Bible and Sword (34 page)

Lecky’s
History of Rationalism
appeared in 1865, the same year as Stanley’s
Jewish Church
, and in that same year the Palestine Exploration Fund was founded, the direct outcome of the new flesh-and-blood approach to the Holy Land. Remember that, only the year before, the judges had decided in the heresy case that it was not penal under the law for a clergyman to affirm that authorship of the books of the Bible was human, not divine. The dikes were down. To recover the real past and the real people of the Book was the task the P.E.F. set itself. Not only Palestine’s archaeology, but also its topography, meteorology, botany, zoology, and every other -ology was to be, said the P.E.F.’s prospectus, within its scope. It sternly announced, in asking for funds, that it would be bound by three guiding principles: field work was to be carried out on scientific
principles, the Fund was to abstain from religious controversy, and it was not to be conducted as a religious society. Oxford University, naturally, led the list of donors with £500, Cambridge £250, the Syria Improvement Committee £250, the Queen £150, and the Grand Lodge of Freemasons £105.

Curiously enough, although the P.E.F. was founded in the spirit of rationalist investigation, its original impulse came from the evangelical Finns and their friends in Jerusalem. They had founded a Jerusalem Literary Society for the study of local “antiquities,” and it had rapidly become the center for all the Biblical historiographers who came in those years, like a pack of excited bird dogs, to flush the relics of the far-off time when “the documents of our faith were written.” Local members of the Society went on excavating trips and dug up enough artifacts to start a little museum. A library of a thousand volumes was collected. The Archbishop of Canterbury became a patron. The Prince Consort sent £25. Learned foreigners and distinguished archaeologists become corresponding members. Prominent visitors — Ernest Renan, Holman Hunt, Dean Stanley, de Lesseps, Layard the discoverer of Nineveh-came to its meetings.

As a result of all this bustling and digging the true immensity of Palestine’s past and the size of the task necessary to uncover it began to be understood. Concerted and professional effort must replace the enthusiastic amateur.

In 1864 the War Office was persuaded to appoint an officer of engineers (without however, paying his expenses) to begin a survey of Jerusalem and its vicinity. Sir Charles Wilson volunteered, and the results of his work (which included a plotting of the difference in levels between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea) constituted the first publication of the P.E.F., organized in the following year. Wilson went again to survey the Beirut and Hebron area, and many years later, after a military career that included command of the expedition that failed to
rescue General Gordon in the Sudan, he returned to Palestine in 1899 and 1903 to locate the controversial sites of Golgotha and the Holy Sepulcher.

After Wilson the P.E.F. sent out Sir Charles Warren, whose researches led him to the conclusion, already quoted from his
Land of Promise
, that Palestine could again be the productive land it had been of old. In 1872 the basic and most extensive work of surveying was begun by two officers of the Royal Engineers in their twenties, Lieutenant Claude Conder and one destined to greater world fame in another sphere, Lieutenant Kitchener. Kitchener surveyed Eastern Palestine; Conder took the territory west of the Jordan and in three years mapped an area of 4,700 square miles. He located the previously unknown sites of a hundred and fifty Biblical place names, plotted the boundaries of the Twelve Tribes, traced the routes of armies and migrations, and deciphered ancient inscriptions. For two years more, back in England, he and Kitchener worked together preparing their material for publication. The historical findings were issued in seven volumes of
Memoirs
by the P.E.F., beginning in 1880; the maps were printed by the Ordnance Survey Office. Conder published his own account,
Tent Work in Palestine
, illustrated with his own drawings, and went back again and again to the Holy Land. The rest of his life, between tours of military duty in Egypt and South Africa, he devoted to bringing into the light the lost history of the land and its people. In 1882 he was chosen to guide Prince George, later George V, on a Holy Land tour, as Dean Stanley had guided Edward twenty years earlier.

