The tribal territory in which Anathoth lay was Benjamin’s. Even where not actually desert the bleak and stony soil accords with the character given to the tribe and its few historical personages. _Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf._(100) Of Benjamin were the mad King Saul, the cursing Shimei, Jeremiah’s persecutors in Anathoth, and the other Saul who breathed threatenings and slaughter against the Church—while Jeremiah himself, in his moods of despair, seems to have caught the temper of the tribe among whom his family dwelt. Whether in the land or in its sons it was hard, thorny soil that needed deep ploughing.(101) It was, too, as Isaiah had predicted, the main path of invasion from the North,(102) by Ai, Migron, Michmash, the Pass, Geba, Ramah, Gibeah of Saul, Laish, and _poor_ Anathoth herself. It had been the scene of many massacres, and above all of the death of the Mother of the people, who returns to bewail their new disasters:— A voice in Ramah is heard, lamentation And bitterest weeping, Rachel beweeping her children, And will not be comforted, For they are not.(103) The cold northern rains and the tears of a nation’s history alike swept these bare uplands. The boy grew up with many ghosts about him—not Rachel’s only but the Levite and his murdered wife, the slaughtered troops at Gibeah and Rimmon, Saul’s sullen figure, Asahel stricken like a roe in the wilderness of Gibeon, and the other nameless fugitives, whom through more than one page of the earlier books we see cut down among the rocks of Benjamin. The empty, shimmering desert and the stony land thronged with such tragedies—Jeremiah was born and brought up on the edge between them.