THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. REV. THOMAS WHITELAW, D.D. LONDON: JAMES NISBET & CO., 21 BERNERS STREET. MDCCCLXXXVII. CONTENTS. PAGE I. THE CREATION OF THE WORLD I II. THE APPEARING OF MAN 26 III. THE CRADLE OF THE RACE 47 IV. THE STORY OF THE FALL 74 V. THE FIRST AGE OF HISTORY . . . . . -99 VL THE JUDGMENT OF THE FLOOD 128 VII. THE SECOND AGE OF HISTORY 156 VIIL THE TABLE OF NATIONS 178 IX. THE TOWER OF BABEL 208 X. THE CALL OF ABRAHAM 231 XI. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM 253 XII. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM (continued) . . . 280 2017845 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. THE CREATION OF THE WORLD. THE problem of the universe has always exercised a powerful fascination over the higher intellects of the race. In every age it has attracted towards itself the eager and absorbed contemplation of the world's thinkers and sages, as well as given rise to the sublimest, if also at times the most grotesque speculations. The mystery which, apart from Ee- velation, surrounds man's position on the earth, itself a tiny globe in the midst of unnumbered spheres, impels the thoughtful and reflecting spirit to at least make the attempt to penetrate the veil, and, if possible, discover the secret of existence. Whence has the immense fabric of the universe, this seemingly firm-set earth with the constantly moving stellar firmament overhead, proceeded ? or, has it maintained its position in the all-surrounding ocean of space from eternity ? Is it a self-existent 2 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. entity? or, is it dependent on the will of a Supreme Intelligence ? If the latter, when was it summoned into being? Does its birth date from a remote past, extending to perhaps millions of years ? or, is it of comparatively recent origin, say not older than a few decades of centuries ? By what agencies and through what processes, in what stages, and after what methods has it been brought to its present order and beauty, finished to such a degree of ex- cellence, adorned with such manifest as well as manifold perfection ? For what purpose has it been created? and to what goal is it steadily progressing ? Questions like these, which in the judgment of many were deemed to have long since received their answers and been satisfactorily dis- posed of, have in these times again been raised into importance, in point of fact once more called up for consideration and adjudication. Not only is the light available for their examination greater to-day than at any former epoch in the world's history, in consequence of the gigantic strides that have been made during the past quarter of a century in all departments of know- ledge, but more especially in the fields of chemical and geological science, of natural history and biology, of ethnology and archaeology ; but the tendency of not a little of that literature, in which THE CREATION OF THE WORLD. 3 the results of these investigations are reported and speculated upon, is to challenge time-honoured con- clusions which have, sometimes without sufficient reason, been deemed unassailable. Hence the time cannot be fairly held as either premature or inop- portune for endeavours to furnish to the above series of interrogations such replies as the present state of our knowledge on this momentous theme will warrant. A convenient guide for this inquiry may be found in the sublime cosmogony which stands as a preface to the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Scriptures. Without laying down any presuppositions as to its inspiration, it may be claimed for that venerable document that it is the most ancient writing extant which professes to deal with this exalted subject. The theory of the late composition of the Pentateuch, which in recent years has been reviving its preten- sions, notwithstanding the great names by which it has been supported, 1 and the eloquent language in which it has been expounded, must be held in the meantime as having failed to commend itself to general acceptance. The preponderance of argu- ment, so far as the present writer has been able to form an opinion on the question in debate, 2 lies 1 Kuenen, Wellhausen, Colenso, W. R. Smith. 2 See "Pulpit Commentary on Genesis," Introduction "The Authorship of the Pentateuch." 4 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. with those who contend for its Mosaic authorship. If, therefore, the opening chapter of the Book of Genesis emanated from the pen of the great Hebrew Lawgiver, and if, as is probable, it was simply the reproduction of a document which had been handed down in Israel from a remote antiquity, 1 it is cer- tain that its only rivals in respect of age can be those deeply interesting papyruses and tablets that have recently been recovered from the tombs of Egypt and the ruins of Assyria ; that none of these can compete with it in either sublimity of thought or majesty of diction requires only a cursory in- spection to perceive. Perhaps the oldest extant MS. in the world is the Prisse Papyrus which a French archaeologist of that name acquired in Thebes ; 2 and yet it is not too much to say that, placed alongside of the lofty composition forming the introduction to the Old Testament Scriptures, this Egyptian roll is at once seen to be little more than " a string of platitudes " 3 and dreary com- monplaces. On account, therefore, of incomparable superiority over every other ancient writing of a similar description, it seems reasonable to concede to the Mosaic hymn of creation the honour of directing our investigations. 1 Handworterbuch, des Biblischen Alterthums, Art. " Schopfung." 2 "Egyptian Life and History," by M. E. Harkness, p. 18. 8 Geikie's "Hours with the Bible," voL i. p. 2. THE CREATION OF THE WORLD. 5 i. The origin of the universe is in the Biblical cosmogony ascribed to tlie Will of a Supreme, Self- Existent Personal Intelligence, who " spake and it was done," who " commanded and it stood fast." "The heavens and the earth," the usual Hebrew designation of the universe, "were created," or summoned into being, by " Elohim," the God in whom resides the fulness of Power. 1 The solution thus given of the problem of the universe is neither atheistic, assigning to matter eternal duration as well as " the potency of life " and intelligence, in order to be able to dispense with a Personal Deity ; nor pantheistic, affirming that the All is God and God is the All, and so commingling and confound- ing the Creator with His works ; neither polythe istic, crowding the vast temple of immensity with a host of self-existing but mutually balancing and sometimes fiercely opposing divinities ; nor dualistic, setting over against the absolute and underived Artificer of all things, as equally with Him pos- sessed of unbeginning being, the matter out of which the system of the universe is formed ; but, radically different from, and, indeed diametrically opposed to/every one of these, theistic and mono- theistic, declaring all things to be the handiwork of One Supreme Personal God. In this respect it 1 Gen. i. i. G THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. accords with the general tenor of Scripture teaching in both Old and New Testaments. 1 It harmonises also with the primitive beliefs of mankind as these have been expressed in those ancient religions with which Biblical archaeology has made recent times acquainted. The Litany of Ra deciphered from the walls of royal sepulchres at Thebes, and the Hymn to Osiris, appearing frequently in cemeteries on monumental tablets, distinctly enough proclaim that the Egyptians from the dawn of history accepted the doctrine of a First Cause, whom they worshipped as the " Supreme Power, the urn of the creatures," " who makes the spheres and creates bodies," "the Eternal Essence who pene- trates the empyrean," 2 as the " Lord of length of times, King of the gods, of many names, of holy transformations," " the paut-ti of the world," the word paut-ti being connected with the idea of creation, 3 though it is doubtful whether the Egyp- tians did not rather think of an emanation from, than of a production by, the Supreme. Then the Chaldean and Babylonian legends of creation may be cited as indications that the early settlers in the Tigris and Euphrates valley were familiar with the 1 Job. xxxviii. 4; Ps. xxiv. I, 2 ; xxxiii. 6, 9 ; Isa. xlii. 5 ; Acts xiv. 15 ; Eph. iii. 9 ; Heb. iii. 4 ; Rev. iv. n. 2 The Litany of Ra : see "Records of the Past," vol. viii. p. 105. 3 Hymn to Osiris : see " Records of the Past," vol. iv. p. 99. THE CREATION OF THE WORLD. 7 thought of one who existed while " none of the gods had yet been born," l who " constructed dwell- ings for the great gods," 2 who " created mankind," 3 and produced "the host of heaven and earth."* Certainly no one can peruse these old Accadian myths without becoming painfully conscious of the wide gulf which separates them from the Scriptural account of the origin of things ; yet they have their value in attesting the acquaintance of the human mind in those dim primeval epochs, with the ideas of a cosmical beginning and a creative beginner. And these ideas the best philosophy to which the intellect of man has been able after long and profound meditation to attain, 5 has declared to be in absolute accordance with the laws of reason. Nor can it be seriously maintained that modern science has conclusively established that these, the highest utterances of the philosophic and the religious consciousness, are incorrect, that the universe never had either a beginning or a be- ginner, but that the present cosmos of symmetry and beauty, of life and intelligence, has, through 1 " Records of the Past," vol. ix. 117. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., vol. vii. p. 127. 4 " Fresh Light from the Assyrian Monuments," p. 27. 6 Kant's " Critique of Pure Reason," p. 382 (Bonn's edition) ; Ferrier's "Institutes of Metaphysic," p. 522 ; Caird's "Introduction to the Philosophy of Reliyion," D. 126. 8 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. self-developing processes requiring myriads of ages, been evolved from eternally existing matter. It is sometimes tacitly assumed that such has been the case, but so far from modern science having established the eternity of matter, its last word may be said to teach the opposite. " We have thus," say Professors Stewart and Tait, " reached the beginning as well as the end of the present visible universe, and have come to the conclusion that it began in time, and will in time come to an end." l 2. The age of the world, or the date of its origination, has been left undetermined by the Mosaic record. Simply with the sublime act of calling it into existence time began. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Whether this occurred only some few thousand years ago, or immeasurable ages earlier, Scripture does not affirm. At first sight it might seem as if, according to the Hebrew cosmogony, the world were only 144 hours older than man. But, unless compelled by the exigencies of the text to interpret the successive periods, during which the Creator laboured in the forming of the cosmos, as brief solar days of 24 hours each, there is no reason why we should adopt a conclusion so palpably in conflict 1 " The Unseen Universe," p. 93. THE CREATION OF THE WORLD. 9 with the ascertained results of geological research. There is, however, ground for believing, as was conjectured by Augustine long before the era of scientific discovery, that the "days" referred to in the Biblical account of creation were epochs of indefinite duration. 1 Accordingly impartial exegesis readily admits that there is nothing in the record to forbid the supposition that incalculable ages may have rolled away since the heavens and the earth first sprang into the midst of space in obedience to the fiat of Omnipotence. Geology, it is well known, demands enormous intervals of time for the stratification of the 72,000 feet of rocks of which the earth's crust is composed according to one calculation 1,036,800,000 years, according to another at least 86,400,000 years. 2 The latter of these estimates has also been largely confirmed by Sir William Thomson, who, basing his computa- tions as to the age of our planet on ( i ) the internal heat and rate of cooling of the earth, (2) the tidal retardation of the earth's rotation, andfe (3) the origin and age of the sun's heat, concludes from a consideration of all the evidence that the time 1 De Genesi ad Literam, lib. v. 5 ; cf. " Pulpit Commentary on Genesis," pp. 12, 13; and Cotterill's "Does Science aid Faith?" p. 1 6. 2 Dawson, "The Origin of the World," p. 335; Geikie's "Text- book of Geology," p. 55. 10 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. available for the evolution of the present cosmos from primeval chaos cannot have been more than 100 millions of years. 1 Professor Tait, however, inclines to think that 10 or 15 millions will more exactly represent the period in question. 2 Yet neither of these requirements is of such a character as to embarrass the defender of the Biblical cos- mogony; on the contrary, the remarkable corre- spondence between the best results of science and the most intelligent findings of Scripture interpre- tation lends additional validity to both. 3. The order of creation as unfolded in the Hebrew record demands careful study. The original condition of this terrestrial planet is depicted by a combination of terms signifying " wasteness " and " emptiness." * Shortly after, in obedience to Heaven's command, it had leapt into space, this mundane sphere was " formless and life- less, a huge, shapeless, objectless, tenantless mass of matter, the gaseous and solid elements commingled, in which* neither organised structure, nor animated form, nor even distinctly traced outline of any kind appeared." 4 There is no reason to suppose 1 "Trans. Roy. Soc. Edin.," xxiii. p. 157 ; cf. Fisher's "Physics of the Earth's Crust," p. 94. 2 "Recent Advances in Physical Science," p. 167. 3 Gen. i. 2. 4 " Pulpit Commentary on Genesis," p. 4. THE CREATION OF THE WORLD. 11 that the writer intends to represent this primeval chaos as the ruin of an earlier cosmos, although this opinion has been championed by so dis- tinguished commentators as Delitzsch, Murphy, and Wordsworth. Next, the work of transforming this rudis indigestaque moles, this chaotic heap of unarranged matter into a cosmos of light and life, order and beauty, is distributed through the above- mentioned six creative days, in a double series of three days each. In the first series of three days, i.e., in the first half of the creative week, the light is separated from the darkness on the first day, the atmosphere is uplifted above the still liquid globe on the second, and the dry land is distinguished from the sea on the third. Corresponding to these are the specific labours which occupy the second half of the creative week. On the first day of the second series the light which on the first day of the first series had been called into existence, is brought together and con- centrated in the sun, moon, and stars-; on the second day of the second series, the atmosphere and the waters which were parted on the second day of the first series, are filled with their respec- tive inhabitants, the atmosphere with fowls and the waters with fish ; on the third day of the second series the dry land with its vegetation, 12 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. which was called forth on the third day of the first series, is constituted the abode of animals and man. Thus the order of creation is progressive. First the inorganic world is arranged; then the vegetable kingdom is introduced : after that ornithic and aqua- tic creatures are let loose within the trackless oceans of air and water ; subsequent to these the higher animals appear upon the scene ; and finally man, the image of his Maker, crowns the whole, com- pleting the programme of the great Creator's work. It is urged, indeed, that stress cannot be laid on this exposition of the world-building process, on the ground that important deviations from it occur in other parts of Scripture, as in Job xxxviii. 4, which depicts the angels and the morning stars as already in existence and shouting for joy when the foundations of the earth were laid and the corner- stones thereof were fastened, as in Ps. civ., in which a poet of the Post-Exilian Period, while fashioning his creation ode after the pattern of the Mosaic programme, not only allows himself a large amount of licence in the collocation of its details, but omits all mention of creative days, and as in Genesis itself (ii. 4, 25), in which man appears to have been created before the plants and the animals. 1 1 Kalisch on Genesis, p. 84 ; Handworterbuch des Biblischen Alter- thums, Art. " Schopfung." THE CREATION OF THE WORLD. 13 The two former of these citations, however, may be held as answering for themselves that being poetical compositions they are entitled to the privilege of freedom in expression commonly accorded to ima- ginative writings ; while the third can, without violence to either text or exegesis, be so explained as to remove the least appearance of contrariety between the supposed Elohistic and Jehovistic records of the earth's formation. 1 Then, in this connection it is of interest to note that, if the old Chaldean and Babylonian legends of creation, re- cently exhumed from the royal library at Nineveh, may be regarded as representing the primeval faith of the Semitic settlers in the Euphrates valley, in many points they harmonise with the Biblical account just reviewed. First, the desolate and void condition of the earth is depicted on a tablet, the first of the creation series, discovered in the palace of Assurbanipal, king of Assyria, B.C. 885. 1. At that time the heavens above named not a name, 2. Nor did the earth below record one : 3. Yea, the deep was their first creator, 4. The flood of the sea was she who bore them all. 1 See " Pulpit Commentary on Genesis," in loco. 14 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. 5. Their waters were embosomed in one place, and 6. The flowering reed was ungathered, the marsh-plant was ungrown. 7. At that time the gods had not issued forth, any one of them, 8. By no name were they recorded, no destiny (had they fixed). 9. Then the great gods were made, 10. Lakamu and Lakhamu issued forth (the first), 11. They grew up. . . . 12. Next were made the host of heaven and earth, 13. The time was long (and then) 14. The gods Anu (Bel and Ea were born of) 15. The host of heaven and earth. Professor Sayce, whose translation we have fol- lowed, 1 is doubtful whether this account is older than the seventh century B.C., as there are no in- dications of its having been derived from an older Accadian document. Another legend, however, belonging to the library of Cuthah, in which certain expressions and proper names are Accadian, 1 " Fresh Light from the Assyrian Monuments," p. 27. A trans- lation by Mr. George Smith will be found in the " Chaldean Genesis," p. 62 ; and one by Mr. Fox Talbot, in " Records of the Past," vol. ix. p. 117. The three translations show slight variations. THE CREATION OF THE WORLD. 15 he infers should be assigned to the primitive Chaldeans, and in it is set forth " the struggle between the evil powers of darkness, storm, and chaos, and the bright powers of order and light." * Then in the creation series of tablets are two frag- ments which George Smith conjectures 2 have a reference to the first part of the third day's work ; the one saying 1 . When the foundation of the ground of rock (thou didst make) 2. The foundation of the ground thou didst call, 3. Thou didst beautify the heaven . . . 4. To the face of heaven . . . 5. Thou didst give . . . And the other, which is much more mutilated and obscure, describing the God Sar (or Assur) as de- claring 7. Above the sea which is the sea of ... 8. In front of the esara (firmament) which I have made. 9. Below the place I strengthen it. 10. Let there be made also elu (earth?) for the dwelling of [man ?]. 1 "Records of the Past," vol. xi. pp. 107-114. 8 " Chaldean Genesis," p. 68. 16 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. Passing on to the fifth tablet, a striking reminis- cence of the fourth day's work appears. The sub- joined translation is that of Mr. Fox Talbot : 1 1. He constructed dwellings for the great gods. 2. He fixed up constellations, whose figures were like animals. 3. He made the year. Into four quarters he divided it. 4. Twelve months he established, with their constellations, three by three. 5. And for the days of the year he appointed festivals. 6. He made dwellings for the planets : for their rising and setting. 7. And that nothing should go amiss, and that the course of none should be retarded. 8. He placed with them the dwellings of Bel and Hea. 9. He opened great gates on every side : 10. He made strong the portals, on the left hand and on the right : 11. In the centre he placed luminaries. 12. The moon he appointed to rule the night, 1 "Records of the Past," vol. ix. p. 117. For George Smith's translation see " Chaldean Genesis," pp. 69-73. THE CREATION OF THE WORLD. 17 13. And to wander through the night until the dawn of day. 14. Every month without fail he made holy assembly days. 15. In the beginning of the month, at the rising of the night, 1 6. It shot forth its horns to illuminate the heavens. 17. On the seventh day he appointed a holy day. 1 8. And to cease from all business he com- manded. 1 9. Then arose the sun in the horizon of heaven in (glory). Next, a fragment obtained from one of the trenches at Konjunjik reads like an echo of the making of the animals and of the first pair of human beings : 1. When the gods in their assembly had created . . . 2. Were delightful the strong monsters . . . 3. They caused to be living creatures. 4. Cattle of the field, beasts of the field, and creeping things of the field . . . 5. They fixed for the living creatures. 18 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. 6. ... cattle and creeping things of the city they fixed . . . 9. ... And the God Nin-si-ku (the lord of noble face) caused to be two . . . 1 " There is no need of pointing out," writes Pro- fessor Sayce, " how closely this Assyrian account of the creation resembles that of Genesis. Even the very wording and phrases of Genesis occur in it ; and though no fragment is preserved which ex- pressly tells us that the work of creation was accom- plished in seven days, we may infer that such was the case from the order of events as recorded on the tablets." 2 To some this may suggest the thought that probably no more weight should be attached to the Mosaic than to the Assyrian or Chaldean outline of creation. Accordingly, before quitting this branch of our inquiry, it may serve an important end to indicate how far the order revealed in Scripture is borne out by the science of the nineteenth Christian century. It is frankly conceded that the writer of the Genesis account could not have designed to furnish a scientific exposition of the order in which the universe, or a part of it, this globe, was built ; but it need not 1 " Chaldean Genesis," p. 76. 2 " Fresh Light from the Assyrian Monuments," p. 28. THE CREATION OF THE WORLD. 19 for that reason be determined beforehand that the exposition which he does furnish is in conflict with science. On the contrary, it is certain that physical research into the primitive condition of our planet declares it to have existed in a state not dissimilar from that in which by the Hebrew narrative it is represented to have been prior to the first day's work, viz., " in an intensely heated, gaseous, or fluid state." 1 " What we actually know about the condition of the earth's interior," says a recent author, " is very little. Whether any portion of it, or how much of it, is at the present time liquid can only be determined by secondary considerations. But we may feel almost certain on account of its present form and the law of the variation of gravity upon its surface that it was once wholly melted." 2 Then the order in which the organised creatures are introduced in the Mosaic programme, first vege- tation, then the smaller aquatic creatures, after that the larger land animals, and finally man, receives a signal confirmation from the wonderful disclosures of the rocks. It is only needful to examine any carefully prepared tabular view of the succession of geological formations and organic remains to per- ceive that it largely harmonises with the outline 1 " Green's Geology," p. 487. 2 Fisher's "Physics of the Earth's Crust," p. 18. 20 THE PATKIARCHAL TIMES. sketched in Genesis. Beginning with the third day's vegetation, the best authorities are agreed that that may be traced in the graphite and un- resolved schists of the Azoic or Hypozoic Period. The earliest life enters just above these, probably in the gigantic foraminifer, Eozoon Canadense of Principal Dawson, found in the Laurentian strata of the Palaeozoic Period. Above this, in the Cam- brian, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, and Per- mian strata, still belonging to the Palaeozoic Period, follows an unbroken succession of marine animals, from the shell fishes of the earlier to the lizard-like reptiles of the later depositions. Then the first trace of birds appears in what is called the Mezozoic or Secondary Period. Still ascending, in the Ter- tiary Period are discovered fossiliferous remains of the first living invertebrates, while in what is known as the Modern Period, in the Post-Pliocene formations, the first living mammals are detected ; and last of all, in the Post-Glacial and Recent Era of this same period, man is observed to step upon the scene. 1 It is scarcely possible to fail in recog- nising that the testimony of the rocks is in sub- stantial accord with the Hebrew cosmogony. Then it would be wrong not to note the striking con- 1 The question of the Antiquity of Man will be discussed in the next article of this series. THE CREATION OF THE WORLD. 21 firmation which this same cosmogony derives from the most recent of all our sciences, that of biology. The two results which, up to the present moment at all events, have been secured from this depart- ment of knowledge, are that all life has a common physical basis, every conceivable variety thereof being derived from the same kind of protoplasmic cell, and that no living creature can be spontane- ously evolved from dead matter, but must be gene- rated by some antecedent life. 1 But exactly these are the assertions of the writer of this Scripture record. The entire world, or the successive series of worlds, of living creatures, is represented as having been developed from the underlying matter of the globe, the grass from the soil, the fish and the fowls from the sea, the animals from the ground, man himself from the dust of the earth. Yet this primitive composer is as much aware as any modern Huxley or Haeckel can be, that dead matter cannot originate life, that spontaneous gene- ration is an unproved, and most likely an unprove- able hypothesis, for in every instance in which he represents life as appearing, he ascribes it to an express fiat of the Creative Will " Let the earth 1 The Rev. W. H. Dallinger, LL.D., " Researches on the Origin and Life Histories of the Least and Lowest Living Things," Nature, 2jd October 1884. 22 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. bring forth grass!" "Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life," "Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind," "Let us make man in our own image ; " and in general, while maintaining that the present cosmos was arranged by the operation of second causes, and in accordance with what are usually styled the laws of nature, he is ever careful to trace the efficiency of these second causes to the Will of Elohim as the First Cause of all, and to portray the laws of nature as nothing other than the modes in which the Creative Will worked out its magnificent designs" And God said, Let the waters under heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear; and it was so ; " 1 and again, " Let the earth bring forth grass," and " the earth brought forth grass." 2 It is scarcely requisite to add that the popular hypothesis of evolution, in so far as it sets forth the order and method and progress of the Divine creative activity in each separate kingdom the inorganic, the vege- table, the animal, the human does not conflict with the teaching of this ancient record, but rather surprisingly accords with the exhibition it gives of the gradual unfolding of the Supreme World- Builder's plan. 1 Gen. i. 9. 2 Gen. i. T i. THE CREATION OF THE WORLD. 23 4. The purpose of creation, though not expressly stated in the Hebrew cosmogony, may be reason- ably deduced from certain things in it which strongly arrest attention. First, the gradually ascending order of creation from the arrangement of inorganic matter up to the fashioning of man, would seem to indicate that the entire previous process of globe construction had been designed to prepare the way for the appearance of man as the decus et tutamen, the glory and defence of the visible universe ; and this surmise may be said to derive confirmation from the solemn and deliberate manner in which the Creator is exhibited as pro- ceeding to the task of man's formation " Let us make man in our own image ; " l while, if more is needful to impart to it certainty, the singular fact may be pointed to that immediately after man is made, the work of creation ceases, and the Divine Artificer enters on His Sabbatic rest. Then the termination of the great creation process in the Sabbath as its ornament and crown, has been thought to show 2 that even from the beginning the Divine purpose had an outlook towards the kingdom of God to be afterwards established in Israel. Perhaps also it is legitimate to see in 1 Gen. i 26. 2 Handworterbuch des Biblisc/ien Alterthums, Art. " Schopfung." 24 THE PATKJARCHAL TIMES. man's designation as the image and likeness of Elohim, and in his elevation to supreme dominion over the material globe with all its tenants, a pro- phecy of One in whom that lofty ideal of humanity should subsequently be realised. In this light they were viewed by the Hebrew Psalmist, 1 and after him by the writer to the Hebrews ; 2 and when this thought is added to the two preceding, it will be discovered that the threefold purpose for which the universe was summoned into space and the earth slowly elaborated from primeval chaos, was one worthy of a God, viz., that it might serve as a home for the human family, as a place of education for the chosen people, as an arena on which the Son of God and Son of man might carry forward and accomplish the salvation of a lost world. 5. TJie goal of the universe whither it is tend- ing does not properly fall within the scope of the Mosaic record of creation. Information as to it can only be obtained from a careful study of the later writings of the Christian Apostles. These declare that as the universe, the heavens and the earth, has had a beginning, so will it also have an end ; and in this they are supported by the verdict of the best science of to-day. 3 They likewise state, 1 Ps. viii 2 Heb. ii. 6-9. 3 See above, p. 440. THE CREATION OF THE WORLD. 25 and in this they are at least not contradicted by either science or philosophy, that from the terrible catastrophe in which this present order will be en- gulfed, a second cosmos, a new heavens and a new earth will arise, in which the sinless sons and daughters of God will find an eternal home. II. THE APPEARING OF MAN. IF a high degree of interest attaches to questions connected with the origin of the world, and the method of its cosmical arrangement, a fascination scarcely less absorbing clusters round the subject of man's introduction to this previously prepared planet. At what point in the sublime procession of ages through which, according to both science and revelation, the earth advanced from primeval chaos to that finished cosmos which met the gaze of its first human inhabitant at what epoch in the unrecorded history of this globe did man for the first time step upon the scene? Was it at a period comparatively recent, a period measured, let us say, by several thousands of years ? or was it at a date in the remote past whose distance can be reckoned only by the sweep of centuries ? By what power, too, and through what process was he produced ? Did he spring spontaneously from the soil, accord- ing to the fancy of classical fable ? Was he evolved THE APPEARING OF MAN. 27 from some pre-existing ape or ascidian, as some modern scientists allege? or did he owe his birth and being to a special act of creation, as the sacred Scriptures affirm ? The reply to the first of these inquiries will lift into prominence the much- debated question of the antiquity of man ; the answer furnished to the second will necessitate consideration of the scarcely less agitated problem of the origin of man. Never perhaps have these topics been handled with greater energy and ability than at present by both devotees of science and students of revelation ; never certainly was there more need than now for a calm and dispassionate weighing of evidence on these momentous themes, and that too on the part of both classes of inquirers, i. TJie date of man's appearance on the earth is by the Mosaic record, which again may be allowed to lead, though not to control investiga- tion, definitely fixed as the latter half of the sixth creative day, after the production of the larger land animals. 1 It in no degree militates against the accuracy of this assertion that, in another portion of the same narrative, 2 man appears to have been summoned into existence earlier than the beasts of the field, the fact rather than the time of the crea- tion of the animals being that which the historian 1 Gen. i. 26. 2 Gen. ii. 19. 28 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. in his second account desires to emphasize. Yet the statement does not help in determining, even approximately, the birth hour of humanity, since data are entirely wanting for measuring with exac- titude the length of the creative days. Nor is it possible by counting backwards to reckon with certainty the ages that have elapsed since man became a denizen of earth. Hebrew chronology, it is well known, is a variable quantity. The period from Adam to the Deluge has been differ- ently computed ; by the Genesis original at 1656, by the Greek translation at 2262, and by Josephus at 2256 years. The interval from the Deluge to Abram has been estimated by the Hebrew text at 367, and by the Septuagint version at 1017 years ; that from Abram to the Exodus has been put down by Josephus and the LXX. at 430, by Kalisch and others at 730 years; while that from the Exodus to Christ has been rated by Ussher at 1491, by Petavius at 1531, by Jackson at 1593, and by Hales at 1648 years. Adding together the smallest figures in each period for the one extreme, and the largest figures for the other, and append- ing to both the years of the Christian era, 1889,^ will become apparent that, according to the biblical account, the continuance of man upon the earth has been not less than 5833, and not more than THE APPEARING OF MAN. 29 7546 years. Of course no claim to absolute accu- racy can be advanced for such a mode of reckon- ing. It is simply a rough-and-ready method of striking a balance between diverging calculations ; and yet it may with fairness be adopted, provision- ally at least, until some better system of biblical chronology can be devised, as the best answer that can be extracted from Scripture concerning the period of man's duration on the earth. The general correctness of this answer derives confirmation from the recently ascertained fact that the authentic histories of the oldest nations do not travel farther back than between thirty and forty centuries B.C. at the utmost, whilst the probability is that they do not reach so far. The earliest date assigned to Menes the first Egyptian king, that advocated by Mariette and Lenormant, 5004 B.C., is now abandoned by the best Egyptologers,. Brugsch adopting as the probable date of the first dynasty of sovereigns, 4455 B.C.; Lepsius, 3892 B.C. ; Bunsen, in his earlier view, 3623 B.C., in his later, 3059 B.C. ; Poole, 2717 B.C. ; and Wilkinson, 2691 B.C., with the last two of whom Rawlinson agrees, 1 though a recent writer, Harkness, returns to the estimate of Lepsius, 3800 B.C. 2 Similar 1 "Egyptian Civilisation," Leisure Hour, February 1876. 2 "Egyptian Lii'e and History," p. 13. 30 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. results are obtained from the study of the monu- mental history of ancient Babylonia. The annals of Assurbanipal, 1 an Assyrian monarch who nourished about 668-625 B.C., the Sardanapalus of the Greeks, mention an invasion of Babylonia by an Elamite conqueror, Kuduruauhundi, which occurred 1635 years earlier, i.e., sometime between 2303-2260 B.C. A remarkable corrob oration of the reliability of this calculation has been derived by Dr. Julius Oppert from the Annals of Sargon, 2 engraved upon the halls of Khorsabad, which furnish a true chronology of Babylon after the Berosian canon, and make allusion to "a period of sin, or lunar period, which ended in B.C. 712." This lunar period the eminent Assyriologist just named has proved to be an eclipse epoch containing 22,325 Synodical months, or 1 805 years. This computa- tion has again enabled him to fix with mathe- matical certainty the date of the Median dynasty in Babylon at B.C. 2517 (712+ 1805). But ac- cording to Berosus, the Elamite invasion happened 234 years later. Deducting therefore 234 from 2517, we reach the date of 2283 B.C., which corresponds with that already ascertained from the Assurbanipal texts. Hence if Kudurnanhundi was "Records of the Past," vol. i. p. 90; cf. voL iii. p. 7. 2 Ibid., vol. vii. pp. 21-24. THE APPEARING OF MAN. 31 the ancestor of the Chedorlaomer of Scripture, and of the Kudur Mabuk of the inscriptions (Mr. W. St. Chad Boscawen 1 identifies the two latter; Professor Sayce 2 regards them as having been brothers), it will be obvious that about the time of Abraham the chronologies of the Babylonian and Hebrew records converge. Nor though ancient Accadian history should be regarded as having commenced with Sargon I., 8 the Chaldean Moses who, like the Hebrew lawgiver, was concealed after birth, exposed in a wicker cradle on the river Euphrates, and subsequently rescued by a water- carrier named Akki, but who, on reaching manhood ascended the throne of his country in B.C. 3800, and carried his arms far and wide, penetrating to " the sea of the setting sun " (the Mediterranean), and carving his image on its rocky coast not even on this assumption will it travel far beyond the larger date assigned by Hebrew chronology for the flood. Then pushing farther east to the vast Empires of India and China, it is satisfactory to note that the most competent writers do not claim for them an antiquity of more than 2000 or 3000 years. Professor Max Miiller, the highest living 1 "British Museum Lectures," Third Lecture, December 17, 1884. 8 "Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments," p. 55. 3 " Records of the Past," vol. v. p. 56 . " Babylonian Life and History " (Budge), p. 40. 32 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. authority on all matters relating to Indian chrono- logy, states that the commencement of the Yedic literature, and so of Indian civilisation, does not require to be placed further back than the begin- ning of the twelfth century B.C., 1 whilst Dr. Edkins, who occupies a similar position with reference to Chinese literature and history, affirms 2 that " there is nothing in the Chinese classics which demands a longer period for the presence of the Chinese in their own country than 2800 years." Thus it would seem that not only is there no disharmony, but rather a large amount of agreement between the views propounded in the Hebrew Scriptures and those set forth in the historical records of other peoples, so far as these have been investi- gated, concerning the date of man's appearance on the earth. Unless, therefore, from some other quarter evidence can be adduced compelling us to set aside this united testimony, it may be held as in the highest degree probable that the human period in the history of this globe has not ex- tended far over eight or nine, or at most ten thousand years. Exactly, however, of the kind demanded, is, in 1 " Sanscrit Literature," p. 572 ; cf. " Chips from a German Work- shop," vol. i. p. 13. 2 "The Antiquity of the Chinese," Leisure Hour, October 1876. THE APPEARING OF MAN. 33 the judgment of not a few, the evidence which science offers. With much confidence in the truth of its allegations, it asserts that such views as would restrict man's duration on the earth to a period of even 10,000 years are wholly inadequate ; that the time required for the distribution of man- kind and the development of its races, assuming all to have proceeded from a primal pair, cannot be restrained within so contracted a limit; that the laws which regulate the formation of language de- mand a much more protracted interval for the evolution and consolidation of the many tongues which belong to men ; and that, above all, the incontrovertible evidence of late years brought to light by geological research renders it imperative to believe that man has been a denizen of earth, certainly long, perhaps incalculable ages, antecedent to the time spoken of by the Hebrew Bible. Until recently it was thought that geology had signally confirmed the correctness of the scriptural account by showing that fossiliferous remains of man were confined almost exclusively to what is known as the recent or human period in the earth's develop- ment. Now, however, it is maintained that suf- ficient evidence exists to establish man's presence on the globe at a much earlier date, in what is usually styled the Pleistocene, Post- Pliocene, or 34 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. Glacial Period, the Great Ice Age, which, beginning at the close of the Tertiary Period, continued, with at least one interval of warmer climate, up to the Recent or Human Period, and which by its arctic rigours is sometimes supposed to have killed off the larger animals of the Mammoth Age, such as the Rhinoceros trichorinus, the Elephas antiquus, the Hippopotamus major, the wild boar, and the cave hyena, though the destruction of these megatheria may perhaps more successfully be ascribed to an amelioration of the climate in consequence of the passing away of the Ice Age. 1 The grounds upon which such extreme antiquity is claimed for man, as set forth by Sir Charles Lyell, 2 Sir John Lub- bock, 3 Professor Geikie, 4 and others, are principally the exhumation of manufactured implements of flint and stone, together with human remains, from peat mosses and raised beaches belonging to the Eecent or Human Period, and the discovery of similar remains in cave deposits containing bones of extinct mammalia, and on that account adjudged to be Post-Pliocene formations. " In other words," says Professor Alleyne Nicholson, 5 "man's existence 1 Geikie's " Text-Book of Geology," p. 894. 2 " The Antiquity of Man," chaps. ii.-xix. 8 " Prehistoric Times," chap, ix., x. * " The Great Ice Age," chap, xxxvii. 6 "Manual of Palaeontology," vol. ii. pp. 422, 423. THE APPEARING OF MAN. 35 dates back to a time when several remarkable mammals had not yet become extinct," and as these extinct mammals with which man coexisted " are referable in many cases to species which pre- sumably required a very different climate to that now prevailing in Western Europe," it has been inferred that man must have come upon the scene many thousands of years earlier than has commonly been supposed. As to the premises from which this deduction is made, there does not seem to be room for doubt. That stone knives and flint hatchets, along with bones of men and extinct mammals, have been exhumed from alluvial plains, raised beaches, and cave deposits, it is impossible to deny. It is only when attempts are made to fix the age of the so-called Post-Pliocene Period in which these palaeolithic implements and bones have been found that an element of uncertainty enters. " Stratigraphically the beds " containing these re- mains " are newer than the newest deposits of the Tertiary Period ; nay, more, they do not even pass the horizon of the latest boulder clay ; " but " as they are all superficial, it is evident that their stratigraphical position gives no data newer than that of their deposition." 1 Hence to determine 1 British and Foreign Evangelical Review, April 1867, Art. "The Antiquity of Man," p. 395. 36 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. their age recourse must be had to " analogies and comparisons which may be disputed." This is frankly conceded even by those scientists who adhere to the view of their extreme antiquity. Sir Charles Lyell honestly avows that the mini- mum of time required for the extinction in the district of Liege of the carnivorous and herbivorous animals of the Cave Period, for the growth of peat in the valley of the Somme, and generally for the changes in physical geography that have taken place since the close of the Tertiary Period cannot be determined. 1 Professor Geikie also writes that "it is hardly possible to arrange the Post-Tertiary deposits in a strictly chronological order, because we have no means of deciding, in many cases, their relative antiquity." 2 Similar acknowledgments might be cited from equally competent investigators. 8 It is true that, while making these admissions, the scientists referred to are unanimous in claiming for man an antiquity reaching far beyond the boundaries of biblical chronology, even when these have been stretched to the utmost ; but the dispassionate inquirer, dis- cerning that such a claim rests not upon clearly 1 The Antiquity of Man," pp. 74, 1 1 1. 2 "Text-Book of Geology," p. 883. 3 Professor Nicholson, " Man. of Palaeont," vol. ii. p. 423 ; Page, "The Philosophy of Geology," p. 117. THE APPEARING OF MAN. 37 established conclusions, but only upon conjectural calculations as to the age of certain cave deposits which, after all, may be wrong may reasonably hold himself entitled to pause before casting aside as utterly unworthy the results arrived at by a comparison of biblical and archaeological records, and all the more that so capable a critic as Principal Dawson, who, besides having been trained in the school of Lyell, has himself examined with much care "the deposits of the more modern periods on both sides of the Atlantic," thus con- cludes a careful and painstaking investigation into the probable past duration of man upon the earth : "We require to make great demands on time for the pre-human period of the earth's history, but not more than sacred history is willing to allow for the modern or human age." * 2. The mode of man's appearance on the earth is in the Mosaic narrative ascribed to a direct and immediate act of creation : " And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. . . . So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him ; male and female created He them." z The specific manner in which this creation was effected is more particularly re- presented in the subsequent account which modern 1 "The Origin of the World," p. 321. * Gen. i. 26, 27. 38 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. criticism usually assigns to the Jehovist redactor or reviser of the Genesis original : " And the Lord God formed man, dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul ; " l the formation of woman being described in an afterpiece which exhibits the Lord God as first casting Adam into a deep sleep, next as extracting from his side a rib, and finally as fashioning it into one who should prove an helpmeet for him. 2 Whatever views be entertained as to the authorship of these seemingly divergent sketches, it is apparent that they har- monise in the central thought that man owes his first appearance on this globe to a direct forthputting of Divine creative energy. Though the earth " dust from the ground " was in his case, no less than in that of the lower animals, the point of departure for the process of making, the manifest implication of both accounts is that the dust of the ground could not have evolved itself into a man without supernatural assistance. Even should it be conceded that the language of the second account is not incompatible with the notion that man, in so far as he is an animal, may have been produced, not at once by an express creative fiat, but by a slow process of natural development, it 1 Gen. ii. 7. 2 Gen. ii. 21, 22. THE APPEARING OP MAN. 39 is still the teaching of the Hebrew writer that the inspiration of Jehovah was necessary to elevate the creature which the mysterious machinery of nature had fashioned to the rank and dignity of a living soul, i.e., in his case of a conscious person- ality. It is doubtful, however, if this concession is legitimate, though it is occasionally offered in the interest of evolution theories. 1 Since the lower animals are, equally with men, styled Neplicsh Chayah, living souls, it would seem to be the object of the Hebrew narrator to distinguish the "living soul," man, from the "living soul," the lower creature, by directing attention to the different methods of their formation. Had man, as to his corporeal and psychical nature, been, in the initial stage of his production, simply an evolved or improved animal, he would, according to Hebrew conceptions, have been a Nephesh Chayah, or a living soul even prior to the inbreathing by Jehovah into his nostrils of the breath of life. But the explicit statement of the Mosaic record is that he did not become a living soul until that act of inspiration occurred ; hence it does not seem admissible to concede that the sacred writer may have held a doctrine of modified evolution. Pos- sibly such a doctrine is the only one tenable if the 1 The Theological Library : "Does Science aid Faith?" p. 195. 