Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: H = cr o 2 tr Bd 8,1 1 s - I § 2. W Z 3 f t o I G. ' O S chapter{Section 4HEBBON AND MAMKE. 31 t there and on the borders of the Dead Sea. But the future proved that hi his haste he had overleaped, and chosen badly. For in that fervid and steaming climate, men always degenerate, and the Arabs now living in the Ghor or deep Jordan valley are among the lowest of their name. Lot's lineage blended afterwards with the people of that region, and became the Moabites and the wild Ammonites, but they shared all the ill fortune which fell upon the wickedness of the Dead Sea cities, and became entangled in all then- misfortunes. Abraham on the other hand, became the possessor of the breezy and invigorating hill-tops, having a hardy soil, indeed, and a rougher climate, but having those qualities which produce able and rugged manhood, and which saved his stock from premature decay. Just as New England's soil and climate have been the vigorous nursing mother of a stalwart race, so did Abraham's possessions, though apparently the less propitious, make his fortune much the better. From the halting place near Bethel, Abraham moved southward to the neighborhood of Hebron, the place named in Scripture the " Plains of Rtamre." It was doubtless hard by the present city of Hebron, for the unvarying voice of tradition and the hints which the Scriptures give us, make it certain that it was there where Abraham tarried. The place was probably the high upland in the rear of modern Hebron, and his flocks and herds may have found pasturage in the fertile valleys near by. Hebron was then a city, one of the most ancient cities of the world, and giving tokens, like Damascus, that it had note and mark even then. The tribe of Hittites occupied it then, and in the neighborhoo...