185. The event was first recorded by Kallisthenes, and Plutarch (Alex. 17) states that ‘many historians’ had described it. Arrian (i. 27) alludes to it, and Menander introduced a scoffing reference to the miracle in one of his plays. The actual facts are given by Strabo (Geog. xiv. 3, 9), who says that near Phasêlis Mount Klimax juts out into the sea, but that in calm weather a road runs round its base on the seaward side. If the wind rises, however, the road is submerged by the waves. Alexander ventured to march along it while still covered by the sea, and though the water was up to the waists of the soldiers, passed safely through it, the wind not being very strong. His success came to be regarded as a miracle, and the miraculous passage of the sea by his army is narrated with many embellishments in the fragment of an unknown historian in a lexicon discovered by Papadopoulos in 1892.
186. The narrative is careful to indicate that this was the case (Exod. xiv. 23, 28). It is only in the Song of Moses (Exod. xv. 19) that ‘Pharaoh’s horses’ are changed into ‘the horse of Pharaoh,’ a change which, like the confusion between ‘the sea’ and the Yâm Sûph, shows either that the Song is of later date or that its language has been modified and interpolated.
187. Pap. Anastasi, iv. A translation of it by Dr. Birch will be found in Records of the Past, first series, vol. iv. pp. 49-52. The poet says of the king: ‘Amon gave thy heart pleasure, he gave thee a good old age.’ The name of the king, however, is not given, and it is therefore possible that Seti II. rather than Meneptah is referred to.
188. The last Pharaoh whose monuments have been found in the Sinaitic peninsula is Ramses VI. of the twentieth dynasty (De Morgan, Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte, p. 237).
189. The Amalekites adjoined Edom (Gen. xxxvi. 12) and southern Israel (Judg. v. 14), and extended from Shur, or the Wall of Egypt, to Havilah, the ‘sandy’ desert of Northern Arabia (1 Sam. xv. 7; see Gen. xiv. 7). That these Amalekites were the same as those conquered by Moses is expressly stated in 1 Sam. xv. 2 (cf. Exod. xvii. 16). The latter, therefore, lived miles to the north of the Sinaitic peninsula. The wilderness of Paran lay on the southern side of Moab (Deut. i. 1) and Judah (Gen. xxi. 14, 20, 21). Kadesh, now ’Ain Qadîs, was situated in it (Numb. xiii. 26). The geography of the Exodus is treated with great ability and logical skill in Baker Greene’s Hebrew Migration from Egypt (1879).
190. Judg. v. 4, 5; Deut. xxxiii. 2; Hab. iii. 3.
191. First pointed out by Baker Greene, The Hebrew Migration from Egypt, p. 170; Elim is the masculine, and Elath the feminine plural. Compare El-Paran, perhaps ‘El(im) of Paran,’ in Gen. xiv. 6, as well as Elah in Gen. xxxvi. 41.
192. Exod. xvi. 1 compared with Numb. xxxiii. 11.
193. The name is found in an inscription of Hadramaut (Osiander, Inscriptions in the Himyaritic Character, p. 29), where the god is called the son of Atthar or Istar instead of her brother, as in Babylonia, as well as in a Sabæan text from Sirwaḥ.
194. Numb. xiii. 26. The sanctuary had originally been Amalekite (Gen. xiv. 7).
195. Unfortunately, no calculation of distance can be made from the statement that Elijah was ‘forty days and forty nights’ on his way from Jezreel to Horeb, since ‘forty’ merely denotes an unknown number.
196. In the early days of the monarchy the armies of both the Israelites and the Philistines were similarly divided into companies of a hundred and a thousand (1 Sam. xxii. 7; xxix. 2; 2 Sam. xviii. 1). The system could not have been derived from Babylonia, where sixty was the unit of notation.
197. See my Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments, pp. 74-77, and Hibbert Lectures on the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, pp. 70-77.
198. The text of this is given in the 125th chapter of the Book of the Dead. A translation of it will be found in Wiedemann’s Religion der alten Aegypter, pp. 132, 133.
199. The conceptions which underlay this were embodied in the mediæval jurisprudence of Europe, and curious reports exist of the trials of cocks, rats, flies, dogs, and even ants, which lasted down to the eighteenth century (see Baring-Gould, Curiosities of Olden Times, second edit., pp. 57-73).
