CHAPTER V
FROM DAN TO BEERSHEBA
The size of Palestine is surprising to every visitor. You know it is small, but you cannot appreciate how small it is until you have travelled over it.
Then you see why it has been called “the least of all lands.” The whole country does not average more than fifty miles wide, and it is only about a hundred and forty miles long. You could lose it in many of the counties of Texas, and on some of its mountains you can look from one side of it to the other. Standing on the Mount of Olives, just outside of Jerusalem, I could see the Mediterranean on the west and on the east the Dead Sea and the River Jordan. From Dan to Beersheba is not as far as from New York to Washington, and the “stormy banks” of the Jordan inclose a stream across many parts of which you can easily throw a stone, and which though it winds in and out like a corkscrew, is not over two hundred miles long. The Mount of Olives, upon which Jesus was taken by the Devil, is described as “an exceeding high mountain,” but it is only about twenty-seven hundred feet high and would be no more than a hill in the Rockies. “All the kingdoms of the world” which Satan showed him consisted of a few half-barren hills and some fertile plains, which together would not make more than a good-sized Western county. With an aeroplane we could fly across the whole of Palestine in less than an hour. Including Syria, which takes in the mountains of Lebanon and much other country in addition to Palestine proper, it is not as long as from New York to Pittsburgh. It begins at the boundary of the French Mandate of Syria on the north, and extends from there southward along the line of the Mediterranean Sea until it is lost in the sands of Arabia.
Though it has bulked so large in history and religion, the Holy Land itself is not as big as Rhode Island, while all Palestine is only about the size of Vermont. If you could take it up and stretch it over the United States it would hardly make a patch of court plaster on Uncle Sam’s body. Dropped down upon New England, with one end at Boston, the other would be at Mount Washington, and most of the country would not be wider than from Boston to Springfield. If spread out upon northern Illinois the whole might be included inside a line drawn from Chicago to Aurora and thence to Decatur and back to Chicago.
The Bible has called this little territory a land of milk and honey. The expression must have been used by contrast to the dreary sand of the Sinai desert, through which the Israelites travelled on their way hither. As I know from former travels, it is more rocky than any part of the Alleghanies; and the Blue Ridge of Virginia, which is covered with stones, is the Mississippi Valley compared with it. The country has a backbone of mountains comprising the hills of Judea, Samaria, and Galilee, with a low coastal plain, where the Philistines lived, extending to the Mediterranean Sea. On the other side of the backbone is the great ditch in which lie the Sea of Tiberias, or Galilee, and the Dead Sea, with the winding Jordan running from one to the other. This ditch is below the level of the sea and parts of it have the hottest and most oppressive climate on earth. On the opposite side of the Jordan toward the east is a country much richer than Palestine. It is composed of highlands from two thousand to three thousand feet above sea level, giving excellent pasture and, in the north, large crops of wheat. This was the Bashan, Gilead, and Moab of the Bible, and it is now inhabited chiefly by Mohammedan Bedouins, who live in tents, driving their camels, cattle, and sheep from place to place. In the past it was thickly populated, and archæologists have uncovered the ruined cities of the people who used to live there. Palestine, on the other hand, could never have had a very large population, and the “hosts” spoken of in the Scriptures would dwindle by comparison with the numbers of people we are used to nowadays.
The trip from Jaffa to Jerusalem gives us a fair idea of the character of the country. The coastal plain is typical of the richest part. Its soil is a chocolate brown, the grass is as green as that of Egypt, and there are great orchards of olives and fruits of all kinds. The roads are lined with rich red poppies and there are wild flowers on all sides.
Climbing the hills is like jumping from the Nile Valley into the desert. There is nothing but rocks with a sparse vegetation scattered here and there through them. The limestone crops out everywhere, and in places heaps of stones have been thrown up to make little fields. Such fields are fenced with stone walls. There are also corrals for the sheep made in this way.
Fuel is so scarce in this land of no woods that even roots and twigs bring good prices. Two years of poor olive crops often drive the peasants to cutting down their precious olive trees and selling them
