Palestine as an oasis. — It is shut oft" from the rest of the world by a complete ring of natural barriers. Mountains on the north ; a vast desert on the east, with the deep and long trench of the Jordan Valley set as a second and inner barrier like a moat ; desert again on the south ; and the west wholly bounded by the alien sea which so few under- stood— these are the boundaries of Israel. And there was also a double ring of national barricades. At a distance had stood the great empires of the East, the Parthians. having taken in His time the place of ancient Nineveh and Babylon. To the south-west lay Egypt. An inner ring of wild Arabian tribes wandered over the eastern desert, and now and then raided the land. Formerly an unbroken belt of neighbouring heathen enemies encircled Israel, and even cut her oft' from the sea by the Philistine wedge driven along her western coast, stretching from the Pillar of Egypt to the Phoenician seaports. All this Avas modified, and much of it broken up, in the time of Jesus ; but the religious meaning of it all was thus being only the better understood.
The whole meaning of the land in OT times had been the isolation of Israel for religious ends. For her, ' to act like men ' {i.e. to imitate the nations round about her) was denounced by her prophets as a betrayal (Hos 6"). As a matter of fact, every experiment which she made in such imitation of ' men ' w'as a failure. Under Solomon she had adopted the ' Policy of Orientalism' of the great world - empires. Under Jeroboam she had sought to conform to the secular ideas of ritual then fashionable, and had even attempted something in the way of a democratic system of government. Under many kings she had sought greatness in aggressive wars. Under Omri she had, by her alliance with Phoenicia, tried for the position of a great commercial power. In every one of these attempts she had found herself defeated, and driven b£^ on the one thing she could do as no other nation could. That one thing was re- ligion, and the meaning of Israel's isorktion was that worship o^Jehovah which grew up with her institutions, and of whose regulations she was the destined recipient and repository.
For Jesiis also Palestine was an oasis^ It is true that the Palestine of His tmie was no er the ' garden enclosed ' which the prophets hsM Wriven to keep it. All its hedges were by this time broken down and driven through by the re- sistle.ss march of Kome. In the heart of the invaded country Jerusalem remained bitterly ex- clusive and hostile to all the world, .so far as the Pharisees could keep it so. Galilee was much more open to the wider thought of the time than Judaea, and Jesus was in sympathy rather with the Galilsean than with the Judajan sj)irit. Yet, so far as His own work went. He retained and utilized the oasis view of His land. His three temptations were an epitome of the nation's temptations — ' to act like men ' for bread, or for fame, or for power. In resisting them He was thrusting from His King- dom the ideals of commercial prosperity, military conquest, and political empire, just as the i)ropliets of Israel had fought against these as national ideals. He remained, and set His speech and His works, among those relationships where God had placed Him. He confined His own ministry and the earlier ministry of His disciples to the land of Israel (Mt 10') ; and that land was still sufficiently isolated from the thought and life of the world to provide a true cradle and fostering-place for those thoughts which formed the nucleus of the Kingdom of heaven. Thus, in the earliest years, they were sufficiently aloof to gain intensity.
Palestine as a focus. — If Palestine was no longer an oasis in the full sense in which it had been so in OT times, it was more a focus than it had ever been before. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a little hollow place with a flattened ball in it is still exhibited to the incredulous visitor as the centre of the world. The cosmography of the
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Middle Ages took this as serious science, Jerusalem being tiie antij)otles of the island of Purgatory at the otiier pole. No doubt some such conception ■was in the minds of many who looked in early Christian times for new heavens and a new earth and a new Jerusalem. Such thoughts were true in a wider sense than the tliinkers knew. At the time of Jesus, Palestine w.as the meeting-point of East and West.
For many centuries Israel had been a buffer State between the conflicting powers of Egypt and Mesojiotaniia. Now instead of Egypt there was Rome, at the heiglit of its military power, and armed also with the spiritual weapons of Greece, whose national power it had destroyed and by the deed had set free its spirit. The eastern empires of Nineveh and Babylon were gone, and instead of them were those changing hosts of Persian and Parthian warriors wlio were soon to dispute the world with Rome. And behind them, more clearly visible since the cam- paigns of Alexander tlie Great, thougli still dim in the mists of vast distances, lay India and the Far East.