200. The exhortation, together with some of the laws, is given again in a somewhat changed form in Exod. xxxiv. 10-26.
201. The name belongs to the period when the Philistines were infesting the sea, before they had settled on the coast of Palestine, and indicates the early date of the passage in which it occurs. Perhaps the Greek tradition of the command of the sea by the Kretan Minos is a reminiscence of the same period.
202. W. A. I. i. 54, Col. ii. 54 sqq.
203. Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology, vii. 1, pp. 53, 54.
204. A contract-tablet dated in the 32nd year of Nebuchadrezzar, and published by Dr. Strassmaier (Inschriften von Nabuchodonoser, No. 217), gives us an insight into the details of Babylonian sacrifices, though, unfortunately, the signification of many of the technical words employed in it is doubtful or unknown. The tablet begins as follows: ‘Izkur-Merodach the son of Imbiya the son of Ilei-Merodach of his own free will has given for the future to Nebo-balásu-ikbi the son of Kuddinu the son of Ilei-Merodach the slaughterers of the oxen and sheep for the sacrifices of the king, the prescribed offerings, the peace-offerings (?) of the whole year, viz., the caul round the heart, the chine, the covering of the ribs, the ..., the mouth of the stomach, and the ..., as well as during the year 7000 sin-offerings and 100 sheep before Iskhara who dwells in the temple of Sa-turra in Babylon (not excepting the soft parts of the flesh, the trotters (?), the juicy meat and the salted (?) flesh), and also the slaughterers of the oxen, sheep, birds, and lambs due on the 8th day of Nisan, (and) the heave-offering of an ox and a sheep before Pap-sukal of Bit-Kidur-Kani, the temple of Nin-ip and the temple of Anu on the further bank of the New Town in Babylon.’
205. The Ancient Hebrew Tradition, pp. 282-284.
206. See the illustration in Erman’s Life in Ancient Egypt (Eng. tr.), p. 298.
207. Mr. G. Buchanan Gray (Studies in Hebrew Proper Names, p. 246, note 1) suggests that Aholiab is a foreign name. At all events, while we find names compounded with ohel, ‘tabernacle,’ in Minæan and Phœnician inscriptions, no other name of the kind is found among the Israelites.
208. Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici (Part i.), remarks on this: ‘I would gladly know how Moses, with an actual fire, calcined or burnt the golden calf into powder; for that mystical metal of gold, whose solary and celestial nature I admire, exposed unto the violence of fire, grows only hot and liquefies, but consumeth not.’
209. An interpolation (Exod. xxxiii. 1-5) makes the worship of the golden calf account for the fact that, as declared in Exod. xxiii. 20, an angel should lead Israel into Canaan, and not Yahveh Himself. But it ignores the further fact that Yahveh was really present in the Holy of Holies as well as in the pillar of fire and cloud.
210. Hadad-sum and his son Anniy (see my Patriarchal Palestine, p. 250). Small stone tablets like those of Balawât, engraved with cuneiform characters, are in the museums of Europe.
211. Sayce, Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments, pp. 79-83.
212. The contrast between such cases, where the names and details are as circumstantially stated as in the legal tablets of early Babylonia, and cases which rest merely upon the memory of tradition, will be clear at once from a reference to Numb. xv. 32-36. Here we have to do with tradition only, and accordingly no name is given, and the story is introduced with the vague statement that it happened at some time or other when the Israelites ‘were in the wilderness.’ The whole of the chapter is an interpolation which is singularly out of place in the narrative, and seems to have been substituted for a description of the disasters which followed on the abortive attempt of the Israelites to invade Canaan.
213. Sayce, Babylonian Literature, pp. 79, 80; Knudtzon, Assyrische Gebete an den Sonnengott, pp. 73 sqq.
214. Athenæus, Deipn. xiv. 639 c.
215. Amiaud’s translation of the Inscriptions of Telloh in the Records of the Past, new ser., ii. pp. 83, 84.
216. This was clearly shown by Colenso, The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua critically examined, Pt. i.
217. The soss was 60, the ner 600.
218. Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt (Eng. tr.), p. 475.
219. So in Josephus, Antiq. ii. 10.
220. Trumbull, Kadesh-barnea (1884).
221. Numb. xiii. 21 seems to be a later exaggeration when compared with the following verse. No argument, however, can be drawn from the statement that the spies were absent only ‘forty days,’ since here, as elsewhere, ‘forty’ merely means an unknown length of time.
222. Eshcol, however, was already the name of an Amorite chieftain of Mamre in the time of Abraham (Gen. xiv. 13).
223. Numb. xxi. 1-3 is a combination of this abortive attempt and the subsequent conquest of Arad and Zephath by Judah and Simeon (Judg. i. 16, 17), and is intended to resume the thread of the history which had been broken by the insertion of chapter xv.
