venience of its projecting point for the first sea-fishermen to "catch" the "fish"" of the Mediterranean, and even the rock of Tyre still answers the same purpose. Amongst all these cities, it is on Tyre that the attention of the Biblical student is chiefly fixed. Its main features can still be distinguished and illustrated by the situation of kindred cities elsewhere. The massive remains of the ancient walls of Arvad, nearly surrounding the island of the modern Ruad, give some notion of the defences of Tyre. The limited size of the island led both in Tyre and Arvad to an arrangement which must have rendered them a striking exception to most Oriental, and to most ancient cities. For the sake of economising the narrow space, the 'houses of both were built up, fearless of earthquakes, to the height of many stories, recalling, says Strabo, the aspect of the gigantic mansions of the Augustan Rome. With this lofty mass of edifices towering on its sea-girt rock, Tyre might well be thought a fit type of the ancient Queen of Commerce; and the prophet naturally spoke of her as a floating palace; as a ship moored by the long strand"; "in the midst of the seas," with her "masts of cedar," her " sails of fine linen, blue and purple," her "mariners, rowers, and pilots."

cia.

There is one point of view in which this whole coast is specially remarkable. "A mournful and solitary Desolation silence now prevails along the shore which once of Phoeniresounded with the world's debate." This sentence, with which Gibbon solemnly closes his chapter on the Crusades, well sums up the general impression still left by the six days' ride from Beirût to Ascalon; and it is no matter of surprise that in this impression travellers have felt a response to the strains in which Isaiah and Ezekiel foretold the desolation of Tyre and Sidon. In one sense, and that the highest, this feeling is just. The Phoenician power which the Prophets denounced has entirely perished; even whilst "the world's debate" of the middle ages gave a new animation to these shores, the brilliant Tyre of Alexander and Barbarossa had no real connection with the Tyre of Hiram; and perhaps no greater stretch of imagination in ancient history is required than to conceive how the two small towns of Tyre and Sidon,

Kenrick's Phoenicia, pp. 47, 58.

Strabo. This has been well caught by Macaulay, Hist. of Eng. vol. v.

3 For the elaborate representation of Tyre as a ship, see Ezekiel xxvii. 3-26 (Kenrick, pp. 193, 319).

as they now exist, could have been the parent cities of Carthage and Cadiz, the traders with Spain and Britain, the wonders of the East for luxury and magnificence. So total a destruction, for all political purposes, of the two great commercial states of the ancient world has been frequently held up to commercial states in the modern world, as showing the precarious tenure by which purely mercantile greatness is held; and in this respect the prophecies of the Hebrew seers' were a real revelation of the coming fortunes of the world, the more remarkable because experience had not yet justified such a result. But to narrow the scope of these sublime visions to the actual buildings and sites of the cities, is as unwarranted by facts as it is mistaken in idea. Sidon has probably never ceased to be a populous, and, on the whole, a flourishing town: small, indeed, as compared with its ancient grandeur, but never desolate, or without some portion of its old traffic; and still encompassed round and round with the lines of its red silk manufacture. Tyre may perhaps have been in a state of ruin shortly after the Chaldean, and subsequently after the Greek conquest of Syria. But it has been always speedily rebuilt; and the magnificent columns which strew its shores and its streets at the present day, attest its splendour during a long portion of its existence -through the period not only of its ancient, but of its medieval, history. After the termination of the Crusades, it still remained a seat of European factories; and, though confined within a very small part of the ancient city, it is still a thriving and well inhabited village, with a considerable traffic in millstones, conveyed from Hermon in long caravans, and thence exported to Alexandria. The period, during which it sunk to the lowest ebb, was from the close of the seventeenth to the beginning of the present century; and the comparative desolation which it then exhibited no doubt presented some of the imagery on which so much stress has been laid, in order to convey the impression of its being a desolate rock, only used for the drying of fishermen's nets. But as this was not the case before that period, and is certainly not the case now, it is idle to seek for the fulfilment of the ancient prediction within those limits; and the ruin of the empire of Tyre, combined with the

1 Isa. xxiii. 1, 15; Ezek. xxvi.-xxviii.

revival and continuance of the town of Tyre, is thus a striking instance of the moral and poetical, as distinct from the literal and prosaic, accomplishments of the Prophetical scriptures. The same argument applies with greater or less force to the prophecies against Ascalon, Damascus, and Petra, as well as to those of which the fulfilment is supposed to be yet future. If the revival of these cities, after their temporary destruction, shows that we are not to press the letter of prophecy beyond its professed object, so also the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans shows that no expectations of its future prosperity can be founded on prophecies uttered long before that time in reference to its restoration by Ezra. It is possible that, in the changes of the Turkish empire, Palestine may again become a civilised country, under Greek or Latin influences; that the Jewish race, so wonderfully preserved, may yet have another stage of national existence opened to them; that they may once more obtain possession of their native land, and invest it with an interest greater than it could have under any other circumstances. But the localities of Syria, no less than common sense and piety, warn us against confounding these speculations with divine revelations, or against staking the truth of Christianity and the authority of the Sacred Records on the chances of local and political revolutions. The curse on Ascalon must have expired before the time when it became the residence of the Herods and the court of the Crusaders. If Petra under the Roman empire rose into a great thoroughfare of Eastern traffic, and is now again, after a long interval of desertion, the yearly resort of European travellers, it is clear that the words "None shall pass through it for ever and ever," cannot be extended beyond the fall of the race of Esau. In like manner the curtain of prophecy falls on the Holy City, when "Jerusalem was trodden down" by the armies of Titus. Its successive revivals under Hadrian, Constantine, Omar, and Godfrey, as well as its present degradation, and its future vicissitudes, are alike beyond the scope of the Sacred Volume".

