Ishmael, and corresponded with the twelve tribes of Israel which were
called after their names. And yet the correspondence required a little
forcing. It is questionable whether, at any one time, there ever were
exactly twelve Israelitish tribes. In the Song of Deborah Judah does not
appear at all, Ephraim taking its place and, along with Benjamin,
extending as far south as the desert of the Amalekites, while Machir is
substituted for Manasseh and Gad. Levi never possessed a territory of
its own; had it done so, the tribes would have been thirteen in number
and not twelve. At the same time, it had just as much right to be
considered a separate tribe as Dan, whose cities were in the north as
well as in the south, where, however, they were absorbed by Judah; more
right perhaps than Simeon, which hardly existed except in name. The
territory of Reuben lay outside the boundaries of Palestine, and was
merely the desert-wadis and grazing-grounds of the kingdom of Moab; the
country can be said to have belonged to the tribe only in the sense that
the wadis east of the Delta belong to the Bedâwin, whom the Egyptian
government at present allows to live in them. Manasseh, lastly, was
divided into two halves, in order to bring the number of tribes up to
the requisite figure.
It is clear that the scheme is an artificial one. Israel, after its
conquest of Canaan, could indeed be divided into twelve separate parts,
but such a division was theoretical only. There were no twelve
territories corresponding to the parts, while the parts themselves could
be reckoned as thirteen, eleven, or ten, just as easily as twelve.
The conclusion to be drawn from this is obvious. History credited Jacob
with twelve sons, and it was consequently necessary to bring the number
of Israelitish tribes into harmony with the fact. Modern criticism has
amused itself with reversing the history, and assuming that the twelve
sons of the patriarch owed their origin to the twelve tribes. It has
accordingly drawn inferences from the fact that some of the sons of
Jacob are said to have been the offspring of concubines, and not of his
two legitimate wives, and that Joseph and Benjamin were the youngest of
all. But such inferences fall with the assumption that in the twelve
sons we have merely the eponymous heroes of the twelve tribes. It is a
cheap way of making history, and, after all, what we know of the tribes
does not fit in with the theory. There is nothing in the history of Dan
and Naphtali, or Gad and Asher, which would have caused them to be
regarded of bastard descent, if that bastard descent had not been a
fact; indeed, in the Song of Deborah, which is almost universally
allowed to go back to the early age of the Judges, Naphtali and Zebulun
are placed on exactly the same footing. The distinction between the sons
of Leah and those of Rachel does not answer to the real cleavage between
the tribes of the south and those of the north of Palestine: Benjamin,
after the age of Saul, followed Judah and Simeon, while the sons of
Joseph were joined with Zebulun and Issachar. Moreover, had the sons of
Jacob been mere reflections of the tribes, it would be difficult to
account for the existence of Joseph, or to understand why Machir takes
the place of Manasseh and Gad in the Song of Deborah.
The critical theory is the result of introducing Greek modes of thought
into Semitic history. The Greek tribe, it is true, traced its origin to
an eponymous ancestor, but that ancestor was a god or a hero, and not a
man. Among the Semites, however, as the history of Arabia may still
teach us, the conception of the tribe was something wholly different.
The tribe was an enlarged family which called itself by the name of its
first head. It began with the individual, and to the last styled itself
his children. The Greek tribe, on the contrary, began with the clan, and
its theoretical ancestor, accordingly, was merely the divine personage
whose common cult kept it together. In the Semitic tribe there could be
no cult of its ancestor, for the ancestor was but an ordinary man, who
worshipped the same form of Baal and used the same rites as his
descendants after him.
Nevertheless, there may be an element of truth in the ‘critical’
assumption. The names of the ancestors of some of the Israelitish tribes
may have been the reflex of the later names of the tribes themselves. It
does not follow that the name by which one of the sons of Jacob became
known to later generations was actually the name which he bore himself.
Had Jacob been uniformly called Israel by the Hebrew writers, we should
never have known his original name. And it is possible that the name of
Asher is really a reflex of this kind. The _Travels of the Mohar_,
written in Egypt in the reign of Ramses II. before the Israelitish
conquest of Canaan, speak of ‘the mountain of User’ as being in the very
locality in which the tribe of Asher was afterwards settled. And in the
case of one tribe at least there is evidence that its name must have
been reflected back upon that of its progenitor.
This is the tribe of Benjamin. In the book of Genesis (xxxv. 18)
Benjamin is represented as having received two different names at his
birth. The statement excites our suspicion, for such a double naming is
inconsistent with Hebrew practice, and our suspicion is confirmed when
we find that both names have a geographical meaning. Benjamin is ‘the
son of the South’ or ‘Southerner’; Ben-Oni, as he is also said to have
been called, is ‘the son of On,’ or ‘the Onite.’ On, or Beth-On, it will
be remembered, was an ancient name of Beth-el, the great sanctuary and
centre of the tribe of Benjamin, while ‘the Southerner’ was an
appropriate title for the lesser brother tribe which lay to the south of
the dominant Ephraim. It is of Ephraim that Deborah says, in her Song of
Triumph, ‘Behind thee is Benjamin among thy peoples’ (Judg. v. 14).
The etymology suggested in Genesis for the name of Ben-Oni is a sample
of those plays upon words in which Oriental writers have always
delighted, and of which the Hebrew Scriptures contain so many
illustrations. They all spring from the old confusion between the name
and the thing, which substituted the name for the thing, and believed
that if the name could be explained, the thing would be explained also.
Hence the slight transformations in the form of names which allowed them
to be assimilated to familiar words, or their identification with words
which obviously gave an incorrect sense. Hence, too, the choice of
etymologies which was offered to the reader: where the real origin of
the name was unknown or uncertain, it was possible to explain it in more
than one way. Isaiah (xv. 9) changes the name of the Moabite city of
Dibon into Dimon in order to connect it with the Hebrew _dâm_, ‘blood,’
and the writer of Genesis gives two contradictory derivations of the
name of Joseph (Gen. xxx. 23, 24). The latter fact is of itself a
sufficient proof of the true value of these etymologies, or rather,
popular plays upon words, and the sayings in which they are embodied can
still be matched by the traveller in the East. Similar embodiments of
popular etymologising are still repeated to explain the place-names of
Egypt.[90]
The origin of some of the names of the sons of Jacob is as obscure to us
as it was to the writer of Genesis. We do not know, for instance, the
meaning and derivation of the name of Reuben. Equally doubtful is the
real etymology of the name of Issachar.[91] The name of Simeon is
already found among the places in Canaan conquered by the Egyptian
Pharaoh Thothmes III. before the age of Moses, and in Judah we have a
name which seems to be the same as that of a tribe in Northern
Syria.[92] Levi, like Naphtali, is a gentilic noun, and must be
connected with the _lau’â(n)_, or ‘priest’ of Southern Arabia.[93] Gad
was the god of good fortune, Dan ‘the judge,’ the title of certain
Babylonian deities, and Dinah is the feminine corresponding to Dan.
Jacob, ever timorous, fled from Hivite vengeance after the destruction
of Shechem, forsaking the property he had acquired there by purchase and
the sword. He made his way southward to Beth-el, and there rested on the
edge of the great mountain block of Central Palestine. Hard by was the
city of Luz, soon to be eclipsed by the growing fame of the high-place
on the height above it. Here, at Beth-el, an altar was erected by the
patriarch to the God of the locality who had once appeared to him in a
dream. It was the prototype of the altar that was hereafter to arise
there when Beth-el had become a chief sanctuary of the house of Israel.
Whether the altar stood on the high-place on the summit of the mountain,
where the Beth-el or column of stone had been consecrated by Jacob, we
do not know; there are indications in the prophets, however, that the
high-place and the temple were separate from one another. Indeed, from
the words of Genesis, it would seem that the altar and future temple
were on the lower slope of the hill, close to the old Canaanitish town.
Here, at any rate, on the road to the city, was that Allon-bachuth, that
‘Terebinth of Tears,’ which is referred to by Hosea (xii. 4), and is
connected in the book of Genesis with the death of Deborah, the nurse of
Rachel. In later days another Deborah dwelt under the shadow of a
palm-tree on the same road (Judg. iv. 6), and modern critical ingenuity
has accordingly discovered that the terebinth and the palm were one and
the same tree.
Beth-el, however, was still too near the Hivites of Shechem, and Jacob
continued his journey to the south. The death of Isaac called him to
Hebron, where, for the last time, he met his brother Esau, who came to
take part in his father’s burial. But his own residence was at
Beth-lehem, ‘the Temple of the god Lakhmu,’ called Ephrath in those
early days.[94] Here Rachel died, and here accordingly was raised the
tombstone which marked her grave down to the day when the book of
Genesis assumed its present form.[95]
It was ‘beyond the tower of Edar,’ the tower of ‘the Flock,’ that Jacob,
we are told, ‘spread his tent.’ The tower of the Flock guarded the
city-fortress of Jerusalem (Mic. iv. 8), and it was therefore between
Jerusalem and Beth-lehem that the patriarch made his home. But his
flocks were scattered northwards as far as Shechem, grazing on the
mountain slopes under the charge of his sons. Jacob remained like a
Bedâwi of to-day living among the settled inhabitants of the country,
and yet keeping apart from them and sending his flocks far and wide
wherever there was fresh grass and free pasturage.
It was while he thus lived that the disgraceful events occurred
connected with the marriage of Judah and the Canaanitish Tamar, which
throw an evil light on the manners and morals of the patriarch’s family.
The whole episode stands in marked contrast to the ordinary character of
the history, and its insertion is evidence of the impartiality of the
writer. It is clear that he has put together all that reached him from
the past history of his people, omitting nothing, modifying nothing. All
sides of the past are brought before us, the darker as well as the
lighter, and no attempt is made to spare or condone the forefathers of
Israel. It has indeed been asked by an over-sensitive criticism how the
recital of such abominations can be consistent with the sanctity claimed
for the Mosaic writings. But the question has troubled the minds only of
the critics themselves; and not more than three centuries ago the
compilers of the Anglican lectionary saw no harm in ordering the chapter
to be read publicly to men and maidens in church.
The episode was inserted in the midst of the story of Joseph, one of the
most pathetic and touching ever told. We need not repeat its details, or
describe how Joseph, the spoilt darling of his father, dreamed dreams
which aroused the alarm and jealousy of his brothers, how he was sold by
them into Egypt, how there he became the vizier of the Pharaoh, and how
eventually Jacob and his family were brought into the land of Goshen,
there to enjoy the good things of the valley of the Nile. But the story
brings us back again to the great stream of ancient Oriental history;
once more the history of Israel touches the history of the world, and
ceases to be a series of idyllic pictures, such as the memory of
shepherds and Bedâwin might alone preserve.
The story of Joseph forms a complete whole, distinguished by certain
features that mark it off from the rest of the book of Genesis. It
contains peculiar words, some of them of Egyptian origin,[96] and it
shows a very minute acquaintance with Egyptian life in the Hyksos age.
There are even words and phrases which seem to have been translated into
Hebrew from some other language, and the meaning of which has not been
fully understood: thus it is said that the cupbearer of Pharaoh ‘pressed
the grapes’ into his master’s goblet instead of pouring the wine; and
the word employed to denote an Egyptian official, and translated
‘officer’ in the Authorised Version, properly signifies ‘eunuch.’ Can
the story have been translated from an Egyptian papyrus? The question is
suggested by the fact that one of the most characteristic portions of it
has actually been embodied in an ancient Egyptian tale. This is the
so-called _Tale of the Two Brothers_, written by the scribe Enna for
Seti II. of the nineteenth dynasty while he was crown-prince, and
therefore in the age of the Exodus. Here we have the episode of Joseph
and Potiphar’s wife told in Egyptian form. The fellah Bata takes the
place of Joseph; his sister-in-law plays the part of Potiphar’s
wife.[97]
This part of the story was therefore known among the literary classes of
Egypt in the days when Moses was learned in all their wisdom. And if it
has been preserved among the few fragments that have been saved from the
wreck of ancient Egyptian literature, may we not conclude that had the
whole of that literature come down to us, other portions of the story of
Joseph would have been preserved in it as well? There is a gentleness in
the character of Joseph which reminds us forcibly of Egyptian manners,
and offers a sharp contrast to the rough ways and readiness to shed
blood which distinguished the Hebrew Semite.
At all events, the story must have been written by one who was well
acquainted with the age of the Hyksos. It is true that an attempt has
recently been made, on the strength of certain proper names, to show
that it is not the Egypt of the Hyksos that is described, but the Egypt
of Shishak and his successors. The names of Potipherah or Potiphar and
Asenath are said to have been unknown before that date. A couple of
proper names, however, is an insecure foundation on which to build a
theory, more especially when the argument rests upon the imperfections
of our own knowledge. That no names corresponding in formation to
Potipherah and Asenath should as yet have been met with earlier than the
time of Shishak is no proof that they did not exist. A single example of
each is sufficient to prove the contrary. And, as a matter of fact, such
examples actually occur. A stela of the reign of Thothmes III. records
the name of Pe-tu-Baal, ‘the Gift of Baal,’ as that of the sixth
ancestor of the Egyptian whose name it records;[98] while the Tel
el-Amarna tablets contain the name of Subanda, the Smendes of Greek
writers, which is an exact parallel in form to Asenath.[99] Pe-tu-Baal
must have lived at the close of the Hyksos period, and the Semitic deity
with whose name his own is compounded indicates that it has been formed
under Semitic influence. It was, in fact, as we learn from the Phœnician
inscriptions, an imitation of a Canaanitish name.[100] The Hyksos had
come from Asia, and had imposed their yoke upon Egypt, where they ruled
for more than five hundred years. Though they held all Egypt under their
sway, they had established their capital at Zoan, now called Sân, far to
the north on the eastern frontier of the Delta. Here they were near
their kinsfolk in Canaan, and could readily summon fresh troops from
Asia in case of Egyptian revolt.
