thus tilled, was the land:  but the world was still large enough; and the men were not so circumspect, necessitous, and active, as to usurp at once the whole adjacent country.  Between their possessions were extended large spaces, in which grazing herds could freely move in every direction.  In one of these spaces Abraham resides; his brother Lot is near him:  but they cannot long remain in such places.  The very condition of a land, the population of which is now increasing, now decreasing, and the productions of which are never kept in equilibrium with the wants, produces unexpectedly a famine; and the stranger suffers alike with the native, whose own support he has rendered difficult by his accidental presence.  The two Chaldean brothers move onward to Egypt; and thus is traced out for us the theatre on which, for some thousands of years, the most important events of the world were to be enacted.  From the Tigris to the Euphrates, from the Euphrates to the Nile, we see the earth peopled; and this space also is traversed by a well-known, heaven-beloved man, who has already become worthy to us, moving to and fro with his goods and cattle, and, in a short time, abundantly increasing them.  The brothers return; but, taught by the distress they have endured, they determine to part.  Both, indeed, tarry in Southern Canaan; but while Abraham remains at Hebron, near the wood of Mamre, Lot departs for the valley of Siddim, which, if our imagination is bold enough to give Jordan a subterranean outlet, so that, in place of the present Dead Sea, we should have dry ground, can and must appear like a second Paradise,—­a conjecture all the more probable, because the residents about there, notorious for effeminacy and wickedness, lead us to infer that they led an easy and luxurious life.  Lot lives among them, but apart.

But Hebron and the wood of Mamre appear to us as the important place where the Lord speaks with Abraham, and promises him all the land as far as his eye can reach in four directions.  From these quiet districts, from these shepherd-tribes, who can associate with celestials, entertain them as guests, and hold many conversations with them, we are compelled to turn our glance once more towards the East, and to think of the condition of the surrounding world, which, on the whole, perhaps, may have been like that of Canaan.

Families hold together:  they unite, and the mode of life of the tribes is determined by the locality which they have appropriated or appropriate.  On the mountains which send down their waters to the Tigris, we find warlike populations, who even thus early foreshadow those world-conquerors and world-rulers, and in a campaign, prodigious for those times, give us a prelude of future achievements.  Chedor Laomer, king of Elam, has already a mighty influence over his allies.  He reigns a long while; for twelve years before Abraham’s arrival in Canaan, he had made all the people tributary to him as far as the Jordan.