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THE TIMES BEFORE THE PENTATEUCH

WAS WRITTEN.

ARABIA AND THE PATRIARCH JOB.

No. IV.

"The mingled people that dwell in the desert." Ir cannot be certainly proved whether the times of the patriarch Job were before or after Abraham, but we may surely conclude that he lived within the limit defined by St. Paul in Romans v. as "from Adam to Moses," and that his country was either Syria or Northern Arabia.

The Arabians are called in Scripture "the mingled people that dwell in the desert" (Jer. xxv. 24). Our readers should now refer to the map of Arabia, given p. 14, to form some idea of that great country, almost a continent in itself, whose western length along the Red Sea is 1400 miles; along the Indian Ocean to the south it is 1200 miles; while the great isthmus joining it to Asia, from Syria to Chaldea, is 900 miles across.

Arabia belongs to Asia, but it has often been called "Africa in little." It has a small repetition of its mighty self at its north-west corner, which is called Arabia Petrea, or the stony Arabia; and in that portion of it the children of Israel wandered forty years before their entrance to their promised land of Palestine on the north.

If you now look again at the enlarged map of the northern portion of Arabia given in p. 44, you will find the second division of Arabia-called Desertaon the south of Eastern Palestine. The tract of Chaldea does not really come within that map at all, but is inserted to shew the relative direction from which Abram came. Arabia Deserta is a high plain, stretching far and wide, under a burning cloudless sky, where no showers temper the heat, and where none could live but for the cool winds and dews of night. You will find such a country described in the short 35th chapter of Isaiah, as "the wilderness and the solitary place," the "parched ground where pools and streams and springs would truly call forth songs of praise; and these are promised, "when the ransomed of the Lord return and come to Zion," with everlasting joy upon their heads, and when their "sorrow and sighing shall flee away."

But those days are not yet arrived. By day the winds still raise intolerable clouds of fine dust. There is not a single navigable river in all Arabia, and very few streams as yet find their way to the sea. The country is watered, if at all, by wadisi.e., channels of land depressed a few feet below the surrounding level, down which, in the rainy season, run rills or brooks, which are so picturesquely used by Job as an image of the pity he expected from his friends (Job. vi. 15-18) and found not.

"My brethren have dealt deceitfully as a brook, and as the stream of brooks they pass away. What time they wax warm they vanish: when it is hot they are consumed out of their place. They go to nothing and perish.'

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From Arabia the Stony, however, and Arabia the Desert, you can pass southwards to the great tract of Arabia Felix, or the Happy, where arid deserts alter

nate with grander green oases, or wide spots of verdure and fertility, far wider than we had been used to conceive before the modern traveller, Mr. Palgrave, had in 1862 penetrated to Arabia's inner heart.

His way through the desert he describes as "level, monotonous, desolate," absolutely dry, where you chew dry dates and cinder-cake as you plod along through the wilds which defy all attempts of man to reclaim or change them, threading the great desert ring which encircles central Arabia and renders communication so difficult between it and the outside lands of Syria and Persia.

The inner portion of Arabia is a vast and mountainous table land, called by the name of the Upper and the Lower Nejd. Long has that name been written on the maps, while nothing more was known of this centre of ancient civilization. The outer edge of the sandy ring is girt by a line of mountains, low and sterile in general, but on the south, in Yemen and Oman, expanding into high, and broad, and fertile regions, beyond which lies a narrow rim of coast land, bordered by the sea.

The Arabs call their deserts "Nafood "-"the swellings of Nafood;" and when the traveller is among those enormous ridges of red, loose sand, each ridge two or three hundred feet in height, all furrowed by the capricious gales in the depths between, he feels as if hemmed in by burning walls; when each slope is ascended, he overlooks what seems a vast sea of fire, ruffled into little redhot waves; the sun strikes blazing down, till clothes, baggage, housings, all take the smell of burning, and scarce permit the touch.

Such is the land of the "mingled people." None could live in it, but for its oases. At the edge of

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