Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 4.djvu/155

Rh dan, passes over its waters, and spreads himself over the fair southern regions of Palestine. This land was already occupied, and tolerably well inhabited. Mountains, not extremely high, but rocky and barren, were severed by many watered vales favourable to cultivation. Towns, villages, and solitary settlements lay scattered over the plain, and on the slopes of the great valley, the waters of which are collected in Jordan. Thus inhabited, thus tilled, was the land: but the world was still large enough; and the men were not so circumspect, necessitous, and active, as to usurp at once the whole adjacent country. Between their possessions were extended large spaces, in which grazing herds could freely move in every direction. In one of these spaces Abraham resides; his brother Lot is near him: but they cannot long remain in such places. The very condition of a land, the population of which is now increasing, now decreasing, and the productions of which are never kept in equilibrium with the wants, produces unexpectedly a famine; and the stranger suffers alike with the native, whose own support he has rendered difficult by his accidental presence. The two Chaldean brothers move onward to Egypt; and thus is traced out for us the theatre on which, for some thousands of years, the most important events of the world were to be enacted. From the Tigris to the Euphrates, from the Euphrates to the Nile, we see the earth peopled; and this space also is traversed by a well-known, heaven-beloved man, who has already become worthy to us, moving to and fro with his goods and cattle, and, in a short time, abundantly increasing them. The brothers return; but, taught by the distress they have endured, they determine to part. Both, indeed, tarry in southern Canaan; but while Abraham remains at Hebron, near the wood of Mamre, Lot departs for the valley of Siddim, which, if our imagination is bold enough to give Jordan a subterranean outlet, so that, in place of the present