CHAPTER XIV.
THE THEATER OF GIANTS.
“Once more we look and all is still as night,
All desolate! Groves, temples, palaces
Swept from the sight and nothing visible,
... Save here and there
An empty tomb, a fragment like a limb
Of some dismembered giant.”
“Og, the King of Bashan, came out against us to battle at Edrei, and the Lord said unto me, Fear him not: for I will deliver him, and all his people, and his land, into thy hand. And we took ... three-score cities of the Kingdom of Og, in Bashan.”—Deut. iii.
“Bashan is the land of sacred romance.” “His mission [Paul’s, Gal., 1: 15] to Bashan seems to have been eminently successful. Heathen temples were converted into churches, and new churches built in every town.” “In the fourth century nearly the whole of the inhabitants were Christian.” “The Christians are now nearly all gone.” “Nowhere else is patriarchal life so fully exemplified.” “Bashan is literally crowded with towns, the majority of them deserted, but not ruined.” “Many are as perfect as if finished only yesterday.”—Porter’s “Giant Cities.”
