^.S-^oZ^ Srotn f^e feifirarg of (profeBfior n2?ifftam %txix^ (Breen (jBequeaf^c^ fig ^im fo f^e feifirarj? of (prtnceton C^eofogtcaf ^eminarj ^ . THE PENTATEUCH BOOK OF JOSHUA CONSIDEnED WITH REFERENCE OBJECTIONS THE BISHOP OF NATAL. ROBERT MOON, M.A. LATE FELLOW OF QUEENS' COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. LONDON: KIVINGTONS, WATERLOO PLACE. 18G3. LONDON : GILBERT AND RIVINGTON, PRINTERS, ST. John's square. MY FELLOW-CHRISTIANS I IlfSCEIBE THIS CBITICISM, IN THE HOPE THAT ITS PERUSAL MAT HAVE UPON THEIE MINDS THE EFFECT WHICH THE PEEPAEATION OF IT HAS PEODUCED UPON MY OWN; BY CONFIRMING THEIE FAITH IN THOSE THINGS WHICH HAVE HITHERTO BEEN MOST SURELY BELIEVED AMONG US. ADYERTISEMENT. The following criticism having been in the main prepared, and to a considerable extent printed, before the second part of Dr. Colenso's work appeared, contains no reference to the contents of the latter. Lincoln's Inn, 23rd Feb., Ifi63. CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I. Introduction . 1 — 4 II. The Family of Judah 5— If) — Addendum respecting the Family of Judah .... 17 — 19 III. The Size of the Court of the Tabernacle compared with the Number of the Congregation. Moses and Joshua addressing all Israel 20 — 25 IV. The Extent of the Camp compared with the Priest's Duties and the Daily Necessities of the People 26—30 V. The Number of the People at the first muster compared with the Poll-tax raised six months previously . . . .31—34 VI. The Israelites armed ' 35—38 VII. The Institution of the Passover 39—47 VIII. The March out of Egypt. The Sheep and Cattle of the IsraeUtes in the Desert 48-67 IX. The Number of the Israelites compared with the Extent of the Land of Canaan ......... 68 — 74 X The Numbers of the Firstborns compared with the Number of male Adults 75-77 XI. The Sojourning of the Israelites in Egypt. The Exodus in the fourth Generation. The Number of the Israelites at the Time of the Exodus 78-101 XII. The Danites and Levites at the Time of the Exodus . . 102— ,120 XIII. The Number of the Priests at the Exodus compared with their Duties and the Provision made for them . . . .121 — 124 XIV. The Priests and their Duties at the Celebration of the Pass- over 125—128 XV. The War on Midian. Conclusion 129—152 CHAPTER I. INTRODtTCTION. In his Preface and Introductory Chapter Dr. Colenso raises a variety of points, the satisfactory discussion of which would occupy more time and space than the discussion of the main body of his work. I shall, therefore, not allow myself to be tempted by the remark of his " simple-minded but intelligent native," (quoted Pi'eface, p. vii,) or by Dr. Colenso's own speculations respect- ing the geology of Auvergne, to discuss, upon the present occasion, the question of the Universal Deluge : nor shall I stop to point out how it may happen that one who recognizes in the relation of the sun standing still, a stupendous miracle, may suspend his judgment as to the manner in which that miracle was performed '. 1 I cannot forbear adverting, how- ever, to Dr. Colenso 'a mode of dealing with a suggestion of Archdeacon Pratt's, to the effect that the miracle of " the sun standing still," may have consisted in a temporary suspension of the earth's rotation. Without participating in the sentiment, I can understand why some persons hesitate to believe that, for man's sake, the eternal God would perform so stupendous a miracle as that of destroying the velocity of rota- tion of this solid globe, and subse- quently re-impressing it. But I am wholly unable to understand the argu- ment that God would not do this be- cause the doing of it would imply also the destruction and subsequent renewal of the velocity of the sea, of the air, and of the living creatures and move- able things abovo, upon, or under the surface of the earth : and might imply INTRODUCTION. Neither sliall I do more than advert to the extremely naive manner in which Dr. Oolenso informs us that "for his own part," he is " very far indeed from judging the clerical authors of Essays and Reviews for remaining, as they still do, as ministers within "" the pale of the Church of England : nor shall I discuss how far the pain of separating from that Church is a valid reason for the remaining in it of one, who has apparently had no pain, but rather a great deal of pl-easure, in renouncing and attacking the declaration of faith on the strength of which he was admitted one of her ministers. I do not deem it necessary on the present occasion to discuss how far it is true " that our Church . . . requires us [her appointed Ministers] to protest against" what ?ce believe to be " perversion of the Truth," but which she has declared to be " the truth :" nor to show that a partial surrender of freedom of action and utterance is the necessary condition of entrance into the ministry, not merely of the Church of England, but of every Ecclesiastical body whatever : nor shall also the introduction of some compen- sation for the temporary loss of cen- trifugal force. The difficulty which appears to Dr. Colenso so " fatal," viz. that about the moon, is entirely without foundation. The hypothesis of the destruction of the earth's rotation is introduced to ac- count for the expression, that the sun stood still, by the fact of his seeming to do so. It is not necessary for this purpose to assume that the earth's velocity of translation was destroyed ; but if the case were otherwise, while the destruction of the velocity of rota- tion would account for the relation of the sun's standing still, that of the moon staying would be left to be taken literally. I may observe, too, that the sugges- tion that the sun, earth, and moon did not really stand still, although a con- viction to that effect was impressed on the minds of thousands of men, and was corroborated by effects which could be ordinarily accounted for on no other supjiosition than the truth of that conviction, is not such an expla- nation of the alleged miracle as any neologian would propose : neither is it an explaining away of a miracle, as it is clear that nothing but a supernatural exercise of divine power could have operated such a result. What Dr. Colenso says of Arch- deacon Pratt's "lending the weight of his high position," &c. to the support of a view which every natural philo- sopher [and therefore a fortiori one of Archdeacon Pratt's " mathematical cele- brity "] will know to be untenable, would amount to a scandalous personal imputation, if it could be regarded as any thing more than a mere rhetorical flourish. INTRODUCTION. 6 I comment on the strange views of what constitutes religion, or the singular want of precision evinced by a writer, who speaks of " freedom of thought and utterance,"" as " the verj- essence of our Protestant religion." I do not care to enter into the question of how far Dr. Colenso''s work is drawn from the German Rationalists, though it will appear in the course of the following criticism, that such of the considerations he brings forward as possess any weight are wholly devoid of novelty, and derive no additional force from Dr. Oolenso's mode of handling them. Neither shall I discuss the state of belief at the present time of the "intelligent Laity in England," nor how far a more genera' cultivation of the Hebrew tongue would have led to an earher discovery of the errors in the Mosaic narrative pointed out in Dr. Colenso's work ; in which the whole number of Hebrew words commented upon amounts to about eight, of which two are the Hebrew equivalents for the pronouns ' this ' and ' that,' and all of which, so far as any advancement of his argument is concerned, might have been omitted altogether. I do not propose to discuss the subjects of the Creation or the Fall, or how far " the fear of transgressing the bounds which the Scripture statements are supposed to have set to " scientific speculations has heretofore operated, or does now operate as a restraint upon scientific inquiry ; or the bearing on the question of the inspiration or truthfulness of the Mosaic Scriptures of our Lord's quotations of those Scrip- tures contained in the New Testament. Neither shall I discuss the theoretical truisms, but practfcal fallacies, with regard to the pursuit of truth and the solving of difficulties extracted by Dr. Colenso from the writings of Archbishop Whately, Dr. Moberly, and others. The question which I propose to consider in the following pages, is that which forms the main scope of Dr. Colenso's work, namely. Whether it is ti'ue that "the conviction of the unhistorical character of the so-called Mosaic narrative'' B 2 4- INTROBUCTION. is "forced upon us, by the considerations of the many absolute {mpossibilities involved in it, when treated as simple matters of fact, and without taking account of any argument which throws discredit on the story merely by reason of the miracles or supernatural appearances recorded in it, or particular laws, speeches, and actions ascribed in it to the Divine Being?" Whether it is true that if we "consider w^ell the statements made in the books [of the Pentateuch] themselves, — about matters which they profess to narrate as facts of common history, — we shall find them to contain a series of manifest contradictions and inconsistencies, which leave us no alternative but to conclude that main portions of the story of the Exodus, though based, probably, on some real historical foundation, yet are certainly not to be regarded as historically true?" (Oolenso, p. 11.) CHAPTER 11. THE FAMILY OF JUDAH. (Colenso, pp. 1 7—20.) The first of the " absolute impossibilities" which Dr. Colenso supposes to be involved in the Mosaic narrative, occurs in the Mosaic account of the family of Judah, from which account he deduces the following propositions : — 1 . That Judah was forty- two years old when he went down with Jacob into Egypt. 2. That in the course of these forty-two years of Judah's life (i.) He grew up, married a wife — " ' at that time,"' ver. 1, that is, after Joseph's being sold into Egypt, when he was seventeen years old, Gen. xxxvii. 2, and when, conse- quently, he was at least twenty yeaxs old, — and" had ^"sepa- rately three sons by her." (ii.) The eldest of these sons grew up, married, and died. The second grew to maturity, married his brother's widow, and died. The third grew to maturity, declined to marry his brother's widow, who afterwards conceived by Judah himself, and bore him twin sons, Pharez and Zarah. (iii.) One of the twins grows to maturity, and has two sons born to him before Jacob went down into Egypt. 6 THE FAMILY OF JUDAH. The first of the above propositions Dr. Colenso endeavours to estabhsh as follows : — '"Joseph was thirty years old when he stood before Pharaoh," Gen. xH. 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. Gen. xxix. 3o, and Joseph in the seventh. Gen. XXX. 24 — 26, Gen. xxxi. 41 , thence Judah was forty-two years old, when Jacob went down to Egypt." " The above," that is, the statement embodied in the fore- going propositions. Dr. Colenso very justly concludes is " certainly incredible." Let us now see how far the Mosaic narrative is answerable for the statement in question. I. Before the writings of an author can be convicted of involving absolute impossibilities, it must obviously be shown with regard to the passages relied upon for the purpose, not merely that they will bear the interpretation placed upon them, but that they are absolutely incapable of bearing any other. For instance, the charge above made by Dr. Colenso against the Mosaic account of the family of Judah rests to a large extent upon the assumption, that the words "at that time," which occur in Gen. xxxviii. 1, refer to the period at which Joseph was sold into Egj-pt ; therefore, if it can be shown that these words are capable of being referred to a consider- ably earlier period of time, the argument founded on that assumption must faU to the ground. Is it absolutely impossible, or certainly incredible, or even at all unlikely, that a writer, living at the distance of several ages from the events which he describes, should use the above words in the connexion in which they occur as referring to the epoch of Joseph and his brethren generally, and not to the particular epoch at which Joseph was sold into Egypt ? THE FAMILY OF JUDAH. 7 Let US consider the general frame of the narrative. The thirty-seventh chapter ends with the words, " And the Midianites sold him into Egypt unto Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh's, and captain of the guard." The thirty-ninth chapter begins thus : " And Joseph was brought down into Egypt ; and Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, captain of the guard, an Egj^tian, bought him of the hands of the Ishmaelites, who brought him down thither f by which careful recapitulation of the circumstances detailed in the concluding part of the thirty-seventh chapter, the writer testi- fies his anxiety, that the interposition between these two passages of the thirty-eighth chapter relating to the family of Judah should not have the effect of breaking the current of the story about Joseph. JSIoreover, the thirty-eigJith chapter is occupied with an account of the depravity of Judah and the impiety of his sons. The thirty-ninth chapter relates an example of purity in Joseph which has been a proverb throughout all subsequent ages ; and the source of tliat purity, viz. reverence for the Divine will, is distinctly stated, — " How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God f Can there be a doubt that the relation about Judah in the thirty-eighth chapter has been introduced into the narrative about Joseph for the purpose of enhancing the effect of the latter by contrasting the purity and piety of Joseph, with the iujpurity and impiety of his relatives and contemporaries I — the phrase " at that time." being adopted in order to mark a break in the sequence of time, not to signify its continu- ance \ ' The second chapter of St. Mattliew closes with the words referring to the reputed father of our Lord : — " And he came and dwelt in a city called Naza- reth : that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazaiene." The third chap- preaching in the wilderness of Judaea." What would be thought of a critic who attempted to argue that the phrase "in those days" must be referred to the period of the return from Egypt : and that as the Baptist's preaching did not occur until many years afterwards, ter commences with the words, " In , the Gospel of St. Matthew must be those days came John the Baptist, rejected as unlristorical .' 8 THE FAMILY OF JUDAH. II. From the manner in which Dr. Colenso quotes Gen. XXX. 24 — 26, and xxxi. 41, to prove that Joseph was born in the seventh year of the double marriage of Jacob with Leah and Rachel, it might be supposed that the year of Joseph's birth was therein stated totidem verbis, instead of being, as the fact is, a mere inference from the passages in question. In Gen. xxxi. 38. 41, Jacob, having finally fled from Haran, addresses Laban, who had pursued him to Mount Gilead, in the following words : " This twenty years have I been with thee ;'" " Thus have I been twenty years in thy house ; I served thee fourteen years for thy two daughters, and six years for thy cattle ;" whence it has been inferred that Jacob was in Haran twenty years, and no more ; and as it is clear from the whole tenor of the narrative contained in Gen. xxx. 25—43, that Jacob had acquired no cattle or substance before Joseph was born ', it follows that the six years of servitude for the cattle must have taken place after Joseph's birth. On the other hand, during the first seven years of Jacob's residence in Haran he was unmarried ; so that if his entire residence in that country did not extend beyond twenty years, the birth of Joseph cannot be set later than the seventh year after the double marriage— that is, the fourteenth year of Jacob's residence in Haran '. I shall now proceed to show, first, that if we dismiss from our consideration the verses last quoted (chap. xxxi. 38. 41), the assumption that Jacob was only twenty years in Haran is * This appears from • the following considerations: (1) There is no men- tion of any hiring, after that for the wives, until after Joseph's birth. (2) In ver. 2(], Jacob demands of Laban the wives for whom he had served, but makes no mention of any substance he had acquired. (.3) The expression in ver. 30, " When shall I provide for my own house ? " implies two things, first, that up to that time Jacob had made no provision for his house, and, secondly, that he was not in the way of making any. (4) The prosperity re- lated in ver. 43, and in chap. xxxi. 16 — 18, is clearly stated to have resulted from the hiring which occurred after Joseph's birth. 3 This is the period at which the birth of Joseph is fixed in Usher's Chronology : no doubt, under the pres- sure of the considerations stated in the preceding note. THE FAMILY OF JUDAH. y irreconcileable with the rest of the narrative. Secondly, that the assumption that Jacob was considerably more than twenty years in Haran is not irreconcileable with the expression of Jacob to Laban in the verses last quoted. While discussing these two propositions, I shall take occasion to point out what are the real indications of the narrative, both with respect to the date of Joseph's birth, and to the diflference of age between him and Judah. 1. I observe in the first place, that if Jacob was only twenty years in Haran, and if, as Dr. Colenso alleges, Joseph was thirty-nine years old when Jacob went down into Egypt (and Joseph cannot at that time have been very much more), it will follow — since Jacob was one hundred and thirty years old when he went into Egypt (Gen. xlvii. 28) — that Joseph was born when Jacob was ninety-one years old ; that Jacob had no child till six years before that time, i. e. when he was eighty-five years old ; that Jacob did not come into Haran till he was seventy-seven years old ; and that all the children of Jacob but one (Benjamin), that is to say, eleven sons and one daughter, were born in the space of about six years. I observe further, that seven of the above children, that is to say, six sons and one daughter, were born to Jacob suc- cessively by one mother, Leah ; that, if Leah bare a son in each successive year, her son Issachar must have been born towards the end of the fifth year, and her son Zebulun towards the end of the sixth year of the double marriage ; and, consequently, that Issachar could have been only two years, and Zebulun one year, older than Joseph, " the son of" Jacob's " old age"" (Gen. xxxvii. 8) ; that Leah certainly did not bear a son every year ; as we are told that after she bare her fourth son Judah " she left bearing " (Gen. xxix. 35), — an expression that seems to imply the lapse of several (perhaps of a considerable number of) years, between the births of her fourth and fifth sons, and which would be very inadequately represented by an interval of one year ; though that interval would make Zebulun of the same age as Joseph, 10 THE FAMILY OF JUDAH. and would throw the birth of Dinah beyond that of Joseph, at the same time that the whole tenor of the narrative, here as well as in the thirty-fourth and thirty-seventh chapters, seems to indicate the contrary. I observe also, that whatever was the date at which Kachel gave Bilhah to Jacob, we learn from that part of the narrative, and also from the analogous relation respecting Sarah and Hagar, that the expedient adopted by Sarah and Rachel of each giving to her husband her handmaid, that she might bear him children, was a. pis aller, and would never have been adopted unless they themselves despaired of having children ; and, having thus, in the instances of Sarah and Rachel, an expHcit guide to the nature and objects of this singular custom of a remote age, we are entitled to conclude, in analogy to those instances, that Zilpah would not have been given by Leah to Jacob until Leah herself despaired of having children ; that is, until probably several years — at the least one year— after the birth of Judah. On this view, it would follow that Gad, Zilpah's first son, could not have been born till towards the end of the sixth year of the double marriage, and Asher, her second son, not till towards the end of the seventh year ; that is, according to Dr. Colenso, not till the time when Joseph, the son of Jacob's old age, was born. But it is clear that Issachar and Zebulun were born suc- cessively after fjrad and Asher, and Dinah after the two former ; so that, if Joseph was the youngest of Jacob's children except Benjamin, as the whole tenor of the narrative indicates, he could hardly by possibility have been born until two or three years after the expiration of the first seven years of the marriage ; and therefore Jacob must have been at least two or three and twenty years resident in Haran. Li fact, if the narrative contained in the twenty-ninth and two following chapters be carefully considered, apart from the above-quoted expressions of Jacob to Laban, the allowance of a twenty years' interval between the marriage of Jacob and the birth of Joseph will appear much more suitable than THE FAMILY OF JUDAH. 11 an interval of nine or ten ; at the same time that the allowance of an interval of considerably more than twenty years would be fully justified. 2. But if Joseph was not born till twenty years after Jacob's marriage, Jacob must have been thirty-three years in Haran ; and how is this to be reconciled with the ex- pressions of Jacob in Gen. xxxi. 88. 41, where a residence of twenty years only seems to be indicated ? To this I answer, that even if Jacob resided thirty-three years in Haran, he was Laban's hired servant during the first fourteen, and the last six years of that period only. After the expiration of the fourteen years' servitude for his wives, Jacob would naturally remain in the encampment of Laban as a son of the house, receiving no wages, and doing little or no work, — living, in fact, so' far as was possible in that age and country, a life of ease. That Laban would be satisfied to have Jacob on such terms is evident from Gen. xxx. 27, where Laban says, " I have learned by experience that the Lord hath blessed me for thy sake." When Joseph was born, the child of Jacob's old age and of his dearly loved wife Rachel, the paternal feelings of Jacob seem to have been suflficiently roused to the necessity of making provision for his family (Gen. xxx. SO), either by securing the portion of the paternal inheritance which was his due, or otherwise ; and then he was induced to enter upon the six years' hiring, which resulted so successfully for himself. If these were the circumstances of the case, and I think, that apart from Gen. xxxi. 38. 41, the narrative fully justifies us in assuming that they were so, is it impossible or incredible that Jacob, under the circumstances in which he was at that time placed, should have expressed himself in the manner in which he is related to have expressed himself in the verses last quoted ? It will be remembered, that when Laban pursued after Jacob, the latter feared lest Laban should take by force his daughters from him (Gen. xxxi. SJ) ; and it would be difficult 12 THE FAMILY OF JUDAH. to account for Laban's strenuous pursuit, which was only baffled at the last moment by the special interference of God, unless we suppose Laban to have had some such object in view. In fact, it is evident from Gen. xxxi. 42 (" Except the God of my father . . . had been with me, surely thou hadst sent me away empty ") that Jacob considered that if Laban could have had his own way, he would have robbed him of the whole fruit of his service. It is evident also that Jacob was extremely indignant at the search of his stuff; regarding that proceeding as an imputation upon his honesty ; considering, in all probability, that the fruitless search for the gods was a mere pretext for the purpose of ascertaining whether he had carried away property which did not belong to him. It was natural, therefore, that, feeling his integrity impugned, his right to his wives and property challenged, he should have recapitulated the circumstances under which thosa acquisi- tions had been earned ; the hard service and onerous responsi- bility, of which they had been the reward. In doing this, any reference to the period in which Jacob was not actually earn- ing his wives and property would have been entirely out of place. Moreover, it must be remembered that he is not addressing himself to the generations that were to come after, he is not addressing himself merely to people of his own time and neighbourhood, but he is speaking to Laban, who stood actually Ipefoi-e him, who was thoroughly conversant with every circumstance connected with the relations which had existed between them, to whom the slightest reference to the number of twenty years as involved in those relations would convey as distinct an idea of what was meant, as the words subsequently used in the forty-first verse, " I served thee fourteen years for thy two daughters, and six years for thy cattle." Is it impossible or incredible, or even unlikely, that under these circumstances Jacob, having been much more than twenty years in Laban's encampnicnt, but having been only twenty years his hired servant, should speak to him of the THE FAMILY OF JUDAH. 13 twenty years he had been with him in that capacity, of the twenty years that he had been in his house or rather house- hold ? I cannot beheve that it is so *. But if Jacob lived thirty-three years in Haran, (and while it is consistent with ray argument that he should have lived longer than that, it is not essential to it that he should have lived there so long,) and Judah was born in the fourth year been thirteen years older than Joseph, and not three years as Dr. Colenso makes out. On the other hand, if it were true that Joseph according to the Mosaic account was thirty-nine years old when Jacob went into Egypt (a point on which I shall presently offer some remarks), it would follow that Judah must have been then fifty-two ; and if Jacob came from Haran into Canaan when Joseph was six (and therefore Judah nineteen) years old, it will follow that Er, the firstborn of Judah, might have been born when Judah was twenty, Onan, his second son, when Judah was twenty-one, and Shelah, the third son, when Judah was twenty-two. Hence, Shelah miglit, according to the law of England, have been marriage- able when Judah was thirty-six ; so that Pharez, the child of Judah by Tamar, might have been born when Judah was thirty-seven ; and might have been married when Judah was fifty-one ; and might have become the father of Hezron and Hamul when Judah was fifty-two years old, i. e. just before the going down into Egypt. On the above view, the representation as to the family of Judah contained in the Mosaic narrative, though disclosing * The equivalents for the above ex- pressions which occur in the Septua- gint are highly significant, and without wishing to press them too far seem confirmatory of the view I have given. TavTo, fLoi (iKotri €1 rj eifil iyoi fitra !nr\ 'that/ as in xiii. 8; and so ver. 14, 'this day shall be unto you for a memorial / and, besides, in the chapter preceding, xi. 4, we read, 'and Moses said [to Pharaoh], Thus saith Jehovah, About midnight will I go out into the midst of Egypt : and all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die,' where there can be no doubt that the ' midnight ^ then next at hand is intended." So. far Dr. Colenso. It is difficult to conceive how any man of ordinary judgment could commit himself to so prepos- terous a criticism as that just quoted. The word which in ver. 12 is translated " this " in the English version, is the same word as in the 8th verse is translated " that,"" so that if Dr. Oolenso is resolved that it shall mean " this,'" and nothing else, — and I have not the slightest objec- tion to his doing so, — let us see how the whole will run. ' And the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, .... Speak ye unto all the congregation of Israel, saying, In the tenth day of this month they shall take to them every man a Iamb And ye shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month : and the whole congre- gation of the children of Israel shall kill it in the evening. And they shall take of the blood and strike it on the two side posts and on the upper door post of the houses, where they shall eat it. And thpy shall eat the flesh in this night.' Will any man contend that the " in this night" here does not signify the night of which the evening inuncdiately before spoken of (ver. 6) formed the commencement, that is, the night which followed the fourteenth day I And if this be the meaning of the " this night " of the 8th verse, will any one pretend that the " this night " of the 1 2th verse is a different night ? The command above quoted must have been given either before the " tenth day," or after it. If it was given before the tenth day, and the phrase " in this night " be referred to the night following the fourteenth day, the whole of the pas- THE INSTITUTION OF THE PASSOVER. 