Remarkable characters and places of the Holy Land : comprising an account of partriarchs, judges, prophets, apostles, women, warriors, poets, and kings ; with descriptions of ancient cities and venerated shrines

Front matter

REMARKABLE

CHARACTERS AND PLACES

OP THE

Preface

Between the covers of the Bible is to be found the most wonderful collection of writings in the world. Like the Alps, they are to be seen from every side, they can be approached from every quarter, and they always present some new aspect of interest, or beauty, or sublimity. Nowhere is there so broad and rich a vein of history, of poetr-y, and of human nature, as here.

The present volume approaches these Scriptures, on what may be called their Human side. Without assuming to treat high questions of theology or doctrine, it attempts to bring forward the Human Nature and the real life of the wonderful characters which have lived in the Holy Land. It aims to see and to reproduce them as they appeared in their own day and among their own people. The aged Patriarch sitting in the door of his tent, the young Shepherd-King chanting his inspired songs among the lonely hills of Galilee, the vehement Prophet launching his denunciations in the faces of wicked

FREE A CE.

kings, the enthusiastic Apostle fleeing for his life, these were once living men and women. In the flood of light which has been thrown back upon them, they may have come to appear unreal; rather angels or demi-gods than human beings. Surely this is a mistake; for with whatever amount of divine truth they may have been endowed, they were once men, with passions and appetites like our own; and it is one of the amazing virtues of the old Hebrew writers, that in recounting the lives of their Fathers, their Kings, and their Heroes, they varnished nothing. They told in ( terribly plain words, of their weaknesses, their vices, their cruelties, and their crimes—along with their noble virtues, and heroic deeds. It is this relish of truth which makes the old Hebrew litera¬ ture so wonderful, so valuable, so readable,

To the Human side, therefore, of these striking characters, this volume asks attention.

Beside the personages presented to us by the Sacred histo¬ rians, are some others who have played a part in the great' drama which has been enacted on the scarred and desolated land of Palestine. Herod, and Manamne, and the magnani¬ mous Saladin demand our consideration; and in these later days, Ibrahim Pasha, presiding in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, is a figure worthy of notice.

In addition to the personages, brief but truthful descrip¬ tions of the remarkable places where they lived and died are given—places which their great deeds or great thoughts have made imperishable—and whenever it is found possible, these descriptions are given in the words of truthful men who have stood on the ground they describe. Thus in the compass of

PREFACE.

a single volume, it is believed that a great amount of valuable and interesting matter will be found.

Egypt, too, that strange land from which Moses drew so much of his worldly wisdom, could not well be omitted from this book ; but it is re-presented as briefly as seemed possible.

In the completion of this task, some of the best pens and most accomplished scholars have • contributed. Each writer is responsible for his own words only, and in no case for the statements or vifews of another;

Thus has grown up this volume of pictubeb of life in the

HOLT LAND.

a w. k

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

The Princess Finding Moses . . • •

Egypt and the Riveb Nile ......

The Child Samuel and the High Priest . . .

Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

Mount Sinai and the Plain.

Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives .

Enclosure of the Temple and the Mosk . .

The Friends of Jesus.

The Dead Sea from the North.

Mount Lebanon.. • •

The Citt of Antioch .......

The City of Damascus .......

PAGE

Fboktotock.

. 117

. 195

. 369

. 383

. 413

. 483

. 661

. 574

. 678

Map of the Holy Land

L

THE PATRIARCHAL LIFE.

By Theodore 1). Woolsey, D. D.

PAG*

Patriarch — Ur of the Chaldees—Charran—Tiphsah—Damascus—Star- Worship—The Hamites—The 'City Dwellers—Beginning of the Wan¬ dering—Life and Manners—Orientalism—The Second Generation—The Third Generation—The Fourth Generation—The Religious Faith of Abraham — The Primeval Doctrine—Monotheism — Polytheism—An Objective Faith—A National Religion—Divine Manifestation— A Future

Life—A Subjective Religion—Morality Progressive. 25

SALEH AND 8HAVEH. 38

IL

ABRAHAM THE WANDERER. B. 0. 1921.

