CHAPTER II. - THE NOAHIC PROGRAM.
THE voice of prophecy was not altogether
silent in the intervals between the seven successive commencements of
human history of which we have spoken. From time to time it gave utterance
to isolated predictions such, for example, as that of Enoch about the
coming of the Lord with ten thousands of His saints to judge the wickeda
very glorious prophecy, yet one which had in view exhortation and warning
rather than definite prediction. It was no chart of future events, it
did not foretell the course of human history, but only the moral aspects
of its final issues. As such detached and hortatory prophecies do not
form parts of the program we have to consider, we do not pause to dwell
on this utterance of ?the seventh from Adam, ? who was translated that
he should not see death.
With the second father of the human family the definitely predictive element reappears. Not only was the approaching
end of the antediluvian age made known to Noah not only was he acquainted
beforehand with the purpose of God to destroy by a flood the evil generation
which had corrupted the earth but he was informed also of the exact
chronological distance of the deluge. It was not to overtake the world
for a hundred and twenty years: thus far would the longsuffering of
God wait, if men would perchance be warned and repent. This is the first
chronologic prophecy in the Bible, and it indicated in advance the
end of the antediluvian age. We shall see, as we proceed, that all the
other chronologic predictions of Scripture similarly throw their light
forward to the close of the
different ages to which they respectively belong.
Moved with fear the fear born of faith
Noah prepared an ark to the saving of his house, and while doing so
acted as ?a preacher of righteousness? to the evil generation in whose
midst his lot, was cast. His knowledge of the approaching end of the
age in which he lived did not make him idle, impracticable, speculative,
or despairing; it roused him rather to preach with power and labor with
diligence, and it separated him in spirit from the wickedness, the worldliness,
and the unbelief of his age. None of the wicked understood, believed,
or heeded his warning words. As decade after decade of the last century
of the old world rolled away, its millions remained as full as ever
of carnal confidence and unbelieving indifference. They were occupied
exclusively with earth and its interests agricultural, commercial, social
right up to the hour when Noah and his family entered into the ark.
The Divine Hand that shut him in, opened at the same time the windows
of heaven and broke up the fountains of the great deep; and though its
approach had been revealed by God more than a century previously, and
though His righteous servant had not failed to proclaim to men the counsel
and purpose of the Almighty, ?they knew not until the flood came and
took them all away.?
When Noah and his family emerged into
the new world, they were wiser than our first parents in paradise. Adam,
gazing around him in Eden, may well have inwardly exclaimed as to God,
?He can create?, but Noah, doing the same from Ararat, must surely have
added, ?He can destroy.? Sorely
must the second father of the human race have needed the light of promise
and of prophecy at the solemn crisis when he and his stood amid the
wreck of the old world the sole survivors of a perished race. Events
had forced upon them a vivid realization of the solemn fact that the
great Creator would actually destroy the works of His own hands, rather
than permit the victory of moral evil. It was a terrible revelation,
for did not they too belong to the sinful race? What was to be their
future and that of their posterity? Must they anticipate a recurrence
of the late awful catastrophe? Oh, how they needed the sure word of
prophecy as a lamp to shine in the dark place where they stood! The
wrath of God seemed to have recalled His gift of the earth to the sons
of men. Dared they take possession of this new earth as Adam had done
of the old? Evil might and probably would fill the world afresh, and
what then was their tenure to be?
Never did trembling mariners launching
on a stormy and unknown ocean more need the compass, pilot, and daylight,
than did the prisoners of the ark when they first alighted on Ararat
need the guidance of Divine promise. And hence, as might be expected,
the grace that had saved speedily reassured their fearful hearts: God
set His bow of promise in the cloud, and prophecy witnessed the reflection
of her beams of light from the retiring waters. A covenant of mercy
gave them a new charter of natural blessings, and a new grant of dominion
in the earth. A second time was the human family commanded to multiply
and replenish all its waste places. The word of promise soothed the
fears of the rescued; no recurrence of a deluge was to be apprehended.
Seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night,
were not again to be interrupted in their natural sequence; and four
thousand years have proved God?s faithfulness to His promise. The Noahic
covenant is our present lease of the earth. According to its terms,
God legislates for the winds and waves, the sunbeams and the storm clouds,
so as to secure to man the indispensable order of the seasons.
?The great circle of the heavens
apparently described by the sun every year (owing to our revolution
round that body) is called the ecliptic... The plane of the earth?s equator, extended towards
the stars, marks out the equator of the heavens, the plane of which
is inclined to the ecliptic at an angle... known as the
obliquity of the ecliptic. It is this inclination which gives rise
to the vicissitudes of the seasons during our annual journey round the
sun... The obliquity of the ecliptic is now slowly decreasing at the
rate of about 48? in 100 years. ?It will not always, however, be on
the decrease; for before it can have altered 1½ N, the cause
which produces this diminution must act in a contrary direction, and
thus tend to increase the obliquity. Consequently the change of obliquity
is a phenomenon in which we are concerned only as astronomers, since
it can never become sufficiently great to produce any sensible alteration
of climate on the earth?s surface. A consideration of this remarkable
astronomical fact cannot but remind us of the promise made to man after
the deluge, that ?while the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, cold
and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.?
That the perturbation of obliquity consisting merely of an oscillatory
motion of the plane of the ecliptic will not permit of its inclination
ever becoming very great or very small, is an
astronomical discovery in perfect unison with the declaration made
to Noah, and explains how effectually the Creator has ordained the
means for carrying out His promise, though the way it was to be
accomplished remained a hidden secret until the
great discoveries of modern science placed it within human comprehension.?
?(Chambers? ? Handbook of
Descriptive Astronomy, ? p. 73.)
The promises and predictions that followed
the flood were of a cheering and merciful nature, and exactly calculated
to restore in the hearts of those who had witnessed the evil effects
of the fall, and seen a guilty race whelmed in the darkness and death
of the deluge, hope, courage, and confidence in God. No threats, no
conditions were attached to the gracious covenant of which the rainbow
is the beautiful and abiding token. It should be noted here that the
promise of redemption was not
renewed in the Noahic covenant, because nothing that had happened had
in the slightest degree invalidated it. It stood as before; and Noah
and his family evinced their acquaintance with it by offering sacrifice.
They doubtless prized it in the new earth as they had ever done in the
old, for the dark background of judgment and perdition must have made
more precious than ever the hope of redemption and deliverance.
We must not pause to dwell at any length
on these early Noahic predictions, the fulfillment of which has been
a matter of experience to the human race for four thousand years. We
must pass on rather to those given at a later point in the life of the
patriarch Noah, which partake more of the nature of a
program of the world?s history-
Just as it was subsequently granted
to Jacob and to Moses to foresee and to foretell the future of the different
tribes of Israel, so to Noah, the second father of the human race, it
was given towards the close of his long life of nine hundred and fifty
years, to foresee and foretell the future of the
races that should descend from him, by
whom the whole earth should in due time be overspread. We have no means
of fixing the exact date of the very remarkable prophecy in which he
does this.#Ge
9:24-29. Owing to
its position as the first recorded incident after the flood, it is often
taken for granted that it followed closely upon that event; but there
is really no ground for this assumption. It is the only
incident mentioned in the subsequent life of the patriarch; indeed,
with the exception of the death of Noah, the only incident recorded
between the flood and the building of Babela period of many centuries.
Its place in the narrative is therefore no
guide to its actual date, nor to its position in the life of Noah.
If it occurred as early as is generally supposed, then Noah?s grandson
Canaan is mentioned before he was born, or had done good or evil; which
is most unlikely. On the other hand, if it shortly preceded the event
next following in the record the death of Noah then the parallel with
the cases of Jacob and Moses is close, and an additional solemnity and
importance attaches to the prediction.
Further, this memorable utterance of
the great preacher of righteousness must never be regarded as the imprecation
of a curse and the bestowal of blessings, much less as if the words
had been prompted by any angry or vindictive feeling on Noah?s part
against his youngest son. A thoughtless reading of the narrative might
produce such an impression on the mind, but reflection will show it
to be an unworthy and wholly groundless one. The words were, as their
fulfillment proves, an inspired prophecy, not an imprecation the future
of each race is not so much assumed as foretold; and
the good or bad destiny in each case is connected not so much with the
moral character of Shem, Ham, and Japhet personally, as with that of
their descendants in distant ages, all whose deeds lay even then naked
and open before the eyes of the revealing Spirit of God. The incident
in connection with which the prophecy was given was not in any sense
the cause of the destinies declared, though it gave occasion to the utterance of the prediction.
The prophet speaks of races, not of individuals, as Isaac spoke of the
future of Jacob?s and Esau?s descendants, rather than of their own personal
experience. The portion foreseen for each was not merited by the parents?
conduct only or mainly, but by the character and conduct of their unborn
posterity. Such oracles are far removed from the nature of private fortune-telling;
they are utterances given by inspiration of God. As Bishop Newton well
observes on this passage: ?Noah was not prompted by wine or by resentment,
for neither the one nor the other could infuse the knowledge of futurity
or inspire him with the prescience of events which happened hundreds,
nay thousands, of years afterwards. But God, willing to manifest His
superintendence and government of the world, endued Noah with the spirit
of prophecy, and enabled him in some measure to disclose the purposes
of His providence towards the future races of mankind.?
The points emphasized in Noah?s foreview
of human history are few but important. The predictions are brief and
clearly expressed. There is no indistinctness about them, no vague wording
which might apply equally well to any course of events. Like the predictions
in paradise, the sentences though simple contain a world of meaning,
are all inclusive in their scope, and reach right on to the end. On
the other hand, they differ from them widely in their subject-matter,
dealing not with the moral issues, fundamental physical experiences,
or final results of human history, but rather with the great
ethnological divisions of the race, with the distinctive fortunes of
its three main sections, and with their relations to each other.
The program of Noah presents the future
not of the race of mankind as a whole as did the Adamic foreview; nor
that of individual kingdoms and nations as do subsequent programs but
that of the three main races into which mankind
has been divided since the flood. The destiny foreseen for each race is sharply defined, and widely distinct from that foreseen
for the other two. Thousands of years of human history have elapsed
since this wonderful prophetic utterance: if therefore the prophecy
has been falsified by the event, it will be futile to deny it; and if,
on the other hand, it has been fulfilled, there can be no mistake about
the fact, which must be capable of full demonstration.