His erudition was enormous, his mind searching and original, his interests limitless, his prose lively. He could speak and write Hebrew and Arabic and was expert in ancient cuneiform. He translated the Tel-Amarna tablets, the primary source material for pre-Hebraic Palestine. He could trace the history of every place he visited from the Crusades back through to the Bible, peeling off Moslem,
Byzantine, Roman, and Assyrian layers one by one. He could write with authority on geology, archaeology, philology, medicine, agriculture, art, architecture, literature, and theology. Unconcerned with proving or disproving doctrinal dogmas, he loved to dig down to the history beneath the religious façade. Instead of bowing before the Church of the Holy Sepulcher he called it that “grim and wicked old building,” cause of more human misery and spilling of blood than any other edifice in the world. Short of a whole chapter on Conder, the best résumé of his work can be gained just from listing the titles of some of his works:
Judas Maccabaeus and the Jewish War of Independence
(1879),
Primer of Bible Geography
(1883),
Syrian Stone Lore
(1886),
The Canaanites
(1887),
Palestine
(1891),
The Bible in the East
(1896),
The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem
(1897),
The Hittites and their Language
(1898),
The Hebrew Tragedy
(1900), and
The City of Jerusalem
(1909) the year before he died.

Besides all this he helped Sir Charles Wilson gather and edit material for the Palestine Pilgrims Text Society, an offshoot of the P.E.F. Early accounts of Palestine by pilgrims from all lands from the fourth century to the fifteenth were translated and, after eleven years’ work, eventually published in a twelve-volume series.

Conder, when he wrote on the prospects for the regeneration of Palestine through Jewish colonization, brought to the subject the practical common sense of a man who knew the ground. His flat statement that “there is not a mile of made road in the land from Dan to Beersheba” is enough in itself to reveal the awful extent of the task that would be required to make Palestine livable again. Roads, said Conder, to allow transport by wheeled vehicles were the first necessity. Irrigation and swamp drainage, restoration of aqueducts and cisterns, sanitation, seeding of grass and reforestation to check soil erosion were all, he pointed out, essential to a colonization program.

Until the work of the Palestine Exploration Fund began
to be published there were few practical people who thought the land could be revived at all. It was the great contribution of the P.E.F. (apart from its historical findings) to show that Palestine had once been habitable by a much larger population and a more advanced civilization than was commonly supposed and therefore could be again. When the work started the common picture of Palestine was of a deserted tract left to the desolation predicted by Isaiah, “an habitation of dragons and a court for owls.” The infertile ground left the impression that even in Biblical times the land had been an obscure, unproductive country inhabited by simple people of simple pursuits. But gradually the true grandeur of the past hidden beneath the surface was scraped out. Outlines of old cities, of temples and vineyards, kingdoms and thoroughfares, markets and bazaars emerged, and a civilization, “with its settled institutions, priests, kings, magistrates, schools, literature and poets,” was revealed. Fields of grain had once covered the plains, and even the Negeb had supported, in Byzantine times, six towns of from 5,000 to 10,000 population, with many smaller settlements in between. The country was not under a curse, the archaeologists found. It had reverted to the nomad and gone to decay for a simpler reason: lack of cultivation. The Arab conquest had swept out the last of Byzantine civilization “as a locust swarm devastates a corn-field,” leaving the land to Bedouins and goats.

The implications of the P.E.F.’s work could not escape Palestine’s venerable champion, and the P.E.F. itself did not long escape Lord Shaftesbury. Ten years after its founding he became, inevitably, its president. And here in the closing years of his life he could still expound more eloquently than anyone else the hope of Israel. “Let us not delay,” he told the Fund in his opening address, “to send out the best agents … to search the length and breadth of Palestine, to survey the land, and if possible to go over every corner of it, drain it, measure it, and, if you will,
prepare it for the return of its ancient possessors, for I must believe that the time cannot be far off before that great event will come to pass.…

“I recollect speaking to Lord Aberdeen when he was prime minister, on the subject of the Holy Land; and he said to me, ‘If the Holy Land should pass out of the hands of the Turks, into whose hands should it fall?’ ‘Why,’ my reply was ready, ‘Not into the hands of other powers, but let it return into the hands of the Israelites.’ “

Lord Shaftesbury was perfectly aware that he did not have the full sympathy of his audience, many of whom were interested more in Israel’s past than in its future. (One in the audience was the famous and erratic Captain Burton, Arabian explorer and translator of the
Arabian Nights
, whose views on the Jews were distinctly unfriendly. Speaking after Lord Shaftesbury, he made the point, fairly taken, unfortunately, that the “Israelites of Europe” were not going to prove too ready “to unloose their purse strings for the benefit of Judea.”) But Shaftesbury, evangelical to the last, refused to be intimidated by scientists and archaeologists. All over England, he told them, were people like himself, animated by “a burning affection for that land” [Palestine]; its revival should be a goal equal in importance to the recovery of its past; and on this question he concluded: “My old age is not much tamer than my early life.”

