for the wilderness, and started in obedi- | 264 a day, or about one every five ence to the order, after 'borrowing' of minutes? their masters jewels' and 'raiment,'when each family was shut up closely in its own house, and strictly forbidden to come out of it till summoned, and they could not, therefore, communicate the tidings freely, as by day, from one person to a number of others. That they did start suddenly in hurried flight,' according to the story, is manifest from the statement in E.xii.39, From twenty years old and upward, all that were able to go forth to war in Israel.' 65. 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 single family of every town and village, throughout a tract of country as large as Hertfordshire, but ten times as thickly peopled ;-that, in obedience to such order, having first 'borrowed" very largely from their Egyptian neighbours in all directions, (though, if we are to suppose Egyptians occupying the same territory with the Hebrews, the extent of it must be very much increased,) they then came in from all parts of the land of Goshen to Rameses, bringing 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 marched on to Succoth, not leaving a Rameses that very same day, and single sick or infirm person, a single woman in childbirth, or even a 'single hoof,' E.x.26, behind them! 66. And now let us see them on the 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 moment's notice, and actually started, march itself. If we imagine the people not one being left behind, together with to have travelled through the open all their multitudinous flocks and herds, desert, in a wide body, fifty men which must (60) have been spread out abreast, as some suppose to have been over a district as large as a good-sized the practice in the Hebrew armies, English county. I do not hesitate to then, allowing an interval of a yard declare this statement to be utterly in-between each rank, the able-bodied credible and impossible. Were an English village of (say) two thousand people to be called suddenly to set out in this way, with old people, women, young children, and infants, what indescribable distress there would be! But what shall be said of a thousand times as many? 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 warriors alone would have filled up the road for about seven miles, and the whole multitude would have formed a dense column more than twenty-two miles long,- -so that the last of the body could not have been started till the front had advanced that distance, more than two days' journey for such a mixed company as this. 67. And the sheep and cattle-these must have formed another vast column, but obviously covering a much greater tract of ground in proportion to their number, as they would not march, of course, in compact order. Hence the drove must have been lengthened out | kneading-troughs? Afterwards, indeed, for many long miles. And such grass as they advanced into the wilderness, as there was, if not eaten down by the we are told how the people were supfirst ranks, must have been trodden under foot at once and destroyed, by those that followed them mile after mile. What, then, did those two millions of sheep and oxen live upon, during this journey from Rameses to Succoth, and from Succoth to Etham, and from Etham to the Red Sea? It 68. Even if we supposed with some, contrary to the plain meaning of the Scripture, that they did not all rendezvous at Rameses, but fell into the line farther on, on the first day or the second, still this would not in reality in any way relieve the difficulty, of so many miles of people marching with so many miles of sheep and oxen. would only throw it on to a farther stage of the journey. For when, on the third day, they turned aside and 'encamped by the Sca,' E.xiv.2, what then did this enormous multitude of cattlewhether 2,000,000 or (say) 200,000 or even 20,000-feed upon? KITTO, Hist. of the Jews, p.177, says, The journey to this point had been for the most part over a desert, the surface of which is composed of hard gravel, often strewed with pebbles. What, again, did they eat the next day, when they crossed the Sea? What on the next three days, when they marched through the wilderness of Shur, and 'found no water,' E.xv.22 ? Of this last stage KITTO says, ib.p.191:Their road lay over a desert region, sandy, gravelly, and stony, alternately. In about nine miles they entered a boundless desert plain, called El Ati, white and painfully glaring to the eye. Proceeding beyond this, the ground became hilly, with sand-hills near the coast. 