We now turn sharply to the other side of things, and it must be apparent to every one that we are passing from the smaller to the vastly greater element in the spirit of Syria. The text in Deuteronomy which we quoted[35] shows us joy commanded at the sword’s point, as if the nation were unwilling and unlikely to obey easily the happy command. Even when Jesus Christ repeats the injunction in His great words, “Rejoice and be exceeding glad,” it is a defiant gladness He enjoins. The context shows that the rejoicing is that of persecuted and slandered men. A recent writer has bitterly described our march through life in the words: “We uphold our wayward steps with the promises and the commandments for crutches, but on either side of us trudge the shadow Death and the bacchanal Sex.”[36] The words sound profane to Western ears, but they are not untrue of the spirit of Syria. It is of “the shadow Death” that the present chapter treats.
As primitive religion decayed and men lost their{191} sense of kinship and their easy and friendly relations with the old gods, they were left alone with death, which everywhere stared them in the face and claimed them for its own. Next to God, death is the most impressive fact in human experience, with sin for its sting. When old and defective views of God are passing away, two courses are open to men. As death closes in upon them, and they feel its grasp upon their unprotected souls, they may appeal from it to God, and find Him revealing Himself, with eternal life for them in the knowledge of Him. This was what the noblest of Israel’s thinkers did, and the growing revelation of the Bible was their reward. God showed Himself to them in ever-increasing clearness, until one and another and another of them found that the hand that grasped them was “not Death but Love.” But another course is open. They may enthrone death in place of the broken gods—“Death is king, and vivat rex!” They may “say to corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister.” Then the emphasis of thought will fall on the grave, and all men’s imaginations will grow morbid.
The tombs of the Holy Land are of many patterns. In his Haifa, Laurence Oliphant describes several different kinds of them, from the cave-sepulchres, or the underground galleries, to the little wayside graves or narrow holes driven into rock which seem such tightly-fitting homes for the dead. There are, of course, the modern graves sacred to the wives and children of missionaries who have laid down their lives{192} in the loving service of Christ and man. Buckle the historian sleeps in the Christian burying-ground at Damascus, and Henriette Renan was laid to rest in Byblus. These graves and others dear to the Western world are, as graves have been since Abraham’s day, symbols of the strangers’ inheritance and lot in the Holy Land. From these, back to the tombs of hoariest antiquity, the country is bound by an unbroken chain of death. Through all the centuries the dead have been thrust upon the notice of the living in a fashion so obtrusive as to make this the most obvious impression of the land. Most of the graves are those of persons now unknown and quite forgotten. Small and great, common men and heroes, are alike conspicuous in death. Each of the invaders has left his memorial, and the sites of ancient cities are traced by help of their burying-grounds.
Moslem tombs are everywhere. Most of them are oblong structures of rude but solid masonry erected over shallow graves. In some cases a painted tarbush (fez-cap) marks the head and a little upright stone the feet. A slight hollow is often cut in the flat top for birds to drink from. Tombs are clustered among their iris-flowers beside the walls of villages. They have crept up to the very summit of the hill which Gordon identifies as Calvary. They have encroached on the palace of Herod’s daughter at Samaria. They crowd the ground outside the built-up “Gate Beautiful” at Jerusalem. There is, to our feelings, a certain indecency in this promiscuous invasion of the grave: Mohammedans seem{193}
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THE CHURCH OF THE NATIVITY AT BETHLEHEM.
From a garden on the opposite hill.
to bury their dead anywhere. The Crusaders have left fewer memorials of themselves in the shape of tombs than one might have expected. Barbarossa’s tomb we have already visited. For the rest, their memorials are mostly those great buildings whose ruins stand to this day. Early Christianity, too, has left its tombs—catacombs and single graves, especially in the southern part of the coast, and eastwards in Hauran. People of importance have sometimes more than one tomb, like St. George, who is buried both in Lydda and Damascus. But the graves of humbler Christians are more precious than these, for their inscriptions remain, breathing forth the faith and peace with which Christ had blessed the world. Such memorials of victory over death are inextinguishable lamps hung in the sepulchres of Syria. And these lamps are kindled at the Great Light. Never was symbolism more appropriate than that of the Holy Fire in the Church of the Sepulchre. The very heart and soul of Syria is a tomb—the reputed grave of Jesus Christ. To this day the chief pilgrim song repeats with exultant reiteration the words, “This is the tomb of Christ.” It is a song which has never been silent in the land. In the Crusader camps a herald closed the day with the loud cry, “Lord, succour the Holy Sepulchre”; and the sentinels passed the word from post to post, “Remember the Holy Sepulchre.”