40 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. findings of present-day science are not to be wholly set aside ; only it cannot be shown by legitimate exegesis that such a view of man's formation is, or may be, included in the words of Old Testament Scripture. If honestly interpreted, these words signify, not that man, having been first evolved from an ape or an ascidian, was subsequently en- dowed with a higher nature by the inbreathing of the Spirit of God, but that man's corporeal frame was fashioned from the dust of the ground and afterwards animated with a living soul by the breathing into his nostrils of the breath of life. But is such an account of man's origin credible in face of the latest scientific teaching, the teach- ing of Lamarck and Oken, of Darwin and Huxley, of Lyell, Lubbock, and Haeckel, not to mention others, that man has by slow and imperceptible stages been developed from the inferior animals? The chief reasons which have led to the adoption of such a theory of man's origin are (i) the alleged antiquity of man's appearance upon the earth ; (2) the so-called incontestable proofs that man has everywhere emerged from a state of barbarism ; (3) the doctrine, believed by its advo- cates to be established, of the transmutation of species ; and (4) the admitted resemblance of man's physical frame to that of the lower creatures. THE APPEAEING OF MAN. 41 The first of these sufficient evidences of man's descent from the brute creation has been disposed of in the preceding pages ; the second will be referred to in considering the question of man's primeval condition ; the third and fourth are of such a character as to call for a word of comment now. With regard to the former, the doctrine of the transmutation of species, i.e., of the production of distinctly new kinds of creatures out of previously existing animals, it may be freely admitted that, if the fact of such transmutation could be estab- lished with reference to inferior organisms, it would be difficult, as Sir Charles Lyell justly contends, 1 to deny its applicability to man. Ac- cordingly Darwin, having, as he supposed, made good the premiss in his earlier work styled " The Origin of Species," does not hesitate in his later volume, " The Descent of Man," to show how by means of natural and sexual selection the task of evolving man from a small mollusc called the ascidian has been effected, stating at the same time the conclusion at which his investiga- tions have enabled him to arrive, that "man is (immediately) descended from a hairy quadruped, 1 "The Antiquity of Man," pp. 472, 473. 42 THE PATRIAKCHAL TIMES. furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the old world." 1 It is, however, idle to pretend that the necessary premiss has in any valid sense been substantiated. " That any organism can ever pro- duce another which varies from itself in any truly specific character," writes the Duke of Argyll, 2 "is an assumption not justified by any known fact." "After much consideration, and with as- suredly no bias against Mr. Darwin's views, it is our clear conviction," says Huxley, 3 "that, as the evidence stands, it is not absolutely proven that a group of animals, having all the characters exhibited by species in nature, has ever been origi- nated by selection, whether artificial or natural." Certainly no instance has been discovered of any such origination of a new species in the Modern or Human Period of the earth's history, and the palaeolithic remains of earlier periods are equally silent as to any such method of animal production. Indeed, as Principal Dawson has observed, 4 the drift of geological testimony is to show that species came into the world per saltum, rather than by 1 " The Descent of Man," part i. p. 213 ; cf. Haeckel's " Evolution of Man," voL ii. p. 180. 2 " Primeval Man," p. 46. 3 " Lay Sermons," p. 323. 4 "The Origin of the World," p. 373 ; cf. "Primeval Man," p. 45. THE APPEARING OF MAN. 43 a process of gradual development. At least, palaeontology has been able to furnish no ex- ample of a new species that did not emerge upon the theatre of existence in a state of perfect and complete organisation. Had any transitional forms existed, as, e.g., between molluscs and fishes, it is more than probable that some of them would have been preserved in contem- poraneous deposits ; their complete absence from all fossiliferous strata in the Pre-human no less than in the Kecent Period, can only point to one conclusion, that such missing links never in reality existed. Then the admitted correspondences between man's anatomical structure and that of some of the lower creatures, e.g., the ape, has been sup- posed by Darwin 1 to justify the inference that the former has been evolved from the latter. But although it should be granted, as Huxley claims, that " man in all parts of his organisation differs less from the higher apes than these do from the lower members of the same group," it remains that the theory of evolution fails to supply a satisfactory explanation of the higher moral and spiritual nature which man possesses in con- tradistinction from every species of monkey. 1 " The Descent of Man," part i. p. 10 et seq. 44 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. When Mr. Darwin 1 deliberately announces it, as the scientific residuum of his investigations, that "the feeling of religious devotion in man is the ultimate development of the feeling experienced by a dog towards its master, or a monkey to its beloved keeper," readers may be excused for think- ing that in some human beings at least the re- ligious faculty has not yet been evolved. Scarcely less preposterous, and certainly not more convincing, are the attempts 2 to show how man's ape-like progenitor succeeded in taking the first step towards the formation of a language, and how he eventually rose to the dignity of possessing a moral sense. But waiving these, and restricting attention to man's physical struc- ture, it must always be a problem for the evolu- tion theory to account for the chasm, in respect of size, which divides the brain of man from that of the gorilla. Accepting Professor Schaafhausen's statement that some Hindoo skulls have as small a capacity as about 46 cubic inches, and Professor Huxley's that the largest cranium of any gorilla yet measured contained 34*5 cubic inches, 3 it may be asked why any such impassable gulf should have 1 "The Descent of Man," part. i. p. 65. 2 Ibid., part, i pp. 56, 71. 3 "The Antiquity of Man," p. 84. THE APPEARING OF MAN. 45 established itself between man and the gorilla, if in all essential respects they belonged to the same order of creature ? Why should a brain bulk of 34-5 inches and under mark out a brute beast, and one of 46 inches and upwards indicate a man ? That beasts possessing brains of 34*5 inches are incapable of such improvement as is revealed in man is undeniable ; why should a difference of 1 1 cubic inches in the size of the cranium deter- mine its possessor to be susceptible of almost in- finite progress ? The Duke of Argyll l replies with force and justice that the only possible answer to these interrogations is that the two beings, man and the gorilla, are fundamentally distinct. Nor is this the hardest problem that the evolution theory must solve before it can command universal accept- ance. In particular, it must explain why the imper- sonal vis natures evolved only a human being from the antecedent ape ; why, since man has existed for incalculable ages (on this hypothesis), no other ape has exhibited a tendency to develop upwards into a human being ; and finally, why the process of evolution has stopped with man. The pertinence and force of the last of these objections is recog- nised by John Fiske, the author of " Outlines of 1 "Primeval Man," pp. 56, 57. 46 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. Cosmic Philosophy," who, in a small volume 1 lately published, seeks to show that no higher creature than man, zoologically considered, can ever appear upon the earth. " In the regions of unconditioned possibility," he writes, "it is open to any one to argue, if he chooses, that such a creature may come to exist; but the Darwinian theory is utterly opposed to any such conclusion." The evidence, however, which he offers in support of this state- ment is not so much a demonstration that no further evolution in the direction of physical variation is possible, as an assertion of that which calls for proof, viz., that " the process of zoological change has come to an end," and "a process of psychological change" taken its place. What is still required to be shown is, why the upward movement along " this supreme line of generation," that of the bodily life, should have ceased. 1 " Man's Destiuy Viewed in the Light of His Origin," chap. iii. III. THE CRADLE OF THE RACE. THE questions of man's origin and antiquity, or of the mode and time of his appearing on this planet, having been considered, it naturally follows to inquire into the place and condition in which he appeared. From what particular spot of earth did the human race take its departure when it set forth upon the journey of existence ? What region of the globe formed its cradle or birthplace ? What was the character of its infancy ? Howsoever, whenso- ever, wheresoever produced, what was the condition physical, intellectual, and moral in which the original progenitor of the race appeared? Did he emerge upon the stage of being in possession of a full-orbed manhood, with the powers and capacities of his soul, if not completely developed, at least entirely provided, as the Pallas Athene of Grecian mythology sprang fully armed from the head of Zeus, chanting a war-song and poising 48 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. a spear ? Or did lie slowly urge his way forward and upward, with incalculable labour and through a long series of years, perhaps centuries, from a state of brutish ignorance and savageism to that of enlightenment and culture ? In other words, has the course of human history been from bar- barism to civilisation, not in individual instances merely, but upon the whole ? Or, were the early men by whom the earth was peopled possessed of large capacity and pronounced intelligence, as in all probability, judging from the skulls of the mammoth age, they were " of great bodily stature and high jcerebral organisation " ? l The import- ance in these times attached to such inquiries may be gauged from the fact that to their settlement the best efforts of not a few of the ablest and most gifted scientists and scholars have been directed ; it will be the aim of the present paper to set forth the most reliable results which have been obtained on the two points above indicated, viz., the original birthplace of mankind, and the primeval condition of the race. i. The original birthplace of mankind, accord- ing to the Hebrew Scriptures, was the continent of Asia, in a pleasant and delightful region, the geographical features of which are thus carefully 1 Dawsoji, " The Origin of the World," p. 298. THE CEADLE OF THE RACE. 49 defined : " And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He placed the man whom He had formed. And the Lord God caused to grow out of the ground every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, and the tree of life in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pison : that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold, and the gold of that land is good; there is bdellium and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon : the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel : that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates." l That this is no mere ideal sketch of some Utopia, such as ancient Oriental mythologies are known to furnish, 2 may be inferred from the seemingly historical character of the narrative, which, pro- fessing to depict man's original abode, expressly localises it by means of the rivers traversing its 1 Gen. ii. 8-14. 3 Philo, Origen, Bohlen, Bertheau, Encyd. Brit., Art. "Eden" (gth ed.) ; Herzoy's tieal-encydopUdie, Art. " Eden." , D 50 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. surface, and the countries lying in its vicinity. " To us," says Canon Kawlinson, 1 " it appears that a geographic character manifestly attaches to the entire description contained in the second chapter of Genesis, and that it would be contrary to all sound canons of historical or literary criticism to treat as mythic or allegorical a passage of a nar- rative, the general historical character of which is allowed, when there is nothing in the passage itself suggestive of either myth or allegory." That Eden was indeed an actual terrestrial locality, with distinct geographical boundaries, but that now, in consequence of changes on the earth's surface, more especially through the catastrophe of the Deluge, its site is undiscoverable, is a notion which, though claiming learned names in its sup- port, 2 must also be discarded, being sufficiently disposed of by the observation that the writer of this description of primeval Paradise " is certainly not speaking of things supposed to be obliterated by the Deluge, but of places recognised, however vaguely, in the knowledge of the day." 3 Accord- ingly, proceeding on the assumption that the exact situation of Eden was intended to be given 1 Monthly Interpreter for April 1886, Art. "The Site of Paradise," p. 402. 2 Clericus, Reland, Baumgarten, Luther. 3 Tayler Lewis in Lange's "Genesis," p. 217. THE CRADLE OF THE RACE. 51 by the author of the Book of Genesis, in terms also which, while involved in much obscurity to present- day readers, were perfectly intelligible to those into whose hands the writing was first put, and restricting attention to the Hebrew narrative, the following facts emerge to guide us in our search for the first birthplace of man. The garden was situated in the east of Palestine. The region in which it lay was one of singular fertility and beauty, the term "Eden" signifying pleasure or delight. It was watered by a river which, outside its limits, was divided into four separate streams, of which two, at least, have been identified. The Hiddekel, the Darter, or, accord- ing to a different etymology, "The stream with high banks," * from its situation " in front of Asshur," unquestionably meaning Assyria, as well as from its correspondence in sound with the Idiklat or Diklat of the cuneiform inscriptions, appearing in the Persian as Tigra, and passing over into Greek and Latin as Tigris, has been unanimously found in the Tigris of modern geography. The Perath, which was well known to the Hebrews as the River, the Great River, and required no description beyond its name, in Assyrian cuneiform Purat or' Purata, the Great 1 Delitzsch, Wo lay das Paradies? App. I. p. 171. 52 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. Stream, 1 in Persian cuneiform Ufr&tush, in Arabic Furat or F'rat, in Greek Eity/jd-n??, has been almost universally 2 recognised as the Euphrates. Hence, whatever be the solution of the site of the Biblical Paradise, it is clear that these acknowledged facts largely discredit such conjectures as locate the cradle of the race either in Palestine or in India, either in Syria or in Egypt, either in Media or in Arabia, since all of these regions are too remote from Assyria, while none of them can be said to be contiguous to the Tigris or Euphrates. In par- ticular, it disposes of the theory which would find man's primeval abode among either the Himalaya 1 Delitzsch, Wo lag das Paradies] App. I. p. 169 ; cf. Rawlinson, " Site of Paradise," Monthly Interpreter, p. 403: 2 Both of these identifications are at some length, but, we think, unsuccessfully, disputed in a work just issued from the Leipsic press, entitled Die Losung der Paradiesfrage, by Moritz Engel, who finds the Hiddekel in the Wadi el Garz, which flows eastward from the Ilauran, and the Perath in the Wadi es Sam in the same locality the Pison being the Wadi Tes from the north, and the Gihon the Wadi el Gumar from the east. All the four streams, according to the proposed solution of the Paradise question, proceed from the district of Eden, which is discovered by the author in the Hauran, converge upon the low-lying oasis, Rubhe, which forms the natural middle point of the region, and which constitutes the garden of Scripture, and overflow it with their waters. These, after fertilising the soil, draw themselves off into a lake towards the north end of the garden ; the author's translation of Gen. ii. 10 being : " And water goes out of Eden to water the garden, and therein it separates itself (or draws itself off), and it (i.e., the water) has belonged to four source streams.' 1 THE CRADLE OF THE RACE. 53 or the Hindu-Kush mountains a theory not with- out the sanction of eminent authorities, such as Dillmann (earlier), Lenormant, and Renan. The first-named writer, 1 discovering the Pison and the Gihon in the Ganges and the Indus, concludes that the seat of Eden must be looked for amongst the Himalaya Mountains of Northern India ; the second, with whom the third agrees, identifies the Land of Eden with the Mountains of Ararat, and detects both in the "immense plateau of Central Asia, bounded on the south by the Himalayas, on the west by the Hindu-Kush and the Belur-tagh, on the north by the Altai, and on the east by various groups of mountains which succeed each other from the Altai to the Himalayas." 2 But besides being too distant from the Mesopotamian valley, the Pamir plateau can scarcely be the Paradise of Genesis, since by no possibility can its rivers be brought into conjunction with the Tigris and Euphrates. Manifestly those theories alone can be regarded as wearing a prima facie appearance of credibility, which proceed upon the assumption that Eden must be found in that part of Asia through which these rivers run; and of those theories only two can be said to demand 1 Schenkel's Bibel lexicon, Art. " Eden." 2 Contemporary Review, Art. "Ararat aud Eden," Sept. iSSi. 54 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. investigation, viz., that which looks for man's primeval abode in Northern Armenia, near the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates, and that which directs its search towards Southern Baby- lonia, where the two rivers converge before they debouch into the Persian Gulf. The former of these theories, which places Eden between the sources of the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Araxes, and the Phasis, though it cannot claim any ancient authority of weight in its support, has succeeded in obtaining the suffrages of not a few modern advocates of note, such as Eeland, Kurtz, Keil, Bunsen, Brugsch; yet it is open to too many objections to be even probably correct. To begin with, the district of Armenia is cold and inhos- pitable, whereas the Scriptural Paradise is sugges- tive of sunny skies and genial climes. Then it is situated rather in the north than towards the east of Palestine. Moreover, the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates are not contiguous, but lie consider- ably apart. Neither has the Phasis nor the Araxes a connection with the former rivers, or indeed any title beyond conjecture to be regarded the one as the Pison and the other as the Gihon. And, finally, "the other geographical names, Gush, Havilah, Eden, have no Armenian representa- tives, the resemblance of Havilah to Colchis, THE CRADLE OF THE RACE. 55 which some have urged, being at any rate not very apparent." l Hence attention inust be turned towards the south, where the two streams con- verge in their progress towards the sea, though not even in this direction does entire unanimity of sentiment prevail. By one class of scholars Eden has been sought in the neighbourhood of the modern Korna, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, in 31 o' 28" N. L. Calvin, who first propounded this view, finding the Pison and the Gihon in the two mouths of the Schatt-el- Arab, has been followed by more recent inter- preters, either wholly or in part; by Kalisch, 2 Schrader, 3 and Dillmann (later), 4 who select as the Pison and the Gihon the Indus and the Nile ; by Pressel, 5 who discovers them in the Karun and the Kertha, the two eastern tributaries of the Schatt-el-Arab ; and by Professor Tayler Lewis, 6 who sees them in the two coast lines of the Persian Gulf. This hypothesis, however, must now be abandoned, concurring evidence going to show 1 Rawlinson, " The Site of Paradise/' Monthly Interpreter, April 1885. Cf. Riehm's Handworterbiich des Hiblischen Alterthums, Art. " Eden." " Commentary on Genesis," pp. 92-97. Riehm's Handuvrterbuch, Art. " Eden." Kurtzgefastes Exeyetischen Handbuch die Genesis, p. 59. Herzog, v. pp. 332-337, Art. " Paradise." Lange's "Genesis," p. 217. 56 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. that the delta of the Schatt-el-Arab is of recent formation ; that originally the Euphrates dis- charged its waters directly into the Persian Gulf; and that in the time of Alexander the Great the mouths of the Tigris and the Euphrates were separated by a day's journey. Not only is it certain that the delta of the Schatt-el-Arab is advancing even now at the rate of an English mile in sixty or seventy years, but Sir Henry Rawlinson 1 is of opinion that its growth in ancient times must have been more rapid, probably at the rate of one mile in thirty years ; while Professor Fried. Delitzsch 2 has shown that, according to the cuneiform inscriptions, " the Persian Gulf extended in the time of Sennacherib nearly as far inland as the modern Korna, or about one hundred English miles from the present extremity of the Schatt-el- Arab farthest from the Persian Gulf." Accord- ingly, attention has of late been turned with lively interest to the district contiguous to Babylon as in all probability the site of Paradise. Sir Henry Rawlinson, Mr. George Smith, Professors Sayce and Delitzsch, unite in recognising in Kar-Duniash the park or garden of the god Duniash, in the 1 " Journal of the Geographical Society," vol. xxvii. p. 1 86. * Wo lag das Parodies 1 p. 40 ft ; cf. the Rev. Chas. H. H. Wright, D.D., in Nineteenth Century, Oct. 1882, Art. "The Site of Paradise." THE CRADLE OF THE RACE. 57 cuneiform inscriptions Ganduniyas, an echo of the Biblical Gan-Eden. The Pison and the Gihon they discover in two large canals or water-courses in the vicinity, which appear to have been origi- nally natural arms of the Euphrates. The former, the Pison, in the Babylonish tongue meaning "canal," is believed to have been the celebrated Pallacopas, originally a branch of the Euphrates, and now leading from a point somewhat north of Babylon, passing by the Birs-i-Nimroud on the west, flowing on in a course nearly parallel to the Euphrates, and falling into the Persian Gulf by a channel of its own. The latter, the Gihon, has not been identified with the same unanimity. Professor Delitzsch l detects the Gihon, which was probably the Accadian Gughana, mentioned along with the Tigris and the Euphrates in the cuneiform inscriptions, in the Schatt-en-Nil, " another arm of the Euphrates which led from Babylon itself, and, after passing by the ancient city of Erech (where now the ruins of Warka exist), ultimately discharged its waters again into the main stream of the Euph- rates. In this opinion Professor Sayce 2 appears to concur. Canon Rawlinson, 8 however, proposes 1 Wo lag das Parodies ? p. 45 ff. ; cf. the Rev. Chas. H. H. Wright, D.D., in Nineteenth Century, Oct. 1 882, Art. " The Site of Paradise." 2 "Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments," p. 31. 8 Monthly Interpreter, April 1885, Art. "The Site of Paradise." 58 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. to find the Gihon and the Hiddekel in the two streams into which the Tigris divides at Kut-el- Amarah, the former in the eastern arm or Tigris proper, and the latter in the Schatt-el-Hie, which retains the direction of the original river. It is, of course, impossible to arrive at absolute certainty with regard to this point; but enough has been ascertained to show that in all probability the Cradle of the Race was in Southern Babylonia. For the present, however, it will suffice to extend our view to the larger region included in a circle drawn through the three sites that have been remarked upon, in Babylonia, in Armenia, in the mountains of Hindu-Kush. There cannot be a doubt that the Mosaic record traces back the origin of man to some spot or other within that region ; and to that region also converges all the collateral evidence furnished by mythology and philology as to the primitive abodes of the race. " The ancient traditions of the European nations as to their own origin and early history conduct the inquirer con- stantly to the Caucasian regions, to Asia Minor, to Phoenicia, and to Egypt ; countries all of them contiguous to, in the vicinity, and even on the coast of that central region. Among the primitive Asiatic nations the Chinese place the cradle of their origin and civilisation in the north-west THE CRADLE OF THE RACE. 59 province of Shensee ; and the Indians fix theirs towards the north of the Himalaya Mountains." l The tongues of men, it has been said, when arranged according to the lines of their respective affinities, appear to radiate from a common centre in Western Asia, " where we find a cluster of the most ancient and perfect languages;" while an eminent authority, 2 mapping out the races of man- kind according to a similar principle of affiliation, obtains the lines of their convergence, and, as a consequence, the place of their origination, in an imaginary continent, Lemuria, now submerged in the Indian Ocean. 3 "There is also sufficient reason to conclude," writes another, "that all animals and plants have spread from some local centres of creation," and that "the district of Asia, in the vicinity of the Euphrates and Tigris, is the centre to which we can, with the greatest probability, trace several of the species of animals and plants most useful to man." 4 Nor does it 1 Schlegel's " Philosophy of History," p. 83 (Bohn). 2 Haeckel, " History of Creation," chap, xxiii. and Table xv. ; cf. "The Evolution of Man." p. 183. 3 "This view has found a recent advocate in General Charles Gordon, R.E., who locates the Garden of Eden in the vicinity of the Seychelles Islands, situated to the north of Madagascar. See "Palestine Exploration Fund, Quarterly Statement," April 1885, Art. " Eden and Golgotha." * Dawson, "Origin of the World," p. 237. 60 THE PATKIARCHAL TIMES. militate against this conclusion, that as yet the earliest traces of man discovered by geological research have been confined to Southern and Western Europe, because obviously "until these Asiatic regions have been examined it were pre- mature to hazard any opinion as to man's first appearance on the globe." 1 2. The primeval condition of the race is no less explicitly set forth in the Mosaic record. The last of animated creatures to appear on earth man, Adam, was also the noblest. Fashioned from the dust of the ground, 2 whether by immediate or mediate creation is not expressly stated, although the former seems to be implied in the use of the term " bara," **"??> 3 ne was niade in " the image and likeness" of Elohim. Whatever the distinc- tion between the two terms, " image," tselem, and " likeness," damuth, it is impossible to understand them, when conjoined, as importing less* than that the primus homo possessed a full-orbed manhood, as completely furnished with mental faculties and moral sensibilities as with physical organs, though to the perfect exercise of neither had he then attained. The brief sketch of his Edenic life, supplied by the sacred narrative, unquestion- 1 Page, "The Philosophy of Geology," p. 115. 2 Gen. ii. 7. 3 Gen. L 26. THE CRADLE OF THE RACE. 61 ably leaves the impression that the primeval ancestor of humanity was, from the outset of his career, a being capable of speech, of large discourse of reason, of social affections, of moral intuitions. Located in a garden of unparalleled beauty and fertility, containing " every tree that was pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he was charged by Jehovah Elohim " to dress it and to keep it," which implied that he could both understand the language of command and direct his activity by means of intelligence. The prohibition under which he was placed with regard to the tree of knowledge, taken in connection with the penalty by which he was threatened in case of disobedience, shows him to have been a subject of moral govern- ment. His naming of the animals when these were presented to him, and much more his instan- taneous recognition of the helpmeet provided for him "This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh : she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man" demonstrates that his intellectual powers existed in a state of readi- ness to be called forth into exercise by appropriate excitements ; while both incidents reveal that he was capable of uttering his thoughts in articulate 62 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. speech. The above ejaculation when he first beheld Eve Chavah, the mother of all living admits of no doubt that he knew himself to be endowed with social affections ; and this conclusion will be strengthened if we may suppose that the words, "Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife ; and they shall be one flesh," were his rather than the writer's. The story of the temptation and the fall necessitates the assumption not only that he was innocent, but that his religious nature was in active operation. The entire narrative depicts a condition of existence in which man's sentient, intellectual, social, moral, and religious instincts had each its approximate and adequate environ- ment : his body, the fair and fertile Paradise which formed his home ; his mind and heart, the scenery of Eden, the company of the lower creatures, the affection of Eve ; his moral and religious capacities, the favour and fellowship of God. Nothing can be clearer than that, according to the writer of the Book of Genesis, man did not step upon the scene of earth as "the twenty-second and final stage" in a long ancestral pedigree, of which the one-celled, soft, structureless Monera, or "organ- ism without organs," was the first, and the speech- THE CRADLE OF THE RACE. 63 less Apeman or Alalus the last progenitor; 1 but bearing in his upright form and on his noble brow, as well as evincing in his lofty intelligence, his godlike speech, his moral purity, and religious aspirations the tokens of a heavenly origin as well as of a perfect manhood. Nor did the writer think of man as beginning his terrestrial career at the lowest point of savageism, and slowly advancing by stages imperceptible, if not well- nigh infinitesimal, to the pinnacle of mental and moral greatness on which he now stands ; but exactly contrary to this, in the subsequent de- velopment of man's history, the Hebrew author represents him as having lapsed from the high estate of innocence and felicity in which he first appeared, and as having, through the entrance of sin, degenerated and declined into a state of barbarism, intellectual and moral no less than physical, out of which it is the aim of His Creator to eventually raise him. Whatever opinion may be formed of the credibility of such views as to man's primeval condition, it does not appear possible to deny that such are the views pro- pounded in the sacred books of both the Hebrew and the Christian Church. That these views, however, are incorrect, and 1 Haeckel, "The Evolution of Man," p. 189. 64 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. must now be replaced by others, framed on a different hypothesis as to man's origin, is with no small degree of confidence asserted by extreme evolutionists of the school of Darwin and Lyell, Huxley and Haeckel, Lubbock 'and Fiske. Accord- ing to this theory, which has been appropriately styled the Bestial or Savage Theory of Man's Origin, the primitive condition of mankind was one of " utter barbarism," x " out of which several races have independently raised themselves ; " or, to apply somewhat milder language, " of a lowly and primitive nature, with everything to acquire, and no accumulated experience to assist." 2 " The Pyramids of Egypt seem like things of yesterday, when we think of the cave-men of Western Europe in the Glacial Period, who scratched pictures of mammoths on pieces of reindeer antler with a bit of pointed flint. Yet during an entire geologic aeon before these cave-men appeared on the scene, " a being erect upon two legs," if we may quote from Sergeant Buzfuz, " and wearing the outward semblance of a man, and not of a monster," wan- dered hither and thither over the face of the earth, setting his mark upon it as no other creature yet 1 Sir John Lubbock, British Association Paper (Dundee) ; cf. " Prehistoric Times." 2 Page, " Man : Where 1 Whence ? Whither ? " p. 83. THE CRADLE OF THE KACE. 65 had done, leaving behind him innumerable tell-tale remnants of his fierce and squalid existence, yet too scantily endowed with wit to make any written disclosure of his thoughts and deeds." l Those predecessors of the cave-men, according to the author of " Cosmic Philosophy," were evolved from the Catarhine apes, and were the actual progenitors of the human family. The grounds upon which these assertions are made are not, as one might have anticipated, either so numerous or so self- evident as to constrain immediate acceptance, although the last-named writer somewhat ex- travagantly exclaims : " There is no more reason for supposing that this conclusion will ever be gainsaid than for supposing that the Copernican astronomy will some time be overthrown, and the concentric spheres of Dante's heaven reinstated in the minds of men ; " 2 on the contrary, the amount of solid argument advanced in support of this con- clusion is disappointingly small, and consists mainly of a number of propositions that cannot be said to have been themselves made good. These proposi- tions are : (i.) That the early traces of man upon the earth, as attested by the implements he has used, can be arranged in three great divisions, cor- 1 John Fiske, "Man's Destiny," p. 55. 2 " Man's Destiny," p. 20. 66 THE PATEIAECHAL TIMES. responding to what the Danish archaeologists have styled the Stone, the Bronze, and the Iron Ages ; (2.) That the existence of savage races, squalid in physical appearance, feeble in intellectual capacities, absolutely ignorant of civilisation, and totally de- void of religion, proves barbarism to have been the primitive condition of mankind ; (3.) That the in- evitable absorption or extermination of lower races of mankind by higher warrants the conclusion that the latter have been preceded by the former, e.g., " that the Caucasian or White Man has been pre- ceded by the Mongol, Red Indian, and Malay, and that these in turn were preceded by the Ethiopian or Negro ; " l and (4.) That man's demonstrated (?) affinity to and evolution from the lower creatures shows him to have started his career on earth in the manner maintained by modern science. But first, with reference to the so-called Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, it is certain that, while "on the whole this has been the general order of succession in Europe, where men used stone and bone before they had discovered the use of metal, and learned how to obtain bronze before they knew anything of the metallurgy of iron," 2 it is impossible to build upon that succession anything like a strict chrono- 1 Page, "Man: Where? Whence? Whither?" p. 81. 2 Geikie, " Text-Book of Geology," p. 902. THE CRADLE OF THE RACE. 67 logical table as to man's appearance upon the earth. Besides being a matter of extreme difficulty to decide with precision as to the antiquity of an implement merely from its rudeness, it is now recognised by geologists and archaeologists alike that the three ages have in some instances existed side by side in the past as we see them do in the present ; that the discovery of stone or bronze im- plements in one part of the world can be no index whatever of the state of civilisation in another; and that the use of rude stone implements by a people is not necessarily a sign of their barbarous condition. In short, as the Duke of Argyll justly observes, " there is no proof whatever that such ages ever existed in the world." 1 As to the second proposition, that man's original condition was one of barbarism, because to-day the Hotten- tots besmear their bodies with grease, never wash their clothes, and load their hair with soot and fat ; because the Andaman Islanders, whom Pro- fessor Owen considers " the most primitive or lowest in the scale of civilisation of the human race," live chiefly on fruit, mangroves, and shell-fish, cover themselves with mud, and wear no clothes ; and because the Australian aborigines have no religion nor any idea of prayer, but believe in evil 1 " Primeval Man," chap. iii. 68 THE PATKIARCHAL TIMES. spirits and have a great dread of witchcraft one wonders how an intelligent person like Sir John Lubbock could mistake this for logic. Granting that contemporary savage life is as deplorable as he paints it, the question remains whether it has not resulted from antecedent civilisation. Sir John thinks that "if the Cape of Good Hope, Australia, New Zealand, &c., had ever been in- habited by a race of men more advanced than those whom we are in the habit of regarding as the aborigines, some evidence of this kind would have remained," and that " none of our travellers having observed any ruins, or other traces of a more advanced civilisation, there does not appear to be any sufficient reason for supposing these miserable beings to be at all inferior to the ancestors from whom they are descended." * But Sir John himself affirms that in a cave on the north-eastern coast of Australia were observed certain "tolerable figures of sharks, porpoises, turtles, lizards, trepans, star-fish, clubs, canoes, water -gourds, and some quadrupeds, probably intended to represent kangaroos and dogs," which were not the work of the natives, and were by them ascribed to diabolic agency ; while, as to the Tasmanians, 2 who had no canoes when visited by 1 " Prehistoric Times," pp. 337, 338. 2 Ibid., pp. 347, 348. THE CRADLE OP THE KACE. 69 Captain Cook, and whom a modern writer scarcely regards as rational beings, it has been properly observed that their ancestors could not have reached the island without canoes. Then the fact that modern savageism is generally found in un- propitious settlements at the earth's extremities, as it were rather points, as the Duke of Argyll has shown, 1 to deterioration and degeneration through the driving forth of the weaker tribes of mankind to the less hospitable and more sterile regions of the globe, than to indigenous growth and aboriginal production ; so that the absence of all traces of an earlier civilisation in any defi- nite locality does not necessarily prove that its inhabitants were not descended from ancestors superior to themselves. The third argument, that because certain uncivilised races are, in different quarters of the globe, seen to retire before or become absorbed in certain higher races with which they come in contact, therefore the latter must have been evolved from the former, does not strike one as a specimen of convincing ratiocination; while the fourth, that man, being descended from the apes, must have started life at a point scarcely removed from a bestial condition, proceeds on an unproved hypothesis, as Haeckel himself practically 1 " Primeval Man," chap. iii. 70 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. admits, in conceding that the ape-like man or inter- mediate link between the gorilla and the genus homo is awanting, is in fact lying with the lost con- tinent Lemuria at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Nor is it merely that the reasoning usually urged in support of the savage theory of man's origin is inconsequential as well as insufficient, but considerations of the highest moment speak in corroboration of the view propounded in the Hebrew Scriptures. (i.) It is certain that many races now existing as savages have lapsed into that condition through a process of degeneration. Of the Veddahs of Ceylon, who now, according to Sir John Lubbock, " do not seem to have any reli- gion," according to Mr. Bailey are " more barbarous specimens of the human race " than one can well conceive, and, according to Sir Emerson Tennent, " make themselves understood by signs, grimaces, and guttural sounds which have little resemblance to definite words or language in general," Max Muller writes l that " if they now stand low in the scale of humanity, they once stood higher ; nay, they may possibly prove in language, if not in blood, the distant cousins of Plato and Newton and Goethe;" the ground of this assertion being that " more than half the words used by them are 1 " Chips from a German Workshop," vol. iv. p. 360. THE CRADLE OF THE RACE. 71 mere corruptions of Sanscrit." (2.) There is evi- dence, already ample and constantly increasing, that the farther back we travel in the line of history we arrive at traces of civilisations, now vanished, that show the early men by whom this globe was tenanted and subdued to have been of vigorous capacity, both in mind and body. Be- ginning with the New World, it is enough to mention the marvellous works of the mound builders l that have been exhumed in the Missis- sippi valley, magnificent remains of a civilisa- tion so ancient, that by the modern American Indians it was never known to have existed. The excavations of Dr. Schliemann on the site of ancient Ilium afford another illustration. Priam's capital was destroyed by the heroes of Agamemnon in or about B.c. 1 300 ; and now that the spade of the German archaeologist has laid open the buried secrets of Hissarlik, it is found that no fewer than five different civilisations lie above one another, the undermost of which was probably coeval with that of the earliest monarchies of Assyria and Egypt. What kind of culture prevailed on the banks of the Euphrates and the Nile between 3000 and 2000 years before Christ, one may learn from the cuneiform inscriptions of Babylonia and 1 See Wilson's " Prehistoric Man," chaps, x., xvi. 72 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. the hieroglyphic monuments of Egypt, which are every day shedding fresh light upon the manners and customs of these early times. (3.) If we push our inquiries farther back, and inquire into the condition of the so-called Palaeolithic men, we shall find in the great variety of their implements, as well as in the degree of excellence to which they appear to have attained in the carving of bone and ivory, no small indication that the primitive occu- pants of the globe were not the ignorant and in- capable savages they are sometimes represented to have been ; and this conclusion will derive con- firmation by reflecting that, if they were savages who owed their subsequent elevation entirely to their own unaided efforts, the greatest and most beneficent inventions by which the race of man has profited must, have proceeded from men who were least capable of the same. " It may possibly be true," writes the Duke of Argyll, " as Whately argues, that man never could have discovered the use of fire and the use of corn without Divine instruction. If so, it is fatal to the savage theory. But it is equally fatal to that theory if we assume the opposite position, and suppose that the noblest discoveries ever made by man were made by him in primeval times." 1 (4.) If we finally compare 1 " Primeval Man," chap. iii. THE CRADLE OF THE RACE. 73 the cerebral development of these so-called Palaeo- lithic or primitive men, we shall find that they afford no evidence whatever of graduating into inferior races. " The expectation of always meet- ing with a lower type of human skull," says Sir Charles Lyell, 1 " the older the formation in which it occurs, is based on the theory of progressive development, and it may prove to be sound ; nevertheless we must remember that as yet we have no distinct geological evidence that the appear- ance of what are called the inferior races of man- kind has always preceded in chronological order that of the higher races." Hence, on the ground of strictly scientific evidence, there is not only no sufficient warrant for rejecting as incorrect, but, on the contrary, much encouragement for accepting as true, the scriptural declaration that man began his terrestrial career, not as the descendant of a tailless simian, but as a son of the living God. 1 " The Antiquity of Man," p. 90. IV. THE STORY OF THE FALL. THAT man was ushered into being in possession of a fully formed, if not also of a perfectly developed manhood, that his mental faculties were all in existence from the first, though not all instantane- ously or simultaneously called into exercise, that his moral nature was at least exempt from sin, if it was not unassailably established in goodness, and that his capacity for religion was not a latent possibility waiting evolution at a later stage, but a sublime actuality of which he became conscious the instant he crossed the threshold of life, is the express and unambiguous testimony of the Hebrew Scriptures ; and this testimony, as has been shown, so far from being contradicted, is rather strikingly confirmed by the best scientific findings, as well as the most authentic historical investigations. That man, however, is not now so unchallengeably the image of his Maker as he was THE STORY OF THE FALL. 75 at the creation, that his manhood has not developed itself along the lines of holiness and truth, as, from the conditions under which he commenced his career, might have been anticipated, that his mental faculties have not been able to keep them- selves disentangled from error, that his moral nature has not retained its pristine innocence, that his religious capacity has in large degree under- gone a contraction, if it has not in some instances entirely shrivelled up, is no less palpably and irrefragably the witness of world-wide experience. Whatever theories may be resorted to in search of an adequate explanation, the fact of man's present intellectual and moral imperfection is too obvious to be denied, even by those who refuse assent to scriptural conceptions of truth and error, of sin and holiness, of a fall and a redemption. Accord- ingly the object of the present paper will be to inquire whether any reasonable solution can be offered of the existing state of humanity, whether on any credible hypothesis it can be accounted for that man, having started on his high career of conscious existence in the manner above described, with a complete array of mental powers, and with a moral nature uncontaminated by sin, should nevertheless have lapsed universally into a con- dition of ignorance and error, of sinfulness and 76 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. wretchedness, out of which he can only raise him- self, if indeed he can do so at all without super- natural assistance, after long and painful effort, and sometimes into a state of bestiality and savageism out of which, even with the aid of heaven, it would almost seem as if recovery were impossible ; or whether it must remain for ever, to man himself at least, if not to finite intelligences generally, a dark and inscrutable enigma. Ad- hering to the method thus far pursued, we shall first address our inquiry to the Mosaic narrative of man's primeval state, after which we shall interrogate the records of ancient nations so far as these have been rendered accessible through his- torical and archaeological research, and conclude with a brief examination of the bearing on this profound problem of modern science and philo- sophy. i. The Hebrew solution of this enigma is contained in "the story of the fall," which in the Old Testament Scriptures finds a place in immediate succession 1 to the account given of man's paradisiacal or primeval condition. Located in Eden, in a garden of surpassing love- liness and fertility, the site of which forms the subject of the preceding chapter, the first man was 1 Gen. iii. i. THE STORY OF THE FALL. 77 entrusted with the pleasant as well as easy task of dressing and keeping it, i.e., of cultivating it as well as guarding it against the inroads and depredations of the larger animals that roamed without. In the midst of it, and conspicuous amongst the other plants, were two trees in which for him both interest and expectation centred the tree of life, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It does not accord with the purpose of this inquiry to linger over the speculations of theologians and commentators as to what kind of trees they were ; it suffices to observe that their names were signifi- cant of the uses to which they were put in the moral and religious probation of man. The tree of life was symbolic of that physical as well as spiritual immortality which belonged to him so long as he continued obedient to the law of his Creator, which law for him, as yet untrained in the application of moral distinctions, was summed up in the simple injunction not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In the day that he transgressed that precept, he would fall beneath the doom of death, he would forfeit the prospect of immortality that lay before him, he would die, as only a soul can die, by being severed in the springs of its being from God, who is its life, and he would expire as an earth-born creature expires, in the 78 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. only way possible for such, by returning to the dust out of which it was taken. If, as is pro- bable from the biblical account of the transac- tion, this instruction was given to Adam prior to Eve's appearance by his side, there cannot be a doubt that she was forthwith made aware by her husband of the conditions under which he, as the head of the future family of man, had been placed. As much as this is presupposed in the narrative which follows. In the assault upon Eve's integrity made by the Nachash, or serpent, he assumes her acquaintance with the prohibition under which Adam had been placed "Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of any tree in the garden ? " and this assumption the woman recognises as correct by replying, "Of the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat ; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die." Nevertheless the woman yields to the further enticements of the tempter, and at last discerning the tree, on which she has begun to gaze with longing eyes, to be "good for food," "a delight to the eyes," and "a tree to be desired to make one wise," she reaches forth her hand and partakes of the forbidden fruit, giving of it to her husband either then, if he was present, or after- THE STORY OF THE FALL. 79 wards, if he was at a distance, so that he also becomes a participant in her transgression. The result was as the Nachash had predicted, though not at all as they had expected. " Their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked." They had attained to an experimental knowledge of evil which they did not before possess, no less than of good, which they then realised by its loss. That their moral natures had suffered a change for the worse was revealed by the guilt and shame of which they instantly became conscious, by the terror which seized upon them when they heard the voice of Jehovah Elohim walking in the garden in the cool of the day, by the lying and deception with which they sought first to hide and then to extenuate their crime, by the fact also that their offspring were more appropriately described as begotten in their father's image than created, as he had been, in God's, and by the melancholy history of their first-born sons, of whom the elder lived to be an unbeliever and a murderer, while the younger died beneath a fratricidal blow. Whatever view be entertained of the historic credibility of the Hebrew narrative, whether the two mystic trees and the speaking serpent be regarded as authentic realities, or relegated to the 80 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. limbo of the poetic imagination 1 as specimens of that luxuriant verbal drapery in which the religious myth was wont in ancient times and in Oriental countries to clothe itself, it is impossible to doubt that the doctrinal residuum which remains after all that is supposed to be non-essential has been brushed aside is, that, on the threshold of exist- ence, and in the person of the original progenitor of the race, human nature suffered such a dissocia- tion as fundamentally affected all subsequent pos- terity, causing it to be born in a state of sin rather than in a condition of holiness or innocence, and determining the line of its future development to be downward and retrogressive instead of upward and progressive. Whether the Pauline conception of inherited guilt and condemnation, as well as of transmitted moral depravity, can be fairly extracted from the Mosaic narrative of the Fall may be dis- puted. It is hardly open to debate that the prac- tice of sacrificial worship in which the first pair of Adam's descendants engaged, whether that peculiar cultus was of Divine institution or of human inven- tion, proceeded on the supposition that man was not only fallen into sin, but lying under condemna- tion, not only deteriorated in his moral nature, but standing in altered relations to God from those 1 Tuch, Bolilen, Oort, &c. THE STORY OF THE FALL. 81 which he occupied before the incident in Eden. We are far indeed from thinking either that that incident itself is purely fabulous, or that the record of it is entirely mythical or allegorical. To our mind it seems impossible to challenge its historical accuracy in the face of the allusions l made to it in the New Testament by Christ and His apostles, or even in the Old Testament by writers of repute in the Hebrew Church. But even if it were permissible to cast suspicion on its literary form, it does not appear possible to doubt that, in the estimation of the author of Genesis, of the Hebrew prophets, of Christ, and of the writers of the New Testament Scriptures, man's present state or condition is the result of a gigantic moral and spiritual catastrophe which human nature suffered at the outset of its career ; or, to use the terminology of science, is the effect and exhibition of a tendency to degeneration, with which as a self-conscious organism it is affected, rather than an intermediate and imperfect stage in an upward process of evolution through which it is slowly but surely passing. 