The stay at his desolate tent; and onward he went yet again to Hebron 'to 'bury his father in the cave of Machpelah,' and to linger awhile at the spot in the land wherein his father was a 'stranger.' In the mixture of agricultural and pastoral life which now gathers round him is laid the train of the last and most touching incidents of Jacob's story. It is whilst they are feeding their father's flocks together, that the fatal envy arises against the favourite son. It is whilst they are binding the sheaves in the well-known corn-field, that Joseph's sheaf stands. upright in his dream. On the confines of the same field at Shechem the brothers were feeding their flocks, when Joseph was sent from Hebron to 'see whether it was well with his 'brethren, and well with the flocks, and to bring his father 'word again.' And from Shechem he followed them to the two wells of Dothan,' in the passes of Manasseh, when the caravan of Arabian merchants passed by, and he disappeared from his father's eyes. His history belongs henceforth to a wider sphere. The glimpse of Egypt, opened to us for a moment in the life of Abraham, now spreads into a vast and permanent prospect. The descent 7. This shall be reserved for the consideration of the general relations of Israel to Egypt. But the story itself, though too familiar to be repeated here, too simple to need any of Jacob into elaborate elucidation, is a fitting close to the life of Egypt. Jacob. Once more he is to set forth on his pilgrimage. The old wanderer, the Hebrew Ulysses, has still a new call, a new migration, new trials, and new glory before him. The feeling so beautifully described by the modern poet is there first shadowed forth in action: Something ere the end, Some work of noble note may yet be done 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. He came to the frontier plain of Beersheba; he received 1 Sinai and Palestine, 247. the assurance that beyond that frontier he was to descend yet further into Egypt. 'God spake unto Israel in the visions of 'the night, and said, Jacob, Jacob. And he said, Here am I. 'And He said, I am God, the God of thy father; fear not to 'go down into Egypt, for I will there make of thee a great 'nation.' He 'went down' from the steppes of Beersheba ; he crossed the desert and met his son on the border of the cultivated land; he was brought into the presence of the great Pharaoh; he saw his race established in the land of Egypt. And then the time drew near that Israel must die; and his one thought, oftentimes repeated, was that his bones should not rest in that strange land; not in pyramid or painted chamber, but in the cell that 'he had digged for himself,' in the primitive sepulchre of his fathers. Bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt, but I will lie with my fathers, and thou shalt carry me out of Egypt, and bury me in their burial-place. 'Bury me with my fathers, in the cave that is in the field of 'Ephron the Hittite, in the cave that is in the field of Mach'pelah, which is before Mamre, in the land of Canaan, which 'Abraham bought with the field of Ephron the Hittite for a 'possession of a burial-place. There they buried Abraham ' and Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife; and there I buried Leah. The purchase of the field 'and of the cave that is therein was from the children of Heth. 'And when Jacob had made an end of commanding his sons, 6 The death 'he gathered up his feet into the bed and yielded up of Jacob. 'the ghost, and was gathered to his people.' His body was embalmed after the manner of the Egyptians. A vast funeral procession bore it away; the asses and the camels of the pastoral tribe mingled with the chariots and horsemen characteristic of Egypt. They came (so the narrative 1 seems to imply) not by the direct road which the Patriarchs had hitherto traversed on their way to Egypt by El-Arish, but round the long circuit by which Moses afterwards led their descendants till they arrived on the banks of the Jordan. Further than this the Egyptian escort came not. But the valley of the Jordan 1 Gen. 1. 10. resounded with the loud shrill lamentations peculiar to the ceremonial of mourning, and with the funeral games with which, then as now, the Arabs encircle the tomb of a departed chief. From this double tradition the spot was known in after times as 'the meadow,' or 'the mourning,' ' of the Egyptians,' Abel-Mizraim; and as Beth-hogla, 'the house of the circling ' dance.' 'And his sons carried him into the land of Canaan, ' and buried him in the cave of the field of Machpelah. 'And Joseph returned into Egypt, he, and all his brethren, and all that went up with him, . after he had buried his 'father. LECTURE IV. ISRAEL IN EGYPT. THE appearance of Joseph in Egypt is the first distinct point of contact between Sacred and secular history, and it is, accordingly, not surprising that in later times this part of his story should have become the basis of innumerable fancies and traditions outside the limits of the Biblical narrative. His arrival in Egypt, his acquisition of magical art, his beauty, his interpretation of dreams, his prediction of the famine, his favour with the king, are told briefly but accurately in the compilation of the historian Justin. The feud of the modern Samaritans and Jews is carried up by them to the feud between Joseph and his brethren.2 The history of Joseph and Asenath has in one instance been inserted amongst the canonical books of the Church of Armenia. To the description of the loves of Joseph and Zuleika in the Koran, Mahomet appealed as one of the chief proofs of his inspiration. Christian pilgrims of the middle ages took for granted that the three or the seven pyramids which they saw from the Nile could be nothing else than Joseph's barns.3 The well of Joseph and the canal of Joseph are still shown to unsuspecting travellers by unsuspecting guides, from a wild but not unnatural confusion of his career with that of his great Mussulman namesake, the Sultan Yussuf, or Joseph, Saladin I. But the most solid links of connexion between the story of Joseph and the state of the ancient world are those which are supplied by the simple story itself on the one hand, and our 1 Justin, xxxvi. 2. Comp. also Artapanus, in Euseb. Præp. Ev. ix. 23. 2 Wolff, Travels, &c. ch. vii. 3 Maundeville, in Early Trav. 154 constantly increasing knowledge of the Egyptian monuments on the other hand. I. It has been said that Egypt must have presented to the nomadic tribes of Asia the same contrast and the same attractions that Italy and the southern provinces of Joseph in Egypt. the Roman Empire presented to the Gothic and Celtic tribes who descended upon them from beyond the Alps. Such is, in fact, the impression left upon our minds when we are first introduced into the full view of Egypt, as we follow in the track of the caravan of Arabian merchants who carried off Joseph from the wells of Dothan. We need only touch on the main incidents in the story to see that it is the chief seat of power and civilisation then known in the world, and that it is the same as that of which the memorials have been so wonderfully preserved to our own time. What I have said of the retention of the outward appearance of the Egypt. Patriarchs in the unchangeable customs of the Arabian tribes, is true, in another sense, of the retention of the outward appearance of the Pharaohs in the unchangeable monuments of Egypt. The extraordinary clearness and dryness of the climate, the rare circumstance of the vicinity of the desert sands which have preserved what they have overwhelmed, the passionate desire of the old Egyptians to perpetuate every familiar and loved object as long as human power and skill could reach, have all contributed to this result. The wars, the amusements, the meals, the employments, the portraits, nay even the very bodies, of those ancient fathers of the civilised world, are still amongst us. We can form a clearer image of the court of the Pharaohs, in all external matters, than we can of the court of Augustus. And, therefore, at each successive disclosure of the state of Egypt in the Sacred narrative, we find ourselves amongst old friends and familiar faces. We know not whether we may not have touched a human hand that was pressed by the hand of Jacob or Joseph. The Biblical names of Egypt are Mizraim (possibly from the two banks, or the upper and lower districts), and Ham (dark). Traces of both remain-the one in the Arabic name of Cairo, Misr; the other in the word 'alchemy,'' chemistry,' as derived from the medical fame of ancient Egypt. |