My Palestine Recollections. 6. Sitting in the Dust

 •  3 min. read  •  grade level: 12
THIS expression, which is applied to the virgin daughter of Babylon in Isa. 47:11Come down, and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon, sit on the ground: there is no throne, O daughter of the Chaldeans: for thou shalt no more be called tender and delicate. (Isaiah 47:1), and is akin to the passage in chap. 3:26, applied to Jerusalem herself, “She, being desolate, shall sit upon the ground,” was brought vividly to my mind by what I witnessed in the first walk we took in Jerusalem. Leaving the house of our kind friend, Mr. Audi Azam, we entered the City by the Jaffa gate, and sought out the Jews’ place of wailing. This is a stone-paved court, adjoining the boundary wall of the Haram or Sacred Enclosure, upon which once stood the Temple of Solomon, but now the Mosque of Omar, dedicated to the worship of Allah, the Arabic name for God, but through the intercession of the false prophet, Mahomet. Five times during the day and night does the muezzin or crier, from the minaret of the mosque, cry out:
“La illah ilia Allah,
wa Mahmoud el
RasAl lillah.”
“God is God, and Mahomet is the prophet of God,” and then calls upon the “faithful” to pray. It is a striking spectacle, and much impressed me when I witnessed it on the deck of our steamer, between Alexandria and Joppa, to see, at the “hour for prayer,” the Mahomedan pilgrims spreading their garments on the deck and, kneeling down, with their faces towards Mecca, repeat their prayers as above-mentioned. But we are now in the presence of a few of the remnants of the nation to whom the Lord gave the Land of Promise, and placed His name in Jerusalem. They regard, no doubt rightly, these venerable stones of the wall as having been built one upon another in the days of King Solomon: not stones of the Temple—for all they have been thrown down, according to the word of the Lord Jesus in Matt. 24:22And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down. (Matthew 24:2)—but part of the retaining wall which enabled that part of the Tyropman valley to be raised to the level of the higher ground adjoining, on which the Temple was built. Look at them: some of them are literally “sitting upon the ground.” Listen to them: they are reading passages from the Book of Lamentations, or other Scriptures which tell of the Lord’s judgments on His people for their unfaithfulness to Him. But what are those two doing? They have gone up to the wall. Notice that one—he takes a little scrap of paper on which a prayer in Hebrew is written, and presses it into a crevice between two of the great stones. That written prayer was sent to him by some one of his nation living in Europe, with a present of money, and a request that he would put the written prayer as near to the place of the Temple as he can. Now, see, they both press their lips to the joints of the stones, and pour in their prayers toward the holy place of old, which they truly believe God will yet again cause to resound with His praise.