blooming, and, hemmed in by the high wall, we had some moments of solemn
peace, broken only by the sound of a Moslem darabooka drum throbbing
near at hand. Desecrated as this spot is, and made cheap by the petty
creations of superstition, one cannot but feel the awful significance
of the place, and the weight of history crowding upon him, where battles
raged for a thousand years, and where the greatest victory of all was
won when Christ commanded Peter to put up his sword. Near here Titus
formed his columns which stormed the walls and captured the heroic city
after its houses, and all this valley itself, were filled with Jewish
dead; but all this is as nothing to the event of that awful night when
the servants of the high-priest led away the unresisting Lord.
It is this event, and not any other, that puts an immeasurable gulf
between this and all other cities, and perhaps this difference is more
felt the farther one is from Jerusalem. The visitor expects too much; he
is unreasonably impatient of the contrast between the mean appearance of
the theatre and the great events that have been enacted on it; perhaps
he is not prepared for the ignorance, the cupidity, the credulity,
the audacious impostures under Christian names, on the spot where
Christianity was born.
When one has exhausted the stock sights of Jerusalem, it is probably the
dullest, least entertaining city of the Orient; I mean, in itself, for
its pilgrims and its religious fêtes, in the spring of the year,
offer always some novelties to the sight-seer; and, besides, there is a
certain melancholy pleasure to be derived from roaming about outside
the walls, enveloped in a historic illusion that colors and clothes the
nakedness of the landscape.
The chief business of the city and the region seems to be the
manufacture of religious playthings for the large children who come
here. If there is any factory of relics here I did not see it. Nor do I
know whether the true cross has still the power of growing, which it
had in the fourth century, to renew itself under the constant demand for
pieces of it. I did not go to see the place where the tree grew of which
it was made; the exact spot is shown in a Greek convent about a mile
and a half west of the city. The tree is said to have been planted by
Abraham and Noah. This is evidently an error; it may have been planted
by Adam and watered by Noah.
There is not much trade in antiquities in the city; the shops offer
little to tempt the curiosity-hunter. Copper coins of the Roman period
abound, and are constantly turned up in the fields outside the city,
most of them battered and defaced beyond recognition. Jewish mites are
plenty enough, but the silver shekel would be rare if the ingenious Jews
did not keep counterfeits on hand. The tourist is waited on at his
hotel by a few patient and sleek sharks with cases of cheap jewelry
and doubtful antiques, and if he seeks the shops of the gold and silver
bazaars he will find little more. I will not say that he will not now
and then pick up a piece of old pottery that has made the journey
from Central Asia, or chance upon a singular stone with a talismanic
inscription. The hope that he may do so carries the traveller through
a great many Eastern slums. The chief shops, however, are those of
trinkets manufactured for the pilgrims, of olive-wood, ivory, bone,
camels' teeth, and all manner of nuts and seeds. There are more than
fifty sorts of beads, strung for profane use or arranged for rosaries,
and some of them have pathetic names, like “Job's tears.”
Jerusalem is entitled to be called the City of Beads.
There is considerable activity in Jewish objects that are old and rather
unclean; and I think I discovered something like an attempt to make a
“corner” in phylacteries, that is, in old ones, for the new are made
in excess of the demand. If a person desires to carry home a phylactery
to exhibit to his Sunday school, in illustration of the religion of the
Jews, he wants one that has been a long time in use. I do not suppose it
possible that the education of any other person is as deficient as mine
was in the matter of these ornamental aids in worship. But if there
is one, this description is for him: the phylactery, common size, is a
leathern box about an inch and a half square, with two narrow straps
of leather, about three feet long, sewed to the bottom corners. The
box contains a parchment roll of sacred writing. When the worshipper
performs his devotions in the synagogue, he binds one of the
phylacteries about his left arm and the other about his head, so that
the little box has something of the appearance of a leathern horn
sprouting out of his forehead. Phylacteries are worn only in the
synagogue, and in this respect differ from the greasy leathern talismans
of the Nubians, which contain scraps from the Koran, and are never taken
off. Whatever significance the phylactery once had to the Jew it
seems now to have lost, since he is willing to make it an article of
merchandise. Perhaps it is poverty that compels him also to sell his
ancient scriptures; parchment rolls of favorite books, such as Esther,
that are some centuries old, are occasionally to be bought, and new
rolls, deceitfully doctored into an appearance of antiquity, are offered
freely.