41 sage is clear and intelligible. But on any other hypothesis, that is, if the command was given after the tenth day ; or if, being given hefore the tenth day, the words " in this night "" are to be referred to the night of the day in which the com- mand was given, the passage becomes, not merely "perplexing and contradictory," but the most absolute nonsense. If it could be shown that in every other passage of every Hebrew writer in which the word HT occurs referring to time, the reference could be proved to be to present time and not to time past or future, the passage before us, standing as it does in the most conspicuous part of Jewish history, and having endured the scrutiny of twenty centuries, would alone be suf- ficient to show that the contrary usage was admissible '. With regard to the intimation contained in Exod. xi. 4, to the effect that "about midnight" God would go out into the midst of Egypt and all the firstborn should die— and which if it was not delivered by Moses to Pharaoh personally must be supposed to have been delivered by him at the royal residence through some of Pharaoh's servants — I may observe that, if it were certain, as Dr. Colenso asserts, " that the midnight then next at hand is intended" (which it is not), all that could be made out from that circumstance would be that the intimation was given as a final warning immediately before the final catastrophe: the time at which the children of Israel were first commanded to keep the passover would be entirely unaffected by it. 1 In the middle of the account of the events which preceded the great deliverance, the Spirit of God breaks through the chain of the narrative with the emphatic declaration, "^ Ye shall observe the feast of unleavened bread ; for in this selfsame day have I brought your armies out of the land of Egypt ; therefore shall ye observe this day in your generation by an ordinance for ever." Is the " this day" here to be referred to the day on which the command was revealed to the irtspired penman ? Dr. Colenso may study further the force of "this" and "that," even in English idiom, in the forty-second verse of the same chapter, in which both words are referred simultaneously to the same subject-matter^" this is that night of the Lord to be observed of the children in their generations." 42 THE INSTITUTION OF THE PASSO^'ER. If, therefore, we suppose that this command was given on the first of the month, as the narrative allows us to suppose, it will follow that, instead of one day or " rather twelve hours," nine days would elapse before the first step in the celebration of the passover — that, namely, of " taking " the lamb on the tenth day — would be required to be taken ; a period during which there would be ample time to communicate the message to " each separate family," even allowing for their being much more scattered than Dr. Colenso supposes. Dr. Colenso does his best to perplex himself and his readers with what he chooses to consider as the contradictory intima- tions contained in the Mosaic account with regard to the locahty occupied by the Israehtes previous to the flight from Egypt. We are told Exod. iii. 22, "Every woman shall borrow of her neighbour, and of her that sojourneth in her house, jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment," therefore "it would seem to follow that the Hebrews were regarded as living in the midst of the Egyptians mixed up freely with them in their dwellings." " The story, however, will not allow us to suppose that they were living in any such city [as London] at all:" "they are represented as still living in the land of Goshen :" and then Dr. Colenso flies off more siio to an arithmetical calculation for the purpose of showing the quantity of land they must have been spread over; which calculation he bases on the number of lambs which he supposes would be required to keep the passover. It is a singular circumstance that it should never have occurred to this sagacious critic that the apparent contradic- tions above referred to may be reconciled by supposing that a portion of the Israelites occupied the land of Goshen, while others lived in cities in the midst of the Egyptians. Confir- matory of the latter view is the mode in which the land of Goshen is referred to in tlie midst of the plagues. For instance, 'the land of Goshen' was exempt from the plague of flies and the plague of hail, but it is not referred to in describing the exemption of the Israelites from other plagues ; THE INSTITUTION OF THE PASSOVER. 43 as, for instance, the murrain upon the cattle, sheep, and draught animals, and the three days of darkness. The terms of the exemption in this latter case are particularly striking, "■ but all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings,"''' which would apply to the inhabitants in the towns as well as to the dwellers in Goshen. Moreover it is clear from Num. xxxii. 1, that the tribes of Reuben and Gad, and the half tribe of Manasseh, possessed cattle to an extent which was quite exceptional as compared with the rest of their brethren : and this may have been so far the case as that while the former had cattle in great numbers, the other tribes might have had scarcely any. This would seem to point to the fact that during the latter part of the sojourn in Egypt, the tribes who were finally settled east of the Jordan had the chief possession and occupation of the land of Goshen : thus leaving the bulk of the nation to be accounted for as living, immediately previous to the Exodus, chiefly in towns. But, as regards the question of the number of sheep possessed by the Israelites, it may be observed that, if the bulk of the nation lived in towns mixed with the Egyptians, it is to be presumed that they would have the same means of supplying themselves with provisions and necessaries as the latter; so that it is not by any means necessary to suppose that the bulk of the lambs used at the first passover were the offspring of the flocks of the Israelites : a circumstance which materially affects the validity of Dr. Colenso's calculations upon this subject. It is true that this remark will not apply to the second passover, but previously to that passover the flocks and herds may have been increased by conquest from the Amalekites, or by purchase from the tribes of the desert, or by an exceptional rate of increase. Moreover, Dr. Colenso has no right to assume that more than one passover was ever solemnized in the desert. No doubt the passover was one of the greatest and most im- portant rites imposed upon the Israelites ; but it was not 44 THE INSTITUTION OF THE PASSOVER. greater or more important than the rite of circumcision, which dated from a much earher period, and which we find was wholly omitted during the wanderings in the desert (Josh. V. 5 — 8). The desert life of the Israelites was so entirely exceptional, that it was quite to be expected that a power of dispensing with laws which prevailed previous to the Exodus, or which were to be the rule of the nation after their arrival in the promised land, would exist. This case of the circumcision proves the existence of such a power ; and it is perfectly possible that it may have been exercised with regard to the passovers after the first, which must otherwise have been solemnized in the desert. The simple fact with which we have to deal, therefore, is that the Israelites kept one passover in the wilderness, under or near to Mount Sinai, at the end of one year from the Exodus; and this fact gives rise to two questions: 1. AMiat was the number of male lambs of the first year required for this purpose ? 2. What must have been the number of sheep and goats possessed by the Israelites in order to yield to them so many male lambs ? 1 . The only authority quoted by Dr. Colenso upon the first point is Josephus, who lived 1500 years after the Exodus. " Josephus reckons fen persons on an average for each lamb ; ' but,' he says, ' many of us are twenty in a com- pany.' " As the passover in the desert was kept under circum- stances the most extraordinary, we are entitled to assume that the full number partook of each lamb which the usage of later ages allowed of, viz. twenty. This, assuming the number of the Israelites at 2,000,000, would give us 100,000 as the number of male lambs required for the Passover under Mount Sinai. 2. How many rams and ewes, he-goats and she-goats, were required to yield in one season 100,000 male lambs? It is evident that 100,000 ewes, arrived at the age of bear- ing, would in one season bring forth, at the usual rate of two THE INSTITUTIOI^ OF THE PASSOVER. 45 lambs to each mother, 200,000 lambs, of whom one-half may be assumed to have been males. But what number of rams w'ould be required with the ewes to produce this result ? The usual allowance of rams to ewes for breeding in this country is one to sixty. It is well known, that in the case of goats the corresponding proportion is extraordinarily small. Taking, however, the proportion of one to sixty, the produc- tion of the lambs required at the passover under Mount Sinai implies the possession by the Israelites of 1666 rams arrived at maturity. Thus it appears that the keeping of the passover under Mount Sinai may be supposed to indicate the possession by the Israelites, at the first rutting season which occurred after the Exodus, of 101,666. rams and ewes arrived at maturity; but it does not indicate that at that time the Israelites pos- sessed more tlir.n that number. If it be urged that the existence of so many matured rams and ewes imphes the existence of a greater number which were not matured, as otherwise the numbers of the flock could not be kept up ; it may be admitted, as a general fact, that such would be the case. But what we are dealing with now is, not the keeping up of the flocks of the Israelites to a given standard, but the number of matured sheep requisite to produce the 100,000 male lambs consumed at the passover under Mount Sinai. There is nothing to prevent our sup- posing that every ram or ewe which w'ould not have arrived at maturity on the 1st of October, in the year of the Exodus, was previously killed off. If the Israehtes found the difficulty in maintaining their flocks in the desert which Dr. Colenso supposes, they would act like other persons under the same circumstances, by keeping the best breeders and killing off" the rest. If it be urged that the doing of this and the destruction of the male lambs at the passover under Mount Sinai, would have made it impossible to keep up the numbers, I reply, that 46 THE INSTITUTION OF THE PASSOVER. we do not know that the numbers were kept up ; but at any rate tlie 100,000 ewe lambs, with their mothers, and the 1666 old rams, would be sufficient for the purpose. There is nothing in the Mosaic narrative to necessitate the possession by the Israelites, either after the birth of the lambs which were consumed at the passover under Sinai, or at any point of time between that period and the Exodus, of more than 300,000 sheep and goats of all ages and sexes. But though I demur entirely to Dr. Oolenso's estimate of the number of the sheep of the Israelites, which he places at 2,000,000, I have no objection to the conclusion he founds upon it, that the land of Goshen may have been as large as Hertfordshire ; although I do object to his assuming that all the Israelites, or the greater part of them, were located in the land of Goshen immediately previous to the Exodus. I shall consider, hereafter, the mode in which the Israelites were gathered together at the Exodus ; but in the mean time I must say that it argues a most wonderful contraction of mind in a writer, that he should object to the truth of the Mosaic narrative, not because it relates that two millions of people were fed for forty years by bread showered from heaven six times a week ; or because it relates that the Israelites were preceded in their journeys by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night ; or because it relates that the firstborn of the whole Egyptian nation were destroyed in one night, while among two millions of Israelites, a large portion of whom dwelt in the midst of the Egyptians, not a firstborn died ; or because of all the other wonders of Egypt, — but because of the " enormous difficulty " of supposing that two millions of men, scattered over twenty-five miles of country, were roused up suddenly on a particular morning, and simultaneously left their habitations. I may here observe that, but for the reckless manner in which Dr. Colenso pursues his criticism, one might take what he says in this chapter about the borrowing from the Egyptians, — where he speaks of it as if it were all effected THE INSTITUTION OF THE PASSOVER. 47 on the morning of the Exodus, — for a deliberate misrepresen- tation. In Exod. xi. 2, the order to borrow is given, so far as appears, even before the passover vi^as commanded. It was given immediately after the first allusion to the " one plague "* which was to effect the deliverance. So that we may infer that the borrowing was the first preparatory step made with a view to the final consummation. For any thing that appears in the narrative to the contrary, the borrowing may have taken place weeks before the Exodus. The reference to the borrowing made Exod. xii. 36, is merely a repetition of what had been previously stated on the subject, and is introduced at this par- ticular point in order to show that the Israelites did what it had been beforehand prophesied that they should do. The lending would occur through the operation of the most opposite motives: personal friendship, family ties, religious awe, acting differently on the minds of different individuals '. 2 In reference to the number of the sheep and goat3 necessarily implied by the keeping of the passover under Mount Sinai, I would ask, Is it certain that in the early days of the institution of the passover other than adult males participated in it ? Consider the way in which they were to eat it ; " with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand ;'' terms which seem hardly appUcable to women or very young children. Consider also the injunction in Deut. xvi. 16, " Three times in a year shall all thy males appear before the Lord thy God in the place which He shall choose." I gather that in much later times women partook of the passover, but this is not conclusive as to what took place at the origin of the institution. Moreover the injunction to each per- son in the night of the passover to drink four cups of wine, (see Kitto, Cyclop. Bibl. Literat., Art. Passover,) appears hardly applicable to very young children ; although a young boy is stated to have ordinarily, if not always, taken part in the ceremony. I am aware that the directions in Exod. xii. 11, above quoted, were after- wards disused ; but if only adult males partook of the first passover, would other than adult males take part in the second ? CHAPTER VIII. THE MARCH OUT OF EGYPT. — THE SHEEP AND CATTLE OF THE ISRAELITES IN THE DESERT. (Oolenso, pp. 61 — 81.) ^^ And the children of Israel Journeyed from Barneses to S'uc- coth, about six hundred thousand on foot that were men, beside children. And a mixed multitude went up also with them, and focks, and herds, even very much cattle^ — Exod. xii. 37, 38. Upon the above we have the following comments : " It appears from Num. i. 3 ; ii. 82, that these six hundred thousand were the men in the prime of Hfe, from 'twenty years old and upward, all that were able to go forth to war in Israel." And (as we have seen) this large number of able- bodied warriors implies a total population of, at least, two millions. Here, then, we have this vast body of people of all ages, summoned to start, according to the story, at a mo- ment's notice, and actually started, not one being left behind, together with all their multitudinous flocks and herds, which must have been spread out over a district as large as a good- sized English county.**' Dr. Colenso next indulges us with an account of the con- fusion which occurred in his "own small household" when obliged to fly in the dead of the night on a false alarm of an impending attack of Caffres, and invites us to compare the THE MARCH OUT OF EGYPT, &C. 49 feelings of the Israelites on the morning after the passover, when their deliverance from the bondage of Egypt was in effect accomplished, after a series of unexampled displays of Divine power exerted in their favour, with the " indescribable distress " which would prevail in an English village of 2000 inhabitants if "called suddenly to set out" in the way he describes. He then continues, " And what of the sick and infirm, or the women in recent or imminent childbirth, in a population like that of London, where the births are 264 a day, or about one every five minutes ? " But this is but a very small part of the difficulty. We are required to believe that, in one single day, the order to start was communicated suddenly, at midnight, to every town and village throughout a tract of country as large as Hert- fordshire, but ten times as thickly peopled ; that, in obedience to such order, having first ' borrowed '' very largely from their Egyptian neighbours in all directions, .... they then came in from all parts of the land of Goshen to Rameses, bring- ing with them the sick and infirm, the young and the aged ; further, that, since receiving the summons, they had sent out to gather in all their flocks and herds, spread over so wide a district, and had "driven them also to Rameses; and lastly, that having done all this since they were roused at midnight, they were started again from Rameses that very same day and marched to Succoth, not leaving a single sick person, a single woman in childbirth, or even a 'single hoof (Exod. x. 16) behind them. " This is undoubtedly what the story in the book of Exodus requires us to believe." Exod. xii. 31 — 41. 51. To the above I answer in the first place, that it is not true that the book of Exodus requires us to believe that " the order to start was communicated at midniglit to every single town and village throughout a country as large as Hertford- shire," and that the assertion implied by Dr. Colenso that 50 THE MAKCH OUT OF EGYPT. — THE SHEEP the Hebrews did not borrow from the Egyptians until after the passover is false, as has before been shown, I will here recall to Dr. Oolenso"'s mind that the first time we read of Rameses in the Pentateuch it is as ' the land of Rameses,' Gen. xlvii. 1 1 . Before he can assume, therefore, as he does in the passage above quoted, that when summoned to depart from Egypt, the Israelites in the first instance gathered themselves together, their flocks, their herds, their sick, and their little ones, to the city called Rameses, he must prove that the city of Rameses, and not the district of Rameses, is the starting-point referred to in Exod. xii. 87. I will next ask Dr. Colenso, where, in the book of Exodus, it is stated that the children of Israel journeyed from Rameses or Goshen to Succoth in one day ? The duration of the journey is not mentioned, and, for any thing that appears to the contrary, it may have occupied several days. In Num. xxxiii. we have an account of the journeyings of the children of Israel, and of the various places where they pitched their camp. In this account, the first place in which they are mentioned to have pitched after leaving Rameses, is Succoth ; but lest any one should thence conclude that they arrived at Succoth on the night of the day on which they left Rameses, we are told, vv. 7, 8, that they pitched in Migdol ; and then, after passing through the sea, and having gone " three days'' journey in the wilderness," we are told that they " pitched in Marah." So far from the statement that "the children of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth ■" implying that they all reached Succoth on the same day, it does not even imply that they all took their departure out of the land of Rameses on the same day. It may be that they did both, but this passage, at any rate, does not prove that they did either. Dr. Colenso has given us his version of what the Mosaic account of the Exodus involves ; I will now state what that account appears to me to indicate. The children of Israel, as we have seen, were at this period divided into two classes : those living among their own people. AND CATTLE OF THE ISRAELITES IN THE DESERT. 51 apart, in the land of Goshen ; and those who dwelt together in cities in common with the Egyptians. The Egyptian cities, which were inhabited by the two nations jointly in the manner we have supposed, may be assumed to have been situated on or near to the Nile : and the land of Goshen or Eameses must be assumed to be more or less distant from the Nile, on the Red Sea side of that river. The children of Israel ' were thrust out of Egypt, and could not tarry,' The children of Israel, in the strict sense of the word, did not want to tarry ; so that we must regard the above as implying that they, or some considerable portion of them, with all their anxiety to depart, were obliged to leave in more haste than they would have liked. Why were they so obliged ? Because the ' Egyptians were urgent," ' for they said. We be all dead men.' That this was a natural feeling on the part of the Egyptians who were living in towns alongside of the Israelites who will gainsay ? It was natural that the Israelites should be turned out of these towns tumultuously ; but, after they were ejected from the gates, would the anxiety of the populace pursue them much further ? When the Israelites had been expelled from Pithom, would the Egyptians left in Pithom be very anxious as to what had become of the Israelites in Rameses? Or would the Egyptians in Rameses, after expelling the Israelites from their city, be very solicitous as to what had been done with the IsraeHtes in Pithom? Still less would the Egyptians in Pithom or Rameses be solicitous as to what had become of the Israelites in the land of Goshen, which was their exclusive possession. It seems probable, therefore, that the departure of the Israelites out of the district of Rameses or Goshen, would be undertaken in a considerably less hurried manner than the flight from the cities ; so that there is no necessity to suppose that the Israelites in Goshen had not time to gather together their flocks and herds, to strike their tents, and to bring away a large portion of their effects. e2 52 THE MARCH OUT OF EGYPT. — THE SHEEP But what would become of the outcasts from the cities? Could they be under any doubt as to the direction into which they should betake themselves ? The whole narrative assumes that both classes of the Israelites — those who dwelt in the Egyptian cities, and those who dwelt in Goshen alike — felt as one nation. Even if no plan had been concerted as to what was to be done in case permission were given them to depart, would the urban Israelites, after being ejected from their homes, have any hesitation in bending their steps towards the tents of their brethren? If a plan had been concerted, it would obviously form part of that plan that the two divisions of the nation should in the first instance unite together. Hence the whole people would be collected together in the land of Rameses, though not necessarily in one particular locality, and then would commence the journey from Rameses to Succoth commemorated in Exod. xii. 37. But how long would these events occupy ? We may con- ceive the territory of Goshen to have its Western or North- western boundary parallel with the river, and at the distance of a very few miles from it : so that each caravan of fugitives, flying from the different cities, would early strike the territory. Nor is it necessary to suppose that the news of what had happened would be first brought to the shepherds by the slow movements of the caravans. There were horsemen in Egyjjt, and the Israelites had wealth ; and most probably individuals among them were possessed of power and influence. The narrative distinctly assures us that such was the case as regards Moses, and we have independent testimony to that effect. Hence the news might fly over the land of Goshen in an extremely short space of time : and thus the whole of the shepherd tribes would speedily be set in motion. It is extremely probable that the land of Goshen was a long strip, having both its principal boundaries parallel, or nearly parallel, with the Nile ; being shut in by the land fertilized by the river on the one side, and by the desert on the other. If I am asked whether I think it possible that AND CAITLE OF THE ISRAELITES IN THE DESERT. 53 the fugitives from the cities would have time to cross the country which separated them from the land of Goshen, and also to cross the land of Goshen, and get out on the eastern side, so as to be strictly out of the land of Egypt, within twenty-four hours from their being first ejected ; I reply that, when we are better acquainted with the actual distances, we shall be better able to decide that question. I have no hesitation, however, in saying, that the Mosaic narrative does not require us to believe that any such feat was performed. Probably it was performed by a considerable number of the people ; possibly it was performed by a large number of them. But if it were the fact, that neither the whole people, nor the bulk of them, nor any of them, suc- ceeded in getting out of the Egyptian territory during the twenty-four hours which followed the destruction of the first- born, we should still be justified in asserting, that the ejection from the Egyptian community of those of the Israelites who were living in the midst of it, — the removal of all obstacles in the way of the nation at large going whither it would, — the actual departure from their homes of the bulk of the people and their rulers with a view to finally quitting Egypt, — the active preparations for departure made by the remnant of the community, — and all this followed by the speedy and total exit of the whole nation, — these various facts taken together amount to such a combination of circumstances as would amply justify the use, after the consummation of the events of such expressions as occur in Exod. xii. 17. 41. 51 : "For in this selfsame day have I brought your armies out of the land of Egypt :" " the selfsame day it came to pass, that all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt :" " the selfsame day .... the Lord did bring the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt ;" upon which expressions alone is founded the assumption that the Israelites wholly quitted Goshen and Egypt within twenty-four hours from the death of the firstborn. And what I here contend for would be equally true whether after the destruction of the firstborn 54 THE MARCH OUT OF EGYPT. — THE SHEEP three days, or seven days, or ten days elapsed before the last remnants of the host had been gathered together at the rendezvous at Succoth '. With regard to the women in recent or imminent child- birth, if the principle of averages is supposed absolutely to govern a transaction with which were mixed up so many extraordinary manifestations of the providence of God^ I may observe, that a birth every five minutes is a high average among two millions of people. Probably a birth every eight or nine minutes would be a fairer estimate. But if, after the exposition I have given of the deliberate manner in which the Israelites may be supposed to have with- drawn from Egypt, this matter of the women in childbirth 1 In the text I have not thought it worth while to insist on what may pos- sibly have been the case, namely, that the land of Goshen may have been a dependent territory, within the do- minion of Egypt, but not part of the land of Egypt properly so called, though occasionally included under that desig- nation. It seems not improbable that, in the large sense, Egypt, the realm or dominion of that name, may have in- cluded both Succoth and Etham (de- scribed as in the edge of the wilderness), and, indeed, the whole country as far as the Red Sea. - If a great series of events occurred which were wholly out of the course of God's ordinary Providence, at the same time that in a vast number of the trans- actions of life the ordinary coiorse of Providence was the rule, the economy of nature would lead us to expect that the series of ordinary transactions would be connected with the extraordinary series by a perfect gradation of circum- stances, almost infinite in number, in which the degree of deviation from the ordinary law would vary from the minutest possible, such as would pre- vail in cases where it would be impos- sible for man to distinguish between the natural and supernatural, up to the most unquestionable miracle. The above remark has particular force with reference to the questions of the supply of water, and the pasturage of the flocks of the Israehtes ; assuming that it can be shown, — which Dr. Co- lenso, however, fails to show, — that at the period of the Exodus the ordinary pasturage in the wilderness was insuffi- cient for the purpose. A modification of the mode in which the clouds from the Indian Ocean precipitated their rain might convert impetuous, but short-lived torrents, into perennial streams, and their sandy beds into verdant meads; yet such a circum- stance would probably escape the no- tice of every individual of the host, including Moses himself. Hence the occasional total stoppage of the supply of water might become necessary, in order to bring home to the minds of the people how com- pletely they were dependent for that necessary of existence on the special mercy of God. AND CATTLE OF THE ISRAELITES IN THE DESERT. 