Parched Mountains, With A Grey Bleak Olive-Tree
Trembling Here And There; Savage Ravines And Valleys, Paved With
Tombstones - A Landscape Unspeakably Ghastly And Desolate, Meet The
Eye Wherever You Wander Round About The City.
The place seems
quite adapted to the events which are recorded in the Hebrew
histories.
It and they, as it seems to me, can never be regarded
without terror. Fear and blood, crime and punishment, follow from
page to page in frightful succession. There is not a spot at which
you look, but some violent deed has been done there: some massacre
has been committed, some victim has been murdered, some idol has
been worshipped with bloody and dreadful rites. Not far from hence
is the place where the Jewish conqueror fought for the possession
of Jerusalem. "The sun stood still, and hasted not to go down
about a whole day;" so that the Jews might have daylight to destroy
the Amorites, whose iniquities were full, and whose land they were
about to occupy. The fugitive heathen king, and his allies, were
discovered in their hiding-place, and hanged: "and the children of
Judah smote Jerusalem with the edge of the sword, and set the city
on fire; and they left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all
that breathed."
I went out at the Zion Gate, and looked at the so-called tomb of
David. I had been reading all the morning in the Psalms, and his
history in Samuel and Kings. "Bring thou down Shimei's hoar head
to the grave with blood," are the last words of the dying monarch
as recorded by the history.
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