It is not, however, the victory over death that impresses one as the spirit of Syria. It is death itself, unconquered, mysterious, and dark. Its Christian{194} tombs are few and far between compared with the countless multitude of sepulchres where there is no lamp alight. Most common and most impressive of these are the Roman and Greek graves. The sands of Tyre and Sidon are strewn with sarcophagi. Here a man’s magnificently carved stone coffin serves for a drinking-trough, there a little child’s stands alone and desolate near a river mouth. In Sidon the ancient cemetery is on a scale whose rifled grandeur speaks volumes concerning the vanity of earthly greatness. At Gadara, the eastward road is a miniature Appian Way: hollow to the tread of horses as they cross the excavated rock, and adorned with sarcophagi carved with crowns and garlands, but bearing inscriptions without hope in them. Farther north, on the eastern slopes of Hermon, we found a far older monument near one of the Druse villages. We were crossing a little brook, when we noticed that the bridge consisted of two huge monolithic slabs of limestone, which, on examination, appeared to be the lids of ancient sarcophagi. The carving on the ends was obviously intended to represent figures of cherubim or some such winged creatures. The heads were gone, but the plumage of the wings was very perfectly preserved. No one in the locality knew anything about their origin. Their general appearance seemed to connect them with the far East.
The Jewish tombs are those which impress the imagination most with the bitterness of death in Syria. They are so sad, with their antique solemnity—so severely simple and unadorned. Where there is{195} carving it is almost always of Roman or Christian workmanship. A few stones with such symbols as the seven-branched candlestick engraved on them are the only unquestionable remains of ornamental Jewish work. Few of the Jewish sepulchres have escaped appropriation by Gentiles. The more famous of them have been appropriated by the Mohammedans, and early Christian tradition is responsible for many other indentifications. The saints and heroes of Israel, claimed also by Mohammedans and Christians, have achieved a kind of funereal immortality which makes the whole land seem one vast graveyard. Every prospect is dotted with tombs. The tomb of Jonas shines white from its hill-top north of Hebron, that of Samuel north of Jerusalem, while Joseph’s tomb commands the view where the Vale of Shechem opens on the wider valley of Makhnah. None of them, however, is at all so impressive as the tomb of Rachel, where a modern house and dome cover a rough block of stone worn smooth with the kisses of centuries of Jewish women. The wailing, as we saw it there, is a memorable custom. The women were mostly elderly or aged, but they were weeping real tears and wailing bitterly as they kissed the stone. It is an old story that consecrates that rough stone, but how eternal is its human pathos: “And they journeyed from Bethel; and there was but a little way to come to Ephrath: and Rachel travailed, and she had hard labour.... And Rachel died, and was buried in the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem.”[37]
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The earlier fashion of Jewish work seems to have been the “pigeon-hole,” in which the corpse was thrust into a little tunnel six feet long driven at right angles to the rock face. Later, troughs were excavated to fit the body along the line of the rock. In some instances these graves, especially the former kind, are found in detached groups in wayside rocks, whose perpendicular faces front the open air. For the most part they are grouped in larger numbers within natural caves or subterranean excavations, whose low doorway is blocked by a large circular stone running in a groove. A later example of such a cave is that which is shewn as the “new tomb” of Joseph of Arimathea, close to Gordon’s Calvary. A few specimens of another sort, built of masonry without cement, are to be found in Galilee.[38] Nothing could be gloomier than the constantly repeated ruins of ancient Jewish graves in Syria. No day’s journey is without them. They meet you casually, as it were, at every turning. They are not, indeed, quite dark like the pagan tombs; but the twilight, in which the hope of immortality just broke the darkness for ancient Israel, is grey and cheerless, and the contribution of Jewish graves to the spirit of Syria is a very sombre one.
The typical spot for this side of the spirit of Syria is the town of Hebron.
The lanes and the dark bazaar are filthy and foul-smelling. The mosque is an impressive building, suggestive of military rather than devotional ideas.{197} The Tomb of Abraham, which it covers, is one of the sights which only a very few Christian eyes have seen. It is permitted to none but Mohammedans to approach nearer the entrance to it than the seventh step of the lane, or staircase, alongside its eastern wall. There is a hole in that wall which is supposed to communicate with the cave below. Jews write letters to Abraham, and place them in this hole, to tell him how badly they are being treated by the Moslems. But the Moslem boys are said to know that the hole has no great depth, and to collect these letters and burn them before Abraham has seen them. The tomb is the very heart and black centre of the Shadow of Death in Palestine.
There is no part of man’s faith in which it is more necessar............