seems now to be much diminished, illustrate those parts of scripture, which mention the fords and passages of Jordan. It no longer indeed rolls down into the Salt Sea so majestic a stream as in the days of Joshua, yet its ordinary depth is still about ten or twelve feet, so that it cannot even at present be passed but at certain places. Of this well-known circumstance, the men of Gilead took advantage in the civil war, which they were compelled to wage with their brethren: "The Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: ... then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan." The people of Israel, under the command of Ehud, availed themselves of the same advantage in the war with Moab: "And they went down after him, and took the fords of Jordan towards Moab, and suffered not a man to pass over." But although the state of this river in modern times, completely justifies the incidental remarks of the sacred writers, it is evident, that Maundrell was disconcerted by the shallowness of the stream, at the time of the year when he expected to see it overflowing all its banks; and his embarrassment seems to have increased, when he contemplated the double margin within which it flowed. This difficulty, which has perhaps occurred to some others, may be explained by a remark which Dr. Pococke has made on the river Euphrates. "The bed of the Euphrates," says that writer, "was meas-" ured by some English gentlemen at Beer, and found to be six hundred and thirty yards broad; but the river only two hundred and fourteen yards over; that they thought it to be nine or ten feet deep in the middle; and were informed, that it sometimes rises twelve feet perpendicularly. He observed that it had an inner and outer bank; but says, it rarely overflows the inner bank: that when it does, they Sow watermelons and other fruits of that kind, as soon as the water retires, and have a great produce." From this passage, Mr. Harmer argues; "Might not the overflowings of the Jordan be like those of the Euphrates, not annual, but much more rare ?" The difficulty, therefore, will be completely removed, by supposing that it does not, like the Nile, overflow every year, as some authors by mistake had supposed, but, like the Euphrates, only in some particular years; but when it does, it is in the time of harvest. If it did not in ancient times annually overflow its banks, the majesty of God in dividing its waters, to make way for Joshua and the armies of Israel, was certainly the more striking to the Canaanites; who, when they looked upon themselves as defended in an extraordinary manner by the casual swelling of the river, its breadth and rapidity being both so extremely increased, yet, found it in these circumstances part asunder, and leave a way on dry land for the people of Jehovah.

The casual overflowing of the river, in Mr. Harmer's opinion, seems to receive some confirmation from a passage in Josephus, where that writer informs his readers, that the Jordan was sometimes swelled in the spring, so as to be impassable in places where people were wont to go over in his time; for, speaking of a transaction on the fourth of the month Dystrus, which answers to our March, or, as others reckon, to February, he gives an account of great numbers of people who perished in this river, into which they were driven by their enemies; which, by the circumstances, appears to have happened in a few days after what was done on the fourth of Dystrus. But the solution offered by this respectable author is rather strained and unsatisfactory. The inspired writer of the book of Joshua uses language on that subject, which naturally suggests the idea of periodical inundations: "Jordan overfloweth all his banks all the time of harvest." The present time certainly indicates the general habit of the subject to which it refers, and in this case, what commonly happens to the river. It may be swelled in the spring occasionally; but it is not easy to discover a reason for the general remark of the sacred writer, if the inundations in the time of harvest were not annual. The causes of these inundations, the melting of the snows on the top of Lebanon, and the former and latter rain, uniformly take place at their appointed seasons; but a steady periodical cause will certainly produce a corresponding effect. But if this reasoning be just, why did not Maundrell see the effect when he visited the river at the appointed time? This question may be answered by another, Why do the inundations even of the Nile sometimes fail? The reason is obvious; the rains in Abyssinia are not every season equally copious.

In the same manner, if the snows on Lebanon, and the periodical rains, are less abundant in some seasons, it will easily account for the state of the river when it was visited by Maundrell. Admitting the fact, that the volume of water in the Jordan is diminished, and that he never overflows his banks as in ancient times, that intelligent traveller him. self has sufficiently accounted for the circumstance: some of the waters may be drained off by secret channels, which is not uncommon in those parts of the world; and if the rapidity of the current be so great that he could not swim against it, the depth of the channel must be greatly increas ed since the days of Joshua and the Judges. To these some other causes of considerable power may be added the present state of Lebanon, now for a long time deprived of its immense forests of cedar, which formerly exerted a powerful attraction on the humidity of the atmosphere, and served to accumulate the snows on the Sannin, while they screened from the burning rays of the sun, the fountains and rills that fed the Jordan and his tributary streams: and the great extent to which the declivities of that noble mountain have been subjected to the arts of cultivation, by the Maronites, and other nations, who have taken refuge in its sequestered retreats from the intolerable oppression of the Turks, by which its numerous streams have been still further diminished,—must, it is imagined, produce a very sensible difference in the volume of water which that river, once so celebrated for its full and majestic tide, now pours into the Salt Sea. Still, however, taking the mean depth of the stream during the whole year at nine feet, and admitting that it runs about two miles an hour, the Jordan will daily discharge into the Dead Sea, about 6,090,000 tons of water.

