Bethany is a squalid hamlet clinging to the rocky hillside, with only one redeeming feature about it,—the prospect. A few wretched one-story huts of stone, and a miserable handful of Moslems, occupy this favorite home and resting-place of our Lord. Close at hand, by the roadside, cut in the rock and reached by a steep descent of twenty-six steps, is the damp and doubtful tomb of Lazarus, down into which any one may go for half a franc paid to the Moslem guardian. The house of Mary and Martha is exhibited among the big rocks and fragments of walls; upon older foundations loose walls are laid, rudely and recently patched up with cut stones in fragments, and pieces of Roman columns. The house of Simon the leper, overlooking the whole, is a mere heap of ruins. It does not matter, however, that all these dwellings are modern; this is Bethany, and when we get away from its present wretchedness we remember only that we have seen the very place that Christ loved.
We returned along the highway of the Entry slowly, pausing to identify the points of that memorable progress, up to the crest where Jerusalem broke upon the sight of the Lord, and whence the procession, coming round the curve of the hill, would have the full view of the city. He who rides that way to-day has a grand prospect. One finds Jerusalem most poetic when seen from Olivet, and Olivet most lovely when seen from the distance of the city walls.
At the foot of the descent we turned and entered the enclosure of the Garden of Gethsemane. Three stone-wall enclosures here claim to be the real garden; one is owned by the Greeks, another by the Armenians, the third by the Latins. We chose the last, as it is the largest and pleasantest; perhaps the garden, which was certainly in this vicinity, once included them all. After some delay we were admitted by a small door in the wall, and taken charge of by a Latin monk, whose young and sweet face was not out of sympathy with the place. The garden contains a few aged olive-trees, and some small plots of earth, fenced about and secured by locked gates, in which flowers grow. The guardian gave us some falling roses, and did what he could to relieve the scene of its artificial appearance; around the wall, inside, are the twelve stations of the Passion, in the usual tawdry style.
But the birds sang sweetly in the garden, the flowers of spring were blooming, and, hemmed in by the high wall, we had some moments of solemn peace, broken only by the sound of a Moslem darabooka drum throbbing near at hand. Desecrated as this spot is, and made cheap by the petty creations of superstition, one cannot but feel the awful significance of the place, and the weight of history crowding upon him, where battles raged for a thousand years, and where the greatest victory of all was won when Christ commanded Peter to put up his sword. Near here Titus formed his columns which stormed the walls and captured the heroic city after its houses, and all this valley itself, were filled with Jewish dead; but all this is as nothing to the event of that awful night when the servants of the high-priest led away the unresisting Lord.
It is this event, and not any other, that puts an immeasurable gulf between this and all other cities, and perhaps this difference is more felt the farther one is from Jerusalem. The visitor expects too much; he is unreasonably impatient of the contrast between the mean appearance of the theatre and the great events that have been enacted on it; perhaps he is not prepared for the ignorance, the cupidity, the credulity, the audacious impostures under Christian names, on the spot where Christianity was born.
When one has exhausted the stock sights of Jerusalem, it is probably the dullest, least entertaining city of the Orient; I mean, in itself, for its pilgrims and its religious fêtes, in the spring of the year, offer always some novelties to the sight-seer; and, besides, there is a certain melancholy pleasure to be derived from roaming about outside the walls, enveloped in a historic illusion that colors and clothes the nakedness of the landscape.
The chief business of the city and the region seems to be the manufacture of religious playthings for the large children who come here. If there is any factory of relics here I did not see it. Nor do I know whether the true cross has still the power of growing, which it had in the fourth century, to renew itself under the constant demand for pieces of it. I did not go to see the place where the tree grew of which it was made; the exact spot is shown in a Greek convent about a mile and a half west of the city. The tree is said to have been planted by Abraham and Noah. This is evidently an error; it may have been planted by Adam and watered by Noah.
