harmless the elements. He asked him why he should be affected now? He replied, 'From the awful idea of being crushed to death by the hand of God with stones from heaven, when resistance would be vain, and where it would be impious to be brave.' He clasped his hands, raised his eyes to heaven, and exclaimed, 'God is great!' "Up to this hour, late in the afternoon, I have not recovered my composure; my nerves are so affected as scarcely to be able to hold my pen, or communicate my ideas. The scene was awful beyond all description. I have witnessed repeated earthquakes; the lightning has played, as it were, about my head; the wind roared, and the waves have at one moment thrown me to the sky, and the next have sunk me into a deep abyss. I have been in action, and seen death and destruction around me in every shape of horror; but I never before had the feeling of awe which seized upon me on this occasion, and still haunts, and I feel will ever haunt me. I returned to the beautiful village of Buyucdere. The sun was out in all its splendour; at a distance all looked smiling and charming; but a nearer approach discovered roofs covered with workmen repairing the broken tiles; desolated vineyards, and shattered windows. My porter, the boldest of my family, who had ventured an instant from the door, had been knocked down by a hailstone, and had they not dragged him in by the heels, would have been battered to death. Of a flock of geese in front of our house, six were killed, and the rest dreadfully mangled. Two boatmen were killed in the upper part of the village, and I have heard of broken bones in abundance. Many of the thick brick tiles with which my roof is covered, are smashed to atoms, and my house was inundated by the rain that succeeded this visitation. It is impossible to convey an idea of what it was. Imagine to yourself, however, the heavens suddenly froze over, and as suddenly broken to pieces in irregular masses, of from half a pound to a pound weight, and precipitated to the earth. My own servants weighed several pieces of three quarters of a pound; and many were found by others of upwards of a pound. There were many which fell around the boat in which I was, that appeared to me to be as large as the swell of the large sized water decanter. You may think this romance. I refer to the bearer of this letter, who was with me, and witnessed the scene, for the truth of every word it contains."-LETTERS FROM CONSTANTINOPLE. Ver. 12. Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the This in the East is a favourite way of triumphing over a fallen foe. In the history of the battles of the gods, or giants, particular mention is made of the closing scene, how the conquerors went and trampled on their enemies. When people are disputing, should one be a little pressed, and the other begin to triumph, the former will say, "I will tread upon thy neck, and after that beat thee." A lowcaste man insulting one who is high, is sure to hear some one say to the offended individual, "Put your feet on his neck." (See on Isa. xviii. 2, 7.)—ROBERTS. CHAPTER XIV. Ver. 12. Now therefore give me this mountain, whereof the LORD spake in that day; for thou heardest in that day how the Anakims were there, and that the cities were great and fenced; if so be the LORD will be with me, then I shall be able to drive them out, as the LORD said. The mountainous parts of the Holy Land are so far from being inhospitable, unfruitful, or the refuse of the land of Canaan, that in the division of this country, the mountain of Hebron was granted to Caleb as a particular favour; "Now, therefore, give me this mountain of which the Lord spake in that day." In the time of Asa, the "hill country of Judah" mustered five hundred and eighty thousand men of valour; an argument beyond dispute, that the land was able to maintain them. Even in the present times, though cultivation and improvement are exceedingly neglected, while the plains and valleys, although as fruitful as ever, lie almost entirely desolate, every little hill is crowded with inhabitants. If this part of the Holy Land was composed, as some object, only of naked rocks and precipices, why is it better peopled than the plains of Esdraelon, Rama, Acre, or Zabulon, which are all of them extremely fertile and delightful? It cannot be urged that the inhabitants live with more safety on the hills and mountains, than on the plains, as there are neither walls nor fortifications to secure their villages and encampments; and except in the range of Lebanon, and some other mountains, few or no places of difficult access; so that both of them are equally exposed to the insults of an enemy. But the reason is cbvious; they find among these mountainous rocks and precipices, sufficient convenience for themselves, and much greater for their cattle. Here they have bread to the full, while their flocks and their herds browse upon richer herb age, and both man and beast quench their thirst from springs of excellent water, which is but too much wanted, especially in the summer season, through all the plains of Syria. This fertility of Canaan is fully confirmed by writers of great