In our Authorized Version the prediction
runs thus ?And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall
he be unto his brethren.
?And he said, Blessed be the Lord God
of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
?God shall enlarge Japhet, and he shall
dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.? {#Ge
9:25, 26, 27}
Now the first question which arises
in considering this prediction is, Why is Canaan, the fourth son of
Ham, mentioned instead of his father, whose gross misconduct, evincing
his depraved moral character, afforded the occasion for the prophecy?
There is some ground to think that we have not here the true original
reading of the passage, that a copyist?s error has obscured it, and
that the two words, ?Ham abi? (Ham the father of),
have been omitted. Some copies of the Septuagint
and the Arabic Version give these words as the text. Their insertion
would certainly give the passage far more internal consistency, as well
as bring it into fuller harmony with other Scriptures. As it stands,
it does not include all the posterity of Noah, but leaves entirely unmentioned
nearly one-third of it that of all the sons of Ham, with the exception
of Canaan. Bishop Newton says, in speaking of this passage;
?Hitherto we have explained the prophecy
according to the present copies of our Bible ; but if we were to correct the text, as we should that of any classic author in a like case, the whole might he made easier and plainer.
?Ham, the father of Canaan.? is mentioned in the preceding part of the
story; and how then came the person of a sudden to be changed into Canaan?
The Arabic version in these three verses hath ?the father of Canaan,
? instead of ?Canaan.? Some copies of the Septuagint likewise have Ham
instead of Canaan, as if Canaan were a corruption of the text. Vatablus
and others by ?Canaan? understand ?the father of Canaan, ? which was
expressed twice before. And if we regard the metre, this line, ?Cursed
he Canaan, ? is much shorter than the rest, as
if something was deficient. May we not suppose therefore that the
copyist by mistake wrote only ?Canaan, ? instead of? Ham the father
of Canaan, ? and that the whole passage was originally thus ?And Ham
the father of Canaan saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two
brethren without.... And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his
younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Ham the father of Canaan; a servant of
servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the
Lord God of Shem; and Ham the
father of Canaan shall be servant to them. God shall enlarge Japhet;
and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Ham
the father of Canaan shall be servant to them.?
?By this reading all the three sons
of Noah are included in the prophecy, whereas otherwise Ham, who was
the offender, is excluded. or is only punished in one of his children.
Ham is characterized as ?the father of Canaan? particularly, for the
greater encouragement of the Israelites, who were going to invade the
land of Canaan; and when it is said, ?Cursed he Ham the father of Canaan;
a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren, ? it is implied
that his whole race was devoted to servitude, but particularly
the Canaanites. Not that this was to take effect immediately, but was
to be fulfilled in process of time, when they should forfeit their liberties
by their wickedness.? ?Newton
on the Prophecies, ? p. ii.
There is a possibility that Ham alone
was mentioned in the original prophecy, and that the allusion to his
being ?the father of Canaan? was introduced by Moses in view of the
approaching invasion of the land of Canaan by the Israelites, to encourage
them hopefully to undertake the subjugation of its seven nations, by
recalling the fact that it had long since been predicted that the descendants
of Ham, including these wicked Canaanites, should be their servants.
But that the prophecy spoke of the Canaanites exclusively is not likely,
or even credible. As it correctly predicts the future of all
the descendants of Ham, not that of those of his fourth son merely or
mainly, it is most improbable that Canaan alone was mentioned.
It is true that in the parallel prophecy
of Moses the name of Joseph does not occur, but those of his sons Ephraim
and Manasseh do: so that the prophecy of Moses covered the entire posterity
of Jacob. Moreover, it was Ham?s misconduct, not Canaan?s, that was
the occasion, though not the causeof the delivery of this oracle. How
highly improbable then that his name should be omitted from it! The
Jews have a tradition that it was the young Canaan who first saw his
grandfather?s exposed condition, and called his father to join him in
ridiculing and mocking the aged patriarch. There is, however, nothing
but traditional evidence for this story; and even if it were true, it
would account only for a mention of both father and son, and not for
the exclusive naming of the son, as in our text. Whichever view be taken
as to the text, it makes however no difference as to the fulfillment of the prophecy. If the original prediction was worded
as in our version, it has been abundantly fulfilled, as we shall show;
and if Ham was mentioned as well as, or instead of, his son, it has
been fulfilled still more conspicuously on a wider sphere and through
a longer period. We lean to the view that all the three sons of Noah
were mentioned, and that thus the future of the entire human race was
outlined in this second program of the world?s history.
It contains several distinct points.
First, it implies that each of Noah?s sons would become the father of a
race. This might have been otherwise, as one of them might, like Abel,
have been cut off and have left no issue. Secondly,
it states that the descendants
of Ham were to be servants to their brethren. Servile subjection, including
various forms of slavery, would be their specially characteristic portion,
though there might, of course, be exceptions to the rule, which would
only tend to prove its general prevalence; that the race would be servants
of servants to their brethren is thrice over asserted. Thirdly,
it states that a peculiarly
sacred character would be connected with the descendants of Shem, that
Jehovah would be in some special sense the Lord God of Shem. The passage
must not be read as an invocation, as it sometimes is, as if it were
?Blessed of Jehovah my God be Shem.? It is an ascription of praise,
?Blessed be Jehovah-Elohim of Shem!? implying that the one living and
true God would be the God of Shem?s descendants, or, as Luther puts
it, that Shem should enjoy ?a most abundant blessing, reaching its highest
point in the promised seed.? The name Shem means ?renown?; and the prophecy
shows that the exaltation and renown of his seed would depend rather
on spiritual and religious advancement than on mere political prosperity.
That it is the race of Shem,
and not he himself personally, that is contemplated by the prophecy,
is intimated in the plural pronoun, ?Canaan shall be their servant, ? not his servant. Ham?s descendants would be in tributary
subjection to Shem?s descendants. Fourthly,
it is stated that the race
of Japhet, Noah?s eldest son, whose name means ?the one that spreads
abroad, ? should be the most widely diffused and, as regards material
blessings, the most prosperous of the three; that God would greatly
multiply it, and open to it vast spheres. The words have been rendered,
?God will concede an ample space? to Japhet?s posterity, or ?make wide
room? for them. So great was to be this enlargement of Japhet that his
descendants would ultimately not only occupy all their own tents, or
dwelling-places, but inhabit also some of those belonging to Shem; and
though it is not distinctly stated in the prediction, yet there is nothing
in the words to exclude the thought that the enlargement of Japhet may
include vast intellectual
as well as material development, and that his descendants were to dwell
in the tents of Shem in this sense also, i.e.
to enter into their spiritual and religious inheritance. Japhet?s race,
like Shem?s, was also to hold in subjection Hamitic races.
Thus the patriarch, gazing down the
dim vista of ages then unborn, and extending his view even to our own
day, beheld with eyes opened by the revealing Spirit, the future of
his threefold family. He who in retrospect could recall the history
of the first human race, with its tragic close, was allowed in prospect
to foresee the main outline of the fortunes of the second family of
man his own family. And what did he foresee? For the Semitic races religious
supremacy and sacred renown; for Japhet?s posterity vast enlargement and political supremacy; and for the descendants
of Ham, the father of Canaan, servile
degradation.
We must not omit to note, in passing,
the important practical lesson taught by the fact that the evil races
for whom the doom of perpetual servitude is foreseen are the descendants
of a bad man. A straw shows which way the stream
runs; the incident here recorded of Ham is trivial in one sense, yet
it clearly shows what manner of man he was destitute of the fear of
God, without natural affection, gratitude, reverence, compassion, self-respect,
or decency; full of heartless levity, addicted to coarse amusement and
brutal vulgarity; in short, a bad son who could never make a good father.
It is a solemn thought for parents that they cannot help transmitting
to their offspring of the most distant generations, their own moral
character as well as their own physical features.
Now it is evident that before we can
trace the fulfillment of this prophecy, we must to some extent divide the races of mankind, both ancient
and modern, into ethnic groups, distinguish the families of nations
apart each from the other, ascertain which sprang from Shem, which from
Ham, and which from Japhet. The question consequently arises, Are there
in existence such materials as enable us to disentangle the complex
ramifications of the genealogical tree of the human race during the
last four thousand years, so as to arrive at satisfactory conclusions
on this subject? If not, it must of course be impossible to demonstrate
that the Noahic program has been fulfilled.
The reply is, There are, in the good providence of God, ample materials in existence for this
preliminary inquiry a rich and ever-increasing abundance; and so well
have these materials been utilized of late by scholars that the main
questions connected with this difficult problem are practically set
at rest. Many a minor point may still remain obscure. There are certain
tribes and peoples, both of ancient and modern times, whose ethnic relations
may be doubtful, but the outline is clearly ascertained, and details
do not affect our argument. The sources of information are: the wonderful
genealogical table in the tenth of Genesis, and other Bible notices
on the subject; the statements and tables of profane historians and
other ancient writers, such as Herodotus, Strabo, Josephus, etc.; the
hieroglyphic and cuneiform inscriptions on monumental remains and other
antiquities, brought to light and deciphered by modern archeological
research in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and elsewhere; the ever-multiplying
observations and investigations of modern explorers and travellers into
the languages, laws, customs, traditions, and ethnic affinities of newly
visited tribes and peoples; and last, but not least, the very important
and interesting, though somewhat bewildering, young science of language, which, though almost the youngest of the sciences,
is yet one which has already secured great acquisitions of knowledge,
read some of the puzzling riddles of antiquity and ethnology, and, like
all other true science, confirmed in a wonderful way the veracity of
Scripture. We must gather and focus a few of the rays proceeding from
these various sources on the point we have in hand.
