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tant to ascertain the particular species of tamarisk to the product of which the Arabs give the name of mann. Fortunately, Burckhardt gives the Arabic name tarfah. Now this is the tamarix gallica; one of the plants which M. Delisle sets down in his list of those which grow spontaneously in the valley of the Nile, and also in his list of those which are common to Egypt, Barbary and Syria. It also occurs very frequently in Arabia Petræa and Mesopotamia. There is, in fact, scarcely any product which could have been better known to the Hebrews before and after their wandering in the desert. They could never have been at a loss to know what it was; and any attempt to persuade them that it was a miraculous supply of food from heaven could only have occasioned laughter and disgust.

But even if the produce of the tarfah were the manna of Scripture, it would be impossible by the help of this bright discovery to get rid of the miracle. The Hebrews began to get their manna in May, and continued for forty years to have it fresh every day, excepting Saturdays; but the tarfah only yields its product in July and August. And then the quantity afforded by a single shrub is so inconsiderable, that it baffles imagination to conceive the forests of tamarisks which would suffice to supply the wants of the Hebrew host wherever they went. Above all, when they remained a year in one place, as in the neighbourhood of Mount Sinai,-where grew the tamarisks that could afford them subsistence all that time?

However this subject be dealt with, if we explain away the miracle related by Moses, we practically require one as great, or greater, to fill its place. We are, therefore, content to take this matter as we find it in the scriptural narrative.

(5) MOUNT SINAI, p. 195.-We long since contended that neither Mount St. Catherine nor Mount Mousa could be the Sinai of Scripture. We are therefore pleased that this con-clusion has since received the support of Lord Lindsay's testimony; the rather as his intimate acquaintance with all the Biblical statements renders him a more competent judge on such a question, than many travellers of higher scientific pretensions. This is not a question of science. The following is the substance of his statement, pruned of various considerations concerning the preferable claims of a Jebel Minnegia, of which no one ever heard before,

Mémoire sur les Plantes que croissent spontanément en Egypte,' in Descript. de l'Egypte,' tome xix. 23, et seq.

and which was certainly never regarded, like Mount Serbal, as "the Mount of God."

"I have said that neither Jebel Mousa nor Jebel Katerin answer the Scriptural description of Sinai. . . . There is not space enough in the narrow precipitous ravines from which alone the peaks are visible, or in any other plain or valley in the whole district for the people to have encamped with such regularity and comfort, as it is evident they did (Exod. xxxii.), nor for their having removed and stood afar off, as they had apparently ample space to do, when trembling at the thunderings and lightnings,-nor, after the golden-calf idolatry, for the tabernacle to have been pitched without the camp, afar off from the camp, when all the people rose and stood, every man at his tent-door, and looked after Moses till he was gone into the tabernacle.

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Moses went up to the top of the mount,' and God came down upon Mount Sinai, 'on the top of the mount,' and the glory of the Lord was 'like devouring fire on the top of the mount,' 'in the eyes of the children of Israel,' in the sight of all the people.' Neither Jebel Mousa nor Jebel Katerin are visible from the plains." We very much wish that Lord Lindsay had ascended Mount Serbal, and given us his opinion of its suitableness to be the scene of the events recorded in the Pentateuch. His knowledge that this was anciently considered as the Mount of God, might have recommended this as a preferable course to that of selecting a new mountain, or rather hill, the claims of which he does not make by any means clear.

(*) GOD OR MOSES? p. 198.-There is a large class of sceptical men of whom it would be harsh to say that they sit in the chair of the scorners. They are too thoughtful and too candid to deny that Moses was a great and good man, that he was actuated by truly generous and patriotic motives, and that his measures and conduct were eminently wise and noble. Indeed, they exalt rather than disparage his character. Their argument requires him to be great. They are convinced that the facts which the history relates are true; - that Israel was delivered from the hard and bitter bondage of Egypt by his instrumentality; that the multitudes of Israel were fed with manna in the wilderness; that the law was delivered from Mount Sinai;-all this they believe; but in all this they see only Moses and refuse to see GOD. That Moses professed to act but as he was directed by a superior Power, from

Not the tabernacle. See our own statement of this matter,

has given to men their first notions of the Divinity. It is from their summits that the devastating torrents are precipitated; it is in their bosom-to the noise of explosions which shake and subvert the earth-that are prepared the reddened stones, the melted minerals, which, in rains of fire and floods of lava, come to swallow up or overturn whole cities; it is over their summits that the winds move with utmost force-that the dark clouds gather under terrible and fantastic forms-and that the thunder bursts with highest grandeur, amid the lightnings, and seems to convulse the valleys.*

