of Jacob. ever . . . . and I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth, so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed be numbered. Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee." 1 Those bleak hills were indeed to be the site of cities whose names would be held in honour after the very ruins of the seats of a corrupt civilisation in the garden of the Jordan would have been swept away; that dreary view, unfolded then in its primeval desolation before the eyes of the now solitary Patriarch, would be indeed peopled with a mighty nation through many generations, with mighty recollections "like the dust of the earth in number, for ever." The next scene is less easily identified. Yet thus much Sanctuary may be said. The western slopes of the ridge just described are crossed by the track which the thoroughfare of centuries has worn in the central route of Palestine. This track winds through an uneven valley, covered, as with gravestones, by large sheets of bare rock; some few here and there standing up like the cromlechs of Druidical monuments. It is impossible not to recall, in this stony territory," 2 the wanderer who "went out from Beersheba and went toward Haran; and he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place and put them for his pillow, and lay down in that place to sleep." Then rose the vision of the night, "the ladder whose foot was set upon the earth,”—on the bare sheet of rocky ground on which the sleeper lay,-"and whose top reached to heaven," into the depths of the starry sky, which, in that wide and open space, with no intervening tree or tent, was stretched over his head. "And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and said, Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not; and he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place—this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." Such was the beginning of Beth-El, "the 1 Gen. xiii. 10-17. 2 Gen. xxviii. 10-17. "The nature of the soil is an existing comment on the record of the stony territory, where he 'took of the stones of that place."" (Clarke, vol. iv. p. 287.) House of God," the place which bore, amidst all the subsequent sanctuaries of the Holy Land, the distinctive name which has since spread to every holy place throughout the world. Its connection with the scene is best expressed in the wanderer's own words, "The Lord is in this place, and I knew it not." There is, indeed, nothing to indicate the Divine Presence, no religio loci, no awful shades, no lofty hills. Bare wild rocks, a beaten thoroughfare; these are the only features of the primeval sanctuary of that God, of whom nature itself there teaches us, that if He could, in such a scene, so emphatically reveal Himself to the houseless exile, He "is with him," and with His true servants, everywhere, and will "keep them in all places whither they go." From that rude beginning the rough "stone that Jacob set up for a pillar "1. grew the sanctuary of Bethel. First, rose the altar which he himself built there on his return, above the 'oak of tears' beneath which, in the vale below, Deborah was buried;2 then it became the seat of the assemblies gathered there in the time of the Judges; and, finally, when it seemed on the point of being superseded by the new sanctuary at Jerusalem, it assumed a fresh importance as the Holy Place of the northern kingdom. Northern It is in this last aspect that its remaining history is Sanctuary remarkable. In ancient times, before the Conquest of ofte Joshua, there had already existed a Canaanitish city Tribes. on the spot named Luz, situated on the western slope of the mountain of Abraham's altar;5 the same, probably, whose inhabitants came forth to assist their neighbours of Ai, when attacked by Joshua. It was not taken at that time, and seems long to have resisted the invaders. At last it fell before the arms, not of the little tribe of Benjamin, within whose territory it was included, but of the powerful house of Joseph, who 1 Gen. xxviii. 18. 2 Gen. xxxv. 6-8. Allon-Bachuth= Oak of Tears. This is probably the same oak as that referred to in 1 Sam. x. 3 (though there translated "plain"); 1 Kings xiii. 14. 3 Judg. xx. 18, 26. The words are in both cases translated "the House of God." Judges i. 23. attacked it from the north, and who thus acquired possession of it for their descendants, though properly speaking it had been allotted to Benjamin.' In this respect there is a singular analogy between Bethel and Jerusalem. Each, situated in the tribe of Benjamin, resisted, by a strong position, the first shock of the conquest, and being ultimately taken, not by that tribe itself, but the one by its more powerful neighbour on the south, the other by its more powerful neighbour on the north, passed out of its history into theirs. And the frontier which at Jerusalem had been originally drawn by the ravine of the Kedron and of Hinnom, at Bethel was drawn by the gorge of the Wâdy Suweinit, which has been so often mentioned as the pass from Jericho, and which in later times