'Canaanite was then in the land.' But the abodes of settled life are described as confined to two spots: one, the oldest city in Palestine, the city of Arba or the Four Giants, as it was called, in the rich vale of Hebron; the other, 'the circle,' of the five cities in the vale of the Jordan. These were the earliest representatives of the civilisation of Canaan; the Perizzites, or, as they were usually called, the 'Hittites,' the dwellers in the open villages, who gave their name to the whole country; so much so that the children of Heth are called 'the children ‘of the land,' and the land itself was known both on Egyptian and Assyrian monuments as the land of 'Heth.'1 Mingled with these, on the mountain tops, as their name implies, were the warlike Amorite chiefs,2 Mamre and his two brothers. Along the southern coast, and the undulating land called the 'south country,' between Palestine and the desert, were the ancient predecessors of the Philistines, probably the Avites; not, like their future conquerors, a maritime people of fortified cities, but a pastoral, nomadic race, though under a ruler entitled 'king.' On the east of the Jordan, round the sanctuary of the Horned Ashtaroth, and southward as far as the Dead Sea, were remnants of the gigantic aboriginal tribes, not yet ejected by the encroachments of Edom, Ammon, or Moab, the Horites, dwellers in the caves of the distant Petra, the Emim and Zamzummim on the banks of the Arnon and the Jabbok, and the Rephaim, whose name long lingered in the memory of the later inhabitants, and was used to describe the shades of the world beyond the grave.

Haltingplaces.

3

I. Such must have been the general outline of Palestine when Abraham 'passed over' from Damascus, and 'passed through the land.' Let us, as he roves, almost at will, through the unknown country, briefly note the halting-places, to which we are specially invited by the Sacred narrative, and also by the account of the Patriarchal wanderings in the speech of S. Stephen. They bring before us the point

often forgotten, which that great precursor of S. Paul was specially endeavouring to impress upon his hearers, that the migration was still going on that the Patriarch 'had no in'heritance in the land, no, not so much as to set his foot on.' Fixed locality was to form no essential part of the true religion. Abraham was still the first Pilgrim, the first Discoverer; 'not 'knowing whither he went.'1 The words which Reuchlin used to Melanchthon leaving his father's home were directly and without effort taken from the call to Abraham, to go out 'from his country and from his kindred and from his father's 'house.' The figures which we thus employ, in prose and poetry, in allegory and sermon, are the direct bequest of the Patriarchal pastoral age. In the sight of that primitive time, the symbols and realities which we now regard as separate from each other, were blended in one. The curtain of the picture of life, if I may use the expression of the Greek artists, was to that age the picture itself.

Shechem.

I. Look at the Patriarchal wanderings in this light, and it will not be thought misspent time to dwell for a short space on the successive stages of their advance. The first was 'the place,' as it is called, of Shechem; then, as it would seem,. only marked by the terebinths of Moreh.2 It is the earliest instance of these primitive wanderers pitching their tents, for shelter against wind or rain, under the shade of some spreading tree. As a rock or a palm-grove in the desert, so in Palestine itself was the isolated terebinth or ilex, the most massive and majestic of its native trees, and therefore legitimately, though not quite correctly, rendered by the English parallel of 'the oak.' The oak of Moreh, like that of Mamre, to which we shall presently come, probably derived its name from some ancient chief, and was perhaps already regarded as in some measure sacred. Here, by the side of the gushing streams of the vale of Shechem, we are told that the first encampment was made, and the altar of the earliest holy place in the Holy Land consecrated. The oak remained for many

Heb. xi. 8.

2 Gen. xii. 6. See Sinai and Palestine, 142, 235.

centuries the object of national reverence. The sanctity of the place lasts even to this day,

Bethel.

2. The second halt was a day's journey farther south, on the central ridge of Palestine, at Bethel; then only known, if known at all, by its ancient name of Luz; and to this same spot Abraham returned after the journey from Egypt, of which we will presently speak more at length. That arrival at Bethel was more than a halt; it is represented as the turning-point of his life. In the philosophical and religious traditions of all countries there is often described a separation as between two parting roads, a divortium, or 'watershed,' as the Romans called it, where those who have been companions up to a certain point are thenceforth severed asunder. In Greek teaching the choice is described, through the well-known fable of Hercules, between the rugged path of Virtue and the easy descent of Pleasure. In Mussulman legends, Mahomet stands on the mountain above Damascus, and, gazing on the glorious view, turns away from it with the words, 'Man has but one paradise, and mine is fixed elsewhere.’ Often, too, in the lives and conversations of good men in later times, shall we see this same necessity of selection brought before us in the spiritual world. Here it is presented to us in one of those instances which I just noticed, in which the spiritual lesson and the outward image are so blended together as to be indistinguishable. The two emigrants from Mesopotamia had now swelled into two powerful tribes, and the herdsmen of Abraham and Lot strove together, and the first controversy, first primeval pastoral controversy, divided the Patriarchal Church. 'Let there be no strife, I pray thee' (so the Father of the Faithful replied in language which might well extend beyond the strife of herdsmen and shepherds, to the strife of 'pastors and teachers' in many a church and nation), 'let 'there be no strife, I pray thee, between thee and me, between 'my herdsmen and thy herdsmen, for we are brethren. Is not 'the whole land before thee? Separate thyself, I pray thee, 'from me. If thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to

