Canaan in the Old Testament, which was promised to Abraham and conquered
by his descendants. It is the land in which David ruled and in which
Christ was born, where the prophets prepared the way for the Gospel and
the Christian Church was founded.

Shut in between the Desert of Arabia and the Mediterranean Sea on the
east and west, it is a narrow strip of territory, for the most part
mountainous, rugged, and barren. Northward the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon
come to meet it from Syria, the Anti-Lebanon culminating in the lofty
peaks and precipitous ravines of Mount Hermon (9383 feet above the level
of the sea), while Lebanon runs southward till it juts out into the sea
in its sacred headland of Carmel. The fertile plain of Esdraelon or
Megiddo separates the mountains of the north from those of the south.
These last form a broken plateau between the Jordan and the Dead Sea on
the one side and the Plain of Sharon and the sea-coast of the
Philistines on the other, until they finally slope away into the arid
desert of the south. Here, on the borders of the wilderness, was
Beersheba the southern limit of the land in the days of the monarchy,
Dan, its northern limit, lying far away to the north at the foot of
Hermon, and not far from the sources of the Jordan.

Granite and gneiss, overlaid with hard dark sandstone and masses of
secondary limestone, form as it were the skeleton of the country. Here
and there, at Carmel and Gerizim, patches of the tertiary nummulite of
Egypt make their appearance, and in the plains of Megiddo and the coast,
as well as in the "Ghor" or valley of the Jordan, there is rich alluvial
soil. But elsewhere all is barren or nearly so, cultivation being
possible only by terracing the cliffs, and bringing the soil up to them
from the plains below with slow and painful labour. It has often been
said that Palestine was more widely cultivated in ancient times than it