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LETTER ^«'CAL8t^
BISHOP COLENSO,
WHEREIN HIS OBJECTIONS TO THE PENTATEUCH APvE EXAMINED IN DETAIL.
WITH ADDITIONAL REMARKS ON PART 1 1
BY THE y
REV. WILLIAM H.'llOARE. M.A.
LATE FELLOW OF ST, JOHN's COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE \ AUTHOR OF "outlines OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY," "VERACITY OF GENF.SI-
ETC.
TEIRB EDITION.
LONDONT : RIVINGTONS, WATEELOO PLAOP:.
CAMBKIDGEr-DEIGHTON, BELL. & CO. 1863.
Pn : -rR
^ Price One Shilling. ^~^
( ^ APR 1 ^ 192
LETTER %..„, ^,.,
TO
BISHOP COLENSO,
WHEREIN HIS 0BJECTI0:N^S TO THE PENTATEUCH ARE EXAMINED IN DETAIL.
WITH ADDITIONAL REMARKS ON PAET II.
BY THE
REV. WILLIAM H.^toARE, M.A.
TATE FELLOW OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE ; AUTHOR OF " OUTLINES OF ECCLESIASTICAL HI&TOBY," '' YF.BACITY OF GENESIS,
ETC.
THIBD EDITION,
LONDON :
RI^^INGTONS, WATERLOO PLACE.
CAMBRIDGE :— DEIGHTON, BELL & CO.
1863.
Price Ove Shining.
V
• LONDON :
CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR, PIUNTERS, BREAD STREET HILL.
ADVERTISEMENT TO THE THIRD EDITION.
The very considerable additions made to tliis work (particularly on Chapters ii. — viii.) in the j)resent Edition, justify the remark, that there remains now but little, if anything, in Bishop Colenso's First Part, which has not received a full and free examination from all sides of the Church. The sheets being already in the press when Dr. M 'Caul's larger work appeared, the Author has not had the opportunity of benefiting by what he understands to be the Doctor's able and intelligent treatment of the subject. With regard to his own labours, he may be allowed to add, that he has con- tinued, as before, to keep principally in view the large and in- fluential class to whom the BishojD has specially addressed himself as representing the plain good sense of his countrymen, the English Laily. " I appeal," remarks the Bishop, in his Second Part (Preface, p. xxvii.), " to the Laity with confidence." If the author might speak of ' confidence ' too, it is only under the conviction, that he has endeavoured to treat the Bishop with the respect due to his oflice, without compromising the truthfubiess due to his subject.
PEEEACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
Though the work of demolition is not yet complete, we must now follow the Bishop, while he slowly rears his fabric out of the ruins which the hand of an unsparing criticism has thrown heedlessly around. Indeed, if he is right in his conjectures, the time must be at hand when nothing but a pure vacuity will be left (!), for he speaks (Part II., Preface p. viii.) of "breath spent in vain" in defending the forlorn cause, " when the composite character of the story of the Exodus is once distinctly recognised, and the Pentateuch falls to pieces, as it were, in the reader's hands''
At this point, then, it seems specially necessary to review our position as affected by Part I. If any one thinks that the business is disposed of, and the reasonings in the former Part have little or no bearing on the future aspects of the question, I fear he will find himself greatly deceived. Bishop Colenso is quite of another mind, and has no thought of his former speculations passing away as a mere matter of idle curiosity. They are to be the basis of all the subsequent deductions, and will be found to affect seriously, not the Pentateuch only, but every book of the Old Testament. It is, therefore, once for all that we must make up our minds, or not com- plain that these deductions come upon us by surprise. We must take good heed at the beginning, or we shall find our-
vi PREFAC^E TO THE THIRD EDITION.
selves landed suddenly on strange ground, with a very small residuum of Scripture truth to stand upon. Speaking, for example, of the signs there are in the Scripture documents, which indicate a later date for the Pentateuch than the time of Moses, the Bishop writes thus— " But these difficulties, " after all, are by us regarded as only of secondary import- " ance. They are not those on which we rest the stress of " our argument. Being satisfied on other sure grounds, as " set forth in Part /., that the story of the Pentateuch has no " claim to be regarded as historically true, much less as " divinely infallible, we are not obliged to have recourse to " such suppositions as the above, to escape from the conclu- " sions, to which we should certainly be led, if we were " discussing a ' classical ' and not a ' sacred ' writer." (247, Ans. iv.) And, again — " Undouhtedly, as I have shovm, I " believe, sufficiently in Part I., an unquestioning, implicit faith " in all the details of the story of the Exodus, as recorded in " the Pentateuch, involves, again and again, assent to propo- " sitions as monstrous and absurd as that two and two make " five "' (490). In Chapter V. (238), the Bishop says, " We " have already seen reason to conclvde that the account of " the Exodus, generally, as there narrated, could not have " been written by Moses, or by any one of his contempo- " raries." Now, where does the reader think that this has been * already seen ? ' The nearest I can find to any proof at all is where we read as follows (222) : "Our lyrevioiis consider- " ations have forced upon us the conviction, by reason of the " impossibilities contained in it, that the account of the " Exodus, generally, is wanting in historical truth. . . . But " if the last four books of the Pentateuch must be pronounced " to be, for the most part, unhistorical, it will hardly be con- " tended that the Book of Genesis can be any other tlian, in
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. VU
" tlie main, imhistorical also." Tims everything runs back to the '' sv/tr grounds" the " inevious considerations,'' the " con- " vincing conclusions " of the former Part. These are made the basis on which the whole fabric is to be erected, which is to display the Pentateuch in its proper character and original constitution.
We have now, then, an insight into the general plan and tenor of the argument before us. The order of the reasoning is as follows : —
In the First Part, the Bishop claims to have shown the many manifest 'inaccuracies,' 'contradictions,' 'errors,' and ' absurdities,' which disfigure the pages of the Pentateuch ; from this he concludes against the 'infallibility,' and, con- sequently, against the 'inspiration,' of the writers. From which, again, he infers, that, being no longer ' restrained by any religious fears or scruples' (216), nor being obliged to suppose any supernatural qualifications in the authors of the books, we are henceforth at perfect liberty to assign any sort of authors, and any number we please !
To accuse the Scripture writers in these broad and uncom- promising terms, though it is nothing new with the P>ishop — is, assuredly, paying dear for a theory ! and a theory, after all, which by no means covers the whole phenomena of the case even according to his own showing. For ' inspiration ' there must he somewhere, or how else can we account for the authority which the Bishop liimself attributes to the sacred writings in matters spiritual and divine? For he says of the Pentateuch, " It does not therefore cease to ' contain the " true Word of God,' with ' all things necessary for salvation,' " to be ' profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction " in righteousness.' It still remains an integral portion of that " Book which, whatever intermixture it may show of human
viii PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
" elements, . . . has yet, through God's providence, and the " 8'pmial wm^hing of His Spirit on the minds of its writers, been " the means of revealing to us His true Name, the Name of '' the only Living and True God ; and has all along been, and, " as far as we know, will never cease to be, the mightiest " instrument in the hand of the Divine Teacher, for awakening " in our minds just conceptions of His character, and of His " gracious and merciful dealings with the children of men." — Part I. (14). And again. Part II. (515), " The Hebrew Scrip- " tures are a gracious gift of God, which He, in His provi- " dence, has ' caused to be written for our learning ' in Divine " things."
But I would ask further, what does he mean by ' infalli- hility in the Avriters ? ' The Bishop may deny it if he pleases {see Part II. Preface, ix. x.) ; but this is far too strong a term to have any just application in the particular instances before us — instances involving, perhaps, merely a number, or a name, or a subordinate incident in the sacred narrative ! There may have been occasions in the heat of argument, when a little exaggeration has been indulged on this head among the advocates of Christian truth ; but this is by no means the general rule in the Church. '' Infallibility " is no appropriate term, when the question concerns things ascertainable by common pains and care, and which require no express reve- lation. We should remember the discreet advice of a right reverend prelate of former days, from whose pages I have quoted in a former part of this "Letter" (p. 9). I would recommend also to the reader's careful consideration the able and judicious remarks of the present Norrisian Professor, in his truly valuable contribution to the Aids to Faith (see "Letter" 12). To require in the Sacred writers, the same pre- cision in matters of science, or common history, which Ave justly
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. IX
expect in matters of divine and revealed truth, is to lay the stress of inspiration on the letter more than on the spirit. Time itself may alter the letter— may corrupt a reading ;— but the Word of God, in its inward spirit and truth, is secured by the Divine promise from ever changing, and from ever passing away. But this is quite a different thing from im- puting " errors and contradictions/' and I know not what other forms of imbecility and utter unreliableness, which, in the volume before us, we find unsparingly heaped upon the Sacred writers.
The Bishop appears to have set out with an unfortunate and unreasonable dread of intolerance in a Church which, more than any other, has succeeded in uniting, on the broad basis of the Catholic Creeds, persons of the most opposite tendencies and habits of mind, who, without feeling that they are sacrificing the liberty of conscience which each holds dear, can meet on the great cardinal points of Scripture truth, and, for the rest, agree to differ— a Church the most tolerant, per- haps, of any in the world. The very question now before us in Part II.— viz. the age and autJiorship of the Fentateucli — has been freely handled by competent men before now. It has not perhaps attracted so much attention in England as among our brethren across the Channel ; perhaps, when it does, we shall find our difficulties as weU as they. But in what has been attempted hitherto, there has not been, so far as I have seen, any fear or uneasiness as to its being a high crime and misdemeanour, rendering one amenable in Ecclesiastical courts, to review it dispassionately, and to apply to it the just rules of criticism, provided this be done with due reverence for the Scriptures, and, thus far, in conformity with the established rule and order of the Church. I could point to works where the writers have felt perfectly at liberty, provided they did so
h
X PEEFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
in a really ' becoming spirit/ to argue on the supposition that the exact authorship of the Pentateuch might be regarded as a matter of comparative indifference ; and the expression of such an opinion has passed unreproved. My belief is, that opinions on this subject are left open to a much greater extent than the Bishop appears to imagine. And if this was the chief thing that troubled him, and on which he wanted to have had something conceded to his doubts, it appears to me that the court was open, and he might have pleaded with perfect safety in the ears of candid and right-judging men, if he had only been willing to proceed in a spirit of greater reverence and caution — if he had taken more deliberate counsel with his own friends and equals, and had been carejul to reserve his conclusions till he had heard the other side of the question more freely discussed among persons competent to the task.
But what hope is there* of any good understanding, on the basis of Scripture and the Catholic Creeds, so long as the Bishop will persist in his manifest error of imputing igno- rance to the Blessed Saviour Himself? When will he be able to see that that Divine 'Word,' the 'Maker of all things ' (John i. 3), who made Moses himself, could not possibly but Unow whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch ? And if every- where in His discourses He couples the name of Moses with the Law, is it not doing Him a dishonour to doubt His Word ? We may not think it necessary to infer that every ' word ' and every ' letter ' of the Pentateuch is thereby authenticated as ' infallible ;' but the least degree of reverence for the holy
* The Bishop emphatically repeats the arguments in Part I., which explain away the expressions of our Blessed Lord when referring to Moses in the Gospels, on the ground of the imperfect information which He possessed as the Son of Man. (See Part II. Pref. xv.— xvii.)
PEEFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. m
Gospels, in which our faith is written, would surely make us reluctant to deny in toto the Mosaic origin of the books.*
The labours, perhaps, of a translator, superadded to the responsible charge of a Colonial Diocese, may have left the Bishop but little time to collect his thoughts, while both must have conspired to raise within him a high ambition to pro- mote, in a measure worthy of such great opportunities, the cause of the 'Truth.' The Bishop, assuredly, if any man, was not the ' good easy brother ' described in his Preface, " who never knew what it was to have a passionate yearning '' for the Truth as Truth — who never made a sacrifice in the " search, or for the maintenance of it ; and never, in fact, gave "himself an hour's hard thinking in his life." (Part II. Pref. xxix.)
One might heartily wdsh that in this matter of ' relieving himself and his readers of all restraint', he had not so entirely mistaken the temper of the Church, and the spirit of the times. One could wish, at least, that the nine years during which he has been in charge of the Diocese of Natal, he had been able to spend in England — there to witness the growing spirit of unity and brotherly love, exhibiting itself in the various modes, which are springing up on every side, of assembling together for the purpose of mutual counsel and co-operation — whether in Church Congress, — Diocesan Synod,
* I may here refer to the opinion of a writer who will not be accused by the Bishop of any want of liberality, and who says, " We fully allow, that the " testimony of Christ and his Apostles would be decisive with us, were it " borne unequivocally and clearly on behalf of the Mosaic authorship of the '• whole Pentateuch. For though their mission into the world was not to " teach the Jews criticism, and though true faith in Christ is not hasty to set " limits to critical investigations, yet we remember that they were teachers " of truth, and would not have allowed any error of importance, or ignorant " prejudice, to have remained in the minds of the Jews." — Dr. Samuel Davidson, p. 617, Text of the Old Testament. Longmans : 1856.
xii PKEFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
— Clerical Association, — or Church Institution, where 'the Laity ' take a principal part. This was not a time when it was likely that any speculations should be received with favour, which seemed to indicate a hasty or contentious spirit — a spirit of impatience with those restraints which the wise order and discipline of the Church has thrown around her members, and which are specially binding on those who have been called to the sacred office of the ]Ministry.
As regards the particular question brought before us in this last member of the Bishop's work, as to the age and authorship of the Pentateuch, — it may be of use to some of my readers to be made acquainted with the general merits of the question before they enter into the objections alleged by Dr. Colenso in the Part which has just appeared, against the view generally received in the Church. With the hope of satisfying this want, I purpose in a following number, if God permit, to <lraw up a short and plain account of tlie principal arguments on behalf of the Mosaic origin of tlie books ; and then to notice the principal objections on the contrary part. The Bishop carries over so much of his argu- ment to ' another Part,' still, and altogether scatters his observations in so discursive a manner, that it is difficult to follow him ; but, as far as one can see, it may be expected, I think, that he will begin his Zulu Bible with the Book of l^salms ! It strikes me the old-fashioned way is better, of beginning with Genesis.
CONTENTS.
PAOE
Advertisement to the Thihd Edition iii
Preface to the Third Edition v
Advertisement to the Reader 2
General Observations 3
On Chapters
( The Family of Jddah )
TI. III. ] [ 11
( The Seventy who went down to Egypt )
IV. — The Size of the Court of the Tabernacle compared with
THE Number op the Congregation 21
V. — Moses and Joshua addressing all Israel 23
VI. — The Extent of the Camp, compared with the Priests' Duties
AND THE daily NECESSITIES OF THE PEOPLE 26
VII. — The two Numberings 29
VIII. — The Israelites dwelling in Tents 32
IX. — The Israelites armed 34
( The Institution of the Passover )
X. XL ] [ 37
( The March out of Egypt . . . )
/ The Sheep and Cattle of the Israelites in the Desert \
XII 1 f
{ The Number of the Israelites, compared with the Ex- ) 43
XIII. / \ \ tent of the Land of Canaan ^
The Number of the Israelites who went down into )
XIV. Egypt, compared with the Number who returned
TO -| — The Tbie of their Sojourn — The Number of the \ 50 XIX. Tribe of Levi — The Number of the tribe of Dan —
The Number of the First-borns J
XX ( The Number of the Priests at the Exodus, compared )
XXL ^ WITH their Duties )
XXII. — The last Campaigns before the Death of Moses . . . . QQ
XXIII. — General Observations— Conclusion 74
Appendix . 78
A
ADVERTISEMENT TO THE EEADER.
In replying to a work professedly critical, it may need some expla- nation, why there is not more of allusion to gi'eat critical works than will be found in the following pages. The author is not unacquainted with such works, but agrees with Bishop Colenso in thinking, that they are often " overlaid with an unwieldy mass of erudition," unfitting them for general use. (xxxii.)
And besides, the Bishop's appeal is not to the works of the learned, but to the plain mind and good sense of his countrymen. " Especially," he says, " I commend this subject to the attention of the Laity." (xxxv.) And again, (xxxiii.) " The facts have only to be stated, as I have endeavoured to state them, in a form intelligible to the most milearned layman." It has been the writer's endeavour to adapt his remarks to the same class of readers, and especially to those who are tolerably well acquainted with Scripture History.
The reader will find in the Appendix a convenient Summary of the Family of Jacob, as we have it in the Hebrew text, and in the LXX. version, of Gen. xlvi.
L E T T E 1^.
