Jesse Lyman Hurlbut - Bible Atlas: A Manual of Biblical Geography and History

On this side of the sea we sit down with a big book in our hands. It is an old book. Nearly two thousand years have passed since the last word of it was written, and no one can tell how many thousands of years ago the records were made or the words uttered, out of which its first writer prepared his wonderful statements.

This old book is a singular book as to the variety of its contents,ranging from dry chronological statement to highest flight of royal poetry. Many pages of it are simply historical, with lists of kings, and names of family lines through many generations. Geographical allusions descending to minutest detail are strewn thickly through its pages. There is no department of natural science which does not find some of its data recognized in the chapters of this venerable volume. Stones and stars, plants and reptiles, colossal monsters of sea and land, fleet horse, bird of swift flight, lofty cedar and lowly lily,these all find their existence recognized and recorded in that book of "various theme."

As it is a long time since these records were made, so are the lands far away in which the events recorded are said to have occurred. We measure the years by millenaries, and by the thousand miles we measure the distance. The greatest contrast exists between the age and land in which we live and the age and lands in which this book found its beginning, its material and its ending.

To one familiar only with the habits, dress and customs of American life, the every-day events recorded in the book seem fabulous. We do not dress as the book says that people dressed in those far-away years and far-away lands; we do not eat as they did; our houses are not like theirs; we do not measure time as they did; we do not speak their language; our seasons do not answer to the seasons that marked their year. It is difficult, knowing only our modern American life, to think ourselves into the conditions under which this book says that people lived and thought in those long-ago ages. Their wedding feasts and funeral services differed utterly from ours. They lived and died in another atmosphere, under a government that no longer exists; made war upon nations that are powerless to-day as the sleeping dead in a national cemetery; and the things which we read concerning them seem strange enough to us.

In the changes which have taken place through all these centuries, it would be an easy thing, under some circumstances, for men to deny that the people of the book ever lived, that the cities of the book were ever built, that the events of the book ever transpired. And, if its historic foundation were destroyed, the superstructure of truth, the doctrinal and ethical teachings resting upon it, might in like manner be swept away.

This old Bookthe Bible, a divine product, wrought into the texture of human history and literature with the gradually unfolding agesis the old Book we study to-day on this side the sea.

It is a "Book of books,"the Book out-shining all other books in the literary firmament, as the sun out-splendors the planets that move in their orbits around him.

It is a book that deals with man as an immortal soul; making known the beginnings of the race; going back of the beginning to God, who is from "everlasting to everlasting," and who "in the beginning created the heaven and the earth"; revealing the creative purpose and loving grace of God; tracing the fall and deterioration of man, the divine interposition in human history, the preparation of a family, a race, a nation, and a world at large, for the coming of the Redeemer; revealing the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ; showing how the Christ came, what he did, what he said, what he resisted, what he endured, what he suffered, what he achieved; telling in simple way the story of the early church, from the little meeting of the bereaved disciples in the upper room to the magnificent consummation of Christ's coming, as seen in the prophetic visions of St. John on the Isle of Patmos.

It is a book full of history, of geography, of archology, of prophecy, of poetry, of doctrine, of "exceeding great and precious promises."

In an important sense the foundations of this book are laid in human history and geography. However high toward the heavens it may reach in doctrine and promise, its foundations lay hold of the earth. If the children of Israel did not live in Egypt and Canaan and the far East, if the statements of their history as recorded in the book be not facts, if the story of Jesus Christ be false,everything fails us. With the sweeping away of fact, we must also bid farewell to the words of doctrine and of promise here recorded; to the divine words of assurance which now give comfort to the penitent, hope to the despairing, strength to the feeble, and immortal life to the dying.

As we sit down on this side of the sea, it is well that we are able to look beyond the sea to the lands which gave to the world the book in our hands. And it is well, that, as we look, we are able to connect the book of to-day with those same lands as they now lie among the rivers and by the seaside, from the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates to the mouths of the Nile, from the palaces of Babylon to the dock at Puteoli and the prison at Rome. And it is well that the lands as they are found to-day correspond to the records of the Book as they were made centuries and centuries ago. The Book, on its human historic, geographical and archological side, is true to the facts as in the nineteenth century they are presented to us in the lands of the East.