MRS. OLIPHANT'S " JERUSALEM."*
THERE seems a special fitness in the history of the capital of the Holy Land being written by one bearing the name of that strange and impenetrable personality whose biography she has herself penned, the man in whom the mysticism of the Middle Ages and the restless activity of the nineteenth century seem to meet, whose dwelling was on the heights of Carmel, and whose memory is still held there in a quite superstitious veneration, as we learn from the little book by F. R. Oliphant (Mrs. Oliphant's son), part of the contents of which first appeared as letters to the Spectator. Its merit is in inverse ratio to its size, and of the countless travels in Palestine we have read, none has given us so much pleasure, for as we turned its pages we seemed once more wandering amid the scenes so truthfully and graphically describel. It is so well up to date that we would heartily recommend all intending pilgrims to make it their com- panion. Our readers will remember how exactly these letters hit the right mean of condensation without in- accuracy or dryness, and the same merit attaches to the two valuable additional chapters, i. and viii., which are characterised by the same charm of a perfectly unaffected style,—a style so refreshing in these days of striving after effect. Mr. Oliphant's concluding chapter is a very suggestive one. He does not consider the establishment of a Jewish Kingdom in the Holy Land at all a feasible scheme, and therein he is in accord with one of Israel's own most gifted sons, who lately informed us that Russia would make the support of any such Kingdom a casus belli with any European Power that should attempt to be a bulwark to it, and that none of them would (1.) .1 "ma'am : its Wistoru and Hope. By Mrs. Oliphant. London : Mac- millan and CO. 1891.—(24 Notes of a Pagrimags to Jerusalem and the Holy Laud. By F. R. Oliphant. Edinburgh and London : William Blackwood and Bons. 1891.
care to go to war with Russia for the sake of reviving Solomon's Empire. Mr. Oliphant inclines to the setting-up of an independent State in Palestine, under the strongest guarantees from all the Powers interested, under the control of a European Prince, who should profess the Protestant religion. as most likely to be impartial in disputes between the two principal Churches.
But we must now pass from the future of the Holy Land to the tale of the marvellous past of Jerusalem, as written by the pen of one whose Makers of Florence and Makers of Venice have made the great men of old seem to live and move and have their being once more. We rejoice to find that this pen has not lost its cunning, for Mrs. Oliphant has successfully accom- plished the difficult achievement of recasting the familiar old Hebrew stories into the language of our own land and century without losing their charm, and although the modernness of some of her expressions (as when she calls Goliath a "swashbuckler," compares St. Andrew to "some Scotch salt-water sea-dog in London," and speaks of David holding a " Parliament ") occasionally gives the reader a shock, these narratives of the past gain in clearness by being brought into touch with the present. In many places Mrs. Oliphant's prose rises to the level of impassioned poetry, as when she introduces us to the newly conquered Jerusalem ; but it is a pity that she spoils the broad tones of this grand word-picture by dragging in a depreciation of the ancient Greeks, and cannot resist a fling at the scientific philosopher, for whom she has a supreme contempt, only exceeded by het' scorn for the whole race of critics, from the learned and pious exegetes of this country down to " that ape of genius, Renan." She ignores the results of their labours even when they have removed difficulties from the path of the student of the Bible. Thus, in commenting on David's lament for Jonathan, she gives the reading, " He bade them teach the children of Israel the use of the bow," a weapon used by them, according to Psalm lxxviii., as early as the conquest of Palestine. The jarring element introduced by this useless command, disappears in the new reading, which makes David direct that his elegy should be sung to the tune of "The Bow," doubtless a familiar chant, like that of " The Dove of the Distant Terebinths," to which Psalm lvi. was sung.
Mrs. Oliphant repeatedly asserts that the Old Testament contains the most ancient literature in the world, unaware that, not to speak of the precious fragments enshrined in the Vedas and the Zend-Avesta (dating, according to Professor Max Muller and Dr. Mills, from before the age of Moses), and the far earlier Babylonian poems, we possess Egyptian papyri, fall of the loftiest religious and moral teaching, that were extant more than fifteen hundred years ere that story of Joseph was written which she supposes to have been penned " before even ancient Egypt had begun to engrave her rigid annals upon stone." Had she studied the thrilling record of the recent discovery of the letter from the Priest- Sing of Jerusalem. to the King of Egypt, engraved in cuneiform characters one hundred years before the Exodus, she would not have imagined the Holy City to have first received its familiar name in David's time, and might have begun its history much earlier, though we should then have missed the dramatic force given by making the era of the Shepherd-King her starting-point. In' the David cycle Mrs. Oliphant is at her very best, and her character-sketches show a truly marvellous insight into the inmost springs of thought and action. She penetrates below the pessimism of Ecclesiastes, and finds its true key-note. " The darker sentence," she says, " that ' all is vanity,' has been adopted by acclaim, a conclusion in which he has simply forestalled every generation of his successors. But this, too, is the burden of Solomon not less emphatic :—that the joy of life is in the doing : that the gift of God is that satisfaction which lies in a man's work and the exercise of his faculties : that he who does with all his might what his hand finds to do, is the happy man."
