FOREWORD

Most histories have been histories of kings and emperors.  The daily life of the common people—­their joys and sorrows, their hopes, achievements, and ideals—­has been buried in oblivion.  The historical narratives of the Bible are, indeed, to a great extent an exception to this rule.  They tell us much about the everyday life of peasants and slaves.  The Bible’s chief heroes were not kings nor nobles.  Its supreme Hero was a peasant workingman.  But we have not always studied the Bible from this point of view.  In this course we shall try to reconstruct for ourselves the story of the Hebrew people as an account of Hebrew shepherds, farmers, and such like:  what oppressions they endured; how they were delivered; and above all what ideals of righteousness and truth and mercy they cherished, and how they came to think and feel about God.  It makes little difference to us what particular idler at any particular time sat in the palace at Jerusalem sending forth tax-collectors to raise funds for his luxuries.  It is of very great interest and concern to us if there were daughters like Ruth in the barley fields of Bethlehem, if shepherds tended their flocks in that same country who were so fine in heart and simple in faith that to them or their children visions of angels might appear telling of a Saviour of the world.  On such as these, in this study, let us as far as possible fix our attention.

CHAPTER I

SHEPHERDS ON THE BORDER OF THE DESERT

Ancient Arabia is the home of that branch of the white race known as the Semitic.  Here on the fertile fringes of well-watered land surrounding the great central desert lived the Phoenicians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Canaanites who, before the Hebrews, inhabited Palestine.  So little intermixing of races has there been that the Arabs of to-day, like those of the time of Abraham, are Semites.

The Hebrew people are an offshoot of this same Semitic group.  They began their career as a tribe of shepherds on the border of the north Arabian desert.  The Arab shepherds of to-day, still living in tents and wandering to and fro on the fringes of the settled territory of Palestine, or to the south and west of Bagdad, represent almost perfectly what the wandering Hebrew shepherds used to be.

The Arabs of to-day are armed with rifles, whereas Abraham’s warriors cut down their enemies with bronze swords.  Otherwise, in customs, superstitions, and even to some extent in language, the modern desert Arabs may stand for the ancient Hebrews in their earliest period.  They were nomads with no settled homes.  Every rainy season they led out their flocks into the valleys where the fresh green of the new grass was crowding back the desert brown.  All through the spring and early summer they went from spring to spring, and from pasture to pasture seeking the greenest and tenderest grass.  Then as the dry season came on and the barren waste came creeping back they also worked their way back toward the more settled farm lands, until autumn found them selling their wool to the nearby farmers and townspeople in exchange for wheat and barley and some of the other necessaries of life.