no more than eighty miles across as the traveler journeys from the Mediterranean coast through Jerusalem to the Transjordan desert. The distant coasts and islands of the Mediterranean were to the people of Palestine the “ends of the earth” (see Map 2). This great sea gets its name from its situation in the “middle of the lands,” and these realms were to the peoples of biblical times the outer edges of the world as they knew it. So the prophetic vision of a worldwide expansion