Book Description

By the World War the Moslem was forced to the rear and Palestine has become more and more the possession of Christian and Jew. General Allenby and his troops have taken the part of Richard the Lion-hearted and the Crusaders, and Jerusalem is at last out of the hands of the followers of the Prophet Mohammed. Among the innovations that followed are the removal of the tax gatherers who robbed the poor and the rich in the name of the Sultan, the safeguarding of the roads from the wandering Bedouins, and the reclaiming of the soil, so that the country bids fair to become once more the land of milk and honey that it was when it gladdened the tired eyes of the Israelites after their long wanderings in the desert of Sinai. Railways now cross the desert, connecting Palestine with Egypt and Turkey, and one may go on the cars from Cairo to Jerusalem and from Paris, via Constantinople and Damascus, to Galilee. At the same time the Holy Land of the Bible is the Holy Land of to-day. It has the same skies as those under which the Wise Men followed the Star to the birthplace of Jesus. It has the same flowers as those trodden by Joseph and Mary, and the water in Jacob’s Well is still sweet, notwithstanding it is now compared with that of the Nile which flows in pipes over the desert almost to the Pool of Siloam. The sheep still pasture on the hills as they did in the days of our Saviour, and boys and girls may be seen picking the tares from the wheat. Asses like Balaam’s still carry their masters over the road, although their brays are now and then drowned in the horns of the automobiles; and the strange people one constantly meets personify Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Rachel and Ruth, and the other Bible characters who lived and loved in the days of the Scriptures. All these belong to the Palestine perennial, and to that Palestine belong the talks of this book. They are based on the notes dictated to my stenographer or written by me in the midst of the scenes they describe. I give them as they came hot from the pen, changing only a line here and there to accord with the changing conditions. We start in the Land of Goshen which Joseph gave to his father and brothers after he was sold to the Ishmaelites and carried down into Egypt, and enter Palestine at Jaffa, the city of Jonah and Simon the Tanner. We cross the plains of Sharon by rail, and travel back and forth over the Holy Land from Beersheba to Dan. Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Jericho and the Jordan, Shechem and Nazareth are among the places where we linger longest, and it is on the opposite side of the Sea of Galilee from Capernaum that we take the train for Damascus. In that city we go to the wall over which Saint Paul was let down in a basket, shop in the Street called Straight, and then, crossing the Abana, one of the rivers that Naaman the Leper would have preferred to the Jordan, ascend the mountains of Lebanon to the ruins of Baalbek. We next climb down to the Mediterranean Sea at Beirut and sail north to Smyrna to pay our respects to the ruined shrine of the Goddess Diana on the site of old Ephesus. After a peep at Asia Minor we take a ship for home. Throughout the journey, the old is ever tramping on the heels of the new, and the Palestine of the future is seen through the veil of the Palestine of the past.