My Lord,
From the prestige of your name in connexion with mathematical science, expectations were raised high when it was announced that you were engaged on certain new calculations, affecting the truth of the Pentateuch and of some other portions of Holy Scripture. Your work has since appeared; and no one can be surprised at the ability with which you handle your figures, or at the formidable array of statistics which meet us at every page, and which seem at first sight to imperil the veracity of all that we hold dear in the word of Revelation. And yet there is nothing in the problems themselves, so to call them, which you have here introduced to our notice, beyond the reach of any one moderately well acquainted with the rules of arithmetic. I wish, indeed, one could look upon these questions as of no higher importance than so many arithmetical curiosities ; but in reality they assume a much graver character, when one sees that upon them hang conclusions which affect seriously the foundations of the "current belief" in the inspiration of the Sacred Volume. You may well, my lord, under such circumstances, have furnished the world with some new rules and methods, among which we may be thankful to see prominent mention of the necessity of "prayer, and of a reverential spirit." (3, 16, and p. xxii.) To these prerequisites in the mind and temper of the inquirer, you properly add a " serious " sense of the supreme import- ance of the consequences involved." (p. xx.) You do not underrate the great "labour and special training" required for the work of a fair and close investigation on botli sides
of the question, (xxv.) In " trying the spirits whether they be of God " — in " proving all things, and holding fast that which is good," we must proceed, you faithfully counsel us, " in watchfulness and prayer, as those who desire only to know the will of God and do it." And it has been your own purpose " to set yourself deliberately to find the answer, with, you trust and believe, a sincere desire to know the truth, as God wills us to know it, and with an humble dependence on that Divine Teacher, who alone can guide us into that knowledge, and help us to use the light of our minds aright." (7)
Such purposes and counsels — marking sufficiently (if any evidence were wanted) your own sincerity and good inten- tions— seemed to give promise of all that was sober in reasoning and judicious in conclusion. What strange incon- sistency, then, must it not appear when, after so reverent and guarded a preamble, we find you, in the sequel, borne rapidly away, with scarce the expression of a regret, far into the lines of doubt as to the historical veracity of the earlier books of Scripture ! I say, emphatically, its '' liistorical veracity : " for you are not one of those who deal in doubtful insinuations, or mystify your meaning by ambiguous language. You plainly confess, that while you regard the question before us as undoubt- edly "the question of the present day" (3), your conclusion upon the premises is, that you " can no longer shut your eyes to the palpable self-contradictions of the narrative ; " but that "the conviction of the unhistorical character of the (so-called) Mosaic narrative seems to be forced upon us by the con- sideration of the many absolute impossibilities involved in it when treated as relating simple matters of fact, and without taking account of any argument which throws dis- credit on the story merely by reason of tlie miracles, or supernatural appearances, recorded in it, or particular laws, speeches, and actions ascribed in it to the Divine Being." (10, 11, 14.) This judgment you pronounce not, indeed, ex cathedra, as of authority, but simply as an opinion to which you think proper to lend your name. You have found
objections, you inform us, which affect *' not only one or two points of the story, but the entire substance of it; and, until they are removed, they make it impossible for a thoughtful person to receive, without further inquiry, any considerable portion of it as certainly true in an historical point of view. It is plain that .... the narrative of the Exodus is full of contradictions." (168) Before you ventured in this manner to find fault with so considerable a portion of God's word, you were bound to produce reasons little short of certain. It requires not merely some plausible, but some irrefragable arguments to support conclusions of this magnitude. For, observe, it makes a very great difference on which side of the question one is arguing about the veracity of the Scripture. On the side of the defence, it is enough if any tolerable pro- babilities can be shown in favour of a Scripture statement, for we can back the particular probability thus otherwise ascer- tained, by the general weight and authority of the whole body of Scripture, attested as it is by the express teaching of om* Lord * and His Apostles, and by the concurrent witness of the Church. But, on the side of the attack, the mere sugges- tion of an error or a contradiction is not enough; there ought to be an absolute certainty of it, since here tliere is notliing to fall back upon except one's own ideas of what is possible or impossible, rational or absurd — the determination of which is, of all things, the most uncertain.f
* The single chapter, Heb. xi. in a compendious form, seems enough to authenticate almost all the Old Testament History, Add such passages as Acts vii., xxiv. 14; xxvi. 6, 22; 1 Pet. iii. 20; 2 Pet. i. 21, ii. 5—7; Luke xxiv. 44 ; Joh. i. 45, iii. 14, v. 45, 46, and the argument is complete.
t Suppose a parallel case : If it were argued, for example, " England is a great country, but its laws are exceedingly unjust and absurd, and reflect little credit on the ability and wisdom of her legislators." Imagine a discussion upon this subject, with reasons for and against the laws of England ; and suppose there seemed little to choose between the arguments on either side. Under these circumstances, " on the side of the defence " there would be, in further support of the argument, an apy>eal to the general verdict of history, and to the opinion of the world at large, an appeal which would be wholly wanting on the "side of the attack." The latter, therefore, to supply the disadvantage, ought to produce something like irrefragable proof, to justify the language in which the laws of England had been defamed.
6
And yet, be it candidly acknowledged, that attacking, as you have not scrupled to do, the historical credibility of Scripture, you are able to confess that your faith in Divine Revelation remains firm and unshaken. Yes ! let the reader beware how he mistake your meaning — you manfully avow your belief, that " the Pentateuch does not, upon this account, cease to contain the true Word of God, with all things necessary for salvation, and to be profitable for doc- trine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness; " that " it still remains an integral portion of that Book, which, whatever intermixture it may show of human elements — of error, infirmity, passion, and ignorance — has yet, through God's providence and the special working of His Spirit on the minds of its writers, been the means of revealing to us His True Name, the Name of the only Living and True God, and has all along been, and as far as we know will never cease to be, the mightiest instrument in the hand of the Divine Teacher, for awakening in our minds just conceptions of His character, and of His gracious and merciful dealings with the children of men." And, again, "the Bible is still the very Book of Truth," — " the best of books " — wliere " God has, in His providence, laid up in store for our use, food for the inner man, supplies of spiritual strength and consolation, living words of power to speak to our hearts and consciences, and wake us up to daily earnestness of faith and duty." (13, 181.) With so much in common in our beliefs, would it not have tended mucli to the peace and harmony of the Church, as well as to the peace and comfort of your own mind, if you had given less encou- ragement to the objector to think, that the wonderful increase of knowledge and critical skill — the discoveries of geology — the advances in philology, ethnography, and science in general, which distinguish the present day, were all certain to tell exclusively on his side of the argument? an assumption as shallow as it is unfounded ! Would it not have been better to have imitated the example of a former bishop of our Church, a man eminent for the liberality of his views, and yet who, in taking a similar line of argument, took care
to guard it with those limitations and reserves which properly belong to the expression of a mere private opinion. In his " Apology for the Bible," Bishop Watson thus refers to St. Augustine, as saying, " I am of opinion that those men to whom the Holy Ghost revealed what ought to be received as authoritative in religion, might write some things, as men, with historical diligence, and other things, as prophets, by Divine Inspiration ; and that these things are so distinct, that the former may be attributed to themselves, as contributing to the increase of knowledge, and the latter to God speaking by them things appertaining to the authority of religion." On \7hich the Bishop goes on to observe ; '* Whether this opinion be right or wrong, I do not here inquire ; it is the opinion of many learned men and good Christians ; and if you" (he is addressing the notorious infidel Thomas Paine) " will adopt it as your opinion, you will see cause, perhaps, to become a Christian yourself; you will see cause to con- sider chronological, geographical, or genealogical errors, apparent mistakes or real contradictions as to historical facts, needless repetitions and trifling interpolations — indeed, you will see cause to consider all the principal objections of your book to be absolutely without foundation. Receive but the Bible as composed by upright and well-informed, though in some points fallible men (for I exclude all falli- bility when they profess to deliver the Word of God), and you must receive it as a book revealing to you in many parts the express will of God, and, in other parts, relating to you the ordinary history of the times. Give but the authors of the Bible that credit which you give to other historians ; believe them to deliver the Word of God, when they tell you that they do so ; believe, when they relate other things as of themselves and not of the Lord, that they WTote to the best of their knowledge and capacity, and you will be in your belief something very different from a Deist : you may not be allowed to aspire to the character of an orthodox believer, but you will not be an unbeliever in the Divine authority of the Bible, though you should admit human mistakes and
8
human opinions to exist in some parts of it. This I take to be the first step towards the removal of the doubts of many sceptical men ; and when they are advanced thus far, the grace of God, assisting a teachable disposition and a pious intention, may carry them on to perfection."
With whatever disposition to admit the force of these obser- vations, are we to be called upon to apply them to every ima- ginary difficulty, to every fancy, and every crudity, which a lively wit may suggest, or which may float to the surface in a vacant mind ? Or, rather, does not their application lie to such well-matured and well-reasoned conclusions as should approve themselves generally to the good sense and judgment of Christian people? But is this the rank, in which you can expect to see placed the statistical difficulties which figure so conspicuously in your book? By your own confession, indeed, ^Hhe result arrived at in Fart I. required comj)aratively very Utile lahour. Tlie facts have only to he stated, as I have endeavoured to state them, in a form intelligible to the most unlearned layman ; and the truth of the conclusions drawn ivill, as it ajopears to me, he self-evident to most of my readers who have courage to face the truth, and courage to confess it." (xxxiii.) My lord, so great a stake deserved less easy treatment, and you may still live to benefit the Church if you carefully suppress any other conclusions you may have come to in your Second Part, until you have devoted more time and labour to their mature consideration. Unless you do this, you will not, I think, be likely to make the easy conquest which you imagine of the English mind, not even that " of the most unlearned of the laity."
The declaration has been elicited from you since the earlier impressions of your work, that ' you made no pretence of bringing forward novelties' (Part TI. Preface, vii.). The arguments, you intimate, might have been new to yourself, and, probably, ' to very many of your readers ; ' but you would rather regard them as what ' must be noticed by every one who would carefully study the Pentateuch.' Be it so, then some of your reviewers erred in thinking that you con-
9
sidered your objections ' new.' But in one thing we must all agree, that the objections, though not new in themselves, come with new force when recommended in this way by a Bishop ! From the Bishops and Fathers of the Church, from the St. Augustines, the St. Jeromes, and the great divines of former days, one had been accustomed to look for advice and assistance in support of the faith, and not for arguments in derogation of it. Pardon us if we looked for the same from you ; and if we were not quite prepared to see you throwing yourself upon the verdict of men who professedly have no time to consult the musty volumes of antiquity, accessible though they are to any reader who can bestow the requisite time and labour of research. Was it reasonable or wise to take up such mere questions of detail, and lead the public to look upon them as matter of life and death to the cause of truth — as things essential to the very integrity of the Faith ? Perhaps, my lord, in the end this will prove to have been really the wisest and most useful, as it is in appearance the fairest and most open course. In the interest of truth I devoutly hope this may be the case. The danger is, that the treatment of the subject may fall into hands little prepared by previous habits of careful and patient study, much less by that spirit of seriousness and reverence which is indispensably requisite in the search after truth. And it is this apprehension which makes one wish that you, my lord, who have naturally great influence from your name and office, had not committed your- self to your conclusions with so much haste, nor published them with so little reserve. You might have opened the question ever so wide ; you might have invited inquiry, and done all you could to assist it. This would have made it a less delicate task for others to have entered the lists in fair argument with you, and to have consulted together for mutual improvement.
Without further preface, however, and passing over some little incidents which you mention in connexion with the Zulus, I propose now to follow you into the details to which you appear to attach so particular a value in the determination
B
10
of the questions before us. My plan will be to take the several passages on which your objections are founded, in the order in which they stand in your book ; and not only to meet the particular objections as they occur, but also to suggest what may, in each instance, seem a fair account of the passage. And in so doing, I shall have occasion to show,, that many of your criticisms on the Scripture history are criticisms on some particular view that you have taken up, — some private construction that you have put upon the text — rather than on the plain sense of Scripture itself; and, consequently, that the contradictions and impossibilities which you impute, on the strength of them, to the Scripture narratives, are without any certain foundation. 1 shall thus, I hope, be able to do some little justice to those who have hitherto professed their belief in the historic accuracy of the Pentateuch, by showing that they have not been without some good grounds for so doing, and that the weight of argument has not been so much on the side of the objector as you would have us imagine. With this explanation, it is time we proceed* to the further examination of details.
* I am unwilling to leave these general observations, without suggesting that it might be an important aid to the faith of some, if they would well consider the following admirable remai^ks of the Norrisian Professor :—
" If we believe that God has in different ages authorized certain persons to communicate objective truth to mankind — if, in the Old Testament history and the books of the Prophets, we find manifest indications of the Creator — it is then a secondary consideration, and a question in which we may safely agree to differ, whether or not every book of the Old Testament was written so completely under the dictation of God's Holy Spirit, that every word, not only doctrinal, but also historical or scienUfic, must be infallibly correct and true. . . . Whatever conclusion may be arrived at, as to the infallibility of the writers on matters of science or of history, still the whole collection of the books will be really the oracles of God, the Scriptures of God, the record and depository of God's supernatural revelations in early times to men. . . . ^Yith all the pains and ingenuity which have been bestowed upon the subject, no charge of error, even in matters of human knowledge, has ever yet been substantiated against any of the writers of Scripture. But, even if it had been otherwise, is it not conceivable that there might have been infallible Divine teaching in all things spiritual and heavenly, whilst, on mere matters of history or of daily life, Prophets and Evangelists might have been suffered to write as men ? Even if this were true, we need not be perplexed or disquieted, so we can be agreed that the Divine element was ever such as to secure the infallible truth of Scripture in all things D/n'we." -Pj?of. Harold Brownk, Aids to Faith, pp. 317, 318.
11
ON CHAPTEES II. III.
" And they took their cattle, and their goods, which they had gotten in the land of Canaan, and came into Egypt, Jacoh, and all his seed with him : His sons, and his sons^ so7is ivith him, his daughters, and his sons' daughters, and all his seed brought he with him into EgyptP — Gen. xlvi. 6, 7.
" Thy fathers went down into Egypt with threescore and ten jpersons ; and now the Lord thy God hath made thee as the stars of heaven for multitude.^' — Deut. x. 22.
The general drift of the passages where the numbers of the children of Israel, who went into Egypt, are distinctly told, is not difficult to see. In your own words, which express it clearly enough (24 vi. Ans.), " The narrative lays no stress whatever on the mere fact of their ' coming to ' Egypt, in the case of Joseph's sons, as if they had come because their father had come [which is the explanation of some commentators]. The fact of their being born in Egypt, or rather being in Egypt at this time, is all that the writer takes account of; though, wishing to sum up the seventy souls* under one cate- gory, he uses (inaccurately, as he himself admits) the same expression, ' came into Egypt.' So he sums up, inaccurately, Jacob himself, as one of the seventy souls, Simong his children, in V. 8, * These are the names of the children of Israel, which came into Egypt, Jacob and his sons,'' " And, again, you say (28), "Evidently the sons of Joseph are not reckoned with those that went down into Egypt with Jacob, because they * went down in their father,' but because they were born there, or, rather, were living there, were ' in Egypt already,' at the time of Jacob's migration. The description is, of course,
* To make out this, however, we have no right — as was done in the first edition of Bishop Colenso's work (since happily corrected) — to leave out an important word, and alter the stop, at Gen. xlvi. 12 ; whereas it is there written distinctly and in a separate clause, "And the sons of Pharez were Hezrou and Haniul." And N.B., the Hebrew and the Greek have the equiva- lent verb at full, ">7^] and iyei^ouTo,
12
literally incorrect; but the writer's meaning is obvious enough. He wishes to specify all those ' out of the loins of Jacob ' who were living at the time of the commencement of the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt, and from whom such a multitude had sprung at the time of the Exodus. ... In point of fact, in the writer's view, Joseph himself had not ' gone down ' into Egypt till his father went. He had been carried down as a captive many years before ; but from this time dates his true migration into Egypt, when his father settled there, and he and his sons shared in *the sojourning of the children of Israel.' " '
It is, indeed, no more than a common and natural accommo- dation of language, thus to group particulars under the general characteristic of the whole. But, to obviate mistakes, we find in this passage of Scripture, special care on the part of the writer to explain himself Let us refer for a moment to the text ; wherein we may note, first, that in this list of Jacob's family "Jacob " himself is variously included among " his sons," or reckoned separately {See v. 8, 15 ; and v. 27) ; and next, that when Jacoh is the chief subject in view, the children are spoken of not only as '' coming into Egypt," but as "coming with Jacoh into Egypt ; " when Joseph is chiefly in view, then it is called "■coming into Egypt"" simply. But it is understood throughout (as, indeed, in one passage it is expressly stated), that the "children" spoken of were those which "came out of his loins;" and it seems implied that, with the exception of the two sons of Joseph, they were all •'gotten in the land of Canaan,"* (v. 6.) For greater clear- ness it is added, "besides Jacob's sons' wives" (ver. 26). The passages run thus : —
(Gen. xlvi.)
"6. And they took their cattle, and their goods, which they had gotten in the land of Canaan, and came into Egypt, Jacob, and all his seed with him :
* Why else are some of the descendants of the Patriarchs omitted altogether ? — as Jocliebed, the daughter of Levi (Numb, xxvi. 59)— the descendants of Manaiseh and Ephraim {ih. v. 29, 2,z,)—Zahdi (or Zimri), and four other sons of Zcrah, the second son of Judah. hy Tamar, (Josh. vii. 11 ; 1 Chron. ii. 6.)
13
** 7. His sons and his sons' sons with him, his daughters, and his sons' daughters, and all his seed brought he with him into Egypt.
" 8. And these are the names of the children of Israel, which came into Egypt, Jacob and his sons."
Mark the same clear distinction in the two following verses, where the list is summed up at the conclusion of the account : —
" 26. All the souls that came WITH Jacob mto Egypt\ which came out of his loins, hesides JacoVs sons wives, all the souls icere threescoke and six.
" 27. And the sons of Joseph, which were horn him in Egypt, were two souls (repeated from v. 20) : all the souls of the house of Jacob, which CAME INTO Egypt, were threescore and
TEN."
And we find precisely the same computation, Exodus i. 5, Dent. X. 22 : " And all the soids that came out of the loins of Jacoh were seventy souls: for Joseph ivas in Egypt already.'*'' " Thy fathers went down into Egypt with threescore and ten persons ; and now the Lord thy God hath made thee as the stars of heaven for multitude.''^ *
* To some it may appear trifling to enter so precisely into the minutiae of Jacob's family. But the Scripture itself, by its careful enumeration, and by its frequent allusion in other places to this original stock of the great Israelitish families, and to the number Seventy whereof it consisted, specially invites inquiry ; and the exact numbers here are not indifferent, when once we are led to think, that *'the historical truth of the whole Mosaic narrative, which in so many places reiterates the statement in question, is seriously involved in its accuracy" (25 i.), and when it is the root number of the 600,000 warriors who eventually proceeded from this stock, and of which Dr. Colenso says : —
*' "We cannot here have recourse to the ordinary supposition that there may be something wrong in the Hebrew numerals. . . . 'This number' (600,000) ' is woven as a kind of thread into the whole story of the Exodus, and cannot be taken out without tearing the whole fabric to pieces. . . . The multiplied impossibilities introduced by this number alone, independently of all other considerations, are enough to throw discredit upon the historical character of the whole narrative.'" (169, 170.)
The reader is referred to an article in the Appendix for an exact enumera- tion of Jacob's family, and for a comparison of the Hebrew and Septuagint accounts.