reputation, whose impartiality cannot be justly suspected. Tacitus calls it a fruitful soil, uber solum; and Justin affirms, that in this country the purity of the air, and the fertility of the soil, are equally admirable: Sed non minor loci ejus apricitatis quam ubertatis admiratio est. The justice of these brief accounts, Dr. Shaw, and almost every modern traveller, fully verifies. When he travelled in Syria and Phenicia, in December and January, the whole country, he remarks, looked verdant and cheerful; and the woods particularly, which are chiefly planted with the gall-bearing,oak, were everywhere bestrewed with a variety of anemonies, ranunculusses, colchicas, and mandrakes. Several pieces of ground near Tripoli were full of licorice; and at the mouth of a famous grotto he saw an elegant species of the blue lily, the same with Morrison's lilium Persicum florens. In the beginning of March, the plains, particularly between Jaffa and Rama, were everywhere planted with a beautiful variety of fritillaries, tulips of innumerable hues, and a profusion of the rarest and most beautiful flowers; while the hills and the mountains were covered with yellow pollium, and some varieties of thyme, sage, and rosemary. -PAXTON. CHAPTER XVII. Ver. 16. And all the Canaanites that dwell in the land of the valley have chariots of iron, loth they who are of Bethshean and her towns, and they who are of the valley of Jezreel. The warriors of primitive times were carried to the field in chariots, drawn for the most part by two horses. The custom of riding and fighting upon horses, was not introduced into Greece, and the regions of Asia bordering on the Hellespont, till some time after the Trojan war; for Homer, whose authority in such cases is indisputable, always conducts his heroes to battle in chariots, never on horseback. In what age the chariot was first used 1. battle, cannot now be ascertained; but by the help of the sacred volume, we can trace the practice to a very remote antiquity, for the aboriginal inhabitants of Canaan appear, from the number of armed chariots which they possessed, when Joshua invaded their country, to have been trained to that mode of warfare long before. "And the children of Joseph said, The hill is not enough for us; and all the Canaanites that dwell in the land of the valley have chariots of iron, both they who are of Bethshean and her towns, and they who are of the valley of Jezreel." This by no means íntimates, that the chariots were made of iron, but only that they were armed with it. Such chariots were by the ancients called currus falcati, and in Greek speravopypa. They had a kind of scythes, of about two cubits long, fastened to long axle-trees on both wheels; these being driven swiftly through a body of men, made great slaughter, mowing them down like grass or corn. The efficacious resist ance which the Canaanites, from their chariots of iron, opposed to the arms of Israel, is emphatically remarked by the sacred historian: "And the Lord was with Judah, and they drave out the inhabitants of the mountain, but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron." The native princes of Canaan, inlly aware of the great advantages to be derived from this Decies of force, in combating the armies of Israel, which cnsisted, as has been already observed, entirely of infantry, continued to improve it with a care and diligence proportioned to its importance. In the time of the judges, not long after the death of Jeshua, Jabin the king of Canaan, sent nine hundred chariots of iron into the field against the people of Israel: and in a succeeding war, between this people and their inveterate enemies the Philistines, the latter met them in the field with "thirty thousand chariots, and six thousand horsemen, and people as the sand which is on the seashore for multitude."-PAXTON. CHAPTER XVIII. Ver. 25. Gibeon, and Ramah, and Beeroth. of some noble subterranean cisterns at Ramah, not inferior either in extent or execution to many of those at Alexandria: they were intended for the same purpose, namely, to serve in time of war as reservoirs of water."-BUCKINGHAM. CHAPTER XXIII. Ver. 7. But they shall be snares and traps unto you, and scourges in your sides, and thorns in your eyes, until ye perish from off this good land which the LORD your God hath given you. "What!" says a wife to her angry husband, "am I a I am now a thorn in his eyes." "Were I not a thorn in his thorn in your eyes?" "Alas! alas! he has seen another; eyes, his anger would not burn so long." "My old friend Tamban never looks at my house now, because it gives thorns to his eyes."