The Holy Land and Syria

by Frank G. Carpenter

His Lord to see.

The ruins I have been exploring represent not the city of Christ’s time, but that of the day of Joshua and Rahab. You remember Rahab, the fair lady, not so good as she should have been, who lived upon the walls of Jericho, and who hid Joshua’s spies under the stalks of flax she had stored up on her roof. She told them of the terror which prevailed in the city over the expected attack of Joshua, and made them promise to save her when Jericho was taken. The spies arranged with her that she should tie some red thread to the bars of her window so that her house might be spared. She then let them down by a cord through the window, and they escaped and reported to Joshua. That was a good day’s work for Rahab. The promise of the spies was carried out by the Israelites. Moreover, she married one of the princes of Judah, a man named Salmon, and thereby became one of the most famous women of the ancestral tree of the Israelites. She was the mother of Boaz, the husband of Ruth, and King David was one of her great-great-grandchildren. On the next step of her genealogical ladder we find King Solomon, while away down the centuries later comes the name of Joseph, the husband of Mary, and of the family of Christ. In the first chapter of Matthew are given the generations from Abraham to the birth of our Saviour, in which are mentioned the names of only four women: Thamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba, who had been the wife of Uriah and became the mother of Solomon.

Right under old Jericho is the fountain of Elisha which the prophet made sweet by throwing salt into it. It is not far from the spot where he was mocked by the children who cried after him: “Go up, thou bald head.” Thereupon, say the Scriptures, the prophet turned and “cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the woods and tare forty and two children of them.”

It is said that the place where Elijah was carried up in a whirlwind to heaven was not far from Jericho, and on my way down here from Jerusalem I saw the cave in which the prophet is supposed to have been fed by ravens. It is in the Wady Kelt, a great dry rocky canyon with high walls. The cave is half way up the side of the gorge and partly hidden by the monastery which the Greeks have built there.

But let me tell you how I came down to Jericho. The way from Jerusalem is through the wilderness of Judea, over one of the roughest and stoniest lands of the world. There is but little green to be seen and the glare is intense. The dust of the limestone and chalk road is so thick that it gets into eyes, mouth, and nostrils. This road, which is the chief highway from the Jordan to the Holy City, is travelled by thousands. The traffic was even greater in the time of Christ, for the Jordan Valley was then covered with irrigated farms and the rich men of Jerusalem had their winter homes there.

I left Jerusalem in a carriage, going out through the Damascus Gate, crossing the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and skirting the Garden of Gethsemane at the foot of the Mount of Olives.

My carriage was an easy victoria drawn by three Arabian horses, and the coachman was a Syrian Jehu with hair as red and a face as fair as my own. I had a soldier with me to keep off the robbers. He was furnished by the government of Jerusalem at a cost of three dollars and was under the direct command of the sheik here at Jericho. This soldier carried a gun and sword, and went ahead, nominally to clear the road. Every party I met on the way, including a company of hunters from Jerusalem on their way for game in the lands beyond the Jordan, had an escort of soldiers.

I stopped at Bethany to look at Lazarus’s tomb, and was reminded of how Mark Twain said that he would “rather sleep in the tomb than in any other house in the place.” The Bethany of to-day is a dirty, ragged village of forty or fifty stone huts inhabited by perhaps three hundred people. The houses stand on the side of a hill, rising one over the other. The people are small farmers who cultivate patches of stony land and little orchards of olives and figs. They have cows and make butter for Jerusalem. They are all Mohammedans, and their children call out for baksheesh.

Entering the town, I took a look at the tomb. It is a sort of cavern cut out of limestone and entered by steep steps. It belongs to the Franciscan monks, who often say mass there.

The house of Mary and Martha, where Christ stopped, is said to have been in an inclosure now full of brambles and wild cactus. There is no building left, although the guides point out a pile of stones which they say was once a part of the wall.