A mile to the south, beyond a green and lovely plain, is Mizpeh――“The Look-out”――one of the oldest watch-towers in Southern Palestine. With it stand connected many of the most thrilling events in Jewish history. Chosen in the infancy of the nation for the advantages it afforded as a point of observation in times of war, it subsequently became the national rendezvous, where the tribes were accustomed to meet to worship Jehovah, to make war, to conclude peace, and elect a king. Justly aggrieved at the insult offered the whole country by the citizens of Gibeah in refusing to surrender the young men who had committed the horrid crime on the person of the Levite’s concubine, the eleven tribes here assembled, and, having vowed never to return to their homes till the inhabitants of Gibeah were punished, they marched forth to that series of battles in which thousands fell, and in which the tribe of Benjamin was well-nigh exterminated.[431] Two hundred and eighty-six years later, Samuel gathered the armies of Israel at Mizpeh to fight against the Philistines, and after their return from the slaughter of the foe he set up a memorial-stone and called it Ebenezer.[432] A quarter of a century thereafter the nation reassembled to choose a king; and here, for the first time in Israel, when the people beheld the majestic form of Saul, the son of Kish, on whom the lot had fallen, their loyal exclamations awakened the echoes of the surrounding hills――“God save the king!”[433] Fortifying it for the protection of his frontier, King Asa removed from Rama the materials with which Baasha had constructed his battlements, and with them built a strong fort. Five centuries after the coronation of Saul, Ishmael, of the royal family of Judah, here surprised and assassinated Gedaliah, the Chaldean governor, who, during the Jewish captivity, resided at Mizpeh.[434]