-ROBERTS. Ver. 32. And the bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel brought up out of Egypt, buried they in Shechem, in a parcel of ground which Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor, the father of Shechem, for a hundred pieces of sil ver and it became the inheritance of the chil dren of Joseph. Joseph was not interred in Shechem, but, according to the ancient custom, in a field adjoining. Probably the other children of Jacob received the like honour, each tribe taking care to bury its ancestor, either at Machpelah, or elsewhere in the land of Canaan. Josephus asserts that it was so, upon the credit of an ancient tradition. St. Stè The oriental geographers speak of Ramah as the metropolis of Palestine; and every appearance of its ruins even now confirms the opinion of its having been once a considerable city. Its situation, as lying immediately in the high road from Jaffa to Jerusalem, made it necessarily a place of great resort; and from the fruitfulness of the country around it, it must have been equally important as a military station or a depot for supplies, and as a magazine for the collection of such articles of commerce as were export-phen confirms the relation. Acts vii. 16. Savages consider ed from the coast. In its present state, the town of Ramah is about the size of Jaffa, in the extent actually occupied. The dwellings of this last, however, are crowded together around the sides of a hill, while those of Ramah are scattered widely over the face of the level plain on which it stands. The style of building here is that of high square houses, with flattened domes covering them; and some of the old terraced roofs are fenced around with raised walls, in which are seen pyramids of hollow earthenware pipes, as if to give air and light, without destroying the strength of the wall itself. The inhabitants are estimated at little more than five thousand persons, of whom about one third are Christians of the Greek and Catholic communion, and the remaining two thirds Mohammedans, chiefly Arabs; the men of power and the military being Turks, and no Jews residing there. The principal occupation of the people is husbandry, for which the surrounding country is highly favourable, and the staple commodities produced by them are corn, olives, oil, and cotton, with some soap and roarse cloth made in the town. There are still remains the tombs of their ancestors as titles to the possession of the lands which they inhabit. This country is ours, say they; the bones of our fathers are here laid to rest. When they are forced to quit it, they dig them up with tears, and carry them off with every token of respect. About thirty miles below the falls of St. Anthony, (says Carver,) in North America, several bands of the Naudowessie Indians have a burying-place, where these people, though they have no fixed residence, living in tents, and abiding but a few months on one spot, always contrive to deposite the bones of their dead. At the spring equinox these bands annually assemble here to hold a grand council with all the other bands; wherein they settle their operations for the ensuing year. At this time, in particular, they bring with them their dead, for interment, bound up in buffaloes' skins. If any of these people die in the summer, at a distance from the burying-ground, and they find it impossible to remove the body before it would putrify, they burn the flesh from the bones, and preserving the latter, bury them in the manner described.-BURDER. JUDGES. CHAPTER I. meant than merely its having a large door, or being spa Ver. 7. Threescore and ten kings, having their cious; at least there are now other contrivances in the East, thumbs and their great toes cut off. The Hebrew has this, "the thumbs of their hands and of their feet." The Hindoos call the thumb the reria-viril, the great finger of the hand, and the large toe is named the great finger of the foot. This punishment was exceedingly common in ancient times, and was inflicted principally on those who had committed some flagrant offence with their hands and their feet. Thus, those convicted of forgery, or numerous thefts, had their thumbs cut off. The practice is abolished, but its memory will remain, as it is now one of the scarecrows of the nursery and domestic life: "If you steal any more, I will cut off your thumbs." "Let me find out the thief, and I will soon have his thumbs.”— ROBERTS. CHAPTER III. to give coolness to particular rooms, which are very common; and though the time in which Eglon lived, is acknowledged to be of very remote antiquity, yet we are to remember he was a prince, and in the palaces of such these contrivances without doubt began. The doctor is silent upon this point, but Russell has given us the following account of one of their methods of cooling rooms. Their great houses at Aleppo are composed of apartments on each of the sides of a square court, all of stone; and consist of a ground door, which is generally arched, and an upper story, which is flat on the top, and either terraced with hard plaster, or paved stone; above-stairs is a colonnade, if not round the whole court, at least fronting the West, off from which are their rooms and kiosques; these latter are a sort of wooden divans, that project a little way from their other buildings, and hang over the street; they are raised about a foot and a half higher than the floor of the room, to which Ver. 17. And he brought the present unto Eglon they are quite open, and by having windows in front and king of Moab and Eglon was a very fat man. 18. And when he had made an end to offer the present, he sent away the people that bare the present. See on Gen. 43. 