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exercised the beneficial influence which none deny to it. The Patriarchal rites of Circumcision and of Sacrifice have vanished away, but the name of the Sabbath of the Decalogue, the Sabbath of Mount Sinai,—as if it partook of the universal spirit of the code in which it is enshrined,—is still, as though by a natural anomaly, revered by thousands of Gentile Christians. If this be so even in the one exception to the spiritual and moral character of the Decalogue, much more is it with the remaining nine of these fundamental laws. 'Thou 'shalt have none other gods but Me,' 'Thou shalt do no 'murder,' 'Thou shalt not commit adultery,' 'Thou shalt not 'steal,' are still as impressive and as applicable as when first heard and written. The Second Commandment is full of the recoil against the idolatry of Egypt; the Fourth Commandment, in one version, grounds itself on the recollection of the servitude in Egypt; the Fifth rests its rewards on the possession of the yet unconquered Land of Promise. But these local and temporary allusions, whilst they effectually show that the letter of the Commandments is a thing of the past, serve as proofs of the enduring force of the spirit which has come down to us, thus embedded in the blocks of Sinai. And, if there is a profound spiritual sense in the declaration that the words were 'written by the finger of God,' there is also a grave truth, both historical and spiritual, in the fact that 'the tables' were the solid fragments hewn out of the rock of Horeb. Hard, stiff, abrupt as the cliffs from which they were taken, they remain as the firm, unyielding basis on which all true spiritual religion has been built up and sustained. Sinai is not Palestine; the Law is not the Gospel ; but the Ten Commandments, in letter and in spirit, remain to us as the relic of that time. They represent to us, both in fact and in idea, the granite foundation, the immovable mountain on which the world is built up; without which all theories of religion are but as shifting and fleeting clouds; they give us the two homely fundamental laws, which all subsequent Revelation has but confirmed and sanctified-the Law of our duty towards God, and the Law of our duty towards our neighbour.

LECTURE VIII.

KADESH AND PISGAH.

THE close of the history of the Wanderings bears on its face the marks of confusion and omission.

Two stages alone of the journey are distinctly visible, from Sinai to Kadesh, and from Kadesh to Moab.

Journey

from Sinai

I. I have elsewhere1 pointed out the profound obscurity in which the Mosaic narrative has wrapt the first of these two periods. Not merely are the names of nearly all the encampments still lost in uncertainty, but the narrative itself draws the mind of the reader in different directions; and the variations of the text itself 2 repel detailed inquiry still more positively.

to Kadesh.

To this outward confusion corresponds the inward and spiritual aspect of the history. It is the period of reaction and contradiction and failure. It is chosen by S. Paul 3 as the likeness of the corresponding failure of the first efforts of the primitive Christian Church; the one 'type' of the Jewish History expressly mentioned by the writers of the New Testament. It left hardly any permanent trace on the history of the people, and, therefore, according to the plan laid down in these Lectures, may be passed with the same rapidity with which it was passed by the Sacred record itself. Some few institutions, however, or fragments of institutions, come down to the Jewish and even into the Christian Church, from that time; and some few salient points emerge full of eternal significance.

1 Sinai and Palestine, 92.

Comp. Deut. x. 6, 7, with Num. xxxiii. 30-36.

1 Cor. x. II. 'These things happened ' unto them for examples'-'types' in the

original. This is the true meaning of the word; and it is the only case in which it is applied in the New Testament to the Jewish History.

The brazen plates of the altar.

Conspiracy of Levi and

Reuben.

The brazen plates which covered the ancient wooden altar, and which were perpetuated in 'the brazen altar' of Solomon's temple, were traced back to the relics of the censers of brass which had belonged to the chiefs of the great conspiracy of the tribes of Levi and Reuben against the rule of the two prophet-brothers of the family of Aaron. Never again did Levi make the attempt to gain the possession of the priesthood, nor Reuben to seize the reins of government. The two tribes afterwards became entirely parted asunder in their characters and fortunes: the one was incorporated into the innermost oircle of the settled civilisation of Palestine; the other hovered on the very outskirts of the Holy Land and chosen people, and dwindled away into a Bedouin tribe. But the story of Korah belongs to a time when they, with Simeon, still breathed the same fierce and uncontrollable spirit of their Arabian ancestry ; when Levi was still fresh from the great crisis in Sinai, by which their tribe had been consecrated and divided from the rest; when the recollection of the birthright of Reuben still lingered in the minds of his descendants. In the desert they marched side by side; and their joint conspiracy naturally grew out of their joint neighbourhood. It was the last expiring effort of the old traditions of the Beni-Israel against the constitution of the new order of things, which every generation would more firmly establish. 'Thou leddest Thy people like sheep by the 'hand of Moses and Aaron.' 2

