Lapas attēli
PDF
ePub

murale, or outward court, and the Court of the Women, which was surrounded by the OPITTOΣ, or reticulated wall which no foreigner was allowed to pass.

[ocr errors]

و

An identification so important leads to the careful investigation of a passage which has been usually considered as mystic, not to say unintelligible. The English commentators cannot be complimented on their work here. It appears entirely devoid of meaning. The translation of St. Jerome, on the contrary, although not altogether reliable, is such as to show that the writer had a distinct idea of what he was saying. As, compass and scale in hand, verse after verse is compared with the Ordnance plan of the Noble Sanctuary,' and with the parallel passages in the Talmud, the future and glorious Temple' of dear old Whiston and the other theologians fades away like the mirage of the valley of the Jordan. That poetic and imaginary structure entirely disappears. But in its place we find something of tangible value. We have a record of its leading dimensions, penned fourteen years after the attempt of the Chaldeans utterly to obliterate the very traces of the Temple of Solomon. Nor can we doubt that when, forty-two years later, Zerobabel the son of Shealtiel, and Jeshua the son of Josedec the High Priest, attempted the rebuilding of the Temple, the description given by Ezekiel must have been of signal service.

One by one the principal features of the building emerge from a long obscurity. The double threshold of the Golden Gate, under the yet undated restorations and adornments of which two megaliths still attest the original width, was first measured by the angel. The very puzzle of the plan, the eccentric position of this gate, is indicated by verse 19, as noting the distance of its vestibule from the north-east angle of the Chel. The positions of Tadi (v. 20) and of Huldah (v. 24), in line with the gates of the Inner Sanctuary, follow. The adits from these gates (a feature absent in that on the east) are here described by the term 'the arches thereof were beforǝ 'them.' The length of these adits, and the distance from their termination to the Chel, is not stated. The court which is 'without the Temple leave out, and measure it not.'* The hundred cubits that actually separate the stairs on the north, and again those on the south, of the platform, are measured in verses 23 and 27. The towers enclosing the Sanctuary gates are given as 50 cubits by 25. According to Josephus, the

Apoc. xi. 2. It is a remarkable fact that the mean width of the great Court is exactly 666 great cubits.

vestibules of the gates built by Herod were 30 cubits by 15; but the first is an exterior, and the second an interior measurement.

When we come to the dimensions of the Holy House, and of the court in which it stood, we can detect the changes effected by Herod on the original plan. Avoiding any minute detail, the Holy House of Solomon was 90 cubits from east to west, and 70 from north to south. It stood in a court 100 cubits square. Before this, in a court of equal size, stood the altar. A third quadrangle, also of 100 cubits, corresponded to the Court of the Women of the Middoth.

In the third Temple, the Holy House was 10 cubits longer than that of Solomon, and had a façade of 100 cubits.* Its face was 5 cubits westward of the original line, and the total width from Nicanor to the west wall of the Sanctuary was 22 cubits more than in the Temple of Solomon. The breadth of these central courts was also increased from 100 to 135 cubits. We thus can understand the expressions of Josephus as to the enlargement, by Herod, of the inner courts, the rockhewn platform and the measured Chel remaining as before; and we can further understand how 20 cubits of the work of Herod, as not resting on the foundations prepared by Solomon, ' after'wards fell down't-a catastrophe of which the cause may no doubt be attributed to the natural slope of the rock.

[ocr errors]

We must pause, not from want of matter, but from want of space, Much remains to be told, more to be recovered. Lieutenant Condert has just sketched the crypt of one of the six conclaves'§ that stood within the Sanctuary, respectively named the Chambers of Salt, of Parva, of Baptism, of Wood, of the High Priest, and of the Sanhedrim. We have yet to trace the bounds of the four unroofed courts (in the corners of either the Sanctuary, the Chel, or the outer court), allotted to the store of wood, to the purification of the lepers, to the store of oil, and to the service of the Nazarite. The crypts and foundations of the houses Nitsus and Moked must be in situ. The extension by Herod of the western part of the Sanctuary explains the confused and broken outline of this part of the platform, as compared with the sharp rock-cut indications remaining on the other three sides.

With the 500 cubits of the Chel thus identified, and with the limits of the Sanctuary, at first 400 cubits by 300, and

* Ant. XV. ii. 3.

† Middoth, v. 1.

P. E. F. Quarterly Statement, Oct. 1872.
SR. Chija, De Die Expiationis.

afterwards 400 by 322, so distinctly indicated as to reconcile the various statements of the Bible, of the Talmud, and of Josephus, with existing facts, it only remains to remove an error that prevails as to the meaning of the Jewish historian when he speaks of the length of the cloisters built by King Herod.* Agrippa was besought by the Jews to rebuild the eastern cloister. It is therefore clear that this was not done by his great-grandfather. The total length of the south, the west, and the northern cloisters agrees with the 6 furlongs mentioned by Josephus.

It is thus that we are able to stand, with no uncertain foot, on the site dedicated to God by King Solomon; and to recognise clear traces of the cities of David, of Nehemiah, and of the House of Herod. But the recovery of Jerusalem is The detailed determination of the only at its commencement. course of the walls, the discovery of the sites of the various palaces, the identification of the Xystus, which the Second Book of Maccabees mentions as under the tower,' and the unveiling of the tombs of David and his royal line, all await the explorer.