45. There is often in the East a great deal of pomp and parade in presenting their gifts. Through ostentation," says Maillet, "they never fail to load upon four or five horses what might easily be carried by one. In like manner as to jewels, trinkets, and other things of value, they place in fifteen dishes, what a single plate would very well hold." Something of this pomp seems to be referred to in this passage, where we read of making an end of offering the present, and of a number of people who conveyed it. This remark also illustrates 2 Kings viii. 9. So Hazael went to meet him, and took a present with him, even of every good thing of Damascus, forty camels' burden.-HARMER. Ver. 19. But he himself turned again from the quarries that were by Gilgal, and said, I have a secret errand unto thee, O king: who said, Keep silence. And all that stood by him went out from him. From a circumstance mentioned by Mr. Bruce, it appears that Ehud acted in strict conformity to the customs of the time and place, so that neither the suspicion of the king nor his attendants should be excited by his conduct. It was usual for the attendants to retire when secret messages were to be delivered. "I drank a dish of coffee, and told him, that I was a bearer of a confidential message from Ali Bey of Cairo, and wished to deliver it to him without witnesses, whenever he pleased. The room was accordingly cleared without delay, excepting his secretary, who was also going away, when I pulled him back by the clothes, saying, stay, if you please; we shall need you to write the answer."-BURDER. Ver. 20. And Ehud came unto him; and he was sitting in a summer-parlour, which he had for himself alone. Dr. Shaw tells us, their doors are large, and their chambers spacious; conveniences, as he observes, very well adapted to those hotter climates. But when Eglon is represented as receiving Ehud and Death, in a parlour of cooling, as it is called, in the margin of Judges iii. 20, or rather in a chamber of cooling, something more seems to be on each side, there is a great draught of air, which makes them cool in the summer, the advantage chiefly intended by them. They have another way of cooling their rooms in Egypt. It is done by openings at the top, which let the fresh air into them. Egmont and Heyman, as well as Maillet, make mention of them, but the last-mentioned author gives the most distinct account of these contrivances: they make, he tells us, their halls extremely large and lofty, with a dome at the top, which towards the North has several open windows; these are so constructed as to throw Ver. 25. And they tarried till they were ashamed; The wooden locks commonly used in Egypt, " consist of a long hollow piece of wood, fixed in the door, so as to slide backward and forward, which enters a hole made for it in the doorpost, and is there fastened by small bolts of iron wire, which fall from above into little orifices made for them in the top of the lock. The key is a long piece of wood, having at the end small pieces of iron wire of different lengths, irregularly fixed in, corresponding in number and direction with the bolts which fall into the lock; these it lifts upon being introduced into the lock, which it then pulls back. The bolts of wire differ in number from three to fourteen or fifteen, and it is impossible to guess at the numiber a lock contains, or at the direction in which they are placed."-TURNER's Journal of a Tour in the Levant. Ver. 31. And after him was Shamgar the son of Anath, which slew of the Philistines six hundred men with an ox-goad: and he also delivered Israel. Mr. Maundrell has an observation which at once explains this transaction, and removes every difficulty from he passage. He says, "the country people were now everywhere at plough in the fields, in order to sow cotton. It was observable, that in ploughing they used goads of an extraordinary size; upon measuring of several, I found them about eight feet long, and at the bigger end six inches in circumference. They were armed at the lesser end with a sharp prickle for driving the oxen, at the other end with a small spade, or paddle of iron, strong and massy, for cleansing the plough from the clay that encumbers it in working. May we not from hence conjecture, that it was with such a goad as one of these, that Shamgar made that prodigious slaughter related of him, Judges iii. 21. I am confident that whoever should see one of these instruments, would judge it to be a weapon not less fit, perhaps fitter, than a sword for such an execution. Goads of this sort I saw always used hereabouts, and also in Syria; and the reason is, because the same single person both drives the oxen, and also holds and manages the plough; which makes it necessary to use such a goad as is above described, to avoid the encumbrance of two instruments."