Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 77:305 (Jan 1920)
Article: Notes On The Troglodytes In Palestine
Author: Wallace Nelson Stearns

BSac 77:305 (Jan 1920) p. 14

Notes On The Troglodytes In Palestine

Wallace N. Stearns, Ph.D.

Introduction

During the great Ice age glaciers were formed on the heights of the Lebanon Mountains, northeast of Beirut. The glacier in the valley of the Kadisha extended down to the level of 5,000 feet, and the present grove of cedars of Lebanon stands upon the terminal moraine. Though there is no evidence of glaciers south of this point, there is evidence of the Glacial period in the abandoned shore lines of the Jordan, one of which is 1,400 feet above the Dead Sea, and a more prominent one at 650 feet. These evidently are the results of the cold and moist climatic conditions accompanying the Glacial period, during the last stage of which Palæolithic man appeared in Palestine as well as in Europe and America.1 Scant knowledge on great problems still marks the study of prehistoric Asia. The next decade is one of promise. We are safe, however, in identifying the Palæolithic with the Glacial period. The late Neolithic period was still on in 2500 b.c. Tools were still of stone, metals are not yet known.2

The Land

The basis of Palestine is a limestone plateau laid down millenniums past, and once all but submerged in prehistoric seas. At that time the Mediterranean extended far east to the crest of the Judean plateau; and southward the waters spread up the Nile, converting that valley for a thousand miles into an ocean floor. Likewise the Red

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Sea extended northward to the base of Lebanon, drowning the Jordan Valley and the chasm of the Dead Sea. Geologically Palestine belongs to Africa, and is at best only a hangnail of Eurasia. The entire country is volcanic. Earthquakes have constituted an ever-recurring phenomenon. Indeed, it is a local superstition that once in seventy years the dread experience is bound to recur; and as the time comes around, the natives, without waiting for the premonitions, abandon the villages and get out into the open hills. Devils seem to have gotten possession of the country in more ways than one. The pool which the angel troubled, for example, is now stirred by a sleeping dragon; jinns haunt every lonely roadside; and underneath the high table-land of Judah a huge dragon lies fitfully sleeping, his restless turnings creating the dread quakings of the earth above him.

But time has wrought wonders. The silting up of the Nile and the uplift of the ocean bed have created historic Egypt, “the gift of the Nile.” Likewise the shoulder of Philistia has turned back the waters of the Mediterranean, and an upheaval of the height of land south of the Dead Sea has creat...