whose banks Moses was exposed-whose waters were turned into blood? Let our author be heard:— This question is one, however, which cannot be at all satisfactorily answered without a particular investigation of the country through which that river once flowed, and which now represents the desolate and deserted kingdom of Mitzraim; nor until that investigation has been accomplished, can it justly be said that the non-existence of a river in the present day, is a proof that no such river could have existed in the time of the Pharaohs; knowing, as we do, the vast physical changes which take place (even before our eyes) in other parts of the earth's surface; and considering also, that in that particular country important alterations have indubitably been effected merely by the change which has taken place in the coast line by the gradual advance of the land upon the sea, and also by the equally progressive encroachment of the sands of the desert; whilst it may not even be unphilosophical to imagine that some more considerable geological change in the surface of the country has taken place, in order to carry completely into effect the denunciations of the Lord, "And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up.'p. 287. But before we proceed to the prophesyings, on which our author lays so much stress, we must express our astonishment at his assertion, that artificial irrigation is unknown in Egypt. The remarkable passage in Deuteronomy- The land whither thou goest is not as the land of Mitzraim from whence ye came, where thou sowedst thy seed, and wateredst it with thy foot, as a garden of herbs' has till this time been adduced as a remarkable instance of the graphic fidelity of the sacred writer, and the immutability of Eastern customs. Our author may not have read the very curious description, in Philo, of the hydraulic machine moved by the foot. He may have paid little attention to modern travellers, among whom Shaw explains the passage by another custom of actually directing the water from the cisterns into the gardens by pressing earth down with the foot. Niebuhr, however, describes the machine (called, by the Arabs, sakki tdir beridsjel, the water-engine) as exactly the same which was in use in the time of Philo, and no doubt in that of Moses. All this Mr. Beke might have found in so common a book as 'Burder's Oriental Customs,' or in any historical commentator on the Old Testament. It is true that the Nile was the chief source of Egyptian fertility; but the water of the flood has always been kept up in tanks and cisterns, and artificial channels; and these are the ponds' and the pools,' which, as well as the river,' were turned into blood during the plagues of Egypt. But when Mr. Beke, at the close of the last extract, appeals to the 19th chapter of Isaiah, we confess that our critical zeal takes fire at this profanation of one of the most beautiful passages of Hebrew poetry. The beauty consists not so much in the unrivalled spirit and imaginative richness, as in the living fidelity and truth. It is Egyptian-purely, vividly, exclusively Egyptian, in every image, in every allusion. In any great eastern kingdom the idols might be moved at the presence of the Lord, and the heart of the people melt in the midst of it. But was it in Arabia the Stony that the cities were so numerous and powerful, and that conflicting kingdoms wasted the land by civil strife? How often, on the other hand, in Egyptian history, has city (fought) against city, and kingdom against kingdom?" The Alexandrian translators, with local propriety, have translated' nome against nome.' Without going back to the theory of Marsham, espoused by Gatterer and others, that the dynasties of Manetho were not of successive, but of contemporary kings, who reigned in different parts of Egypt, the reader of Herodotus will immediately call to mind the twelve kings,' as well as the civil wars, in which, since Grotius, interpreters of the Scripture have generally traced the accomplishment of this prediction. We will not insist on the charmers, the familiar spirits, and the wizards-superstitions, though peculiarly prevalent in Egypt at all times, yet common, no doubt, to most eastern tribes :-let us proceed to the next verse :- And the waters shall fail from the sea, And the river shall be wasted and dried up.' In this parallelism both the sea and the river, in the general opinion of Hebrew scholars, mean the Nile. Diodorus informs us that the Egyptians called the Nile xavos, l. i. 12; it is called hayos by Herodotus during its overflow; and both Rosenmuller and Gesenius have observed that in the Koran it is described by the Arabic noun, which is the same as the Hebrew one here interpreted' sea.' But who that is not enslaved to a system will not recognise in these vivid words the suspension of the periodical inundation of the Nile? Who would argue that— The words, "the river shall be wasted and dried up," have been held to refer to the Nile; and yet, during the 2500 years which have elapsed since the period when those words were uttered, that mighty river has continued to roll its waters into the sea, without diminution, and substantially without change!' To what other country, less dependent for its glory, its power, its vital existence, upon its full and overflowing river, would the malediction apply with the same tremendous energy? The reader who would feel its full force, will do well to look at Volney's powerful description of the famine caused by one failure of the inundation, in which it was estimated that a sixth part of the population population perished. We cannot refrain from giving the few following verses, in which we have taken the liberty of mingling together, according to our own judgment of the real force and signification of the original, our authorized version, with those of Lowth, Rosenmuller, and the unrivalled one of Gesenius : The water-courses stink; The canals of Egypt are drained and dry; The reeds and the flags wither; The meadows by the water-courses, by the margin of the water courses; The seed sown by the water-course is withered, is blasted, is no more. Then mourn the fishers; Troubled are all that cast the hook in the river; They that spread the net over the face of the waters languish; The weavers of the snow-white robes.' We have not ventured, in the fourth line, to retain the characteristic paper reeds of our version; but to the traveller who has visited Egypt-to the scholar who has studied the antiquities and the manners of Egypt-to the reader who has seen the splendid publication of the Tuscan government, published under the care of Rosellini, how forcible, how pregnant, how appropriate is every allusion! In the latter volume we have the fisher casting