The City of Ur—Teraphim Worship—The Voice—Lot—Bethel—The First Sacrifice—The Hills of Judea—Egypt— 1 She is my Sister’—The Second Sacrifice—‘We are Brethren’—Hebron—Chedorlaomer—‘Take the Goods ’—Melchisedek—Wavering Faith—Hagar the Slave—Hospitality —Angelic Strangers—A Child is Bom—Sarah—‘ Cast out the Slave ’ —The Terrible Trial—The Child is Saved—Sarah the Princess—Machpelah, 'The Field I give Thee ’—The Father of the Faithful. 39

HEBRON.. 49

IIL

ISAAC AND ISH1CAEL.

Laughter—The Burial of Abraham—Manhood—Rebeka—Still Childless— Esau and Jacob—Abimelech— 1 She is my Sister ’—The Blessing of Primogeniture—A Prince.

zii

Contents

IV.

JACOB, ESAU, AND JOSEPH.

PAttK

I. The Patriarchal Life

By Theodore D. Woolsey, LL.D.

PATRIARCH—UR OF THE CHALDEES—CHARE AN—TIPHSAH—DAMASCUS—STAR-WOR¬ SHIP—THE HAMITES—THE CITY DWELLERS—BEGINNING OP THE . WANDER¬ ING—LIFE AND MANNERS—ORIENTALISM—THE SECOND GENERATION—THE THIRD GENERATION—THE FOURTH GENERATION—THE RELIGIOUS FAITH OF ABRAHAM—THE PRIMEVAL DOCTRINE—MONOTHEISM—POLYTHEISM-—AN OBJECTIVE FAITH—A NATIONAL RELIGION'—DIVINE MANIFESTATION—A

FUTURE LIFE—A SUBJECTIVE RELIGION—MORALITY PROGRESSIVE.

The word patriarch, denoting the ruler or head of a tribe or sept, was probably coined in the times when the Jews her gan to make a free use of the Greek language, and was in current use among Jewish writers of Greek when the New Testament was composed. In the New Testament it is spoken of Abraham by the author of the epistle to the Hebrews, of the twelve sons of Jacob in the Acts, and of David, by an ex¬ tension of its meaning, in the same book. We shall employ it as denoting the progenitors of the Jewish people in the four generations from Abraham to Joseph and his brethren. With the first of these patriarchs the distinctive characteristics of Jewish history and religion begin. With the fourth genera¬ tion a very important outward change takes place in the emi¬ gration to Egypt, and the character of the line also suffers a

THE HOLT LAND.

change by no means favorable to the progress of religious history and civilization.

At the opening of the history of the patriarchs Abraham appears before us as a dweller in Ur of the Chaldees, situated in Northern Mesopotamia, ‘ beyond the flood ’ that is, to the east of the Euphrates. From Ur, the old seat of his family, he removes with his father and his nephew Lot to Haran or Charran, 1 a little to the south, with the intention of going into Canaan, but remained here until he was seventy-five years old. At this time of his life he was led, after his father’s death, by a divine command and in company with Lot, to separate forever from his kindred, and, moving • southward and westward, without doubt across that same ford of Tiphsah or Thapsacus which gave passage to so many emigra¬ tions and invading armies afterward,—he bent his way by Damascus into the land of Canaan, where, as a dweller in tents, and changing his dwelling from place to place, he spent the rest of his life.

It was time that he should separate from his kindred, if he was to begin a new development of the religious history of mankind. At least this was the case, if we are to interpret strictly that remarkable passage in the last chapter of the book of Joshua, where the fathers of the Jewish people “ who dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time, even Terah the father of Abraham and the father of Nachor,” are said to have “ serv¬ ed other gods.” Of such polytheism in the family of Abraham there is no other trace, until in the third generation the ‘ terap h i m ’ or family penates of Laban, the ‘images’ stolen by Rachel, or ‘ gods,’ as Laban calls them, are mentioned (Gene¬ sis xxxi. 19, 30, 32, 34). Now this same Laban recognized and worshipped the “ God of Abraham, and the God of Nachor,

1 The same with Carrae, where Crassus was defeated and slain by the Par* thians. From this place, favorably situated for trade, roads went out into North¬ ern Mesopotamia. It was a walled border town of Justinian’s empire, and a seat of the star-worshippers, who had there a shri"**, the building of which they referred back to Abraham.