The tenth chapter of Genesis the most
ancient genealogical table in existence a wonderful and profoundly interesting
document, is our first guide. It is a book in itself, the book of ?the
generations of the sons of Noah?; and short as it is, it contains more
important matter than many a bulky volume. A careful study of it will
show that the first five verses give us the names of the seven sons
of Japhet and their descendants; the next, and by far the longest section
(verses 6 to 21), mentions the four sons of Ham and the nations which
sprang from them, including the Canaanites; while the third and closing
section enumerates the five sons of Shem with their posterity, including
that family descended from Eber, from which Abraham the Hebrew was ultimately
called out. The great value of this ancient record in our present investigation
is, that it links the three races of mankind with the geographical spheres
which they originally occupied, and from which their first migrations
took place.
?It is impossible to exaggerate the
importance of this ethnological table. Whether regarded from a geographical,
a political, or a theocratical standpoint, ?this unparalleled list,
the combined result of reflection and deep research, ? is ?no less valuable
as a historical document than as a lasting proof of the brilliant capacity
of the Hebrew mind.? Undoubtedly the earliest effort of the human intellect
to exhibit in a tabulated form the geographical distribution of the
human race, it bears unmistakable witness in its own structure to its
high antiquity, occupying itself least with the Japhetic tribes which
were furthest from the theocratic center, and were latest in attaining
to historic eminence, and enlarging with much greater minuteness of
detail on those Hamitic nations, the Egyptian, Canaanite, and Arabian,
which were soonest developed, and with which the Hebrews came most into
contact in the initial stages of their career. It describes the rise
of states, and, consistently with all subsequent historical and archeological
testimony, gives the prominence to the Egyptian or Arabian Hamites,
as the first founders of empires. It exhibits the separation of the
Shemites from the other sons of Noah, and the budding forth of the line
of promise in the family of Arphaxad. While thus useful to the geographer,
the historian, the politician, it is specially serviceable to the theologian,
as enabling him to trace the descent of the woman?s seed, and to mark
the fulfillments of Scripture prophecies concerning the nations of the
earth, In the interpretation of the names which are here recorded, it
is obviously impossible in every instance to arrive at certainty, in
some cases the names of individuals being mentioned, while in others
it is as conspicuously those of peoples.??The
Pulpit Commentary, ? p. 156.
From this table we learn
1. That the descendants of Japhet?s seven
sons peopled ?the isles of the Gentiles, ? in which expression not islands
only are included, but all those countries from which visitors would
approach Palestine by sea the coasts of the Mediterranean and the adjoining
maritime provinces, the shores of the Black Sea, and of the Caspian,
the Levant, Archipelago, and Adriatic.
2. That the four sons of Ham settled in
the more southern portions of the then known world in Southern Babylonia
round the head of the Persian Gulf, in Southern Arabia, in Abyssinia,
Ethiopia, Egypt, and other parts of Northern Africa; and especially
that Nimrod, the first founder of imperialism, was descended from Cush,
Ham?s eldest son, as well as that the seven nations afterwards expelled
by the Jews from the land of promise were the offspring of Canaan, his
youngest son.
3. That the five sons of Shem were ancestors
of the Syrians, Lydians, Elamites, Arabs, and Hebrews.
Now here we have, as we have said, three
ethnic groups linked with three distinct sets of localities; the young
nations are mentioned in connection with their respective habitations.
In other words, the primary geographical distribution of the descendants
of the sons of Noah is plainly indicated in this genealogical table
of his posterity. Profane history, as far as it has anything at all
clear to say on the subject, adds its confirmation to these statements,
and modern discovery and research are producing every year fresh proof
of their accuracy.
But Noah?s predictions about his threefold
posterity have less to do with their primitive settlements than with
their permanent fortunes. The question we must therefore consider next
is, whether it is possible clearly to connect these original nations
and peoples, first, with their representatives in the ages of subsequent
history, and secondly, with their descendants now living? This will
evidently be no easy matter. Peoples, tribes, and nations flourish for
a time and then fade from view, to reappear afterwards under other names
in other connections, and possibly in distant spheres. Nation rises
against nation, conquest leads to the subjection of one people to another,
to the merging of many into one, or again to the breaking up of one
into many. Such political changes have introduced great complexity into
the mutual relations of the different peoples of the earth; so that
in the course of ages the problem of their ethnic affinities becomes
of necessity an exceedingly difficult one. Unless, however, it can to
some extent be solved, it is evident that we can never discern the fulfillment
of the Noahic program.
We ask then, Have historians been able
to do for the existing nations of the earth what Garter King-at-Arms
and the College of Heraldry do for the representatives of ancient families
trace out their genealogies, establish their relationship by unquestionable
evidence, exhibit their connections, and show, not only the line of
their own descent, but that of the collateral branches of their families?
The answer is, that, to a large extent, they have.
In the first century of our era, for
instance, Josephus gives a glance at the problem as it presented itself
in his day, eighteen hundred years nearer to the dispersion of mankind
than our own, and when consequently it must have been comparatively
easy to trace back the genealogy of nations. He says
?Now they were the grand-children of
Noah, in honour of whom names were imposed on the nations by those that
first seized upon them. Japhet, the son of Noah, had seven Sons. They
inhabited so, that, beginning at the mountains Taurus and Amanus, they
proceeded along Asia, as far as the river Tanais, and along Europe to
Cadiz; and settling themselves on the lands they light upon, which none
had inhabited before, they called the nations by their own names. For
Gomer founded those whom the Greek now called Galatians (Gauls), but
were then called Gomerites. Magog founded those that from him were named
Magogites, but who are by the Greeks called Scythians. Now as to Javan
and Madai, the sons of Japhet; from Madai came the Madeans, who are
called Medes by the Greeks; but from Javan,
Jonia (or lonia) and all the Grecians are derived. Thobel founded
the Thobelites, which are now called Iberes; and the Moscheni were founded
by Mosoch; now they are Cappadocians. There is also a mark of their
ancient denomination still to be shown; for there is even now among
them a city called Mazaca, which may inform those that are able to understand,
that so was the entire nation once called. Thiras also called those
whom he ruled over Thiracians; but the Greeks changed the name into
Thracians. And so many were the countries that had the children of Japhet
for their inhabitants. Of the three sons of Gomer, Aschanaz founded
the Aschanasians, who are now called by the Greeks Rheginians. So did
Riphath found the Ripheans, now called Paphlagonians; and Thruggramma
the Thrugrammeans, who, as the Greeks resolved, were named Phrygians.
Of the three sons of Javan also, the son of Japhet, Elisa gave name
to the Eliseans, who were his subjects.; they are now the Eolians. Tharsus
to the Tharsians, for so was Cicilia of old called; the sign of which
is this, that the noblest city which they have, and a metropolis also,
is Tarsus, the Tau being by change put for the Theta. Cethimas possessed
the island Cethima: it is now called Cyprus; and from that it is that
all islands, and the greatest part of the sea-coasts, are named Cethim
by the Hebrews; and one city there is in Cyprus that has been able to
preserve its denomination; it is called Citius by those who use the
language of the Greeks, and has not, by the use of that dialect, escaped
the name of Cethim. And so many nations have the children and grand-children
of Japhet possessed. Now when I have premised somewhat, which perhaps
the Greeks do not know, I will return and explain what I have omitted;
for such names are pronounced here after the manner of the Greeks, to
please my readers; for our own country language does not so pronounce
them.
?The children of HAM possessed the land
from Syria and Amanus, and the mountains of Libanus; seizing upon all
that was on its sea-coasts, and as far as the ocean, and keeping it
as their own. Some indeed of its names are utterly vanished away; others
of them being changed, and another sound given them, are hardly to be
discovered; yet a few there are which have kept their denominations
entire; for of the four sons of Ham, time has not at all hurt the name
of Cush; for the Ethiopians, over whom he reigned, are even at this
day, both by themselves and by all men in Asia, called Cushites. The
memory also of the Mesraites is preserved in their name; for all we
who inhabit the country (of Judea) call Egypt Mestre, and the Egyptians
Mestreans. Phut also was the founder of Libya, and called the inhabitants
Phutites, from himself. There is also a river in the country of the
Moors which bears that name; whence it is, that we may see the greatest
part of the Grecian historiographers mention that river and the adjoining
country by the appellation of Phut. But the name it has now, has been
by change given it from one of the sons of Mestraim, who was called
Lybyos. We will inform you presently what has been the occasion why
it has been called Africa also.
?Canaan, the fourth son of Ham, inhabited
the country now called Judea, and called it from his own name Canaan....
Nimrod, the son of Cush, stayed and tyrannised at Babylon, as we have
already informed you. Now all the children of Mesraim, being eight in
number, possessed the country from Gaza to Egypt, though it retained
the name of one only, the Philistim, for the Greeks call part of that
country Palestine..
?The sons of Canaan were these; Sidonius,
who also built a city of the same name; it is called by the Greeks,
Sidon; Amathus inhabited in Amathine, which is even now called Amathe
by the inhabitants, although the Macedonians named it Epiphania, from
one of his posterity; Arudeus possessed the island Aradus; Arucas possessed
Arce, which is in Libanus. But for the seven others (Eucus), Chetteus,
Jeboseus, Amorreus, Gergesus, Eudeus, Sineus, Samareus, we have nothing
in the sacred books but their names, for the Hebrews overthrew their
cities.
?Shem, the third son of Noah, had five
sons, who inhabited the land that began at Euphrates, and reached to
the Indian Ocean. For Elam left behind him the Elainites, the ancestors
of the Persians Ashur lived at the city of Nineve and named his subjects
Assyrians, who became the most fortunate nation, beyond others. Arphaxad
named the Arphaxadites, who are no called Chaldeans. Aram had the Aramites,
which the Greeks call Syrians, as Laud founded the Laudites, which are
now called Lydians. Of the four sons of Aram, Us founded Trachonitis
and Damascus; this country lies between Palestine and Celesyria....
Sala was the son of Arphaxad; and his son was Heber, from whom they
originally called the J exvs, Hebrews. Heber begat Joctan and Phaleg:
he was called Phaleg or Peleg because he was born at the dispersion
of the nations to their several countries; for Phaleg, among the Hebrews,
signifies division. Now Joctan, one of the sons of Heber, had these
sons.... And this shall suffice concerning the sons of Shem.?
This statement of Josephus and many
similar ones might, if space permitted, be presented from both earlier
and later historians forms a link between the primitive state of things
and the present. It gives us a glance at one of the countless stages
by which the young nations enumerated in the tenth of Genesis have been
gradually developed in the course of four thousand years into the world
full of nations and peoples, civilized and savage, with which we are
familiar.