the angle and spreading the net; the whole process of gathering the reeds, of weaving the linen, copied from paintings on the walls of the excavations, much older probably than the time of Isaiah, but with all their lines as distinct, and their colours as fresh, as if they had been drawn but yesterday. We really pity Mr. Beke, if he is insensible to the exquisite, the religious feeling of poetry, which thrills our hearts at the life and the truth of these, as well as other passages in the Hebrew prophets, which allude to Egypt, and, by the graphic fidelity of every touch, bring before us the whole country, with its singular products and manners: if, instead of this, he has to imagine, in the barren desert, a kingdom, a state of society, a people whose local circumstances, manners, and religion, will harmonize with equal accuracy with the language of the sacred writer. For ourselves, we cannot consent to allow the transcendent poetry of Isaiah and Ezekiel to become thus dry, barren, vague, and unmeaning, at least without evidence and argument of a very different character from the inferences, and surmises, and conjectures of these 'Origines Biblicæ.' The other prophecies on which Mr. Beke insists are those VOL. LII. NO. CIV. 2 M which which describe the total degradation of the Mitzraitish kingdom, and the eternal failure of its princes : The prophetic announcements, "The sceptre of Mitzraim shall depart away," and "There shall be no more a prince of the land of Mitzraim," have been applied to Egypt, although those announcements were followed by the accession of the powerful native dynasty of the descendants of Lagus, who retained the sceptre of that country during nearly three whole centuries:-and, in like manner, the denunciation upon Mitzraim, "It shall be the basest of the kingdoms; neither shall it exalt itself any more above the nations: for I will diminish them, that they shall no more rule over the nations," has been considered to be accomplished in the subsequent state of Egypt, in spite of the facts, that under the sway of the Ptolemies that country attained a higher degree of opulence and splendour than it had probably ever possessed under any preceding monarchs;—that during the peaceful and happy reign of Philadelphus it "was the first power by sea, and one of the first by land, in the world; "—and that under his successor, Euergetes, its empire actually extended over the whole of the then known portions of the continents of Africa and Asia.'—p. 301. We leave Mr. Beke to settle one part of this question with some other modern interpreters of prophecy. We know that there are certain worthy persons who have been seriously apprehensive and sadly embarrassed by the rise of Mohammed Ali, and cannot quite make out how to reconcile his Egyptian kingdom, particularly now that he has renounced his allegiance to the Porte, with these prophecies of Jeremiah and of Zachariah. We have been cautious not to disturb still further the trembling faith of these deep critics with any appeal to profane history, nor have we ventured to adduce the precedents of the magnificent Ptolemies, or the not less splendid Fatimite Sultans. But, for our own part, we are quite content to rest the veracity of the prophets on the total extinction of the native line of princes, concerning whom they wrote. We greatly doubt whether any of these particular predictions relating to the kingdoms and dynasties of antiquity look beyond their immediate accomplishment, or that they were intended to pledge, as it were, Divine Providence to remote ages; their accomplishment is to be sought, and will, we assert, invariably be found, in the history of the times. Thus with the Assyrian, or rather with the Persian conquest, the reign of the Egyptian Pharaohs, the successors of Menes and Sesostris, was for ever terminated; and though we know little of the effects of the Assyrian conquest, no conquered monarchy, probably, was ever so degraded, so reduced to be the basest of kingdoms,' as Egypt was by the mad tyranny of Cambyses. Read the account in Herodotus of the wanton insults of the Persian conqueror upon the religion, religion, as well as his grinding tyranny over the people in Egypt, and no further illustration of the maledictions of Isaiah * or Ezekiel will be required by the sober student of the prophetic writings. We must conclude with the expression of our sincere regret that Mr. Beke has not applied his talents and ingenuity to some more profitable purpose: we would speak with respect of both. Though we have been compelled to give a verdict of not proven' against every plea which he has advanced in the work before us, we trust that in no instance we have departed from the urbanity of the scholar or the charity of the Christian. We would hope that the time is come when such questions may be debated without the slightest tinge of polemic acrimony; and though our author must feel some natural disappointment, if he shall be convinced that he has wasted much valuable time upon an untenable hypothesis, in the end he will not be dissatisfied at our friendly and temperate admonition, which would strongly urge more mature consideration and more profound inquiry, before he ventures to publish another volume of Origines Biblica.' ART. XII.-Louis Philippe et la Contre-Révolution de 1830. Par B. Sarrans, jeune. 2 tomes. Paris, 1834. WE E alluded to this work in our last Number as a formal bill of indictment preferred against Louis Philippe, for every species of political apostacy and of private ingratitude. We now resume a more particular consideration of the work-not with the view of entering into the polemic details of the squabbles between the citizen-king and his quondam friends-with which our readers are, we believe, sufficiently acquainted, and may be, we fear, somewhat tired-but for the purpose of recording some anecdotical facts concerning the new dynasty. Though we are far from giving implicit credit to all M. Sarrans's assertions—and, though we reject the whole of his doctrines and most of his reasonings, it is impossible to deny that he has made out his case of ingratitude and apostacy against Louis Philippe but he has made one great, and in every sense, radical mistake-he lays the whole blame of this change on the king, when, in fact, the greater part of it belongs to the persons and principles which the king has been forced to repudiate. Ad hominem M. Sarrans's argument is conclusive; and the answers which the king and his friends have attempted are miserably weak, and must necessarily be so, because they have not yet *And the Egyptians will I give over into the hand of a cruel lord; and a fierce king shall rule over them, saith the Lord, the Lord of Hosts.'—Isaiah xix. 4. |