-BURDER. CHAPTER IV. Ver. 6. And she sent and called Barak the son of Abinoam out of Kedesh-naphtali, and said unto him, Hath not the LORD God of Israel commanded, saying, Go, and draw towards Mount Tabor, and take with thee ten thousand men of the children of Naphtali, and of the children of • Zebulun? Arriving at the top, we found ourselves on an oval plain, of about a quarter of a mile in its greatest length, covered with a bed of fertile soil on the west, having at its eastern end a mass of ruins, seemingly the vestiges of churches, grottoes, strong walls, and fortifications, all decidedly of some antiquity, and a few appearing to be the works of a very remote age. First were pointed out to us three grottoes, two beside each other, and not far from two cisterns of excellent water; which grottoes are said to be the remains of the three tabernacles proposed to be erected by St. Peter, at the moment of the transfiguration, when Jesus, Elias, and Moses, were seen talking together. In one of these grottoes, which they call more particularly the Sanctuary, there is a square stone used as an altar; and on the sixth of August in every year, the friars of the convent come from Nazareth, with their banners and the host, to say mass here; at which period they are accompanied by all the Catholics of the neighbourhood, who pass the night in festivity, and light large bonfires, by a succession of which they have nearly bared the southern side of the mountain of all the wood that once clothed it. Besides these grottoes, no particular history is assigned to any other of the remains, though among them there seem to have been many large religious buildings. The whole of these appear to have been once enclosed with a strong wall, a large portion of which still remains entire on the north side, having its firm foundation on the solid rock. This appeared to me the most ancient part. Traditions here speak of a city built on the top, which sustained a five years' siege, drawing its supplies by skirmish from different parts of the fertile plains below, and being furnished with water from two excellent cisterns still above; but as no fixed period is assigned to this event, it may probably relate to the siege of Vespasian. As there still remained the fragments of a wall on the southeast angle, somewhat higher than the rest, we ascended it over heaps of fallen buildings, and enjoyed from thence a prospect truly magnificent, wanting only the verdure of spring to make it beautiful as well as grand. Placing my compass before me, we had on the northwest a view of the Mediterranean sea, whose blue surface filled up an open space left by a downward bend in the outline of the western hills: to west-northwest a smaller portion of its waters were seen: and on the west again the slender line of its distant horizon was just perceptible over a range of land near the seacoast. From west to south the plain of Esdraelon extended over a vast space, being bounded on the south by the range of hills, generally considered to be the Hermon, whose dews are poetically celebrated, Psalm cxxxiii. 3, and having in the same direction, nearer the foot of Tabor, the springs of Ain-el-Sherrar, which send a perceptible stream through its centre, and form the brook Kishon of antiquity. Psalm lxxxiii 9. From southeast to the east is the plain of Galilee, being almost a continuation of Esdraelon, and, like it, appearing to be highly cultivated, being now ploughed for seed throughout. Beneath the range of this supposed Hermon is seated Endor, famed for the witch who raised the ghost of Samuel, to the terror of the affrighted Saul; and Nain, equally celebrated as the place at which Jesus raised the only son of a widow from death to life, and restored him to his afflicted parent. The range which bounds the eastern view is thought to be the mountains of Gilboa, where the same Saul, setting an example of self-destruction to his armour-bearer and his three sons, fell on his own sword, rather than fall wounded into the hands of the uncircumcised, by whom he was defeated. The sea of Tiberias, or the Lake of Gennesareth, famed as the scene of many miracles, is seen on the northeast, filling the hollow of a deep valley, and contrasting its light blue waters with the dark brown shades of the barren hills by which it is hemmed around. Here, too, the steep is pointed out down which the herd of swine, who were possessed by the legion of devils, ran headlong into the sea. In the same direction, below, on the plain of Galilee, and about an hour's distance from the foot of Mount Tabor, there is a cluster of buildings,. used as a bazar for cattle, frequented on Mondays only. Somewhat farther on is a rising ground, from which it is said that Christ delivered the long and excellent discourse called the Sermon on the Mount; and the whole view in this quarter is bounded by the high range of Gebel-el-Telj, or the Mountain of Snow, whose summit was at this moment clothed with one white sheet, without a perceptible breach or dark spot in it. The city of Saphet, supposed to be the ancient Bethulia, a city said to be seen far and near, and thought to be alluded to in the apophthegm which says, a city set on a hill cannot be hid," is also pointed out in this direction: but though the day was clear, I could not distinguish it, its distance preventing its being defined from hence without a glass. To the north were the stony hills over which we had journeyed hither, and these completed this truly