55 seems to occasion any further difficulty, I would refer Dr. Oolenso to the case of the Helvetii cited by himself (p. 35). Their number being 868,000, or more than one-sixth of the two millions assigned to the Israelites, according to Dr. Co- lenso's scale, births must have occurred among the Helvetii at the rate of one every half-hour ; or, adopting the pro- portion I have suggested, at the rate of about one every fifty minutes'. I may further observe, that among Dr. Co- lenso's friends, the Caffres, the migration of a whole nation is not an event wholly unknown ; and that, as they may be supposed to be acquainted with the expedients necessary to be adopted on such occasions, their experience on the subject might possibly possess more novelty and value than the ex- periences personal to himself with which Dr. Colenso has thought proper to favour us. " And now let us see them on the march itself." My conception of " the march" is wholly different from Dr. Colenso's. Instead of " a dense column of more than twenty- two miles long " starting from the neighbourhood of a particular town at which the whole body of the people had assembled, I conceive that " the march " took place in bands of varying magnitude, starting from different points of a district "as large as an English county." I conceive that the first arrivals at Succoth would wait there, and that " fresh parties would constantly join them." The words last quoted are taken by Dr. Colenso from Kurtz, and he answers them by citing the verse, " The children of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth about six hundred thousand on foot," which he seems to consider affords a complete answer, but which, as I Jiave shown, is no answer at all. But now, as we have arrived at Succoth, it may be desirable to make a slight digression, which may throw some little light on the general story. ' If the Helvetii could get over the I the Israelites might get over the diffi- diflSculty of their 48 or 28 daily births, | culty of their 264 or 154 daily births. 56 THE MAKCH OUT OF EGYPT. — THE SHEEP The original programme of the children of Israel (if we may be allowed the use of the expression) when Moses first went in unto Pharaoh, was to go three days'" journey into the wilderness, " that they might sacrifice to the Lord," Exod. iii. 18;" that they might hold a feast unto the Lord in the wilderness " (ver. 1). It seems highly probable that the actual locality in the wilderness where this feast was to be held was indicated to Moses, and by him communicated to the people or their elders. We may reasonably conclude, also, that the place was 6ne suitable for temporary occupation ; possessing pas- turage for cattle, and water, and possibly, as aifording ma- terials to be used in sacrifice and for shelter, wood also. On the other hand, in Lev. xxiii. 40 — 43, it is assigned as a reason for the Hebrews at the feast of tabernacles dwelling in booths made of "goodly trees, branches of palm trees, and willows of the brook," that their generations might know that God had made the children of Israel to dwell in booths when He brought them out of the land of Egypt. The name Succoth signifying " booths,'' it has been suggested that at Succoth this dwelling in booths took place. If they did so dwell at Succoth, Succoth must have been a locality possessed of both wood, water, and pasturage ; so that it seems probable that Succoth may have been the place in the wilderness, where, before Moses went in unto Pharaoh, it was originally designed that the Israelites should sacrifice, and hold a feast unto the Lord ; and where, we may therefore conclude, that that intention was actually carried out after the departure from Egypt. If this were the case, and the time during which the Hebrews of future generations were enjoined in Leviticus to dwell in booths was fixed with reference to the period during which their progenitors dwelt in them, upon whose dwelling in them the custom was founded, it will follow that the dwelling in booths at Succoth would occupy seven days; a period which would give ample time for the whole body of the people who had been driven from Egypt to gather together. AND CATTLE OF THE ISRAELITES IN THE DESERT. 57 Upon the view I have taken, the selection of Succoth as a place of rest and rendezvous must have been peculiarly appro- priate. For, it is natural to suppose that the first parties to arrive there, and in all probability the larger part of the nation, would be the fugitives from the cities ; people, who having been driven from their fixed domiciles, had shelter to seek. During this rest we may suppose that supplies were got in, tents contrived for those who had not tents, draught animals procured, and the host reduced to some degree of organiza- tion. If it be asked. How could the Israelites procure the various articles I have suggested, I would answer that the Israelites possessed one great means for their procurement, viz. wealth, and that, if the Egyptians at large had such a horror of the Israelites as to refuse to have dealings with them upon advan- tageous terms, the Egyptians must have been different from every nation that we ever read of, or that is now to be found upon the earth *. But unfortunately for all that we have advanced about the rest at Succoth, Dr. Colenso will not allow that there was any rest there at all : " Nothing is said or implied about these ' days of rest ' in the Scripture. There would surely have been some reference to them if they really occurred." Notwithstanding the confidence with which Dr. Colenso here tells us that " there would surely have been some refer- ence" to these days of rest " if they really occurred," we find him in a subsequent part of his work (p. 145), where it suits his argument to do so, assuming without the smallest scruple the exact contrary, viz. that days of rest occurred where there is no reference to any such whatsoever. * If there were any such antagonism between the two nations at the period in question, as is supposed, there must have been plenty of persons among the " mixed multitude " who followed the Israelites able and willing to act as agents between the two peoples. 58 THE MARCH OUT OF EGYPT. — THE SHEEP But, waiving the question of the author's consistency, what does the argument here used amount to ? Sujipose that in one of the late Lord Macaulay's works we were to find it stated that a particular man walked from London to York, from York to Edinburgh, and from Edin- burgh to John o"" Groat''s House ; not the slightest intimation being given as to the length of time consumed in any part of the expedition, or as to the traveller having rested at either of the intermediate stations upon the way. Would any critic argue from such a statement that Lord Macaulay must be held to assert that the journey from London to York was performed in one day, that the journey from York to Edin- burgh was performed during the next day, and that the journey from Edinburgh to John o"* Groans House was com- pleted on the third day ; and that, as this was utterly impos- sible, the work in which the statement was found must be regarded as unhistorical ? Yet this is exactly the argument advanced by Dr. Colenso in the case before us. The book of Exodus tells us that " the children of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth," without stating how long they were upon the road. It further tells us, that at* some subsequent time, "they took their journey from Succoth and encamped in Etham ;" but without informing us on what day they left Succoth, or on what day they arrived at Etham, or how long a time they occupied between those places. We are then told, that at some subsequent time, but without being told when, they were directed to " turn and encamp before Pi-hahiroth ;" and we are left to infer that this connnand was obeyed, but as to how soon after it was issued there is neither statement made, nor intimation given. On this state of facts Dr. Colenso first makes out that Moses asserts the journey from Rameses to the Red Sea to have been accom- plished in three days ; and then argues, that as it was impos- sible that this could be done, the account given in Exodus must be regarded as unhistorical and unworthy of credit ! AND CATTLE OF THE ISRAELITES IN THE DESERT. 59 Having touched upon the nature of the march to Succoth, it may be as well to discuss here the mode in which the wan- derings of the Israelites generally may be supposed to have been conducted. Undoubtedly the people would be grouped together in bands under the direction of their natural leaders ; and under ordinary circumstances, I conceive, the host would cover a very wide space of ground. When the camp was pitched for a considerable time, large parts of their body would be de- tached from head-quarters for purposes of forage. The parties so detached, or some of them, would probably require the support of armed men ; but it is impossible to doubt that these would be forthcoming in. sufficient numbers to awe the rude and scanty tribes of the desert. Without intending to found any thing upon the remark, but simply for the purpose of clearing up our conceptions upon the subject, I may observe that it is extremely probable, that, through the aid of parties detached from the main body under the direction of their chiefs, the Israelites might possess a considerable amount of information with regard to events which were passing in the Sinaitic peninsula and the con- terminous countries ; to an extent, in fact, corresponding with the information which we know to have been possessed by the inhabitants of these countries respecting the Israelites themselves. It is not improbable, moreover, that, within certain limits, relations of commerce subsisted between the Israelites and the tribes of the desert ; and, through the latter or otherwise, with the inhabitants of the neighbouring countries; and thus considerable amelioration of the condi- tion of the wanderers might occur. But for the general sustenance of the Israelites and of their cattle, I conceive, we must look in a totally different direction. The Israelites themselves, as we all know, were sustained miraculously ; but how were the flocks and herds nou- rished ? 60 THE MARCH OUT OF EGYPT. — THE SHEEP In answer to this question, Dr. Colenso in effect makes the following assertions : — I. That the flocks and herds could not be sustained naturally. II. That they were not sustained supernaturally. I. The first of these assertions Dr. Colenso attempts to establish by means of two arguments. 1 . That the country would not now support large numbers of flocks and herds ; and that there is no reason to suppose that the climate and soil have changed materially in the mean time. With regard to the present capacity of the country in this respect, I shall cite the testimony of Dr. Robinson. Speak- ing of the stations between the Red Sea and Sinai, which were occupied by the Israelites previous to the encampments at Dophkah and Alush, he proceeds as follows : — " More probably the stations as enumerated refer to the head- quarters of Moses and the elders, with a portion of the people who kept near them, while other portions preceded or followed them at various distances, as the convenience of water and pasturage might dictate. Water, such as it is, they would find in small quantities throughout this tract . . . But how they could have obtained a sufficiency of water during their whole stay in the peninsula and their subsequent wan-" derings in the desert, even where no want of water is men- tioned, is a mystery which I am unable to solve ; unless we admit the supposition, that water was anciently far more abundant in these regions than at present. As we saw the peninsula, a body of two millions of men could not subsist there a week, without drawing their supplies of water, as well as of provisions, from a great distance."" (Biblical Researches, vol. i. p. 106.) The difficulty suggested here, as well as in the passages cited by Dr. Colenso from Dr. Stanley, refers to the supply of water and to the supply of provisions for the host, not to the pasturage for the flocks and herds. A little farther on, AND CATTLE OF THE ISRAELITES IN THE DESERT. 61 however, we have the following passage, which at first sight seems decisive upon the latter point : " There, too," i. e. within ten miles of Jebel Mousa, " were several small palm trees, and a few tufts of grass, the first [grass] we had seen since leaving the borders of the Nile." (P-129.) , But we have, militating decisively agamst this conclusion, the following description of the " Wady-esh- Sheikh, one of the largest and most famous valleys of the peninsula. It takes its rise in the very heart of Sinai, whence it issues a broad valley After receiving the Akhdar, it takes the name of Feiran, and as such is well watered, has gardens of fruit and palm trees, and receiving many branches, runs to the northward of Serbal quite down to the sea." (p. 127.) This last extract must, be read with reference to the fol- lowing, which is taken from the description of the ascent of Mount St. Catherine : " We now kept along the western side of the ridge, beneath the brow, where the mountain-side slopes rapidly down into the depths below, and is covered like the Wadys with tufts of herbs and shrubs, furnishing abundant pasturage for the flocks of the Bedawin, as well as for the troops of gazelles and mountain goats which haunt these wild retreats This vegetation extends quite up to the foot of the highest peaks." (pp. 161, 162.) The observations contained in the foregoing extracts were made towards the end of the month of March, somewhat before the period of the year in which the Israelites are related to have arrived in these regions. But lest it should be supposed that the representation above given, by reason of the time of year to which it refers, is more favourable than the average state of circumstances would warrant, I must re- quest attention to the following passages relating to the same expedition : " Such had been the lack of rain for several years, and especially the present season, that all food and pasturage was bZ THE MARCH OUT OF EGYPT. — THE SHEEP dried up, and camels were dying of famine in great nmnbers." (p. 134.) " Owing to the great drought of the two preceding years, they [the gardens of the convent] were less productive. In a few weeks the convent would have consumed all the produc- tions of its own gardens, and expected to become dependent upon Egypt for every thing." (p. 195.) " We were told that many camels had died in the peninsula the present year, owing chiefly to the excessive drought, there having been but little rain (or, according to Arab speech, none) for now two seasons." (p. 120.) As illustrative of how far the present state of the region is to be taken as an exact test of what it was 3500 years ago, I give the following : " The seat of the bishop appears to have been at Pharan or Faran, the present Feiran, where was likewise a Christian population and a senate or council so early as the time of Nilus, about the year a.d. 400. About this time, too, Naterus or Nathyr is mentioned as its bishop. The bishop Macarius [who flourished in the middle of the fifth century] .... probably had his seat there ; and before the middle of the sixth century there is express mention of Photius as bishop of Pharan Theodorus of the same see was famous in the Monothelitic controversy, and was denounced by two councils ; that of the Lateran, a.d. 649, and that of Constantinople, a.d. 680. The town of Faran or Feiran was situate in the wady of that name, opposite to Mount Serbal. Riippell found here the remains of a church, the architecture of which he assigns to the fifth century; and Burckhardt speaks of the remains of some two hundred houses, and the ruins of several towers visible on the neighbouring hills." (pp. 185, 186.) Yet this town of Faran, with its senate or council, its suc- cession of bishops continued through many ages, and its two hundred ruined houses discernible by Burckhardt within the last fifty years, was little more than fifteen miles from the AND CATTLE OF THE ISRAELITES IN THE DESERT. 63 convent of St. Catherine ; where in the year 1838 Dr. Robin- son found the few monks, with their numerous gardens, the principal of which, that of the Tur, was considerably further from them than Pharan, expecting shortly to be dependent for all their supplies upon Egypt. Let the reader now advert to the extent of the flocks we have shown to be assignable to the Israelites, and let him consider that all that we Jcnoio of the extent of their herds and cattle during their sojourn in the wilderness of Sinai, or indeed during their wanderings in the wilderness generally, is what may be inferred from two statements, namely : ( 1 ) that at the Exodus the Israelites " had very much cattle ;" (2) that at the end of the wanderings, just before crossing Jor- dan, the two tribes of Reuben and Gad were similarly en- dowed. Having reference to these facts, and to the facts stated in the above extracts from Dr. Colenso's work ; — assuming that at the date of the Exodus the vegetable productions of the Sinaitic peninsula were the same in character and quantity as at present ; — and assuming the silence as to any specific mira- cle or special provision of Providence for the maintenance of the flocks and herds of the Israelites to be conclusive proof that none such occurred, — I think there will be little difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that, except perhaps as regards the supply of water, Dr. Colenso has wholly failed to make out his objection against the Mosaic narrative, founded upon the alleged impossibility of maintaining in the desert such flocks and herds as the Israelites must be supposed to have On account of the small quantity of water imbibed by * To make good such an objection, I tuted with a special view to the point under the assumptions of the text, we ' before us ; and continued through a should require to be furnished with the series of years, so as to give us alike result of a detailed examination of the j the average and the extremes of the capabilities of the entire district, insti- ' statistics of the subject. 64; THE MARCH OUT OF EGYPT. — THE SHEEP sheep, we may dismiss from our consideration as regards them the question of the supply of water ; so that of the mountain of objection raised by Dr. Oolenso in reference to the maintenance of the sheep and oxen of the Israelites in the wilderness, there remains only what small residuum of difficulty may be considered to exist in respect of the supply of water for the oxen ; a difficulty, which, whatever might be its intrinsic weight if it existed alone, cannot enhance in any appreciable degree the difficulty long since recognized, and emphatically by Dr. Robinson, in a passage already quoted, of accounting for the supply of water to the congregation at large. Having shown that the pasturing of the flocks and herds of the Israelites would not be an insuperable difficulty even at the present day, the question whether the climate and soil of the wilderness through which they wandered have or not materially changed since the Exodus becomes of very little importance, though the arguments of Dr. Colenso in reference to this point show his usual want of consideration. As for instance, where he argues that floods cannot have deteriorated the fertihty of the counti-y, because the "flood of one year, by the deposit which it leaves, rather assists than otherwise, the vegetation of the next year." To which it may be replied, that this depends altogether upon circum- stances, viz. upon what the flood of one year does " leave," and also upon what it carries away. Or, where he argues from a few years' experience of the effect of cutting down trees in Natal, to the effect in the course of thousands of years of cutting down wood in the Sinaitic peninsula. Or, where he assumes that the destruction of trees would not affect directly the growth of grass, or only to a very slight and almost " inappreciable degree,"" a view which is entirely opposed to that of every person who has paid attention to the subject. 2. But Dr. Oolenso is not content with endeavouring to AND CATTLE OF THE TSKAELITES IN THE DESERT. 65 make out his point by consideration of the present state of the scene of the Israehte wanderings ; he seeks to enlist the testimony of the Mosaic narrative itself in his favour. " It is described as being then what it is now, 'a desert land," a 'waste, howling wilderness,"" Deut. xxxii. 10. True, but flocks can now be pastured in it, and that, too, where there is no grass. '' ' Why have ye brought up the congregation of Jehovah into this wilderness, that we and our cattle should die there ? And wherefore have ye made us to come up out of Egypt, to bring us unto this evil place ? It is no place of seed, or of figs, or of vines, or of pomegranates ; neither is there any water to drink,'" Numb. xx. 4, 5. If there was no pasture for the flocks and herds, it is rather extraordinary that the discontented Israelites should not have complained of that circumstance, which would have been, to say the least of it, as much to the purpose as their complaint about the figs and pomegi*anates. If it be thought that the reference to the cattle dying shows that they were without food, equally must the reference to the congregation themselves dying prove that tJiei/ had no food, whereas we know that the contrary was the fact. Both as regards the congregation and the cattle, however, it was evidently the absence of water which exposed them to the risk of death ; if, indeed, the exclamations of the people are to be taken for more than an ebullition of angry impatience, wrung from them when under the torments of thirst. II. " There was no miraculous provision of food for the herds and flocks. They were left to gather sustenance as they could in that inhospitable wilderness." "Even if the people were supported by miracles, yet there is no provision whatever made for the support of the cattle." (Colenso, p. 70.) I presume that the precision of these statements is intended to make up for the total absence of any argument by which they are attempted to be supported. Are these statements true? Does it follow that where no F 66 THE MARCH OUT OF EGYPT. — THE SHEEP miracle or extraordinary dispensation of Providence is men- tioned in the Scriptures, none such occurred? Does the Old Testament contain an account of every miracle per- formed, or extraordinary provision made by God up to the time of the coming of our Lord I Does the New Testament contain an account of every miracle of our Lord, or of His Apostles ? If these questions are to be answered in the negative, as surely they must be, why should we assume that the Mosaic account of the dealings of God with the Israelites contains an account of every miracle performed, or extraordinary provision made in their favour? The primary object of the wonderful deliverance of the Israelites, of their being led and sustained through the desert, of their being finally brought into the promised land, was to convince the people who were the witnesses of those extraordinary events. For this purpose it might seem to the Divine mind necessary or desirable to perform many miracles, to exhibit many ex- traordinary providences, at the same time that it might not appear necessary or desirable to communicate to us the details of those providences or miracles. In the present state of our knowledge upon the subject, I believe it to be impossible to conclude with certainty, w*liether or not the natural supply of water in the wilderness was suffi- cient for the wants of the Israelites and their cattle during their wanderings in those cases in which no miraculous supply of water is mentioned. At the same time I see nothing either in the account of the wanderings themselves, as it is presented to us, or in the notions which we are able to form as to what such an account might be expected to include, which forbids our supposing that the miraculous supply of water occurred much more frequently than in the instances in which its oc- currence is commemorated, or which forbids our supposing that it was almost perpetual. On the other hand, though I conceive that, the desert being no other than what it is now, it would have afforded amply sufficient pasture for such flocks and herds as we are AND CATTLE OF THE ISRAELITES IN THE DESERT. 6 1 bound to suppose that the Israelites possessed : and though confessing myself unable to come to any conclusion as to whether the capabilities of the desert for pasturage were or not materially greater at the time of the Exodus than what they are at present ; yet I see no difficulty in concluding that, assuming there has been no change in the latter respect, the fertility of the wilderness during the wanderings may have been so far in excess of its average as to be in the nature of a special Providence or miracle. F 2 CHAPTER IX. THE NUMBER OF THE ISRAELITES COMrARED WITH THE EX- TENT OF THE LAND OF CANAAN. (Oolenso, pp. 82, 83.) " / will send my fear before thee^ and will destroy all the people to v)hom thou shalt come^ and I will make all thine enemies turn their hacks unto thee. And I will send hornets before thee, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite, from, before thee. I will not drive them out before thee in one year ; lest the land become desolate., and the beast of the field multiply against thee. By little and little I laill drive them out from before thee., until thou be increased., and inherit the land.''"' — Exod. xxiii. 