'dreams' for themselves or their people, 'all who lived tempe'rately and justly-those always and those only.' In the dead of night, as to Samuel; in the ploughing of the field, as to Elisha; in the gathering of the sycamore figs, as to Amos; the call might come. 'Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth,' was to be the ready and constant answer. And thus, even in its first establishment, the Theocracy, in its true sense, contained the warrant for its complete development. Moses was but the beginning; he was not, he could not be, the end. The light on his countenance faded away, and had to be again and again rekindled in the presence of the Unseen. But his appearance, his character, his teaching, familiarised the nation to this mode of revelation; and it would be at their peril, and against the whole spirit of the education received from him, if they refused to receive its later manifestations, from whatever quarter. 'The 'LORD thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet, from the 'midst of thee, of thy brethren like unto me. Unto Him shall 'ye hearken.' The same event, it has been truly remarked, never repeats itself in history. Yet a like event in one age is always a preparation for a like event in another, especially when the first event is one which involves the principle of the second. Moses, the expounder of the Theocracy, the founder of the Hebrew Prophets, the interpreter between God on Mount Sinai and Israel in the plain below,-was the necessary forerunner, because the imperfect likeness, of the Last Prophet of the last generation of the Jewish Theocracy. In the fullest sense might it be said to that generation: There is one that accuseth you, 'even Moses, in whom ye trust: for had ye believed Moses, ye 'would have believed Me; but, if ye believe not his writings, how 'will ye believe My words?'1 III. There was another point in the Revelation of Sinai not less permanent, and equally characteristic. We speak of it as a revelation of 'Religion.' But this was not the name by which it was known in ancient times. The Israelite spoke not of the 'Religion' but of the 'Law' of Moses. Moses was a Lawgiver 2 even more than he was a The Law. 1 John v. 45-47. "He is twice so called in the Pentateuch, Num. xxi. 18; Deut. xxxiii. 21. Prophet. In this aspect the Revelation presented itself, and from this were derived some of its most important features. At first sight it might appear as if 'the Law' was not the form of truth for which the wild desert and the return to the wandering Arab life would have predisposed them; and as regards the minuteness of many of the enactments, Egypt, as I have before observed, and not Sinai, must be considered the fitting school of preparation. But those who have studied the Bedouin tribes know that there is no contradiction between their wild habits and an elaborate though purely traditional system of social and legal observances. Such a system has been carefully collected and expounded by the traveller Burckhardt, who thus closed the first portion of his remarkable work: 'The present state of the great Bedouin commonwealth of 'Arabia . . . offers the rare example of a nation which, not'withstanding its perpetual state of warfare, without and within, 'has preserved, for a long succession of ages, its primitive laws ' in all their vigour. . . . But,' he adds, 'of the origin of these 'laws nothing is known. . . The ancient code of one Bedouin 'tribe only has reached posterity. . . The Pentateuch was 'exclusively given to the Beni-Israel.' 1 It is this code of the Beni-Israel-the 'sons of Israel' (the name itself is an enduring mark of their first Patriarchal state), —this one extant code of an ancient Bedouin tribe, which, bearing in mind this peculiarity of its first appearance, we have now to examine. Here, as elsewhere, it is only by remembering what there was immediate, historical, and local, that we shall be able fully to appreciate what there is of the eternal and universal. It has been a question often debated amongst scholars, how far the code of the Pentateuch was a collection of earlier, later, or contemporaneous customs, under one general system. It will here suffice to name those portions of the Law which, by direct connexion with the life of the Desert, can be traced back to the Sinaitic period. 1 Notes on the Bedouins, i. 381. Constitution of the Desert. 2 They The 1. There is no express enactment of any form of government in the Mosaic law. But the 'elders' or chiefs of the tribes, who appear as the background of the primitive constitution, are distinctly Arabian, and in part existed before the Exodus,' in part, at least, may be ascribed to Jethro. The word is almost identical with the 'Sheykh' of modern times, and is the same which designates the chiefs of the Bedouin tribes of Midian. Their original names are preserved.3 Together they formed a council of seventy, of which, as it would seem, Hur was the head. were chosen by the people and dedicated by Moses. priests were not part of them.5 Through all the changes of the office the name still continued. From time to time it appears in the settled period of the monarchy. On the dissolution of the kingdom it reasserts something of its original importance." Out of the elders or Sheykhs of the desert grew the elders of the synagogues; and out of the elders of the synagogues,— with no change of name except that which took place in