There is not much trade in antiquities in the city; the shops offer little to tempt the curiosity-hunter. Copper coins of the Roman period abound, and are constantly turned up in the fields outside the city, most of them battered and defaced beyond recognition. Jewish mites are plenty enough, but the silver shekel would be rare if the ingenious Jews did not keep counterfeits on hand. The tourist is waited on at his hotel by a few patient and sleek sharks with cases of cheap jewelry and doubtful antiques, and if he seeks the shops of the gold and silver bazaars he will find little more. I will not say that he will not now and then pick up a piece of old pottery that has made the journey from Central Asia, or chance upon a singular stone with a talismanic inscription. The hope that he may do so carries the traveller through a great many Eastern slums. The chief shops, however, are those of trinkets manufactured for the pilgrims, of olive-wood, ivory, bone, camels’ teeth, and all manner of nuts and seeds. There are more than fifty sorts of beads, strung for profane use or arranged for rosaries, and some of them have pathetic names, like “Job’s tears.” Jerusalem is entitled to be called the City of Beads.
There is considerable activity in Jewish objects that are old and rather unclean; and I think I discovered something like an attempt to make a “corner” in phylacteries, that is, in old ones, for the new are made in excess of the demand. If a person desires to carry home a phylactery to exhibit to his Sunday school, in illustration of the religion of the Jews, he wants one that has been a long time in use. I do not suppose it possible that the education of any other person is as deficient as mine was in the matter of these ornamental aids in worship. But if there is one, this description is for him: the phylactery, common size, is a leathern box about an inch and a half square, with two narrow straps of leather, about three feet long, sewed to the bottom corners. The box contains a parchment roll of sacred writing. When the worshipper performs his devotions in the synagogue, he binds one of the phylacteries about his left arm and the other about his head, so that the little box has something of the appearance of a leathern horn sprouting out of his forehead. Phylacteries are worn only in the synagogue, and in this respect differ from the greasy leathern talismans of the Nubians, which contain scraps from the Koran, and are never taken off. Whatever significance the phylactery once had to the Jew it seems now to have lost, since he is willing to make it an article of merchandise. Perhaps it is poverty that compels him also to sell his ancient scriptures; parchment rolls of favorite books, such as Esther, that are some centuries old, are occasionally to be bought, and new rolls, deceitfully doctored into an appearance of antiquity, are offered freely.
A few years ago the antiquarian world was put into a ferment by what was called the “Shoepira collection,” a large quantity of clay pottery,—gods, votive offerings, images, jars, and other vessels,—with inscriptions in unknown characters, which was said to have been dug up in the land of Moab, beyond the Jordan, and was expected to throw great light upon certain passages of Jewish history, and especially upon the religion of the heathen who occupied Palestine at the time of the conquest. The collection was sent to Berlin; some eminent German savans pronounced it genuine; nearly all the English scholars branded it as an impudent imposture. Two collections of the articles have been sent to Berlin, where they are stored out of sight of the public generally, and Mr. Shoepira has made a third collection, which he still retains.
Mr. Shoepira is a Hebrew antiquarian and bookseller, of somewhat eccentric manners, but an enthusiast. He makes the impression of a man who believes in his discoveries, and it is generally thought in Jerusalem that if his collection is a forgery, he himself is imposed on. The account which he gives of the places where the images and utensils were found is anything but clear or definite. We are required to believe that they have been dug up in caves at night and by stealth, and at the peril of the lives of the discoverers, and that it is not safe to visit these caves in the daytime on account of the Bedaween. The fresh-baked appearance of some of the articles is admitted, and it is said that it was necessary to roast them to prevent their crumbling when exposed to the air. Our theory in regard to these singular objects is that a few of those first shown were actually discovered, and that all the remainder have been made in imitation of them. Of the characters (or alphabet) of the inscriptions, Mr. Schepira says he has determined twenty-three; sixteen of these are Phoenician, and the others, his critics say, are meaningless. All the objects are exceedingly rude and devoid of the slightest art; the images are many of them indecent; the jars are clumsy in shape, but the inscriptions are put on with some skill. The figures are supposed to have been votive offerings, and the jars either memorial or sepulchral urns.
The hideous collection appeared to me sui generis, although some of the images resemble the rudest of those called Phoenician which General di Cesnola unearthed in Cyprus. Without merit, they seem to belong to a rude age rather than to be the inartistic product of this age. That is, supposing them to be forgeries, I cannot see how these figures could be conceived by a modern man, who was capable of inventing a fraud of this sort. He would have devised something better, at least something less simple, something that would have somewhere betrayed a little modern knowledge and feeling. All the objects have the same barbarous tone, a kind of character that is distinct from their rudeness, and the same images and designs are repeated over and over again. This gives color to the theory that a few genuine pieces of Moabite pottery were found, which gave the idea for a large manufacture of them. And yet, there are people who see these things, and visit all the holy places, and then go away and lament that there are no manufactories in Jerusalem.