The court of the Hyksos Pharaohs, however, soon became Egyptianised.
They adopted the arts and science, the manners and customs, of their
more cultured subjects, and one of the few scientific works of ancient
Egypt that have come down to us—the famous _Mathematical Papyrus_—was
written for a Hyksos king. It was only in physiognomy and religion that
the Hyksos conqueror continued to be distinguished from the native
Egyptian.
Besides Zoan, Heliopolis, or ‘On of the North,’ was a chief centre of
Hyksos power. It was the oldest and most celebrated sanctuary of Egypt,
where ancient schools of learning were established, and from whence the
religious system had been disseminated which made the Sun-god the
supreme ruler of the universe. The Hyksos had no difficulty in
identifying the Sun-god of On with their own supreme deity Sutekh, who
was a form of the Canaanitish Baal. On, consequently, once the chief
seat of the orthodox faith of Egypt, became the centre of foreign
heresy. The Sallier Papyrus, which describes the origin of the war that
resulted in the expulsion of the Hyksos, specially tells us that ‘the
Impure of (On), the city of Ra, were subject to Ra-Apopi,’ the Hyksos
Pharaoh, and the Egyptians changed into Ra, the Egyptian Sun-god, the
name of Sutekh, which a scarab of Apopi shows was really prefixed to
that Pharaoh’s name.[101] The great temple of the Sun-god of On,
accordingly, before which Usertesen of the twelfth dynasty had planted
the obelisks, one of which remains to this day, was transformed into a
temple of the foreign god; and though its high-priest still continued to
bear his ancient title, and perform the ceremonies of the past, it was
Sutekh and not the native divinity whom he served. Potipherah—in
Egyptian, Pa-tu-pa-Ra—was a literal translation of the Canaanitish
Mattan-Baal, ‘the gift of Baal,’ and implied of itself the foreign cult.
Potiphar is an abbreviation of Potipherah, and reminds us of similar
abbreviations met with in the letters of the Canaanitish correspondents
of the Pharaoh in the Tel el-Amarna collection. It is an abbreviation
which points to long familiarity with the name on the part of the Hebrew
people. The titles, however, given to Potiphar are obscure. The second
seems to signify ‘captain of the bodyguard,’ but the first—_saris_ in
Hebrew—means an ‘eunuch.’ Ebers, it is true, has pointed out that
eunuchs in the East have not only held high positions of state, but have
married wives as well;[102] this, however, has been in Turkey, not in
ancient Egypt. Perhaps the word is the Babylonian _saris_, ‘an officer’;
at all events, the Rab-sarîs of 2 Kings xviii. 17 is the Assyrian
Rab-sarisi, or ‘chief officer.’ That Babylonian words should have made
their way into Egypt in the age of the Hyksos is by no means strange. We
have learned from the Tel el-Amarna tablets that Babylonian was for
centuries the literary language of Western Asia, and was studied and
written even on the banks of the Nile, while the monuments of Babylonia
itself have shown that Babylonian culture had made its way to the
frontiers of Egypt at a very remote age. The history of Joseph contains
at least one word which bears testimony to its influence. When Joseph
was made ‘governor over all the land of Egypt,’ the heralds who ran
before his chariot to announce the fact shouted the word ‘abrêk!’ For
this word no explanation can be found either in Hebrew or in Egyptian.
But the language of the Babylonian inscriptions has unexpectedly come to
our aid. In Chaldæa _abarakku_ was the title of one of the highest
officers of State, and _abriqqu_, borrowed from the earlier Sumerian
_abrik_, signified ‘a seer.’
We have said that the history of Joseph is marvellously true in all its
details to what archæology has informed us were the facts of Egyptian
life. Thus the prison in which ‘the king’s prisoners’ were confined is
called by the strange name of ‘the round house.’ Such, at least, would
seem to be the literal meaning of the Hebrew phrase, the second element
of which signifies ‘roundness.’ The word is written _sohar_, though
there is evidence of another reading, _sokhar_. _Sohar_ or _sokhar_,
however, is really an Egyptian word. The royal prison at Thebes, where
the State prisoners were kept under guard, was: called _suhan_, in which
we have the same interchange of final _r_ and _n_ that is still a
characteristic of Egyptian Arabic.[103] The term _bêth has-sohar_, ‘the
house of the Sohar,’ is found nowhere else in the Old Testament: it is,
in fact, one of the peculiarities which distinguish the story of Joseph,
and at the same time testify to the acquaintance of its writer with the
details of Egyptian life.
The titles of the royal cupbearer and the chief of the bakers have been
found in the lists of Egyptian officials; the Pharaoh’s kitchen was
organised on an elaborate scale;[104] and the Egyptians were famed for
their skill in confectionery and in making various kinds of bread.[105]
On the monuments we may see depicted the cupbearer offering the goblet
of wine, and the baker carrying on his head the baskets filled with
round ‘white loaves.’ The ‘birthday of the Pharaoh’ was a general
festival, on which, as the decrees of Rosetta and Canopus have taught
us, the sovereign proclaimed an amnesty and released such prisoners as
were thought deserving of pardon.[106] The dreams that Pharaoh dreamed
are in full accordance with Egyptian mythology and symbolism. The seven
kine fitly represent the Nile, which from time immemorial had been
likened to a milch-cow. The cow-headed goddess Hathor or Isis watched
over the fertility of the country, and the fertilising water of the
river was called the milk that flowed from her breasts. The number seven
denotes the ‘seven great Hathors,’ the seven forms under which the
goddess was adored. The dreams themselves fall in with the Egyptian
belief of the age. Throughout Egyptian history they have been a power
not only in religion, but in politics as well. It was in consequence of
a dream that Thothmes IV. cleared away the sand from before the paws of
the Sphinx, and a thousand years later Nut-Amon of Ethiopia was summoned
by a dream to invade Egypt. The dreams usually needed an interpreter to
explain them, such as is mentioned in a Greek inscription from the
Serapeum at Memphis. Books, however, had been compiled in which the
signification of dreams was reduced to a science; and as in modern
Egypt, so yet more in the past, men spent their lives in pondering over
the signification of the dreams of the night.[107]
Even the statement that the east wind had blasted the ears of corn (Gen.
xli. 6) betrays an acquaintance with the peculiarities of the Egyptian
climate. Those who have sailed up the Nile know that the wind feared
alike by the peasant and the sailor is that which blows from the
south-east; while the crops of spring are matured by the northern
breeze, they are parched and destroyed by the evil wind from the
south-east.
The golden collar placed around the neck of the royal favourite is
equally characteristic of Egyptian customs, at all events in the age of
the Hyksos and the eighteenth dynasty. ‘Captain’ Ahmes, whose tomb is at
El-Kab, and who took a prominent part in the final struggle which drove
the Hyksos strangers out of the Delta, describes the rewards bestowed
upon him by the Pharaoh for his deeds of valour, and chief among the
rewards are the chains of gold. Before Joseph was allowed to enter the
presence of the monarch, he was not only clad in new raiment, but shorn
as well. This, too, was in accordance with Egyptian custom. None could
appear before Pharaoh unless they had been freshly shaven, and in the
eyes of the Egyptian not the least part of the ‘impurity’ of the Asiatic
Semite was his habit of growing a beard.[108]
The change of name, moreover, which marked Joseph’s elevation was again
characteristic of Egypt. The monuments have told us of other cases in
which an Asiatic from Canaan, or a Karian from Asia Minor, became an
Egyptian official, and in so doing was required to adopt an Egyptian
name.[109] That the name of Zaphnath-paaneah is of Egyptian origin has
long been recognised, and that it contains the Egyptian _pa-ânkh_,
‘life’ or ‘the living one,’ is clear. It is only over its first elements
that discussion is possible.
It is hardly necessary to notice further points which prove how
intimately the writer of the history of Joseph was acquainted with
Egyptian life and manners, language and soil. The Egyptians, he notes,
could not eat together with the Hebrews, for that would have been ‘an
abomination’ to them. It would, indeed, have defiled them ceremonially,
and have caused them to participate in the impurity of those whom they
termed ‘the unclean.’ So, too, we read, ‘every shepherd is an
abomination to the Egyptians,’ not indeed, as has been imagined, because
Egypt had been conquered by the ‘Shepherd’ kings, but because the flocks
of the Delta were tended partly by Bedâwin, partly by half-caste
Egyptians, whose unclean habits and unshorn faces were the butt of the
literary world. The ‘marshmen,’ as they were contemptuously called, were
looked upon as pariahs.[110]
While, however, the narrative is thus thoroughly Egyptian in character,
the Egypt it brings before us is the Egypt of the age of the Hyksos.
Chariots and horses have already been introduced. It has been supposed
that the horse came with the Hyksos; at all events, there is no trace of
it before the conquest of the country by the Asiatic stranger. The
Pharaoh, moreover, holds his court in the Delta, not far from the
Canaanitish border and the land of Goshen; and the waggons which carried
Jacob and his family travelled easily from Beth-lehem to the Egyptian
capital. Zoan consequently must still have been the residence of the
Pharaoh; and Thebes, in Upper Egypt, had not as yet taken its place.
There is one fact, furthermore, which stands out prominently in the
history of Joseph, and points unmistakably to the Hyksos age. We are
told that it was his policy which reduced the people of Egypt to the
condition of serfs. Pressed by famine, they were compelled by him to
sell their lands for corn, and to receive it again as tenants of the
Pharaoh, with the obligation of paying him a fifth part of the produce.
The priests, or rather, the temples, were alone allowed to retain their
old possessions; henceforward the land of Egypt was shared between them
and the king. In the language of modern Egypt, it became either
Government property or _waqf_.
Now, this fact corresponds with a change in the tenure of land which the
monuments have informed us must have taken place under the dominion of
the Hyksos dynasties. When Egypt was conquered by the Asiatics, it was
divided among a number of feudal families who were landowners on a large
scale, and at times the rivals of the sovereign himself. By the side of
this higher aristocracy there was also a lower one, answering in some
measure to the yeomen farmers of the northern counties, but equally
owners of land. When, however, the Hyksos were finally driven out, a new
Egypt comes into view. The feudal aristocracy has disappeared—or almost
disappeared—along with the other landowners of the country, and the only
proprietors of land that are left are the Pharaoh and the priests, to
whom in after times the military caste was added. Only in Southern
Egypt, where the struggle against the foreigner first began, do we find
instances of private ownership of land, and this, too, only in the
earlier years of the eighteenth dynasty. Before long the Pharaoh had
absorbed into his own hands all the land that had not been given to the
gods; the old nobility had disappeared, and their place been taken by an
army of officials who derived all their wealth and power from the king.
The Pharaoh, the priests, and the bureaucracy henceforth are the rulers
of Egypt.
This momentous change must have had a cause, but we look in vain for
such a cause in the Egyptian monuments. It has been suggested that the
War of Independence may have brought it about by increasing the power of
the king as leader in the struggle.[111] But this would not explain his
absorption of the land; and even if all the older families had perished
in the war, which is not very probable, the lesser landowners would have
remained. Moreover, the generals of the king would in this case have
claimed similar spoils to those of their leader. What their commander
had seized would have been seized also by the officers under him.
However great may be our reluctance to accept the explanation offered by
the story of Joseph, certain it is that it is the only adequate
explanation forthcoming. And there is one strong argument in its favour.
Under Ahmes, the conqueror of the Hyksos and the founder of the
eighteenth dynasty, there are still instances of land being held by
private individuals. But this was at El-Kab, in Upper Egypt, where the
Hyksos rule had long been nominal rather than real, and where it had not
been obeyed at all for three generations previously.[112] As soon as the
eighteenth dynasty kings were established firmly on the throne of the
Hyksos Pharaohs in the north as well as in their ancestral homes in
Southern Egypt, even these instances of individual ownership in land
came to an end. It was only where the Hyksos supremacy had been weak
that they had lingered on. When once the Prince of Thebes had become in
all respects the successor of the foreign Pharaohs who had reigned at
Zoan, they cease altogether.
The account of Joseph’s procedure is true to facts in another point
also. From the time of the eighteenth dynasty onwards we hear repeatedly
of the public _larits_ or granaries which were under State control.[113]
The peasantry were required to contribute to them yearly in a fixed
proportion, and the corn stored up in them was only sold to the people
in case of need. It was out of these granaries, furthermore, that many
of the Government officials were paid in kind, as well as the workmen
employed by the State. The office of ‘superintendent of the granaries’
was therefore a very important one: once each year he presented to the
king an ‘account of the harvests of the south and the north’; and if the
account was exceptionally good, if the inundation had been abundant and
the harvest better than ‘for thirty years,’ his grateful sovereign would
throw chains of gold around his neck.[114] The origin of these royal
granaries and of the office of their superintendent which thus
characterise the ‘new empire’ of Egypt is explained by the history of
Joseph.