Tamer he certainly was not. In 1876, nearly forty years after his first article on the subject in the
Quarterly Review
, he wrote another that reveals how much, for all his still fervent Evangelicalism, he had learned from the rise of Jewish nationalism in the intervening years. It is perhaps the classic expression of England’s role in the revival of Palestine:

“Syria and Palestine will ere long become most important. The old time will come back … the country wants capital and population. The Jew can give it both. And has not England a special interest in promoting such a restoration?
… She must preserve Syria to herself. Does not policy then—if that were all—exhort England to foster the nationality of the Jews and aid them, as opportunity may offer, to return as a leavening power to their old country? England is the great trading and maritime power of the world. To England, then, naturally belongs the role of favouring the settlement of the Jews in Palestine.… The nationality of the Jews exists; the spirit is there and has been for three thousand years but the external form, the crowning bond of union, is still wanting. A nation must have a country. The old land, the old people. This is not an artificial experiment; it is nature, it is history.”

England’s purchase of the Suez Canal in 1876 as the opening gun of Disraeli’s premiership ushered in a quarter-century of imperial expansion unequaled since the conquests of Alexander the Great. Following logically after Suez came the Cyprus Convention in 1878. By this treaty Britain committed herself to a military guarantee of Turkish possessions in Asia. Thus the historic area from the Nile to the Euphrates, staked out by the Lord for Abraham, was embraced as a British sphere of influence. Palestine was to remain under Turkish rule for another forty years, but after Suez and Cyprus its ultimate physical possession by Britain was a foregone conclusion.

England had become officially an empire after the Indian Mutiny of 1858; from India and around India and along the paths to India, all the rest followed. Under the “imperious and irresistible necessity of acquiring defensible frontiers—in the words of Lord Cromer, a senior partner in empire-building—Britain acquired a million and a quarter square miles in the ten years 1879–89. Afghanistan to block Russia off from India on the north, Burma on India’s eastern frontier, Egypt to protect the Suez Canal, were brought in during these years. Next came Africa, from the Transvaal at the bottom to Egypt at the top, with enough
in between to complete a road of British red the length of the Dark Continent from the Cape to Cairo. The vast horizon of empire was pushed outward not only for the sake of defensible frontiers, but also under the equally imperious necessity of acquiring markets for Manchester cotton goods. What made the combination irresistible was the imperious, and often genuine, belief that Britain was fulfilling her manifest destiny to extend the civilizing benefits of rule by the British race. It is, said Joseph Chamberlain unhesitatingly, “the greatest of governing races the world has ever seen.”

“God’s Englishman” was the phrase made famous by Lord Milner, the spokesman of empire. Lord Rosebery saw in imperial expansion “the finger of the Divine.” Doctor Livingstone opened up central Africa as a missionary. General Gordon went to his death in the Sudan with the Bible in his pocket and read it as often as did Oliver Cromwell. W. T. Stead in his opening manifesto for the
Review of Reviews
proclaimed the imperialist’s creed that “the English-speaking race is one of God’s chief chosen instruments for executing coming improvements in the lot of mankind.” On the other hand the “Little Englanders” of the Gladstone wing saw nothing but a “mania for grabbing” and “a fatal lust for empire.”

But the trend was against them, and the Suez Canal was its initial impulse. By giving Britain command of the Red Sea route to India and the Far East it made the southeast corner of the Mediteranean the most vital strategic spot in the Empire. Henceforth the Holy Land became its military left flank, even as Egypt and the Sudan became its right flank and were accordingly occupied in the eighties. It becomes understandable why the War Office was ready to send Royal Engineers to map Palestine in the interests of Biblical research.