Their law was in its essentials a law of the land; their ambitions, their crimes, everything to do with them, were concerned with the land, upon the produce of which they existed and grew rich, some of them, by means of a system of barter.

They had no coinage, their money being measures of corn or other produce, horses, camels, acres of their equivalent of soil, and so forth.
And yet, oddly enough, their country is the richest in gold and other metals that I have ever heard of even in Africa--so rich that, according to Higgs, the old Egyptians drew bullion from it to the value of millions of pounds every year.

This, indeed, I can well believe, for I have seen the ancient mines which were worked, for the most part as open quarries, still showing plenty of visible gold on the face of the slopes.

Yet to these alleged Jews this gold was of no account.

Imagine it; as Quick said, such a topsy-turvy state of things was enough to make a mere Christian feel cold down the back and go to bed thinking that the world must be coming to an end.
To return, the prince Joshua, who appeared to be generalissimo of the army, in what was evidently a set phrase, exhorted the guards at the last gates to be brave and, if need were, deal with the heathen as some one or other dealt with Og, King of Bashan, and other unlucky persons of a different faith.