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PART

II.

Burning ground.

Scripture allusions.

This practice of burning over the ground is very ancient in other lands besides this, and as there are neither fences nor habitations in the open country to be injured by the fire, there is no danger in it. Every schoolboy will remember what Virgil sings about it :

"Long practice has a sure improvement found,
With kindled fires to burn the barren ground.
When the light stubble, to the flames resigned,
Is driven along, and crackles in the wind."

Yes, but these Arab peasants would think the poet but a stupid farmer, to puzzle himself with half a dozen speculations about the possible way in which this burning is beneficial; as, whether the “hollow womb of the earth is warmed by it," or some "latent vice is cured," or redundant humours "driven off, or that new breathings" are opened in the chapt earth, or the very reverse

"That the heat the gaping ground constrains,

New knits the surface, and new strings the veins;
Lest soaking showers should pierce her secret seat,
Or freezing Boreas chill her genial heat,
Or scorching suns too violently beat," &c., &c.

The Arab peasant would laugh at the whole of them, and tell you that two very good reasons not mentioned by the poet were all-sufficient: That it destroyed and removed out of the way of the plough weeds, grass, stubble, and thorn-bushes; and that the ashes of this consumed rubbish was a valuable manure to the land.

David has a terrible imprecation against the enemies of God in the 83d Psalm, based upon this operation, perhaps : "As the fire burneth a wood, and as the flame setteth the mountain on fire, so persecute them with thy tempests, and make them afraid with thy storms." The woods of this country are almost exclusively on the mountains, and hence the allusion to them. I have known several such catastrophes since I came to Syria, and am always reminded by them of this passage.

In Nahum i. 10 the prophet has a striking comparison, or rather double allusion to thorns and fire. Speaking of the wicked, he says-" For while they be folden together as thorns, and while they are drunken as drunkards, they shall be devoured as stubble fully dry." Now these thorns, especially that kind called bellan, which covers the whole country, and is that which is thus burned, are so folden together as to be utterly inseparable, and being united by thousands of small intertwining branches, when the torch is applied they flash and flame instantly, like stubble fully dry; indeed, the peasants always select this bellan, folden together, when they want to kindle a fire from their matches.

There is another allusion to the fire among thorns, which you, as a farmer in this neighbourhood, must have occasion to notice. Moses says—“If fire

11 Georgic.

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break out and catch in thorns, so that the stacks of corn, or the standing corn, CHAPTER or the field be consumed therewith, he that kindled the fire shall surely make XXIII. restitution."1

Yes, we are obliged to charge our nâtûrs, or watchmen, as harvest-time Fireadvances, to guard with the utmost care against fire. The reason why spreading. Moses mentions its catching among thorns only, I suppose, is because thorns grow all round our fields, and actually intermingle with the wheat. By harvest-time, they are not only dry themselves, but are choked up with tall grass dry as powder. Fire, therefore, catches in them easily, and spreads with great rapidity and uncontrollable fury; and as the grain is dead ripe, it is impossible to extinguish it.

fire-rais

When I was crossing the plain of Gennesaret in 1848, during harvest, I Laws stopped to lunch at 'Ain et Tîny, and my servant kindled a very small fire to against make a cup of coffee. A man, detached from a company of reapers, came im- ing. mediately and stood patiently by us until we had finished, without saying what he wanted. As soon as we left, however, he carefully extinguished our little fire; and upon inquiry I found he had been sent for that purpose. Burckhardt, while stopping at Tiberias, hired a guide to the caves in Wady el Hamâm, and says that this man was constantly reproving him for the careless manner in which he threw away the ashes from his pipe. He then adds, "The Arabs who inhabit the valley of the Jordan invariably put to death any person who is known to have been even the innocent cause of firing the grass; and they have made it a public law among themselves, that, even in the height of intestine warfare, no one shall attempt to set his enemy's harvest on fire." The ordinance of Moses on this subject was a wise regulation, designed to meet a very urgent necessity. To understand the full value of the law, we must remember that the wheat is suffered to become dead ripe, and as dry as tinder, before it is cut; and further, that the land is tilled in common, and the grain sown in one vast field, without fence, ditch, or hedge, to separate the individual portions. A fire catching in any part, and driven by the wind, would consume the whole, and thus the entire population might be stripped of their year's provisions in half an hour.

1 Exod. xxii. 6.

PART
II.

T

Road to

Genne

saret.

Descent.

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OUR road for this day leads down to, and then along the shore of that beautiful Gennesaret, so interesting to every Christian mind, and to the ruins of those cities where our Lord wrought most of his mighty works. We are in the very centre of that region in which he passed the greater part of his life on earth, and on all sides are the deserted sites of villages and towns which he must have visited. They have the usual marks of antiquity, but nothing is known of their history. His eye, however, saw them crowded with inhabitants, and from them poured forth the thousands of Galilee to hear his sermons, eat his miraculous loaves, and be healed by his divine skill.

This half hour has brought us down in the world immensely.

And there is still a heavy descent to the lake, which lies full six hundred feet below the Mediterranean, according to my aneroid. This small plain which we are now crossing is called Kaiserîyeh (Cæsarea) by some lost historical association; and below it we must pick our way over and through a very rocky waar for half an hour.

We are passing over limestone, with strata dipping at a sharp angle into the wady. I had expected to find trap rock as we approached the lake.