Another relic of that dark time was one which remained till the time of Hezekiah in the Jewish Church, but which, The Brazen partly in symbol and partly in pretensions to the Serpent. reality, has prevailed even to our own day in the Christian Church. 'The serpent of brass that Moses had 'made' was long cherished as a sacred image in the sanctuaries of Judah and Jerusalem. Incense was offered to it, and a name conferred on it;3 and even after its destruction by

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Hezekiah the recollection of it was still so endeared to the nation, that from it was drawn one of the most sacred similitudes of the New Testament; and even the Christian Church claimed for centuries to have preserved its very form intact in the Church of S. Ambrose, at Milan. The snakes against which the brazen serpent was originally raised as a protection, were peculiar to the eastern portion of the Sinaitic desert. There and nowhere else, and in no other moment of their history, could this symbol have originated.

Kadesh.

2

Amidst the general obscurity and doubts of this period of the Wanderings, one spot emerges, if not into certainty, at least into unmistakable prominence. It is in this stage of the history almost what Sinai was in the first. 'He brought them to 'Mount Sinai and to Kadesh Barnea.'1 It is the only place dignified by the name of a 'city'. Its very name implies its sanctity--the Holy Place;' as if, like Mount Sinai itself, it had a sacredness of its own before the host of Israel encamped within its precincts: possibly from the old oracular spring of judgment described in the earliest times of the Canaanitish history. The encampment there is distinct in character from any other in the wilderness, except the stay at Sinai. Once, if not twice, 'they abode there many days.' Situated as it was on the border of the Edomite territory, its close connexion with Israel invested with a kind of Sinaitic glory the whole range of the Idumean mountains. 'O Jehovah, when 'Thou wentest out of Seir, when Thou marchedst out of 'Edom.' 13 'God came from Teman, and the Holy One from 'Mount Paran.' 4 'Jehovah came from Sinai, and rose up from 'Mount Seir unto them: He shined forth from Mount Paran, 'and He came with the ten thousands "of Kadesh." '5

On what precise spot amongst the rocks of Edom this 'Holy 'Place' was enshrined, is a question even more uncertain than

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Petra.

that which regards the exact locality of Sinai. But nothing has yet been discovered to shake the substantial credibility of the Jewish, Mussulman, and Christian traditions, which have fixed it in the neighbourhood of the city afterwards known by the name of the 'Cliff' or 'Rock.' That huge sandstone 'cliff,' through which the most romantic of ravines admits the stream of living water to fertilise the basin of Petra, and which, doubtless, was the origin of the later Hebrew and Greek title of the city, still bears the name of Moses, and in its rent the Arabian tribes still believe that they see the mark of his wonder-working staff.

Death and burial of

It is this scene of the giving of water to the angry Israelites and 'their beasts' ('The Thirst' of Murillo's famous picture), on which our attention is chiefly fixed, and which is identified either with the new name, or the new turn given to the old name of the place, 'Meribah Kadesh,' 'Strife and Sanctity.' But there are two other events which more distinctly mark the stage of the history at which we have arrived. In Kadesh passed away the eldest born of the ruling family of Israel. 'Miriam died there and was buried there,' in one of the rock-hewn tombs which perforate the whole range Miriam. of the hills surrounding Petra; it may be, in that secluded spot still known2 by the sacred name of the 'Con'vent,' still scaled by the long ascent cut out of the rock for the approach of pilgrims in ages beyond the reach of history. The mourning for her death, according to Josephus,3 lasted for thirty days, and was terminated by the ceremony which remained to the last days of the Commonwealth, the sacrifice, as if in special allusion to the departed Prophetess, of the red heifer. Close in the neighbourhood of Kadesh passed away the second of the family. On the summit of Mount Hor, immediately facing that other sanctuary of which we just now spoke, has, for at least two thousand years, been shown the grave of Aaron. From that craggy

Death and burial of Aaron.

1 Num. xx. 12, 13.

2 See Sinai and Palestine, 96.

"He describes (Ant. iv. 4, § 6) that she

was buried in state on the top of Mount Sin.

Josephus, Ant. iv. 4, § 6.

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