The most remarkable point in the behaviour of these native gentry was the reverence for age shown even by grey-bearded men to those some ten years older. We noticed also that the religious Sheikh of the village sat above our host after the Jeb’a banquet.
On Friday, the 30th of August, we left Jeb’a and moved on to Jenîn.
By noon we reached Dothan, the scene of Joseph’s betrayal by his brethren, and halted under a spreading fig-tree beside a long cactus hedge. Just north of us was the well called Bîr el Hŭfîreh, “Well of the Pit,” and east of us a second, with a water-trough, thus accounting for the name Dothan, “two wells.” Above the wells on the north rises the shapeless mound where the town once stood, and on the west spread the dark brown plain of ’Arrâbeh, across which runs the main Egyptian road—the road by which the armies of Thothmes and Necho came up from the sea-coast, and by which the Midianite merchants went down with their captive. The cattle stood by the well, huddling in the shade, waiting to be watered, and rude cowherds and goatherds gathered around us in groups which were no doubt not far different in dress or language from Joseph’s brethren four thousand years ago.
One place of interest must be noticed in concluding this chapter—Tirzah, once the capital of Israel, famous for its beauty.
It is the only Samaritan town mentioned among the royal cities taken by Joshua, and even this name was changed by the Rabbinical writers into Tiran, a place in Galilee.
Just twelve miles east of our Jeb’a camp, on a plateau where the valleys begin to dip suddenly towards Jordan, stands the mud hamlet of Teiâsîr. We afterwards visited it from the Jordan camp, and found it to have been once a place of importance, judging from the numerous, rock-cut sepulchres burrowing under the houses, the fertile lands and fine olives round, and the monument of good masonry, seemingly a Roman tomb. Just north of it we discovered a ruin called Ibzîk, which is unquestionably a Bezek known to Eusebius, and probably the place where Saul collected his army before attacking the Ammonites (1 Sam. xi. 8).
In the latter ruin is a little chapel dedicated to Neby Hazkîn, “the Prophet Ezekiel,” and the high mountain crowned with thicket behind is called “Ezekiel’s Mountain.”
This name Teiâsîr I suppose to be Tirzah. It contains the exact letters of the Hebrew word, though the two last radicals are interchanged in position, a kind of change not unusual among the peasantry. The beauty of the position and the richness of the plain on the west, the ancient remains, and the old main road to the place from Shechem, seem to agree well with the idea of its having once been a capital; and if I am right in the suggestion, then the old sepulchres are probably, some of them, those of the early kings of Israel before the royal family began to be buried in Samaria.
