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Taranaki Daily News, 4 June 1921, Page 10

Lecturing at the Town Hall at Wellington on “The Bible as a Book,” the Chief Rabbi (Dr. Hertz) spoke a£ some length on the land of the Bible, the Holy Land. Some 10,000 volumes had been written, he said, on the geography of Palestine. It was a unique land. Starting in the “White Mountains,” the mountains of Lebanon, in the north, 9000 ft above the level of the sea, the River Jordan —“the descender,” for that was the meaning of the word Jordan—plunged down twenty-seven rapids in its 130-mile course' till it reached the Dead Sea, 1300 ft below sea-level. The Jordan had never been navigated, and the Dead Sea was a sea which had never had a port—a sea, too, in which it was impossible to drown. No other part was 1300 ft below sea level; Holland, with all its dykes to keep out the ocean, being only 27ft below sea level. It had an infinite character of climate, ranging from the eternal snows to Edenic heats. It stood at the junction of three continents, and had therefore for thousands of years been the meeting place of the greater part of the civilised world, and bad in the course of its history been conquered and reconquered again and again. .