Following the Sultâny, or “Queen’s Highway,” our path lay among the “hills of Judea,” clad with vines and covered with corn. Approaching the large town of Beit ’Abab, we turned to the west, and at high noon reached the ancient city of Bethshemesh. Thistles and marigolds now cover the ruins of the Philistine village, to which the Ark of the Lord was brought from Ekron, and where fifty thousand people were slain for their temerity in looking into the ark, contrary to the Lord’s express command.[378] We were now in the country of Samson. Around us rose his native hills, and beneath us stretched the valleys of his childhood, while here and there appeared the scenes of many memorable deeds of his riper years. On the summit of a neighboring hill to the right, which rises steeply from the Valley of Sûr’ah, is the village of Zorah, where he was born,[379] and adjoining it is the field where the angel of the Lord appeared unto Manoah and his wife. Beyond an intervening ridge, and less than two miles to the westward, is Timnath, situated on a plain, the place where Samson married his Philistine wife.[380] It was in one of the vineyards in the adjacent glen that, as he hastened to his betrothed, he turned aside to slay the lion of Timnath who roared against him,[381] and from whose dead carcass, on a subsequent occasion, he took the honey which, on his wedding-day, was the subject of that perplexing riddle, “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.”[382] It was there the wife of his bosom was afterward given to another, and, to avenge himself, he went forth to destroy the corn-fields of his enemies, which dotted the Plain of Philistia.[383] From the base of his native hill extends the Valley of Sorek, the home of Delilah,[384] and where the man with a divine secret, yielding to the entreaties of a woman, fell asleep in the lap of false affection, to awake to weakness and to shame. Along this same vale the road leads to Gaza, whither the blind captive was led, bound with fetters of brass, to grind in the prison-house of the Philistines.[385] And now, after the lapse of so many centuries, all the incidents of his wedding are illustrated by existing customs and confirmed by facts. Wives are procured now, as then, by the intervention of parents; marriages are attended by the same display; and on such occasions riddles are propounded by the bridegroom, and other sports practiced. In the wild glens of this region, and on the rugged hills, are foxes or jackals, and through the corn-fields on the rich plains below another Samson might send them on their burning mission.