14
But now comes the great difficulty at which you stumble. I shall argue it on your own ground — the ground which we have just agreed upon, as to the general completeness of the recorded number of Jacob's children, and the birth of his two grandchildren before the descent into Egypt. But, in fairness of argument, it must be noted that this is not the universal opinion, nor is it necessary to the historical truthfulness of Scripture to maifitain it. It may, on the con- trary, be very fairly insisted, that the same latitude of expres- sion which comprehends *' Jacob" among " his sons," and the sons of Joseph among those who " went into Egypt," applies also to the mention of the two grandsons of Judah, notwith- standing they may have been born in Egypt. But, not to dwell farther on this point, I am happy, as regards the pre- misses, to be able here to agree with you, though in your con- clusion I must entirely differ. Why do you call it " in- credible" (20 iii.), that all these seventy should have already come into the world at the time of Jacob's going down into Egypt? In particular, you object that the two great- grandchildren of Jacob, Hezron and Hamul (v. 12), included in the seventy, could not have been born, and had no right to be included. To make out that they could not have been born, you say that J udah, their father, was then but forty-two years old — old enough, one would think, to have had grandchildren ! But then, you say he was not married till upwards of twenty — that after that, the story requires him to have had in succession three sons, Er, Onan, and Shelah, two of which sons married in succession the same wife, and the last should have married her too, but that meantime she deceived Judah himself, and had two sons by him, one of whom (Pharez) was the father of the two children in question, Jacob's great-grandchildren. {See Gen. xxxviii.) For the birth of all these sons of Judah and of his two grandsons, you require more time than you think can possibly be allowed on the strength of the Scripture account. Now, my lord, if your calculation were certainly correct when you say Judah married at twenty years of age, there would, I am ready to admit, be some
15
difficulty here. But I beg you to observe tliat this is a mere assumption, and the ground of a complete fallacy. Your argument rests on one little expression at the beginning of Gen. xxxviii. " And it came to pass at that timt that Judah went down from his brethren:" subsequently to which, of course, he became father of the children about whom you make all this difficulty. From this you conclude — not un- naturally, I grant, if circumstances would admit, which they do not — that Judah's marriage took place at a time subsequent to the events in the chapter preceding, viz. Joseph being sold by his brethren ; and this gives you a date, since Joseph was then at the age of seventeen. If 4here was any necessity for this inference, the case would be altered. But as the phrase * here made use of places no necessary limit on the time, we are free to take it as a mere introduction to the narrative fol-
* It is tolerably clear that where the expression "a^ that time''' occurs. Matt. xii. 1, it is scarcely a note of time at all. But, indeed, the original words in the Hebrew are much less definite than this expression in the English — cnrr D'p^, literally meaning '^ in those days," the exact equivalent of which we have, Matt. iii. 1, "In those days came John the Baptist;" — where the interval between this and the events of the chapter preceding was about thirty years. Compare also Matt. xi. 25, with its parallel passage, Luke x. 21, where the same event is placed in quite a different connexion, and yet the phrase runs '^ at that time." Bean EUicott observes that, in the whole group of chapters from Matt. chap. v. to xiii. "the structure is peculiar ; the EvangeHst by no means being unacquainted with the correct order of events, but designedly departing from it, and grouping together the nearly contemporary events and miracles, with such notices of place as should guard against the possibility of misconception." — EUi- cott, Historical Lectures on the Life of our Blessed Lord, p. 156. Th& parallel between these passages and that in Genesis is at any rate remark- able, as this Gospel is reputed to have been first written in Hebrew ; and Lightfoot — no inconsiderable authoi'ity on the language and customs of the Hebrews — thus comments on the text in St, Matthew, chap. xii. 1, " The expression ^ at that time' doth not always centre stories in the same point of time, but sometimes hath made a transition betwixt tivo stories, whose times were at a good distance asunder." And then he instances this vert passage, Gen. xxxviii. 1, and Deut. x. 8. The incident described in the xii. chapter is, in fact, closely connected with a Passover, but that Passover had clearly preceded — and that by a considerable period — the events related before it, such as the return to Galilee, the assembling of the Twelve, the Sermon on the Mount, the Message from John the Baptist, &c. see chap. v. — xi. Such a phrase, therefore, and still more the less definite one " in those days," which is the literal sense in Genesis, places no necessary limit on the exact time.
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lowing; the events following being not all of them con- sequent upon the events of the chapter preceding, but only that one particular event to which they all lead up, as the matter of principal interest in the chapter. I find Dr. Kalisch of the same opinion. " The marriage of Judah would have taken place," he says, " about three years after Jacob's return from Mesopo- tamia . . . and about seven years hefore the selling of Joseph ; but it is 710W only incidentally mentioned, because the chief object of this chapter is to relate Judah's unjust con- duct towards Tamar_, and the birth of Pharez and Zarah, which events fall after Joseph's abduction." According to this very reasonable account, Judah would have been married twenty-nine years before Jacob's going into Egypt. But the Scriptures give us yet a nearer clue. Very soon after the return from Mesopotamia, Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, and his seventh child by Leah, becomes of marriageable age. Judah, then, her elder brother by three degrees, must have been marriageable* too; and this not- withstanding that Joseph was not much above six years old at this time, since Joseph was younger than these brothers, who were Leah's children. And now, if we give Joseph six years of age at the return from Mesopotamia, then, since he was thirty-nine at the going down of Jacob into Egypt, there were exactly thirty-three years between these two events ; i. e. there were thirty-three years f in which Judah, if he married towards the beginning of this period, ichen he first became marriageahle, might easily have become a grandfather before the going down into Egypt. It is true this latter supposition would make him born at a some- what earlier date in Jacob's servitude than according to Dr. Kalisch's reckoning. But as it is by no means certain that the marriage of Leah was postponed till the expiration of the -first seven years, this supposition is not precluded. Dr. Hales [Analysis of Sacred Chronology, vol. ii. p. 135)
* Other reasons for supposing Judah of marriageable age at this time may be observed in the note to p. 19.
t And these thirty-three, by an easy and natural supposition might be extended to thirty-six. Comp. the note, p. 19.
17
remarks, ' Wlietlier Jacob married at the beginning or the end of his first seven years of stipulated service, is a question which has divided chronologers. The more probable opinion is, that his marriage with Leah took place about a month after his aiTival at Charran, at the heginning of the seven years, and his marriage with Rachel the week after.' Whichever supposition we adopt (and that of Dr. Kalisch may, on the whole, be the safest), the time was ample to admit of Judah being a grandfather, though you have denied it. It will be naturally asked on what your denial is built. You shall speak for yourself ;
"Now Judah w&B forty-two"^ years old, according to the story, when he went down with Jacob into Egypt. But if we turn to Gr. xxxviii. we shall find that, in the course of these forty -two years of Judah' s life, the following events are recorded to have happened : —
" (i) Judah grows up, marries a wife — ' at that time,' v. 1, that is, after Joseph's being sold into Egypt, when he was * seventeen years old,' G. xxxvii. 2, and when Judah, conse- quently, was, at least, ticenty years old, — and has, separately, three sons by her.
'' (ii) The eldest of these three sons grows up, is married, and dies.
* "Joseph was thirty years old, when he 'stood before Pharaoh,* as governor of the land of Egypt, G. xli. 46 ; and from that time nine years elapsed, (seven of plenty and two of famine,) before Jacob came down to Egypt. At that time, therefore, Joseph was thirty-nine years old. But Judah was about three years older than Joseph ; for Judah was born in the fourth year of Jacob's double marriage, G. xxix. 35, and Joseph in the seventh, G. XXX. 24-26, xxxi. 41. Hence Judah was forty-two years old when Jacob went down to Egypt." — Colenso on the Pentateuch (20). But even this is uncertain : and according to Dr. Hales he was forty-seven at this time, instead of forty-two. " Judah was about forty-seven years old when Jacob's family settled in Egypt." — Hales' Analysis, vol. ii. p. 145. Others extend the period, by assigning a much longer time than the usually supposed twenty years, to the sojourn of Jacob in Mesopotamia ; whereby, the age of Joseph remaining unaltered, Judah might be supposed many years older. But the difficulty turns, not altogether on the total years of Judah's age at the going down into Egypt, but also, and, I think, chiefly, on the precise time of his marriage, which, on either of these last suppositions, would still remain undetermined.
C
18
" The second grows to maturity, (suppose in another year,) marries his brother's widow, and dies.
" The third grows to maturity, (suppose in another year still,) but declines to take his brother's widow to wife.
" She then deceives Judah himself, conceives by him, and in due time bears him twins, Pharez and Zarah.
" (iii) One of these twins also grows to maturity, and has two sons, Hezron and Hamul, born to him, before Jacob goes down into Egypt." (20)
Which you declare to be incredible.
About the case of Benjamin you make no difficulty ; but it was too remarkable an one to escape your notice altogether. You remark upon it — " The expression ' little one ' is used of Benjamin when he must have been more than twenty-two years of age : " and to explain the difficulty of his having at that time ten sons (which is the reckoning in the Hebrew and in our English version, v. 21), you say, " It is quite possible he may have had ten sons, perhaps by several wives." This might have been the case ; but if it was so, the other patriarchs also may have had a plurality of wives, though, not being of Jacob's blood, they are not specially mentioned in the list of Jacob's family. We may here gain a hint, by the way, how unnecessary it is to limit the number of the Israelites, on their first entrance into Egypt, to the exact number of the Seventy, as recorded in the Hebrew, or the Seventy-five, as the LXX. version and Acts vii. 14 have it. There might well have been other children born to the patriarchs after their settlement in Egypt, even as they might have had other wives besides those mentioned, v. 26, before they went thither. There is another explanation of this difficulty about the sons of Benjamin, derived from the LXX. text of Gen. xlvi. 21, where, instead of ten sons of Benjamin, we find mention of nine children only, in various degrees of descent, viz. three sons, five grandsons, and one great grandson. We may take our choice of the two solutions ; but if the latter be the true one, then we have in v. 26 another example of that sort of accommodation of language in calling them ' sons,' and in
19
speaking of them as ' going into Egypt,' (though they must have been born there,) which you have yourself noticed where Jacob is included among his own sons, and the sons of Joseph among those of the other patriarchs. And if this be so, we may observe, in passing, that according to the LXX. version no difficulty is made about reckoning among the sons some who were not born at the time of the rest going down.
But to return to the main point of your objection. A little attention, as I have already pointed out, will show where the whole strength of your argument lies, viz. on your construction of the little phrase with which Chap, xxxviii. begins, "At that time." This, you say, necessarily fixes the time of Judah's mar- riage to a time after the events of the chapter preceding, viz. Joseph being sold into Egypt when he was seventeen (Gen. xxxvii. 2), and consequently when Judah was about twenty years of age. And thus, since Judah was forty- two years old at the going down to Egypt (20, note), you leave us only twenty-two years in which he was to become a grandfather. I have already removed any such necessity, and have shown, that we may easily allow Judah, upon Dr. Kalisch's compu- tation twenty-nine, and upon my own, thirty-three, years from his marriage to the going down into Egypt ; and thus your difficulty disappears.*
I have argued on the supposition, which is the usual one and that adopted by yoa, that Joseph was thirty-nine years of age when his family were called into Egypt. It has been suggested (and the suggestion is an important one), by way of allowing more time for the parentage of Judah's sons and grandsons, that there is a possibility of error in
* It may further be observed that there was no absolute necessity, in Dr. Kalisch's computation, or my own, to make Joseph so much as six years old at the return to Canaan. Gen, xxx. 35 intimates clearly enough the expiration of the fourteen years of Jacob's service when Joseph was born ; but HOW LONG after that time he was born, it does not say. Put it three years, as we know that Jacob stayed for another six years altogether, Gen. xxxi. 38. By this arrangement, the figures become, instead of twenty-nine and thirty- three, thirty-two for Dr. Kalisch's, and thirty-six for my own — estimate of the years from Judah's marriage to the settlement in Egypt, during which he might have had grandchildren.
20
our present reading of Gen. xli. 46, which would affect materially the terminal figure in the usual calculation of these thirty-nine years, and make them sixt2/-mne. This would leave for the marriage of Judah and of his sons, and for the birth of the two grandsons, from fifty-two to sixty-three years. When difficulties concern transactions which occurred so many thousand years ago, and records which are themselves of such ancient date, it is difficult to say which solution is best. But, in fact, either supposition would be sufficient to destroy the absolute certainty of your position, that there were only twenty- two years, in which, under circumstances of aggravated impro- bability, Judah must be supposed to have become a grand- father.
In either case, and whatever may be the most probable solution, I cannot but wonder at the extreme confidence with which you rush to so bold a conclusion, and say — " The above, being certainly incredible, (!) we are obliged to con- clude that one of the accounts must be untrue." But what a ' measuring of ourselves by ourselves ' is this, * which is not wise ' ! You take your arithmetical glasses, and then hold the object so near to your eye, that you can but half see it in its just and true proportions. A passage must be taken literally, or not literally ; — with allowance for ' inaccuracy,' because ' the meaning is obvious ' (28 (i) Ans.), or with no allowance ; — we ' must suppose ' (42, 62), or we must 7iot sup- pose (61) ; — and all this, just as we are led by our own ideas or our own imagination ! Only we must take care never to impute to an opponent any wilful perversion or ' concealment of truth ' (26, note). What else have you done yourself, when you say of so great a man as Hengstenherg (29), " It is painful to mark the shifts to which so eminent an author has had recourse, in order to avoid confessing (!) the manifest truth in this matter. Of course, if a writer sets out with the determination to maintain, at all costs (!), the ' veracity and authenticity ' of every portion of the Pentateuch, something must be said in order, if possible, to dispose of such contra- dictions as those w^hich we are here considering."
21
ON CHAPTER IV.
" A7id Jehovah sjyaJce unto Moses, saying, , . . Gather thou the Congregation together unto the door of the Tabernacle of the Congregation. And Moses did as Jehovah commanded him. And the Assembly was gathered unto the door of the Tabernacle of the Congregation. — Lev. viii. 1 — 4."
It is strange you should venture here to impute to the writer such a meaning as would be positively suicidal if he wished to have any credit for veracity, and was in his sound senses when he wrote. It is not, however, difficult to see, that he was thinking more of the sacred meaning of the word " Tabernacle of the Congregation," than of what exact number of people the building would contain. You take no notice of the fact that the very term "Tabernacle of the Congregation, ^FJ/ID /H^^j" may be understood to bear reference to the idea of "God meeting His people in the house of prayer," rather than to the mere fact of the people there meeting together. It is a term expressive not of a numerical, but of a religious idea. So Mede and Patrick^ on Ex. xxix. 44, Num. xvii. 4, &c., " the Taber- nacle of the Congregation was so called, not from the people's meeting there, as it seems to import in the English, but from God's meeting them, which is mentioned just before, v. 43, ''And there will 1 meet with the children of Israel.^ " But to take it in your sense ; — who could seriously have thought of a dense mass of two millions and a half of people being crowded into a space of 84 x 18 feet ? or, to take the extreme contents of the Court of the Tabernacle in front of the door, 84 x 90 feet? Perhaps the wi'iter was not aware that the people amounted in all to so large a number ! But this is to suppose
22
him ignorant of that which must liave been known to every reader of the Pentateuch ; for, if the number of "fighting men" above twenty years of age was 603,550 (as it is so often quoted), there can be little doubt, adding a due proportion for old men and male children, and doubling this for the female population, that the sum total would be at least two or two and a half millions. (See Townsend, Hales^ Home, Patrick, &c.) Nor are the other conditions of the problem new. Such an absurdity, therefore, as is here imputed, upon your version of the writer's sense, could not have escaped the notice of the merest scribe i As you justly observe, " not two-thirds of the Levites " alone, who were of an age to minister in the Taber- nacle, " could have entered the court," much less stood before the door, if they all came at once. But this very remark, which is your own (38), lets us into the whole secret: the Levites never did enter at once, for it was not at all required ; neither is it to be understood that " all the congregation," or the "whole Assembly," came at once; but, like the Levites, a competent number only, according to the occasion. On some occasions they might all come, by doing so in turns. What would be thought of some future historian who should tell the world "it must have been impossible" for the Commons of England ever to have sat in a house containing seats for 630 ? Yet ' the Commons ' can possibly be meant to be un- derstood of the representatives only of that body ! And so, precisely, in this case of the ' congregation ' of Israel. Your objections here will trouble no one who reads the Scriptures with any moderate degree of candour and common sense.
23
ON CHAPTEK V.
" These he the words which Moses spahe unto all IsraeV — Deut i. 1.
^' And Moses called all Israel j and said unto them'' — Deut. V. 1.
" And afterward he read all the words of the Law, the bless- ings and the cursings, according to all that which is written in the Book of the Law. There was not a word of all that Moses commanded^ which Joshua read not before all the Congregation of Israel, with the women, and the little ones, and the strangers that icere conversant among them.'" — Josh. viii. 34, 35.
*'How is it conceivable," yon ask, ''that a man should do what Joshua is here said to have done, unless, indeed, the reading every word of all that Moses commanded was a mere dumb show, without the least idea of those most solemn words being heard by those to whom they were addressed ? For surely no human voice, unless strengthened by a miracle, of which the Scripture tells us nothing, could have reached the ears of a crowded mass of people, as large as the whole population of London." . . . "Espe- cially after he had been already engaged, as the story implies, on the very same day, in writing a copy of the Law of Moses upon the stones set up in Mount Ebal. Josh. viii. 32, 33." As if it could be meant that any one man did all this duty with his own hand or voice in one day ! But Quifacitper alium facit per se ; Joshua neither ''wrote" out the law, nor " read it before all the congregation " himself alone, but with the assistance of other competent persons. Precisely the same way of speaking we have in other passages of this same book of Joshua ; for example, Josh. viii. 28, " And
24
Joshua burnt At, and made it an heap for ever." x. S3, "Then, Horam, King of Gezer, came up to help Lachish, and Joshua smote Mm and Jnspeojyhj until he had left him " none remain- ing." And so in many other places, as Mark viii. 9 : " And they that had eaten were about four thousand, and he sent them away^
But you complain (Part II. Pref xii.) that you are only half met by your critics ; that, it has been the practice to quote some one or other of your arguments 'partially y so as to omit altogether the xQdl j)oint of the reasoning.
