wholly occupied with hopes and fears about his departure; but he left them, and with a few monks, who seem soon to have left him, he went his way, never to return. He first turned towards Babylon, then to Egypt. He fled to the Oasis, and afterwards sailed for Sicily. There he lay hid for a time; but his disciple Hesychius at last discovered him. He again set forth in search of solitude; but wherever he went his miracles betrayed him. He at length arrived in Cyprus, the home of his friend Epiphanius. There he found a solitary and inaccessible place, still called by his name, where he lived the last three years of his life, often in the company of Hesychius and Epiphanius. His body was buried in the grounds of a lady named Constantia, but Hesychius disinterred it, and carried it to Majoma in Palestine. Constantia died of grief, but the translation caused joy throughout Palestine, where its anniversary was observed as a festival. Vita S. Hilarionis, in Jerome's Works vol. ii. 13–40, ed. Vall.; Soz. iii. 14, vi. 32; Vit. Patrum, lib. v. c. 4, § 15, p. 568, in Migne's Patr. Gk. vol. lxxiii. His name occurs in the Byzantine Calendar, Oct. 21, as "our Father Hilarion the Great." ^[1]

Ρeleshet . Four times in KJV, found always in poetry (Exodus 15:34; Isaiah 14:29; Isaiah 14:31; Joel 3:4); same as Philistia (Psalms 60:8; Psalms 87:4; Psalms 83:7 "the Philistines".) The long strip of seacoast plain held by the Philistines. The Assyrian king Ivalush's inscription distinguishes "Palaztu on the western sea" from Tyre, Samaria, etc. (Rawlinson, Herodotus 1:467.) So in the Egyptian Karnak inscriptions Pulusata is deciphered. The Scriptures never use it as we do, of the whole Holy Land. (See CANAAN for the physical divisions, etc.) "The land of the Hebrew" Joseph calls it, because of Abraham's, Isaac's, and Jacob's settlements at Mamre, Hebron, and Shechem (Genesis 40:15). "the land of the Hittites" (Joshua 1:4); so Chita or Cheta means the whole of lower and middle Syria in the Egyptian records of Rameses II. In his inscriptions, and those of Thothmes III, Τu-netz , "Holy Land," occurs, whether meaning "Phoenicia" or "Palestine". In Matthew 7:24-273 "land of Jehovah," compare Leviticus 25:23; Isaiah 62:4. "The holy land," Zechariah 2:12; Zechariah 7:14, "land of desire"; Daniel 8:9. "the pleasant land"; Daniel 11:16; Daniel 11:41, "the glorious (or goodly) land"; Ezekiel 20:6; Ezekiel 20:15, "a land that I had espied for them flowing with milk and honey, which is the glory of all lands." God's choice of it as peculiarly His own was its special glory (Psalms 132:13; Psalms 48:2; Jeremiah 3:19 margin "a good land, a land of brooks of water (wadies often now dry, but a few perennial), of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills (the deep blue pools, the sources of streams), a land of wheat, barley, vines, figtrees, pomegranates, oil olive, honey (dibs , the syrup prepared from the grape lees, a common food now) ... wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack anything in it; whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass" (Deuteronomy 8:7-9). "The land of the Amorite" (Amos 2:10). "The land of Israel" in the larger sense (1 Samuel 13:19); in the narrower sense of the northern kingdom it occurs 2 Chronicles 30:25. After the return from Babylon "Judaea" was applied to the whole country S. and N., and E. beyond Jordan (Matthew 19:1). "The land of promise" (Hebrews 11:9). "Judaea" in the Roman sense was part of the province "Syria," which comprised the seaboard from the bay of Issus to Egypt, and meant the country from Idumea on the S. to the territories of the free cities on the N. and W., Scythopolis, Sebaste, Joppa, Azotus, etc. The land E. of Jordan between it and the desert, except the territory of the free cities Poilu, Gadara, Philadelphia, was "Perea." From Dan (Banias) in the far N. to Beersheba on the S. is 139 English miles, two degrees or 120 geographical miles. The breadth at Gaza from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea is 48 geographical miles; at the Litany, from the coast to Jordan is 20 miles; the average is 34 geographical or 40 English miles. About the size of Wales. The length of country under dominion in Solomon's days was probably 170 miles, the breadth 90, the area 12,000 or 13,000 square miles. The population, anciently from three to six millions, is now under one million. The Jordan valley with its deep depression separates it from the Moab and Gilead highlands. Lebanon, Antilebanon, and the Litany ravine at their feet form the northern bound. On the S. the dry desert of Paran and "the river of Egypt" bound it. On the western verge of Asia, and severed from the main body of Asia by the desert between Palestine and the regions of Mesopotamia and Arabia, it looks on the other side to the Mediterranean and western world, which it was destined by Providence so powerfully to affect; oriental and reflective, yet free from the stagnant and retrogressive tendencies of Asia, it bore the precious spiritual treasure of which it was the repository to the energetic and progressive W. It consists mainly of undulating highlands, bordered E. and W. by a broad belt of deep sunk lowland. The three main features, plains, hills, and torrent beds, are specified (Numbers 13:29; Joshua 11:16; Joshua 12:8). Mount Carmel, rising to the height of above 1,700 ft., crosses the maritime plain half way up the coast with a long ridge from the central chain, and juts out into the Mediterranean as a bold headland. The plain of Jezreel or Esdraelon on its northern side, separating the Ephraim mountains from those of Galilee, and stretching across from the Mediterranean to the Jordan valley, was the great battlefield of Palestine. Galilee is the northern portion, Samaria the middle, Judaea the southern. The long purple wall of Gilead and Moab's hills on the eastern side is everywhere to be seen. The bright light and transparent air enable one from the top of Tabor, Gerizim or Bethel at once to see Moab on the E. and the Mediterranean on the W. On a line E. of the axis of the country and running N. and S. lie certain elevations: Hebron 3,029 ft. above the sea; Jerusalem, 2,610; Olivet, 2,724; Neby Samwil on the N., 2,650; Bethel, 2,400; Ebal and Gerizim, 2,700; Little Hermon and Tabor, N. of the Esdraelon plain, 1,900. The watershed sends off the drainage of the country in streams running W. to the Mediterranean and E. to the Jordan, except at the Esdraelon plain and the far N. where the drainage is to the Litany. Had the Jews been military in character, they would easily have prevented their conquerors from advancing up the precipitous defiles from the E., the only entrances to the central highlands of Judah, Benjamin, and Ephraim, from the Jordan valley; as Engedi (2 Chronicles 20:1-2; 2 Chronicles 20:16) and Adummim, the route between Jericho and Jerusalem by which Pompey advanced when he took the capital. The slope from the western valleys is more gradual, as the level of the plain is higher, and the distance up the hills longer, than from the eastern Jordan depression; still the passes would be formidable for any army with baggage to pass. From Jaffa up to Jerusalem there are two roads: the one to the right by Ramleh and the wady Aly; the other the historic one by Lydda and the Bethorons, or the wady Suleiman, and Gibeon. By this Joshua drove the Canaanites to the plains; the Philistines went up to Michmash, and fled back past Ajalon. The rival empires, Egypt and Babylon-Assyria, could march against one another only along the maritime western plain of Palestine and the Lebanon plain leading toward and from the Euphrates. Thus Rameses II marched against the Chitti or Hittites in northern Syria, and Pharaoh Necho fought at Mefiddo in the Esdraelon plain, the battlefield of Palestine; they did not meddle with the central highlands, "The S. country" being near the desert, destitute of trees, and away from the mountain streams, is drier than the N., where springs abound. (See PHARAOH NECHO; MEGIDDO.) The region below Hebron between the hills and the desert is called the Negeb (the later Daroma) from its dryness. Hence Caleb's daughter, having her portion in it, begged from him springs, i.e. land having springs (Judges 1:15). The "upper and lower springs" spring from the hard formation in the N.W. corner of the Negeb (Joshua 15:19); here too Nabal lived, so reluctant to give "his water" (1 Samuel 25:11). The verdure and blaze of scarlet flowers which cover the highlands of Judah and Benjamin in spring, while streams pour down the ravines, give place to dreary barrenness in the summit. Rounded low hills, with coarse gray stone, clumps of oak bushes, and the remains of ancient terraces running round them, meet one on each side, or else the terraces are reconstructed and bear olives and figs, and vineyards are surrounded by rough walls with watchtowers. Large oak roots are all that attest the former existence of trees along the road between Bethlehem and Hebron. Corn or dourra fills many of the valleys, and the stalks left until the ensuing seedtime give a dry neglected look to the scene. More vegetation appears in the W. and N.W. The wady es Sumt is named from its acacias. Olives, terebinths, pines, and laurels here and ten miles to the N. at Κirjath Jearim ("city of forests") give a wooded aspect to the scenery. The tract, nine miles wide and 35 long, between the center and the sudden descent to the Dead Sea, is desolate at all seasons, a series of hills without vegetation, water, and almost life, with no ruins save Masada and one or two watchtowers. (On the caves, see CAVES.) No provision is made in the S. for preserving the water of the heavy winter and spring rains, as in Malta and Bermuda. The valley of Urtas, S. of Bethlehem, abounding in springs, and the pools of Solomon, are exceptions to the general dryness of the S. The ruins on every hill, the remains of ancient terraces which kept the soil up from being washed into the valleys, and the forests that once were in many parts of Judea until invasions and bad government cleared them away, and which preserved the moistness in the wadies, confirm the truth of the Bible account of the large population once maintained in Judah and Benjamin. The springs and vegetation as one advances N. toward Mount Ephraim especially strike the eye. (See FOUNTAINS; EN HAKKORE; GIHON; ENGEDI; HAROD; ENGANNIM; ENDOR; JEZREEL.) Such springs as Ain Jalud or Rasel Mukatta, welling forth as a considerable stream from the limestone, or Tel el Kady forming a deep clear pool issuing from a woody mound, or Banias where a river issues roaring from its cave, or Jenin bubbling from the level ground, are sights striking by their rarity. Mount Ephraim (jebel Nablus) contains some of the most productive land in Palestine. Fine streams, with oleanders and other flowering trees on their banks, run through the valleys which are often well cultivated. N.W. of Nablus is the large, rich, grain abounding, and partly wooded district toward Carmel, which reaches to where the mountains slope down to Sharon plain under Mount Carmel. Extensive woods there are none, and the olives which are found everywhere but little improve the landscape. This absence of woods elsewhere makes their presence on Carmel's sides, and parklike slopes, the more striking. N. of Esdraelon the Galilee hills abound in timber, the land round Tabor is clad in dark oak, forming a contrast to jebel ed Duhy (Little Hermon) and Nazareth's white hills. Oaks, terebinths, maples, arbutus, sumach, etc., cover the ravines and slopes of the numerous swelling hills, and supply the timber carried to Tyre for export as fuel to the seacoast towns. The hills throughout Palestine are crowned with remains of fenced cities, scarcely a town existed in the valleys. Inaccessibility was their object, for security; also the treacherous nature of the alluvial sand made the lower position unsafe in times of torrent floods from the hills, whereas the rock afforded a firm foundation (1618738793_44). Unlike ordinary conquests, the Israelite conquerors took the hills, but the conquered Canaanites kept the plains where their chariots could maneuver (Judges 1:19-35). Appropriately a highland coloring tinges their literature (Psalms 72:3; Psalms 72:16; Isaiah 2:2; Ezekiel 36:1,; 1 Kings 20:28). The hills were the sites also of the forbidden "high places." The panoramic views from many hills, trodden by patriarchs, prophets, and heroes, as Olivet, Bethel, Gerizim, Carmel, Tabor, etc., are remarkable for their wide extent, comprising so many places of historic