grand and interesting panoramic view. -BUCKINGHAM. Van Egmont and Heyman give the following account of Tabor" This mountain, though somewhat rugged and difficult, we ascended on horseback, making several circuits round it, which took us about three quarters of an hour. It is one of the highest in the whole country, being thirty stadia, or about four English miles, a circumference that rendered it more famous. And it is the most beautiful I ever saw, with regard to verdure, being everywhere decorated with small oak-trees, and the ground universally enamelled with a variety of plants and flowers, except on the south side, where it is not so fully covered with verdure. On this mountain are great numbers of red partridges, and some wild-boars; and we were so fortunate as to see the Arabs hunting them. We left, but not without reluctance, this delightful place, and found at the bottom of it a mean village, called Deboura, or Tabour, a name said to be derived from the celebrated Deborah mentioned in Judges." Pococke notices this village, which stands on a rising ground at the foot of Mount Tabor westward; and the learned traveller thinks, that it may be the same as the Daberath, or Daberah, mentioned in the book of Joshua, as on the borders of Zebulun and Issachar. "Any one," he adds, "who examines the fourth chapter of Judges, may see that this is probably the spot where Barak and Deborah met at Mount Tabor with their forces and went to pursue Sisera; and on this account, it might have its name from that great prophetess, who then judged and governed Israel; for Josephus relates, that Deborah and Barak gathered the army together at this mountain." This point Josephus was not required to prove, as the sacred history contains explicit information on this head, to which the Jewish historian was incapable of adding a single particular. The name of the village seems, however, more probably to be derived frot the mountain, than from the prophetess. Deborah, the name of the place where she dwelt, and to which the children of Israel came up to her for judgment, was between Ramah and Bethel in Mount Ephraim, and consequently much farther to the south. Whereas in Deboura, or Dabour, we have the very Dabor or Thaboor of the scriptures, with only that slight corruption which the Hebrew names receive, as pronounced by the Arabs. The mountain itself they call Djebel Tour.-MODERN TRAVELLER. Ver. 10. And Barak called Zebulun and Naphtali to Kelesh; and he went up with ten thousand men at his feet: and Deborah went up with him. The phrase “men at his feet," did not, I believe, refer to any particular class of soldiers, but applied to ALL, whether they fought in chariots, on horses, or on foot. This form of speech is used in eastern books to show how many obey or serve under the general. It may be taken from the action of a slave being prostrate at the feet of his master, denoting submission or obedience. In this way devotees, when addressing the gods, always speak of themselves as being at their feet. When the Orientals speak of his Majesty of Britain, they often allude to the millions who are at his feet. The governors, generals, or judges in the East, are said to have the people of such countries, or armies, or districts, at their feet. Nay, it is common for masters, and people of small possessions, to speak of their domestics as being at their feet. It is therefore heard every day, for "I will send my servants," en-käl-adiyila, “those at my feet."-ROBERTS. Ver. 18. And Jael went out to meet Sisera, and said unto him, Turn in, my lord, turn in to me; fear not. And when he had turned in unto her into the tent, she covered him with a mantle. The Arabs are not so scrupulous as the Turks about their women; and though they have their harem, or women's apartment, in the tent, they readily introduce their acquaintances into it, or those strangers whom they take under their special protection. Pococke's conductor, in his journey to Jerusalem, led him two or three miles to his tent, where he sat with his wife and others round a fire. The faithful Arab kept him there for greater security, the wife being always with him; no stranger ever daring to come into the women's apartment unless introduced. We discover in this custom, the reason of Jael's invitation to Sisera, when he was defeated by Barak: "Turn in, my lord, turn in to me, fear not." She invited him to take refuge in her own division of the tent, into which no stranger might presume to enter; and where he naturally supposed himself in perfect safety.