I am sorry you have found it so ; and, to prevent mistakes, will here let you speak for yourself. " It may be said that only a portion of this great host was really present, though ' all Israel ' is spoken of. And this might have been allowed without derogating from the general historical value of the book, though, of course, not without impeaching the literal accuracy of the Scripture narrative." (42.) Indeed, it would be a thing hardly worth many minutes' consideration, were it not that such observations as you here make, we find very constantly repeated by you, in the chapter preceding as well as here. And as you accuse us of but half entering into your difficulties, it may be worth while to subjoin a few familiar illustrations. Would any one, then, object to such language as the following — that " all London had assembled to witness the opening of the International Exhibition"? or this of Gibbon? — "When he" (the Emperor Julian) "reached Heraclea, all Constantinople was poured forth to meet him " ? {Roman Empire, ch. xxii.) Or, to take a more familiar example, suppose a person describing one of our common English games, and saying that " on such a day, he had seen Surrey play All England." And now, let us apply your test, which you shall have precisely in your own language (See Part II. xxxix. Corrections and additions to Part I.).
" While it is conceivable that a later [reporter] imagining such a scene as this, may have employed such exaggerated expressions as occur in [this account], it cannot be believed that an actual eve- witness .... with the actual facts of the
25
case before hira, could have expressed himself in such extrava- gant language."
If there are any of your lay friends that mix at all in the sports of England, they will be able to help you out of this difficulty, with a laugh, perhaps, besides, at your thinking to have caught them in so transparent a trap.
"But," says the Bishop, "the point of my argument, which none of my Eeviewers have touched, is this : that it is expressly stated in Lev. viii. 1, that Jehovah Himself sum- moned the congregation together, and that it is impossible to believe that Almighty God did really issue a command, which was not meant to be strictly obeyed — by all, at least, who were able to attend the summons." (Part II. Pref. xiii.)
I the more mention this, because you make the same sort of reply (Pref. xiv.) as to the offering of the '"' two tm^tle-doves, or two young pigeons " on the part of the " leper " (Lev. xiv. 22), viz., that they were expressly " ordered by Jehovah Him- self ^ I can only say, that if you intended the stress to be laid on the command emanating, in either case, from " the direct voice of Jehovah Himself," you might well excuse our giving you credit for more discernment. For I would ask any one — when the words of Scripture are, " And Jehovah spake unto MoseSj saying, Gather thou the congregation unto the door of the Tabernacle,'' — whether the stress of the meaning is, " that the congregation was summoned by the direct voice of Jehovah Himself " ? The order to Moses came, if you please, from ' the direct voice ' of God — the ^ summons to the con- gregation ' certainly did not. You must have been driven hard, indeed, for an argument here; and yet, by objections such as these, you think to break down the credit of the Mosaic history. Is this what you would call appealing with confidence to the Laity? {See Part II. Pref xxvii.)
26
ON CHAPTER VL
*' And the sMn of the huUocJc, and all his flesh, with his head, and with his legs, and his inwards, and his dung, even the ichole hullock shall he {the Priest) carry forth without the camp unto a clean place, where the ashes are poured out, and hum him on the wood with fire : where the ashes are poured out, shall he he hurntP — Lev. iv. 11, 12.
" And the priest shall put on his linen garment, and his linen hreeches shall he put upon his flesh, and take up the ashes which the fire hath consumed loith the hurnt-offering on the altar, and he shall put them heside the altar. And he shall put off his garments, and put on other garments, and carry forth the ashes without the camp unto a clean placed — Lev. vi. 10, 11.*
" We must imagine," you say, ^' a vast encampment covering more than 1,652 acres of ground, more than a mile and a half across in each direction, with the Tabernacle in the centre. . . . The refuse of the sacrifices would have had to be carried ... a distance of three quarters of a mile — and they could not surely have gone outside the camp for the necessities of nature, as commanded in Deut. xxiii. 12 — 14."
I might almost omit your notion of the Priest alone having to carry the skin, &c. of the sacrifice. This is just a part of his business, which we may properly enough imagine him to have performed by proxy, or at least to have received competent assistance in carrying his burden. For most pm'poses the Levites were to be at the service of the Priests, to do for them whatever ofiices they might appoint them, Numb. iii. 6 ; viii. 19. But even in other cases, more peculiarly appertain- ing to the ofiice of the Priesthood, Necessitas non hahet leges :
* This text has been added at the particular suggestion of the Bishop, Part II. xxxix., Corrections and Additions to Part I.
27
there would be the same liberty, surely, where it was necessary, as in the time of Hezekiah, when we read, 2 Chron. xxix. 34, " But the priests were too feio^ so that they could not flay all the burnt offerings ; wherefore their hrethren the Levites did help themy
The remainder of the difficulty is not very considerable, and would less perplex a quartermaster general than it seems to have perplexed you. As to the Tabernacle being precisely and mathematically ''in the centre," there is no more reason to assume such a thing, than to imagine the heart of a man to be in the precise centre of his body, exactly equidistant from each of its extremities, because the Psalmist says, " my heart also in the midst of my hody is even like melting wax." The arrangements necessary in the camp would require a little ingenuity, but nothing more.
If ever you were driven into a corner, it is in this and in the two preceding chapters. We want nothing more than your own admissions. " I am quite ready to admit," you say, in the confession extorted from you in Part II. p. xiii., " that the Hebrew word here employed (Lev. iv. 11) may be used in the sense of carrying out with the help of others, as in Lev. xiv. 45 : the Priest ' shall carry forth (the stones, timber, mortar, &c. of a house stricken with leprosy) out of the city unto an unclean place.' " But you continue: " The stress of my argument is not laid upon the necessity of the Priest himself in person doing this, but upon the fact that it had to he done hy somebody ^^ Perhaps so ; but it looks very much like an after-thought, inasmuch as you must give me leave to observe there is 7io hint of the kind in the original chapter Part I., unless you call it ' somebody doing it' where you use the words (44), " Th refuse of these sacrifices would have had to be carried by the Priest himself (Aaron, Eleazar, and Ithamar ; there ivere no others) a distance of three-quarters of a miUr Let any one judge whether, in these words, you were particularly 'laying the stress' on ' somebody doing it,' who was not one of the Priests'? Soon after follow the memorable words, under which it could only happen that
28
either the Priest or yourself should break down, viz. " We have to imagine the Priest having himself to carry, on his back on foot, the skin, and flesh, and head, and legs, and inwards, and dung, even the whole bullock [about as far as] from St. Paul's to the outskirts of the metropolis" (45). Here was your picture ! And what now is your improved version of it ? In Part II. ( Corrections and Additions, p. xxxix.) you say, **■ For ' on his back on foot,' read ' perhaps with the help of others.' " Why, this is all the admission we desired !
And how does the new passage (Lev, vi. 10, 11) help you out?
Coming, as it does, after chap. iv. 11, 12, from which your former quotation was taken, one would naturally say that the mode of ' carrying ' in the first case would decide the mode of carrying in the latter, viz. by your own reluctant admission — "with the help of others." And accordingly, this very next emendation of yours relieves us of the neces- sity of any further disputation on the subject. It is clear, however, you are not quite satisfied about the sanitary regula- tions, because there is no mention of water to ' cleanse the sewage,' and I suppose you would expect to hear of high, lower, and middle levels, &c. &c., when unfortunately there is nothing at all but the solitary contrivance (Deut. xxiii. 12 — 14) of a * paddle on the weapon of the men-of-war,' wherewith they were to turn over the ground at a due dis- tance from the camp.* At any rate, if we must make Moses a sanitary commissioner, let us not make things worse than we need. There was not, surely, but one single 'camp' in a large station or encampment, though the whole might sometimes he called ' the camp.' But each tribe would naturally encamp apart, and wliat could be easier tlian to have sufficient spaces between? The subject is not very attractive, but you shall not be obliged to complain of being only ' partially met in your arguments.'
* You rake up this objection again and again, remarking (Part II. 200) — *' The rules for maintaining perfect cleanliness in the camp would have been futile, if laid down for the population of a small English town, as well as for a much greater multitude."
29
ON CHAPTER VII.
" And Jeliovah spake unto Moses, saying, When thou takest the sum of the children of Israel after their number, then shall they give every man a ransom for his soul icnto Jehovah, ivhen thou numherest them; that there he no plague among them,vjhen thou numherest them. This they shall give, every one that passeth among them that are numbered, half a shekel after the shekel of the sanctuary : an half-shekel shall he the offering of J.ehovah" — Ex. xxx. 11 — 13.
Those who know the difficulty of taking the exact census of a population, will think it most probable, though the num- bers of the children of Israel required to be taken twice for distinct purposes, in the short interval of half a year, yet that one census was made to suffice for both occasions. And there- fore, whether the first was made the basis of the second, *as Hdvernick thinks, or the second of the first, as Kurtz would rather have it, there is no reason to be surprised at the num- bers agreeing, viz. the number stated Ex. xxxviii. 26, and the number '' six months afterwards," Numb. ii. 32 — being in both places 603, 550. Of the two, I should be disposed to prefer the explanation of Kurtz to that of Hdvernick, since the passage. Numb. i. 18, on which the latter relies, as appearing to indicate that families and not individuals were the basis of the second census, must be taken in connexion with a preced- ing verse, v. 2, where it is further enjoined to " take the sum of the congregation . . . with the number of their names, every male hy their polish But, as usual when two differ, there comes in a third, who hits upon the happy medium, and I can find nothing in your remarks in this chapter to prevent our concurring in the extremely fair account of Michaelis. " In Ex. xxxviii. there is no account of an actual numbering, but
30
every one above twenty years old paid his tax, and was registered accordingly. But on the present occasion, Num. i. ii. Moses received instructions to arrange the lists, and sum them up. The names had been given in before, though the actual counting only took place now. And therefore Moses did not hesitate, when recording the account of the tax, to insert what were afterwards found to be the actual numbers,"
But you appear to intimate that whoever raised the money (Exod. xxxviii.) must have known the numbers also, as they were taken six months afterwards (47). And you think it irregular not to have taken the tax at the same time as the census was taken (Numb. i. — iii.) in the manner prescribed in the passage prefixed to this chapter. You are determined to make out that there were two numherings, though ' nothing is said ' in Scripture of the former of the two, and that there ought to have been two taxings^ though * there is no indication ' in the Scripture account of more than one. And then it is a matter of surprise to you that the numbers in Exod. xxxviii. 26, and Numb. ii. 32, though taken some " six months " apart, should be identically the same (47).
■But this very consideration might have let you into the secret, if you had been willing to learn of the sacred writers, instead of teaching tliem what they ougM to have written, and prescribhig for yourself how matters ouglit to have been con- ducted ! It is certainly provoking that the Scripture writers are continually found not doing what they ouglit ! As far as we can conjecture, however, and since the arrangements of a census take a long time, it seems that the whole transaction was but one tax-gathering and one census, and was spread over a time not exceeding six months, though it is quite uncertain how long this interval was, and it might have been much shorter. Tliere is also no impropriety in supposing — and it certainly is not ' incredible ' — that persons who may have been exempted, or been absent, at the first collection of the tax, were required to pay up at the numbering, when their names would naturally be called over again. Persons also — if the time was really so long as you conjecture — who became
31
liable meanwhile by having grown to the rateable age, would now have to pay like the rest. And all this— being done for the sake of convenience or despatch, or for some sufficient reason now unknown — might be regarded as one single numbering and one single collection of the tax. And the only fault to be found with the sacred writer is, that he is so correct in his arithmetic ; for really, as you say, " this purports to be a strictly accurate account of the matter, and not merely a rough or even a pretty close estimate, as Kurtz supposes " (49, iv.) ; and (what makes it worse) it " bears to be checked in a great variety of ways " (49, iii. 198). I think we may excuse Moses this fault ! and be careful on our own part not too hastily to conclude against those who may ' possibly ' in the end be discovered to know better than ourselves. The fact is, you are so accustomed to look upon Scripture as in- correct, that when you find any part of it more correct than you expected, you instantly conclude that it cannot be Scrip- ture ! But at this rate we shall shortly have no guide left us but the pride of our intellects, or the waywardness of our wills. And these, I fear, will prove but miserable substitutes for the light which God has given us in the Eevelation of His own express word and will.
32
ON CHAPTEE VIII.
" Take ye every man for them which are in Ms tents r — Ex. xvi. 16.
You calculate that " Tents of tlie lightest modern material; with poles, pegs, &c., sufficient to hold all the families of Israel, would require at least 50,000 oxen to carry them ; but as the Hebrew tents were probably made of skins, you add further, that such tents as these would have required 200,000 oxen to carry them." You think it impossible that this number of cattle was forthcoming at the time, especially as there was no time to train them to their work as beasts of "burden. You also deem it impossible to have procured the tents, to say nothing of providing the means of transport. Omitting a little verbal criticism, this is about the substance of your objections here. Your difficulty, then, principally turns on the means which the Israelites had at their disposal for the procuring of these conveniences ? As this is a question which will be more ripe for solution as we advance in our inquiries, I may perhaps be allowed to defer the consideration of it to a later place. (See on chapters X. XI. p. 42.)
You have another difficulty here about the Israelites, in one place being said to dwell in " tents " (probably of * skins'), Ex. xvi. 16; and, in another, in "booths" (proba- bly of ' leaves ' and rough ' sticks '), Lev. xxiii. 42, 43. And in your late Corrections and Additions, you strengthen this latter by a fresh passage from Nehemiah, ch. viii. 14 — 17: " And they found written in the law ichich the Lord had com- manded hy Moses, that the children of Israel should dwell in booths in the feast of the seventh month. And that they should publish and i^oclaim in all their cities, and in Jerusalem,
33
saying, Go forth unto the momd, and fetch olive branches, and pine branches, and myrtle branches, and palm branches, and branches of thick trees, to inake booths, as it is loritten,^^ &c. &c. Upon which you observe, that there is a hopeless confusion between ' tents ' and ' booths ' ; and how one sort of tent coukl be a commemoration of another, you are quite at a loss to under- stand. But if a camp-life in the wilderness afforded nothing- better than poor ' tents ' (for it is quite your own fancy that the tents had 'pegs,' 'poles/ and every modern appurtenance!), what was there inappropriate, when they came to a land of plenty and ease, if they should take advantage of the better means at their command, to make a more cheerful and com- fortable sort of tent, called in our translation ' booths ' ? and yet be reminded, with even greater gratitude, of their wilder- ness-life, and of their happiness in being delivered safely from the ' land of Egypt and from the house of bondage ' "?
34
ON CHAPTER TX.
" The children of Israel went up harnessed out of the land of Ecjypr—'FiX. xiii. 18.
You allow that instead of "harnessed," the sense given to the word in the Septuagint version is " in the 5th generation ;" and that elsewhere the word is rendered TreyLtTrraSe?, or " ranks of five ; " that at any rate the HebreAv word for *' five" (li^pH) is very probably the root of the word here rendered '' har- nessed " (D"]^Dn). The late learned Dr. Townsend thus comments on the passage : " In the margin of our authorized translation, the word is rendered ' five in a rank.' This would limit the meaning to the military order of their march, and approaches nearer to the probable interpretation. But neither can this be the right meaning; for, as the number was so large, their whole column of march, if even confined only to the 600,000, would have occupied 68 miles." [Let the reader note this, to show that the objection is by no means new.] . . . " I think it probable, that each detachment or division of this immense number, was ordered in companies or parties of 50 in a rank. This would give 1,000 ranks only to each company of 50,000 men ; and eacli cavalcade would not, therefore, occupy much less space than a mile; and would be, consequently, more easily under the direction of their leaders, Moses and Aaron ; and under the respective heads of their own several tribes who commanded under them. Thus would each tribe go out in calm and peaceful array. ' God brought forth Israel with joy and his people with gladness,' in twelve orderly religious processions, as the triumphant conquerors of the gods, the king, the princes, and the people of Egypt. They came forth in suph array, order, and regularity, that all the texts which describe their march may thus be reconciled with each
35
other. They were 600,000 in number. They were the hosts of Jehovah, arranged in their armies according to their tribes, and ' harnessed ' or provided with arms for battle, with their flowing robes girded round their loins for their journey, arranged in their fifties of thousands — ordered, in each 50,000, in their companies of fifties — with not one feeble person among their tribes. And so the people of Israel went forth on that memorable night from Rameses to Succoth, the first of their wonderful journeys." {Holy Bible, arranged in His- torical and Chronological Order: Rev. G. Townsend, D.D.) Instead, then, of the unquestionably awkward, but, as the reader will have observed, not altogether novel conception of the order of march, which would make them a corps " perhaps 68 miles long" (60), we are at liberty to divide them, ac- cording to the number of their tribes, in 12 corps, of 50,000 men each, marching 50 in a rank, and each corps occupying a space of about 1,000 yards.
But now let us take the word in the sense which you con- sider preferable; viz. : — '' armed," or " in battle array." I do not the least dispute your right to make use of this sense of the word, if you prefer it. It is 7iot the necessary sense of it, though you support it by ingenious arguments. I quarrel with you here on a difierent ground. For you proceed to make the following most extraordinary assertion : " AVe must suppose," you say, " that the whole body,'' (the italics are your own,) " of the 600,000 warriors were armed when they were numbered, (Num. i. 3,) under Sinai." {Q2.) Where is the necessity ? Where is even the likelihood of this supposi- tion, that the whole body carried arms? The first passage you rely upon is that in Exod. xiii. 18, which you prefix to the chapter. " The children of Israel went up harnessed {i.e. armed) out of the land of Egifpt''' But this, surely, speaks of ''the children of Israel" generally; and your assumption might as well be that all the two and a half millions of them were armed, since they are all alike spoken of here as " coming up harnessed," or " armed," if you prefer this meaning, " out of Egypt." But, perhaps, some other pas-
86
sage will come to your relief. There are two left you ; viz. Num. i. 3; ii. 32. The first says, " From twenty years old and upwards, all that are able to go forth to war in Israel, Aaron shall number them by their armies." In the second we read only " all those that were numbered of the camps throughout their hosts were six hundred thousand, and three thousand, and five hundred and fifty." Extract what you will from these passages, they give us no reason for putting arms into the hands of all this number, merely because they are described as *' able to go forth to war." We are still then to seek for some authority. But, failing the passage already disposed of, viz. Exod. xiii. 18, we look round in vain for any other ; and I ask again, what ground have you for your confident asser- tion, "We imist suppose that the whole lody of 600,000 warriors were armed?" It is, indeed, supposition only. You are in- genious enough at such a resource when it helps your argu- ment, but if any one ventures to "suppose" that "perchance the Israelites picked up some quantity of arms among the spoils of the Egyptians at the Ked Sea " (for which, by-the- bye, there is the authority of Josephus), you are up in arms at once, and say, " The Bible story says nothing about this stripping of the dead, as it surely must have done, if it really took place." (61.)