2. Turning to the records of ancient heathen nations, so far as these have been disclosed by the 1 John viii. 44 ; Rom. v. 12, 14, 18 ; i Cor. xv. 21, 22 ; 2 Cor. xi. 3 ; i Tim. ii 13, 14 ; Job xxxi. 33 ; Eccles. vii. 29 ; Isa. xliii. 27 ; Hos. vi. 7. F 82 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. labours of the historian and archaeologist, it is, to say the least, remarkable how large a degree of correspondence prevails between the various solu- tions of this mystery as to man's present condition which these offer and that which we have seen unfolded in the Hebrew Scriptures and indeed in the Bible generally. Nor is it simply that they corroborate the central truth contained in the Eden story, that human nature has experienced a fall, but in a striking manner also they lend a high degree of probability to the literal correctness and historic credibility of the Hebrew narrative. (i.) The Babylonian or Ancient Chaldean tradi- tion, as deciphered from the cuneiform tablets, unmistakably alludes to the doctrine of a fall. It may be problematical whether, as maintained by Mr. George Smith, Sir Henry Rawlinson, Pro- fessor Sayce, and others, the district of Kardunias, with its four rivers, Euphrates, Tigris, Surappi, and Ukui, was the actual site of Eden ; it seems unchallengeable that the first inhabitants of that fertile region possessed no inconsiderable acquaint- ance with an early condition and history of man- kind closely resembling that reported in the Hebrew Scriptures. 1 George Smith, indeed, supposed he had recovered a valuable fragment relating to that 1 "Chaldean Genesis," pp. 81-91. THE STORY OF THE FALL. 83 memorable passage in the Paradise experience of man. After describing on its obverse side, as he imagined, the purity of the first man who, by the way, belonged to the dark races, and was called Admi or Adami and his fellowship with the gods, this fragment was supposed to set forth on its reverse side an imperfect account of what seemed to be a Chaldean legend of the fall. The lost lines of writing, it was assumed, recounted the temp- tation. Where the fragment began, the dragon Tiamat, or the dragon of the deep, was introduced, it was conjectured, as the instrument or agent by whom man's seduction was accomplished. Towards the close, the Lord of the earth was thought to be depicted as cursing in somewhat vehement fashion the man who had " corrupted his purity." " In the language of the fifty great gods, By his fifty names he called, and turned away in anger from him : May he be conquered, and at once cut off. Wisdom and knowledge hostilely may they in- jure him : May they put at enmity also father and son, may they plunder." Mr. Smith's translation, however, appears to have been hastily made, and widely differs from 84 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. that subsequently executed by Dr. Jules Oppert. Alluding to this, 1 M. Lenormant says : " One thing is now quite established the fragment has no kind of reference to original sin and the curse of man." Professor Sayce 2 regards it as having been a hymn to the Creator. Nevertheless both agree with the opinion expressed by Mr. Smith, that " a form of the story of the fall, similar to that of Genesis, was known in early times in Babylonia." Not only were the primitive Accadians acquainted with " a wicked serpent," the serpent of night and darkness, which had brought about the seduction of man an archaic Babylonian seal, preserved in the British Museum collection, represents " two figures sitting one on each side of a tree, holding out their hands to the fruit, while at the back of one is stretched a serpent ; " but the tree of life had its counterpart in the holy and mysterious plant " the pine-tree of Eridu " which was guarded by genii and a sword turning to all the four points of the compass, and of which numerous representations occur in Assyrian bas-reliefs. Though as yet no text has been discovered authoritatively fixing the precise import of the symbol, there can be little question that it was designed as an emblem of immortality. 1 Contemporary Review, Sept. 1879, Art. "The First Sin." 2 " Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments," pp. 29, 30. THE STORY OF THE FALL. 85 This at least is a not unwarrantable deduction from the circumstance that it frequently appears sur- mounted by a winged disc, which was recognised as the symbolic image of the Supreme God. It likewise tends to confirm his interpretation that in the idiom of the ante- Semi tic population of Chaldea the name of Babylon, Tin-tir-ki, signified " the place of the tree of life." Perhaps also the lines which follow, taken from a penitential psalm l of the same pre-Semitic Babylonians, and belong- ing to a date anterior to the seventeenth century B.C., contain a reminiscence of the Fall : " That which was forbidden by my God, with my mouth I ate ; That which was forbidden by my goodness, in my ignorance I trampled upon ; " and again in the same hymn : " The forbidden thing did I eat ; The forbidden thing did I trample upon." (2.) Passing now to the Indian tradition, 2 which may be viewed as preserving the faith of the early Aryan tribes on this important subject, the same 1 "Records of the Past," pp. 153, 154. 2 M. Lenormant, Contemporary Review, Sept. 1881, Art "Ararat and Eden." 86 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. constituent features a garden with its four rivers and two trees, a period of felicity and innocence, a serpent and a fall enter into the picture which it sketches of man's primeval condition. Accord- ing to this ancient myth, the cradle of the human race was a highly elevated tableland in Central Asia overlooked by a lofty mountain, Meru, or "that which has a lake," and encircled by four peaks of lesser elevation, each of which in turn had a smaller lake, supplied from the celestial source Ganga. Meru was the residence of the holy gods. The expansive plateau on which it stood rejoiced in the names of Svarga-bhuni or Celestial Land, Suvarna-bhuni or Golden Land, Akrida-bhuni or Land of Amusements, Tushita-bhuni or Land of Joy, with others of an equally euphonious descrip- tion. On each of the four lesser hills and close to its lake an enchanted garden was supposed to exist, in the midst of which grew a wonderful tree called Kalpavrikcha, Kalpadruna, or Kal- pataru, meaning, " Tree of the desires or periods," which appears to have been both a tree of life and a tree of knowledge of good and evil, since it prolonged the days of him who ate of it by ful- filling all his desires. From the four lakes issued forth four streams to the four different quarters of the globe, corresponding to -the four Paradise THE STORY OF THE FALL. 87 Rivers in the Book of Genesis. Here, then, in this district of Meru, the first generations of the human family passed their existence in innocence and bliss. In the later Hindoo literature they are represented as having been endowed with righte- ousness and perfect faith, as having been exempt from guilt and filled with wisdom wherewith they contemplated the Glory of Vishnu till after a time they were seduced. The king of the evil demons, through whose instrumentality they were cast down from their integrity, was the king of the serpents, named Naga, or the Prince of the Nagis, a term in which some have detected an echo of the Hebrew word Nachash. As in the Hebrew story, so in this, the great serpent is depicted as being eventually conquered by one who tramples on its head. (3.) Closely allied to the preceding, both in origin and character, is the Iranian or old Persian* tradition. Here too the primitive abode of man is established on the summit of a lofty mountain, Hara-Berezaiti, situated in a cold northerly region east of the Caspian and Aral Seas. On its highest peak, where is " neither day nor night, nor icy wind nor burning heat, nor sickness 1 Lenormant, Contemporary Review, Sept. 1 879, Art. " The First Sin;" Sept 1881, Art. "Ararat and Eden." Schrader, Iliehm's Handwo'rterbuch des Bibliscken Alterthums, Art. " Eden." 88 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. which is the cause of numerous deaths, nor defile- ment produced by the daevas," is a garden, the Airyana-Vaedja, in the midst of which lies a lake, the Aravi-gura, from which the waters of immor- tality flow forth in four different streams. In the middle of the lake grows a single miraculous tree, as in the Indian myth, or, according to another account, two trees corresponding to those of the biblical Gan-Eden, the Vicpataokhma or " tree of every seed," from which come all the seeds belong- ing to the plant-world scattered over the earth, and " the white Haoma " or Gaokerena, the tree of life and immortality, the taste of which confers unending existence and protects from every variety of evil, while through it eventually will the dead be restored to life at the resurrection. In this garden of Ahuramazda the first man, Yama, passes his existence in the enjoyment of Edenic blessed- ness, till, falling into sin, he is cast out and given up to the dominion of the serpent, the evil spirit Angromainyus, who finally brings about his death by horrible torments. A later form of the legend, in the Bundehesh, makes the first pair, whose names are Masha and Mashyana, live a thousand years in abiding fellowship with Ormuzd, humble in heart, pure in thought, word, and deed, free from every evil and defect, and THE STORY OF THE FALL. 89 anticipating heaven as the reward of their con- tinued innocence. By and by, however, an evil demon (Dev) sent by Ahriman, and assuming the guise of a serpent, intrudes himself into their peaceful abode. First, he instils into their minds suspicious thoughts concerning Ahuramazda ; then, becoming bolder, offers them the fruit of the wonderful tree, Haoma, or of another tree which he causes to spring up beside it ; and finally com- pletes their seduction from his rival. As a con- sequence, evil inclinations arise within their hearts, their moral excellence departs, the happiness which they have hitherto enjoyed disappears, they are banished from their garden home. Becoming dwellers in the bleak and sterile country beyond the precincts of Paradise, they betake themselves to hunting, and begin to clothe themselves with the skins of wild beasts. The correspondence of all this with the Hebrew narrative is too appa- rent to require pointing out. (4.) With regard to Egypt, though it does not appear that the story of the fall had assumed any concrete form in the valley of the Nile, there are not wanting indica- tions that the early inhabitants of the Black Land accepted the fact of a fall as the proper explanation of man's sinful condition. At least the only re- presentative of evil in the ancient religion of the 90 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. subjects of Pharaoh was an enormous serpent, Apep, corresponding to the Apophis of the Greeks. That they believed in a great author of evil is undoubted ; while the antagonism, represented in their hieroglyphic pictures and mythical hymns, between the solar deities and this half dragon, half serpent, unmistakably points to their belief in the universal conflict between good and evil, if it does not also contain a reminiscence of the Eden story which is preserved in the Hebrew Scriptures. (5.) The similar traditions found in occidental countries, such as the well-known legends of Pan- dora's Box and the Garden of the Hesperides, current amongst the ancient Greeks, need not be dilated on, partly because of their later origin, but chiefly because of their less close resemblance to the biblical account. They agree with this no less than do the Oriental traditions above recited, in representing the first men as having lived in innocence and bliss, and in having suffered a fall ; but they do not so minutely harmonise in their details with the scriptural narrative as do these earlier Aryan and Chaldean myths. It has, in- deed, been thought by critics of the school of Bohlen that the Mosaic representation was im- mediately derived from the Persian, but, unless prepared to admit the post-exilic origin of Genesis, THE STORY OF THE FALL. 91 we entirely fail to see how any such position can be established. There is more probability in the conjecture that the Hebrew version was derived from the Chaldean, since Abraham and his descen- dants may reasonably be supposed to have been acquainted, more or less intimately, with the re- ligious beliefs prevailing amongst the early settlers in the Tigro-Euphrates valley. This, however, does not prove either that the Mosaic story is entitled to no more credence than these primitive Accadian and Aryan traditions which it resembles, or that that which is the kernel of them all, viz., the notion of a fall, was not a reality but a fiction. Rather the concurrence in their most essential details of the legends existing amongst the primi- tive Aryans and Semites points to their having had a common origin at a time when these nations had not yet begun to separate. And if it be asked whether a world-moving event such as a fall en- tailing disastrous consequences upon the entire family of man, or a poetic creation, however bril- liant and captivating, of some primeval singer, would be the likelier to affect the after currents of traditional recollection, the answer will not be far to seek. On no sound principle of reason can it be maintained that these ancient stories receive an easier or more satisfactory explanation by being 92 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. ascribed to the mythical spirit than by being traced back to a stupendous historical catastrophe such as that which they depict. Nay, if, as we believe, this latter is not only the preferable but the true hypothesis, it is only one step more to affirm that if such a declension as these primitive legends described occurred at all, the probabilities are that it occurred as the First Book of Moses represents. That such a step is even more than permissible, that it is almost rendered inevitable, the incom- parable superiority of the Hebrew story over these other legends with which it has been compared, in respect not only of religious elevation but also of literary sobriety, seems by no means unambigu- ously to declare. At the same time, as M. Lenor- mant has well observed, " it is not the form of the narrative that signifies here, but rather the dogma that it expresses, and this dogma of the fall of the human race, through the bad use that its earliest progenitors made of their free will, re- mains an eternal truth which is nowhere brought out with the same precision. It affords the only solution of the formidable problem which con- stantly returns to rear itself before the human mind, and which no religious philosophy outside of revelation has ever been able to solve." 3. Advancing to the final department in this THE STORY OF THE FALL. 93 inquiry, we have to ask what the verdicts are which modern science and philosophy have to deliver upon this momentous theme, and in par- ticular whether they can show cause why the solution of the problem as to man's present con- dition, furnished alike by the Hebrew Scriptures and by Oriental tradition, should not be accepted as correct. Passing by objections to the doctrine of a fall which proceed upon the denial of sin's existence, and dealing only with such as recognise the reality of moral distinctions, it may be urged with some degree of confidence that no assault can successfully be made against this fundamental tenet of the Hebrew and Christian religions on the side of philosophy. If moral evil be a reality, then it must have had a commencement, and that com- mencement must be sought for in the Great Head of humanity, the primus homo from whom the race has descended. The hypothesis that sin may have broken in upon mankind at a stage later than the beginning is not one that has ever been seriously formulated. The solidarity of the race and the law of heredity in morals render it at least the more probable assumption that the spiritual decay under which the race now pines fell upon it in the person of its original progenitor. No system of philosophy that recognises sin to be a 94 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. reality entertains a suspicion that the first sinner was not the first man. It may offer explanations as to how sin arose that are inconsistent with the biblical account, saying that sin is of necessity in- volved in the conception of a finite being, or in the historical transition of humanity from a state of nature to a state of culture ; but it does not call in question that sin did arise, that man did not enter on the stage of time in a state of sin but in a state of innocence, and that he passed from the one to the other through his own personal volition. It may be uncertain whether the first man's fall affected all his posterity in such a fashion as to render a fall on their part unnecessary, because of being already fallen ; it has no hesitation in asserting that the first man must have passed through a moral crisis such as the Scripture story depicts. When it rejects the idea of a hereditary transmission of moral depravity, it atones for its rejection of that too obvious phenomenon by in- sisting on as many falls as there are individuals in the race, for no true system of philosophy can shut its eyes to the fact that sin or moral evil is as universal as the race. Hence it may be argued that no valid argument can be offered by a reasonable philosophy against the Mosaic account of sin's en- trance into the world by man's yielding to seduc- THE STORY OF THE FALL. 95 tions and enticements pressed upon him from without; as to whether the fatal blandishments before which man fell were in any way connected with an evil spirit who might have used the serpent as an instrument for the accomplishment of his nefarious design, it does not seem that that lies within the legitimate province of a sober philo- sophy to determine. But if philosophy can present no insurmountable difficulty in connection with this subject, may not science be able to erect in the way of faith what wears the aspect at least of being an impassable barrier ? To not a few it looks as if it did. The notion of a fall such as Scripture repre- sents having taken place in the early history of man, is declared to be expressly negatived by the science of to-day. It is inconsistent, it is said, with the ascertained fact that death, which the biblical narrative alleges to have owed its entrance into the world to the transaction which occurred in Eden, in reality existed long before man appeared upon the scene at all ; and it is incompatible with the law of evolution as understood by the foremost scientists of the century, according to which man has never really suffered a lapse because in truth he began so low that a lapse was impossible but has constantly advanced from a less perfect to a more perfect condition, mentally, morally, socially, 96 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. and religiously. Certainly, if these allegations are established beyond cavil, this part of the old faith, however reluctantly, must be abandoned. But is it so that either the existence of death in the pre-Adamic world, or the law of evolution in the present world, is inconsistent with the doctrine of a fall ? With regard to the first, it is commonly assumed that the Bible declares the pre-Adamic world to have been free from death. Yet a careful exegesis shows that neither Moses nor Paul binds his readers down to any such position. The most that either can be fairly held as teaching is, that in the world of humanity death was unknown until man had transgressed. Unless, therefore, science can prove that man must have died even if he had continued innocent, there is no ground for insisting that irreconcilable opposition exists between the teaching of Scripture and the voice of science on the subject of a fall. But manifestly whether a sinless being would also of necessity have been mortal is a question lying beyond the sphere of physical science. Physical science can say that man as presently known to it is mortal : of man in a state or condition of existence of which it has no experience physical science can affirm nothing. Hence neither on the ground that death existed in the pre-Adamic world, which is an admitted fact, THE STORY OF THE FALL. 97 nor on the ground that death would have reigned over mankind even if the first man had not sinned, which is an unverifiable hypothesis, can physical science justly take exception to the biblical story of a fall. It is not, however, so clear that the law of evolution, if established, would permit us to adhere to the Scripture idea of a fall. A re- cent writer, Dr. Matheson, in a richly suggestive volume, 1 undertakes to show that it would. On the ground that the law of evolution as exhibited in nature does not demand a perpetual progress forwards and upwards, but admits of alternate advances and regressions, but chiefly on the ground that the fall of man was in reality an advance, being " the birth of his intellectual nature," which was ample compensation for the loss of his inno- cence, it appears to him that the old faith will not be destroyed by the assertion of the new. It is, however, extremely unlikely that this solution of the problem will satisfy either the biblical student or the scientific evolutionist. The former will find it difficult to admit that the intellect was not yet born in the being who, during the period of his innocence, was possessed of the divine image, and could hold fellowship with his Maker, who could understand moral distinctions as well as interpret 1 " Can the Old Faiih Live with the New ?" chap. via. G 98 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. the language of command, who could name the beasts of the field when they were brought to him in Paradise, and even recognise, as well as fitly desig- nate his wife when she was first beheld ; the latter will decline to concede that the moral nature of the first man was evolved before the intellectual, or that he was capable of exercising a "deliberate" moral choice when as yet he had not really entered on the stage of mental evolution. That a fall such as Scripture describes is wholly and finally incom- patible with a law of evolution such as Haeckel and scientists of the extreme materialistic school advocate, must be fairly and frankly recognised ; whether it may not harmonise with a modified evolutionism, such as Dr. Matheson ascribes to Mr. Spencer an evolutionism which is simply theism under a new name it seems premature to either affirm or deny. V. THE FIRST AGE OF HISTORY. THE course of human history may be divided into four successive eras : the antediluvian, reaching from the Fall to the Deluge, a space of at least 1 600 or 2000 years ; the patriarchal, commencing with the coming forth of Noah and his family from the ark, and terminating with the exodus of Israel from Egypt, a period of uncertain duration, but in all probability not less than ten or twelve centuries; the Mosaic, covering the 1500 or 1600 years be- tween the giving of the law and the birth of Christ; and the Christian, which, beginning with the Incar- nation, has already run for nearly 2000 years, and will eventually close with the second advent of the Son of man. The first of these eras was an age of mercy and forbearance, which opened with a signal act of clemency to the first pair, placing them and their descendants under a dispensation of grace and salvation, and closed with an overwhelming deed of judgment, when Heaven's gentleness was 100 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. despised, and Heaven's forgiveness refused. The second was an age of selection and separation, in which the God of redemption entered, as it were, upon a new experiment, that of committing the knowledge of His gracious purpose, along with the enjoyment of His salvation, not to mankind at large, as under the previous dispensation, but to a people specially chosen and trained for this end, the process of choosing and training being carried no farther during this stage than to fix upon the individual who should be the head of the future family, to separate his descendants from the other tribes of earth, and to bring them into a state of fitness for being formed into a nation. The third era was an age of preparation and anticipation, during which the chosen people were instructed in the fundamental ideas of religion, such as sin, holi- ness, fellowship with God, atonement, redemption, and regeneration, and the shadows of the good things to come were set up before them in the elaborate ritual of Mosaism. The fourth, still current, is by pre-eminence an age of revelation and redemption, in which, through the gospel of the resurrection, the clearest and fullest light has been cast upon Heaven's scheme of mercy, while all has been accomplished that is needful to render God's salvation accessible to man. The last is thus the THE FIRST AGE OF HISTORY. 101 culmination of the three preceding : the Christian era the fulfilment of the Mosaic, the complement of the patriarchal, the exponent of the antediluvian. Of this last the present paper treats. i. The historical details of the first or ante- diluvian age are recorded only in the Hebrew Scriptures. The authentic records of no other people than the Jews reach as far back as the days before the Flood. On a tablet lately recovered 1 from the Tigro-Euphrates Valley are the names of persons believed to have been early Chaldean or Babylonian kings that reigned after the Flood, and there is much plausibility in the conjecture that on the upper portion of the column, which is broken off, stood the names of kings that reigned before the Flood. As yet, however, nothing has been obtained by the archaeologist to cast light upon that long period of man's sojourn upon the earth. Nor have geologists been furnished with materials from which deductions might be drawn as to pre- diluvian man. The only information possessed con- cerning this morning time of history is that derived from the Mosaic narrative, and even of this the particulars are scanty. When the first pair iu Eden had, by eating the forbidden fruit, forfeited Divine favour and incurred the threatened penalty 1 " Babylonian Life and History," by Wallis Budge, p. 43. 102 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. of death, according to- the inspired record they were visited by Heaven's clemency rather than adjudged to richly merited retribution. While the tempter and his instrument, the serpent, were appropriately punished for their respective shares in the seduction of Adam and Eve, these, their victims, though not without experience of fatherly chastisements in the case of Adam a doom of labour, in that of Eve a lot of pain were ad- mitted to the hope of ultimate salvation for both themselves and their descendants, through faith in the future advent of One, announced to them as the woman's seed, who through suffering should destroy the adversary by whom they had been deceived, effect their emancipation from the power of sin beneath which they had fallen, and regain for them the inheritance of immortality which they had lost, and of the loss of which they were hence- forth to be reminded by exclusion from Paradise. That the first pair accepted this arrangement in humble faith, the Hebrew narrator appears to signify by stating that Adam called his wife's name Eve, Chavvah, living, or life, "because," said he, "she is, or shall be, the mother of all living ; " that they were in turn accepted by God seems intimated by the statement that " the Lord God made for Adam and his wife coats of skin," THE FIRST AGE OF HISTORY. 103 probably from the skins of animals slain in sacri- fice, " and clothed them." In due time the bene- diction * which had been pronounced upon them in the garden, but which had been suspended in its operation until the point was determined whether the Adamic race should be developed in a state of innocence or a state of sin that benediction, in which lay the promise and the potency of untold generations, began to take effect upon the pardoned pair. First, a son was born, whom the happy mother, in the exuberance of her joy and the freshness of her faith, named Cain, or possession, saying, "I have gotten a man from," or "with the help of the Lord," meaning no doubt that she saw in her babe at once a precious gift from heaven, and a bright pledge of the seed that was to come. Next, in the same birth, or, what is more likely, in a following, another son was added, to whom she assigned the name of Abel, or vanity, rather than " son," according to Dr. Jules Oppert, 2 who connects the Hebrew term ^n with the Assyrian Abil, " a son." Perhaps she so called her second born because already she had begun to feel a sense of disappointment in connection with her first, occa- 1 Gen. i. 28. 1 Monthly Interpreter, July 1885, Art. " The Old Testament in the Light of Recent Discoveries." 104 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. sioned, it lias been surmised, 1 by "the long and helpless infancy " through which it required to pass, " with the restraints which that infancy imposed, and the sedulous attention which it exacted ; " per- haps she desired to preserve a monument of the miseries of human life, of which it is possible she had been forcibly reminded by her maternal sorrow. That these were the first children of Adam and Eve the Scripture story suggests, though its silence does not warrant the deduction that other children, sons and daughters, were not born to them during the long interval which preceded the appearance of Seth. An old Arabian tradition mentions that Cain and Abel respectively had twin sisters, the twin of Cain, styled Achima, becoming afterwards the bride of Abel, and the twin of Abel, Lebuda, the bride of Cain. The natural conclusion from the record is that at the time of Abel's murder, which occurred shortly before the birth of Seth, the population of the world had so multiplied that a mark needed to be set on Cain, " lest any finding him should kill him." 2 It is impossible to state the exact num- ber of the earth's inhabitants at this early period ; it is equally impossible to doubt they formed a considerable company. 1 Kitto's "Daily Bible Illustrations" (sth ed.), p. 82. 2 Gen. ix. 15. THE FIRST AGE OF HISTORY. 105 On arriving at man's estate the two brothers turned to different occupations, the elder following the calling of an agriculturist, and the other that of a shepherd. " In process of time," or at the end of the days, i.e., at the close either of the year, at which season the Jewish Feast of Ingathering was afterwards kept, or of the week, when the Sabbath came round, the two went together to perform an act of worship to Jehovah. There is ground for thinking that the earliest altar was erected at the gate of Eden, immediately in front of the cherubim and revolving sword of fire which guarded the entrance to Paradise, and probably was regarded even then as the visible symbol of Jehovah's pre- sence. The offering presented by Abel " of the first- lings of his flock and the fat thereof " was accepted by the unseen Deity, who dwelt between the cheru- bim ; that of Cain, which consisted of the fruits of the ground, was rejected, being left, we may suppose, unconsumed upon the altar, while the gift of his brother had been licked up by the burn- ing flame as by a fiery tongue. Disappointed and enraged at what appeared the partiality of Heaven, the chafed agriculturist began to cherish wrathful thoughts against the God whose favour he had failed to secure. That God, however, did not cast him off, but in considerate mercy advised him of 106 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. the perilous as well as unjustifiable character of the feelings he was indulging, telling him there was reason for neither anger nor despair, that if he did well, i.e., followed Abel's example, and presented a right offering in a right spirit, he also should be accepted ; but that if he did not well, i.e., persisted acting in a contrary spirit, he would certainly find that sin was couching at his door like a wild beast ready to devour him. So far from soothing the ruffled temper of Cain, the prudent counsel of Jehovah deepened his resentment. Talking with his brother soon after on the subject, presumably of Jehovah's communication, and listening perhaps to fraternal admonitions which, in the heated temper of his soul, only added fuel to the flame, he grew further incensed, and, doubtless in a moment of unthinking rage, felled his brother to the ground. Whether he intended to commit murder may be doubted. As yet he had never seen a human being die. Kitto questions l whether Cain could have supposed man to be liable to death by violence. An old writer 2 cites the opinion that Cain was instigated by the devil to destroy his brother because of a fear which he, the devil, entertained that Abel, who was holy and 1 Kitto's " Daily Bible Illustrations " ($th ed.), p. 93. 2 Pererius, Commentaria in Genesim, vol. i. p. 733. THE FIRST AGE OF HISTORY. 107 innocent, and to God most pleasing, sanctus et innocens Deoque gratissimus, might be the woman's seed himself, or the progenitor thereof; and Mohammedan tradition states that the devil taught Cain how to do the deed by placing himself one day before the brothers as they walked in the fields, and shattering, with a stone which he lifted, the head of an approaching wolf. Whether the brothers had an altercation, as the Midrash sug- gests, about the share of this world's goods each was to get, or a disputation on some high point in divinity, as the Jerusalem Targum opines, may be left to the curious to determine. A more impor- tant question is, in what way did the murderer dispose of the dead body of his victim? Here again Oriental legend 1 interposes, affirming that Cain, carrying about the corpse upon his back, observed two crows fighting, the one of which killed the other, and, digging a hole in the earth with its beak, buried that other ; and that Cain, noticing the action, remarked, " I shall learn sense from this bird ; I too will bury my brother in the ground ; " which accordingly he did. Another tradition runs, that after Abel's death the dog which had kept his sheep guarded his body, while 1 Kitto's "Daily Bible Illustrations v (5th ed.), pp. 94, 95; Geikie's "Hours with the Bible," vol. i. p. 176. 108 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. Adam and Eve sat beside it, not knowing what to do, when a raven, whose friend was dead, said, " I will teach Adam a lesson." Preparing a hole in the soil, the sorrowing bird laid his friend therein, covering him up thereafter with earth ; which seeing, Adam and Eve exclaimed, "We will do the same with Abel." A modified form of this legend represents the raven as Satan, who had transformed himself into that bird of prey, and Cain as the one who buried Abel after witnessing the raven's performance, Adam and Eve remain- ing in ignorance of what had happened to their beloved son until one day Adam's ploughshare turned up the still distinguishable remains of Abel, when " he resigned himself to the will of God, and was comforted." The murder of Abel was quickly followed by Cain's expulsion from Eden, as Adam and Eve had already been ejected from the garden. The land of Nod, i.e., of wandering, whither he retired, described by Moses as lying to the east of Eden, has by Bohlen 1 been found in " India in its widest meaning ; " and, singularly enough, the cuneiform tablets have revealed that there must have existed in early times intercourse between Babylonia and India, pieces of teak having been found at Mug- 1 " Introduction to Genesis," vol. ii. p. 91. THE FIRST AGE OF HISTORY. 109 heir, the ancient Ur, and an old Babylonian list of articles of clothing, making mention of " cloth of wooden fibre " in Accadian and Sindhu, or " Sind cloth" in Assyro- Babylonian, which Professor Sayce l thinks cannot have been anything else than cotton, which must have been imported into Chal- dea from India. It is, however, probable, as the last mentioned writer suggests, that the land of Nod is to be looked for in the direction of Elam, which, according to the inscriptions, contained a "royal city," Nadit, situated on the river Nadit, as well as another town, named Nadia, in both of which appellations perhaps an echo of the Hebrew term should be heard. But be that as it may, to Nod the arraigned, convicted, and condemned, though reprieved fratricide migrated, accompanied by his wife, and, it may be assumed, by a company of Adam's other children, whom Calvin thinks had all gone in the way of Cain, as well as protected by a mark which God Jiad set upon him, or by a sign which God had given him, " lest any finding him should kill him." There he founded a family and eventually built a city, which he called Enoch, Chanoch, i.e., initiated or dedicated, after the name of his first-born son. If Enoch was so designated 1 Monthly Interpreter, July 1885, Art. "The OKI Testament in the Light of Recent Discoveries," pp. 177, 178. 110 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. because Cain had already begun to give promise of a renovated mind by engaging to instruct his offspring in the duties of virtue and religion, the same circumstance may account for his affixing the like appellation to his city. Thereby, writes Kalisch, 1 " he meant to intimate that the firstling of his social prosperity belonged to God, for he had learned to appreciate the value of His blessing ; and, at the same time, he perpetuated the name of his son in whom all his hope and all his joy were centred." It is the purest assumption to assert, as Bohlen does, 2 that the narrator here exactly reverses the true state of the case, that "the use of the name Enoch for an individual was certainly derived from its previous employment for the name of a city," and that the actual city which gave birth to the present so-called legend was " the very ancient commercial city of Chanoge, Arabic Khanug, San- scrit Kanya or Kubja, in Northern India, celebrated in the epics of the Hindoos, and called by the ancients Canogyza, of which the narrator might have heard." That the real city "Enoch" was nothing like that depicted by Macaulay 3 is appa- rent. Says the poet 1 " Commentary on Genesis," pro loco. 2 " Introduction to Genesis," vol. ii. p. 91. 3 Miscellaneous "Writings" The Marriage of Tirzah and Ahirad." THE FIRST AGE OF HISTORY. Ill " From all its threescore gates the light Of gold and steel afar were thrown ; Two hundred cubits rose in height, The outer wall of polished stone. On the top was ample space For a gallant chariot race. Near either parapet a bed Of the richest mould was spread, Where amidst flowers of every scent and hue Rich orange trees and palms and giant cedars grew." "It is much more likely," observes Geikie, 1 " that ' the city ' was simply an aggregate of huts or tents, strengthened against attacks from wild beasts by a rude stockade ; " while Kitto 2 thinks " an Irish mud-cabin " might form " no inadequate represen- tative of the buildings of Cain's city." The im- portant circumstance to be noted is that from this location or settlement as a centre the human race developed outwards in the line of Cain through seven or eight generations of which little more is known than the names of those heads of families who belonged to the main branch ; Enoch, Irad, townsman, a word which in Hebrew, according to Professor Sayce, 3 corresponds letter for letter with the name of the Babylonian city Eridu, "which 1 " Hours with the Bible," vol. i. p. 179. 2 " Daily Bible Illustrations," vol. i. p. 106. 3 Monthly Interpreter, August 1885, Ajt. "The Old Testament in the Light of Recent Discoveries." 112 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. was closely connected with the recollection of Paradise," Mehujael or smitten of God, Methusael or man of God, in Assyrian Mutu-sa-ili, Lamech or the strong youth, Jabal or the traveller, Jubal the player, and Tubal Cain the worker in brass and iron names the interpretations of which are largely conjectural, and are above provisionally given. From this point onward history is silent concerning individual members of the family of Cain, the story turning to pursue the fortunes of Seth, who, as the record indicates, was born in Adam's 1 3oth year, who was received by his grate- ful mother as a divine gift in compensation for the son that had been taken from her side, who ap- peared on reaching man's estate to have inherited the piety of his martyred brother, and who was honoured to transmit that piety to his son Enos a word, like Adam, signifying " man " in whose days "men began to call upon the name of the Lord." In this line also little more is recorded than a catalogue of names, 1 many of them closely resembling those occurring in the line of Cain, though not on that account warranting the hypo- thesis 2 that the two genealogies are different forms of the same legend. Cain, a possession', Mahalaleel, 1 Gen. v. 1-32. 2 Ewuld, " History of Israel," vol. i. p. 265. THE FIRST AGE OF HISTORY. 113 praise of God ; Jared, descent ; Enoch, dedicated ; Methuselah, man of a dart ; Lamech, strong, or young man ; Noah, rest, carry forward the history of the Sethites, till, becoming intermingled with the Cainites, in consequence of moral and spiritual degeneration they are along with these latter swept from the face of earth by a flood, Noah and his family alone escaping the devouring element. 2. The mental characteristics of the first age of history may with some degree of confidence be deduced from the pages of the Hebrew historian. Nothing can have been farther from the purpose of that writer than to represent the primitive inhabitants of the globe as a handful of Troglo- dytes or cave-men, burrowing like wild animals in holes, living on roots, and generally struggling upwards through a squalid and miserable existence, from a condition only one or two removes from that of the beasts of the field, as so many modern scientists assert. "It is a curious fact," says Russell Wallace, 1 "that while all modern writers admit the great antiquity of man, most of them maintain the very recent development of his intellect, and will hardly contemplate the possi- bility of men equal in mental capacity to ourselves having existed in prehistoric times." "Was the 1 British Association Address, 1876. II 114 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. primal man, supposing we are at liberty to use such a phrase, a savage or a civilised being?" asks Mr. Pengelly; 1 in the same publication re- plying to his own query, " I cannot answer this, but I know that the farther I have pursued man into antiquity, the ruder he has turned out to be." The exact value to be attached to the so-called scientific testimony as to man's primeval condition has already been pointed out ; 2 it will suffice here to show that according to the biblical account the men who peopled this globe in the dawn of history were by no means half-developed Pithecoids, but, if not intellectual giants in the modern sense of the expression, at least beings of no mean mental capacity. Not only was the first man, Adam, endowed with high intelligence at his creation, but after the Fall his two sons evinced themselves to be possessed of abilities to enter on the busi- nesses respectively of farming and shepherding, avocations to which savages are not usually found addicting themselves. Then, more particularly, Cain soon began to distinguish himself as a builder of cities. One of his descendants in the fifth gene- ration, Jabal, according to the double import of his name, traveller or producer, became an extensive 1 Kent's "Cavern:" a Lecture, 1876, p. 32. 2 " The Cradle of the Kace." THE FIRST AGE OF HISTORY. 115 sheep and cattle grazier, as well as breeder of stock, wandering about from place to place, and dwelling in tents as he tended his flocks ; another, Jubal, carrying out also the promise of his name, acquired reputation as a maker of musical instruments, which obviously presupposed by this time rude attempts at poetical and musical composition, the first ballad-maker probably being Lamech; a third, Tubal-Cain, signalised himself as the first smith who taught the art of working in iron and brass. Thus within the compass of a few verses we read of a variety of industrial occupations and mechanical arts, as well as of agricultural and pastoral pursuits. The early men were farmers, ploughmen and shepherds, architects and builders, sinkers of mines, workers in metal and wood, manufacturers of musical instruments, agricultural implements and warlike weapons, not to say com- posers of ballads and makers of tunes. Manifestly they had passed beyond, if we should not rather say they had not yet declined to, the stone-age of modern archaeology, when flint arrow-heads and stone hatchets were their most familiar utensils. They had even acquired some imperfect knowledge of the all-conquering principle of modern political economy, the division of labour, since while Tubal- Cain hammered out his swords, his half-brothers 116 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. Jabal and Jubal respectively took to rearing sheep and making flutes. Nor can it be maintained that this industrial activity was manifested only in the line of Cain. Though nothing is mentioned as to the mental calibre of the Sethites, it would be unsafe to infer that, in respect of intellectual capacity, these were behind their unbelieving con- temporaries. If the Scripture is silent as to the progress amongst them of civilisation, the reason may be found in this, that their chief distinction was neither the intelligence they possessed nor the energy they displayed, but the piety by which they were adorned. In any case, there is no cause for concluding that the early men who walked about on earth during the first or antediluvian age of history were pigmies in grasp of mind any more than in stature of body. If it is urged that Cain's city was in all probability little better than a collection of mud huts, that Jabal's tent was more than likely only a few ox-hides or sheep- skins stretched on poles, that Jubal's organ was a pan's pipe and nothing more, and that Tubal- Cain's swords were not exactly Toledo blades, it must nevertheless not be forgotten that the build- ing of the first city, the stretching of the first tent, the making of the first pipe, the fashioning of the first plough, and the forging of the first sword, THE FIRST AGE OP HISTORY. 