In the geography of the Old Testament, however, Mount Sinai was in Edom.

This is expressly stated in the Song of Deborah, one of the oldest

products of Hebrew literature. Here we read (Judg. v. 4, 5), ‘Lord, when

Thou wentest out of Seir, when Thou marchedst out of the field of Edom,

the earth trembled, and the heavens dropped, the clouds also dropped

water. The mountains melted from before the Lord, even that Sinai from

before the Lord God of Israel.’ Similar testimony is borne by the

blessing of Moses (Deut. xxxiii. 2), ‘The Lord came from Sinai, and rose

up from Seir unto them; He shined forth from the Mount of Paran,’ an

expression which appears in another form in Habakkuk (iii. 3), ‘God came

from Teman, and the Holy One from the Mount of Paran.’ Teman denoted

Southern Edom, and Paran was the desert which adjoined Edom on the west

and Judah on the south, and in whose midst was the sanctuary of

Kadesh-barnea.[194] In the Blessing of Moses the parallelism of Hebrew

poetry requires that Sinai and Seir should be equivalent terms.

We must, then, look to the frontiers of Edom and the desert of Paran for

the real Sinai of Hebrew history. But it is useless to seek for a more

exact localisation until the mountains of Seir and the old kingdom of

Edom have been explored. Then, if ever, the Sinai of the Pentateuch may

be discovered. It would seem that it formed part of a range that was

known as ‘Horeb,’ the ‘desert’ mountains, and as late as the age of

Elijah it was still reverenced as ‘the Mount of God’ (1 Kings xix.

8).[195]

Before the Israelites actually reached the sacred mountain, they had to

make more than one encampment in ‘the Wilderness of Sin.’ The itinerary

in the book of Numbers gives the names of three—Dophkah, Alush, and

Rephidim—the narrative mentions only the last. Rephidim, the

‘Encampments,’ was the scene of the first conflict the Israelites were

called upon to face. Here they were attacked by the Amalekites, the

Bedâwin tribes who still consider the desert as their own, and whose

hand is against all that pass through it. The attack was repulsed, but

not without loss, and the remembrance of it never faded from the minds

of the Hebrew people. There was henceforth to be war between Amalek and

Israel ‘from generation to generation,’ until the Bedâwin marauders of

the desert should be destroyed. The Song of Deborah (Judg. v. 14) tells

us how the struggle was continued after the settlement in Canaan, and

the first Israelitish king did his utmost to root out these pests of the

Hebrew borderland. Saul smote them, it is said, from Havilah to Shur (1

Sam. xv. 7), from the ‘sandy’ desert of Arabia Petræa to the great Wall

of Egypt. And the Hebrew writer expressly adds that these were the same

Amalekites as those who had lain in wait for Israel ‘in the way when he

came up from Egypt.’ There were no Amalekites in the Sinaitic peninsula;

the desert in which they ranged was that which adjoined Edom, and was

known to the ancient Babylonians as the ‘land of Melukhkha.’ Hence it

was that Edomites and Amalekites were mingled together, and that Amalek

was counted by the genealogists a grandson of Esau.

The battle at Rephidim was followed by the visit of the father-in-law of

Moses, Jethro, ‘the priest of Midian.’ The visit was natural, for the

real Sinai lay on the frontier of Midian. It was while Moses was feeding

the flock of Jethro that he had first come to it and received his

commission from Yahveh. Here, therefore, at ‘the Mount of God,’ he was

within hail of his old home.

Jethro’s visit marked the first step in the organisation of Israel.

Under his guidance and counsel judges of various grades were appointed

before whom minor cases could be brought, and each of whom was invested

with a certain amount of power. The functions of the ‘judge’ were

administrative and executive as well as legal; what was meant by the

term we may learn from the book of Judges as well as from the Shophetim

or judges who at one time took the place of the kings at Tyre. They

corresponded closely with the higher officials in the Turkish provinces,

who possess an undefined and in some respects absolute authority,

subject only to the official who is immediately above them. The ‘judges’

established by Moses on Jethro’s advice derived their titles from the

numerical extent of their jurisdiction. They were judges ‘of thousands,’

‘of hundreds,’ ‘of fifties,’ and ‘of tens.’ The community was divided

into ideal units, of larger and smaller size, the basis of the

arrangement being the decimal system. The whole arrangement may have

been of Midianite origin; at all events, in the Assyrian texts we hear

also of a ‘captain of fifty’ and a ‘captain of ten.’[196]

Moses remained the supreme ‘judge’ and lawgiver of his people. To him

alone all ‘great matters’ were referred, and from him came all the laws

and ordinances, the rules and regulations which they were called upon to

obey. The leader who had brought them safely out of ‘the house of

bondage’ now became their recognised head and legislator. Moses ‘was

king in Jeshurun,’ exercising all the authority in Israel which in later

times belonged to the king.

Hardly was the political organisation of the new community completed

before the Israelitish tribes reached the venerated sanctuary of Sinai,

and encamped before ‘the Mount of God.’ The first object of their

journey was accomplished, and the promise of Yahveh was fulfilled that

they should ‘serve God’ on the mountain where He had appeared to their

leader. Here at Sinai the earlier portion of the Mosaic legislation was

promulgated. It was subsequently supplemented by the legislation at

Kadesh-Barnea, that second resting-place of the tribes, where by the

side of En-Mishpat, ‘the Spring of Judgment,’ they prepared themselves

in the security of the heart of the desert for the future invasion of

Canaan.

It was amid the terrors of a thunderstorm that Yahveh declared His laws

to the people of Israel. While darkness rested on the summit of the

mountain, broken only by the flashes of the lightning and the voice of

the thunder, ‘the Ten Words’ were delivered to man. In their forefront

stood that stern, uncompromising declaration of monotheism which

henceforth marked the religion of Israel. They began with the

commandment that Israel should have ‘no other gods before’ the Lord.

Yahveh had brought them forth from Egypt, and Yahveh only must they

therefore serve. The commands which followed were partly general, partly

applicable to the Israelites alone. The prohibition to make ‘the

likeness of any thing in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in

the water under the earth,’ defined the character of the God before whom

no other was to be worshipped. He had no form or attributes which could

be represented by art; it was the gods of the Gentiles only of whom

images or pictures could be made. Egypt had been a land of idols, and in

leaving Egypt Yahveh required that the idols also should be left behind.

In the simple life of the desert there was no place for art: here man

was alone with his Creator, who revealed Himself in the light of the

burning bush or the thunderings of the storm, not under the forms of the

creatures He had made. The second commandment was part of the teaching

which the wanderings in the desert were intended to enforce; and if

Israel was to remain a ‘peculiar people,’ dedicated to the service of

Yahveh, and secure from absorption into the nations that surrounded it,

it was necessary that it should be fenced about with a law of

puritanical strictness, which forbade the introduction of art under any

shape. Art in the world of the Exodus was too closely interwoven with

the religions of Egypt and Canaan and Babylonia to be other than a

forbidden thing. The subsequent history of Israel proved how wise and

needful had been the prohibition. The art which adorned the temple and

palace of Solomon was followed by the erection of altars to the

divinities of the heathen, and even in the wilderness the golden calf

was worshipped in sight of Sinai itself.

The third and fourth commandments were, like the second, Israelitish

rather than general in character. The third forbade taking in vain the

name of Yahveh; the name of the national God of Israel which had been so

specially revealed was too sacred to be lightly spoken of. The ‘name’ of

Yahveh, in fact, was equivalent to Yahveh Himself, and to deal lightly

with the name was to deal lightly with One of whose essence it was. The

obligation to keep the Sabbath was part of the culture which Western

Asia had received from Babylonia. Among the Babylonians the Sabbath had

been observed from early times, and the institution seems to have gone

back to a pre-Semitic period. At all events, it was denoted in Sumerian

by a term which a cuneiform tablet explains as ‘a day of rest for the

heart,’ and its Assyrian name of Sabattu or ‘Sabbath’ was even derived

by the native etymologists from the two Sumerian words _sa_, ‘a heart,’

and _bat_, ‘to rest.’[197] In Babylonia and Assyria, as in Israel, the

Sabbath was observed every seventh day, perhaps in accordance with the

astronomical system which dedicated the seven days of the week to the

seven planets of Babylonian science. These seven-day weeks, however,

were based on the lunar months of the Babylonian year, the Sabbath or

rest-day being on the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th of each month. There

was, moreover, another Sabbath on the 19th of the month, that being the

end of the seventh week from the first day of the preceding month. On

these Sabbath days work of all kinds was forbidden to be performed. The

king, it was laid down, ‘must not eat flesh that has been cooked over

the coals or in the smoke, must not change the garments of his body,

must not wear white clothing, must not offer sacrifices, must not ride

in a chariot, must not issue royal decrees.’ Even the diviner was not

allowed to ‘mutter incantations in a secret place.’ Nor was it permitted

to take medicine.

With the other elements of Babylonian culture the institution of the

Sabbath had made its way to the West. But at Sinai it was given a new

and special application. Not only was it to be observed each seventh day

of the week, irrespective of the beginning of the month, it became also

a sign and mark of the covenant between Israel and its national God. In

the book of Exodus, it is true, the reason given for keeping it is that

Yahveh had rested on the seventh day from His work of creation—a reason

which will hardly be accepted by the geologist—but in Deuteronomy (v.

15) it is more fittingly brought into direct connection with the

deliverance from Egypt: ‘Remember that thou wast a servant in the land

of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a

mighty hand and by a stretched out arm: therefore the Lord thy God

commanded thee to keep the Sabbath day.’

The sanction of the fifth commandment is also one which applied to

Israel alone: children were enjoined to honour their parents that their

days might be long in the land which Yahveh had promised to give them.

But the last five commandments are of general application, and

accordingly no reason is given for keeping them derived from the

accidents of Hebrew history. They apply to all mankind, at all times and

in all parts of the world. Murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and

covetousness are all crimes forbidden everywhere by the legal or moral

code. But it is strange that lying and deceit are not included among

them; in this respect the so-called negative confession, which the soul

of the dead Egyptian was called upon to make in the next world, was more

complete.[198] The lie, however, which does not involve false witness is

apt to be condoned among the nations of the East.

The ten commandments were followed by a series of other laws, many of

which were probably re-enactments of laws or regulations already in

force. The law of retaliation, for instance (Exod. xxi. 23-25), is as

old as human society; so also is the law that murder should be punished

by death (xxi. 12). The law which punished the master for the murder of

a slave if he died on the spot, but allowed him to go scot-free if the

slave lingered for a day or two (xxi. 20, 21), had its parallel in

ancient Babylonia, and the death-penalty exacted from the ox which had

gored a man (xxi. 28-32) is a survival from the days when dumb animals

and even inanimate objects were regarded as responsible for the injuries

they had caused.[199] The regulations in regard to ‘a field or

vineyard,’ or ‘the standing corn’ of a field (xxii. 5, 6), belonged to

the land of Goshen or to Canaan, not to the life in the wilderness, and

the dedication of the firstborn to God (xxii. 29, 30) was one of the

most ancient articles of Semitic faith.

Equally applicable to Egypt or Canaan only are the injunctions to let

the land lie fallow every seventh year (xxiii. 11), and to celebrate the

three great feasts of the year (xxiii. 14-19). They were all feasts of

the agriculturist rather than of the pastoral nomad. The year was

ushered in with the spring festival of unleavened bread; then in the

summer came the feast of harvest, and finally in the autumn—‘the end’ of

the old civil year—the feast of the ingathering of the fruits.

Such were some of the laws promulgated under the shadow of the sacred

mountain, when Israel first encamped before Mount Sinai. They concluded

with an exhortation to march against Canaan. Yahveh declared that He

would send His Angel before His people to guide them in their way, like

the _sukkalli_ or ‘angels’ of the Babylonian gods. Yahveh would fight

for them, and they should drive out the older inhabitants of the land

and take their place. They were in no wise to mingle with them or

worship their gods; like the idolaters themselves, the idols they adored

were to be destroyed. ‘From the Yâm Sûph to the sea of the Philistines

and from the desert to the river’ were to be the bounds of their new

home, a promise which was fulfilled in the kingdom of David.[200] That,

too, extended to ‘the river’ Euphrates, and included the land of Edom

with its two ports on the Yâm Sûph. ‘The sea of the Philistines’ is a

new name for the Mediterranean, and bears testimony to the maritime fame

those pirates from the north had already acquired.[201]

The laws thus promulgated at Sinai became the first code of Israel. They

rested on the covenant that had been made between Yahveh and His people,

of which the first clause was that they should worship none other gods

but Him. The book in which they were written by Moses was accordingly

called the Book of the Covenant, and its words were read aloud to the

assembled multitude (Exod. xxiv. 7). The audience, it must be

remembered, included not the Israelites only, but the ‘mixed multitude’

as well (Numb. xi. 4).

Once more Moses ascended the sacred mountain, to learn the ‘pattern’ of

the tabernacle in which Yahveh was henceforth to be worshipped. It was

to be a tent, moving along with the people, and containing all the

objects of Israelitish veneration. Chief among these was the ark of the

Covenant, surmounted by the mercy-seat and its two cherubim, between

which Yahveh sat enthroned when He revealed Himself to His worshippers.

Babylonia also had its arks, its mercy-seats, and its cherubim, and

Nebuchadrezzar speaks of ‘the seat of the oracles’ in the great temple

of Babylon ‘whereon at the festival of Zagmuku, the beginning of the

year, on the 8th and 11th days, Bel, the god, seats himself, while the

gods of heaven and earth reverently regard him, standing before him with

bowed heads.’[202] The cherubim, indeed, were of Babylonian origin, and

their presence in the tabernacle seems somewhat inconsistent with the

prohibition to make a carven image. But the Israelites were the heirs of

the ancient culture of Western Asia, and the tabernacle and its

furniture embodied familiar forms of architecture and older religious

conceptions.