We have not forgotten that the chief interest of Western Europe is excited, not so much by the monuments of the ritual of the Temple as by the shadowy traces of the scenes that surrounded the cradle of Christianity. But a knowledge of the main features of ancient Jerusalem is a necessary preliminary to the formation of any intelligent opinion as to the verity of the monkish sites. We have attempted what no author has yet done. We have pointed out two exact spots to which on a known day, eighteen hundred and seventy-five years since, the Child Jesus was borne by His parents. How Constantine founded his metropolitan cathedral (under the same invocation as that of one of our well-known city churches) on a spot as exactly central to the city of Herod as could be well selected -how tradition, that cannot be dignified by the term apocryphal, has reared a church or a chapel to localise every recorded event in the Divine Life, and many which have no record but that of the imagination-has yet to be told. A new Holy City, monkish Jerusalem, sprang up, as if by magic, on the ruins of Elia Capitolina. To this belongs that coenaculum which, by an exegesis worthy of the wildest romance of the Talmud, is made to do duty at once for the sepulchre of David, and for the scene of the Last Supper. To this belongs the column of the scourging, erect on a mass of débris resulting

* Ant. XX. ix. 7.

from the demolition by Titus. To this, the niche self-formed in the wall, that shrank to give shelter to the Madonna, when pressed by the crowd; the house of St. Veronica; the house of Dives; the house of Lazarus; the stone on which Lazarus sat to beg; and the stone which was about to cry out when Christ entered Jerusalem, and which went so far as to form a mouth for the purpose. The pool, which was once troubled by an angel, is now guarded by a dragon, during whose slumbers the waters sink, to rise and flow upon his awaking. The investigation of these, and of less, or perhaps more, doubtful points, will form a new chapter in the history of Jerusalem; a chapter dated a thousand years later than that which we now reluctantly close. Mr. Besant has done much to awaken, and to satisfy, interest as to the history of the Christian Conquest. It is in speaking of the City of the Crusaders, of that Dux inclytus Godefridus, who refused to wear a golden crown where Christ had worn one of thorns, and of the fate of that shadowy sceptre which, by falling eight times to the spindle, seemed almost to justify the Salic law, that the sites hallowed by the Greek and Latin Churches must be described. But the true features of mediæval Jerusalem can only be laid down on a plan, on which the bounds of the cities of Solomon, of Manasseh, and of the Idumean kings shall have been previously and accurately traced.

We trust that the foregoing pages, by showing how much positive knowledge has been gained by the exploration of Jerusalem already effected, may stimulate the public to aid in the worthy prosecution of the enterprise. This is a modern crusade for the recovery of the Holy Places, not undertaken in the spirit of knight-errantry or superstition, but of science, knowledge, and patient research. It is a fact unprecedented in the history of the world that an undertaking which may be termed in the broadest and noblest sense a religious effort, at once claims for its illustrious patron the Defender of the Faith, and is sanctioned by the firman of the Caliph. Two of the most powerful ecclesiastical princes of the younger forms of the monotheistic faith, linked together in a knightly brotherhood, thus unite to draw back the veil which has so long obscured the cradle of a worship that was the parent of their own. Such a conjuncture might have fired the imagination of Bacon as a harbinger of the fulfilment of his great hope- the first of the steps of unity in the City of God.

ART. II.-Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin, Governor of Jamaica, Governor-General of Canada, Envoy to China, Viceroy of India. Edited by THEODORE WALROND, C.B. London: 1872.

THE

HE duties and position of an English governor or viceroy, the representative of the Queen in the government of the great dependencies of this empire, are peculiar and without a precedent in history. We have ceased to rule over these vast possessions with an exclusive regard to the interests of Great Britain. We aim at the promotion of their present and future welfare more than at the establishment and maintenance of our own authority. We draw from them no tribute, and we ask of them no allegiance but that which is based on mutual respect and affection. We desire to plant in them the seeds of our own freedom, science, and enterprise. We leave them, like children advancing to the maturity of life, in possession of ample independence, of self-government, and of institutions But we are more modern, if not more free, than our own. prepared to defend them in war, to assist them with the capital and intelligence of the mother-country, and, above all, to set before them by example and by advice. a high standard of culture, of law, of social order, and of political experience. For this purpose, mainly, the Crown selects, and the colony willingly accepts, a supreme governor or chief ruler from the The colonies most able and energetic of British statesmen.

are thus relieved from one of the great difficulties of all free communities-the choice of a chief magistrate from amongst themselves. The governor goes out to a young and halfcivilised country, invested with the dignity of an ancient sovereignty and a great power. He takes with him, amongst a people of equal ranks, the rank of some race as ancient as the Bruce, and the highest traditions of station and honour; he takes with him the education of our universities, the polish of our manners, the experience of our public offices of government, the eloquence of our political assemblies; he is the representative of whatever is best in the nation quite as much as of the majesty of the Crown; and he conspicuously supplies precisely that in which a young people, struggling with the powers of nature, intent on material gain, and separated by oceans from the civilisation of Europe, is necessarily most deficient. A colonial governor over a great dependency who combines these qualities and gifts, or who possesses even a fair share of them, fills therefore one of the most honourable, useful,

« iepriekšējāTurpināt »