interest at once, owing to the clearness of the air. The seacoast lowland between the hills and sea stretches from Εl Αrish ("river of Egypt") to Carmel. The lower half, Philistia, is wider; the upper, or Sharon, narrower. This region from the sea looks a low undulating strip of white sand. Attached to the plain is the shephelah or "region of lower hills" intermediate between the plain and the mountains of Judah. Low calcareous hills, covered with villages and ruins, and largely planted with olives, rise above broad arable valleys. Olive, sycamore, and palm encircle Gaza and Ashdod in the plain along the shore. The soil is fertile brown loam, almost without a stone. Brick made of the loam and stubble being the material of the houses, these have been washed away by rains, so that the ancient villages have left few traces. The plain is one vast grainfield, produced without manure, save that supplied by the deposits washed down by the streams from the hills, without irrigation, and with only the simplest agriculture. Sharon is ten miles wide from the sea to the mountain base; there are no intermediate hills, as the shephelah in Philistia. Its undulations are crossed by perennial streams from the central hills, which instead of spreading into marshes, as now, might be utilized for irrigation. The ancient irrigatory system, with passes cut through the solid wall of cliff near the sea for drainage, is choked up. The rich soil varies from red to black, and on the borders of the marshes and streams are rank meadows where herds still feed, as in David's days (1 Chronicles 27:29). The white sand is encroaching on the coast. In the N. between Jaffa and Caesarea sand dunes are reported to exist, three miles wide, 300 ft. high. The Jews, though this region with its towns was assigned to them (Joshua 15:45-47; Joshua 13:3-6; Joshua 16:3 Gezer, Joshua 17:11 Dor), never permanently occupied it. The Philistines kept their five cities independent of, and sometimes supreme over, Israel (1 Samuel 5; 1 Samuel 21:10; 1 Samuel 27:2; 1 Kings 2:39; 2 Kings 8:2-3). The Canaanites held Dor (Judges 1:27) and Gezer until Pharaoh took it and gave it to his daughter, Solomon's wife (1 Kings 9:16). Lod (Lydda) and Ono were in Benjamin's possession toward the end of the monarchy and after the return from Babylon (Nehemiah 11:34; 2 Chronicles 28:18). Gaza and Askelon had regular ports (majumas, Kenrick, Phoen. 27-29). Ashdod was strong enough to withstand the whole Egyptian force for 29 years. Under Rome Caesarea, (now a ruin washed by the sea) and Antipatris in this region were leading cities of the province. Joppa between Philistia and Sharon. is still the seaport for travelers from the W. to Jerusalem, and was Israel's only harbor. They had no word for harbor, so unversed in commerce were they; yet their sacred poets show their appreciation of the phenomena of the sea (Psalms 104:25-26; Psalms 107:23-30). Bedouin marauders and Turkish misrule have closed the old coast route between N. and S., and left the fertile and to be comparatively uncultivated. The Jordan valley is the special feature of Palestine. Syria is divided, from Antioch in the N. to Akaba on the eastern extremity of the Red Sea, by a deep valley parallel to the Mediterranean and separating the central highlands from the eastern ones. The range of Lebanon and Hermon crosses this valley between its northern portion, the valley of the Orontes. and its main portion the valley of Jordan (the Αrabah of the Hebrew, the Αulon of the Greeks, and the Ghor of the Arabs.) Again, the high ground S. of the Dead Sea crosses between the valley of the Jordan and the wady el Arabah running to the Red Sea. The Jordan valley divides Galilee, Ephraim, and Judah from Bashan, Gilead, and Moab respectively. The bottom of Jordan valley is actually more than 2,600 ft. below the level of the Mediterranean, and must have once been far deeper, being now covered with sediment accumulated by the Jordan. The steepness of the descent front Olivet is great, but not unparalleled; the peculiarity which is unique is that the descent is into the bowels of the earth; one standing at the Dead Sea shore is almost as far below the ocean surface as the miner in the lowest depths of any mine. The climate of the Jordan valley is tropical and enervating, and the men of Jericho a feeble race. "The region round about Jordan" was used of the vicinity of Jericho (Matthew 3:5). The Jordan is perennial, but most of the so-called "rivers" are mere "winter torrents" (nachal ), dry during fully half the year (Job 6:15-17). The land of promise must have been a delightful exchange for the dreary desert, especially as the Israelites entered it at Passover (Joshua 5:10-11), i.e. springtime, when the country is lovely with verdure and flowers. There is a remarkable variety of climate and natural aspect, due to the differences of level between the different parts, and also to the vicinity of snowy Hermon and Lebanon on the N. and of the parched desert of the S., and lastly to the proximity of the ever fresh and changing sea. The Jordan valley, in its light fertile soil and torrid atmosphere where breezes never penetrate, somewhat resembles the valley of the Nile (Genesis 13:10). The contrast between highland and lowland is marked by the phraseology "going up" to Judah, Jerusalem. Hebron; "going down" to Jericho, Gaza, Egypt. "The mountain of Judah," "of Ephraim," "of Naphtali," designate the three great groups of highlands. In these the characteristic names occur, Gibeah, Geba, Gibeon (hill), Ramah, Ramathaim ("brow"), Mizpeh, Zonhim (watchtower, watchers). The lower hills and southern part of the seacoast plain is the "shephelah "; the northern part Sharon; the Jordan valley Ηa-Αrabah ; the "ravines", "torrent beds", and "small valleys" ('eemeq , nachal , gay ) of the highlands are never confounded. The variations in temperature, from the heat of midday and the dryness of summer to the rain, snow, and frosts of winter, are often alluded to (Psalms 19:6; Psalms 32:4; Psalms 147:16-18; Isaiah 4:6; Isaiah 25:5; Genesis 18:1; 1 Samuel 11:9; Nehemiah 7:3; Jeremiah 36:30). The Bible by its endless variety of such illusions, familiar to the people of the W. and suggested by Palestine which stands between E. and W., partaking of the characteristics of both, suits itself to the men of every land. ANTIQUITIES. In contrast to Egypt, Assyria, and Greece, Palestine does not contain an edifice older than the Roman occupation. There are but few remains left illustrating Israelite art. The coins, rude and insignificant, the oldest, being possibly of the Maccabean era, are the solitary exception. The enclosure round Abraham's tomb at Hebron we know not the date of Solomon's work still remains in some places. Wilson's arch is probably Solomonic, and the part of the sanctuary wall on E. side. (See JERUSALEM.) The "beveling," thought to be Jewish, is really common throughout Asia Minor; it is found at Persepolis, Cnidus, and Athens. The prohibition (1) of making graven images or likenesses of living creatures, and (2) of building any other temple than that at Jerusalem, restricted art. Solomon's temple was built under Hiram's guidance. The synagogues of the Maccabean times were built in the Greek style of architecture. Tent life left its permanent impression on Israel (2 Samuel 20:1; 1 Kings 12:16; 2 Chronicles 10:16; 2 Kings 14:12; Jeremiah 30:18; Zechariah 12:7; Psalms 78:55; Psalms 84:1; Isaiah 16:5). GEOLOGY. Palestine is a much disturbed mountainous tract of limestone, of the secondary or jurassic and cretaceous period. It is an offshoot from Lebanon, much raised above the sea, with partial interruptions from tertiary and basaltic deposits. The crevasse of the Jordan is possibly volcanic in origin, an upheaval tilting the limestone so as to leave a vast split in the strata, but stopping without intruding volcanic rocks into the fissure. The basins of the sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea resemble craters. Others attribute the chasm to the ocean's gradual action in immense periods. The hills range mainly N. and S. The limestone consists of two groups of strata. The upper is a solid stone varying from white to reddish brown, with few fossils, and abounding in caverns; the strata sometimes level for terraces, oftener violently disarranged, and twisted into various forms, as on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. This limestone is often topped with flint-abounding chalk, as on the western side of the Dead Sea, where it has many salt and sulfurous springs. Dolomite or magnesian limestone, a send-crystalline rock, white or brown with glistening surface, blends with the mass of limestone, near Jerusalem. The lower limestone group has two series of beds: the upper darkish, cavernous, and ferruginous; the lower dark gray, solid, abounding in the fossil cidaris, an extinct echinus, the spines of which are the "olives" of the convents. This is the substratum of the whole country E. and W. of Jordan. The ravine from Olivet to Jericho affords an opportunity of examining the strata through which it cuts. After the limestone had assumed its present outline, lava burst, from beneath and overflowed the stratified beds, as basalt or trap, long before historic times. These volcanic rocks are found in the cis-Jordanic country, only N. of the Samaria mountains, e.g. S.W. of Esdraelon plain and N. of Tabor. The two centers of eruption were: (1) The older about Kuru Hattin, the traditional mount of beatitudes, from whence the lava flowed forming the cliffs at the back of Tiberius; the disintegration of the basalt formed the fertile black soil of the plain of Gennesaret. (2) The more recent, near Safed, where three craters have become the lakes el Jish, Taiteba, and Delata. The earthquake in Uzziah's time (Zechariah 14:5), which injured the temple and brought down a mass of rock from Olivet (Josephus, Ant. 9:10, section 4), shows that volcanic action has continued in historic times. From the 13th to the 17th centuries A.D. earthquakes were unknown in Syria and Judaea, but the Archipelago and southern Italy suffered greatly. Since than their activity has been resumed, destroying Aleppo in 1616 and 1822. Antioch in 1737, and Tiberius and Safed in 1837. See Amos 4:11; compare Matthew 27:51; Psalms 46:1-2. The hot salt and fetid springs at Tiberias, Callirrhoe (wady Ζerka Μain , E. of the Dead Sea), and other places along the Jordan valley, and round the lakes, as Ain Tabighah N.E. of lake Tiberias, the rock salt, niter, and sulphur of the Dead Sea, evidence volcanic agency. The Tiberias hot springs flowed more abundantly and increased in temperature during the earthquake of 1837. W. of the lower Jordan and Dead Sea no volcanic formations appear. The igneous rocks first appear in situ near the water level at wady Hemarah, a little N. of wady Zerka Main N.E. of the Dead Sea. Here and E. of the upper Jordan the most remarkable igneous rocks are found; the limestone lies underneath. The Lejah, anciently Argob or Trachonitis, has scarcely anything exactly like it on the earth. (See ARGOB.) Traces of two terraces appear in the Jordan valley. The upper is the broader and older; the second, 50 to 150 ft. lower, reaching to the channel of the Jordan, was excavated by the river before it fell to its present level, when it filled the space between the eastern and western faces of the upper terrace. The inner side of both terraces is furrowed by the descending rains into conical hillocks. The lower terrace has much vegetation, oleanders, etc. The tertiary beds, marls, and conglomerates prevail round the margin of the Dead Sea; at its S.E. corner sandstone begins and stretches N. to wady Zerka Main. The alluvial soil of Philistia is formed of washings from the highlands by winter rains. It is loamy sand, red or black, formed of sandstone disintegrated by the waves and cast on the shore, or, as Josephus (Ant. 15:9, section 6) states, brought from Egypt by the S.S.W. wind. It chokes the streams in places, and forms marshes which might be utilized for promoting fertility. The plain of Gennesaret is richer land, owing to the streams flowing all the year round, and to the decay of volcanic rocks on the surrounding heights. Esdraelon plain is watered by the finest springs of Palestine, and has a volcanic soil. Asphalt or bitumen is only met with in the valley of the Jordan, and in fragments floating on the water or at the shore of the Dead Sea. Bituminous limestone probably exists in thick strata near neby Musa; thence bitumen escapes from its lower beds into the Dead