27—30. We are here indulged with a comparison of the area of Judeea with that of the three agricultural counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex : that of the former being 11,000 square miles, or about 7,000,000 acres, against the 3,362,531 acres of the latter. Dr. Colenso then informs us that the number of the IsraeUtes being assumed at 2,000,000, and the aggre- gate population of the same three counties in 1851 being 1,149,247, Judaea would have been about as thickly peopled by the two million Israelites as the Eastern Counties are by their actual population. And yet it cannot be said that these three " counties, with their flourishing towns of Nor- wich, Lynn, Yarmouth, Aylsham, Cromer, Thetford, Wis- bcach, Bungay. Beccles, Lowostoff, Ipswich, Southwold. THE NUMBER OF THE ISRAELITES, tSlC. 69 Bury St. Edmunds, Sudbury, Woodbridge, Harwich, Col- cliester, Chelmsford, Romford, Maiden, &c., and their in- numerable villages, are in any danger of lying ' desolate," with the beasts of the field multiplying against the human inhabitants." Dr. Colenso thinks, however, that " a still better comparison may be instituted " between " the state of Canaan in those early days," and "the colony of Natal," which "has an extent of 18,000 square miles, and a population .... probably not exceeding 150,000 altogether."" Notwithstanding this scan- tiness of the population, " the human inhabitants are perfectly well able to maintain their ground against the beasts of the field. The larger animals have disappeared, and though leopards, wild boars, hyaenas, and jackals are killed occa- sionally, a man may live in, the colony for years without seeing or hearing one." Judsea was the promised possession of the Israelites ; and the subject treated of in the above extract from the book of Exodus is, the most advantageous way of entering upon that possession. It is clearly stated that it would not be advantageous for the Israelites to be put in possession of the whole of Judaea at. once ; and the reasons for that statement are given, viz. : I. That the land might not become deso- late ; II. That the beast of the field might not multiply against them. Let us see whether there is in these reasons any of the absurdity which to Dr. Colenso's mind appears so marked, I. The whole argument contained in the passage turns upon the assumption that the people already in possession of -the land of Canaan were very much more numerous than the Israelites themselves. Let us assume that they amounted to 4,000,000 ; i. e. that they were exactly double the number of the Israelites. If it be urged that this supposes a population twice as numerous to the square mile as exists in the above-named three counties, with their " flourishing towns," I observe in 70 THE NUMBER OF THE ISRAELITES COMPARED answer, that all we know of the land of Canaan tends to show that, at the time in question, it also abounded in flourishing towns. Instead of comparing " the state of Canaan in those early days " with the Eastern Counties and the colony of Natal — as if tliey exhausted all the phases of nature and of communities of men — let the comparison be instituted between Canaan and portions of Ireland and India. I assume that the 11,000 miles above assigned to the area of Judsea are statute miles, and are therefore equivalent to about 8500 geographical square miles. A population of 4,000,000 on this area would give an average of about 470 to the geographical square mile. The following table contains the average population to the geographical square mile in six Irish agricultural counties, according to the census of 1831 ' : — Tipperary 880 Longford 419 Louth 444 Cavan 426 Monaghan 530 Armagh 577 If it be asked how far is this rate made up by the popula- tion of towns, it may be sufficient to say in answer, that the three chief towns in the co. Armagh — viz. Armagh, Lurgan, and Portadown — contained respectively, in 1851, 9306, 4211, and 3091 inhabitants; that at the same period the town of Monaghan, the most populous in the county of that name, contained 3484, and that no other town in the county con- tained as many as 3000. Take the following table ^ relating to seven districts in Bengal : — ' I take these figures from the large . Useful Knowledge, map of Ireland in the original collec' ^ Extracted from Encyc. Brit., last tion of the Society for the Diffusion of | edition ; Art. Bengal. WITH THE EXTENT OF THE LAND OF CANAAN. 71 Ai-ea in miles. Population. Chittagong . . 2560 1,000,000 Burdwan . . . 2224 1,854,152 Rungpore . . . 4130 2,559,000 Baj corah . . . 2160 900,000 , Hooghly . . . . 2089 1,520,840 Moorshedabad . 1856 1,045,000 Patna . . . . 1828 1,200,000 The district of Burdwan has for its chief place the town of the same name, the third in point of population in Bengal, and containing 53,900 inhabitants. The district is more than one-fourth of the size of Judaea. Upon the scale of its popu- lation Judfea would contain nearly 7,000,000 of inhabit- ants. The district of Rungpore is situated in the northern part of Bengal, abutting on the Brahmaputra. It is about half the size of Judaea. If Judaea were peopled on the same scale as Rungpore, it would contain about 5,000,000 of inhabit- ants. The estimate of the number of the Canaanites above given, therefore, namely, at 4,000,000, may be considered mode- rate. But how were these millions supported 2 The agriculture of the Eastern Counties and of Natal is entirely deficient in the two leading features which characterized the agriculture ©f Canaan, viz, 1. Irrigation ; 2. Terracing. 1. Irrigation is practised to this day in Judaea, notwith- standing the barbarism which prevails there. Where it exists, " the same field, after a crop of wheat in May, pro- duces pulse in autumn." It was equally practised in the time of Abraham. " And Lot hfted up his eyes, and beheld all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered every where .... even as the garden of the Lord, Me the land of Egypt:' (Gen. xiii. 10.) 72 THE NUMBER OF THE ISRAELITES COMPARED It was equally practised intermediately. The remains of" the cisterns in which the rain-water was collected, and traces of the canals by which this water was distributed remain to this day. As to the effect of irrigation in causing productiveness, I shall simply refer to the statement of General Cotton, who assures us that 2,225,000 acres of irrigated land in Madras produce the whole food of 8,000,000 persons, — one-third of the inhabitants of the entire presidency. (Public Works in India. London, 1S54.) 2. The effect of terracing the hills in increasing the pro- ductiveness of such a country as Judaea would be hardly less remarkable than that of irrigation itself. That it was ex- tensively practised is certain. " There is no part of the hill- country, however at present desolate and depopulated, which does not bear evidence of ancient agricultural labour in its scarped rocks and ruined terrace walls.'"* (The Rev. G. Wil- liams, in Smith's Dictionary of Ancient Geography, Art. Palestine.) Works of the character we have described constituted the wealth of Canaan. That they should be maintained in their efficiency was essential to the prosperity of the possessors of the land. If these works fell to ruin, the produce of the plains would diminish alike in quantity and in certainty, while the cultivated hills would become, not fallow, but what they now are — desolate. The hills would not relapse into their primitive state of wood and pasture, but, by reason of the free course given to the rains in washing off their soil, would acquire, as they have acquired, a degree of sterility only to be paralleled by the rocks of Sinai. It being so essential, therefore, to keep up these works, the question arises, If by means of them a population of 4,000,000 was enabled to subsist in this small country, would they have been kept up by a population of 2,000,000 I If this question, as surely it must be, be answered in the nega- WITH THE EXTENT OF THE LAND OF CANAAN.^ 73 live, it follows that the apprehension expressed in the passage of Exodus of the land's becoming desolate by reason of the Canaanites being driven out in a year was not a visionary apprehension. II. But with regard to the second danger apprehended, namely, lest the beasts of the field should increase upon them, how does the matter stand 'i It is well known that the fertility of certain parts of Judsea was extraordinary ; as of the sea-coast plains, the borders of the lake of Gennesaret, the plain of Esdraelon, and the plain of Jericho. The produce of these portions of the country, when under a high state of cultivation, would be like that of a garden. The numbers of the Israelites being very much less than what the land would sustain, they would naturally cluster about these fertile centres, which would become like so many oases surrounded by the desolate hills. Under such circumstances, would it have been a particularly unlikely thing that the wild animals should increase upon them to a most inconvenient extent ? The disappearance from the colony of Natal of the larger wild animals, whether owing to the migration of the game upon which they preyed, or otherwise, though it may be a curious subject for inquiry, affords no argument against this portion of the Mosaic narrative. To this day in the great country of France, notwithstand- ing its centuries of civilization, and its population numbered by scores of millions, there are many Departments where wolves abound, notwithstanding the constant efforts made to extir- pate them. Many centuries after the time of the Exodus we have the most irrefragable testimony as to the prevalence of the lion in the countries bordering upon the JSIediterranean. The Assyrian sculptures afford us significant indications upon this point ; but we have mucli more specific testimony with regard to it. Pompey exhibited in the arena on one occasion six hundred lions. Caesar upon another occasion exhibited 74 , THE NUMBER OF THE ISRAELITES, &C. eight hundred. With all our superior means of transit, and with our unlimited access to all parts of the existing lion countries, it may be doubted whether it would be within the power of England to bring about for a single year any such result. Herodotus refers to the lions in Thrace during the expedi- tion of Xerxes ; and Pausanias, who lived five centuries later, tells us that they abounded from the river Achelous in ^-Etolia to the Nestus in Macedonia. The plains of Thessaly, at the foot of Mount Olympus, were likewise infested by them. To be exposed to the attacks of such an animal, even if the actual loss of life resulting therefrom were inconsiderable, would be no light evil ; and the Israelites, who had probably more practical experience upon the subject, might possibly estimate the deliverance from it more highly than Dr. Colenso seems disposed to do. But we need not confine ourselves in considering this sub- ject to the more dangerous animals. Hares, rabbits, coneys, deer, foxes, and other kinds of vermin, though they probably would not have increased to such an extent as to endanger the actual prosperity of the Israelites, might have increased so far as to become a serious nuisance. On the whole, I think we may have little diflficulty in con- cluding on the grounds stated in the above passage from Exodus, that it was for the advantage of the Israelites that the nations of Canaan should not be driven out from before them in one year. CHAPTER X. THE NUMBERS OF THE FIRSTBORNS COMPARED WITH THE NUMBER OF MALE ADULTS. (Colenso, pp. 84—90.) ''All the firstborn males, from a month old and upwards, of those that were numbered, were twenty and two thousand two hundred threescore and ten.''' — Numb. iii. 43. From this Dr. Colenso deduces the following conclusion : " According to the story in the Pentateuch, every mother of Israel must have had on the average forty-two sons/' The difficulty Dr. Colenso here makes arises entirely from a misapprehension. The command to sanctify the firstborn is given Exod. xiii. 1, &c. "And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Sanctify unto me all the firstborn, whatsoever openeth the matrix among the children of Israel, both of man and of beast : it is mine." This command, from the very terras in which it is given, was evidently prospective. Not that which hath opened the matrix, but that which shall open the matrix is to be sancti- fied. Moreover, it is not necessarily that which should there- after open the matrix for the first time; but that which 76 THE NUMBERS OF THE FIRSTBORNS should open the matrix first after the issuing of the com- mand, whether the matrix had been opened before the com- mand was issued or not '. Thus, as the command to number the firstborns appears to have been given soon after the beginning of the second month (Numb. i. 1), and was to in- clude all the firstborns from a month old and upwards, we may consider that the enumeration included every male child born within twelve months from the destruction of the first- born of Egypt, and who w^as alive when the numbering took place, excepting those comparatively few cases in which two or more male children were born at a birth, or in which one mother had successive confinements within the twelve months, in each of which she had a male child. The number of firstborns being 22,270, if we assume the births of female infants within the same period of twelve months to have been equally numerous, we should have a total of 44,540 ; and adding a correction for the double births, and for double confinements in the year, .and also for the deaths which liad taken place within the twelve months, it is probable that 50,000 would be a very moderate estimate of the whole number of infants of both sexes born within the period in question. In Porter's "Progress of the Nation" (London, 1847, p. 13), I find the average proportion of births to population in England and Wales for the ten years ending 1831, estimated at 1 in 34|. Assunling this proportion to have held among the Israelite nation in the year following the Exodus, the above figures would lead us to an entire population at that time of 1,712,500 against the 2,000,000 at which Dr. Colenso estimates it. If Dr. Colenso thinks that it is an " absolute impossibility" > For instance, if a mother had had male children before the issuing of the command, and had a male child within tlie fii-st twelve months after the issuing of the command, such last-mentioned child, and such last-mentioned child only, would, as I consider, be included in the enumeration. COMFAKED WITH THE KFIMBER OF MALE ADULTS. 77 to account for the difference between these two last-mentioned totals by adverting to the entirely exceptional circumstances in which the Israelites were placed during the twelve months in question, and for some time previously, I shall leave him in possession of that opinion. CHAPTER XL THE SOJOURNING OF THE ISRAELITES IN EGYPT. — THE EXODUS IN THE FOURTH GENERATION. — THE NUMBER OF THE ISRAELITES AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS. (Colenso, pp. 91—106.) In his fifteenth chapter, Dr. Colenso arrives at the conchision that, according to the Mosaic account, the sojourning of the IsraeHtes in the land of Egypt must be taken to have lasted 210 or 215 years: and in the accuracy of this latter number I am prepared to acquiesce. Then taking for granted that Jacob had no grandsons except those whose names are given in Gen. xlvi. ; and having proved to his own satisfaction, in a manner hereafter to be considered, that the adult males, at the time of the Exodus, were the offspring of the fourth generation from the sons of Jacob \ he arrives at a conclusion which I shall give in his own words. " The twelve sons of Jacob, then, as appears from the above, had between them, 68 sons, that is on the average 4^ each. Let us suppose that they increased in this way ' In his fifteenth and sixteenth chap- ters, Dr. Colenso speaks of " the adults in the prime of life, who went down with Jacob," as the root from which he counts; which, of course, would in- clude grandsons : but it is evident from his seventeenth chapter, where his nu- merical calculations come into play, that it is the sons of Jacob from which the generations are counted. SOJOURNING OF THE ISRAELITES IN EGYPT. 79 from generation to generation. Then in the first generation, that of KohatJi, there would be 54 males (according to the story, 58, or rather only 51, since Er and Onan died in the land of Canaan without issue,)— in the second, that of Amram, 243.— in the third, that of Moses and Aaron, 1094,— and in the fourth, that of Joshua and Eleazar, 4923, that is to say, instead of 600,000 warriors in the prime of life, there could not have been 5000.*'"' I. It would be difficult to parallel the extravagance of this absurd calculation. Take the case of those who were exactly 20 years old at the time of the Exodus, and who must therefore have been born 195 years after Jacob's arrival in Egypt. By Dr. Colenso's hypothesis, they were the great-grandchildren of the sons of the twelve patriarchs; that is, they were the great-grand- children of men every one of whom was born before the arrival in Egypt. Thus in every case the great-grandfather must have been 195 years older than the great-grandchild; and might very well have been in many cases 215 or 225 older: so that on the average, the duration of the three generations preceding that of the great-grandchild must have been at least 65 years each ; and might have been 75 years each. In the case of the adults who at the Exodus were 30 years old, this average will be reduced to 61 1 years as a minimum, but susceptible of being raised in numerous instances to 7lf. In the case of the adults who were 40 years old at the Exodus, the minimum average would be reduced to 58^ years; but surely it betrays an extraordinary state of intellect or feeling in a writer that, in discussing the antecedent probability of confessedly the most remarkable increase of population on record, he should commit the absurdity of estimating the duration of a generation at some- thing like double the length at which it is ordinarily fixed. Yet Dr. Colenso, in this identical portion of his work, in which he makes out that children of the third generation from the arandsons of Jacob are alone admissible into the number 80 SOJOURNING OF THK ISRAEI,ITES IN EGYPT. of adults at the Exodus," and in which he speaks of the rule to that effect prevailing unwersally in the Pentateuch, actually quotes Gen. i. 23, in which we are told that ' Joseph saw Ephraim's children of the third generation,' and comments upon the passage to the effect that " one of them [most people would think two at the least] may have been born about seventy years after the immigration into Egypt T" acquiescing, apparently with perfect calmness, in the conclu- sion that, in the ] 45 years which elapsed between the birth of such child or children of Ephraim of the third generation and the Exodus, he, she, or they made not the slightest contribu- tion to the number of adult males existing at the date of the latter ^ II. All that we know of the time at which Manasseh and Ephraim were born, is that it Was "before the years of famine came," Gen. xli. 50 ; an expression which would be satisfied if they were born in the last year of plenty ; that is, according to Dr. Colenso's chronology, seventy-three or seventy-four years before the death of Joseph ; and even if Joseph were married innnediately after he stood before Pha- raoh, Manasseh and Ephraim cannot have been born more than seventy-nine years before their father's death. Yet within this period of seventy-nine years were born four gene- rations ; one of them immediately at the commencement of the period, another immediately before its close, thus giving in this case y or 264. years as the extreme length of a gene-* ration ; at the same time that there is evei-y probability that it may have been very much less. Now, suppose that all the grandsons and more remote descendants of Jacob up to the Exodus brought forth chil- dren with the same rapidity as Ephraim and his children and 2 The argument is still stronger in ho case of Hozron and Hamul, sons of Pharez, and therefore great-grandsons of Jacob, who were born before Jacob wont into Egypt, i. e. two hundred and fifteen years before the Exodus. Ac- cording to Dr. Colenso's principle, tlieir sons only would be admissible among the adults at the Exodus, to the exclu- sion of their remoter descendants ! NUMBER OF AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS. 81 grandchildren, adopting the minimum rate of 26^ years for a generation of the latter. In such case, in eight periods of 26^ years each, i. e. in 211 years, nine generations of children might have been born ; the first of these generations being born at the commencement of the 21 1 years, and the ninth and last at the end of the 211 years, and the eighth of these generations, that is, those born at the end of the seventh period of 26^ years, would be adults at the end of the 211 years. Let us now see how many of these children of the eighth generation there would be upon Dr. Colenso's assump- tion of the sons of each marriage always averaging 4^ in number; and also assuming (which assuredly was not the case) that every one of Jacob's grandsons was born in the year in which Jacob went into Egypt. The number of male chijdren of the fourth generation, ac- cording to Dr. Colenso, would be 4923 ; those of the Ji/th generation would be 22,153; those of the sixth generation would be 99,688; those of the seventh generation would be 448,576 ; and those of the eighth generation woiild be 2,018,592. So that, if all the grandsons of Jacob were born in the year Jacob went into Egypt, we should, on this basis of calculation, be entitled to conclude that at the end of the seventh period of 26^ years, i. e. at the end of 184^ years from that time, upwards of 2,000,000 of children would have been born ; a number which would give us at the end of 205 years, or ten years before the Exodus, after making ample allowance for deaths in the mean time, vastly more than the 600,000 males, whose existence at the time of the Exodus appears to Dr. Colenso so insuperable a difficulty. III. I have entered into the preceding calculation, not because I consider that it affords the most satisfactory mode of accounting for the rapid increase of the Israelites— a sub- ject to which I shall hereafter recur — but in order to show to those who are not familiar with the powers of numbers, how vital a matter it is with Dr. Colenso to keep down thenumber of the generations between the birth of Jacob's grandsons and G 82 SOJOURNING OF THE ISRAELITES IN EGYPT. the Exodus. Let us now see, however, how far the Mosaic account warrants Dr. Colenso''s assumption that the adult males at the time of the Exodus consisted solely of the fourth generation from, or the great-great-grandsons of, the sons of Jacob. Dr. Colenso tells us (p. 96), " When it is said, Gen. xv. 16, ' In the fourth generation they shall come hither again,' that can only mean ' in the fourth generation ' from the time when they should leave Canaan and go down into Egypt." How are the generations to be reckoned in this case ? Four generations went down into Egypt, viz. : 1 . Jacob. 2. His sons. 3. His grandsons. 4. His great-grandsons. From which of these four generations is " the fourth genera- tion " referred to in the above passage from Genesis to be reckoned ? Dr. Colenso answers this question in the strangest way imaginable, namely, by taking the second in the list, — that is, the sons as the starting-point. Can there be a doubt that in this case the generations ought to be reckoned by heads of families ? Jacob was at the head of the family at the time of the descent into Egypt ; and the table given by Dr. Colenso at p. 96 of his work, if it proves nothing else, proves that there were heads of families in the fourth generation from Jacob in existence at the date of the Exodus, which would be a sufficient fulfilment of the pro- phecy ; so that any argument derived from this source in favour of supposing that the great-grandchildren of men born before the descent into Egypt were alone to be taken into account in estimating the number of adult males at the Exodus, must fall to the ground. But according to Dr. Colenso, " If we examine the different genealogies of remarkable men, which are given in the Penta- teuch, we shall find that, as a rule, the contemporaries of Moses and Aaron are descendants in the third, and those of Joshua and Eleazar in the fourth generation, from some one of the sons or adiilt grandsons of Jacob, who went down with him into Egypt'' (p. 96). NUMBER OF AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS. 83 Upon this subject we are furnished with the following table : — 1st Gen. 2nd Gen. 3rd Gen. 4th Gen. 5tli Gen. 1. Levi. . . . Kohath Amrara Moses Exod. vi. 16. 18. 20. 2. Levi Kohath Amram Aaron Exod. vi. 16. 18. 20. 3. Levi Kohath Uzziel Mishael Lev. x. 4. 4. Levi Kohath Uzziel Elzaphan Lev. x. 4. •5. Levi Kohath Izhar Korah Num. xvi. 1. 6. Reuben . PaUu Eliab Dathan Num. xxvi. 7—9. 7. Reuhen . Pallu Eliab Abiram Num. xxvi. 7—9. 8. Zarah . . Zabdi Carmi Achan Jos. vii. 1 . 9. Pharez.. Hezron Ram Amminadab Nahshon Ruth iv. 18, 19. 10. Pharez . . Hezron Segub Jair 1 Chron. ii. 21, 22. 11. Pharez.. Hezron Caleb Hur Uri Bezaleel 1 Chron. ii. 18— 20. To the eleven cases contained in this table Dr. Colenso adds one other, that of " ' Zelophehad, the son of Hepher, the son of Gilead,"* whose daughters came to Moses for land, and died in the wilderness r" Gilead being the son of Machir the son of Manasseh. Dr. Colenso tells us that " the above include all the instances which " he ]ias " been able to find where the genea- logies are given in the Pentateuch itself." I would here observe, as illustrative of the extraordinary- care and judgment with which Dr. Colenso has conducted this part of his criticism, that the principle upon which he proposes to calculate the number of the adult males among the Israelites, and by which he arrives at the valuable result that that number would not exceed 4923, would, on his own showing, exclude from the number of adult males Nahshon, Bezaleel, and Zelophehad ; i. e. three of the twelve examples upon which the principle professes to be founded. For, ac- cording to Dr. Colenso himself, Nahshon and Zelophehad were in the fftJi generation from the sons of Jacob, and therefore would not enter into the above number of 4923 ; while Beza- leel, being in the sixth generation from Judah, would be even less eligible for that purpose. Yet Nahshon, who is thus ex- cluded from the number of adult males, was " prince of the g2 84 SOJOURNING OF THE ISRAELITES IN EGYPT. children of Judah," " head of the house of his fathers," " renowned in the congregation," " one of the heads of thousands in Israel ;"" and may very well have been eighty years of age, and have had adult grandchildren about him at the period of the Exodus ; while Bezaleel, who and whose father are alike excluded as too young to enter into the list of males of twenty years old and upwards, was yet old enough to have entrusted to him the chief work of the sanc- tuary, which was constructed during the first year after the Exodus. Not to dwell any longer however on this singular incon- sistency, I shall proceed to show, 1 . That, with regard to all these cases except the first five and the ninth and tenth, we may conclude with perfect certainty that all the links in the chain of descent are not given. 2. That it is impossible to arrive at any reliable conclusion from the tenth case. 8. That it is doubtful whether all the links are given in the ninth case. 4. The first five cases in the above table I shall consider separately. 1. The mode in which in the Old Testament writings the son is put for the grandson, or remoter descendant of a person, is familiar to every one. A remarkable instance of this kind occurs in the case of Jair, who is named in the above table ; and who is there described as descended from Hezron, who, therefore, might be expected to be designated as of the tribe of Judah. We find, however, in Num. xxxii. 