The Holy Land and the Bible; . rent altars; and he can think of no more vividimage of the curse impending over Jerusalem than that it shouldbecome an abomination before God, like this accursed place. The Hill of Evil Counsel rises on the south from the Valley ofHinnom: it owes its name to a tradition that the house of the highpriest Caiaphas, in which the leaders of the Jews resolved on thedeath of our Lord, stood there. Beneath it the steep rocky sides ofthe valley are pierced with a great number of tombs, showing thatthis spot was used by the Jews in ancient times as a cemetery.* Someof thes
The Holy Land and the Bible; . rent altars; and he can think of no more vividimage of the curse impending over Jerusalem than that it shouldbecome an abomination before God, like this accursed place. The Hill of Evil Counsel rises on the south from the Valley ofHinnom: it owes its name to a tradition that the house of the highpriest Caiaphas, in which the leaders of the Jews resolved on thedeath of our Lord, stood there. Beneath it the steep rocky sides ofthe valley are pierced with a great number of tombs, showing thatthis spot was used by the Jews in ancient times as a cemetery.* Someof these sepulchres are cut into domes in the rock and ornamented,others are mere holes for bodies, hewn in the face of the hill; somehave many such holes dug out in the sides of a larger or smaller cham-ber, most of the entrances to these appearing to have been closed by a 1 2 Kings xvi. 3; xxi. G. 2 2 Kinps xxiii. 10: Ui\. xxx. 33, Jev. vU. 31; xix. 6,11,12,13. 3 IS4,XXX. 33. 4 Some think tlie tombs Clnistian. > c £. so cr. a c. XXIV.] ROUND JERUSALEM. 341 stone door, turning on a socket hinge, and secured by bolts. Wander-ing amidst these graves, once full, but now long empty, one feels him-self surrounded by a city of the dead, the beginnings of which runback to the grey antiquity of the early Jewish kings. Close at hand,but a little higher up tlie valley, is a spot with the evil name of Acel-dama— the Field of Blood, ^ on which rises an old ruin thirty feetlong and twenty wide, one side partly the naked rock, the other draftedstone, the whole forming a flat-roofed cover to a dismal house of thedead. Two caverns open in the floor, their rocky sides pierced withholes for bodies ; and galleries of tombs run into the hill from thebottom. Holes in the roof are still seen, through which tlie corpseswere let down by ropes, and there are marks of steps by which thetombs were entered. Here, say the local traditions, was the Pot-ters Field, bought for the burial of strangers by the h
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