Around this well what thrilling memories cluster! Departing from Hebron after the conflagration of Sodom, Abraham planted here a grove, whose fruit he gathered, and beneath whose shade he worshiped.[357] Here Isaac spent his happy youth, rejoicing in the smiles of honored parents, and here his father received the command to offer the child of promise as a burnt-offering.[358] After the demise of his mother, here Isaac received his bride Rebekah; and Beersheba became the scene of that sad episode in domestic life, the fraud of Jacob in obtaining Esau’s birthright.[359] Here, in manhood, those brothers were estranged by a mother’s folly, and from this ancestral abode Jacob fled to Haran.[360] After the lapse of seventy-five years he was here again, and offered sacrifices prior to his departure into Egypt, whence he was brought back with funeral honors such as only kings receive.[361] Threatened by the infatuated Jezebel, hither Elijah fled, and, sitting beneath the shade of a juniper-tree, requested for himself that he might die.[362] And here was the southern boundary of the Promised Land, whose uttermost limits, in the earlier history of the nation, were from “Dan to Beersheba.”
In a land where social and domestic customs never change, the scenes of historic associations possess an interest that never fails. The advanced civilization of Europe has there left to the traveler the ruins of renowned cities, without perpetuating the customs of their citizens. The temples, palaces, and dwellings of the Greeks and Romans remain, attesting the genius, elegance, and wealth of their age, but the social habits of the inhabitants of Athens and Rome bear no resemblance to those of their superior ancestors. In Italy and Greece one feels himself in an ancient country surrounded by a modern people, and, to re-live the past, he must forsake the present. But in the East, where a “thousand years are but as one day”――where the stereotyped life of the patriarchs is the every-day life of the Arabs――where intonations of voice, peculiarities of gesture, modes of salutation, styles of dress, habits of business, customs of domestic life, and where the tent, the meal, the fold are the same, the only difference is in the change of the persons who now occupy the homes of those whose memory we cherish, whose examples we imitate, and whose faith we aspire to attain. Accustomed to the slow and regular processes of nature, possessing power rather than capacity, and clinging to experience as something immutable, those who live by the cultivation of the soil look with suspicion upon novelties, regard innovations with dread, and are the last to change. The incoming of Franks into Eastern cities insensibly affects the manners of society; but here, on the patriarchal pasture-fields of Mamre and Beersheba, the domestic life of to-day is the same as it was 4000 years ago.