concerted him; however, he supposes it might anciently have overflowed the level strand up to the first bank, though at present it seems to have forgot its ancient greatness, either by having worn its channel deeper than it was formerly, or because its waters are diverted some other way. But possibly the whole of it lies in this, that it does not, like the Nile, overflow annually, as authors by mistake had supposed, but, like the Euphrates, only in some particular years; but when it does, that it is in the time of harvest. It is rather unfortunate that no virtuoso has ascertained the fact: may the writer of these papers venture to recommend the examination of it to the curious?

If it did not in ancient times annually overflow its banks, the majesty of GoD's dividing its waters, in the days of Joshua, was certainly the more striking to the Canaanites, who, when they looked upon themselves as extraordinarily defended by the overflowing of the river, which happened not every year, its breadth and rapidity being both so extremely increased, yet found the river in these circumstances open itself, and make a way on the dry land for the people of JEHOVAH.

• It appears from a passage of Josephus, (de Bell. Jud. lib. 2, cap. 7) that the Jordan was sometimes swelled in the spring, so as to be impassible in places where people were wont to go over, in his time; for speaking of a trans. action on the fourth of the month Dystrus, which answers our March, or, as some reckon, February, he gives an account of great numbers of people who perished in this river, into which they were driven by their enemies, which, by the circumstances, appears to have happened in a few days after what was done on the fourth of Dystrus

OBSERVATION XLVI.

Of the Woods and Thickets in Judea.

THOUGH Wood is very scarce in Palestine, in some well-watered places they have considerable thickets of trees, and of reeds.

So Dr. Pococke represents Jordan as almost hid by shady trees, between the lake Samochonites, and the sea of Tiberias; which trees, he says, are chiefly of the platanus-kind, and grow on each side of it. To which he adds, that the lake itself, when the waters are fallen, is only a marsh. And, in another place,' he describes the sea of Tiberias as having reeds growing by it in great numbers. Sandys had long before given a similar account of these places: observing that Jordan was shaded with poplars, alders, tamarisks, and reeds of sundry kinds; and that the lake Samochonites, then called Houle, was in the summer for the most part dry, and overgrown with shrubs and reeds.'

In these places live many wild boars, according to both authors. Dr. Pococke in particular observed very large herds of them on the other side Jordan, where it flows out of the sea of Tiberias; and several of them on the same side (on which he was) lying among the reeds by the sea. The wild boars of other

countries delight in the like moist habitations."

These shady marshes are called in the Scripture woods, for it calls these animals the wild boars of the wood, Ps. lxxx. 13.

Might not the wood of Ephraim, in which the battle was fought between the army of Absalom and the servants of David, be a wood of the same kind? If it was, a difficulty that seems to have perplexed commentators may be removed for it is certain that a boggy place may be very fatal to an army, partly by suffocating those that in the hurry of flight inadvertently venture over places incapable of supporting them; and partly by retarding them, so as to give their pursuers an opportunity of coming up with them, and cutting them off. A greater number of people than of those that fall in the height of battle may thus be destroyed.

So the Archbishop of Tyre tells us, that some of the troops of one of the Christian kings of Jerusalem, were lost in the marshy places of a valley of this country, out of which that prince was driving a great number of catt'e, owing to their not being acquainted with the passages through them; and this, though he was successful in his expedition, and had no enemy to molest him in his return.* They were indeed, according to the Arch

See Keysler concerning the wild boars of Germany, vol. 1, p. 134, and Le Bruyn concerning those of Persia, vol. 4, p. 451. * Gesta Dei per Francos, p. 1003.

bishop, but few; but in what numbers would they have perished, must we think, had they been forced to fly, like the men of Absalom, before a victorious army. So Josephus ascribes the death of Demetrius, one of the kings of Syria, to his horse's plunging into a muddy place, which could not easily be passed through, where being entangled, he was slain by those very enemies he had been pursuing, who seeing the accident, turned back, and killed him with their darts." On such accounts as these, the ancient warriors thought such retreats as marshes proper places for them to encamp in, especially when their enemies .surpassed them in numbers: so Josephus represents Jonathan the Maccabee, as encamping in the fens of Jordan, and after being forced from thence by Bacchides, as returning thither again. The secure retreat two young Babylonian Jews and their comrades found, seems to have been of the same kind—a reedy wood, surrounded by the Euphrates."

No commentator however, that I know of, has proposed this explanation of this piece of David's history-his causing the battle to be in the wood, and of the wood's destroying more than the fight. Instead of it, some of them. have supposed the meaning of the last particular was, that Absalom's soldiers were destroyed by the wild beasts of this wood. A most improbable thought: as we cannot believe that z Ibid. cap. 1. § 3 & 5.

Antiq. 1. 13, cap. 2.

in such a time as that of king David, when Israel was so numerous, wild beasts should be so numerous in one of the woods of that country, as to occasion such a destruction; and if their numbers were ever so large, they would doubtless have retired upon the approach of the two armies, under the apprehension of danger to themselves, rather than have stayed to devour those that fled. The expeditions of the Turks against Faccardine, the famous Emir that made such a noise in the beginning of the last century, were chiefly in the woods of Mount Lebanon, according to Mons. la Roque, where, that author elsewhere tells us, there are many wild beasts,* yet not one word of either Maronites or Turks being injured by them occurs in this account." Yet unnatural as this thought is, it is, we are told, the comment of some Jewish writers, of the Chaldee Paraphrast, and of the authors of the Syriac and Arabic versions of the Old Testament.

Others have given different conjectures, which, if not so improbable as that I have been considering, are however, I think, less natural than that I have proposed.

If we turn our thoughts to other countries, Lewis the Second of Hungary lost his life in a bog, fighting in his own kingdom, in the sixteenth century; and Decius, the Roman Emperor, long before him, perished with his army in a fen, according to Zosimus.