served the purpose of the southern boundary of the northern kingdom. Bethel thus became doubly important to the new state; first as a strong frontier-fortress, but still more as a sanctuary, founded on the holiest recollections, and in a great measure supplying the place which Shiloh had of old filled in the same great tribe of Ephraim. What structure there may have been in former ages commemorating the Vision of Jacob, it is impossible now to determine. "The House of God"the "Beth-El"- described as the scene of the assemblies in the period of the Judges, was probably some rude monument of primitive times, bearing the same relation to the Jeroboam's Temple which Jeroboam afterwards built near or round it, as the original sanctuary of the Mahometan worldknown by the very same name, Beit-Allah, "the House of God"-bears to the magnificent enclosure with which Mussulman devotion has since surrounded it. On both of the two lower eminences which overhang the modern village are ruins which may possibly indicate the site of Jeroboam's Temple. Above it, on the east, are the higher "mountains and hills," to which (in the language 2 of Hosea) the inhabitants of Bethel would in the day of their shame call "to cover" and to "fall on them." It was built, we cannot doubt, with all the splendour which Temple. his acquaintance with Egyptian worship,' and his desire to emulate the glory of the rival sanctuary of Jerusalem, would necessarily dictate. It was, we know, regarded emphatically as "the king's sanctuary," as "the king's house," with a high "priest," and "the noise of songs," and "the melody of viols," and "burnt-offerings and meatofferings," and "feast days," and "solemn assemblies." 4 And it was on the greatest of those feast days, "the fifteenth day of the eighth month," which Jeroboam had "devised out of his own heart,"-in imitation of the great Feast of Tabernacles, which Solomon had chosen for the festival of the dedication of the Temple on Mount Moriah, -that Jeroboam took his place by the altar which stood before the statue of the Golden Calf, and was interrupted. at the very moment of inauguration by the sudden and awful apparition of the Man of God from Judah.5 In that story and its consequences is contained almost all that we know of the later history of Bethel. The schools of the prophets still lingered round the sacred place, when Elijah passed through it down the long defile-then mentioned for the last time in history-on his way to Jericho. But the chief association which the Jews of Jerusalem attached to it was of the rival and idolatrous Temple. The very name of Beth-El, "the House of God," was in the times of the later prophets, exchanged for "Beth"the House of Idols,"-and, when Josiah passed Josiah. through, it was to destroy and not to build up. The "altar" and "the high place" of Jeroboam, and the aven, דיי appearance of a Beth-Aven near Bethel grove and worship of Astarte that had grown up round it, he razed and burnt.1 And "as Josiah turned," we are told, "he spied the sepulchres that were there in the Mount." 2 The "Mount" doubtless is the same as the "mountain" on the east of Bethel, described in the history of Abraham. The "sepulchres" must be the numerous rock-hewn tombs still visible in the whole descent from that "mountain" to the Wâdy Suweinit. In one of those, though we know not which, lay side by side the bones of the two prophets the aged Prophet of Bethel and his brother and victim, the "Man of God from Judah," and they were left to repose. From that time the desolation foretold by Amos and Hosea has never been disturbed; and Beth-El, "the house of God," has become literally Beth-aven, "the house of nought." 12 Kings xxiii. 15. 2 2 Kings xxiii. 16. 3 2 Kings xxiii. 17, 18. NOTE ON RAMAH AND MIZPEH. I. THE RAMAH OF SAMUEL. There is no general interest in discussing the precise situation of Ramah, the birth-place, residence, and burial-place of Samuel, further than what attaches to anything which relates to the life of so remarkable a man. But the question is invested with an incidental interest which may make it worth a few moments' investigation. It is, without exception, the most complicated and disputed problem of Sacred topography. It is almost the only passage in which the text of the Scriptural narrative (1 Sam. ix. 1-x. 10) seems to be at variance with the existing localities. All that we know certainly about the place is, that it was on an eminence, as its name of "Ramah" implies, and was situated somewhere south of Gibeah, the birth-place of Saul; as it is hardly possible to avoid identifying the city where Saul found Samuel with the usual residence of that prophet. This, which is not stated expressly in the Old Testament, is taken for granted by Josephus. From the dual termination to the name Ramathaim-by which it is called in the Hebrew and LXX text of 1 Sam. i. 1, and by Josephus always, and from which the name of Arimathea seems to be derived in the New Testament-it might be inferred that it was 1 The LXX name Apuadalμ shows the leginning of the transition. |