like the death of Joseph in the New Testament, which none of the Evangelists affirm to have taken place before the Crucifixion, though all imply it. This kind of consistency I look upon as beyond the reach of the most subtle contriver in the world.

ས.

On the return of this servant of Abraham, his embassy fulfilled, and Rebekah in his company, he discovers Isaac at a distance, who was gone out (as our translation has it)" to meditate or (as the margin has it) in the field at eventide."*

to

pray

Now in this subordinate incident in the narrative there are marks of truth, (very slight indeed it may be,) but still, I think, if not obvious, not difficult to be perceived

* Genesis, xxiv. 63, mp

and not unworthy to be mentioned. Isaac went out to meditate or to pray-but the Hebrew word does not relate to religious meditation exclusively, still less exclusively to direct prayer. Neither does the cor

responding expression in the Septuagint (αδολεσχῆσαι) convey either of these senses exclusively, the latter of the two perhaps not at all. The leading idea suggested seems to be an anxious, a reverential, a painful, a depressed state of mind-" out of the abundance of my complaint" (or meditation, for the word is the same here, only in the form of a substantive,) "out of the abundance of my meditation and grief have I spoken," are the words of Hannah to Eli.* "Who hath woe, who hath sorrow, who hath contentions, who hath babbling, (the word is here still the same and evidently might be ren* 1 Samuel, i. 16.

dered with more propriety melancholy,) who hath wounds without cause, who hath redness of eyes?* Isaac therefore went

out into the field not directly to

pray, but to give ease to a wounded spirit in solitude. Now the occasion of this his trouble of mind is not pointed out, and the passage indeed has been usually explained without any reference to such a feeling, and merely as an instance of religious contemplation in Isaac worthy of imitation by all. But one of the last things that is recorded to have happened before the servant went to Haran, whence he was now returning, is the death and burial of Sarah, no doubt a tender mother (as she proved herself a jealous one,) to the child of her old age and her only child. What more likely than that her loss was the subject of Isaac's mournful * Proverbs, xxiii. 29.

meditation on this occasion? But this conjecture is reduced almost to certainty by a few words incidentally dropped at the end of the chapter; for having lifted up his eyes and beheld the camels coming, and the servant, and the maiden, Isaac "brought her into his mother Sarah's tent, and took Rebekah and she became his wife, and he loved her, and was comforted after his mother's death."*

The agreement of this latter incident with what had gone before is not set forth in our version, and a scene of very touching and picturesque beauty impaired, if not destroyed.

* Genesis, xxiv. 69.

F

VI.

We have now to contemplate Isaac in a different scene, and to remove with him (after the fashion of this earthly pilgrimage,) from an occasion of mirth to one of mourning.

Being now grown old, as he says, and "not knowing the day of his death," he prepares to bless his first-born son, "before he dies."* So spake the Patriarch. This looks very like one of the last acts of a life which time and natural decay had brought near its close; yet it is certain that Isaac continued to live a great many years after this, nay, that probably a fourth part of his whole life yet remained to him-for he was still alive when Jacob returned from Mesopotamia; when even many of Jacob's sons

* Genesis, xxvii, 2. 4.