But although these causes must have produced a considerable diminution in the swellings of Jordan, we have the authority of a recent traveller for asserting, that they still take place at the appointed season, and exhibit a scene of no inconsiderable grandeur. In winter, the river overflows its narrow channel, which between the two principal lakes is not more than sixty or eighty feet broad, and, swelled by the rains, forms a sheet of water sometimes a quarter of a league in breadth. The time of its overflowing is generally in March, when the snows melt on the mountain of the Shaik; at which time, more than any other, its waters are troubled and of a yellow hue, and its course impetuThe common receptacle into which the Jordan empties his waters, is the lake Asphaltites, from whence they are continually drained off by evaporation. Some writers, unable to find a discharge for the large body of water which is continually rushing into the lake, have been inclined to suspect, it had some communication with the Mediterranean; but, besides that we know of no such gulf, it has been demonstrated by accurate calculations, that evaporation is more than sufficient to carry off the waters of the river. It is in fact very considerable, and frequently becomes sensible to the eye, by the fogs with which the lake is covered at the rising of the sun, and which are afterward dispersed by the heat.

ous.

How large the common receptacle of the Jordan was, before the destruction of Sodom, cannot now be determined with certainty; but it was much smaller than at present; the whole vale of Siddim, which, before that awful catas trophe, was crowded with cities, or covered with rich and extensive pastures, and fields of corn, being now buried in the waters of the lake. The course of the stream, which is to the southward, seems clearly to indicate, that the original basin was in the southern part of the present sea. But, although the waters of the river at first presented a much less extended surface to the action of the sun and the atmosphere, still a secret communication between the lake and the Mediterranean, is not perhaps necessary to account for their discharge. By the admission of Volney, evapo ration is more than sufficient to carry them off at present: and if to this be added, the great quantity of water consumed in the cities, and required by the cultivator, to refresh his plantations and corn-fields, under the burning rays of an oriental sun, it is presumed, a cause equal to the effect is provided. This is not a mere conjecture, unsupported by historical facts; for only a very small portion of the Barrady, the principal river of Damascus, escapes from the gardens that environ the city, through which it is conducted in a thousand clear and winding streams, to maintain their freshness and verdure.-PAXTON.

The bitterness of their doom did not consist in being subjected to a laborious service, for it was the usual employment of women and children; but in their being degraded from the characteristic employment of men, that of bearing arms, and condemned with their posterity for ever to the employment of females.-PAXTON.

CHAPTER X.

Ver. 6. And the LORD said unto Joshua, Be not afraid because of them; for to-morrow, about this time, will I deliver them up all slain before Israel: thou shalt hough their horses, and burn their chariots with fire.

With the enemy's horses, the Israelites had a different procedure from other booty. For their direction, indeed, on this point, they had no general and permanent law, prescribed them, but merely the order from God, issued by Joshua (x. 6) before the battle at the waters of Merom; according to which order, they were naturally led to regulate their conduct in aftertimes. In their wars before the reign of Solomon, they made no use of horses, though some of their enemies did; and this same cavalry of their enemies was wont to be very formidable, and sometimes gave them the superiority of the Israelites in the plains. At the same time, the event has often shown, that a brave, steady, close infantry, without the support of horse, will stand the shock of hostile cavalry without the smallest disorder; of which, although our cavalry is far more formidable by reason of their close charge, modern history furnishes examples. Indeed, on one occasion, besides more than 20,000 infantry, David took, I know not whether 1700, or 7000 cavalry, prisoners; their retreat across the Euphrates having been probably cut off, or that they were compelled to surrender for want of subsistence. But when the Israelites did get a booty of horses, they did not know what use to make of them. Their husbandry was carried on in the ancient way, and to much more advantage, with oxen, which are not so expensive to maintain; and to this their whole rural economy was directed. In war, they did not employ cavalry, and would have been bad horsemen; and for travelling, they commonly made use of the ass, to which whoever is accustomed from his youth, will not willingly venture to ride a mettled horse, particularly such a ane as is employed in war. Horses, therefore, were to them quite a useless sort of plunder, unless they had sold them, which was not advisable, because their enemies, in a roundabout way, might have bought them again. It was far better policy for them to diminish as far as possible this race of animals, by means of which their enemies might, on some occasions, obtain a manifest advantage over them; just as the Romans put the elephants of their enemies to death, because they had no desire to make use of this foreign and dubious expedient to help them to victory, and yet saw that elephants might sometimes be dangerous to their troops. In the first engagement which the Israelites had with an enemy whose cavalry and war-chariots made him formidable, God commanded them to hough or hamstring, that is, to cut the thigh-sinew of the horses which they took; and they did so, Josh. x. 6-9. From ignorance of military affairs, most expositors have understood this command as if it meant, not that the horses should be killed, but merely lamed in the hind-legs, and then let go and into this mistake, by following Bochart, as he had Kimchi, I was led in the first edition of this work.-I have never been in war, and know just as little of the veterinary art; nor have I ever seen a ham-strung horse. But a horse so treated, must, instead of running off, fall instantly backward, and writhe about miserably till he die, which generally happens from loss of blood, by the stroke of the sabre cutting the artery of the thigh. This is still, as military people have since informed me, the plan adopted to make those horses that are taken, but cannot be easily brought away, unserviceable to the enemy again. They ham-string them, which can be done in an instant; and they generally die of the wound, by bleeding to death; but though they should not, the wound never heals; so that if even the enemy recover them alive, he is forced to despatch them: and every compassionate friend of horses, who has ever seen une in that situation, will do so, in order to terminate his inisery. There is, therefore, no foundation for Kimchi's