whom he received the laws which he promul- | phenomena; and fear not less than gratitude gated, and to whom he sedulously ascribed the glory of all events, is what the persons of whose sentiments we speak very willingly admit; and although they believe this to have been a mere pretence, they do not blame him for it, but approve it rather. They regard it as a wise measure for procuring more respect and attention, more obedience, from an unruly and ignorant multitude, unable to appreciate his character and plans, and insensible of what was really for their good, than could be obtained without the appearance of the superior sanction of a Divine Being, who took a peculiar interest in their affairs; and without the belief that laws given for their government in future time, came from one who was able to enforce them and to punish all disobedience to them. They remind us that other great reformers and law-givers, Minos, Lycurgus, Zoroaster, Mohammed, felt this necessity and acted on it: and with them they compare Moses; but allow that he was greater than they, seeing that it devolved on him to form a nation out of the most intractable materials on which a great mind ever undertook to operate. The retirement to the wilderness of Sinai, there to receive, on the cloud-invested summit of " the great mountain," from the hand of God, a system of imperative law, is thus compared with the revelations which other legislators professed to have received in the mountains of Ida, and Hara, and Azerbijan.

Let not the men whose ideas we are endeavouring to represent be misunderstood or unduly reprobated. They deny not God, but they doubt that he took that active part in the laws and proceedings of the Hebrews which their history represents. They are not blind. Their eyes are open; but they see men only as trees walking; and where they might see God they can see the man Moses only.

The motive which such speculators suppose really engaged Moses to lead the people of Israel to the mountains of Sinai, is well and ingeniously developed by M. du Bois Aymé* in these words:-" All the people who inhabit the environs of Mount Sinai believed that God dwelt there. High mountains have always been regarded as the habitual residence of the gods. And this is very natural. There is none of us who at the feet of these enormous masses, does not realize the feeling of his own weakness and unimportance. And the result is solemnizing, and much disposes the mind to the reception of religious impressions. Mountains are also the theatre of many appalling

In his Notice sur le Séjour des Hébreux en Egypte,' in • Descript. de l'Egypte,' viii. 133–135.

"It was by the spectacle of such a storm as this, that Moses hoped to strike the imagination of the Israelites, and to confirm them in the belief of his intercourse with God. Nothing similar had been seen by them under the skies of Egypt, sparkling with light during the day, of the most beautiful azure during the calm nights, and never obscured by any cloud ; and it was therefore easy to foresee that the Hebrews would be struck with a religious terror the first time that they saw the lightnings ploughing the dark clouds, and heard the thunder rumble upon the high mountains, where the echoes augmented and prolonged the sound. Then the clouds presented to them forms the most monstrous and grotesque; and their mobility and their metamorphoses have often inflamed the imaginations of weak and ignorant men: the first have regarded these as the signs of heavenly wrath, and the others as their gods or the shadows of their ancestors. With the thunder all nations have armed the Lord of the universe; and we find that, notwithstanding the progress of science and the extension of education, very many people still regard it with superstitious dread. A great sound gives the idea of force; and the imagination turns it into the angry cry of a powerful and irritated being.

"Moses had long watched his flocks in

"When I read to the Institute of Cairo my 'Memoir ' upon the passage of the Red Sea by the Israelites, and upon their sojourn at the foot of Mount Sinai, I announced that this mountain was an extiuct volcano: the large volcanic stones which I had seen in the vessels which arrive at Suez from Tor,

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with the description which Moses gives of the appearance of
God upon Mount Sinai, had suggested this opinion to me.
after the reading of my Memoir,' MM. Coutelle and De Rozière
went to the Convent of Mount Sinai; and they found that the
mountain was granitic, and offered no traces of a volcano."
Very good; but our author unhappily mars this by adding,
-"A storm, after all, agrees quite as well as a volcanic
eruption with the recital of Moses." Indeed! that must be a
singular description which equally well answers to such differ-
ing phenomena.

"During the four or five years I passed in Egypt I only once heard a thunder-clap, and then it was so feeble that seve ral persons who were with me took no notice of it."

Sinai, and had been a witness of the sublime effects produced by storms upon the high mountain of that name. The recollection of that which he had observed probably engaged this able man to make these phenomena subservient to his designs."

On these views this writer proceeds to examine the passages which refer to the intercourse of Moses with God in the mount. But having indicated the principles of his explanation, we need not follow observations which may easily be anticipated. And we have not noticed them to this extent, so much on account of the rank or character of the persons who entertain such views, as because it happens, in this age of fluctuating principles and halting opinions, that, in reading the biblical narrative, many persons, who wish to think rightly and dread to think wrong, get loose and vague notions into their minds similar, in kind, to those plainly avowed in the extract we have adduced.

As it is to some extent the duty of an historian to vindicate the disputed points of his history, we might be tempted to enter into a detailed reply to such statements and impressions, if our limits allowed and if we thought it necessary. But we do not. Yet lest we should seem to offer poison without the antidote, we may remark :-That in all this statement about the design of Moses in leading the Hebrews to this place, it is fatally forgotten that although such phenomena as are described may have been new to them at this time, they subsequently became familiar to them; and the reaction would have been dreadful when they ultimately discovered, as they could not fail to do, that Moses had been imposing natural phenomena upon them for supernatural manifestations of the Divine presence.

