Search the history of over billion web pages on the Internet. Full text of " Manual of Biblical geography. A text-boo 3 olin Overs The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text.
On this side of the sea we sit down with a big book in our hands. It is an old book. Nearly two thousand years have passed since the last word of it was written, and no one can teU how many thousands of years ago the records were made or the words uttered, out of which its first writer prepared his wonderful statements.
This old book is a singular book as to the variety of its contents, โ ranging from dry chronological state- ment to highest flight of royal poetry. Many pages of it are simply historical, Avith lists of kings, and names of family lines through many generations. Geographical allusions descending to minutest detail are strewn thickly through its pages.
There is no department of natural science which does not find some of its data recognized in the chapters of this venerable volume. Stones and stars, plants and rep- tiles, colossal monsters of sea and land, fleet horse, bird of swift flight, lofty cedar and lowly lily, โ these all find their existence recognized and recorded in that book of "various theme.
We measure the years by. The greatest contrast exists between the age and land in which we live and the age and lands in which this book found its beginning, its material and its ending. To one familiar only with the habits, dress and cus- toms of American life, the every-day events recorded in the book seem fabulous. We do not dress as the book says that people dressed in those far-away years and far-away lands ; we do not eat as they did ; our houses are not like theirs; we do not measure time as they did; we do not speak their language; our seasons do not answer to the seasons that marked their year.
