This Arabia is certainly none other than that which Eusebius explains by ἣ καὶ Βαταναία, and that κοπρία or mezbele to be sought nowhere except near the Makâm Êjûb. And should there by any doubts upon the subject, ought they not to be removed by the consideration that the proud structure of the Monastery of Job, with its spring festivals mentioned above, standing like a Pharos casting its light far and wide in that age, did not allow either the Syrian Christians or the pilgrims from foreign parts to mistake the place, which tradition had rendered sacred, as the place of Job's sufferings?
There is no monastery whose origin, according to an unimpeachable testimony, belongs to such an early date as that of the Monastery of Job. According to the chronicles of the peoples (ta'rı̂ch el-umem), or the annals of Hamze el-Isfahâni (died about 360 of the Hegira), it was built by ‘Amr I, the second Gefnide. Now, since the first Ghassanitish king (Gefne I) reigned forty-five years and three months, and ‘Amr five years, the Monastery would have been in existence about 200 a.d., if we place the beginning of the Gefnide dynasty in the time 150 a.d. Objections are raised against such an early date, because one is accustomed on good authority to assign the origin of monasteries to about the year 300 a.d. In the face of more certain historical dates, these objections must remain unheeded, for hermit and monastery life (rahbanı̂ja) existed in the country east of Jordan among the Essenes and other societies and forms of worship, even before Christianity; so that the latter, on its appearance in that part, which took place long before 200 a.d., received the monasteries as an inheritance: but certainly the chronology of the Gefnide dynasty is not reliable. Hamze fixes the duration of the dynasty at 616 years; Ibn Sa'îd,[1] in his history of the pre-Islamic Arabs, at
- ↑ Wetzstein, Catal. Arab. MSS collected in Damascus, No. 1, p. 89.
