The city of Jerusalem

I first set eyes on Jerusalem one summer morning in 1872. The view--a mile away--of the long grey wall, the cypress trees of the Armenian garden, and the single minaret at the w...

The mysterious figure of Melchizedek King of Salem haunted the memory of Hebrew writers in later times.[46] The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews says, “Now consider how grea...

From the citadel of Zion the Jebusites looked down on David’s men arrayed beyond the dividing valley. Like many other defenders of a doomed city, they mocked their foes, and the...

The seventy years of Babylonian oppression reckon from the accession of Nebuchadnezzar to the first year of Cyrus in 538 B. C., when the cruel policy of transplanting the popula...

The influence of Greece, which afterwards became so important a feature of Hebrew history, began to be felt in Palestine after the rough he-goat of Macedon had smitten the ram w...

The headless corpse of Pompey was tossing in the waves, off the coast of Egypt, fifteen years after his bloody conquest of Jerusalem, “and there was none to bury him because he...

Passover being finished, and the Galileans having set out in a pilgrim caravan for their homes in the north, the Temple courts were no longer crowded, and the rabbis sat in the...

Only forty years after the day of the Crucifixion the blood of the rejected Messiah came on the heads of those who had invoked it on themselves and on their children; and the so...

When the last smouldering fires had burned out among the ruins, the silence of death came over the desolate heaps which had once been Jerusalem, nor does it appear certain that...

The Romans policed the western world for the benefit of Italy alone. We have made them our model, but the progress of higher thought in the past was due to the Hebrew, the Greek...

Among the texts, from the Ḳorân, of the mosaics in the Dome of the Rock occurs one which reads, “Jesus the son of Mary is one sent by God, and His Word whom He sent upon Mary, a...

The Turks,[481] or “settlers,” were a branch of that strong Mongol race which first created civilisation in Mesopotamia, and which, through the courage and masterfulness that ha...

Peter the Hermit was a knight of gentle birth from Picardy: “dwarfish, of mean figure, quick-witted, and with a sharp but kindly eye, he was free spoken, and not wanting in eloq...

There is no more charming character in Moslem history than Saladin, the brave and generous sulṭân who settled the Eastern question with Richard Lion-heart of England, and whose...