Jerusalem attracts while it repels; and both it and all Palestine exercise a spell out of all proportion to the consideration they had in the ancient world. The student of the mere facts of history, especially if his studies were made in Jerusalem itself, would be at a loss to account for the place that the Holy City occupies in the thought of the modern world, and the importance attached to the history of the handful of people who made themselves a home in this rocky country. The Hebrew nation itself, during the little time it was a nation, did not play a part in Oriental affairs at all commensurate with its posthumous reputation. It was not one of the great kingdoms of antiquity, and in that theatre of war and conquest which spread from Ethiopia to the Caspian Sea, it was scarcely an appreciable force in the great drama.
The country the Hebrews occupied was small; they never conquered or occupied the whole of the Promised Land, which extended from the Mediterranean Sea to the Arabian plain, from Hamath to Sinai. Their territory in actual possession reached only from Dan to Beersheba. The coast they never subdued; the Philistines, who came from Crete and grew to be a great people in the plain, held the lower portion of Palestine on the sea, and the Phoenicians the upper. Except during a brief period in their history, the Jews were confined to the hill-country. Only during the latter part of the reign of David and two thirds of that of Solomon did the Jewish kingdom take on the proportions of a great state. David extended the Israelitish power from the Gulf of Akaba to the Euphrates; Damascus paid him tribute; he occupied the cities of his old enemies, the Philistines, but the kingdom of Tyre, still in the possession of Hiram, marked the limit of Jewish sway in that direction. This period of territorial consequence was indeed brief. Before Solomon was in his grave, the conquests bequeathed to him by his father began to slip from his hand. The life of the Israelites as a united nation, as anything but discordant and warring tribes, after the death of Joshua, is all included in the reigns of David and Solomon,—perhaps sixty or seventy years.
The Israelites were essentially highlanders. Some one has noticed their resemblance to the Scotch Highlanders in modes of warfare. In fighting they aimed to occupy the heights. They descended into the plain reluctantly; they made occasional forays into the lowlands, but their hills were their strength, as the Psalmist said; and they found security among their crags and secluded glens from the agitations which shook the great empires of the Eastern world. Invasions, retreats, pursuits, the advance of devouring hosts or the flight of panic-stricken masses, for a long time passed by their ridge of country on either side, along the Mediterranean or through the land of Moab. They were out of the track of Oriental commerce as well as of war. So removed were they from participation in the stirring affairs of their era that they seem even to have escaped the omnivorous Egyptian conquerors. Eor a long period conquest passed them by, and it was not till their accumulation of wealth tempted the avarice of the great Asiatic powers that they were involved in the conflicts which finally destroyed them. The small kingdom of Judah, long after that of Israel had been utterly swept away, owed its continuance of life to its very defensible position. Solomon left Jerusalem a strong city, well supplied with water, and capable of sustaining a long siege, while the rugged country around it offered little comfort to a besieging army.
For a short time David made the name of Israel a power in the world, and Solomon, inheriting his reputation, added the triumphs of commerce to those of conquest. By a judicious heathen alliance with Hiram of Tyre he was able to build vessels on the Red Sea and man them with Phoenician sailors, for voyages to India and Ceylon; and he was admitted by Hiram to a partnership in his trading adventures to the Pillars of Hercules. But these are only episodes in the Jewish career; the nation’s part in Oriental history is comparatively insignificant until the days of their great calamities. How much attention its heroism and suffering attracted at that time we do not know.
Though the Israelites during their occupation of the hill-country of Palestine were not concerned in the great dynastic struggles of the Orient, they were not, however, at peace. Either the tribes were fighting among themselves or they were involved in sanguinary fights with the petty heathen chiefs about them. We get a lively picture of the habits of the time in a sentence in the second book of Samuel: “And it came to pass, after the year was expired, at the time when kings go forth to battle, that David sent Joab and his servants with him, and all Israel; and they destroyed the children of Ammon, and besieged Rabbah.” It was a pretty custom. In that season when birds pair and build their nests, when the sap mounts in the trees and travellers long to go into far countries, kings felt a noble impulse in their veins to go out and fight other kings. But this primitive simplicity was mingled with shocking barbarity; David once put his captives under the saw, and there is nothing to show that the Israelites were more moved by sentiments of pity and compassion than their heathen neighbors. There was occasionally, however, a grim humor in their cruelty. When Judah captured King Adoni-bezek, in Bezek, he cut off his great toes and his thumbs. Adoni-bezek, who could appreciate a good thing, accepted the mutilation in the spirit in which it was offered, and said that he had himself served seventy kings in that fashion; “threescore and ten kings, having their thumbs and great toes cut off, gathered their meat under my table.”