Before the days when the conquests of the eighteenth dynasty had created
an Egyptian empire in Asia, and brought foreign supplies of food to
Egypt, the rise of the Nile was a matter of vital interest. The very
existence of the people depended upon it. Too high a Nile meant
scarcity, too low a Nile famine. It was only when the river rose to its
normal level and overflowed the fields at the stated time that the heart
of the agriculturist was gladdened, and he knew that the gods had given
him a year of plenty.
The seven years’ famine of Joseph’s age is not the only seven years’
famine which Egypt has had to endure. El-Makrîzî, the Arabic historian
of Egypt, describes one which lasted for seven years, from A.D. 1064 to
1071, and, like that of Joseph, was caused by a deficient Nile. A stela
discovered by Mr. Wilbour on the island of Sehêl, in the middle of the
First Cataract, and engraved in the time of the Ptolemies, similarly
records a famine that was wasting the country because ‘the Nile-flood
had not come for seven years.’[115] And it is possible that a memorial
of the famine of Joseph has been discovered by Brugsch in one of the
tombs of El-Kab. Here the dead man, a certain Baba, is made to say,
‘When a famine arose, lasting many years, I issued out corn to the
city.’ Baba must have lived in the latter part of the Hyksos domination,
so that the date of his inscription would agree with that of
Joseph.[116]
Whether the power of Joseph and his master would still have extended as
far south as El-Kab in the age of Baba, we do not know. But we do know
that a famine which prevailed in Lower Egypt in consequence of a low
Nile would have equally prevailed in the Thebaid. It would not, however,
have prevailed in Canaan. In Canaan the ground is watered, not by the
Nile, but by the rains of heaven, and in Canaan, therefore, it was only
a want of rain that could have caused a scarcity of food.
Famines, indeed, did occur in Palestine from time to time, and we hear
of Egyptian kings sending corn to that country to supply its needs.[117]
As Egypt was the granary of Italy in the days of the Roman Empire, so
too it had been the granary of Western Asia in an earlier age. A dry
season in Canaan brought famine in its train; and if that dry season
coincided with a deficient Nile in Egypt, there was no other land to
which its inhabitants could look for food. It is quite possible that one
of these famines in Canaan may have happened at the very time when the
Nile refused to irrigate the fields of Egypt. When, however, we read
that ‘the famine was over all the face of the earth,’ and that ‘all
countries came into Egypt to Joseph to buy corn because the famine was
sore in all lands,’ it is evident that the narrative has been written
from an Egyptian point of view. The Egyptians might have supposed that
when a low Nile produced a scarcity of food all other countries would
equally suffer—such, indeed, was the case with Ethiopia—but a
supposition of the kind is inconceivable in the mind of a Canaanite. An
inhabitant of Palestine knew that the crops of his country were
dependent on the rain, not on the waters of the Nile; it was only the
Egyptian who modelled the rest of the world after that part of it which
was known to him.
Here, then, we have a clear indication that the story of Joseph must
have been written in Egypt, and further probability is added to the
theory that it has been translated into Hebrew from an Egyptian
original. But more than this. Is it likely that the Hebrew translator,
if he had been acquainted with the climate of Canaan, would have left
the words of the story just as we find them? Can we imagine that the
language he employed about the extent of the famine would have been so
definite, so comprehensive, so Egyptian in character? Like the Egyptian
words embodied in the narrative, it points to a writer or translator who
lived in Egypt, and not in Canaan.
Who was the Pharaoh under whom Joseph became the first minister of the
State? Chronology shows that he must have been one of the kings of the
last Hyksos dynasty. George the Syncellus makes him Aphophis, Apopi
Ra-aa-kenen, or Apopi II. of the monuments, and the date would suit very
well.[118] Apopi II. was the last powerful Hyksos sovereign. His
authority was still obeyed in Upper Egypt, but it was in his reign that
the War of Independence broke out. According to the story in the Sallier
Papyrus, it was caused by his message to the _hiq_ or vassal prince of
Thebes, requiring him to renounce the worship of Amon of Thebes and
acknowledge Sutekh, the Hyksos Baal, as his supreme god.[119] The war
lasted for four generations, and ended in the expulsion of the
foreigner.
But long before this took place the family of Israel was settled in the
land of Goshen, on the outskirts of Northern Egypt. The geographical
position of Goshen has been rediscovered by Dr. Naville. It corresponded
with the modern Wadi Tumilât, through which the traveller by the railway
now passes on his way from Ismailîyeh to Zagazig. It took its name from
Qosem or Qos, the Pha-kussa of Greek geography, and the capital of the
Arabian nome, the site of which is marked by the mounds of Saft
el-Hennah.[120] The very name of the ‘Arabian nome’ indicates that its
occupants belonged to Arabia rather than to Egypt. It was, in fact, a
district handed over to the Bedâwin by the Pharaohs, as it still is
to-day. Meneptah, the son of Ramses II., says in his great inscription
at Karnak that ‘the country around Pa-Bailos (now Belbeis, near Zagazig)
was not cultivated, but left as pasture for cattle, because of the
strangers. It was abandoned since the time of the ancestors.’[121]
Abandoned, that is to say, by the Egyptians themselves. But the Semitic
nomad pitched his tent and fed his flocks there, partly because it was
on the road to his own country and countrymen, partly because it was
fitted for grazing and not for agriculture. Here, too, he was not in
immediate contact with the Egyptian fellah, though the court of the
Hyksos Pharaoh at Zoan was nigh at hand.
Joseph’s brethren were made overseers of the royal cattle, an official
post of which we also hear in the native Egyptian texts. After a while,
Jacob died, full of years, and his body was embalmed in the Egyptian
fashion. The actual process of embalming occupied forty days, the whole
period during which ‘the Egyptians mourned for him,’ being threescore
and ten. The statement is in accordance with other testimony as to the
length of time needed to embalm a mummy. Herodotos (ii. 86) states that
the corpse was kept in natron during seventy days, ‘to which period they
are strictly confined.’ According to Diodoros,[122] ‘oil of cedar and
other things were applied to the whole body for upwards of thirty days,’
the full period during which the mourning for the dead and the
preparation of his mummy lasted being seventy-two days. Between the age
of Joseph and that of Diodoros it would seem that little change had
taken place in this part, at any rate, of the Egyptian treatment of
their dead. When, however, the Hebrew text states that the corpse was
embalmed by ‘the physicians, the slaves’ of Joseph; the word
‘physicians’ must be understood in a restricted sense. Pliny,[123] it is
true, avers that during the process of embalming physicians were
employed to examine the body of the dead man and determine of what
disease he had died. But the _paraskhistæ_, who made the needful
incision, were regarded with the utmost abhorrence; they were the
pariahs of society, who lived in a community apart. It was the embalmers
who were the associates of the priests, and whose persons, in the words
of Diodoros, were looked upon as ‘sacred.’ Nor is it easy to see who
could have been the physicians who were the ‘slaves’ of the Hebrew
vizier. The physician in Egypt was usually a free man, who followed a
profession which brought with it honour and respect. The doctor belonged
to the learned classes, and, like the scribe, had no mean opinion of his
worth and dignity. But such physicians were employed in healing the
sick, not in embalming the dead, and must have stood in a very different
position from that of Joseph’s ‘slaves.’ More light is still wanted on
the subject from monumental sources; in spite of the papyri which
describe the ceremonies attendant on the various acts of the embalmment,
we are still ignorant of its practical details.
When at last the days of mourning were past, Joseph spoke, we are told,
to ‘the house of Pharaoh.’ The expression is purely Egyptian, and refers
to the signification of the word ‘Pharaoh’ itself. Pharaoh, the Egyptian
Per-âa, is the ‘Great House’; ‘the son of the Sun-god’ was too highly
exalted to be spoken of as a man, and it was therefore to ‘the Great
House’ that his subjects addressed themselves. Modern Europe is familiar
with a similar phrase; when we allude to the ‘Sublime Porte’ we mean the
Turkish Sultan, who once administered justice from the ‘High Gate’ of
his palace.
Jacob was buried in the cave of Machpelah. A long procession of soldiers
and mourners, partly in chariots, partly on foot, accompanied the mummy
on its way out of Egypt. Such a procession was no unusual thing. The
wealthy Egyptian desired to be buried near the tomb of Osiris at Abydos,
and it was therefore not unfrequently the custom to convey his mummy in
solemn procession to that sacred spot, and then to carry it back once
more to its own final resting-place. The procession which accompanied
the body of the patriarch must have followed the high-road which led
through the Shur, or line of fortification on the eastern border of the
desert, and brought the traveller with little difficulty to Southern
Palestine. The reference in the narrative to the threshing-floor of
Atad, on the eastern side of the Jordan, is an interpolation, which
embodies merely a local etymology. The chariot-road from Egypt to
Palestine naturally never ran near the Jordan; and the threshing-floor
of Atad would have been far out of the way. But popular imagination had
seen in the name of Abel-Mizraim, where the threshing-floor was
situated, a ‘mourning of Egypt,’ and had accordingly connected it with
the great mourning that was made for Jacob. As a matter of fact,
however, Abel-Mizraim really signifies ‘the meadow of Egypt,’ _abel_, ‘a
meadow,’ being a not uncommon element in the geographical names of
ancient Canaan.[124]
Two sons had been born to Joseph by his Egyptian wife, whom the
Israelites knew by their Hebrew names. They had been born before the
death of his father, and had thus received his blessing. Joseph himself
lived ‘an hundred and ten years.’ This was the limit of life the
Egyptian desired for himself and his friends, and in the inscriptions
the boon of a life of ‘an hundred and ten years’ is from time to time
asked for from the gods. It is the term of existence a court poet
promises to Seti II. ‘on earth,’ and Ptah-hotep, the author of ‘the
oldest book in the world,’ who flourished in the days of the fifth
dynasty, assures us that, thanks to his pursuit of wisdom he had already
attained the age.[125]
Joseph was embalmed, but his mummy was not carried to Hebron for burial,
like that of his father. If Apopi II. had been the Pharaoh who had
transformed him from a Hebrew slave into the highest of Egyptian
officials, the War of Independence must have broken out long before his
death. The Hyksos dynasty was hastening to its decay. Its strength had
departed from it, and the Pharaohs of Zoan, who had lost all power in
Upper Egypt, would still more have lost all power in Asia. Their
soldiers were needed for other purposes than that of escorting the
coffin of the dead vizier across the desert of El-Arish. Moreover,
Joseph was an Egyptian official, and by his marriage into the family of
the high priest of Heliopolis had become as much of an Egyptian as his
Hyksos master. We are told that he made the Israelites swear to carry
his corpse with them should they ever return to Palestine; the triumph
of the Theban princes was growing more assured, and Joseph knew well
that the vengeance of the victorious party would be wreaked upon the
dead as well as upon the living. The history of Egypt had already shown
that the tomb and the mummy were the first to suffer.
A change of sepulchre was no unheard-of thing. King Ai of the eighteenth
dynasty had two, if not three, tombs made for himself, and the mummy
could be transported from one place of burial to another. All knew where
it was interred; year by year offerings were made to the spirit of the
dead, and in many cases the estate of the deceased was taxed to support
a line of priests who should perform the stated services at the tomb. As
long as the sepulchre of Joseph was in the neighbourhood of his people
it would have been easy to protect his mummy from violence, and to carry
the coffin out of Egypt when the needful time should come.
Footnote 1:
See Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_, Eng. tr., second edit., ii.
p. 134.
Footnote 2:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., v. pp. 66 _sqq._
Footnote 3:
Thus in an Assyrian hymn (K 890), published by Dr. Brünnow in the
_Zeitschrift für Assyriologie_, July 1889, we have (line 8) _istu pan
Khabiriya iptarsanni âsi_, ‘from the face of my confederates he has
cut me off, even me.’
Footnote 4:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., vi. p. 39.
Footnote 5:
Thus Kharbi-Sipak, a Kassite or Kossæan, from the western mountains of
Elam, is called a ‘Khabirâ’ (W. A. I. iv. 34, 2, 5). The name is
probably connected with that of Khapir or Âpir, originally applied to
the district in which Mal-Amir is situated, south-east of Susa, but
afterwards in the Persian period extended to the whole of Elam (see my
memoir on the _Inscriptions of Mal-Amir_ in the Transactions of the
Sixth Oriental Congress at Leyden, vol. ii.). Kharbi-Sipak himself,
however, seems to have been employed by the Assyrian king in Palestine
in the neighbourhood of the cities of Arqa and Zaqqal (Hommel in the
_Proceedings_ of the Society of Biblical Archæology, May 1895, p.
203).
Footnote 6:
W. A. I. ii. 50, 51 (where Khubur is said to be a synonym of Subarti).
Footnote 7:
W. A. I. ii. 51, 4.
Footnote 8:
Hommel, _The ancient Hebrew Tradition as illustrated by the
Monuments_, pp. 196, 245-262, 323-327; Glaser in the _Mittheilungen_
of the Vorderasiatische Gesellschaft, ii. 1897.
Footnote 9:
K 3500.
Footnote 10:
That _Ebir-nâri_ signified the country west of the Euphrates in the
later days of Babylonian history is shown by a contract-tablet, dated
in the third year of Darius Hystaspis, and translated by Peiser
(_Keilinschriftliche Bibliothek_, iv. p. 305), in which mention is
made of ‘Ustanni, the governor of Babylon and Ebir-nâri’ (line 2).