The process has resembled that of organic
growth. The Noahic acorn has become an immense and ancient oak, its
three main stems having divided into numerous great branches extending
in all directions, each giving rise in its turn to countless shoots
and twigs bearing generation after generation of leaves. Is
it not destined to develop yet into a forest, and to fill many of the
myriads of worlds belonging to our own galaxy, with the ransomed race
of man?
Josephus modernizes in measure the archaic
nomenclature of Genesis. ?The isles of the Gentiles? are seen to include
?Europe and Cadiz, ? Gomer becomes ?the Galatians and the Gauls, ? ?Javan?
changes into the Ionians and the Grecians; and instead of a list of
names which convey to our modern minds only the most hazy ideas, we
get Cappadocians and Thracians, Phrygians or Eolians, the island of
Cyprus, the land of Palestine, Egypt, Judea, Persia, the Indian Ocean,
the Lydians, the Chaldeans, and the Syrians. Here we see our way, and
feel that there can be no insuperable difficulty in connecting the condition
of things in Josephus? day with that existing in our own. It might be
difficult to recognize in old age a man known only in infancy, but not
so if he had been seen at intervals through life. To the uninitiated
it may seem that there must be a good deal of guess work and uncertainty
in the identification of modern nations with primitive peoples, but
the historian who has traced the whole process of development feels
that he stands on terra firma,
and his conclusions may be accepted with confidence.
He begins with the main branches of the oak, and following one till
it forks, he traces its divisions down to the latest shoot.
The student of language, on the other
hand, adopts the opposite course, and approaches the problem the other
way. He examines the languages of existing nations, and traces them
backwards to their origin. He finds the latest shoots running into older
twigs, these again into small branches, these in their turn to larger
ones, and these finally into one or other of the three main stems of
the old tree. When the results of historian and philologist agree, we
may rest satisfied that they are substantially correct.
But there are multitudes of nations
to-day in Central Africa, Asia, Western America, and elsewhere, who
have no history, who have sunk so low that, like the arab children of
our streets, they do not know where they were born, nor how old they
are, nor to whom they belong, and scarcely can tell their own family
name. In discovering the birth and parentage, the relationships and
affinities of such nations, the science of language is especially helpful.
Experience has proved that there is no basis for a classification of
the innumerable nations and tribes into which mankind is now divided
so broad and so certain as that of language.
?Physical resemblances, or diversities,
are not found to present so ultimate a ground of classification as those
of the human speech. The Word is the highest outward expression for
the soul; and the properties of the immaterial part of man his unconscious
instincts, his hopes, his passions, his imaginings, his tendency of
thought, his general habit of nature, appearing in language and its
forms are transmitted more entirely from generation to generation, and
are less liable to he changed by external influences than any features
of the face or the body. It is well known that time and external circumstances,
and the mingling with other stocks, can change to a considerable degree
(how far, is not here in consideration) the color, the hair, the shape
of the skull, and the size of the body. Yet after many generations,
when the physicist could scarcely, by external signs, recognize the
bonds of common blood binding different peoples together, the student
of language discerns the clearest and most irrefutable proofs of their
common descent. What scholar doubts now the brotherhood of descent,
at a remote period, between the Hindu and the Englishman? and yet how
few physical ethnologists could discover it by any bodily feature. It
is as if the more intangible properties of man?s nature were those most
acted upon by the principle of inheritance, and the last to he changed
or destroyed by external physical influences.? Brace?s
? Manual of Ethnology, ? p. 3.
Language then, alone or in connection
with history, is the clue to the discernment, not of nationality, but
of race a far stronger and deeper bond than mere nationality. There
is a mysterious, far-reaching influence connected with heredity and
conveyed by blood, which associates a distant ancestor with his remotest
posterity, and links together by common characteristics the families,
tribes, and nations descended from him, marking them off at the same
time from all others. It might have been supposed that the mixture of
nations which. has taken place all over the world during the last four
thousand years, through emigrations, conquests, and colonization, would
have so mingled languages that it would now be impossible to distinguish
their original character. This is far from being the case. Such agencies
have extensively modified
language, but research shows that no tongue is ever entirely obliterated
by another, and that the primary
streams of language, even though they may meet in close contact, never
merge into each other, as Norman and Saxon did in the formation of English.
These were cognate tongues to begin with, spoken by different families
of one race. But where, as in Western Asia at present, three primary
languages, belonging to three different races Tartar, Arabic, and Persian
co-exist side by side, it is found that no such combination takes place;
the three races remaining distinct in speech, as in appearance, character,
and habits.
Now, at the furthest point to which
history and tradition can conduct us in the past, we discover three prominent families of nations from
whom have come down through the ages of history three broad streams of language covering the ancient continents, from
which have branched out tile almost innumerable rivulets of speech which
now interlace with each other all the world over. They are THE HAMITIC,
THE SEMITIC, and THE ARYAN, or INDO-EUROPEAN, families of language.
These three, however, do not include all the languages of the world.
There is no fourth family, but there is a fourth group
the Turanian languages. This large and widely scattered group is
less distinctly defined, and its various branches are less distinctly
related to each other than are those of the three families above named,
though they have some common characteristics. It includes the nomad
languages, those which are less settled and more changeable than any
others, which have a remarkable facility in assuming new forms and producing
rapidly diverging dialects of great irregularity. According to some
authorities it includes also the Chinese language, which has been called
the most infantile form of human speech, and which seems in some respects
to antedate other forms even of Turanian language. But this is one of
the unsettled problems of the science, other authorities classing Chinese
as Hamitic. The group of so-called ?Turanian? or barbarous tongues will
probably be in due time, as a result of further investigation, to a
large extent distributed among the three principal families leaving
a residuum of dialects which may be degenerate descendants of the mother
tongue, from which all languages alike sprung. At present the Turanian
group is considered by Professor Max Muller to consist of the Tungusic,
Mongolic, Turkic, Samoyedic, Finnic, and aboriginal Indian languages.
?Turanian speech is rather a stage than a form
of language. It seems to be the earliest mould into which human discourse
naturally and as it were spontaneously throws itself, being simpler,
ruder, coarser, and far less elaborate than the later developments of
Semitism and Aryanism. It does not, like those tongues, possess throughout
its manifold ramifications a large common vocabulary, or even a community
of inflections. Common words are exceedingly rare, and inflections,
though formed on the same plan, are entirely unlike.... We are not justified
in assuming the same original ethnic unity among the various nations
whose language is of the Turanian type, which presses upon the mind
as an absolute necessity when it examines the phenomena presented by
the dialects of the Semitic or of the Aryan stock.?(Rawlinson?s ?Herodotus,
? vol. i. p. 645.)
The ethnological connections of this
Turanian group being extremely uncertain, it is evident that it can
have no bearing on our present argument. We pass it by consequently,
remarking merely that the existence of such a group of miscellaneous
unclassified languages affords no presumption against the historical
veracity of the statement in the tenth of Genesis, that the human race
divided after the flood into three great branches. The genealogies there
refer of course to descent by blood and not to linguistic connection.
We know that tribes and nations often change their languages, though
they cannot alter their ethnic connections. All Jews, for instance,
are children of Abraham, no matter what language they may speak; and
the Negroes in America do not cease to be Africans because they talk
English. In a word, language may or may not be a clue to the ancestry
of a people. It needs to be considered in connection with history and
geography; taken alone it may be valueless.
In the case of the Turanian nations,
where history and geography afford little light, language is an insufficient
guide to genealogical connection; while in the case of the three great
families of language, their speech forms a principal clue to the relation
of the different nations and peoples, leading us to attribute a common
descent to some that re now tar separated socially and geographically,
though th ir earliest ancestors dwelt under the same roof tree.
The conclusions of ethnologists do not
contradict the genealogical table of Genesis x., but confirm it. It
asserts that there were three original races. The science of language
asserts that there are still three distinct families of nations, but
it adds that there are also a number of nations
whose ethnic relations cannot be traced
out from historic or linguistic clues. What more natural than that such
should be the case after the lapse of four thousand years, and especially
with regard to the less important and more uncivilized and remote branches
of the human race? New dialects, not to say new languages, spring up
even now as a result of isolation and barbarism among peoples who have
no literature and hold no public assemblies.
But if the Turanian group throws no light on our subject, the
three families of language
throw not a little, and we will now proceed briefly to consider them
in their order.
THE SEMITIC FAMILY.
The Semitic family is divided into three
main branches the Aramaic, the Hebraic, and the Arabic. The Aramaic
includes Syriac and Chaldee. The former is still spoken in a corrupt
form by the Nestorians and other Christians in Kurdistan and Armenia;
and the latter was the language adopted by the Jews in Babylon. After
the captivity, Syriac became vernacular in Palestine; it was tile language
spoken by our Lord and 1-lis disciples, and was the speech of common
life over all the territory extending from the Mediterranean to Mesopotamia.
The Hebraic includes the Biblical Hebrew, the language in which the
Samaritan Pentateuch was written, and the language of the Carthaginian
and Phcenician inscriptions. It was the language of the later Canaanites,
though not of the original seven nations of Canaan. The Arabic branch
includes the Amharic tongue, the Gees language of Abyssinia, and the
ancient Himyaritic inscriptions in Arabia. It includes also the languages
spoken along the north of Africa from Egypt and Ethiopia to the Atlantic
Ocean.
?Of all the families of man, the Semitic
has preserved the most distinet and homogeneous mental characteristics.
?Always, in all its branches, tenacious
of the past, conservative, not inclined to change or reform, sensual
and strong of passion, yet deeply reverent and religious in temperament,
capable of the most sublime acts, either of heroism or fanaticism, it
was, from the first, a fit medium for some of the grandest truths and
principles which can inspire the human soul. Its very peculiar itiesits
tenacity and sensuousness and reverence adapted it to feel and retain
and convey Divine inspirations. The Semitic mind was never capable of
artistic effort, but has made its great contributions to human knowledge
in the invention of the alphabet, and in the exact sciences. In poetry,
it has given to the world the most sublime lyrics which human language
can present; though in the drama, it has produced only as it were the
type or introduction, and in the epic it has contributed nothing. The
Semitic races have never shown themselves skilled in colonization even
the Phoenician colonies formed no permanent States and they seemed almost
as little capable of organizing enduring governments. Individuality
has been too strong with them for permanent associated effort.
?In one of their earliest branches the
Phoenicians and in the modern Jew, they have manifested a wonderful
capacity for traffic and commerce. In the primeval ages, probably no
one influence tended so much to unite and civilize mankind as the Semitic
commerce and ingenuity under the Phoenicians. The sensuousness and the
religious reverence of the race so vividly shown in the Bible history
united in the heathen Semites, the tribes of Syria and Asia Minor, to
produce a mythology debasing and corrupt beyond what the human imagination
has anywhere else brought forth; a mythology which, transplanted to
Greece and refined by the Grecian sense of beauty, has poured through
all ages a flood of sensual and licentious imaginations, corrupting
art and literature almost to the present day.
?Three of the great religions of history
Mohammedanism, Judaism, and Christianity have come forth from the Semitic
races, and through future time it will be their glory that with all
their former vices, and their subsequent degradation, one of their humblest
tribes was fitted to receive and was appointed to convey the purest
oracles of God to all succeeding generations.?
The influence of the Semites reasserted
itself very strongly in the Middle Ages. Under the rule of the Aryan
Romans and Byzantines they had been subject and inferior tribes; but
?With the tenacity peculiar to the race, they had still retained, under
all the conquests, their national characteristics, and after centuries
of submission and quiet they rose again at the call of religious fanaticism,
with the same fire and passion which they had shown as Jews, under the
Maccabees or against Titus. The foundations for their remarkable conquests
were laid by the constant emigration of Arab tribes to Persia and various
countries of Asia, whose population became thus gradually much mingled
with Semitic elements.
?In 622 Mohammed proclaimed the Semitic
doctrine of the unity of God and the peculiar tenets of the Islam faith.
Within twenty years vast countries of Europe and Asia were overrun and
conquered by his fiery disciples. Syria was subdued from 632 to 638;
Persia from 632 to 640; Egypt in 638; Cyprus and Rhodes in 649.
?Within a century the Semitic Moslems
had conquered Asia from Mount Taurus to the Himalaya and the Indus,
and from the Indian Ocean to Mount Caucasus and the Iaxertes on the
north; they held the north of Africa, and after defeating the Teutonic
Goths in Spain, took possession of most of that country. They had even
invaded France, and seemed about overrunning all Europe, when they were
defeated at Tours, in 732, by Charles the Hammer.... Since this brilliant
period of conquest, the Semitic family of nations has never again attained
to a leading place among the races of men.
?Even as in the ancient days of Semitic
glory in Assyria, this race again distinguished itself in the exact
sciences and in architecture. Geometry, astronomy, anatomy, and chemistry,
all witnessed a revival under the new Arabian civilization; and the
Moorish architecture, a product of the sensuous Semitic mind, under
the more graceful influences of Byzantine taste, covered Spain with
its gorgeous and fantastic structures.
?This family of the human race is distinguished
by the peculiar character of the language which it spoke. Those languages,
in fact, constitute a group clearly separated from the other leading
forms of human speech. The great peculiarity of the group lies in the
very structure of its roots, which consist mostly of three consonants,
while those of the Aryan and Turanian groups have only one or two. Out
of these tri-literal roots the mass of their words were coined by merely
varying the vowels, and in some cases by adding a syllable; on the other
hand, words formed by composition are almost unknown. The verb has but
two tenses, the noun but two genders, and the relations of cases are
not, in general, expressed by inflected forms. In the structure of the
sentence, the Semitic dialects present little more than a process of
addition; words and propositions are placed side by side, and are not
subject to the involution and subordination of clauses, so striking
in many of the Indo-European tongues.
?In short, these languages have a kind
of poetic power, and express passion and feeling with great intensity;
but they are lacking in logical precision, deficient in analytical terms,
and imperfectly adapted to embody the grandest results of human thought.?
?Long before recorded history, perhaps even before the full formation of
their distinctive language, that family of mankind from which the Semitic
tribes have come, poured forth its hordes from Asia over the northern
portion of Africa. Of these, one vigorous tribe, with the tenacity of
the Semitic stock, have held possession of the valleys of the Atlas
under all the successive waves of conquest which have passed over Northern
Africa. The colonies and conquests of the Phmnicians, the Romans, the
Byzantines, the Vandals, and the Arabs, have not destroyed or absorbed
this tough and warlike people. Pressed farther to the south by the fierce
attacks of the Arabs, in the first half of the eleventh century, they
could not be driven from the desert; and they hold, now, a larger extent
of territory than is occupied by any other race on African soil.? From
the Atlantic Ocean, on the west, their tribes extend to the borders
of Egypt on the east, and from the Atlas chain on the north over the
oases of the Great Desert.
Their traders form the great media of commerce between the Soudan and the
Mediterranean coast, ?while their wild and nomad hordes are the special
obstacle and danger to the traveller. They are known under the name
of Libyans in the most ancient history; their distinguishing features
are beheld even on the pictures of Egyptian monuments, and, on the other
hand, the most warlike and distinguished of modern military corps is
formed originally of their soldiers, the Zowaves.
?The name by which this race is best
known is BERBER, a word much disputed, but whose origin may be naturally
traced to the Roman name of these people, Barbari.?(Brace?s ? Manual
of Ethnology, ? p. 171.)]
The Semitic territory in antiquity included
Syria, Phoenicia, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Chaldea, Assyria, Susiftna,
and the immense deserts of Arabia. The Semites had less tendency to
spread abroad in the earth than either of the other great families.
It was not till the thirteenth century
before Christ that they began to become prominent; and though at that
time their political importance was not great, they soon rose to be
the principal commercial and manufacturing
people in the world.
They planted commercial stations around
the whole length of the Mediterranean, which it took at that time seventy
or eighty days to traverse. Their ships brought tin from England, and
the luxuries of India from the mouths of the Indus. They had a chain
of commercial stations into the interior of Asia, and traded between
points as far separated from each other as Babylon and Cadiz, Italy
and India, Arabia and Armenia. During tile same period they established
the old Assyrian empire on the Upper Tigris, an empire which lasted over six and a half centuries, and held a
vast extent of country in subjection, from Suza in Persia to Lower Egypt.
The turning point in the history of this empire was the destruction
of Sennacherib?s host by pestilence, B.C. 691. It gradually declined
after that event, and its great city, Nineveh, fell before an Aryan king, Cyaxares the Mede, in BC. 625. The second Babylonian empire
lasted scarcely a century, and the MEDO-PERSIAN empire which followed
was the open ing of the Aryan
period of history. Cyrus the Persian belonged to the Aryan race;
and when his empire fell, the ruling power in the world passed from
Asia to Europe.
?What is especially remarkable of the
Semitic family is its concentration, and the small size of the district
which it covers compared with the space occupied by the other two. Deducting
the scattered colonies of the Phoenicians, mere points upon the earth?s
surface, and the thin strip of territory running into Asia Minor from
Upper Syria, the Semitic races in the time of Herodotus are contained
within a parallelogram 1, 600 miles long from the parallel of Aleppo
to the south of Arabia, and on an average about 800 miles broad. Within
this tract, less than a thirteenth part of the Asiatic continent, the
entire Semitic family was then, and, with one exception, has ever since
been comprised.
?Once in the world?s history, and once
only, did a great ethnic movement proceed from this race and country.
Under the stimulus of religious fanaticism, the Arabs in the seventh
century of our era burst from the retirement of the desert, and within
a hundred years extended themselves as the ruling nation from the confines
of India to Spain. But this effort was the fruit of a violent excitement
which could not but be temporary, and the development was one beyond
the power of the nation to sustain. Arabian influence sank almost as
rapidly as it had risen, yielding on the one side before European, on
the other before Tartar attacks, and, except in Egypt and Northern Africa,
maintaining no permanent footing in the countries so rapidly overrun.
Apart from this single occasion, the Semitic race has given no evidence
of ability to spread itself either by migration or by conquest. In the
Old World, indeed, commercial enterprise led one Semitic people to aim
at a wide extension of its influence over the shores of the known seas;
but the colonies sent out by this people obtained no lasting hold upon
the countries where they were settled, and after a longer or a shorter
existence they died away almost without leaving a trace. Semitism has
a certain kind of vitality a tenacity of lifeexhibited most remarkably
in the case of the Jews, yet not confined to them, but seen also in
other instances, as in the continued existence of the Chaldeans in Mesopotamia,
and of the Berbers on the North African coast.
?It has not, however, any power of vigorous
growth and enlargement, such as that promised to Japhet, and possessed
to a considerable extent even by the Turanian family. It is strong to
resist, weak to attack, powerful to maintain itself in being notwithstanding
the paucity of its numbers, but rarely exhibiting, and never for any
length of time capable of sustaining, an aggressive action upon other
races. With this physical and material weakness is combined a wonderful
capacity for affecting the spiritual condition of our species, by the
projection into the fermenting mass of human thought, of new and strange
ideas, especially those of the most abstract kind. Semitic races have
influenced, far more than any others, the history of the world?s mental
progress, and the principal intellectual revelations which have taken
place are traceable in the main to them.?
THE ARYAN FAMILY.
The great Indo-Aryan, or Japhetic family,
is so extensive and so varied that we shall best convey a fair idea
of it by presenting Professor Max Muller?s own table of its principal
members.
____________________________________________________________________________
1 Rawlinson?s ?Herodotus, ? vol. i.
p. 661.
____________________________________________________________________________
??????????????????????????????????????
GENEALOGICAL TABLE OF THE ARYAN FAMILY OF LANGUAGES.
Living
Languages. Dead Languages. Classes.
Dialects of India Prakit and Pali
Indic SOUTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of the Gipsies Indic SOUTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Persia Parsi - ?Pehlevi?
