The Nations Around, by A. Seery (Macmillan), is a volume
of a series which we have frequently had occasion to mention with great pleasure, the "Sunday Library." By the "Nations Around" are meant the neighbours more or less close to the borders of Israel with whom that people was from time to time brought into contact in the course of their history. Egypt, the Phcenician cities of Tyre and Sidon, Assyria, and Babylon are the chief subjeets with which Miss Keary deals. There are others of which we would gladly have heard more. There are the Philistines, for instance, of whom we have but a cursory and insufficient notice. Little, it is true, is known of them from other than Scriptural sources; yet a connected sketch of their history, mixed up as it was for centuries with that of the Hebrews, would have been acceptable. There are, again, the neighbours of Israel on its eastern border, Moab, Ammon, Edom, and the Midianites, or Bedouin Arabs. The little knowledge that exists about these peoples is scattered and difficult of access, and would, therefore, have been the more welcome. What Miss Keary gives us, however, is well selected and well arranged, not pretending, of coarse, to contain much that is new to scholars, but full of interest for general readers. Our author has the faculty of putting things together. The conjecture, for instance, that Benhadad, whose vain and boastful character does not prepare us for his successful resistance to Shal- maneser, may have been assisted by Neiman, by whom "the Lord gave deliverance to Syria," is ingenious and probable. We notice a curious expression on p. 190, that Hoshea, tempted by promises from the King of Egypt, " again and again remitted the yearly tribute exacted from him by Shalmaneser," when it is meant that he refused to pay. Is this due to the printer, or is it a Latinism ?
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