wn.[341] Palestine is therefore
a mountain fastness, and most of the waves of war swept by, leaving it
untouched and unassailed. From Jerusalem to Jericho the distance is only
thirteen miles, but the latter place is a thousand feet lower than the
former, so that it was very proper to speak of a man's "going down from
Jerusalem to Jericho."

The Jews belonged to what has been called the Semitic race. This family,
the only historic rival of the Japhetic (or Aryan) race, is ethnologically
composed of the Assyrians and Babylonians, the Phoenicians, the Hebrews
and other Syrian tribes, the Arabs and the Carthaginians. It is a race
which has been great on land and at sea. In the valley of the Euphrates
and that of the Tigris its sons carried all the arts of social life to the
highest perfection, and became mighty conquerors and warlike soldiers. On
the Mediterranean their ships, containing Phoenician navigators, explored
the coasts, made settlements at Carthage and Cadiz, and sailing out of the
Straits of Gibraltar went as far north as Great Britain, and
circumnavigated Africa two thousand years before Vasco da Gama. This race
has given to man the alphabet, the Bible, the Koran, commerce, and in
Hannibal the greatest military genius of all time.

That the different nations inhabiting the region around the Euphrates and
Tigris, Syria and Arabia, belonged to one great race, is proved by the
unimpeachable testimony of language. The Bible genealogies trace them to
Shem, the son of Noah. Ewald,[342] who believes that this region was
inhabited by an aboriginal people long before the days of Abraham,--a
people who were driven out by the Canaanites,--nevertheless says that they
no doubt were a Semitic people. The languages of all these nations is
closely related, being almost dialects of a single tongue, the differences
between them being hardly greater than between the subdivisions of the
German group of languages.[343] That which has contributed to preserve the
close homogeneity among these tongues is, that they have little power of
growth or development. As M. Renan says, "they have less lived than
lasted."[344]

The Phoenicians used a language almost identical with the Hebrew. A
sarcophagus of Ezmunazar, king of Sidon, dating from the fifth century
before Christ, was discovered a few years since, and is now in the Museum
of the Louvre. It contains some thirty sentences of the length of an
average verse in the Bible, and is in p