Iranic SOUTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Afghanistan Iranic SOUTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Kurdistan Iranic SOUTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Armenia Old Armenian Iranic
SOUTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Ossethi Iranic SOUTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Wales Keltic SOUTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Brittany Keltic SOUTHERN
DIVISION
?? Cornish Keltic NORTHERN
DIVISION
Dialects of Scotland Keltic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Ireland Keltic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of the Isle of Man Keltic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Portugal Italic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Spain Italic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Provence Langue d?Oc Italic NORTHERN
DIVISION
Dialects of France Langue d?Oil
Italic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Italy Illyric NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Wallachia Hellenic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of the Grisons Hellenic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Albania Doric-Aeolic Hellenic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Greece Attic-Ionic
Hellenic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Lithuania Windic NORTHERN DIVISION
?? Old Prussian Windic NORTHERN
DIVISION
Dia. of Kurland and Livonia Windic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Bulgaria Old Slavonic Windic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Russia Windic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Poland Windic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Bohemia Old Bohemian Windic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Lusatia Polabian Windic NORTHERN
DIVISION
Dialects of Germany Old German Teutonic
NORTHERN DIVISION
?? Gothic Teutonic NORTHERN
DIVISION
Dialects of England Anglo-Saxon Teutonic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Holland Old Dutch Teutonic NORTHERN
DIVISION
Dialects of Frisland Old Frlslan Teutonic NORTHERN
DIVISION
Dia. of North of Germany Old Saxon Teutonic NORTHERN
DIVISION
Dialects of Denmark Old Norse Teutonic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Sweden Old Norse
Teutonic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Norway Old Norse
Teutonic NORTHERN DIVISION
Dialects of Iceland Old Norse Teutonic NORTHERN
DIVISION
??????????????????????????????????????
It will be seen at a glance that this
family of languages comprises most of the ancient and modern languages
of Europe, including Greek and Latin and all the Slavonic and Teutonic
dialects; in fact, with a few exceptionsthe Finn, the Lapp, the Hungarian,
and the Crimean languages all. It comprises also the Indian languages
derived from the ancient Sanskrit, though not the Tamil and Telegu tongues,
nor the languages of the aboriginal tribes in India, which are Turanian.
The aboriginal races of India belong to the Turanian type, though the Hinduthe
leading raceis Aryan. The difference is very marked between the hill-tribes,
as they are called, and the Aryans of the plains. The former are despised
and outlawed by the Hindus, own no property, seldom cultivate the land,
and have institutions and customs wholly different from those of the
Hindus. They do not observe caste; their widows are allowed to marry
again; they eat flesh and have no objection to the shedding of blood;
they indulge freely in intoxicating drinks, do not venerate the Brahmans,
and bury their dead instead of burning them. All these things establish
decisively that they are of a different origin, and the difference in
their language confirms that conclusion. There are a great variety of
races among them, but they all differ as widely as possible from the
Aryan Hindus, among whom they have dwelt for ages.
The Parsee, the Persian, and the Arminian
languages are also Aryan. Though differing so widely among themselves,
all these forms of speech, belonging to various and widely scattered
nations and peoples, have retained enough of the original language from
which all alike sprang to demonstrate their common origin.
?One of the greatest discoveries of
modern time, as affecting the question of races, is that conclusion
from comparison of languages, which has defined what is called the Aryan
or Indo-European family of nations,
?By a simple examination of the roots
and structure of various languages, and their comparison especially
with those of the Sanskrit, it has been ascertained, on evidence clear
and unassailable, that certain nations, the most widely separated and
the most diverse in physical characteristics, have
a common origin. The blonde Norwegian and the dark-eyed Spaniard,
the mercurial Kelt and the steady Anglo-Saxon, the Slavonic Russian
and the lively Frenchman, the practical Anglo-American and the dreamy
Hindu, the German and the Persian, the Greek and the Roman, are proved
to be all emigrants from one home, and to have spoken once a common
tongue.
?We can see also, in the words they
have all preserved, how far their common forefathers had progressed
in thought and in civilization, before the remarkable causes arose which
scattered them in various tribes over the face of the earth.
?The words which all, or nearly all,
their descendants have in common are those which convey the simplest
ideas of existence and action; those which describe the nearest family
relations, such as father
and mother, son and daughter;
those for domestic animals, such as dog,
pig, sow, boar goose, and
duck; those for the simplest articles of
food, for certain metals, for the great luminaries of the sky, and ?the
objects of religious worship, derived from these great phenomena, ?
and words of feeling, like heart
and tears.
?Language shows conclusively that the
Aryan tribes had passed beyond the lowest barbaric stage before they
separated. There is no certain evidence that they were agricultural,
but they were probably nomadic or occupied with the care of flocks;
they had built houses and worked in metals; they had constructed boats
and fastened animals to vehicles for domestic labor, and were acquainted
with the art of sewing if not of weaving. Words present to us as clearly
as a historical record that even in that distant antiquity, certain
great features, common to Indo-European nations, whether for good or
evil, still existed.
?The relation of husband and wife, the
position of the sexes, the absence of caste, and the priestly authority
of the father, were characteristics of our earliest ancestors. It is
an additional evidence of their early peaceful life, that the words
which are different in the many branches of their descendants are, with
a few exceptions, the names of wild animals, and those for the instruments
of war. The common parent tongue of our ancestors has perished,
but in the various languages of their descendantswhether Sanskrit, Latin,
Greek, Celtic, or Englishwe see traces
of the primeval tongue.
?The center from which these various
races first migrated is hid in the mists of a distant antiquity; but
both language and the traditions of two races designate the high plateau of Asia lying east of the Caspian, as their common
home.From the Indian Aryans have come the great people of the Brahmanic
Hindus; and from the Iran or Persic Aryans descended the Persians, the
Medes, the Carmanians, the Bactrians, the Sogdians, the Hyrcanians,
the Sargartians, and others of minor importance.... However early may
have been the original dispersion of the Aryan tribes, the
historical appearance of this powerful family is comparatively late.
The Turanian, the Hamitic, and the Semitic peoples, had successively
erected powerful empires, ere the vigorous Aryan family came forward
upon the field of history. Since that period, with the exception of
the Assyrian empire, and the Semitic conquests under Mohammed, and occasional
Turanian invasions, the Aryan races have held the dominion of the
world; bearing with them Art and Law, and Science and Civilization;
exercising the singular philosophic and intellectual power of this family;
manifesting especially to the world the principle of public spirit (or
individual sacrifice for the good of a community); and becoming the
universal instruments through which the Semitic conceptions of Deity,
and the Semitic inspirations of Christianity, have been spread through
all nations.
?Their two great streams of populationthe
European and the Asiatic Aryans, the practical races and the meditative
racesafter unknown ages of separation, modified by incomprehensible
and countless influences of climate and of nature, as apparently diverse
as any two branches of the human family, have, during the past two centuries,
met again in the valleys of India, and the last few years have witnessed
what is perhaps the final prostration of the Asiatic Aryan beneath the
ingenuity and vigour of the European Aryan.? Brace?s
?Manual of Ethnology, ? pp. 3842.
THE HAMITIC FAMILY.
It is difficult to define the elements
of the Hamitic family, as the most varied opinions exist among philologists
on the question. Dr. Edkins, of the London Missionary Society, thinks
that even Chinese is a Cushite, or Hamitic, language, and that the migration
which peopled the Celestial empire was connected with the age and race
of Nimrod. It is impossible to decide that many of the so-called Turanian
languages are not Hamitic;
but it is easy to prove that certain languages are
so, and a consideration
of these is sufficient for our present purpose.
The unquestionably Hamitic nations include
Egypt, Babylonia, Ancient Syria and Palestine, and other parts of Africa.
1. EGYPT. There is abundant proof that
the most ancient organized state of which we have any knowledgeEgypt
was peopled by the descendants of Mizraim, the son of Ham. The present
Arabic name of Egypt is Misr; and the Hebrew Mizraim, which is dual
in form and signifies the two Misrs, or Egypts, indicates the upper
and lower sections of the long valley of the Nile. We learn from the
tenth of Genesis that the early Egyptians were closely related to the
primitive inhabitants of Canaan, who were descended from Mizraim?s brother
Cush. Herodotus, Diodorus, and other Greek writers are agreed that settled
government was established in Egypt. under monarchical institutions
at an earlier date than in any other country. Some writers carry back
the origin of Egypt into a fabulous antiquity, but historians of repute
are agreed that it dates from a time anterior to B.C. 2000; in other
words, that it goes back to a time soon after the Noahic deluge. Hamitic
speech seems to have developed first in Egypt, and to have spread thence
to other Hamitic races who were then perhaps dwellers in that land,
by whom it was carried in two distinct lines to other parts of the earthin
one line it passed to Ethiopia, Southern Arabia, Babylonia, Susiana,
and the adjoining coast; and in another line to Philistia, Tyre, Sidon,
and the country of the Hittites.
In Scripture Egypt is frequently mentioned
as ?the land of Ham.? ?He smote all the firstborn in Egypt; the chief
of their strength in the tabernacles of Ham.? ?Israel also came into
Egypt; and Jacob sojourned in the land of Ham.? ?They forgat God their
Savior, which had done great things in Egypt; wondrous works in the
land of Ham, and terrible things by the Red Sea.?
#Ps 78:51 Ps 105:23 Ps 106:25, 22 2 . BABYLONIA. The earliest or one of the earliest empires established in
the great Mesopotamian valley was undoubtedly a Cushite or Hamitic one.
Nimrod was the founder of a dynasty which reigned in Babylonia for some
centuries; but whether his empire was the earliest founded in that region
whether it rose soon after the flood, as is commonly supposed, or nearer
to the days of Mosesis as yet an undecided question. On account of its
mention in the genealogical table in the tenth of Genesis, it is generally
assigned to the earliest post-diluvian antiquity. But it should be noted
that Nimrod is there introduced in a parenthetical way. He is not mentioned
among the sons of Cush in verse 7, but separately and subsequently.
It is not asserted that he built Babel or Babylon, but only that it
became his first seat of empire, and that from Babylon he went forth
to Asshur and built a new capital for himselfNineveh. It is further
asserted that his renown was proverbial apparently in the days when
the Pentateuch was published, as if his exploits were fresh in the minds
of men as late as the days of Moses, a thousand years after the flood.