THE PATRIARCHAL LIFE.

the God of their father” Terah. We may suppose that poly¬ theism, and with it image-worship, was creeping into the por¬ tion of the Semitic race to which Abraham belonged; perhaps star-worship had already got a footing there, yet not so as to have rooted out the veneration for the one God of the primeval religion; perhaps also that family cultus, resembling the Ro¬ man worship of the lares, to which Laban was addicted, had begun to corrupt the religious ideas of the inhabitants of Haran. (Comp, especially Genesis xxxv. 2, 4.)

In the land of Canaan Abraham found a people speaking a dialect of the same Semitic language which was his mothertongue. How is this to be reconciled with the statement that Canaan was of the race of Ham ? The difficulty which this genealogy presents is not easily explained. We may however suppose that a conquering race of Hamites—Philistines, Canaanites, and wearing other names—fewer in number but more advanced in .the arts of war, invaded the earlier Semitic settlers of Palestine and adopted their language. With this the tradition, preserved by Herodotus, can be brought into connection, that the Sidonians emigrated to Syria at an early period from the Persian Gulf.

Some of the city-dwellers in this land had already reached a high pitch of wickedness. But with this there appear traces of monotheism,' which are wholly independent of any influence emanatiiig from Abraham and his family. The remarkable form of Melchizedek king of Salem almost startles us, as some¬ thing unearthly, with his noble name of “ king of righteous¬ ness,” with his kingly and priestly dignity combined, with his blessings upon Abraham in the name of “ the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth.”

The life that these four generations of patriarchs led in the land which was to be the home of their descendants deserves our notice. It was the same kind of life, in the main, that Abraham was accustomed to in his old haunts. He left Haran by no means as a solitary wanderer, but with substance

TEE HOL Y LAND.

and with souls which he “ had gotten in Haran ” (Genesis xii. 5), that is, with movable property, consisting both of gold and silver and of flocks and herds, and with slaves acquired by purchase or possibly bom also in his house. In Canaan the domestic animals which he and his descendants owned and reared were neat cattle, sheep, goats, asses, and camels, the latter first appearing in the history of Jacob. Horses, although referred to in Jacob s blessing (Genesis xxxxix. 17), are not spoken of as in use at this early date. The family, as it wandered from place to place, was a large body of servants employed in tending the cattle, together with the immediate relatives of the chief. Abraham appears in Genesis jriv. at the head of three hundred and eighteen trusty or well-trained homebom servants, when he pursues the kings who had taken his nephew captive. And the very great present of flocks and herds which J acob sent to Esau to disarm his animosity (Genesis xxxii. 14—16) shows that,—although naturally on his way back from Syria he woidd not be as opulent as his grandfather,—he was nevertheless a great proprietor and must have had many slaves. These slaves held the most favorable position which it is possible for those to hold who are not their own master. Being a part of the tribe, seldom sold to strangers, in occupation and mode of life scarcely differing from the children, bora to a great extent ‘ in the house ’ and having their own relations there, naturally of the same religion with their master, who was their priest, they must often in process of time have been incorporated into the tribe, have become proprietors themselves, have even married into the family and mingled their blood with the blood of the master. Abraham when he was childless expects that the heir of his property will be Eliezer of Damascus, evidently one of his head-servants (Genesis xv. 2-3). And in another place we read of a man who had no sons but only daughters, one of whom he gave in marriage to his Egyptian servant (1 Chron. ii. 34). It is probable, or at least not unlikely, that when the children of Israel went into Egypt they had many domestic servants, from whom, adopted into the tribes, a large part of the people may have descended—a supposition which will account for the great population at the time of the exodus, that otherwise seems unaccountable.

