same heights Balaam looked down on the Israelites and undertook to curse them, Moab lies south of the Arnon and east of the Dead Sea.  In the time of a famine, an Israelite, named Elimelech, with his wife and sons, sojourned in this land.  After the death of Elimelech and both of his sons, who had married in the land, Naomi returned to Bethlehem, accompanied by her daughter-in-law, Ruth, the Moabitess, who came into the line of ancestry of David and of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Once, when the kings of Judah, Israel, and Edom invaded the land, the king of Moab (when they came to Kir-hareseth, the capital) took his oldest son, who would have succeeded him on the throne, “and offered him for a burnt offering upon the wall.”  At this the invaders “departed from him and returned to their own land.”

The political geography of Palestine is so complicated that it can not be handled in the space here available.  Only a few words, applicable to the country in New Testament times, can be said.  The provinces of Galilee, Samaria, and Judaea were on the west side of the Jordan, while the Decapolis and Perea lay east of that river.  The northern province of Galilee, which saw most of the ministry of Jesus, extended from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, and a much greater distance from the north to the south.  It was peopled with Jews, and was probably a much better country than is generally supposed, as it contained a large number of cities and villages, and produced fish, oil, wheat, wine, figs, and flax.  “It was in Christ’s time one of the gardens of the world—­well watered, exceedingly fertile, thoroughly cultivated, and covered with a dense population.”—­Merrill.

Samaria, lying south of Galilee, extended from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, and was occupied by a mixed race, formed by the mingling of Jews with the foreigners who had been sent into the land.  When they were disfellowshiped by the Jews, about 460 B.C., they built a temple on Mt.  Gerizim.

The province of Judaea was the largest in Palestine, and extended from the Mediterranean on the west to the Dead Sea and the Jordan on the east.  It was bounded on the north by Samaria, and on the south by the desert.  Although but fifty-five miles long and about thirty miles wide, it held out against Egypt, Babylonia, and Rome.

The Decapolis, or region of ten Gentile cities, was the northeastern part of Palestine, extending eastward from the Jordan to the desert.  Perea lay south of the Decapolis, and east of the Jordan and Dead Sea.  The kingdom of Herod the Great, whose reign ended B.C. 4, included all of this territory.  After his death the country was divided into tetrarchies.  Archelaus ruled over Judaea and Samaria; Antipas ("Herod the tetrarch”) had control of Galilee and Perea; Philip had a section of country east of the Sea of Galilee, and Lysanius ruled over Abilene, a small section of country between Mt.  Hermon and Damascus, not included in the domain of Herod the Great.