Let us be fair on both sides, and let not mere hypothesis be licensed for the purpose of invalidating the authority of the Scripture narrative, when it is forbidden in defending it. We might require more. For, whereas on the side of the defence, if any tolerable probability can be shown, there is an appeal for confirmation, not only to the letter of Scripture, but also to the sense and tradition of the Church in all ages, Jewish as well as Christian ; on the other side there is no appeal but to abstract ideas as to what, in the nature of things, may be considered possible or impossible. Besides which, before it can be worth while to disturb the whole tenor of the sacred history, and "the current belief" in the same, there should be something more than mere probability — there should be some positive certainty to justify the attempt.
37
OK CHAPTEES X., XI
" Then Moses called for all the elders of Israel, and said unto them, Draw out now, and take you a lamb according to your families, and Mil the Passover. And ye shall take a hunch of hyssop, and dij) it in the hlood lohich is in the hason, and strike the lintel and the two side-posts with the hlood that is in the hason ; and none of you shall go out at the door of his house
till the morning And the children of Israel went aioay,
and did as Jehovah had commanded Moses and Aaron : so did tlieyT Ex. xii. 21 — 28. " And the children of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, ahout six hundred thousand on foot that were men, hesides children. And a mixed multitude went up also loith them, and flocks and herds, even very much cattle" —Ex. xii. 37, 38.
On the former of these passages you observe, ''the first notice of any such feast to be kept is given in this very chapter." In speaking thus, many would understand you to imply, that this was the "first notice given," even to Moses himself. But, on the contrary, we find at the very beginning of the preceding chapter (xi. 1), that the Lord expressly said unto Moses, "Yet will I bring one plague more upon Pharaoh and upon Egypt ; afterwards he will let you go hence." Then follows the precept, to take of the Egyptians (who seemed by this time only too glad to come to any terms with the Israelites), "jewels of silver and jewels of gold," which they readily gave in such quantities that the latter are said to have " spoiled the Egyptians,^^ (xii. 86). But they had only, it seems, to ask, and they received this abundant sjipply, suffi- cient to enrich them during all the long march that was before
38
them : for " the Lord " it was that " gave the people favour in the sight of the Egyptians." (xi. 3.) We must evidently allow time for these proceedings, and yet your theory of an immediate start with scarce " a moment's notice," (74) leaves no room for any considerable interval here for the collection of these treasures, though it seems necessarily implied in the original. The narrative seems very emphatically to dwell on this interval of time as an important one; — "Moreover," it continues^ '' the man Moses was very great in the land of Egypt, in the sight of Pharaoh's servants and in the sight of the people." (v. 3.) So widely, indeed, was the terror of the chosen people spread, after that sore calamity of the plagues, which for a long season had afflicted the land, that they were anxious for their departure at any price ; and they would rather waste their treasures, than all the peace and happiness of their lives. "The Egyptians," therefore, as the history emphatically repeats, (xii. 33.) " were urgent upon the people that they might send them out of the land in haste, for they said, 'We be all dead men.' " * But, now, let me ask. How does it tally with this account, which is all from Scripture, when you say that, besides the difficulty of informing such a population, there is that " of their horroiving, when summoned in the dead of nighty (Ex. xii. 29 — 36.) to the extent implied in the story." Their "borrowing," as you call it, was not in the dead of the night, as I have just shown, but at least a day, perhaps many days before.
" It cannot," you think, "be said that they had notice seve- ral days beforehand," on the mere ground that they "were to 'take' the lamb on the tenth day of the month, and *kiir it
* I may support my view of the passages above quoted from Ex. xi., by the following from the Commentary of Dr. Kalisch on v. 1 ; — " The close connexion between this and the preceding chapter is this : After Pharaoh had threatened Moses with death if he ventured to appear again before him (x. 28) ; Moses, already informed iy the Lord of the fitted events, noiv so nearly impcndhifj, answered him that he would willingly obey his commands (v. 29); but, pre- vious to his departing, he announced to the King the death of all the first-born ^^ Egypt, and . . . the other circumstances with which the event of the Exodus would be accompanied.'"
39
on the fourteentli, v. 3, 6 ; and that so v. 12 only means to say, 'on that night'— the night of the fourteenth — 'I will pass through the land of Egypt.' For the expression in v, 12 is distinctly HTi*!, 'this,' not ^^^^^, ' that' as in xiii. 8." It is true that the expression ' this day,' and ' this night/ (Heb. T]^TV) is of frequent occurreuce in Exod. xii. for the night of the Passover. But in the lexicons we find '' Mc' and ^ iste' both given as the sense of this pronoun HT : and our trans- lators must have had some good reason for rendering it at V. 12, " on that night." The Vulgate agrees, both here and at V. 12, 'nocte ilia,'' although at v. 14 it renders it 'hunc diem/ The reader may refer to Poll Synopsis ad Exod, xii. 1, where he will find it the general opinion of commentators that the warning here given to Moses was at least given as long before as the tenth * — probably on the first day of the month. Certainly, then, if the people were taken by surprise, Moses was not ; and it is inconceivable but that many knew of it as well as he. From the central town where they lived, relays of messengers might easily have been ready to convey the intelligence throughout the whole land of Goshen. Moreover, the line of march lying for the most part east- ward of the chief city, which was the direction in which the children of Israel were about to effect their escape (see Kitto on Ex. xii. 37.), the out-lying body of the people might receive notice to fall in, as the main body came up : and this Avithout the extreme hurry and confusion of a sudden panic, though it is granted, they set out with considerable " liaste,^^ of which they preserved a memorial in the un- leavened bread, and in other observances of the Paschal feast. Nor were they in danger of molestation from the people among whom they lived, whether it were in the chief city of Rameses, or in the shepherds-tracts, or in other small towns. Some difficulty, no doubt, must have attended the transport of women and children, who could not well have followed on
* I am glad to find this interpretation confirmed, in the very clear expo- sition of this passage (Exod, xii.) by the Lord Bishop of LlandajBT. ^qq. Letter to the Clergy oj the Diocese of Llandaff. Rivingtons, 1863.
40
foot, or kept up with the men of war ; but as the land of Goshen, where they dwelt, was near the great highway into Egypt along the coast of the Mediterranean, and also had an outlet in another direction round the head of the Red Sea — there would naturally have been a plentiful influx from time to time of people from the neighbouring tribes ; and of these they might have served themselves, to assist in all menial offices ; and others they might have hired for the transport of what they most valued, and of what they required for present exigencies. This is, in fact, the " mixed multitude which went up with them, with flocks and herds and very much cattle," alluded to, Exod. xii. 38. It appears wholly unnecessary, and even an error, to suppose that the provisions for the Passover (Exod. xii.) were to come at once into full and immediate operation, on the very night of the Exodus. As Dr. Kalisch well points out, this chapter embodies in one account, for the sake of completeness, the full provisions that were hereafter to he observed, so soon as the people were sufficiently settled to admit of such obser- vance. For the present emergency it would, perhaps, be only necessary that provision should have been made for the killing of as many lambs as would suffice for the '* sprinkling of the blood on the doors of the houses where the children of Israel were," and also to keep such a hasty feast as they were able, ''with the shoes on their feet, with their loins girded, and with staves in their hands," ready for their journey. The number of lambs required for this would not be large ; or, if it were, the people must have received earlier notice to prepare, than is directly mentioned in the Scripture account of the event. We are at liberty to adopt whichever supposition we please. And thus we may dismiss the *'rnany miles of people marching, with so many miles of sheep and oxen.'' (78) !
And really your idea of scarce *' a moment's notice " is too palpably absurd. It is to forget a prophecy (Gen. xv. 13, 14.) which, in no indistinct terms, had predicted this very event of the Exodus, and the exact time of it — a prophecy to whose fulfilment every eye would be now anxiously directed, as tlie
41
time was drawing nigh ; and Avliich Moses, the servant of God, was of all men the least likely to have forgotten or overlooked. Instead of " one day," we have in fact a notice of "four hundred years."! It was by a similar prediction that the Jews of a later day, under the teaching of Daniel, were sustained in their hope of a return during the seventy years' captivity in Babylon ; — and why should the Israelites, under their Egyptian bondage, have been less mindful of the voice of prophecy, especially when the approaching time of their deliverance was heralded by the " mighty hand and stretched- out arm " of their Almighty protector ? For what had been the express object of the plagues of Egypt but to be one continued notice to Pharaoh to " let the people go " ? And must there not have been a strong presentiment in the minds of all the people, that the time of their redemption was at hand, when their chief could thus confidently address the king, some days, at least, before, '' Thou hast spoken well, I will see thy face again no more." (Exod. x. 29.) And why should you speak of " a day's notice," even though you wilfully shut your eyes to this long course and train of preparation ? The march from Rameses took place *' on the loth day" (Numb, xxxiii. 3) ; and the Passover night began on *' the 14th at even," i.e. 36 hours before! But if you will still have it " one single day," (73, 75) we must set against this the three months of the plagues (see Bryant, Hales^ Toicnsend, &c.) — besides the four hundred years of the prophecy running on — which all conspired to give them due warning of an event so highly important to them all. Though not a man " went out at the door of his house till the morning," — we may add, though no telegram was yet known to science, — the Almighty was not without messengers to proclaim His will, and to announce, as by a trumpet tongue, that the day of redemption was come. He was about to " lead His people through the way of the wilderness by the Eed Sea." "He was about to go before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light." (Exod. xiii. 18, 21.) Was it likely He should want means to bring
42
them forward on the first step of their journey, and to prepare them for their triumphant exit ?
We proposed (vid. on chap. VIII.) to consider, in a later place, the difficulty of providing " tents '' for so large a multitude. We may now observe that this, difficulty is allied to that just considered, p. 32, of procuring transport for the women and children. And it is obviously met by the same considerations. We have only to remember the numerous children of the desert who were at hand, to give their services for reasonable hire. We have only to realize the notoriety of the route, and the natural facilities of supply of almost every article of commerce. We have seen that the means of purchase were not likely to be wanting to a people who, in addition to the ordinary earnings of a long and probably an industrious life in Egypt, had but lately profited by the wealth unsparingly lavished upon them in the ardour of the inhabitants to "let them go free." (Consult, if you please, my Veracity of Genesis, chap. II. pp. 36, 37.)
43
ON CHAPTEES XII, XIII.
" And the children of Israel did eat manna for forty years^ until they came to a land inhabited ; they did eat manna until they came into the horders of the land of Canaan!' Ex. xvi. 35. " I will send my fear hefore thee, I will destroy all the ;peoiAe to whom thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their hacks unto thee. And I will send hornets hefore thee, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite from hefore thee, I will not drive them out from hefore thee in one year, lest the land hecome desolate^ and the heast of the field multijoly against thee. By little and little I will drive them out from hefore thee, until thou he increased, and inherit the land!' — Ex. xxiii. 27—30.
It may now very fairly be said: However well supplied with tents and provisions, with flocks and herds, and other conveniences for the journey, the Israelites might have been at the time of the Exodus itself, these resources must soon have been spent — they had nothing but " a waste howling wilder- ness " before them — and, setting miraculous interposition aside, if their numbers were really as large as they are represented, they must soon have been reduced to the lowest and most necessitous condition. Wood and water, shelter as well as pasture for their flocks, and all other necessaries, would soon begin to fail them ; and how they were to subsist with- out a perpetual miracle, in this destitute condition, it is im- possible to conceive ! Such might very naturally be the tenor of thought, as one attempted to follow the chosen people along their barren and weary way. But this does not content you. You are not satisfied without a much more sweeping conclusion. You pronounce it next to impossible that the
means of support could liave been found for so large a body of cattle and men in the peninsula of Sinai without a special miracle, of which the Bible says nothing (85). The people, you allow, may have been supplied with " manna ;" but for the cattle you utterly despair (79). The impossibility, however, which you assert, you have entirely failed to prove. You make out a prima facie improbability for the people having stayed in one locality (say under Mount Sinai) with their flocks and herds for any very long period ; but allowing the full force of your arguments, when you allege the great scarcity in the desert owing to its exceeding barrenness, it seems to me, for the reasons that will be given presently, that they prove nothing against the possibility of their staying there one year, which is the time stated, and all that the history requires ; though it might have been a difficulty if they had been related to have made it their halting-place for a much longer time. And thus, for anything you have shown to the contrary, we may still abide by the Scripture account, which gives them at least a year in the Sinaitic peninsula. It is a strange thing to imagine that you have shown this account to be in- credible, when you have not even shown it improbable. In venturing to assert this, I might be almost contented to adduce, in proof of it, the admirable reasons on the Scripture side of the statement which you have yourself brought forward from Dr. Stanley, whose arguments you have very imperfectly answered, and have certainly done nothing to refute. But I will not at present go over this ground with you or with your readers again. I am really astonished you should have left out of your consideration so many things besides *' the manna for the people." One distinct reference to the line of route along which the Israelites were marching, would have gone far to dissipate the illusion which makes all your difficulty here. Were not the Israelites, with some few diversions to which their own disobedience and unbelief condemned them, marching for the most part along the high way which carried tlie chief commerce of Arabia and the East down to Egypt? Was there not, at the one end of it.
45
the rich and fertile land which they had left, and at the other the fat pastures of Bashan and of the further Midian ? Is it to be supposed there were no longer Midianitish merchants passing that way? We read in Kitto (see Palestine, and Pictorial Bible, Exod. xii. 37), "From Rameses Moses had before him the choice of two roads to Palestine ; the direct one, along the coast of the Mediterranean to el-Aresh ; and the more circuitous one by the head of the Red Sea and the desert of Sinai. The Lord directed the latter, Exod, xiii. 17, 18. This would appear to have been a known and travelled way, by which passed doubtless the commerce that must have subsisted between Egypt and Arabia, and leading probably around the present head of the Red Sea, at the same or nearly the same point where the caravans now pass." Do you call it an impartial account which leaves entirely out of consideration such a circumstance as this? A circum- stance opening out to them a fair prospect of supply, whether they wanted provender for their cattle, or wood for the Taber- nacle, or lambs for the Passover. You have shrunk, it seems, from all mention of their having any such facilities of traffic at their command. The unwary reader of your account might conclude, because Egypt was shut against them, that they had no commimication with any other people to help them out ! Yet I find in these Midianites the solution of one chief difficulty on which you rest the incredibility which you are pleased to charge against the history, viz., the prodigious number of sheep that the Israelites would be required to keep in order to supply themselves with a sufficiency of lambs for the Passover. You reckon them to have needed *' a flock of at least 200,000 sheep and lambs of all ages " (71). We may see, however, now, that there was no such necessity at all. With a little foresight, they might have pro- cured the requisite number of lainbs alone ; and we have no occasion whatever to suppose a proportionable number of sheep to supply the lambs ; or at least they might have made up the number, partly out of their own flocks, partly by purchase from the travelling merchants of the East. Had it even been neces-
46
sary to keep a flock, it is a well-known fact that goats will find subsistence in mountainous and desert tracts where sheep cannot. From these, therefore, might be obtained a great part of the supply necessary for any such sacrifices as the yet imperfect state of the law required, and as the circumstances of the people would admit ; and why should we overlook the special provision in the law itself, designed, perhaps, to meet the very exigency which your objection contemplates, — " Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year : ye shall take it out from the sheep or from the goatsy Ex. xii. 5. Besides, this vast number of cattle, of which you make such a difficulty, is quite of your own imagining. The provisions for the sacrifices prescribed in the law, were not to come into operation till the people tvere settled in the land of their rest. Our attention will have to be directed to this point when we come to some later chapters (see below, pp. 58, 59). Suffice it for the present to adduce one passage in which we have the mind of Scripture on this matter, and which I will cite at at length — " And the Lord commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and judgments, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go over to possess it'" — Deut. iv. 14.
But much as all these considerations affect your argument, they are not the only things which you ignore or keep out of sight. Was it nothing that they were under the command of an experienced leader like Moses ; of one to whom the deserts of Horeb were no strange country, but who had tended there the flocks of his own father-in-law, a prince of that country ? Was it nothing that he was acquainted with the "wells" where he had himself watered the flocks of Jethro ? (Exod. ii. 16_20.) Was all his acquaintance with the passes and intricacies of the way, to go for nothing ? Must we not take account of the assistances he would derive from all his past experience for forty years ? from the companionship of Jethro himself during a part of the way, and of Hobab, Jethro's son, for a much longer time? These are plain omissions, which, it seems to me, nothing can excuse, if you had wished
47
to give a complete and impartial account. It is not even necessary to suppose that the normal condition of the Israel- ites in the wilderness was one of penury and privation. It seemed more the purpose of Providence to vary the discipline under which they were placed ; to try them by every kind of vicissitude, by sickness and by health, by plenty and by want, by sudden checks and by unexpected deliverances. Thus " He led them about, He instructed them ; " — He trained them up to be " a peculiar people/' who should serve, amidst a de- generate world, as the depositories of Divine truth. It was probably quite as much from the jealousy of the neighbouring tribes, excited by the fame of their successes and adventures, that the Israelites were often liable to suffer, as from the actual deficiency of ordinary supplies. Or else it was by the special act of Divine Providence that they were permitted to "wander in the wilderness- in a solitary way," and that "hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them." I am not pretending to say that they would have had the same facilities during all the years of the wandering as during the first year, when their resources were more plentiful, and they were fresh from Egypt, and still contiguous to it, and when they were on the highway between Egypt and Midian. But then, as their resources diminished, their wants must have diminished also ; since, after the Passover held at the expiration of the first year, we read of no more Passovers during the remainder of the forty years in the wilderness ; indeed, it would appear that not only the Passover, but all the rites of the law, and all the legal sa- crifices, ceased to be observed, or, perhaps, never came into use, till the final entrance into Canaan, when the initiatory rite of circumcision was promulgated, as it were, afresh, and for the first time strictly observed (Josh. v. 6 ; and see below, on Chapters XX. XXI.).