Several things are implied in these statements:That Babylonia and the
country to the north of it in the great valley between the Tigris and
the Euphrates, ?the land of Shinar, ? was originally inhabited and governed
by ?Asshur, ? or by Assyrians, i.e. by descendants of Shem. That after
a considerable lapse of time sufficient for many great cities to have
arisen beside Babylon itselfNimrod, a Hamite and a descendant of Cush,
invaded and conquered the country, taking Babylon and the other places
mentioned first, and gradually extending his dominion northward and
eastward, till he reached the magnificent site on the Tigris which tempted
him to erect a new capital to his empireNineveh, the remains of which
are with us to this day.
The words ?Cush begat Nimrod? need not
necessarily mean that the latter was the great-grandson of Noah, for
very numerous parallel expressions elsewhere, both in Scripture and
in various oriental works, prove distinctly that the words convey nothing
more than that Nimrod was by descent a Cushite. No information of his
chronological distance from his ancestor, nor of the number of generations
which intervened between them, is given in the passage. That his empire
did not belong to the earliest post-diluvian antiquity is implied in
Genesis xiv., where we have an enumeration of the monarchs reigning
in Abraham?s time in the great valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates.
The kings of Shinar and Elam are specially mentioned, and yet there
is not the least allusion to Nimrod as reigning at Babylon, or to the
existence of such a city as Nineveh, indicating that the latter was
not built, nor the kingdom of Nimrod established in the days of Abraham.
The rulers of the entire district seem to have been involved, more or
less, in the great war of the ?four kings with five, ? and the occupants
of Babylon at the time were descendants of Shem, as is evident from
their names. Hence it would seem as if Nimrod and his Cushite dynasty
cannot at that time have come into existence. Now cuneiform monuments
speak distinctly, like Genesis x., of a Cushite dynasty conquering Babylonia,
spreading to the north, and erecting Nineveh on the Tigris. But they
place this event about the sixteenth or seventeenth century before Christ,
and state that by these conquests one original Chaldean empire was overthrown.
Traces of Nimrod?s empirei.e. of a Hamite dynastyhaving ruled in Mesopotamia
were found by Layard among the ruins of Nimrod, carved ivories bearing
a strong resemblance to similar antiquities found in Egypt, and even
monuments with distinctly Egyptian physiognomies. Cush and Mizraim,
the founders of the Egyptian kingdom, were brothers. Berosus, the Chaldean
priest, of whose history of his people considerable fragments exist,
also throws light on the subject. He states that the fifth dynasty which
ruled in Babylon consisted of ?nine Arabian kings, ? who reigned 245
years. Now as Arabia was originally peopled by the Cushites, this dynasty
may well be that of Nimrod. Further, some very ancient Babylonian writings,
discovered in an Arabic translation, and investigated by Professor Chwolson,
of St. Petersburg, mention a foreign dynasty founded in Babylonia by
one called Nemroda, or Nimrod, as actually ruling in the days when the
author wrote. His book has no date, but its internal evidence shows
that it belongs to a period long prior to the second Babylonian empire
founded by Nabonassar, and subsequent to the early Chaldean monarchy.
On these and other grounds the existence
of the Cushite empire of Nimrod is, by many careful scholars, now considered
to be proved, independently of the statement in the tenth of Genesis;
but they hold it to have intervened between the old Chaldean monarchy
and the rise of the Semitic Assyrians to supreme power in Western Asia.
Even as late as the century of Nebuchadnezzar, 600 B.C., the Hamitic
race is shown by the monuments to have formed a large element in the
population of Babylonia.
Thus, while altering our preconceived
opinion as to its precise chronological position, profane history and
archaeological discovery alike agree in maintaining what Scripture asserts
(i) That Babylon was founded very soon after the flood; (2) that Mesopotamia
was at first occupied by descendants of Shem; (3) that Nimrod, a Cushite
invader, conquered the country, and then extending his empire northward,
built Nineveh, and founded a dynasty which ruled over the neighbouring
nations for a considerable period of time before the later Assyrian
dynasty arose. Further explorations of the mounds on the Tigris and
Euphrates will probably in years to come make still clearer our present
conceptions of the exact nature of these events, and help us more accurately
to determine the dates of these early political revolutions.
?The close connection between Egypt
and Babylonia is in any case unquestionable. Ancient classical tradition
and recent linguistic research agree in establishing a close connection
between the early inhabitants of the lower Mesopotamian plain and the
people which under the various names of Cushites, Ethiopians, and Abyssinians,
bad long been settled upon the Nile.... Names which are modifications
of Cush have always hung about the lower Mesopotamian region, indicating
its primitive connection with the Cush upon the Nile. Even now ancient
Susiana is known as Khuzistan, or the land of the Cushites. Standing
alone, these might be weak arguments; but Sir Henry Rawlinson, the first
translator of primitive Babylonian documents, declares the vocabulary
employed to be ?decidedly Cushite
or Ethiopian, ? and states that he was able to interpret the inscriptions
chiefly by the aid which was furnished to him from published works on
the Galla or Abyssinian and the Mahia or South Arabian dialects.? Rawlinson?s ?Egypt and Babylon, ? p. 8.
THE EMPIRE OF THE HITTITES.
Nor was it in Egypt and in Babylonia
only that the Hamites rose to supremacy in early post-diluvian times.
A third great empire arose among them before any of the descendants
of Shem or Japhet became prominent on the stage of the world?s history.
And this third empire was not merely Hamitic, it was also distinctly
Canaanitish; so that whatever reading we adopt of the text of Noah?s
prophecy whether we read ?Ham the father of Canaan, ? or ?Canaan? alonethe
history of this empire is in point.
The Bible notices of the races who occupied
the land promised to Abraham include a variety of nations under the
general name Canaanites. Among these the Hittites appear frequently
as first and mightiest, as having widespread dominions and great power.
They are called ?the children of Heth, ? the second son of Canaan. In
the Bible we first meet with them at Hebron, on the high-road from Egypt
to Jerusalem, where they seem to have been recognized as the rightful
owners of the place, from whom Abraham, regarded as a prince among them,
purchased a burying ground. The Hittites were not only a commercial
people, as we see by this money transaction, but they were also the
proprietors of the land. This is the earliest transfer of land on record,
and they were Hittites who made out these earliest title deeds. It seems
that they subsequently secured sufficient foothold in Egypt to found
the city called Zoan; as we are told in a parenthetical sentence, that
Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.
Esau married several Hittite wives,
who were a bitterness of spirit to Isaac and Rebecca. When Joshua took
possession of Canaan, the command to destroy the Hittites was definitely
given; and the limits of the land were defined in the words, ?From the
wilderness and Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates,
all the land of the Hittites, and unto the great sea toward the going
down of the sun, shall be your coast.? In the various confederacies
formed against the Israelites by the nations of Canaan, the Hittites
are frequently mentioned; and in the great and decisive battle of Lake
Merom their chariots and horses are alluded to. Though their power was
crushed on the conquest of Canaan, many of them were spared and continued
to dwell in the land. {#Jud 3:5} David had
Hittite warriors in his army; and Bathsheba, the mother of Solomon and
ancestress of our Lord, was the wife of Uriah the Hittite. Solomon also
had Hittite wives. At the time of David?s extensive empire, Kadesh,
the southern capital of the Hittites, was included in it, {#2Sa 8} for he sent Joab
there to number the people.
The word ?Tahtim-hodshi?, {#2Sa 24:6} which is simply transliterated from
the Hebrew in the Authorised Version, is translated in the Septuagint
?Gilead, and the land of the Hi/tiles
of Kadesh.?
Some of them, however, continued to
enjoy an independent existence, for in #1Ki
10:29 we read that the kings of the Hittites had horses and chariots
brought up for them out of Egypt. In 2 Kings we read that the Syrians
fled panic-stricken from the siege of Samaria, on imagining that the
king of Israel had hired against them ?the kings of the Hittites.?
In all these passages there is implied,
if not plainly stated, the existence of a wide-spread Hittite power
from the days of Abraham to those of David.
Historical critics, however, asserted
that there were no traces of any such empire in classic history, and
pronounced the Bible notices of it to be unhistoric and unworthy of
credence. Professor Newman and the Rev. I. K. Cheyne entirely rejected
the Scripture account, and asserted that it was not, in spite of its
great antiquity, of equal value as historic evidence with the hieroglyphic
inscriptions of Egypt. Remarkable recent discoveries prove the
Bible to be right and the critics to be wrong, and establish by a surprising amount of evidence the existence for
about a thousand years of a great and mighty Hittite empire, which was
able to dispute supremacy in the earth with the most powerful Pharaohs
of Egypt for many centuries, and to extort from one of them at last
a treaty of peace, which was sealed by a matrimonial alliancea marriage
from which it seems probable that the foster-mother of Moses was born.
It is about ten years since Dr. Wright first obtained casts of some
very ancient inscriptions from Hamath in Northern Syria, and called
public attention to them as Hittite remains. Many similar ones have
since been discovered in the same script elsewhere by other explorers,
in Asia Minor, on the shores of the Euxine Archipelago and Levant, on
the borders of Egypt, and on the banks of the Euphrates. These inscriptions
have been deciphered by Professor Sayce, who has devoted his life to
the study of such questions, and who says: ?We may now consider the
Hittite origin of the peculiar system of writing first noticed by modern
travellers on the site of Hamath, to be among the ascertained facts
of science and Dr. Isaac Taylor, in his learned book, ?The Alphabet,
? refers to those hieroglyphics and sculptures ?as in the unmistakable
style of Hittite art.? ?Transactions of the Soc. Bib. Arch., ? vol. vii. part ii. p. 246. Vol.
ii. p. 520.
The cumulative evidence resulting from
the decipherment of these very ancient historical remains proves that
the empire of the Hittites was wider and their power even greater than
is implied in the Scripture notices. ?That their empire extended, ?
says Dr. Isaac Taylor, ?as far as the Euxine and the Egean, is shown
by hieroglyphics scattered over Asia Minor, more especially in Lydia,
Lycaonia, Cappadocia, and Cilicia.? ?Scholars are only just beginning
to realize the vast extent of the dominions of the Hittites, and their
important place in primitive history. Till the rise of Assyria, they
were the most powerful nation in North-western Asia. Dr. Schliemann?s
discoveries at Troy, and the Hittite monuments scattered over Asia,
as far west as the neighbourhood of Smyrna, prove the extent of their
empire to the west; while to the south, at a time prior to the exodus
of the Hebrews, their dominion extended as far as Hebron; and if Mariette
is right in his belief that one of the Hyksos dynasties was Hittite,
they must have established their rule over Egypt itself.?