69. They had not 'prepared for themselves any victual,' E.xii.39: much less, we must believe, had they prepared food for their cattle. Who, indeed, could suppose that, when they started with their kneading-troughs bound up in their clothes upon their shoulders,' (showing their want of carts, &c., to convey their common necessaries,) they carried also bundles of forage for their flocks and herds? Or were the oxen so laden with forage, that they could not also carry the plied with manna, E.xvi.35. But 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. We will now go on to consider the possibility of such a multitude of cattle finding any means of support, for forty years, under these circumstances. CHAPTER VIII. THE FLOCKS AND HERDS IN THE DESERT. 70. And, first, it is certain that the story represents them as possessing these flocks and herds during the whole of the forty years which they second year, Moses asks,— spent in the wilderness. Thus, in the 'Shall the flocks and the herds be slain for them to suffice them?' N.xi.22. And in the fortieth year we read, 'The children of Reuben and the children of Gad had a very great multitude of cattle,' This, it is true, is said immediately after the capture of a great number of cattle and sheep from the Midianites, N.xxxi. But the spoil in that case was divided among all the people. And, therefore, if the tribes of Reuben and Gad could still be distinguished among the rest, as having a great multitude of cattle, they must have been so noted before the plunder of the Midianites. Accordingly, we find that, at the end of the first year, they kept the second Passover under Sinai, N.ix.5, and, therefore, we may presume, had at that time, as before, 200,000 male lambs or kids of the first year (59) at their command, and two millions of sheep and oxen close at hand. 71. Again, it cannot be supposed, as some have suggested, that the flocks and herds were scattered far and wide, during the sojourn of the people in the wilderness, and so were able the more easily to find pasture. The story says nothing, and implies nothing, whatever of this; but, as far as it proves anything, it proves the contrary, since we find the whole body of the people together, on all occasions specified in the history. If, indeed, they had been so | dispersed, they would surely have required to be guarded, by large bodies of armed men, from the attacks of the Amalekites, Midianites, and others. 72. But, even if this was the case during the thirty-seven years, about which the story is silent altogether, yet, at all events, during nearly twelve months, they were all collected under Sinai, while the Tabernacle was in process of building, at the end of which time the second Passover was kept. We must, therefore, conclude that they came to Sinai with those immense bodies of sheep and oxen, with which, three months before, they had set out from Egypt. Hence we find the command in E.xxxiv.3, "Neither let the flocks nor herds feed before that mount.' 73. Lastly, it cannot be said that the state of the country, through which they travelled, has undergone any material change from that time to this. It is described as being then what it is now, a 'desert land,' a 'waste howling wilderness,' D.xxxii.10. '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 pome: granates; neither is there any water to drink,' N.xx.4,5. From the above passage it appears also that the water from the rock did not follow them in all places, as some have supposed. 'Beware that thou forget not Jehovah, thy God, who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water, who brought thee forth water out of the rock of flint.' D.viii.15. "Neither said they, Where is Jehovah, that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, that led us through the wilderness, through a land of deserts and of pits, through a land of drought and of the shadow of death, through a land that no man passed through, and where no man dwelt?' Jer.ii.6. Musa, the wells of Moses. It is a strange spot, this plot of tamarisks, with its seventeen wells, literally an island in the desert, and now used as the Richmond of Suez, a comparison which chiefly serves to show what a place Suez itself must be. Behind that African range lay Egypt, with all its wonders,—the green fields of the Nile, the immense cities, the greatest monuments of human power and wisdom. On this Asiatic side begins immediately a wide circle of level desert, stone, and sand, free as air, but with no trace of human habitation or art, where they might wander, And. as far as they saw, for ever and ever. between the two, rolled the deep waters of the Red Sea, rising and falling with the tides. which, except on its shores, none of them could have seen, the tides of the great Indian Ocean, unlike the still dead waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The day after leaving Ayun-Musa was at first within sight of the blue channel of the Red Sea. But soon Red Sea and all were lost in a sand-storm, which lasted the whole day. (I have retained this account of the sandstorm, chiefly because it seems