The Eastern Range is blessed with a temperate climate. Heat is always moderated by breezes which bring health and prosperity with them. The soil is fertile, sufficiently watered and very productive. It is a region where agriculture and grazing are followed, and natural conditions are favorable to both occupations. In spite of these advantages, the region lies exposed to the south and east. Desert tribes make life and fortune uncertain for the inhabitants. Even today, when conditions have been somewhat improved, those who grow crops in this region must pay tribute to wandering tribes who demand it, or lose their all. How much more precarious must life have been in those days when even among the most enlightened nations the hand of the plunderer was scarcely restrained at all. The Hebrew tribes which settled this plateau were in the beginning as strong as those that located farther east, but they could not maintain their individuality against the conditions that beset them. Sooner or later, they drifted with the restless hordes and lost their ident.i.ty.
One more natural division remains to be considered--the Plain of Esdraelon. Triangular in shape, one point lies north of Mt. Carmel, while the two long lines extend south-easterly, and meet the third near the river Jordan. It was this famous plain that gave access to the Central Range from the west--from the Coast Plain, approach to Samaria was not difficult by this means.
The region is rather made up of a series of plains, broken by scattered mountains, yet permitting free pa.s.sage from the sea to the river Jordan.
An ancient route lay along this way. It has been called the key to Palestine, and over it came the enemies of Israel. Especially interesting is the following description, with the added explanation of a bit of ancient Hebrew poetry characterizing the region:
"As you stand upon that last headland of Gilboa, 200 feet above the plain, ... the great triangle is spread before you. Along the north of it the steep brown wall of the Galilean hills, about 1000 feet high, runs almost due west, till it breaks out and down to the feet of Carmel, in the forest slopes just high enough to hide the Plain of Acre and sea.
But over and past these slopes Carmel"s steady ridge, deepening in blue the while, carries the eye out to its dark promontory above the Mediterranean. From this end of Carmel the lower Samarian hills, green with bush and dotted by white villages, run southeast to the main Samarian range, and on their edge, due south, seven miles across the bay, Jenin stands out with its minarets and palms.... But the rest of the plain is before you--a great expanse of loam, red and black, which in a more peaceful land would be one sea of waving wheat with island villages; but here is what its modern name implies, a free, wild prairie, upon which but one or two hamlets have ventured forth from the cover of the hills and a timid and tardy cultivation is only now seeking to overtake the waste of coa.r.s.e gra.s.s and the thistly herbs that camels love. There is no water visible. The Kishon itself flows in a muddy trench, unseen five yards away. But here and there a clump of trees shows where a deep well is worked to keep a little orchard green through summer.... The roads have no limit to their breadth, but sprawl, as if at most seasons one caravan could not follow for mud on the path of another. But these details sink in a great sense of s.p.a.ce, and of a level made almost absolute by the rise of hills on every side of it. It is a vast inland basin, and from it there breaks just at your feet, between Jezreel and Shunem, the valley Jordanwards,--breaks as visibly as river from lake, with a slope and almost the look of a current upon it.... From Jezreel you can appreciate everything in the literature and in the history of Esdraelon.
"To begin with, you can enjoy that happiest sketch of a landscape and its history that was ever drawn in half a dozen lines, _Issachar_--to which the most of Esdraelon fell--
"Issachar is a large-limbed a.s.s, Stretching himself between the sheepfolds: For he saw a resting-place that it was good, And the land that it was pleasant."
"Such exactly is Esdraelon--a land relaxed and sprawling up among the hills to north, south and east, as you will see a loosened a.s.s roll and stretch his limbs any day in the sunshine of a Syrian village yard. To the highlander looking down upon it, Esdraelon is room to stretch in and lie happy. Yet the figure of the a.s.s goes further--the room must be paid for--
"So he bowed his shoulder to bear And became a servant under task-work."
"The inheritors of this plain never enjoyed the highland independent of Mana.s.seh or Naphtali. Open to east and west, Esdraelon was at distant intervals the war-path or battle-field of great empires.... Even when there has been no invasion to fear, Esdraelon has still suffered: when she has not been the camp of the foreigner she has served as the estate of her neighbors."[4]
CLIMATE AND PRODUCTIVITY OF PALESTINE.
