from before them, and dwelt in their stead." It was the rough rocky country described in their father's blessing: "Behold, thy dwelling shall be the fatness of the earth and of the dew of heaven;" by the sword they were to live; a race of hunters among the mountains; their nearest allies, the Arabian tribe Nebaioth. Petra, the mysterious secluded city, with its thousand caves, is the lasting monument of their local habitation.

So we part from the house of Esau and return to the latter days of Jacob. He, too, moves onward. From the summit of Mount Gerizim the eye rests on the wide opening in the eastern hills beyond the Jordan which marks the issue of the Jabbok into the Jordan valley. Through that opening, straight toward Gerizim and Shechem, Jacob descends "in peace and triumph."

At every stage of his progress henceforward we are reminded that it is the second and not the first settlement of Palestine that is now unfolding itself. It is no longer, as in the case of Abraham, the purely pastoral life; it is the gradual transition from the pastoral to the agricultural. Jacob, on his first descent from the downs of Gilead, is no longer a mere dweller in tents; he "builds him an house;" he makes "booths" or "huts" for his cattle, and therefore the name of the place is called "Succoth." He advances across the Jordan; he comes to Shechem in the heart of Palestine, whither Abraham had come before him. But it is no longer the uninhabited "place" and grove; it is "the city" of Shechem, and "before the city" his tent is pitched. And he comes not merely as an Arabian wanderer, but as with fixed aim and fixed habitation in view. He sets his eye on the rich plain which stretches eastward of the city, now, as eighteen hundred years ago, and then, as twenty centuries before, "white already to the harvest" with its waving cornfields. This, and not a mere sepulchre like the cave of Machpelah, is the possession which he purchases from the inhabitants of the land. The very pieces of money with which he buys the land are not merely weighed, as in the bargain with Ephron; they are stamped with

the earliest mark of coinage-the figure of the lambs of the flocks. In this vale of Shechem the patriarch rests, as in a permanent home. Beersheba, Hebron, even Bethel, are nothing to him in comparison with this one chosen portion which is to descend to his favorite son.

It is with the latest portion of Jacob's life that are most clearly interwoven those cords of natural and domestic affection which so bind his name round our hearts. He revisits then his old haunts at Bethel and Beersheba. The ancient servant of his house, Deborah, his mother's nurse, the only link which survived between him and the face which he should see no more, dies, and is not forgotten, but is buried beneath the hill of Bethel, under the oak well known to the many who passed that way in later times as Allonbachuth ("the oak of tears"). They draw near to a place then known only by its ancient Canaanite name, and now for the first time mentioned in history-" Ephratah, which is Bethlehem." The village appears spread along its narrow ridge, but they are not to reach it. "There was but a little way to come to Ephrath, and Rachel travailed, and she had hard labor. And it came to pass, as her soul was in departing-for she diedthat she called the name of the child Ben-oni (that is, 'the son of sorrow'); but his father called him Ben-jamin (that is, 'the son of my right hand'). And Rachel died and was buried in the way to Ephrath. And Jacob set a pillar on her grave, that is the pillar of Rachel's grave unto this day." The pillar has long disappeared, but her memory long remained. She still lived on in Joseph's dreams. Her name still clung to the nuptial benediction of the villagers of Bethlehem. After the allotment of the country to the several tribes, the territory of the Benjamites was extended to a long strip far into the south, to include the sepulchre of their beloved ancestress. When the infants of Bethlehem were slaughtered by Herod, it seemed to the Evangelist as though the voice of Rachel were heard weeping for her children. from her neighboring grave.

In the mixture of agricultural and pastoral life which now gathers around him is laid the train of the last and most touching incidents of Jacob's story. It is whilst they are feeding their father's flocks together that the fatal envy arises against the favorite son. It is whilst they are binding the sheaves in the well-known cornfield that Joseph's sheaf stands upright in his dream. On the confines of the same field at Shechem the brothers were feeding their flocks when Joseph was sent from Hebron to "see whether it were well with his brethren and well with the flocks, and to bring his father word again." And from Shechem he followed them to the two wells of Dothan, in the passes of Manasseh, when the caravan of Arabian merchants passed by and he disappeared from his father's eyes. His history belongs henceforth to a wider sphere. The glimpse of Egypt, opened up to us for a moment in the life of Abraham, now spreads into a vast and permanent prospect.

The story of the descent into Egypt, too simple to need any elaborate elucidation, is a fitting close to the life of Jacob. Once more he is to set forth on his pilgrimage. He came to the frontier plain of Beersheba; he received the assurance that beyond that frontier he was to descend yet farther into Egypt. He "went down" from the steppes to Beersheba; he crossed the desert and met his son on the border of the cultivated land; he was brought into the presence of the great Pharaoh; he saw his race established in the land of Egypt. And then the time drew near that Israel must die, and his one thought, oftentimes repeated, was that his bones should not rest in that strange land, not in pyramid or painted chamber, but in the cell that he had "digged for himself" in the primitive sepulchre of his fathers. So his body was embalmed after the manner of the Egyptians, and a vast funeral procession bore it away, the asses and the camels of the pastoral tribe mingling with the chariots and horsemen characteristic of Egypt. They came-so the narrative seems to imply-not by the direct road which the patriarchs had hitherto traversed on

their way to Egypt by El-Arish, but round the long circuit by which Moses afterward led their descendants till they arrived on the banks of the Jordan. Farther than this the Egyptian escort came not. But the valley of the Jordan resounded with loud, shrill lamentations peculiar to their ceremonial of mourning, and with the funeral games with which, then as now, the Arabs encircle the tomb of a departed chief. From this double tradition the spot was known in after times as "the meadow" or "the mourning" of the Egyptians (Abel-Mizraim), and as Beth-hogla ("the house of the encircling dance"). "And his sons carried him into the land of Canaan, and buried him in the cave of the field of Machpelah. And Joseph returned into Egypt, he and all his brethren, and all that went up with him, after he had buried his father."

W

VII.

JOSEPH.

ATEVER way we turn a diamond, it flashes out rays of light of various hues, but all exquisitely beautiful. Such a gem is the story of Joseph. Indeed, it is in many respects unique. A universal favorite, one over

which gentle childhood bends with interest and venerable age with tears, it is in some respects as unrivaled in the Bible as the Bible is unrivaled among books.

Regarded only as a literary composition, with what inimitable beauty and pathos is the story told! In Jacob's doting love for the motherless boy, the first-born of his beloved Rachel; in the wildness of that grief the bloody cloak awoke, and sons and daughters rose in vain to comfort; in the rebound of his feelings at the news from Egypt, from the unbelief that heard them as too good to be true, to the vehement emotion that burst out in the cry, “Joseph my son is yet alive, I will go and see him before I die;" in the wakening up of the consciences, the dread and the remorse of the guilty brothers; in the trembling question, “Is your father well, the old man of whom ye spake? is he yet alive?" in the tender recollections that woke at the sight of Benjamin, and sent Joseph to another chamber to preserve his disguise and relieve his heart by a flood of tears; in that matchless address of Judah when, making us forget his crimes and mingle our tears with his, he pleaded for the old man's sake, and offered himself a ransom for the trembling boy; and in the events that