s not any remaining of the
house of Esau.

Human sagacity, with all the facts before its face, can not give any
rational account of the causes of this anomaly. It can not tell to-day
why this people exists separate from, and scattered through all nations,
from Kamschatka to New Zealand; how, then, could it foretell, three
thousand years ago, this singular exception to all the laws of national
existence? While the sun and moon endure, the nation of Israel shall
exist as God's witness to God's word, an undeniable proof that the mouth
of the Lord hath spoken it.

A very peculiar feature of the desolation of Israel was the
_desolation_, but not the _destruction_ of the cities. In most cases of
the desolations of war, the cities have been burned and the buildings
destroyed. There is no shelter for man or beast in the mounds of rubbish
which cover the ruined cities of Assyria. Where the buildings have not
been destroyed, or have been rebuilt, they have again been inhabited; as
we see in the cases of Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and many others.
But on the cities of Israel it was written that God's curse should go
forth "till the cities should be wasted without inhabitant, and the
houses without man, and the land be left utterly desolate." But for a
long time the literal fulfillment of this prediction was not witnessed,
as the cities on this side the Jordan had been mostly reduced to ruins.
The richest and most populous part of the land, however, was the land of
Bashan; where, in a territory of about thirty miles by twenty, sixty
cities still remain standing to attest the wonderful fertility of the
soil and industry of the people. "And though the vast majority of them
are deserted, _they are not ruined_. * * * Many of the houses in the
ancient cities of Bashan are perfect, as if only finished yesterday. The
walls are sound, the roofs unbroken, the doors, and even the window
shutters in their places."[117] From two hundred to five hundred houses
have been found perfect in some of these cities; and from the roof of
the Castle of Salcah, Dr. Porter counted thirty towns and villages
dotting the plain, many of them perfect as when first built; "yet for
more than five centuries there has not been an inhabitant in one of
them." So sure is every word of God.

Take another instance of preservation, so remarkable amid the
surrounding destruction, that it arrested the attention and admiration
of the author of the Decline and Fall