In Egypt, too, the gods had their shrines, though these were usually

boats which on the days of festival floated over the sacred lakes. Arks,

however, were not unknown, and, as in Babylonia, contained the images of

the gods. Sometimes, however, in Babylonia and Assyria, the ark, like

that of Israel, had no image within it: the stone coffer, for instance,

found by Mr. Hormuzd Rassam in the inner sanctuary of the little temple

of Balawât contained two tables of alabaster on which the annals of king

Assur-nazir-pal were engraved. The native workmen who discovered them

naturally saw in them the two tables of stone which had been similarly

placed by Moses in the ark (Deut. x. 5).[203]

The parallelism between the temples and ritual of Israel and of

Babylonia is indeed close. The temple itself was of the same square or

rectangular form. Outwardly it presented the appearance of a huge box.

Within were the forecourt and court, while at the back came the Holy of

Holies, with its altar and ark. There was, however, one distinguishing

feature in the Babylonian temple which was lacking in the Hebrew

tabernacle. That was the great tower which mounted up towards heaven,

and the topmost stage of which seemed to approach the gods. In the

absence of a tower the Hebrew tabernacle agreed with the temples of

Canaan.

The Israelitish altars found their counterpart in Babylonia. So, too,

did the table of shewbread, which similarly stood in the sanctuaries of

the Chaldæan deities. The sacrifices and offerings were also similar.

Babylonia had its daily sacrifice. its ‘meal-offering,’ and its

offerings for sin; the same animals that were sacrificed to Yahveh were

sacrificed also to Bel; and the Babylonian worshipper sought the favour

of his gods with the same birds and the same fruits of the field. Oil,

moreover, was used for purposes of anointing, and herein the ritual of

Babylonia and Israel differed from that of Egypt, where oil was not

employed.[204]

The contrast between Egypt and Israel, indeed, in the details of

religious service was as great as the agreement in this respect between

Israel and Babylonia. The children of Israel had never forgotten their

Asiatic origin; throughout their long sojourn in Goshen they had

preserved their old culture and habits of thought as tenaciously as they

had preserved their language. Between them and the Egyptians, on the

contrary, there had been antagonism from the outset. And this antagonism

was accentuated by their lawgiver, who was naturally anxious to turn

their thoughts from ‘the fleshpots of Egypt,’ and to prevent them from

lapsing into Egyptian idolatries. Even the Egyptian legend of the Exodus

bears witness to this fact.

In one detail, however, we find an analogy in Egypt. Professor

Hommel[205] has pointed out that the breastplate of the high-priest, the

mysterious Urim and Thummim, with its twelve engraved stones, is

pictured on the breast of an Egyptian priest. Thus Seker-Khâbau, a

high-priest of Memphis in the age of the nineteenth dynasty, wears upon

his breast a sort of double network with four rows of precious stones

set in it, each row consisting of three stones, alternately in the form

of crosses and disks.[206] The Hebrew breastplate was used as an oracle,

like the linen ephod which was worn under it, though how the future was

divined from it we do not know. But in moments of danger it was usual to

consult it; and the fact that ‘when Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord

answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets,’ is

brought forward as a proof that he had been forsaken by his God (1 Sam.

xxviii. 6). Like the lawgiver himself, it was the mouthpiece of Yahveh,

and as such it bore the name of ‘the breastplate of judgment.’

The architects of the tabernacle and its adornment in precious metals

were Bezaleel of Judah and Aholiab of Dan.[207] Modern criticism would

hold them to be part of an elaborate fiction, of which the tabernacle

was the subject. But the fiction would be too elaborate, too detailed,

to be conceivable. Moreover, we have references to the tabernacle or

‘tent of meeting’ in the later history of Israel; and to declare these

to be interpolations or the products of the same pen as that which

invented the tabernacle itself may be an easy way of saving a theory,

but it is not scientific. How far the description of the tabernacle is

exact, how far it has not been coloured by the conceptions of a later

age, is, of course, a question that may be asked. Those who maintain

that the Pentateuch goes back in substance to the Mosaic age must

nevertheless allow that it has undergone many changes and modifications

before assuming its present shape. But, except in rare instances, it is

impossible to indicate these changes with the assurance that the

historian demands, and we must therefore be content with the probability

that in the description of the tabernacle we have the revised version of

an old story.

It has been asked how the materials used in the construction of the

tabernacle could have been obtained in the desert, from whence came the

silver and gold, the bronze and precious stones, the rich embroideries

and cloths stained with Tyrian dye? Those who ask such questions have

forgotten that the Israelites were not wild Bedâwin, and that they were

laden with the spoils of Egypt. Like the invading hosts who attacked

Egypt in the reign of Ramses III., they carried with them in their

retreat the treasures of their late masters. And we are specially told

that the gold was obtained from the bracelets and earrings and rings

which were offered by the people and melted down.

It was during the second absence of Moses, when the conception and form

of the tabernacle were being revealed to his mental vision, that his

followers showed how little they understood the spirit and character of

the legislation he was endeavouring to give them. They believed he had

deserted them, and with his departure his religious teaching departed

also. Israelitish religion was no slow growth: like Zoroastrianism or

Buddhism or Christianity itself, it implies an individual founder who

gave it the impress of his own individuality. Modern theories which

attempt to explain it as a process of evolution start with a false

assumption, and arrive consequently at false conclusions. None of the

great religions of the world has been a product of evolution except in

an indirect sense; they are all stamped with individualism, and owe

their existence to the genius or inspiration of an individual. The

religions of Babylonia and Egypt, as far as we know, were the results of

a slow development; but Mosaism and Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and

Christianity derived not only their names, but their essence also from

the individual founders who created them. We cannot understand the

religion of Israel without the Law in its background, and we cannot

understand the Law without the personality of its lawgiver.

The declaration that Israel should serve no other gods before Yahveh

stood or fell with Moses, to whom Yahveh had revealed Himself. And Moses

seemed to have vanished among the clouds that enveloped the summit of

the sacred mountain. Their leader and his God had deserted them, and the

people required another. Aaron the priest was ready to take the place of

the lost lawgiver, and to provide them with a new deity and a new faith.

And, after all, it was but an ancient faith, the faith of the kindred

nations that surrounded them, their own faith, moreover, in the days

before the Exodus. A calf was fashioned out of their golden earrings,

and in it both priest and people beheld the god who had brought them out

of Egypt. Aaron proclaimed a feast in honour of the divinity whose

worship was celebrated with the same shameless rites as those which

characterised the cult of the Semitic populations of Babylonia, of

Canaan, and of Arabia.

But in the midst of the festival Moses suddenly reappeared. The sons of

Levi rallied round their tribesman, and fell with him upon the rebels

against his laws. Some of the latter were slain, the rest were

terrorised, and the golden calf was ground to powder.[208] Aaron was

forgiven, perhaps because he too had gone over to the side of Moses,

perhaps because he was too powerful or too necessary to be removed.[209]

But in his wrath at the defection of his people Moses had dashed to the

ground the two stone tables on which the words of God had been written,

and it was needful that they should be replaced. Once more, therefore,

Moses left the camp and sought solitary communion with Yahveh on the

summit of Sinai. Two fresh tables of stone were hewn, and with these he

ascended the mountain.

We must not picture to ourselves heavy stelæ of stone such as the kings

and princes of Egypt delighted to set up in their tombs and temples, or

the ‘great slab’ which Isaiah was bidden to engrave (Isa. viii. 1). They

were rather like the small alabaster slabs found in the ark of the

Assyrian temple at Balawât, which measure only twelve and a half inches

in length by eight in width and two and a half inches in thickness, and

nevertheless contain a long and valuable text. They were, in fact, stone

tablets cut in imitation of the clay tablets which served as books in

the Asiatic world of the Exodus, and, like the latter, were probably

inscribed with cuneiform characters. That these characters were used for

‘the language of Canaan’ we know from the existence of two seals of the

age of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, now in the possession of M. de

Clercq, which record the names of two Sidonians.[210] It is probable

that the first draft of the Ten Commandments was also in the cuneiform

script.

The book of Exodus ends fitly with the conclusion of the legislation

which was promulgated from Mount Sinai and with the building of the

tabernacle. Henceforward Yahveh was to reveal Himself to His people, not

amid the clouds of a mountain in the wilderness, but in the sanctuary

which they had raised in His honour. The first stage in the education of

Israel had been completed; the Israelites had become a nation with a

national God and a national sanctuary. Henceforth the sanctuary was to

be the centre of their religious faith, the place where the law and

judgment of God were to be declared, and to which the tribes were to

resort that they might ask counsel from Him. The tabernacle, nomad

though it still was, like the tribes themselves, had taken the place of

‘the mount of God,’ and with the legislation of Leviticus a new book of

the Pentateuch begins.

We are not to suppose that this legislation has descended to us from the

age of Moses without addition and change. Such a belief would be

contrary to the history of other religious law-books, or indeed to

historical probability. As the utterances of the Hebrew prophets were

modified or enlarged according to the circumstances of the successive

ages to which they were applied, so too the Mosaic legislation must have

undergone revision and enlargement. Laws and regulations which suited

the life in the desert needed adaptation to the changed conditions of

life in Canaan; tribes fresh from their servitude in Egypt required

different guidance from that required by a nation of conquerors; and the

details of a legislation which was adapted to the period of Moses would

have been wholly unsuited to the period of the Judges, and still more to

the period of the Kings. So far as the change and modifications are

concerned, which all institutions in this world must necessarily

undergo, the Mosaic legislation was a matter of growth. But it was the

form and details that changed, not the substance of the legislation. The

spirit and conceptions of the legislator had imprinted themselves too

indelibly upon it ever to be obliterated. The reiteration of the same

law in various forms, and the confused arrangement of many of them, may

indeed show that later hands have been at work, but in essence and

origin they remain his. The book of Leviticus, modernised though it may

be, nevertheless goes back to the age of Moses.

Even in the age of Moses many of its regulations were not new. We find

their parallels in Babylonia and Canaan, and they had doubtless long

been among the unwritten institutions of Israel. But Moses gave them a

new sanction and a new adaptation. The Israelites must have had priests

like the nations round about them; but it was Moses who defined the

priestly character of the sons of Aaron, and consecrated his own tribe

to the service of Yahveh. If Yahveh was the national God of Israel, He

was also in a special way the tribal God of Levi.

We still know too little about the details of Babylonian ritual to be

able to compare it with the religious institutions of Israel. We know,

however, that the peace-offerings and trespass-offerings of the Mosaic

Law were represented in it, that even the heave-offerings found in it

their counterpart, and that solemn fasts and days of atonement were

observed in Babylonia and Assyria as well as among the Israelites. In

Babylonia, too, a distinction was made between clean and unclean

animals, and, as in Israel (Lev. xxi. 17-23), none who was maimed or

diseased was allowed to minister to the gods. Purification with water,

moreover, played much the same part in Babylonian ritual that it played

in the ritual of the Israelites, and tithes were exacted for the support

of the service in the temples.

Similar regulations prevailed in Canaan, as we may learn from the

Phœnician sacrificial tariffs found at Carthage and Marseilles. Both are

mutilated, but the missing portions of the one can to a large extent be

supplied from the other. The text thus obtained is as follows:—

‘In the temple of Baal the following tariff of offerings shall be

observed which was prescribed in the time of the judge ...-Baal, the son

of Bod-Tanit, the son of Bod-Ashmun, and in the time of Halzi-Baal, the

judge, the son of Bod-Ashmun the son of Halzi-Baal, and their comrades.

For an ox as a full-offering, whether it be a prayer-offering or a full

thank-offering, the priests shall receive ten shekels of silver for each

beast, and if it be a full-offering, the priests shall receive besides

this three hundred shekels’ weight of flesh. And for a prayer-offering

they shall receive besides the small joints (?) and the roast (?), but

the skin and the haunches and the feet and the rest of the flesh shall

belong to the offerer. For a bullock which has horns, but is not yet

broken in and made to serve, or for a ram, as a full-offering, whether

it be a prayer-offering or a full thank-offering, the priests shall

receive five shekels of silver for each beast, and if it be a

full-offering they shall receive besides this one hundred and fifty

shekels’ weight of flesh; and for a prayer-offering the small joints (?)

and the roast, but the skin and the haunches and the feet and the rest

of the flesh shall belong to the offerer. For a sheep or a goat as a

full-offering, whether it be a prayer-offering or a full thank-offering,

the priests shall receive one shekel of silver and two _zar_ for each

beast; and in the case of a prayer-offering they shall have besides this

the small joints (?) and the roast (?), but the skin and the haunches

and the feet and the rest of the flesh shall belong to the offerer. For

a lamb or a kid or a fawn as a full-offering, whether it be a

prayer-offering or a full thank-offering, the priests shall receive

three-fourths of a shekel of silver and two _zar_ for each beast; and in

the case of a prayer-offering they shall have besides this the small

joints (?) and the roast (?), but the skin and the haunches and the feet

and the rest of the flesh shall belong to the offerer. For a bird,

whether wild or tame, as a full-offering, whether it be _shetseph_ or

_khazuth_, the priests shall receive three-fourths of a shekel of silver

and two _zar_ for each bird, and [a certain amount of flesh besides].

For a bird, or for the offering of the firstborn of an animal, or for a

meal-offering, or for an offering with oil, the priests shall receive

ten pieces of gold for each.... In the case of every prayer-offering

which is offered to the gods, the priests shall receive the small joints

(?) and the roast (?); and the prayer-offering ... for a cake and for

milk and for fat, and for every offering which is offered without

blood.... For every offering which is brought by a poor man in cattle or

birds, the priests shall receive nothing.... Anything leprous or scabby

or lean is forbidden, and no one as regards that which he offers shall

taste of the blood of the dead. The tariff for each offering shall be

according to that which is prescribed in this publication.... As for

every offering which is not prescribed in this table, and which is not

made according to the regulations which have been published in the time

of ...-Baal the son of Bod-Tanit, and of Bod-Ashmun the son of

Halzi-Baal, and of their comrades, every priest who accepts the offering

which is not included in that which is prescribed in this table shall be

punished.... As for the property of the offerer who does not discharge

his debt for his offering [it shall be taken from him].’[211]

The general resemblances between these regulations and those of the

Levitical law are obvious. In both we have the same kind of sacrifices

and offerings—the ox, the sheep and the goat, the lamb and kid, birds

and cakes, meal and oil. Silver shekels were to be paid to the priests,

like the silver shekels of the sanctuary exacted in certain cases from

the Israelite (Lev. v. 15, xxvii. 25), and the blood and the fat were to

be offered to the gods. The necessities of the poor man were remembered

as they were in the Levitical law (Lev. v. 7, xii. 8, xiv. 21), and

whatever was ‘leprous or scabby or lean’ was forbidden to be brought to

the altar. The firstborn could be claimed by Baal as they were claimed

by Yahveh, and the offerer was not permitted to taste of the blood of

the slain beast (compare Lev. vii. 26, 27). The ‘full-offerings’ of the

Phœnician tariffs mean that the whole of the victim had been given to

the gods, and so correspond with the burnt sacrifices of the Mosaic

Code. It is unfortunate that we cannot fix with certainty the exact

signification of the words denoting the parts of the animal which were

the due of the priests, and consequently cannot be sure whether or not

they answer to the breast and shoulder of the peace-offering, which

under the Levitical legislation were assigned to the sons of Aaron (Lev.

vii. 33, 34).