A few years ago the antiquarian world was put into a ferment by what
was called the “Shoepira collection,” a large quantity of
clay pottery,—gods, votive offerings, images, jars, and other
vessels,—with inscriptions in unknown characters, which was said
to have been dug up in the land of Moab, beyond the Jordan, and was
expected to throw great light upon certain passages of Jewish history,
and especially upon the religion of the heathen who occupied Palestine
at the time of the conquest. The collection was sent to Berlin; some
eminent German savans pronounced it genuine; nearly all the English
scholars branded it as an impudent imposture. Two collections of the
articles have been sent to Berlin, where they are stored out of sight
of the public generally, and Mr. Shoepira has made a third collection,
which he still retains.
Mr. Shoepira is a Hebrew antiquarian and bookseller, of somewhat
eccentric manners, but an enthusiast. He makes the impression of a
man who believes in his discoveries, and it is generally thought in
Jerusalem that if his collection is a forgery, he himself is imposed on.
The account which he gives of the places where the images and utensils
were found is anything but clear or definite. We are required to believe
that they have been dug up in caves at night and by stealth, and at the
peril of the lives of the discoverers, and that it is not safe to visit
these caves in the daytime on account of the Bedaween. The fresh-baked
appearance of some of the articles is admitted, and it is said that it
was necessary to roast them to prevent their crumbling when exposed to
the air. Our theory in regard to these singular objects is that a few of
those first shown were actually discovered, and that all the remainder
have been made in imitation of them. Of the characters (or alphabet)
of the inscriptions, Mr. Schepira says he has determined twenty-three;
sixteen of these are Phoenician, and the others, his critics say, are
meaningless. All the objects are exceedingly rude and devoid of the
slightest art; the images are many of them indecent; the jars are clumsy
in shape, but the inscriptions are put on with some skill. The figures
are supposed to have been votive offerings, and the jars either memorial
or sepulchral urns.
The hideous collection appeared to me sui generis, although some of the
images resemble the rudest of those called Phoenician which General di
Cesnola unearthed in Cyprus. Without merit, they seem to belong to a
rude age rather than to be the inartistic product of this age. That is,
supposing them to be forgeries, I cannot see how these figures could be
conceived by a modern man, who was capable of inventing a fraud of this
sort. He would have devised something better, at least something less
simple, something that would have somewhere betrayed a little modern
knowledge and feeling. All the objects have the same barbarous tone,
a kind of character that is distinct from their rudeness, and the same
images and designs are repeated over and over again. This gives color
to the theory that a few genuine pieces of Moabite pottery were found,
which gave the idea for a large manufacture of them. And yet, there are
people who see these things, and visit all the holy places, and then go
away and lament that there are no manufactories in Jerusalem.
Jerusalem attracts while it repels; and both it and all Palestine
exercise a spell out of all proportion to the consideration they had in
the ancient world. The student of the mere facts of history, especially
if his studies were made in Jerusalem itself, would be at a loss to
account for the place that the Holy City occupies in the thought of the
modern world, and the importance attached to the history of the handful
of people who made themselves a home in this rocky country. The Hebrew
nation itself, during the little time it was a nation, did not play
a part in Oriental affairs at all commensurate with its posthumous
reputation. It was not one of the great kingdoms of antiquity, and
in that theatre of war and conquest which spread from Ethiopia to the
Caspian Sea, it was scarcely an appreciable force in the great drama.