41, and Deut. iii. 14, that the same person is described as the son of Manasseh. The explanation of the apparent discrepancy which here occurs, is given in 1 Chron. ii. 21, 22, from which it appears that Hezron, the grandfather of Jair, married a daughter of Machir the son of Manasseh ; so that this Jair, though described as the son of Manasseh, was actually the groat-grandson of the latter. The books of the Pentateuch contain numerous examples NUMBER OF AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS. 85 of the use of the word " sons " in the sense of descendants generally; as in Num. xvi. ], which speaks of " Dathan and Abiram the sons of EHab, and On the son of Peleth, the S071S of Reuben." And again in the eighth verse: " And Moses said unto Korah, Hear, I pray you, ye sons of Levi." Of course where a writer has occasion to use an expression which is liable to such various interpretations, he must take care that the connexion in which the word occurs shall be such as to point out the sense in which it is meant to be taken; and this, no doubt, was in general so far done by the writers in the Old Testament, as that, to those thoroughly famihar with the idiom, and possessed of a certain degree of knowledge of facts which are now wholly lost to us, no ambiguity would arise whatever : although at the present day, from the circumstance of our being destitute of such col- lateral knowledge, it may be utterly impossible to say with certainty in what sense a particular word or phrase was in- tended to be taken. In the cases we are now considering, however, no such ambiguity occurs. The pedigree of Dathan and Abiram is nowhere so fully given as in Num. xxvi. 5 — 9. But let attention be directed to the connexion in which this pedigree occurs. It follows an account of the four great divisions into which the tribe of Reuben was divided, viz., "the family of the Hanochites," '' the family of the Palluites," " the family of the Hezronites," " the family of the Oarmites." The number of adult men, as stated in the very same account, included in the same four divisions, was 43,730; implying a total number of all ages and sexes (adopting the scale of Dr. Colenso in estimating^ the total number of the Israelites from the number of adult men) of upwards of 130,000; or an average of 43,000 and upwards to each family. Would any Israelite, reading this account, have the slightest doubt that, in describing Eliab the father of Dathan and Abiram as the son of Pallu, nothing 86 SOJOURNING OF THE ISRAELITES IN EGYPT. more was meant to be conveyed than that Ehab was of the family of the Palluites'? Take again the case of Zelophehad. He is first introduced to us in the chapter of Numbers last mentioned, after a description of the families into which the tribe of Manasseh was divided : " The family of the Machirites," " the family of the Grileadites," " the family of the Jeezerites," " the family of the Helekites,"" "the family of the Asrielites," "the family of the Shechemites," " the family of the Shemidaites," " the family of the Hepherites ;"" eight in all. The same account tells us, that these eight families comprehended 52,700 adult males; implying a total of all ages and sexes, on the scale before mentioned, of upwards of 1 58,000 ; thus giving an average of 19,000 and upwards to each family. When therefore we find Zelophehad, in ver. 33, described as the son of Hepher, it is obvious that all that is meant is that he belonged to the great family of the Hepherites. Exactly the same argument applies to Achan. In the same chapter of Numbers we read that the tribe of Judah was divided into five families ; the Shelahites, the Pharzites, the Zarhites (from Zerah), the Hezronites, and the Hamuli tes. The adults of the tribe of Judah are also described as 76,500, implying the total number of the tribe to be upwards of 220,000 ; which gives an average of 44,000 and upwards to each family. When we are told therefore. Josh, vii. 16 «Sz;c., that Joshua " brought the family of Judah, and he took the family of the Zarhites; and he brought the family of the Zarhites man by man (i. e. by the heads of families), and Zabdi 3 It will be observed that in the sixteenth chapter of Numbers, 'where Dathan and Abiram are first intro- duced to us, they are described as the sons of Eliab ; and there they and tlieir fathers are simply referred generally to the tribe of Reuben. In Num. xxvi., where the four great divisions of the tribe are named, it was natural to go a little further in indicating the extrac- tion of these great offenders, by point- ing out that the family of the Palluites was that one of the great divisions of the tribe from which they sprung. NUMBER OF AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS. 87 was taken; and he brought his household man by man, and Achan the son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah of the tribe of Judah was taken," all that is to be inferred from this is, that Achan with his father and grandfather (both of whom appear to have been then living) belonged to the family of the Zarhites of the tribe of Judah*. The same argument, I conceive, applies to the eleventh case in the above list, that of Bezaleel. In 1 Chron. ii. 18 — 20 we read, " Caleb, the son of Hezron, begat children of Azubah his wife . , . . and when Azubah was dead, Caleb took unto him Ephrath, which bare him Hur, And Hur begat Uri, and Uri begat Bezaleel." I conceive that all that is implied here is, that Caleb of the family of the Hezronites, one of the five great families into which the tribe of Judah was divided as above mentioned, took wives and had children in the manner described. If it be thought that the riinth verse of the same chapter proves that the Caleb the father of Hur was actually the son of Hezron, I must observe that it in fact proves the exact contrary, for that verse runs thus : " The sons also of Hezron, that were born unto him ; Jerahmeel, and Ram, and Chelubai," or Caleb, as the marginal reading suggests. But, that the Caleb of the eighteenth verse is not the Chelubai or Caleb of the ninth verse, is shown conclusively by * This case of Achan seems to point to the fact, that in the Pentateuch it is usual to designate a person by naming all his ancestors living at the same time; that, occasionally, his tribe, as that of Reuben, is also mentioned, and more rarely that of the family in the tribe to which he belonged ; as, that of Pallu. On this principle we may account for Bezaleel being described as the son of Uri the son of Hur ; while his companion in the work of the sanctuary, Ahohab, is simply styled the son of Ahisamach. Probably Amminadab the father of Nahshon, as well as the fathers of the other princes named (Num. i.), were living at the date to which the incidents there re- lated are to be referred ; having been passed over as too aged for the required of the princes. 88 SOJOURNING OF THE ISRAELITES IN EGYPT. the forty-second verse of the same chapter, which is to this effect : " Now the sons of Caleb tlie hrother of Jerahmeel were, Mesha, his firstborn, which was the father of Ziph ; and the sons of Mareshah the father of Hebron ;" where " Caleb the brother of Jerahmeel " is clearly put in opposition to the Caleb last before mentioned as the father of Hur ; where also the list of sons is wholly different from that given of the sons of the father of Hur. If any thing were wanting to show that Caleb the brother of Jerahmeel, and Caleb the father of Hur were not one and the same person, it would be afforded by the forty-ninth verse of the same chapter. In this verse it is stated, (referring doubtless to the Caleb lastly before named, i. e. the brother of Jerahmeel,) the " daughter of Caleb was Achsa," showing that this latter Caleb was the Caleb the son of Jephunneh, the associate of Joshua in giving a good report of the promised land (see Josh. xv. 16, 17); arid further showing also, that where in 1 Chron. ii. 9, we are told that " the sons of Hezron that were born unto him were Jerahmeel, Ram, and Chelubai," either that by the word sons are not meant sons strictly, at least in so far as relates to Jerahmeel and Caleb, or else ' that Caleb and Jerahmeel were not brothers' children, but descendants of brothers. In fact, to show how careful we must be in inferring identity of persons from identity of names, the fiftieth verse gives clear indication of a third Caleb, the son of Hur, and uncle to Bezaleel. The forty-second verse above quoted exemplifies also in a striking way the conventional, and to the uninitiated, per- plexing manner in which the word sons is sometimes used ; the sons of Mareshah being there reckoned among the sons of " Caleb the brother of Jerahmeel ;" which of course, if the words were to be taken in their strict sense, would be an impossibility. 2. With regard to the tenth of the above cases, that of NUMBER OF AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS. 89 Jair, it will be found that the connexion between Jair and Hezron indicated in 1 Chron. ii. 21, 22, is much closer than in the cases we have previously considered ; and it is highly probable that Jair was in fact the grandson of Hezron. But on the other hand there is a total absence of conclusive proof as to the time at which Jair flourished. The passage which at first sight appears most definite upon the subject is Num. xxxii. 41, "And Jair the son of Manasseh went and took the small towns thereof [i. e. of Gilead], and called them Havoth-jair." But, if Jair in person did what is here spoken of, he must have been under twenty years of age at the date of the Exodus; and, as his grandfather Hezron was born before the descent of Jacob into Egypt, it follows that at least one hundred and ninety^five years must have intervened between the birth of the grandfather and the grandchild, thus giving ninety-two years and a half to the length of a generation ; a precedent on which few will be bold enough to found a rule applicable to the descendants of Jacob at large. The real explanation of the passage last quoted, is evidently that Jair is there spoken of as representing his descendants. This usage, as before intimated, is very common in the Old Testament, and is one which well explains many of the apparent ambiguities which there occur. Nothing can prove the reality of such a usage more strikingly than the two verses preceding that last quoted. " And the children of Machir the son of JSIahasseh went to Gilead, and took it, and dispossessed the Amorite which wa§ in it. And Moses gave Gilead unto Machir the son of Manasseh, and he dwelt therein \" I think it evident, therefore, that no 5 It is worthy of remark that, in the fortieth verse of Num. xxxii., the name of Machir occurs representing, not the whole of his descendants, but a portion of them only (see Josh. xvii. 1, ti). 90 SOJOURNING or THE ISRAEIJTES IN EGYPT. argument in support of Dr. Colenso's principle of calculation can be deduced from the case of Jair. 3. With respect to the ninth case in the above table, namely, that of Nahshon, I do not think that there is the same indication that the words which occur in the part of Ruth in which the pedigree is given (followed in Mai. i.), are used in a conventional sense, as we have found in the former cases above considered, in which that construction is adopted ; though some of them may have been so used. As before in- dicated, however, the case of Nahshon is against Dr. Oolenso''s principle, and not in favour of it. 4. We now come to the consideration of the first five cases which occur in Dr. Colenso's table, in reference to which I observe in the first place, that if Dr. Colenso's principle of computation derives no support from the other seven instances which he has adduced in its favour, as I have endeavoured to prove, there would be no sort of fairness in attempting to found it upon so Umited a number of examples as five. This want of fairness, moreover, would be much enhanced by the consideration that the five instances in question relate exclusively to the tribe of Levi : that is, that one of the twelve tribes in which notoriously the increase was less than in any other ®. But not only do all these five instances refer exclusively to the tribe of Levi, they all relate exclusively to the family of Kohath ; in which the rate of increase, upon the view of the matter which Dr. Colenso takes, was extraordinarily slow. ^ The whole number of Levite males from a month old and upwards, at the end of the first year after the Exodus, was 22,273 ; giving a total number of both sexes of about 45,000 ; which was about one-fiftieth of the whole number of Israelites instead of one-twelfth, showing that the increase in the tribe of Levi was to the average in- crease in the other tribes, as 1 ; 4J. So that upon Dr. Colenso's principle of computation, the adoption of the tribe of Levi as the standard of comparison, is equivalent to taking one from the number of generations. NfMBER OF AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS. 91 For we know that Aaron was eighty-three years of age at the Exodus : so that if Kohath was born in the year of Jacob's arrival in Egypt, 132 years must have elapsed between the birth of Kohath and that of his grandson Aaron ; that is, the father and grandfather of Aaron, on the average, had each no children till he was sixty-six years of age. To suppose that one of Jacob's grandsons, as Kohath, had no child till he was aged sixty-six, and that the son of this son (that is, Amram) had likewise no child till he was aged sixty-six, may be very allowable ; but to assume that exactly the same kind of thing happened to the other fifty grandsons of Jacob, and also to all the sons of those fifty grandsons, that is, to assume that in upwards of one thousand instances, comprising all the male births which took place in one great family connexion during two generations, the father, of each child, on the average, was at least sixty-six years old at his birth, would be to reach the utmost pitch of extravagance. Hence, if it could be made out from the Mosaic narrative, as Dr. Oolenso professes to make out, that Moses, Aaron, Mishael, Elzaphan, and Korah were all in the third generation from Levi, and all grandsons of Levi's son Kohath, that cir- cumstance would afford no sort of countenance to Dr. Co- lenso's assumption that all the men who at the time of the Exodus were about the same age as Moses, Aaron, Mishael, Elzaphan, and Korah, were in the same degree of propinquity, reckoned by generations, to the patriarch Jacob. But what was in fact the degree of relationship to Kohath of those five persons who are thus alleged to have been his grandsons ? Are there in their respective genealogies any of those missing links to which we have had in other cases oc- casion to advert ? In Exod. vi. we have unmistakeable indications that however precise may be certain parts of the genealogy there given, the word " sons "" is there to be construed with the same latitude as in the other cases of its occurrence which we have been 92 SOJOURNING OF THE ISRAELITES IN EGYPT. lately considering. The genealogy of the Levites commences as follows : " These are the names of the sons of Levi according to their generations : Gershon, and Kohath, and Merari,"" ver. 16. " The sons of Gershon ; Libni, and Shimi, according to their families^'''' ver. 17. " The sons of Kohath ; Amrara," fcc, ver. 18. " The sons of Merari ; Mahali and Mushi ; these are the families of Lem according to their generations," ver. 19. The genealogy closes with the following : " These are the heads of the fathers of the Levites accord- ing to their families^'''' ver. 25. In the genealogy in Num. iii. the indications are still more striking. " These were the sons of Levi l^ their names ; Gershon, and Kohath, and Merari," ver. 17. " These are the names of the sons of Gershon by their families; Libni, and Shimei," ver. 18. " The sons of Kohath by their families ; Amram,"&c., ver. 19. " The sons of Merari by their families ; Mahli, and JSlushi. These are the families of the Levites according to the house of their fathers," ver. 20. Reading these genealogies by the light of what has pre- viously been elicited upon the subject, it is evident that, although they can be relied on as showing the channels through which those families of the Levites, which were recognized as such at the Exodus, derived their descent from Levi, they cannot be relied on as showing, nor can they be regarded as professing to show, each step in the chain of descent ; or, to express the same idea in other words and more precisely, — From the consideration of these genealogies we may conclude that whenever in either of them we find such an expression as "the sons of" a person followed by a list of names ; then, except in the case of the immediate sons (in the NUMBER OF AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS. 93 strict sense) of Levi himself, and in those other cases in which independent evidence may be forthcoming to the contrary, the word " sons " is to be considered as tantamount to descend- ants generally. As regards the descent of Moses and Aaron, I consider that, — the comparative fulness and particularity of the accounts respecting them ; the mode in which their birth and parentage are spoken of in Exod. vi. 20, and Num. xxvi. 59 (see also ver. 58), together with the fact that with regard to every one of their progenitors whose name is mentioned, his age is stated (a circumstance which does not apply to any other descend- ant of Jacob with the single exception of the patriarch Joseph) ; these various facts taken together, though in- sufficient perhaps to show that the omission of a link in the chain of descent is an "absolute impossibility," yet do, as I conceive, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, go very far in showing that such an omission is highly improbable. But how with regard to the remaining three of the five cases which are at present the object of our attention, those, namely, of Mishael, Elzaphan, and Korah? With respect to .the two first of these Dr. Colenso cites Lev. x. 4, which runs as follows : "And Moses called Mishael and Elzaphan, the sons of TJzziel the uncle of Aaron." In reference to which I observe that, for the reason already so often stated, however far this verse may go towards showing that Uzzlel was in fact the brother of Amram, and therefore, in the strict sense, the son of Kohath, it goes no way towards showing that Mishael and Elzaphan were the sons, rather than the grandsons or other more remote descendants, of Uzziel. With regard to the descent of Korah, as the statement relating to it in Num. xvi. 1, cited by Dr. Colenso, contains nothing more than what is stated in the genealogies in Exod. vi. and Num. iii., we must regard it as subject to the remark 94 SOJOURNING OF THE ISRAELITES IN EGYPT. above made with regard to those genealogies, viz. that they are not to be relied upon as showing each step in the chain of descent ^ On the whole it appears, therefore, that the only instances adduced by Dr. Colenso in favour of his method of assessing the number of generations between Jacob and the Exodus, upon which any degree of reliance can be placed, are those of Moses and Aaron ; a basis, I need scarcely remark, which is wholly insufficient for the support of so extravagant a super- structure ^ Having already shown the absurdity of the principle upon which Dr. Oolenso's mode of computing the number of the Israelites at the Exodus is founded, as well as the futility of the arguments by which it is supported, I shall now pro- ceed to discuss his mode of answering a particular objection which he has foreseen might be brought against his hypo- thesis. The objection to which I refer is that derived from the genealogy of Joshua, as given in 1 Ohron. vii. 22 — 27, in which Joshua is placed " in the ninth generation from Ephraim, or the tenth from Joseph." Dr. Colenso objects in limine that " we are not here con- ^ In discussing tke character of the genealogies of the tribe of' Levi, I have not thought it necessary to advert to the argument derived from the num- bers contained in the different famihes. Those numbers, hovrever, though con- siderably less than in the case of the families of the other tribes (see Num. iii.), are still suflSciently large to give to this argument its full force. * According to the common mode of interpreting the testimony of the Books of Moses on the subject (and which, as before has appeared, I am not prepared to combat), Moses and Aaron were, on the father's side, the great-great-grand- sons, and on their mother's side the great-grandsons of Jacob. Though it is highly probable that at the time of the Exodus many other Israelites stood in a similar degree of propinquity to the founders of the race ; and that by their means the traditions of God's dealings with their fathers were handed down with extraordinary fulness and purity ; there seems a special fitness in the circumstance that in the number of those who were endowed with this privilege should have been included the two great leaders who were to guide and mould the future nation. NUMBER OF AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS. 95 cerned with the books of Chronicles .... but with the narrative of the Pentateuch itself and book of Joshua, and must abide by the data which they furnish"" — a rather singular objection to be taken, when, but for the support of the book of Chronicles, two of the twelve cases upon which Dr. Co- lenso''s rule is founded must have disappeared from his list. But it is evident that Dr. Colenso thinks that he can deliver here an overwhelming blow against the books of Chronicles themselves, and hence his eagerness to rush into the lists against them. As Dr. Colenso has evidently taken great pains with this objection, and as he appears particularly to plume himself on the success of his efforts in connexion with it, I shall consider the subject with equal minuteness, and shall endeavour, so far as it is possible, to deliver his argument upon it in his own words. " Since Joseph saw Ephraim's children of the third genera- tion, Gen. i. 2, 3, Telah, one of these, may have been born about seventy years after the migration into Egypt.'* In reference to this I observe, that as Ephraim may have been born the year after Joseph interpreted Pharaoh's dream, and as the years of plenty can hardly have commenced till at least one year after the dream, seventy-nine years may have elapsed between the birth of Ephraim and the migration into Egypt. Consequently, if Ephraim had a son when he was twenty, and that son had a son when he was twenty, and such grandson had a son when he was twenty, there would have been a child of Ephraim's of the third generation in existence when Ephraim was sixty years old, i. e. fifty-one years after the migration. The true way of putting this point of the period of birth of Ephraim's children of the third generation is, therefore, that it must have happened within seventy years after the migration, and may have happened within fifty years after. But to proceed. " We have no express statement of the age of Joshua at the time of the Exodus, but we may suppose it to have been 96 SOJOURNING OF THE ISRAELITES IN EGYPT. about the same as that of Caleb, with whom he is so often coupled ; and Caleb was forty years old when sent to spy the land at the end of the first year after the Exodus, Josh. xiv. 7. We may, therefore, adopt the estimate of Josephus, who reckons the age of Joshua as forty-five at the time of the Exodus. This will agree well enough with the fact, that shortly after leaving Egypt, while still young enough to be 'minister' or 'servant of Moses,' Exod. xxiv. 13, he was old enough to command the host of Israel in the fight against Amalek, Exod. xvii. 9, 10." Undoubtedly we may suppose Joshua to have been about the same age as Caleb, but we are not bound to do so. It is probable that in selecting those who were to spy out the land, the qualities of strength, courage, energy, and resolution were considered of as much importance as the fact of a man's being forty years of age ; and those qualities would be as likely to be found in Joshua at twenty-five as at forty-five. If the authority of Josephus be relied upon to establish this assumption of Dr. Colenso's, it may be replied that Josephus lived fifteen centuries after the events to which he refers ; and further, "we are not here concerned with" Josephus, " but with the narrative in the Pentateuch itself and book of Joshua, and must abide by the data which they furnish."" I may observe, that the supposition that at the Exodus Joshua was twenty-five years of age, agrees better with the position assigned to him as "minister" of Moses, than the supposition that he was then forty-five ; and if it be urged that at twenty-five he was not " old enough to command the host of Israel in the fight against Amalek," I answer, that Alexander was only twenty-two when he fought at the Granicus ; Scipio was only twenty-four when appointed to the command in Spain ; Conde at Rocroi was only twenty- one ; and that Hannibal and Napoleon were each twenty-six years of age only when appointed, the one to be commander- in-chief of the Carthaginians, the other to the command of the arniv of Ttalv. NUMBER OF AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS. 97 Deducting from the whole period of 215 years between the migration into Egypt and the Exodus, the seventy years which Dr. Colenso conceives to have occurred between the former of these events and the birth of Telah, and further deducting from the result so obtained the forty-five years which he assigns as the age of Joshua at the Exodus, he arrives at the result " that, according to the chronicler, there must have been six complete generations in 100 years, which is hardly credible." But if we substitute 51 for 70, and 25 for 45, which we have above seen to be allowable, we have a period of 139 years instead of 1 00 for the occurrence of the six generations ; giving 23^ for the average length of a generation ; that is, we must suppose that for six successive generations, every person through whom descent is traced was born, on the average, when his father was twenty-three years and two months old : a conclusion which Dr. Colenso will not convince many people involves any " absolute impossibility," or any thing " certainly incredible," or any thing particularly unlikely. Dr. Colenso, however, has not done with this part of his argument. " According to the chronicler ' Elishama the son of Ammihud,' was the grandfather of Joshua. But ' Elishama the son of Ammihud," was himself the captain of the host of Ephraim, Num. ii. 18, about a year after his grandson, Joshua, had commanded the whole Hebrew force which fought at Amalek, Ex. xvii. 8 — 16, which also is hardly credible." The title captain of the host of Ephraim above quoted by Dr. Colenso, evidently points to the fact that Elishama was the chief ruler of the entire tribe of Ephraim ; and does not point to the fact that he was the acting commander-in-chief of the fighting men of the tribe.- To the same conclusion tends Num. i. 1 6, where Elishama, with the other chiefs, is described as prince of the tribe of his fathers. Such being the case, the supposition that .Joshua commanded the army of H 98 SOJOURNING OF THE ISRAET,1TES IN EGYPT. Israel against Amalek, while his grandfather Elishama was the chief ruler of the tribe of Ephraim, involves in it nothing more incredible than is involved in the statement contained in Herodotus, to the effect that, while Astyages sat upon the throne of Media, Cyrus his grandson led an army against him, and dethroned him. The great argument, however, by which Dr. Colenso pro- poses to meet the objection to his hypothesis derived from the Book of Chronicles, has yet to come. " The account of Joshua's descent in 1 Chron. vii. involves a palpable contradiction. Thus in ver. 24 we are told that Ephraim's daughter built two villages in the land of Canaan. If we suppose this to mean that the descendants of EphrainVs daughter, after the conquest in the time of Joshua, did this, yet in v. 22, 23 we have this most astonishing fact stated, that Ephraim himself, after the slaughter by the men of Gath of his descendants, in the seventh generation, ' mourned many days,' and then married again, and had a son, Beriah, who was the ancestor of Joshua y The "fact " here referred to would indeed be most astonish- ing if true ; but in truth no such fact is stated in the passage in Chronicles : neither is there to be found there the slightest reference to Ephraim's having married again. As the matter is one of considerable importance on account of the light which it throws on these genealogies, the obscurity of which is generally admitted, I shall give the passage at considerable length. *' And the sons of Ephraim ; Shuthelah, and Bered his son, and Tahath his son, and Eladah his son, and Tahath his son, and Zabad his son, and Shuthelah his son, and Ezer^ and Elead^ whom the men of Gath who were born in that land slew, because they came down to take away their cattle. And Ephraim their father mourned many days, and his bre- thren came to comfort him. And when he went in to his wife, she conceived, and bare a son, and lie called his name Beriah, because it went evil with his house. (And his daughter was NUMBER OF AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS. 99 Sherah, who built Beth-horon the nether, and the upper, and Uzzen-sherah), and Rephah was his son ;" and then follows the genealogy of Joshua above quoted, in the reverse form from Dr. Colenso. The genealogies here indicated will be understood most readily when thrown into the following form : — Ephraim I Bered I Tahath I Eladah I Tahath I Zabad I Shuthelah. Ezer, whom the men of Gath slew. Elead, whom the men of Gath slew. Beiiah I Rephah I Resheph I Telah I Tahan ^ I Ammihud Elisharaa I- Non i Jehoshuah. It thus appears that Ephraim had four sons, to wit, Shuthelah, Ezer, Elead, and Beriah ; the second and third of whom were killed by the men of Gath in the manner described. That Ezer and Elead were the sons of Ephraim in the strict sense appears clearly from the following considera- tions. 