Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

iron walls blow their trumpets-the walls fall-the sun stands still, and the winds fly to his aid, and the horses of the conquerors plunge up to their nostrils in the blood of the enemy.

This wild story points no doubt to the bond of union which in the great extremities of war was kept up between the two banks of the Jordan. The battle-cry of the eastern portion of Manasseh seems to have extended to the whole tribe-Whosoever is fearful and afraid, let him depart from Mount 'Gilead."2 But their usual relations belong to a more touching class of recollections and anticipations.

[ocr errors]

The East the refuge

of the West.

Those eastern hills were to the Western Israelites the land of exile the refuge of exiles. One place there was in its beautiful uplands consecrated by the presence of God in primeval times. 'Mahanaim' marked the spot where Jacob had divided his people into two 'hosts,' and seen the Two Hosts' of the angelic vision.3 To this scene of the great crisis in their ancestor's life the thoughts of his descendants returned in after years, whenever foreign conquest or civil discord drove them from their native hills on the west of Jordan-when Abner fled from the Philistines, when David fled from Absalom, when the Israelite captives lingered there on the way to Babylon, when David's greater Son found there a refuge from the busy world which filled Jerusalem and the Sea of Galilee, when the infant Christian Church of Palestine escaped to Pella from the armies of Titus. From these heights, one and all of these exiles must have caught the last glimpse of their familiar mountains. There is one plaintive strain which sums up all these feelings—the 42nd Psalm. Its date and authorship are uncertain, but the place is beyond doubt the Trans-Jordanic hills, which always behold, as they are always beheld from, Western Palestine. As, before the eyes of the exile, the 'gazelle' of the forest of Gilead panted after the fresh streams of water which thence descended to the Jordan, so his soul panted after God, from whose outward presence he was shut out. The river with its winding

1 Samaritan Joshua, ch. 37.

3 See Lecture III.

2

* Judg. vii. 3. See Lecture XV.

rapids, 'deep calling to deep,' lay between him and his home. All that he could now do was to remember the past, as he stood in the land of Jordan,' as he saw the peaks of 'Hermon,' as he found himself on the eastern heights of Mizar, which reminded him of his banishment and solitude. The Peræan hills are the 'Pisgah' of the earlier history. To the later history they occupy the pathetic relation that has been immortalised in the name of the long ridge from which the first and the last view of Granada is obtained; they are 'The Last Sigh' of the Israelite exile. In our own time, perhaps in all times of their history, they have furnished to the familiar scenes of Western Palestine a shadowy background, which imparts to the tamest feature of the landscape a mysterious and romantic charm, a sense as of another world, to the dweller on this side of the dividing chasm almost inaccessible, yet always overhanging the distant view with a presence not to be put by. And with this thought there must have been blended, in large periods of the Jewish history, a feeling which has now long since died away--that from these Eastern mountains, and from the desert beyond them, would be the great Return of the scattered members of the race. 'Mine own will 'I bring again from Bashan,'-' How beautiful on the moun'tains [of the East] are the feet of him that bringeth good 'tidings'-' Make straight in the desert [beyond the Jordan] a 'highway for our God.' 1

1 Ps. lxviii. 22; Isa. lii. 7, xl. 3.

LECTURE X.

THE CONQUEST OF WESTERN PALESTINE-THE FALL OF

JERICHO.

THE Conquest of Eastern Palestine has been drawn out at length in the preceding Lecture, because, from the scanty and fragmentary notices of it in the narrative, we are in danger of losing sight altogether of a remarkable portion both of the Holy Land and of the Sacred history. But it is a true feeling which has caused the chief attention to be fixed on the conquest of the western rather than of the eastern shores of the Jordan, as the turning-point, in this stage, of the fortunes of the Jewish Church and nation.

Conquest of
Western
Palestine.