117 were the works which required intellect and evinced genius, not the construction of the second city, the second tent, the second pipe, the second plough, or the second sword. George Stephen- son's " Travelling Engine," that crawled along the railway at Killingworth, 1 scarcely faster than a man could walk, was a greater triumph of intellect than the express locomotive, a model of elegance and power, that speeds along the line to-day at sixty miles an hour. It needs a giant to invent, though a pigmy may copy. Without adding that these primitive men must have been acquainted with the use of fire and the cultivation of cereals, it will be seen that enough has been advanced to demonstrate that " upon the whole the civilisation and knowledge in art of the antediluvians have been greatly underrated." 2 3. The religious ideas of the first age of history form an interesting study. These may be said to group themselves round the different figures that in turn rise into prominence. First, the age started in Adam and Eve with the fundamental conceptions of God, holiness, sin, grace, mercy, pardon. When the human consciousness awoke, it knew God and was known of Him. The fellow- 1 " Life of Stephenson," by Smiles, p. 89. 2 Kitto's "Daily Bible Illustrations " (sth ed.), p. 120. 118 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. ship existing in Eden between Creator and crea- ture rendered ignorance of man's relations to the Deity impossible. The tree of knowledge of good and evil instructed the first pair as to what was signified by holiness, at least in its negative as- pect, viz., abstinence from disobedience. The Fall brought to them acquaintance with sin in its positive conception. Happily, however, they be- gan their terrestrial career with thoughts suited to their needs as fallen and sinful beings. The non-infliction of the penalty denounced against transgression a penalty which they had incurred could not fail to remind them that God was merciful and gracious, long-suffering and slow to wrath. The promise of the woman's seed who should arise to bruise the serpent's head would probably enable them to perceive in some dim fashion the ground on which Heaven's clemency had been extended to them and should be extended to their posterity; while their cloth- ing with coats of skin might assist them to realise that they were already objects of divine favour. Then coming to the days of Cain and Abel, we discover an addition made to their circle of religious ideas. The duty of worship, at stated seasons, in stated places, and in stated forms, though doubtless not unknown to THE FIRST AGE OF HISTORY. 119 the first pair, acquires importance and receives emphasis from the incident recorded of their sons. The dedication of a seventh portion of time to physical rest and religious observance appears the best explanation of what was manifestly habitual practice on the part of the first brothers. The offering of slain victims when approaching God in worship, whether invented by the religious consciousness of man himself, or appointed by God's express command, by no means obscurely points to the doctrines of redemption through atoning blood and salvation by faith in pro- mised grace. The different fortunes of the wor- shippers, while showing the inherent difference in God's sight between faith and unbelief, re- flected light as well on the different destinies to which they led, the one, if to suffering, per- secution, and martyrdom on earth, likewise to divine approbation and ultimate vindication, the other to certain condemnation and appropriate retribution. Next, in the time of Enos, a step forward was taken by recognising the propriety as well as profit of combining in social worship, and definitely marking the distinction between the fellowship of faith or the Church and the community of unbelief or the world. Perhaps also then for the first time prominence was given 120 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. to the object of religious worship, as Jehovah or the covenanted God of redemption and salvation. In the era of Enoch, the seventh from Adam, further developments occurred. According to a New Testament writer, 1 Enoch predicted a general judgment of mankind by Jehovah, though whether at the close of the antediluvian or at the termina- tion of the current era is matter of debate; but restricting our view to the Hebrew narrative, the conceptions both of a super-terrestrial world and of a continued existence therein, on departing from this sublunary scene, could scarcely fail to present themselves to devout minds after, if they had not done so before, that holy man's transla- tion. Of course numerous attempts have been made to impeach the historical credibility of this remarkable occurrence, for the authenticity of which another New Testament writer 2 vouches. It has been understood 3 as importing merely that Enoch died early in comparison with the other patriarchs, as it is written in the Wisdom of Solomon 4 concerning the good man in general : " He pleased God, and was beloved of Him ; so that living among sinners he was translated;" and again, " For his soul pleased the Lord ; there- 1 Jude 14. 2 Heb. xi. 5. 3 Bohlen, " Introduction to Genesis," vol. ii. p. 104. 4 iv. 10, 14. THE FIRST AGE OF HISTORY. 121 fore hasted He to take him away from the wicked ; " or as Livy * has recorded of Romulus, nee deinde in terris fuit, he was no more upon the earth. But against this interpretation stands the absence in the case of Enoch of that solemn refrain, " And he died," which winds up the life- story of all his predecessors and successors. The story of Enoch's translation has been compared with similar traditions among heathen nations, such as that of Ganymede among the Romans, though it possesses that which all others want, a profound moral and religious spirit and aim. Even the Chaldean legend 2 of Xisuthros, the tenth of the prediluvian patriarchs, who, on account of his piety, was taken to the realm of the gods without dying, does not approach it in spiritual elevation. Yet perhaps we ought to see in this and other Oriental tales, as for in- stance that of the Phrygian sage Annacus, who lived before the Flood of Deucalion to the age of three hundred years, and was afterwards taken up to heaven, a reflection, and to that extent also an authentication, of the biblical account. Hence we cannot doubt that this amazing incident would * i. 16. 2 " Chaldean Genesis," pp. 228 ff. ; " Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments," p. 33 ; Klehm's Handwtirterbuch des Biblischen Alterthums, Art. " Henoch." 122 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. tend to plant in the human mind ideas of immor- tality and heavenly felicity, even should these have had no existence in human thoughts before. 4. The spiritual results of the first age of his- tory were extremely disappointing. These were, to sum them up shortly, extending wickedness in the line of Cain, and declining piety in that of Seth. The experiment of dealing with man- kind in a way of mercy and forbearance had practically turned out a failure. The principle of evil, which had been let in upon humanity through the Fall, had asserted its unmistakable supremacy. Notwithstanding the grace and mercy which had been extended to the first transgressors, and the covenant of peace and salvation which had been established with them and their descen- dants on the basis of faith in the woman's seed, the principle of good had not been able to regain that ascendency over man which it had lost, nay, had scarcely been able to maintain its ground in face of the hostile forces with which it was assailed. The separation which in the second century had been effected between the Cainites and the Sethites had not sufficed to preserve the latter from the inroads of unbelief and immorality, while it re- moved from the former every check and hindrance to the growth of their impiety. As the centuries THE FIRST AGE OF HISTORY. 123 advanced, the Cainites declined into grosser wicked- ness. Their progress in ungodliness was evinced by the names they gave their children, the works they achieved, and the lives they pursued. Enoch, Irad, Mehujael, and Lamech were suggestive of qualities, principles, and characteristics such as the spirit of worldliness approved, while Adah, " the adorned," and Zillah, " the shady " or " the tinkling," as clearly pointed to sensual attractions. If there was nothing wrong in the building of cities, the laying out of farms, the sinking of mines, or even in the cultivation of music and the construction of organs, it is doubtful if as much can be said for the manufacture of warlike weapons and the composition of Bacchanalian songs. The story of Lamech, the seventh from Adam in the line of Cain, affords a melancholy proof of the deepening degeneracy of the times : the first polygamist of whom mention is made in Scripture, he afterwards acquired notoriety through a deed of blood which he committed and sought to justify in words l which have taken the form of an ancient ballad, which has been aptly named by Ewald " The Song of the Sword : " " Adah and Zillah, hear my voice ; Ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech, 1 Gen. iv. 23, 24. 124 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. For I have slain a man for wounding me, And a young man for bruising me ; If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, Truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold " This song, upon which Origen wrote two whole books of his commentary, at last pronouncing it inexplicable and no wonder after such a quantity of exposition is understood by some to mean that Lamech had in self-defence slain a young man who had wounded him, but that he did not on that account anticipate danger, since, as he explained to his wives, if God had promised to avenge Cain sevenfold, should any one kill him, Lamech, he being not a wilful murderer, but at worst a cul- pable homicide, on that man seventy-and-seven- fold vengeance would be exacted. If, however, the verb should be regarded as a future, then " the father of Tubal-Cain will be depicted as exulting in the weapons which his son's genius had in- vented, and with boastful arrogance threatening death to the first man who should injure him, impiously asserting that by means of these same weapons he would exact upon his adversary a vengeance ten times greater than that which had been threatened against the murderer of Cain." 1 Considering the character of the speaker, and the 1 " Pulpit Commentary on Genesis," in loco. THE FIRST AGE OF HISTORY. 125 spirit of the times, this is probably the correct interpretation of Lamech's ballad; and if so, it significantly intimates that lawlessness and violence had already begun to stalk with unblushing front through the land, It prepares us for the sub- sequent announcement, that a later age beheld the uprise of a race of Nephilim, translated " giants " in both the Authorised and Revised Versions, but with some degree of likelihood rather meaning " men of violence," roving, lawless gallants who fall on others, robbers or tyrants, the ancient counterparts of modern highwaymen and free- booters, by means of whom the world of those days was ultimately filled with violence. Nor is it wonderful that before this rushing torrent of impiety the true religion was well-nigh swept away. For a few centuries indeed the primitive faith appeared to be making headway, when the devout Sethites organised themselves into praying communities. In the time of Enoch it culminated, attaining its greatest strength and beauty in the person of that holy man himself who for three hundred years walked with God. After his age it became speedily apparent that godliness, as a power acting on humanity, had passed its meridian. Moral deterioration, which was spreading fast among the Cainites, began also to infect the Sethites. 126 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. The sons of Elohim, i.e., neither young men of the upper ranks 1 as distinguished from maidens of humble birth, an opinion which may now be regarded as exploded, nor members of the angelic race, 2 of whom it is stated by Christ that they " neither marry nor are given in marriage," but the pious Sethites, 3 the true worshippers of Jehovah, contracted matrimonial alliances with the beautiful daughters of men, i.e., of the wicked Cainites. The result quickly proclaimed itself in a frightful development of immorality even in that line which had been previously distinguished for its goodness. The offspring of these marriages be- came the well-known mighty men of the ante- diluvian age, the Gibborim, the strong, impetuous heroes of the time, "men of the name" as they were styled, " the first nobility of the world," says Calvin, " honourable robbers, who boasted of their wickedness." And so the world rolled along to its destruction, on every side licentiousness raging, violence prevailing, and corruption deepening, till at length it had sunk to a lower point than that from which it started, in the middle of the seven- 1 Onkelos, Jonathan, Symmachus, and Aben Ezra. 2 The Septuagint, Philo, Josephus, Luther, Gesenius, Von Bohlen, Ewald, Delitzsch, Kurtz, Hengstenberg, Alford. 3 Augustine, Calvin, Keil, Havernick, Lange, Murphy, Speaker's Commentary, and others. THE FIRST AGE OF HISTORY. 127 teenth century one man only, Noah, remaining righteous before and walking with God, while the rest of mankind had hopelessly succumbed beneath the power of moral evil, and were swiftly maturing for judgment. " And God saw that the wicked- ness of man," i.e., of the Adam He had made, of the being He had created in His own image, " was great," was no slight iniquity, but a widespread, firmly rooted, and deeply staining corruption " in the earth," and pervading it so that, as Calvin remarks, "integrity possessed no longer a single corner," "and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually ; and it repented the Lord that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart ; and the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast and the creeping thing ; for it repenteth me that I have made them." The day of judgment for the first age of history was at hand. ( 128 ) VI. THE JUDGMENT OF THE FLOOD. the first age of history closed, the human race was ripe for destruction. Of the families into which it had developed, that alone of Noah could be described as righteous, while even of it there was room for question whether the piety of its head was in any measure shared by its members. Outside this narrow circle, which sparkled in Heaven's eye like a jewel in a lump of clay, like an islet in mid ocean, like an oasis in the centre of a desert, all was moral wasteness and corrup- tion, raging violence and devastation, spiritual deadness and irreligion. Anthropomorphically speaking, the Supreme Creator was sorry he had called it into existence "it repented the Lord that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart." In just judgment He deter- mined, while protecting Noah and his family, to bring its career to a termination " And the Lord said, I will destroy (Heb., blot out) man whom I THE JUDGMENT OF THE FLOOD. 129 have created from the face of the ground ; both man and beast, and creeping thing and fowl of the air ; for it repenteth Me that I have made them." The sacred writer represents this determination as having been arrived at 120 years l before it was put into execution. Whether it was then com- municated to the son of Lamech cannot be cer- tainly deduced from the Hebrew narrative, though it need not be doubted that announcement of the impending calamity was made in time sufficient to admit of the requisite preparations for ensuring the safety of him who had " found grace in the eyes of the Lord." i . The biblical account of the deluge is narrated with extreme simplicity. After depicting the char- acter of Noah as one in which the best features of Enoch's piety were reproduced, the record mentions that Jehovah furnished His servant with instruc- tions for the building of an ark, or Tebah a word believed by some 2 to be of Egyptian derivation, a boat being styled in that language tept, and by others 3 to be of Sanscrit origin, in which tongue pota signifies a boat or river-ship. The measure- ments of the vessel were accurately given, 300 cubits long, 50 cubits broad, and 30 cubits high dimensions which a Dutch Anabaptist, P. Jansen, 1 Gen. vi. 3. 2 Knobel, Keil, Kalisch. 3 Bohlen. 130 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. in the beginning of the seventeenth century, proved by actual experiment to yield a larger carrying capacity, though not a faster sailing power, than any other cubical form, and which an eminent English engineer, Scott Kussell, in the present century approximated towards at least, in con- structing the now historical steamship called the Great Eastern. The vessel itself was not to be a ship in the modern acceptation of the term, but a huge box or chest capable of floating, an enlarged specimen of that l in which Moses was afterwards exposed upon the Nile. The timber of which it should be made was specified as gopher-wood, in all probability the resinous cypress of which his- tory informs us the Assyrians were accustomed to build their river boats, the Athenians their coffins, and the Egyptians their mummy cases. The sides of the vessel, both within and without, were to be smeared with bitumen or asphalt, for the purpose, it is obvious, of rendering it watertight. Its in- terior was to be portioned off into three flats or stories of chambers, or nests (kinnim). These again were to be furnished with a lighting apparatus or window (tsohar), of which no certain idea can be formed, different interpreters putting forward dif- ferent conjectures, each possessed of as much or as i Exod. ii. 3. THE JUDGMENT OF THE FLOOD. 131 little likelihood as the other. 1 Gesenius, for ex- ample, thinks of a series of apertures ; Luther and Calvin of one ; Knobel of a space running along the top of the sides of the ark, occupied by some translucent substance, and sheltered by the eaves of the roof; Lange of an opening in the upper deck, stretching along its entire length, and pene- trating down through the different stories; and finally, Tayler Lewis, of a sloped roof, with a slit along the ridge, which would both admit the clear light of heaven and serve as a meridional line, enabling Noah and the other inmates of the ark to ascertain the hour of noon. The ark was to be entered by a door, but whether there were three doors in all, one for each flat, or only one, is uncertain. Along with these instructions intima- tion was made to the patriarch that God would enter into covenant with him that he and his family, along with two of each sort of living creature, would be sheltered in the ark, and that the rest of men and animals would be wiped off the face of the ground by means of a deluge of waters, a Moibbul, an archaic word, as some think, expressly coined to denote what was certainly to be an unusual phenomenon. How long Noah was occupied in the construction 1 See " Pulpit Commentary oil Genesis," in loco. 132 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. of this gigantic vessel the biblical narrator does not specify, though he states that seven days before the threatened judgment descended the ark was finished. Immediately thereafter, acting on divine instructions, 1 the patriarch selects for pre- servation in the ark of every clean beast "by sevens," which is best understood as signifying seven pairs ; 2 and of beasts that are not clean by twos, the male and his female the larger number of the former being in all probability demanded, if not as yet by the necessities of food, at least by the requirements of sacrifice. That the mention of this distinction between clean and unclean animals involves an anachronism, and betrays the late composition of the book, cannot be successfully maintained, since if sacrificial worship existed at all in prediluvian times, some such mark of separation must have been even then established between animals appropriate for sacrifice and animals that should not be so employed. Be that, however, as it may, the Hebrew story continues that Noah, having safely lodged his irrational fellow-voyagers, himself entered the ark, accom- panied by his wife and his sons, with their wives, 1 Gen. vii. 2. 2 Vulgate, LXX., Aben Ezra, De Wette, Knobel, Kalisch, and others. THE JUDGMENT OF THE FLOOD. 133 and that Jehovah shut him in ; after which, in the 6ooth year of his life, in the second month, and on the seventeenth day of the month, the appalling visitation began. The fountains of the great deep, i.e., the waters of the ocean and of subterranean reservoirs were broken up ; the windows of heaven were opened. Forty days and forty nights it rained upon the earth. "And the waters in- creased." The first degree of increase was marked by the floating of the ark "the waters bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth ; " the second, " and the waters increased greatly on the earth," by the going of the ark " the ark went upon the face of the waters ; " and the third, " and the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth," by the elevation of the ark above the highest hills "all the high mountains that were under the whole heaven were covered." It is popularly supposed * that this proves the flood to have been universal; but strict exegesis requires nothing more than a partial inundation. As the present writer has elsewhere 2 said : "It is almost certain that, had the narrator designed to record only the fact that all the heights within the visible horizon had disappeared beneath the rising waters, he 1 Keil, Kalisch, Alford, Bush, Wordsworth, and others. 2 " Pulpit Commentary on Genesis," in loco. 134: THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. would have done so by saying that ' all the high hills under the whole heaven were covered.' " Hence, to say the least, the language of the Hebrew historian does not necessitate the hypo- thesis of a total submergence of the globe beneath the oceanic waters, but is satisfied with the notion of a deluge restricted in its extent to a region contiguous to the Valley of the Euphrates, or at all events to that portion of the earth's surface which at the time was occupied by man. The sacred text is perfectly explicit in setting down the destruction of the human family as the end aimed at and accomplished by the terrible catastrophe. It may therefore be regarded as indubitable that so far as Scripture is concerned it is not needful to affirm, at least geographically, the universality of the flood. For five months of thirty days each the ark slowly floated up the Tigris and Euphrates Valley, during which time the waters " returned from off the earth continually." First, the waters assuaged or began to grow calm after the preceding period of commotion; then a backward or ebbing tide commenced, in which the waters went and re- turned, advanced and retreated; and finally, a visible diminution of the waters appeared. In the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of THE JUDGMENT OF THE FLOOD. 135 the month, the ark grounded on the mountains, i.e., upon one of the peaks in the district of Ararat. Bohlen, 1 to whom the Hebrew narrative is only " a romantic legend," fancies that the Land of Ararat may be explained by Aryavarta, the Holy Land of the Hindoos north of the Himalayas. Josephus and the older critics generally think of a peak in the Carduchian range of hills separating Armenia on the south from Kurdistan, and having a town in their vicinity named by Ptolemy Naxuana, or the city of Noah, and by the Armenians Nachid- shenan, or the first place of descent. Gesenius selects an unknown mountain between the Araxes and Lakes Van and Urumiah, in which he is followed by respectable authorities. The opinion, however, which has secured widest acceptance is that supported alike by Jewish and Mohammedan tradition, as well as favoured by scholars of emi- nence like Fiirst, Kalisch, Keil, Delitzsch, and Lange, that the mountain referred to is the modern Ararat in Northern Armenia, about 12 miles south of Erivan, which rises in the form of two majestic cones to the height of 16,254 and 12,284 feet (Parisian) above the level of the sea. The loftier of these peaks, by the Armenians styled Mads, by the Turks Aghri-Dagh, the difficult or steep moun- 1 "Introduction to Genesis," vol. ii. p. 139. 136 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. tain, and by the Persians Kuchi Nuch, the moun- tain of Noah, is described by travellers as of in- comparable splendour. " It appeared," writes Ker Porter, 1 " as if the highest mountains in the world had been piled upon each other to form this one sublime immensity of earth and rocks and snow. The icy peaks of its double head rose majestically into the clear and cloudless heavens ; the sun blazed bright upon them, and the reflection sent forth a radiance equal to other suns." "Nothing," adds Morier, 2 "can be more beautiful than its shape, more awful than its height. All the surrounding mountains sink into insignificance when compared with it. It is perfect in all its parts ; no hard rugged feature, no unnatural prominences ; every- thing is in harmony, and all combines to render it one of the sublimest objects in nature." Professor Parrot, 3 a German, who ascended the Kara Dagh or Greater Ararat in 1829, declares its summit to be formed of " eternal ice without rock or stone to interrupt its continuity ; " and Professor Bryce of Oxford, 4 the latest to scale its slippery sides, while reporting that the mountain itself is "a huge broad-shouldered mass, more of a dome than a 1 "Travels,"!. 132,11.636. 2 "Journey," 1. 16, ii. 312, 345. 3 "Journey to Ararat," pp. 149, 178. 4 " Transcaucasia and Ararat," chap. vii. THE JUDGMENT OF THE FLOOD. 137 cone, supported by strong buttresses, and throwing out rough ribs or ridges of rock that stand out like knotty muscles from its solid trunk," depicts the view from its summit as neither beautiful nor splendid, but stern, grim, and monotonous, the softer colours of the landscape seeming to be lost, and the surrounding elevations looked at from above seldom showing well-marked peaks, but oftener rough-hewn masses, and the whole scene presenting an aspect of sterility and desolation. On one of the lower ledges, then, of this enor- mous pyramid, there is reason to believe the ark ultimately settled. Two and a half months after touching ground the tops of the mountains were seen. Forty days later, the imprisoned patriarch sent forth a raven, which went to and fro upon the surface of the deep until the waters were dried up from off the earth. Seven days passed and a dove was despatched, " to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground." Finding no rest as yet for the sole of its foot, the pigeon returned, probably at nightfall, and was taken into the ark. Again seven days revolved, and a second time the dove was set free, again returning at eventide, but this time bearing in its mouth an olive leaf plucked off, from which the patriarch inferred that the waters were abated from off the earth. Hav- 138 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. ing waited seven days additional, the patriarch a third time gave freedom to the dove, "which returned not again unto him any more." Satisfied that the deluge was now over, that not only had the waters disappeared, but the ground was dried, after one year's imprisonment within the ark, in the second month, and on the seven and twentieth day of the month, in obedience to Divine com- mand, Noah, with his family and the living creatures that were with him in the ark, emerged from the place of his captivity. In joyful celebra- tion of his and their safety, as the second head of the human family, building an altar, he offered sacrifice to God, who, smelling a sweet savour, or, in other words, graciously accepting both the offerer and his offering, said within His heart, " I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake ; for that the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth: neither will I again smite any more every living thing, as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease." Such is the biblical story of the flood. 2. The traditional reports of this stupendous catastrophe are both numerous and interesting. (i.) The Babylonian legend in particular, whether THE JUDGMENT OF THE FLOOD. 139 as told by Berosus or as deciphered from the Chaldean monuments, presents a large amount of correspondence with the Hebrew story. Berosus was a Chaldean priest who flourished in the third century before Christ, and wrote a history of his own country in Greek. According to the tale which he relates, 1 the god Kronos or Bel appeared to Xisuthros, the tenth king of Babylon, warning him of a deluge that should approach on the fifteenth day of the month Desius, and enjoining him to prepare a vessel for the safety of himself and his friends, along with specimens of the different animals that then lived. Xisuthros, obedient to the vision, constructed a vessel five stadia in length and two in breadth, and conveyed into it, as directed, his wife, children, and friends. During the continuance of the flood he three times sent out from the vessel birds, which twice returned to him, the second time with mud upon their feet, and the third time returned not. Discovering that the vessel had grounded, Xisuthros disem- barked with his wife and children, erected an altar, and offered sacrifice to the gods. In recom- pense for his piety, he was thereupon translated 1 George Smith's ' Chaldean Genesis," chap. iii. ; Bohlen, " In- troduction to Genesis," vol. ii. pp. 172, 173; Encyclopedia, Britan- nica (Qth ed.), Art. "Deluge." 140 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. to heaven. As deciphered from the Chaldean tablets, 1 the Babylonian legend of the flood ex- hibits a still more remarkable agreement with the biblical account. In the series of tablets, twelve in number, in which it occurs, the adventures are recounted of a solar hero, whose name, provision- ally rendered Ghizdubar, signifies, according to Mr. Boscawen, "the Mass of Fire." Learning that the secret of immortality was possessed only by the sage Tam-zi or Samas Napisti, "the Sun of Life," the Chaldean Noah, who like Enoch had been translated to heaven for his piety, and that the sage could be reached only by a voyage across the waters of death, symbolised to the early Babylonians by the sea into which the two rivers Tigris and Euphrates emptied themselves by separate mouths, Ghizdubar undertakes to find him. The tenth tablet records the journey by sea which Ghizdubar makes to the abode of Samas Napisti or Xisuthros. The eleventh contains the story of the deluge, which he hears from the sage's lips. After telling how the gods had determined to destroy the ancient city Surippak, on the banks of the Euphrates, by means of a flood, on account 1 George Smith's " Chaldean Genesis," chap. xvi. ; " Records of the Past," vol. vii. pp. 135 ff. ; " Fresh Light from the Ancient Monu- ments," pp. 32 if. ; " British Museum Lectures " (Boscawen), Third Series, Lect. iii. THE JUDGMENT OF THE FLOOD. 141 of the wickedness of its inhabitants, the sage narrates how the gods instructed him to build a ship of prescribed dimensions, and to cause to ascend into the midst of it "the seed of life of every kind," at the same time commanding him not to shut the door of the vessel until he was expressly directed to do so. "Then," said Hea, the Chronos of the Babylonian Pantheon, "enter the door of thy ship, and bring into the midst of it thy corn, thy property, and thy goods, thy (family), thy household, thy concubines, and the sons of thy people. The cattle of the field, the wild beasts of the field, as many as I would preserve, I will send unto thee, and they shall keep thy door." Next describing the construction of the ship, its division into compartments, and its fortification against leakage by pouring three mea- sures of bitumen over the inside and three over the outside, the sage recites how he stored it with food " like the dust of the earth," and with " beer, oil, and wine like the waters of a river;" how he heaped up within it all that he possessed of silver and gold and of the seed of life ; how he collected into it all his slaves and concubines, the cattle of the field, the beasts of the field, with the sons of the people ; and how he waited for the time of which the god had spoken, saying, "I will cause 142 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. it to rain from heaven heavily, enter thou into the midst of thy ship and shut thy door." At length the hour struck. Samas Napisti ascended his ship, which seemed like a floating palace, shut up the doorway, and handed over all to the care of a pilot named Buzar-sadi-rabi, " the Sun God of the Great Mountain." "Then arose Mu-seri-ina-namari (the water of dawn at daylight) from the horizon of heaven (like) a black cloud. Eimmon thundered in the midst of it, and Nebo and the wind god go in front ; the throne-bearers go over mountain and plain ; Nergnl the Mighty removes the wicked ; Adar goes overthrowing all before him. The spirits of earth carried the flood ; in their terrible- ness they sweep through the land ; the deluge of Eimmon reaches unto heaven ; all that was light to (darkness) was turned. (The surface) of the land like (fire ?) they wasted ; they destroyed (all) life from the face of the land ; to battle against men they brought (the waters)." So appalling was the ruin that even the gods became alarmed for their safety. " In heaven the gods feared the flood, and sought a refuge ; they ascended to the heaven of Anu. The gods, like a dog in his kennel, crouched down in a heap." Meanwhile the tempest went on raging and overwhelming for six days and nights without intermission. On the THE JUDGMENT OF THE FLOOD. 143 seventh day " the storm subsided, and the flood which had fought against (men) like an armed host was quieted." By and by the immured voyager became conscious of a noise made by the waters caused probably by the motion of the backward tide. Looking out through the window of his ark, he beheld corpses floating on the waters like reeds, saw that land had arisen " twelve measures high" above the sea, and away on the horizon could trace the outline of a coast. Slowly the ship steered towards the land, of which the name was Nizir supposed to have been the Kur- dish mountains of Pir Mam, to the north-east of Babylonia and "the mountain of Nizir stopped the ship." On the seventh day thereafter Xisu- thros sent forth a dove, which went and returned because " a resting-place it did not find." Next he let loose a swallow, which also went and returned because it "found no resting-place." A raven, however, which he next despatched, went but returned not ; " it ate, it swam, it wandered away, it returned not." At length coming forth from the ark, he " built an altar on the peak of the moun- tain " and " sacrificed a sacrifice," at which the gods, having smelt the good savour, gathered themselves like flies. The great goddess at her approach lighted up the rainbow which Anu, the 144 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. god of the sky, had created. The soul of the sage was full of gratitude for his deliverance, and gave a welcome to all the assembled divinities except Bel, whom he supposed to have been the author of the flood. " Those days I have thought of, and never may I forget them. May the gods come to my altar ; May Bel not come to my altar ; Since he did not consider but caused a flood, And my people he assigned to the abyss." As might have been anticipated, Bel was indig- nant at the slight put upon his godhood, but was eventually pacified by a brother divinity; after which " he went up into the midst of the ship," taking with him Samas Napisti (or Xisuthros) and his wife. There he blessed the happy pair, saying " Hitherto Samas-Napisti has been a mortal, But now, Samas-Napisti, may they to live like the gods be lifted up ! Yea, to dwell, O Samas-Napisti ! in a far distant place at the mouth of the rivers." Thereupon, adds the sage to Ghizdubar, "they took me, and afar off at the mouth of the rivers they made me dwell." The resemblance of this to the biblical account is too apparent to require comment, and is perhaps most satisfactorily ex- THE JUDGMENT OF THE FLOOD. 145 plained by the supposition that they both rest upon a common primitive tradition. 1 (2.) The Indian legend 2 also has points of contact with the scriptural narration. Through the loss of the sacred Vedas which the first man, Manu, had re- ceived from Brahma, but which an evil demon, Hayagriva, had surreptitiously abstracted, the human race became fearfully degenerate. Only the good King Satyavrata, with seven other saints, formed an exception to the general cor- ruption. On the banks of the river Wirini the god Brahma appeared to the pious monarch in the likeness of a fish, intimating the approach of a flood, and advising him to build a ship, or, according to another version, promising to send a miraculously constructed vessel, for the preserva- tion of himself and the seven holy wise men, along with seed of every kind, both animal and vege- table. Obeying the orders of the deity, Satyavrata prepared an ark and entered it with the seven saints, accompanied by their wives and one pair of each of all the irrational animals. For seven days the rain fell in torrents. At this point, according to the alternative version already alluded 1 Herzog's Real Encylopadie, Art. ' Noah." 2 Bohlen, "Introduction to Genesis," vol. ii pp. 119, 120, 173, 174 ; Kalisch's " Genesis," p. 203. K 146 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. to, a huge boat was beheld upon the waters moving slowly towards the shore, where the king stood trembling with apprehension for his safety. The king and his companions entered it as they had been counselled. Again the god appeared in the form of a fish with an immense horn, to which the vessel was made fast, a great sea-serpent serving as a cable. For a whole night of Brahma the god drew the ark, and eventually landed it upon the highest peak of the Himalaya Mountains, which thence received the name of Naubandhanam, or ship's binding. When the flood had abated, the god slew the demon, recovered the sacred books which had been stolen, instructed Satyavrata in all heavenly sciences, and appointed him the seventh Manu, from whom, as from a second father, the human family was reproduced. The Hindoo legend concludes with an episode re- sembling that which, according to the Hebrew text, resulted in the cursing of Ham. (3.) Of an Egyptian legend in the strict sense it is impossible to speak ; and yet it is certain that the germs at least of a deluge story were not entirely unknown to the dwellers on the Nile. Eusebius quotes Manetho, the Egyptian historian, as asserting that Thoth, the god of writing, erected certain pillars with inscriptions, which after the deluge were THE JUDGMENT OF THE FLOOD. 147 transcribed into books. According to Plato, 1 Solon was informed by an Egyptian priest that the gods when wishing to purify the earth were accustomed to overwhelm it by a deluge, from which the herdsmen and shepherds saved themselves on the tops of the mountains. Josephus 2 appeals to Hieronymous the Egyptian as a voucher for the accuracy and credibility of his account of the deluge. An inscription, 8 moreover, on the walls of a small chamber in the tomb of Seti I., belong- ing to the nineteenth dynasty, represents the god Ra as supremely disgusted with the insolence of mankind, and resolving on that account to effect their extermination. The goddesses Hathor and Sechet execute his royal will, smiting over the whole land the men who had been born of himself and had uttered words against him, and trampling their blood under feet as far as Hierapolis. The majesty of Ra demands an offering of " fruits in quantity," which are at once produced ; mixed with the blood of men they form seven thou- sand pitchers of drink. The anger of the god is appeased. "It is well done all this," said the majesty of Ra ; "I shall now protect men on 1 "Timaeus," chap. v. p. 21. 2 " Antiquities," i. 3, 9. 3 "Records of the Past," voL vi. p. 103. 148 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. account of this." During night "the fields are entirely covered with water through the will of the majesty of the god," as a token that his dis- pleasure is removed. This is no doubt far from establishing the allegation that the inhabitants of the Black Land were acquainted with a primi- tive tradition of the earth's submergence beneath the waters of a flood indeed, it would rather seem to point in an opposite direction ; yet it distinctly enough shows them to have been familiar with the notion that the human race had been overtaken with almost total annihilation as a consequence of, and in punishment for, moral degeneration and sin. The circumstance that in this Egyptian story another agency than water is selected as the instrument of destruction, it has been well said, 1 explains itself, the inundation of the country by the Nile being to the Egyptian the highest symbol and proof of divine favour, for which indeed it is in the present instance made to stand. (4.) In illustration of the Grecian legend it will be unnecessary to do more than advert in a few brief sentences to the well-known story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, which, first given by Pindar, was afterwards related and amplified by Apollodorus, Plutarch, Lucian, and Ovid, the last i Geikie, Hours with the Bible," vol. ii THE JUDGMENT OP THE FLOOD. 149 mentioned 1 in particular furnishing an account so closely agreeing with the Hebrew story as to suggest the probability of its having been derived, either directly or indirectly, from a Hebrew source. It depicts the previous corruption of manners which prevailed on the surface of the globe, the eminent piety of Deucalion, the determination of the gods to consign the race of man to the waves, the construction of a boat by Deucalion in obedience to divine instructions, the sudden break- ing forth of the storm, the rising of the waters, the universal ocean in which all distinction be- tween sea and land was obliterated, the gradual subsidence of the flood, the landing of the vessel of Deucalion on the double-peaked summit of Parnassus, the consultation of the deity " per sacras sortes," by the sacred rite of lot-casting, as to how the earth should be repeopled, and the answer of the god that it should be done by Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha casting stones behind their backs ; and this it does with such graphic power as to make the successive tableaux which compose the story read, as one happily expresses it, " like amplified reports of the record in Genesis." Indeed, by Philo, Deucalion was distinctly regarded as Noah. (5.) Finally, what 1 Ovid, " Metamorphoses," lib. i. f. vii. 150 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. is perhaps equally surprising, the traditional reports of this gigantic cataclysm are as numerous and striking in the western continent of America as amongst the older populations of the East. The Esquimaux in the north, the Red Indians, the Mexicans, and the Brazilians in the central parts of America, and the Peruvians in the south, have all their peculiar versions of the deluge story. 1 The Dog-ribbed Indians, for instance, represent their ancestor Chassewee as saving him- self and his family along with all manner of four- footed beasts and birds by means of a canoe from a flood which overflowed the land. When the water had continued many days Chassewee sent forth a beaver to search for the land, but the beaver was drowned, and its corpse floated past the canoe in the water. Next a musk-rat was despatched for the same purpose, and on returning after an absence of some time was found to have a little earth on its paws. At this the heart of Chassewee was glad. Lifting up the rat he stroked it with his hands and laid it in his bosom ; after which he took the earth, moulded it with his hands, and laid it on the water. The 1 Auberlen's "Divine Revelation," p. 171 ; Dawson's "Fossil Men," p. 262 ; Humboldt's " Travels and Researches " (M'Gillivray), pp. 191, 192. THE JUDGMENT OF THE FLOOD. 151 earth gradually increased in size till it formed an island in the ocean. The natives on the banks of the Orinoco say, "that at the time of the great waters, when their fathers were obliged to betake themselves to their canoes in order to escape the general inundation, the waves of the sea beat upon the rocks of Encanamada ; " and, when asked how the human race survived the deluge, they reply, "that a man and a woman saved themselves upon a high mountain called Tamanacu, situated on the bank of the Assevern, and that, throwing behind them over their heads the fruits of the Mauritia palm, they saw arising from the nuts of these fruits the men and women who repeopled the earth." And now, without adducing further ex- amples, what is the inference to be drawn from this widespread, indeed, it may be claimed, uni- versal tradition of the deluge? Bohlen 1 has no doubt the legends of the deluge are derived from the yearly occurrence of inundations ; Schirren and Gerland are of opinion that the deluge stories were originally either myths descriptive of the pheno- mena of the sky, which gradually were transferred from the celestial regions to the earth ; but the harmony existing between so many different traditions is the best proof that in the remote 1 "Introduction to Genesis," voL ii. p. 177. 152 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. past they must have had a common basis, and that the occurrence which they represent must have been a historical reality, and not simply a poetical or mythical invention. In short, as Canon Rawlinson l observes, of a tradition living amongst all the great races into which ethnologists have divided mankind, " but one rational account can be given, viz., that it embodies the recollection of a fact in which all mankind was concerned." 3. The scientific difficulties in the way of ac- cepting as historically credible the biblical account of the flood are in a large measure stripped of their force, if once it be conceded, that a rigid exe- gesis of the Hebrew text permits it to be held that the deluge may not, and need not, have been universal, but only partial and local. It is usual to classify these difficulties as astronomical, geolo- gical, and zoological ; and a word or two may be added to indicate the bearing which these have upon the question of the geographical extent of the deluge. (i.) The astronomical objection is urged by Kalisch, who affirms that the quantity of water required to submerge the globe accord- ing to his calculation eight times the aggregate quantity contained in all the seas and oceans of the earth would so materially change the action 1 " Historical Illustrations of the Old Testament," p. 20. THE JUDGMENT OF THE FLOOD. 153 of gravity upon the earth, that not only would the rotation of the earth's axis be varied and the earth's orbit disturbed, but the entire solar system would be deranged ; but this alarming picture of the ter- rible results that would have followed had the deluge been universal instead of partial, does not carry to the mind that resistless force of conviction which perhaps its author expected. If the earth was in the beginning under water, as revelation and science unite to teach, it will always be possible to believe that a condition of the globe similar to that which existed before the dry land was sepa- rated from the sea might have been brought about without the addition of any water to that already contained in the earth's seas and oceans ; and even though it could not, though additional water must have been imported, sufficient to cover the entire surface of the earth, as the present writer has elsewhere remarked, "it is doubtful if that would have much more effect upon the equilibrium of the globe than the breaking out of a profuse sweat upon the body or the filling up with water of the indentures on the rough skin of an orange would have upon either of these organisms, in which case it is more than probable that the apprehended disturbance of the solar system would prove in great part imaginary." There is greater force in 154 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. (2.) the geological objections to a universal flood, though it is possible to lay more stress on these than they will bear. It is true that geology can detect no certain traces on the earth's surface of an aqueous submergence such as the Noachic deluge is supposed by the hypothesis to have been. On the contrary, it is usual to point to such phe- nomena as the extinct volcanoes of Languedoc and Auvergne as conclusive evidence that no such thing as a world-wide flood could have taken place, since these volcanoes, which are believed to have been in operation long anterior to the time of man's appearance on the earth, are as perfect in their lava cones to-day as they were when these were first thrown up which, it is argued, they could not have been had they been subjected to any cataclysmal immersion, such as Noah's deluge is assumed to have been. The accuracy of this conclusion, however, depends upon two things, of which no certain estimate can be formed the firmness with which the scoriae may have adhered to the sides of the cones, and the force of the water-current with which they were struck. If the flood was not torrential in its violence, but gentle in rising and falling, the lava cones and ancient trees, so often quoted against the possibility of a flood, may obviously have been submerged THE JUDGMENT OF THE FLOOD. 