1. The expression "Ephraim their father" must clearly apply to them. 2. If the names Ezer and Elead are not governed by the expression " the sons of Ephraim " which commences the passage, the occurrence of these names in the position in which they are found is wholly unintelligible, as there is no pretence for supposing that the persons indicated were sons of Shuthelah, or Zabad, whose names occur imme- diately before theirs ®. ^ If marks of parenthesis had been in use at the time the books of Chro- nicles were written, all the names which occur between those of the first Shu- H 2 100 SOJOUR^JING OF THE ISRAELITES IN EGYPT. The fact adverted to by Dr. Colenso, that Beriah " is not named at all among the sons of Ephraira in the list given in Num. xxvi. 35," is to be explained upon the principle that the names there given do not refer to the sons of Ephraim strictly so called, but to those of his descendants who became heads of families. Passing by for the moment the numberless inconsistencies and extravagances which have been indicated as involved in Dr. Colenso's mode of calculating the number of the descend- ants of Jacob at the time of the Exodus, the results of this chapter may be summed up as follows : — 1 . Dr. Colenso having endeavoured to prove his hypothesis that the male adult Israelites at the Exodus consisted solely of the descendants in the fourth generation of the sons of Jacob, by adducing from various parts of the Old Testament the genealogies of twelve persons, all of whom he alleges to have been living at the time of the Exodus ; and which genealogies, he alleges, include all those deducible from the Old Testament bearing upon the case which are entitled to any degree of credit ; it has been shown that ten out of these twelve genealogies wholly fail to support his argument, which rests solely on the genealogy of the brothers Moses and Aaron. 2. The Book of Chronicles furnishing us with what appears to be a perfect pedigree of one of the principal actors in the IMosaic narrative, and which would make it appear that that person, so far from being in the fourth, was in the tenth gene- ration from a son of Jacob ; and Dr. Colenso having under- taken to prove that this pedigree is entirely unreliable ; it has been shown that he has wholly failed in this attempt ; and that the pedigree of Joshua contained in the first Book of Chronicles, together with the argument which may be deduced thelah and Ezer in the passage in question would, doubtless, have been included within brackets ; a circum- stance which would have conduced materially to the intelligibility of the passage. NUMBER OF AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS. 101 from it, in contradiction of Dr. Colenso'^s hypothesis, not- withstanding his efforts to the contrary, remains absolutely intact \ 1 I shall hereafter endeavour to point out what I regard as the proper mode 6i viewing the increase of the people of Israel at the period of the Exodus. I may here advert, however, to a point raised by Dr. Colenso in discussing this part of his subject. " It is certainly strange that, among all the sixty-nine children and grand- children and great-grandchildren of Jacob, who went down with him into Egypt, there should be only one daughter mentioned, and one grand- daughter," This " is only another in- dication of the unhistorical character of the whole account." P. 102, 10.*?. The circumstance of having twelve sons and only one daughter is one which probably at this moment affects many parents in England. The appa- rent paucity of Jacob's granddaughters deserves more attention. Dr. Colenso's inference in reference to this point is entirely derived from Gen. xlvi. 26, which runs thus : " All the souls that came with Jacob into Egypt, which came out of his loins, besides Jacob's sons' wives, all the souls were threescore and six." Now, since there is no reason to sup- pose that any of Jacob's sons married his sister, it is evident that the wives of Jacob's sons, taking that word in the strict sense, did not come out of Jacob's loins : hence it is evident that there would be no propriety in the insertion in the above verse of the reservation, " besides Jacob's sons' wives," unless by the term " sons' wives " were meant the wives of Jacob's male descendants generally, or, in other words, of his grandsons. Not only would this be in conformity with the frequent usage already so often explained, but it is in exact accordance with the phraseology by which we are introduced to the enumeration of Jacob's descendants which occurs in this chapter, and which runs thus : " These are the names of the chil- dren of Israel, which came into Egypt, Jacob and his S07is " (v. 8). After which follows a list of names of sons and grandsons ; including also a daughter and granddaughter. We need have no hesitation, therefore, in concluding that by the phrase " Jacob's sons' wives " are signified grand- daughters of Jacob, who were married to their cousins. It may very well have happened, moreover, that granddaughters of Jacob had become connected in marriage with the progeny of Esau, or with others of the descendants or relatives of Abra- ham, under which circumstances they would naturally have remained in Syria with their husbands. The objection brought forward by Dr. Colenso on this head therefore seems entirely devoid of weight. CHAPTER XII. THE DANITES AND LEVITES AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS- (Colenso, pp. 107—112.) Evidently not a little elated by the supposed success of his previous efforts, Dr. Colenso, in his chapter on the Danites and Levites, pursues still further the consequences of his valuable discovery as to the true mode of calculating the numbers of the descendants of Jacob at the time of the Exodus. I. " When, however, we go on further to examine into the details of this large number of male adults, the results will be found yet more extravagant. Thus Dan in the first genera- tion has one son, Hushim, Gen. xlvi. 23 : and that he had no more born to him in the land of Egypt, and therefore had onlt/ one son, appears from Num. xxvi. 42, where the sons of Dan consist of only one family ;" and then, applying his formula of the four generations. Dr. Colenso reckons that, at the Exodus, Dan " would have had twenty-seven warriors descended from him, instead of 62,700 as they are numbered in Num. ii. 26 ;" and, following to its legitimate conse- quences this absurd result, he arrives at the conclusion that, in order to have had this latter number born to him, " Dan''s one son, and each of his sons and grandsons, must have had about eighty children of both sexes."" THE DANITES AND LEVITES, &C. 103 1. Now let us assume foi' the moment that Hushim, who came with Jacob into Egypt, was Dan's only son, and sup- pose — and since Dr. Colenso cannot prove that any " abso- lute impossibility" or any thing "certainly incredible" is involved in the hypothesis, we are entitled to assume that such may have been the case — suppose that Hushim was married when Jacob came into Egypt, and that he had six sons born to him successively in six consecutive years from that date. Suppose further, that these sons of Hushim and their descendants multiphed during the next 200 years some- what less rapidly than Ephraim's immediate descendants are related to have done ; that is, for example, instead of taking 26-1- years, take 30 years for the average length of their generations ; then at the end of 60 years from the birth of Hushini"'s youngest san, there would be, on Dr. Colenso''s principle of 4| sons to each father, about 120 sons in exist- ence ; at the end of a second period of 60 years there would be about 2400 sons in existence ; and at the end of a third period of 60 years, that is, at the end of J 86 years from the arrival of Jacob in Egypt, there would be about 48,000 such sons in existence. All of these sons who survived till the year after the Exodus, when the first numbering took place, would be adult males, of the tribe of Dan^ of twenty years old and upwards. If this number of 48,000 seem too much below the number of 62,700 stated in the first chapter of the book of Numbers, we have only to increase the number of genera- tions by one ; that is, we have only to suppose the rate of increase to have been as rapid as it was in the case of the first four generations of the descendants of Joseph ; aijd we shall have many more adults in excess of, than on the other principle of calculation we should have in defect from, the requisite number, I do not by any means propose the above method as the most satisfactory mode of accounting for the great increase in the number of the Israelites ; but, as many persons who are not such adepts in arithmetic as Dr. Colenso are apt to 104 THE DANITES AND LEVITES be scared by such calculations as he has thought proper to present to us, I have deemed it desirable to show how easy it is to extemporize an argument in favour of the Mosaic account to the full as vraisemhlahle as that which he has adduced against it. 2. Leaving, however, for the present, this .part of the subject, I observe, with reference to the question whether Dan had or not more sons than one, that, if the fact of only one family of Danites being mentioned in Num. xxvi. proves that- he never had more than one son ; the fact that in the same chapter only five families of Simeonites are mentioned would prove that Simeon had never more than five sons ; the fact that only seven families of the tribe of Benjamin are mentioned, of whom two derived their designation from grand- children or remoter descendants, would prove that Benjamin had never more than five sons ; and the fact that only five families of the tribe of Asher are mentioned, of whom two were derived from grandchildren or remoter descendants, would prove that Asher had never more than three sons ; whereas we know from Gen. xlvi. that, when Jacob went into Egypt, Simeon had six sons living, Benjamin had ten sons living, and Asher four sc«is living. The twenty-sixth chapter of Numbers proves conclusively that after the migration into Egypt, not one of the sons of Jacob gave birth to a son who became the head of a family which acquired its designation from his name, but it proves nothing more. If Dan or any other of the twelve patriarchs had sons born to him after the migration into Egypt, those sons, like such of the sons of Simeon, Benjamin, and Asher, as are passed over in Num. xxvi., might have married and become adopted into other tribes or families ; or, they and their descendants might have been absorbed into other families of their brethren ; somewhat in the manner indicated in a verse quoted by Dr. Colenso, " And Jahath was the chief, and Zizah was the second ; but Jacob and Beriah had not manv AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS. 105 sons, and therefore they were in one reckoning according to their father's house." The principle upon which the faraiHes enumerated in Num. xxvi. were grouped together is one of great obscurity. The reference there made to the famiUes of Levi (see ver. 58), which is much more succinct than is given any where else in the Old Testament, shows that the mode of enumeration, as regards that family at any rate, was not invariable. It will be found in the case of all the tribes except Levi, Joseph, and Benjamin, that not one of the " families " enumerated in this chapter is derived from any descendant of Jacob born after the migration into Egypt. It will be found also, that each of the four great-grandsons of Jacob who are stated in Gen. xlvi. to have been born before the migration, gave his name to one of the families enumerated in Num. xxvi. ; while, except in the case of descendants of Levi, Joseph, and Ben- jamin, not a single other great-grandson of Jacob gave his name to one of those families, although by far the greater number of Jacob's great-grandsons must have been born after the period in question. The cases excepted were evidently exceptional in their nature ; that of Levi, on account of the peculiar position and duties destined for his descendants ; the other two, on account of the power and influence of Joseph, and of the interest which he may be supposed to have felt in the descendants of his brother Benjamin \ It would seem, indeed, as if, owing to some circumstance connected with the migration into Egypt, the nature of which it is impossible now to guess at, the fact of being born before the migration was, in general, an indispensable qualifi- cation for becoming the head of a family. In those cases in which an exception to this rule occurs it seems impossible now to assign, otherwise than by conjecture, the principle 1 That the grouping into families of the descendants of Joseph was subject to very special influences will be evi. dent from the consideration of ver. 28 — 37 ; and particularly of that portion of the account referring to the families of Manasseh the firstborn. 106 THE DANITES AND LEVITES upon which the exception is founded. Thus, while among the nine tribes not included in the exception, the heads of all the families were grandsons and great-grandsons of Jacob ; i. e. those in the second and third generations from Jacob who were born before the migration ; we find the families of the excepted tribes taking their designations, not merely from those in the second generation from Jacob born before the migration, but also from those born after the migration in the third, fourth, fifth, or probably even more remote generations from Jacob. Hence the supposition that Dan or others of the twelve patriarchs had sons born unto them after the migration, whose descendants swelled the numbers of the Israelites at the Exodus, although those sons did not become heads of fami- lies, is not so improbable as at first sight might appear, or as Dr. Oolenso would have us believe "'. 3. To conclude this matter of the tribe of Dan, I observe that Dan may have made up for his deficiency in sons by a superabundance of daughters born after the migration into Egypt ; and these daughters may have intermarried with the sons of other tribes, or with servants, or with Egyptians, and so have given rise to races of descendants, who, being adopted into the tribe of Dan, — in the same manner as Jair became adopted - From Num. xxvi. ^0, 31, as ren- dered in the English version, it appears that the family of the Asrielites, de- scended from Asriel, were reckoned among " the sons of Gileud :" whereas, from 1 Chron. vii. 14, it would appear that " Ashriel " was one of the sons of Manasseh, and therefore was an uncle of Gilead. Yet the account in Chronicles equally recognizes the fact of the Ash- futo the family of Gilead, and that the rest of the family were considered as participating in the same relationship as their chief. I may here remark, that there is nothing in the narrative to forbid our supposing the twelve patriarchs to have had, after the migration, any possible number of daughters : further than this, that, if it could be shown posi- rielites being "the sons of Gilead" 1 ti\ely that not one of them had a son (see V. 17). I conceive the explanation of this apparent discrepancy to consist in the fact, that the head of the ori- ginally independent family of Ash- rielites became adopted by marriage born after the migration, it would be inconsistent with that fact to suppose that they had collectively a large num- ber of daughters. AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS. 107 or engrafted into the tribe of Manasseh, — would swell the number of the former tribe ; at the same time that, being included in the family of the Shuhamites ^ they would not add to the number of the families ; so that, on the whole, this case of the tribe of Dan may be considered to present no difficulty other than that general difficulty which pertains to the subject at large. II. I have elsewhere remarked that where in the genealogy contained in Exod. vi. we find the phrase "the sons of" a person, followed by a list of names, then, except in the case of Levi''s three sons, Gershom, Kohath, and Merari, and in those other cases in which independent evidence to the con- trary may be forthcoming, we cannot rely on the word " sons " meaning sons in the strict sense, rather than grandsons or more remote descendants. In the chapter of Dr. Colenso's work now under considera- tion, he not merely takes for granted that wherever sons are mentioned, sons in the strict sense are meant, but that the names following each such phrase as "the sons of' a person include all the sons of that person, and even goes so far as to construe the allegation, that Eleazar''s wife Putiel " bare him Phinehas," into an allegation that Eleazar had never any other son besides Phinehas I It is unnecessary that I should here recapitulate the argu- ment by which I have before shown that this genealogy of the family of Levi, while it can be relied on for showing, more or less closely, the connexion between persons and families actually existing or well known at the time the account was written, cannot be relied upon as giving us, and that it cannot be regarded as professing to give us, all the links in the chain of descent; a circumstance which entirely disposes of the absurd calculations made by Dr. Colenso in his 108th and 109th pages, for the purpose of showing that the male Levites at the Exodus cannot have been more than " forty-eight, or There is no trace of any family deriving its designation from a female ]08 THE DANITES AND LEVITES rather forty- four" in number, and which are based entirely on the assumption that the word " sons" throughout the pas- sage in question means sons in the strict sense. To the arguments before advanced upon the subject, how- ever, I may add the following. 1. In Num. xxvi. 58, the families of Levi are stated as five ; namely, Libnites, Hebronites, Mahlites, Mushites, and Korath- ites ; as against the Libnites, Shimites, Amramites, Izeharites, Hebronites, Uzzielites, Mahlites, and Mushites, — eight in all, — which are the Levite families enumerated in Num. iii. It thus appears, conclusively, that the family of Shinii was occasionally considered as included in the family of Libni ; at the same time that the four families spoken of in Exod. vi. and Num. iii. of Amram, Tzehar, Hebron, and Uzziel, were occasionally compressed into the two families of Hebronites and Korathites, the latter of whom, it appears conclusively, did not derive their designation from any son (in the strict sense) of Kohath. But if the family of Libni could be re- garded as including the family of Shimi, why should not the family of Shimi itself be considered as made up of other families whose names have not been handed down to us ? The same remark applies to the other families commemorated in Exod. vi. and Num. iii. except as to the three great divisions of Gershonites, Kohathites, and IVIerarites, and the family of Amram (the latter of which we are entitled to except for rea- sons before specified) ; hence on this ground also we may see that a calculation based on the assumption that Libni and Shimi were the sons in the strict sense, and the only sons of Gershom, and on other like assumptions, must fall to the ground *. * It is curious that in 1 Chron. xxiii. or Libni (i. e. Laadanites, or Libnites) 7, where one of the divisions of the being occasionally put for the whole of Gershonites takes its designation from the Gershonites is plainly intimated (see Laadan (from which it does not follow , v. 9). that Laadan and Libni were different ! I may here remark that, as it is clear names for one and the same person), Korah was at the head of one of the the fact of the familv of Laadan two divisions in which in Num. xxvi. AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS. 109 2. In 1 Chron. vi. 42, 43, Shimei is spoken of as " the son of Jahath, the son of Gershom, the son of Levi."" Yet in the same chapter, v. 17, Libni and Shimei are spoken of as "the sons of Gershom," as Shimei no doubt was, in a sense familiar to the Israelites, but not in the strict sense. We have thus in Jahath one of the missing links which we have asserted to exist. S. In ver. 22 of the same chapter Amminadab is spoken of as one of "• the sons of Kohath,'" though no son of Kohath of that name occurs in Exod. vi. or Num. iii. Here also may be another missing link. It is true that this case is less conclusive than the preceding, inasmuch as, construing son in the strict sense, Korah would still be the grandson of Kohath, in like manner as a similar construction of Exod. vi. would make him out to be ; and Amminadab may be taken to be another name for Izhar. But against this is the fact that in Exodus, Numbers, in other parts of this book of Chronicles, and in the chapter before us (three times over, vv. 2, 18, 38) Izhar is included among the sons of Kohath, and the name of Amminadab, so far as I am aware, occurs as such son nowhere but in this 22nd verse. The explanation I would propose, namely, that there was more than one link between Korah and Kohath, and that the writer in Chronicles, for some reason now inscrutable, chose in this passage to trace the connexion in a different manner from that ordinarily adopted, seems, to say the least of it, as probable as any other \ the Levites are classed : if we suppose, as seems natural, that Moses and Aaron were the heads of the other division, that, namely, of the He- bronites, we seem to have a clue to the secret motives which led to the events commemorated in Num. xvi. * I may remark that the principal object of the genealogy in Exod. vi. is to set forth the extraction and position among their brethren of the family of Aaron. The sons of Reuben and Simeon are first noticed, for the sake of showing the position of the tribes and families of Levi among the tribes and families of Israel ; but, that being done by the citation of the tribes and families of Reuben and Simeon, who were older than Levi, those of his younger brethren are entirely omitted. In the same way the pedigree of Moses and Aaron and of the first -priests is 110 THE DANITES AND LEVITES III. Dr. Colenso is very difficult to please about the in- crease of the Levites. Up to the Exodus the Mosaic ac- count makes the increase much too great for him, but after the Exodus the increase is far too little. At the first census, Num. iii. 39, the number of Levite males from a month old and upwards was 22,000, At the second census. Num. xxvi. 62, the number was only 23,000, which "involves a great inconsistency."" And why ? Because " the population of England increases at the rate of about twenty-three per cent, in ten years," and " upon the same scale" the Levites "should have increased in ten years to 27,060, in the next ten years to 38,284, in the next ten to 40,939, and in the last eight to 48,471, instead of which, the number of this favoured tribe is given only at 23,000. In other words, they should have increased by more than 26,000, but they are represented as increased by only 1000." The absurdity of this paragraph is so immeasurable, that I can only account for its appearance by the supposition that the author wrote it in his sleep, and by some extra- ordinary oversight overlooked it during the revision of his work. For the benefit of those persons to whom it does not appear absurd on the face of it to compare the increase of an Asiatic tribe, placed in the extraordinary circumstances in which the Israelites were placed during the wanderings in the desert, with the increase in the population of England and Wales between the years 185 1 and 1861, I may observe that it is the universal opinion of all those who have given attention to the subject, that the population of these islands was, during many ages, to the full as stationary as the numbers of the tribe of given with great particularity. Phi- nehas is singled out for mention, not because he was the only son of Eleazar, but from his high position at the time the record was written ; viz. high priest infuturo, if not in esse. A minor ob- ject, and one which is carried out much less completely, appears to have been to explain the extraction of the rival family of Korah. AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS. Ill Levi are stated to have been during the interval between the two censuses commemorated in the book of Numbers '. IV. The argument subsequently proposed by Dr. Colenso, to the effect that in the period during which Levi increased only from 22,000 to 23,000, the adults of Manasseh increased from 32,000 to 52,700, is deserving of more consideration. To this it may be answered, however, that the habits and mode of life of the Levites may be presumed to have been utterly different from those of the ISIanassites. Moreover, among a race in which, as we have seen, adoption was prac- tised, large transfers might in that way have been made from one tribe to another. The superior wealth and position which we may naturally attribute to "the firstborn of Joseph" would give adequate motive for such transference in the case of the tribe of Manasseh. INIoreover, either the tribe of Manasseh or the family of Gilead (which seems to have included, in some sense or other, the whole or nearly the whole tribe) appears to have included the chief among the fighting men (Josh. xvii. 1), and so may have attracted many to its standards. Supposing a man of another tribe to have married an heiress of the house of Manasseh, it is quite pos- sible that descendants of the marriage might elect to take their designation from Manasseh rather than from the tribe to which their male ancestor belonged, in the same way as the descendants of Segub and Jair appear to have done ; the latter, as already has been shown, being derived in the male line from the house of Judah : and this might very well have happened at a considerable distance of time, l^'or instance, it may very well have happened that both Segub and Jair may have chosen to designate themselves as belong- ing to the house of Judah ; and that their descendants may not have chosen to alter this designation until long after- 8 If Dr. Colenso is unmoved by the above considerations, I would recom- mend him to exercise his arithmetical talent in calculating, upon the assump- tion of a uniform increase of 23 per cent, every ten years, the population of England and Wales at the date of the Conquest. 112 THE DANITES AND LEVITES wards, when they came to be very numerous ; and thus we may see how large bodies of men may have been transferred simultaneously from one tribe to another. Regarded in this point of view, I cannot see that the vary- ing rate of increase of the different tribes, as shown by a comparison of the numbers at the two censuses, affords the slightest argument against the truth of the narrative. V. Adopting " the certain historical datum " of the popu- lation of England and Wales having increased at the rate of 23 per cent, in ten years. Dr. Colenso arrives at the con- clusion that " the fifty-one males in Gen. xlvi. would only have increased in 215 years to 4375." 1. Adopting a "certain" other "historical datum," the United States' census of 1790 showed a white population of 3,164,148 : the census of 1800 made the number of the white population 4,31 2,841 \ This gives an increase of 36*3 per cent, in ten years, — a rate at which the population would double itself in 22| years. By a comparison of births and deaths, Humboldt calcu- lated that if the order of nature were not interrupted by extraordinary disturbing causes, the population of New Spain ought to double itself every nineteen years*; that is, I pre- sume, assuming the people to be well off, having plenty of food, and adequate clothing and shelter, and assuming exemption from wars and epidemics. Taking nineteen and a half years as the period of doubling, we should have exactly eleven such periods during the 215 years of the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt. Hence the 51 grandsons of Jacob, with the 51 wives we may assume them to have had (and who may be assumed to have been in existence at this time, since their husbands were so), without any aid from without, might have given rise to a total popu- ^ The emigration during the interval was infinitesimal. ^ I take the above figures from the Art. Population, Encyc. Brit., last edition. AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS. 113 lation of 102 x 2'\ or 208,856; i. e. to 104.,428 males, in- stead ef the 4375, to which Dr. Colenso would bind us'. 