One fact of great signiflcance in the life of Pales- tine was that it had to be lived in constant view of the desert tribes to the east of it. Kinglake has described the Jordan as the boundary-line between roofs and tents ; and besides the tents of nomad tribes there Avere also those cities of Edom and the Hauran, where, in a rude kind of civilization, Aral) kings ruled their kingdoms. The terror of the desert Bedawin and the barbaric splendours of these kingdoms both contributed a romantic ele- ment, which was enforced by the eternal mystery of the desert, in which all things are seen in a strong light which magnihes their signihcance and fascin- ates the imagination. Most of Jesus' jmrables of kings and their wars (Mt 18-^ etc.), and certainly His picture of a strong man armecl guarding his house against a stronger (Lk 14^i IP'- ^^ etc.), tell of just such a condition of unsettled government and expectation of surprise as existed on the border- line between Arabian and Israelite territory.
In this border region stood the cities of the Deca- polis, in which a wealthy, and strongly defended Greek life held its own, by force of Roman garrisons, against the desert and the south. The marvellous ruins of Jerash, the two theatres and ornate tombs of Gadara, and the debris of carved stones aliove the dam which retained water for the nnnmarhini at Abila, tell an almost incredible tale of luxurious and ostentatious grandeur. The blend of civiliza- tion and savagery which such places produce is a phenomenon of the most startling kind. The fact that Jesus visited the Decapolis (Mk 7^' ; cf. Mt 4-5 and Mk 5^"), bearing His high and pure spirituality into that region of the Syrian world, suggests some of the strongest and most dramatic situations which it would be iw.ssible to conceive. In this light we see the extraordinary realism of the story of the Gadarenes and their swine and their devils (Mt 8'* etc.). It was inevitable that they should have be-
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sought Him to depart out of their coasts. And the reaction on His own thought was equally inevit- able. He saw the ideals for which He lived and was to die, not as spiritual visions remote from the actual world, or as an advance on its honest en- deavours after holiness, but against the background of a life whose gilded swinishness threw it up in all the high relief of the holiness of heaven against earth at its most sordid. And yet it Tyas to this region tliat He often retired for refuge fiom the Galilfeans of the western shore, and through this region that He chose to travel on His last journey to the Cross. The relief He sought in it was not wholly that of solitude. Even these degenerate races called for His sj^mpathy ; and being un- prejudiced by religion, they at least let Him be alone.
The sea-coast conies little into the story of the Gospels. Afterwards, in the lives of Peter and Paul, Joppa and Caesarea were to assume an important place. But, so far as we know, Jesus visited it only once, when He retreated to the coasts of Tyre and Sidon from the Pharisees who had followed Him from Jerusalem. The few references which He made to the sea appear to be all subsequent to that %-lsit. They are in every case characteristic of the inland Israelite's thought of the sea as a place of horror rather than of beauty (Mt lSt> ; cf. art. Poet below, p. 375b). It was natural that the part of the sea-coast to which He went for concealment should have been that of T\Te and Sidon. We are not, indeed, told that He visited those towns, and the word 'coasts' may even refer to the landward district near them. Yet, obviously, no place could ofier Him better hiding than a manufacturing seajwrt town, where He would be easily lost in the crowds of workmen which came and went about the dye-works and the glass-works and the shipbuilding yards, or in the many-coli>ured throngs of native and foreign sailors on the quays. It is characteristic of Jesus that the record of that \"isit ignores the whole splendour of the wealthy life of Phoenicia ; its temples with their sun- pillars, its markets, and its ships might have been non-existent for all the notice given to them. The one fact that has been found worthy of commemoration is that story where, in inimitable sprightliness and \ivacity, we see for a moment the foreign mother, and hear her tale of human sorrow assuaged.
Samaria (wh. see) divided Galilee fi-om Judaea by the alien race that is supposed to have originated in a ci'oss between Mesopotamians and Israelites after the hrst captivity. During the centuries that had intervened there had been time for this nation to settle into a fixed and distinct type of its own, but the race still bore all the marks of its bastard origin. Luxurious and soft morally, with the fer- tility of the land encouraging the eti'eminacy, they seem to have relaxed their standards of purity in all directions, and the life of the woman of Sychar (.Jn 4^*) was probably typical of current views of ►sexual relations. The palace life of Herod at the central city of Samaria, and his intercourse with Rome at Coesarea, upon which he had spent fabu- lous sums, must have intensified the Bohemian and foreign elements in the national character. The tragedies of the palace, the wild story of the murder of Mariamne and what happened after it, and the subsequent strangling of her two sons in that same palace, were matters Avithin the memory of living men. These, and the whole efl'ect of Herod upon the place, must have been all on the side of those primitive and half-savage elements which entered largely into the Samaritan character. In religion the Samaritans had ado]ited a kind of blend of heathen and Israelitish worship, in wliich the centre of en- thusiasm was a rival group of holy places set over against those of Jerusalem, and a passion for relic- iiunting whicli, in Clirist's time, took the form of a search for hidden treasure in Gerizim. This, too, reveals the primitive, in its frank blending of the greed of gold with worship, and it took so deep a hold as to draw the vengeance of Pilate upon a Samaritan religious assembly (Keim, ii. 334). The claims of Samaritan religion, and its com- promise with relaxed morality, are retlecteil in the conversation of the woman at the well (Jn 4^''*-).