Tent Work in Palestine — Part 197

The S[)u]rt[)u]beh is a block of chalk which has slid down the face of the tilted dolomitic limestone of the watershed hills. Its summit, two thousand four hundred feet above the valley, is capped by a cone two hundred and seventy feet high, with steep smooth sides like those of the so-called Frank Mountain (Herodium) near Bethlehem. The building on the top appears to be the foundation of a Crusading fort with large drafted stones; beneath are caves all round the hill, and lower still a sort of terrace like a garden. An aqueduct follows the contour of the mountain, collecting surface-drainage and leading to some large reservoirs cut in rock. A wall, enclosing a space some thirty yards by ninety, surrounds the foundations of the tower, which are about eighteen feet in height.

This mountain, under which we lived for just a month, has so remarkable an appearance, and yet so slight a history, that one could not help imagining a mystery about it. We asked the Arabs, but they said that S[)u]rt[)u]beh was a king who built a castle on the top. It has by some been supposed to be the Tower of Alexandrium near Corea, noticed more than once by Josephus; but Corea was on the boundary of the lands of Judea and Samaria, and near the watershed, as Josephus expressly tells us.

The name Surtuba occurs in the Talmud, as that of a beacon-station on the way from Jerusalem to the Hauran, which was lighted when the new moon appeared. This fact is, no doubt, connected with the title Dalûk, applied, not to the conical summit, but to one close to it on the chain, and meaning "burning” in Hebrew; and also perhaps with the name "Mother of the New Moon” applied to a prominent point on the mountain. S[)u]rt[)u]beh means, as Dr. Chaplin pointed out to me, neither more nor less than "Bellevue,” and is certainly a title very appropriate to this fine point. I have only been able to find one later reference to the place, Marino Sanuto speaking of it as the fortress of Docus where Simon the Hasmonean was murdered; but this is a mistake, and other mediæval writers point out the true site near 'Ain Dûk.

In 1874 I proposed to identify the Kurn with the place where the great monumental altar of Ed was erected, by the children of Gad, Reuben and Manasseh. The site seems wonderfully appropriate for a monument intended to show that the trans-Jordanic tribes were not cast out from their participation in the religious rites of the western tribes. The place stands above the great ford, by which they perhaps crossed in going from Shiloh to the land of Gilead, and the name Ed is perhaps recognisable in the Tal'at Abu 'Aid on the side of the mountain. There are, however, objections to the theory; first that the tribes crossed by the "passage of the children of Israel” (Josh. xxii. 11) after leaving Shiloh, and this seems to point, not to the Dâmieh, but to the Jericho ford; secondly, Josephus says that the altar was east of Jordan; thirdly, Abu 'Aid, "father of the feast,” may be (as it sometimes is) a proper name of a person born on a feast-day. The idea is therefore merely a conjecture, and far from being an identification.