Meissner (_Zeitschrift für Alttestament_, _Wissenschaft_, xvii.) has
pointed out that Ustanni is the Tatnai of Ezra, v. 3, 6; vi. 6, 13,
who is there called the ‘governor of the land beyond the river’
(_’Abar Nahara_).
Footnote 11:
See Hilprecht, _The Babylonian Expedition of the University of
Pennsylvania_, i. 2, p. 31.
Footnote 12:
An inscription of Sargon recently published by M. Dangin (_Revue
Sémitique_, April 1897) states that ‘the governor’ of the subjugated
Amorites was Uru-Malik, where the name of Malik or Moloch is preceded
by the determinative of divinity. Uru-Malik, which is an analogous
formation to Uriel, Urijah, Melchi-ur (or Melchior), etc., shows that
what we call Hebrew was already the language of Canaan. The
inscription has been found at Tello in Southern Chaldæa.
Footnote 13:
Zabsali, also written Savsal(la) or Zavzal(la), probably represents
the Zuzim or Zamzummim of Scripture. See my article in the
_Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, February 1897, p.
74.
Footnote 14:
We possess a list of the kings of Babylonia, divided into dynasties,
from the first dynasty of Babylon, to which Khammu-rabi belonged, down
to the time of the fall of Nineveh. The number of years reigned by
each king is stated, as well as the number of years each dynasty
lasted. But, unfortunately, the compiler has forgotten to say what was
the duration of the dynasty to which Nabonassar (B.C. 747) belonged;
and as the tablet is broken here, the regnal years of most of the
kings who formed the dynasty have been lost. There are, however, a
good many synchronisms between the earlier period of Babylonian
history and that of Assyria, and by means of these the chronology has
been approximately restored. We can also test the date of Khammu-rabi
in the following way. We learn from Assur-bani-pal that
Kudur-Nankhundi, king of Elam, carried off the image of the goddess
Nana from the city of Erech 1635 years before his own conquest of
Elam, and therefore 2280 B.C. As Eri-Aku boasts of his capture of
Erech, and as he was assisted in his wars by his Elamite kinsmen, it
seems probable that the capture of the image by Kudur-Nankhundi was
coincident with the capture of the city by Eri-Aku.
The discovery of Mr. Pinches has been supplemented by that of Dr.
Scheil, who has found letters addressed by Khammu-rabi to Sin-idinnam
of Larsa, in which mention is made of the Elamite king
Kudur-Laghghamar. Sin-idinnam had been driven from Larsa by Eri-Aku
with the help of Kudur-Laghghamar, and had taken refuge at the court
of Khammu-rabi in Babylon. Fragments of other letters of Khammu-rabi
are in the possession of Lord Amherst of Hackney (see _inf._ pp. 27,
28).
Footnote 15:
The name of Khammu-rabi himself is written Ammu-rabi in Bu. 88-5-12,
199 (_Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum_,
Part 2).
Footnote 16:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., iii. p. xvi.
Footnote 17:
Hommel, _Geschichte des alten Morgenlandes_, p. 62, _The Ancient
Hebrew Tradition as illustrated by the Monuments_, p. 96.
Footnote 18:
Published by Budge, _Zeitschrift für Assyriologie_, iii. 3, pp. 229,
230.
Footnote 19:
The text, which is on a stela found in the ruined temple of Isis at
the south-east corner of the great pyramid of Gizeh, is now in the
Cairo Museum. It has been published by M. Daressy in the _Recueil des
Travaux relatifs à la Philologie et à l’Archéologie égyptiennes et
assyriennes_ (xvi. 3, 4, 1894), and is dated in the third year of king
Ai. It follows from the inscription that ‘the domain called that of
the Hittites’ lay to the north of the great temple of Ptah, and
immediately to the south of two smaller temples built by Thothmes I.
and Thothmes IV. In the time of Herodotos there was a similar district
assigned to the Phœnicians, and known as ‘the Camp of the Tyrians,’ on
the south side of the temple of Ptah (see my _Egypt of the Hebrews and
Herodotos_, p. 251).
Footnote 20:
Amurru, ‘the Amorite god,’ was a name which had been given by the
Sumerians, the earlier population of Chaldæa, to the Syrian Hadad whom
the Babylonians identified with their Ramman or Rimmon (cf. Zech. xii.
11). A cuneiform text published by Reisner (_Sumerisch-babylonische
Hymnen nach Thontafeln griechischer Zeit_, p. 139, lines 141-144)
couples Amurru, ‘the lord of the mountains,’ with Asratu, the
Canaanitish Asherah, ‘the lady of the plain.’ Asratu is identified
with the Babylonian Gubarra.
Footnote 21:
W. A. I. v. 12, 47.
Footnote 22:
W. A. I. v. 33, i. 37.
Footnote 23:
_Padanu_ also had the meaning of ‘path.’ Whether this is derived from
the other or belongs to a different root is questionable. But in the
sense of ‘path,’ _padanu_ was a synonym of Kharran.
Footnote 24:
This does not imply that the population which founded the kingdom of
Mitanni, and probably came from the mountains of Komagênê or of Ararat
in the north, was unknown in early Babylonia. In fact, one of the
_Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets_, published by the British
Museum in 1896 (Bu. 91-5-9, 296), contains the names of ‘the governor’
Akhsir-Babu and other witnesses to a contract, most of which are
Mitannian.
Footnote 25:
I have given the tablet in transliteration in the _Proceedings_ of the
Society of Biblical Archæology, Nov. 1883, p. 18. The passage reads:
‘14-½ shekels of lead we have weighed in _nakhur_.’
Footnote 26:
See Sachau, _Die altaramäische Inschrift auf der Statue des Königs
Panammu von Sam-al_ and _Aramäische Inschriften_ in the _Mittheilungen
aus den orientalischen Sammlungen d. K. Museums zu Berlin_, ix., and
the _Sitzungsberichte der K. preussischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften_, xli. (1896).
Footnote 27:
See my _Races of the Old Testament_, pp. 110-117, and H. G. Tomkins in
the _Journal_ of the Anthropological Institute, Feb. 1889.
Footnote 28:
In a report of an eclipse of the moon sent to an Assyrian king in the
eighth century B.C., the countries of ‘the Amorites and the Hittites’
represent the whole of Western Asia (R. F. Harper, _Assyrian and
Babylonian Letters_, Part iv. p. 345).
Footnote 29:
The discovery of the name of Shakama or Shechem in the _Travels of the
Mohar_ is due to Dr. W. Max Müller (_Asien und Europa_, p. 394).
Footnote 30:
Or II., according to Maspero, who makes three Hyksos sovereigns of
this name.
Footnote 31:
It is in the possession of Mr. John Ward.
Footnote 32:
See my _Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monument_, pp. 160,
161.
Footnote 33:
Recent discoveries have made it clear that the Amraphel of Genesis is
the Khammu-rabi of the cuneiform texts. Khammu-rabi is also written
Ammu-rabi (Bu. 88-5-12, 199, l. 17), and Dr. Lindl has pointed out
that the final syllable of Amraphel is the Babylonian _ilu_, ‘god,’ a
title which is frequently attached to the name of Khammu-rabi. We
learn from the Tel el-Amarna tablets that in the pronunciation of
Western Asia a Babylonian _b_ often became _p_.
Footnote 34:
Pinches, _Certain Inscriptions and Records referring to Babylonia and
Elam_, a paper read before the Victoria Institute, Jan. 7, 1896; see
also Hommel, _The Ancient Hebrew Tradition_, pp. 180 _sqq._
Footnote 35:
Some Assyriologists interpret Manda as ‘much’ or ‘many’; in this case
Umman Manda, ‘much people,’ will be still more literally the Hebrew
_Goyyim_.
Footnote 36:
Dr. Scheil, the discoverer of the letters of Khammu-rabi to
Sin-idinnam which are now in the Museum at Constantinople, gives the
following translations of them (_Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la
Philologie et à l’Archéologie égyptiennes et assyriennes_, xix. 1, 2,
pp. 40-44): (1) ‘To Sin-idinnam Khammu-rabi says: I send you as a
present (the images of) the goddesses of the land of Emutbalum as a
reward for your valour on the day (of the defeat) of Kudur-Laghghamar.
If (the enemy) trouble you, destroy their forces with the troops at
your disposal, and let the images be restored in safety to their (old)
habitations.’ (2) ‘To Sin-idinnam Khammu-rabi says: When you have seen
this letter, you will understand in regard to Amil-Samas and
Nur-Nintu, the sons of Gisdubba, that if they are in Larsa, or in the
territory of Larsa, you will order them to be sent away, and that a
trusty official shall take them and bring them to Babylon.’ (3) ‘To
Sin-idinnam Khammu-rabi says: As to the officials who have resisted
you in the accomplishment of their work, do not impose upon them any
additional task, but oblige them to do what they ought to have done,
and then remove them from the influence of him who has brought them.’
All three letters were found at Senkereh, the ancient Larsa. Fragments
of some other letters of Khammu-rabi are in the possession of Lord
Amherst of Hackney. See above, p. 12.
Footnote 37:
Nicolaus of Damascus, in Josephus _Antiq._ i. 7, 2.
Footnote 38:
See my _Patriarchal Palestine_, pp. 160, 165. The figure and name of
the god Salimmu, written in cuneiform characters, are on a gem now in
the Hermitage at St. Petersburg. The same god, under the name of
Shalman, is mentioned on a stela discovered at Sidon, and under that
of Selamanês in the inscriptions of Shêkh Barakât, north-west of
Aleppo (Clermont-Ganneau, _Études d’Archéologie orientale_ in the
_Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études_, cxiii. vol. ii. pp. 36,
48; Sayce in the _Proceedings_ of the Society of Biblical Archeology,
xix. 2. p. 74).
Footnote 39:
As Professor Hommel says (_Expository Times_, Nov. 1896, p. 95), ‘The
“Mighty King” cannot possibly be the Pharaoh.’ But he seems to me to
introduce an unnecessary element of complication into the subject by
supposing that in the Tel el-Amarna letters the epithet has been
transferred to the king of the Hittites from the supreme god of
Jerusalem, to whom it properly belonged. It is true that in a letter
of the governor of Phœnicia (Winckler und Abel, No. 76, l. 66) the
title is given to the king of the Hittites, but it does not follow
that the king of Jerusalem employs it in the same way.
Footnote 40:
It should be noticed that, according to Hesykhios (_s. v._), ‘the most
high God’ of the Syrians was Ramas, that is, Ramman or Rimmon, who was
identified with the sun-god Hadad, the supreme deity of Syria. The
Babylonians called him Amurru ‘the Amorite.’
Footnote 41:
Pietschmann, _Geschichte der Phönizier_, p. 115. The suggestion was
first made by von Bunsen.
Footnote 42:
For a possible explanation of the origin of the practice, see H. N.
Moseley in the _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, vi. 4, p.
396. Bastian gives another in his description of the practice among
the Polynesians (_Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, vi. pp. 40, 41).
Footnote 43:
A brilliant suggestion of Professor Hommel, however, may prove to be
the true explanation of the mysterious name. In the Minæan
inscriptions of Southern Arabia a long _â_ is constantly denoted in
writing by _h_; and Abraham, therefore, may be merely the Minæan mode
of writing Abram. If so, this would show that the Hebrew scribes were
once under the influence of the Minæan script, and that portions of
the Pentateuch itself may have been written in the letters of the
Minæan alphabet (Hommel, _The Ancient Hebrew Tradition_, pp. 275-277).
Dr. Neubauer has suggested to me that this also may be the explanation
of the name of Aaron (_Aharôn_), which, like Ab-raham, has no
etymology. Aaron would be the graphic form of Âron, an Arabic name
which appears as Aran in the genealogy of the Horites (Gen. xxxvi.
28).
Footnote 44:
See Berger, _L’Arabie avant Mahomet d’après les Inscriptions_ (1885),
pp. 27, 28.
Footnote 45:
D. H. Müller, _Epigraphische Denkmäler aus Arabien_ (1889), p. 13.
Footnote 46:
Thus we have _anuki_ ‘I,’ Heb. _anochi_; _badiu_ ‘in his hand,’ Heb.
_b’yado_; _akharunu_ ‘after him,’ Heb. _akharono_; _rusu_ ‘head,’ Heb.
_rosh_; _kilubi_ ‘cage,’ Heb. _chelûb_; _har_ ‘mountain,’ Heb. _har_.
See my _Patriarchal Palestine_, p. 247.
Footnote 47:
On the question of the site of Mizpah of Gilead, see G. A. Smith, _The
Historical Geography of the Holy Land_, pp. 586, 587.
Footnote 48:
_Ausgrabungen in Sendschirli_ in _Mittheilungen aus den orientalischen
Sammlungen_, xi. (1893).
Footnote 49:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., v. pp. vi, vii.
Footnote 50:
Dussaud (_Revue Archéologique_, iii. xxx. p. 346) states that
according to the Ansarîyeh of the Gulf of Antioch the ‘Yudi’ or
Hebrews formerly occupied their country, and constructed the ancient
monuments found in it, one of which is called after the name of
Solomon. For Neubauer’s suggestion that the Dinhabah of Gen. xxxvi. 32
is identical in name with the Dunip or Tunip of Northern Syria, see
further on.