Sea, and there accumulates till, becoming accidentally detached, it rises to the surface. Sulphur is found on the W., S., and S.E. shore of the Dead Sea, a sulfurous crust spreading over the beach. Niter is rare. Rock salt abounds. The Khasm Usdum, a mound at the S. of the Dead Sea, is five miles and a half long by two and a half broad, and several hundred feet high; the lower part rock salt, the upper Sulphate of lime and salt with alumina. BOTANY. Palestine is the southern and eastern limit of the Asia Minor flora, one of the richest in the earth, and contains many trees and herbs as the pine, oak, elder, bramble, dogrose, hawthorn, which do not grow further S. and E. owing to the dryness and heat of the regions beyond hilly Judaea. Persian forms appear on the eastern frontier, Arabian and Egyptian on the southern. Arabian and Indian tropical plants of about 100 different kinds are the remarkable anomaly in the torrid depression of the Jordan and Dead Sea. The general characteristics, owing to the geographical position and mountains of Asia Minor and Syria, are Mediterranean European, not Asiatic. Palestine was once covered with forests which still remain on the mountains, but in the lower grounds have disappeared or given place to brush wood. Herbaceous plants deck the hills and lowlands from Christmas to June, afterward the heat withers all. The mountains, unlike our own, have no alpine or arctic plants, mosses, lichens, or ferns. Volney objected to the sacred history on the ground of Judaea's present barrenness, whereas Scripture represents it as flowing with milk and honey; but this is strong testimony for its truth, for the barrenness is the fulfillment of Scripture prophecies. Besides our English fruits, the apple, vine, pear, apricot, plum, mulberry, and fig, there are dates, pomegranates, oranges, limes, banana, almond, prickly pear, and pistachio nut, etc.; out no gooseberry, strawberry, raspberry, currant, cherry, Besides our cereals and vegetables there are cotton, millet, rice, sugar cane, maize, melons, cummin, sweet

Euthymius (4) , abbat in Palestine, born in 377, at Melitene in Armenia, and placed at an early age under the direction of its bishop, Otreius. After his ordination as priest he was placed in charge of all the monasteries in and near the place. Finding this too great an interruption to his meditations, in his 29th year he escaped to Jerusalem to visit the holy places, and found a home with a community of separate monks at Pharan, 6 miles from Jerusalem. With another hermit, Theoctistus, he used to take long walks into the desert of Cutila at sacred seasons. On one of these occasions, in the 9th year of his stay at Pharan, they came to a tremendous torrent with a cavern on one of its banks. Here they determined to live, lost to the world. They were, however, discovered by some shepherds, who sent them gifts. The fathers of Pharan also found them out, and came at times to see them. About 411 Euthymius began to receive disciples. They turned the cavern into a church, and built a monastery on the side of the ravine. Theoctistus had charge of it. In 420 Euthymius erected a laura, like that of Pharan, on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, where he would see inquirers on Saturdays and Sundays, and his advice was always given with captivating sweetness and humility. In 428 the church of his laura was consecrated by Juvenal, the first patriarch of Jerusalem, accompanied by the presbyter Hesychius and the celebrated Passarion, governor of a monastery in Jerusalem. A new turn was given to the life of Euthymius by a cure which he effected for Terebon, son of Aspebetus, prince of the Saracens, who, hearing of his fame, brought the afflicted boy to his gloomy retreat with a large train of followers. The prayers of Euthymius are said to have restored health to the patient, and the whole company believed on the Lord Jesus. Euthymius ordered a little recess for water to be hollowed out in the side of the cave, and baptized them on the spot, the father taking the name of Peter. His brother-in-law Maris joined the community of anchorets, bestowing all his wealth for the enlargement of the buildings. The story spread over Palestine and the neighbouring countries, and Euthymius was besieged with applications for medical assistance and prayer. Peter, bp. of the Saracens, on his way to the council at Ephesus, a.d. 431, visited Euthymius, who exhorted him to unite with Cyril of Alexandria and Acacius of Melitene, and to do in regard to the creed whatever seemed right to those prelates. When the council of Chalcedon issued its decrees (451), two of his disciples, Stephen and John, who had been present, brought them to their master. The report of his approval spread through the desert, and all the recluses would have shared it but for the influence of the monk Theodosius, whose life and doctrine appear to have been equally unsatisfactory, who even tried hard to persuade Euthymius to reject Chalcedon, but without success. The empress Eudoxia, an energetic Eutychian, after the death of her husband in 450, went to Jerusalem, and being urged by her brother Valerius to become reconciled to the Catholic church, determined to consult Euthymius. She built a tower about 4 miles S. of his laura, and sent to him Cosmas, guardian of the so-called True Cross at Constantinople, and Anastasius, a bishop. Euthymius came; and after giving his blessing to the empress, advised her that the violent death of her son-in-law, Valentinian, the irruption of the Vandals, the captivity of her daughter Eudoxia and of her grandchildren, might all be attributed to her Eutychian opinions. She should abjure her schism, and embrace the communion of Juvenal, patriarch of Jerusalem. The empress obeyed, and her example was followed by a multitude of monks and laymen. A celebrated anchoret also, Gerasimus, owed his separation from Eutychianism to Euthymius. Euthymius died in 473; his obsequies were celebrated by the patriarch Anastatius and a large number of clergy, among whom are mentioned Chrysippus, guardian of the Cross, and a deacon named Fidus. See Cotelier's ed. of the Vita Euthymii by Cyrillus Scythopolitanus (Cot. Eccl. Graec. Monum. iv. 1, Paris, 1692). ^[1]

taken in a limited sense, denotes the country of the Philistines or Palestines, including that part of the land of promise which extended along the Mediterranean Sea, from Gaza south to Lydda north. The LXX were of opinion that the word Philistiim, which they generally translate Allophyli, signified "strangers," or men of another tribe. Palestine, taken in a more general sense, signifies the whole country of Canaan, the whole land of promise, as well beyond as on this side Jordan, though pretty frequently it is restrained to the country on this side that river; so that in later times the words Judea and Palestine were synonymous. We find, also, the name of Syria Palestine given to the land of promise, and even sometimes this province is comprehended in Coelo-Syria, or the Lower Syria. Herodotus is the most ancient writer we know that speaks of Syria Palestine. He places it between Phenicia and Egypt. See CANAAN .

(pal' uhss tine) Geographical designation for land of Bible, particularly land west of Jordan River God allotted to Israel for an inheritance (Joshua 13-19 ). Various terms have been used to designate that small but significant land known in the early Old Testament era as “Canaan” (Genesis 12:5 ) and often referred to as the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 9:28 ). The area was designated “Israel” and “Judah” at the division of the kingdoms in 931 B.C. By New Testament times the land had been divided into provincial designations, “Judea,” “Samaria,” “Galilee,” and others. Generally, the region was considered to be a part of Syria. Palestine is derived from the name Pelishtim or “Philistines.” See Philistines. The Greeks, familiar primarily with the coastal area, applied the name Palestine to the entire southeastern Mediterranean region. Although the word Palestine (or Palestina) is found four times in the KJV (Exodus 15:14 ; Isaiah 14:29 ,Isaiah 14:29,14:31 ; Joel 3:4 ), these are references to the territory of the Philistines and so properly designate only the strip of coastland occupied by that people. For the purposes of this article, Palestine extends to the north ten to fifteen miles beyond the ancient site of Dan and New Testament Caesarea Philippi into the gorges and mountains just south of Mount Hermon. To the east, it extends to the Arabian steppe. To the south, Palestine extends en to fifteen miles beyond Beer-sheba. On the west is the Mediterranean Sea. It therefore includes western Palestine—between the Jordan River and the Sea, and eastern Palestine—between the Jordan and the Arabian steppe. Palestine west of the Jordan covers approximately 6,000 square miles. East of the Jordan an area of about 4,000 square miles was included in the land of Israel. Geographical Features Palestine is naturally divided into four narrow strips of land running north and south. 1. Coastal plain This very fertile plain begins ten to twelve miles south of Gaza, just north of the Egyptian border, and stretches northward to the Sidon-Tyre area. Usually it is divided into three sections: (1) the Plain of Philistia, roughly from south of Gaza to Joppa (Tel Aviv); (2) the Plain of Sharon, from Joppa north to the promontory of the Carmel chain; and (3) the detached Plain of Acco, which merges with the Plain of Esdraelon, the historic gateway inland and to the regions to the north and east. The Plain of Sharon varies from a width of a few hundred yards just south of Carmel to more than twelve miles wide near Joppa. Covered with fertile alluvial soil and well watered by springs, the area was once covered with extensive forests. Further south is the Plain of Philistia. Here were located the Philistine strongholds of Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath. Salt marshes—the Serbonian bog—located at the southern end of the Philistine plain have been known as breeding grounds of disease. Forming the southwestern end of the Fertile Crescent, the coastal plain has been the highway of commerce and conquest for centuries. This was the route followed by the Hittites and the Egyptians, by Cambyses, Alexander, Pompey, and Napoleon. The coastal plain lacked an outstanding natural harbor. Joppa had roughly semicircular reefs that formed a breakwater 300 to 400 feet offshore and, consequently, was used as a port. Entrance from the south was impossible, however, and the north entrance was shallow and treacherous. Herod the Great developed Caesarea Maritima into an artificial port of considerable efficiency. See Caesare. 