1 Zeph. ii. 4, 7.

2 Isa. xxxiv. 10; Jer xlix. 18. 3 Luke xxi. 24.

4 For the general question of the local predictions of the Old Testament, see Arnold's Two Sermons on Prophecy.

T

NOTE A.

HOUSE OF SIMON AT JAFFA.

ONE of the few localities which can claim to represent an historical scene of the New Testament is the site of the house of Simon, the tanner, at Jaffa. The house itself is a comparatively modern building, with no pretensions to interest or antiquity. The outer door is from the street in which stand the Latin and Armenian convents, but no church or convent appears to have been built on the site, and no other place is shown as such. The house is occupied by Mussulmans, and regarded by them as sacred; a small mosque or praying-place is in one of the rooms, which is said, by the occupants, to commemorate the fact that "the Lord Jesus here asked God for a meal, and the table came down at once," a remarkable instance of the vulgar corruption of miracles so common in Mussulman traditions; and, in this case, curious as an evident confusion of the Mahometan versions of the Feeding of the Five Thousand', and of the Last Supper', with the Vision of Peter. Such a tradition, even from the fact of its distortion, and from its want of European sanction, has some claim to be heard. And this claim is remarkably confirmed by the circumstances of the situation. The house is close "on the sea-shore;" the waves beat against the low wall of its court-yard. In the courtyard is a spring of fresh water, such as must always have been needed for the purposes of tanning, and which, though now no longer so used, is reported to have been so used in a tradition which describes the premises to have been long employed as a tannery. It is curious that two other celebrated localities may be still identified in the same manner. One is in Jerusalem. At the southern end of the Church of the Sepulchre stood the palace of the Knights of St. John. When Saladin took the Holy City, it is said that he determined to render the site of the palace for ever contemptible, by turning it into a tannery. And a tannery still remains with its offensive sights and smells amongst what are the undoubted remains of that ancient home of European chivalry. Another case is nearer home. Every one knows the story of the parentage of William the Conqueror, how his father, under the romantic cliff of Falaise, saw Arlette amongst the tanneries. There, again, the

1 See Weil's Biblical Legends, p. 226.

2 Koran, v. 118. (Calcutta Review, iv. p. 201.)

tanneries still take advantage of the running streams which creep round the foot of the rock,-living memorials of the ancient story.

The rude staircase to the roof of the modern house, flat now as of old, leads us to the view which gives all that is needed for the accompaniments of the hour. There is the wide noonday heaven. above; in front is the long bright sweep of the Mediterranean Sea, its nearer waves broken by the reefs famous in ancient Gentile legends as the rocks of Andromeda'. Fishermen are standing and wading amongst them- such as might have been there of old, recalling to the Apostle his long-forgotten nets by the Lake of Gennesareth, the first promise of his future call to be "a fisher of men."

NOTE B.

VILLAGES OF SHARON.

Ir may be expedient to give here two or three notices of places, not as being directly connected with Sacred History, but as having been omitted in previous accounts.

About three hours N. of Jaffa is a village on the sandy ridge of the "Ramleh," ""El-Haram Ali ibn-Aleim," "the sanctuary of El-Haram Ali the son of Aleim," so called from the mosque and tomb and Arsuf. of that saint, whose story as related to us by the keeper of the mosque is as follows: "He was a dervish in the adjacent village of Arsuf, Sultan of all the dervishes of all the country round. The villagers thought not at all about God. When Sultan Bibars (from Egypt) came to besiege it, Ali-who lived in the town on alms that were given to him-baffled him by catching all the cannon-balls in his hands. A dervish from the besieging army, after some time, came to ask him the cause of the failure of all their attacks. Ali replied, 'Will the Sultan make me a good mosque and tomb, and is he a good Mussulman ?' 'Yes,' answered the dervish. Send him then to me, disguised as a dervish.' The Sultan Bibars came and promised to build for Ali the mosque and tomb; and Ali stipulated for twenty-four hours before the cannonading was to begin anew. He then warned the people of Arsuf to become Mussulmans, threatening the fall of the town if they refused to listen to him. They disbelieved him; the twenty-four hours elapsed the cannonading recommenced-Ali no longer intercepted the balls, and the town was destroyed."

The ruins of Arsuf are still visible on an eminence a little north of "El-Haram," with a fosse on the land-side, and walls on the sea

' Compare Kenrick's Phoenicia, p. 20.