Hoffmann (_Zeitschrift für Assyriologie_, xi. p. 210) maintains that
the origin of the Aramaic dialects is to be sought in a Bedâwin
language allied to that of the Arabs and Sabæans, which underwent
intermixture with Canaanitish (or Phœnician) through the settlement of
its speakers in a Canaanitish country.
Footnote 51:
In Assyrian letters of the Second Empire mention is made of the
Nabathean Â-kamaru, the son of Amme’te’, and the Arabian Ami-li’ti,
the son of Ameri or Omar (Harper, _Assyrian and Babylonian Letters_,
iii. p. 262; iv. p. 437).
Footnote 52:
It is stated in Deut. xxiii. 4 that Balaam was hired from ‘Pethor of
Aram Naharaim,’ not only by the Moabites, but by the Ammonites as well
(though it is true that in the Hebrew text the word _sâkar_, ‘hired,’
is in the singular). It may be noted that the mother of Rehoboam,
whose name is compounded with that of Am or Ammi (compare Rehab-iah, 1
Chron. xxiii. 17), was an Ammonitess (1 Kings xiv. 21). For a full
discussion of the name of ’Ammi or ’Ammu, and the historical
conclusions which may be deduced from it, see Hommel, _The Ancient
Hebrew Tradition_, pp. 89 _sqq._
Footnote 53:
The name of Carchemish is usually written Gargamis in the cuneiform
inscriptions (Qarqamish in the Egyptian hieroglyphs), but
Tiglath-pileser I. (W. A. I. i. 13, 49) calls it ‘Kar-Gamis’ (the
Fortified Wall of Gamis) ‘in the land of the Hittites,’ and from the
Hebrew spelling in the Old Testament we may gather that Gamis was
identified with the Moabite Chemosh. In Babylonian tablets of the age
of Ammi-zadoq mention is made of a wood Karkamisû or ‘Carchemishian’
(Bu. 88-5-12, 163, line 11; 88-5-12, 19, line 8). It may be noted that
the name ‘Jerabîs,’ sometimes assigned to the site of Carchemish
instead of Jerablûs, is, according to the unanimous testimony of
English and American residents in the neighbourhood, erroneous.
Footnote 54:
See _Records of the Past_, new ser., v. p. 45.
Footnote 55:
For the identity of the Zuzim with the Babylonian Zavzala, see my note
in the _Proceedings_ of the Society of Biblical Archæology, xix. 2,
pp. 74, 75.
Footnote 56:
See above, p. 21.
Footnote 57:
See above, p. 20.
Footnote 58:
We owe the term ‘Eurafrican’ to Dr. Brinton (see his _Races and
Peoples_, 1890, Lecture iv.). For the relationship of the Libyan and
the Kelt, see my Address to the Anthropological Section of the British
Association, 1887.
Footnote 59:
The expression ‘mountain of the Amorites,’ which we meet with in Deut.
i. 7, 19, takes us back to Abrahamic times. One of the campaigns of
Samsu-iluna, the son and successor of Khammu-rabi or Amraphel, was
against ‘the great mountain of the land of the Amorites’ (_kharsag gal
mad Martu-ki_, Bu. 91-5-9, 333; _Rev._ 19).
Footnote 60:
See my _Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, p. 41; D.
H. Müller, _Epigraphische Denkmäler aus Arabien_, p. 8 (the Minæan
inscriptions of El-Oela, south of Teima, are given pp. 21 _sqq._).
Footnote 61:
Philo Byblius in his work ‘On the Jews,’ as quoted by Eusebius (_Præp.
Evang._ i, 10), stated that ‘Kronos, whom the Phœnicians call El, the
king of the country, who was afterwards deified in the planet Saturn,
had an only son by a nymph of the country called Anôbret. This son was
named Yeud, which signifies in Phœnician an only son. His country
having fallen into distress during a war, Kronos clothed his son in
royal robes, raised an altar, and sacrificed him upon it.’ In his
account of the Phœnician mythology, the same writer describes the
sacrifice a little differently: ‘A plague and a famine having
occurred, Kronos sacrificed his only son to his father the Sky,
circumcised himself, and obliged his companions to do the same’
(Euseb. _l. c._).
Footnote 62:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., v. p. 49, No. 81.
Footnote 63:
_L’Imagerie Phénicienne_ (1880), p. 105.
Footnote 64:
Which may also be read _ayyal_ or ‘hart.’
Footnote 65:
See my _Races of the Old Testament_, pp. 130 _sq._
Footnote 66:
See my _Races of the Old Testament_, pp. 127, 132, where a photograph
is given of Professor Flinders Petrie’s cast of the Ashkelon profiles.
Footnote 67:
_Black Obelisk_, lines 60, 61, compared with _Monolith Inscription_,
ll. 90-95.
Footnote 68:
One _feddan_ or acre contained 1800 _sari_ (Reisner in the
_Zeitschrift für Assyriologie_, xi. 4, p. 421). The area was not
great, though it was calculated that not more than 120 _sari_ could be
ploughed by a single ox.
Footnote 69:
Published by Strassmaier in the Transactions of the Fifth Oriental
Congress, ii. 1, _Append._ pp. 14, 15; a translation will be found in
Peiser’s _Altbabylonische Urkunden in the Keilschriftliche
Bibliothek_, iv. p. 7. The tablet was found at Tel-Sifr.
Footnote 70:
Published by Meissner, _Beiträge zum altbabylonischen Privatrecht_,
No. 43 (with corrections by Pinches); a translation is given by
Peiser, _Keilschriftliche Bibliothek_, iv. pp. 23-25.
Footnote 71:
Gen. xxiii. 18. The Hebrew expression ‘In the presence of’ is the same
as that which is translated ‘Witnessed by’ in the Babylonian
documents.
Footnote 72:
Babylonian _shaqâlu kaspa_, Hebrew _shâqal [eth-hak-] keseph_.
Footnote 73:
According to Professor Flinders Petrie, the heavy maneh or mina as
fixed by Dungi and restored by Nebuchadrezzar weighed 978,309 grammes.
An example of it is now in the British Museum. See Lehmann in the
_Verhandlungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft_, 1893, p. 27.
Footnote 74:
The identification is, however, doubtful, since only potsherds of the
Roman period are visible at Umm Jerâr, which, moreover, according to
Palmer (_Name-lists_ in the _Survey of Western Palestine_, p. 420), is
merely Umm el-Jerrâr, ‘the mother of water-pots.’
Footnote 75:
Beti-ilu (Winckler’s _Tel el-Amarna Letters_, Nos. 51, 125) is
associated with Tunip and the country of Nukhassê. The reading of the
name is not quite certain, however, as it may be transcribed Batti-ilu
or Mitti-ilu. A Babylonian of the Abrahamic age also has the name of
Beta-ili.
Footnote 76:
The title seems to have been of Horite origin (see Gen. xxxvi. 21, 29,
30).
Footnote 77:
It is noticeable that the Edomite leader who was carried captive to
Egypt by Ramses III. after he had destroyed ‘the tents’ of ‘the Shasu
in Seir,’ is entitled ‘chieftain,’ and not ‘king.’ There is a portrait
of him on the walls of Medînet Habu at Thebes.
Footnote 78:
For another explanation of the name, see Gen. xxv. 26; Hos. xii. 3.
Footnote 79:
Jacob-el is written Ya’akub-ilu; Joseph-el, Yasupu-ilu and Yasup-il,
which is found in a list of slaves of the same early age (Bu. 91-5-9,
324). In the same list mention is made of land belonging to Adunum,
the Heb. _adon_, and to Nakha-ya, which is a parallel formation to the
Heb. Noah. In a tablet dated in the reign of Zabium, the founder of
the dynasty to which Khammu-rabi or Amraphel belonged, we find the
name of Ya-kh-ku-ub-il, _i.e._ Ya’qub-il (Bu. 91-5-9, 387).
Footnote 80:
Iqib-ilu and Asupi-ilu.
Footnote 81:
See _Records of the Past_, new ser., v. pp. 48, 51.
Footnote 82:
One of the scarabs of Ya’qob-el is in the Egyptian Museum of
University College, London. _El_ is written _h(a)l_.
Footnote 83:
On the summit of the hill above Beitîn, the ancient Beth-On or
Beth-el, the strata of limestone rock take the form of vast steps
rising one above the other.
Footnote 84:
Cf. the article of Mr. Pinches on ‘Gifts to a Babylonian Bit-ili’ in
the _Babylonian and Oriental Record_, ii. 6.
Footnote 85:
See, for example, Peiser, _Texte juristischen und geschäftlichen
Inhalts_ (_Keilinschriftliche Bibliothek_, iv.), p. 49, No. iii.,
where Ubarum hires himself out to Ana-Samas-litsi for a month, for
half a shekel of silver.
Footnote 86:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., v. p. 169.
Footnote 87:
Deut. xxxii. 15. See also Deut. xxxiii. 5, 26; Isa. xliv. 2.
Footnote 88:
According to immemorial tradition, the site of the field is marked by
Jacob’s Well (S. John iv. 6). Dr. Masterman in the _Quarterly
Statement_ of the Palestine Exploration Fund, April 1897, gives for
the first time a satisfactory explanation why this deep well, which is
often dry in summer, should have been sunk in the neighbourhood of a
number of springs:—‘The springs have probably always belonged to the
townsfolk (since they became settled); and, in the case of any
wandering tribes with considerable flocks among them, it is
exceedingly probable that the more settled inhabitants would first
resent and then resist the new-comers marching twice daily into their
midst to water their flocks at their springs, Probably any experienced
nomad with such flocks, accustomed to such a country as this, would
know pretty surely where he might, from the conformation of the hills,
expect to find water. If, then, a quarrel arose, what more probable
than that he should seek to make himself independent of these
disagreeable neighbours. Further, if we can accept the tradition, we
have, in the story of Jacob, two special facts connected with this:
firstly, he bought a piece of ground on which he could make a well for
himself; and then we gather from Genesis xxxiv. that his family made
themselves sufficiently obnoxious to the Shechemites to make it very
necessary for Jacob to be independent of their permission to use their
springs.’
Footnote 89:
Cf. Gen. xlix. 14, 15. The Hebrew word rendered ‘two burdens’ by the
Authorised Version in v. 14 should be translated ‘sheepfolds,’ as it
is in Judg. v. 16.
Footnote 90:
Thus the ancient Abshek, the Abokkis of classical geography, has
become Abu Simbel, or ‘father of an ear of corn’; and Silsila is said
to have derived its name from a ‘chain’ or _silsila_ stretched across
the Nile from the rocks on either bank, though it really has its
origin in the classical Silsilis, the Coptic Joljel or ‘barrier.’
Footnote 91:
In the list of Thothmes III. the name of Nekeb of Galilee (Josh. xix.
33) is followed by that of Ashushkhen, which may be compared with
Issachar, since the interchange of final _n_ and _r_ is not uncommon.
But the substitution of _kh_ for _k_ (_ch_) is difficult to account
for.
Footnote 92:
Shmâna is the thirty-fifth name in the Palestine list of Thothmes, and
follows the name of Chinnereth (Josh. xix. 35; comp. also Shmânau, No.
18. See Tomkins in _Records of the Past_, new series, v. pp. 44, 46).
One of the Tel el-Amarna tablets (W. and A. ii., No. 39) mentions ‘the
Yaudu’ in the neighbourhood of Tunip, now Tennib, north-west of
Aleppo. The name of the Jews is written in the same way in the
cuneiform texts, though the Yaudu of the Tel el-Amarna tablets are
probably to be identified with the land of Ya’di, which the
inscriptions of Sinjerli place in Northern Syria. But it is noticeable
that the Tel el-Amarna correspondence makes Kinza a district near
Kadesh on the Orontes, close to the Lake of Homs, and Kinza is letter
for letter the Biblical Kenaz. The Kenizzites, it will be remembered,
formed an integral part of the later tribe of Judah.
Footnote 93:
Hommel, _Aufsätze und Abhandlungen sur Kunde der Sprachen, Literaturen
und der Geschichte des vorderen Orients_ (1890), p. 31.
Footnote 94:
The Rev. H. G. Tomkins (_Quarterly Statement_ of the Palestine
Exploration Fund, April 1885) first pointed out the true signification
of the name of Beth-lehem, Lakhmu was one of the primeval gods of
Chaldæan religion.
Footnote 95:
The village of Rachel, which was probably where the stone stood, is
referred to in 1 Sam. xxx. 29.
Footnote 96:
_E.g._ _Yeôr_, ‘river,’ Egyptian _aur_; _akhu_, ‘herbage on the river
bank’ (Gen. xli. 2), Egyptian _akhu_; _rebid_, ‘collar,’ Egyptian
_repit_. See Ebers, _Aegypten und die Bücher Mose’s_, pp. 337-339.
Footnote 97:
See my _Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos_, pp. 25 _sq._
Footnote 98:
See Tomkins, _Life and Times of Joseph_, p. 184.
Footnote 99:
Asenath is probably Nes-Nit, ‘Attached to Neith,’ as Subanda is
Nes-Bandid, ‘Attached to Bandid.’
Footnote 100:
Mattan-Baal. The corresponding Hebrew name is Mattaniah.