2. Central Hill Country The second strip of land is the mountainous ridge beginning just north of Beer-sheba and extending through all of Judea and Samaria into upper Galilee. Actually, the rugged terrain running the length of the land is a continuation of the more clearly defined Lebanon Mountains to the north. The only major break in the mountain range is the Plain of Esdraelon also called the Valley of Jezreel. Three divisions are evident: Judea, Samaria, Galilee. (1) Judea Rising from the parched Negeb (Negeb means “parched” or “dry land”), the Judean hills reach their highest point, 3,370 feet, near Hebron. See Negeb . Jerusalem is located in the Judean hills at an elevation of 2,600 feet. The eastern slopes form the barren and rugged “wilderness of Judea,” then fall abruptly to the floor of the Jordan Valley. The wilderness is treeless and waterless. Deep gorges and canyons cut into the soft sedimentary formations. The western foothills of Judea are called the “Shephelah,” meaning “valley” or “lowland.” The name has been inaccurately applied to the Plain of Philistia, but the towns assigned by the Old Testament to the Shephelah are all situated in the low hills rather than the plain. The Shephelah is a belt of gently rolling hills between 500,1,000 feet in height. Five valleys divide the region, from the Wadi el Hesy in the south to the Valley of Ajalon in northern Judea. These passes have witnessed the conflicts between Saul and the Philistines, the Maccabees and the Syrians, the Jews and the Romans, Richard I and Saladin. Here Samson grew to manhood. Here David encountered Goliath. The Shephelah had great military importance. It formed a buffer between Judea and the enemies of the Hebrew people—Philistines, Egyptians, Syrians. Formerly heavily wooded with sycamores, the region served to impede an attack from the west. (2) Samaria The hills of Samaria descend gently from the Judean mountains, averaging just over 1,000 feet in height. Several notable mountains such as Gerizim (2,890 feet), Ebal (3,083), and Gilboa (1,640 feet) dominate the area. This land of mountains is marked by wide and fertile valleys. Here the majority of the people lived during the Old Testament era, and here significant events of Hebrew history took place. The openness of Samaria is a prominent feature of the land, making movement much easier than in Judea and thus inviting armies and chariots from the north. The valley between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim was a central location, apparently providing the perfect point from which a united nation could have been governed. Roads went in all directions—to Galilee, the Jordan Valley, south to Jerusalem. Here Shechem was located, important to the patriarchs and in the day of the judges. Shechem, however, had no natural defenses and was consequently rejected by the kings of Israel as their capital. From this region the main range of mountains sends out an arm to the northwest that reaches the coast at Mount Carmel. Carmel reaches a height of only 1,791 feet, but it seems more lofty because it rises directly from the coastline. It receives abundant rainfall, an average of 28 to 32 inches per year, and consequently is rather densely covered with vegetation, including some woodland. The Carmel range divides the Plain of Sharon from the narrow coastal plain of Phoenicia. It forms the southern side of the Plain of Esdraelon, with the ancient fortress of Megiddo standing as one of its key cities. This natural barrier caused the passes in the Carmel chain to achieve unusual importance, lying as it does on the historic route between Egypt and Mesopotamia. (3) Galilee North of the Plain of Esdraelon and south of the Leontes River lies the region called Galilee. The name comes from the Hebrew galil, meaning, literally “circle” or “ring.” In Isaiah 9:1 , the prophet refers to it as “Galilee of the Gentiles” (NIV). The tribes of Asher, Naphtali, and Zebulun were assigned to this area. There is evidence of mixed population and racial variety from early times. In the day of Jesus, many Gentiles were in Galilee. The region is divided into Upper Galilee and Lower Galilee. Lower Galilee is a land of limestone hills and fertile valleys. Most of the region is approximately 500 feet above sea level—but with mountains like Tabor reaching a height of 1,929 feet. Grain, grass, olives, and grapes were abundant. Fish, oil, and wine were common exports. Several major international roads crossed the area, and caravan traffic from Damascus through Capernaum to the south was heavy. Josephus spoke of Galilee as “universally rich and fruitful.” Some of the most important cities of Galilee were on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Those on the northwestern shore, such as Capernaum, were more Jewish than those to the south. Tiberias, built in A.D. 25 by Herod Antipas and named after the reigning caesar, became the capital and the most important city during the New Testament era. The terrain of Upper Galilee is much more rugged than Lower Galilee, an area of deeply fissured and roughly eroded tableland with high peaks and many wadis. The highest peak is Mount Meron, at 3,963 feet the highest point in Palestine. The basic rock is limestone, in the eastern sections often covered with volcanic rock. In the east, Galilee drops off abruptly to the Jordan, while farther south, near the Sea of Galilee, the slopes become much more gradual and gentle 3. Jordan Rift Valley As a result of crustal faulting, the hills of Palestine drop into the deepest split on the surface of the earth. The fault is part of a system that extends north to form the valley between the Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon chains, also extending south to form the Dead Sea, the dry Arabah Valley, the Gulf of Aqabah, and, eventually, the chain of lakes on the African continent. The Jordan River has its source in several springs, primarily on the western and southern slopes of Mount Hermon. Several small streams come together near Dan, then flow into shallow, reedy Lake Hula (Huleh). From its sources to Hula the Jordan drops somewhat less than 1,000 feet over a distance of twelve miles, entering Lake Hula at 230 feet above sea level (not 7 feet, as reported by some older publications). In recent years the Jordan bed has been straightened after it leaves Hula, the swamps of the valley have been drained, and the size of the lake has been greatly reduced. Most of the area is now excellent farmland. Over the eleven miles from Hula to the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan drops 926 feet, flowing in part through a narrow canyon. From Galilee to the Dead Sea there is an additional drop of 600 feet. The Sea of Galilee is a significant part of the upper Rift Valley and is formed by a widening of it. It has several names—the Lake of Gennesaret, the Sea of Tiberias, Lake Chinnereth—but it is best known as the Sea of Galilee. Around it most of the ministry of Jesus took place. Here He could rest, escape crowds, find cool relief from the heat. Shaped much like a harp, it is thirteen miles long and seven miles wide. The hard basalt environment has given the lake an almost constant level and size. In the New Testament day, the lake was the center of a thriving fishing industry. The towns around the lake testify to this fact: Bethsaida means “fishing place,” and Tarichea is from a Greek term meaning “preserved fish.” As the Jordan flows south out of the Sea of Galilee, it enters a gorge called the Ghor, or “depression.” The meandering Jordan and its periodic overflows have created the Zor, or “jungle,” a thick growth of entangled semitropical plants and trees. Although the distance from the lower end of the Sea of Galilee to the upper end of the Dead Sea is only 65 miles, the winding Jordan twists 200 miles to cover that distance. The Ghor is about twelve miles wide at Jericho. Seven miles south of Jericho, the Jordan flows into the Dead Sea, one of the world's most unique bodies of water. The surface of the water Isaiah 1,296 feet below sea level, the lowest point on the surface of the earth. Forty-seven miles long and eight miles wide, the Dead Sea has no outlet. It has been calculated that an average of 6.5 million tons of water enter the sea each day. The result of centuries of evaporation is that now 25 percent of the weight of the water is mineral salts. Magnesium chloride gives the water a bitter taste, and calcium chloride gives it an oily touch. Fish cannot live in Dead Sea water. Indeed, it destroys almost all organic life in it and around it. Thirty miles down the eastern side, a peninsula, the Lisan, or the “Tongue,” juts into the sea. North of it the sea is deep, reaching a maximum depth of 1,319 feet—2,650 feet below sea level. South of the peninsula the sea is very shallow, with a maximum depth of thirteen feet. It is thought that this area is the location of “the cities of the Plain” (Genesis 13:12 ), Sodom and Gomorrah. 4. Transjordan Plateau East of the Jordan is an area where the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and the half tribe of Manasseh settled. In New Testament times, Decapolis and Perea were located there. The ministry of Jesus took Him to limited parts of these provinces. Transjordan is divided into sections by several rivers—the Yarmuk, the Jabbok, the Arnon, and the Zered. (1) Across from Galilee and north of the Yarmuk River is Bashan (Hauron), an area of rich volcanic soil with rainfall in excess of sixteen inches per year. The plateau averages 1,500 feet above sea level. To the east of Bashan lies only desert that begins to slope toward the Euphrates. In the New Testament era, it was a part of the territory of Philip, the Tetrarch, son of Herod the Great. (2) South of the Yarmuk, reaching to the Jabbok River, was Gilead. During the Persian rule the boundaries were rather rigid. Both before and after Persian domination, Gilead reached as far south as Rabbah (Philadelphia, modern Amman). Formerly heavily wooded, with many springs and with gently rounded hills, Gilead is one of the most picturesque regions of Palestine. Olive groves and vineyards are found on the hillsides. Jerash and Amman, the capital of the Heshemite Kingdom of Jordan, are located here. (3) South of Gilead lies Moab. Originally, its northern border was the Arnon River, but the Moabites pushed north, giving their name to the plains east of the spot where the Jordan enters the Dead Sea (Ammon attempted to establish herself between Gilead and Moab using Rabbath-Ammon as her stronghold. This succeeded only under the infamous Tobiah during the years of the Exile.) Moab's southern border was the Zered River, Wadi al Hasa. (4) Still farther south is Edom, with the highest mountains of the region. The area is arid and barren. Fifty miles south of the Dead Sea lies the ancient fortress of Petra, “rose-red half as old as time.” Climate Palestine lies in the semitropical belt between 30 15' and 33 15' north latitude. Temperatures are normally high in the summer and mild in the winter, but these generalizations are modified by both elevation and distance from the coast. Variety is the necessary word in describing Palestinian weather, for in spite of its relatively small size, the geographical configuration of the area produces a diversity of conditions. Because of the Mediterranean influence, the coastal plain has an average annual temperature of 57 at Joppa. Jerusalem, only 35 miles away, has an annual average of 63. Its elevation of 2,500 feet above sea level causes the difference. Jericho is only seventeen miles further east, but it Isaiah 3,400 feet lower (900 feet below sea level), consequently having a tropical climate and very low humidity. Here bitterly cold desert nights offset rather warm desert days. Similarly, much of the area around the Sea of Galilee experiences temperate conditions, while the Dead Sea region is known for its strings of 100 plus summer days. Palestine is a land of two seasons, a dry season and a rainy season, with intervening transitional periods. The dry season lasts from mid-May to mid-October. From June through August no rain falls except in the extreme north. Moderate, regular winds blow usually from the west or southwest. The breezes reach Jerusalem by noon, Jericho in early afternoon, and the Transjordan plateau by midafternoon. The air carries much moisture, but atmospheric conditions are such that precipitation does not occur. However, the humidity is evident from the extremely heavy dew that forms five nights out of six in July. With late October, the “early rain” so often mentioned in Scripture begins to fall. November is punctuated with heavy thunderstorms. The months of December through February are marked by heavy showers, but it is not a time of unrelenting rain. Rainy days alternate with fair days and beautiful sunshine. The cold is not severe, with occasional frost in the higher elevations from December to February. In Jerusalem snow may fall twice during the course of the winter months. All of Palestine experiences extremely disagreeable warm conditions occasionally. The sirocco wind (the “east wind” of Genesis 41:6 and Ezekiel 19:12 ) blowing from the southeast during the transition months (May—June, September—October) brings dust-laden clouds across the land. It dries vegetation and has a withering effect on people and animals. On occasion the temperature may rise 30F and the humidity fall to less than 10 percent. Along the coastal plain, the daily temperature fluctuation is rather limited because of the Mediterranean breezes. In the mountains and in Rift Valley, daily fluctuation is much greater. Timothy Trammel

Denotes, in the Old Testament, the country of the Philistines, which was that part of the land of promise extending along the Mediterranean Sea on the varying western border of Simeon, Judah, and Dan, Exodus 15:14 Isaiah 14:29,31 Joel 3:4 . Palestine, taken in later usage in a more general sense, signifies the whole country of Canaan, as well beyond as on this side of the Jordan; though frequently it is restricted to the country on this side that river; so that in later times the words Judea and Palestine were synonymous. We find also the name of Syria-Palestina given to the land of promise, and even sometimes this province is comprehended in Coele-Syria, or the Lower Syria. Herodotus is the most ancient writer known who speaks of SyriaPalestina. He places it between Phoenicia and Egypt. See CANAAN.