The country the Hebrews occupied was small; they never conquered
or occupied the whole of the Promised Land, which extended from the
Mediterranean Sea to the Arabian plain, from Hamath to Sinai. Their
territory in actual possession reached only from Dan to Beersheba. The
coast they never subdued; the Philistines, who came from Crete and grew
to be a great people in the plain, held the lower portion of Palestine
on the sea, and the Phoenicians the upper. Except during a brief period
in their history, the Jews were confined to the hill-country. Only
during the latter part of the reign of David and two thirds of that of
Solomon did the Jewish kingdom take on the proportions of a great state.
David extended the Israelitish power from the Gulf of Akaba to the
Euphrates; Damascus paid him tribute; he occupied the cities of his
old enemies, the Philistines, but the kingdom of Tyre, still in the
possession of Hiram, marked the limit of Jewish sway in that direction.
This period of territorial consequence was indeed brief. Before Solomon
was in his grave, the conquests bequeathed to him by his father began
to slip from his hand. The life of the Israelites as a united nation, as
anything but discordant and warring tribes, after the death of Joshua,
is all included in the reigns of David and Solomon,—perhaps sixty or
seventy years.
The Israelites were essentially highlanders. Some one has noticed their
resemblance to the Scotch Highlanders in modes of warfare. In fighting
they aimed to occupy the heights. They descended into the plain
reluctantly; they made occasional forays into the lowlands, but their
hills were their strength, as the Psalmist said; and they found security
among their crags and secluded glens from the agitations which shook the
great empires of the Eastern world. Invasions, retreats, pursuits, the
advance of devouring hosts or the flight of panic-stricken masses, for
a long time passed by their ridge of country on either side, along the
Mediterranean or through the land of Moab. They were out of the track
of Oriental commerce as well as of war. So removed were they from
participation in the stirring affairs of their era that they seem even
to have escaped the omnivorous Egyptian conquerors. Eor a long period
conquest passed them by, and it was not till their accumulation of
wealth tempted the avarice of the great Asiatic powers that they were
involved in the conflicts which finally destroyed them. The small
kingdom of Judah, long after that of Israel had been utterly swept away,
owed its continuance of life to its very defensible position. Solomon
left Jerusalem a strong city, well supplied with water, and capable
of sustaining a long siege, while the rugged country around it offered
little comfort to a besieging army.
For a short time David made the name of Israel a power in the world, and
Solomon, inheriting his reputation, added the triumphs of commerce to
those of conquest. By a judicious heathen alliance with Hiram of Tyre
he was able to build vessels on the Red Sea and man them with Phoenician
sailors, for voyages to India and Ceylon; and he was admitted by Hiram
to a partnership in his trading adventures to the Pillars of Hercules.
But these are only episodes in the Jewish career; the nation's part in
Oriental history is comparatively insignificant until the days of their
great calamities. How much attention its heroism and suffering attracted
at that time we do not know.
Though the Israelites during their occupation of the hill-country of
Palestine were not concerned in the great dynastic struggles of the
Orient, they were not, however, at peace. Either the tribes were
fighting among themselves or they were involved in sanguinary fights
with the petty heathen chiefs about them. We get a lively picture of the
habits of the time in a sentence in the second book of Samuel: “And
it came to pass, after the year was expired, at the time when kings go
forth to battle, that David sent Joab and his servants with him, and
all Israel; and they destroyed the children of Ammon, and besieged
Rabbah.” It was a pretty custom. In that season when birds pair and
build their nests, when the sap mounts in the trees and travellers long
to go into far countries, kings felt a noble impulse in their veins to
go out and fight other kings. But this primitive simplicity was mingled
with shocking barbarity; David once put his captives under the saw,
and there is nothing to show that the Israelites were more moved by
sentiments of pity and compassion than their heathen neighbors. There
was occasionally, however, a grim humor in their cruelty. When Judah
captured King Adoni-bezek, in Bezek, he cut off his great toes and his
thumbs. Adoni-bezek, who could appreciate a good thing, accepted the
mutilation in the spirit in which it was offered, and said that he had
himself served seventy kings in that fashion; “threescore and ten
kings, having their thumbs and great toes cut off, gathered their meat
under my table.”
