spot said to be that where the rod of Moses had brought the water from the smitten rock. For an

hour and a half we pass through this gorge, between rocky walls that "overlap and crumble and

crack," their intervening heights "throughout almost as narrow as the narrowest part of the defile

of Pfeffers." At the entrance we pass under an arch that spans the chasm. Our progress is along

what had once been a paved way, where the torrent had been "diverted," "along troughs in the

rocks, into a water-conduit for the city." Festoons of the caper-plant and wild ivy and oleanders

fringe the road, which winds like a river, affording at every turn the surprise of new views. The

cliffs are red - in the sunshine, scarlet; in the shadow, black. Then through a narrow opening,

where the rocks here overarch, we find ourselves suddenly at a turn of the road in face of a temple,

with its pale pink pillars, all hewn into the rock. For all here is rock - rock graves, streets of rock,

rock dwellings, rock temples, rock monuments; gorgeous rocks, dull crimson streaked with purple,

over which seem to flow ribbons of yellow and blue. Again the road narrows through the streets of

tombs, till it passes into the bottom of the rock-enclosed hollow or valley, with its branching

valleys of rocks. This is the site of Petra now a desolation, but once a city of splendor and wealth,

the central station for the commerce from India.

For further description this is not the place.* It was into the midst of all this wondrous glory of

nature and wealth of man that the Jewish army marched with its ten thousand captives. There

cannot be doubt that the victorious host plundered and laid waste Sela. This explains how Amos

does not mention it, but only Bozrah** (Amos 1:12), which seems to have become the capital of

* See it and the plan of Petra in Badeker. We only note that Petra is about halfway between the

southern end of the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Akabah.

** About sixteen miles south-east of the Dead Sea.

Similarly, it is not named by the later prophets, except in Isaiah 16:1 and 42:11; and it only again

emerges into imp ortance in the fourth century before our era. But the most terrible scene yet

remained to be enacted in the conquered city. We can scarcely be mistaken in supposing that the

victors marched or drove their captives through its streets across to the western bank of the rivulet.

There up the western cliffs mounts "a staircase" of broad steps "hewn out of the rocks." "High up

in these cliffs, between two gigantic walls of cliff, stands a temple." It must be here, or on the

cliffs above and around - or perhaps on the Acropolis somewhat to the south of it that we have to

look for "the height of Sela" (2 Chronicles 25:12* -lit., "the top," or "head"), whence the ten

thousand Edomite captives were hurled, their shattered limbs dashing from cliff and rock, and

their mangled remains strewing the heights and covering the ground beneath. But as they that long

afterwards laid waste Jerusalem changed its name to Aelia Capitolina, so did King Amaziah

change that of Sela into Joktheel, "the subdued of God" (2 Kings 14:7). Ye t neither the one nor the

other name, given by man in his pride, did long continue.**

* In the A.V. "top of the rock."

** Even this circumstance seems to betoken a contemporary notice.

It is a horrible, heart -sickening scene of history, so utterly un-Jewish in character that we can only

account for its enactment by the state of moral degradation which the contemporary prophets

Hosea and Amos describe in such vivid language. Yet another terrible inheritance, besides the

guilt of this deed, did Judah bring back from the campaign against Edom. We can readily imagine

how deeply the rock-city had impressed the mind of the king. But one of its chief features, which

still first attracts the traveler, is the startling appearance and weird location of its temple s. An

Eastern mind, not religious, but superstitious, would readily come under the spell of these

divinities whose temples were so weird and grand, so thoroughly in accord with nature around.*