But the people are no sooner out of the wilderness, than a fresh difficulty meets you in the face ; and you wonder how the Scripture can represent it as a matter of alarm, that, unless they retained among their population some admixture
48
of the ancient inhabitants of the land, the wild beasts would multiply upon them, and the land become desolate. There was no room, you think, for any such apprehension if the number of the people was really what the Scripture represents, viz. upwards of two millions. And to make this appear, you compare the colony of Natal with the land of Canaan. In the colony, you observe, " the inhabitants are perfectly well able to maintain their ground against the beasts of the field. And, in fact, the lions, elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippo- potami, which once abounded in the country, have long ago disappeared " (92). Now " the population of the Israelites in the land of Canaan would have been more than twenty times as thick as that of Natal ;" and you deem it absurd to think they could have required any of the old inhabitants to be left, " lest the land should become desolate, and the beast of the field multiply against them." Ex. xxiii. 29. There is no help for it, but to go into the comparative extent of area and people. The extreme length, then, of Palestine, ac- cording to Professor Stanley, " From Dan to Beersheba being about 180 miles," and the mean breadth, if we include the trans-Jordanic territory, varying from 30 miles to half the length, the extent in area will be about (180 x 60 =•) 10,800 square miles. Put it at 11,000, as the border was to extend ultimately to the Euphrates, Gen. xv. 18; Ex. xxiii. 31. And this agrees with your own computation and that of Kitto to which you refer. The number of the Israelites, as we have seen above, was about two millions, i.e. neai'ly equal to the population of London. But London extends over an area of about 100 square miles: — Palestine, therefore, would be to London in the proportion of 11,000 : 100, i.e. 110 times as large ; space enough, one would think, to hold the Israelites and a few Canaanites intermixed, with some margin left for wild beasts to multiply to an inconvenient extent in the more desert and thinly inhabited parts.
To such subtleties you are driven, in your endeavours to make out any tolerable case of historic incredibility, against the
49
writers of the Pentateuch ! If such are the grounds on which the world is to be driven from its propriety, and the credit of the Holj Scriptures shaken, I think you yourself, my lord, will soon join the defence, and leave the attack to more ex- perienced and, I may say, less scrupulous hands. At least, I persuade myself, it will require arguments of sterner stuff, before the intelligence of England will be gained over to the side of denying the historic credibility of the Pentateuch.
50
ON GHAPTEES XIY— XIX.
" Noio the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and. thirty years ^ — Ex. xii. 40. {Heb, andE. V)
^\The sojourning of the children of Israel, lohich they sc>journed in Egypt and in the land of Canaan, was four hundred and thirty years'' — Ex. xii. 40. {Samaritan and LXX.)
These chapters may be conveniently classed together; their contents corresponding with those of chapters II. and III. In chapters 11. and III. a computation was made of the nmnbers going down to Egypt, the seed, as it were, of the futm-e harvest of God's chosen people ; and in chapters XIV. — XIX. are computed the numbers of the population at the time of their Exodus, and of their final establishment in the land of promise. By way of detail, we are introduced parti- cularly to the comparative number of "the first-born in Israel," (chap. XIV.) " of the Danites and Levites," (chap. XVIII.) and of the "entire population of Israel," (chap. XVII.) while two other chapters explain the principles on which these calculations are mainly founded, (chaps. XV., XVI.) In chapter XIX. we have certain replies to Kurtz, Hengstenberg, and others.
To speak confidently about possibilities and impossibilities, in such a matter as the increase of population, will not, I am sure, be expected in this place, though I propose to pass these chapters carefully in review. Suffice it to repeat, once for all, the very just and cogent observation of Professor Kawlinson, that " Egypt was a country where both men and animals are said to have been remarkably prolific ; where, therefore, natural laws would have tended in the same direction as the
51
special action of Divine Providence at this time." The dis- position to early marriages further favoured tliis increase. The case of Benjamin, whose age at the going into Egypt may be taken from twenty-two to twenty-six years (vid. Hales' Analysis, ii. 145), is an instance in point. Dr. Hales ob- serves : " From such early marriages, in a fruitful country, finely watered, and a warm climate like Egypt, joined to the prolific blessing of Providence, the children of Israel, in the course of 215 years till their exode, multiplied exceedingly . . . till at last, supposing the men able to bear arms in a given district amount to about a fourth part of the whole com- munity, the whole of the Israelites who went out of Egypt must have exceeded two millions." Next to the prospect of a final settlement in the land of promise, there was nothing to which the Israelite looked forward with more sanguine hope than to a vast increase of the nation, till they should be as the dust of the earth and as the sand of the sea-shore for multitude, and till the prophecy to Abraham should be ful- filled : " Look now towards heaven and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them, so shall thy seed be." (Gen. xv. 5.) Hence it was that Jacob exclaimed with evident exultation, " With my staff I passed over this Jordan, and now I am become two bands." (Gen. xxxii. 10.) The expectation of a fruitful offspring was still kept before his eyes. (Gen. XXXV. 11.) And it is not, therefore, surprising that stress should be laid on the vast increase of this people on their final deliverance from Egypt. " And the children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty ; and the land was filled with them." Exod. i. 7. But we must not stay long on these gene- ralities, but follow you to the arithmetical details, to which you draw special attention. Not that I am afraid for the author to whom I have just had occasion to refer, and whom you seem rather to accuse of dealing in generalities, but I am speaking honestly for myself, and hope to omit nothing, which deserves special notice, in your statements in this place. You will admit then, I think, that the following
52
are the chief matters of detail involved; viz.: — (1.) The number of the children of Jacob, who went down to sojourn in Egypt, and who, including himself, are usually reckoned at 70. (2.) The time of their sojourn. (3.) Their Exodus in the fourth generation. (4.) Their numbers at the time of that Exodus, and especially (as they are usually reckoned in round numbers) the 600,000 males above twenty years of age, and fighting men. (5.) The number of the tribe of Daii. (6.) That of the decendants of Levi; and (7.) The number of the first-born. These are the conditions of the problem here before us, and on which I hope now to enter in all the detail which you require.
(1.) On the first point, I find we are agreed ; viz., that the number of the persons of Jacob's family — descendants naturally from him — who went down into Egypt and settled there, is clearly stated in Scripture to have been " seventy souls." (See the remarks on a former chapter, p. 13 — 18.)
(2.) On the second point there is more room for difi'erence. We have no certain account anywhere of the exact duration of the sojourn in Egypt. The Scriptures leave it free to us to inform ourselves as best we may on this point. By referring, however, to the best authorities among the Jews, Josej)lius, the Seder Olam, Rabhi Abraham Levita, &c., we find this period computed at 215 years. St. Paul (Gal. iii. 17) makes it 400 years from the promise to Abraham to the time of the Exodus, and St. Stephen (Acts vii. 6) 430 years ; both which neces- sarily imply some shorter period for the Egyptian sojourn included in this larger period. Usher and many Bible chrono- logists agree in making it 215 years. (Dr. Wordsworth's Greek Testament, Acts vii. 6 — 14, may be consulted here.) Still this is only assumption; as neither St. Paul nor the Scriptures elsewhere determine anything more than that 400 or 430 years was the term during which the seed of Abraham should be in some sense "a stranger," and without a settled habitation. For so ran the prophecy, Gen. xv. 13 — 16 : " Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not tlieirs^ and shall serve them; and they shall afflict
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them four hundred years .... and afterwards shall they come out loith great substance. . . . And in the fourth generation they shall come hither again'' Such was the prediction to Abraham some twentj-five years before Isaac was born ; and this place in Genesis is the first Scripture mention of this celebrated period, called in Exodus (chap. xii. 40, 41), where the next mention of it occurs, as also by St. Paul (Gal. iii. 17), 430 years. The rest is made up thus : —
From Gen. xii. 4, to birth of Isaac . . 25
To Jacob's birth 60
To Jacob's journey into Egypt . . . 130
Total .... "215 In Egypt 215
Total .... 430
But as opinions are much divided as to the initial date of these 430 years, many of the most celebrated commentators make the period to begin from the birth of Isaac : this wonld leave twenty-five years still unaccounted for ; which they add to the sojourn in Egypt. For my part I am inclined to give you the benefit of a well-reasoned chapter in your book (chap. XV.) and to admit, for anything I can see to the contrary, that the years of the sojourn in Egypt were about 215. I would put them at 225.
(3.) But what next, about the " fourth generation ? " Bishop Patrick, Ex. vi. 20, gives us the best and most approved sense of this expression. " The fourth from Levi," he says, *' was Moses, for Moses was his great grandson^ And in the same way Caleb was "in the fourth generation'' from Judah. But if you prefer to begin a generation later, then "the fourth" would be from the children of Levi to the children of Moses. I am sorry that I cannot assist you in bringing this point to a mathematical certainty; it is not a very material one. But we now come to the point where the grand mistake in your argument appears to lie, viz., in the utterly wrong application which you make of this " fourth generation." You
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take it for a mere measure of population ! But was it not, on the other hand, chiefly intended to serve as a measure of God's faithfulness to His promises ? The circumstance of its occurring first in a prophecy should lead us to think how extraordinary an instance we have here of the Divine foreknow- ledge in predicting, and of the Divine power in bringing it about, that any ^persons 2c7ia fever in the " fourth generation " from those who went down to Egypt should have been found to return to Canaan! It is by no means necessary to the truth of that prophecy, tliat all the people, at the Exodus, should have been removed by the same degree from their ancestors living at the first ^'going-down" of Jacob (here lies your fallacy) ;^ it was sufiicient that this should have been the case with some, and who these were the Scriptures take care to inform us. But I take leave to hold that with the majority of the people life and death succeeded each other at the usual rate ; and, accordingly, to divide the period into the ordinary generations of mankind, i.e. into periods of twenty-five or thirty years, thereby making altogether, for the Egyptian sojourn, about nine generations.
(4.) God having, however, in His providence seen fit to order that the lives of some chief persons should extend over the whole period by only four generations, the Sacred Historian is careful in the particular case of the Levite family to notice (Exod. vi. 16, 18, 20) the exact years of the four Iiats of Levi, Kohath, Amram, and Moses, viz. Levi, 137 ; Kohath, 133 ; Amram, 137 ; and Moses, who was 80 at the time of the
* We find, on the contrary, that Elisheba, the wife of Aaron, was sixth iu descent from Judah (Ex. vi. 23, Ruth iv. 19, 20). Again, that Joseph lived to see his son Ephraim's ' children of the third generation,' Gen. 1. 23 ; but, as Joseph lived to 110 years, and was probably thirty-nine when his brethren came down, this 'third generation ' must have begun at latest (110 - 39 =) 71 years after Jacob's arrival there, — leaving 144 years to be divided among the generations subsequent, and if there were three generations in 71 years, there wovdd be at least six generations more in 144 years — thus making nine gene- rations altogether in the total period. It appears, again (1 Chron. vii. 20 — 27), that Joshua was bom in the tenth generation from Joseph (vid. Hales* Analysis of Sacred Chronology, vol. ii. p. 145) ; and thus the calculation in the text seems abundantly confirmed.
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Exodus ; the ages of the parentage, however, in each case not being particularly specified. The ages in these four generations of tlie family of Levi being so exactly given in the Scripture account, is no sign that the people generally lived so long, and had children at so late an age — or, in short, that^ as a general rule, so few lives stretched over so many years in only four generations. The miracle of Providence was that any did, however few ; and the special mention of those few tends to show that with the rest it happened as with men in general, the ordinary term of a generation in- cluding no more than twenty-five years. It is, however, a perfectly fair inquiry, what the rate of increase during these generations was ? Now the eleven sons of Jacob had among them, before they settled in Egypt, 52 children* (we do not reckon Joseph and his two sons, as they might have been bom aftericards) ; {. e. they had increased to about four times and threefourths of the generation of the eleven patriarchs them- selves. Your own calculation makes it four and a half (118). There is not much difference, and we shall be within the mark if we omit either fractional part, and make the sons of Jacob to have multiplied in a single generation at the rate o^ four times their own number. And though this includes one daughter (v. 17), it is absolutely exclusive of any children (and we might fairly suppose many) bom to Jacob's sons after their settlement in Egypt. The omission of the fractional part will amply make up for our omitting, in the computation, Joseph and his two sons. Grandchildren have, of course, been omitted.
* See Appendix, p. 71-73. The two sons of Joseph are omitted here, because it is uncertain how many he had after the going doAvn into Egypt, and I am taking those descendants only of Jacob who were born in Canaan. But the tv:o deceased sons of Judah are inchided, though in the Scripture account, which refers only to those who were ahve at the going down into Egypt, these are omitted. And thus we make 52. Bishop Colenso (116) com- putes thus: "Eeuben had 4 sons, Simeon 6, Levi 3, Judah 5, Issachar 4, Zebulon 3, Gad 7, Asher 4, Joseph 2, Benjamin 10, Dan 1, Xaphtali 4," — Total, 53. But as this includes the two sons of Joseph, whom I have pur- posely omitted above, this total is reduced to 51 ; or, adding the one daughter of Asher, we have — Sons, 51 ; Children (including daughter), 52, as in the text.
66
We have before seen that 225 is not an extravagant number to allow for the total years of the sojourn in Egypt, making nine generations of twenty-five years each. So we have now a series of nine terins^ or generations ; the rate of increase, four; and (taking no account of children born after the going down into Egypt) we have, for the first term in the series, the fifty-two children, viz. the fifty who survived the above-named fifty-two, together with the two sons of Joseph himself, — since these are, in the Scripture account, regarded as the original stock from which were descended the future generations of Israel (Gen. xlvi. 27).* And the ninth term of this series will be the number to which the descendants of Jacob might naturally have multiplied in the 225th year, i.e. at the end of their sojourn in Egypt. This number comes to 3,407,872,t — sufficient, evidently, to allow of the proportion assigned in Scripture as that of the male population fit to carry arms, viz. 603,550 men.
(5, 6.) We come next to the Levites and tlie Danites. Xev2*, you observe, had three sons, KohatJi, Oershon^ and Merari ; these three increased in the next generation (the second) to eight persons ; in the third to sixteen ; and in the fourth to forty-eight (126). And this you make out verymucli to your satisfaction from Exod. vi. 16 — 26. You contrast your amount with the numbers taken at the census (Numb. iv. 48),
* From this 52, the number 70 may be easily completed thus :—
As above 52
Twelve sons of Jacob 12
Jacob 1
Dinah 1
Grandsons of Judah and Asher (v, 12, 17) . . . . 4
Total 70
Compare The Family of Jacob and his Sons, in the Appendix.
+ Algebraically thus : — If a be the first term of a geometrical series, r the common ratio, and I the nth term ; — then l = ar^—'^-
Here a = 52 (the number of children of the 12 sous,) ?' = 4, n = 9, .-. 2 = 48x52 = 65536x52 = 3,407,872.
See Oolenso's Algebra, Pt. I. § 145.
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wliere the Levites are reckoned at 8,580 ! And you say, "Whence this contradiction?" which, indeed, seems a very natural subject of inquiry. But a little closer examination will show us, I think, that Exod. vi. 16—26, was never intended for anything like a complete list of the numbers in that family. The occasion of it was of a different kind, viz. to introduce, for the first time, the exact parentage of those distinguished persons, Moses and Aaron, and of some other principal heads in the order of the Levites. Accordingly, we find no mention whatever of Hebron {2. fourth son of Kohath) having any children, although in 1 Chron. xxiii. 9, we find that he had at least four sons ; and, to make it still plainer, the Hebronites are mentioned in two places, Numb. iii. 27, and xxvi. 58, as among the principal " families " of this tribe.
In like manner to " the two sons of Gershon," Exod. vi. 17, viz. " Libni and Shtmi,'" you liberally allow two sons apiece ; but you take no notice that the Libmtes are mentioned else- where, Numb. xxvi. 58, as one of the most eminent " families " in Israel— which they could not have been if your meagre computation were correct, giving only two sons to Libni, and an increase to these two of six in the next generation ! And, again, we read, Numb. iii. 21, " Of Gershon was the famili/ of the Libmtes and the family of the Shimites.'' There were other celebrated "families" in the fourth generation, from "Kohath, Gershon, and Merari," which would have made a sorry figure indeed, if Exod. vi. was to be taken as a complete register of that family. " These are the families of the Levites— the family of the Libnites, the family of the Hebronites, the family of the Mahlites, the family of the Mushites, the family of the Kohathites." (Numb, xxvi, 58.) (Compare 1 Chron. vi. 33 — 44.)
(6.) Of the Danites. There is nothing to show that the people of this tribe were under the same providential law of increase as the pontifical and priestly family of Levi. You bring them to twenty-seven in the fourth generation, but, let them have increased at the rate which I have shown to be no
H
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more than the ordinary rate in Jacob's family, viz, 4 to each generation, then, as there are nine ordinary generations in 225 years, the numbers of the Danites at the end of this period (even if we allow only one son to Dan himself) would be the ninth term of this series, viz. 65,536. The Scripture makes it 62,700. Numb. ii. 26.
