PART II. Noble view. so important or so conspicuous as this. It is not possible, however, to iden tify some of these ancient sites with certainty, and this is one of the most doubtful. By leading our horses down the terraces through this olive grove, we shall shorten our distance to the town more than half. What a noble view over plain, and marsh, and lake, and mountain! and how sweetly reposes the village of Banias in this verdant and sheltered nook of Hermon! Its fifty tottering huts, however, form a wretched representative of ancient grandeur, and the place is now very unhealthy, especially in autumn. During the hot months the people erect booths on their roofs, elevated on poles, to escape Scorpions. from scorpions, of which there are countless numbers among the ruins. I have Scripture allusions. see one of these stinging scourges. They are not a little celebrated in the Bible. An insolent allusion to them cost Rehoboam the loss of ten tribes. They magnified the horrors of that "great and terrible wilderness,” and are standing types of the wicked, "whose torment is as the torment of a scorpion when he striketh a man.' "1 Return here three months hence, and your wish can easily be gratified. You may chance to get even more than you seek for. Is there any resemblance between a scorpion and an egg, to suggest the antithesis in our Lord's question, "If he ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion ?" 2 There is no imaginable likeness between an egg and the ordinary black scorpion of this country, neither in colour nor size, nor, when the tail is extended, in shape. But old writers speak of a white scorpion, and such a one, with the tail folded up, as in specimens of fossil trilobites, would not look unlike a small egg. Perhaps the contrast, however, refers only to the different properties of the egg and the scorpion, which is sufficiently emphatic. Our Lord says, "Behold, I have given you power to tread on serpents and scorpions," etc. Is this ever done now? Catching I have seen little boys draw out scorpions from their holes by thrusting in scorpions. small sticks with wax on the end, into which their claws fasten. They then 1 Rev. ix. 5. 2 Luke xi. 12. 3 Luke x. 14. XVIII. catch them in their fingers, and stick them on to a rod of bird-lime or com- CHAPTER mon wax, until they cover the rod with them; nor do they seem to be afraid, but rub their hands up and down this string of scorpions without hesitation. We also hear of fanatics who actually crush them in their mouths and pretend to eat them. But it is to be remembered that the scorpion's sting is in its tail, Habits of with which it strikes its victim (as is correctly implied in the quotation from scorpions. the Revelation), and that it cannot strike sideways. If, then, it be properly held between the fingers, or so stuck into the bird-lime as not to admit its longitudinal stroke, there is no danger; and, moreover, the boys may have something on their hands or in the wax which "charms" or stupifies it. The pain from its stroke is very intense, but never fatal in Syria. Those on the northern coast of Africa are said to be larger, and the poison so virulent as frequently to cause death. At any rate, it is a hateful creature, crabbed and malicious in the extreme. I have tried the experiment of surrounding one with a ring of fire; and, when it despaired of escape, it repeatedly struck its own head fiercely, and soon died, either from the poison, its satanic rage, or from the heat, I could not be certain which, perhaps from all combined. For a minute description of this reptile you must apply to books of natural history, and to drawings of them, which can easily be procured. We shall sleep all the more safely because, from hibernating instincts, they are now buried deeply beneath the rubbish of old Banias. OUR Camp-ground to-night is at Kudes, the Kedish-Naphtali of the Jews, and we are again favoured with a superb day. It might have been otherwise, as I know by sad experience, and then the ride round this marsh is gloomy and disagreeable, as it is now bright and cheerful. From the plateau south of the Sãāry I saw the world wake up this morning Nature at about old Hermon, and it was an hour never to be forgotten-universal nature worship. at worship, harping on ten thousand harps the morning psalm. Banias and her surroundings do in fact form one of nature's grandest PART 11. nature. temples, in whose presence those made by men's hands are a mere impertinence. These oak glades and joyous brooks, these frisking flocks and happy Temple of birds, all bear their parts in the service; and so, also, the mountains preach, the hills and valleys sing, and the trees of the field clap their hands. Thus the ancient prophets heard and interpreted the manifold utterances of nature: "Praise the Lord from the earth, mountains, and all hills; fruitful trees, and all cedars: beasts, and all cattle; creeping things, and flying fowl: kings of the earth, and all people; both young men and maidens, old men and children: let them praise the name of the Lord; for his name alone is excellent; his glory is above the earth and heaven." 1 In these scenes and scenery of Hermon, there is not only poetry, but solemn mystery and suggestive types, and rich spiritual adumbrations; and he that hath an ear for such heavenly discourse may ever hear with ravishing delight. And now we are at Tell el Kady-Hill of Dan -the Judge-to translate both the Hebrew and the Arabic names at once. Tell el Kady The young Jordan. Its lessons. And is this circular, semi-concave mound the site of that famous city? How utterly desolate ! Josephus calls it the source of the Lesser Jordan, with reference to others more distant, I suppose, for this is far the largest of them all.* Look southward, and you see that the river runs in a straight course through marsh, and lakes, and sinking plain, quite down to the dark and bitter sea in which it is finally lost. Dan and the Dead Sea-the cradle and the grave-the birthplace and the bourne! Men build monuments and rear altars at them, and thither go in pilgrimage from generation to generation. Thus it has been and will ever be. It is a law of our nature. We ourselves are witnesses to its power, drawn from the distant New World to this lonely spot, where the young Jordan leaps into life, by an influence kindred to that which led the ancients to build temples over it. The young Jordan! type of this strange life of ours! Bright and beautiful in its cradle, laughing its merry morning away through the flowery fields of the Hûleh; plunging, with the recklessness of youth, into the tangled brakes and muddy marshes of Merom; hurrying thence, full-grown, like earnest manhood with its noisy and bustling activities, it subsides at length into life's sober midday in the placid lake of Gennesaret. When it goes forth again, it is down the inevitable proclivity of old age, sinking deeper and deeper, in spite of doublings and windings innumerable, until finally lost in the bitter Sea of Death-that melancholy bourne from which there is neither escape nor return. But surely the Jordan can teach other and happier lessons than these. It speaks to me and to all mankind of forgiveness of sin, of regeneration by the Psalm cxlviii. 7-13. *["It is probably the largest fountain in Syria, and among the largest in the world; but for grandeur and picturesque beauty, it cannot be compared to the fountain of the Abana at Fijeh (Damascus). Another smaller fountain springs up within the Tell, and flows off through a break in the river on the south-west" (Hand-Book for Syria and Palestine, p. 436).—ED.] Spirit of God, and of a resurrection to everlasting bliss. Must this dear CHAPTER type of life and immortality be swallowed up for ever by the Dead Sea? Far from it. That is but the Jordan's highway to heaven. Purified from every gross and earthly alloy, it is called back to the skies by the all-attracting sun, emblem of that other resurrection, when Christ shall come in the clouds, and all the holy angels with him. May we be thus drawn from earth to heaven by the mighty attraction of that glorious Sun of righteousness! More than three thousand years ago a vast and mingled host encamped on the eastern bank of this river. There was the mailed warrior with sword and shield, and the aged patriarch trembling on his staff. Anxions mothers and timid maidens were there, and helpless infants of a day old. And there, too, were flocks and herds, and all the possessions of a great nation migrating westward in search of a home. Over against them lay their promised inheritance, "While Jordan rolled between," XVIII. Joshua. full to the brim, and overflowing all its banks. Nevertheless, through it lies The pastheir road, and God commands the march. The priests take up the sacred sage of ark, and bear it boldly down to the brink; when, lo! "the waters which came from above stood and rose up upon an heap very far from the city Adam, which is beside Zaretan; and those that came down toward the sea of the plain, even the salt sea, were cut off; and the people passed over right against Jericho." "1 And thus, too, has all-conquering faith carried ten thousand times ten thousand of God's people in triumph through the Jcrdan of death to the Canaan of eternal rest. "O could we make our doubts remove Those gloomy donbts that rise— And see the Canaan that we love With unbeclouded eyes; Not Jordan's stream, nor death's cold flood, Should fright us from the shore." I shall not soon forget this birth-place of the Jordan, nor the lessons which it can teach so well. But it is time we were prosecuting our long ride. Dan. As we pass round this singular mound, you see that it resembles the rim of The foun a crater. The fountain rises among those briers and bushes in the centre-at tain at least that portion of it does which passes by this ancient oak, and drives these mills below it. Most of the water, however, glides through the volcanic wall, at the north-west corner of the Tell, into the pool beneath those wild fig-trees. If this be really the mouth of an extinct crater, it is probable that the water from the slopes of Hermon, following the line of the inclined strata, met, far below, this obtrusion of trap, and, being cut off by it, rose to the surface in this volcanic shaft or chinney. At any rate, it first appears in the centre of 1 Josh. ii. 16. PART II. Fall of The buf falo. Probably the behemoth of Job. the mound, and, of course, old Dan had an inexhaustible supply of excellent water within her walls. I see very little evidence of the ancient city, unless the houses were built out of this shapeless lava over which we have been stumbling. No doubt they were, in the main; and as basalt never disintegrates in this climate, we have them before our eyes just as they were three thousand years ago. Limestone exposed melts back to dust in a few generations. I was once here, however, when men were quarrying well-cut limestone from the rubbish on the north side of the Tell. Dan never became an important place after Benhadad smote it, nearly a thousand years before Christ.1 When TiglathP'ileser took Ijon, and Abel, and all this region, some two hundred years later, this place is not even mentioned.2 It may have sunk, by that time, to an unimportant village, known merely as a mazar, sacred to religious purposes. This pool is crowded with buffaloes; and how oddly they look, with nothing but the nose above water! Yes; and observe that their mouths are all turned up stream toward the fountain, and on a level with the surface, as if, like Job's behemoth, they trust that they can draw up Jordan into their mouths.3 Do you suppose that the buffalo is the behemoth of the Bible? It is not easy to adjust Job's magnificent description in all the details to the buffalo, yet I am inclined to believe that these black, hairless brutes are the modern, though immensely belittled representatives of that chief of the ways of God, who "eateth straw like an ox, who lieth under the shady trees in the covert of the reeds and fens. The shady trees cover him with their shadow, the willows of the brook compass him about." 4 All these particulars are exact enough, and, indeed, apply to no other known animal that can be associated 11 Kings xv. 20. 22 Kings xv. 29. 3 Job xl. 15-23. 4 Job xl. 15, 21, 23. |