155 without suffering much harm. Perhaps the great- est barrier in the way of assenting to the uni- versality of the flood is (3.) the zoological, which refers to the difficulties of collecting into one place the different species of animals that then existed, and of accommodating them for upwards of a twelvemonth in the ark. So long as Raleigh's computation of the number of species was ac- cepted as correct, eighty-nine in all, the problem could hardly be deemed insoluble ; but with up- wards of 2000 mammals, 7000 birds, and over 1 500 kinds of amphibious animals and reptiles, not to speak of half a million insects, any one can see that the task becomes enormously increased. Nay, the very mustering of these multitudinous creatures from their respective habitats presents a diffi- culty which, from the side of science at least, seems fatal to the notion of a universal flood. Yet, if science thus appears to demand that the biblical deluge shall be restricted to a portion of the earth's surface, it is incontestable that to the notion of a partial inundation science offers no objection, but rather strong and striking con- firmation. ( 156 ) VII. THE SECOND AGE OF HISTORY. WITH the landing of the ark upon Ararat, and the coming forth of Noah with his family and the living creatures that had been with him in the ark to occupy the renovated earth, the second age of history began. The first age had commenced with the creation of a single pair of human beings, that all succeeding generations, being derived from a common stock, might form a united race, and be knit together in the bonds of brotherhood; the second started with a company of eight persons, or of four pairs, of whom three were the offshoots of the fourth, so that the primitive and fundamental oneness of the race was still preserved in pristine integrity. The first had opened with a sinless condition of humanity, but with no accumulated treasures of experience to draw from when sum- moned to encounter the shock of trial and tempta- tion in actual life for which reason it quickly lapsed from its original state of innocence, and THE SECOND AGE OP HISTORY. 157 in spite of heaven's merciful forbearance, at the end of twenty centuries became so grossly dete- riorated as to call for its termination by the judgment of a Flood ; the second bounded forth on its career, with man's powers and capacities enfeebled and corrupted by sin, it is true, but as if to counterbalance that tremendous disadvantage, with a rich storehouse of memories in its new head, which, warning him and his descendants of the heinous culpability and disastrous results of sin, tended to keep them in the paths of righteous- ness and truth. The first had closed with the gracious rescue of Noah and his family from the universal degradation and tbe pitiless destruction of the rest of mankind ; how the second rolled on, and to what it ultimately -led, will in due course appear. i . The conditions under which the human race proceeded to develop, in the opening of this second age of history, must be carefully investi- gated before a trustworthy verdict can be pro- nounced upon its character, (i.) The primeval benediction which God had pronounced upon the first pair in Eden was still continued to the race : l "And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, " Be fruitful, and multiply, and 1 Geu. ix. i. 158 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. replenish the earth." It might indeed have been anticipated that, considering the outcome and issue of the extremely rapid development of the human family in the preceding period, a certain amount of restraint would in this new age have been placed upon the powers of reproduction pos- sessed by man ; but, exactly as it had been spoken by Elohim to the original progenitors of man- kind, 1 the marriage blessing was repeated to the postdiluvian heads of the race. The outpopulat- ing energy of this second stock of humanity was to be as great as, if not greater than, that of the first. Its capacity to overrun and take possession of the earth would be at least three times as large as that of its predecessor, starting as it did from three homes instead of one, from the three sons of Noah instead of only from Adam. So far from a slower rate of increase to the human family being from this point onward contem- plated, arrangements were set up to secure that as nearly as possible the opposite should be the case. (2.) Enlarged provisions were made for the sustenance of the race. Whereas in the Edenic charter herbs and fruits alone were mentioned as man's food, under the Noachic "every beast of the earth, every fowl of the air, and every fish 1 Gen. i. 28. THE SECOND AGE OP HISTORY. 159 of the sea," in short, " every moving thing that liveth," was delivered over into man's hand to be meat for him, with only the significant reservation that blood should not be eaten with the flesh. 1 Whether this implied that man had originally been a vegetarian, and only after the Flood became a flesh-eating animal, is a point concerning which diversity of sentiment exists. On the ground that this appears to be the import of the sacred writer's language, it is contended by good authorities 2 that animal food was prohibited in prediluvian times, and first received sanction with the dawning of the new era. Others 3 hold that, though per- mitted in the antecedent period, it was not generally, if at all, used by men until after the Deluge, when by God it was expressly directed to be eaten. A third class 4 of interpreters believe that, whether permitted or prohibited before the Flood, it was employed as food, and only after that catastrophe was formally allowed. The view, 5 however, which has met with most acceptance, Gen. ix. 2, 4. Mercerus, Rosenmiiller, Candlish, Murphy, Wordsworth, Kalisch, and others. Theodoret, Chrysostom, Aquinas, Pererius, Luther. Keil, Alford, " Speaker's Commentary." Justin Martyr, Calvin, Bush, Knobel, Macdonald, Lange, Quarry, and others. 160 THE PATRIAECHAL TIMES. regards the Noachic charter as in this respect simply an emphatic republication of the original Edenic grant. In that earlier permit, it is urged, the consumption of flesh meat was not formally disallowed. Then the scientifically demonstrated existence of carnivorous animals before the Flood, although to them were assigned merely vege- table products, renders it hazardous to argue ab silentio concerning man, that he did not also, at least occasionally, live on flesh. More- over, the admitted fact that in the prediluvian dispensation animals were slain in sacrifice may be claimed as suggesting the probability that they were likewise employed as food. And finally, if it may be supposed that the extreme ferocity and brutal violence which characterised the Gibborim and Nephilim, the giants and robbers of the days before the Flood, were due to the excessive use of unblooded flesh meat, a rational account will be supplied of the re- striction henceforth imposed upon Noah and his descendants. From this time forward, in order to prevent the recurrence of such a reign of terror as prevailed in the last centuries of the preceding age, when men had become bruta- lised and preyed upon each other like wild beasts, whatever flesh might be eaten should THE SECOND AGE OF HISTORY. 161 be previously drained of blood. There were other reasons, doubtless, why the blood should not be eaten with the flesh, and these, it may be, were more particularly hinted at in the words which ac- companied the restriction, " But flesh with the life (literally, the soul) thereof, ye shall not eat ; " yet this, that the prohibitory regulation was prophy- lactic in its purpose, intended to ward off a danger which had contributed in no- small degree to the ruin of the preceding age, is by no means destitute of force or unworthy of consideration. Then (3.) stricter measures were adopted for the preservation of the race. For one thing, a greater sanctity was in future to be attached to human life ; and this, as just suggested, was probably the reason of the statute against eating blood. Henceforth the blood even of an animal was to be counted in a manner sacred. Coming frequently to light in Scripture, this idea was by no means unfamiliar to pagan systems of religion. In ancient Egyptian hierogly- phics, for example, the hawk, which feeds on blood, represented the soul. 1 The Greek philosophers taught that the blood was either the soul itself, or the soul's food, or the soul's seat, or the soul's producing cause. 2 In Homer, 3 the Shades 1 " The Antiquities of Egypt " (Osburn), p. 149. 3 Delitzsch, "Biblical Psychology," div. iv. n. s Odyssey," xL 36, 98, 147. L 162 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. thirsted after blood, since by means of it they were supposed to regain both redemp- tion from Erebus and the faculty of speech. Accordingly it has been thought that the re- striction now placed upon the eating of un- blooded flesh was intended mainly to protect human life, by discovering the value which in God's eyes attached to the lives of the lower animals. The same purpose also would appear to have been served by the enactments now for the first time published against bloodshed and murder. Under the preceding dispensation acts of violence against the person, even to the extent of homi- cide, were not only not unfrequent so pre- valent, in fact, were they, as to have formed one of the accelerating causes of the Flood but they were comparatively unrestrained. The divine clemency had itself extended immunity to Cain, the first who had imbrued his hands in a fellow-creature's blood. Perhaps, too, the very enormity of Cain's transgression the murder, not of a stranger, but of a brother had its effect in disposing the earlier generations to leniency in exacting satisfaction for lesser crimes. By and by, in Lamech's time, the spirit of violence was daring enough to shed blood with perfect dis- regard of consequences, against which it could THE SECOND AGE OF HISTORY. 163 protect itself, as is supposed, by means of Tubal's swords. And so the lives of men would seem to have been esteemed as nothing, and blood to have been spilt like water in the days that were before the Flood. But now all that was to be changed. In the new era God was to exact vengeance on the murderer, whether man or beast. The destroyer of human life was himself to be destroyed. In the case of man the capital sen- tence was to be inflicted by his fellow-man, acting as God's instrument and vicegerent : " Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." 1 It is generally allowed that in this Noachic statute lay, as in a germ, the magisterial office by which, as society organised itself, the power of the sword ultimately came to be borne. But in the meantime, even before the formal constitution of tribunals for the administration of justice, society was directed, not merely per- mitted, but expressly enjoined, to defend itself against the reckless waste of human life by inflicting the death penalty upon all who delibe- rately and wilfully shed a fellow-creature's blood. The reason assigned for such impartial retribution was the original and inherent dignity of man as a creature made in the divine image, and there- 1 Gen. ix. 6. 164 THE PATKIAECHAL TIMES. fore in a manner allied to the divine nature as well as set beneath the divine protection. It may be added that this solemn statute, enjoining capital punishment on murderers, having been given to Noah, was presumably intended for the entire family of man, and not having been formally revoked by Christ, may be fairly regarded as of universal obligation. (4.) And now as a fourth condition of the new era, the entire race was anew placed, and that with increased distinct- ness and emphasis, beneath a canopy of grace. " And I, behold I, establish " literally, am causing to stand up " My covenant," * i.e., the covenant which is mine, which was of my forming at the first, and will be of my maintaining to the last. Nor was this ancient covenant simply recon- structed after the fashion it had worn in pre- diluvian days, so that a second time by another deluge it might be overthrown. On the contrary, it should be so permanently fixed that never again would it so much as seem to be revoked by divine judgments on account of sin. The merciful con- sideration extended to mankind during the ante- cedent period, so far from being contracted in this, was to be conspicuously enlarged. Never again was Heaven's patience to become exhausted or its 1 Gen. ix. 9. THE SECOND AGE OF HISTORY. 165 benignant sway to be arrested by a display of judicial anger against transgressors : " I will not again curse the earth any more for man's sake ; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth ; neither will I again smite any more every living thing as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease." " And I will establish My covenant with you : neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth." 1 This, the distinctively new element added to the original Edenic promise of a woman's seed the engagement to conserve the orderly constitution and course of nature, and in particular to avert in future time the recur- rence of any such widespread and destructive inun- dation as a flood is sometimes spoken of by later writers in Scripture as "God's covenant of the day and of the night," 2 although by theologians it is usually designated the Noachic as distin- guished from the Adamic, the Abrahamic, and the Mosaic covenants. As in every covenant, also, there are, besides a promise, a sacrifice upon which that covenant rests, and a sign or seal by which 1 Gen. viii. 21, 22, ix.ii. 2 Jer. xxxiii. 20, 25. 166 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. it is confirmed, so in this the burnt-offerings of Noah were accepted as a typical foreshadowing of that greater oblation which constitutes the sole ground in law for the forthflowing of grace or mercy to sinful men, while the public attestation or external pledge of the covenant's formation was supplied by God Himself, who for the future established the rainbow as a " token of the cove- nant " He was then giving : " And it shall come to pass when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud, and I will re- member My covenant which is between Me and you and every living creature of all flesh, and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh." l It is by no means to be argued from this either that now for the first time the rain- bow appeared, 2 or that, at least, the author of Genesis thought so ; 3 since unless the laws of light and the atmospheric conditions of the earth were different before the Flood from what they afterwards became of which there is not suffi- cient proof that " coloured splendour thrown by the bursting forth of the sun upon the departing clouds" must have been a frequent spectacle in the prediluvian sky. This being so, and the ori- ginal composer of this part of Genesis having pro- 1 Gen. ix. 14, 15. 2 Bush,Keil, Delitzsch. s Knobel. THE SECOND AGE OF HISTORY. 1G7 bably been Noah whoever was its latest editor it is just as likely as not that he understood the rainbow was not then for the first time called into existence, but only then exalted from a common to a sacred use, by being selected and appointed as a sign or visible token of the re-erected cove- nant. Nor can it be successfully urged against the credibility of what is here reported, that from time immemorial the bow in the cloud has in diverse tongues and amongst widely severed peoples been connected with ideas of religion. In the ancient Chaldean legend of the deluge, the rainbow is represented as a creation of Anu, the god of the sky, the president of the Babylonian pantheon, while the veritable circumstance of its creation "in the assembly of the gods" is com- memorated on a mutilated Assyrian tablet pre- served in the British Museum. 1 Among the Hindoos a myth depicts the god of the firmament, Indras, as encountering the heaven-storming As- suras with storms and torrents of rain, bending his bow, Indrayuda, like the son of Saturn, and discharging from it lightning-tipped arrows, after which he lays the bow aside as a sign of peace. 2 An old Persian picture, mentioned by Stolberg in 1 Monthly Interpreter, July 1885, Art - "0 1(i Testament in the Light of Recent Discoveries." 2 Bohlen, "Introduction to Genesis," vol. ii. p. 146. 168 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. the first volume of his " History of the Eeligion of Jesus Christ," represents a winged boy on a rain- bow with an aged man kneeling before him in the attitude of worship. 1 The Chinese esteemed the rainbow as the harbinger of troubles and misfor- tunes on the earth, while the early Scandinavians regarded it as a bridge constructed by the gods from earth to heaven. The Greeks called it by the name of Iris with which is probably connected the beautiful word Irene, "peace" fabled it to be the daughter of Thaumas or Wonder, and Electra or Brightness, herself the daughter of Oceanus, and assigned it the office of Messenger to the King and Queen of Olympus. Indeed, Homer 2 speaks of rainbows as having been fixed in clouds by the son of Kronos as "a sign to articulate speaking men." Yet neither of these coincidences between pagan mythology and the biblical story, nor all of them together, can estab- lish the position that the latter should be thrust down to the level of the former, while the con- nection of the rainbow with God's covenant of salvation places the latter at an immense moral elevation above the former, and so secures for it an acceptance which is denied to these. 2. Such being the conditions, physical, social, 1 Kalisch, " Commentary on Genesis," p. 223. 2 Iliad, xviii. 182-184 5 ibid., xi. 27. THE SECOND AGE OF HISTORY. 169 and religious, under which the new era, or second age of humanity, opened, it will be interesting to inquire into the features it ex- hibited, in so far at least as these were fore- shadowed by the incidents and experiences of its earlier years and centuries. Scanty as are the materials for forming a judgment concerning the qualities or characteristics of this particular portion of time, a careful consideration of what lies to hand will enable one to estimate the directions in which, if not the velocities with which, the social currents of the day began to move. (i.) The new era had scarcely dawned when the old virus of sin, which had swept away the first world, revealed itself in the second. The tree of humanity had been cut down to the roots by the axe of judgment at the close of the preceding period; yet, as if to show that the seat of that moral malady under which it had deteriorated was not in the branches but in the root, no sooner did it evince symptoms of awakening vitality than the old principle of corruption, also reviving, com- menced to operate even from within the root. Noah, the second head of the family, began to be an husbandman or man of the ground, and, in pursuance of his chosen occupation, planted 170 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. a vineyard. In so doing he deserved commen- dation. It cannot certainly be inferred from the biblical narrative that husbandry and vine cultivation were unknown until invented and introduced to the notice of mankind by Noah. That the vine was indigenous to Armenia is testified by Xenophon, 1 while both biblical and monumental history declare that it was largely cultivated in ancient Egypt. Nor is there ground for supposing that up to this time Noah, though acquainted with the tree and its fruit, had never manufactured wine or fermented grape juice. "With the strongest possible desire to deal gently with the venerable patriarch, to set down naught against him in malice, to charge him with nothing that is not stated in the record, on a comprehensive view of the situation one is shut up to the dis- agreeable conclusion that Noah, from some cause which is unexplained, forgot himself, indulged in the intoxicating liquor to excess, and became inebriated in fact, got so drunk, that he knew neither where he was nor what he did. A more deplorable exhibition of the natural fruits of intemperance than that which Noah furnished in his own person it will be difficult to discover in any modern Sodom. It was, moreover, a melan- 2 Anabasis, iv. 4, 9. THE SECOND AGE OF HISTORY. 171 choly proof that, notwithstanding the waters of judgment through which it had passed, the heart of man was exactly what it had been before that penal infliction, " evil, only evil, and that continually." If aught else was needed to demonstrate the inherent depravity of the new race, it was the behaviour of Ham, the youngest son of the patriarch, over which it is perhaps best to drop a veil of silence. (2.) Another characteristic of the new period which speedily appeared was the separation of the human family into two distinct classes according to their moral qualities and religious dispositions. As Adam and Eve had hardly quitted Eden when the two antagonistic forces of good and evil the seed of the woman and the brood of the serpent began to show themselves in the twin brothers Abel and Cain, definitely fixing themselves, as the years rolled away, in the opposing lines of Seth and Cain, so on the threshold of the New Era, in the circle of the patriarch's immediate descen- dants, the old cleavage in the race returned, disentangling from one another and thrusting ever more widely apart the two families of the righteous and the wicked. That which started this moral rupture in the family of Noah was the incident above alluded to, which did not 172 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. indeed create, but called into activity, thereby confirming and intensifying the latent tenden- cies already possessed by his sons, in the case of Ham towards disregard of parents, sensuality, and malice ; in that of Shem and Japheth, towards filial piety, moral purity, and tender charity. When Noah, waking from his wine, learned the affront which had been put upon him by his youngest son, and broke forth under the impulse of prophecy to unfold the future destinies of his descendants, he did not by any arbitrary power, either inherent in himself or dele- gated by heaven, impose these destinies upon his descendants, but simply recognised and predicted them as the natural outcome and issue of the contrasted qualities which had already thrust themselves into visibility and prominence in the characters of his sons. Permanence of type is a phrase which the science of the present day has made familiar as the most appropriate expression of a law, otherwise known as the law of heredity, by which organised beings manifest a tendency to reproduce themselves not merely after their kinds, but according to their constitutional peculiarities ; and all experience goes to show that the law exists and operates in the realm of humanity and in the sphere of morals no less than in that of THE SECOND AGE OF HISTORY. 173 intellect or of physical formation. That in the Second Age of history, as in the first, it should have borne fruit, is precisely what one, inquiring into the subject, should have expected to find ; that it was to do so is exactly what the patriarch foretold. It is in this way alone that the doom foreannounced for Ham's son can be satisfactorily explained : " Cursed be Canaan ; A servant of servants shall he be to his brethren. Blessed be the Lord God of Shem ; And Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, And he will dwell in the tents of Shem, And Canaan shall be his servant." It is impossible to maintain that nothing more is contained in this lofty utterance than a prediction that such should be the respective futures of his children. The force of the word "cursed" can be reduced only by weakening along with it the import of the term " blessed ; " but inasmuch as the divine actions represented by these expres- sions are always based upon moral presuppositions in man, it is not necessary to impair the full strength of either the benediction or the impreca- tion in order to vindicate the divine impartiality, or to show that in cursing Canaan the son of Ham while blessing Japheth and Shem, Jehovah Elohim was neither respecting persons nor exercising an 174 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. unreasonable sovereignty, but manifesting Himself in the one case as a God who hateth iniquity and can by no means clear the guilty ; in the other as a God who loveth truth and rewardeth righteous- ness. Some have sought to escape the seeming harshness of making Canaan suffer for the wicked- ness of Ham, a son for his father's sins, as if that were not the will of Providence to-day as much as it was then, by supposing that Canaan had been the first to witness Noah's shame, and had gleefully rehearsed it to his father. It will, how- ever, in all respects be found a safer solution of the problem to assume that the patriarch foresaw that the depravity which had so unexpectedly disclosed itself in the irreverent and cruel beha- viour of his younger son would reproduce and fix itself in the line of one of his descendants, draw- ing down upon them along the ages the maledic- tion of heaven ; whilst, on the other hand, the piety of Shem and Japheth also reappearing in their offspring, would as infallibly attract towards them the good- will of Jehovah Elohim. And this brings up for consideration a third feature of the new era, viz. : (3.) The breaking up of the hitherto united family of man into races, tribes, and nations. This formally took place in the fifth generation after the Flood, in the days of Peleg the son of THE SECOND AGE OF HISTORY. 175 Eber j 1 but, in its main lines at least, it was discerned from the first by the patriarch, who also must have seen the movement considerably advanced before he died, since he survived till the fifty-eighth year of the life of Abraham, in whose time Egypt and Canaan were in possession of the Hamites, while the Japhethites were already occupying the north- west of Asia and the shores of the Mediterranean, the Shemites remaining in their primitive settle- ments around the Tigro-Euphrates Valley. For the Canaanites, a portion of the Hamite race, Noah foreannounced a future of political degrada- tion : " Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants," i.e., a servant of the most abject type, "shall he be unto his brethren." This prophecy was after- wards abundantly fulfilled. In the time of Joshua 2 the Canaanites were partly exterminated and partly reduced to the lowest form of slavery by the Israelites who belonged to the family of Shem, whilst the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Egyp- tians, likewise part of the family of Canaan, were in turn subjected by the Japhethite Persians, Macedonians, and Eomans. 8 To Shem was ap- pointed by divine direction a destiny of religious 1 Gen. x. 25. * Josh. ix. 23. 8 Knobel, Die Genesis, p. 95 (Kurtzgefasstes Exegetisches Hand- buck) ; Keil and Delitzsch on "Genesis," p. 159 (darks' Foreign Theol. Library). 176 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. exaltation : " Blessed be the Lord God of Shem ! " an ascription of praise to the God of Shem which implied for the people of Shem the highest possible renown. They should retain amongst them the knowledge and worship of the true God, they should be enriched with the fulness of blessing which resided in Jehovah Elohim, they should be the medium of transmission onwards to distant ages of the primeval promise of salvation ; and thus, through the moral and religious ascendency conferred upon them, they should become a means of powerfully influencing for good the other nations of the earth. The descendants of Japheth should be distinguished by territorial expansion : "God" Elohim, because Jehovah as such never was the God of the Japhethites "shall enlarge Japheth, and he," i.e., Japheth, "shall dwell in the tents of Shem." The play upon the words in the original Hebrew is lost in our translation, the Revised no less than the Authorised. Were the lines to read, "God enlarge the one whose destiny is to be enlarged ! " or " May God spread abroad the one whose calling is to spread abroad ! " the exact force of the patriarch's language would be better understood. The mission of the tribes and nations that should spring from Noah's eldest son was to act as the world's pioneers, breaking THE SECOND AGE OF HISTORY. 177 up new countries, leading forth new colonies, and establishing new settlements on the outskirts of civilisation ; whilst at the same time they should be more or less intimately associated with the children of Sbem in the participation for them- selves of the blessings of religion, and the com- munication of these blessings to the other nations of mankind. That this has been the characteristic of the Japhetic as distinguished from the Shemitic nnd Hamitic races of the world all history from Noah's time to this attests. ( 178 ) VIII. THE TABLE OF NATIONS. AMONGST the characteristics of the second age of history has been mentioned the gradual breaking up of the original unity of the race of mankind and the distribution of its members into families, tribes, and nations. According to the author of Genesis, 1 that disintegrating and dispersing move- ment began in the days of Peleg, the fifth in the line of direct succession from Noah, and was largely accelerated, if not immediately occasioned, by a mysteriously sudden and seemingly supernatural confusion of tongues which happened in connection with the building of the Tower of Babel, of which notice will be afterwards taken. At the date of the composition of Genesis, the process had been so far completed that a chart could be prepared of all the most considerable peoples of antiquity, and an attempt made to exhibit their derivation from and relation to the three sons of Noah, of whom it THE TABLE OF NATIONS. 179 is expressly said that after the Flood " of these was the whole earth overspread." It is that chart confessedly the oldest and best ethnological register in existence that lies to view in the celebrated tenth chapter of the First Book of Moses, challeng- ing inspection, inviting criticism, defying amend- ment, maintaining its substantial accuracy in the face of hostile review and in the clear light of modern discovery. Supplying to ethnologists, philologists, and archaeologists, to historians, geo- graphers, and politicians, no less than to Bible students, the most reliable information now pro- curable concerning the early nationalities of earth, first in their formations, next in their migrations, and finally in their locations, it likewise attests the brilliant capacity of the Hebrew mind, which, in what for it might a priori have been deemed an unfamiliar region, that of geographical research, has achieved a success without parallel amongst even the most gifted peoples of antiquity ; 1 while, so far as relates to an intelligent acquaintance with the author's purpose in compiling or writing the Book of Genesis, it provides a bridge by which the student may safely cross the gulf of centuries that lies between the ancient world which perished in 1 See Delitzsch, Die Genesis, p. 213; Kalisch, '-On Genesis," P- 235- 180 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. the Flood and the new condition of society out of which the important and powerful family of the Abrahnmidse arose. i. The literary structure of this venerable document is the first point that calls for exami- nation. By whomsoever prepared, and from what- soever age proceeding, its materials are by no means promiscuously thrown together, but, on the contrary, are arranged on easily understood principles, (i.) The nations of the earth with which, when this world-chart was constructed, the author was familiar, are collected into three main groups, of which one is assigned to each of the three sons of Noah as its original progenitor. As each group has its distinct common ancestor, so has it also its separate location on the surface of the globe ; the Japhethites, or peoples deriving their existence from the eldest son of Noah, occu- pying the countries lying on the shores of the Caspian, the Euxine, and the Mediterranean Seas ; the Hamites, or the descendants of Noah's youngest son, finding rest in the warmer regions of Nortli Africa and Arabia; and the Shemites, or those regarded as having sprung from Noah's middle son, establishing themselves generally in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley, and never removing far from the primitive settlements of the race. (2.) THE TABLE OF NATIONS. 181 To each separate people in the different groups a specific tribal ancestor or national progenitor is furnished, who in some cases is a grandson, and in others a great or great-great-grandson of Noah. In several instances uncertainty prevails as to whether the ancestral cognomen has not been de- rived from the designation of the people, as in Aram, Cush, Mizraim. The ordinary mode of pro- cedure is to carry forward and transform into the appellation of a people the name of the progenitor from whom it was believed to spring. (3.) The considerations determining the grouping of the earth's populations in this early record are as- serted by the author or composer to be four, if not five: physical relationship "in their families;" affinity of speech "after their tongues;" geographical proximity "in their countries;" national peculiarities "in their nations;" his- torical development " after their generations." It is not certain how far these five factors were allowed to operate in each particular instance ; it admits of no doubt that the table as a whole was constructed with an eye not to one of these regula- tive ideas to the exclusion of the rest, but to each of them alike and to all of them in combination ; l 1 Of. Kiehm's Worterbuch des Biblischens Alterthums, Art. " Viilk- ertafeL" 182 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. and this circumstance, it is pertinent to add, must be carefully remembered in attempting a detailed exposition of the register. (4.) The order in which the nations are introduced is not difficult to grasp. The Japhethite peoples are first recited, not because Japheth was the oldest of Noah's sons, but because they were farthest removed from the Theocratic centre, and probably were earliest developed. 1 The Hamites obtain the second place, not that the two good sons of Noah might embrace and shut in the family tree, but that, in accordance with the method followed throughout in the composition of Genesis, subordinate lines of history being first disposed of, the main thread may be taken up and carried forward without interruption. The Shem- ites conclude the list, because in them the line of promise reaches onward to its immediate goal in the rise of the Terachites and the calling of Abra- ham. A geographical arrangement appears to be observed in the enumeration of the particular nations that compose the main groups, the record usually commencing with the peoples most remote from, and advancing to those the most near to, the standpoint of the writer. 2. The historic credibility of this ancient monu- ment has been assailed on a variety of grounds. 1 Knobel, Die Genesis, p. 99. THE TABLE OP NATIONS. 183 (i.) On account of its resemblance to similar world- charts belonging to ancient peoples and proceed- ing from prehistoric times, it has. been relegated to the category of legend. In particular, it has been compared 1 with the ethnographic mythology of the Greeks, in which peoples are epically trans- formed into individual heroes representing national progenitors the Dorians, ^Elians, lonians, and Achseans, for example, being traced back re- spectively to a Dorus, an ^Eolus, an Ion, and an Achaeus. It has been likened to correspond- ing Hindoo productions, in which contiguous nations, barbaric tribes, and even foreign races are exhibited as of a common stock with the Hindoos themselves, tribal names being trans- formed into those of patriarchal ancestors sup- posed to have declined from the Brahminical religion. But this manifest commingling of races witnessed in both Grecian and Hindoo registers, the undeniable presence in both of elements universally admitted to be mythic fab- rications, and the manifold diversity and ', dis- figurement in which these legends appear, set a palpable as well as wide distinction between 1 Boblen, " Introduction to Genesis," voL i p. 203 ; Knobel, Die Genesis, p. 99. 184 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. these genealogies and this table of nations. 1 " The whole ancient world," says Delitzsch, 2 " has nothing to show of like universality with this table. The earth-describing sections of the Epic poems of the Hindoos, and some of the Puranas, go greatly astray, even in respect to India, whilst the nearest lands are lost in the wild and mon- strous accounts that are given of them. Their system of the seven world-islands (dvipas) that lay round the MSru, occupies itself more with the worlds of the gods and genii than with the earth of man. Nowhere is there to be found so universal a survey of the national connections." And this survey is so accurate that, unlike the mythical formations of antiquity, it resists all tendency to change, and remains substantially the same far on in the centuries, indeed till the age of the chronicler, 3 a circumstance which apologists with reason cite as powerful, though indirect, confirmation of its truth. (2.) On the ground of so-called internal evidence its com- position is assigned to a post-Mosaic era, so that its information concerning the early settlements of mankind must be viewed at the best as con- 1 Cf. Havernick, " Introduction to the Pentateuch," p. 120. 2 Die Genesis, p. 213. 3 I Chron. i. 5, 26. THE TABLE OF NATIONS. 185 jectural. By Bohlen 1 it is placed as late as the Exile, generally on account of the order and position in which the principal nations are ex- hibited in the chart, and in particular "because Assyria, Nineveh, and the country beyond the Euphrates were at that time first known to the Hebrews." According to Knobel 2 it took its rise not long before the year 1000 B.C., was the product of such geographical and ethnological knowledge as the Israelites had then acquired through their intercourse with Phoenicia, and was intended to supply a picture of the condition of mankind and the distribution of its popula- tion somewhere between the twelfth and tenth pre-Christian centuries; the main argument in support of these assertions being that the table covers pretty nearly the extent of territory that was covered by Phoenician commerce in the days of Solomon and Hiram. With greater show of reason, however, Delitzsch, Hengstenberg, and Havernick maintain that the table itself bears unmistakable traces of having proceeded from patriarchal times, and of having been enriched through the knowledge of the populations of the earth which the Israelites brought with them 1 " Introduction to Genesis," vol. ii. p. 207. * Die Genesis, p. 96. 186 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. out of Egypt an opinion which perfectly har- monises with the idea that its present form was prepared by Moses. (3.) Because of certain philo- logical difficulties which the table presents, an unfavourable judgment has been passed upon its authenticity. The Phoenicians and Canaanites, it is urged, are in the register assigned to Ham, whereas, according to both the situation of their settlements and the language of their people, they ought to have been Semites. Bohlen, indeed, has no doubt that they were Semites, who, by the Exilian genealogist, out of national pride, were handed over as an accursed race to the Hamites, " that they might not be brought into any close relationship with the Hebrews." Few, however, will question that a better explanation of the singular phenomenon is, that the Canaanites, though descendants of Ham, had invaded Semitic territory, and, like other conquerors since, had acquired the language of the people they con- quered. 3. The ethnic distribution presented by this celebrated table may now be studied. First comes Japhet with his seven sons and seven grandsons. (i.) Amongst the sons the foremost is Gomer, the tribe-father of a people in after years inheriting his name; according to the best authorities, the THE TABLE OF NATIONS. 187 Gimirrd of the Assyrian inscriptions, and the Cimmerians of Homer, whose abodes were the shores of the Caspian and Euxine Seas, whence they spread themselves westward over Europe as far as the Atlantic, leaving traces of their presence in the Cimbri of North Germany and the Cymri of Wales. "We first hear of them," writes Professor Sayce, 1 " in the time of Ezarhaddon, when they threatened the northern frontier of the Assyrian Empire, under their chieftain Teispes, but were defeated with great slaughter and driven westward into Asia Minor." Next Magog appears, whose de- scendants, described by Ezekiel 2 as a fierce and warlike people, presided over by Gog, the prince of Bosh, Mesech, and Tubal, are commonly iden- tified with the Scythians, a very ancient people well known to Homer and Hesiod, whose territories lay around the Sea of Asov, and in the Caucasus. In the Assyrian Inscriptions Magog is supposed to be represented by Mat-Gugu, or the Land of Gyges. After him Madai follows, universally recognised as the ancestral head of the Medes, on the south-west shore of the Caspian, who, 1 The Monthly Interpreter, December 1885, Art. "The Old Testa- ment in the Light of Recent Discoveries ; " cf. " Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments," p. 45. 2 Chap, xxxviii. 2. 188 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. according to the Inscriptions, in the time of Shalmanezer II., B.C. 840, bore the names of Amada and Mata, but were afterwards designated Mada or Madai, as in Hebrew. Standing fourth in succession is Javan, whose posterity has been identified with the lonians or Greeks generally, who are styled in Scripture 1 Javan, in Sanscrit Javana, in old Persian Jund, aud on the Eosetta Stone Jounan. Tubal and Meshech form the fifth and sixth of the band. Usually associated iii Scripture with Magog as tributaries and depen- dants, they are without doubt the Tibarenes of classical geography, the Tabal of the Assyrian Inscriptions, aud the Moschi of the geographers, or the Muskd of the monuments, 2 both of whom inhabited the southern shores of the Black Sea. The list closes with Tiras, nowhere else in Scrip- ture mentioned, and not yet properly identified, though since the time of Josephus regarded as the race-progenitor of the Thracians. Kalisch, how- ever, deems the Thracians too far distant from Armenia, and with Lenormant seeks the habita- tions of Tiras in the regions traversed by the Taurus Mountains ; in favour of which is the fact 1 Isa. livi 19; Ezek. xxvii. 13; Dan. viii. 21, x. 20; Joel iii. 6. a " Records of the Past," vol. iii. p. 113; p. 46. THE TABLE OF NATIONS. 189 that on old Egyptian monuments 1 the names Maschoasch and Toerscha stand together as they do here, and as Tubal and Meshech in the Assyrian Inscriptions. (2.) Amongst the grandsons of Japhet the sons of Gomer properly precede Ashkenaz, Bipath, and Togarmah. The first is to be sought for, according to Jeremiah 2 in the vicinity of Ararat and Minni, i.e., in the district stretching from the Euxine Sea to the Caspian, with which corresponds the land of Asguza, described by Sargon as lying between the king- doms of Ecbatana and the Minni. The second, of uncertain position, may be provisionally located about the Eipha3an Mountains on the north of the Caspian. The third, mentioned by Ezekiel 3 as a nation belonging to the north quarters, and accustomed to trade with horses, horsemen, and mules in the markets of Tyre, must be iden- tified, either with the Armenians generally, 4 who to this day call themselves "the House of Thorgom," or with Tulgarimmu, 5 a city on the borders of the Tabul, and in the neighbourhood of Malatiyeh, i.e., in the extreme east of Cap- padocia, a location already favoured by Bochart. 1 Hengstentierg, Die Biicher Mose's und Alrjypttn, p. 206. 2 li. 27. 8 xxvii. 14, xxxviii. 6. Knobel, Delitzsch. 6 " Records of the Post," vol. vii. p. 38- 190 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. After these the sons of Javan complete the company of the Japhethites. Elishah, praised by Ezekiel for its blue and purple, is commonly supposed to be Elis, the western portion of the Greek Peloponnesus, but Professor Sayce thinks a Greek district in Asia Minor like JEolus would be more probable, and Knobel so far accords with this opinion that he regards these Asiatic .^Eolians as the people alluded to by the prophet of the exile, while the ^Eolians of Thessaly he pronounces the people referred to in the table. Tarshish, now almost universally accepted as the Greek Tartessos, in the vicinity of Gibraltar, more probably denotes the whole of Spain as it was known to the Hebrews, just as Javan is used to designate all the Greeks. 1 In later Scripture 2 Tarshish is represented as a wea]thy and flourishing country, abounding in silver, iron, tin, and lead mines, and ruled over by its own independent kings. Situated between the mouths of the Guadalquiver, it formed the extreme limit on the west of the voyages undertaken by Phoenician vessels, which were 1 Kalisch, " On Genesis," p. 242 ; cf. Bohlen, " Introduction to Genesis," vol. ii. p. 216. 2 i Kings x. 22 ; Ps. xlviii. 7, Ixxii. 10 ; Isa. Ix. 9, Ixvi. 19 ; Jer. x. 9; Ezek. xxvii. 12. THE TABLE OF NATIONS. 191 thence named " ships of Tarshish." If the de- rivation be correct, 1 which finds in Tarshish only a form of the Sanscrit or Aryan word Tarischa "the sea" or the "sea coast," then a striking confirmation is supplied of the statement in the table, that the first settlers in Tarshish were of Aryan or Japhetic extraction. Kittini or Chittim, spoken of in Scripture as an island or a group of islands, has since the time of Josephus been identified with the islands lying in the eastern portion of the Mediterranean, and, in particular, with Cyprus, which contained a Phoe- nician colony, called Kition by the Greeks, but now named Larnaka. Dodanim, if accepted as the correct reading, can only be, 2 as "the whole of the Illyrian or North Grecian tribe," or Dodona* in Epirus, one of the oldest seats of Grecian civilisation ; if, however, the reading Rodanim be preferred, 4 there can be small ques- tion that the best identification 5 sees in them the inhabitants of Rhodes, an island which Epi- phanius conjoins with Citium or Cyprus. The second place in the table is occupied by Geikie, " Hours with the Bible," voL i. p. 235. Knobel, Die Genesis, p. 105. Micheelis, Delitzsch, Havernick, and others. I Chron. i. 7 ; the Septuagint and Samaritan versions. Bochart, Bohlen, Professor Sayce, and others. 192 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. Ham and his four sons, with numerous grand- sons and several more remote descendants, (i.) Of his sons the first introduced is Cush, the Kusu of the Assyrians, the Kesh of the Egyptians, whose descendants were undoubtedly the dark- skinned ^Ethiopians in the North Soudan, though they also spread abroad to Arabia, Babylonia, and even India. The second is Mizraim or Egypt, the Hebrew word being a dual form of Matzor or Mazor, a singular occurring in later books, 1 and corresponding to Mutzur, the Assyrian name for Egypt, the old Egyptian designation of the country, as appears from the monuments, being Kemi or Chemi, the Black Land, alluding to the dark colour of the soil deposited by the Nile inunda- tions. The term Matzor, " fortified," was probably suggestive of its impregnable situation through the great " wall of defence " which sheltered it on the east against the attacks of Bedouins and other Asiatic nations. 2 Its dual form has been explained as pointing to the two strips of country divided by the Nile, but is now generally under- stood as preserving a memorial of the two Egypts, Upper and Lower, of which the Pharaohs were 1 Kings xix. 24; Isa. xix. 6, xxxv. 25. 2 Bohlen, Altes Indien, vol. ii. p. 456 ; cf. fiber's ^Jgypten und die Sucker Jfose's, p. 79 ; Professor Sayce, " The Old Testament in the Lightof Recent Discoveries " (Monthly Interpreter, Dec. 1885). THE TABLE OF NATIONS. 193 monarchs, styling themselves, with special refer- ence to their double empire, " lords of the two countries," " lords of the diadems," "lords of the white and red crowns," the former symbolising their rule over Southern or Upper, the latter their dominion over Northern or Lower Egypt. 1 The third son of Ham is Phut, an appellation, in all likelihood, reporting itself in the Punt of the in- scriptions, " the divine land," as it was sometimes called, because of the spicery and perfumes it yielded, the land lying to the south of Egypt on both sides of the Red Sea. The fourth son, Canaan, gave his name to the strip of country between Lebanon and the sea, the inhabitants of which, Phoenicians, described themselves as Canaanites, or Lowlanders, as distinguished from the Amo- rites, or highlanders, who occupied the higher or mountainous districts. In later times the term Canaan applied to the whole of Palestine. (2.) Following the sons, the grandsons, great grand- sons, and other descendants are introduced. Of the sons of Cush it is agreed that Seba meant the inhabitants of Meroe, in Nubia, north of Ethiopia ; that Havilah, which must here be distinguished 1 " Records of the Past," vol. ii. p. 61, vol. iv. pp. 19, 35, 43, &c. ; "Egyptian Life and History" (Harkness), pp. 10, 11; "The Dwel- lers oil the Nile" (Budge), p. 50. N 194 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. from the Shemitic territory of the same name in verse 29, signified the Avelitae of the ancients, an African tribe of Ethiopians who dwelt south of Babelmandeb ; that Sabtah was a branch of these same Ethiopians, whose metropolis was Sdbota, in Hadramut, in Southern Arabia; that Eaamah is best explained of the inhabitants of Rhegmah, a city on the Persian Gulf ; and that Sabtechah was either Samydake, on the eastern shore qf the Persian Gulf, and therefore nearer to India, or Nigritia, in Africa, which the name Subatok, discovered on Egyptian monuments, seems to favour. Of the graudsons of Gush, two are sons of Eaamah. Sheba is not to be confounded with the Seba or Meroe already mentioned, but must be sought for either in the Sabsea or Sheba of Arabia Felix, whose queen came to hear the wisdom of Solomon, whose people were dis- tinguished for commercial enterprise, and whose principal city was adorned with magnificent palaces or temples, or in a tribe of Northern Arabia, mentioned by Tiglath-Pileser and Sar- gon ; Dedan is manifestly Daden on the Persian Gulf. The one remote descendant of Gush who finds a place in the register is Nimrod, whose name has not yet been detected among the cunei- form inscriptions, though George Smith and other THE TABLE OF NATIONS. 195 Assyrian scholars have supposed him to be Ghiz- dubar, the hero of the Chaldean epic in which occurs the legend of the Flood. 