From the death of Joshua to the fall of Samaria, the history of the Jews
is largely a history of civil war. From about seven hundred years before
Christ, Palestine was essentially a satrapy of the Assyrian kings, as it
was later to become one of the small provinces of the Roman empire. At
the time when Sennacherib was waiting before Jerusalem for Hezekiah
to purchase his withdrawal by stripping the gold from the doors of the
Temple, the foundations of a city were laid on the banks of the Tiber,
which was to extend its sway over the known world, to whose dominion the
utmost power of Jerusalem was only a petty sovereignty, and which was
destined to rival Jerusalem itself as the spiritual capital of the
earth.
If we do not find in the military power or territorial consequence of
the Jews an explanation of their influence in the modern world, still
less do we find it in any faithfulness to a spiritual religion, the
knowledge of which was their chief distinction among the tribes about
them. Their lapses from the worship of Jehovah were so frequent, and of
such long duration, that their returns to the worship of the true God
seem little more than breaks in their practice of idolatry. And these
spasmodic returns were due to calamities, and fears of worse judgments.
Solomon sanctioned by national authority gross idolatries which had
been long practised. At his death, ten of the tribes seceded from the
dominion of Judah and set up a kingdom in which idolatry was made and
remained the state religion, until the ten tribes vanished from the
theatre of history. The kingdom of Israel, in order to emphasize its
separation from that of Judah, set up the worship of Jehovah in the
image of a golden calf. Against this state religion of image-worship
the prophets seem to have thought it in vain to protest; they contented
themselves with battling against the more gross and licentious
idolatries of Baal and Ashtaroth; and Israel always continued the
idol-worship established by Jeroboam. The worship of Jehovah was the
state religion of the little kingdom of Judah, but during the period of
its existence, before the Captivity, I think that only four of its kings
were not idolaters. The people were constantly falling away into the
heathenish practices of their neighbors.
If neither territorial consequence nor religious steadfastness gave the
Jews rank among the great nations of antiquity, they would equally fail
of the consideration they now enjoy but for one thing, and that is,
after all, the chief and enduring product of any nationality; we mean,
of course, its literature. It is by that, that the little kingdoms
of Judah and Israel hold their sway over the world. It is that which
invests ancient Jerusalem with its charm and dignity. Not what the Jews
did, but the songs of their poets, the warnings and lamentations of
their prophets, the touching tales of their story-tellers, draw us to
Jerusalem by the most powerful influences that affect the human mind.
And most of this unequalled literature is the product of seasons of
turbulence, passion, and insecurity. Except the Proverbs and Song of
Solomon, and such pieces as the poem of Job and the story of Ruth, which
seem to be the outcome of literary leisure, the Hebrew writings were all
the offspring of exciting periods. David composed his Psalms—the most
marvellous interpreters of every human aspiration, exaltation, want, and
passion—with his sword in his hand; and the prophets always appear to
ride upon a whirlwind. The power of Jerusalem over the world is as truly
a literary one as that of Athens is one of art. That literature was
unknown to the ancients, or unappreciated: otherwise contemporary
history would have considered its creators of more consequence than it
did.
We speak, we have been speaking, of the Jerusalem before our era, and of
the interest it has independent of the great event which is, after all,
its chief claim to immortal estimation. It becomes sacred ground to
us because there, in Bethlehem, Christ was born; because here—not in
these streets, but upon this soil—he walked and talked and taught
and ministered; because upon Olivet, yonder, he often sat with his
disciples, and here, somewhere,—it matters not where,—he suffered
death and conquered death.
This is the scene of these transcendent events. We say it to ourselves
while we stand here. We can clearly conceive it when we are at a
distance. But with the actual Jerusalem of to-day before our eyes, its
naked desolation, its superstition, its squalor, its vivid contrast to
what we conceive should be the City of our King, we find it easier to
feel that Christ was born in New England than in Judæa.
V.—GOING DOWN TO JERICHO.
