Scene in Palestine

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 11, 1866

Scene in Palestine.

An Illustration of Isa. xl, 11.

I was traveling over Anti-Lebanon. It was a bright summer day, and near noon. Weary and way-worn, I rode down from a bare mountain ridge into the wild and beautiful valley of Hebron, and dismounted beside a little fountain, under the “shadow of a great rock.” A group of some fifteen or twenty shepherds were there, too, resting during the heat of the day, and their flocks, amounting to several thousand sheep and goats, filled nearly the whole of the valley. At first I was greatly annoyed by the too near approach of both men and animals; but when the time came to lead the flocks away to pasture again, I watched their motions with intense interest.

The shepherds rose, went into the middle of the dense mass of animals, and then separating, walked away slowly in different directions. As they went, each kept uttering a peculiar cry, or call. The sheep heard, and they began to separate one from the other. I observed the whole mass was agitated, as if the sheep and goats had been driven thither by some unseen power. Gradually they formed a series of dense, moving columns, following in the footsteps of the shepherds, and drawn after them with their voices. I also observed that while each shepherd wound his way through the united flocks, some of the animals fled at his approach, frightened at his voice, and others hastened toward him “for they knew his voice.” In a short time they were led off, and the fountain was completely deserted, not a sheep or goat venturing to lag behind.

Then the calls of the shepherds were heard, echoing from rock and cliff, now dying away in the distance, while the flocks were seen obedient to the calls, following, in long distinct streams, the guides whom they alone knew and trusted. As I sat there gazing with mingled pleasure and wonder on that strange and instructive scene, it brought to mind another scripture illustration. One shepherd led his flock by a zig-zag path, up the almost perpendicular bank of the glen. Behind it two young lambs trotted along at the feet of their mother. At first, they frisked and jumped lightly from stone to stone, but soon they began to fall behind. The poor little things cried piteously when the path became steeper and the rocks higher, and the flocks more and more distant. The mother cried, too, running back and forth—now lingering behind, now hastening on before, as if to wile them upward.

It was vain. The ascent was too much for their limbs. They stopped, trembling on the shelving cliff, and cried. The mother stopped and cried by their side. I thought they certainly would be lost; and I saw the great eagles that soared in circles round the cliffs far overhead, sweeping lower and lower, as if about to pounce upon their prey. But no! The plaintive cry of distress had already reached the ears of the good shepherd. Mounting a rock, he looked down and saw the helpless little ones. A minute and he was standing by them; then taking them up in his arms; he put them one on each side in his bosom, in the ample folds of his coat, which was bound round the waist with a girdle.

The lambs made no attempt to run away from him. They seemed to know what he was going to do when he lifted them in his arms; and the little creatures lay there with their heads out as contentedly as an infant in its mother’s bosom, while the shepherd scaled the dizzy heights again, and took his place at the head of his flock. It may be easily imagined with what deep interest I have ever since read the beautiful words of Isaiah: “He shall feed His flock like a shepherd; He shall gather the lambs with His arm and carry them in His bosom.”