9. The modern name of the country is es-Shem {Geoyr. Woi-Ji^ ofSadik Isfahani, in Ibn Haukal's Oriental Geoyr. p. 7), corresponding to the ancient Aram, and to our Syria. But this of course includes much more than what we usually call Palestine. The Jews to this day call Palestine by the Chaldee name o( Areo-Keditsha, or " Holy Laud," though Jewish maps may be found with " Land of Canaan," etc., upon them.
IV. Historical Allitsions.—\. Early References.— The earliest notice of Palestine is a latent one, and is con- tained in these memorable words of Moses :
"In the Most Iligh's portioiiiiig of the nations, lu his dispersion of the sous of Adam,
PALESTINE
557
PALESTINE
He set the bonuds of the peoples
According to the number of the sons of Israel.
For the portion of Jehovah is his people,
Jacob the lot of his iuheritauce" (Deut. xxxii, 8,9),
Thus the divine ej'e rested on Canaan, and it was set apart for Israel from the lirst ; so that all other inter- mediate possessors were illegitimate tenants of a land assigned by its true owner to another. The ecclesi- astics of the third century, however, dreamed a more ambitious dream. They linked Paradise and Palestine together, and record that Adam, shortly after his expul- sion, migrated westward (Cain eastward), and deposited his bones, or at least his skull, in one of the hills on which Melchizedek afterwards built his city; from which event the place was called Golgotha, "the place of a skull." Whatever the fact may be, the thought is not conceived amiss — that the first Adam should dwell in the same land as the second, and lay his body in the same grave. Hebron is made to claim this honor by some; but all these fabulists agree that Adam died in Palestine; and they have determined that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the centre of the earth — 6j.i<pa- \6q ytjg, umbilicus terrcB ; just as the Greeks decided re- garding Delphi and Apollo's shrine — "Apollo, qui um- bilicum certum terrarum obtines" (see Jerome, Be Loc. Jlebr. ; Pererius Valentinus, On Genesis, i, 294, 41C, where the references to the fathers are given). This legend as to Adam is not altogether oi Christian origin. The Jews have a tradition that he died in Palestine, affirming that thafoitr, from whom Kirjath-Arba took its name, were not only four patriarchs — Adam, Abra- ham, Isaac, Jacob — but four matrons — Eve, Sarah, I!e- bekah, Leah. The better known and more probable tradition of the Jews is that Melchizedek, king of Salem, was Shem, son of Noah (Jerome, Conini, on Isa. xli).
2. Pagan Fables. — To Joppa, now Jaffa, there is at- tached the wild legend of Andromeda, the maiden ex- posed by her father Cepheus to the sea- monster, and rescued by Perseus. The story of the surf, the rock, the chain, the broken links still visible, has been told not only by Greek poets, but by Christian annalists or trav- ellers, from Jerome down to Felix Fabri (Pliny, Ovid, Jerome, Fabri's Kcagatorium). This Cepheus, according to Plin}', was king of Palestine, though an Ethiopian ; according to Ovid, he was son of Phoenix, who gave name to Phcenician Palestine; while according to Tac- itus he was king of the Jews — " /Ethiopium prolem (he calls them) quos rege Cepheo, metus atque odium mu- tare sedes pepulit" (Tacit. ///«/. v, 2). I'agan memories and myths crowd themselves much more numerously into the rocks and nooks of the " Holy Land" tlian we generally know; names, exploits, temples, haunts of gods and goddesses are associated with verj' many lo- calities along the line of the Phoenician and Philistian shore, from the Gulf of Issus down to the Egyptian sea- board. Palestine was not a blank when Israel entered it. It swarmed with gods ; and Joshua's task was not merely to assail hostile forts or armies, but to raze tem- ples whose every stone was obscenity, whose every altar blasphemy. The "Land of Promise" (like the human spirit) was the haunt of every unclean and hateful idol, before it was the dwelling of the living God. First un- clean; then clean; and now unclean again; this is the history of the land. Herodotus speaks of a temple of the celestial Venus at Ascalon,and notes it as the most ancient of all her shrines (Herod, i, 105 ; see Kawlinson's Herod, i, 247) ; Athenanis mentions the drowning of Atergatis, or Derceto, the Syrian Venus, in a lake near Ascalon, by Mopsus, a Lydian (Kawlinson's Herod, i, 364) ; Lucian refers to this later as the place where sacred fishes were reared, in honor of the sea-born goddess. At the other extremity of the land, or Lebanon, this same Venus was worshipped with vile rites. Byblus, Adonis, Heliopolis were associated with like deities and like worship (see Kenrick, rhrenicia, p. 306, 312). To this region also belong the lustful myths of the Syrian As- tarte and the Greek Europa ; the fable of Dredalus (also
called Hepbaistos or Vulcan), the father of the Phoe- nician Cabiri, and of Hercules, the tutelary god of Tyre and discoverer of the Tyrian purple, to whom Hiram, the friend of Solomon, built a temple, if Menander, quoted by Josephus, wrote the truth (Joseph. Ant. viii, 5, 3). Along the sea-coast we find, in disorderly profusion, the legends of the West, the rudiments of the gods of Greece; while in the interior we find the legends of the East, the worn-out relics of the gods of Babylon and Assyria- Widely over Palestine had these fables settled down, like so many unclean birds, to preoccupy each crag and cliff, and prevent the entrance of true faith and holy worship. It was as if the idols of Shinar, in their mi- gration to Europe, had been permitted to rest for a sea- son in Judaea before finally settling down on the hills and in the groves of Greece.