BIBLE NAMES FOR TOWNS.

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1402, 11 September 1923, Page 2

BIBLE NAMES FOR TOWNS.

If you glance through a gazetter of the British Isles, you will find an astonishingly large number of place names which have been selected from the Bible, observes a writer in John o' London's Weekly. In fact, in this respect Great Britain can give Palestine points and a beating, for, while the Holy Land has only one Jordan, we have eight, including a river near Edinburgh, a hill in Dorsetshire, and a sandbank off the Lancashire coast, the other live being county seats, villages, or suburbs. We have also two Jerichos—one in Leicestershire, one in Lancashire—and a couple of Joppas. Of the latter the better known is, of course, a suburb of the wellknown Scottish seaside resort, Portobello. The other is a village in Ayrshire. Wales possesses two Bethesdas, both in Carnarvonshire. One of these is well remembered for the record strike of slate workers, which caused its huge quarries to be closed for years. Novelists have nicknamed London the modern Babylon. There is actually a Nineveh in the country, this being the name of an old farm near Aldborough, in Yorkshire. Mount Ararat may be found on our large-scale Ordnance map. also Mount Zion, Mount Ephraim, and Mount Tabor; while .Mount Carmel is a big house in County Monaghan, in Ireland. The name of the patriarch Jacob is commemorated, by Jacobstow in Cornwall and the village of Jacobstow in Devon; the heights of Abraham can be found in Derbyshire, but I have not as yet traced any place named after Isaac. These placenames, of course, endure for ever. They were probably given in the Middle Ages, when their religion meant more to men than it does today.