Tent Work in Palestine — Part 82

From natives of Haifa we learnt that a kind of deer called Yahmûr was to be found on Carmel, and, offering a reward, we procured for some of the Arab charcoal-burners a specimen which resembled the English roebuck. The flesh we ate and found excellent, the skin and bones Mr. Drake sent to the museum at Cambridge; and in 1876 I was informed by competent authority that the specimen was indistinguishable from the English roebuck. Now the interest of this discovery lies in the name. The Yahmûr gives a title to a large valley in a wooded district south of Carmel, and in translating the nomenclature I found that it was a Hebrew word used in the Bible (Deut. xiv. 5) to designate a kind of deer. The authorised version renders it "fallow-deer,” but this latter animal is properly called Ayal in Hebrew and Rîm in Arabic. Thus until we were able to ascertain the existence of the roebuck, previously heard of but not seen by Dr. Tristram, and to obtain the name Yahmûr, there was no clue to the true identification of the deer which furnished Solomon's table daily with choice venison (1 Kings iv. 23).

The history of the Carmelite settlement is interesting and not generally known. The information which I was able to collect in 1875 from their records and by word of mouth from the monks may be briefly summarised.

Carmel has been a sacred mountain from the time of its earliest appearance in history. Elijah himself "repaired the altar of the Lord that was broken down” (1 Kings xviii. 30), from which we infer that a sacred place or Makom had existed on the summit of the mountain at an earlier period, though, according to the Talmud, such high places became for ever unlawful after the building of the Temple at Jerusalem. From Tacitus we learn that Vespasian visited a place on Carmel, sacred to the deity of the mountain, but without either statue or altar, and even now, as above noted, the Druses hold the site at El Mahrakah in reverence as a sacred place.

In the early Christian period the memory of Elijah consecrated Carmel, and it became a favourite resort of hermits, to whom in 412 A.D. John, the forty-second Bishop of Jerusalem, gave a rule of life. In 1185, after Jerusalem had been taken by the Crusaders, a church rose over the sacred Grotto of Elijah, and in 1209 another monastery of St. Margaret or St. Brocardus was built in a steep gorge south of the promontory. We visited from Haifa its ruins, with a cave containing sedilia for the monks and an upper open story, a spring with sedilia beside it, and below, at the opening of the valley, a second spring, and a garden of fruit trees, pomegranates, apricots, and figs. The lower spring was called after Elijah, and the title still remains in the corrupted form El Haiyeh ("the snake”), applied to the stream from it. A tradition exists that Elijah turned the fruits of the garden to stone, and the huge geodes in the white chalk of the valley are shown as the petrified fruit. This monastery was sacked by the Saracens in 1238, the monks were massacred and thrown into a rock-cut tank by the lower spring, and hence the place is still called "the Valley of Martyrs.”