The western section is triangular in form, the base being marked by the Mediterranean coast and the hills of Judah, and the apex by Ras Mohammed on the extreme south. This vast tract is divided by the Gulf of Akabah, and the deep valley of the Arabah, into two great sections. The southern limits of the wilderness were marked by the Red Sea and its gulfs and time northern by Canaan, Moab, and Bashan. Travellers in this region often pass through a moving tribe whose outer extremities are twenty miles apart. It bore a far closer resemblance to the migration of an Arab tribe, whose flocks, herds, shepherds, and guards, with their families, spread over the country for many miles. There can be little doubt that their march was never conducted, like that of a modern army, in one dense column. How much of the latter it included cannot be determined, because the eastern boundary of Edom is indefinite and even were it minutely definied, it would be impossible to ascertain how close to or how far from it the Israelites travelled. The country embraced in the "Wilderness of Wandering" extended from the borders of Egypt and the Mediterranean on the west, to the plateau of Arabia on the east. In our treatment of it here we give in detail its geographical character and productions. They tend to demonstrate the perfect consistency of Bible history in its minutest details. The appropriateness of these natural features to the scenes recorded in the sacred narrative cannot safely be overlooked by the modern critic and commentator. They were wrapped in a silence which gave full effect to the morning and the evening shout with which the encampment rose and pitched, and still more to the thunders, and the voice exceeding loud on the top of Horeb" (Sin.and Pal. They were enclosed within a sanctuary of temples and pyramids not made With hands - the more awful from its total dissimilarity to anything which they or their fathers could have remembered in Egypt or Palestine. There, as Stainley says, "they were brought into contact with a desolation which was forcibly contrasted with the green valley of the Nile. It was here, amid nature's grandest and wildest architecture, wrapped in nature's profoundest silence and solitude, far removed from the din and distraction of the world of life and action, that the people of Israel met with their God, and witnessed manifestations of his glory and majesty and power such as mortals never witnessed before, and never can witness again. This is a convenient popular designation of the wide region in which the people were led by the divine guidance under Moses, for forty years, from Egypt to Canaan. Wilderness Of The Wandering Of The Children Of Israel. Wilderness of the Wandering of the Children of Israel
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