east of Jordan up to the desert edge, David had stopped further
incursions from Arabia; and, though the Aramaean state of Damascus was
growing into a formidable danger, he had checked for the present its
tendency to spread southwards, and had strengthened himself by
agreements with another Aramaean prince, him of Hamath, who lay on the
north flank of Damascus, and with the chief of the nearest Phoenician
city, Tyre. The latter was not yet the rich place which it would grow to
be in the next century, but it was strong enough to control the coast
road north of the Galilean lowlands. Israel not only was never safer,
but would never again hold a position of such relative importance in
Syria, as was hers in a day of many small and infant states about 1000
B.C.: and in later times, under the shadow of Assyria and the menace of
Egypt, the Jews would look back to the reigns of David and his successor
with some reason as their golden age.

The traveller would not have ventured into Arabia; nor shall we. It was
then an unknown land lying wholly outside history. We have no record (if
that mysterious embassy of the "Queen of Sheba," who came to hear the
wisdom of Solomon, be ruled out) of any relations between a state of the
civilized East and an Arabian prince before the middle of the ninth
century. It may be that, as Glaser reckoned, Sabaean society in the
south-west of the peninsula had already reached the preliminary stage of
tribal settlement through which Israel passed under its Judges, and was
now moving towards monarchy; and that of this our traveller might have
learned something in Syria from the last arrived Aramaeans. But we, who
can learn nothing, have no choice but to go north with him again,
leaving to our right the Syrian desert roamed by Bedawis in much the
same social state as the Anazeh to-day, owing allegiance to no one. We
can cross Euphrates at Carchemish or at Til Barsip opposite the Sajur
mouth, or where Thapsacus looked across to the outfall of the Khabur.