Deuteronomy 8:9

without scarceness The noun is found only here, and its adj. thrice only in the late Ecclesiastes 4:13; Ecclesiastes 9:15 f.; cp. Isaiah 40:20. Scarcity of bread is a great curse of the desert nomads: some tribes taste it but once a month, others not so often, and it is regarded as a luxury (Robinson, Bib. Res. ii. 497, cp. i. 197 f., Musil, Arabia Petr. iii. -Ethnolog. Reisebericht," 148). Their hunger for it is a frequent cause of their raids on the fellahin (for an instance see von Oppenheim, Vom Mittelmeer zum Pers. Golf, i. 269).

whose stones are iron Whether ironhere means basalt as in Deuteronomy 3:11 (q.v.) is doubtful, for basalt is not confined to fertile lands, but is also found in the desert. More probably it is ironproper: not introduced to Palestine till the arrival of Israel or perhaps later. Like copper it came from the North (Jeremiah 15:12), where the Phoenicians and Arameans seem to have moulded and worked it in the Lebanons (Ramman-Nirari III of Assyria records it as tribute from Aram-Damascus; and Idrisi, see ZDPV, viii. 134, mentions a mine above Beyrout). Josephus speaks of the Iron Mountain running as far as Moabitis (IV. B.J.Deuteronomy 8:2) and the Letter of Aristeas says that both iron and copper were brought before the Persian period from the Mts of Arabia. -Some have denied that the promise to Israel of iron in the rocks of their own land is justified by the geological facts. But ancient sources of the ore have been discovered at Ikzim on Mt Carmel, and near Burme, N. of the Jabbok" (Jerus.i. 332). Some of the hot springs of Palestine are impregnated with iron (Driver quoting Burckhardt, 33 f.). The excess of the references to iron and to furnaces in Jer. and Deut. over those in previous writers points to an increase of the metal in Israel before 650 b.c.

brass -In the O.T. this never refers to the alloy of zinc to which the term is now confined" (J. H. Gladstone, PEFQ, 1898, 253 n.) but means either bronze, copper with alloy of tin, or pure copper. In W. Asia no source of tin has been certainly identified. But in a paper on -Copper and its Alloys in Antiquity" (reported in Athenaeum, Feb. 3, 1906) the President of the Anthropological Institute gives his opinion that bronze was made directly from a copper ore containing tin long before the two metals were artificially mixed. The sources of copper for Palestine were Cyprus, the Lebanons (-the land of Nuḥashshi" or bronze), Edom, and N. Arabia (Tell-el-Amarna Letters (Winckler's ed.), 25, 27, 31 ff.; see the present writer's article -Trade, etc." in Enc. Bibl.§ 7; and for the copper-mines and smelting furnaces of N. Edom at Fênân, the Phainôn of antiquity, see Musil, Edom, i. 156 f., 287, 298, 323, ii. 7 f.).