As we might expect in a land possessing such a varied topography, nearly every known climate is represented in Palestine. Along the seash.o.r.e the salt breezes of ocean blow; the climate of the Coast Plain is mild and pleasant, and favorable to the growth of gardens and orchards; within the Central Range itself several varieties of climate prevail, and in the low valley of the Jordan and in the region of the Dead Sea, the heat of the tropics obtains. The plateaus of the Eastern Range are visited by health-giving breezes, which moderate the atmosphere. Farther east and south extends the desert, with its parched sands and sultry air, yet in the very sight of these desert wastes rise snowy mountain peaks.
"There are palms in Jericho and pine forests in Lebanon. In the Ghor, in summer, you are under a temperature of more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and yet you see glistening the snow-fields of Hermon. All the intermediate steps between these extremes the eye can see at one sweep from Carmel--the sands and palms of the coast; the wheat-fields of Esdraelon, the oaks and sycamores of Galilee; the pines, the peaks, the snows of Anti-Lebanon. How closely these differences lie to each other!
Take a section of the country across Judaea. With its palms and shadoofs the Philistine Plain might be a part of the Egyptian Delta; but on the hills of the Shephelah which overlook it, you are in the scenery of Southern Europe; the Judaean moors which overlook them are like the barer uplands of Central Germany; the shepherds wear sheep-skin cloaks and live under stone roofs--sometimes the snow lies deep; a few miles farther east and you are down on the desert among the Bedouin, with their tents of hair and their cotton clothing; a few miles farther still, and you drop to torrid heat in the Jordan Valley; a few miles beyond that and you rise to the plateau of the Belka, where the Arabs say "the cold is always at home." Yet from Philistia to the Belka is scarcely seventy miles."[5]
The year is divided into a wet and a dry season. The rains begin the last of October and are over by the last of March. These are called the "early" rains in the Old Testament. Showers which fall in the late spring are called the "latter" rains. From May until October the summer is dry. The vegetation is sustained in many places by the heavy dews.
Water is not abundant and the rain-water which falls during the winter months is stored in wells and cisterns for use in the dry months.
Flowers of many varieties are found through the land and range from those common to tropical and desert lands to those native to high alt.i.tudes. As in Egypt the fertile land borders upon the shifting desert sands, so in Palestine the strong contrasts between the productive and waste lands is the more marked because of their proximity.
Palestine is not a land of heavy forests. To be sure, ages upon ages of habitation have divested many slopes of native timber, but evidences go to show that at no time since records began has the country been heavily forested. Today the woodlands are frequently mere undergrowth. Orchards are plentiful. The olive is most widely cultivated; apricots, figs, oranges, almond and walnut trees are grown, and the vine is grown extensively. Grain fields wave on the plains, in the valleys and lowlands, wheat, barley and millet being most abundant. Vegetables of many varieties are commonly raised. Beans, tomatoes, onions and melons are produced in large quant.i.ties. Gra.s.s is grown only on small areas, pasturage being for the most part found on the public land. During the summer months pasturage exists only near the large fountains or the carefully built cisterns. These are jealously guarded by their owners.
In earlier times and now, to some extent, wells and pools are provided to preserve water falling during the winter, and these are for the use of all who come to them with their flocks and herds.
We find no such condition here as in Egypt, where crops grow abundantly if the seeds be but once dropped into the ground. On the contrary, while grains, fruits and garden produce are generally grown, care and constant industry are required to bring forth good yields. Certain portions of the country are adapted to the art of husbandry, while others have always been better suited to cattle and sheep raising. So much of the tablelands is rocky and stony and unsuited for cultivation that no arable spots are allowed to go untended.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] George Adam Smith: Historical Geography of the Holy Land, 149.
[2] George Adam Smith: Historical Geography of the Holy Land, 208.
[3] George Adam Smith: Historical Geography of the Holy Land, 349.
[4] George Adam Smith: Historical Geography of the Holy Land, 381.
[5] George Adam Smith: Historical Geography of the Holy Land, 56.
CHAPTER VI.
EFFECTS OF GEOGRAPHICAL CONDITIONS UPON THE HEBREWS.