(7) There is left the number of the first-born. But, before we speak too positively on this head, it will be well to con- sider a little the history of '' the dedication of the first-born to the service of Almighty God," because I think their dedica- tion (Ex. xiii. 12 — 16.) throws great light upon their number, and is, indeed, the proper clue to explain why that number seems at first sight so small, viz. in the proportion of about ^th to the whole population. You infer from this (93, 94), that, throwing into the account the younger sons, each mother must have had forty-four sons ; and this seems to you such a height of improbability, as to be well-nigh impossible. But why impossible ? if we remember carefully that this dedica- tion was, in the nature of its foundation, a commemoration of cMldreriy not of adults, having been signally delivered from imminent danger. We read (Exod. i. 15 — 17), " And the Mng of Egypt spake to the Helrew midwives, When ye do the office
of a midwife to the Hebrew women If it he a son, then
shall ye kill him : hut if it he a daughter, then she shall live. But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them^ hut saved the men children alive J" In just retribution, however, for this murderous intent, the Egyptians themselves, after a long series of plagues, were punished by the death of their first-born, on the night of the Passover. It seems all along as if children had been contemplated both in the death of the first-born in Egypt, and also as the special subjects of the Divine interposition when the houses of the Israelites escaped. In commemoration of this, the " first-born " among the children were selected to be specially dedicated to the service of the Temple (Exod. xiii, 15.), till, after some time, the Levites were accepted in their place, or, rather, substituted for them, (Numb. iii. 41 — 45.)
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To me it seems quite inappropriate to have iacluded among these "first-bom" any beyond the age of children. And, therefore, there is nothing absurd in taking the explanation of Kurtz^ and supposing " Heads of families ^'^ i. e. grown-up people of a certain standing, '* not to have been included in the reckoning,''' although they were literally the oldest among their own brothers and sisters, in other words, " the first- bom:" — nothing, again, absurd, if we prefer to think with Scott, that the number 22,263 (Numb. iii. 43) includes only the first-born among the children born since the gi'eat night of the Passover in Egypt, A slight modification of this plan of Scott's might, I think, give us a yet nearer approxima- tion to the truth ; — if, instead of the children of quite recent marriages (to the probability of which, in that time of danger, you with some reason object (98 Ans. (ii.) ), we were to sup- pose the ' first-born ' children to be taken from the young rising families of the out-going generation, not yet come to their full complement so as to make a distinct generation of themselves, twenty-two thousand would be a tolerably high figure for the first-born of such families, especially if we take care to exempt from the reckoning the children of mixed or of illegitimate descent, since these would be unworthy of dedi- cation to the Priesthood ; for "a bastard must not even enter the congregation of the Lord." (Deut. xxiii. 2.)
We have in either case a fair way of accounting for the number being small, out of a population (taking males only) of about 900,000 men. Again, this number of the first- bom, 22,263, was found, when the census was taken, nearly equal to the number of the whole tribe of Levi. Now the tribe of Levi, being i^th of the whole population of the twelve tribes, ought to have amounted to about 75,000 men. In the same manner, since it is calculated (98) " that the first-born in any company ought, in general amount, to be, at least, one in eight or ten," the first-born ought to have been, at least, 90,000. But we learn from these two instances, that things do not always turn out what (measuring by our own ideas) they ought to be, A little practical good
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sense might, however, convince us, that the most reliable accounts are those which treat of things as they are, not as we might imagine they ought to be ! I will not, there- fore, stay to notice your other objections.* It is enough to observe that, in contending for the strict application of the term " first-born " to the mother s side, you have against you the whole law and usage of the Hebrews, You press into your service the mere dictionary sense of a term, and over- look the sense and custom of the people : and so you make out that the almost pleonastic expression DH"! lOD ''opening the womb/' is decisive on the point of thus reckoning the first- born, thereby making the number of these the same as the number of all the mothers in Israel. Now take only one clear passage of Scripture^ and you will not wonder that the commentators are almost all against you here, and maintain that the first-born were so denominated from being the eldest on the fathers and not on the mother's side. " If a man have two wives, one beloved and another hated, and they have borne him children, both the beloved and the hated, and if the first-horn son be hers that was hated, then it shall be, when he maketh his sons to inherit that which he hath, that he may not maize the son of the heloved first-horn hefore the so7i of the hated, the first-born ; but he shall acknowledge the son of
* It is scarcely possible to repress some feeling of indignation at the triumphant air with which every point in the book is assumed to have been proved by Bishop Colenso in this chapter. He thus winds up, " By this time, surely, great doubt must have arisen, in the mind of most readers, as to the historical veracity of sundry portions of the Pentateuch. That doubt will, I believe, be confirmed into a certain conviction, by its appearing plainly from the data of the Pentateuch itself, that there could not have been any such popula- tion as this to come out of Egypt,— in other words, that the children of Israel, at the time of the Exodus, could not, if only we attend carefully to the dis- tinct statements of the narrative, have amoimted to two millions, — that, in fact, the whole body of warriors could not have been hvo thousand.^' It will have been seen, on the contrary, that these numbers, so far from being incre- dible, may all of them be brought within the range of probability, and that, even when we come to the " first-born," there is no such disparity between their re- corded number, and the probable estimate of it, which might at first sight very plausibly appear.
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the hated for the first-born, by giving him a double portion of all that he hath." (Deut. xxi. 15—17.) *
But even were there nothing at all in the principle on which I have here estimated the probable increase of the Israelites in Egypt from seventy to upwards of three millions of population, there are not wanting other means of account- ing for so great an increase. We have seen that those only, who were related by hlood to Jacob, are reckoned among the seventy who went down with him into Egypt. The " wives," certainly, were not reckoned, for so we are expressly informed Gen. xlvi. 26. And if Jacob himself had several wives, and among them the two handmaids of Eachel and Leah, it is presumable his sons had also more than the wives who are expressly mentioned in the Scripture account. It is very little likely (though, I observe, you adduce some few argu- ments to the contrary) that the " three hundred and eighteen trained servants " of Abraham (Gen. xiv. 14.) had no repre- sentatives in the household of Jacob his descendant. Jacob would most likely have inherited his full share of these dependents of his grandfather ; and if so, there would be a proportionate number of them that would have intermanied w^'th his sons, and contributed to the further increase of the nation during the Egyptian sojourn ; — and this, notwith- standing that in the narrative itself the blood-relations only of their father Jacob are reckoned up. It is a mere assump- tion, that because there is express mention of the seventy that went down to Egypt being all of Jacob's own family and lineage, no others could possibly have gone with him. The inference should rather be the contrary ; that, while many others went down in their company^ these only were men- tioned, as claiming descent from the patriarchs ; and it was desirable to have a perfect registry of their names and number, lest confusion should afterwards arise in the genealogical tables, the careful preservation of which was a matter of such par- ticular pride with the Israelitish people.
* The reader may consult again the Lord Bishop of Llandaff, in Letter to Clergy of the Diocese, pp. 47, 48.
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ON CHAPTEES XX, XXI.
Any one would think, in these chapters, that you were catering for the reader^s amusement, and were not altogether in earnest. Such work as you give the priests : " eating daily more than eighty-eight pigeons each'' (156) — not that you would deny such birds being found here and there in desert places (152), but, though disposed to make every reasonable concession of this sort, you cannot but speak doubtfully of a sufficient supply being forthcoming in such a desert as the Israelites were then in. Again, you make 150,000 lambs to have been killed in two hours, when the priests could only muster three hands, i.e.^ four hundred lamhs every minute for two hours together ! and this within a small plot of ground that could only have held 5,000 people. (159—161.) By examples such as these, it seems, diligently weighed and examined, the credit of the Pentateuch must stand or fall! There is no choice, then, but to go seriously to work, and ask how these things can be? Let me not be misunderstood. I know, my lord, you are as much in earnest as myself. What you say, you mean seriously, but I am equally sure that others will make a jest of it ; and I think you might have put these matters in a less ludicrous light. For it is a serious thing to charge the writers of Scripture with downright absurdities and contradictions, and with a total disregard of even common sense! I say this the rather, because on the plain face of Scripture, you must own there is none of that palpable absurdity which, by an ingenious way of putting it together, may be made to appear.
But I must turn now to the particular details : viz. — (1) "The number of the priests and their perquisites." (chap. XX.)
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(2) Their duties at the celebration of the Passover. Your manner of treating these subjects will be already apparent from the specimens that have been given above. That some difficulty attends them, few would wish to deny. On the other hand, it is not difficult, among much that is uncertain, to fix on one or two principles which may serve as a clue to the leading difficulties of the case. I would observe, then, first, that the laws which prescribed the "duties" and the '' perquisites " (if you like the term), or allowances, of the priests, and such other ceremonial matters, were adapted from time to time, during the infancy of the Hebrew polity, to the conveniences and necessities of the occasion. It is so with all laws. But then are we, or are we not, entitled to affirm that in the earlier passages (Exod. xxiii. 17 ; Lev. i. 3, 5, 11, 15 ; iii. 2, 8, 13, and Deut xvi, 2, 5, 6, &c.), where regulations are laid down for the Passover and other legal rites of the Mosaic covenant, it is often in the way of anticipation, and not as if designed for immediate observance? Kurtz says we are ; and I think so too. I see nothing to object to the observation which you quote from him, "The sprinkling of the blood, (viz. in all the peace-offerings, sin-offerings, and tres- pass-offerings as prescribed, Lev. i. 3, 5, 11; iii. 2, 8, 13, &c.) by the priests, may have been one of the very numerous modifications which were introduced into the worship, in consequence of the erection of the Temple" (164) ; "and thus the sacrificial system was not meant to be in full operation in the wilderness " (146). I find the same in Dr. Kalisch ; and I refer to this author the more, because he is commenting on the very chapter, which contains the fullest account of the Passover that is anywhere to be found in Scripture. Kalisch says, Exod. xii., " This chapter is evidently written aftee THE EVENT, and the inspired author had already a sufficiently clear conception of the character of the Passover to enable him logically to combine the precepts concerning its present and future celelrationsy And of this v. 25 affords an instance, where the same commentator observes, " It is evident, from this verse, that the complete rites of Passover, especially the
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offering the Paschal lamb, was only to be observed in the Holy Land, except one Passover, which was celebrated in the desert, on the second year after the Exodus, by the special command of God." (Numb. ix. 1 — 5).
Another instance in point is the tithing of all the produce of the land which was early set apart for the share of the priests, but which, though enjoined in Leviticus, could not possibly have come into operation till the Israelites were already arrived in the land itself. How could they have received in the wilderness the " best of the oil, and of the wine, and of the v/heat," "the first-fruits of all the land," to which they had not yet come ? Even circumcision appears to have been disused during the forty years' wandering, and the law enjoining it had to be promulgated afresh, when the people were come to the land of promise (vid. Josh. V. 6). We may then fairly suppose that, together with circumcision, which was the initiatory rite, all the laws and regulations pertaining to the rites and ceremonies of the Tabernacle had to be deferred* in their operation till the time when the people became settled in their own land, and greater facilities were at hand for carrying them into effect. Some of these laws, though recorded in some earlier chapters of the history, might at that later period have been promulgated at greater length, and with fuller particulars than they were in the actual time of Moses. Moses might have left them in writing, just as he describes the nature of the country before he had ever set foot in it. But it would be unreason- able to suppose that he would have insisted on all the legal niceties, and on all the minutise of the ceremonial in hia own time in the wilderness — for had he attempted to do so,
* I am advised by a friend that the passage, Acts vii. 42, 43, referring tc Amos V. 25, 26, implies distinctly that sacrifices were, for the most part, not in use during the forty years' wandering in the wilderness. On which point the reader may consult Bishop Colenso's Criticism Criticized, by the Eev. Joseph B. M'Caul, p. 21 — 26. That many of the rites and ceremonies prescribed were prospective only, follows clearly from a passage before quoted, and which may here again be profitably consulted. "And the Lord commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and judgments, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go over to possess it." — Deut. iv. 14.
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the people would not have been able so much as to under- stand what he said, much less to carry it out. The impossi- bility would have been as patent in their eyes as it is in yours, so long as you are under the false impression which you appear to entertain of the law having come into operation at once. We see, on the contrary, that much of the law was prospective in its nature and provisions, and hence it ceases to be surprising that so few priests as we know there were in the time of Aaron's sons, should apparently have had so much to divide between them, whether as " duty," or "perquisites," or *' sacrificing," or anything of the like description. When you ask, therefore, with reasonable surprise, " how could three or four priests have '' consumed," " carried," '^ or sprinkled the blood" of such a vast number of animals? the answer is, '^ the three or four priests you speak of, never did consume nor carry those animals, nor sprinkle their blood. It was only when the people were settled in Palestine, and when the number of the priests was grown adequate to the task, that those rites of the law (2 Chron. xxx. 5, 16, xxxv. 11) came into practice. You allege two facts of Scripture, and putting them together you reduce them to a manifest absurdity, whereupon you proceed at once to the conclusion that all the accounts containing them must be infallibly wrong, and must be given up as incredible ! Your objection is, that here are two Scripture facts which involve an impossibility; the answer is, that the facts themselves are open to dispute, and that one of them at least, so far from being certainly true, is, most probably, an utterly incorrect version of the Scripture account.
m
ON CHAPTER XXII.
We come now to a chapter which appears at first sight an example of the most copious and convincing details. But it will prove, I apprehend, on close inspection, an example of the very contrary ! It is actually deficient in the details most necessary to give anything like a fair and complete represen- tation of the case. It reads like one continuous scene of bloodshed, rapine, and war — a record of unbridled cruelty and licentious passion. This is not said by way of evading the particular difficulties ; but it is the fair impression which the chapter makes ; it would probably miss its design if it did not. But the reader must be on his guard ; he must not mis- take the view here given for a complete representation of the Scripture facts. It is the dark side of the picture, unrelieved by the lighter one. It stirs up bad and resentful feelings, but leaves the judgment uninformed, because of its omissions and one-sidedness. Let us see whether this assertion can be made good ; and that without underrating the force of the objections themselves, and especially of the imposing statistics whereon the case is made to rely. First, then, as to the figures gene- rally. I say generally, because, in the matter of figures, it is agreed on all hands that very little certainty can be had — certainly nothing whereon to build any safe and conclusive argument for either side of the question. There are exceptions, indeed, to this general remark. It may be perfectly true that such a number as that of the 600,000 men of war (in Exod. xii. 37, xxxviii. 51) is one of such frequent occurrence in the narrative that we can hardly doubt its being the genuine number intended by the writer. " It is woven," as you justly observe, " like a thread into the whole story of the Exodus."
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Like the number of the twelve tribes, or the forty years' wan- dering in the wilderness, it seems in a manner stereotyped into the very face of the narrative, and cannot, without unna- tural violence, be dissevered from it. But we are at liberty in other cases to make some allowance for the natural errors of transcribers through many generations as well as for some confusion in the Hebrew mode of computation. It is your opinion, indeed, that no allowance of this kind can be admitted in the case which you place at the head of your present chapter, viz. "the war on Midian." You will allow any amount of numerical errors in such passages as Judg. xx., where, first, the Benjamites slay of the Israelites 40,000 men, V. 21, 25, and then the Israelites kill of the Benjamites 43 000, V. 35, 44, all these being " men of valour that drew the sword!" or again, Judg. xii. 6, 1 Sam. iv. 10, xiii. 5, 2 Sam. X. 18, &c. But you contend that no such observation can apply to this case of the Midianites, Numb. xxxi. And why not? Because it is said, " They warred against the Midianites, and slew all the males" (v. 7). And besides this, Moses commands them (v. 17), "Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man." And these latter you compute, by one of those ready calculations in which you shine, at 48,000 females, and 20,000 young boys, which was "more shocking than the tragedy of Cawnpore." You add that this bemg the number of females, the males " must have been," at least, as many, who were "all" put to death. Here are, at least, three or four assumptions. But, because there were so many helpless females taken, "must we" necessarily "believe they took the same number of men? Some might have escaped into the wilderness, which was the natural haunt ot the whole tribe. There are many other ways in which we can conceive these whole transactions to have taken place, different to what you suppose. For my part, so far from assenting to your statistics here, I thoroughly believe this part of your reasoning to be misound. The description, as we have it in Scripture, touches little more than the way or
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rule by which the Israelites were to dispose of their prisoners. " They slew all the males/' that is, all whom they took prisoners in war, — a considerable number, no doubt, — for they took "all the cities," i.e. all that did not surrender of their own accord ; for they had everywhere great success, because God was with them, and intended to punish this people, and particularly the women, for the great corruption and laxity of their manners. (Numb. xxv. 7 and 8.) And remember, while the only thing you notice in the account is that the Israelites come off without the loss of a man, the Scriptures are careful to record that, besides the Midianitish women, God punished His own people by a plague (Numb. xxv. 9), in which there fell some 24,000 Israelites, to which, also, St. Paul calls our special attention. (1 Cor. x. 8.) But what a very inattentive reader of Scripture must he be who imagines that literally all the Midianites were " slain," and that therefore an utter extermination of this people took place, when we find, not many generations after, the self- same people appearing again as one of the most numerous and dangerous adversaries of Israel, — Gideon being raised up for no other purpose than to deliver Israel out of their hands, for so we read in the book of Judges, " The Midianites came up, and the Amalekites . . . and the children of the East, and encamped against them, and destroyed the increase of the earth . . . and left no sustenance for Israel, neither sheep, nor ox, nor ass. . . . And Israel was greatly impoverished because of the Midianites." (Judges vi. 3—6.) And, again, as Israel took all Midian, so very recently are the Amorites said to have taken ^^ all the land'' of the king of Moab. (Numb. xxi. 26.) Yet it is not necessary to suppose either that Moab was utterly dispossessed — we know he was not — or the Midianites utterly exterminated, as you would have us suppose !
We proceed to some other qualifications with which you would have done well to guard and mitigate youi* view of these dreadful horrors. If you had not wished to put every- thing in the most atrocious light, why should you have
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omitted all mention of the remarkable instances where mercy was shown and good feeling cultivated ? Moses, in Deuter- onomy, lays quite as much emphasis on the instances where he had received command to deal friendly with a people, as where he was commanded to wield the sword. Take, for example, the case of Edom, or that of the Ammonites : " When Sihon," said Moses, when afterwards reviewing those times, "came out against us to fight at Jahaz, we smote him, and his sons, and all his people ; there was not one city too strong for us ; only unto the land of the children of Ammon thou camest not, nor unto any place of the river Jabbok, nor unto the cities in the mountains, 7ior unto whatsoever the Lord our God forhad usy (Deut. ii. 32 — 37.) And, again, " Distress not the Moabites, neither contend with them in battle ; for I will not give thee of their land for a possession, for I have given Ar unto the children of Lot for a possession." (Deut. ii. 9.) We may see, then, a settled purpose and law of the Divine conduct, throughout these whole transactions. It was no more His design to encourage, or even tolerate, an indiscriminate thirst for blood and conquest in the chosen instruments of His will, than it was to leave the guilty inhabitants of Canaan to contaminate them any longer by their evil examples. But all this, you will say, must go for nothing, unless the Scrip- ture narrative is correct. Of course not. But what pre- sumption is there against its correctness here ?
