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David has discovered that God demands no sacrifice, much less self-torturing penance. What he demands is the heart. The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit. A broken and a contrite heart he will not despise. It is such utterances as these which have given, for now many hundred years, their priceless value to the little book of Psalms ascribed to the shepherd outlaw of the Judaean hills.
The headless body was then borne to a grave, either in the grim, gaunt hills of Moab, or in that little village, away on the southern slopes of the Judaean hills, where, some thirty years before, the aged pair had rejoiced over the growing lad. God knows where that grave lies; and some day it will yield up to honour and glory the body which was sown in weakness and corruption.
Lowell published Emerson's "Brahma" in spite of the shallow ridicule with which he foresaw it would be greeted; but when Emerson sent him his "Song of Nature" he returned it on account of the single stanza: "One in a Judaean manger, And one by Avon stream, One over against the mouths of Nile, And one in the Academe." which he declared was more than the Atlantic could be held responsible for.
Even Eshmun-'zar's desire for burial in an Egyptian sarcophagus may be paralleled in Hebrew tradition of a much earlier period, when, in the last verse of Genesis, it is recorded that Joseph died, "and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt". Since it formed the subject of prophetic denunciation, I refrain for the moment from citing the notorious adoption of Assyrian customs at certain periods of the later Judaean monarchy.
From the hand of the Shepherd no vandal shall steal his own away. How the words thrill! Sometimes Quintus has seen in the Judaean pastures the keeper with his flocks, and knows how unchanging is his fidelity. It is as if this watcher in his devotion is anticipating the faithfulness of the greater Shepherd. How entrancing is the lesson to this seeking soldier from beyond the Adriatic!
Before us the crumbling walls and turrets of the Gothic kings ran down from the bluff to the water-side, its terrace overlooking the baths where, for his woe, Don Roderick saw Count Julian's daughter under the same inflammatory circumstances as those in which, from a Judaean housetop, Don David beheld Captain Uriah's wife. There is a great deal of human nature abroad in the world in all ages.
The Judaean hills and the mountains of Moab are merely the southward prolongation of the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, and their neighbourhood to the sea endows this narrow tract of habitable country with its moisture and fertility. It thus formed the natural channel of intercourse between the two earliest centres of civilization, and was later the battle-ground of their opposing empires.
Ahaz, the Judaean king, against the protest of the prophet Isaiah, invoked the aid of the Assyrian monarch, Tiglath-Pileser II. The call was answered. The league was overthrown by him in a great battle fought near the Euphrates, and numerous captives, according to the Assyrian practice, were carried away from Samaria and Damascus.
That these "petits comités de bonnes gens" though influenced by a great example and wakened out of their "delicious pastoral" by a heroic death, should have been able to make an impression on Judaean faith, Greek intellect, and Roman civilisation, and to give an impulse to mankind which has lasted to this day, is surely one of the most incredible hypotheses ever accepted, under the desperate necessity of avoiding an unwelcome alternative.
The picture of Canaan presented to us by the Tel el-Amarna correspondence has been supplemented by the discovery of Lachish. Five years ago Prof. Flinders Petrie undertook to excavate for the Palestine Exploration Fund in the lofty mound of Tel el-Hesi in Southern Palestine. Tel el-Hesi stands midway between Gaza and Hebron on the edge of the Judaean mountains, and overlooking a torrent stream.
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