2. Dr. Colenso considers that the whole of the 51 wives of Jacob''s 51 grandsons must have been drawn from other sources than the descendants of Jacob. Let us assume that something of this kind occurred during the first six of the eleven periods of doubling between the migration into Egypt and the Exodus ; that is, let us assume that half the sons derived their wives from without in a manner hereinafter to be considered, and that half the daughters derived their husbands from without in a similar manner. Taking Jacob's 51 grandsons and their 51 wives as the base from which the increase is to be calculated, at the end of the first of the eleven periods of doubling, the numbers would have increased up to 204 ; and if we suppose that by marriage of sons and daughters of the race with those out of the race this number was raised one-half, the base from which the increase in the second period of doubling would have to be calculated would be 306. At the end of the second period of doubhng, these 306 would have increased up to 612; and supposing an infusion of males and females to have been imported into the body, in the manner before referred to, the base to be calculated from, for the third period of doubling, w^ould be 918. In a similar manner the base for calculation for the fourth period would be 2754 ; for the fifth period would be 8262 ; for ih^ sixth period would be 24,786; for the seventh period would be 74,358. That is, abandoning from henceforth all infusion of fresh blood, the number at the end of the seventh ^ It is obvious that we should be fully justified in including in the base from which the increase is calculated, the whole of the Israelite community, including Jacob himself and the twelve patriarchs. This would raise the base (assuming half the wives of the patri- archs to have been living at the mi- gration) to 70+51 4-C; and would in- crease the above estimate in the ratio of 102 : 127. 114 THE DANITES AND LEVITES period would be 148,716; and at the end of the eleventh period, i. e. 215 years after the migration, the numbers would be 168,716 x 2\ or 2,876,256'. VI. But from what sources external to the tribe could this infusion of fresh blood have been obtained ? It might have been obtained from — 1 . The connexions of the race in Syria. 2. The tribes of the desert, from one of whom Moses took his wife. 3. The Egyptians'. 4. The hereditary servants of Jacob and his descendants. With regard to the first three of these sources, it may be observed that the Israelites being prosperous and well to do, as we have every reason to believe that they were up to the time of the "king who knew not Joseph," there would be inducement enough to those of other races, whether male or female, to form alliances with them. With regard to the hereditary servants of the Israelites, it may be remarked that, whatever the exact nature of the restraints to which they were subject, it is probable that their bonds sat more lightly upon them than in any case of slavery of which we have any intimate knowledge. Independently of the numerous minute indications to this effect contained in the history of thte early patriarchs, I ' ground the foregoing conclusion on two facts related in the history of Abraham ; the first being the circumstance of his entrusting his servants with arms (Gen. xiv. 14), the second consisting in the peculiar relationship in which Eliezer stood to Abraham before the birth of Isaac, and which was such, that, though " born in " his " house," he appears to have had a claim, as of right, to become Abraham's heir, Gen. xv. 2, 3. ' The whole number of persons im- ported by marriage from sources ex- ternal to the race of Israel on the above hypothesis would be, 51 + I02+H06+918+2754-f8262 + 24,780, making up the very moderate total of :<7,1C!). i '^ In 1 Chron. ii. 34 is related a re- markable instance of this : an heiress of one of the families, suflficicntly illus- trious to have its genealogy recorded in the book of Chronicles, being re- lated to have married one who was a " servant " as well as an Egyptian. AT THE TIME OF THE EXODUS. 115 That the marriage of a free man or woman with a " ser- vant ""' was a connexion which could be contemplated without disgust, is plain from the case cited in the preceding note. That Jacob came into Egypt with a great retinue of ser- vants, male and female, numbered certainly by hundreds, and possibly by thousands, I think there cannot be the shadow of a doubt. Unfortunately, Dr. Colenso holds an entirely opposite opinion. According to him, "there is no word or indication of any such a cortege having accompanied Jacob into Egypt " (p. 114). People, no doubt, will differ as to what are the " indica- tions'' with regard to this point. Possibly, if it were referred to the verdict of a jury composed of Sunday-school children, the decision might be in Dr. Colenso's favour. It must be remembered, however, that the Mosaic narrative was originally prepared for the use of a Syrian tribe who existed thousands of years ago, the whole train of whose associations must have been entirely different from our own, and who must habitually have been imbued with ideas respecting the condition of their ancestors which are much less palpable to our minds. It would undoubtedly never cross the mind of any Is- raelite reader of the book of Genesis that their forefather Jacob, from- whom the great sovereign of Egypt conde- scended to accept a blessing, together with the five sons to whom that monarch gave a personal reception, were mere herdsmen, without servants or retinue. Jacob, at this epoch, would undoubtedly present himself to the minds of his descend- ants as what the narrative represents him, a great pastoral chief. Some of the " indications " to this effect contained in the narrative are the following : Abraham had 318 trained servants who fought with him in battle. Gen. xiv. 14. Isaac " waxed great .... and grew until he became very great, for he had possession of flocks, and possession of herds, and great store of servants,'' Gen. xxvi. 13, 14. i2 1 ] 6 THE DANITES AND LEVITES Jacob was the heir to the greater part of Isaac's wealth, and before he had succeeded to the smallest portion of his future inheritance, he had independently acquired "much cattle, and maidservants, and menservants, and camels, and asses." Gen. xxx. 43. From the call of Abraham till the era of the king " who knew not Joseph," uninterrupted prosperity appears to have been the characteristic of the race. The narrative contains not the slightest "word or indication" of any check to this prosperity, much less of any succession of previous ill-fortune, by which Jacob had become so far impoverished before coming into Egypt, as to have such flocks and herds only as his grandchildren and his sons' wives were competent to look after. There is nothing in the narrative, in short, to indicate that Jacob, at the time of his coming into Egypt, was other than what his father had been before him ; " very great, with pos- session of flocks and herds, and great store of servants." But, according to Dr. Colenso, " there is no sign even in Gen. xxxii. xxxiii., where Jacob meets with his brother Esau, of his having any such a body of servants." If the list of animals included in the present made to Esau, Gen. xxxii. 14, &c., and the number of attendants requisite to conduct them, be carefully considered, and it be at the same time borne in mind, that this was merely a selection " of what came to Jacob's hand," I apprehend that he will be thought a bold man who should attempt to deduce an argu- ment against the magnitude of Jacob's retinue from this passage. Moreover, at this time Jacob had not come into his paternal inheritance. " .... If he [Jacob] had so many at his command, it is hardly likely that he would have sent his darling Joseph, at seventeen years of age, to go, all alone and unattended, wan- dering about upon the veldt in search of his brethren." But it is not an " absolute impossibility," or "certainly incredible" that Jacob should have done so. He himself was AT THE TIME OF THE EXOUUS. 117 sent to Haran — a much longer journey — alone, though no doubt at a more advanced age. At the same time, I must observe that it does not follow that because Joseph was seventeen when "feeding the flock with his brethren, .... with the sons of Bilhah and with the sons of Zilpah .... and brought unto his -father their evil report," therefore he was only seventeen when he was sent to Shechem. That a considerable time was occupied by the events related in Gen. xxxvii, is obvious ; whether to be reck- oned by weeks, months, or years it is impossible now to say. For any thing that appears in the narrative, however, Joseph may have been five-and-twenty instead of seventeen when he was sold into Egypt. It is not certain^ moreover, that Joseph did go unattended to seek his brethren at Shechem. If he had an escort, to dismiss the escort when he reached his brethren would be a natural proceeding. If the escort remained, the nature of the occupations in which they were all engaged would make it easy for Joseph's brethren to get the attendants out of the way. " Nothing is said about any of these servants coming down with the sons of Jacob to buy corn in Egypt, rather, the whole story implies the contrary ; in fact, their eleven sacks would have held but a very scanty supply of food for one year of so many starving ''thousands'^.'''''' It is possible that eleven sacks of corn would form a very inadequate twelvemonth's consumption, not merely for " starving thousands,'"' but even for a household consisting of sixty-seven persons, without counting the wives of Jacob« sons and grandsons, more particularly if the provender of the asses upon the way had to he furnished from the eleven sacks. Gen. xlii. 27. I do not find, however, any statement that ^ The number here spoken of, viz. " thousands," is taken by Dr. Colenso from Kurtz, and is unnecessarily large for our purpose, though it may very well be that it is correctly applied. 118 THE DANITES AND LEYITES the corn carried out of Eg'jpt by Jacob's sons was intended for a twelvemonth's consumption. If the fact were otherwise, the difficulty would be overcome by supposing that there was a train of animals consisting of a much greater number than eleven. As confirmatory of this view, it will be observed that the discovery of the returned money was made upon the return journey by only one of the brothers, Gen. xlii. 27; that the money of all the others had been likewise returned was not discovered till their arrival at home (ver. 35), when naturally all the sacks would be emptied. If there were only eleven sacks, and each man gave his ass provender (and if one ass required provender there is every reason to sup- pose that all the others would do so), we should have expected each, or at any rate, more than one, would have discovered his money at the same time, or at any rate during the journey. But, " The flocks and herds did not absolutely require any ' ser- vants ' to tend them in the absence of Jacob's sons, since there remained at home with the patriarch himself his thirty- nine children and grandchildren, as well as his sons' wives." If Dr. Colenso will inform us what the number of the flocks and herds was, we shall be better able to form an opinion as' to whether Jacob's grandchildren and his sons' wives were competent to look after them. Has he taken the opinion of any of his '"experienced sheepmasters " in Australia upon the subject? or what other authority has he to cite with regard to it ? Moreover, what does he suppose to have been the age of the grandchildren upon whom, with the women, during the absence in Egypt of Jacob's sons, the whole care must have fallen ? In our expose of his scheme of the fourth generation we have supposed that they were all born in the year of the descent into Egypt. If it is to be supposed that they were then adults, or quasi-adults, the absurdities shown to flow from that scheme will be considerably enhanced. VII. We have above supposed that many of the descend- ants of the servants whom Jacob brought with him into AT THE TIME OF THE EXOUUS. 119 Egypt, became engrafted by marriage into the stock of the Israelites. The question here arises, Were all the descendants of Jacob's servants thus engrafted? and if this be answered in the negative, as involving too high a degree of improbability, it may further be asked, What became of those of the descendants of servants in whose veins not a drop of the blood of Jacob flowed? Either they must all have fallen away from the Israelites, or, remaining with the Israelites, they must have been circumcised, and have formed part of the nation. It is evident that the rite of circumcision enjoined with regard to the servants was not a punishment inflicted, but a benefit conferred. In virtue of it they must have been entitled to consider themselves in certain respects (though in what respects it may now be difficult to say with perfect pre- cision), as participating in the benefits of God's covenant with Abraham. If "the children of the promise" were tp be " counted for the seed," surely these had fully as much title to be so. Whatever the rights which circumcision gave to the persons in the condition we are now considering, it would be wholly out of the power of the Israelites by blood, on leaving Egypt, to abandon them without their consent, even if self-interest had allowed of such a proceeding. Whether the injunctions with regard to the year of Jubilee are sufficient to prove that shortly after entering the promised land hereditary servitude ceased to exist, except in those cases where it was voluntarily re-imposed, I will not take upon me to decide, but that it existed in the wilderness I consider to be clear from the following passage : " Ye stand this day all- of you before the Lord your God ; your captains of your tribes, your elders, and your officers, with all the men of Israel, your little ones, your wives, and thy stranger that is in thy camp, from the heicer of thy wood unto the draicer of thy icater ; that thou shouldest enter into cove- nant with the Lord thy God ... . that he may establish thee 120 THK DANITES AND LEVITES, to-day for a people unto himself, and that he may be unto thee a God, as he hath said unto thee, and as he hath sworn unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob." Deut. xxix. 10— IS. From the considerations above submitted I arrive at the conclusion, that the circumcised descendants living at the Exodus of the servants Jacob took with him into Egypt, although not of the seed of Abraham according to the flesh, were in fact his children by adoption, and as such onigJit have heen included in the numberings given in the Pentateuch. From the passage last quoted I conceive it to be clear that they actually were so included *. * Dr. Colenso thinks "it is evident that the whole stress of the story is laid upon this very point, that Ihe mul- titude, — the males at all events,— who went out of Egypt at the Exodus, had come out of the loins of Jacob, and in- creased from the ' seventy souls,' who went down at first." When Dr. Colenso points out the passages upon which he relies as esta- blishing this position, it will be time enough to discuss it. CHAPTER XIII. THE NUMBER OF PRIESTS AT THE EXODUS COMPARED WITH THEIR DUTIES, AND WITH THE PROVISION MADE FOR THEM. (Oolenso, pp. 122—130.) In his twentieth chapter Dr. Oolenso gives a series of extracts from the books of Leviticus and Numbers, which it is not necessary to set forth here, showing the different duties of the priestly office. He next tells us that, for the performance of " all these multifarious duties during the forty years' sojourn in the wilderness .... there were only three'''' priests,— to wit, " Aaron (till his death) and his two sons Eleazar and Itha- mar :" with reference to which assertion I would observe that it rests solely upon the fact, that the only consecration of priests which we read of is the first which took place, viz. that of Aaron and his four sons Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar ; two of whom, namely, Nadab and Abihu, ap- pear to have died shortly after the ceremony. We are there- fore left to infer that, in Dr. Colenso's opinion, the fact of Moses having given an account of the ceremonies of the first consecration which took place entailed upon him the necessity of mentioning every subsequent consecration which occurred ; and this with such unerring certainty, that the mere fact of 122 THE NUMBER OF PRIESTS AT THE EXODUS none other being mentioned, makes it perfectly certain that none other occurred ; the idea, as it would appear, never having presented itself to the mind of this profound writer, that the ceremonies observed on this first consecration may have been set forth, not for the purpose of gratifying the curiosity of the historical student as to the number of priests in the desert, but in order that they might serve as a standard and model for all similar occasions. When the second consecration of the priests of the Israelites took place it is impossible now to say ; but, for any thing that appears in the narrative, it might have occurred the vei*y day after the first. According to Dr. Colenso, Phinehas could not have been consecrated a priest till after the Israelites had entered the promised land, although he must then have been upwards of forty years of age. Yet, for any thing that appears in the narrative, he may have been of the priestly age at the Exodus, and may have had many brothers and cousins in the same condition, every one of whom, together with himself, may have been consecrated within two years from that time. In estimating the number of these cousins, moreover, it is not necessary that we should confine ourselves to the offspring of Ithamar. They may have included sons of Nadab and Abihu, and of daughters of Aaron, — the absence of whose names from the different genealogies which occur in the Pentateuch and the book of Chronicles simply proves that they did not become heads of families. But assuming that there were only three priests in the wilderness, " How was it possible that those two or three men should have discharged all these duties for such a vast multitude? The single work of offering the double sacrifice for women after childbirth, must have utterly overpowered three priests, tliough engaged without cessation from morning to night. As we have seen, the births among two millions of people may be reckoned as, at least, 250 a day, for which, conse- COMPARED WITH THEIR DUTIES, &iC. 123 quently, 500 sacrifices (250 burnt-offerings and 250 sin-offer- ings) would have had to be offered daily. Looking at the directions in Lev. i. iv., we can scarcely allow less than five minutes for each sacrifice ; so that these sacrifices alone, if offered separately, would have taken 2500 minutes, or nearly forty-two hours," &c. — Oolenso, p. 123. To this I reply, that " the double sacrifice for women after childbirth" was commanded in the following terms : — "And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, saying. If a woman have conceived seed, and born a man child, then she shall be unclean seven days ; and in the eiglitli day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised And when the days of her puri- fying are fulfilled, for a son or for a daughter, she shall bring a lamb of the first year for a burnt-offering,'" &c. Lev, xii. 1, &c. From Josh. v. 5, we know with certainty that that part of the command relating to the circumcision was not intended to refer to the period of the sojourn in the desert, — though, nei- ther in the above passage in Leviticus, nor in any other part of the Pentateuch, is the slightest hint given to that effect. We have here, therefore, a clear example of the manner in which particulars of the highest importance to the contem- poraries of, or persons originally principally interested in cer- tain events, may be entirely omitted from the Scripture record of those events. The principle upon which such omission occurs is perfectly intelligible. For it is evident that, to the Israelites in the promised land, for whose benefit the Mosaic narrative was primarily intended, the point of importance was, not to know the regulations under which their forefathers subsisted in the desert, but the regulations which were intended for their own guidance. In the communication and perpetuation in a suffi- ciently authentic and authoritative manner of these latter, there might be, and no doubt was, a necessity for the employ- ment of an inspired penman ; but it is hardly conceivable 124 THE NUMBER OF PRIESTS AT THE EXODUS. &iC. that such should have been the case in the same degree with regard to the former ; that is, it is hardly conceivable that the inspired relation of regulations which had become obso- lete should have possessed the same fulness and particularity as the records of a living law. Hence before Dr. Colenso can establish his argument that the duties enjoined on the priests by the Mosaic law were so excessive as to be incapable of performance in the desert, and that the remuneration of the priests from the sacrifices was out of all rational proportion to the number of priests, he is bound to show with regard to every one of those duties and sacrifices to which his argument refers, either that it was specifically commanded to be performed in the desert, or that it was incapable of performance except in the desert ; since, as has been seen, the bare fact of a command appearing in the Mosaic law which was capable of being performed in the promised land, unaccompanied by any intimation as to whether its performance was meant to be limited to the promised land or not, is insufficient to show that it was not intended to be so limited ; the object of the Mosaic law being to give regula- tions for the future guidance of the people, and not to perpe- tuate the remembrance of regulations by which, under certain exceptional circumstances which could never recur, they had at a former time been governed. With i-egard to the objection which Dr. Colenso takes to the account of the number of cities allotted to the families of Aaron, as compared with the number of persons included in those families, I shall content myself with repeating my pro- test against his estimate of those numbers ; and with this further observation, namely, that the allotment of those cities to the children of Aaron does not imply that they exclusively occupied, or were competent to fill those cities; but simply that those cities were their patrimony, and were subject to their jurisdiction. CHAPTER XIV. THE PRIESTS AND THEIR DUTIES AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE PASSOVER. (Colenso, pp. 131—138.) In his twenty-first chapter Dr. Colenso puts forth the fol- lowing argument: — "We are told in 2 Chron. xxx. 16, XXXV. 11, that the people killed the passover, but "^ the priests sprinMed the hlood from their hands^ and- the Levites flayed them f ■" and as, at the Passover kept under Sinai, " we must suppose that 150,000 lambs were killed at one time," it follows that " each priest must have had to sprinkle the blood of 50,000 lambs in about two hours, — that is, at the rate of about /oMr hundred lambs every minute for two hours together.'''' In answer to this, I, I shall endeavour to point out, first, how far the pas- sages in Chronicles prove that, at the era to which they refer, the practice was what Dr. Colenso asserts it to have been. II. And I shall consider, secondly, how far the practice at the era referred to can be relied on to prove that such prac- tice originated in a command contained in the books of Moses, and uttered on Mount Sinai. I. 2 Chron. xxx. 15, 16 is to the following effect: "Then they killed the passover .... and the priests and Levites .... brought in the burnt-offerings into the house of the 126 THE PRIESTS AND THEIR DUTIES Lord. And they stood in their place in their manner according to the law of Moses the man of God ; the priests sprinkled the blood which they received from the hand of the Levites." It is obvious that no one can contend from this passage that at Hezekiah's first Passover the priests " sprinkled the blood ^ of the paschal lambs. We are told that the priests " sprinkled the blood " which they received from the Levites. What blood ? Clearly that which it was their duty to sprinkle, — namely, that of the " burnt-offerings " wherewith the priests and Levites had " sanctified themselves," and which had been " brouglit . . . into the house of the Lord." 2 Chron, xxxv. 9 — 11 proceeds as follows : — " Conaniah [and others] . . . chief of the Levites gave unto the Levites for passover offerings, five thousand small cattle and five hundred oxen. So the service was prepared, and the priests stood in their place, and the Levites in their courses according to the king''s commandment. And they killed the passover, and the priests sprinkled the blood from their hands, and the Levites flayed them." Comparing the latter part of this passage with the verses above quoted from the thirtieth chapter, there cannot be a doubt that the blood sprinkled by the priests was, not the blood of the passover, but of the " passover offerings,"'"' the "small cattle" and "oxen" previously referred .to. The intimation that the Levites flayed them is conclusive upon this point ; for we read in chap, xxix. 84, that the priests whose duty it was to flay the burnt-offering. Lev. i., " were too few, so that they could not flay all the burnt-offerings : wherefore their brethren the Levites did help them." Was it the duty of the priests or Levites to flay the passover ? Li order that the passage from Leviticus cited by Dr. Co- lenso, p. 132, may be applicable, it will be necessary to show that the passover was a peace-offering, or an offering in some sense ; and to show that the priest was not merely to AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE PASSOVER. 