opinion, that mere laning was enjoined, because it would be wrong to put an animal unnecessarily to death. For thus to lame a horse that would still live, in my opinion, would rather have been extreme cruelty; because, being then useless, nobody would be likely to give him any food -MICHAELIS.

Ver. 11. And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Beth-horon, that the LORD cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with hailstones, than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword.

Some writers are of opinion that this was hail, larger and more violent than usual; others maintain that Joshua is to be understood literally, of a shower of stones. Such a circumstance, so far from being impossible, has several times occurred. The Romans, who looked upon showers of stones as very disastrous, have noticed many instances of them. Under the reign of Tullius Hostilius, when it was known to the people of Rome that a shower of stones had fallen on the mountain of Alba, at first it seemed incredible. They sent out proper persons to inquire into this prodigy, and it was found that stones had fallen after the same manner as a storm of hail driven by the wind. Some time after the battle at Cannæ, there was seen upon the same mountain of Alba a shower of stones, which continued for two days together. In 1538, near a village in Italy called Tripergola, after some shocks of an earthquake, there was seen a shower of stones and dust, which darkened the air for two days, after which they observed that a mountain had risen up in the midst of the Lucrine Lake.-BURDER.

A similar phenomenon in modern times is thus described in Com. Porier's Letters from Constantinople and its Environs, (vol. 1. p. 44,) as having occurred in the summer of 1831:

"We had got perhaps a mile and a half on our way when a cloud rising in the west, gave indications of an approaching rain. In a few minutes we discovered some thing falling from the heavens with a heavy splash, and of a whitish appearance. I could not conceive what it was, but observing some gulls near, I supposed it to be then darting for fish; but soon after discovered that they were large balls of ice falling. Immediately we heard a sound like rumbling thunder, or ten thousand carriages rolling furiously over the pavement. The whole Bosphorus was in a foam, as though heaven's artillery had been discharged upon us and our frail machine. Our fate seemed inevita ble, our umbrellas were raised to protect us; the lumps of ice stripped them into ribands. We fortunately had a bul lock's hide in the boat, under which we crawled and saved ourselves from further injury. One man, of the three oarsmen, had his hand literally smashed; another much injured in the shoulder; Mr. H. received a severe blow in the leg; my right hand was somewhat disabled, and all more or less injured. A smaller kaick accompanied, with my two servants. They were both disabled, and are now in bed with their wounds; the kaick was terribly bruised. It was the most awful and terrific scene that I ever wit nessed, and God forbid that I should be ever exposed to such another. Balls of ice as large as my two fists, fell into the boat, and some of them came with such violence' as certainly to have broken an arm or leg, had they struck us in those parts. One of them struck the blade of an oar and split it. The scene lasted, may be, five minutes; but it was five minutes of the most awful feeling that I ever experienced. When it passed over, we found the surrounding hills covered with masses of ice, I cannot call it hail; the trees stripped of their leaves and limbs, and every thing looking desolate. We proceeded on our course, however. and arrived at our destination, drenched and awe-struck. The ruin had not extended so far as Candalie, and it was difficult to make them comprehend the cause of the nervous and agitated condition in which we arrived; the Reis Effendi asked me if I was ever so agitated when in action? I answered no, for then I had something to excite me, and human means only to oppose. He asked the minister if be ever was so affected in a gale of wind at sea? He answered no, for then he could exercise his skill to disarm or render