which consequently the sanctity of the whole range was as it were concentrated.  It was upon their summits that the worshipper felt himself peculiarly near the God of heaven, and where therefore the altar was built and the sacrifice performed.  One of these peaks was Hermon, “the consecrated,” whose name the Greeks changed into Harmonia, the wife of Agenor the Phoenician.  From its top we can see Palestine spread as it were before us, and stretching southwards to the mountains of Judah.  The walls of the temple, which in Greek times took the place of the primitive altar, can still be traced there, and on its slopes, or perched above its ravines, are the ruins of other temples of Baal—­at Der el-’Ashair, at Rakleh, at Ain Hersha, at Rasheyat el-Fukhar—­all pointing towards the central sanctuary on the summit of the mountain.

The name of Hermon, “the consecrated,” was but an epithet, and the mountain had other and more special names of its own.  The Sidonians, we are told (Deut. iii. 9), called it Sirion, and another of its titles was Sion (Deut. iv. 48), unless indeed this is a corrupt reading for Sirion.  Its Amorite name was Shenir (Deut. iii. 9), which appears as Saniru in an Assyrian inscription, and goes back to the earliest dawn of history.  When the Babylonians first began to make expeditions against the West, long before the birth of Abraham, the name of Sanir was already known.  It was then used to denote the whole of Syria, so that its restriction to Mount Hermon alone must have been of later date.

Another holy peak was Carmel, “the fruitful field,” or perhaps originally “the domain of the god.”  It was in Mount Carmel that the mountain ranges of the north ended finally, and the altar on its summit could be seen from afar by the Phoenician sailors.  Here the priests of Baal called in vain upon their god that he might send them rain, and here was “the altar of the Lord” which Elijah repaired.

The mountains of the south present no striking peak or headland like Hermon and Carmel.  Even Tabor belongs to the north.  Ebal and Gerizim alone, above Shechem, stand out among their fellows, and were venerated as the abodes of deity from the earliest times.  The temple-hill at Jerusalem owed its sanctity rather to the city within the boundaries of which it stood than to its own character.  In fact, the neighbouring height of Zion towered above it.  The mountains of the south were rather highlands than lofty chains and isolated peaks.

But on this very account they played an important part in the history of the world.  They were not too high to be habitable; they were high enough to protect their inhabitants against invasion and war.  “Mount Ephraim,” the block of mountainous land of which Shechem and Samaria formed the centre, and at the southern extremity of which the sacred city of Shiloh stood, was the natural nucleus of a kingdom, like the southern block of which Hebron and Jerusalem were similarly the capitals.  Here there were