the

'the right; or, if thou depart to the right hand, I will go to 'the left.' 1

It was the first instance of agreeing to differ,' in later times so rarely found, so eagerly condemned; and yet not less suitable to all times, because of the extreme simplicity of its earliest application.

Meanwhile let us take our stand with them on the mountain east of Bethel. The indications of the Sacred text, and the peculiar position of the localities, enable us to fix the very spot. On the rocky summit of that hill, under its grove of oaks, Abraham had pitched his tent and built his altar,—the first of the 'high places' which so long continued in Palestine amongst his descendants. And now, from this spot, he and his kinsman made the choice which determined the fate of each, according to the view which that summit commands. Lot looked down on the green valley of the Jordan, its tropical luxuriance visible even from thence, beautiful and well watered as that garden of Eden, of which the fame still lingered in their own Chaldæan hills, as the valley of the Nile in which they had so lately sojourned. He chose the rich soil, and with it the corrupt civilisation which had grown up in the rank climate of that deep descent; and once more he turned his face eastward, and left to Abraham 2 the hardship, the glory, and the virtues of the rugged hills, the sea-breezes, and the inexhaustible future of Western Palestine. It was Abraham's henceforward; he was to arise and walk through the length 'and through the breadth of it, for God had given it to him.'

Gen. xii. 8; xiii. 3-17. There is another like passage in the history of Isaac; I give it as it appears in the Vulgate. This, by translating the Hebrew proper names, preserves the spirit of the original, which in our version is entirely lost: 'Isaac's servants digged in the valley, and found there a well of springing water, and the herdsmen of Gerar did strive with Isaac's herdsmen, saying, The · water is ours; and he called the name of 'it Calumny, because they strove with

him. And they digged another well, and

strove for that also: and he called the name of it Strife. And he removed from 'thence and digged another well, and 'for that they strove not; and he called 'the name of it Latitnde. and he said, 'For now the Lord hath made latitude 'for us, and we shall be fruitful in the 'land.'-Gen. xxvi. 19-22.

2 It is on this divergence of the characters of Lot and Abraham that is founded the legend of the Holy Cross, commemorated in the convent of that name near Jerusalem.

This was the first appropriation, the first consecration of the Holy Land.

The oak of

3. Then Abraham removed his tent, and came and dwelt "in the "oak grove" of Mamre, which is in Hebron, and built 'there an altar unto the Lord.' Here we have the Mamre. third and chief resting-place of the wandering Patriarch. The modern town of Hebron, or, as it is now called after its first illustrious occupant, El-Khalil,' 'The Friend,' lies on the northern slope of a basin formed by the confluence of two broad valleys, whose superior cultivation and vegetation have probably caused the long historical celebrity of this spot as the earliest seat of the civilisation and power, if not of Palestine, at least of Judæa. The hills which rise above it on the north present for a considerable distance a level tableland slightly broken by occasional depressions, now mostly occupied by cornfields. On this high ground, in one of these depressions, a large square enclosure of ancient masonry exhibits, in all probability, the remains of the sanctuary built in former ages round what is still called by Jews and Arabs 'The House,' or 'The Height,' 2 of Abraham. On this spot, in the time of Josephus, a gigantic terebinth was shown as coeval with the Creation, and as being that under which the tent of the Patriarch was pitched. Images and pictures of Abraham's life hung from its branches. A fair used to be held beneath it, in which Christians, Jews, and Arabs assembled every summer, when each with their peculiar rites honoured the sacred tree. Constantine destroyed the images, but left the tree; its trunk, standing in the midst of the church, was still visible in the seventeenth century; and its name ('the field of the tere'binth') still lingers on the spot. Within the enclosure is a deep well,3 being in truth precisely what one would expect to find hard by the Patriarchal encampment,

This is the nearest approach to a home that the wanderings

1 Gen. xiii. 18. See Sinai and Palestine, 142, 164.

2 Ramet el Khalil. See Robinson, Bib. Res. i. 216.

3 Early Travellers, p. 87. This well (at the south-west corner of the enclosure) is not mentioned by Robinson.