PALESTINE 1. Situation and name. The land of Palestine is the territory which lies between the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian Desert as E. and W. boundaries, and whose N. and S. boundaries may be approximately stated at 31° and 33° 20’ N. Lat. respectively. These boundaries have not always been clearly fixed; but the convention is generally agreed upon that Palestine is separated from Egypt by the Wady el-’Arîsh or ‘River of Egypt,’ and from Syria by the Kasmiyeh or Lîtani River, the classical Leontes. Biblical writers fixed the limits of the territory by the towns Dan and Beersheba, which are constantly coupled when the author desires to express in a picturesque manner that a certain event affected the whole of the Israelite country ( e.g . Judges 20:1 ). The name ‘Palestine’ ^[1] in Joel 3:4 ; in Exodus 15:14 , Isaiah 14:29 ; Isaiah 14:31 Peter alestina; RV ^[2] Philistia ], being derived from that of the Philistines , properly belongs only to the strip of coast-land south of Carmel, which was the ancient territory of that people. There is no ancient geographical term covering the whole region now known as Palestine: the different provinces Canaan, Judah, Israel, Moab, Edom, etc. are enumerated separately when necessary. The extension of the word to include the entire Holy Land, both west and east of the Jordan, is subsequent to the introduction of Christianity. 2. Geology and geography . The greater part of the country is of a chalky limestone formation, which overlies a layer of red sandstone that appears on the E. shore of the Dead Sea and elsewhere. Under the red sandstone are the archæan granitic rocks which form a large part of the Sinai Peninsula. Above the chalk is a layer of nummulitic limestone, which appears on some mountains. Volcanic rock, the result of ancient eruptions, appears in the Hauran, Galilee (especially in the neighbourhood of Safed), and elsewhere. For fuller information on the geology of the country, see art. Geology. With respect to the surface, Palestine divides naturally into a series of narrow strips of country running from north to south, and differing materially from one another in character. ( a ) The first of these is the Maritime Plain running along the coast of the Mediterranean from the neighbourhood of Sidon and Tyre southward, and disappearing only at the promontory of Carmel. This plain widens southward from Carmel to a maximum breadth of about 20 miles, while to the north of that promontory it develops into the great plain of Esdraelon, which intersects the mountain region and affords the most easy passage into the heart of the country. This plain is covered with a most fertile alluvial soil. ( b ) The second strip is the mountainous ridge of Judæa and Samaria, on the summit of which are Hebron, Jerusalem, and other important towns and villages; and which, with the single interruption of the piain of Esdraelon, runs continuously from the south border of the country to join the system of the Lebanon. ( c ) The third strip is the deep depression known as the Ghôr , down which runs the Jordan with its lakes. ( d ) The fourth strip is the great plateau of Bashan, Moab, and Edom, with a lofty and precipitous face towards the west, and running eastward till it is lost in the desert. 3. Water supply, climats, natural products. There is no conspicuous river in Palestine except the Jordan and its eastern tributaries, and these, being for the greater part of their course in a deep hollow, are of little or no service for irrigation. In consequence, Palestine is dependent as a whole for its water supply on springs, or on artificial means of storage of its winter rains. Countless examples of both exist, the former especially in Galilee, parts of which are abundantly fertile by nature, and would probably repay beyond all expectation a judicious expenditure of capital. The case of Judæa is a little different, for here there are extensive tracts which are nearly or quite waterless, and are more or less desert in consequence. The climate of Palestine is, on the whole, that of the sub-tropical zone, though, owing to the extraordinary variation of altitudes, there is probably a greater range of average local temperature than in any other region of its size on the world’s surface. On the one hand, the summits of Hermon and of certain peaks of the Lebanon are covered with snow for the greater part of the year; on the other hand, the tremendous depression, in the bottom of which lies the Dead Sea, is practically tropical, both in climate and in vegetation. The mean local temperature is said to range from about 62° F. in the upland district to almost 100° F. in the region of Jericho. Rainfall is confined to the winter months of the year. Usually in the end of October or November the rainy season is ushered in with a heavy thunderstorm, which softens the hard-baked surface of the land. This part of the rainy season is the ‘ former rain ’ of the Bible (as in Joel 2:23 ). Ploughing commences immediately after the rains have thus begun. The following months have heavy showers, alternating with days of beautiful sunshine, till March or April, when the ‘ latter rain ’ falls and gives the crops their final fertilization before the commencement of the dry season. During this part of the year, except by the rarest exception, no rain falls: its place is supplied by night dews, which in some years are extraordinarily heavy. Scantiness of the rainfall, however, is invariably succeeded by poverty or even destruction of the crops, and the rain is watched for as anxiously now as it was in the time of Ahab. Soon after the cessation of the rains, the wild flowers, which in early spring decorate Palestine like a carpet, become rapidly burnt up, and the country assumes an appearance of barrenness that gives no true idea of its actual fertility. The dry summer is rendered further unpleasant by hot east winds, blowing from over the Arabian Desert, which have a depressing and enervating effect. The south wind is also dry, and the west wind damp (cf. 1 Kings 18:45 , Luke 12:54 ). The north wind, which blows from over the Lebanon snows, is always cold, often piercingly so. As already hinted, the flora displays an extraordinary range and richness, owing to the great varieties of the climate at different points. The plants of the S. and of the Jordan Valley resemble those found in Abyssinia or in Nubia: those of the upper levels of Lebanon are of the kinds peculiar to snow-clad regions. Wheat, barley, millet, maize, peas, beans, lentils, olives, figs, mulberries, vines, and other fruit; cotton, nuts of various species; the ordinary vegetables, and some (such as solanum or ‘egg-plant’) that do not, as a rule, find their way to western markets; sesame, and tobacco which is grown in some districts are the most characteristic crops produced by the country. The prickly pear and the orange, though of comparatively recent introduction, are now among its staple products. The fauna includes (among wild animals) the bat, hyæna, wolf, jackal, wild cat, ibex, gazelle, wild boar, hare, and other smaller animals. The bear is now confined to Hermon, and possibly one or two places in Lebanon; the cheetah is rare, and the lion ( 1 Samuel 17:34 , 1 Kings 13:24 etc.) is extinct. So also is the hippopotamus, bones of which have been found in excavations. Among wild birds we may mention the eagle, vulture, stork, and partridge: there is a great variety of smaller birds. Snakes and lizards abouod, and crocodiles are occasionally to be seen in the Nahr ez-Zerka near Cæsarea. The domesticated animals are the camel, cow, buffalo (only in the Jordan Valley), sheep, horse, donkey, swine (only among Christians), and domestic fowl. The dog can scarcely be called domesticated: it is kept by shepherds for their flocks, but otherwise prowls about the streets of towns and villages seeking a living among the rubbish thrown from the houses. 4. History, races, antiquities . The earliest dawn of history in Palestine has left no trace in the country itself, so far as we can tell from the limited range of excavations hitherto carried out. There was, however, a Babylonian supremacy over the country in the fourth millennium b.c., of which the records left by the kings of Agade speak. These records are as yet only imperfectly known, and their discussion in a short article like the present would be out of place. A very full account of all that is as yet known of these remote waifs of history will be found in L. B. Paton’s excellent History of Syria and Palestine . About b.c. 3000 we first reach a period where excavation in Palestine has some information to give. It appears that the inhabitants were then still in the neolithic stage of culture, dwelling in caves, natural or artificial. The excavation of Gezer has shown that the site of that city was occupied by an extensive community of this race. They were non-Semitic; but as they practised cremation, the bones were too much destroyed to make it possible to assign them to their proper place among the Mediterranean races. Further discoveries may ultimately lead to this question being settled. It is possible that the Horites of Genesis 14:6 and elsewhere may have been the survivors of this race. About b.c. 2500 the first Semitic settlers seem to have established themselves in the country. These were the people known to Bible students as Canaanites or Amorites . The success of attempts that have been made to distinguish these names, as indicating two separate stocks must be considered doubtful, and it is perhaps safer to treat the two names as synonymous. About b.c. 2000, as appears by the reference to ‘Amraphel, king of Shinar’ (= Hammurabi), occurred the battle of the four kings and five recorded in Genesis 14:1-24 the first event on Palestinian soil of which a Palestinian record is preserved. The dominion of Egypt over S. Palestine, or at least the influence of Egyptian civilization, must early have been felt, though no definite records of Egyptian conquest older than Tabutmes iii. (about b.c 1500) have come to light. But scarabs and other objects referable to the Usertesens (about b.c. 2800 2500, according to the opinions of various chronologists) are not infrequently found in excavations, which speak of close intercourse between the Canaanites and the civilization of the Nile valley. Of the Canaanites very extensive remains yet await the spade of the excavator in the mounds that cover the remains of the ancient cities of Palestine. The modern peasantry of the country closely resemble the ancient Canaanites in physical character, to judge from the remains of the latter that excavation has revealed; indeed, in all probability the substratum of the population has remained unchanged in racial affinities throughout the vicissitudes that the country has suffered. By the conquests of Tahutmes iii. ( c . 1500), and Amenhotep iii. ( c . 1450), Palestine became virtually an Egyptian province, its urban communities governed by kings ( i.e . local sheiks) answerable to the Pharaoh, but always quarrelling among themselves. The ‘heretic king’ Amenhotep iv. was too busy with his religious innovations to pay attention to his foreign possessions, and, city by city, his rule in Palestine crumbled away before the Aramæan tribes, named in the Tell el-Amarna tablets the Khabiri . This name is identical with that of the Biblical Hebrews ; but it has not yet been possible to put the Khabiri and the Hebrews into their proper mutual relations. The Hebrews represent themselves as escaped slaves from Egypt who (about the 13th cent. b.c.) were led as a solid whole under a single leader (Joshua) to the complete conquest of Canaan this is the account of the Book of Joshua. According to the older tradition preserved in Judges 1:1-36 , they entered the country without an individual leader, as a number of more or less independent tribes or clans, and effected only a partial conquest, being baffled by the superior strength of certain specified cities. This account is more in accordance with the events as related by the Tell el-Amarna tablets, but further discoveries must be made before the very obscure history of the Israelite immigration can be clearly made out. The Israelite occupation was only partial. The important Maritime Plain was in the hands of a totally distinct people, the Philistines . The favourite, and most probable, modern theory regarding the Philistines is that they were of Cretan origin; but everything respecting that mysterious race is veiled in obscurity. As above mentioned, it is not likely that the change of ownership affected the peasants the Gibeonites were probably not the only ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ ( Joshua 9:21 ) that survived of the older stock. And lastly, we cannot doubt that an extensive Canaanite occupation remained in the towns expressly mentioned in Judges 1:1-36 , as those from which the various tribes ‘drave not out’ their original inhabitants. So far as we can infer from excavation an inference thoroughly confirmed by a consideration of the barbarous history of the Judges the effect of the Israelite entrance into Canaan was a retrogression in civilization, from which