It is true that the tariffs of Carthage and Marseilles belong to a late

period. But they embody regulations and usages which were common to the

Semitic world of Western Asia, as we may gather from a comparison of

them with the ritual of Babylonia, and which therefore must have been—at

least in substance—of great antiquity. Two conclusions result from this

fact. On the one hand the Levitical legislation cannot have been the

invention of the Exilic age, as some adventurous critics have believed;

on the other hand, it is based on customs and ideas which must have been

prevalent in Israel long before the birth of Moses. The Hebrew

legislator did but develop, modify, and define existing rites; the

Levitical Code is not a new creation, but a body of religious and ritual

laws which has been formed deliberately and with individual effort out

of older customs and habits of thought. Doubtless there are laws and

regulations which were the immediate creation of the lawgiver; from time

to time new cases arose for which special legislation was needed, and of

which the cases of Nadab and Abihu (Lev. x. 1-3), of the son of

Shelomith and the Egyptian (Lev. xxiv. 10-16), and of the daughters of

Zelophehad (Numb. xxvii. 1-11) are examples. To assume that such cases

originated in the laws which they illustrated, and not the reverse, is a

gratuitous supposition which is contradicted by the history of modern

European law.[212]

Whether the Day of Atonement, the Feast of Trumpets on the first of each

seventh month and the Year of Jubilee were also new creations of the

lawgiver, may be questioned. The special legislation connected with

them, as well as their association with the Exodus out of Egypt, was

certainly peculiar to the Levitical code, but the same is true of the

three older feasts of the Semitic calendar. These too were made to

illustrate the events of Israelitish history, and new regulations were

laid down for their observance. The Day of Atonement, however, had its

counterpart in Babylonia and Assyria. There also in periods of danger or

distress, days of humiliation and fasting were prescribed, and prayers

and offerings were made to the gods that they might forgive the sins of

the people. When at the beginning of Esar-haddon’s reign Assyria was

threatened by the Kimmerian invasion, ‘religious ordinances and holy

days’ were proclaimed by the priests for ‘a hundred days and a hundred

nights,’ and the sun-god was besought to remove the sin of his

worshippers.[213] So, again, after the suppression of the Babylonian

revolt, Assur-bani-pal tells us that ‘by the command of the prophets I

purified their sanctuaries and cleaned their streets which had been

defiled. Their wrathful gods and angry goddesses I tranquillised with

prayers and penitential hymns. Their daily sacrifice, which had been

discontinued, I restored in peace and established again as it had been

before.’ The Feast of Trumpets reminds us that in Babylonia the first

day of each month was kept as a Sabbath, and the Babylonian analogy is

still more manifest in the case of the Feast of Pentecost, on ‘the

morrow after the seventh Sabbath,’ after the offering of the

firstfruits. This ‘seventh Sabbath’ is the Babylonian Sabbath, on the

19th of the month, forty-nine days after the first Sabbath of the

preceding month. The Year of Jubilee was a Babylonian institution of

exceeding antiquity. We learn from classical writers[214] that once each

year in the month of July the feast of Sakea was held at Babylon, when

the slave changed places with his master, and for five days lived and

was clothed as a free man. We can now carry the history of the

institution back to the age of the third dynasty of Ur. Gudea, the

high-priest of Lagas, B.C. 2700, states in his inscriptions that after

he had finished building the temple of E-ninnu, he celebrated a

festival; and ‘for seven days no obedience was exacted; the female slave

became the equal of her mistress, and the male slave the equal of his

master; the subject became the equal of the chief; and all that was evil

was removed from the temple.’[215]

The Year of Jubilee, it is clear, was but an adaptation and improvement

of one of the oldest institutions of Babylonian culture. To assert that,

together with the other holy days of the Levitical Code, it was borrowed

from Babylonia in the age of the Exile, is to assert what not only

cannot be proved, but is in the highest degree improbable. In the age of

the Exile, Babylonia had become a second Egypt to the Jews, and the

religious party among them regarded with abhorrence all that was

specifically Babylonian. The feasts consecrated to ‘Bel and Nebo,’ the

rites associated with the worship of the Babylonian gods, were the last

things that would be adopted or adapted by a pious Jew. Moreover, we now

know that the culture which had been carried from Chaldæa to the west

long before the period of the Exodus included the gods and sacred rites

of the Babylonians. So distinctive a characteristic of it as ‘the feast

of Sakea,’ or days of prayer and humiliation for ‘the removal of sin,’

would not be forgotten when Anu and Moloch and Ashtoreth and Nin-ip made

their way to Canaan.

There are passages in the Levitical Code which look back very distinctly

to Egypt. Thus marriage with a sister, whether a full sister or a

half-sister, is forbidden (Lev. xviii. 9). This was one of ‘the doings

of the land of Egypt’ (Lev. xviii. 3) which had been consecrated there

both by the civil and by the religious law, and continued in force down

to the time of the Roman conquest. So, too, tattooing the flesh, and

shaving the head or lacerating the flesh for the dead, were prohibited

(Lev. xix. 27, 28, xxi. 5), all of them practices which are still common

in the valley of the Nile. But, on the whole, it is remarkable how

entirely Egypt is ignored. The Mosaic legislation seems intentionally to

close its eyes to all things Egyptian, and, wherever it is possible, to

make enactments which tacitly contradict or set aside the beliefs and

customs of Egypt. Even the doctrine of the resurrection, as Bishop

Warburton long ago observed, is carefully dropped out of sight. There is

no reference to it, no sign that obedience to the laws of Yahveh will

benefit the Israelite in any other world than this. On any theory of the

age and authorship of the Levitical law such a silence is remarkable.

Indeed, if the law is as late as the epoch of the Babylonish exile the

silence would be more than remarkable, since the doctrine of a future

life and of the power of the god Merodach to raise the dead to life had

been firmly established for centuries among the Babylonians. A belief in

the resurrection, or at all events, in a life beyond the grave, could

not but have betrayed itself in the atmosphere of the Exile. For those,

however, who had the Egyptian house of bondage immediately behind them,

and who feared lest the tribes in the desert might again lust after the

flesh-pots and green pastures of the Delta, the silence is intelligible.

The doctrine was closely associated with Egyptian idolatry, with Osiris

and Anubis, with the assessors of the dead, and with the pictured

polytheism of the Egyptian monuments.

The Levitical legislation was accompanied by a census of the people.

What credit we are to attach to the numbers which have been handed down

is a question that has been much debated. On the one hand it has been

shown that the vast multitude presupposed by them could not have moved

about in the desert, as it is represented to have done, and that many of

the regulations in the Levitical Code could not have been carried out

with a nomad population of over two millions.[216] On the other hand,

the 600,000 men above twenty years of age who were ‘able to go forth to

war’ are specified again and again, and the same number is implied in

all the calculations that are made of the numerical strength of Israel.

It is also the sum of the numbers assigned to the fighting men of the

individual tribes. Throughout the history the ciphers are consistent

with one another. If the number is exaggerated, it it is an exaggeration

which has been consistently adhered to. We must either accept it, or

believe that it belongs to an artificial system which has been framed

with deliberate intention. But the same may be said of the chronology of

the early patriarchs as well as of the chronology of the kings of Israel

and Judah, and in both instances we know that the system is wrong. In

the case of the chronology of the early patriarchs, indeed, there are at

least three rival systems, all equally complete and self-coherent, while

the chronology of the kings involves such hopeless anachronisms as have

long since caused it to be rejected by the historian. The difficulties

presented by the census of the Israelites in the wilderness are similar

in character to the anachronisms presented by the chronology of the

kings, and the same reasons which lead us to reject the one ought

equally to induce us to reject the other.

Nevertheless, the chronology of the kings is not wholly incorrect. The

length of reign assigned to the several kings is usually right. It is

only the system into which it has been fitted that is at fault. And

probably this is also the case as regards the numbering of the tribes of

Israel. It may be that the 8580 Levites and the 22,273 firstborn males

are authentic, and that the increase of the population by 3550 (Exod.

xxxviii. 26; Numb. i. 46) a few months after the flight from Egypt, and

its decrease by 1820 at the end of the wanderings (Numb. xxvi. 51), rest

on a foundation of fact. Even the traditional number of 600,000 may have

better support than its being a multiple of the Babylonian _soss_ and

_ner_.[217] Perhaps it originally represented the whole body of

fugitives from Egypt.

At all events, some light may be thrown on the matter by a comparison of

the numbers given in the Pentateuch with those of the Libyans and their

allies as recorded in the inscription of Meneptah. Of the Libyans, 6365

men were slain and 230 (including 12 women) were captured; of their

allies, 2370 fell on the field of battle, and 9146 were taken prisoners,

while no less than 9111 bronze swords were taken from the Maxyes. We

gather from the history of the battle that few, if any, of the enemy

escaped. The whole force of fighting men, therefore, would not have

amounted to very much over 25,000. And yet this was one of the most

formidable hosts that had invaded Egypt; and its male population had not

been decimated by the tyranny of an Egyptian king. On the other hand, a

population of 2,000,000 in the land of Goshen is inconceivable, and

there would hardly have been room in the eastern Delta for 600,000

able-bodied brickmakers. The Sweet-water Canal was dug by only 25,000

fellahin, though 250,000 worked at the Mahmudîya Canal, and for some

years 20,000 fresh labourers were sent monthly to excavate the Suez

Canal. Even in the desert, moreover, the Egyptians required a

considerable number of troops to guard the serfs or convicts who worked

for them. At Hammamât, for example, in the reign of Ramses IV., the 2000

bondservants of the temples who effected the transport of the stone were

attended by 5000 soldiers, 800 mercenaries, and 200 officers; and

provisions for this large body of men were carried across the desert in

ten waggons, each drawn by six pairs of oxen, and laden with bread,

meat, and cakes.[218] For 600,000 Israelites the whole Egyptian army

would not have sufficed. According to Manetho, the Hyksos, when driven

from Egypt, did not number more than 240,000 in all.

We cannot, then, look upon the numbers that have come down to us as

exact. The occupants of the Israelitish camp, continually under the

personal supervision of Moses, and constantly required to assemble

before the tabernacle, could not have been a very large body of men. Had

the fighting population amounted to anything like the number recorded,

there would have been no need of avoiding ‘the way of the land of the

Philistines,’ lest the people should ‘see war,’ or of doubting the issue

of the combat at Rephidim with the Bedâwin tribes.

The year after the flight from Egypt, Sinai, ‘the mount of God,’ was

left behind. The service that Yahveh required had been performed, the

legislation revealed there had been completed, and the tabernacle and

ark had been made. Israel had henceforth another religious centre than

the sacred mountain of the desert, which had now fulfilled its part in

the religious training of the tribes. Canaan, and not the wilderness,

was the destined home of the descendants of Jacob, and to Canaan the ark

and the tabernacle were to accompany them.

The guiding column of cloud moved accordingly from the wilderness of

Sinai to that of Paran (Numb. x. 12). This is in harmony with the rest

of Old Testament geography. In the blessing of Moses (Deut. xxxiii. 2)

it is said that when God came from Sinai, ‘He shined forth from the

mount of Paran,’ and in Habakkuk (iii. 3) the mount of Paran takes the

place of Sinai itself. Paran, in fact, was the desert which formed not

only the southern boundary of Canaan, but also the western frontier of

Edom. The real Mount Sinai of Hebrew geography, therefore, was upon the

Edomite border; and since Paran was the home of Ishmael (Gen. xxi. 21),

it is not surprising that Esau should have taken one of Ishmael’s

daughters to wife (Gen. xxxvi. 3).

Before Sinai was left, however, Hobab the Midianite, the brother-in-law

of Moses, proposed to return to his own land. Sinai adjoined Midian, if

indeed it was not included in Midianitish territory, and here,

therefore, if at all, it was needful for the Midianite chief to quit the

Israelitish camp. But his knowledge of the district was too valuable to

be lost, and Moses persuaded him to remain with the Israelitish tribes

and guide them to the places where they should encamp. The Kenites in

later days traced their descent to him (Judg. i. 16, iv. 11), and the

rocky nest of the Kenites was visible from the heights of Moab, perhaps

in Petra itself (Numb. xxiv. 21).

The geographical details which follow are confused. In the itinerary

(Numb. xxxiii. 15, 16) the camp is transported at once from the

wilderness of Sinai to Kibroth-hattaavah. In the narrative, however, we

are told that the people first went ‘three days’ journey,’ and then

rested at Taberah, which seems to be identified with Kibroth-hattaavah;

from thence they travelled to Hazeroth, and then pitched their tents ‘in

the wilderness of Paran.’ On the other hand, the book of Deuteronomy

(ix. 22) distinguishes between Taberah and Kibroth-hattaavah, and

interpolates Massah between them, which, according to Exod. xvii. 7, was

visited before Sinai. If we follow the official record, we must suppose

that the incident connected with Taberah has been inserted in the wrong

place, or else that Taberah and Kibroth-hattaavah are, like Massah and

Meribah, one and the same. At all events, all these encampments must

have lain on the outskirts of the desert of Paran. Hazeroth, ‘the

enclosures,’ was a common name for the Bedâwin encampments in the desert

south of Judah, and the Hazeroth mentioned here is doubtless that of

which we read in Deut. i. 1. It lay near Paran on the borders of the

plains of Moab.