passing from Hebrew to Greek and from Greek to the languages of modern Europe, the 'Presbyters,' 'Prestres,' and 'Priests,' of Christendom. That word and that office, so limited in its present meaning, is the direct descendant of the rudest and most pastoral forms of the Jewish nation. The Christian Presbyter represents, not the high priest Aaron, but the Bedouin Jethro, -not the sacerdotal, but the primitive nomadic element of the ancient Church. Encamp ment. 2. The Encampment and its movements were peculiar to the desert. Never again, after the first settlement in Canaan, could the sight have been witnessed of the detailed arrangements which called forth the passionate burst of Balaam's admiration: 'How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, 'and thy tabernacles, O Israel !' Many usages mentioned in connexion with it must have perished at once on their entrance into settled life. But relics of such a state are long to be traced both in their language and in their monuments. The very words 'camp' and 'tents' remained long after they had ceased to be literally applicable. "The tents of the Lord' were in the precincts of the Temple. The cry of sedition, evidently handed down from ancient times, was, 'To your tents, O Israel !' 'Without the camp' was the expression applied even to the very latest events of Jerusalem. In like manner, the national war-cries, always the oldest of national compositions, go back to this early state. 'Rise up, O Lord, and let Thine enemies 'be scattered; let them also that hate Thee flee before Thee.' This martial shout was incorporated into the Psalms of the monarchy; but its first force came from the time when, morning by morning, it was repeated as the ark was slowly raised on the shoulders of the Levites, and went forth against the enemies of God in the desert.2 Arise, O Lord, into Thy resting place! 'Thou and the Ark of Thy strength.' 'Give ear, O Shepherd 'of Israel, Thou that leadest Joseph like a flock; Thou that 'dwellest between the cherubim, shine forth! Before Ephraim, 'Benjamin, and Manasseh, stir up Thy strength and come and 'help us. Grand and touching as is this address, taken in its application to the latest decline of the Jewish kingdom, it is still more so, when we see it in the reflected image of the order of the ancient march, when the Ark of God went forth, the pillar of fire shining high above it, surrounded by the armed Levites, its rear guarded by the warrior tribes of Ephraim, Benjamin, and Manasseh, the brother and the sons of Joseph, doubtless entrusted with the embalmed remains of their mighty ancestor. 3 And if from these fragments of Sacred speech we turn to the actual relics of antiquity (in the literal sense of relics), their desert lineage can be yet more clearly traced. Down to the latest times of the monarchy was preserved, in the innermost sanctuary of the Temple, the ancient Ark or coffer of wood, purporting to be the same which had been made at Mount Sinai and carried through all their wanderings. Its 1 Heb. xiii. 13. 2 Num. x. 35, 36; Ps. Ixviii. 1. 3 Ps. lxxx. 1; cxxxii. 8. The Ark. form, as we have seen, possibly its religious significance, was derived from Egypt. But its material was such as can hardly be explained, except by the account given of its first appearance. It was not of oak, the common wood of Palestine, nor of cedar,' the wood usually employed in Palestine for sacred purposes, but of shittim or acacia, a tree of rare growth in Syria, but the most frequent, not even excepting the palm, in the Peninsula of Sinai. manna. What lay within the Ark, also of this period, shall be mentioned hereafter. Two lesser objects of interest were laid The pot of up, we know not for how long a time, in front of it, both relics of Sinai. One was the pot of manna. Many a perplexed controversy on the nature of the food which sustained the Israelites in the desert would have been spared, could we have but caught one glance at this its authentic perpetuation. It has been conjectured by Reland (and, in a matter of such obscurity, even the conjecture of so great a scholar may be worth notice), that the existence of this vessel, with the handles or ears by which it was supported, may have lent a pretext to the strange fable already quoted from Tacitus, that the Jewish sanctuary contained the figure of an ass's head, in commemoration of the events in the wilderness. Another object which lay beside the vessel of manna was the staff or rod of almond wood,—the sceptre of the tribe of Levi,- sometimes borne by Moses,2 sometimes by Aaron, the emblem of the ancient shepherd life, when sceptre and crook were one and the same. The like staff is still carried by the present chiefs of the Sinaitic Peninsula. The staff of But the most remarkable vestige of the nomadic state of the nation was the Tabernacle or Tent, which was the shelter of the Ark long after the entrance into Canaan, and which was finally laid aside and treasured up in the chambers of the Temple, when the erection of that stately building rendered its further use superfluous. The Temple The Tabernacle. 'Rabbinical writers, in their ignorance, interpret shittim as 'cedar.' If we translate shittim as 'cedar,' and tachash (vide infra) as 'badger,' neither of which is found in the desert, we must, as was observed in Lect. VI., exchange the historical ground of the narrative for two imaginary miracles. 2 See Num. xvii. 6; xx. 8-10. |