1 There is, how- ever, ground for believing this conjecture to be inaccurate, since Ghizdubar was originally the god of fire, who afterwards became a solar hero, and in the Accadian poem is not described as either a "mighty hunter" or a founder of king- doms, 2 in which characters he appears in the Hebrew record. Without admitting the Nimrod section to be a later Jehovistic supplement, 3 the reason of its introduction in this place is obvi- ously not to point out this descendant of Gush as another of the great ethnic heads of the Hamite division of the race, but to set a mark upon him as one of the earliest pioneers of postdiluvian civi- lisation, and as the first founder of imperialism. At the same time, the table emphasizes, through his name Nimrod, which signifies "rebel," through his character, which was that of a Gibbor or mighty one, like the roving gallants of the pre- diluvian time, and through his avocation, which was that of a mighty hunter before the Lord, or in a spirit of defiance against the Lord, that the 1 See " The Judgment of the Flood," p. 128. 2 See ibid. 8 Vater, Sclaimann, Knobel, 196 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. true secret of his enterprise was restless and towering ambition. From being a subduer of wild beasts, he passed on, as it were by natural gradation, to be a conqueror and ruler of men. Crossing over from Arabia to the Land of Shinar in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley, he laid his hands upon Babel or Babylon, in Semitic Baby- lonian Bdb-ili, a translation of the old Accadian Ka-dimirra, or " gate of the god," identified by modern discovery as Hillah, on the east bank of the Euphrates ; upon Erech, or Uruk in the native dialect, believed to be Wurka, about eighty miles south of Babylon ; upon Accad, in Accadiau Agade, in the vicinity of Sippara, its sister city, with which it formed " Sepharvaim," or " the two Sipparas," discovered by Mr. Eassam at Abbu Habba, 30 miles south-west of Bagdad ; and upon Cain eh, the Cul-unu of the monuments, and situated in the southern division of the land, as Accad was in the northern, though as yet its exact position has not been ascertained. Then passing northwards into Asshur or Assyria, the region on the north-east of Babylon, through which flows the Tigris, the fourth of the Paradise rivers, he laid the foundations of Nineveh, a non-Semitic term signifying " the dwelling-place of the god Niiiua," which afterwards became the largest and THE TABLE OF NATIONS. 197 most flourishing city of the ancient world, and of which the ruins have been excavated by Layard and others at Nebbiyunus and Koujunjik. 1 To this he added Rehoboth-Ir, or " the streets of the city," which may describe the open squares of Nineveh, or of another town whose site is un- known, Calah, the Assyrian Calkhu, which lay to the south of Nineveh, and is now represented by the mounds of Nimroud and Resen, between Nineveh and Calah, which, according to Professor Sayce, 2 is Res-eni, " the head of that spring," " a town mentioned by Sennacherib as in the vicinity of Nineveh." And now having disposed of the posterity of Gush, the writer brings into the field the descendants of Mizraim, forming eight separate peoples ; Ludim, whom Ebers has identified with the Egyptian retu or "men," generally supposed to have been aboriginal inhabitants of the country ; Anamim, conjectured by the same authority to have been wandering Semites who settled in the delta of the Nile, and were called anamaima or herdsmen ; Lehabim, understood to be the Lubim of later Scriptures, 3 and the Libyans of the Egyp- tian monuments ; Naphtuhim, according to Knobel 1 Layard's "Nineveh," vol. ii. p. 136. 2 The Monthly Interpreter, Dec. 1885, p. 135. 3 2 Chron xii. 3 ; Dan. ii. 43 ; Nah. iii. 9. 198 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. and Ebers l the Egyptian na Ptaku, people of Ptah or Memphis ; Pathrusim, the inhabitants of the city of god Pa-Hathor, and generally the people of Upper Egypt, which in Egyptian was called Pa-to-res, or "the land of the south," whence the plural Pathrusim ; Casluhim, believed by Bochart to be the Colchians, according to Hero- dotus, an old Egyptian colony, but more success- fully, though as yet hypothetically, explained by Ebers as a people dwelling near Mount Kasios, Kas-lokh, or the dry mountain of the ancient Egyptians; Philistim, the Philistines on the Medi- terranean coast, extending from Egypt to Joppa, whose five principal cities were Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gath, and Ekron ; and Caphtorim, out of whom, according to later Scriptures, 2 and not out of the Casluhim, the Philistines came, Phoe- nician colonists who settled on the coast-land of the delta, and were known to the Egyptians as Keft-ur, or Greater Phoenicia, Keft being the Egyptian title of Phoenicia. (3.) The sons and remote offspring of Canaan complete the gene- alogy of Ham. Sidon, his first-born, gave his name to the famous city of Sidon, upon the coast of Syria ; while Heth, another of his chil- 1 jEgypten und die Biiclier Mose's, pp. 1 12 ff. 2 Deut. ii. 23 ; Jcr. xlvii. 4 ; Amos ix. 7. THE TABLE OF NATIONS. 199 dren, became the father of the Hittites, the Kheta of the Egyptian monuments, the Khdte of the cuneiform inscriptions, a powerful Syrian tribe, whose chief seats were at Kadesh, on the Orontes, and Carchemish, on the Euphrates, the Hittites in the south of Palestine being a branch of the same ; a literary people who, be- sides borrowing art and culture from Babylonia, had invented for themselves a peculiar system of hieroglyphic writing, and probably composed books in their own tongue, if one may judge from the name of one of their cities in the south of Judab, Kirjath Sepher, or Book-town. 1 The Jebusite, from Jebus, the original desig- nation of Jerusalem, established himself at and around that city before it became the capital of Judah ; the Ammonite or mountaineer dwelt among the hills of Palestine; the Girgasite, located probably about the centre of the coun- try, is now nothing but a name. The Hivite, the villager, ' according to one philologist, the settler in a city according to another, was afterwards heard of in the days of the patri- archs 2 and of the conquest, and has latterly been supposed to have been discovered "in 1 " Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments," chap. v. 8 Gen. xxxiv. 2 ; Josh. is. I, 7. *i. 3 ,' Juilg. vi. 3. 200 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. the Khavvat of the Assyrian texts which de- noted the district about Hamath." The Arkite was an inhabitant of Arka, a Phoenician city, according to Alexander Severus, identical with Csesarea Libani, to the north of Tripolis, pro- bably the city of Arqua, whose ruins still exist in Tel-' Arka at the foot of Lebanon. The Sinite lived a little farther north, near a moun- tain fortress called Sinnas, and in a town named Sini, of which perhaps the memory was still preserved in the fifteenth century by a small village, Syn, situated near the river Area. The Arvadite abode in Arvad, or Arados, now Rudd, an important city on the north frontier of Phoenicia, often mentioned in Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions. The Zemarite inhabited Simirra or Zemar, a city taken by Tiglath- Pileser II. in his Palestine war, 1 the Simyra of the Greeks, and now known as Sumra. The Hamathite resided in the town of Hamath, styled Hammath Rabbah by the prophet Amos, Hammatti by Tiglath-Pileser II., Epiphaneia by the Greeks, and Hamah by the Syrians of to-day. With a brief description of the boun- daries of Canaan, as extending from Zidon unto 1 " Records of the Past," vol. v. pp. 48, 51. THE TABLE OF NATIONS. 201 Gaza, the historian concludes his account of the descendants of Ham. In the third main division of the table are enrolled the posterity of Shem, who is honour- ably introduced as the father of all the children of Eber, and amongst these of the Hebrews, for whose sake indeed the clause is inserted, and as the brother of Japheth the elder, i.e., as we under- stand it, the elder of Japheth's brothers, Ham being the younger. (i.) The first rank in the catalogue is assigned to the five sons of Shem. In Elam, in Assyrian Elamu, scholars recognise the Elamites of Gen. xiv., the warlike and civilised hill -men, who occupied the region east of Baby- lonia, between the Persian Gulf and Assyria, who in early times frequently invaded Babylonia and Assyria, one of whose monarchs, Kudur-Nankh- undi, in B.C. 2275, carried off an image of the goddess Nana from a temple in Erech, and who successfully maintained their independence till B.C. 640, when they were finally subdued by Assurbanipal of Assyria. 1 At a later period Elam was known to the Romans as Susiana, from the name of its capital Susan or Susa. Asshur, as already explained in connection with 1 " Records of the Past," vol. iii. p. 7. 202 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. the exploits of Nimrod, bestowed his name on the kingdom of Assyria. From Arpachshad, ac- cording to Josephus, 1 descended the Arpachsha- dites, who in his day were called Chaldeans, and the derivation of the compound term adopted by some authorities, from 'urfa or arfa the Arabic for boundary, and chesed, the singular of casdim, the word translated Chaldeans in the Authorised Version may seem to favour this idea ; but the general consensus of opinion seems to point to the district of Arrapachitis in the north of Assyria as the proper home of this people. The reference of Lud to the Lydians of Asia Minor, though controverted 2 on the ground that according to the order of the table it should be found between Arpachshad and Aram, can be satisfactorily upheld by supposing that at an early period they migrated thither from their original abodes; and it lends some countenance to this that tradition 3 speaks of the first Lydian king as a son of Ninus and a grandson of Belus. The designation Aram, in Assyrian Aramu, Arimu, Arumu, and meaning "the highlands," though conferred primarily on the region east of 1 " Antiquities of the Jews," i. 6. 4. 2 Professor Sayce, The Monthly Interpreter, March 1885. * Herodotus, i. 7. THE TABLE OF NATIONS. 203 tLe Euphrates in the neighbourhood of the Hit- tites, was subsequently extended to the whole territory of the Arameans, i.e., both Syria and Mesopotamia, and indeed ultimately came to em- brace all Aramaic speaking peoples of Semitic origin, who belonged not to any of the preceding branches. 1 (2.) The second rank is taken by the grandsons of Shem, or the sous of Aram, and the son of Arpachshad. The sons of Aram were Uz, the Khazu of the Assyrian texts, the country of Job, a tract of the Arabia desert situated south-east of Palestine ; Hul, probably the " district round Lake Merom, still known as JEl-Huleh, if it is not rather to be sought in the vicinity of Uz ; G ether, lying somewhere between El-Huleh and Uz, 2 perhaps the petty kingdom on the eastern side of the lake, from which David obtained his wife Maacah, Absalom's mother; and Mash, writ- ten in the Chronicles as Meshech, "the land of Mas" or desert of Northern Arabia, according to Professor Sayce, while Knobel locates it in the north-east of Mesopotamia in the neighbourhood of Mount Masios and the river Masche, and Thomson discovers it in Mais-el-Jebel in the east of Merom. Of Arpachshad's son, the designation 1 Geikie, "Hours with the Bible," vol. i. p. 262. 2 Thomson, "Land and Book," p. 251. 204 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. SlielacL, "to send forth," may point to the fact of an early migration from primitive Chaldean settlements; and a kindred allusion may lie in the name of Shelach's son Eber, or "crossing," the ancestor of the Hebrews or " Ibrim," the people from the other side of the river. 1 (3.) A third rank is formed of the remoter descendants of Shem, or the sons of Eber, viz., Peleg and Joktan. Of the etymological significance of " Peleg," or " division," there can be no doubt. He was so named to commemorate the great movement which ended in the distribution of the earth's population represented in the present table, though an earlier separation has been thought of by some, while others discern only an allusion to the parting of the brothers themselves. Peleg and his descendants settled, it is said, 2 near the junction of the Chaboras and the Euphrates, at a spot named Phaliga, where for- merly a town stood ; Joktan and his thirteen tribes turned towards the desert of Arabia. Almodad is commonly referred to Yemen. Sheleph appears to designate the Salapenoi of Ptolemy in the 1 Knobel, Lie Genesis, p. 115; Delitzsch, Die Genesis, p. 225; Bohlen, Introduction to Oenesix, voL ii. p. 250 ; Geikie, " Hours with the Bible," voL i. p. 264. 2 Geikie, " Hours with the Bible," vol. i. p. 265. THE TABLE OF NATIONS. 205 interior of the desert and to the south of Medina. Hazarmaveth is represented by Hadramut in the south-east of Arabia, where also Jarech, " the sons of the moon," must be placed. Hadoram is preserved in the Atramitse of the south coast of Arabia. Uzal is Awzal, the capital of Yemen. Diklah, "a palm tree," may suggest the palm- beariug region of Arabia Felix. The habitations of Obal and Abimsel are unknown. Sheba is Sabtea in Southern Arabia. Ophir was probably 'Ufar, in Oman on the Persian Gulf. Havilah may be taken as the district of Chaulan in Arabia Felix; Jobab as the Jobarites of Yemen. "With a note of the bounds of the Joktanite territory, from Mesha to Sephar, the mountain of the east, i.e., as some conjecture, from Northern Arabia to Shaphar the ancient Himyaritish capital on the Indian Ocean, the record of the Shemites is closed. 4. The theological importance of this extraordi- nary world-chart may be indicated in a few con- cluding sentences. Unmistakably it proclaims the unity of the race. It affirms that the successive families of mankind have sprung not from several pairs, but from one. Diverse as they now appear in their geographical situations, in their physical constitutions, in their mental endowments, in their 206 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. national characteristics, in their degrees of civilisa- tion, they have all proceeded from a common source. That is the teaching of this oldest ethnological register. It is also the sentiment which Paul an- nounced on Mars Hill to the assembled learning and culture of the Grecian metropolis, that " God Lath made of one blood all men for to dwell upon all the face of the earth." It is with an ever- enlarging degree of certitude the doctrine of the best science of this enlightened and critical nineteenth century. To quote words which we have elsewhere 1 used, "The anatomical structure of the human frame, especially of the brain and skull, the physiological properties and functions possessed by the body, the physiological nature of man and the power of indefinite propaga- tion, which are the same in all nations, with the ascertained results of comparative grammar, which have already traced back all existing lan- guages to three primitive branches, tend in a powerful degree to confirm the doctrine which this table teaches." Nor must it be overlooked that this table has nn outlook to the world's future as well as a retrospect upon the world's past. If it tells, on the one hand, of the breaking up of the once united human family into widely divergent 1 " Pulpit Commentary on Genesis," p. 162. THE TABLE OF NATIONS. 207 and sometimes mutually antagonistic tribes and nations ; if it shows how in the providence of God the holy seed was gradually separated from the other races on the surface of the globe that it might be fitted for its lofty calling while these were allowed to go their own way for a season ; yet also, on the other hand, it touchingly reminds us by the preservation of their names, as Kurtz beautifully says, that "no one of all these nations shall be allowed to go lost for the holy history, or be forgotten of the counsel of eternal love ; " yen, adds Delitzsch with equal truth and beauty, " it presents in perspective the prospect that these widely diverging paths of the peoples, proceeding from the ancestral house of Noah, shall at last come together at a goal marked by Jehovah ; and therefore does Baumgarten supplement the word of Johannes von Mliller, that * with the table of nations must history begin,' with another saying equally correct, that 'in the table of nations as its last end must history close.' " ( 208 ) IX. THE TOWER OF BABEL. WHETHER or not the account furnished by the Hebrew historian of the Tower of Babel and the confusion of tongues ought to have preceded l the genealogy of the nations, it can scarcely be doubted that between the two sections of his narrative it was intended a close and evident connection should subsist. Having set forth in a world-chart, at once comprehensive and detailed, the distribution of the earth's population into races, tribes, and nations, it naturally fell to him to offer some explanation, if such could be given, of the way in which this dispersion of mankind had been brought about. Already in the Ethnic Eegister it had been suggested that the separation of the originally united mass of Noah's descen- dants, that is, of postdiluvian humanity, into three main divisions, and the breaking up of these again into smaller groups of peoples, was contem- 1 Bohlen, "Introduction to Genesis," vol. ii. p. 255. THE TOWER OF BABEL. 209 poraneous with the rise and development amongst them of a mysterious speech variation. As yet, however, it had not been made clear whether that speech variation had been the cause or the consequence of the visible disintegration of the race's unity. Indeed, it had not been certainly indicated whether it was the dispersion or the combination of the nations to which it was related, the shattering of the original mass into fragments, or the gathering up and drawing together of these fragments into lesser bodies. So far as the pre- ceding chart afforded light upon the question, the former might have been effected by forces altogether different from those arising out of various tongues ; what the chart expressly men- tioned was that sameness, resemblance, and affinity of language operated as unconscious under-currents in drawing severed peoples to- gether, and as powerful influences in welding them into nations. It was therefore indispen- sable, before passing on to the special theme of his history, to furnish whatever information he possessed upon points so important for a right understanding of the early movements of the race. This accordingly he does in the story of the Tower of Babel. 1 1 Gen. xi. 1-9. 210 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. i. The time when this remarkable under- taking was projected has been variously com- puted. It is not necessary at present to do more than mention the assertion of Bohlen, 1 that as Babel was unknown to the Israelites previous to the age of Hezekiah, in the eighth century before Christ, the narrative in which the Tower of Babel occurs must refer to a still later period, or B.C. 625-539, when Babel had become the capital of the Babylonian kingdom, and that the tower of which the writer speaks "was perhaps associated in gene- ral estimation with the Temple of Belus, which had at that time already fallen into decay" Archaeological research has progressed with rapid strides since these words were penned, and the cuneiform inscriptions, which were then un- deciphered, have yielded up their secrets to the combined genius and industry of inquirers like Grotefend, Lassen, Burnouf, and others ; and it is now recognised by the best autho- rities that the Temple of Belus, which, according to Herodotus, 2 stood in one division of the city, was not the tower alluded to by the Hebrew writer, and that, even if it was, it was undoubtedly an erection of extreme antiquity 1 Seep. 208. * i. 1 8 1. THE TOWER OF BABEL. 211 in the days of Hezekiah, and much more of Nebuchadnezzar. The opinion of Josephus, 1 that the tower was the work of Nimrod, whom he makes a grandson of Ham, is not entirely destitute of weight, since the third descendant from Noah in the line of Ham might easily have been contemporary with Peleg, the fifth descendant in the line of Shem. Yet the pre- ponderance of argument is against accepting Nimrod as either the projector or the con- structor of the heaven-scaling turret. It is sometimes argued that the statement in the preceding table, 2 " And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel," implies that Nimrod was the founder of the city ; but, rigidly inter- preted, the language can be held responsible for no more than this, that Babel was the earliest of Nimrod's conquests, and the com- mencement of his empire. Then the preceding table seems at least to convey the impression that in the days of Nimrod the Cushites had been separated to their own locations in Ethiopia and Arabia, and that the presence of their distinguished leader in the Tigro - Euphrates Valley was a hostile invasion of Shemitic territory ; whereas, according to the record, 1 "Antiquities of the Jews," i. 4. 2. 2 Gen. x. 10. 212 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. when the city and the tower in Shinar were undertaken, the whole population of the globe was "of one language and of one speech." If, therefore, the chronology of the succeeding paragraph be followed, inasmuch as Peleg, in whose days the earth was divided, was born in the first , year of the second, and died about the middle of the fourth century after the Flood, it will not be possible to assign the incident of the tower-building to an earlier date than the former, or a later date than the latter of these events. 2. The place where this foolish enterprise was set on foot Scripture definitely mentions as the Land of Shinar, or the Land of the Two Kivers, i.e., Mesopotamia, the two rivers being the Tigris and Euphrates. The term Shinar, which has not yet been found on any ancient monument, was probably the Jewish name for Chaldea. As the sons of Noah, who in the course of one or two centuries must have multiplied considerably, moved down from the uplands of Armenia, migrating towards the East, or journeying about in the East, they lighted on an extensive tract of level country, suitable for permanent occupation. It is agreed that this corresponds exactly with the de- THE TOWER OF BABEL. 213 scription penned by Herodotus 1 of the site of ancient Babylon, as standing on a broad plain. There is, therefore, no reason to sus- pect the correctness of that opinion which re- gards the narrative preserved in the opening section of the eleventh chapter of Genesis as an authentic indeed, as the only existing account of the founding of that mighty empire, which after- wards for centuries played so important a part upon the stage of time, but whose beginning still continues shrouded in the mists of a remote an- tiquity. According to monumental evidence, 2 the Babylonian empire existed, and was ruled over by a monarch called Sargon L, king of Agade, as far back as B.C. 3800, and it cannot reasonably be supposed that no potentates preceded him. In- deed, a bilingual tablet recently discovered at Babylon contains a list of early Chaldean kings dating from the Flood a missing portion of the tablet, it is supposed, having had inscribed upon it the names of ten kings that ruled before the Flood ; and in any case, whatever light is shed by the monuments on this subject goes to show that Babylon arose "at a time when all the nations around were in a state of rude barbarism." 3 1 i. 178. 2 "Babylonian Life and History" (Budge), p. 40. 3 Ibid., pp. 13, 43. 214 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. 3. The motive which impelled the early builders is represented by the Hebrew author as having been twofold, consisting partly of ambition and partly of a spirit of rebellion. They had hoped, by constructing a city and a tower whose top might touch the skies a hyperbolical expression for a tower of vast altitude to at once achieve for themselves celebrity, and counteract the ten- dency to dispersion, which, perhaps, by this time, had begun to manifest itself within their ranks. With this explanation of the genesis of the tower- builders' purpose, it is interesting to notice that the statements of Josephus 1 are in substantial accord. "God also commanded them," i.e., the postdiluvians, he writes, " to send colonies abroad for the thorough peopling of the earth, that they might not raise seditions among themselves, but might cultivate a great part of the earth and enjoy its fruits in a plentiful manner ; but they were so ill-instructed that they did not obey God. . . . Nay, they added to this their disobedience to the divine will the suspicion that they were therefore ordered to send out separate colonies, that, being divided asunder, they might the more easily be oppressed." The endeavour to preserve their unity, Delitzsch 2 thinks, was not in itself sinful, 1 " Antiquities of the Jews," i. 4. i. 2 Die Genesis, p. 227. THE TO WEE OF BABEL. 215 but only in so far as it had its roots in ambition or desire of fame, aimed at a unity apart from God, whose positive revelation no longer satisfied or pleased them, and sought to realise it by something purely external ; yet must it not be overlooked that from the first it had been the divine intention that men should spread themselves abroad, " mul- tiply and replenish the earth," and that to aspire after any unity which required disobedience to this, which had twice over been enjoined upon the race, could only be described as sin all the more that the highest unity of mankind was perfectly compatible with its widest distribution. 4. The execution of their daring purpose was hopefully begun. With lively energy they sum- moned one another to the work. " Go to ! " they said in English, " Come on 1 " " let us build us a city and a tower." With unity of mind and heart they put hands to their self-elected task. One in nature and descent, one in character and life, one in speech and tongue, one in counsel and aim, they were also one in action and determina- tion. Difficulties were nothing thought of by these primeval men, who cleared forests, hunted wild beasts, dug quarries, and erected pyramids. Before bands of such resolute toilers as were now mustered on the plains of Shinar even impossi- 216 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. bilities vanished. In the estimation of Heaven there was almost nothing that they might not attempt and carry through, if only they continued united and inspired by such enthusiasm. The country round was destitute of stones that could be utilised for building purposes ; but the rich alluvial soil of the valley was full of clay and asphalt. " Go to ! " said the workmen, " let us bake bricks, and let us burn them to a burning ; " in the double alliteration giving vent to the cheery and dauntless hope by which they were sustained ; and here it should be noticed, as a striking confirmation of the historic credibility of this account of the material employed by the tower-builders, that, as attested by Josephus and Justin, by Tacitus and Pliny, by Herodotus and Aristophanes, by Strabo and Vitruvius, no less than by modern travellers and archaeologists, the walls of ancient Babylon were made of brick cemented with bitumen. "As fast as they dug the moat," writes the father of Grecian history, 1 " the soil which they got from the cutting was made into bricks, and when a sufficient number were completed they baked the bricks in kilns. Then they set to building, and began with brick- ing the borders of the moat, after which they 1 Herodotus, i. 179. THE TOWER OF BABEL. 217 proceeded to construct the wall itself, using throughout for their cement hot bitumen, and interposing a layer of wattled reeds at every thirtieth course of the bricks." This testimony also is corroborated by the cuneiform inscriptions, which, though not bearing out the statements of classical authors as to the height or extent of the walls of Babylon, abundantly endorse what is said by Moses and Herodotus as to their construction. " The great walls of Babylon," says Nebuchad- nezzar, 1 " I completed : buttresses for the embank- ment of its fosse, and two long embankments, with cement (or bitumen) and brick I built ; " and again, " The walls of Babylon, whose banner is invincible, as a high fortress by the ford of the rising sun, I carried round Babylon. Its fosse I dug; and its mass with cement and brick I reared up." Layard reports, 2 that so firmly have these bricks been united that it is now almost impossible to detach one from the muss to which it adheres. 5. The interruption of the work was brought about by Divine intervention. With the usual anthropomorphism of the Old Testament, Jehovah is represented as coming down from heaven to 1 "Records of the Past," vol. v. pp. 125, 127. 2 " Nineveh ami Babylon," p. 499. 218 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. inspect the work of the builders, as after the fall He descended to Paradise to arraign and pro- nounce judgment upon Adam and Eve, and as in a subsequent section of this history He is depicted as resolving to go down to Sodom in order to inquire into its wickedness. The result of Jehovah's examination in the instance of the Shinar artificers was that He determined to de- stroy the unity of speech which they had turned to so ill account. It can hardly be intended by this that never before had human speech been the subject of variation. It is scarcely conceiv- able that sin, which, in so conspicuous a fashion, had corrupted every other part of human nature, should have left the tongue of man entirely free from its degenerating sway. It may therefore be assumed that, even prior to the incident here recorded, modifications had begun to assert them- selves in the primitive language as spoken by the postdiluvian men, though these had not yet amounted to radical divergence or attained to such dimensions as to render common intercourse impossible. Now, however, in the judgment of Heaven the moment had arrived when, as the best means of driving men apart, and compelling them to fulfil His high behest that they should occupy the earth, a cleavage should be made in their THE TOWER OF BABEL. 219 speech, which, thus divided, would ultimately, under the operation of natural laws, branch out into the many tongues of articulate-speaking men. The historian does not indicate how the desired partition of human language was effected, whether by a purely internal process, as, for instance, by changing the ideas associated with words ; or by means that were wholly outward, as, for example, by altering the mode of pronouncing words, or, what is more probable, by both of these methods together. He simply records that, in some mys- terious fashion which he does not attempt to explain, the builders began to experience difficulty in understanding what they said to one another, and eventually found it so laborious, if not im- possible, to exchange ideas, that they not only felt obliged to discontinue their gigantic enterprise, but, realising the fact that co-operation was no longer within their power, at least as an unbroken community, were likewise resistlessly compelled to subdivide their ranks, draw themselves off into smaller societies of similarly speaking men, and seek for new abodes in which they might, but on a lesser scale, pursue their common aims. The one thing he does state without reservation, in- deed, in the most emphatic manner, is that this confusion of tongues which unexpectedly broke 220 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. out amongst the toilers on the Babylonian plain was not a purely natural occurrence, superinduced by the environment in which they found them- selves, but was, so far at least as its primal cause was concerned, a distinctly supernatural pheno- menon, effected by the impact upon humanity of a Divine will. This, of course, is one of the main difficulties in accepting this portion of the sacred narrative, modern philology being supposed to have established that the existing differences of language among mankind are the result of slow and gradual changes brought about by the opera- tion of natural causes, such as the influence of locality in changing and of time in corrupting human speech. It is, however, doubtful if modern philology has as yet been able to do more than account for the sub-modifications of language which exist in the three main branches of speech, known as the Shemitic, Aryan, and Turanian tongues, and if the origin of these three fundamental forms of articulation be not as much a mystery to it modern philology as if they had been produced in the miraculous fashion here described. At all events, the best ascertained results of modern philology go far to corroborate the truth of what is reported by the Hebrew historian, that the different languages of men have all sprung from THE TOWER OF BABEL. 221 a common source. Max Mtiller, 1 while asserting that " the impossibility of a common origin of language has never been proved/' on the other hand distinctly maintains that "nothing necessi- tates the admission of different independent begin- nings for either the material or formal elements of the Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan branches of speech." "While these three great families of language are characterised by wide distinctions in form and structure," adds Geikie, 2 " there is at the same time such an amount of similarity in the leading roots as would indicate something like a common origin." What the primitive speech of man was cannot now be ascertained. The Jewish Rabbis, the Christian Fathers, and some modern theologians 3 have maintained that it must have been Hebrew. The race of Shem, they have supposed, not having been participants in the impious transaction which called forth the judg- ment of Heaven, were not affected as the others by the miraculous confusion of tongues, but were suffered to retain the primeval language which had been handed down to their day through Noah, and was afterwards transmitted through Eber to 1 "Lectures on the Science of Language," vol. i. pp. 352, 353. 2 " Hours with the Bible," vol. i. p. 282. 3 Hiiveriiick, Gerlach, Baumgarten-Crusius, and others. 222 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. Abraham and his descendants. It is, however, one assumption that the primitive tongue of mankind never varied from Adam to Noah ; another that the Shemites were not involved in the criminality of the rest of the race ; a third that the curse did not strike the speech of mankind as a whole ; and a fourth that the family of Abraham spoke Hebrew. If the term used by Laban in covenanting with Jacob Jegar-sahadutha, 1 " heap of witness " may be accepted as a guide in the settlement of this question, it was Aramaic 2 rather thau Hebrew that constituted the mother tongue of Abraham's family. Hence, ou this ground at least, the claim of Hebrew to be regarded as the speech of Paradise must be held as not made good. Similar claims have been advanced in behalf of other tongues, such as the Sanscrit, the Syriac, or Nabataean, and even the cuneiform language of Babylon, but with no greater measure of success. The probability is, as Keil 3 remarks, that, " with the disappearance of the race's unity, the one original language was also lost, so that neither in the Hebrew nor in any other language of history has enough been pre- 1 Gen. xxxi. 47. 2 Delitzsch, Die Genesis, p. 231 ; Bleek, "Introduction to the Old Testament," voL i. 34. 3 "Commentary on the Pentatench,'' vol. i. p. 175. THE TOWER OF BABEL. 223 served to enable us to form the least conception of its character." 6. A memorial of their undertaking, of the folly out of which it sprang, as well as of the confusion to which it led, was long pre- served in the name afterwards affixed to the city which arose upon its site. By whom that name was affixed the historian does not state, but he mentions that it was understood to convey an allusion to the singular event which had there happened, Babel, for balbal, from balal, to pour together, to confound, signifying "confusion." As, however, the designation of the city in Semitic Babylonian was Babili, which was in turn a translation of the origi- nal Accadian Ka-dimirra, or "the Gate of God," it has been maintained that here at least must be recognised an inaccuracy on the part of the Hebrew composer. The likelihood, how- ever, is that the Genesis writer merely purposed to say offering perhaps his own explanation of the matter that by a singular coincidence, no doubt providentially brought about, the name by which in after years the city came to be known was one which, if translated into Hebrew, contained in its import a memorial of the event which had happened there. As an 224 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. eminent scholar l puts it : " The history of the matter is, the Semites made a pun upon the name of the city ; " or, if this explanation be rejected, the two meanings of the word may be harmonised " by supposing either that it was first given in scorn, and afterwards a better meaning was found for it ; or (more probably) that the word, haviug been intended by the Babylonians themselves in the sense of ' the Gate of God/ w r as from the first under- stood in a different sense by others, who con- nected it with the confusion of tongues." 2 7. Attempts have been made to identify one or other of the existing ruins in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley with the original Tower of Babel. Its site is supposed by some to have been that on which subsequently stood the Temple of Belus, described by Hero- dotus as " a square enclosure two furlongs each way, with gates of solid brass," with " a. tower of solid masonry" rising in the middle "a furlong in length and breadth, upon which was raised a second tower, and on that a third, and so on up to eight," the top being 1 Budge, " Babylonian Life and History," p. 15 ; cf. Sayce, "Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments," p. 43. 2 Rawlinson, " Egypt and Babylon," p. 10. THE TOWER OF BABEL. 225 reached by an outside staircase winding round the towers to the summit. This Temple of Belus is believed to be now represented by the Mound Babil, or, in primitive Chaldaic, Bit- Saggatu, rendered by Dr. Oppert la pyramide et la tour, one of the temples of Merodach in the north quarter of the city and on the east side of the river ; but the best archaeologists * are of opinion that the site of the tower is occupied to-day by the Mound of Birs Nimroud, in the south quarter of the city and on the wes- tern side of the river, according to George Smith " one of the most imposing ruins in the country." Sir Henry Eawlinson examined the great pile, and discovered that the excavated tower consisted of seven stages of brickwork on an earthen plat- form, each stage being of a different colour. The temple was consecrated to the seven planets. The first stage, built of bricks blackened with bitumen, was devoted to Saturn ; the second, faced with orange- coloured bricks, to Jupiter ; the third, whose bricks were red, probably to Mars; the fourth, supposed to have been originally plated 1 Schroder, Keilinschriften und das alte Testament, p. 36 ; and in Riehm's BandwSrterbuch des Biblischen Alterthums, Art. "Baby- lonischer Thurm ;" Smith, "Chaldean Genesis," p. 162 ; ' Assyrian Discoveries," p. 59. P 226 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. with gold, to the sun ; the fifth, sixth, and seventh, probably to Venus, Mercury, and the moon. From the cylinders found at the corners of the third stage a cuneiform text was obtained, which showed that the temple had been restored by Nebuchad- nezzar, in whose days it was already a venerable pile. The following lines are taken from Mr. Fox Talbot's translation 1 of that inscription, which is now deposited in the British Museum : The Temple of the Seven Planets, which is the Tower of Borsippa, Which former kings had built, And raised it to the height of forty-two cubits, But had not finished its upper part. From extreme old age had rotted away. The water-springs beneath it had not been kept in order. The rain and the tempest Had ruined its buildings : The slabs that covered it had fallen off. The bricks of its walls lay scattered in heaps. To repair it the great LORD MAEDUK Incited my heart. Its site had not been disturbed: its timin 2 had not been destroyed. In a fortunate month, and on a lucky day, The bricks of its wall, and the slabs that covered it, I collected the finest of them, And I rebuilt the ruins firmly. Inscriptions written in my name I placed in the finest apartments, And so of rebuilding (the ruin) And of completing the upper part, I made an end. 1 "Records of the Past," vol. vii. p. 75. 2 Platform containing the dedication cylinders. THE TOWER OF BABEL. 227 8. It is scarcely surprising that an event so remarkable as the tower-building of Babel should have reported itself far down the stream of time in the traditions of the scattered nations, (i.) The Chaldean legend preserved by Eusebius, 1 who probably drew his materials from Berosus, states that " the first inhabitants of the earth, glorying in their own strength and despising the gods, undertook to raise a tower whose top should reach the sky, in the place in which Babylon now stands ; " that as it approached completion the winds assisted the gods to overthrow the work upon its contrivers ; that, along with this, the gods introduced a diversity of tongues among men w r ho till that time had employed the same speech ; and that the place in which the tower was erected was called Babylon on account of the confusion of tongues, " for confusion is by the Hebrews called Babel." To a similar effect writes Alexander Polyhistor, as quoted by Eusebius, citing -the Sibylla Myth, probably also derived from Berosus, and referred to by Josephus. The chief interest, however, attaches to the form assumed by this legend in the cuneiform texts. Though the table containing the old Accadian version of the story is much mutilated, it is im- 1 Prceparatio Evanydica, lib. i*. 14, 15. 228 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. possible not to recognise the striking similarity of that ancient tale to the Hebrew narrative. The fragments that remain appear to suggest that a great king, or some other person of influence and power, has turned away his heart from the father of all the gods, and set his subjects or his country- men to the building of some immense temple tower. Babylon corruptly to sin went, and Small and great mingled on the mound. Babylon corruptly to sin went, and Small and great mingled on the mound. Their (work) all day they founded. To their stronghold in the night Entirely an end He made. In His anger also the secret counsel He poured out. To scatter abroad His face He set. He gave a command to make strange their speech. Their progress He impeded. In that day He blew, and for future time The mountain (was demolished ?). Nu-nam-nir (the god of no rule) went. . . . Like heaven and earth, he spake. . . . His ways they went. . . . Violently they fronted against him. He saw them, and to the earth (descended). Violently they wept for Babylon, Very much they wept. The translation here followed is that of Mr. St. THE TOWER OF BABEL. 229 Chad Boscawen ; l with which the renderings of Mr. George Smith 2 and Professor Sayce, 3 though differing slightly, substantially agree. (2.) The Greek version of the story was, according to Plato, that the gods divided the tongues of men, because men demanded of the gods immortality and eternal youth ; and, according to Homer, whom Ovid fol- lowed, that two giants undertook to scale the heavens by setting Ossa on Olympus and Pelion on Ossa, and that in all probability success would have crowned their labours had they been per- mitted to attain the age of manhood. Fortunately, however, for the happiness of mankind, this was not permitted to them. The son of Jove destroyed them before the hair had grown on their cheeks or the down on their chins. (3.) The New World also, when discovered, was found to be acquainted with an incident occurring in the early history of mankind closely resembling at least that narrated in the pages of Genesis. Baron Humboldt 4 states that, according to a Mexican manuscript at present in the Vatican, which he examined, seven persons in the country of Anahuac, whose primitive inhabi- 1 "Records of the Past," vol. vii. pp. 131, 132. 2 "Chaldean Genesis," pp. 160, 161. 3 The Monthly Interpreter, Dec. 1885, Art. " Old Testament in the Light of Recent Discoveries." 4 " Researches," vol i. p. 96. 230 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. tants were giants, had not been destroyed by a great inundation which occurred nearly five thou- sand years after the creation of the world. Of these giants one, Xelhua, surnamed the Architect, went to Cholula, where, "as a memorial to the mountain Ilaloc, which had served as a refuge to himself and his six brethren, he built an artificial hill in the form of a pyramid." Ordering bricks to be baked in the province of Tlamanalco, at the foot of a mountain, he passed them on from hand to hand by means of a file of men. "But the gods beheld with wrath this building, the top of which was to reach the clouds, and, irritated at such an attempt, hurled fire on the pyramid. Numbers of the workmen perished, the work was discontinued, and the portion built was dedicated to Quetzalcoatl, the god of the air." It is by no means an unreasonable conjecture that we have here a far-off echo of the Scripture story of the Tower of Babel, which the first Mexican settlers brought with them when they entered the country from the east. ( 23! ) THE CALL OF ABRAHAM. IF the tower-building in the land of Shinar was the first attempt to found a city and an empire in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley, it is apparent that this attempt was for some time abandoned. According to the Hebrew writer, " they," i.e., the children of men, "left off to build the city." Eventually, however, at a subsequent period opera- tions must have been resumed on the old site, as in the days of Nimrod, the Cushite invader of Babylonia, there was already a city of Babel which he subdued, and which became the beginning of his empire. Thus the narrative of Scripture as good as suggests that the primitive settlers in the rich and fertile country to the north of the Persian Gulf, and lying between the above-named streams, were a mixed population of Shemites and Hamites, but under the dominion of the latter. And this accords exactly with the knowledge now possessed of ancient Chaldea, derived from the 232 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. monuments. 1 Upwards of five thousand years ago, probably about 3800 B.C., the region of Baby- lonia was inhabited by an extremely heterogeneous population. The earliest tribes that found loca- tion in that fertile land, "the Garden of the Gods" as it afterwards came to be styled, were a branch of the Turanian group of peoples which had been swept thither by one of those migratory waves which in the dawn of history were constantly proceeding from the lofty tableland in Central Asia called the plateau of Pamir. The tongue they spoke was of an agglutinative character, "totally distinct from the Semitic, and having a grammar and vocabulary resembling the Tigro- Finnic group of languages." As a people they were slow, plodding, and constructive. They were industrious builders of -cities ; Uru, the Ur of the Chaldees, of which more extended notice will im- mediately be taken ; Larsa, on the left bank of the Euphrates, represented by the modern ruin Senkereh ; Arcu, the present - day Warka, the Erech of the Table of Nations; and Bdbilu, i.e., Babylon, the Babel of Scripture and the Hillah 1 "Records of the Past," vol. iii. pp. 3-5 ; "Babylonian Life and History" (Budge), p. 33 ff. ; "British Museum Lectures" (Boscawen), Lect. i., 1885; Riehm's Handworterbui-h des Biblischen Alterthums, Art. " Babylonian." THE CALL r^ ABRAHAM. 233 of to-day, being foujr of tlieir principal foundations. By them probahjy the cuneiform system of writ- ing was invented, while it is at least certain that by them j^was possessed. How long their supre- niacj^continued cannot be determined, but they appear to have in course of time been subdued by a Semitic race which also found its way to the same luxuriant abodes. From the conquered the conquerors acquired the art of cuneiform writing, though the two peoples long continued to preserve their separate tongues. An evidence of this may probably be found in the fact that places and cities commonly had double names, Sumir, or Southern Babylonia, e.g., being called in Turanian Ke-engi, and in Semitic Sumiri; while Accad, or Northern Babylonia, was styled in Turanian Urdu, and in Semitic Akkadi. It is perhaps also to be reckoned as an indication of the double nationality of the ancient Chaldeans, that from an early period tlieir monarchs were accustomed to style them- selves the kings of Sumir and Accad, precisely as the Pharaohs of Egypt had been wont to designate themselves "kings of the upper and the lower land," or " lords of the double crown." i. That Ur of the Chaldees, from which the Terachite Abram was called to become an emigrant towards an unknown country which afterwards 234 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. proved to be Canaan, wasVe thousand years Chaldea, or in the land of Sum? region of Baby- universally acknowledged. The Ciheterogeneous advanced in behalf of Ur, 1 a Persitbund loca- Persicum Castellum, mentioned by AmnVxls" Marcellinus as lying between Nisibis and the Tigris, and of the modern Orfah, 2 the Edessa of the Greeks, " on one of the bare rugged spurs which descend from the mountains of Armenia," it is felt must be abandoned in favour of TJr? or Hur, the most important of the early capitals of Southern Babylonia, represented at the present time by the ruin of Mugheir, at no great distance from the mouth, and six miles to the west of the Euphrates. "Here on a dead flat," says Canon Kawlinson, " broken only by a few sandhills, are traces of a considerable town, consisting chiefly of a series of low mounds, disposed in an oval shape, the largest diameter of which runs from north to south, and measures more than half a mile. The chief build- ing is a temple, which is a very conspicuous object even at a considerable distance, its greatest height 1 Bochart, Michaelis, Rosen muller, Delitzsch, Knobel. 2 Stanley, " Lectures on the Jewish Church," i. 7. 