“But now, if we subtract from this what was wilderness and desert, and also what was at no time inhabited and controlled by the Israelites, we further reduce their habitable territory about one-half. The land of Canaan being nearly all mountainous and bounded on the south and east by a vast desert which encroached upon the borders of the country, a great part of it was barren wilderness. Nor did but one-fifth of the Israelites (two and a half tribes) occupy the country east of the Jordan, which was almost equal in extent to that on the west, the proper Land of Promise. The eastern half, therefore, must have been but thinly populated by the two and a half tribes, who were only able to maintain a precarious foothold against the bordering enemies. So, then, it is not probable that the Israelites actually inhabited and governed at any time à territory of more than 3000 square miles, or not much if any larger than the little State of Delaware. At all events, it can hardly be doubted that Delaware contains more good land than the whole country of the Jews ever did. “The promise to Abraham in Gen. 15: 18 is ‘from the river of Egypt to the river Euphrates.’ But the Jewish possessions never reached the Nile by 200 miles. In Ex. 33: 31 the promise is renewed, but the river of Egypt is not named. The boundaries are ‘from the Red Sea to the Sea of the Philistines (the Mediterranean), and from the desert to the river.’ By ‘the river’ was doubtless meant the Euphrates; and assuming that by ‘the desert’ was meant the eastern boundary (though Canaan was bounded on the south also by the same great desert which reached to the Red Sea), we have in this promise a territory 600 miles long by an average of about 180 broad, making an area of about 100,000 square miles, or ten times as much as the Jews ever could claim, and nearly one-half of it uninhabitable. So, then, the promise was never fulfilled, for the Israelites were confined to a very small central portion of their land of promise, and whether they occupied 3000 or 12,000 square miles in the period of their greatest power, the fact is not to be disputed that their country was a very small one. “Lamartine describes the journey from Bethany to Jericho as singularly toilsome and melancholy—neither houses nor cultivation, mountains without a shrub, immense rocks split by time, pinnacles tinged with colors like those of an extinct volcano. ‘From the summit of these hills, as far as the eye can reach, we see only black chains, conical or broken peaks, a boundless labyrinth of passes rent through the mountains, and those ravines lying in perfect and perpetual stillness, without a stream, without a wild animal, without even a flower, the relics of a convulsed land, with waves of stone’ (vol. ii., p. 146).”