But then you have another argument, besides the fearful numbers of the slain, captive, &c. It is the impossibility of getting over the ground in the time. You proceed upon the following calculation : —
" Take down the date of Aaron's death, viz., the fortieth year of the wandering in the wilderness, the fifth month, the first day, and see what is supposed to have been done during the short space of the seven months that remained out of the year. First, there is the mourning for Aaron, one month (Numb. XX. 29) ; then the war with Arad (Numb. xxi. 1 — 3), say another month ; then the scene of the brazen serpent ; then a march, and ' nine encampments,' say for both these,
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six weeks. Then the war with Sihon, and the excursion against Jaazer, say six weeks. Then the war with Og, king of Bashan, another month ; then the ' march forward [sic] to the plains of Moab,' Numb. xxii. 1 ; the incidents of Balaam's journey to Balak ; Israel's abiding in Shittim, and their sin with the daughters of Moab, Numb. xxv. 1 — 3 ; the second numbering of the people, and the war upon Midian, already alluded to. So many events, you say, could never have been crowded into so small a space of time. Therefore the narrative is ' unhistorical here as elsewhere.' We are no longer obliged to believe it." (172, 173.)
The events are crowded, it must be owned, and the people are likely to have been somewhat harassed by the fatigues of the way. It is, indeed, a mark of veracity in the sacred his- torian, that he takes notice of this very circumstance, Numb, xxi. 4 : " And the people were much discouraged because of the way." It was, indeed, a great wonder, how out of weakness they were made so strong, and with feeble means what great successes they met with ; — it was wonderful, but if we believe in the power of God's special Providence, it was by no means " impossible." It is possible, again, that your calculations may be incorrect. Why should you make the people halt and draw up for a month's rest because of the mourning for Aaron? (Numb. XX. 29.) This is your favourite resource, to tell us what " Scripture must mean; " but what if it means no such thing? The people might all wear some insignia of mourning, but march along notwithstanding, as, indeed, soldiers commonly do, and thus we gain, at starting, one month. Then you bring them, by " nine encampments " and several incursions north- ward, as far up as Bashan, and a "forward march from Bashan" to the "plains of Moab:" all which you tliink enough to exhaust their time, if not their strength; and, in short, you think such wonderful doings quite impossible. But on in- spection of their route, it will appear that they had been close to the ''plains of Moab" for a long time; and instead of " marching forward " to this last station, it would be rather a backward movement from Bashan ; but, as we shall see
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presently, the probability is they had made these plains their head-quarters for some time, and had only to return to them after the conquest of Bashan. At least they had been circu- lating round about the territory of Moab — now upon its broad table-lands, now upon the border-country of Moab and Edom, now upon the defiles commanding the Jordan, now upon the brook Zered, now upon the banks of the Arnon, now upon the mountains, now in the wilderness (see Numb. xxi. 11, 20 ; Deut. ii. 37) ; till at last, with more care to avoid en- croachments than with any insuperable difficulty about the way, they pitched their camp on the plain between the Jordan and the ISalt Sea, having Abel- Shittim (or " the field of the Acacias") on their north, and Beth-Jeshimoth (or "the house of the wastes ") on their south. Here they made their head- quarters and principal depot ; and as it would be necessary to secure themselves on their northern wing from the Amorite hordes in that direction, it was natural they should carry their arms beyond the plains where they lay, into the mountainous districts beyond. And thus began the war with the Amorites: which was soon succeeded by a similar campaign in Bashan. After defeating Sihon, king of the Amorites, and Og, the king of Bashan, they were at liberty to commence their preparations for the passage of the Jordan. But, though these operations would require some time, we know that some of them at least were managed by detachments from the main body, and not by a general advance from the plains of Moab. Thus we find Jair, the son of Manasseh, specially rewarded by Moses for having headed an expedition which ended in the capture of Argob (Deut. iii. 18). In the war against Midian we are expressly informed that 1,000 men only were told ofi'from each of the twelve tribes (Numb. xxxi. 3, 4) ; all which particulars lead us to conclude that Moses, with the main body, was for the most part occupied in preparations at head -quarters for the approaching entrance into the land of promise. The place of their encampment was well suited for this object, being in the plains of Moab, and commanding the approaches to the Jordan by the way of Jericho (see Deut. xxxiv. 1 ; Numb.
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xxxiii. 48). In short, out of the "nine encampments," which you make it (Numb. xxi. 10 — 20), the second found them already in Moab ; for there was mount Aharini situated ; on the skirts of which (" Ije-abariin^^) this second encamp- ment was made, as we find mentioned again (Numb, xxxiii. 44). Ije-Abarim was probably towards the Eastern fron- tier of the country, as the " plains of Moab " were on the Western. And it is easy to conceive in what direction the Israelites were making their way across the river Arnon to the banks of the Jordan, opposite Jericho. But to show clearly that they had been making for a long time a quiet circuit of the land of Moab, we have only to put together the following places along the line of march indicated hy yourself where Moah is expressly mentioned. Thus, in the parallel passage to your very place of starting " by the way of the Hed Sea, to compass the land of Edom^^ (Numb, xxi. 4, quoted Colenso, 173, iii.) — viz., Deut. ii. 8, we read, " WQ passed hy from our brethren the children of Esau, through the way from Elath, and from Ezion-geber . . . and passed by the way of the wilderness cf Moabr They soon came to Ije-Abarim, Numb. xxi. 11, the second (as we have before seen) of your ^'nine encampments," (173 iv.) and again in Moah; indeed, both the text and the parallel passage (Numb, xxxiii. 44) expressly add '-'■in thehorder of Moah ^ Again, Numb, xxxiii. 47, we find them at another part (probably the western) of the same "Mountains of Abarim, before Nebo." In the three following verses, " the plains of Moab " (thrice repeated) are still the centre of the scene ; — all tending to confirm the idea that the main body rested throughout, in or about the country of Moab. and that no very distant or difficult marches need be imagined, beyond the expeditions against the Amorites and the people of Bashan. Your " abiding in Shittim " (124), you will perceive, enters easily into this scheme of their proceedings, and also Numb. xxii. 1 : ^^ And the children of Israel set forward, and pitched in the 2'>lains of Moah on this side Jordan by Jericho. ''''
As I read this part of tlie history, I own myself, upon
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these accounts, very little impressed with the extreme diffi- culties, amounting almost to impossibilities, which you speak of. It seems an easy thing to set down on the one side, one month's mourning, nine encampments, two campaigns, one " march forward from Bashan," and a few other incidents of note — and, on the other, the remaining seven months of the year in which Aaron died ; and then, to make such a propor- tion between them as may seem to reduce the whole narrative to an apparent absurdity ! More profit would have been found, and the depth as well as beauty of the Scripture narra- tive would have been made to appear, if you had led us to observe, through the somewhat intricate accounts of this passage in the Israelitish history, the numerous '* undesigned coincidences " which are everywhere discernible — showing plainly the ordering of Divine Providence, not only in the fortunes of the chosen people, but also in the records wherein tlie memory of them is so faithfully preserved.
In the seventh chapter of Professor Stanley's Sinai and Palestine, the reader may find an agreeable guide to the scene of this last encampment of the Israelites before they passed over the Jordan. (See pp. 298, 299.) It was memorable, among other things, as being immediately overlooked by the mountain-summit of Nebo, from which Moses obtained that famous survey of the promised land, which was the first and last he ever had, for on that mount he died. — (See Life of Moses in my Veracity of Genesis, chapter III.)
74.
ON CHAPTER XXIII.— CONCLUDING EEMARKS.
There must, my lord, I believe, be an historic basis for the Faith and Hope that is in us ; revelations once made must be handed down through historic channels from age to age, and these channels deserve to be kept and guarded with jealous care. Reason and conscience, independent of the outward revelation, however worthy to be obeyed in their proper places, become blind and uncertain guides. Reason, that noblest faculty of man, and his guide to action, needs itself to be guided by the Holy Spirit of God, and by the knowledge of His holy word ; conscience, the inward monitor, and judge of actions done, needs the same divine influence, and, with- out it, ceases to pronounce a true and independent verdict. Passion and prejudice, pride and self-indulgence, are apt to step in and exercise a disturbing influence on the unassisted powers of man. Some imperceptible bias may be carrying him further and further into the mazes of error, though conscience gives no alarm, but may even sleep in a fatal security. It is the same as with the natural eye, whose vision may be deranged through a feeble constitution, or a dis- ordered body, and thus we may see things m a false light, or in those strange and unnatural proportions in which objects appear in a mist. There must, in short, be some outward guide — a voice which can make itself heard, though conscience sleeps, and though reason lead astray. And this is the voice of an external revelation committed to the keeping of man, and embodied in the teaching of the Church. It is this voice which is necessary to supplement the natui'al weakness and fallibility of the reason ; and it must be a voice which gives no uncertain sound, but to the ear of faith speaks always a
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plain and intelligible language. Nothing does this but the Bible, interpreted in accordance with the sense of good men in all ages, and especially with the creeds handed down from Apostolic times. You would not be of the number of those who would deny to the oracles of God's truth this proper place in our regard. And yet you can put your hand to the axe which cuts up their authority, so far as mere history is conceinied, root and branch ! You have given us, indeed, some scraps of truth from heathen sources ; and classical antiquity would furnish many similar examples, creditable to our common humanity, and not unworthy of comparison with Christian models. But while it was not your meaning, evidently, to exalt such lesser lights to a rank of equality with the more highly favoured and directly-accredited messengers of Heaven, one may easily fore- see that others, more ready to disparage the Holy Scriptures, will be glad to quote you to this effect. You have written generally with a bold disregard of any such misconstructions, and of the consequences that may follow. Again, therefore, I would express the hope that, if it be truly your design to pro- mote God's glory and the advancement of the truth, you will, in the remaining portion of your work, do something to strengthen the positive side of your argument, and to vindicate the position which, among some appearances to the contrary, you still seem desirous to occupy, when you commend those who ''believe unfeignedly in the Divine authority of the Scriptures, relying on the records as an efficient instrument of communication from God to man, in all that is necessary to salvation." (180.)
Let us be well on our guard how we venture to throw discredit on the wisdom and veracity of Him, especially, who " spake as never man spake." This were, surely, an excess of liberty in any Christian, worthy to be universally reprobated in the Church. But let me seriously ask you, whether, in treating of this subject as you have done cursorily in your Preface (xxx., xxxi.), you have not confounded slight or supposed inaccuracies, various readings, &c. &c., with the main thread and substance of the Bible history ? and thus
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liave been led on incautiously to speak with something like irreverence of Christ, who may have quoted passages of Scripture, with what critics may call some freedom, but whose words must certainly be regarded as a guarantee for the general truth of those passages ? Because 8t. Luke describes Him in the days of His childhood, as " increasing in wisdom and in stature,"— is this to be thought any ground for con- cluding, that He entered upon His public ministry and upon the discharge of His prophetic office without " full and accurate information," as you term it, — '* about the authorship and age of the different portions of the Pentateuch " (xxxi.) ? Surely this — to say the least of it — is not the most reverent way of characterising the Divine teaching of Christ ! Theolo- gical distinctions between the Divine and human natures in our Lord, seem inappropriate in all those instances where no shadow of an intimation is given us by Himself, that He spake with any measure of hesitation or uncertainty. That ' ' Word ' ' * wdiich w^as the " Maker of all things," and which made Moses, himself, was not likely to be ignorant w^hether Moses wrote the Pentateuch ; t or, knowing the contrary, to have com- mitted Himself to a plain error of speech ! There is nothing in the revealed conditions of the humanity which He assumed into His own Person, that should lead us to impute to Him either such ignorance or such misrepresentation. If one Evan- gelist speaks of Him, during the years of His childhood, as " growing in wisdom, and in stature, and in favour with God and man " (Luke ii. 52), we are expressly informed by another, that " the Father giveth not the Spirit by measure unto Him " (John iii. 34) ; and by an Apostle, " In Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily " (Col. ii. 9). The whole mode of Christ's coming was in fulfilment of types and pro- phecies firmly imbedded in the very framework of the Sacred
* John i. 1 — 3.
t Let it be observed, that the works of ' Moses ' were expressly x'eferred to by our Blessed Lord, even subsequently to His resurrection (Luke xxiv. 27, 44) — at a time when He must havo been infinitely removed from any of the possible imperfections in the degrees of knowledge possessed by Him in His infancy.
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History; and if the Scriptures are to be broken up and wrenched asunder by the puny arm of human criticism, then not only Moses and the Prophets, but Christ and the Apostles, and, at last, the sacred name of Him who sent them, will be alike involved in the ruins of an hopeless unbelief. The life and ministry of our Lord were to a great extent a fulfil- ment of prophecies going before. The " Scriptures " were to be " searched whether these things were so." But if a doubt be thrown upon these Scriptm-es, as to their historic veracity — who cannot foresee that the prophecies will come next to be regarded as imaginary prophecies ? — the types and figui'es of the law as imaginary figures ? the law itself (though " one iota or one tittle of it was not to pass away, till all be fulfilled" Matt. v. 18), as nothing but a tissue of myths and fables ! the Ten Commandments an imaginary code ! — as uncertain as the fifty-two children of Jacob's sons, or the six hundred thousand of the Israelitish warriors ! These will be the downward steps that must await the path of advancing, we might rather say, of declining science. And then, from an imaginary law and imaginary Prophets, the transition will be easy to an imaginary Gospel, and an imaginary Christ. Surely you will feel it an honour to take part in averting so grievous a catastrophe ; and that this honour may yet be reserved for you is the fervent hope and prayer with which I remain,
My lord.
Your obedient Servant,
William H. Hoare.
APPENDIX I.
The Family of Jacob and his Sons.
N.B. — This List will include only those who, in the Scripfure reckoning, " came into Egypt " (not including wives) Gen. xlvi. 26, 27. The family is thus described in Scripture, Gen. xlvi. v. 6, 7, — " Jacob and all his seed with him ; his sons and his sons' sons with him, his daughters and his sons' daughters, and all his seed, brought he with him into Egypt."
The Sons by Leah,
(1) Eeuben, and 4 sons, v. 9.
(2) Simeon, and 6 sons, v. 10.
(3) Levi, and 3 sons, v. 11.
(and 3 sons, ]
(4) Judah, ^ 2 grandsons, ]^'' ^^•
(5) Issachar, and 4 sons, v. 13.
(6) Zebulon, and 3 sons, v. 14.
i.e .6 Fathers, 23 so7is, 2 grandsons,
and Dinah the daiighter of Jacob.
Total from Leah (v. 15) 32
Add Jacob himself 1
33
The Sons by Zilpah,
(7) Gad, and 7 sons, v. 16.
Tand 4 sons, v. 17.
(8) Asher, j ^ daughter, and 2 grandsons.
i.e. . . . 2 Fathers, Xlsons, 1 daughter, 2 grandsons. Total from Zilpah, (v. 18) 16
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The Sons by Eachel,
(9) Joseph, and 2 sons, v. 20.
(10) Benjamin, and 10 sons, v. 21.
i.e. ... 2 Fathers, 12 sons. Total from Eachel, (v. 22) 14
The Sons by Bilhah,
(11) Dan, and 1 son, v. 23.
(12) Naphtali, and 4 sons, v. 24.
i.e. ... 2 Fathers, 5 soiis.
. Total from Bilhah, (v. 25) 7
Total Family of Jacob — viz. Jacob himself, his sons,
1 daughter, grandsons, and great-grandsons (v. 27) . 70
On comparison with the LXX. we find in this List a little variation, —
{a) In the number and degrees of Joseph's de- scendants. ih) In the number and degrees of Benjamin's. {a) To Joseph they give 2 sons, 3 grandsons, and
2 great-grandsons. (h) To Benjamin 3 sons, 5 grandsons, 1 great-grandson. Thus making the total from Eachel (v. 22), 18 instead of 14.
In the LXX., it would seem, the reckoning was made thus — 33 (v. 15) -f- 16 (v. 18) + 10 (v. 22) (viz. Benjamin and nine sons, grandsons, &c. v. 21, LXX.) -j- 7 (v. 25) = 66 (v. 26).
In the Hebrew, thus —
32 (omitting Jttcob from the 33 in v. 15) + 16 (v. 18) + 11 (viz. Benjamin and ten sons, v. 21, Heh.) + 7 (v. 25) = 66 (v. 26), as before.
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rrom which the main number easily follows, viz. —
In the LXX, 66 + 9 = 75 (v. 27, LXX.),
the 9 being Joseph and eight sons, grandsons, &c. (v. 20, LXX.).
In the Hebrew, 66 + 4 = 70 (v. 27, Heb.\
the 4 being Jacob, Joseph, and two sons of Joseph (v. 20, Heb.).
I need scarcely add, that from the LXX. is derived the reckoning in the Acts, ch. vii. 14.
To return to the Hebrew text, and to our former list, it will be observed that the sons of the twelve Patriarchs, by the first descent, were 23 + 11 + 12 + 5 = 51. The sons of eleven of them (if we omit Joseph's two) were 49. To find the rate of' increase of these eleven (see pp. 49, 50), add to the 51 the 2 sons of Judah deceased at the going into Egypt (v. 12), and 1 for the daughter of Asher, and we have a total of children in the first descent from eleven patriarchs, 51 - 2 + 2 + 1 = 52, which is the reckoning in the text, pp. 49, 50. Joseph and his sons are omitted, because if we added all the sons born to the Patriarchs in Egypt, w^e should probably have to add a much larger number, and we may be contented with those born in Canaan.
N.B. — The Hebrew text exhibits uniformly, the same number 70, Gen. xlvi. 27; Ex. i. 5; Dent. x. 22. The LXX. varies : Dcut. x. 22, tlic number being 70, as in the Hebrew ; in tlie other passages, lb.
THE END.