But the fourth I cannot overlook.
And I will send a fire on the walls of Gaza,
Which shall devour the palaces thereof.—Amos i. 6, 7.
Zephaniah[[77]] had said, “Gaza shall be forsaken;” and last of all Zechariah[[78]] had declared,
Ashkelon shall see it and fear,
Gaza also shall see it and grieve,
The king shall perish from Gaza,
And Ashkelon shall not be inhabited.
What the prophets foretold against Gaza, which was one of the five principal cities of the south-west of Canaan, Alexander the Great had fulfilled. Her ruins bore witness also to the prowess of the later heroes of Israel, Jonathan and Simon. The city had been originally allotted to the tribe of Judah, and the Philistines never prospered in their unjust possession of it. It was the seat of the worship of [Dagon], a monstrous idol, whose lower half had the form of a fish, and the upper of a woman. Helon regarded the city as a monument of Israel’s revenge, placed on the very confines of the Promised Land. To-day he was to enter that land, and it seemed as if this awful spectacle had been exhibited to him, to impress indelibly upon his mind the transition from the land of the heathen to the land of Jehovah.
Lost in these thoughts, he stood unconscious of what was going on around him. Myron placed himself beside him, and, for a long time, watched him with earnest curiosity. “In good truth,” he at last suddenly exclaimed, “this is oriental contemplation! Helon, thou thinkest on Jerusalem!” Helon, disagreeably startled from his sublime reflections, replied, “I was not thinking on Jerusalem, but on that city of the heathens, on which, as our prophet predicted, ‘baldness is come.’”