Deuteronomy 1:28 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

Ver. 28. Walled up to heaven— A strong hyperbole, usual with the very best writers, to express the height and strength of their enemies' walls. See Genesis 11:4 and Bochart's Phaleg. lib. 1: cap. 13. The author of the Observations remarks, that, "anciently if they raised up the walls of their cities so high as not to be able to be scaled, they thought them safe." The same simple contrivance is, to this day, sufficient to guard places from the Arabs, who live in that very wilderness in which Israel wandered, when the spies discouraged the hearts of the people, by saying the cities are great, and walled up to heaven; and who are a nation more inured to warlike enterprises than the Israelites were. To say that the height of the walls, which, by a strong Eastern way of speaking, are said to reach up to heaven, must have been supposed to have given pain to the people whom Moses was conducting out of Egypt,—and who were by no totals qualified to surmount this difficulty, though among us it would be very easily overcome—would be a just, but a cold and formal comment on these words, if compared with the liveliness and satisfaction the mind would receive from the setting down what modern travellers have said about the present inhabitants of these desarts, who must be supposed to be as able to overcome any obstruction of this kind as Israel when that nation came out of Egypt, and who are, by this means, oftentimes prevented from effecting their purposes on the inhabitants of these walled places. I shall, therefore, here set down two or three passages of this kind, as an amusing explanation of the force of this complaint of the spies. The great monastery at mount Sinai, Thevenot observes, "is well built of good free-stone, with very high smooth walls; on the east side there is a window, by which those that were within drew up the pilgrims into the monastery with a basket, which they let down by a rope which runs into a pulley, to be seen above at the window; and the pilgrims went into it, one after another, and so were hoisted up." These walls, he remarks in the next chapter, are "so high, that they cannot be scaled, and without cannon that place cannot be taken." The monastery of St. Anthony in Egypt, says M. Maillet, Leviticus 8: p. 321 is inhabited by religious of the Coptic nation, to whom provisions are sent from time to time. It is a vast inclosure, with good walls, raised so high as to secure this place from the insults of the Arabs. There is no entrance into it but by a pulley, by means of which people are hoisted up on high, and so conveyed into the monastery. "By means of such their walls, these places are impregnable to the Arabs: the Israelites thought the cities of Canaan must be impregnable to them; for they forgot the divine power of their leader."