Footnote 101:
A translation of the Sallier Papyrus is given by Maspero in the
_Records of the Past_, new series, ii. pp. 37 _sq._ For the scarab of
‘Sutekh-Apopi’ see Maspero’s _Struggle of the Nations_ (Eng. tr.), p.
vii. The names of Beth-On or Beth-el in Canaan, and of On near
Damascus (Amos i. 5), indicate a connection with the cult of the
Sun-god at On in Egypt. On in the ‘Beka’’ of Damascus is probably the
Heliopolis of Syria, to which the worship of Ra of Heliopolis of Egypt
was brought in the reign of the Pharaoh Senemures (Macrobius,
_Saturnal._ i. 23, 10).
Footnote 102:
_Aegypten und die Bücher Mose’s_, p. 299.
Footnote 103:
Maspero, _The Struggle of the Nations_, p. 271, note 5.
Footnote 104:
Cf. Brugsch, _Aegyptologie_, pp. 218 _sq._
Footnote 105:
Ebers, _Aegypten und die Bücher Mose’s_, pp. 323-333.
Footnote 106:
Ebers, _l.c._, pp. 335, 336.
Footnote 107:
See Wiedemann, _Religion der alten Aegypter_, pp. 142-144. The
_khartummîm_ and _khakâmîm_ (Authorised Version, ‘magicians’ and ‘wise
men’) seem to correspond with the Egyptian _kherhebu_, ‘interpreters
of the sacred books,’ and _rekhu khetu_, ‘wise men.’
Footnote 108:
See Tomkins, _Life and Times of Joseph_, p. 44; Erman, _Life in
Ancient Egypt_ (Eng. tr.), p. 439.
Footnote 109:
Mariette, _Abydos_, p. 421 (Ben-Mazan from Bashan becomes
Ramses-em-per-Ra); Daninos-Pasha and Maspero in the _Recueil de
Travaux relatifs à la Philologie et à l’ Archéologie égyptienne et
assyrienne_, xii. p. 214; and Sayce in the _Academy_, 1891, p. 461.
Footnote 110:
See Erman, _Life in Ancient Egypt_ (Eng. tr.), p. 439.
Footnote 111:
See Erman, _Life in Ancient Egypt_ (Eng. tr.), pp. 102, 103.
Footnote 112:
Thus ‘Captain’ Ahmes had land given him according to his biographical
inscription, ll. 22, 24; see Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_ (Eng.
tr.), second edit. i. p. 249.
Footnote 113:
See Virey in _Records of the Past_, new ser., iii. pp. 7 _sqq._ There
were similar public granaries in Babylonia called _sutummi_, under the
charge of an officer who bore the title of _satammu_, and the
institution was probably introduced into Egypt from Asia.
Footnote 114:
Erman, _Life in Ancient Egypt_ (Eng. tr.), p. 108.
Footnote 115:
See Brugsch’s translation of the inscription in his _Die biblischen
sieben Jahre der Hungersnoth_ (1891).
Footnote 116:
See Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_ (Eng. tr.), 2nd edit., i. pp.
262, 263. ‘Captain’ Ahmes, who took part in the War of Independence
under Ahmes I., calls himself the son of Abana, and traces his descent
to his ‘forefather Baba.’ In Abana, Maspero (_The Struggle of the
Nations_, p. 85) sees the Semitic Abîna, ‘Our father.’
Footnote 117:
Thus in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, Rib-Hadad, the governor of
Phœnicia, asks the Pharaoh to send corn to Gebal, as the crops there
had failed (Winckler and Abel, No. 48, ll. 8-19), and Meneptah sent
corn to the Hittites when they suffered from a famine (Brugsch, _Egypt
under the Pharaohs_, Eng. tr., 2nd edit., ii. p. 119).
Footnote 118:
According to Abulfarag (_Chron._ p. 14), Joseph became Vizier in the
seventeenth year of the reign of Apopi. Maspero (_Struggle of the
Nations_, pp. 59, 107) makes Apopi Ra-aa-kenen the third of the name.
Footnote 119:
See Maspero’s translation in _Records of the Past_, new ser., ii. pp.
37 _sq._
Footnote 120:
E. Naville, _Goshen and the Shrine of Saft el-Hennah_, Fourth Memoir
of the Egypt Exploration Fund (1887), pp. 14 _sq._
Footnote 121:
See Naville, _Goshen_, p. 26.
Footnote 122:
_Bibl. Hist._, i. 91.
Footnote 123:
N. H. xix. 5.
Footnote 124:
Abel-Mizraim may be the Abel that is mentioned in connection with the
‘gardens,’ the ‘tilth,’ and the ‘spring’ of Carmel of Judah in the
list of places in Canaan conquered by Thothmes III. (No. 92). Another
Abel is mentioned two names earlier (No. 90).
Footnote 125:
See Virey’s translation in _Records of the Past_, new ser., iii. p.
34.
CHAPTER II
THE COMPOSITION OF THE PENTATEUCH
The Literary Analysis and its Conclusions—Based on a Theory and an
Assumption—Weakness of the Philological Evidence—Disregard of the
Scientific Method of Comparison—Imperfection of our Knowledge of
Hebrew—Archæology unfavourable to the Higher Criticism—Analysis of
Historical Sources—Tel el-Amarna Tablets—Antiquity of Writing in the
East—The Mosaic Age highly Literary—Scribes mentioned in the Song of
Deborah—The Story of the Deluge brought from Babylonia to Canaan
before the time of Moses—The Narratives of the Pentateuch confirmed
by Archæology—Compiled from early Written Documents—Revised and
re-edited from time to time—Three Strata of Legislation—Accuracy in
the Text—Tendencies—Chronology.
The book of Genesis ends with the death of Joseph. When the five books
of the Pentateuch were divided from one another we do not know. The
division is older than the Septuagint translation, older too than the
time when the Law of Moses was accepted by the Samaritans as divinely
authoritative. As far back as we can trace the external history of the
Pentateuch, it has consisted of five books divided from one another as
they still are in our present Bibles.
An influential school of modern critics has come to conclusions which
are difficult to reconcile with this external testimony. Instead of the
Pentateuch it offers us a Hexateuch, the Book of Joshua being added to
those of Moses, and of the origin and growth of this Hexateuch it
professes to be able to give a minute and mathematically exact account.
Very little, if any of it, we are told, goes back to the period of
Moses, the larger part of the work having been composed or compiled in
the age of the Exile. It is true, the theories of criticism have changed
from time to time; what was formerly held, for instance, to be the
oldest portion of the Hexateuch being now regarded as the latest; but
each generation of critics has been equally confident that its own
literary analysis was mathematically correct. At present the
hypothetical scheme most in favour is as follows.
The earliest part of the Hexateuch, at all events in its existing form,
is a document distinguished by the use of the name Yahveh, and sometimes
therefore termed Yahvistic or Jehovistic, but more usually designated by
the symbol J. The Yahvist is supposed to have been a Jew who made use of
older materials, and lived in the ninth century B.C. His work begins
with ‘the second’ account of the Creation, in the middle of the fourth
verse of the second chapter of Genesis, and the last trace of it is to
be found in the story of the death and burial of Moses at the end of
Deuteronomy. His style is said to be naïve and lively, and his
conceptions of the Deity grossly anthropomorphic.
Next in order to the Yahvist comes the Second Elohist (symbolised by the
letter E), whose title is derived from the period, not very far distant,
in the history of criticism, when what is now known as the Priestly Code
was assigned to a First Elohist. The Elohist is characterised by the use
of the word Elohim, ‘God,’ rather than Yahveh, and the critics have
discovered in him a native of the northern kingdom. To him belong the
‘Ten Words’ which represent the original form of the Ten Commandments,
as well as the history of Joseph. He is said to have written with a
certain theological tendency, to which is due his predilection for
introducing dreams and angels into his narrative. His date is ascribed
to the eighth century B.C., and the combination of his narrative with
that of the Yahvist (J.E.) produced a composite work to which the name
of Prophetic or Pre-Deuteronomic Redaction has been applied. The
Redactor endeavoured to reconcile the contradictions between the two
narratives by various harmonistic expedients; his success was not great,
and the nineteenth century critic accordingly believes himself able not
only to separate the two original documents, but to point out the
additions of the Redactor as well.
Contemporaneous with this work of redaction was the appearance of a new
book, the so-called Book of the Covenant. This was of small dimensions;
at any rate, all that remains of it is contained in a few chapters of
Exodus (xx. 24-xxiii. 33, xxiv. 3-8). It was added, however, to the
Prophetic Redaction, and the Mosaic Law for the first time was
introduced to the world.
But now appeared a book which was of momentous consequences for both the
history and the religion of Judah. This was the book of Deuteronomy, or
rather the middle portion of the book of Deuteronomy (chaps. xii-xxvi.),
the rest of the book being a subsequent addition. This abbreviated
Deuteronomy, it is assumed, is ‘the book of the Law’ which Hilkiah the
high priest declared he had ‘found in the house of the Lord’ in the
reign of Josiah, and it is further assumed that the word ‘found’ is
intended to cover a ‘pious fraud.’ The Egyptian inscriptions mention
books of early date which had been similarly ‘found’ in the temples, and
some of these books really seem to have been forgeries of a later
date.[126] Modern criticism has determined that Hilkiah and his friends
imitated the example of the Egyptian priests in the case of Deuteronomy.
At all events, the results were instantaneous and revolutionary. The
king and his court believed that they had before them the actual
commands of their God to the great lawgiver of Israel, and the Jewish
religion underwent accordingly a radical reform. Nor did the effect of
the supposed discovery end here. Like the forged Decretals in mediæval
Europe, the book of Deuteronomy had a continuous and wide-reaching
influence upon Jewish thought. Its teaching was matured during the
Exile, and out of it grew that form of Jewish religion of which
Christianity was the heir. The book of Deuteronomy (symbolised by D) in
the first as well as in the second or enlarged edition belongs to the
latter part of the seventh century B.C. But the Hexateuch was still far
from complete. During the Exile a book of the Law, now contained in Lev.
xvii.-xxvi., was written and promulgated, the author, it appears, having
been incited to his work by Ezekiel’s ideal of a theocratic state. This
book of the Law was followed by a far more ambitious production, the
‘Priestly Code’ (generally known as P, and not unfrequently called the
‘Grundschrift’ by German writers). The Priestly Code embodies what
earlier critics knew as the work of the First Elohist; it not only in
the name of Moses shapes the ritual and religion of Israel to the
advantage of the priests, but it attempts to trace the history of the
revelation which resulted in that religion back to the Creation itself.
The name of Elohim is again a distinguishing feature in the narrative,
which is described by the ‘critics’ as formal and pedantic, as
affectedly archaistic, and as disfigured by a strong theological
tendency. Wellhausen and Stade assure us that it transforms the
patriarchs into pious Jews of the Exile. And yet it was just this
narrative, which we are now told bears so plainly on its face the marks
of its late age and sacerdotal character, that hardly twenty years ago
was declared by the critics themselves to be the oldest portion of the
Hexateuch!
By this time the Hexateuch was nearly ready to become the Pentateuch,
which should be read by Ezra before the Jewish community as ‘the law of
God’ (Nem. viii. 8), and be accepted by the hostile Samaritans as alone
authoritative among the sacred books of Israel. All that was needed
further was to combine the existing books into a whole, smoothing over
the inconsistencies between them and supplying links of connection. The
‘final Redactor’ who accomplished this task lived shortly after the
Exile, and has been identified with Ezra by some of the critics. Whoever
he was, he was naturally more in harmony with the spirit and ideas of
the Priestly Code than he was with those of the Prophetic Redaction, or
even of Deuteronomy; indeed, it is hard to understand why he should have
troubled himself about the Prophetic Redaction at all. Between the
Jewish religion of the days of Asa or Jehoshaphat and that of the period
after the Exile a great gulf was fixed.
It is clear that if the modern literary analysis of the Pentateuch is
justified, it is useless to look to the five books of Moses for
authentic history. There is nothing in them which can be ascribed with
certainty to the age of Moses, nothing which goes back even to the age
of the Judges. Between the Exodus out of Egypt and the composition of
the earliest portion of the so-called Mosaic Law there would have been a
dark and illiterate interval of several centuries. Not even tradition
could be trusted to span them. For the Mosaic age, and still more for
the age before the Exodus, all that we read in the Old Testament would
be historically valueless.
Such criticism, therefore, as accepts the results of ‘the literary
analysis’ of the Hexateuch acts consistently in stamping as mythical the
whole period of Hebrew history which precedes the settlement of the
Israelitish tribes in Canaan. Doubt is thrown even on their residence in
Egypt and subsequent escape from ‘the house of bondage.’ Moses himself
becomes a mere figure of mythland, a hero of popular imagination whose
sepulchre was unknown because it had never been occupied. In order to
discredit the earlier records of the Israelitish people, there is no
need of indicating contradictions—real or otherwise—in the details of
the narratives contained in them, of enlarging upon their chronological
difficulties, or of pointing to the supernatural elements they involve;
the late dates assigned to the medley of documents which have been
discovered in the Hexateuch are sufficient of themselves to settle the
question.[127]
The dates are largely, if not altogether, dependent on the assumption
that Hebrew literature is not older than the age of David. A few poems
like the Song of Deborah may have been handed down orally from an
earlier period, but readers and writers, it is assumed, there were none.
The use of writing for literary purposes was coeval with the rise of the
monarchy. The oldest inscription in the letters of the Phœnician
alphabet yet discovered is only of the ninth century B.C., and the
alphabet would have been employed for monumental purposes long before it
was applied to the manufacture of books. As Wolf’s theory of the origin
and late date of the Homeric Poems avowedly rested on the belief that
the literary use of writing in Greece was of late date, so too the
theory of the analysts of the Hexateuch rests tacitly on the belief that
the Israelites of the age of Moses and the Judges were wholly
illiterate. Moses did not write the Pentateuch because he could not have
done so.
