Haifa; or, Life in modern PalestineOliphant, Laurence
History
Haifa; or, Life in modern Palestine
Oliphant, Laurence
Palestine -- Description and travel
Sir Charles Warren was the officer who so courageously entered the
desert of Sinai after the late Egyptian war, when he succeeded in
capturing the murderers of Professor Palmer, Captain Gill, and
Lieutenant Sharrington, and bringing them to justice. The result of his
labors in Jerusalem, and that of his fellow-explorers, is a magnificent
atlas, published last year by the Palestine Exploration Fund, containing
a most elaborate series of maps, plans, elevations, and engravings,
which reproduce the sacred city in all its most striking features,
accompanied by a handsome volume of descriptive matter. We are thus able
to base an account of the ancient topography of the city on data more
exact than any previously acquired, and to read the ancient historic
accounts by the light of ascertained facts, instead of guessing at
probabilities by the aid of descriptions, which, however carefully
written, are still, as all descriptions must be, vague where the student
requires most exactitude, and deficient where he most wishes for
details.
With the assistance of these publications a guide-book might be compiled
which would enable the tourist to order his dragoman to take him
straight to the places worth seeing, instead of—following on the track
of exploded tradition—going with him like a sheep to those that are not.
Much could be done to clear away existing confusion and prevent the
perpetuation of error by a change in the received nomenclature, whereby
things should be called by their right names so far as they are known,
instead of by misleading appellations, derived from the records of early
pilgrims or the later crusaders. I will take a few examples as
illustrations. Not far from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the guide
shows the traveller an immense reservoir, now being filled up. This, he
says, is the Pool of Bethesda, but it has only been thus designated
since the fourteenth century. In the twelfth this pool was supposed to
be a cistern near the Church of St. Anne, and in the fourth the site of
Bethesda was shown at the twin pools, northwest of Antonia. The fact is
that there are only two sites which may be regarded as possible for
Bethesda, one being the spring of En-Rogel, which has an intermittent
ebb and flow, and which is still frequented by the Jews, who bathe in it
to cure various diseases. The other is the curious well immediately west
of the Temple enclosure, now called Hamman Esh-Shefa, or the Healing
Spring, a long reservoir reached by a shaft nearly one hundred feet
deep. None of the pools which have at various times been selected by
tradition have any supply of living water, and none can well be supposed
to have any intermittent rise and fall, such as we understand by the
moving of the waters.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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