Mediterranean coast, lay Phoenicia with its cities

Phoenicia.

a narrow

strip of the coast about 120 miles in length and 20 miles at most in breadth.

The Phoenicians were a Semitic people of remarkable industry, intelligence, and enterprise. They were for a long period the exclusive navigators of the Mediterranean and became the great commercial people of antiquity. Greece owed to these busy traders and colonists some important elements of her early culture and civilization. The Phoenicians were the merchants of Palestine;' the Israelites found a market for their products at Tyre and Sidon; Abibal and Hiram I. were the friends and allies of David and Solomon; Ahab married the daughter of Ethbaal. But though Solomon for a while maintained a navy which perhaps inspired the Israelites with dreams of commercial greatness, they had no lasting opportunity of becoming a sea-faring people. They never established themselves on the coast, and the successors of the Philistines and Phoenicians in the possession of the maritime cities were ultimately the Greeks.

The most important features of the land, so far as Old Testament history is concerned, have now been described. Neither the noble mountain Hermon, which forms the most conspicuous object in the landscape looking north-east, nor the sea of Chinnereth (Galilee), so closely associated with the Gospel record, call for special notice in connection with the Old Testament history. A few words however may be added, in order briefly to describe the situation of the two cities which became respectively the capitals of the northern and southern kingdoms.

Situation of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem was virtually a mountain-city, lying on the barren and scantily watered plateau due west of the northern end of the Dead Sea. It stood at a height of 2600 feet above the sea, on a spur the central range sharply defined by the valleys of Hinnom and 1 In Hos. xii. 7 a 'Canaanite' means a 'merchant.'

of

the Kidron. The city sloped gently to the south, and was surrounded on three sides by ravines which forbade any extension of its boundaries. On the fourth side (the north and north-west) it was strongly fortified. On the east it was overlooked by the Mount of Olives. But its most striking feature was its seclusion. It lay apart from the great highways of commerce, and from the route trodden by alien armies in their passage to and from the further east. It was connected only by rough mountain-paths with Egypt on the one side, and Syria on the other. It was almost entirely cut off from the opportunities of that close intercourse with foreign lands which was so fatally easy for its rival Samaria. In fact the austere surroundings and isolated situation of Jerusalem qualified it for its future destiny as a unique centre of religious influence. It was not so much a home of culture and civilization as a stronghold and sanctuary of faith.

Samaria.

The situation of Samaria was strikingly different. The city lay on a flat-topped hill in a wide and verdant basin, encircled on three sides by lower heights of the central range, and opening into the plain of Sharon. This hill, commanding a wide prospect to the west, was selected by the sagacious and powerful king Omri in preference to Shechem, the natural centre of the land, because of its comparative proximity to the sea. The district to which Samaria gave its name was uniformly rich and fertile, and it was in later times guarded by a chain of important fortified towns. The danger of Samaria lay in the openness of its situation; it was easily overrun by invaders from east or west, and its population yielded too readily to the corrupting influence of foreign heathenism. "The surrounding Paganism poured into her ample life; and although to her was granted the honour of the first great victories against it- Gideon's and Elijah's-she suffered the luxury that came after to take away her crown."

1 G. A. Smith, HGHL, p. 331.

"1

Summary.

It

It is obvious that Palestine was specially qualified to be the home and source of a world-wide religion. occupied a central position among the nations of the earth, yet was separated from other lands, on the west by the sea, on the east and south by the desert, on the north by a mountain range; it was at once "near to and aloof from the great streams of human life." The maritime plain on which the heights of Judah looked down was a highway of the world's commerce and often a battlefield of contending nations. Thus Israel watched, without the power of controlling, the restless movements of the gigantic empires which lay to the east and to the south-west of Palestine. Though in a sense the fewest of all peoples, Israel was conscious of a vocation which placed it above all peoples that are upon the face of the earth (Deut. vii. 6, 7), and which made its small and rugged territory the glory of all lands (Ezek. xx. 15). To the home which God had assigned to them, the Jewish people owed much of their physical and mental vigour, their habits of industry, their stubborn individuality, their reckless courage. In exile their hearts turned towards the land which they had lost with passionate regret, and with unutterable yearnings for the fulfilment of the cherished ideal of prophecy,

The LORD will have compassion on Jacob,

And will yet choose Israel, and set them in their own land.

1 G. A. Smith, HGHL, p. 112.

(Isa. xiv. 1.)

CHAPTER V.

THE AGE OF THE JUDGES.

The age of the Judges.

We have already seen that the Canaanites were far from being exterminated by the conquests of Joshua. The coast-land remained in the possession of the Philistines and Phoenicians; the strong fortress towns of central Canaan were still held by their former inhabitants; there were many districts in which the Israelitish invaders were allowed to have a footing, but not supremacy. In fact it was only the lack of cohesion among the demoralized Canaanites that enabled the Hebrews to hold their ground. A united and determined effort on the part of their foes might have swept them back into the deserts from which they had emerged. For the most part they lived in 'villages' or open encampments, like those to which they had been used during their wilderness life, with the result that they came into more frequent contact with the Canaanitish peasantry than with the dwellers in towns. Moreover the relations subsisting between the different tribes were as yet undefined and insecure. They were weakened by their want of organization, by their tenacious love of independence, and by their unfamiliarity with the habits of a settled people. Conquerors and conquered soon became inextricably intermingled: Israel still to a great extent imbued with the ideas and beliefs it had inherited from Moses; the Canaanites possessed of a superior culture, but deeply debased

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by the corrupting taint of Semitic heathenism.1 For a time it was doubtful which type of civilization would prevail. For as the Hebrews naturally learned from the Canaanites the necessary arts of husbandry, so they were inevitably introduced by them to the local sanctuaries (bamoth or 'high places'), at which were practised the foul rites of the heathen deity who was regarded as the author of fertility, and the giver of corn, wine, and oil to his worshippers.2 The Hebrews did not indeed openly abandon their allegiance to Jehovah, but they co-ordinated, and sometimes even identified, their national Deity with one or other of the gods of Canaan, and thus the simple and pure worship of Jehovah was gradually corrupted by the admixture of usages and symbols borrowed from the nature-worship of the Canaanites. The compilers of the Book of Judges, however, writing some five or six centuries after the events of this period, regarded Israel's religious retrogressions as even amounting to a formal apostasy from Jehovah.

Disunion of the tribes.

Two features of this stage in Israel's career, during which it was transformed from a powerful horde of nomads into an agricultural people, call for attention at the outset. First, the bonds of union between the different tribes were quickly dissolved when they found themselves dispersed in different districts, and when the conditions of warfare were finally exchanged for a state of security and peace. The peculiar formation of the land itself with its sharp contrasts of mountain and plain, table-land

1 The Tel el-Amarna letters shew that the Canaanites were both in race and language closely akin to the Hebrews. Isaiah even describes Hebrew as 'the language of Canaan' (xix. 18).

2 "When we speak of Baal as the principal god of the Canaanites, it is not to be understood that there was one god, Baal, whom all the Canaanites worshipped, but that the many local divinities were all called by this significant name." (Moore in Polychrome Bible on Judg. ii. 13.) The Ba'al of a place is the god to whom it belongs, just as the citizens of a town are its ba alim, 'proprietors.'

See eg. Judg. ii. 12, x. 6.