224. In Numb. xx. 1-13 a tradition about the waters of Meribah takes the place of a history of the long period that elapsed between the first and the second arrival at Kadesh, during which the numerous series of stations mentioned in Numb. xxxiii. 19-36 was passed. A comparison with Exod. xvii. 1-7 and Deut. xxxiii. 8 seems to show that the story of ‘the water of Meribah’ has been transferred from Rephidim to Kadesh. At Kadesh, indeed, there would have been no want of water (see Gen. xiv. 7), and it may be that the meaning of the word Meribah, ‘contention,’ has been the cause of the transference. En-Mishpat, ‘the Spring of Judgment,’ where contentions were decided, had been for centuries the name of the spring at Kadesh-barnea. As for the name of Zin, it possibly signifies ‘the dry place.’
225. Gen. xxxvi. 27; 1 Chron. i. 42.
226. In Deut. x. 6, 7 (which has been interpolated in the middle of the narrative of the legislation at Mount Sinai), the order of events is: (1) Departure from Beeroth of Beni-Yaakan to Mosera, (2) death of Aaron at Mosera, (3) departure to Gudgodah, (4) departure to Yotbath. In Numb. xx., xxxiii. 30-39 it is, on the contrary: (1) Departure from Hashmonah to Moseroth, (2) departure to Beni-Yaakan, (3) departure to Hor-hagidgad, the Gudgodah of Deuteronomy, (4) departure to Yotbathah, (5) departure to Ebronah, (6) departure to Ezion-geber, (7) departure to Kadesh, (8) departure to Mount Hor, (9) death of Aaron on Mount Hor.
227. The passage was already corrupt in the time of the Septuagint translators. But instead of eth-wâhab, their text reads eth-zâhâb. If this was correct, the reference would probably be to Dhi-Zahab, ‘(the mines) of gold’ which, according to Deut. i. 1, was not far from Sûph.
228. Zeitschrift des Palästina Vereins, xiv. pp. 142 sq. Tell ’Ashtereh is the Ashteroth-Karnaim of Gen. xiv. 5.
229. Professor Erman reads them Akna-Zapn, perhaps Yakin-Zephon, ‘Jachin of the North.’ Above the figures is the winged solar disk (Erman, Der Hiobstein in the Zeitschrift des Palästina Vereins, xiv. pp. 210, 211).
230. On the left side of the base of the second statue in front of the pylon, where it follows the name of Assar, the Asshurim of Gen. xxv. 3; see Daressy, Notice explicative des Ruines du Temple de Louxor, p. 19.
231. Bela’s city is stated to have been Dinhabah (Gen. xxxvi. 32), which Dr. Neubauer has identified with Dunip, now Tennib, north-west of Aleppo, which played an important part in the history of Western Asia during the fifteenth century B.C.
232. W. A. I. i. 46; Col. iii. 29, 30. In another passage Esar-haddon describes them as ‘serpents with two heads’ (Budge, History of Esar-haddon, p. 120).
233. Bronze serpents were regarded in Babylonia as divine protectors of a building, and were accordingly ‘set up’ at its entrance. Thus Nebuchadrezzar says of the walls of Babylon, ‘On the thresholds of the gates I set up mighty bulls of bronze and huge serpents that stood erect’ (W. A. I. i. 65, i. 19-21).
234. It is called simply Iyîm in the official itinerary (Numb. xxxiii. 45). Punon is the Pinon of Gen. xxxvi. 41, where it is coupled with Elah, the El-Paran of Gen. xiv. 6.
235. Those who wish to see what can be done by ingenious philological conjectures which satisfy none but their authors may turn to a paper by Professor Budde in the Actes du Dixième Congrès Internationale des Orientalistes, iii. pp. 13-18, where they will find a ‘revised’ version of Numb. xxi. 17, 18. The two last lines are changed into ‘With the sceptre, with their staves: From the desert a gift!’
236. Numb. xxxii. 41, 42; Deut. iii. 14. We learn from Judg. x. 3, 4, that Jair was one of the judges, so that the conquest of Havoth-Jair must have taken place long after the death of Moses.
