E.— GEOGRAPHY. Ill 



as literature, emerge ; the more surely their contents take their proper 

 place, not as legends of an unearthly wonderland, but as contemporary 

 record of a peculiar people, confronted, in a region no less remarkable, 

 with the most momentous crisis that can befall any people, at a crucial 

 period in the growth of the civilisation which is our own. 



If anyone should object that this kind of study is not easy, and propose 

 to postpone it until (to borrow a familiar phrase) ' he shall be certified 

 that the child shall well endure it,' I would reply that in some people's 

 experience neither the Authorised Version nor the classical literatures of 

 Greece and Rome are easy reading. Yet I do not find that admitted 

 difficulties and even uncertainties of interpretation, or the fairyland 

 remoteness of their setting, prevent people from insisting that all children 

 shall be confronted with the one, and all whose parents can pay for it with 

 the others as well, at a surprisingly early age, and with the deliberate 

 conviction that it is (among other things) just this unfamiliarity which 

 makes acquaintance with them so salutary. And the lavish way in which 

 popular books on Biblical subjects, and places where Biblical teaching goes 

 on, are garnished with pictorial reconstructions of Biblical scenes, suggests 

 to the mere geographer that the need for what is now suggested has been 

 in some measure anticipated by specialists. 



At first sight — or rather, as it has been commonly presented hitherto — 

 the homeland and the history of the Hebrew people offer less obvious 

 opportunities for this kind of correlation of historical and geographical 

 studies. But in two fundamental aspects that people supplies illustra- 

 tions of the same interplay of factors, with characteristic — indeed almost 

 unique — results. In Hebrew literature we have what is almost wholly 

 missing in the Greek instance, an autobiography of an immigrant people 

 during the whole momentous process of acclimatisation to regional condi- 

 tions strongly contrasted with those out of which the newcomers came. 

 Nomad pastoral tribes, compactly organised in one of the most stable of 

 all known types of community, and austerely habituated to do without 

 almost all the characteristic resources of the ' good land beyond Jordan,' 

 a ' land of corn, wine and oil,' ' flowing with milk and honey,' found itself 

 intruded. into a sedentary agricultural regime, ancient, attuned to those 

 regional surroundings, already composite, and enriched by habitual 

 intercourse with highly civilised neighbours and great centres of industry 

 and organised experience. Confronted with such novelties and such 

 temptations to ' enter in and possess,' how were such people to behave ? 

 The story of their experiences is one of the great dramas of the world ; 

 and the record of it, in our Authorised Version, one of the supreme 

 achievements of English literature. 



That is one aspect of Hebrew history and geography, its domestic 

 aspect, as an internal reconciliation of Folk with Place. The other aspect 

 to which I have to draw attention is external : the reaction of acclimatised 

 Israel to the forces which were shaping the world-history of its times. 

 From no single standpoint is it more illuminating to survey and take stock 

 of the great civilisations of the Nearer East than from the miniature 

 states which centred in Jerusalem and Samaria ; and the fateful separa- 

 tion of these from each other is itself an early symptom of the distractions 

 which those giant neighbours caused. 