On the miracles we will not lay any stress, as persons who take such views as those which we have stated, necessarily must manage to resolve them into a skilful use by Moses of the operation of natural causes, known to and foreseen by him. The miracle which least admits of this treatment is that of the manna, to which therefore we have directed attention in a sepa

rate note.

To our minds, there was ample and reasonable cause for leading the Israelites into a situation of the greatest safety that could be found, that they might there receive the organization, the doctrines, and the laws which might fit them for the high destinies which lay before them.

But our answer in chief to all this and everything of the kind-indeed the all-sufficient

answer, and the only one which we should seriously think it worth while to make, would be by a reference to the principle, the design, the system of the Hebrew history. This design we have sufficiently for our purpose announced in a preceding page ;* and we have therefore only now to remark that Moses was not the author of this system; it must have originated with One who saw the end from the beginning, and who dies not, as Moses died. Moses was not necessary to this system, but God was. The system commenced long before Moses was born; and it went on, steadily and surely, long after he was dead, and we see not the end of it yet. He was but an incident in that system, and we have no evidence that he even knew those ultimate results which it was left for time to develop. If he was permitted to comprehend the whole of that marvellously connected design, one section of which it was his destiny to carry on, no measures taken by him could have ensured the gradual development of that design and its extension into remote ages, or have supplied that series of demonstrations by which the system was carried on through and by circumstances which were all necessary, but which did not exist, and, unless prophetically that is unless through God-could not have been imagined in the time of Moses.

It seems therefore to us that the attempt to exclude God from this portion of the Hebrew history, to make Moses the sole deliverer and legislator of the Israelites, is purely the result of imperfect and crude views of parts of that history, without any comprehension of it as an entire and designed whole. In the providence of God it is probable that the history of every nation has a design, if it could be but discovered; but as it cannot be discovered, the results seem to be determined by fortuitous circumstances. The history of the Hebrews is not, however, even in appearance, when viewed as a whole, fortuitous; and it is the only history in the world that does not even seem to be

So.

The design of that history is repeatedly avowed, is open and complete. To view the history without reference to this most distinguishing peculiarity, and without cognizance of the complete design which is as its living soul, is to look upon a dead carcase from which the vital spirit has been taken, and which may then easily seem to possess none but earthly elements. That design requires God in every part; and to write the history of the Jews without God is as if one were to write the history of the heavens and omit the

sun.

* Page 21-23.

(7) DESTRUCTION OF THE GOLDEN CALF, p. 202.—As there is not the least question but that all which was known to the Hebrews of the metallurgic arts at this early time, had been acquired in Egypt, the making of the golden calf may be taken in evidence, amply confirmed by their existing monuments, of the very great skill in those arts which the Egyptians had attained. But the destruction of the same image, in the manner described, is a still more striking evidence of this. The art of thus treating gold was a secret, probably, but known to Moses, in virtue of his perfect acquaintance with all the sciences which the Egyptians cultivated. Goguet, remarking on the subject, observes that those who work in metal know that this is an exceedingly difficult operation. "Commentators have been much perplexed to explain how Moses burnt the golden image, and reduced it to powder. Most of them offer only vain and improbable conjectures. But an able chemist has removed every difficulty on the subject, and has suggested this simple

In

process as that which Moses employed. stead of tartaric acid, which we employ for a similar purpose, the Hebrew legislator used natron, which is very common in the East.* The Scripture, in informing us that Moses made the Israelites drink this powder, shows that he was perfectly acquainted with all the effect of his operation. He wished to aggravate the punishment of their disobedience; and for this purpose no means could have been more suitable: for gold, rendered potable by the process of which I have spoken, is of a most detestable taste." +

To this, from Goguet, it may be well to add that the operation of the acids, which act upon gold is much assisted by the metal being previously heated. In this we see the reason why Moses cast the golden image into the fire in the first instance.

* STAHLL, Vitull. aureus, in Opusc. Chym., Phys., Medic., p. 585. Origine des Lois,' epoq. ii. liv. ii. chap. 14.

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THERE never was a people whose history had such inseparable connection with their laws and institutions, and such necessary dependence on them, as in the case of the Hebrews. The Hebrew people and the Mosaical code bore the relation of agent and of instrument for the purposes of the great objects for which the descendants of Abraham were set apart among the nations; and for these same objects the peculiar code was not less necessary than the peculiar people. The history of the Hebrews is the history of a system, of which the men so called were only a part. The whole must henceforth be regarded in intimate connection, and therefore it becomes very necessary that the other part-the Law-should be clearly understood.

But on account of the involved and disjointed manner in which the details are exhibited in the books of Moses, it is not easy for even very diligent readers of the Bible to acquire clear and connected ideas of the whole system. We have, therefore, judged it expedient to devote the present chapter to such a review of this code as may render the further portions of our history the more clearly understood. To this we now proceed, and shall endeavour in our way to develop the principles of the Law, and to incorporate such explanations as our limits will allow.

VOL. I.

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