237. Now Dar’at (pronounced Azr’ât by the Bedâwin) and Tell-Ashtereh.
238. Zippor of Gaza was the name of the father of a certain Baal- ... whose servant carried letters in the third year of Meneptah II. from Egypt to Khai, the Egyptian governor of the fellahin or Perizzites of Palestine, and the king of Tyre (Brugsch, Egypt under the Pharaohs, Eng. tr., second edit., ii., p. 126).
239. Ammiya is said to have been seized by Ebed-Asherah the Amorite (The Tel el-Amarna Tablets in the British Museum, 12. 25., 15. 27). It is also called Amma (ib. 17. 7., 37. 58, where it is associated with Ubi, the Aup of the Egyptian inscriptions) and Ammi (W. and A. 89. 13).
240. If the two Balaams, ‘son of Beor,’ are really the same person, Edomite and Israelitish history will have handed down two different conceptions of him. The Israelitish chronology, moreover, would make it impossible for him to have been the first Edomite king (see Numb. xx. 14).
241. Sheth are the Sutu of the Assyrian inscriptions, the Sittiu or ‘Archers’ of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Bedâwin of modern geography. The Beni-Sheth will be the Midianite Bedâwin who are associated with the Moabites in the Pentateuch (Numb. xxii. 4, 7; xxv. 1-18; xxxi. 8).
242. Records of the Past, new ser., iii. pp. 61-65.
243. Tiglath-pileser I. (B.C. 1100) boasts of having sailed upon the Mediterranean in a ship of Arvad, and of there killing a dolphin, while his son, Assur-bil-kala, erected statues in the cities of ‘the land of the Amorites’ (W. A. I. i. 6, No. vi.). A little later Assur-irbi carved an image of himself on Mount Amanus, near the Gulf of Antioch, but the capture by the king of Aram of Mutkina, which guarded the ford over the Euphrates, subsequently cut him off from the west. Palestine is already called Ebir-nâri, ‘the land beyond the river,’ in an Assyrian inscription which Professor Hommel would refer to the age of Assur-bil-kala, the son of Tiglath-pileser I. (The Ancient Hebrew Tradition, p. 196). Professor D. H. Müller (Die Propheten, p. 215) conjecturally emends the Hebrew text of Numb. xxiii. 23, 24, and sees in it a reference to the kingdom of Samalla, to the north-east of the Gulf of Antioch. The two verses become in his translation, ‘[And he saw Samalla], and began his speech, and said, Alas, who will survive of Samalla? And ships [shall come] from the coast of Chittim, and Asshur shall oppress him, and Eber shall oppress him, and he himself is destined to destruction.’ Samalla, however, was only the Assyrian name of a district called by natives of Northern Syria Ya’di and Gurgum; nor is it easy to understand how Balaam could have ‘seen’ the north of Syria from Moab. Professor Hommel is more probably right in his view that Asshur here does not signify the Assyrians, but the Asshurim to the south of Palestine (Gen. xxv. 3, 18).
245. Similar cities of refuge, called puhonua, existed in Hawaii. ‘A thief or a murderer might be pursued to the very gateway of one of those cities; but as soon as he crossed the threshold of that gate, even though the gate were open and no barrier hindered pursuit, he was safe as at the city altar. When once within the sacred city, the fugitive’s first duty was to present himself before the idol and return thanks for his protection’ (Trumbull, The Threshold Covenant, p. 151, quoting Ellis, Through Hawaii, pp. 155 sq., and Bird, Six Months in the Sandwich Islands, pp. 135 sq.). For the asyla of Asia Minor see Barth, De Asylis Græcis (1888); Daremberg et Saglio, Dictionnaire des Antiquités, Grecques et Romaines, i. pp. 505 sqq.; Pauly’s Real-Encyclopädie (ed. Wissowa), iv. pp. 1884-5.
246. Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt (Eng. tr.), p. 299.
247. Cornelius Nepos, Them. ii. 10.
248. Mahaffy, The Empire of the Ptolemies, pp. 144, 156-158. For the hiera or priestly cities of Asia Minor, see Ramsay, The Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, pp. 101 sqq.; their constitution resembled very closely that of the Levitical cities in Israel. Examples of such cities in the history of Israel are Nob in the time of Saul and Anathoth in the age of Jeremiah.
249. The order of events is in many places confused, which probably points to later insertions in the text. See, for example, Deut. x. 6-9, which interrupts the context, and has nothing to do either with what precedes or with what follows.
250. E.g. Deut. xiv. 21, compared with Lev. xvii. 14-16.
251. In this respect it resembles the ‘Negative Confession’ of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which the soul of the dead man was required to make before the judges of the other world (Wiedemann, Religion der alten Aegypter, pp. 132, 133).
