But, in the unmistakable fulfillment of our Lord’s prophecy, time has furnished even a stronger proof of Bible inspiration than the exact correspondence between the narration of the event and the description of the scene. The woman of Samaria is dead; the disciples, one by one, have all passed to their reward; the Redeemer has ascended to glory; Gerizim is a desolation; Moriah is the shrine of Mohammed; and the prophetic words of Jesus, that first fell from his lips on the soft air of the Vale of Shechem, and were whispered back by the winds from Ebal and Gerizim, are now heard in all the valleys and on all the mountain summits in two hemispheres. The tomb of Joseph is in sight of his father’s well, around which he was wont to play when young. When dying in the palace of Pharaoh, he had taken an oath of the children of Israel that they should “carry up his bones from hence;”[488] and, true to their solemn vow, “the bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel brought up out of the land of Egypt, buried they in Shechem, in a parcel of ground which Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor, the father of Shechem.”[489] Crossing a stream on which stands an old mill belonging to the village of Belât, we descended into the plain, and, passing through rich corn-fields half a mile to the north, we came to a small square area inclosed by a white plastered wall, marking the spot where sleeps in peace he who was the darling son, the wandering shepherd, the captive youth, Potiphar’s slave, Asenath’s betrothed, Pharaoh’s prime minister, the preserver of his country, the joy of a dying father, the exemplary saint, and the model man. How strangely the lines of human actions cross each other in the orderings of Providence! What beautiful coincidences transpire beneath his benign sway! The parcel of land his father purchased of Hamor is now the place of Joseph’s sepulchre, and in the very field where he was lost he now rests in death. And though the spot is unmarked by stately granite or marble shaft, Ebal, the mountain of his boyhood, is his imposing tomb-stone, and over the whitened wall a vine is now creeping, the symbol chosen by his dying father to preintimate the prosperity of a beloved son: “Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a wall, whose branches run over the wall.”[490]