very strange to us of these western regions.  To understand the extent of this characteristic one has only to peruse the Song of Solomon.  The bride is black but comely as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.  She is a dove in the clefts of the rock; her hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from Mount Gilead; her teeth are like a flock of sheep which come from the washing; her lips are like a thread of scarlet; her temples are like a piece of a pomegranate; her stature is like a palm tree, and her breasts like clusters of grapes—­all thoroughly oriental.  So also the bridegroom is like a roe or a young hart leaping upon the mountains; his eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters; his cheeks are as a bed of spices; his lips like lilies, dropping sweet-smelling myrrh, and his countenance as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars.  So also if we open the book of Isaiah, we find the Messiah described as “the shadow of a great rock in a weary land”—­a figure which could not well occur to an Englishman or an American, but was perfectly natural in the mouth of a Hebrew familiar with the terrible sun of the Asiatic deserts, where neither tree nor cloud offers a shelter to the thirsty and fainting traveller.  Precisely here lies much of the obscurity of which the expounders of Hebrew poetry complain.  True, there are other difficulties of a formidable character.  The theme is often vast, stretching into the distant and dimly-revealed future; the language rugged with abrupt transitions, the historic allusions obscure, and the meaning of the terms employed doubtful.  But aside from all these considerations the western scholar encounters a perpetual difficulty in the fact that he is not of oriental birth, and can enter but imperfectly into the spirit and force of oriental imagery.  What costs him days of laborious investigation would open itself like a flash of lightning to his apprehension—­all except that which remains dark from the nature of the prophetic themes—­could he but have that perfect apprehension of the language, the historic allusions, the imagery employed, and the modes of thought, which was possessed by the contemporaries of the Hebrew poet.

It remains that we notice in the last place what may be called the theocratic imagery of the Hebrew poets; that is, imagery borrowed from the institutions of the Mosaic law.  The intense loyalty of the Hebrew poets to the Mosaic law has already been noticed.  They were its divinely-appointed expositors and defenders, and their whole religious life was moulded by it.  No wonder, then, that their writings abound with allusions to its rites and usages.  The sweet psalmist of Israel will abide in God’s tabernacle for ever, and trust in the covert of his wings, the literal tabernacle on Zion representing God’s spiritual presence here and his beatific presence hereafter (Psa. 61:4 and elsewhere); he will have his prayer set forth before God as incense, and the lifting up of his hands