to be a pheno. menon peculiar to this special region. VAN EGMONT, NIEBUHR, Miss MARTINEAU, all noticed it; and it was just as violent at the passage of a friend in 1841, and again of another two months after ourselves in 1853.) Imagine all distant objects entirely lost to surface of the desert, like streams of water. the whole air filled with a tempest of sand, driving in your face like sleet. view, the sheets of sand floating along the We were, undoubtedly, on the track of the Israelites; and we saw the spring, which most travellers believe to be Marah, and the two valleys, one of which must almost certainly-both perhaps-be Elim. The general barren plains of sand, as described below,] or, scenery is either immense plains, [i.e. bare and latterly, a succession of watercourses, [without water, see below,] exactly like the dry bed of a Spanish river. These gullies gradually bring you into the heart of strange black and white absolutely bare. But the two rivals for Elim mountains. For the most part the desert was are fringed with trees and shrubs, the first vegetation we have met in the desert. First, there are the wild palms, successors of the threescore and ten, not like those of Egypt or of pictures, but either dwarf, that is, trunkless, or else with savage, hairy trunks, and branches all dishevelled. Then there are the feathery tamarisks, here assuming gnarled boughs and hoary heads, on whose leaves is found what the Arabs call manna. Thirdly, there is the wild acacia, but this is also tangled by its desert growth into a thicket,-the tree of the Burning Bush and the Shittim-wood of the Tabernacle... A stair of rock brought us into a glorious wady, enclosed between red granite mountains, descending precipitously upon the sands. I cannot too often repeat that these wadys are exactly like rivers, except in having no water; and it is this appear 74. Let us now see what Dean STANLEY tells us, first, as to the nature of the country, through which the host of Israel must have marched from the Red Sea to Sinai. (Sinai and Pales-ance of torrent-bed and banks, and clefts in tine.) the rocks for tributary streams, and at times even rushes and shrubs fringing their course, The wind drove us to shore-the shore of which gives to the whole wilderness a doubly dry Arabia and Asia. We landed in a driving and thirsty aspect,-signs of Water, water, sand-storm, and reached this place, Ayun- I everywhere, and not a drop to drink.' Here too began the curious sight of the tree, but every group of trees, lives in the mountains, streaked from head to foot, as if traveller's recollection, as distinctly as the with boiling streams of dark red matter towns and spires of civilized countries. poured over them-really, the igneous fluid The more definitely marked spots of verdure, spurted upwards, as they were heaved from however, are the accompaniments, not of the the ground. The road lay through what empty beds of winter torrents, but of the few seemed to be the ruins, the cinders, of moun-living, perhaps perennial, springs, which, by tains calcined to ashes, like the heaps of a gigantic foundry. p.96-71. There are at first sight many appearances, which, to an unpractised eye, seem indications of volcanic agency. But they are all, it is believed, illusory. The vast heaps, as of calcined mountains, are only the detritus of iron in the sandstone formation. The traces of igneous action in the granite rocks belong to their first upheaving, not to any subsequent convulsions. Everywhere there are signs of the action of water, nowhere of fire. p.22. 75. Such, then, is the track, along which, according to the story, the two millions of Israelites had to pass with their two millions of sheep and oxen. Let us now see what Dean STANLEY tells us about the vegetation generally in the Sinaitic peninsula. Another feature [of the mountains of this peninsula] is the infinite complication of jagged peaks and varied ridges. This is the characteristic described by Sir F. HENNIKER, with a slight exaggeration of expression, when he says that the view from Jebel Musa is 'as if Arabia Petræa were an ocean of lava, which, while its waves were running mountains high, had suddenly stood still.' It is an equally striking and more accurate expression of the same, when he speaks of the whole range as being the Alps unclothed.' This their union of grandeur with desolation-is the point of their scenery absolutely unrivalled. They are the Alps of Arabia, but the Alps planted in the desert, and, therefore, stripped of all the clothing which goes to make up our notions of Swiss or English mountains, stripped of the variegated drapery of oak, and birch, and pine, and fir, of moss, and grass, and fern, which to landscapes of European hills are almost as essential as the rocks and peaks themselves. The very name of Alp is strictly