the country took centuries to recover. The history of the development of these incoherent units into a kingdom is one of ever-fresh interest. It is recorded for us in the Books of Judges and 1Samuel, and the course of events being known to every reader, it is unnecessary to recapitulate them here. It is not unimportant to notice that the split of the short-lived single kingdom into two, after the death of Solomon, was a rupture that had been foreshadowed from time to time as in the brief reign of Abimelech over the northern province (Judges 9:1-57 ), and the attempt of the northerners to set up Ish-bosheth as king against David ( 2 Samuel 2:3 ), frustrated by Ish-bosheth’s ill-timed insult to Abner ( 2 Samuel 3:7 ): Abner’s answer (v. 10) recognizes the dichotomy of Judah and Israel as already existing. This division must have had its roots in the original peopling of the country by the Hebrews, when the children of Judah went southward, and the children of Joseph northward ( Judges 1:3-28 ). Space will not permit us to trace at length the fortunes of the rival kingdoms, to their highest glory under the contemporary kings Uzziah and Jeroboarn ii., and their rapid decline and final extinction by the great Mesopotamian empires. We may, however, pause to notice that, as in the case of the Canaanites, many remains of the Israelite dominion await the excavator in such towns as lay within Israelite territory; and the Siloam Tunnel epigraph, and one or two of minor importance, promise the welcome addition of a few inscriptions. On the other hand, the remains of the population are scantier for it need hardly be said that the modern Jewish inhabitants of Palestine are all more or less recent importations. The Northern Kingdom fell before Assyria, and was never heard of again. Tangible remains of the Assyrian domination were found at Gezer, in the shape of a couple of contract-tablets written there in the Assyrian language and formulæ about b.c. 650; and the modern sect of Samaritans is a living testimony to the story of the re-settling of the Northern Kingdom under Assyrian auspices (2 Kings 17:24-41 ). The Southern Kingdom had a different fate. It was extinguished by Babylon about 135 years later, in b.c. 586. In 538 the captives were permitted to return to their land by Cyrus, after his conquest of Babylon. They re-built Jerusalem and the Temple: the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah are the record of this work of restoration. In b.c. 333 Syria fell to Alexander the Great after the battle of Issus. After his death followed a distracting and complicated period of conflict between his successors, which, so far as Palestine was concerned, had the effect of opening the country for the first time to the influence of Greek culture, art, and religion. From this time onward we find evidence of the foundation of such buildings as theatres, previously quite unknown, and other novelties of Western origin. Although many of the Jews adopted the Greek tongue, there was a staunch puritan party who rigidly set their faces against all such Gentile contaminations. In this they found themselves opposed to the Seleucid princes of Syria, among whom Antiochus Epiphanes especially set himself deliberately to destroy the religion of Judaism. This led to the great revolt headed by Mattathias the priest and his sons, which secured for the Jews a brief period of independence that lasted during the second half of the 2nd cent. b.c., under John Hyrcanus (grandson of Mattathias) and his successors. The kingdom was weakened by family disputes; in the end Rome stepped in, Pompey captured Jerusalem in b.c. 63, and henceforth Palestine lay under Roman suzerainty. Several important tombs near Jerusalem, and elsewhere, and a large number of remains of cities and fortresses, survive from the age of the family of Mattathias. The conquest of Joppa, under the auspices of Simon Maccabæus, son of Mattathias ( 1Ma 13:11 ), was the first capture of a seaport in S. Palestine throughout the whole of Israelite history. The Hasmonæan dynasty gave place to the Idumæan dynasty of the Herods in the middle of the 1st cent. b.c., Herod the Great becoming sole governor of Judæa (under Roman suzerainty) in b.c. 40. It was into this political situation that Christ was born b.c. 4. Remains of the building activities of Herod are still to be seen in the sub-structures of the Temple, the Herodian towers of Jerusalem, and (possibly) a magnificent tomb near Jerusalem traditionally called the Tomb of Mariamme. Herod died shortly after Christ’s birth, and his dominions were subdivided into provinces, each under a separate ruler: but the native rulers rapidly declined in power, and the Roman governors as rapidly advanced. The Jews became more and more embittered against the Roman yoke, and at last a violent rebellion broke out, which was quelled by Titus in a.d. 70, when Jerusalem was destroyed and a large part of the Jews slain or dispersed. A remnant remained, which about 60 years later again essayed to revolt under their leader Bar Cochba: the suppression of this rebellion was the final deathblow to Jewish nationality. After the destruction of Jerusalem many settled in Tiberias, and formed the nucleus of the important Galilæan Rabbinic schools, remains of which are still to be seen in the shape of the synagogues of Galilee. These interesting buildings appear to date from the second century a.d. After the partition of the Roman Empire, Palestine formed part of the Empire of the East, and with it was Christianized. Many ancient settlements, with tombs and small churches some of them with beautiful mosaic pavements survive in various parts of the country: these are relics of the Byzantine Christians of the 5th and 6th centuries. The native Christians of Syria, whose families were never absorbed into Islam, are their representatives. These, though Aramæan by race, now habitually speak Arabic, except in Ma‘lula and one or two other places in N. Lebanon, where a Syriac dialect survives. This early Christianity received a severe blow in 611, when the country was ravaged by Chosroës ii., king of Persia. Monastic settlements were massacred and plundered, and the whole country reduced to such a state of weakness that without much resistance it fell to Omar, the second Caliph of Islam. He became master of Syria and Palestine in the second quarter of the seventh century. Palestine thus became a Moslem country, and its population received the Arab element which is still dominant within it. It may be mentioned in passing that coins of Chosroës are occasionally found in Palestine; and that of the early Arab domination many noteworthy buildings survive, chief of which is the glorious dome that occupies the site of the Hebrew Temple at Jerusalem. The Moslem rule was at first by no means tyrannical; but, as the spirit of intolerance developed, the Christian inhabitants were compelled to undergo many sufferings and indignities. This, and the desire to wrest the holy places of Christendom from the hands of the infidel, were the ostensible reasons for the in vasions of the brigands who called themselves Crusaders, and who established in Jerusalem a kingdom on a feudal basis that lasted throughout the 12th century. An institution so exotic, supported by men morally and physically unfit for life in a sub-tropical climate, could not outlast the first enthusiasm which called it into being. Worn out by immorality, by leprosy and other diseases, and by mutual dissensions, the unworthy champions of the Cross disappeared before the heroic Saladin, leaving as their legacy to the country a score or so of place names; a quantity of worthless ecclesiastical traditions; a number of castles and churches, few of which possess any special architectural interest, and many of which, by a strange irony, have been converted into mosques; and, among the Arab natives, an unquenchable hatred of Christianity. We must pass over the barbarous Mongolian invasions, the last of which was under Timur or Tamerlane at the end of the 14th century. But we must not omit to mention the Turkish conquest in 1516, when Syria obtained the place which it still holds in the Ottoman Empire. R. A. S. Macalister.

See Canaan 2

Joannes (565) Scythopolita, a scholasticus of Scythopolis in Palestine. Photius had read a work of his in 12 books, Against Separatists from the Church or Against Eutyches and Dioscorus , written at the request of a patriarch Julianus, probably Julian patriarch of Antioch, A.D. 471–476 (Phot. Cod. 95, in Patr. Gk. ciii. 339 B). John of Scythopolis was also the author of παραθέσεις or commentaries on the Pseudo-Dionysius, which had a wide circulation for some centuries. Among the Syriac MSS. in the Brit. Mus. there is a Syriac trans. of Dionysius, with an introduction and notes by Phocas bar-Sergius of Edessa, a writer of the 8th cent. The notes are largely a translation of the παραθέσεις (Wright, Cat. Syr. MSS. pt. ii. p. 493). Cf. Loofs, Leontius von Byzanz. (1887). ^[1]

PALESTINE.—The tendency, represented by historians like Buckle and his school, to write history in terms of environment, is one of those remarkable exaggerations of a valuable truth in which the 19th cent. was prolific. Every age which produces elemental theories and sweeping changes in the most widely accepted and venerable views, is liable to this kind of exaggeration. New ideas first stagger and then captivate men’s minds, and the new names which these theories introduce assume magic powers for a time. The next generation smiles at the omnipotence of the catchwords of the first years of evolutionary doctrine, and remembers that other words—‘sympathy’ and ‘perpetual motion’ among the rest—had a similar vogue in their day. Most of all has the power of environment received undue emphasis and been credited with an influence far in excess of the facts, in the case of Jesus Christ. There is nothing which has doomed the work of His purely naturalistic biographers to premature obsoleteness so much as this. Nowhere was Carlyle’s protest in favour of the effect of great personalities so applicable as here. If anything in history is certain, it is that here we have a case in which a unique personality is seen mastering circumstances, rather than one in which circumstances are seen creating a conspicuous personality. Yet the influence of Palestine on Jesus is equally unquestionable. ‘We must not isolate the story,’ says Dr. Dale, ‘from the preceding history of the Jewish race … Many people seem to suppose that they may approach the subject as if the Lord Jesus Christ had appeared in Spain or in China, instead of in Judaea and Galilee’ (Living Christ and the Four Gospels, 89). ‘If, negatively,’ says Hausrath, ‘it be self-evident that Jesus’ mission would have assumed another character had He grown up under the oaks of Germany instead of under the palms of Nazareth, that the subject of Arminius or Maroboduus would have been different from that of Antipas, that the opponent of the Druids would have differed from the opponent of the Rabbis, so, positively, it is indisputable that for Jesus Himself the facts of His consciousness were given Him under those forms of viewing things in which Jewish thought in general was cast. Only by a freak of the imagination can it he supposed that an historical personality becomes conscious of the facts of its own inner life by conceptions other than those in which the thought of the age in general finds expression’ (Hist. of NT Times, ii. 225). Thus we may take it that there is no sentence in the Gospels which can be fairly understood if it be regarded merely as the remark or question of a member of the human race who might have belonged to any nationality. Every word derives something of its significance from the place and time at which it was spoken. Jesus is the Son of Man, but He is also a Syrian teacher. It is Syrian landscape, Syrian history, and Syrian human nature with which the Incarnation works; and we of the West are confronted at every turn by the need to Orientalize our conceptions as we study these records. In this article we shall consider the influence on Jesus (1) of Syria as a whole; (2) of the Gentile elements in the land; (3) of the open field and of Nature as seen in Syria; (4) of the town and village life with which He was familiar; (5) of the city of Jerusalem. 1. Syria as a whole.—Syria is an Eastern land, and the relations and differences between East and West are the first aspects of this subject which demand attention. No phenomenon of the kind is so remarkable as the combination of Eastern and Western characteristics in the thought and work of Jesus. Such books as Townsend’s Asia and Europe and Fielding Hall’s The Soul of a People (to mention two out of many popular accounts of East and West), though their generalizations are not always convincing, are full of suggestive illustrations of this. ‘Though Asiatic in origin,’ says the former writer, ‘Christianity is the least Oriental of the creeds.’ To find lives most typically Christian, we have to look chiefly to Western nations, France and Germany, Britain and America. Indeed, the astonishing fact is evident that in certain respects we have in Jesus an Oriental too Western for Asiatics, so that to a certain extent they have to Occidentalize their conceptions in order to become Christian. This strange fact has commonly been brought as a charge against the methods of Christian missionaries in the East. But there can be no doubt that in some measure it is due to the mind of Jesus Himself. His doctrine of personal immortality, e.g., and still more the triumphant and glad spirit in which He proclaimed it, have a far more congenial appeal to the West than to the East. ‘Eternal consciousness!’ exclaims Townsend: ‘that to the majority of Asiatics is not a promise but a threat.’ Similarly, the prominence given in Christianity to the command to love our neighbour as ourself, in the West will always find at least a theoretical assent, for it will be backed by the sentiment or at least the conscience of sympathy between man and man as such. The East, whose religion is fundamentally a matter of saving one’s own soul, or at widest a matter of tribal loyalties, will find that a hard saying, and indeed has always so found it. Again, everyone must have noticed that in the battles of Jesus against the unintelligent and conventional doctrines of the Pharisees, His constant appeal was to commonsense and the facts of the case obvious to every unprejudiced observer. But that in itself was an instance of the Western type of intellect pitted against the Oriental. Yet, at the depths, Christianity rests upon distinctively Oriental foundations. The very publicity of Eastern life has had its effect upon the Gospels. The whole ministry of Jesus was performed among crowds, in public places of assembly and on thronged highways. His thoughts were flung at once into the arena of public discussion, and even His protests and His disregard of ritual in such matters as hand-washing, fasts, etc., were made under the scrutiny of innumerable eyes. The whole Gospel shows traces of this lack of privacy, and the emphasis of its teachings is often fixed by the angle at which its detail was seen by the onlookers. Again, the great Christian doctrine of renunciation is essentially an Oriental doctrine, typical of Hebraism as contrasted with Hellenism; so much so, that it is to the surprise with which that doctrine broke upon the West that its conquest was in part due. The Oriental has been kept from perceiving how Divine self-sacrifice is, by his familiarity with it as a commonplace of human life. ‘The qualities which seemed to the warriors of Clovis so magnificently Divine, the self-sacrifice, the self-denial, the resignation, the sweet humility, are precisely the qualities the germs of which exist in the Hindu’ (Asia and Europe, 69). Consequently, ‘the character of Christ is not … as acceptable to Indians as to Northern races,’ the former seeking in the Divine a contrast rather than a complement to their human thoughts. Again, that free play of imagination touching even the most everyday subjects, that direct statement of truth, unguarded by qualifications and unbuttressed by proofs, are Eastern rather than Western characteristics. These are but random instances, a few out of very many, and varying in importance from the most casual to the most fundamental, yet they are enough to prove that the thought of Jesus was cast in an essentially Oriental mould. The geographical features of Palestine are strongly marked; and they include, in a very small field, mountains, rivers, plains, lakes and sea-coast. The story of Jesus brings Him in contact with each of these; but the only ones which can be said to have left very distinct traces are the mountains. The Bible is full of mountain scenery, and it owes much to that. The religious thought of the great plains of the world is one thing, that of sea-girt islands is another, and that of mountain-land is a third. The long ranges of Lebanon throw off their southern spurs in Galilee, and the range ends suddenly in the line of steep mountain-side which runs along the northern edge of the Plain of Esdraelon. Not far from this edge, nestling in hollows or crowning heights, lay the towns and villages among which Jesus spent His early years. Hermon is the one great mountain which Anti-Lebanon rises to, standing off to the south, and detached from the continuous range by the deep-cut gorge of the Abana, but sending on the ridge again unbroken, though rugged in outline, past the Sea of Merom on the eastern side, to the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Samaria lies to the south of Esdraelon, a region of finely sweeping valleys and hills of soft and rounded outline. But these hills grow less distinct as the road strikes southward through Judaea. The general level rises to a bare and lofty table-land, from which, near Bethel, rounded heights rise like huge breasts of grey stone from the upheaved bosom of the land. South of that, sheer gorges (geological faults, or the work of flooded winter-torrents) slash across the land from east to west, and open grim and sombre through precipices upon the sunken valley of the Jordan, where Jericho lies steaming in the heat, 6 miles west of the Jordan’s channel-groove, chiselled deep below the level of the valley. Soon Jerusalem is seen, like a round nest among low mountains—a city thrust up from the summit of the land, and moated by deep valleys on two sides. South of that, through the pasture-lands about Bethlehem and the wilderness of Judaea to the east of them, the land slopes down the rolling ‘South Country’ to the Arabian desert. The traveller to-day is often disappointed in the emotions he had expected at sacred sites. The belief in miracle is nowhere so difficult as on the spot, where every detail of the scene seems so uncompromisingly earthly. If, however, he will follow the example of the Psalmist, and ‘lift up his eyes unto the hills,’ he will find the realization of Christ an easier matter. The great sky-lines are for the most part unchanged, and the same edges and vistas are to be seen which filled the eyes of Jesus. This is not merely the result of the fact that local tradition and foolish ways of honouring sacred places have disfigured and stultified so many spots of Palestine. It recalls the fact that Jesus came from the highlands of Galilee, and that He chose to associate many of the most outstanding events of His life with mountains. From the hill above Nazareth He looked abroad on an endless field of mountain tops. Hermon dominated the landscape on the north-east, and Tabor thrust its irrelevant cone, conspicuous and unique, over the undulating sky-line of the mountains between Nazareth and the Lake—a gigantic intruder which had reared its huge head to look down into Nazareth from over the wall of mountains. It was there, with countless mountain summits of familiar name about Him, that the Youth first encountered those tremendous thoughts which finally led Him to the Jordan. Driven thence by the Spirit into the wilderness, He fought His long fight with rival schemes of greatness, in the tract which Judaea thrusts high into the air from the depth of the Jordan Valley, and holds balanced upon the edge of cliffs. Jericho looks up at that mountain of Quarantania, and sees its angular and tilted platform of a summit as a black space cut out of the brilliance of a living, starry sky. From the edge He looked down on Jericho (Matthew 4:1 etc.), and knew the power of worldliness as He saw the palacelife of Herod there, and the glimmer of festive lamps among the palm-groves that had been Cleopatra’s. Mountains were the congenial places for His great utterances in which the Old Law changed to the New, and the freshness as well as the exaltation of these words remind us from beginning to end of them that they are a Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:1). Similarly, by a sure instinct, it was to the heights that He went to find by night the fullest sense of converse with His Father (Matthew 14:23 etc.). Probably it was on some of the slopes of Hermon that such a season of communion brightened to the wonder of Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1 etc.). Hermon’s summit is always white, and many a ‘bright cloud overshadows’ it, until it shines upon the plain for miles around, in a white glory of frosted silver. It is not without significance that Matthew gives as the trysting-place between Jesus and His disciples ‘a mountain of Galilee’ (Matthew 28:16). There is a perceptible air of relief in the words, as if after all those stifling days in Judaea—days of judgment-halls and shut doors in upper rooms, of clouded cross and sealed sepulchre—an irresistible longing had seized Him for the sunlight and the wind-swept heights of His happier early days. Nothing fostered the patriotism of Israel so much as her mountains. From time immemorial they had been her defences in war, and the platforms of her worship. In the story of Jesus they are seen in both these uses, and the feel of the heights is upon much that He has said. Palestine is a little and compressed country, where not only geographical features, but the facts and associations of national history are gathered, so close as to force themselves upon the attention at every step. While travelling there, it is a constant source of wonder that so much could have happened in so small a place. These continual reminders of the past history of the nation, which thrust themselves upon Israelites everywhere, and kept patriotism vehemently alive, had their effect also upon Jesus. The heroes of the past were much in His thought, and His journeys from place to place reminded Him of them continually, Elijah and Elisha, Solomon, David, and Isaiah, were figures not merely remembered from reading in the sacred books. They were the unseen inhabitants of the places where once they dwelt in the flesh, peopling for Him tracts over which He led His disciples. His patriotism is evident continually (Luke 19:9; Luke 13:16). It was a great thing in His eyes to be a son or a daughter of Abraham. Jerusalem, for Him as for the Psalmist, is the ‘city of the great King’ (Matthew 5:35). The waysides are hallowed by the footsteps of the dead. The tombs of the prophets are conspicuous monuments to His imagination (Matthew 23:29). He lived among the dead, and they lived unto God and unto Him in the land where their bones had long crumbled to decay. He receives and is taunted with the title ‘King of Israel’ (John 1:49, Matthew 27:42 etc.). The accusation on the Cross is ‘Jesus, the King of the Jews’ (Matthew 27:37 etc.). Two aspects of the land, taken as a whole, must be remembered, especially if we would understand what it meant to Jesus—Palestine as an oasis, and Palestine as a focus. Palestine as an oasis.—It is shut off from the rest of the world by a complete ring of natural barriers. Mountains on the north; a vast desert on the east, with the deep and long trench of the Jordan Valley set as a second and inner barrier like a moat; desert again on the south; and the west wholly bounded by the alien sea which so few understood—these are the boundaries of Israel. And there was also a double ring of national barricades. At a distance had stood the great empires of the East, the Parthians having taken in His time the place of ancient Nineveh and Babylon. To the south-west lay Egypt. An inner ring of wild Arabian tribes wandered over the eastern desert, and now and then raided the land. Formerly an unbroken belt of neighbouring heathen enemies encircled Israel, and even cut her off from the sea by the Philistine wedge driven along her western coast, stretching from the Pillar of Egypt to the Phœnician seaports. All this was modified, and much of it broken up, in the time of Jesus; but the religious meaning of it all was thus being only the better understood. The whole meaning of the land in OT times had been the isolation of Israel for religious ends. For her, ‘to act like men’ (i.e. to imitate the nations round about her) was denounced by her prophets as a betrayal (Hosea 6:7). As a matter of fact, every experiment which she made in such imitation of ‘men’ was a failure. Under Solomon she had adopted the ‘Policy of Orientalism’ of the great world-empires. Under Jeroboam she had sought to conform to the secular ideas of ritual then fashionable, and had even attempted something in the way of a democratic system of government. Under many kings she had sought greatness in aggressive wars. Under Omri she had, by her alliance with Phœnicia, tried for the position of a great commercial power. In every one of these attempts she had found herself defeated, and driven back on the one thing she could do as no other nation could. That one thing was religion, and the meaning of Israel’s isolation was that worship of Jehovah which grew up with her institutions, and of whose revelations she was the destined recipient and repository. For Jesus also Palestine was an oasis. It is indeed true that the Palestine of His time was no longer the ‘garden enclosed’ which the prophets had striven to keep it. All its hedges were by this time broken down and driven through by the resistless march of Rome. In the heart of the invaded country Jerusalem remained bitterly exclusive and hostile to all the world, so far as the Pharisees could keep it so. Galilee was much more open to the wider thought of the time than Judaea, and Jesus was in sympathy rather with the Galilaean than with the Judaean spirit. Yet, so far as His own work went, He retained and utilized the oasis view of His land. His three temptations were an epitome of the nation’s temptations—‘to act like men’ for bread, or for fame, or for power. In resisting them He was thrusting from His Kingdom the ideals of commercial prosperity, military conquest, and political empire, just as the prophets of Israel had fought against these as national ideals. He remained, and set His speech and His works, among those relationships where God had placed Him. He confined His own ministry and the earlier ministry of His disciples to the land of Israel (Matthew 10:5); and that land was still sufficiently isolated from the thought and life of the world to provide a true cradle and fostering-place for those thoughts which formed the nucleus of the Kingdom of heaven. Thus, in the earliest years, they were sufficiently aloof to gain intensity. Palestine as a focus.