The mountains of Israel are the characteristic features of her history as of her geography. In every part of Syria they are the companions of the journey. Great
MOUNT HERMON, FROM THE SLOPES OF TABOR.
The lofty mountain in the extreme distance is Mount Hermon.
distant masses, or near crests of them, seem to accompany you as you move. And as you travel through the history of the land it is in the same companionship. The Jordan valley lies along the western side of the mountain range, a place of luxury and temptation. But Israel abides on the hills, sending down to it only the most degenerate of her children. It is a very striking fact that Jesus was tempted to sin for bread on the mountain almost within sight of Jericho, where the Herodians were sinning with surfeits of wine and rich meats. All that is truest to Israel and most characteristic of her at her best is on the hills. They are the places of her war and of her worship. The Gilgals have almost all stood siege. All, or at least the most of them, have been fortified. On some of them the rude remains of ancient sacred circles, or the decayed steps of altars cut in the rock, may still be traced. Her enemies found by bitter experience that “her gods are gods of the hills.” Her ark had its abode on the tableland at Shiloh or on the hill of Zion. Its history on the low ground was but a story of calamity; it had to be sent up again to Kirjath-Jearim among the hills. Yet the heights of Israel stand for more than this blend of war and worship; they were her home. All her greater towns nestle among them somewhere; most of them stand on the summits, or just below them. It was a race of Highlanders that gave us our Bible—men whose home was on the heights.
Her wars, indeed, were everywhere, for it is a blood-drenched land. Many of her battles were fought at the edge of the mountain-land, on the kopjes that run along the southern border of Esdraelon, or among the foot-hills near the mouth of the western gorges. There, or on the great plain, she met her invaders. But the heights were the scenes of battles in the last resort, and the gorges are associated with the advance and retreat of armed hosts, the rush of the invader and the headlong retreat of armies that had been surprised and routed from above.
Meanwhile, in the middle spaces, she fought her continuous battle with the desert and the sun for her daily bread. It is said that in Malta, where every possible spot is cultivated, the earth has been all imported, and that the Knights of Malta allowed no vessel to enter the harbour without paying dues in soil. The denuded hill-sides of Palestine, with their ruined heaps of stones that once built up terraces for cultivation, tell a similar story. On some hillsides the remains of sixty or even eighty such terraces may still be traced. In many places the valleys are rich in an altogether superfluous depth of fertile soil. But this did not suffice the inhabitants, and they built up the terraces along the southward slopes, in many places quite to the walls of their mountain villages. On not a few of these slopes labour must have actually created land, and men’s hearts grown strong within them as they changed the rocks into gardens and the slopes of shingle into harvest fields.
CHAPTER IV
THE WATERS OF ISRAEL
Keeping in mind our view of Palestine as an oasis, we naturally turn at once to the thought of the waters that have retrieved it from the desert. By far the most conspicuous of these is the Jordan, flowing down a long course to its deep-dug grave in the Dead Sea. At whatever point we approach that great valley the eye is inevitably led along it northward to the white Hermon, whose great “breastplate” shines over all the land. That mountain, and the Lebanons of which it is the southern outpost, are the real makers of Palestine.