127 sprinkle the blood, but to burn the fat, — or, as Dr. Colenso prefers to call it, the suet,-=— on the altar. II. Supposing that, in the time of Hezekiah and Josiah, it was the practice to sprinkle the blood of the passover on the altar, (which I do not believe, and which the passages above cited certainly do not prove,) would that fact prove that the practice was enjoined by Moses? The only reason for as- suming that the practice under Hezekiah resulted from the command of Moses is, that " Hezekiah desired to have the Passover kept in such sort as it was written." But what proof have we that he completely succeeded in his desire ? When an intricate ceremonial is revived after long disuse, the diffi- culty of exactly following a written statement of directions is almost insurmountable, and is such as no persons would ex- pose themselves to who had other sources of enlightenment at their command. In the case before us there must have been many persons in existence — priests, Levites, and others — who had been present at passovers kept in earlier days. Supposing that in those earlier days the practice of " sprink- ling the blood " of the passover had crept in (as such prac- tices will ever creep in during the lapse of centuries), and suppose that the ancients who had witnessed those earlier passovers testified to the existence of such practice, would those who had only the written law to look to, and who, under the circumstances, may very well have had little fami- liarity with its contents, feel certain that the law contained no passage which, inferentially or otherwise, might be sup- posed to sanction it 1 Even if the practice was enjoined on the Israelites in the promised land, how, consistently with the principles laid down in the preceding chapter, will Dr. Colenso prove that it was binding on them in the desert ? It is evident, in fact, that the difficulty which Dr. Colenso sees " in this part of the story of the Pentateuch," and which he has satisfied himself " is as evident to Kurtz's eves as to " 128 THE PRIESTS AXD THEIR DUTIES, fcc. his own, is as baseless as all the other difficulties raised by Dr. Colenso which have been previously commented on \ • I may observe that the three cases from Chronicles above considered furnish of themselves a sufficient an- swer to Dr. Colenso's objection to the historical character of the Mosaic nar- rative founded on the alleged impossi- bility of carrying out, during the sojourn in the wilderness, certain in- junctions of the Mosaic Law ; it being evident from those cases that, where a command became imprac- ticable — as the flaying of the sacrifices, and the taking of the blood by the priests— as near an approximation to a literal execution of the command as circumstances admitted of was substi- tuted, and was accepted by God. CHAPTER XV. THE WAR ON MIDI AN — CONCLUSION. (Colenso, pp. 136— 188.) At the commencement of his chapter on the war on Midian, Dr. Colenso intimates that he has conchided his " prehminary work of pointing out some of the most prominent incon- sistencies and impossibilities which exist in the story of the Exodus," and conceives that he has " exhibited enough to relieve the mind from any superstitious dread, in pursuing further the consideration of this question." He also inti- mates his belief, " that the clergy and laity of England gene- rally" are as ignorant of "those facts" as he admits that he was himself, " till within a comparatively recent period." Whatever may have been Dr. Colenso's success in relieving his own mind from the dread, superstitious or otherwise, of which he speaks, it may be predicted with perfect certainty that he will not succeed in shaking that awe and reverence, with which the Christian community at large, and the clergy and laity of the Church of England in particular, have ever regarded the Pentateuch and the book of Joshua. Whatever other merits Dr. Colenso may possess, he is evi- dently extremely deficient in caution. He admits that, pre- 130 THE WAR ON MTDIAN. vious to his ordination, he stifled doubts which he could not satisfy ; and which, so far as appears, he took no particular pains to satisfy. With his mind thus half made up, he under- took the vows of ordination. He now gives voice to opinions the direct opposites of those to which he has solemnly pledged himself; and which, it would appear that, until a recent period, he continued to main- tain : assuming, thus precipitately, a position from which retreat must be most difficult, and which it is at least doubt- ful whether the character of his mind will suffer him per- manently to retain. On the whole, it seems not improbable, that Dr. Colenso may find occasion to regret that he has not possessed more of " the mere inertia of religious belief." In the mean time, however, he congratulates himself " that we are no longer obliged to believe, as a matter of fact, of vital consequence to our eternal hope, the story related in Num. xxxi., where we are told that a force of 12,000 IsraeHtes slew all the males of the Midianites, took captive all the females and children, seized all their cattle and flocks (72,000 oxen, 61,000 asses, 675,000 sheep) and all their goods, and burnt all their cities, and all their goodly castles, without the loss of a single man, — and then, by command of Moses, butchered in cold blood all the women and children, " except all the women children who have not known a man by lying with him." Dr. Colenso makes out that 48,000 women and 20,000 young boys were saved from the battle, ^^'ho were afterwards put to death by command of Moses, and adds, — " The tragedy of Cawnpore, where 800 were butchered, would sink into nothing compared with such a massacre." The course which Dr. Colenso has taken in attacking the faith of the Church which he refuses to leave, is sufficient to in- dicate to us that his sense of the difference between right and wrong is, to say the least of it, not Jceen. In a subsequent part of his work he shows himself unconscious of the differ- THE WAR OS MIDIAN- 131 ence between a parable and a falsehood '. In the passage before us he shows himself unconscious of the difference between an execution and a murder. Now with regard to this destruction of the Midianites, it may be observed that, if it resulted from the command of the righteous Grod, it w^as righteously done. What is the objection here ? Is it that men were the instruments for destroying others of their kind ? The thirty years' war in flermany is calculated to have caused the destruction of 5,000,000 of human beings. From the wars of the French Revolution resulted, according to Alison, the destruction of 2,000,000 Frenchmen, more than half of whom perished in the wars of Bonaparte. Yet no one considers Wallenstein, Gustavus Adolphus, Bernard of Saxe Weimar, Torstenson, or the other great generals who figured in the first of these wars (except Tilly), as monsters ; nor do we usually regard in that light the first Napoleon, to whose personal action a large part of the destruction of life which occurred in the wars of the French Revolution was unques- tionably due ; the reason why we do not subject these men to such censure consisting in the fact, that notwithstanding the awful destruction of human life in which they were mainly instrumental, their conduct may be assumed to have been 1 The passage on which I found this the divine lesson, which his own mind remark is the following : — had received, and which he felt himself "To him [the person to whom was commissioned to impart to bis fellow- revealed such parts of Exod. iii. and vi. men, in the story of the flaming bush as Dr. Colenso considers to have re- ' and the audible voice. This circum- sulted from a revelation] first in the stance would not at all affect the nature secrets of his own inner being, was the | of the Truth itself, which remains still revelation made of the nature and eternally true, whatever be the form in character of the Supreme, self-existent, which it is announced to us,— just as Being ; and then he was moved by the the truths, which our Lord Himself selfsame Sph-it, and empowered with teaches, are not the less true because strength from above, to declare that clothed in the imagery of a parable, or Name, as an object of faith, to us. It j of a narrative (like that of Dives and matters not that the writer may have Lazarus, or of the good Samaritan), exhibited the living Truth in the cloth- which we do not suppose to be his- ing of human imagery, and embodied torically true." K 9 132 THE WAR ON MIDIAN. actuated by motives which, if not absolutely blameless, must, on a fair estimate of the average of human action, be con- sidered not unjustifiable. Does any one conceive that the harvest of death which is being daily reaped around us is occasioned by an evil being, in opposition to, and in spite of, the will of God ? If God could contemplate that the hundreds of millions of His creatures who have walked this earth should undergo the penalty of death in ten thousand different ways, why may He not have contemplated that the thousands of Midianites should die in this particular way ? The narrative alleges that the destruction of the Midianites and of the people of Canaan was intended by God as the punishment of their sins ; and, assuming that that is true, it may be inferred that the Israelites were made the instru- ments of that destruction in order to show to them God's abhorrence of sin. Now with respect to the Midianites, either they sinned sins worthy of death, or they did not. Those of them whose sins were worthy of death, died justly ; and we may conclude, that those of them whose sins were not worthy of death, died mercifully ; that is, that death was to them, if not a passage to happiness, at least a passage from misery, immediate or prospective, — in other words, that it was the greatest good or the least evil, of which their con- dition was susceptible ^ As the wonders of Egypt, and that of the " sun standing still " at the command of Joshua— miracles which differed so essentially from the miracles of all subsequent ages — were necessary to show once for all, to the Israelites and through- out all time, that the God of the Israelites was not merely a powerful Being, but that He was the God of Creation, who still wielded the powers of nature ; so the extirpation of the Canaanites was necessary, and was effected, in order to dis- play God's abhorrence of sin, and to serve as a signal that His emphatic denunciations against sin, and the threatened ulti- 2 Who shall undertake to say in any given case how far death is an evil ? THE WAR ON MIDIAN. 133 mate destruction of sinners, were not mere threats, such as a compassionate God would never carry into effect. Therefore, although it may not be " of vital consequence to our eternal hope ;'■' that is, although it may not be indispensable to our eternal salvation, to believe " the story related in Num. xxxi. ;" yet it behoves those who think that God did not act and could not have acted as in the Pentateuch and the book of Joshua He is related to have acted, and who proceed further to infer that He will not, and cannot act, as in certain passages in the New Testament it is asserted that He will act, and who, not content with thinking these thoughts and making these inferences, teach men so, — it behoves, I say, all such persons to ponder well the responsibility which they undertake. Nothing shows more clearly the crudeness of Dr. Colenso''s ideas, and the very limited training, or the extraordinary warp, which his mind has undergone, than the views which he expresses upon the subject of slavery. " How is it possible to quote the Bible as in any way con- demning slavery, when we read here, ver. 40, of ' Jehovah*'s tribute ^ of slaves, thirty-two persons V To the same effect are certain remarks contained in an earlier part of his work, where he speaks of the feelings which would .arise " in most pious minds, when such words as these are read, professedly coming from the Holy and Blessed One, the Father and ' Faithful Creator ■" of all mankind : — " ' If the master (of a Hebrew servant) have given him a wife, and she have borne him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall he her master's, and he shall go out free by himself," Exod. xxi. 4. " The wife and children in such a case, being placed under the protection of such other words as these, — " ' If a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand, he shall be surely punished. Not- withstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money,"" Exod. xxi. 20, 21. " I shall never forget the revulsion of feeling with which a 134 THE WAR ON MIDIAN. very intelligent Christian native, with whose help I was trans- lating these words into the Zulu tongue, first heard them as words said to be uttered by the same great and gracious Being, whom I was teaching him to trust in and adore. His whole soul revolted against the notion that the Great and Blessed God, the merciful Father of all mankind, would speak of a servant or maid as mere ' money,' and allow a horrible crime to go unpunished because the victim of the brutal usage had survived a few hours. My own heart and con- science at the time fully sympathized with his." In what passage of the Bible is slavery condemned ? That the Pentateuch contains no pi'ohibition of slavery is most certain. But if this be an argument against the inspired character of the Pentateuch, it is equally an argument against the inspired character of the New Testament, which nowhere prohibits slavery. The New Testament neither enjoins Chris- tian masters to free their slaves, nor encourages Christian slaves to free themselves by violence, or otherwise than in a legal way from slavery ; nor does it enjoin upon Christian slaves, as a duty which they owe to themselves, to accept freedom when offered to them. True it is, that the Gospel, by virtue of an expansive prin- ciple involved in it, has succeeded in extirpating from exten- sive countries that slavery which for thousands of years pre- vailed universally throughout the earth, but in no country in the world did this take place until many centuries after the Gospel was promulgated ^ During all these centuries slavery was tolerated, and its toleration must have been contemplated by the law of Christ. And why was it so tolerated I Un- questionably as the least possible evil under existing circum- stances. For the same reason, doubtless, it was tolerated under the Mosaic law. ' In the highly civilized and Chris- tian country of Scotland, so late as the last century, the children of colliers were prohibited from working at any trade but their fathers' ; and could not change the colliery at which they worked without the licence of the lord of the manor. THE WAR ON MIDIAN. 135 If it be objected that the Mosaic law did not, like the Christian law, contain that which would ultimately lead to the extinction of slavery, I answer that the Mosaic law was intended to be only temporary ; and that if the principles of the Gospel did not extirpate slavery from any country of the earth until more than a thousand years after the birth of Christ, it is hardly to be supposed that, had they been pro- claimed by Moses, unaccompanied, as they must have been, by Christian influences, they would have succeeded in extirpating slavery in the fifteen hundred years between Moses and the death of Christ. What neither the law of Moses nor the law of Christ would have been effectual to accomplish, the law of Moses did not enjoin. All that the law of Christ could under the circumstances have effected, namely, mitigation of the evils of slavery, the law of Moses sought to do, both by general pre- cept, and by particular regulations. It is to be observed, further, in regard to this subject, that only one course was open to the Mosaic lawgiver. Either he must prohibit slavery, or he must recognize and regulate it ; and the former line of conduct not being open to him, he was compelled to adopt the latter. Hence, however shocking it may be to Dr. Colenso's mind and feelings, there can be no doubt that the Great God, the Merciful Father of all mankind, did recognize the possibility of one man being considered, in a certain sense, as the pro- perty of another, of the one being bought by the other's money, and therefore being, in a certain sense, the other''s money. But, as slavery itself in an earlier stage of society was a mitigation of a greater evil, namely, that of the destruction of captives in war, so slavery itself had its mitigating circum- stances. It fettered the husband and parent in providing for his wife and children, but some compensation in this respect accrued from the circumstance that the necessity of making such provision was thrown upon the master. This 136 THE WAR ON MTDIAN. compensation, however, would have had no existence unless the master's right of property had been accurately defined, and distinctly recognized. If the female slave who was given to the Hebrew servant for a wife had been given to another slave for a wife, it is clear that "the wife and her children" would have been her master's. Such being the case, the question arises. What right did the fact of the Hebrew being free give him in respect of his wife and children as against his master ; he having accepted the wife "given him," with full knowledge of the terms on which he did so ? Dr. Colenso has completely overlooked the principle upon which, when the servant stricken by his master survived " a day or two," the master was not to be punished. A similar provision occurred in the case of a freeman smitten by a stone or with the fist (vv. 18, 19) : if he did not die immediately, but kept his bed, and afterwards walked " abroad," even if it were only " with his staff," then he that smote him was to " go quit ;" and the reason for the provision is the same in both cases, viz, the difficulty of deciding with certainty whether the crime of murder had been committed or not — not that, in the eye of God, he from whose violence death ensued, either to slave or freeman, was absolved from the guilt of murder ; but because by the eye of man the fact of his being guilty or not might not be discernible. But, though the freeman who was injured was to be compensated for the loss of his time, no such compensation was to be made to the wounded slave ; and why ? because his time, if he had been able to employ it, was his master's, who was entitled to the fruit of his exertions ; he being his master's property, " his money." And herein consists the whole amount of difference between the stricken freeman and the stricken slave : from the necessity of explaining which also arises the occurrence of the particular phrase, which, when for the first time brought to his notice by his heathen convert, seems to have given so nnich disquietude to Dr. Colcnso's mind. THE WAR ON MIDIAN. ]37 From the exordium to the chapter at present under con- sideration one might have supposed that Dr. Colenso had done with the subject of the historical character of the JNIosaic narrative. It appears, however, that he has still a long string of charges to prefer against it. i. " We are told that Aaron died on the first day of the fifth month of the fortieth year of the wanderings, Num. xxxiii. 88, and they mourned for him a month, Num. XX. 9." Whence Dr. Colenso infers that the Israelites halted in a state of inaction for one month : the justice of which inference we may be prepared to admit when we see some proof adduced in support of it, but not before. ii. " After this, ' king ' Arad the Canaanite fought against Israel, and took some of them prisoners; whereupon the Israelites attacked these Canaanites, and utterly destroyed them and their cities, Num. xxi. 1 — 3, for which two trans- actions we may allow another months Two references to this transaction are contained in the Pentateuch ; that of which Dr. Colenso gives the above imperfect extract, and another in Num. xxxiii. 40, where it is simply stated that king Arad heard of the coming of the chil- dren of Israel. The passage which Dr. Colenso quotes, how- ever, has in it an important feature ^^ich he has omitted, namely, the statement that, after the prisoners were taken by king Arad, Israel vowed a vow to destroy Arad. The real attack of the Israelites on the country of Arad is detailed in Judges i. 16, 17, and did'not take place until many years after the period indicated in the passage in Numbers. To establish this, I observe that we know from Num. xiii. 21, that "the spies" went from the wilderness of Sin: and we know from Num. xxxiii. 36, that the wilderness of Sin was Kadesh. It so happens, moreover, that Kadesh, from which the spies went up, was the station before Mount Hor. I take the true account of this transaction to be this. When the Israelites were at Kadesh, king Arad, fearing they 138 THE WAR ON MIDIAN. were coming to invade him, attacked some of their straggling parties, and took "some of them prisoners." It obviously was not part of the general scheme of the operations of the Israelites to take possession of Arad or Hormah at this time. Had they done so, and Moses or any of the 600,000 who came out of Egypt had accompanied them, he or they would have set foot in the promised land ; which it is clear that they were not to do, and did not do. The Israelites then, being compelled to withdraw without avenging the attack made on a part of their body, made the vow above spoken of in this part of the book of Numbers, which vow may not have been made till the whole congregation had gathered together at Mount Hor. The vow having been then made and recorded, it was natural that, years afterwards, when its fulfilment had become matter of notoriety, a notice of such fulfilment should have been inserted in the narrative *. I think, therefore, we need have no hesitation in striking the month assigned to this transaction, equally with the month's mourning for Aaron, out of Dr. Colenso'^s account of the transactions of the fortieth year. iii. " Then they 'journeyed from Mount Hor by the way of the Red Sea to compass the land of Edom,' Num. xxi. 4, and the people murmured, and were plagued with fiery serpents ; and Moses set up the serpent of brass. Num. xxi. 5 — 9 ; for all which we must allow, at least, a fortnight."" The first station mentioned after the plague of the serpents is Oboth. From Num. xxxiii. it appears that between Mount Hor and Oboth there were three stations : so that we may conclude they were at least four days between Mount Hor and Oboth : but we have no reason to suppose that they halted on the way, except for the night. Hence we may dispense with ten days of the fortnight which Dr. Oolenso, * That a vow of vengeance should be made, when to vow vengeance was all that could be done, was highly natural ; but that the Israelites, imme- diately before setting out to destroy the people of Arad, should enter into a formal vow to destroy the people of Arad, seems highly improbable. THE WAR ON MIDI AN. 139 without stating any reason whatever, asserts that we must allow for these last transactions. iv. " They now marched, and made nine encampments, Num. xxi. 10 — 20, for which we cannot well allow less than a month.'''' In support of this assumption Dr. Colenso cites Kurtz, to the effect that " at every station at least three days must have been required." But, as at an earlier part of his criticism (p. 63) Dr. Colenso has not the slightest hesitation in throwing overboard a similar suggestion which Kurtz had borrowed from Tischendorf, on the ground that if there had been "days of rest" there would have been some reference to them in the Scripture, we may equally throw overboard here Kurtz's suggestion of the three days at each station, and instead of Dr. Colenso's month for these nine stations, we may put nine days ; for certainly, apart from any independent knowledge we are supposed to have of the localities — upon which Dr. Colenso does not raise any argument — the Mosaic narrative does not require us to suppose that the nine stations occupied more than nine days, or say ten days, to include the one necessary Sabbath, which would fall within the former time. V. Then comes the invasion and conquest of the territory of Sihon ; for which Dr. Colenso assigns a month. vi. We have the attack upon Jaazer, to which he assigns another fortnight. A fortnight for .Jaazer, it may be observed, certainly seems excessive, as it appears to have been an inconsiderable district, with villages only and no towns, from which moreover the Amorites are stated to have been driven out, merely, without being destroyed. vii. Lastly, there is the conquest of Bashan, with its three- score fenced cities ; for which Dr. Colenso assigns a month. To the above catalogue Dr. Colenso adds a further list of events *' which are recorded in the book of Numbers, as having occurred between the conquest of Bashan and the 140 THE WAR ON MIDIAN. address of Moses," related in Deuteronomy ; and which commenced the first day of the eleventh month of the fortieth year. This second list is as follows : — " 1. The march forward to the plains of Moab, Num. xxii. 1. " 2. Balak's sending twice to Balaam, his journey and prophesy ings, xxii. 2 — xxiv. " 3. Israel's abiding in Shittim, and committing whoredom with the daughters of ]\Ioab, Num. xxv. 1 — 3. " 4. The death of 24,000 by the plague, xxv. 9. " 6. The second numbering of the people, xxvi. " 6. The war upon Midian, above considered, during which they burnt all their cities, and all their goodly castles, and surely must have required a month or six weeks for such a transaction."'' With regard to the first of the series of events above set forth by Dr. Colenso, he arrives at the conclusion, upon his own data, that " from ' the first day of the fifth month ' on which Aaron died, to the completion of the conquest of Og king of Bashan, we cannot reckon less altogether than six months." Independently, however, of the circumstance that the month assigned to the mourning for Aaron and the other month for the imaginary war with Arad, must be entirely struck out of the account ; independently of the fact, that the time occupied between different encampments as estimated in items iii. and iv. of the first of tlie above lists, is mere guess-work ; and without taking account of the excessive estimate for the time occupied by the conquest of Jaazer ; the whole plan of Dr. Colenso's calculations is founded upon a vicious principle, namely, the assuming that all the events successively narrated in the Book of Numbers happened in succession ; or to speak more precisely, that every one of the transactions narrated in the Book of Numbers was completed before the transaction next thereinafter narrated began. Let us see if we cannot extract from the Mosaic narrative an account, more intelligible and reliable than that which Dr. Colenso has given us, of the transactions comprehended THE WAR ON MIDIAN. 141 within the eventful seven months which elapsed between the death of Aaron and the commencement of Moses' address related in the Book of Deuteronomy. After the death of Aaron the Israelites travelled from Mount Hor on the west side of Mount Seir to Eziongeber, at the head of the Gulf of Akabah, a distance of seventy miles. They thence travelled on the east side of Mount Seir, and, as it appears, Deut. ii. 29, through the territory of Edom and Moab, till they reached the banks of the Arnon, a distance of 100 miles. Taking the whole distance at two hundred miles, this would occupy twenty travelling days of ten miles each. It appears that the fourth of the nine encampments above referred to by Dr. Colenso was "on the other side of Arnon" (Num. xxi. 13), that is, on the north side, and therefore within the territory of Sihon ; so that instead of the invasion of the territory of Sihon not occurring till after the comple- tion of the whole of the nine encampments, as Dr. Colenso takes for granted was the case, it appears that it occurred in the middle of them. It further appears that this fourth station was in the wilderness, and must therefore have been in the eastern part of the territory of Sihon. Emerging from the wilderness, the Israelites appear to have moved westwards to the fifth station, Mattanah, whence they proceeded to Na- haliel, and from thence to " Bamoth in the valley that is in the country of Moab,'' (ver. 20.) In explanation of this latter expression, I must observe that the whole territory of Sihon had formerly belonged to Moab (Judg. xi.), and it was only by virtue of the Moabites having lost their right in it to Sihon, that the Israelites, who were forbidden to meddle with the Moabites, (Deut. ii. 9,) were allowed to possess this land. Hence, Bamoth, " in the coun- try of Moab," was in fact a place within the territory con- quered from Sihon. The same remark applies to "the plains of Moab on this side Jordan by Jericho," referred to Num. xxii. 1. 142 THE WAR ON MIDIAN. From " Bamoth in the valley '' they moved to the top of Pisgah (or "the hill"), which looketh toward Jeshimon. The only other change of locality made by the Israelites which is recorded in the Pentateuch, is that mentioned in the verse last cited. " And the children of Israel set forward and pitched in the plains of Moab/' That " the plains of Moab " were in the immediate locality of the " Pisgah, which looketh toward Jeshimon," is evident from the fact, that one of the places to which Balak took Balaam that he might see the Israelites who were in the plains of Moab, was " the top of Peor, which looketh toward Jeshimon," eh. xxiii. 28. It appears, therefore, according to the testimony of this part of the book of Numbers, that after crossing the Arnon, all the stations stopped at by the Israelites, except JNlattanah and Nahaliel, were certainly in the land of Sihon, and these two last-named places may have been so. The stations mentioned in Num. xxxi. are somewhat differ- ent. The two accounts have Ije Abarim (the second of Dr. Colenso's nine stations) in conmion ; and also the final en- campment in the plains of Moab preparatory to passing the Jordan; but the intermediate stations in the thirty-third chapter are fewer in number, and bear entirely different names. Their names, in the order in which they occur, are Dibon-Gad, Almon-Diblathaim, and "the mountains of Abarim before Nebo ;" three stations, against six in the twenty-first chapter. Now in Jer. xlviii. 22, Beth-Diblathaim occurs in such a connexion as to show that it must have been in Moab; and as Almon-Diblathaim could not have been in Moab proper, it must have been in the territory of Sihon. It equally appears from Deut. xxxii. 49, that the station in Mount Abarim was m the land of Moab, that is, of Sihon. With regard to the third station, Dibon-Gad, it may be observed, that there was a town in the land of Sihon, called Dibon, Num. xxi. 80, which was allotted to Reuben, Josh. THE WAR ON MIDI AN. 143 xiii. 17 (see also Jer. xlviii. 22), but the tribe of Gad appears also to have built for itself a place of the same name, Num. xxxii. 84 ; and this latter, no doubt, is that which is here referred to. The locality of Dibon-Gad, so far as I am aware, is nowhere more precisely mentioned. As, however, part of the land of Sihon was allotted to Gad, and as the town built by the Gadites was called by a INIoabitish name, the probability is that Dibon-Gad was in the territory of Sihon. It thus appears that, according to Num. xxi., there were only two stations between the Arnon and the plains of Moab which were not certainly in the territory of Sihon ; and in the account in Num. xxxiii. there is only one station mentioned which was not, certainly, in the land of Sihon. It may, therefore, be inferred, that the general camp of the Israelites moved very little, if at all, north of the territory of Sihon : and taking into account that, after the defeat ofd. 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BS1225.4 .C7IVI8 The Pentateuch and book of Joshua Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer Library 1 1012 00039 9776 ■■k i ^ 1 i-^i :: ' m ^