The frequent lapses into idolatry by the Israelites under the reigns of Solomon's successors are traced by Mrs. Oliphant to the influence of their heathen wives and mothers, and this leads her to make the shrewd remark :—" It would be curious to inquire how much of the habitual contempt of the tone of men towards women in all ages is derived from this same source,—the habit of the early world to consider the often
foreign and alien wife as in continued secret opposition The deeply founded doctrine of feminine perversity and
unaccountableness may well be one of those survivals of the unfittest sentiment which mock science to its face." In spite of his denunciations against women, Mrs. Oliphant is strongly attracted by the tragic figure of Jeremiah, and waxes enthu- siastic over the nobly born young priest, " with his timid habits of the cloister. All against him—Kings and Princes, priests and people—and he to stand and proclaim the anathema upon them all." There is much pathos in her rendering of the two interviews between the prophet and the feeble, well- meaning Zedekiah, so soon to be carried away a blinded, help- less captive to Babylon.
The return from the seventy years' captivity, and the part played in the restoration of the Temple and City-of Jerusalem by Ezra and Nehemiah, form one of the many finely-cut cameos from Jewish history which arrest our attention in these pages, which it would be a shame to spoil by fragmen- tary quotation. We will therefore content ourselves with answering the two questions she here asks so earnestly. Puzzled why none of the great modern Jewish capitalists buy the Land of Israel for their own people, she exclaims : " What is it, stronger than ambition, more powerful than wealth, that holds them back ?" From most reliable Jewish sources, we learn that it would be thought by them positively wrong to buy as a whole that land of their fathers which they consider theirs by right, though they may purchase small portions of it as individuals, or receive Palestine itself as a gift from Gentile hands. Mrs. Oliphant next asks : " By what in- cident or series of incidents was a special interest aroused in the mind of Cyrus for these exiles P No historical problem could be more interesting to solve than this, but there is absolutely no information on the subject." This special interest was non-existent, for in his Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments, published in 1888, Professor Sayce tells us of a clay cylinder inscribed by order of Cyrus, that had been lately discovered in Babylonia by Mr. Rassam, and in which we find a reference to the restoration of the Baby- lonian captives to their several homes. It is evident from this cylinder that no preference was shown to the Jewish exiles, but that the other nations which had been brought from East and West were restored at the same time to their lands, along with their gods, whom they were henceforth to worship in peace.
From a rapid survey of the Maccabean period, Mrs. Oliphant hastens on to the reign of Herod, whose "was the hand which not only tried to cut off the final and everlasting Monarch, but at the same time adorned Jerusalem as a bride to await His coming—glorious as in all her vicis- situdes she had never been before." Chiefest among her adornments was her Temple, restored by him at " incalculable expense." Concerning this edifice, our author remarks : " Of -these superstructures, it is needless to say, no vestige now remains." If by these words she means only the upper courses of stone, this is certainly the case ; but in their work on Judas an Art, published in 1890, MM. Perrot and Chipiez tell us that all those large limestone blocks with sunken faces, at the base of the wall of the Haram enclosure, which are considered by Mrs. Oliphant to have formed part of Solomon's Temple (including the stones at the south-east angle on which signs were painted by the workmen, supposed at first to be Phoenician characters, but since shown by Delitsch, Ganneau, and De Vogue to be masons' marks), really belong to the structures erected by Herod.
The author's modest disclaimer of any idea that her Life of Christ can rise to the level of the works of Dr. Edersheim or Archdeacon Farrar, disarms all criticism of her most reverent treatment of the Judasan ministry of our Lord. 'These chapters, in common with the entire volume, are adorned with wood-engravings from drawings and photo- graphs which are of high merit, and to whose absolute fidelity all travellers in Palestine will agree with us in testifying. We only wish there had been among them a sketch of the supposed tree Holy Sepulchre, which is described by Mr. Haskett Smith in the September number of Murray's Maga- zine, and figured in a little work on Christ's Country, by Mr. Home. After reading the profoundly interesting details fur- nished by these two writers, we can understand the emotions aroused in Mrs. Oliphant's mind by this discovery of our own generation, to which she refers (in a note) as " so extraordinarily carrying out all the tomb of our Lord must have• been, and
realising with wonderful minuteness the narrative of St. John," and we cannot forbear quoting her concluding medita- tions on the sacred spot (which is situated by that " green hill " outside the Damascus gate, now generally accepted as the site of Calvary) :—
" And low in the side of the hill is a tomb, cut in the rock, like all the tombs of Judaea : not now a new grave—centuries old, dark with age and the filling up of the soil, yet still distinct, with its shelf, its couch of stone, the place made for the last relics of mortality, yet never finished, one rocky hed, and one alone, having been occupied : a garden' wild with uncultivated herbage, yet not altogether without trace of its ancient use. Was this Joseph's tomb, the place where the watch was set, to which the women came in the morning, where the angels sat, and the sun of the resurrection shone P This will probably never be certainly known until we meet in another state the wit- nesses of that event, and trace with them every hallowed spot, if such an indulgence of human feeling may be dreamed of. But the thought that it may have been so, is one to make the heart swell, and the tears rise, as the pilgrim stands alone in the silence outside the city, disturbed by no clamour of contending creeds, with only heaven over him, no scent of incense or glare of lights, but the fragrance of growing grass, and the sight of the sun. There is no room for human memories in that spot where the greatest of earthly events took place : yet the strained human soul moved to its depths may be permitted to turn aside with a pang of gladness, to think that this grave was discovered in the bowels of the earth with all its solemn possi- bilities, by General Gordon, a tender reward and grace from heaven, almost a sign of intimate sacred friendship and favour, to that true servant, and brother and follower of the Lord."
Previous page