IT is on a lovely spring morning that we set out through the land of
Benjamin to go down among the thieves of Jericho, and to the Jordan and
the Dead Sea. For protection against the thieves we take some of them
with us, since you cannot in these days rely upon finding any good
Samaritans there.
For some days Abd-el-Atti has been in mysterious diplomatic relations
with the robbers of the wilderness, who live in Jerusalem, and farm out
their territory. “Thim is great rascals,” says the dragoman; and
it is solely on that account that we seek their friendship: the real
Bedawee is never known to go back on his word to the traveller who
trusts him, so long as it is more profitable to keep it than to break
it. We are under the escort of the second sheykh, who shares with the
first sheykh the rule of all the Bedaween who patrol the extensive
territory from Hebron to the fords of the Jordan, including Jerusalem,
Bethlehem, Mar Saba, and the shores of the Dead Sea; these rulers would
have been called kings in the old time, and the second sheykh bears the
same relation to the first that the Cæsar did to the Augustus in the
Roman Empire.
Our train is assembled in the little market-place opposite the hotel,
or rather it is assembling, for horses and donkeys are slow to arrive,
saddles are wanting, the bridles are broken, and the unpunctuality and
shiftlessness of the East manifest themselves. Abd-el-Atti is in fierce
altercation with a Koorland nobleman about a horse, which you would not
say would be likely to be a bone of contention with anybody. They are
both endeavoring to mount at once. Friends are backing each combatant,
and the air is thick with curses in guttural German and maledictions in
shrill Arabic. Unfortunately I am appealed to.
“What for this Dutchman, he take my horse?”
“Perhaps he hired it first?”
“P'aps not. I make bargain for him with the owner day before
yesterday.”
“I have become dis pferd for four days,” cries the Baron.
There seems to be no reason to doubt the Baron's word; he has ridden
the horse to Bethlehem, and become accustomed to his jolts, and no doubt
has the prior lien on the animal. The owner has let him to both parties,
a thing that often happens when the second comer offers a piastre
more. Another horse is sent for, and we mount and begin to disentangle
ourselves from the crowd. It is no easy matter, especially for the
ladies. Our own baggage-mules head in every direction. Donkeys laden
with mountains of brushwood push through the throng, scraping right and
left; camels shamble against us, their contemptuous noses in the air,
stretching their long necks over our heads; market-women from Bethlehem
scream at us; and greasy pilgrims block our way and curse our horses'
hoofs.
One by one we emerge and get into a straggling line, and begin to
comprehend the size of our expedition. Our dragoman has made as
extensive preparations as if we were to be the first to occupy Gilgal
and Jericho, and that portion of the Promised Land. We are equipped
equally well for fighting and for famine. A party of Syrians, who desire
to make the pilgrimage to the Jordan, have asked permission to join
us, in order to share the protection of our sheykh, and they add both
picturesqueness and strength to the grand cavalcade which clatters out
of Jaffa Gate and sweeps round the city wall. Heaven keep us from undue
pride in our noble appearance!
Perhaps our train would impress a spectator as somewhat mixed, and he
would be unable to determine the order of its march. It is true that the
horses and the donkeys and the mules all have different rates of speed,
and that the Syrian horse has only two gaits,—a run and a slow walk.
As soon as we gain the freedom of the open country, these differences
develop. The ambitious dragomen and the warlike sheykh put their horses
into a run and scour over the hills, and then come charging back upon
us, like Don Quixote upon the flock of sheep. The Syrians imitate this
madness. The other horses begin to agitate their stiff legs; the donkeys
stand still and protest by braying; the pack-mules get temporarily
crazy, charge into us with the protruding luggage, and suddenly wheel
into the ditch and stop. This playfulness is repeated in various ways,
and adds to the excitement without improving the dignity of our march.
We are of many nationalities. There are four Americans, two of them
ladies. The Doctor, who is accustomed to ride the mustangs of New Mexico
and the wild horses of the Western deserts, endeavors to excite a spirit
of emulation in his stiff-kneed animal, but with little success. Our
dragoman is Egyptian, a decidedly heavy weight, and sits his steed like
a pyramid.