-PAXTON. There is an apparent treachery in the conduct of Jael to Sisera; and it appears from the following account as if the inhabitants of that country were still actuated by the same principle of interested dissimulation. "It was about noon when we reached the small village of Deborah, where we alighted to refresh, not suspecting that the treachery for which it is traditionally infamous, both in holy and profane records, was still to be found here at so distant a period. We entered into this village, and, like the unfortunate Sisera, demanded only a little water to drink, for with every thing else our scrip was well provided. It was furnished to us, as we desired, with provender for our beasts, and the offer of all that the village possessed. While the animals were feeding, I was desirous of ascending to the summit of Mount Tabor, for the enjoyment of the extensive view which it commands. Our guide from the convent offering to accompany me, we took with us a man from the village, who promised to facilitate our ascent by directing us to the easiest paths; and taking our arms with us, while my servant and the muleteer remained below to take care of the beasts, we all three set out together; by forced exertions we reached the summit in about half an hour. In our descent from Mount Tabor we entered a grotto, in which there had formerly been a church, and had scarcely got within it, before we heard the rushing of persons before the outer part of the passage by which we had entered. On turning round to ascertain the cause of this noise, we ob served five or six armed men, three of whom we recog nised to be those who had made such offers of their hospitality in the village of Deborah below. They called out to us in a loud voice, that if we attempted the slightest resistance we should be murdered, but that if we submitted to be quietly stripped, no violence should be offered to our persons. There was no time for parley, though my companions at first cried for mercy, but as I rushed out with my musket cocked, and presented, they instantly folants to seek shelter behind the masses of rock near the lowed me, and an unexpected discharge drove our assailcave. A regular skirmish now commenced, in which we kept up a retreating fire, and often exposed ourselves to their shot, for the sake of getting to our mules at the foot of the hill. During a full hour of this kind of running fight, none of our party was hurt. From the first it seemed evident to us that we had been betrayed by our Deborah guide, and our notion was at length confirmed by his going over to the assailing party, and using his arms against us. Fortunately, and justly too, this man was himself wounded by a ball from my musket, and when he fell shrieking, on the side of the hill, his companions hastened to his relief, while we profited by the alarm of the moment to continue our retreat, and rejoin our mules below. Here we drew off at a short distance from the village of Deborah, and, with arms in our hands, being exhausted and fatigued, refreshed ourselves beneath a tree; but we had not yet remounted, when a large party, professing to be from the sheik of Deborah, a village consisting only of a few huts, came to sequester our beasts, for what they called the public service. We treated this with a proper degree of warmth, and threatened death to the first that should dare to lay hands on any thing belonging to us: so that the brave villagers kept aloof."-Buckingham. Ver. 19. And he said unto her, Give me, I pray thee, a little water to drink; for I am thirsty. And she opened a bottle of milk, and gave him drink, and covered him. hemah) which The method of making butter in the East, illustrates the conduct of Jael, the wife of Heber, described in the book of Judges: "And Sisera said unto her, Give me, I pray thee, a little water to drink, for I am thirsty and she opened a bottle of milk, and gave him drink, and covered him." In the song of Deborah, the statement is repeated: "He asked water, and she gave him milk, she brought forth butter in a lordly dish." The word ( our translators rendered butter, properly signifies cream; which is undoubtedly the meaning of it in this passage, for Sisera complained of thirst, and asked a little water to quench it, a purpose to which butter is but little adapted. Mr. Harmer indeed urges the same objection to cream, which, he contends, few people would think a very proper beverage for one that was extremely thirsty; and concludes, that it must have been buttermilk which Jael, who had just been churning, gave to Sisera. But the opinion of Dr. Russell is preferable, that the hemah of the scriptures, is probably the same as the haymak of the Arabs, which is not, as Harmer supposed, simple cream, but cream produced by simmering fresh sheeps' milk for some hours over a slow fire. It could not be butter newly churned, which Jael presented to Sisera, because the Arab butter is apt to be foul, and is commonly passed through a strainer before it is used; and Russell declares, he never saw butter offered to a stranger, but always haymak: nor did he ever observe the Orientals drink buttermilk, but always leban, which is coagulated sour milk, diluted with water. It was leban, therefore, which Pococke mistook for buttermilk, with which the Arabs treated him in the Holy Land. A similar conclusion may be drawn concerning the butter and milk which the wife of Heber presented to Sisera; they were forced cream or haymak, and leban, or coagulated sour milk diluted with water, which is a common and refreshing beverage in those sultry regions.-PAXTON. Ver. 21. Then Jael Heber's wife took a nail of the tent, and took a hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: (for he was fast asleep and weary :) so he died. |