Certain natural effects of the physical conditions upon the people in Palestine have been apparent as we traced the general land formation. It is evident that in an age when easy communication was essential to union, there could be no political unity among a people dwelling in a country so divided by mountains, plains, and valleys. Again, we would expect tribes settling the plateaus of the Central Range to develop differently from those peopling the fertile plain of Sharon. Indeed, within this range itself we have found that the inhabitants of austere Judaea led a life unlike that of more accessible Samaria. Other effects of natural conditions upon the Hebrews are evident, as we shall see.
The very climate of Palestine seems to have had its influence in molding the religious thought of Israel. "The climate of Palestine is regular enough to provoke men to methodical labour for its fruits, but the regularity is often interrupted. The early rains or the latter rains fail, drought comes occasionally for two years in succession, and that means famine and pestilence. There are too, the visitations of the locust, which are said to be bad every fifth or sixth year, and there are earthquakes, also periodical in Syria. Thus a purely mechanical conception of nature as something certain and inevitable, whose processes are more or less under man"s control, is impossible; and the imagination is roused to feel the presence of a will behind nature, in face of whose interruptions of the fruitfulness or stability of the land man is absolutely helpless. To such a climate, then, is partly due Israel"s doctrine of Providence."[1] In Deuteronomy the contrast between Egypt, the land just left, and Palestine, to which Israel was then pa.s.sing, is drawn, and the price of prosperity definitely given.
"But the land, whither thou goest in to possess it, is not as the land of Egypt, from whence ye came out, where thou sowedst thy seed, and wateredst it with thy foot, as a garden of herbs: but the land, whither ye go to possess it, is a land of hills and valleys, and drinketh water of the rain of heaven. A land which Jehovah thy G.o.d careth for: the eyes of Jehovah thy G.o.d are always upon it, from the beginning of the year even unto the end of the year.
"And it shall come to pa.s.s, if ye shall harken diligently unto my commandments which I command you this day, to love Jehovah your G.o.d, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, that I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil. And I will send gra.s.s in thy fields for thy cattle, that thou mayst eat and be full. Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and ye turn aside, and serve other G.o.ds, and worship them; and _then_ Jehovah"s wrath be kindled against you and he shut up the heaven, that the land yield not her fruit; and lest ye perish quickly from off the good land which Jehovah giveth you."[2]
The productivity of the soil had two important results in the development of the Hebrews. The first affected the very nature of their being, for it changed them from desert nomads into herders and small farmers. In place of the tent, they adopted the house, the _fixed_ habitation. Instead of wandering from pasture to pasture with their cattle and families, as they had done for generation upon generation before their sojourn in Egypt, they cultivated the land and found it overflowing with "milk and honey." In the Song of Moses this great transformation is pictured with vividness and beauty:
"Remember the days of old, Consider the years of generation on generation.
Ask thy father and he will show thee, Thine elders and they will tell thee.
When the highest gave nations their heritage, When he sundered the children of men.
He set the border of the tribes, By the number of the children of Israel.
For the portion of Jehovah is his people, Jacob the measure of his heritage.
He found him in a land of the desert, In a waste, in a howling wilderness.
He encompa.s.sed him, He distinguished him, He watched him as the apple of His eye.
As an eagle stirreth his nest, Fluttereth over his young, Spreadeth abroad his wings, taketh them, Beareth them up on his pinions, Jehovah alone led him And no strange G.o.d was with him.
He made him to ride on the Land"s high places, And to eat of the growth of the field.
He gave him to suck honey from the cliff, And oil from the flinty rock.
Cream of kine and milk of sheep, With lambs" fat and rams"
Breed of Bashan and he-goats, With fat of the kidneys of wheat; And the blood of the grape thou drankest in foam!"
While settlement in Palestine produced an advancement in civilization, it brought at the same time a lower plane of religious life and thought.
With sudden plenty and no longer enforced abstinence of the desert, came a certain confusion and riot. The desert tends to inspire monotheistic ideas and conceptions; lands of varied aspect, such as Greece or Palestine, inspire polytheistic conceptions--divided power rather than unity.