applied only to the green pasturelands, enclosed by rocks or glaciers, a sight in the European Alps so common, in these Arabian Alps so wholly unknown. p.13. The general character of the wadys, as well as of the mountains, of Sinai is entire desolation. If the mountains are naked Alps, the valleys are dry rivers, p.16. For a few weeks or days in the winter, these wadys present, it is said, the appearance of rushing streams. But their usual aspect is absolutely bare and waste, only presenting the image of thirsty desolation the more strikingly, from the constant indications of water, which is no longer there. p.15. There is nearly everywhere a thin, it might almost be said, a transparent, coating of vegetation. There are occasional spots of verdure, which escape notice in a general view, but for that very reason are the more remarkable, when observed. Not, perhaps, every single the mere fact of their rarity, assume an im portance difficult to be understood in the moist scenery of the West and North. The springs, whose sources are for the most part high up in the mountain clefts, occasionally send down into the wadys rills of water, which, however scanty, however little deserving of the name even of brooks, yet become immediately the nucleus of whatever vegetation the desert produces. (RUPPELL notices four perennial brooks.) Often their course can be traced, not by visible water, but by a track of moss here, a fringe of rushes there, a solitary palm, a group of acacias, which at once denote that an unseen life is at work. p.15-18. The highest of these [peaks of Mount Serbal] is a huge block of granite. On this you stand, and overlook the whole peninsula of Sinai. Every feature of the extraordinary conformation lies before you,-the wadys, coursing and winding in every direction,-the long crescent of the Wady es Sheikh,-the infinite number of mountains like a model, their colours all clearly displayed, the dark granite, the brown sandstone, the yellow desert, the dots of vegetation along the Wady Feiran, and the one green spot of the great palm-grove (if so it be) of Rephidim. p.72. 76. We thus see the character of the desert of Sinai, in which this immense number of cattle was sustained, according to the story, for the space of forty years. Dean STANLEY will not, however, evade the difficult question, which is thus raised; and this is his comment upon it, p.23-27, with the replies which must be made to the different parts of his argument. (i) The question is asked, 'How could a tribe, so numerous and powerful, as on any (?) hypothesis the Israelites must have been, be maintained in this inhospitable desert? It is no answer to say that they were maintained by miracles. For, except the manna, the quails, and the three interventions with regard to water, none such are mentioned in the Mosaic history; and, if we have no warrant to take away, we have no warrant to add.' Ans. But, even if the people were supported by miracles, yet there is no provision whatever made in the Scripture for the support of the cattle. And these would need water as well as green food; and from N.xx.5 it appears that the miraculous supply of water was not permanent. (ii) 'Nor is it any answer to say that this difficulty is a proof of the impossibility, and, therefore, of the unhistorical character, of the narrative. For, as EWALD has well shown, the general truth of the wanderings in the wilderness is an essential preliminary to the whole of the subsequent history of Israel.' Ans. EWALD certainly asserts this; but where does he show it? The story of the Exo- | through the desert, in the caravan of the five dus is, no doubt, an essential preliminary' to thousand African pilgrims on their way to certain recorded parts of the subsequent his- Mecca.' tory of Israel, but not to the whole, even of the recorded history. If that story be shown to be untrue, those parts may also have to be abandoned as untrue, but not the whole Jewish history. (iii) Much may be allowed for the spread of the tribes of Israel far and wide through the whole peninsula, and also for the constant means of support from their own flocks and herds.' Ans. Can any allowance be made for such spreading (71)? The Mosaic narrative says nothing of any such a dispersion of the people. And, surely, the whole tone of it implies that they were kept constantly together, under the direct personal control of Moses. As before observed, if the cattle had been scattered in the way here supposed, they would have needed to be guarded by large bodies of armed men, from the attacks of other hostile tribes. But the numbers of the warriors of each tribe are carefully summed up in N.i,ii; and the position of each camp is assigned in N.x, with distinct directions how they were to march, in front, and in the rear, and on either side of the Levites bearing the Tabernacle. How otherwise, indeed, could the different camps have been started by the mere blowing an 'alarm' upon a silver trumpet, N.x.5,6, or the whole congregation' have been gathered together' by blowing simply without an alarm,' v.7? Ans. But the population, which we are now considering, was two millions, not five thousand. And these two millions of all ages had been driven out of Egypt in haste, and had not prepared for themselves any victual,' and had no means of carrying food, if they had had it. Whereas the Mecca caravan will, no doubt, have made all due preparation for the journey long beforehand, and will carry with it, we must suppose, ample store of provisions on the backs of its camels. Again, the two millions remain twelve months at a time in one most desolate spot, and wander forty years in the dry and weary land. Whereas the caravan merely passes through in a few days at the most. Lastly, the Israelites had, according to the story, vast multitudes of cattle, which had to be sustained in the desert without miraculous help. But the caravan has no flocks or herds, and travels with camels, which can go for weeks without water. (v) But, among these considerations, it is important to observe what indications there may be of the mountains of Sinai having ever been able to furnish greater resources than at present. These indications are well summed up by RITTER.' Ans. Whatever they may be, they cannot do away with the plain language of the Bible already quoted, which shows that the general character of the desert was as desolate and barren then as now. Besides which, it seems to be clearly implied in N.ix.17-23 that they travelled all together, and were not separated into different (vi) There is no doubt that the vegetation bodies. When the cloud was taken up from of the wadys has considerably decreased. In the Tabernacle, then after that the children part, this would be an inevitable effect of the of Israel journeyed; and in the place, where violence of the winter-torrents. The trunks the cloud abode, there the children of Israel of palm-trees washed up on the shore of the pitched their tents.' 'Whether it were two Dead Sea, from which the living tree has now days, or a month, or a year, that the cloud tar- for many centuries disappeared, show what ried upon the Tabernacle, remaining thereon, may have been the devastation produced among the children of Israel abode in their tents, and these mountains, where the floods, especially journeyed not; but, when it was taken up, in earlier times, must have been violent to a they journeyed.' Who, in these verses, are degree unknown in Palestine; whilst the meant by the children of Israel'? Plainly, peculiar cause, the impregnation of salt, the same who, a few verses before, in the same which has preserved the vestiges of the older chapter, are ordered to keep the second Pass- vegetation there, has here, of course, no existover in the wilderness of Sinai, N.ix.1,2,-ence. The traces of such destruction were that is, the whole body of the people. Such pointed out to BURCKHARDT on the eastern words as the above cannot surely be under-side of Mount Sinai, as having occurred within stood only of Moses and Aaron and the Tabernacle, guarded, perhaps, by a troop of armed men, going about in circuit continually to visit the different scattered knots of families. But, at all events, they were all, according to the story, assembled together under Mount Sinai, in one of the most desolate parts of the whole peninsula; and they continued there for nearly twelve months, and had their flocks there, since at the end of that time they kept the second Passover, N.ix.5. half a century before his visit; also to WELLSTED, as having occurred near Tur in 1832.' Ans. That palm-trees are found, washed up on the shores of the Dead Sea, into which they found their way, no doubt, from the river Jordan, gives surely no shadow of ground for believing that such trees, or any other, grew in the wilderness of Sinai. Dean STANLEY himself writes of the Dead Sea, p.293, 'Strewn along its desolate margin, lie the most striking memorials of this last conflict Doubtless, they may be supposed to have of life and death,-trunks and branches of derived some support from the slaughter of trees, torn down from the thickets of the rivertheir flocks and herds. The question is, how jungle by the violence of the Jordan, thrust were the flocks and herds themselves sup-out into the sea, and thrown up again by its ported? (iv) Something, too, might be elicited from the undoubted fact, that a population nearly, if not quite, equal to the whole permanent population of the peninsula, does actually pass waves.' It does not appear why the floods are supposed to have been more violent in earlier times than now. But, supposing that they were, and much more violent than in Pales |