Palestine

or Holy Land . A country of Asia, lying along the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and occupying the southwestern part of Syria, which is included within the limits of the Turkish empire. It now forms the modern pashalic of Beirut or Beyrout, and part of the pashalic of Damascus. This is the country in which the principal events recorded in Scripture took place. When it was conquered by the Israeli tes, Joshua divided this and a portion of the country to the east of the Jordan among the twelve tribes. It was conquered, however, by the kings of As syria, who carried captive, first Israel and then Judah, into the eastern provinces of their empire. After the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus, the Jews were allowed to return to their country, to rebuild their temple, and re-establish their ecclesiastical constitution. Judæa thus continued a province of Persia until Asia was invaded by Alexander the Great, to whom it submitted without resistance. The Jews were again exposed to oppre ion from some of the Ptolemies, who attempted to enforce the adoption of the idolatrous worship of the Greeks on the Jewish people. The Jews, however, under the guidance of the Maccabees, offered a most determined resistance to the Egyptian monarch who sought to deprive them of the exercise of their own religion, and Judæa once more became an independent country. It subsequently fell under the dominion of Rome, which established the Herods as tributary kings. It was at this crisis that Judæa became the theatre of those great events which form the foundation of the Christian faith. The Jews, however, having repeatedly rebelled against the authority of the Romans, Titus entered Judæa with a large force in 70, and after a long siege, during which the Jews endured terrible hardships and privations, he took Jerusalem, and razed it to the ground. The temple which had been twice rebuilt, after having been burnt by Nebuchadnezzar and plundered by Antiochus, was again destroyed. More than 1,100,000 Jews perished in the siege and destruction of the city, and about sixty-five years after the Jewish people were banished from Judæa by a decree of the emperor Hadrian. The country continued to form a part of the Roman empire until it was divided into the Eastern and Western empires, when Palestine became a province of the former. Although it was frequently invaded by the Parthians, Persians, and Saracens, it was held by the emperors of Constantinople until it was wrested from them by the last-named people in 638. It then fell under the sway of the Mohammedans, in whose power the land remained until 1099, when the Holy Land was recovered by the Crusaders, and erected into a Latin kingdom under Godfrey de Bouillon. This kingdom lasted till 1187, when it was conquered by Salad in, on the decline of whose kingdom it pa ed through various hands, till, in 1517, it was finally swallowed up in the Turkish empire.