From the death of Joshua to the fall of Samaria, the history of the Jews is largely a history of civil war. From about seven hundred years before Christ, Palestine was essentially a satrapy of the Assyrian kings, as it was later to become one of the small provinces of the Roman empire. At the time when Sennacherib was waiting before Jerusalem for Hezekiah to purchase his withdrawal by stripping the gold from the doors of the Temple, the foundations of a city were laid on the banks of the Tiber, which was to extend its sway over the known world, to whose dominion the utmost power of Jerusalem was only a petty sovereignty, and which was destined to rival Jerusalem itself as the spiritual capital of the earth.
If we do not find in the military power or territorial consequence of the Jews an explanation of their influence in the modern world, still less do we find it in any faithfulness to a spiritual religion, the knowledge of which was their chief distinction among the tribes about them. Their lapses from the worship of Jehovah were so frequent, and of such long duration, that their returns to the worship of the true God seem little more than breaks in their practice of idolatry. And these spasmodic returns were due to calamities, and fears of worse judgments. Solomon sanctioned by national authority gross idolatries which had been long practised. At his death, ten of the tribes seceded from the dominion of Judah and set up a kingdom in which idolatry was made and remained the state religion, until the ten tribes vanished from the theatre of history. The kingdom of Israel, in order to emphasize its separation from that of Judah, set up the worship of Jehovah in the image of a golden calf. Against this state religion of image-worship the prophets seem to have thought it in vain to protest; they contented themselves with battling against the more gross and licentious idolatries of Baal and Ashtaroth; and Israel always continued the idol-worship established by Jeroboam. The worship of Jehovah was the state religion of the little kingdom of Judah, but during the period of its existence, before the Captivity, I think that only four of its kings were not idolaters. The people were constantly falling away into the heathenish practices of their neighbors.
If neither territorial consequence nor religious steadfastness gave the Jews rank among the great nations of antiquity, they would equally fail of the consideration they now enjoy but for one thing, and that is, after all, the chief and enduring product of any nationality; we mean, of course, its literature. It is by that, that the little kingdoms of Judah and Israel hold their sway over the world. It is that which invests ancient Jerusalem with its charm and dignity. Not what the Jews did, but the songs of their poets, the warnings and lamentations of their prophets, the touching tales of their story-tellers, draw us to Jerusalem by the most powerful influences that affect the human mind. And most of this unequalled literature is the product of seasons of turbulence, passion, and insecurity. Except the Proverbs and Song of Solomon, and such pieces as the poem of Job and the story of Ruth, which seem to be the outcome of literary leisure, the Hebrew writings were all the offspring of exciting periods. David composed his Psalms—the most marvellous interpreters of every human aspiration, exaltation, want, and passion—with his sword in his hand; and the prophets always appear to ride upon a whirlwind. The power of Jerusalem over the world is as truly a literary one as that of Athens is one of art. That literature was unknown to the ancients, or unappreciated: otherwise contemporary history would have considered its creators of more consequence than it did.
We speak, we have been speaking, of the Jerusalem before our era, and of the interest it has independent of the great event which is, after all, its chief claim to immortal estimation. It becomes sacred ground to us because there, in Bethlehem, Christ was born; because here—not in these streets, but upon this soil—he walked and talked and taught and ministered; because upon Olivet, yonder, he often sat with his disciples, and here, somewhere,—it matters not where,—he suffered death and conquered death.
This is the scene of these transcendent events. We say it to ourselves while we stand here. We can clearly conceive it when we are at a distance. But with the actual Jerusalem of to-day before our eyes, its naked desolation, its superstition, its squalor, its vivid contrast to what we conceive should be the City of our King, we find it easier to feel that Christ was born in New England than in Judæa.