Taberah, it was said, derived its name from the fire which had here

consumed some of the people, while Kibroth-hattaavah marked the ‘graves’

of the murmurers who had died from a surfeit of quails. Similar flights

of quails still visit the Egyptian Delta in the early spring, when the

sky is sometimes overshadowed by myriads of birds. Hazeroth was

remembered for the rebellion of Aaron and Miriam against their brother

Moses, and the punishment that Miriam the prophetess had in consequence

to endure. The authority of Moses was disputed because he had married an

Ethiopian wife. It is the only passage in the Pentateuch where this

‘Cushite’ wife is alluded to; elsewhere we hear only of Zipporah the

Midianitess. But it points to a traditional recollection of the days

when Moses was still Messu, the Egyptian prince, and when, like that

other Messu, his contemporary, he might have been the Egyptian governor

of Ethiopia.[219] The objection to the Ethiopian wife came but ill from

Aaron, whose grandson bore the Egyptian name of Phinehas, Pi-nehasi,

‘the negro.’ But Yahveh declared that the Cushite affinities of Moses

were no bar to his being a true servant of the God of Israel and the

divinely-appointed leader of the tribes. To him Yahveh had revealed His

will openly, and as it were face to face; not, as to other prophets, in

waking visions and dreams.

In the heart of the wilderness of Paran was the venerable sanctuary of

Kadesh-barnea. Centuries before, the army of Chedor-laomer had swept

through it, slaughtering its Amalekite inhabitants, and drinking the

water of En-Mishpat, ‘the Spring of Judgment,’ where the shêkhs of the

desert had given laws to their people. Its site has been found again in

our own days by Dr. John Rowlands and Dr. Clay Trumbull.[220] The spring

of clear water which fills the oasis with life and verdure is still

called ’Ain Qadîs, the ‘Spring of Kadesh.’ It rises at the foot of a

limestone cliff, in which a two-chambered tomb has been cut in early

times, in the hollow of an amphitheatre of hills. The hills form a block

of mountains which occupy the central part of the desert, midway between

El-Arîsh and Mount Hor, and more than forty miles to the south of

Sebaita, the supposed site of Hormah.

Kadesh, the ‘Sanctuary,’ was destined to be the second resting-place and

scene of Israelitish legislation. The work which had been left

unfinished at Sinai was completed here. The will of Yahveh, which had

first been declared on the summit of the mountain, was now to be more

fully unfolded among the soft surroundings of the oasis in the valley.

Sinai and Kadesh-barnea were the two schools of the desert in which

Israel was trained.

But Kadesh-barnea had other advantages as well. It was on the high-road

from the desert to Canaan, it commanded the approach to the latter

country, and nevertheless within its rocky barriers the Israelites were

safe from attack. Here, therefore, at Kadesh-barnea, the first

preparations were made for the invasion of Palestine. Twelve scouts were

sent, in Egyptian fashion, to explore the land, and bring back a report

of its capabilities for defence. They made their way as far as

Hebron,[221] where a popular etymology derived the name of the valley of

Eshcol from the cluster of grapes they had cut there.[222] But the

report with which they returned was discouraging. The Amorites were tall

and strong; by their side the children of Israel appeared but as

grasshoppers; while the cities in which they dwelt were ‘very great,’

and walled, as it were, to heaven. It was folly for the desert tribes to

dream of assaulting them; that would need the disciplined army of a

Pharaoh, with its chariots and horses and machines for scaling the

walls. ‘We be not able to go up against the people,’ they declared, ‘for

they are stronger than we.’

Here, then, was an end to all the promises of Moses. The Promised Land

was in sight, and they were excluded from it for ever. ‘Let us make

another captain,’ they cried, ‘and return to Egypt.’ The leader who had

brought them thus far had failed on the very threshold of their goal.

The Hyksos, when they forsook Egypt, had found a refuge in Canaan; but

the barren wastes of the wilderness were all that the Israelites could

expect. It was little wonder that a rebellion broke out in the

Israelitish camp, and that the supporters of Moses were threatened with

stoning.

But experience soon showed that the Israelitish tribes were as yet no

match for the people whose possessions they desired to seize. Despite

the report of the spies, they climbed the cliff which formed the

northern boundary of the oasis, and attempted to force their way beyond

the frontiers of Canaan. But their enemies proved the stronger. When

Seti I. had attacked the frontier fortress of Canaan, not far from

Hebron, he had found it defended by Shasu or Bedâwin, and so, too, the

Israelites now found themselves confronted not by the Canaanites only,

but also by their Amalekite or Bedâwin allies. The assailants were

utterly defeated and ‘discomfited even unto Hormah.’

Hormah was more usually known as Zephath (Judg. i. 17), and its site

must be looked for south of Tell ’Arad. It was one of the cities of

Palestine which Thothmes III. claims to have captured, and it lay

towards the southern end of the Dead Sea, on the road to Hazezon Tamar

(Gen. xiv. 7). The mention of it makes it clear that the Israelitish

invasion of Canaan had been a serious attempt. The invaders had marched

along the same military road as that followed by Chedor-laomer, and had

penetrated as far as the hill country of what was afterwards Judah. But

they did not succeed in getting further, and their shattered relics must

have made their way with difficulty back to the fastness of Kadesh. The

first attempt to conquer Palestine had failed.[223]

The disaster was never forgotten. It was some years before the

Israelites again attempted to cross the Canaanitish boundary, and when

they did so it was from a different quarter. A new generation had to

grow up before they were strong enough to renew the attack; indeed, it

is probable that most of the fighting men had been lost in the earlier

expedition. When at last Israel felt able once more to march against

Canaan, it was already in possession of land on the east of the Jordan,

but its great ‘captain’ and lawgiver was dead. Israelitish history found

its leader to the conquest of Palestine not in Moses, but in Joshua.

The history of the period that followed the disaster left little that

was worth recording. The chief incidents of the life in the desert had

been crowded into the first few months of the wanderings. But it was

during this later period that trouble arose with Moses’ own tribesmen,

the Levites. It was again a question of authority. The democratic spirit

of the Israelites resented claims to superior power; and just as Aaron

and Miriam had disputed the authority of Moses, so now the Levites

disputed that of Aaron. It was a dispute which, if we are to believe

modern criticism, was continued into later Jewish history, when it

ended, as it did in the desert, in the triumph of the high-priest.

Aaron and his sons, like Moses, were at the outset Levites, and as such

doubtless had no claim to superior sanctity and power. But circumstances

had placed them at the head of their tribe; and when that tribe became

the ministers of the sanctuary, Aaron and his descendants necessarily

occupied the foremost place in its services. They were in a special

sense the guardians of the ark, and thus alone privileged to enter the

Holy of Holies, where Yahveh revealed Himself above the cherubim. As

long as there was but one sanctuary, it was easy to maintain the

distinction between the priest of the house of Aaron and the ordinary

Levite. But with the conquest of Canaan all this was changed.

Sanctuaries were multiplied all over the land; the old high-places

became seats of the worship of Yahveh, and there were rival centres of

religious authority, like that of Baal-berith at Shechem, or that of the

graven image at Dan (Judg. xviii. 14, etc.). Local temples or

tabernacles took the place of the one that was hallowed by the presence

of the ark, and the line of Aaron fell into the background. In the age

of national trouble and disintegration which preceded the accession of

Saul, the character of the high-priestly family itself had much to do

with the loss of its power and influence. Eli, its representative at

Shiloh, was old and feeble, and his sons set at defiance the Mosaic law,

which required that Yahveh’s portion of the sacrifice should be burned

on the altar before the priests received their share, and so they made

‘the offering of the Lord’ to be ‘abhorred.’ The capture of the ark by

the Philistines and the massacre of the priests at Nob by order of Saul

completed the dissolution of the high-priestly authority; and when the

temple at Jerusalem was built under Solomon, a new branch of the family

of Aaron was appointed to minister in it, and his descendants became

little more than hereditary court-chaplains. It has even been doubted

whether there was any high-priest, properly so called, under the kings;

if there were, he had been divested of the power and position which had

been given him by the Levitical law.

To conclude, however, as has sometimes been done by modern criticism,

that because the priests of Solomon’s temple were no longer the

high-priests of the Pentateuchal law, therefore there had been no such

high-priests at all, is contrary to the evidence of archæology.

Monumental discovery has disclosed the fact that among the Semitic

kinsmen of the Israelites as well as in Chaldæa the high-priest preceded

the king. Not to speak of the _patesis_ or high-priests of the

Babylonian cities who exercised royal sway within the limits of their

territories, like the Popes within the limits of the Romagna, the

earliest rulers both of Assyria and of Saba or Sheba in Southern Arabia

were high-priests. The Assyrian kings followed the high-priests of the

god Assur, and the Makârib or ‘high-priests’ of Saba came before the

kings. Israel also had the same experience. The Israelitish kings

appeared at a comparatively late period on the scene of Hebrew history,

and Saul was preceded by the high-priest Eli.

In the book of Deuteronomy, it is true, we do not find the distinction

between ‘the priests, the sons of Aaron,’ and the rest of the Levites

that is made in the Levitical law. Here the priests are all alike called

Levites; it is not ‘the priests, the sons of Aaron,’ but ‘the priests

the Levites’ who are appointed to perform the highest offices of the

sanctuary. How far the phraseology is due to a different conception of

the Mosaic law, or how far it testifies to an older usage of language,

is a question which need not concern us; what is important to observe is

that the difference of expression is linguistic and not historical.

Historically all the priests were Levites, though from the outset some

of them must have been assigned higher positions than others, and have

been invested with more sacred functions. The Levitical law draws the

distinction which the book of Deuteronomy is not so careful to do. In

fact, there was not the same necessity for doing so in the case of the

Deuteronomic retrospect.

The tabernacle had been constructed, its services arranged, and the

grades and duties of its ministers appointed. Now, therefore,

disappointed in their hope of invading Canaan from the south, the

Israelites settled themselves tranquilly at Kadesh, in the heart of the

wilderness of Zin, and slowly developed into a strong and united

community. Here it was, by the waters of En-Mishpat, that the

legislation of Moses was completed, and the undisciplined horde of

fugitive serfs from Egypt was moulded into a formidable band of warriors

knit together by a common religion and worship, and continually

gathering increased confidence in its own strength.[224]

How long the Israelites remained in their desert fastness we do not

know. A time came when they once more resumed their wanderings, or at

all events a portion of them must have done so. The Itinerary in Numb.

xxxiii. gives a long list of their encampments before they again found

themselves in the oasis of Kadesh. One of the places at which they

rested was Mount Shapher, another was Moseroth, of which we hear in the

book of Deuteronomy (x. 6). Moseroth was in the territory of the Horite

tribe of Beni-Yaakan,[225] and it was from the Beeroth or ‘Wells’ of the

Beni-Yaakan—Hashmonah, as it is called in the Itinerary—that they had

made their way to it.

At Mosera or Moseroth, according to Deuteronomy, Aaron died, and was

succeeded in his office by his son Eleazar. The statement, however, is

not easily reconcileable with what we are told in the book of Numbers.

There it is said that the death of the high-priest took place on the

summit of Mount Hor after the departure from Kadesh.[226] The fact that

Gudgodah was also called Hor-hagidgad, ‘the mountain of clefts,’ may

have been the cause of the transference.

But it must be remembered that Kadesh was merely the headquarters of

Israel during its weary years of waiting in the wilderness. The scanty

notice of the unsuccessful invasion of Southern Palestine shows that it

was only the camp as a whole which remained fixed there. Like the

Bedâwin of to-day, portions of the tribes made distant expeditions, and

the Itinerary may relate rather to their encampments than to that of the

stationary part of the people. Kadesh was a sort of centre from which

fragments of the main body could be sent forth to scour the frontiers of

Seir and Edom, or to encamp at the foot of Ezion-geber on the Yâm Sûph.

In the book of Numbers (xxi. 14, 15) there is a quotation from ‘the Book

of the Wars of the Lord,’ one of the old documents on which the history

of Israel in the wilderness is based. The introductory words are

unintelligible as they stand, thus testifying to the antiquity of the

passage; all that can be made out of them is that they relate not only

to the struggle between Israel and the Amorites at ‘the brooks of

Arnon,’ but also to a previous war carried on by the Israelites ‘in

Suphah,’ near the gulf of Aqaba.[227] Here the Israelites would have

been on the borders of Edom, if indeed they were not in Edom itself; and

it is therefore noticeable that the Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramses III., whose

reign coincided with the period of the wanderings of the Israelites in

the desert, declares that he had ‘smitten the Shasu (or Bedâwin) tribes

of Seir and plundered their tents’ (_ohélu_). Ramses III. was the only

Pharaoh of Egypt who had ventured to attack the Edomite Bedâwin in their

mountain strongholds; while Canaan and the plateau east of the Jordan

had been Egyptian provinces the inhabitants of Mount Seir had retained

their independence. The synchronism, therefore, of this Egyptian

expedition against, not the Edomites only, but ‘the Bedâwin of Seir’ and

the war in which Israel was engaged ‘in Suphah,’ is, at least, worthy of

notice. It may be that part of the training undergone by the Israelites

in the desert for their future conquest of Canaan was the help they had

rendered their kinsfolk of Edom in their contest with the old

taskmasters of the Hebrew tribes.

However this may be, of the three leaders who had brought Israel out of

the house of bondage, Moses alone survived the long sojourn at Kadesh.

Miriam had died there; the death of Aaron also, if we may trust

Deuteronomy, had taken place before the final departure from the great

desert sanctuary. In any case, it had happened in sight of Kadesh, and

before the march had commenced which was to lead the Israelitish tribes

to the Promised Land. The time had now arrived when Israel felt strong

enough once more to attempt its conquest; not, this time, by the road

through the mountains of the south along which Chedor-laomer had marched

to Kadesh, but from the plateau eastward of the Jordan where the kindred

nations of Moab and Ammon had already established themselves. Here, too,

the Israelites made their first permanent settlements in the land which

they had marked out for their own.

The Canaanite population east of the Jordan was sparse and weak compared

with that to the west. It had been further weakened by foreign conquest.