The huge edifice of modern Pentateuchal criticism is thus based on a
theory and an assumption. The theory is that of ‘the literary analysis’
of the Hexateuch, the assumption that a knowledge of writing in Israel
was of comparatively late date. The theory, however, is philological,
not historical. The analysis is philological rather than literary, and
depends entirely on the occurrence and use of certain words and phrases.
Lists have been drawn up of the words and phrases held to be peculiar to
the different writers between whom the Hexateuch is divided, and the
portion of the Hexateuch to be assigned to each is determined
accordingly. That it is sometimes necessary to cut a verse in two,
somewhat to the injury of the sense, matters but little; the necessities
of the theory require the sacrifice, and the analyst looks no further.
Great things grow out of little, and the mathematical minuteness with
which the Hexateuch is apportioned among its numerous authors, and the
long lists of words and idioms by which the apportionment is supported,
all have their origin in Astruc’s separation of the book of Genesis into
two documents, in one of which the name of Yahveh is used, while in the
other it is replaced by Elohim.[128]
The historian, however, is inclined to look with suspicion upon
historical results which rest upon purely philological evidence. It is
not so very long ago since the comparative philologists believed they
had restored the early history of the Aryan race. With the help of the
dictionary and grammar they had painted an idyllic picture of the life
and culture of the primitive Aryan family and traced the migrations of
its offshoots from their primeval Asiatic home. But anthropology has
rudely dissipated all these reconstructions of primitive history, and
has not spared even the Aryan family or the Asiatic home itself. The
history that was based on philology has been banished to fairyland. It
may be that the historical results based on the complicated and
ingenious system of Hexateuchal criticism will hereafter share the same
fate.
In fact, there is one characteristic of them which cannot but excite
suspicion. A passage which runs counter to the theory of the critic is
at once pronounced an interpolation, due to the clumsy hand of some
later ‘Redactor.’ Thus ‘the tabernacle of the congregation’ is declared
to have been an invention of the Priestly Code; and therefore a verse in
the First Book of Samuel (ii. 22), which happens to refer to it, is
arbitrarily expunged from the text. Similarly passages in the historical
books which imply an acquaintance on the part of Solomon and his
successors with the laws and institutions of the Priestly Code are
asserted to be late additions, and assigned to the very circle of
writers to which the composition of the Code is credited. Indeed, if we
are to believe the analysts, a considerable part of the professedly
historical literature of the Old Testament was written or ‘redacted’
chiefly with the purpose of bolstering up the ideas and inventions
either of the Deuteronomist or of the later Code. This is a cheap and
easy way of rewriting ancient history, but it is neither scientific nor
in accordance with the historical method, however consonant it may be
with the methods of the philologist.
When, however, we come to examine the philological evidence upon which
we are asked to accept this new reading of ancient Hebrew history, we
find that it is wofully defective. We are asked to believe that a
European scholar of the nineteenth century can analyse with mathematical
precision a work composed centuries ago in the East for Eastern readers
in a language that is long since dead, can dissolve it verse by verse,
and even word by word, into its several elements, and fix the
approximate date and relation of each. The accomplishment of such a feat
is an impossibility, and to attempt it is to sin as much against common
sense as against the laws of science. Science teaches us that we can
attain to truth only by the help of comparison; we can know things
scientifically only in so far as they can be compared and measured one
with another. Where there is no comparison there can be no scientific
result. Even the logicians of the Middle Ages taught that no conclusion
can be drawn from what they termed a single instance. It is just this,
however, that the Hexateuchal critics have essayed to do. The Pentateuch
and its history have been compared with nothing except themselves, and
the results have been derived not from the method of comparison, but
from the so-called ‘tact’ and arbitrary judgment of the individual
scholar. Certain postulates have been assumed, the consequences of which
have been gradually evolved, one after another, while the coherence and
credibility of the general hypothesis has been supported by the
invention of further subordinate hypotheses as the need for them arose.
The ‘critical’ theory of the origin and character of the Hexateuch
closely resembles the Ptolemaic theory of the universe; like the latter,
it is highly complicated and elaborate, coherent in itself, and perfect
on paper, but unfortunately baseless in reality.
Its very complication condemns it. It is too ingenious to be true. Had
the Hexateuch been pieced together as we are told it was, it would have
required a special revelation to discover the fact. We may lay it down
as a general rule in science that the more simple a theory is, the more
likely it is to be correct. It is the complicated theories, which demand
all kinds of subsidiary qualifications and assistant hypotheses, that
are put aside by the progress of science. The wit of man may be great,
but it needs a mass of material before even a simple theory can be
established with any pretence to scientific value.
There is yet another reason why the new theory of the origin of the
Mosaic Law stands self-condemned. It deals with the writers and readers
of the ancient East as if they were modern German professors and their
literary audience. The author of the Priestly Code is supposed to go to
work with scissors and paste, and with a particular object in view, like
a rather wooden and unimaginative compiler of to-day. And so closely did
the minds and methods of the authors of the Hexateuch resemble those of
their modern European critics, that in spite of their efforts to conceal
the piecemeal nature of their work, as well as of the fact that it
actually deceived their countrymen to whom it was addressed, to the
European scholar of to-day it all lies open and revealed. When, however,
we turn to other products of Oriental thought, whether ancient or
modern, we do not find that this is the way in which the authors of them
have written history, or what purports to be history, neither do we find
their readers to be at all like those for whom the Hexateuch is supposed
to have been compiled. The point of view of an Oriental is still
essentially different from that of a European, at all events so far as
history and literature are concerned; and the attempt to transform the
ancient Israelitish historians into somewhat inferior German compilers
proves only a strange want of familiarity with Eastern modes of thought.
But it is not only science, it is common sense as well, which is
violated by the endeavour to foist philological speculations into the
treatment of historical questions. Hebrew is a dead language; it is
moreover a language which is but imperfectly known. Our knowledge of it
is derived entirely from that fragment of its literature which is
preserved in the Old Testament, and the errors of copyists and the
corruptions of the text make a good deal even of this obscure and
doubtful. There are numerous words, the traditional rendering of which
is questionable; there are numerous others in the case of which it is
certainly wrong; and there is passage after passage in which the
translations of scholars vary from one another, sometimes even to
contradiction. Of both grammar and lexicon it may be said that we see
them through a glass darkly. Not unfrequently the reading of the
Septuagint—the earliest manuscript of which is six hundred years older
than the earliest manuscript of the Hebrew text—differs entirely from
the reading of the Hebrew; and there is a marked tendency among the
Hexateuchal analysts to prefer it, though the recently-discovered Hebrew
text of the book of Ecclesiasticus seems to show that the preference is
not altogether justified.
How, then, can a modern Western scholar analyse with even approximate
exactitude an ancient Hebrew work, and on the strength of the language
and style dissolve it once more into its component atoms? How can he
determine the relation of these atoms one to the other, or presume to
fix the dates to which they severally belong? The task would be
impossible even in the case of a modern English book, although English
is a spoken language with which we are all supposed to be thoroughly
acquainted, while its vast literature is familiar to us all. And yet
even where we know that a work is composite, it passes the power of man
to separate it into its elements and define the limits of each. No one,
for instance, would dream of attempting such a task in the case of the
novels of Besant and Rice; and the endeavour to distinguish in certain
plays of Shakespeare what belongs to the poet himself and what to
Fletcher has met with the oblivion it deserved. Is it likely that a
problem which cannot be solved in the case of an English book can be
solved where its difficulties are increased a thousandfold? The
minuteness and apparent precision of Hexateuchal criticism are simply
due, like that of the Ptolemaic theory, to the artificial character of
the basis on which it rests. It is, in fact, a philological mirage; it
attempts the impossible, and in place of the scientific method of
comparison, it gives us as a starting-point the assumptions and
arbitrary principles of a one-sided critic.[129]
Where philology has failed, archæology has come to our help. The needful
comparison of the Old Testament record with something else than itself
has been afforded by the discoveries which have been made of recent
years in Egypt and Babylonia and other parts of the ancient East. At
last we are able to call in the aid of the scientific method, and test
the age and character, the authenticity and trustworthiness of the Old
Testament history, by monuments about whose historical authority there
can be no question. And the result of the test has, on the whole, been
in favour of tradition, and against the doctrines of the newer critical
school. It has vindicated the antiquity and credibility of the
narratives of the Pentateuch; it has proved that the Mosaic age was a
highly literary one, and that consequently the marvel would be, not that
Moses should have written, but that he should not have done so; and it
has undermined the foundation on which the documentary hypothesis of the
origin of the Hexateuch has been built. We are still indeed only at the
beginning of discoveries; those made during the past year or two have
for the student of Genesis been exceptionally important; but enough has
now been gained to assure us that the historian may safely disregard the
philological theory of Hexateuchal criticism, and treat the books of the
Pentateuch from a wholly different point of view. They are a historical
record, and it is for the historian and archæologist, and not for the
grammarian, to determine their value and age.
The investigation of the literary sources of history has been a
peculiarly German pastime. Doubtless such an investigation has been
necessary. But it is exposed to the danger of trying to make bricks
without straw. More often than not the materials are wanting for
arriving at conclusions of solid scientific value. The results announced
in such cases are due partly to the critic’s own prepossessions and
postulates, partly to the imperfection of the evidence. It is easy to
doubt, still easier to deny, especially where the evidence is defective,
and the criticism of the literary sources of a narrative has sometimes
meant an unwarrantable and unintelligent scepticism. To reverse
traditional judgments, to reject external testimony, and to discover
half-a-dozen authors where antiquity knew of but one, may be a proof of
the critic’s ingenuity, but it does not always demonstrate his
appreciation of evidence.
Criticism of the literary sources of our historical knowledge is indeed
necessary, and a recognition of the fact has much to do with the advance
which has been made during the present century in the study of the past.
But it must not be forgotten that such criticism has its weak side.
Internal evidence alone is always unsatisfactory; it offers too much
scope for the play of the critic’s imagination and the impression of his
own idiosyncrasies upon the records of history. It resembles too much
the procedure of the spider who spins his web out of himself. It is
wanting in that element of comparison without which scientific truth is
unattainable. To determine the age and trustworthiness of our literary
authorities is doubtless of extreme importance to the historian, but
unfortunately the materials for doing so are too often absent, and the
fancies and assumptions of the critic are put in their place.
The trustworthiness of an author, like the reality of the facts he
narrates, can be adequately tested in only one way. We must be able to
compare his accounts of past events with other contemporaneous records
of them. Sometimes these records consist of pottery or other products of
human industry which anthropology is able to interpret; often they are
the far more important inscriptions which were written or engraved by
the actors in the events themselves. In other words, it is to archæology
that we must look for a verification or the reverse of the ancient
history that has been handed down to us as well as of the credibility of
its narrators. The written monuments of the ancient East which belong to
the same age as the patriarchs or Moses can alone assure us whether we
are to trust the narrative of the Pentateuch or to see in it a confused
medley of legends the late date of which makes belief in them
impossible.
As has been said above, Oriental archæology has already disclosed
sufficient to show us to which of these two alternatives we must lean.
On the one hand, much of the history contained in the book of Genesis
has been shown, directly or indirectly, to be authentic; on the other
hand, the new-fangled theory of the composition of the Hexateuch has
been decisively ruled out of court. Let us take the second point first.
In 1887 a large collection of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform
characters was found by the Egyptian fellahin among the ruins of the
ancient city now known as Tel el-Amarna, on the eastern bank of the
Nile, about midway between Minieh and Siût. The city had enjoyed but a
brief existence. Towards the close of the eighteenth dynasty, the
Pharaoh, Amenophis III., had died, leaving the throne to his son,
Amenophis IV., a mere lad, who was still under the influence of his
mother Teie. Teie was of Asiatic extraction, and fanatically devoted to
an Asiatic form of faith. This devotion was shared by her son, and soon
began to bear fruit. Amon of Thebes had to make way for a new deity, who
was worshipped under the visible form of the solar disk, and the old
religion of Egypt of which the Pharaoh was the official head was utterly
proscribed. It was not long before the Pharaoh and the powerful
hierarchy of Thebes were at open war; the very name of Amon was erased
from the monuments where it occurred, and the king changed his own name
to that of Khu-n-Aten, ‘the glory of the Solar Disk.’ But in the end,
Khu-n-Aten had to quit the capital of his fathers and establish himself
with his adherents and courtiers in a new city further north. This city,
Khut-Aten, as. it was called, is now represented by the mounds of Tel
el-Amarna.
Here the Pharaoh was surrounded by his followers, a large proportion of
whom were Asiatics, chiefly from Canaan. The court of Egypt, as well as
its religion, became Asiatised. The revolution in religion was also
accompanied by a revolution in art. The old hieratic canon of Egyptian
art was cast aside, and an excessive realism was aimed at, sometimes
even to the verge of caricature. In the centre of the new city a temple
was raised to the new divinity of Egypt, and hard by the temple rose the
palace of the king. Its ornamentation was surpassingly gorgeous. Its
walls and columns were inlaid with precious stones, with coloured glass
and gold; even its floors were painted with scenes from nature which are
of the highest artistic excellence, and statues were erected, some of
which remind us of the best work of classical Greece.[130]
But the glory of Khut-Aten was short-lived. The latter years of the
reign of its founder were clouded with religious and civil dissension.