—If Palestine was no longer an oasis in the full sense in which it had been so in OT times, it was more a focus than it had ever been before. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a little hollow place with a flattened ball in it is still exhibited to the incredulous visitor as the centre of the world. The cosmography of the Middle Ages took this as serious science, Jerusalem being the antipodes of the island of Purgatory at the other pole. No doubt some such conception was in the minds of many who looked in early Christian times for new heaven and a new earth and a new Jerusalem. Such thoughts were true in a wider sense than the thinkers knew. At the time of Jesus, Palestine was the meeting-point of East and West. For many centuries Israel had been a buffer State between the conflicting powers of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Now instead of Egypt there was Rome, at the height of its military power, and armed also with the spiritual weapons of Greece, whose national power it had destroyed and by the deed had set free its spirit. The eastern empires of Nineveh and Babylon were gone, and instead of them were those changing hosts of Persian and Parthian warriors who were soon to dispute the world with Rome. And behind them, more clearly visible since the campaigns of Alexander the Great, though still dim in the mists of vast distances, lay India and the Far East. The Roman conquest of Syria had brought into immediate and hostile contact two nationalities whose whole history and thought placed them irreconcilably apart. Rome’s ideal of secular empire confronted the Jewish hope of the universal reign of Messiah. Down to the minutest detail of life the two ideals were opposed. To Rome tribute was the obvious consequence of conquest; the theatre was at once a politic and a generous enrichment of the life of the conquered State. To Israel tribute was a sacrilege, and the theatre which rose in Jerusalem a blasphemy. So hateful was the Roman to the Jew, that Jews were a worthless commodity in the Roman slave-market. So unintelligible was the Jew to the Roman, that Tacitus speaks of the nation as ‘given over to superstition, disinclined to religion’ (Hausrath, i. 173–86). These facts are but illustrations of the wider principle, that when a nation with intense national sentiments encounters a nation with strong imperial sentiment, trouble of the most violent kind always ensues. For confirmation of this, one has only to remember the history of Switzerland, of Ireland, or of the Transvaal. In Israel the struggle was only the more acute and inevitable, because the Romanizing policy of the Herods had lent to it the additional aspect of a civil war. Nothing could be imagined more explosive than this state of affairs—a fact which was very clear to the enemies of Jesus (John 11:48). That Jesus also saw this clearly there can be no question; and this, among other things, must have been in His mind when He spoke of Himself as sending a sword (Matthew 10:34), and scattering fire on the earth (Luke 12:49). Towards the Roman power He, in contrast with such revolutionaries as Judas of Galilee, maintained a strictly neutral attitude. It is probable that no words ever uttered showed such consummate diplomatic skill as those in which He answered the question about the tribute money (Matthew 22:17 etc.). His prophecies (Matthew 24:2 etc.) show how patent to Him was the coming explosion of the forces then at play. His policy was to set the word of the Kingdom so fully at the explosive centre, that when the crash came it would send Christianity across the whole world. For that diffusion everything was ready. Great roads had long been open by land and sea for trade and commerce. Even then the Romans were laying down those indestructible causeways by which they united land with land. The Sadducees, who in some respects read skilfully the signs of their times, did all they could to encourage trade in Syria, and to break down the Pharisaic restrictions which hampered it; and in this Jesus was their powerful ally. From the heights of Nazareth He had seen the march of the legions on the Roman road across Esdraelon from Acre to the Jordan, and watched the long lines of laden camels moving slowly from the coast to Damascus and back, along the road that lies like a flung ribbon along the hillsides to the north. When in after years St. Paul utilized the Roman roads for the spread of the gospel, he was but carrying out the work which Jesus initiated when He placed that gospel within the charged mine of Palestine. In the light of one further consideration we see the extraordinary Providence which watched over the situation then. It is a commonplace of history, that civilization and all higher developments of human life spring forward at a bound at the meeting-point of national currents. ‘The great civilizations have always arisen in the meeting-places of ideas’ (Martin Conway, The Dawn of Art, 76). The Norman Conquest offers one of the most conspicuous illustrations, but it is only one of many. The supremely influential meeting of national forces has always been that between the East and the West. ‘The contact between East and West has always been the prolific source of the advancement of humanity’ (op. cit. 59, 60). It was from this contact, induced by the Pilgrimages and the Crusades, that the Renaissance arose. But Christianity itself had arisen at that earlier point of contact, when the Eastern factor was the Hebrew religion, and the Western was Greece and Rome. At the focus of the world Jesus set the light of the world. 2. The relations of Jesus with Gentiles.—Not only was Palestine in close proximity with Gentile neighbours in the time of Jesus; the land itself was overrun with Gentiles, and no account of the meaning of Palestine for Jesus can ignore that fact. His home in Galilee must have given from the first a very different outlook on the Gentile world from any that would have been possible in Jndaea. Far from the centre of Jewish exclusiveness, crossed by great high roads from the sea to the east, and actually inhabited by multitudes of Gentiles from various lands, Galilee was the most open-minded and tolerant part of the land. Commercial and other interests made the Galilaeans acquainted with foreigners, and established much friendly human intercourse. Thus at the outset it must be borne in mind that Jesus was from His childhood accustomed to a more or less cosmopolitan world, and to the ideas current in such a society. The temptation of ‘the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them’ (Matthew 4:8), indicates no new discovery of worldly grandeur, but a knowledge which had been gathering during the experience of thirty years. One fact of great significance in the life of Palestine was that it had to be lived in constant view of the desert tribes to the east of it. Kinglake has described the Jordan as the boundary-line between roofs and tents; and besides the tents of nomad tribes there were also those cities of Edom and the Hauran, where, in a rude kind of civilization, Arab kings ruled their kingdoms. The terror of the desert Bedawîn and the barbaric splendours of these kingdoms both contributed a romantic element, which was enforced by the eternal mystery of the desert, in which all things are seen in a strong light which magnifies their significance and fascinates the imagination. Most of Jesus’ parables of kings and their wars (Matthew 18:23 etc.), and certainly His picture of a strong man armed guarding his house against a stronger (Luke 14:31; Luke 11:21-22 etc.), tell of just such a condition of unsettled government and expectation of surprise as existed on the borderline between Arabian and Israelite territory. In this border region stood the cities of the Decapolis, in which a wealthy and strongly defended Greek life held its own, by force of Roman garrisons, against the desert and the south. The marvellous ruins of J, the two theatres and ornate tombs of Gadara, and the débris of carved stones above the dam which retained water for the naumachiai at Abila, tell an almost incredible tale of luxurious and ostentatious grandeur. The blend of civilization and savagery which such places produce is a phenomenon of the most startling kind. The fact that Jesus visited the Decapolis (Mark 7:31; cf. Matthew 4:25 and Mark 5:20), bearing His high and pure spirituality into that region of the Syrian world, suggests some of the strongest and most dramatic situations which it would be possible to conceive. In this light we see the extraordinary realism of the story of the Gadarenes and their swine and their devils (Matthew 8:28 etc.). It was inevitable that they should have besought Him to depart out of their coasts. And the reaction on His own thought was equally inevitable. He saw the ideals for which He lived and was to die, not as spiritual visions remote from the actual world, or as an advance on its honest endeavours after holiness, but against the background of a life whose gilded swinishness threw it up in all the high relief of the holiness of heaven against earth at its most sordid. And yet it was to this region that He often retired for refuge from the Galilaeans of the western shore, and through this region that He chose to travel on His last journey to the Cross. The relief He sought in it was not wholly that of solitude. Even these degenerate races called for His sympathy; and being unprejudiced by religion, they at least let Him be alone. The sea-coast comes little into the story of the Gospels, Afterwards, in the lives of Peter and Paul, Joppa and Caesarea were to assume an important place. But, so far as we know, Jesus visited it only once, when He retreated to the coasts of Tyre and Sidon from the Pharisees who had followed Him from Jerusalem. The few references which He made to the sea appear to be all subsequent to that visit. They are in every case characteristic of the inland Israelite’s thought of the sea as a place of horror rather than of beauty (Matthew 18:6; cf. art. Poet below, p. 375b). It was natural that the part of the sea-coast to which He went for concealment should have been that of Tyre and Sidon. We are not, indeed, told that He visited those towns, and the word ‘coasts’ may even refer to the landward district near them. Yet, obviously, no place could offer Him better hiding than a manufacturing: seaport town, where He would be easily lost in the crowds of workmen which came and went about the dye-works and the glass-works and the shipbuilding yards, or in the many-coloured throngs of native and foreign sailors on the quays, It is characteristic of Jesus that the record of that visit ignores the whole splendour of the wealthy life of Phœnicia; its temples with their sun-pillars, its markets, and its ships might have been non-existent for all the notice given to them. The one fact that has been found worthy of commemoration is that story where, in inimitable sprightliness and vivacity, we see for a moment the foreign mother, and hear her tale of human sorrow assuaged. Samaria (wh. see) divided Galilee from Judaea by the alien race that is supposed to have originated in a cross between Mesopotamians and Israelites after the first captivity. During the centuries that had intervened there had been time for this nation to settle into a fixed and distinct type of its own, but the race still bore all the marks of its bastard origin. Luxurious and soft morally, with the fertility of the land encouraging the effeminacy, they seem to have relaxed their standards of purity in all directions, and the life of the woman of Sychar (John 4:18) was probably typical of current views of sexual relations. The palace life of Herod at the central city of Samaria, and his intercourse with Rome at Caesarea, upon which he had spent fabulous sums, must have intensified the Bohemian and foreign elements in the national character. The tragedies of the palace, the wild story of the murder of Mariamne and what happened after it, and the subsequent strangling of her two sons in that same palace, were matters within the memory of