Between the fall of the Egyptian empire and the Israelitish invasion the

Amorites under Sihon had formed a kingdom and occupied the territory of

Moab as far south as the Arnon. As in the age of the eighteenth dynasty,

so too under the kings of the nineteenth dynasty, Egyptian rule extended

over what is called in one of the Tel el-Amarna tablets ‘the field of

Bashan.’ The so-called Sakhret Eyyûb, or ‘Stone of Job,’ a little to the

north of Tell ’Ashtereh, eastward of the Jordan, has been discovered by

Dr. Schumacher to be a monument of Ramses II.[228] The figure of the

Pharaoh is engraved upon it, with his name beside him, as well as the

figure of a deity who wears the crown of Osiris, and is represented with

a full face, while his Canaanitish name is written in hieroglyphs.[229]

At Luxor[230] Ramses claims Moab among his conquests, and we may

therefore gather that up to the time of the Exodus the authority of

Egypt had been restored throughout the country east of the Jordan. But

the Libyan invasion shattered the strength of Egypt, and long before the

close of the nineteenth dynasty its possessions in Palestine passed from

it forever. This is precisely the period to which the Pentateuch refers

the kingdom of Og in Bashan and the conquests of Sihon in Moab, and the

Biblical and monumental evidence thus stand in complete agreement.

Moses had requested permission from the Edomite king to pass through his

dominions. The Song of Moses (Exod. xv. 15) still speaks of the

_alûphim_, or ‘dukes,’ of Edom, who had originally governed the country;

but while the Israelites had been lingering in the desert, the ‘dukes’

had made way for an elective monarchy. The dissolution of the Egyptian

power may have had something to do with this; possibly the invasion of

Mount Seir by Ramses III. had produced the same result in Edom that the

Philistine invasion produced among the Israelites, and had obliged them

to elect a king. At all events, the first king of Edom, we read, was

‘Bela, the son of Beor.’ Bela, however, is merely a contracted form of

Balaam, and in the first Edomite king we must therefore see Balaam, the

son of Beor. What relation he bore to the seer from Pethor will have to

be considered later on.[231]

It is not surprising that the Edomite king refused the request that had

been made to him. To have admitted within his frontiers a large body of

emigrants like the Israelites, many of whom were armed, might have been

as dangerous as the passage of the Crusaders through the Eastern Empire

proved to Constantinople. The Israelites were not strong enough to force

their way through a hostile country, and very reluctantly, therefore,

they once more turned southward to the Gulf of Aqaba, and from thence

marched northward again to the east of Edom. Their route brought them to

the southeastern part of Moab.

The people, we are told, bitterly complained of the length of ‘the way.’

It was not strange. The Promised Land, so constantly in sight, seemed

always to recede as soon as it was approached. They had vainly attempted

to enter it from the south; the Philistines kept garrison in the cities

on the Mediterranean coast; and now, when a third and last mode of

approach was undertaken, their brethren of Edom closed the path. The

road, too, which they were thus forced to adopt led them through a

desert, which the Assyrian king Esar-haddon describes as a land of

drought, inhabited only by ‘snakes and scorpions, which filled the

ground like locusts.’[232] These were the ‘fiery serpents’ that bit the

Israelites and increased their miseries. A memorial of their sufferings

lasted down to the age of Hezekiah. The brazen ‘seraph’ or ‘fiery

serpent’ which had been wrought by order of Moses, and planted on the

top of a pole, was religiously preserved in the chief sanctuary of the

nation. Incense was burned before it, for it had been the means of

preserving the people from the fiery poison of the snakes. But the

idolatry of which it was the object brought about its destruction. The

relic, which had been spared by the earlier kings and priests of Judah,

was destroyed by Hezekiah, who realised at last that it was but ‘a piece

of brass.’ It is true that doubts have been cast upon its having

actually been a monument of the life in the wilderness; but it is

difficult for the historian to understand how a modern critic can be

better informed on such a point than the contemporaries of

Hezekiah.[233]

Zalmonah, Punon, and Oboth were the next stages on the journey after

Mount Hor. Then came Iye-ha-Abârim, ‘the Ruins of the Hebrews’—a name,

it may be, which contained a reminiscence of the settlement of the

Israelites in the country.[234] Iye-ha-Abârim was in the plain east of

Moab, under the shadow of the mountain-range of Abarim. Then the stream

of the Zered was crossed, and the emigrants found themselves in Moab.

The banks of the Arnon were the next resting-place.

The nation retained but little recollection of the dreary years that had

been passed in the wilderness. A few incidents alone were recorded which

had broken the monotony of their desert life. But here, on the verge of

Canaan and of conquest, the national consciousness awakened into new

life. The song was handed down which had been sung when at some station

in the desert the ground had been pierced and water found. ‘Spring up, O

well!’ it said; ‘sing ye unto it. O well that hast been dug by princes,

that hast been pierced by the nobles of the people, by (the direction

of) the lawgiver, with their staves!’ Similar songs, according to

Professor Goldziher, were sung in old days by the Arab kinsmen of the

Israelites when they too dug wells in the desert and the refreshing

water bubbled up from below.[235]

Arnon was now the boundary between Moab and the new kingdom of Sihon the

Amorite. Sihon refused permission to the Israelites to pass through his

territories, along the ‘royal highway,’ and endeavoured to stop their

advance. But the tribes were no longer the undisciplined rabble who had

fled from the Canaanites of Zephath, and the result of the struggle was

the complete overthrow of the Amorite forces. The district between the

Arnon and the Jabbok, which had been taken by Sihon from ‘the former

king of Moab,’ was occupied by the Israelites, who accordingly

established themselves midway between Moab and Ammon. It is on the

occasion of this conquest that the Hebrew historian has preserved the

fragment of an Amorite song of triumph which had celebrated the capture

of Ar, the Moabite capital, and which was now embodied by the Israelites

in a similar song of triumph for their own victory over Sihon.

Ammon was too strong to be attacked (Numb. xxi. 24), but ‘Moses sent to

spy out Jaazer,’ not far from Rabbah, the future capital of the

Ammonites, and the fall of the Amorite city of Jaazer brought with it

the conquest of Gilead. The tribes of Reuben and Gad were settled in the

newly-acquired districts, on condition, however, that they should

acknowledge their relationship to the rest of the tribes, and help the

latter in case of necessity (Numb. xxxii. 29-32; Judg. v. 15-17). Gilead

had been conquered by Machir, a branch of the tribe of Manasseh (Numb.

xxxii. 39; Deut. iii. 15; Judg. v. 14), and the conquest was

subsequently extended further by armed bands under chieftains, like Jair

and Nobah, who occupied outlying districts on their own account.[236]

The Havoth-Jair, or ‘Villages of Jair,’ were in the ‘stony’ region of

Argob, the Trachonitis of Greek geography, which extended northward to

the Aramaic kingdoms of Geshur and Maachah. It formed part of the ‘Field

of Bashan,’ which in the Mosaic age was ruled by Og ‘of the remnant of

the Rephaim.’ Like Sihon, he is called an Amorite, and his two capitals

were at Edrei and Ashtaroth-Karnaim.[237] His rule was acknowledged from

the Haurân in the south to Mount Hermon in the north, and he must thus

have been one of the native princes who arose out of the ruins of the

Egyptian empire. But his power was shortlived. He was unable to

withstand the shock of the invaders from the desert, and his dominions

became Israelitish territory. It would seem that what was afterwards the

eastern side of Ammon was included in his kingdom, since in after ages a

huge sarcophagus of black basalt, which was preserved in Rabbah of

Ammon, was pointed out as his ‘iron bed’ (Deut. iii. 11).

These conquests of the Israelites doubtless occupied a considerable

space of time. Some of them, indeed, were made after the Mosaic age, and

were merely extensions of the conquests made at that time. But the

overthrow of Og must have followed quickly on that of Sihon. A year or

two would have sufficed to allow the Israelitish bands to overrun the

districts to the north-east of the Arnon.

It is not wonderful that the Moabites should have wished to rid

themselves of such dangerous neighbours. But their king, Balak the son

of Zippor,[238] was uncertain how to act. The Moabite forces were no

match for the fierce desert-tribes who had overthrown Sihon and burnt

his towns. An embassy was accordingly sent to the seer, Balaam the son

of Beor, who lived at Pethor on the Euphrates, in ‘the land of the

children of Ammo.’ The site of Pethor has been recovered from the

Assyrian monuments. It lay on the west bank of the Euphrates, a little

to the north of its junction with the Sajur, and consequently only a few

miles south of the Hittite capital Carchemish, now Jerablûs. The

Beni-Ammo must have claimed the same ancestry as the Beni-Ammi or

Ammonites, and the name is probably to be found in that of the country

of Ammiya or Ammi, which is mentioned in the Tel el-Amarna tablets.[239]

The fame of Balaam must have been widespread. But it is permissible to

ask whether the only object of the embassy was that the seer should

‘curse’ the descendants of Jacob. A curse usually meant something more

substantial than a form of words; and, as we have already seen, the

first Edomite king given in the extract from the chronicles of Edom

bears the same name and has the same father as Balaam. Did Balaam end by

becoming elected king of Edom, and finally falling in battle against the

Israelites, along with his allies the Midianitish chiefs?[240] The

materials for an answer are not yet before us.

The story of Balaam seems to form an episode by itself. The narrative

and the prophecies constitute a single whole, which cannot be torn

apart. It is the first example in the Old Testament of a written

prophecy, and that the prophet should have been a Gentile diviner is of

itself significant. Nothing can be more vivid and lifelike than the

picture that is presented to us. We see the ambassadors of Balak

persuading the half-reluctant seer to accompany them; we read of the

strange miracles that accompanied the journey, and of the altars that

were reared, and the sacrifices that were offered in the hope that his

enchantments might prevail over those of Israel. He was taken from

high-place to high-place, whence he could look down upon the distant

hosts of the enemy, and upon each, in Babylonian fashion, seven altars

were erected. But all was unavailing. The God of Jacob refused to be

turned from His purpose by the bullocks and the rams that were offered

Him, and the curses of the Aramæan seer were turned into blessings. When

Balaam fell into the prophetic trance, seeing ‘the vision of the

Almighty, but having his eyes open,’ the words which were put into his

mouth were words which predicted the future glories of Israel. ‘A star

should come out of Jacob, and a sceptre should arise out of Israel,

which should smite the corners of Moab and destroy all the children of

Sheth.’[241] Edom, too, should at last become the possession of his

younger brother, and the Amalekites of the desert should perish for

ever.

The age of the episode has been often disputed. Much depends on the

question whether the references in the last prophecy to the Kenites and

others belong to the original document, or are later insertions. The

Assyrians did not penetrate into the desert south of Judah, where the

Kenites lived, until the time of Tiglath-pileser III. and Sargon in the

eighth century B.C. The Amalekites were destroyed by Saul; Moab and Edom

were conquered by David. But the concluding verse of the prophecy is at

present difficult to explain. When was it that ships came from Cyprus

and ‘afflicted’ Assyria and the Hebrews, so that they too perished for

ever? In the age of the Exodus, the pirates of the Greek seas joined

their forces with those of the Libyans in the invasion of Egypt, and the

Philistines and their allies sailed from Krete and other islands of the

Mediterranean, and established themselves on the coast of Palestine. Was

it here that the Hebrews lived who were to perish for ever? It is, at

any rate, worthy of note that it was the Philistines more especially

among whom the Israelites were known as the ‘Hebrews.’ In the time of

the Tel el-Amarna tablets we already hear of Assyrian intrigues in the

far West. The Babylonian king asks the Pharaoh why the Assyrians, his

‘vassals,’ have been allowed to come to Canaan and enter into relations

with the Egyptian court.[242] At a later period, while Israel was ruled

by judges, more than one Assyrian monarch actually made his way to the

Mediterranean coast.[243]

As the historical chapters of the book of Isaiah, including the

prophecies contained in them, have been embodied in the book of Kings,

so, too, the history of Balaam and Balak has been embodied in the book

of Numbers. There is no reason for denying its substantial authenticity.

Written prophecies were already known both in Egypt and in

Babylonia,[244] and it is almost inconceivable that a Jewish fabricator

of prophecies would have made a Gentile diviner the mouthpiece of

Yahveh. Moreover, there is nothing in the narrative or the prophecies

themselves which is inconsistent with the date to which they profess to

belong, unless indeed it is maintained that the conquest of Moab and

Edom by the Israelites could not have been predicted at the time. But,

apart from theological considerations which lie outside the province of

the historian, it did not require much political foresight to conclude

that a people which had begun by destroying the power of Sihon was

likely to end by conquering the nations surrounding them. In fact, it

would seem from the enumeration of the cities occupied by Reuben and Gad

(Numb. xxxii. 34-38) that at one time little, if any, territory was left

to the Moabite king.

In the embassy to Balaam ‘the elders of Midian’ are united with those of

Moab. In fact, it is to the ‘elders of Midian,’ and not to those of

Moab, that Balak first addresses himself (Numb. xxii. 4). It is the

Midianites, moreover, and not the Moabites, who tempted Israel to sin

‘in the matter of Baal-Peor,’ and who were accordingly massacred in the

war that followed, although ‘the people had begun to commit whoredom’

with ‘the daughters of Moab’ (Numb. xxv. 1). It is clear, therefore,

that Moab was at the time occupied by the Midianites, just as the

eastern portion of Israelitish territory was occupied by them in later

days before it was freed by Gideon. Then they had swarmed up from the

south along with the Amalekite Bedâwin and the Kadmônim of the

south-east, and under their five shêkhs had overrun the land of Israel.

Moab had now undergone the same fate, perhaps in consequence of its

weakened condition after the unsuccessful war against Sihon. At any

rate, it is probable that the Moabites had eventually to thank their

Edomite neighbours for their deliverance from the invaders, since in the

list of the Edomite kings we are told that the fourth of them, Hadad,

the son of Bedad, ‘smote Midian in the field of Moab’ (Gen. xxxvi. 35).

The age of Hadad and that of Gideon could not have been far apart, and

Gideon’s success may therefore have been one of the results that

followed upon the Midianite defeat in Moab. The losses sustained by the

Midianites, however, in their struggle with the invading Israelites,

must have weakened their hold upon the territories of the Moabite king.

