The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined (Volume 4) - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1862 edition. Excerpt: ... of pits, through a land of drought and of the shadow of death, through a land that no man passed through, and where no man dwelt?' Jer.ii.6. 83. Let us now see what Canon Stanley tells us, first, as to the nature of the country, through which the host of Israel must have marched from the Eed Sea to Sinai. (Sinai and Palestine.) The wind drove us to shore--the shore of Arabia and Asia. We landed in a driving sand-storm, and reached this place, Ayun-Musa, the wells of Moses. It is a strange spot, this plot of tamarisks, with its seventeen wells, literally an island in the desert, and now used as the Richmond of Suez, a comparison which chiefly serves to show what a place Suez itself must be. Behind that African range lay Egypt, with all its wonders,--the green fields of the Nile, the immense cities, the greatest monuments of human power and wisdom. On this Asiatic side begins immediately a wide circle of level desert, stone, and sand, free as air, but with no trace of human habitation or art, where they might wander, as far as they saw, for ever and ever. And, between the two, rolled the deep waters of the Red Sea, rising and falling with the tides, which, except on its shores, none of them could have seen,--the tides of the great Indian Ocean, unlike the still dead waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The day after leaving Ayun-Musa was at first within sight of the blue channel of the Red Sea. But soon Red Sea and all were lost in a sandstorm, which lasted the whole day. (I have retained this account of the sand-storm, chiefly because it seems to be a phenomenon peculiar to this special region. Van Egmont, NieBuhr, Miss Martineau, all noticed it; and it was just as violent at the passage of a friend in 1841, and again of another two months...