3 Rawlinson, "Ancient Monarchies," i. 15, 16 ; George Smith's "Assyrian Discoveries," xii. 233; Prof. Sayce, "Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments," p. 53 ; Schrader in Riehm's Handworter- luch des BiUisc'ien Alterthums, Art. " Ur Chasdim." THE CALL 04, ABRAHAM. 235 of to-day, being four, about ;o feet It is built in By them probaW n of large bric k S} cemented with ing was inver nce t b e name by W i 1 i c j 1 t h e Arabs by them i^g ru j ns Mugheir, or the bitumened." mac ll the inscribed bricks which have been ex- cavated from the ruins the story of the ancient city can be pretty accurately deciphered. It ap- pears to have been founded by an early potentate who described himself as " Uruk, king of Ur," " the powerful man and fierce warrior," " king of Sumir and Accad," from whom the capital derived its name ; or the city may have existed at a time antecedent to the rule of Uruk, whose imperial cognomen may have been derived from it. Uruk l was a great constructor of buildings, and especially of temples. Indeed, so numerous are the monu- ments that remain in the shape of bricks inscribed with the name of Uruk, that it is doubtful if any earlier or later monarch can compare with him in this respect except Nebuchadnezzar. He built a wall for his city, a palace for himself, and temples for his patron divinities. A temple to the moon and two other edifices, named Bit-timgal and Bit- sarezer, probably towers built in stages like pyra- mids, were erected in the metropolitan city of Ur. In the other towns of his kingdom similar struc- 1 " Records of the Past," vol. iii. pp. 8, 9. 236 THE PATRIAlP 1 ^ 1 TIMES - tures were founded ; in Larsa, situated in Lower in Erech, a temple to Venus ; in ir > is now almost temple of Bel ; and in Zirgulla, a tl aims formerly the king of the gods. These edifices,^ fortress, distinguished for elegance, were of immense ianus The temple at Ur, besides resting on a platform of brick standing 20 feet above the level of the plain, in all probability consisted of three stories, of which only two remain, of course in a decayed condition, the lower story being a rectangular- shaped building, 198 feet long by 133 feet broad, and the second story being similarly formed, but of smaller dimensions. More than 30,000,000 bricks, it is calculated, must have been employed in constructing the temple at Erech. In addition to their religious uses, these temples were probably available as watch-towers for the astronomers of those days, who observed the heavens not indeed, or at least not primarily, for scientific purposes, but in order to extract therefrom those intimations of the divine will which their movements were supposed to give. The dwelling-houses in this ancient city were possessed of some variety, the poorer habitations being fashioned, it is likely, out of reeds woven together and plastered over with bitumen; and the richer mansions, "buildings of two and even three stories high, for the most part THE CALL 0^ ABRAHAM. 237 above the plain beinci flat roofs, the dull monotony a very rude fashiien here and there by layers of bitumen, wheved bricks, let in in alternate bands, designate interposition of dark polished reeds be- Frorri the clay bricks, that had the effect of courses of black marble." l Though by means of inscrip- tions and bas-reliefs attempts were made to deco- rate these latter, yet in respect of comfort they were not much superior to the former, since both alike were usually small and badly lighted. As a seat of royalty, Ur was a centre both of intelligence and activity. The mechanical no less than the fine arts flourished. Amongst its inhabitants were brickmakers and bricklayers, architects and builders, potters, stone-cutters, weavers, smiths, jewellers, in short, representatives of all the in- dustries that might at that age be expected in a thriving and crowded city. It had its wharves on the Persian Gulf in the vicinity, whence its commerce was conveyed to distant parts. In the near neighbourhood it possessed an extensive necropolis, as excavations at Mugheir have re- vealed, a series of low artificial elevations having been discovered to be graves consisting of brick vaults, 7 feet long by 3 feet 7 inches broad, and composed of sun-dried bricks cemented by mud. 1 Keary, " The Nations Around," p. 9. 238 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. In this city, then, a seat of royalty, a centre of in- dustry, a home of the arts and sciences, an abode of superstition, there is reason for believing that Abraham passed his early years. Schrader l gives as grounds for this belief the five following con- siderations : ( i ) That the name Abram has its counterpart in the Assyrio-Babylonish Aburamu; (2) that the manner in which Abraham imposed an oath upon his servant Eliezer appears on clay tablets with regal inscriptions which have been excavated at Mugheir; (3) that Haran, where Abraham rested, exactly as Ur whence he pro- ceeded, is found to have been a principal seat of the worship of the moon-god Sin ; (4) that sundry religious ideas and traditions which meet us among the Western Semites and Hebrews, such as the Tree of Life, Sheol, the Cherubim, the Traditions of the Creation and the Flood, seem to point back to Babylonia as their birthplace; and (5) that even the poetry of the Hebrews, in its form and method, more particularly in the parallelism of its members, bears a marked resemblance to that of the ancient Chaldeans. 2. The date of Abraham's residence in Ur can be determined with considerable approach to 1 Riehm's Handworterluch des Biblischen Alterthums, Art. "Ur Chasdim." THE CALL OF ABRAHAM. 239 certainty. According to the Hebrew writer, 1 shortly after Abram had entered Canaan, the Jordan circle, with its five royal cities, Sodom, Gomorrha, Admah, Zeboim, and Bela or Zoar, was invaded by an allied army from the east, led on by four kings, whose names are given as Amraphel, king of Shinar ; Arioch, king of Ellasar ; Chedor- laomer, king of Elam; and Tidal, king of Goim, translated in the Authorised and in the margin of the Eevised Version, " Nations." But on turning to the monumental history of those times, it is found from an inscription of Assurbani-pal, 2 the king of Assyria (who flourished B.C. 668-625), that, 1635 years before his own invasion of Chaldea, i.e., in B.C. 2303-2260, or, striking the mean, B.C. 2286, an Elamite monarch laid his hands upon the temples of Accad. The accuracy of this reckoning is vouched for by the circumstance that the same Elamite invasion is mentioned in an inscription of Sargon of Assyria, 8 and that according to it the date is B.C. 2283-2059. The name of the monarch by whom this early invasion of Chaldea was con- ducted was Kudur-nankhundi, i.e., the servant of Nankhundi. Then some time after he was followed 1 Gen. xiv. i. 2 " Records of the Past," vol. iii. p. 7 If. 3 Ibid., vol. vii. p. 23. 240 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. by another prince with equally euphonious title, Kudur-Mabuk, i.e., the servant of Mabuk, who styles himself " Lord of Syria, son of Sinti- silhak, worshipper of Ur," whose son, Ardu-Sui according to George Smith, Eri-aku according to Professor Sayce and Mr. Boscawen, became king of Larsa. If, as these eminent authorities suggest, Eri-aku was the Ellasar above referred to as one of Chedorlaomer's allies, then Abraham must have been contemporary with these two monarchs ; and as Kudur-Mabuk's son was the last Elamite ruler of Southern Babylonia, that dynasty having been overthrown in B.C. 2120 by Hammurabi, a Kassite conqueror who made himself master of the whole land of Chaldea, Upper and Lower, united both under one crown, and transferred his capital to a city " then called Dindur, but afterwards known as Bcib-ili, or ' The Gate of God/ the Babel of the Bible, and the renowned city of Babylon," * it will appear that Abraham's residence in Ur must be placed between B.C. 2283 and B.C. 2120, which corresponds in a remarkable degree with Arch- bishop Ussher's chronology, which places the birth of Abraham at B.C. 1996, and even more exactly with that of Hales, which gives for that event B.C. 2153. It may be mentioned that the name 1 " Records of the Past," vol. v. p. 69. THE CALL OF ABRAHAM. 241 Chedorlaomer has not yet been detected on the monuments, although it is obviously formed upon the same model as those of Kudur-nankhundi and Kudur-Mabuk. The Babylonian equivalent of Chedorlaomer would be Kudur-Lagamar, i.e., the servant of Lagamar or Lagamal, whom the monu- ments have shown to be an Elamite deity like Mabuk and Nankhundi. 3. The family to which Abraham belonged was an offshoot from the Arpachshadites, descendants of Arpachshad, the son of Shem and grandson of Noah, who had established themselves in Arrapa- chitis, 1 a region in the north of Assyria. Two generations forward, in the days of Eber, the family divided, sending off a branch, the Joktan- ites, towards the desert of Arabia in the south, whilst the main body, the Pelegites, settled, it is believed, " near the junction of the Chaboras and the Euphrates, at a spot named Phaliga, where formerly a town stood," not far from Carchemish on the east bank of the Euphrates. From this point they gradually gravitated southward, till in the fourth generation from Peleg, after the lapse of two centuries, Terach, his great-great-grandson, is heard of in Southern Chaldea, in the populous and thriving city of Ur, with its priests and temples, 1 See chap, viii., " The Table of Nations." Q 242 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. astronomers and towers, merchants and traders, artisans and sailors. At the age of 1 30 he is the father of three sons, of whom Haran, the eldest, was born in his 7oth, and Abram, the youngest, in his I3oth year, Nahor the second son coming somewhere between. Besides these, the family of which he is the patriarchal head includes Sarai, his own daughter by another wife than the mother of Abram, and the descendants of Haran, who had by this time married, but soon died, leaving behind him a son Lot, and two daughters Milcah and Iscah. Amongst them intermarriages occurred which had important bearings on the future for- tunes, not alone of themselves, but also of man- kind at large. Nahor espouses Milcah, his brother Haran's daughter, and therefore his own niece an alliance which was afterwards forbidden ; l Abram married Sarai his half-sister, which was also inter- dicted in later legislation. It is probable they both were distinguished women in respect of personal attractions and mental endowments, if their names may be accepted as indications of their character, Milcah signifying " queen " or " counsel," and Sarai meaning " my princess." It is certain they were in all respects worthy of the noble men whom they claimed as husbands. From 1 Lev. xviii. 9, 14. THE CALL OF ABRAHAM. 243 the circumstance that the Terachites were flock- masters, it may be inferred they were well con- ditioned in material estate. As to religion, though descended from the house of Shem, they were idolaters, or at least had declined from the pure monotheism of primeval times, and become tainted with the superstitions of the day. An old Arabian tradition describes Terach as a carver and seller of idols in the town of Ur ; indeed, some rabbinical writers aver he was the high priest and head of an order of idol-carvers. For these assertions, however, there does not appear to be sufficient foundation. The only thing certain is that Terach had succumbed to the prevailing cult, descended from the Accadians, which regarded the heavenly bodies as divinities. An old Chaldean hymn to the sun-god Shamas, who occupied an inferior place to that of Sin, the moon-god, will afford insight into the worship which Terach and Abram may have frequently observed and even taken part in. The translation is that of Lenormant : l " Lord, illuminator of the darkness, who piercest the face of dark- ness, Merciful god, who settest up those that are bowed down, who sus- tainest the weak, Towards the light the great gods direct their glances, 1 "Records of the Past," vol. xi. p. 123. 244 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. The archangels of the abyss, every one of them, contemplate eagerly thy face. The language of praise, as one word, thou directest it. The host of their heads seeks the light of the sun in the south. Like a bridegroom thou restest joyful and gracious. In thy illumination thou dost reach afar to the boundaries of heaven. Thou art the banner of the vast earth. O god ! the men who dwell afar off contemplate thee and rejoice." Another hymn to the moon-god, translated by the same scholar, 1 runs : " Father mine, of life the giver, cherishing, beholding all ! Lord, whose power benign extends over all in heaven and earth ! Thou drawest forth from heaven the seasons and the rains ; Thou watchest life and yieldest showers ! Who in heaven is high exalted ? Thou, sublime is thy reign ! Who on earth ? Thou, sublime is thy reign ! Thou revealest thy will in heaven, and celestial spirits praise thee. Thou revealest thy will below, and subduest the spirits of the earth, Thy will shines in heaven like the radiant light ; On ,earth thy deeds declare it to me, Thou, thy will, who knoweth ? with what can man compare it ? Lord ! in heaven and earth, thou lord of gods, none equals thee." Along with these religious liturgies and sacred hymns that were recited in honour of the Chaldean divinities, were numerous legends relating to prim- eval times, which showed that even in Chaldea the fundamental elements of the true faith were not entirely extinct. 2 Introduced doubtless by the 1 Lenormant, Les premieres civilisations, vol. ii. p. 158 (quoted by Geikie, " Hours with the Bible," vol. i. p. 306). 2 " British Museum Lectures," 1885, Lect. iii. (Boscawen) ; " Baby- lonian Life and History (Budge), chap. ix. 1-HE CALL OF ABRAHAM. 245 Semites, they were at least by these preserved in the legendary forms made known to us by the now deciphered tablets which have been recovered from Assyria. From these it is apparent that amongst the primitive inhabitants of Chaldea there still survived the notions of a Creation and a Fall, of a Flood and a Dispersion, of a Heaven and a Hell, of Sin and Salvation, of a Kesurrection from the dead and of a Future Immortality. Pious souls expressed their penitence in hymns and prayers 1 that recall the melting pathos of some of the Hebrew psalms : " Oh, my lord ! my sins are many, my trespasses are great , And the wrath of the gods has plagued me with disease, And with sickness and sorrow. I fainted ; but no one stretched forth his hand ! I groaned ; but no one drew nigh ! I cried aloud ; but no one heard ! O Lord ! do not abandon thy servant ! In the waters of the great storm, seize his hand 1 The sins which he has committed, turn thou to righteousnesa" When good men died, their spirits ascended to "an abode of happiness," to "the feasts of the silver mountain, the heavenly courts, where they dwelt a life eternal and holy in the presence of the gods ; " their bodies descended to the house of darkness, out of which, however, they would eventually be rescued by the hand of Merodach, 1 " Records of the Past," voL iii. p. 136. 246 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. whom an ancient hymn describes as " the merciful one among the gods, who bringest back the dead to life " a text which, says Mr Boscawen, " is alone sufficient to prove the existence in the Chal- dean creed of the belief in a resurrection from the dead." Encompassed, then, as Abram was in his early years by such mingled elements of truth and error, it will not be possible to assert that he had not attained, even prior to the call which he received, to a considerably purer faith than his father Terach. Rather it would seem that in this lay the deepest ground of his summons to depart from Chaldea, that already his highly religious spirit had sifted out the precious grains of truth from the surrounding chaff of error; had cast aside all that was worthless, and retained only that which was valuable in his ancestral faith ; and ascended to the sublime thought, which from his countrymen was hid, that the Supreme God was One and Almighty, and that beside Him of inferior divinities there were none. As to the inward process by which he reached this exalted monotheism, there is no need to have recourse for explanation to the fables that abound in Oriental tradition, derived chiefly from Jewish and Arabian sources. Perhaps of these the most beautiful is that which relates how, in order to escape destruction at the hands THE CALL OF ABRAHAM. 247 of Nimrod, he was, like Moses, secretly preserved by his mother, who hid him in a cave, where also, like Elijah, he was nourished by miraculous food. There, according to the tale, he grew and flour- ished, till one day on stepping outside the cave he beheld a star, when, struck with its beauty, he cried, " This is my god, who has given me meat and drink in the cave." But by and by the moon arose and the star looked dim ; upon which he exclaimed, " That is not my god ; I will wor- ship the moon." Then with the grey light of morning the moon also paled its lustre ; and when the sun shone forth in his splendour, he transferred his allegiance to the sun, saying, " This is my god ; I will worship the sun." But, alas ! the sun in turn sank below the hori- zon ; when he was silent and thought, " I will worship Him alone as God who made heaven and earth." Possibly even in a legend so fanci- ful as this a kernel of truth may be found. The countrymen of Abram were undoubtedly the first to map out the heavens, trace the move- ments of the stars, and predict the periods of comets. It would hardly, therefore, be wonderful if an intrinsically noble and devout soul like that of Terach's son should have often turned an up- ward glance to the midnight sky and asked him- 248 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. self in thought, whilst a solemn hush rested on his spirit " Who made these ? " And if he did, it would just as little be surprising that he should have anticipated the sentiment of David " The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firma- ment showeth His handiwork ; " or the doctrine of Paul, that " the invisible things of God since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being per- ceived through the things that are made, even His everlasting power and divinity." But even if it was not in this way l that Abram was conducted forth into the light of a purer faith than that possessed by his countrymen, there is no reason to doubt that He who was preparing a destiny for Abram, at the same time was careful to prepare Abram for his destiny. When the hour struck for that destiny to be fulfilled, it was found that the man by whom it was to be fulfilled was ready. 4. The departure of Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees is depicted on the one hand as forming part of a larger emigration movement conducted by the Terachites " And Terach took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son's son, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife, and they went forth with them from Ur of the 1 Joseph us' "Antiquities of the Jews," i. 7. i ; "The Koran" (Rodwell), Ixxxix. p. 409. THE CALL OF ABRAHAM. 249 Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan." 1 On the other hand, it is represented as an act of personal obedience to the call of Heaven, which had summoned him to a sublime deed of expat- riation " Now the Lord said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee : and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing, and I will bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curse thee ; and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed." 2 The two views are per- fectly compatible with one another. The deter- mination of the Terachites to abandon the Chal- dean country, even if due to other causes, may have synchronised with the resolution of the patri- arch to forsake the land of his nativity. The pressure of a multiplying population in the Shinar plain, as horde after horde swept down upon it from the encompassing mountain regions, or the oppressions of the Elamite invaders, or perhaps a growing sympathy with the purer faith adopted by Abram, may have induced the Terachites as a family to turn their steps northwards in the direction of their ancestral abodes, in the hope 1 Qen. x' * Gen. zii. 1-3. 250 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. of finding a new country on the other side of the Syrian waste, where they might pasture their flocks in security and worship their God in peace. It is certain that that which principally impelled Abram to cast in his lot with the intending emi- grants was the call which, according to Stephen, 1 first came to him while yet in Ur, and, according to Moses, was afterwards repeated while he lingered in Haran. The route pursued by the travellers was along the banks of the Euphrates, by the road leading into Syria and Palestine. On the boun- daries of the empire that road intersected the highway which led from east to west a highway which, in those early times, had been often trodden by the feet of armies as well as of merchants or pilgrims. A remarkable inscrip- tion, 2 preserved in the British Museum, and relating to the campaigns of Sargon I., B.C. 3800, informs us that, after consulting the omens of the moon, that celebrated monarch, who was greatly distinguished as a warrior, undertook an expedition into Syria, penetrated as far as the Mediterranean Sea, " the sea of the setting sun," carving his image upon the rocks which overlooked its waters, and even crossed into Cyprus ; and the story of Chedorlaomer's campaign reminds us that 1 Acts vii. 2. 2 " Records of the PasfJkBol. v. p. 59. THE CALL OP ABRAHAM. 251 already in the time of Abram " the soil of Canaan had felt the tramp of Babylonian feet." Near the crossing of the highways stood an old Accadian town, Charran, in Accadian Kharran, a road, with its temple to the moon-god of Ur. It was the frontier town of the Babylonian empire, and here the travellers agreed to halt. Whether this was owing to growing infirmity in Terach, or to diminishing courage on the part of Abram, it is certain that the patriarchal leader of the house- hold died, and that the call was repeated to the son. Having paid the last rites to his venerable sire, that son arose himself by this time a man of over threescore years and ten "And Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran " and resumed his journey to the unknown country, of which Heaven's voice had spoken. Whether Nahor and Milcah had accompanied the travellers from Ur to Haran, or whether they followed at a later period, cannot be determined. In any case they formed no part of the company that started from Haran, where in after years Nahor is found by his nephew Jacob, a prosperous and well-known sheep-master. With only Lot and his household as fellow-pilgrims, Abram and Sarai, with their slaves and their flocks, turned their faces and their steps towards the south, cross- 252 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. ing the Euphrates in one of its higher affluents, and moving slowly on, over the Syrian desert, southwards to Lebanon and Damascus. Here, according to Josephus, 1 Abram reigned for some considerable time, " being a foreigner who came with an army out of the land above Babylon, called the land of the Chaldeans ; " in proof of which the Jewish historian mentions that in his day the name of Abram was still famous in the country round Damascus, while a village in the neighbourhood bore the title of "Abram's Habi- tation." That Abram rested for a season at Damascus, is more than a probable deduction from the presence in his household as chief steward of Eliezer of Damascus ; but eventually he broke up his settlement there, as he had already done at Charran, and once more resuming his southward march, rested not until he had crossed the confines of the Promised Land. 1 " Antiquities of the Jews," i. 7. ( 253 ) XI. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. FROM the moment in which the patriarch crossed into Canaan till the day when his honoured dust was consigned to Machpelah, he was essentially a wanderer or pilgrim, 1 a nomad prince or shepherd chief, who roamed about without permanent habi- tation, dwelling in tents which were quickly pitched 'and as easily removed, exactly as his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob did when he was gone, and as the wandering Bedouins of the Arabian Desert or of the Jordan Valley do to-day. In the record of that pilgrimage which the Hebrew his- torian has preserved, 2 certain well-defined stages can be traced, each one beginning with a theophany or visible manifestation of Jehovah, and consisting of incidents and experiences connected therewith, if not always directly arising therefrom. The first 3 of these occurred at Shechem, the patriarch's earliest 1 Acts viL 5 ; Heb. xi. 9. * Qen. xii i-xxv. n. 8 Gen. xii. 7. 254 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. encampment after entering the Promised Land, and was doubtless intended to assure him that at length he had reached his destination, and his feet rested upon the soil of the unknown country into which Jehovah had promised to conduct him. The second 1 took place at Mamre, under circum- stances of peculiar solemnity, when announcements were made to him that a son sprung from his own loins should be his heir, and that in after years his descendants, multiplied into a nation, should occupy the land upon which he stood, and through which he had already wandered. The third 2 happened while the patriarch was still at Mamre, and had for its object the reiteration of the pro- mise of a son and heir, with the additional speci- fication that Sarai, his legitimate wife, should be that son's mother, and the formal appointment of circumcision as a sign of the covenant into which Jehovah had already entered with the patriarch. The fourth 3 followed soon after, also at Mamre, when the birth of Sarah's son was fixed for the ensuing spring. The fifth 4 and last was granted on a mountain summit in the land of Moriah, after Abraham had victoriously passed through his great trial in the offering of Isaac, and was manifestly 1 Gen. xv. i. 2 Gen. xvii. i. 3 Gen. xviii i. * Gen. xxii. i. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 255 meant to confirm the previously given promises of a numerous posterity and of a coming seed, in whom all the families of the earth should be blessed. Accordingly, as these well-marked divi- sions show, the story of the pilgrimage of Abraham falls into five distinct stages, of the first of which the present chapter will furnish a brief account. i. The first stage in Abraham's pilgrimage em- braced a period of ten years, from the date of his arrival in Canaan, in the seventy-fifth year of his life, till that of his receiving, in his eighty-fifth, the promise of a son immediately descended from himself. Abraham, there is reason to believe, 1 approached the Land of Promise by the caravan and military road leading from Damascus through the old town of Laish, afterwards known as Dan, to which at a later period he pursued the Elamite conquerors who ravaged the Pentapolis, or group of five cities in the circle of the Jordan. From Laish, it is likely, he descended the Jordan Valley on the eastern bank of the river, crossing the stream either at the ford immediately below the southern extremity of the Lake Tiberias, where the ruins of a Koman bridge still lie, or at that lower down in the neighbourhood of Succoth, by which Jacob subsequently passed into the country with his 1 Monthly Intv-preter, Sept. 1886, p. 358. 256 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. cattle when returning from Padan-aram. Be that, however, as it may, the Chaldean emigrant for the first time, pitched his tent upon Canaanitish soil, in what the late Dean Stanley a describes as " the most beautiful, perhaps the only beautiful spot in Central Palestine," the narrow valley lying between Mounts Ebal and Gerizim, where afterwards arose the city Shechem, either called after or built by the Hivite prince of that name, a city which attained to importance in the history of Israel, and which is now represented by the modern town of Neapolis, corrupted into Nablus. When first seen by Abraham, Shechem was the settlement of an ancient Canaanitish chieftain, who, if one might judge from his name, Moreh, acted as the teacher or priest of his tribe. There, beneath a spreading oak, which in course of time acquired celebrity as the tree 2 under which Jacob hid the strange gods and earrings fetched by his household from Padan- aram as the tree 3 beneath whose shadow Joshua erected a great stone pillar in commemoration of the covenant he struck with Israel before he died as the tree 4 beside which, during the unsettled period of the Judges, the men of Shechem made the first experiment at king-making known in 1 " Sinai and Palestine," p. 234. 2 Gen. xxxv. 4. 3 Josh. xxiv. 26. 4 Judg. ix. 6, 21. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 257 Israel, by setting a crown upon the head of Gideon's bastard son Abimelech ; an experiment which Jotham, the youngest of Gideon's legitimate sons, ridiculed by his witty parable of the trees as the tree, 1 finally, which became so associated with superstitious rites that men styled it "the oak of the sorcerers " there, under the sheltering arms of this umbrageous oak, the patriarch fixed his first encampment on the soil of Canaan, resolv- ing, it may be supposed, to wait on further indica- tions of the Divine will as to how to turn ; for as yet he had received no assurance that the goal of his journeyings had been reached. This, however, he was soon to obtain. The same Jehovah who had appeared 2 to him in Ur of the Chaldees when his pilgrimage commenced, a second time revealed His presence in some form of outward and visible manifestation which the historian does not specify, and expressly informed him that his feet stood upon the Land of Promise, for the sake of which he had left Chaldea, his ancestral home. The terms in which this announcement was made, " Unto thy seed will I give this land," were perhaps pur- posely selected in order, by omitting the words " to thee," which afterwards found a place in the promise, to convey to Abraham the thought that 1 Judy, is. 37. 2 Acts vii. 2. R 258 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. the land should belong rather to his descendants than to himself, to him only as represented by them, and that consequently the time when this promise should obtain its literal fulfilment was not then, but at a later date. Probably also it is in connection with this intimation that the preceding clause, in which modern criticism 1 has detected a sign of post-Mosaic authorship, receives its most satisfactory explanation. If the author of Genesis deemed it proper to record that when Abraham arrived in the Land of Promise the Canaanite had been there before him, 2 it can by no means be regarded as self-evident that this was for the purpose of indirectly announcing to his readers that at the moment when he was writing the Canaanite was not in the land, but that the Israelites w T ere in possession i.e., that this por- tion of the Pentateuch was not composed by Moses in the wilderness, but by some literary person who flourished after the conquest. It is at least as plausible a hypothesis that the writer may have wished to call attention to the grandeur of the promise about to be given to the patriarch, to the difficulty lying in the way of its immediate realisation, and to the severity of that demand which was now to be made upon the patriarch's 1 Tuch, Bleek, Colenso. 2 Gen. xii. 6. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 259 faith. The land which Jehovah was to show him and bestow on his descendants was not a stretch of unoccupied territory, but a populated region. It was clear, therefore, that Abraham himself could be in it nothing but a pilgrim and a sojourner, whilst not even his. posterity could obtain it with- out a work of conquest. It was manifestly such a promise as Abraham could embrace only in faith ; and this he did by erecting an altar to Jehovah, who had appeared to him. That first altar reared upon the soil of Canaan was the answer of Abraham's faith to the promise he had just received. In effect it was a taking possession of the soil in the name of God, and in virtue of a right which through the promise had been secured to his faith. 1 2. Soon after breaking up his first encampment, whether on account of the hostility of his neigh- bours, or because of the scanty pasturage he here found, is of small moment to determine, the patri- arch selected as his second place of halting a spot upon the central ridge of Palestine, about a day's journey south of his former location, having upon either side of it an old Canaanitish royal city ; on the west, towards the Mediterranean, j or " Almond- tree," a name which Jacob 1 Of. Bush's " Notes on Genesis," in loco. 260 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. subsequently changed to Bethel, or " House of God," on account of the revelations which he there received, and on the east Ai, or with the article Hai, " The Heap of Ruins," signifying doubtless either that it had been built upon an earlier foun- dation, or that a decayed pile somewhere stood in its vicinity. The important part played by the former of these towns in the subsequent his- tory of Israel is well known to every Bible stu- dent ; as, for instance, when in the period of the Judges it was for some time the abode of the Tabernacle ; l in the days of Samuel, the site of one of his judicial courts ; 2 in the times of Elijah, 3 the seat of one of the schools of the prophets ; in the reign of Jeroboam I., one of the chief shrines of the calf- worship * which he established in the northern kingdom. Nor was this the sole occasion on which the latter town came in contact with the fortunes of the chosen people, since it was there that Joshua's warriors ex- perienced their first defeat, though by these the town was eventually utterly destroyed, not again appearing on the page of sacred history till the era of Isaiah, when it is mentioned by the prophet 5 in connection with a fore- 1 Judg. xx. 18-26. 2 l Sara. vii. 16. 3 2 Kings ii. 3. 4 i Kings xii. 28. 6 Isa. x. 28. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 261 announced Assyrian invasion. To-day the two towns are represented 1 by the ruins of Beitin and Tell-el-Chadschar, lying three-quarters of an hour apart, the former on the north and the latter on the south side of the Wadi-el-Matjdch, through which to-day, as in the time of Joshua, a passage leads up from Jericho into the hills. Here it is probable that Abraham for a season rested, as he both pitched his tent and erected an altar in order to pay divine homage to Jehovah. 3. Out of this location, however, he was also ultimately driven by the increasing scarcity of food for himself, his household, and his cattle. In point of fact, the land was suffering from a famine, occasioned by the failure of the rains, which usually fall in Palestine in November and De- cember, and on which the fertility of the country depends. As a consequence, the patriarch re- solved to push on as fast as possible towards Egypt, the fame of which, as a rich corn- growing country, owing to the Nile inundations, had already reached the Tigris and Euphrates Valley. Centuries before the time of Abraham's visit, Egypt had attained to a settled form of government, its rulers styling themselves 1 Wilson, " Quarterly Statement of Palestine Exploration Fund," No. iv., p. 123. 262 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. Pharaohs, 1 which modern Egyptologers explain as an official title signifying " The Great House " (or gate), and which may best be compared with the designations, " The Sublime Porte," given to the Sultans of Turkey ; and " The Mikado" (from Mi, "great," and Kado, "gate"), applied to the rulers of Japan. It is not exactly certain under which Pharaoh Abraham arrived in the Nile Valley, though the best authorities 2 incline to think it must have been a monarch of the I2th dynasty who then held the reins of government ; and all that the monu- ments have made known to us concerning the condition of the country, the character of its people, and the manners of the court about that period, imparts a high degree of credibility to this opinion. As early as the I2th dynasty, B.C. 2466-2266 (Brugsch), B.C. 2354-2194 (Ebers), we read of the prevalence of famines, causing atten- tion to be drawn to the necessity of erecting State* granaries in order to meet emergencies occasioned by a failure in the Nile waters. 3 An 1 Brngsch, "Egypt under the Pharaohs," vol. i. p. 61 ; Ebers in Riehm's Handworterbuch, Art. " Pharao." a Ebers in Aegypten und die Biicher Moses, p. 283 ff. ; Canon Cook, " Speaker's Commentary," voL i. p. 447 ; Budge, " The Dwellers on the Nile," p. 81. 3 Brugsch, "Egypt under the Pharaohs," voL i. p. 158; cf. " Records of the Past," voL xii. pp. 63, 64. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 263 inscription in one of the entrance halls of the well-known tomb at Benihassan represents Ameni- Amenemha, hereditary chief governor of the Nome of Mah, i.e., of Benihassan, under Usertasen L, as chanting his own praises because he had " tilled all the fields of the Nome of Mah up to its southern and northern frontiers," and " preserved the food which it produced," distributing, as necessity arose, to great and small alike, so that no one was hungry or unhappy in his time, " not even in the years of famine." Then a paint- ing l on the wall surface of the tomb of Chnum- hotep, hereditary governor-in-chief of the lands of the east under Usertasen II., represents the arrival in Egypt of a Semitic princeling, Abesha by name, with his wife and children, belonging to the great people of the Amu, and numbering in all thirty-seven persons, who are met on the confines of Chnumhotep's territory by an over- seer called Khiti, and by him conducted to the royal scribe Noferhotep, who first presents to his lord, the governor, on a papyrus leaf, an account of the strangers, their names and their number, with the palace from which they come and the purpose of their visit, and then ushers 1 Brtigsch, "Egypt under the Pharaohs," pp. 177, 178; Ebers in Riehm's Handworterbuch, Art. "Egypten." 264 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. them into the great man's presence. Again, a papyrus 1 in the hieratic character, purchased for the British Museum in 1857 from Madame d'Orbiney, relates a story composed by a scribe for Seti II. of the igth dynasty when he was crown prince, in which a king of Egypt is de- picted as sending forth two successive armies to fetch to him a beautiful woman and to murder her husband ; whilst M. Chabas has pointed out a statement in another papyrus attesting " that the wife and children of a foreigner are by right the lawful property of the king." 2 Hence it is by no means improbable that in the land of the Pharaohs Abraham fared exactly as the Book of Moses records, and that the fear of some such experience on the part of Abraham was the real reason of the, in modern eyes at least, doubtful expedient to which he resorted of palming off himself and Sarai as brother and sister rather than as husband and wife. It was perhaps ex- cusable from the moral standpoint at which both Abraham and Sarai then stood, and in view of the state of Egyptian laxity revealed by the above facts, but it would undoubtedly have been 1 Brugsch, " Egypt under the Pharaohs,'' vol. i. p. 309 ; " Records of the Past," vol. ii. p. 138 ; Budge, " The Dwellers on the Nile," p. 81. 2 Budge, ibid., p. 81. THE PILGRIMAGE OP ABRAHAM. 265 better had Abraham from the first trusted to what in the end proved his sole defence, the protecting care of Heaven. By means of plagues upon the royal house and a private conversation with the patriarch, the eyes of Pharaoh were opened to the true character of the relationship existing between the Semitic stranger and his fair companion ; and eventually orders were given to conduct them safely beyond the boundaries of the empire. It has been frequently objected to the Bible story that it speaks of camels as among the presents received by Abraham from Pharaoh, whereas no trace of these animals has as yet been detected on Egyptian monuments, and in inscriptions its name does not occur until the time, of the igth dynasty, and then only under a Semitic form ; l but it is difficult to see how without these ships of the desert the traffic which the early Pharaohs maintained with the Sinaitic peninsula could have been carried on; while special circumstances with which we are unac- quainted may have perfectly accounted for their absence from pictorial delineations. In the same way, exception was wont to be taken to the fact that Pharaoh should have omitted horses from the gifts wherewith he enriched his visitor ; 1 Rielim's Handuorterbiich des Billischen Alttrthums, Art. "Kainel." 266 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. but it now appears that horses, though abundant enough in the i8th dynasty, i.e., about the time of the exodus, having been brought into Egypt from Central Asia by the Hyksos or shepherd kings, were totally unknown under the old empire. 1 It is therefore an indirect confirmation of the narrative that horses were omitted from, and camels included in the Egyptian monarch's present ; while the other beasts mentioned, sheep, oxen, and asses, were the ordinary domesticated animals of the country, and frequently occur upon the monuments. 4. Eeturning then from Egypt with his wife and with all his possessions, in slaves, in cattle, in silver and gold, accompanied also by his nephew Lot, who by this time is an independent chief- tain with herdsmen and flocks of his own, the patriarch re-entered Canaan and travelled north- ward to his old settlement between Bethel and Ai, where formerly he had built an altar and called upon the name of Jehovah. But unfortu- nately strife arose amongst the herdsmen of the now wealthy sheiks. The two wanderers had become so rich, their flocks and herds having so multiplied, that the land was not able to 1 Riehm's ffandvorterbuch, Art. "Pferd;" Rawlinson's "Egypt and Babylon," p. 223. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 2G7 Lear them, even had the pasture been abundant, which presumably it was not, and still less when both highlands and lowlands were occupied with settlers, the former with the Perizzites, the remnants, it has been conjectured, of an anterior Shemite race which had been displaced by their Hamite invaders, the Canaanites, who ejected them from their townships and drove them to the hills, at the same time establishing them- selves in the lowlands. The situation grew so critical, that in order to avert unseemly wrangling between himself and Lot, Abram proposed they should part, with a lofty magnanimity, which was far from being equalled by Lot, offering him the choice of settlements. " Is not the whole land before thee ? Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me. If thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right ; or, if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left." Lot, though younger than his uncle, was too shrewd a person not to know the value of a great opportunity. Lifting up his eyes, and surveying the circle of the Jordan, with its five regal townships and thriving population, which for beauty and fertility seemed a very garden of Jehovah, Lot chose him that as the quarter whither he should turn, leaving the noble man to whom already the soil 268 THE PATEIAECHAL TIMES. belonged, in all its length and breadth, to make the best he could of the barren hills and sun- dried valleys of the interior. "And Lot journeyed east ; " " and Lot pitched his tent toward Sodom ; " " and Lot dwelt in the cities of the plain." So the Hebrew historian marks the onward stages of Lot's seemingly upward material career, but in reality downward moral progress. When Lot had separated from the patriarch, the latter was honoured with an audible communication from Jehovah, who assured him that the land he had thus renounced would be his in a far more real sense than it ever would or could belong to his nephew, inviting him to lift up his eyes and survey it, to walk through its length and breadth and inspect it, for as certainly as he had now surrendered it by a free act of magnanimous self- sacrifice, it would all be his and his posterity's for ever. " To thee will I give it ! " The view of Palestine obtained from the Bethel plateau is at once commanding and inspiring. " To the east there rises in the foreground the jagged range of the hills above Jericho ; in the distance the dark wall of Moab ; between them lies the wide valley of the Jordan, its course marked by the tract of forest in which its rushing stream is enveloped ; and down to this valley a long and deep ravine, THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 2G9 now, as always, the main line of communication by which it is approached from the central hills of Palestine a ravine rich with vine, olive, and fig, winding its way through ancient reservoirs and sepulchres, remains of a civilisation now extinct, but in the times of the patriarchs not yet begun. To the south and the west the view commanded the bleak hills of Judea, varied by the heights crowned with what afterwards were the cities of Benjamin, and overhanging what in a later day was to be Jerusalem, and in the far distance the southern range on whose slope is Hebron. Northward are the hills which divide Judea from the rich plains of Samaria." l All that, Jehovah now assured him, would one day belong to his descendants. 5. Cheered by the promise he had received, as well as exhilarated by the prospect he had enjoyed, the patriarch moved slowly southwards with his flocks, descending from the Bethel plateau till he came to Hebron, or " Joining," a Canaanitish town of great antiquity, which, according to the author of the Pentateuch, had been built seven years before Zoan in Egypt, 2 and according to the writer of the Book of Joshua 8 bore the name 1 Stanley's " Sinai and Palestine," p. 218. 2 Num. xiii. 22. 3 Josh. xiv. 15. 270 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. of Kir lath Arba, or city of Arba Arba having been a chief of the Anakim until the conquest, when it was changed to Hebron. It is, however, doubtful whether Hebron was not the city's original designation, which was changed by the Anakites into Kirjath Arba during the absence of Jacob's descendants in Egypt, and restored again by the latter at the conquest. In any case the town, which was situated in the hill country, twenty-two miles south of Jerusalem, was at that time the residence of an Amorite chieftain named Mamre, the owner of a terebinth or oak grove in the neighbourhood; and there Abram settled, opening out his tent and erecting an altar, as was his wont, when intending more than a tem- porary sojourn. How long he stayed in th : s locality will come up for subsequent considera- tion ; but he was scarcely established in his new quarters when his history was once more brought into contact with that of Lot. At the time when Lot elected to push his fortunes in the Jordan circle, that fertile region was groaning under foreign domination. According to monu- mental evidence, previously cited, Sargon I. of Accad, B.C. 3800, had already made expeditions into Palestine, while about the time of Abraham the Kuduride monarchs of Elam had acquired ascen- THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 271 dancy over Southern Chaldea. Further investiga- tions 1 have likewise disclosed the fact that one of these Elamite princes, Kudur-Mabuk, was named " The Father of Palestine," from which it would seem that he claimed supremacy also over Canaan. And precisely in accordance with these discoveries the Hebrew narrative records that when Lot went to Sodom, the cities of the Pentapolis had for twelve years been subject to an Elamitish king called Chedorlaomer, or, translated into Baby- lonian, Kudur-lagamar. During the whole of the thirteenth year they proved restive beneath the foreign yoke, and in its closing months broke out into actual rebellion, by declining, it is probable, to forward the stipulated tribute. At that time the Elamite sovereign had as vassal princes Am- raphel, or Amar-pel, i.e., according to Schrader, 2 " Lord is the Son," or, " The Son reigns ; " accord- ing to Mr. Boscawen, 3 " The Circle of Life " king of Shinar or Southern Babylonia ; Arioch, " The Servant of the Moon God," king of Ellasar, iden- tified with Eri-aku, king of Larsa, son of Kudur- mabuk ; and Tidal, or, as the LXX. more correctly 1 "Fresli Light from the Ancient Monuments," p. 55; cf. Schrader in Riehm's Handuxirterbuch, Art. " Kedorlaomer." 2 Keilinscltriften und das alte Testament, p. 46. s "British Museum Lectures, 1 ' 1884. 272 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. render it, Thargal, in Accadian, " The Great Son " (Boscawen), or "The Great Judge" (Sayce), king of the Goim, supposed by Sir Henry Rawlinson to be the Gutim, a name given to the inhabitants of the region lying northwards of Babylonia as far as the mountains of Kurdistan. Collecting these allies with their armies, Chedorlaomer marched westwards to the Jordan circle in order to chastise the five revolted princelings, Bera, king of Sodom ; Birsha, king of Gomorrah; Shinab, king of Admah; Shemeber, king of Zeboim ; and the king of Bela or Zoar, whose name has not been preserved. A pitched battle of the four against five followed in the Vale of Siddim, which then was full of bitu- minous or asphalt pits or wells, which, however, have since disappeared. 1 The rebels were com- pletely routed. The cities were despoiled of their goods. The inhabitants were carried off as pri- soners, and among them the nephew of Abram. Learning of the peril of his relative, the patriarch resolved upon a rescue. Mustering his trained servants to the number of three hundred and eighteen, implying that Abram was by this time master of a household of over a thousand souls, and calling to his aid the Canaanitish chieftains in his neighbourhood, Mamre, " the manly," Eshcol, 1 Sir J. W. Dawson, "Egypt and Syria," p. 113. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 273 " the brave " or " the grape-cluster," and Aner, " the branch," with their dependants, he followed on the trail of the victors, coming up with them at the old town of Laish or Dan, already men- tioned. With a celerity of movement and a strategic skill that has never been surpassed, though often imitated, 1 in the annals of warfare, having divided his little army into four companies, he fell upon them unexpectedly, under cover of the darkness. Panic seized upon them, and they fled. The allied forces pursued them as far as Hobab on the north of Damascus, Abram re- covering the spoil which had been taken, with the women, the people, and his nephew Lot. Objections have been taken to the credibility of what is here related, as if it were impossible that a handful of domestics, even though re- inforced by the private retinues of three native chiefs, could have ventured to give battle to, and far less succeeded in conquering, four warlike monarchs such as Chedorlaomer and his allies, whom the five kings of the Pentapolis had not been able to meet. But, to begin with, it need not be assumed that an immense army was required to defeat the five kinglets of the Siddim Yale, seeing the extent of each one's empire was 1 i Sam. xi. il ; Job i. 17. S 274 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. a single town. Then it ought to be remembered that Chedorlaomer's troops were probably by this time exhausted by their long marches and succes- sive combats, as well as considerably demoralised by their splendid triumphs and great spoils; Josephus, 1 indeed, says that when Abram attacked the Elamites, some were in their beds fast asleep, and some were so drunk that they could neither fight nor run away. Again, the army of the kings of the East was far from home, in a com- paratively strange country, and at the moment not expecting an assault. Besides, the darkness prevented them from accurately estimating the numbers by whom they were opposed, while the fact of being attacked from four different sides would cause them to exaggerate the perils of their situation. And, finally, it may be supposed that other circumstances, not recorded by the historian, may have contributed to the patriarch's success, as, for instance, the circumstance that he was manifestly under the protection of Heaven. It is therefore by no means incredible that a rout so com- plete should have been inflicted on the Elamite con- queror and his victorious allies; nor does any ground exist for calling in question the historical accuracy of the writer by whom this incident is reported. 1 Autiq. i 10. i. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 275 6. Eeturning homeward with his recovered spoils, with the liberated captives, and with his nephew Lot, in the Vale of Shaveh, which Josephus 1 supposes was the valley of the Upper Kedron, about a quarter of a mile north of Jerusalem, at a spot afterwards called " The King's Dale," with obvious allusion to what is here recorded as having happened there, Abram ivas met by two regal personages. First came the King of Sodom to give him welcome. Whether this was Bera, who had not perished in the asphalt pit into which he stumbled when fleeing from the field of battle, but had only been stunned, and had gradually recovered, or Bera's successor, on the supposition that Bera had been killed by his fall, cannot be determined ; but in either case the object of the royal visit was the same to gratefully acknowledge the splendid service Abram had rendered himself and his brother princes by routing the marauders from the East, and so delivering the country from its foreign yoke. Next advanced Melchizedek, the king of Salem in New Testament Scripture 2 interpreted as signi- fying " King of Righteousness " and " King of Peace," whom the writer describes as having been a priest of the Most High God. Without advert- 1 Antiq. vii. 10. 3. 2 Hub. vii. 2. 276 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. ing at length to the fanciful conjectures which have transformed this mysterious figure who comes across the pathway of the patriarch when return- ing from the slaughter of the kings into Shem, the son of Noah, who was then alive, into an angel, into the Holy Ghost, into Christ, it may suffice to say that he was probably an old Canaan- itish prince, who retained the primitive elements of the true faith amid the surrounding heathenism, as, according to Scripture, did many others among peoples not belonging to the chosen race ; who believed in the existence of a Supreme Deity, whom he designated El-Elion, or " God Most High," as the Babylonians called their Supreme God El or II, and the Phosnicians named theirs Eliun; who recognised Him as the Maker and Possessor of heaven and earth ; and who wor- shipped Him by means of sacrifices, himself acting for his people in the twofold capacity of king and priest. That he now stepped forth from obscurity at this particular juncture in the patriarch's his- tory, bringing forth bread and wine, and giving his priestly blessing to the victor, was by no means without significance. In the unique personality of this grand old king-priest, of unknown parent- age, of unrecorded genealogy, of unchronicled existence, who meteor-like flashed across the path THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 277 of the conquering patriarch, emerging from the gloom of historical obscurity and almost instan- taneously vanishing into inscrutable seclusion, the writer to the Hebrews, 1 looking back upon it from the standpoint of Christianity, beheld a type of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Priestly King and Kingly Priest of the Church of God, who evermore brings forth from His celestial palace the bread of God and the wine of heaven, symbolised indeed, but not contained in the Holy Supper, for the spiritual refreshment of the great army of the faithful, and who confers upon them the authoritative benediction of salvation ; and in a sense very similar to this must the whole scene, as it presented itself to Abram, be interpreted. Melchizedek and Abram were both at this moment, it may be assumed, subjects of divine inspiration. Without this, the instantaneous recognition on the one hand by Abram of Melchizedek as the priest of God, and on the other hand by Melchizedek of Abram as the servant of the Most High God, are difficult to understand. Moved, then, by a secret, divine impulse, as the prophets afterwards were moved, and as Abram doubtless had been moved when he fell upon the kings, Melchizedek advanced with bread and wine, not so much to 1 Heb. vii. 1-3. 278 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. refresh the patriarch and his exhausted troops as to symbolise the fellowship with God which Abram as a mighty hero of the faith was hence- forth to enjoy, and which was formally conferred upon him in the benediction which followed. It is noticeable that from this point on in the history, Abram appeared to live in closer spiritual com- munion with God. On receiving the priestly bless- ing, he formally acknowledged Jehovah's grace by giving tithes unto His servant. The practice of giving tithes or " tenths " of the produce of the soil, of the profits of trade, of the spoils of war and the like, for the purposes of religion and in honour of the Deity, was one that had prevailed from a remote antiquity amongst the Shemitic and other peoples. Though subsequently amongst the He- brews transformed by statute into a legal obligation, from the first it was a purely voluntary custom, and had its origin, there can be small question, in a grateful recognition of the Divine Power as the giver of all good. 1 Having accepted these votive offerings, the Priest of Salem immediately thereafter withdrew from the patriarch's presence and returned to his capital amongst the hills, 1 Kitto'aCyclopcedia of Biblical Literature, Art. "Tithes;" Riehm's Handworterbuch des Bi blischen Alterthums, Art. "Zehnten ;" Keil's " Biblical Archaeology," p. 359. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 279 leaving the king of Sodom, who had probably yielded precedence to Abram, to prosecute his suit. Hitherto, in retiring before Melchizedek, that royal personage had acted with courtesy ; now, in speak- ing to the patriarch, he behaves with generosity. He desires only to have his people returned to his city and his rule : he is willing that Abram should retain the spoil. But Abram, who had already surrendered Canaan to the greed of his nephew, was not likely to be outdone by the magnanimity of a Canaanitish prince. Not so much as a thread or a shoe-latchet would he take of what had been the property of the king of Sodom and his brother kings. Though not averse in other circumstances to accept presents from heathen monarchs, he would on no account have it said that he had become enriched by sharing in the wealth of Sodom. If only the soldiers were not required to account for that which had been eaten by the way, and if his confederates Mamre, Eshcol, and Aner received their portions, he was satisfied. So ended the interview with the kings, and so closed the first stage in the pilgrimage of Abram. ( 280 ) XII. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. (Continued.) i. THE second stage in Abraham's pilgrimage opened with a second Theophany 1 soon after the occurrences narrated in the preceding chapter. The phrase employed by the historian to describe this divine manifestation " The word of the Lord came unto Abraham" has by some interpreters been understood to point to a personality in the Godhead distinct from Jehovah, but at least it intimates that the latter now addressed His servant in articulate speech. When this happened the patriarch was still encamped at Mamre. The splendid victory he had recently achieved over the Asiatic monarchs, besides establishing his fame and securing his position in the land, had probably caused him to be regarded by the in- habitants generally in the light of a deliverer, and by the native princes as a powerful chieftain 1 Gen. xv. i. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 281 | with whom it might be prudent to enter into close alliance. Nevertheless, when visited by his Heavenly Friend, he was sunk into deep dejection. This was probably occasioned in part by the natural reaction which almost certainly followed the high excitement he had passed through in his campaign against the kings; at the same time the narrative lends colour to the supposition that it was chiefly due to the disappointment felt in connection with the non-fulfilment of the promise. Already ten years had elapsed since the hope had been kindled in his breast that, notwithstanding the advanced age of Sarai and himself, a child of theirs would, in due time, gladden the patriarchal tent, and gild their remaining years with the rich sunshine of its love. But as yet no sign of realisation for that promise appeared on the horizon of their future ; and the thought began to weigh upon the patriarch's heart like lead that perhaps after all he had misunderstood the promise, that possibly it had never been intended to accom- plish itself through a blood descendant of himself or Sarai, but only through one whom they should adopt into their family, and who should stand to them legally, though not naturally, in the relation of a son. It seems almost indisputable that some such reflections were at this period passing through 282 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. the patriarch's mind. The language in which he utters his complaint to Jehovah " Behold, to me Thou hast given no seed ; and lo ! one born in my house," or, the son of my house, " is my heir " fully warrants the conclusion that up to this point he discerned no other way in which he could become the father of a numerous posterity than by adopting as his heir his house-steward Dam- mesek-Eliezer that being his name in full- er Eliezer the Damascene, i.e., Eliezer who, as Baumgarten suggests, was born at Damascus. Accordingly Jehovah, who now appeared to the patriarch by night in a vision, offered him such consolation as his dejected condition required, and in particular assured him that the illustrious destiny predicted and reserved for him would be realised not through any law-made son, but through the flesh and blood offspring of himself: " He that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir." In token that this prophecy would come to pass, the Divine Being led him outside his tent and placed him beneath the star- lit sky, bidding him direct his gaze aloft and count the number of the shining orbs, adding, " So shall thy seed be ! " Whether, as has been conjectured, the vision of the patriarch was miraculously quickened, so that it might penetrate the depths THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 283 of space and comprehend in its sweep innumerable worlds lying beyond the ken of ordinary sight, it is impossible to say; in any case the impression made upon the soul of the patriarch by the splendour of that midnight spectacle was such that he no longer hesitated to repose his trust in the pure, naked, unsupported word of God, but calmly, intelligently, and firmly believed that what God had promised He was able also to per- form; and from that moment on, according to both the author of Genesis and Paul the Christian apostle, he entered into a new relationship with God, or stood towards Him on a new footing, as a justified or righteous person : " He believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness." 1 In this, however, it is not necessarily implied that Abrnm became immediately conscious of the changed position into which he had been placed by God in answer to his faith. Rather it would seem that he did not, and that he only grew to an assured conviction of such a change as God's people mostly do get by the slow process of inward moral conflict and upward spiritual ascent. Notwithstanding the perfect clearness and explicit- ness of the divine declaration that a veritable child of his own would be his heir, he still felt 1 Gen. iv. 6 ; Rom. iv. 3. 284 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. that he required, or at least would prefer to have, some visible token on which to lean his faith in seasons of despondency like those he had just passed through. Accordingly he requested that such might be given : " Lord God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it \ " In response, Jehovah bade him take a heifer three years old, a she-goat of three years old, and a ram of three years old, a turtle dove, and a pigeon all victims afterwards prescribed by the law 1 and prepare them for a sacrificial offering. In silence the patriarch obeyed, acting, we cannot doubt, under divine impulse, and moving in a condition of ecstasy. The animals he parted into two equal parts, laying one part over against the other ; the birds he divided not, that being unnecessary, but laid the dove on the one side and the pigeon on the other. From early morning, through the sultry hours of noon until the setting of the sun, he watched, eagerly expecting that Jehovah was about to furnish the desired sign. With a touch of naturalness the historian remarks that the carrion attracted towards it birds of prey, which Abram scared away by blowing the breath of Abram's mouth being probably accompanied by a wind from God. With the shadows of the evening fell 1 Exod. xxix. 15 ; Num. xv. 27, xix. 2 ; Deut. xxi. 3 ; Lev. i. 14. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 285 a deep sleep upon the weary watcher a Tar- demah, like that which descended on Adam " in the Garden," 1 a supernatural slumber, in which, though the body's eyes were closed, those of the spirit were awake. An overwhelming horror, occasioned by the deep gloom that encircled him, seized upon his spirit. From the darkness a voice issued, whose words he distinctly heard : " Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land which is not theirs, and shall serve them, and they shall afflict them four hundred years ; and also that nation whom they shall serve will I judge ; and afterwards shall they come out with great substance. But thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace : thou shalt be buried in a good old age. And in the fourth generation they shall come hither again : for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full." The voice was explanatory of the preceding scene, and prophetic of the future adverse fortunes of Abram's descendants. The great darkness symbolised the exile, bondage, and oppression these should suffer in the land of Egypt. The period of their affliction should be 400 years. Whether this should be regarded as a round num- ber for the 430 years 2 of Moses and Stephen, or as an exact date, will depend upon the mode of 1 Gen. ii 21. 2 Exod. xii. 40 ; Acts vii. 6. 286 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. computation adopted. If the date of Abram's call 1 be taken as the starting point for the 430 years, then 30 years later will nearly coincide with the birth of Isaac ; only in this case the 400 years will include the 60 years which passed before the birth of Jacob, the 130 years which elapsed before Jacob's descent into Egypt, with the years of prosperity in Goshen which the Israelites enjoyed before another king arose w T ho knew not Joseph, leaving a comparatively small number of years to represent the time of bondage and oppression. This, it is true, does not easily harmonise either with the language of Jehovah in the present instance " they," i.e., these foreigners, " shall afflict them 400 years ; " or with the statement of Moses 2 that "the sojourning of the children of Israel who dwelt in Egypt was 430 years ; " or with the assertion of Stephen 3 that God spake in this wise, " that His seed should sojourn in a strange land, and that they should bring them into bondage, and entreat them evil 400 years ; " but it pretty fairly accords with the genealogical table in Exodus, 4 which places four lives between the Descent and the Exodus, those of Levi, Kohath, Amram, and Moses, which gives as the combined 1 LXX., Lepsius, Murphy, Wordsworth. 2 Exod. xii. 40. 3 Acts vii. 6. * Exod. vi. 15, 20. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 287 sum of their ages 487 years, and which, when the requisite deductions are made, allows about 215 years or thereby to fill up the interval of exile from Canaan. If, however, the 430 years be reckoned from the time of Jacob's descent, 1 then not merely will the passages above cited from Genesis, Exodus, and Acts, be satisfied, but the declaration of Paul, 2 that the law was given 430 years after the promise, will not be contradicted, since the context distinctly shows that he is speaking not of one specific promise made to Abraham, but of the series of promises given to him and to his seed in which case the time of the promise may be viewed as closing with the death of Jacob. The only difficulty in the way of accepting this solution is the genealogical table in Exodus, which, as has been said, admits of only 215 years between the two termini, the Descent and the Exodus. But a closer examination shows that some names must have been omitted from that register ; that Amram, the son of Kohath, can hardly have been identical with Amram the father of Moses, since in Moses' time the Amram- ites, a branch of the Kohathites, numbered 2150, so that Moses must have had upwards of 2149 brothers and brothers' sons, whereas, according to 1 Delitzsch, Keil, Kalisch, Lange. 2 Gal. iii. 17. 288 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. the record lie had only one brother and two sons. Hence there is ground for believing that the duration of Israel's sojourn in Egypt was exactly as here announced in round numbers, 400 years. This communication made to the patriarch, a startling appearance followed. When the sun had completely sunk below the horizon, and it was perfectly dark, an Oriental furnace, in the form of a cylindrical fire-pot, with a fiery torch or lambent flame emerging from the smoking stove, appeared to pass between the pieces of the divided animals. The strange phenomenon was recognised by the patriarch as a solemn ratification on the part of God, by means of a covenant, of the promise he had just made, and the gift he had just bestowed. As Jehovah Himself explained in an accompanying voice, it signified, " Unto thee have I given this land," the ideal boundaries of which He in the next words defined. It was to reach from the river of Egypt or the Nile, rather than the Wadyel-Arish or Brook of Egypt at the southern limits of the country, unto the Great Eiver, the river Euphrates in the north and east, and embrace the territory then occupied by several ancient peoples, ten in number, of whom the most important were the Hittites, or descendants THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 289 of Heth, who by archaeologists 1 of high repute have been identified with the Cheta of Egyptian, and the Katti of Assyrian monuments, a powerful Asiatic tribe who appear to have early established themselves on the Euphrates, founding an empire with two capitals Garchemish on the Euphrates, and Kadesh on the Orontes and advancing to a high degree of civilisation. It was thus a great transaction in which on that eventful night the patriarch bore a part. That its immediate effect was to confirm his faith in the promise need scarcely be questioned. But by and by he made a false step at the instigation of Sarai, to whom the idea seems to have presented itself, suggested, no doubt, by her continued sterility, that prob- ably she was not destined by Jehovah to be the mother of the Promised Seed, and who accordingly proposed that Abram should marry, as a secondary wife, her Egyptian maid Hagar, in order that she, Sarai, might in this indirect manner, by means of her, obtain children. The account of this marriage, and of the evil consequences that flowed from it, along with the statement that Abram was fourscore and six years old when 1 Ebers, Aegypten und die fiiicher Moses, i. p. 285 ; Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das alte Testament, pp. 27, 31 ; Sayce, "Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments," chap. v. ; " Records of the Past," vol. ii. 65, iv. 25. T 290 THE PATKIAECHAL TIMES. Hagar's child, Ishmael, was born, completes the historian's record of the second stage of Abraham's pilgrimage. 2. Of the third stage only one incident is men- tioned, the appearance of Jehovah to Abram in his ninety-ninth year, 1 to organise the Hebrew Church, by forming Abram, now a believer in the promise, and a justified or righteous person through faith, and Abram's household, who enjoyed the privilege solely because of their rela- tion to him, into a separated and sacred com- munity. This was done by first reasserting and confirming the original promise upon which the faith of Abram was at length steadily fixed ; next, by changing the names of Abram, " high father," and Sarai, " My Princess," into Abraham, " the Father of a Multitude," and Sarah, "Princess," to indicate the new relations in which, by reason of their faith, they were henceforth to stand towards their descendants ; and finally, by insti- tuting circumcision as a sign of the covenant which had thus been established, and of the church which had thus been formed. On every male child of eight days old, whether born in the house or bought with money, the rite was to be per- formed ; the child that was uncircumcised was not 1 Gen. xvii. i. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 291 to be regarded as belonging to the congregation of Jehovah, but counted as cut off from His people. In obedience to this instruction, on the self-same day on which it had been received, Abraham administered the rite to himself, to Ishmael, and to all the male members of his house- hold, thereby incorporating them along with him- self into the visible community of the Old Testa- ment Church. As to whether this peculiar observ- ance was now for the first time instituted, no absolutely certain conclusion can be formed. That it prevailed in Egypt 1 from a very early period is the testimony not alone of Philo and Josephus, Clement and Origen, but also of Egyptian monu- ments and mummies. In a temple at Karnak there has been preserved a representation of the circumcision ceremony, while almost all the mum- mies that have yet been examined have been found circumcised. Still it is doubtful whether amongst the Egyptians the practice was universal, or limited to the priesthood and such as devoted themselves to learning. In favour of the latter notion it has been argued that the male servants of the patriarch, some of whom had been procured 1 Riehm's Handworterbuch des Biblischen Alterthums, Art. " Besch- neiilung ; " KeiTs "Archaeology," pp. 331-333 ; Kitto's Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature, Art. " Circumcision." 292 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. in Egypt, do not appear to have been circumcised until Abraham was commanded to perform the rite ; that Ishmael, though the son of an Egyptian mother, remained uncircumcised till the same time ; and that Pharaoh's daughter recognised Moses as a Hebrew child, which it is supposed she could not have done had circumcision been generally practised amongst her own people. But even though it could be shown that prior to the period of Abraham the custom was of universal observance among the Egyptians, it would not follow that the Hebrews did not adopt it in compliance with divine prescription. As Keil justly observes, " The possibility remains that Abraham during his sojourn in Egypt became acquainted with circumcision, which was already there practised, and that through this he was prepared for the introduction of the same amongst his own people in obedience to Divine command- ment." As to the reasons for its imposition on the Hebrews, there can hardly be room for debate. That among these heathen nations of antiquity who practised it, it served certain hygienic pur- poses, promoted cleanliness, and warded off, as they believed, certain painful disorders, may be con- ceded, and whatever benefit in this direction it was capable of conferring, the descendants of Abraham would no doubt enjoy ; but amongst THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 293 them the ordinance was one of pre-eminently re- ligious significance. Whilst it placed a badge of distinction betwixt them and other peoples, it also served to perpetuate amongst them the memory of Jehovah's covenant, to foster in their minds a hope of Him who was to come and in whom all the families of the earth should be blessed, to impress upon their hearts the duty of cultivating moral purity, to preach to them a gospel of righteous- ness by faith, to suggest the idea of a holy or spiritual seed, and to foreshadow the Christian rite of baptism ; though, of course, it cannot be main- tained that either its ends or its uses were at the time of its appointment or even afterwards fully understood by the patriarch. 1 3. How long an interval elapsed before the next Theophany 2 occurred to mark the opening of a fourth stage in the patriarch's pilgrimage, the author of Genesis leaves unrecorded. The pro- bability is that it was shortly after the last men- tioned transaction, the institution of the covenant of circumcision and the formation of an Abrahamic Church. Its object was to formally announce the arrival of the moment when the long-deferred hopes of the patriarch should blossom into full 1 See "Pulpit Commentary on Genesis," p. 237. 2 Gen. xviii. i. 294 THE PATKIAECHAL TIMES. fruition by the birth of a child of Sarah ; and with this it will be interesting to notice that everything narrated in this long section has a close connec- tion the perfecting of Sarah's faith, the revelation to Abraham of Sodom's approaching doom with Abraham's intercession for the guilty cities of the plain, the destruction of the cities and the rescue of Lot, the residence of Abraham at Gerar, the birth of Isaac, the expulsion of Ishmael, and the covenant with Abimelech. On this occasion the Divine Being made His presence known to the patriarch not in a vision, or at night, or by a voice, or as an angel, but in the clear and open light of day as a man, and in the guise of a traveller, accompanied by two companions. The patriarch, as he sat in the door of his tent and beheld them approach, regarded them as strangers, and with true Oriental hospitality invited them to rest and eat beside his tent, as the Arabs are accustomed to do to-day. "Whenever our path led us near an encampment," writes Porter, 1 "as was frequently the case, we always found some active sheikh or venerable patriarch sitting 'in his tent door/ and as soon as we were within hail we heard the earnest words of wel- come and invitation which the Old Testament 1 " Giant Cities of Bashan," p. 326. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 295 Scriptures had rendered long ago familiar to us : ' Stay, my Lord, stay. Pass not on till thou hast eaten bread and rested under thy servant's tent. Alight and remain until thy servant kills a kid and prepares a feast.'" The invitation extended by Abraham the three travellers accepted ; and when the mid-day repast was finished, the principal Guest of the three, whom we cannot with Delitzsch hold to have been an angel, but with Keil regard as having been Jehovah Himself, commenced to inquire for Sarah, who within the tent, from behind the dark folds of the camel's hair curtain that marked off the woman's apartment, was listening to the conversation, and had overheard the announcement that next spring her long- expected child should be born. At first received with a laugh of incredulity, it was afterwards, there is reason to believe, when she had listened to Jehovah's reproof, welcomed with a simple faith. And now having announced to Abraham that the consummation of his hopes was at hand, with peculiar fitness Jehovah communicates to His servant that the expectations of his kinsman Lot, for whom he had twenty years before renounced possession of the land, were on the eve of being scattered to the winds. As it were, the seed- corns that uncle and nephew had respectively sown 296 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. on Bethel heights had ripened to a harvest in the same hour. Abraham's future occupation of the land was about to be assured by the birth of an heir; Lot's anticipations were approaching the fatal moment of their ignominious destruction. The wickedness of Sodom and her companion, cities in the Jordan circle could no longer be endured by a long-suffering Heaven. The cup of their iniquities was full. The sword of justice could not be another instant arrested. The filthy townships must be wiped off from the face of earth, and their unnatural inhabitants remorselessly destroyed. When the travellers uprose from Mamre they proceeded onwards and downwards towards the plain of Sodom, Abraham accompany- ing them so far as Caphar-barucha, according to tradition, whence a view can be obtained of the Dead Sea. There, on the heights overlooking the valley, while the two angels hastened forwards to execute their mission upon Sodom, Abraham poured forth his heart before Jehovah in sublime intercession for the doomed cities and their guilty inhabitants : " Peradventure there be fifty right- eous within the city, wilt Thou also destroy and not spare the place, for the fifty righteous that are therein ? That be far from Thee, Lord, to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 297 wicked; and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from Thee : shall not the Judge of all the earth do right ? " But, alas ! not even ten such righteous persons could be discovered in the utterly demoralised dens ; and so that very night, as the hours ran towards morning, " Jehovah rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven, and He overthrew those cities and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground " having previously effected the rescue of Lot and his two daughters by means of the angels whom He had commissioned to execute His wrath upon the cities. Questions have been raised as to the exact character of that fiery rain in which Sodom was consumed, and as to the precise site on which the cities stood. As to the former it may suffice to cite the following passage from a recent work by Principal Sir J. W. Dawson : l "The manner of their destruction also connects itself with the locality; we are told that there were ' slime-pits/ that is, petroleum wells, in their vicinity. Now regions of bitumen, like that of the Dead Sea, are liable to eruptions of a most destructive character. Of these we have had examples in the oil regions of America. In a 1 ' Egypt and Syria," pp. in, 112. 298 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. narrative of one of these now before me, which occurred a few years ago in the oil district of Petrolia in Canada, I read that a bore-hole struck a reservoir of gas, which rushed upward with ex- plosive force, carrying before it a large quantity of petroleum. The gas almost immediately took fire, and formed a tall column of flame, while the burn- ing petroleum spread over the ground and ignited tanks of the substance in the vicinity. In this way a space of about fifteen acres was enveloped in fire, a village was burned, and several persons lost their lives. The air flowing towards the eruption caused a whirlwind, which carried the dense smoke into the air, and threw down burning bitumen all around." As to the latter it is now almost certain that the cities in the Jordan circle stood upon a plain on the north rather than the south of the sea. The grounds upon which this opinion rests are briefly these : l that the circle of the Jordan was visible from the Bethel plateau, which is true of the northern but not of the southern extremity of the Asphaltite Lake ; that though the plain upon the north is not itself visible from the heights above Mamre or Hebron, yet the depression be- 1 Smith's "Biblical Dictionary," Art. Zoar ; Tristram's "Land of Israel," pp. 354-358, and "Land of Moab," pp. 330-334 ; Dawson's "Egypt and Syria," p. ill ; Sunday at Home, April 1886, Art. "An Artist's Jottings in the Holy Land," by Henry Harper ; " Pulpit Commentary on Genesis," p. 257. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 299 tween the hills in which the plain lies is dis- cernible, so that Abraham could at once identify the locality when the smoke arose after Sodom's burning ; that as Chedorlaomer, who rounded the south end of the sea, came to Hazezon-tamar, half- way up the western shore, before he reached the Vale of Siddim, the natural inference is that the Pentapolis lay towards the north ratber than the south of Hazezon-tamar ; and finally, that Moses could not have seen Zoar from Mount Nebo, as he is said to have done, unless it had lain in the line of vision between Pisgah and Jericho, that is, unless it had been towards the north rather than the south of the sea. Directing then his gaze towards the well-known cleft between the hills, the patriarch beheld "the smoke of the country" going up " as the smoke of a furnace," and he knew that Jehovah's threatening had been fulfilled, and that the fair cities had been overthrown, or, to use the forcible utterance of the Hebrew, had been turned over as a cake and completely destroyed. It was an appalling catastrophe, which stamped a witness of its terrible severity upon the region itself, which has ever since been a bleak and desolate tract ; upon the page of inspiration, 1 which 1 Deut. xxix. 22 ; Isa. xiii. 19 ; Jer. xlix. 18, 1. 40 ; Lam. iv. 6 ; Amos iv. 1 1 ; 2 Pet. ii. 6 ; Jude 7. 300 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. often afterwards recurred to it as a terrible warn- ing of the danger of provoking the wrath of the Almighty ; and upon the course of ancient tradition, one of the earliest and most striking echoes of it having been that which travelled eastward to Chedorlaomer's land, and took the form of an old Accadian hymn, of which the following translation is furnished by Professor Sayce : l " An overthrow from the midst of the deep there came. The fated punishment from the midst of heaven descended. A storm like a plummet the earth (overwhelmed). To the four winds the destroying flood like fire did burn. The inhabitants of the cities it had caused to be tormented ; their bodies it consumed. In city and country it spread death, and the flames as they rose overthrew. Freeman and slave were equal, and the high places it filled. In heaven and earth like a. thunderstorm it had rained ; a prey it made. A place of refuge the gods hastened to, and in a throng collected. Its mighty (onset) they fled from, and like a garment it concealed (mankind). They (feared), and death (overtook them) ; (Their) feet and hands (it embraced). Their body it consumed. the city, its foundations it defiled. in breath his mouth he filled. As for this man, a loud voice was raised ; the mighty lightning flash descended. During the day it flashed ; grievously (it fell)." Horror-struck by the spectacle, it may well be imagined, the patriarch soon after broke up his 1 "Records of the Past," vol. xi. p. 117. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 301 settlement at Mamre and moved towards the south country, sojourning for a season in Gerar, between Kadesh and Shur, and finally locating himself at Beerslieba, or the Well of the Oath, as it subse- quently came to be called. While in Gerar he repeated his old sin of duplicity in connection with Sarah, concerning whose safety he had now greater cause than ever to be anxious, and again he was delivered from the mischievous results of his own folly by the gracious interposition of Heaven. Abimelech, who had taken Sarah into his harem, was prevented from touching her, and eventually restored her uninjured to her husband. In due time Sarah's son was born, but whether in Gerar or at Beersheba cannot be determined. The Child of Promise, who was named Isaac or " Laughter," because, said his mother, " God hath made me to laugh," was welcomed into the patriarchal tent with demonstrations of joy. On the eighth day it was introduced into the visible church of God by reception of the covenant sign of circumcision : when the time came for it to be weaned, probably towards the end of the third year, a great feast was made. As the years passed it became apparent that Ishmael must be separated from the patri- archal household. In obedience to divine direc- tion, Hagar and her son were sent away. A 302 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. peaceful alliance was cemented between the patri- arch and his Philistine neighbour Abimelech, the king of Gerar ; and so closed the fourth period of Abraham's eventful history. 4. The fifth and last stage in Abraham's pilgrim- age began with the great trial or temptation to which he was subjected in connection with the Son of Promise. By this time the patriarch was established at Beersheba. Isaac was a grown lad, since, according to the narrative, he was able to undertake and perform a journey of more than sixty miles in three days. Probably in a night vision, 1 as on a former occasion, God appeared to the patriarch, commanding him to travel to a distant land, which, either then from God or after- wards from Abraham received the name Moriah, "The Shown of Jehovah," in allusion to the present incident, and there, upon one of the mountains which God would show him, to offer up his son Isaac as a burnt-offering. Immediately on being assured in his mind that the voice to which he listened was that of the Supreme Deity, he arose, and taking with him Isaac, as well as two young men to act as assistants by the way, and all the requisites for the dread ceremonial, he proceeded to the scene of oblation. It is needless to rehearse 1 Gen. xxii. i. THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 303 in tliis place the affecting details of the story. It is enough to note that Abraham did exactly as he had been commanded : built his altar of unhewn stones upon Mount Moriah, laid the wood he had brought in order upon the stones, bound Isaac his son and stretched him upon the wood, and the next instant would have plunged the sacrificial knife into that son's breast if a voice from heaven had not arrested his quivering hand. Looking round in the direction of the voice, the aged father- priest beheld a ram caught in a thicket by the horns. Interpreting this as an indication that heaven had provided a substitute " a lamb for a burnt-offering" he went and took the ram and offered it in the stead of his son; after which he once again received a renewal of the promise, and that in the most solemn and momentous form : " By myself have I sworn," saith the Lord, " for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, that in blessing I will bless thee, and multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea-shore ; and thy MT<( shall possess the gate of his enemies ; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because thou hast obeyed My voice." The authen- ticity of this amazing passage in the patriarch's 304 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. life has been challenged by such writers as De Wette, Schumann, Von Bohlen, and Hartmann, who relegate the whole story to the category of fiction, calling it a later myth invented by the author of Genesis for the glorification of the Hebrew people. To believers, however, in the New Testament Scriptures the statement of the writer to the Hebrews l that " by faith Abraham offered up Isaac," is ample guarantee that the passage in question records an actual occurrence in the history of the father of the faithful ; while the traditional echoes of the story that afterwards arose among the Greeks and Phosnicians lend an indirect con- firmation to its authenticity. Amongst the for- mer 2 the legend of Agamemnon, whose daughter Iphigenia was at the last moment delivered from immolation by her father through the intervention of Diana, who provided a hind in her stead, and amongst the latter 3 that of a king of the country, Israel by name, who sacrificed his only son on the occasion of a great national calamity, bear so close a resemblance to the biblical account of the offer- ing of Isaac, as to leave small doubt concerning their origin. But many who believe that the 1 xi. 17-19. 2 Euripid., Iph., Aul., 783. 3 Kenrick's "Phoenicia," p. 228 (quoted by Geikie, " Hours with the Bible," vol. i. p. 401). THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 305 incident really happened as described profess themselves at a loss to find for it a satisfactory explanation. The notion that God should have demanded of His servant a human sacrifice appears to them so revolting, so contrary to those exalted attributes and qualities we ascribe to God, that they feel compelled to explain it in some other way than by supposing that God actually said, " Take now thy son Isaac, and offer him for a burnt -offering." Hengstenberg escapes the difficulty by holding that God only asked a spiritual surrender of the patriarch's son, and that the patriarch's subsequent action was the result of a misunderstanding, was occasioned by accepting as literal what was de- signed to be interpreted as literal, as God showed by interrupting the fatal deed on the eve of its execution, and directing the astonished parent to slay the ram which had been providentially pro- vided instead of his son. Kurtz * suggests that Abraham mistook an impulse of his own mind for a divine injunction ; that as Abraham knew the Canaanites evinced the strength of their devotion to the deities they worshipped by sacrificing their offspring, and frequently their first-born, so the 1 " History of the Old Covenant ; " cf. Cox in the Expositor. voL i. p. 314, Art. ' The Temptation of Abraham." U 306 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. thought presented itself to him that he also should show the strength of his attachment to Jehovah by la} ing on the altar that which he held nearest and dearest, his only son Isaac. But the narrative is too explicit to admit of any other assumption than that Abraham believed he was acting in obedience to a distinctly expressed Divine com- mand. Nor need it stagger one that God should have asked the life of Isaac, and asked it at the hands of his father. The life of Isaac was in God's hands, as the lives of all men are, to be disposed of as His wisdom and goodness, His holiness and love might direct ; and if He chose to recall it in this particular way, so far as Isaac at least was concerned, there was no room for question or com- plaint. But it is argued that to enjoin Abraham to take the sacrificial knife and plunge it into his son's breast was, on the part of a holy, just, and loving God, who also abhorred human sacrifices, not only revolting in the extreme, but incon- ceivable, impossible. It must, however, always be difficult, if not somewhat presumptuous on the part of a creature to say beforehand what God is and what God is not at liberty to command. If certain actions were permissible to man under the law which are not allowable now under the gospel, it may well be that some things were matters of THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 307 forbearance before the law which were definitely forbidden after it. It is well known, for instance, that human sacrifices were customary among the Canaanites and other heathen nations of antiquity. " In the month Sivan," says an old Accadian manuscript, 1 " from the first day to the thirtieth, an eclipse failed, (and) the crops of the land were not prosperous. When the God of the air (the atmosphere) is fine (then there is) prosperity. On the high places the son is burnt." Another " He gave his offspring for his life ; The head of his offspring for his own head ; The front of his offspring for his own front ; The breast of his offspring for his own breast," Hence it would not shock the moral sense of Abraham to find God demanding such a sacrifice from him, as a similar exaction from us would confound all our ideas of right and wrong. And then it must be borne in mind that as the object which Jehovah had in view was to try or test the faith of the patriarch only by causing him to feel that what was demanded of him was demanded by God, could his yielding of the same be a proof of faith. Had Abraham acted, or proposed to act, 1 Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch., vol. iv. p. 25 (quoted by Geikie, voL i. P- 394)- 308 THE PATRIARCHAL TIMES. as he did from any lesser impulse than submission to a Divine commandment, he could not have been commended for his faith and obedience, but must have been reproved for his guilt and sin. Hence there is no sufficient ground for thinking either that God did not try His servant in the manner indicated, or that Abraham did not act as the narrative reports. It was the culmination period of his life the point at which his faith shot up into meridian splendour. After the transaction on Moriah his career flowed on more peacefully than it had done before. With the mournful account of the death of Sarah, the lively narrative of Rebecca's wooing by Eliezer for his master's son an exquisite prose poem, a veritable epithalamium, which stands unrivalled in any language and the brief mention of his second marriage with Keturah, the history hastens to a close. At the ripe old age of one hundred threescore and fifteen years, Abraham, the Chal- dean emigrant, the father of the faithful, breathed his last, an old man and full of years, or satisfied with living, as the phrase is, and was gathered to his people ; and his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah in the field of Ephron, the son of Zohar the Hittite, which is before Mamre ; the field which he had purchased THE PILGRIMAGE OF ABRAHAM. 309 for himself as a burying-place, and in which he had some years before deposited the honoured dust of Sarah, the bride of his youth, the companion of his pilgrimage, the partner of his hopes, the mother of his well-beloved son. 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Papers on the following subjects will appear during the year 1887 : EARLY SCANDINAVIAN EELIGION AND BIBLICAL THEOLOGY. By RASMUS B. ANDERSON, Minister of the United States to the Court of Denmark. POSITIVISM AS A RELIGION. By Rev, J. RADFORD THOMSON, M.A. PAULINE THEOLOGY. By Rev. J. OSWALD DYKES, D.D. ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE COLOSSIANS. By Rev. JAMES MORISON, D.D. ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS. By Rev. A. F. MCIR, M.A. UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECIES. By Rev. A. MACKENNAL. Rev. DAVID DAVIES on the WELSH HWYL, &c. &c. SPECIAL PAPERS ON PREACHERS AND PREACH- ING. Sennonic Outlines for the Church's Year. ALSO A NEW SYMPOSIUM on "THE REUNION OF CHRISTEN- DOM: IS IT DESIRABLE? IS IT POSSIBLE?" Articles promised by H. E. CARDINAL MANNING, Ven. ARCHDEACON FARRAR, D.D., Rev. HENRY ALLON, D.D., and others. Published Monthly, Price One Shilling, THE HOMILETIC MAGAZINE. " A mass of very valuable literature to ministers." British Quarterly. "The Homiletic Magazine is a very cheap publication, and in its new form will no doubt obtain a more extended circulation." Chrittian World. " The Homiletic Magazine is a useful and serviceable periodical. . . . The present and past Numbers of this Quarterly must be admitted to supply an abundant fund of all that is best and freshest in the religious thought of the present day. . . . The names of the principal contributors names well known and highly appreciated in theological circles more or less wide afford a sufficient guarantee for the general excellence and quality of the several articles." Scotsman. " It suggests texts, affords hints for their treatment, illustrates the art of pulpit division and arrangement, and throws light of an interesting kind on many themes, old and new. It devotes a large proportion of its space to exposition proper the ' Expository Section' being, in our judgment, the strongest feature of the Magazine. In the Numbers before us we have excellent papers by a host of the ablest and best- known scholars of the time. . . . It is a rich collection of paperson Biblical subjects." Glasgow Herald. The Magazine is published in America on the same day as in England. ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION, 12s., payable in advance. LONDON: J. NISBET & CO., 21 BERNERS STREET. 8