The storm-cloud which had terrified Balak passed over him to his

Midianite foes.

The conquest of the Moabite cities brought with it intermarriages

between the Israelites and their inhabitants as well as an adoption of

the native forms of faith. Yahveh was deserted for Baal-Peor, the

Moabite Baal of Mount Peor, but it was not long before He avenged

Himself. Pestilence broke out in the camp, and the people saw in it the

finger of God. By command of Moses ‘all the heads of the people’ were

‘hanged before the Lord in face of the sun’; while Phinehas, the son of

the high-priest, jealous of the rights of Yahveh, stabbed to the death

an Israelite and his Midianitish wife who had dared to show themselves

before the sanctuary of the Lord. The time had passed when Moses was

justified in marrying a wife of Midianitish race; Israel had now become

a peculiar people, dedicated to Yahveh, who would allow ‘no other god’

to share His place. The Midianitish wife was a sign and evidence that

Yahveh of Israel had been forsaken for a Midianitish Baal.

Thus far, it would seem, Israel and Midian had mixed together on

friendly terms. Both were desert tribes, both were connected together by

old traditions and intercourse, and claimed descent from a common

ancestor. But it was now a question of rival deities and forms of faith.

The very existence of the Law that had been promulgated from Sinai and

Kadesh was at stake; and if Israel and its religion were not to be

absorbed into the world of heathenism around them, it was time for the

tribe of Levi—the keepers of the sanctuary—to awake. Moses and Phinehas

saw the danger, and swift punishment descended on the backsliders within

Israel itself. How formidable, however, the danger had been may be

gathered from the statement that ‘all the heads of the people’ were put

to death.

The turn of Midian came next. The Midianite tribes were overthrown, and

their five shêkhs slain, one of whom, Rekem, gave his name to the city

which is better known as Petra. ‘Balaam also, the son of Beor, they slew

with the sword.’ The Midianite villages and forts were burned to the

ground, and the captives and spoil were brought to the Israelitish camp.

Here they were divided among the people, Yahveh and His priests

receiving their share. Out of a total of 16,000 captives, thirty-two

slaves were given to the Lord. Henceforth it became the rule that the

spoil taken in war should be divided into two equal parts, one-half for

the fighting men, the rest for the people as a whole; and that while the

fighting men had to deliver up only one share in five hundred to the

Levites, the priestly tribute levied on the rest of the ‘congregation’

was as much as one in fifty. The regulation was reinforced by David

after his defeat of the Amalekites when his companions clamoured for the

whole of the spoil (1 Sam. xxx. 24, 25), at all events in so far as the

equal division of it was concerned between the combatants and those who

remained at home.

The Midianites were driven from Moab and its frontiers. Their overthrow

meant the triumph of the priestly tribe in Israel. The war had been

waged not against Midian only, but against the allies and kinsmen of

Midian in Israel itself. The old relationship between Israel and Midian

had been severed on the confines of the Promised Land; the supremacy of

Yahveh in Israel had been once more asserted, and Israel had become more

than ever His peculiar people. Before they entered Canaan, it was

needful that the last links that bound them to the wild tribes of the

desert should be cut in two.

The work of Moses was completed. He had led Israel from the house of

bondage, had given it laws and made it a nation in the wilderness, and

had fitted it for the conquest of Canaan. The land flowing with milk and

honey, which the Semitic settlers in Egypt seem always to have regarded

as a home of refuge to which they should ultimately return, was now

within their grasp. Egyptian troops no longer garrisoned it, and its

population was weakened by intestine troubles, by the long war between

Egypt and the Hittites, and, above all, by the invasion of the

Philistines and other pirates from the Greek seas. A large portion of

the cultivated territory on the east side of the Jordan was already in

Israelite hands; all that was needed was to cross the river and take

possession of ‘the land of promise.’ Israel never forgot that it was

from hence that its ancestors had come, and tradition recorded that the

bodies of the patriarchs still lay in the rock-tomb of Machpelah. Even

now the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh carried with them the mummy of

Joseph, from whom they claimed their origin, ready to deposit it

wherever they could gain a permanent foothold and build for themselves a

central sanctuary.

The scene of the last legislation of Moses is laid in the plains of

Moab, in the newly-won territory of Israel, and almost within sight of

the mountains of Canaan. The additional laws and regulations which

needed to be made were not many. Reuben and Gad were settled in the

districts which subsequently bore their names, the Reubenites pasturing

their flocks like nomad Bedâwin among the northern wadis of Moab, while

Gad occupied the greater portion of the Amorite kingdom of Sihon. Part

of the tribe of Manasseh also made its home in the districts of Gilead

and Bashan, which it had won by the sword.

The institution of the six cities of refuge, moreover, as well as of the

forty-eight cities of the Levites, is assigned to the same period.

Modern criticism, however, has shown itself unwilling to accept its

Mosaic authorship. But sacred cities, to which the homicide could flee

for refuge, were an ancient institution in both Syria and Asia Minor. We

find them also in the region of the Hittites. Such _asyla_, as the

Greeks called them, lasted down to the classical period, and played a

considerable part in the local history of Asia Minor. Wherever we find a

Kadesh or a Hierapolis, there we may expect to find also an asylum in

which the gods and their ministers would protect the unintentional

shedder of blood from the vengeance of man. It was a means of checking

the _vendetta_ or blood feud, which was in full harmony with primitive

law.[245]

In establishing the cities of refuge, therefore, the Israelites did but

carry on the traditions of the past. And two at least of the cities,

which were subsequently set apart for the purpose, were sanctuaries, and

consequently ‘asyla,’ long before the children of Jacob entered

Palestine. These were Kadesh in Galilee and Hebron (Josh. xx. 7). The

name of Kadesh declares its sacred character, and the sanctuary of

Hebron had been famous for centuries.

The institution of the Levitical cities, again, was a result of the new

position assigned to the tribe of Levi as the priests and

representatives of the national God. The overthrow of the Midianites and

their Israelitish allies had definitely settled the place of the tribe

in Israel. Yahveh had prevailed over all other gods, and those who

worshipped another god had been put to the sword. It had been the work

of Levi, of those who had been chosen to be the ministers of Yahveh or

had voluntarily devoted themselves to the service of the sanctuary. On

the day that the spoil of Midian was divided it was recognised that Levi

was not a tribe in the sense that the other tribes were so; it

represented the priests and ministers of Yahveh, whoever and wheresoever

they might be. And as, in the division of the spoil, due care was taken

of Yahveh and His priests, so, too, in the division of the land, it was

needful that similar care should be taken for them. The priests of Egypt

had their lands, out of the revenues of which the temples were

supported, and Egypt was not the only country of the Oriental world in

which the same practice prevailed. Indeed, while Canaan was an Egyptian

province temples had been built in it by the Pharaohs, and doubtless

endowed in the same way as the temples of Egypt itself. The revenues of

Syrian towns, moreover, had been given to Egyptian temples; Thothmes

III., for example, immediately after the conquest of Syria, settled

three of its towns (Anaugas, Innuam, and Harankal) upon Amon of

Thebes.[246] The custom lingered on into late times; the Persian king

assigned the three cities of Magnesia, Myos, and Lampsacus for the

maintenance of Themistoklês,[247] and the taxes of the Fayyûm in Egypt

formed the ‘pin-money’ of Queen Arsinoê Philadelphos.[248]

Later ages misunderstood the regulations that related to the Levitical

cities, and, misled by the belief that the tribe of Levi was constituted

like the other tribes of Israel, imagined that they were intended to be

places where the Levites should dwell and none else. This misconception

has coloured the existing text of Numb. xxxv. 2-8, but we have only to

turn to the list of the cities given in Josh. xxi. to see how unfounded

it is. In fact, the Levites, as ministers of the national God, lived

wherever there was a sanctuary of Yahveh to be served; in the days of

the Judges we find a Levite even in the private house of Micah, on Mount

Ephraim, from whence he is taken by the Danite raiders along with the

image of his God (Judg. xviii.). There was no intention of shutting up

the Levites in certain cities apart from the rest of the people; on the

contrary, they were to be ‘scattered’ throughout Israel, the priests and

representatives everywhere of the national God.

The book of Deuteronomy is the testament of Moses. Even the most

sceptical criticism admits that such was already the belief in the age

of Josiah, so far, at any rate, as regards the main portion of the book.

At the same time, the stoutest advocates of the Mosaic authorship of the

Pentateuch also admit that it cannot all have come from his hand. The

account of his death, which forms the close of the book, cannot have

been written by the great legislator himself. Here, as elsewhere, it is

for the historian to decide where the narrative may belong to the Mosaic

age, and where it transports us to the atmosphere of a later period.

The original Deuteronomy of philological criticism begins with the

twelfth chapter, without introduction or even explanation. The

Deuteronomy of Hebrew tradition is the fitting conclusion of the

Pentateuch. Moses, worn out with years and labour, addresses his people

for the last time. They are about to cross the Jordan and enter Canaan;

here on the threshold of the Promised Land his task is done, and he must

leave the work of conquest to other and younger hands. He has been the

legislator of Israel, Joshua must be its general.

We have, first, a recapitulation of the chief events of the wanderings

in the wilderness from the day that the Covenant was made in Horeb, the

mount of God.[249] They are intermingled with antiquarian notes, which

may, or may not, be of the Mosaic age, as well as with exhortations to

obedience to the Law. Then follows a series of enactments which

constitute the Deuteronomic Law itself. The enactments necessarily go

over some of the ground already traversed by the previous legislation;

in some points they even seem to contradict it. But the contradictions

are more apparent than real, like the reason assigned for observing the

Sabbath. Sometimes they are supplementary to the Levitical laws,

sometimes are supplemented by the latter; at other times the same

regulation is repeated from a different point of view.[250]

A special characteristic of the Deuteronomic Law is its tenderness and

care for animals as well as for the poor, ‘the stranger, the fatherless,

and the widow.’[251] Even the Egyptian is not to be ‘abhorred’ (Deut.

xxiii. 7), and all Hebrew slaves are to be released every seventh year.

Along with this, however, we find the ferocity which distinguished the

Semites in time of war. If the enemy lived afar off, all the males of a

vanquished city were to be mercilessly slain, and the children and women

spared, only to become the slaves and concubines of the conquerors. But

even this amount of mercy was forbidden in the case of the Canaanitish

cities; here the massacre was to be universal, lest the Israelites

should take wives from the conquered population and fall away from the

worship of Yahveh. A similar spirit of ferocity breathes through the

Assyrian inscriptions, where the kings boast of the multitudes of the

vanquished whom they had tortured and slain in honour of their god

Assur. Alone of the ancient nations of the East the Egyptians seem to

have understood what we mean by humanity in war.

Like the poor, the Levite is commended to the care and support of the

people. He has no land or property of his own—much less a ‘Levitical

city,’—the Lord alone ‘is his inheritance,’ and consequently those who

remember the Levite remember at the same time the Lord whom he serves.

The portion of the offering is defined which is to be the due of the

Levites, and tithe is to be paid to them upon all the produce of the

land. No distinction is drawn in the book of Deuteronomy between the

Levites and the priests, ‘the sons of Aaron,’ and therefore the laws

relating to the Levites apply to all the priests alike.

Another characteristic of the Deuteronomic Law is its insistence on a

central sanctuary. It was to this central sanctuary that the God-fearing

Israelite was commanded to ‘go up’ three times in the year at each of

the great feasts, and there offer his firstlings and sacrifices to the

Lord. This central sanctuary, however, did not exclude the existence of

local altars or shrines. The Levite is described as living in the

families of the other tribes throughout the land (xii. 19, xiv. 27), and

as deciding cases at law, wherever they might occur, along with the

judges (xvi. 18, xvii. 9, xix. 17, xxi. 6). Nor was it necessary when an

animal was slaughtered, and its life-blood poured out before Yahveh,

that this should be done in the one chief temple of the nation. It was

only such offerings as had been specially vowed to the national God that

were required to be brought there. They had been dedicated to Yahveh as

God of the whole nation, and it was therefore to that sanctuary in which

Yahveh was worshipped by the nation as a whole that they had to be

taken. In his individual or local capacity the Israelite was free to

offer his sacrifices where he would. For, it must be remembered, the

very fact that the life-blood was shed made the death of the animal a

sacrifice to the Lord, and the feast on its flesh which followed was a

feast eaten in the presence of the Lord.

The insistence on the central sanctuary implied an equal insistence on

the absolute supremacy of Yahveh in Israel. Idolaters and enticers to

idolatry were to be cut off without pity; even the prophet who spoke in

the name of another god, and whose words came to pass, was to be stoned

to death. The fulfilment of a prediction guaranteed its truth only if

the prophet was the messenger of Yahveh. Yahveh would suffer no other

gods to be worshipped at His side, and the Deuteronomic Law accordingly

forbids all such practices as were connected with the heathenism of the

neighbouring peoples. The Israelites were forbidden to tattoo themselves

like the Syrian worshippers of Hadad, to scarify their flesh like the

Egyptians in mourning for the dead, far less like the Canaanites around

them to sacrifice their firstborn by fire. Every effort was made to

preserve them from contact with their neighbours; their king was

forbidden to ‘multiply’ horses and wives; for the one would lead to

intercourse with Egypt, the other would introduce into Israel the

worship and the images of foreign deities. The sacred trees which from

time immemorial had been planted near the altars of the gods, some of

them by the patriarchs themselves, were to be destroyed like the conical

pillar of the goddess Asherah and the upright column which symbolised

the sun-god.

Few aspects of Hebrew life are left untouched by the enactments of

Deuteronomy. Marriage and divorce, murder and other crimes, the

institution of the cities of refuge, the observance of the great feasts,

the election and duty of a king, sanitary laws including the distinction

between clean and unclean meats, slavery, commerce, and usury, are all

alike subjects of the Deuteronomic legislation. And the whole

legislation is marked by a spirit of compassion for the poor and

suffering, at all events if they belong to the house of Israel, or have

been allowed to share some of its privileges. The creditor is enjoined

to give back to the poor man before nightfall the raiment he had taken

in pledge, and the master is bidden to pay at the close of the day the

wages of ‘the hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy

brethren or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates.’