So we shall below Rubŭdîyeh, and the same volcanic formation continues to the south of us quite down to Beisan. And now we have reached the bottom of Wady Sulamy, and find it entirely dry. The stream that drove the mills west of el Mughar has vanished beneath the strata, only to reappear, however, lower down, where it takes the name of Rubŭdîyeh, and is carried by

* [In this chapter we reach the memorable plain of Gennesaret, and are surrounded by the scenes amid which our blessed Lord spent the chief part of his public ministry. The question of the true site of Capernaum is raised towards the end of the chapter. Dr. Robinson had fixed at a fountain in the plain of Gennesaret, called 'Ain et Tiny, and is followed in this by Mr. Porter In the "Hand-Book for Syria and Palestine." Dr. Thomson places Capernaum beyond the plain of Gennesaret, at Tell Hûm, near the mouth of the Jordan. Tabiga, which lies between 'Ain et Tiny and Tell Hûm, he regards as having been a manufacturing suburb of Capernaum. So that the difference between him and Dr. Robinson is in reality very small. All the three places are within three quarters of an hour of each other.-ED.]

MISSION OF THE TWELVE APOSTLES.

345

This CHAPTER

canals over a considerable part of the fertile plain of Gennesaret. Rubŭdîyeh was once a considerable town, as appears from the extent of ground XXIV. cumbered by these shapeless heaps of rubbish.

habits.

These farmers about us belong to el Mughar, and their land extends to the Farmers. declivity immediately above Gennesaret, a distance of at least eight miles from their village. Our farmers would think it hard to travel so far before they began the day's work, and so would these if they had to do it every day; but they drive their oxen before them, carry bed, bedding, and board, plough, Their yoke, and seed on their donkeys, and expect to remain out in the open country until their task is accomplished. The mildness of the climate enables them to do so without inconvenience or injury. How very different from the habits of Western farmers! These men carry no cooking apparatus, and, we should think, no provisions. They, however, have a quantity of their thin, tough bread, a few olives, and perhaps a little cheese, in that leathern bag which hangs from their shoulders-the "scrip" of the New Testament; and with this they are "Scrip." contented. When hungry, they sit by the fountain, or the brook, and eat; if weary or sleepy, they throw around them their loose 'aba, and lie down on the ground as contentedly as the ox himself. At night they retire to a cave, sheltering rock, or shady tree, kindle a fire of thorn-bushes, heat over their stale bread, and if they have shot a bird or caught a fish, they boil it on the coals; and thus dinner and supper in one are achieved with the least possible trouble. But their great luxury is smoking, and the whole evening is whiled away in whiffing tobacco and bandying the rude jokes of the light-hearted peasant. Such a life need not be disagreeable, nor is it necessarily a severe drudgery in this delightful climate. The only thing they dread is an incursion of wild Arabs from beyond the lake, and to meet them they are all armed as if going forth to war.

Do you suppose that this wallet, in which they carry their provisions, is the "scrip" which the disciples were directed not to take in their first missionary tours ?1

WALLET.

No doubt; and the same, too, in which the young David put the five smooth stones from the brook.2 All shepherds have them, and they are the farmer's universal vade-mecum. They are merely the skins of kids stripped off whole, and tanned by a very simple process. By the way, the entire "outfit" of these first missionaries shows that they were plain Mission fishermen, farmers, or shepherds; and to such men there was no extraordinary twelve self-denial in the matter or the mode of their mission. We may expound the apostles. "instructions" given to these primitive evangelists somewhat after the following manner :-Provide neither silver, nor gold, nor brass in your purses.3

of the

Matt. x. 10; Mark vi. 8; Luke ix. 3.

21 Sam. xvii. 40.

3 Matt. x. 9. 10.

PART

II.

structions.

way

You are going to your brethren in the neighbouring villages, and the best to get to their hearts and their confidence is to throw yourselves upon their Explana hospitality. Nor was there any departure from the simple manners of the tion of in- country in this. At this day the farmer sets out on excursions quite as extensive, without a para in his purse; and the modern Moslem prophet of Tarshîha thus sends forth his apostles over this identical region. Neither do they encumber themselves with two coats. They are accustomed to sleep in the garments they have on during the day; and in this climate such plain people experience no inconvenience from it. They wear a coarse shoe, answering to the sandal of the ancients, but never take two pair of them; and although the staff is an invariable companion of all wayfarers, they are content with one. Of course, such "instructions" can have only a general application to those who go forth, not to neighbours of the same faith and nation, but to distant climes, and to heathen tribes, and under conditions wholly diverse from those of the fishermen of Galilee; but there are general principles involved or implied, which should always be kept in mind by those who seek to carry the gospel to the masses of mankind either at home or abroad.

No time to be

wasted.

Salutations.

Why do you suppose our Lord commanded the disciples to "salute no man by the way?"1 This seems to be a departure from the general rule, to become all things to all men. Would it not appear very churlish and offensive to refuse the salam even of a stranger?

It would; but I do not think that the prohibition extended so far. But the disciples were sent upon important and urgent business-they were ambassadors from their Lord and King-and were not to loiter by the way in idle conversation with friends whom they might chance to meet. The same is now required of special messengers. No doubt the customary salutations were formal and tedious, as they are now, particularly among Druses and other nonChristian sects, and consumed much valuable time. There is also such an amount of insincerity, flattery, and falsehood in the terms of salutation prescribed by etiquette, that our Lord, who is truth itself, desired his representatives to dispense with them as far as possible,—perhaps tacitly to rebuke them. These "instructions" were also intended to reprove another propensity which an Oriental can scarcely resist, no matter how urgent his business. If he meets an acquaintance, he must stop and make an endless number of inquiries, and answer as many. If they come upon men making a bargain or discussing any other matter, they must pause and intrude their own ideas, and enter keenly into the business, though it in no wise concerns them; and, more especially, an Oriental can never resist the temptation to assist where accounts are being settled or money counted out. The clink of coin has a positive fascination to them. Now, the command of our Saviour strictly forbade all such loiterings. They would waste time, distract attention, and in many ways hinder the prompt and faithful discharge of their important mission.

1 Luke x. 4.

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