252. Levi is included among the six tribes which stood on Mount Gerizim to bless. This is an inadvertency, as the Levites were placed on both mountains, it being their duty to utter the curses as well as the blessings.
253. If it did so, xxxiii. 4 can hardly be original. Perhaps Yahveh rather than Moses was described as ‘king in Jeshurun’ (cf. v. 26). A very ingenious attempt has been made by Dr. Hayman to explain the corruptions of the text in the song by the theory that it was originally written on a clay tablet, a fracture of which has caused some of the words at the ends of the lines to be lost.
254. Cf. 1 Chron. iv. 22.
255. This passage must have been written at a time when Judah had not yet come to occupy a definite place among the tribes in Canaan, and when, as in the Song of Deborah, the territory of Benjamin was regarded as a sort of appendage of that of Ephraim, and as extending as far south as the desert of the Amalekites. (See also Josh. xv. 63.)
256. Josh. xviii. 22.
257. Colonel Watson in the Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund, July 1895, pp. 253-261; see also Quatremère, Histoire des Sultans Mamluks, ii. p. 26; and Mr. Stevenson in the Quarterly Statement October 1895, pp. 334-338.
258. The play is on the verb gâlal, ‘to roll.’ Gilgal, however, means the ‘circle’ of stones, or ‘cairn.’ Moreover, the Egyptians were circumcised, so that uncircumcision could not correctly be called ‘the reproach of Egypt.’ Some of the Israelites may have been circumcised at Gilgal, but it is incredible that none of the males born in the desert had been so. This would have been a flagrant violation of the Mosaic law (see Lev. xii. 3; Gen. xvii. 14).
259. The tongue-like wedge of gold finds its parallel in six tongue-like wedges of silver discovered by Dr. Schliemann in the ‘Third prehistoric City’ of Hissarlik or Troy, and figured by him in Ilios, pp. 470-472. Mr. Barclay V. Head has shown that they each represent the third of a Babylonian maneh.
260. See my Races of the Old Testament, pp. 75-77; Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund, July 1876 and July 1877.
261. Gezer was similarly laid under tribute by Ephraim (Josh. xvi. 10).
262. The Septuagint has Elam instead of Hoham, from which we may perhaps infer that the older reading of the Hebrew text was Yeho-ham. If so, we should have an example of the use of the name of the national God of Israel among the Hebronites. The substitution of El for Yeho would be parallel to the fact that in the inscriptions of the Assyrian king Sargon the contemporary king of Hamath is called both Yahu-bihdi and Ilu-bihdi. Cf. also Joram and Hado-ram (2 Sam. viii. 10; 1 Chron. xviii. 10). Piram resembles the Egyptian Pi-Romi; the name was also Karian (Sayce, The Karian Language and Inscriptions in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, ix. 1, No. ii. 3). The Jarmuth of which Piram was king cannot be the same as the Yarimuta of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, as that seems to have been in the north, though Karl Niebuhr makes it the Delta. For Piram the Septuagint has Phidôn; and it changes Yaphia into Jephthah and Eglon into Adullam.
263. See Flinders Petrie, Tell el-Hesy (Lachish) (1891) and Bliss, A Mound of Many Cities.
264. For Horam the Septuagint again has Elam. Perhaps the original reading was Yehoram. There is no ground for supposing that Hoham of Hebron and Horam of Gezer are one and the same.
265. It is called Huzar in the list of the conquests of Thothmes III. at Karnak, where it follows Liusa or Laish, and precedes Pahil, identified with Pella by Mr. Tomkins, and Kinnertu or Chinnereth.
266. Records of the Past, new ser., v. p. 89.
267. Records of the Past, new ser., v. p. 44, No. 18.
268. See also Josh. xi. 2.
269. Josh. xii. 21-24. Probably the kings of Tappuah, Hepher, Aphek, and Sharon are to be included in the confederacy (verses 17, 18). We do not know where Tappuah was (though it is usually placed in the Wadi el-Afranj; G. A. Smith, Hist. Geog. of the Holy Land, p. 202). Hepher can hardly be the southern Hepher referred to in 1 Kings iv. 10, but is probably Gath-Hepher west of the Sea of Galilee. Aphek (1 Sam. xxix. 1) was a few miles to the south of it, and the plain of Sharon began at Dor. Cf., however, Beth-Tappuah (in the Wadi el-Afranj) and Aphekah near Hebron, in Judah (Josh. xv. 53).