Religious persecution at home had been followed by trouble and revolt
abroad in the Asiatic provinces of the Empire. When Khu-n-Aten died, his
enemies were already pressing around him, and the perils that threatened
him in Egypt obliged him to return no answer to the despairing appeals
for help that came to him from his governors in Palestine. Hardly had
the mummy of the king been deposited in the superb tomb that he had
carved out of a mountain amid the desolation and solitude of a distant
gorge, when the spoiler was at hand. The royal sarcophagus never reached
the niche in which it was intended to be placed; the enemies of the
‘Heretic King’ hacked to pieces its granite sides as it lay upon the
floor of the inner chamber, and scattered to the winds the remains of
its occupant. The destruction of Khut-Aten soon followed; one or two
princes of the family of Khu-n-Aten did indeed struggle for a brief
while to maintain themselves upon his throne, but before long Amon
triumphed over the Solar Disk. The great temple of Aten was razed to the
ground, and its stones carried away to serve as materials for the
sanctuaries of the victorious god of Thebes. The palace of Khu-n-Aten
was destroyed, the religion he had essayed to force upon his subjects
was forgotten, and the Asiatic officials who had filled his court were
driven into exile. The city he had built was deserted, never to be
inhabited again.
The clay tablets found by the fellahin were discovered on the site of
the Foreign Office of the ‘Heretic King,’ the bricks of which were each
stamped with the words ‘The Record Office of Aten-Ra.’[131] It adjoined
the palace, and we learn from a clay seal found among its ruins by
Professor Petrie that it was under the control of a Babylonian. This,
however, was not extraordinary, since the foreign correspondence of the
Pharaoh was carried on in the Babylonian language and the Babylonian
system of writing. In fact, the Tel el-Amarna tablets have shown that
the Western Asia conquered by the Egyptian kings of the eighteenth
dynasty was wholly under the domination of Babylonian culture. All over
the civilised Oriental world, from the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates
to those of the Nile, the common medium of literary and diplomatic
intercourse was the language and script of Chaldæa. Not only the writing
material, but all that was written upon it, was borrowed from Babylonia.
So powerful was this Babylonian influence, that the Egyptians themselves
were compelled to submit to it. In place of their own singular and less
cumbrous hieratic or cursive script, they had to communicate with their
Asiatic subjects and allies in the cuneiform characters and the
Babylonian tongue. Indeed, there is evidence that the memoranda made by
the official scribes of the Pharaoh’s court, at all events in Palestine,
were compiled in the same foreign speech and syllabary.[132] That the
Babylonian language and script were studied in Egypt itself we know from
the evidence of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. Among them have been found
fragments of dictionaries as well as Babylonian mythological tales. In
one of the latter certain of the words and phrases are separated from
one another in order to assist the learner.
The use of the Babylonian language and system of writing in Western Asia
must have been of considerable antiquity. This is proved by the fact
that the characters had gradually assumed peculiar forms in the
different countries in which they were employed, so that by merely
glancing at the form of the writing we can tell whether a tablet was
written in Palestine or in Northern Syria, in Cappadocia or Mesopotamia.
The knowledge of them, moreover, was not confined to the few. On the
contrary, education must have been widely spread; the Tel el-Amarna
correspondence was carried on, not only by professional scribes, but
also by officials, by soldiers, and by merchants. Even women appear
among the writers, and take part in the politics of the day. The
letters, too, are sometimes written about the most trivial matters, and
not unfrequently enter into the most unimportant details.
They were sent from all parts of the known civilised world. The kings of
Babylonia and Assyria, of Mesopotamia and Cappadocia, the Egyptian
governors of Syria and Canaan, even the chiefs of the Bedâwin tribes on
the Egyptian frontier, who were subsidised by the Pharaoh’s government
like the Afghan chiefs of to-day, all alike contributed to the
correspondence. Letters, in fact, must have been constantly passing to
and fro along the high-roads which intersected Western Asia. From one
end of it to the other the population was in perpetual literary
intercourse, proving that the Oriental world in the century before the
Exodus was as highly educated and literary as was Europe in the age of
the Renaissance. Nor was all this literary activity and intercourse a
new thing. Several of the letters had been sent to Amenophis III., the
father of the ‘Heretic King,’ and had been removed by the latter from
the archives of Thebes when he transferred his residence to his new
capital. And the literary intercourse which was carried on in the time
of Amenophis III. was merely a continuation of that which had been
carried on for centuries previously. The culture of Babylonia, like that
of Egypt, was essentially literary, and this culture had been spread
over Western Asia from a remote date. The letters of Khammu-rabi or
Amraphel to his vassal, the king of Larsa, have just been recovered, and
among the multitudinous contract-tablets of the same epoch are specimens
of commercial correspondence.
We have, however, only to consider for a moment what was meant by
learning the language and script of Babylonia in order to realise what a
highly-organised system of education must have prevailed throughout the
whole civilised world of the day. Not only had the Babylonian language
to be acquired, but some knowledge also of the older agglutinative
language of Chaldæa was also needed in order to understand the system of
writing. It was as if the schoolboy of to-day had to add a knowledge of
Greek to a knowledge of French. And the system of writing itself
involved years of hard and patient study. It consisted of a syllabary
containing hundreds of characters, each of which had not only several
different phonetic values, but several different ideographic
significations as well. Nor was this all. A group of characters might be
used ideographically to express a word the pronunciation of which had
nothing to do with the sounds of the individual characters of which it
was composed. The number of ideographs which had to be learned was thus
increased fivefold. And, unlike the hieroglyphs of Egypt, the forms of
these ideographs gave no assistance to the memory. They had long since
lost all resemblance to the pictures out of which they had originally
been developed, and consisted simply of various combinations of wedges
or lines. It was difficult enough for the Babylonian or Assyrian to
learn the syllabary; for a foreigner the task was almost herculean.
That it should have been undertaken implies the existence of libraries
and schools. One of the distinguishing features of Babylonian culture
were the libraries which existed in the great towns, and wherever
Babylonian culture was carried this feature of it must have gone too.
Hence in the libraries of Western Asia clay books inscribed with
cuneiform characters must have been stored up, while beside them must
have been the schools, where the pupils bent over their exercises and
the teachers instructed them in the language and script of the
foreigner. The world into which Moses was born was a world as literary
as our own.
If Western Asia were the home of a long-established literary culture,
Egypt was even more so. From time immemorial the land of the Pharaohs
had been a land of writers and readers. At a very early period the
hieroglyphic system of writing had been modified into a cursive hand,
the so-called hieratic; and as far back as the days of the third and
fifth dynasties famous books had been written, and the author of one of
them, Ptah-hotep, already deplores the degeneracy and literary decay of
his own time. The traveller up the Nile, who examines the cliffs that
line the river, cannot but be struck by the multitudinous names that are
scratched upon them. He is at times inclined to believe that every
Egyptian in ancient times knew how to write, and had little else to do
than to scribble a record of himself on the rocks. The impression is the
same that we derive from the small objects which are disinterred in such
thousands from the sites of the old cities. Wherever it is possible, an
inscription has been put upon them, which, it seems taken for granted,
could be read by all. Even the walls of the temples and tombs were
covered with written texts; wherever the Egyptian turned, or whatever
might be the object he used, it was difficult for him to avoid the sight
of the written word. Whoever was born in the land of Egypt was perforce
familiarised with the art of writing from the very days of his infancy.
Evidence is accumulating that the same literary culture which thus
prevailed in Egypt and Western Asia had extended also to the peninsula
of Arabia. Dr. Glaser and Professor Hommel, two of the foremost
authorities on the subject, believe that some of the inscriptions of
Southern Arabia go back to the age of the eighteenth and nineteenth
Egyptian dynasties; and if they are right, as they seem to be, in
holding that the kingdom of Ma’n or the Minæans preceded that of Saba or
Sheba, the antiquity of writing in Arabia must be great.[133] The fact
that the Babylonian dynasty to which Amraphel belonged was of South
Arabian origin supports the belief in the existence of Arabian culture
at an early period, as do also the latest researches into the source of
the so-called Phœnician alphabet. We now know that in the Mosaic age it
was the cuneiform syllabary, and not the Phœnician alphabet, that was
used in Canaan, while the oldest inscription in Phœnician letters yet
found is later than the reign of Solomon. On the other hand, the South
Arabian form of the alphabet contains letters which denote sounds once
possessed by all the Semitic languages, but lost by the language of
Canaan; and though some of these letters may be derived from other
letters of the alphabet, there are some which have an independent
origin. The caravan-road along which the spices of the South were
carried to Syria and Egypt passed through the territory of Edom;
inscriptions of the kings of Ma’n have already been discovered near
Teima, not far from the frontiers of Midian; and it may be that we shall
yet find records among the ranges of Mount Seir which will form a link
between the early texts of Southern Arabia and the oldest text that has
come from Phœnician soil.
The Exodus from Egypt, then, took place during a highly literary period,
and the people who took part in it passed from a country where the art
of writing literally stared them in the face to another country which
had been the centre of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence and the home of
Babylonian literary culture for unnumbered centuries. Is it conceivable
that their leader and reputed lawgiver should not have been able to
write, that he should not have been educated ‘in the wisdom of Egypt,’
or that the upper classes of his nation should not have been able to
read? Let it be granted that the Israelites were but a Bedâwin tribe
which had been reduced by the Pharaohs to the condition of public
slaves; still, they necessarily had leaders and overseers among them,
who, according to the State regulations of Egypt, were responsible to
the Government for the rest of their countrymen, and some at least of
these leaders and overseers would have been educated men. Moses could
have written the Pentateuch, even if he did not do so.
Moreover, the clay tablets on which the past history of Canaan could be
read were preserved in the libraries and archive-chambers of the
Canaanitish cities down to the time when the latter were destroyed. If
any doubt had existed on the subject after the revelations of the Tel
el-Amarna tablets, it has been set at rest by the discovery of a similar
tablet on the site of Lachish. In some cases the cities were not
destroyed, so far as we know, until the period when it is allowed that
the Israelites had ceased to be illiterate. Gezer, for example, which
plays a leading part in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, does not seem
to have fallen into the hands of an enemy until it was captured by the
Egyptian Pharaoh and handed over to his son-in-law Solomon. As long as a
knowledge of the cuneiform script continued, the early records of Canaan
were thus accessible to the historian, many of them being
contemporaneous with the events to which they referred.
A single archæological discovery has thus destroyed the base of
operations from which a one-sided criticism of Old Testament history had
started. The really strong point in favour of it was the assumption that
the Mosaic age was illiterate. Just as Wolf founded his criticism and
analysis of the Homeric Hymns on the belief that the use of writing for
literary purposes was of late date in Greece, so the belief that the
Israelites of the time of Moses could not read or write was the ultimate
foundation on which the modern theory of the composition of the
Hexateuch has been based. Whether avowed or not, it was the true
starting-point of critical scepticism, the one solid foundation on which
it seemed to rest. The destruction of the foundation endangers the
structure which has been built upon it.
In fact, it wholly alters the position of the modern critical theory.
The _onus probandi_ no longer lies on the shoulders of the defenders of
traditional views. Instead of being called upon to prove that Moses
could have written a book, it is they who have to call on the disciples
of the modern theory to show reason why he should not have done so. And
it is always difficult to prove a negative.
It may be said that the positive arguments of the modern hypothesis
remain as they were. That is possible, but their background is gone. And
how conscious the Hexateuchal analysts were of the importance of this
background, before the discovery of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, may be
seen from their desperate efforts to rid themselves of the counter
evidence afforded by the Song of Deborah. ‘Out of Machir,’ it is there
said (Judg. v. 14), ‘came down lawgivers, and out of Zebulun they that
handle the stylus of the scribe.’ In defiance of philology, the latter
words were translated ‘the baton of the marshal’! But _sopher_ is
‘scribe’ here, as elsewhere in Hebrew; and his _shebhet_, or ‘stylus,’
is often depicted on the Egyptian monuments. In the Blessing of Jacob,
which is allowed to be of early date, like the Song of Deborah, the
_shebhet_ is associated with the _m’khoqêq_ or ‘lawgiver’ (Gen. xlix.
10). The word _m’khoqêq_, however, meant literally an ‘engraver,’ one
who did not write his laws on papyrus or parchment, as the scribe would
have done, but caused them to be engraved on stone, or metal, or
clay.[134] In either case they were written down; and written documents
are thus implied not only in the expression ‘the stylus of the scribe,’
but in the word ‘lawgiver’ as well. The Song of Deborah, by general
consent, belongs to the oldest period of the Hebrew settlement in
Palestine; it belongs also to an age of anarchy and national depression;
and, nevertheless, it is already acquainted with Israelitish lawgivers
and scribes, with engravers of the laws and handlers of the pen. It is
little wonder that its evidence was explained away in accordance with a
method which is neither scientific nor historical.
As historians, we are bound to admit the antiquity of writing in Israel.
The scribe goes back to the Mosaic age, like the lawgiver, and in this
respect, therefore, the Israelites formed no exception to the nations
among whom they lived. They were no islet of illiterate barbarism in the
midst of a great sea of literary culture and activity, nor were they
obstinately asleep while all about them were writing and reading.