[ocr errors]

We have seen what the Eastern territory was-how congenial to the nomadic habits of a hitherto pastoral people: a land in some respects so far superior, both in beauty and fertility, to the rugged mountains on the further side. The Lord had made them ride on the high 'places of the earth, that they might eat the increase of the 'fields; and He made them to suck honey out of the "cliff," 'and oil out of the flinty rock; butter of kine, and milk of sheep; with fat of lambs, and rams of the breed of Bashan, 'and goats; with the fat of kidneys, of wheat, and . . . the 'pure blood of the grape.'1 So we are told, spoke their Prophetleader, whilst they were still in enjoyment of this rich country. Yet forwards they went. It was the same high calling-whether we give it the name of destiny or Providence-which had already drawn Abraham from Mesopotamia, and Moses from the court of Memphis. They knew not what was before them; they knew not what depended on their crossing the Jordan,

1 Deut. xxxii. 13, 14.

on their becoming a settled and agricultural, instead of a nomadic people,-on their reaching to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and from those shores receiving the influences of the Western world, and sending forth to that Western world their influences in return. They knew not, but we know; and the more we hear of the beauty of the TransJordanic territory, the greater is the wonder-the greater, we may say, should be our thankfulness-that they exchanged it for Palestine itself; inferior as it might naturally have seemed to them in every point, except for the high purposes to which they were called, and for which their permanent settlement on the eastern side of the Jordan would, humanly speaking, have wholly unfitted them.

scene.

Phinehas.

It was to inaugurate this new era, of a dangerous present and a boundless future, that a new character appears on the In the Eastern conquest, we have but faintly perceived the hands by which the victory was won, and the people guided. Moses, indeed, is still living; but his command in battle is hardly noticed. Of Jair and Nobah we know scarce anything but the names. The most remarkable leader of that transitional period, whose career overlaps also that on which we are now entering, is the famous son of the High Priest Eleazar, who in his Egyptian name bore the last trace of their Egyptian sojourn. Phinehas, rather than his father, figures throughout this period as the leading member of the hierarchy. In the conflict with Midian,2 in the dispute with the Reubenites, in the war with the Benjamites,3 he is the chief oracle and adviser. On him is pronounced the blessing which secured to his descendants the inheritance of the priesthood, as though up to that time the succession had been in uncertainty. He was long known as the ruler or commander of the Levite guard, and as the type of indomitable zeal. In later Jewish traditions, he is supposed to have received, through the blessing upon his zeal, the gift of immortality, and to have continued.

4

'Brugsch, Egypt, 174.

2 See Lecture IX.

3 See Lecture XIII.

5

* Num. xxv. 13; Ps. cvi. 30; 1 Ch. ix. 20. Fabricius, Cod. Pseudep. i. 893, 894.

on the earth till he reappeared as Elijah; and thus, in Mussulman fancy, he claims, with Elijah, Jethro, and S. George, to be identified with the mysterious Wanderer, who goes to and fro1 on the earth, to set right the wrong and to make clear the dark. But the fierce priest was not to be the successor of the first of the Prophets. It was from another tribe, and from another class of character, that Moses had chosen his constant companion, his ministering servant. Every great prophet had such an attendant, and the attendant of Moses was Joshua the son of Nun. He, according to Jewish tradition,2 was the bosom friend, the first example of pure and dear friendship in the Jewish Church: and to him, rather than to any hereditary kinsman, was the guidance of the nation intrusted.

Joshua.

6

Never, in the history of the Chosen People, could there have been such a blank as that when they became conscious that Moses the servant of the Lord was dead.' He who had been their leader, their lawgiver, their oracle, as far back as their memory could reach, was taken from them at the very moment when they seemed most to need him. It was to fill up this blank that Joshua was called. The narrative labours to impress upon us the sense that the continuity of the nation and of its high purpose was not broken by the change of person and situation. 'As I was with Moses, so will I be with thee. I will not fail thee,3 nor forsake thee.' There was, indeed, as yet, no hereditary or fixed succession. But the germ of that succession is better represented by the very contrast between Moses and Joshua than in any other passage in the Sacred history.

The voice that from the glory came,

To tell how Moses died unseen,
And waken Joshua's spear of flame

To victory on the mountains green,
Its trumpet tones are sounding still,
When kings or parents pass away;
They greet us with a cheering thrill
Of power or comfort in decay.*

'See Lecture VIII.
2 Philo, De Caritate, ii. 384, 385.

3

3 Josh. i. 4.

This poem in Keble's Christian Year

« AnteriorContinuar »