"The creed of the desert nomad is simple and austere--for nature about him is monotonous, silent, and illiberal. But Syria is a land of lavish gifts and oracles--where woods are full of mysterious speech, and rivers burst suddenly from the ground, where the freedom of nature excites, and seems to sanction, the pa.s.sions of the human body, where food is rich, and men drink wine. The spirit and the senses are equally taken by surprise. _No one can tell how many voices a tree has who has not come up to it from the silence of the great desert...._
"But with the awe comes the sense of indulgence, and the starved instincts of the body break riotously forth.... All this is said to have happened to Israel from almost their first encampment in Canaan."
"They moved him to jealousy with strange G.o.ds, With abominations provoked him to anger.
They sacrificed to monsters undivine, G.o.ds they had known not, New things, lately come in, Their fathers never had them in awe."
One more effect of physical conditions may be noted here, leaving the rest to appear in connection with Israel"s story--namely, the effect of the picturesqueness of the land upon these former desert nomads. For one who has made himself familiar with the beautiful places of earth, Palestine has its charm, but to people journeying thither from the wastes of desert, the land possesses matchless beauty. Before calling attention to the reflection of scenery to be found in ancient Hebrew writings, let us read the description of certain aspects of the country, as given by one who knows every foot of the land and has watched it in and out of season.
"There is the coast-line from the headland of Carmel--northwards the Gulf of Haifa, with its yellow sands and palms, ... southwards Sharon with her scattered forest, her coast of sand and gra.s.s: westwards the green sea and the wonderful shadows of the clouds upon it--grey when you look at them with your face to the sun, but, with the sun behind you, purple, and more like Homer"s "wine-colored" water than anything I have seen on the Mediterranean. There is the _excellency of Carmel_ itself: wheat-fields climbing from Esdraelon to the first bare rocks, then thick bush and scrub, young ilex, wild olives and pines, with undergrowth of large purple thistles, mallows with blossoms like pelargoniums, stocks of hollyhocks, golden broom, honeysuckle, and convolvulus--then, between the shoulders of the mountain, olive-groves, their dull green ma.s.s banked by the lighter forest trees, and on the flanks the broad lawns, where in the shadow of great oaks you look far out to sea. There is the Lake of Galilee as you see it from Gadara, with the hills of Naphtali above it, and Hermon filling all the north. There, is the prospective of the Jordan Valley as you look up from over Jericho, between the bare ranges of Gilead and Ephraim, with the winding ribbon of the river"s jungle, and the top of Hermon like a white cloud in the infinite distance. There is the forest of Gilead, where you ride, two thousand feet high, under the boughs of great trees creaking and rustling in the wind, with all Western Palestine before you. There is the moonlight view out of the bush on the northern flank of Tabor, the leap of the sun over the edge of Bashan, summer morning in the Shephelah, and sunset over the Mediterranean, when you see it from the gateway of the ruins on Samaria down the glistening Vale of Barley. Even in the barest provinces you get many a little picture that lives with you for life--a chocolate-coloured bank with red poppies against the green of the p.r.i.c.kly pear hedge above it, and a yellow lizard darting across; a river-bed of pink oleanders flush with the plain; a gorge in Judaea, where you look up between limestone walls picked out with tufts of gra.s.s and black-and-tan goats cropping at them, the deep blue sky over all, and, on the edge of the only shadow, a well, a trough, and a solitary herdsman.
"And then there are those prospects in which no other country can match Palestine, for no other has a valley like the Ghor, or a desert like that which falls from Judaea to the Dead Sea. There is the view from the Mount of Olives, down twenty miles of desert hill-tops to the deep blue waters, with the wall of Moab glowing on the further side like burnished copper, and staining the blue sea red with its light. There is the view of the Dead Sea through the hazy afternoon, when across the yellow foreground of Jeshimon the white Lisan rises like a pack of Greenland ice from the blue waters, and beyond it the Moab range, misty, silent and weird. There are the precipices of Masada and Engedi sheer from the salt coast. And, above all, there is the view from Engedi under the full moon, when the sea is bridged with gold, and the eastern mountains are black with a border of opal."[3]
The literature of no other people has more vividly reflected a landscape than has that of the ancient Hebrews. Without some understanding of Palestine, one would fail to appreciate much that is beautiful in Hebrew poetry. While we shall touch upon this again in the consideration of Hebrew literature, some examples will sufficiently ill.u.s.trate this point. Take, for example, a portion of the Hundred and Fourth Psalm: