hand were tempted to become agriculturists and
shepherds wherever their lot was cast in the lowlands. The sea-coast was
left to the older population, and to the Philistines, who had settled
upon it about the time of the Hebrew exodus from Egypt; but the
Philistines eventually became the subject-vassals of the Jewish kings,
and friendly intercourse with the Phoenicians towards the north not only
brought about the rise of a mixed people, partly Canaanite and partly
Israelitish, but also introduced among the Israelites the Phoenician
love of trade.

Alike, therefore, by its geographical position, by the characteristics
of its population, and by the part it played in the history of the
civilised East, Palestine was so closely connected with the countries
and nations which surrounded it that its history cannot be properly
understood apart from theirs. Isolated and alone, its history is in
large measure unintelligible or open to misconception. The keenest
criticism is powerless to discover the principles which underlie it, to
detect the motives of the policy it describes, or to estimate the
credibility of the narratives in which it is contained, unless it is
assisted by testimony from without. It is like a dark jungle where the
discovery of a path is impossible until the sun penetrates through the
foliage and the daylight streams in through the branches of the trees.

Less than a century ago it seemed useless even to hope that such
external testimony would ever be forthcoming. There were a few scraps of
information to be gleaned from the classical authors of Greece and Rome,
which had been so sifted and tortured as to yield almost any sense that
was required; but even these scraps were self-contradictory, and, as we
now know, were for the most part little else than fables. It was
impossible to distinguish between the true and the false; to determine
whether the Chaldaean fragments of Berossos were to be preferred to the
second and third hand accounts of Herodotus, or whether the Egyptian
chronology of Manetho was to be accepted in all its startling magnitude.
And when all was said and done, there was little that threw light on the
Old Testament story, much less that supplemented it.

But the latter part of the nineteenth century has witnessed discoveries
which have revolutionised our conceptions of ancient Oriental history,
and illuminated the pages of the Biblical narrative. While scholars and
critics were disputing over a