Even the curious prohibition to mix like and unlike together, as in the

case of a garment of wool and linen (xxii. 11), seems to be a reduction

from the principle which forbade the yoking together of the ox and ass.

The legislation relating to the king is perhaps somewhat striking,

especially when we bear in mind the protest raised by Samuel against the

election of one (1 Sam. vii. 6-18). Samuel, however, was not altogether

disinterested in the matter; and it was obvious that as soon as the

conquest of Canaan was completed, there could be no national unity

without a monarch who could represent the people and lead them in war.

Before the time of Samuel, Abimelech had established a kingdom in

Central Palestine, and tradition spoke of Moses also as ‘king in

Jeshurun’ (Deut. xxxiii. 5). The Israelites, if ever they were to form a

nation, were destined to follow the example of their neighbours; even in

the wild fastnesses of Mount Seir the ‘dukes’ of Edom had been succeeded

by kings. The idea of kingship was so familiar to the Mosaic age, that

it is difficult to conceive of any legislation which did not contemplate

it. Whether the legislation would have taken precisely the same form as

that which we find in Deuteronomy is another question.

The commandments enjoined by Moses were ordered to be written on the

stuccoed face of ‘great stones.’ Whether the whole of the Deuteronomic

legislation is meant is more than doubtful. But that the chief

enactments of the code should be thus placed before the eyes of the

people was in accordance with the customs of the age. The acts and

events of the reign of Augustus engraved on the marble slabs of Ancyra

are a late example of the same usage; and the great inscription of

Darius on the cliff of Behistun has similarly preserved to us the

history of the foundation of the Persian empire. To cover stone or rock

with stucco, which was then painted white and written upon, was a common

practice in Egypt. It seems to imply, however, that the writing could be

painted with the brush, and thus to exclude the use of cuneiform

characters. At the same time, these characters could be cut in stucco as

well as in stone, and it is possible that the stucco was intended to be

a substitute for clay, where a large surface had to be covered. However

this may be, the monument was ordered to be erected on Mount Ebal, by

the side of an altar of unwrought stones.

On Ebal, moreover, and the opposite height of Gerizim, it was prescribed

that a strange ceremony should be performed. While half the tribes stood

on the one mountain, and the other half on the other mountain, the

Levites were to curse from Ebal all those who disobeyed the law, and to

bless from Gerizim those who obeyed it.[252] Unfortunately, as might

have been expected, the curses much predominated over the blessings. We

hear afterwards in the book of Joshua that the ceremony was duly

performed, excepting only that Joshua read the words of cursing and

benediction in place of ‘the priests the Levites.’ Critics have doubted

the historical character of the occurrence, but it is inconsistent with

no known fact, and it is difficult to find a reason for its gratuitous

invention.

The latter part of the book of Deuteronomy brings the life of Moses to

an end. It includes the final covenant made between himself on behalf of

Yahveh and the people of Israel, to which are attached the various

calamities that would await the breaking of it. It also tells us that

the law contained in Deuteronomy was really written by the legislator,

and delivered to the priests the sons of Levi with an injunction that it

should be read every seventh year (xxxi. 9-11). Like the ‘witness’ to S.

John’s Gospel, therefore, the compiler of the Pentateuch in its present

form wishes to add his testimony to the belief that the Mosaic law was

written by Moses himself.

Two songs, attributed to Moses, are also incorporated in the book. They

seem to be a reflection of the curses and blessings pronounced

respectively on Ebal and Gerizim. The one paints the sufferings which

forgetfulness of Yahveh was to bring upon Israel; the other describes

the future happiness and glory of the several tribes. Chiefest among

them are Levi and the house of Joseph; ‘the precious things’ of the

Promised Land are reserved for Ephraim and Manasseh, whose warriors

shall drive the enemies of Yahveh to the ends of the earth. Levi shall

be the lawgiver and instructor of Israel, while Benjamin shall be the

‘beloved of the Lord,’ who shall ‘dwell between his shoulders’ at

Shiloh. Judah, on the other hand, stands in the background; little is

said of him except a prayer that he should be delivered from his

enemies. And Simeon is passed over altogether. It is plain that this

second song or ‘blessing’ must be of early date. It cannot be later than

the early days of the conquest of Canaan, when Ephraim and Manasseh were

still the most powerful of the tribes, and when the tabernacle of Yahveh

was erected at Shiloh. The tribes were still united among themselves;

they still recognised a common God and a common worship, and had not as

yet fallen upon the evil days depicted in the book of Judges. The tone

of the song throughout is that of triumph and success; the Israelites

must have still been in their first flush of victory, and the house of

Joseph have still been their leader in war. But history knows of only

two periods when such was the case; the one period that which followed

the conquest of the Amorite kingdoms east of the Jordan, the other

period that which saw Joshua the Ephraimite at the head of the armies of

Israel. Hebrew antiquity decided that it was to the first period that

the song belonged.[253]

The death of Moses was placed on the summit of one of the mountains of

Abarim—the mountains of the ‘Hebrews’—in the land of Moab over against

the temple of Baal-Peor. On the one side he looked down upon the scene

of his last victory over the opponents of his law, on the place where

the Midianites and their Israelitish sympathisers had been slain; on the

other side lay the Land of Promise, to the borders of which he had led

his people. The peak of Pisgah on which he stood had been dedicated in

old days to the worship of Nebo, the Babylonian god of prophecy and

literature, the interpreter of the will of Merodach, the supreme

divinity of Babylon. It was no accident that the prophet and legislator

of Israel, the interpreter of the will of Yahveh, should die on the same

mountain-peak.

The high-places which the kindred Semitic nations dedicated to the gods

become in the history of Israel the scenes of the death of its great

men. Aaron dies on the summit of Mount Hor, and even to-day the tomb of

the prophet Samuel is pointed out on the lofty top of Mizpah. But no

tomb marked the spot where Moses died; alone among the heroes of Hebrew

history he was buried in a foreign land, and the place where he was

buried was unknown. The legislator of Israel, he who had made Israel a

nation, and with whom Israelitish history began, vanished utterly out of

sight. The fact is a strange one, whatever be the explanation we attempt

to give of it. Can it be that Moab had been more completely conquered by

Israel than the narrative in the Pentateuch would lead us to suppose,

but that with the death of Moses the dominion of Israel passed

away?[254] In that case Moab would have had little interest in

preserving a memory of the last resting-place of its conqueror, and the

time would soon have come when its site was forgotten.

Footnote 153:

See Sayce, _The Higher Criticism and the Monuments_, p. 249.

Footnote 154:

E. Naville, _Goshen and the Shrine of Saft el-Hennah_, Fourth Memoir

of the Egypt Exploration Fund (1887).

Footnote 155:

Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_ (Eng. tr.), second edit., ii. p.

133.

Footnote 156:

Flinders Petrie, _Tel el-Amarna_, pp. 40-42.

Footnote 157:

See above, p. 115.

Footnote 158:

For Khar, the Horites of the Old Testament, see Maspero, _Struggle of

the Nations_, p. 121.

Footnote 159:

On the road from Assuan to Shellâl, ‘Messui, the royal son of Kush,

the fan-bearer on the right of the king, the royal scribe,’ has left

his name and titles on a granite rock (Petrie, _A Season in Egypt_,

No. 70). Below the inscription is Meneptah in a chariot, with Messui

holding the fan and bowing before him.

Footnote 160:

For Dr. Neubauer’s suggestion that the name of Aaron, otherwise so

inexplicable, is the Arabic Âron or Âran written in the Minæan

fashion, see above, p. 34, note 1. If the suggestion is right, it was

specially appropriate that Aaron should have met Moses in ‘the Mount

of God,’ on the frontiers of Midian (Exod. iv. 27).

Footnote 161:

A translation of the papyrus has been given by Professor Maspero in

_The Records of the Past_, new series, ii. pp. 11-36.

Footnote 162:

See Preface to Maspero’s _Dawn of Civilisation_, p. v.

Footnote 163:

Reuel, ‘Shepherd of God,’ was a son of Esau, according to Gen. xxxvi.

4. It may have been a title of the high-priest, since _rêu_,

‘shepherd,’ is one of the titles given to the kings and high-priests

of early Babylonia. The high-priest Gudea, for instance, calls himself

‘the shepherd of the god Nin-girsu.’ On the other hand, Hommel (_The

Ancient Hebrew Tradition_, p. 278) compares the name Reuel-Jethro with

the Minæan Ridsvu-il Vitrân.

Footnote 164:

In the word _seneh_ a popular etymology seems to have been found for

the name of Mount Sinai. Hence it is that in Deut. xxxiii. 16, Yahveh

is described as ‘him that dwelt in the _seneh_.’ The _seneh_ was

probably the small prickly _acacia nilotica_.

Footnote 165:

No satisfactory etymology of the name Yahveh has yet been found. This,

however, is not strange, considering that the etymology was unknown to

the Hebrews themselves, as is shown by the explanation of the name in

Exod. iii. 14, where it is derived from the Aramaic _hewâ_, the Hebrew

equivalent being _hâyâh_, with _y_ instead of _w_ (or _v_). The

Babylonians were also ignorant of the original meaning of the word,

since one of the lexical cuneiform tablets gives _Yahu_ or Yahveh as

meaning ‘god’ (in Israelitish), and identifies it with the Assyrian

word _yahu_, ‘myself’ (83, 1-18, 1332 _Obv._; Col. ii. 1). No certain

traces of the name have been found except among the Israelites. It is

a verbal formation like _Jacob_, _Joseph_, etc.

Footnote 166:

Maspero, _Dawn of Civilisation_, pp. 132-134.

Footnote 167:

For ‘strikes’ among the Egyptian artisans, see Spiegelberg, _Arbeiter

und Arbeiterbewegung im Pharaonreich unter den Ramessiden_ (1895).

Footnote 168:

At Tel el-Maskhuta, or Pithom, however, the bricks were not mixed with

straw.

Footnote 169:

See Wiedemann, _Religion der alten Aegypter_, pp. 142 _sq._

Footnote 170:

Exod. vii. 19 contains an exaggeration which could easily be omitted

without any injury to the sense of the narrative. The change of water

in the river would affect the canals and such pools and ponds as were

fed from the Nile, but nothing else. The river-water is not considered

fit for drinking in the early days of the inundation. The green and

slimy vegetation brought from the Equatorial regions renders it quite

poisonous, and it is not until some days after it has become ‘red’

that it is again fit to drink.

Footnote 171:

The ‘camels’ mentioned along with the cattle in Exod. ix. 3 have been

inserted from an Israelitish point of view. The Egyptians had no

camels; and though the Bedâwin doubtless used them from an early

period, none were employed by the Egyptians themselves until the Roman

or Arab age.

Footnote 172:

The passage is, unfortunately, mutilated. What remains reads thus:

‘... the tents in front of the city of Pi-Bailos, on the canal of

Shakana; ... [the adjoining land] was not cultivated, but had been

left as pasture for cattle for the sake of the foreigners. It had been

abandoned since the time of (our) ancestors. All the kings of Upper

Egypt sat within their entrenchments ... and the kings of Lower Egypt

found themselves in the midst of their cities, surrounded with

earthworks, cut off from everything by the (hostile) warriors, for

they had no mercenaries to oppose to them. Thus had it been [until

Meneptah] ascended the throne of Horus. He was crowned to preserve the

life of mankind.’ The word translated ‘tents’ is _ahilu_, the Hebrew

_ôhêl_, which is used by Ramses III. of the ‘tents’ of the Shasu or

Edomites of Mount Seir. For translations of the text, see E. de Rougé,

_Extrait d’un Mémoire sur les Attaques dirigées contre l’Égypte_, pp.

6-13 (1867); Chabas, _Recherches pour servir à l’histoire de la

^{xix}e Dynastie_, pp. 84-92 (1873); Brugsch, _Egypt under the

Pharaohs_, Eng. tr. (2nd edit.), ii. pp. 116-123; Maspero, _The

Struggle of the Nations_, pp. 433-436.

Footnote 173:

_Cont. Apion._ i. 26.

Footnote 174:

This name, however, varied in different versions of the legend.

Chærêmôn makes it Phritiphantes, which may represent Zaphnath-paaneah,

the dental (_t_) taking the place of _z_, and _pa-Ra_, ‘the sun-god’

of _pa-Ankhu_, ‘the living one.’

Footnote 175:

The papyrus is in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg (Golénischeff,

_Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la Philologie et à l’Archéologie

égyptiennes et assyriennes_, xv. pp. 88, 89).

Footnote 176:

Dr. Wilcken has pointed out (_Zur Aegyptisch-hellenistischen

Literatur_ in the _Festschrift für Georg Ebers_, 1897, pp. 146-152)

that two fragments of a Greek papyrus published by Wessely in the

_Denkschriften der Wiener Akademie_, 42, 1893, pp. 3 _sqq._, contain a

legend which closely resembles that of the Egyptian version of the

Exodus. In this, however, a potter takes the place of the seer

Amenôphis, the desire of the king to see the gods is explained by his

wish to know the future, the ‘impure people’ are called the

‘girdle-wearers,’ and the beginning of a Sothic cycle is apparently

combined with the story. Moreover, it would seem that the papyrus does

not yet know of the identification of the ‘impure people’ with the

Jews.

Footnote 177:

_The Threshold Covenant or the Beginning of Religious Rites_ (New

York, 1896).

Footnote 178:

_The Threshold Covenant_, pp. 203, 204.

Footnote 179:

See above, p. 155.

Footnote 180:

_Egypt under the Pharaohs_ (Eng. tr.), second edit., ii. pp. 96-98.

Footnote 181:

_Anastasi_, v. 19. For the translation, see Brugsch, _Egypt under the

Pharaohs_ (Eng. tr.), second edit., ii. p. 132.

Footnote 182:

First pointed out by Goodwin in the Sallier Papyrus, iv. 1, 6.

Footnote 183:

Josh. ii. 10; iv. 23; xxiv. 6-8.

Footnote 184:

Ps. cvi. 7-9, 22; cxxxvi. 13-15; Neh. ix. 9; see also Acts vii. 36.