There is a simplicity about the life and manners of the first generations of the patriarchs, in the.few details which are put on record,—a flavor at once of orientalism and of hoary anti¬ quity,—that is truly charming. Abraham is by no means a modern sheikh, half a robber and half a lord, grasping, revengeful, unscrupulous, treacherous, but a mild, dignified, honorable gentleman, with much experience of life, acquired in his many wanderings, standing as an equal by the side of kings and chieftains, a brave combatant when disaster over¬ took his nephew Lot, yet most peace-loving and ready to make concessions, nursed in the ways of the world yet full of native tenderness, and a stranger to all that is artificial. His very head-servant, in that idyllic chapter where a wife is won for Isaac, is a model gentleman, fit in his manners and gentle grace to be a lord chamberlain. Isaac has another temper and character than his father, but a spirit of the same mould. Untrained by the trial—then so great—of leaving an ancestral home, the child of the tenderness of old age, unused to rough ways, with all his life spread out before him at the outset, he has a quiet, meditative spirit; his character has not been called out by circumstances, so that he has nothing heroic about him, and in fact he can be led and deceived. We might compare him, under protest that the comparison shall not go for too much, to some only son of a rich English country gen¬ tleman, the hope of the family, so tenderly treated and cared for that he betrays a certain inefficiency and want of vigor of mind, but pure, gentle, contented, aiming at nothing higher or broader than his native position, and full of peace within himself towards God and man. It is significant that when a wife was to be found for Isaac he was not left to woo for him¬ self, nor permitted to quit his fond father even on so important

THE HOLT LAND.

an errand, while Isaac’s sons—the one selects for himself with¬ out asking counsel of his parents and against their preference, and the other only so far is influenced by their wishes as to confine his selection within the circle of the family relatives in Mesopotamia.

In the tliird generation the family of Abraham has greatly changed its character. Not to speak of the self-willed, wrathful, volatile, but generous Esau, we find in Jacob’s sons very mean traits, which we are led to refer to his mother’s blood, when we find her to be willing to lend herself to a gross de¬ ception, and her brother Laban to be a thorough trickster and rogue. Yet there is something very interesting in the devel¬ opment of Jacob’s character. He had led his brother in his distress to surrender the rights of an elder son. He had united with his mother to play a scandalous trick on his father, and thus to secure a blessing which was conceived to be of pro¬ phetic import. He was, in short, a hard, worldly, crafty man, with a mind apparently unopened to that religious faith which was the hereditary possession of his ancestors. Yet there must have been good qualities in him in his worst days, and he was worth being made something of—if we may so speak—by a divine discipline. Accordingly trials heavy and long continued are his portion. He flees from his father’s house to avoid the merited vengeance of his brother. He meets with ill treat¬ ment and disappointment in the land of his exile. His favorite wife, long wooed, much loved, is a short-lived possession. He trembles under the apprehension of wrath from the alienated and injured Esau. He lives to see a succession of crimes committed by his children. His old age is embittered by long mourning over the supposed death of his best beloved son, until, as he is drawing near the gates of death, all sorrow at last vanishes, yet not without the necessity of a new removal into a land of strangers. This long series of trials changed and purified him, so that Jacob, that is, the mppla/nter or heelcatcher, became Israel, the warrior of God . In his strong but

THE PATRIARCHAL LIFE.

imperfect character new traits were brought out which made him a worthy successor to the father of the faithful and to his unobtrusive son.

In the fourth generation the character of this series of patriarchs appears to the greatest disadvantage. Whatever be the cause,—whether the evils incident to a family where polygamy prevails, or unfortunate traits inherited from Jacob and from Laban, or sinister circumstances and corrupting in¬ fluences from the growing degeneracy of the inhabitants of Canaan,—none of the older children of Jacob offer to us any pleasant or virtuous traits, if we except a little pity on the part of Reuben and Judah. Only Joseph, whose life lies among foreigners, presents to us a beautiful example of honor, fidelity, discretion, and piety in the new and strange scenes which were allotted to him. But of the other brothers Reuben and Judah were defiled by lust, Simeon and Levi by the grossest fraud and cruelty, and all except the youngest are implicated in a most unnatural plot against the wel¬ fare of their father’s favorite son. It is remarkable that the treacherous murder committed by Simeon and Levi—con¬ duct such as finds its parallel especially in Mohammedan history—is strongly censured in Jacob’s parting words to his sons, ‘ cursed be their anger, for it was fierce, and their wrath, for it was cruel,’ and yet this same conduct is praised without compunction by the writer of the book of Judith, where he makes her address the Lord, the ‘ God of the pa¬ triarch Simeon, who put ifato his hand a sharp sword to inflict vengeance on strangers.’ So much had national fanaticism altered the views and changed the dispositions of the Jews of the later times.

The religious faith and character of the patriarchs is alto¬ gether the most important and interesting point in their history. To one who believes in a plan of God for the pro¬ gressive development of our race, and in a plan involving some sort of supernatural revelation, the calling of Abraham,

THE HOLY LAND.

which in a sense determined the mission and destiny of the Jewish race, mnst appear as one of the great tnming points, 1 or rather beginnings, of human history. And indeed no man who looks at the sequence of events, the economy of Moses, the Jewish dispensation, Christ’s appearance and his universal religion, all of which grow out of the religion and history of Abraham, can fail to ask with great interest, what was the religion of Abraham, what his religious character, how much he brought with him from the East of religious knowledge, how much he handed down to coming time.

We hold, but of course cannot establish within these limits, that there was a primeval doctrine of one only God held by the earliest members of the human family. It is not true that man’s religion was in its earliest form a fetishism such as many African tribes present to us, nor a shamanism, after the fashion of the worship in the northern parts of the world, any more than it is true that he was developed by slow degrees out of a monkey. Nor is it true that polytheism was the older religion, and monotheism a younger generalization or annihilation of a part of the pantheon for the benefit of one of its members; for how could it happen that the Jewish nation, no way distinguished for philosophical thought and prone enough to idolatry, should have had, and should alone have had, this great doctrine of the unity of God from the earliest times ? Nor is true, again, that the Semitic branch of mankind had somehow an unaccountable propensity towards monotheism, differing thus from the other great branches of the human family, for we find that this is contradicted by fact, since the other Semitic nations, as Moab, Ammon, Canaan, the Syrians, the Arabs have been both polytheists and idola¬ ters. The correct view seems to be, that man was at first a monotheist without reflection as he was innocent without cultivation. Had he kept his innocence, he would have kept his sense of an absolute divine spirit But, losing that, he fell under the dominion of nature; the powers of nature became

THE PATRIARCHAL LIFE.

persons, -while the personality of the one God was lost sight of, or he was degraded to be the head of the pantheon; and for man’s sensual mind it was necessary that divine attributes should be represented by material symbols and be confined in their action to particular places. Thus polytheism with its handmaid idolatry is not another form of the same mode of thinking which embraces monotheism, but the two rest on different foundations, the one being the religion of nature, the other the worship of pure Spirit. The one may be sup¬ planted by the other, as Christian ideas have driven polythe¬ ism out of a large part of the world, and Mohammedanism, an offshoot of Judaism, has worked in the same direction; but polytheism never of itself in the progress of cultivation has run into the doctrine of one sole infinite God.

According to these views, there might be true doctrine concerning the deity before the time of Abraham, among his ancestors and elsewhere, but idol-worship was triumphing and spreading on every side. He who calls to mind that the Jews kept running into the worship of strange gods notwithstand¬ ing all their light, and that neither philosophy nor political liberty drove polytheism out of Greece, will admit that there was a proclivity in this direction of which we can now scarcely form an idea. The question then was, whether the knowledge of the infinite one would not fade out of human life and wor¬ ship. This question, according to the divine plan, it was the part of Abraham and of his posterity to settle in favor of the maintenance and the final triumph of monotheism.

The religion of the patriarchs, as an objective faith, may be considered under two aspects. First, it was the simple mono¬ theistic creed which had been held and cherished by the good enlightened men of the primeval world. It was a faith in the omnipotent God, possessor of heaven and earth, the judge of all the earth who doeth right,—a faitli in which Melchizedek and Laban shared, which remained with more or less purity across the Euphrates in the old home of the Hebrews, in

THE EOL Y LA ED.

Edom perhaps, and in. Midian, where the father-in-law of Moses may have held it, and in the land of Uz at the time of Job, in whose story, when he and his friends discourse, out of regard to historical truth, God is called God and the Almighty, but almost never by his peculiarly Jewish and covenant name of Jehovah. What historical facts entered into this faith we cannot tell, nor how much of the earlier portions of Genesis was embraced within the traditions of the fathers. Thus much, however, may be safely assumed: that an article of that creed was, that God was in history as well as in nature, and in history by manifestations of himself in various ways to par¬ ticular individuals.

But the religion of the patriarchs appears also as the beginning of a family and national religion, in which, by promises of special blessings, God is represented as seeking to bind them and their descendants to himself. In this way they were to be the keepers and transmitters of religion, until in due time, divested of its national narrowness, it could spread over the earth, and all the families of the earth be blessed. These promises were such as a grant of the land of their emi¬ gration, a numerous posterity, and the special guardianship of divine Providence over the race, They were given in circum¬ stances which rendered them most unlikely to be fulfilled: thus a moral discipline went with the promise, which was further carried out by trials or ‘temptations’ as they are called, which strengthened faith by the difficulties it had to surmount. In this way a firm persuasion was wrought into the minds of the good men in the Jewish nation, a point of support was given to national institutions and character, and God, the pro¬ tector of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is now become the God of the Jewish people. In the patriarchal times, according to an interpretation of Exodus vi. 3, which we regard as most probable, a preparation was made in the patriarchal history for the national, and the name of Jehovah, specially appro¬ priate to the development of the divine character and relations,

THE PATRIARCHAL LIFE.

was in received use although not yet "known , that is, in its force and meaning not fully comprehended.

The patriarchal religion had also its modes of divine reve¬ lation and manifestation, as well in the hours of wakefulness as of sleep, by a divine voice without a form and by the angel of the Lord, in plain language and in symbolical visions, in the way of announcement of commands and instant events, and in the way of prophecy of the far distant future. The revelations, as in the other stages of religious history, are most numerous at first and dwindle at last in number and import¬ ance, until an age ensued when, for aught that appears, the nation was left to itself. Then came.the economy of Moses.

Among the forms of divine manifestation is that of the angel of the Lord, and a question very difficult to resolve with entire satisfaction is, whether by this expression is meant the appearance of God himself—a theophany, to use a learned word-—or of some being acting as his messenger. The later Hebrew books know of angels in our customary sense of that term, of which there is more than one proof in the Psalms. In Moses’ blessing again (Deuteronomy xxxiii. 2) God is repre¬ sented, when giving the law, as surrounded by ten thousands of holy ones, and in Jacob’s dream the angels of God, ascending and descending the ladder that reached to heaven, are contrasted with the Lord who stood above it. But we are constrained to believe that in the earliest books where the messenger or angel of God appears, it is no other than God himself. He or his manifestation is his messenger.

It may be asked also whether the patriarchs had any doc¬ trine of a future life. Without entering at large into this inquiry, we content ourselves with saying that they may have had longings and a hopeful faith which scarcely assumed the form of a definite proposition; we may even concede that the phrase, ‘to be gathered unto the fathers,’ may denote a place of assembly of souls, and not merely a common sepulchre. But however this might be, no doctrine of a future life is promi-

THE HOLY LAND.

nent in the early scriptures; no faith in such a truth dwelt in the thoughts or influenced the life of the Hebrews in Abraham’s time? or long afterward, else we should hear of it from their lips, and it would be more fully expressed in their religious songs. At the most it was a hope, and the scriptures of the Jews do not draw motives from it for the present life.

Thus the food for the subjective religion, or the piety, of the patriarchs was drawn from but a few of those sources which are opened to believers in the Christian scheme. But notwithstanding the narrow range of their horizon, there is something very delightful in that religious character of which Abraham is the most sincere type. Theirs was an unspeculative creed ; their curiosity was small, their circuit of thought restricted ; but how charming is their native, childlike, simplehearted faith ; how honest and full of reality their veneration^ how unquestioning their obedience. Compare them with their progenitors, and you find them possessed of one new incite¬ ment to piety—the specific promises relating to their race and their dwelling-place, which brings them nearer to God. Compare them with their posterity, and you find more of affectionate confidence iu God, more familiarity, more close¬ ness of communion. How like a child with a father Abra¬ ham pleads with God that Sodom may be spared! “ Shall not the judge of all the earth do right ?” “ That the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee.” And this, when the pleader feels that he is “ but dust and ashes,” and cries, “O let not the Lord be angry with me and I will speak.” He was, in short, the friend of God. The law, with its punc¬ tilious observances and its threatenings, had not yet aroused that dread of God which was a necessary step in the educa¬ tion of the race towards a more noble religion. ' This religion of man’s childhood, as we see it in the best of the patriarchs, was as far removed from what is called the childhood of heathenism as possible. That is marked by terror and guilt, or by licentious indifference. This is marked by trust and steady obedience.