Israel’s position in regard to the belief in immortality is extremely difficult to define. It was obviously with her a thing of gradual development, as her revelation opened its broadening light upon life’s problems. He would be a bold critic who would sum up the situation of Isaiah’s time as Renan does in the statement, “not looking beyond the world for reward and punishment,” the Hebrew life “has a heroic tension, a sustained cry, an unceasing attention to the events of the world.” Everything goes to shew that long before the faith in immortality had grasped the imagination and the belief of the people in general it had been revealed to chosen spirits. As for the others, it had been working its way among them, occupying their minds in speculation, and leading them, as it were, among the shades of the nether world. There was something in the genius of the nation which rendered this interest in death quite inevitable. The natural bearing of the people has a strange solemnity about it, which finds constant expression in pose and gesture, and often strikes the stranger with sudden vividness. Women may be often seen, especially when clad in thin white garments on holidays, who might stand just as you see them as models for monumental sculpture. Along with all its activities, there is a distinct sympathy with death in the genius of Israel. This phenomenon is, of course, due to very complex causes. It is a deep-rooted Semitic instinct, which seems to be not altogether unlike that of the Egyptian feeling to the tomb as the real home. Some parts of Arabia are very rich in sacred tombs and spots of holy ground, and pilgrimages are made to these both by Moslems and by Jews. Long strings of mules, laden with coffins, wend their way to such sacred places as Nejf, and thousands of corpses are sent thither even from India.[42] Old tombstones are held in peculiar veneration by the more devout Arabs. The well-known reverence with which the Syrian Jews regard the tombs of their ancestors may be in part explained on the ground of patriotic loyalty. Such scenes as those which may be witnessed at the tomb of Rachel, remind us that a sense of the pathos of human life and its mortality is also developed strongly and enters as a very real factor into the spirit of Syria.[43] Nor can there be any doubt that a certain moral or didactic use of death is also characteristic of the East, such as is expressed in the sententious rhymes of old graveyards in this country. The reader will recall the famous instance of this, which Sir Walter Scott has made familiar--the shroud which served for the banner of Saladin, with its inscription, “Saladin must die.”[44]