Footnote 185:

The event was first recorded by Kallisthenes, and Plutarch (_Alex._

17) states that ‘many historians’ had described it. Arrian (i. 27)

alludes to it, and Menander introduced a scoffing reference to the

miracle in one of his plays. The actual facts are given by Strabo

(_Geog._ xiv. 3, 9), who says that near Phasêlis Mount Klimax juts out

into the sea, but that in calm weather a road runs round its base on

the seaward side. If the wind rises, however, the road is submerged by

the waves. Alexander ventured to march along it while still covered by

the sea, and though the water was up to the waists of the soldiers,

passed safely through it, the wind not being very strong. His success

came to be regarded as a miracle, and the miraculous passage of the

sea by his army is narrated with many embellishments in the fragment

of an unknown historian in a lexicon discovered by Papadopoulos in

1892.

Footnote 186:

The narrative is careful to indicate that this was the case (Exod.

xiv. 23, 28). It is only in the Song of Moses (Exod. xv. 19) that

‘Pharaoh’s horses’ are changed into ‘the horse of Pharaoh,’ a change

which, like the confusion between ‘the sea’ and the Yâm Sûph, shows

either that the Song is of later date or that its language has been

modified and interpolated.

Footnote 187:

_Pap. Anastasi_, iv. A translation of it by Dr. Birch will be found in

_Records of the Past_, first series, vol. iv. pp. 49-52. The poet says

of the king: ‘Amon gave thy heart pleasure, he gave thee a good old

age.’ The name of the king, however, is not given, and it is therefore

possible that Seti II. rather than Meneptah is referred to.

Footnote 188:

The last Pharaoh whose monuments have been found in the Sinaitic

peninsula is Ramses VI. of the twentieth dynasty (De Morgan,

_Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte_, p. 237).

Footnote 189:

The Amalekites adjoined Edom (Gen. xxxvi. 12) and southern Israel

(Judg. v. 14), and extended from Shur, or the Wall of Egypt, to

Havilah, the ‘sandy’ desert of Northern Arabia (1 Sam. xv. 7; see Gen.

xiv. 7). That these Amalekites were the same as those conquered by

Moses is expressly stated in 1 Sam. xv. 2 (cf. Exod. xvii. 16). The

latter, therefore, lived miles to the north of the Sinaitic peninsula.

The wilderness of Paran lay on the southern side of Moab (Deut. i. 1)

and Judah (Gen. xxi. 14, 20, 21). Kadesh, now ’Ain Qadîs, was situated

in it (Numb. xiii. 26). The geography of the Exodus is treated with

great ability and logical skill in Baker Greene’s _Hebrew Migration

from Egypt_ (1879).

Footnote 190:

Judg. v. 4, 5; Deut. xxxiii. 2; Hab. iii. 3.

Footnote 191:

First pointed out by Baker Greene, _The Hebrew Migration from Egypt_,

p. 170; Elim is the masculine, and Elath the feminine plural. Compare

El-Paran, perhaps ‘El(im) of Paran,’ in Gen. xiv. 6, as well as Elah

in Gen. xxxvi. 41.

Footnote 192:

Exod. xvi. 1 compared with Numb. xxxiii. 11.

Footnote 193:

The name is found in an inscription of Hadramaut (Osiander,

_Inscriptions in the Himyaritic Character_, p. 29), where the god is

called the son of Atthar or Istar instead of her brother, as in

Babylonia, as well as in a Sabæan text from Sirwaḥ.

Footnote 194:

Numb. xiii. 26. The sanctuary had originally been Amalekite (Gen. xiv.

7).

Footnote 195:

Unfortunately, no calculation of distance can be made from the

statement that Elijah was ‘forty days and forty nights’ on his way

from Jezreel to Horeb, since ‘forty’ merely denotes an unknown number.

Footnote 196:

In the early days of the monarchy the armies of both the Israelites

and the Philistines were similarly divided into companies of a hundred

and a thousand (1 Sam. xxii. 7; xxix. 2; 2 Sam. xviii. 1). The system

could not have been derived from Babylonia, where sixty was the unit

of notation.

Footnote 197:

See my _Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, pp. 74-77,

and Hibbert Lectures on the _Religion of the Ancient Babylonians_, pp.

70-77.

Footnote 198:

The text of this is given in the 125th chapter of the Book of the

Dead. A translation of it will be found in Wiedemann’s _Religion der

alten Aegypter_, pp. 132, 133.

Footnote 199:

The conceptions which underlay this were embodied in the mediæval

jurisprudence of Europe, and curious reports exist of the trials of

cocks, rats, flies, dogs, and even ants, which lasted down to the

eighteenth century (see Baring-Gould, _Curiosities of Olden Times_,

second edit., pp. 57-73).

Footnote 200:

The exhortation, together with some of the laws, is given again in a

somewhat changed form in Exod. xxxiv. 10-26.

Footnote 201:

The name belongs to the period when the Philistines were infesting the

sea, before they had settled on the coast of Palestine, and indicates

the early date of the passage in which it occurs. Perhaps the Greek

tradition of the command of the sea by the Kretan Minos is a

reminiscence of the same period.

Footnote 202:

W. A. I. i. 54, Col. ii. 54 _sqq._

Footnote 203:

_Transactions_ of the Society of Biblical Archæology, vii. 1, pp. 53,

54.

Footnote 204:

A contract-tablet dated in the 32nd year of Nebuchadrezzar, and

published by Dr. Strassmaier (_Inschriften von Nabuchodonoser_, No.

217), gives us an insight into the details of Babylonian sacrifices,

though, unfortunately, the signification of many of the technical

words employed in it is doubtful or unknown. The tablet begins as

follows: ‘Izkur-Merodach the son of Imbiya the son of Ilei-Merodach of

his own free will has given for the future to Nebo-balásu-ikbi the son

of Kuddinu the son of Ilei-Merodach the slaughterers of the oxen and

sheep for the sacrifices of the king, the prescribed offerings, the

peace-offerings (?) of the whole year, viz., the caul round the heart,

the chine, the covering of the ribs, the ..., the mouth of the

stomach, and the ..., as well as during the year 7000 sin-offerings

and 100 sheep before Iskhara who dwells in the temple of Sa-turra in

Babylon (not excepting the soft parts of the flesh, the trotters (?),

the juicy meat and the salted (?) flesh), and also the slaughterers of

the oxen, sheep, birds, and lambs due on the 8th day of Nisan, (and)

the heave-offering of an ox and a sheep before Pap-sukal of

Bit-Kidur-Kani, the temple of Nin-ip and the temple of Anu on the

further bank of the New Town in Babylon.’

Footnote 205:

_The Ancient Hebrew Tradition_, pp. 282-284.

Footnote 206:

See the illustration in Erman’s _Life in Ancient Egypt_ (Eng. tr.), p.

298.

Footnote 207:

Mr. G. Buchanan Gray (_Studies in Hebrew Proper Names_, p. 246, note

1) suggests that Aholiab is a foreign name. At all events, while we

find names compounded with _ohel_, ‘tabernacle,’ in Minæan and

Phœnician inscriptions, no other name of the kind is found among the

Israelites.

Footnote 208:

Sir Thomas Browne, in his _Religio Medici_ (Part i.), remarks on this:

‘I would gladly know how Moses, with an actual fire, calcined or burnt

the golden calf into powder; for that mystical metal of gold, whose

solary and celestial nature I admire, exposed unto the violence of

fire, grows only hot and liquefies, but consumeth not.’

Footnote 209:

An interpolation (Exod. xxxiii. 1-5) makes the worship of the golden

calf account for the fact that, as declared in Exod. xxiii. 20, an

angel should lead Israel into Canaan, and not Yahveh Himself. But it

ignores the further fact that Yahveh was really present in the Holy of

Holies as well as in the pillar of fire and cloud.

Footnote 210:

Hadad-sum and his son Anniy (see my _Patriarchal Palestine_, p. 250).

Small stone tablets like those of Balawât, engraved with cuneiform

characters, are in the museums of Europe.

Footnote 211:

Sayce, _Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments_, pp. 79-83.

Footnote 212:

The contrast between such cases, where the names and details are as

circumstantially stated as in the legal tablets of early Babylonia,

and cases which rest merely upon the memory of tradition, will be

clear at once from a reference to Numb. xv. 32-36. Here we have to do

with tradition only, and accordingly no name is given, and the story

is introduced with the vague statement that it happened at some time

or other when the Israelites ‘were in the wilderness.’ The whole of

the chapter is an interpolation which is singularly out of place in

the narrative, and seems to have been substituted for a description of

the disasters which followed on the abortive attempt of the Israelites

to invade Canaan.

Footnote 213:

Sayce, _Babylonian Literature_, pp. 79, 80; Knudtzon, _Assyrische

Gebete an den Sonnengott_, pp. 73 _sqq._

Footnote 214:

Athenæus, _Deipn._ xiv. 639 c.

Footnote 215:

Amiaud’s translation of the Inscriptions of Telloh in the _Records of

the Past_, new ser., ii. pp. 83, 84.

Footnote 216:

This was clearly shown by Colenso, _The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua

critically examined_, Pt. i.

Footnote 217:

The _soss_ was 60, the _ner_ 600.

Footnote 218:

Erman, _Life in Ancient Egypt_ (Eng. tr.), p. 475.

Footnote 219:

So in Josephus, _Antiq._ ii. 10.

Footnote 220:

Trumbull, _Kadesh-barnea_ (1884).

Footnote 221:

Numb. xiii. 21 seems to be a later exaggeration when compared with the

following verse. No argument, however, can be drawn from the statement

that the spies were absent only ‘forty days,’ since here, as

elsewhere, ‘forty’ merely means an unknown length of time.

Footnote 222:

Eshcol, however, was already the name of an Amorite chieftain of Mamre

in the time of Abraham (Gen. xiv. 13).

Footnote 223:

Numb. xxi. 1-3 is a combination of this abortive attempt and the

subsequent conquest of Arad and Zephath by Judah and Simeon (Judg. i.

16, 17), and is intended to resume the thread of the history which had

been broken by the insertion of chapter xv.

Footnote 224:

In Numb. xx. 1-13 a tradition about the waters of Meribah takes the

place of a history of the long period that elapsed between the first

and the second arrival at Kadesh, during which the numerous series of

stations mentioned in Numb. xxxiii. 19-36 was passed. A comparison

with Exod. xvii. 1-7 and Deut. xxxiii. 8 seems to show that the story

of ‘the water of Meribah’ has been transferred from Rephidim to

Kadesh. At Kadesh, indeed, there would have been no want of water (see

Gen. xiv. 7), and it may be that the meaning of the word Meribah,

‘contention,’ has been the cause of the transference. En-Mishpat, ‘the

Spring of Judgment,’ where contentions were decided, had been for

centuries the name of the spring at Kadesh-barnea. As for the name of

Zin, it possibly signifies ‘the dry place.’

Footnote 225:

Gen. xxxvi. 27; 1 Chron. i. 42.

Footnote 226:

In Deut. x. 6, 7 (which has been interpolated in the middle of the

narrative of the legislation at Mount Sinai), the order of events is:

(1) Departure from Beeroth of Beni-Yaakan to Mosera, (2) death of

Aaron at Mosera, (3) departure to Gudgodah, (4) departure to Yotbath.

In Numb. xx., xxxiii. 30-39 it is, on the contrary: (1) Departure from

Hashmonah to Moseroth, (2) departure to Beni-Yaakan, (3) departure to

Hor-hagidgad, the Gudgodah of Deuteronomy, (4) departure to Yotbathah,

(5) departure to Ebronah, (6) departure to Ezion-geber, (7) departure

to Kadesh, (8) departure to Mount Hor, (9) death of Aaron on Mount

Hor.

Footnote 227:

The passage was already corrupt in the time of the Septuagint

translators. But instead of _eth-wâhab_, their text reads _eth-zâhâb_.

If this was correct, the reference would probably be to Dhi-Zahab,

‘(the mines) of gold’ which, according to Deut. i. 1, was not far from

Sûph.

Footnote 228:

_Zeitschrift des Palästina Vereins_, xiv. pp. 142 _sq._ Tell ’Ashtereh

is the Ashteroth-Karnaim of Gen. xiv. 5.

Footnote 229:

Professor Erman reads them Akna-Zapn, perhaps Yakin-Zephon, ‘Jachin of

the North.’ Above the figures is the winged solar disk (Erman, _Der

Hiobstein_ in the _Zeitschrift des Palästina Vereins_, xiv. pp. 210,

211).

Footnote 230:

On the left side of the base of the second statue in front of the

pylon, where it follows the name of Assar, the Asshurim of Gen. xxv.

3; see Daressy, _Notice explicative des Ruines du Temple de Louxor_,

p. 19.

Footnote 231:

Bela’s city is stated to have been Dinhabah (Gen. xxxvi. 32), which

Dr. Neubauer has identified with Dunip, now Tennib, north-west of

Aleppo, which played an important part in the history of Western Asia

during the fifteenth century B.C.

Footnote 232:

W. A. I. i. 46; Col. iii. 29, 30. In another passage Esar-haddon

describes them as ‘serpents with two heads’ (Budge, _History of

Esar-haddon_, p. 120).

Footnote 233:

Bronze serpents were regarded in Babylonia as divine protectors of a

building, and were accordingly ‘set up’ at its entrance. Thus

Nebuchadrezzar says of the walls of Babylon, ‘On the thresholds of the

gates I set up mighty bulls of bronze and huge serpents that stood

erect’ (W. A. I. i. 65, i. 19-21).

Footnote 234:

It is called simply Iyîm in the official itinerary (Numb. xxxiii. 45).

Punon is the Pinon of Gen. xxxvi. 41, where it is coupled with Elah,

the El-Paran of Gen. xiv. 6.

Footnote 235:

Those who wish to see what can be done by ingenious philological

conjectures which satisfy none but their authors may turn to a paper

by Professor Budde in the _Actes du Dixième Congrès Internationale des

Orientalistes_, iii. pp. 13-18, where they will find a ‘revised’

version of Numb. xxi. 17, 18. The two last lines are changed into

‘With the sceptre, with their staves: From the desert a gift!’

Footnote 236: