Sign reads: "God is like... / Pan Am, he makes the going great / Bayer Aspirin, he works wonders / Ford, he's got a better idea. / Hallmark cards, he cared enough to send the best / Pepsi, he comes alive for the younger generation."
We then cross the Plain of Rephaim where David put to flight the army of Philistines, and if our trust in the guide were sufficient we might pause to see what is said to be the old site of the tree that made the cross on which the Son of God was crucified. Under the altar of a chapel there the monks show where the stump of the tree once stood, and the Pilgrim falls down and worships it.
Pilgrims are legion, particularly the Russians, a party of whom we see now at a Syrian inn: but there are many others, and they come from all the corners of the earth often in hunger and thirst through the heat, begging food by the way, and sleeping under the stars at night. Their faith is mighty, their zeal a burning flame and their satisfaction intense. Only a soul entirely free from the trammels of the world, can know and kiss the marble slab which covers a hole, from which a tree is said to have been taken two thousand years ago!
At every turn in Palestine there is something to remind us that the Bible was written there. Entering this market square we halt in the presence of a transaction going on which reminds us of an illustration used in one of Jesus' talks. Grains of various kinds are lying in piles on the bare ground, which has been previously swept clean. The purchaser, not the seller does the measuring. It takes several minutes to fill the measure. Putting in a few handfuls the purchaser presses it down. After it is full to the brim he begins to build a cone, adding a handful at a time and patting it gently. Then as it approaches an apex he makes a hole in the top and fills that. Last of all he holds up a handful and allows the grains to drop very gently and as long as the grains remain upon it he is at liberty to add to the measure. Doubtless Jesus often witnessed the same process as he passed through the markets. It was such an incident as this which suggested his words, "Give and it shall be given unto you; good measure pressed down, and shaken together and running over shall men give unto your bosom. For with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you again."
When they came nigh to Bethlehem, the beloved wife for whom he had served fourteen years, died in the pangs of motherhood, and was buried upon a green slope of the roadside. This is the way one of our great artists has pictured the deathbed. There is something remarkable, something inexplicable, that a man of Jacob's wealth should have buried his beloved in such an exposed and public place, and entirely among strangers, when Machpelah the Sepulchre, of his ancestors, was at Hebron, only a few miles away. Long after this, when he was about to die in Egypt, Jacob told his son Joseph the touching story of his mother's death and burial, and that makes it the more extraordinary that Joseph being the Lord of Egypt, a prince of vast power and wealth, did not transfer the remains of his mother on the highway to the family sepulchre, where Sarah, the wife of Abraham; Rebecca the wife of Isaac; and Leah, the unloved wife of Jacob lay. And we have no explanation of these singular circumstances. The tomb of Rachael, however, in this public place, was known and commemorated when Moses led the host of Israel out of the wilderness; nor has it been lost or overlooked, nor has its identity been questioned to the present hour.
Continuing our own pilgrimage along the Bethlehem road, we come to this little mosque built of coarse white limestone, with a low dome of masonry that stands by the roadside in most unattractive surroundings. It is, however, to multitudes of people one of the most sacred places on earth. About four thousand years ago a young man, named Jacob, came along that way. He had served a deceitful father-in-law seven years, for one of his daughters, and has been betrayed into marriage with another and then had served seven years longer for the right one. His wives and little ones, his man-servants and maid-servants, his herds and flocks, following him as he moved slowly toward Hebron, where his father Isaac dwelt.
The dust of Rachel has long since disappeared, when and how no one can say, but her tomb is more holy in the eyes of Israel than any other place in Palestine, and as sacred to the Mohammedans as to the Hebrews. The present mosque was restored by Sir Moses Montefiore, although it belongs to the Moslems. It has here beside the Tomb of Rachel that Samuel the prophet, met Saul, the son of Kish, when the latter was searching the gullies around Bethlehem for his father's live stock that had gone astray, and anointed him with the holy oil to be King of Israel.
After leaving the Tomb of Rachel the road divides, as you see it here, one branch leading to Hebron and the other to Bethlehem. (The Pool of Solomon at which we looked a few minutes ago is really on the Hebron road). This road which we are traveling is one of the only two made roads in Palestine. Another from Jerusalem to Jericho was constructed together with this one by a progressive Pasha, who in consequence of this enterprise of road-building lost his head at Constantinople.
