Such was Palestine, the promised home of Israel.  It was a land of rugged and picturesque mountains, interspersed with a few tracts of fertile country, shut in between the sea and the ravine of the Jordan, and falling away into the waterless desert of the south.  It was, too, a land of small extent, hardly more than one hundred and sixty miles in length and sixty miles in width.  And even this amount of territory was possessed by the Israelites only during the reigns of David and Solomon.  The sea-coast with its harbours was in the hands of the Phoenicians and the Philistines, and though the Philistines at one time owned an unwilling allegiance to the Jewish king, the Phoenicians preserved their independence, and even Solomon had to find harbours for his merchantmen, not on the coast of his own native kingdom, but in the distant Edomite ports of Eloth and Ezion-geber, in the Gulf of Aqabah.  With the loss of Edom Judah ceased to have a foreign trade.

The Negeb, or desert of the south, was then, what it still is, the haunt of robbers and marauders.  The Beduin of to-day are the Amalekites of Old Testament history; and then, as now, they infested the southern frontier of Judah, wasting and robbing the fields of the husbandman, and allying themselves with every invader who came from the south, Saul, indeed, punished them, as Romans and Turks have punished them since; but the lesson is remembered only for a short while:  when the strong hand is removed, the “sons of the desert” return again like the locusts to their prey.

It is true that the Beduin now range over the loamy plains and encamp among the marshes of Lake Huleh, where in happier times their presence was unknown.  But this is the result of a weak and corrupt government, added to the depopulation of the lowlands.  There are traces even in the Old Testament that in periods of anarchy and confusion the Amalekites penetrated far into the country in a similar fashion.  In the Song of Deborah and Barak Ephraim is said to have contended against them, and accordingly “Pirathon in the land of Ephraim” is described as being “in the mount of the Amalekites” (Judges xii. 15).  In the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna, too, there is frequent mention of the “Plunderers” by whom the Beduin, the Shasu of the Egyptian texts, must be meant, and who seem to have been generally ready at hand to assist a rebellious vassal or take part in a civil feud.

Lebanon, the “white” mountain, took its name from its cliffs of glistening limestone.  In the early days of Canaan it was believed to be the habitation of the gods, and Phoenician inscriptions exist dedicated to Baal-Lebanon, “the Baal of Lebanon.”  He was the special form of the Sun-god whose seat was in the mountain-ranges that shut in Phoenicia on the east, and whose spirit was supposed to dwell in some mysterious way in the mountains themselves.  But there were certain peaks which lifted themselves up prominently to heaven, and in