In the inscriptions at Karnak, referring
to the victories of Thothmes III., there is a long list of towns in
the land of the Hittites. Of these Brugsch says: ?It is clear that this
list exhibits in their oldest orthography the greater number of these
towns which are afterwards mentioned so frequently in the records of
wars, in Assyrian history, in the cuneiform inscriptions which have
been deciphered. They are the old allied cities of those ?Kheta, ? of
unknown origin, who long before the rise of Nineveh and Babylon played
the same part as at a later period the Assyrians
undertook with success.?. As at Megiddo
in Pales
tine, so at Kadesh on the Orontes, the
king of the Hittites had under his command all the surrounding peoples,
either as subjects or allies, and it is clear that the mighty host was
brought into the field by a voice of command that had to be obeyed.?
?The Alphabet, ? by Dr. Isaac Taylor, vol. ii. p. 121. Brugsch?s ?Egypt
under the Pharaobs, ? vol. ii. p. 7. Wright?s ? The Empire of the Hittites, ? pp. 52, 53.
Dr. Isaac Taylor says, speaking of the
monuments: ?They are those of a people who have been identified with
the Hittites of the Old Testament, the Kheta of the Egyptian monuments,
the Khattai of the Assyrian records, and the Keteioi of Homer.
?They were one of the most powerful
peoples of the primeval world, their empire extending from the frontier
of Egypt to the shores of the Egean, and, like the Babylonians and the
Egyptians, they possessed a culture, an art, and a script peculiar to
themselves, and plainly of indigenous origin.? ?The
Alphabet, ? vol. ii. p. 120.
Perhaps, however, the most striking
indication of the might of this ancient empire is afforded by its relations
to Egypt. After tracing these by means of the monumental records of
Egypt itself, Dr. Wright says: ?We thus see the Hittite kings the rivals
of the Pharaohs in peace and war from the twelfth to the twentieth dynasty.
The shock of Egyptian invasion exhausted itself against the frontier
cities of Kadesh and Carchemish, but the mighty empire of the Hittite
extended beyond, on the broad plains and islands of Asia Minor, and
so there were always fresh Hittite armies, and abundance of Hittite
wealth, to enable the Hittite empire to withstand the might of Egypt
for a thousand years.? ?Empire
of the Hittites, ? p. 35.Mr. Theophilus C. Pinches, of the British Museum,
considers that the composition of these tablets cannot be later than
2000 B.C.
If we ask how far back can the existence
of this Hittite empire be traced, Professor Sayce replies: ?Already
in the astrological tables of Sargon of Agane, in the nineteenth century
B.C., the
Hittites are regarded as a formidable power.? ?Transactions of the Soc.
Bib. Arch., ? vol. vii. part ii. p. 265.]
THE ASSYRIAN INSCRIPTIONS record the struggles of Tiglath-Pileser, Assur-Nasir-Pal,
and other Assyrian monarchs with these same ?Kheta, ? or Hittites. Shalmaneser
conducted thirty campaigns against them, according to his own account
on two important monuments, one of which is known as the Black Obelisk
of Nimrod, and the other as the Monolith of Kurkh; but still the warlike
sons of Heth renewed the conflict, nor was it until the days of Sargon
that they were finally subdued at Carchemish, their Eastern capital.
This important event is narrated in one of Sargon?s numerous annals,
translated by Dr. Julius Oppert: ?In the fifth year of my reign, Pisiri
of Carchemish sinned against the great gods, and sent against Mita the
Moschian messenger, hostile to Assyria. He took hostages. I lifted my
hands to Assur, my lord. I made him leave the town. I sent away the
holy vases out of his dwelling. I made them throw him into chains of
iron. I took away the gold, the silver, and treasures of his palace.
The Circesian rebels who were with him, and their properties, I transplanted
to Assyria. I took among them fifty cars, two hundred riders, three
thousand men on foot, and I augmented the part of my kingdom. I made
the Assyrians to dwell in Circesium, and I placed them under the domination
of Assur my lord.? ?Records of the Past, ? vol. vii. p. 30.
If now we inquire what was the moral
character of these people, and what their religion, we shall perceive
that they shared with Egypt and Babylon the moral degradation which
fitted them to exchange dominion and rule for a servile position, that
their moral decadence involved their perishing and passing away from
the stage of history. The rites with which their goddesses were honored
should hardly be called religion. The priestesses were mere ritualists,
and the business of their service was attention to ceremonies without
any reference to morality. Their impure worship seems to have been mingled
with the primitive nature-worship; and in the name Kadesh, the capital
of the Hittites, we see one of the numerous shrines where Hittite girls
were devoted to wickedness in the name of religion. The worship of these
deities took many repulsive forms. Devotees surrendered their children
to Baal in the flames, and the children?s screams were drowned by trumpet
and drum; and the rites of Astarte were equally vile, though accompanied
by the cooing of doves and clouds of incense. Wright?s
?Empire of the Hittites, ? pp. 75, 76. Their idol-gods were innumerable.
Treaties and agreements were placed under the sanction of gods and goddesses
just as in Egypt, and the catalogues of deities whose names are affixed
to such documents are very long.
The Hittite empire passed away after
an existence of about 1000 years. It disappears from the stage of history
subsequently to the battle of Carchemish, and leaves scarcely a trace
behind, so that its ever having existed at all was eventually called
in question. But its records happily withstood the ravages of time,
though the power to read them was lost. The key to their decipherment
now recovered, the old empire emerges from the oblivion of ages, a resuscitated
witness to the historical accuracy of the Old Testament. And though
the Hittite monuments leave unrevealed much which we would fain learn,
yet they bring clearly to our knowledge an important early development
of the posterity of the youngest son of Noah, and the Hittites must
henceforth take their place alongside of the Egyptians, Babylonians,
and Canaanites. All four rose to early eminence in the earth; the moral
and religious character of three of them is sufficiently evidenced by
their still existing remains, and that of the fourth is plainly stated
in Scripture.
THE TURANIAN RACES.
We have now indicated the three leading
groups of nations connected with the three sons of Noah as they appear
in ancient and modern times. A very large number of nations which have
existed and exist still in the earth are, however, as we have said,
not included in any of these groupsthe
Turanian races, the Chinese, and most of the nations who speak the hundreds
of African languages. No certain knowledge of the racial connections
of these nations and peoples has as yet been attained. Ethnographers
and linguists differ among themselves on the question at present. Science
is therefore silent, or ventures only to make suggestions; it cannot
announce any conclusions. But from this very fact it is clear that the
nations we have omitted are not those who have made history. Had they
exerted any great influence in the world, their genealogy would not
have been thus obscured, nor the family connections of their language
lost. Great peoples preserve their archives just as noble families preserve
their genealogies, and can trace back their family tree to its founder.
It is only the most illiterate who can scarcely tell the names of their
great-grandfathers, and only as to the less influential and degenerate
peoples of the earth can any doubt exist as to their true ancestry.
This will be seen at once by a glance at the names of the Turanian group
of languages. There are few among them known generally at all, and fewer
still known to fame. The family embraces the greater portion of the
Asiatic peoplesthe Tartars, Mongols, Thibetians, Tamulians, and aboriginal
Indian peoples, as well as in Europe such nations as the Finns and the
Lapps; and it is possible that the Malay inhabitants of the Eastern
Archipelago and the Central African nations also belong to it, but it
is by no means certain. None of them have in any obvious or notorious
way shared in the distinctive
fortunes of either Shem or Japhet; none of them have attained any great
religious supremacy, or exercised any marked spiritual influence in
the earth like the Semites; nor have any of them secured vast extension
or enlargement like the sons of Japhet. If we could, as we doubtless
shall be able to do in due time, connect them by means of their languages
with their parent stock, it would in no way affect our conclusions as
to the fulfillment of Noah?s wonderful prophecy; for just as a family
of great musicians may have some unmusical members, or a family of painters
some who have no talent for art, so a great family of nations, characterized
as a whole, and in its leading members by certain peculiarities, may
have inferior members wholly destitute of such distinctive features.
Such characteristics as these nations do possess, associate them rather with
the Hamitic races than with either of the other two, and the special
destiny of Ham?s descendants attaches very clearly to some of them.
So markedly have servitude and slavery been the portion of the colored
race of the
Dark Continent, that it is difficult
not to believe that they are descendants
of the youngest son of Noah. It has indeed generally been assumed that
they are so, as, for instance, by Dr. Keith in his admirable unanswered
and unanswerable ?Evidence of Prophecy;? ?Evidence
of the Truth of the Christian Religion derived from the Literal Fulfillment
of Prophecy, ? by Dr. Alexander Keith, p. 513, 37th edition. but
it must be admitted in the light of modern linguistic discovery that
this is an assumption which it is as impossible to
prove as to disprove. We have consulted on this point Robert Cust,
Esq., the well-known writer on languages, and our inquiry referred especially
to the large family of dialects known as the Bantu languages of Central
Africa, which extend from the east to the west of the continent, and
from the south of the Soudan to the borders of Cape Colony, embracing
thus nearly the southern half of Africa, and including hundreds of large
tribes and nationsall the languages spoken on the Congo and its great
tributaries, the Zulu and Kaifre tongues with their sub-divisions, though
not the Hottentot. As regards these languages, Mr. Cust says: ? The Banto family is quite distinct and separate from any other
linguistic family ; it has no affinity whatsoever to
any, either in structure or vocabulary. How it came into existence is
a secret reserved for the next century. We have not a tittle of evidence
to hang a theory upon. It will be safe to say nothing, because we know
nothing; nor can I for a moment admit that the Berber, Galla, Agau,
etc., are Semitic tongues in any sensethey are Hamitic.?
Language does not as yet indicate the
connection, but on the other hand it gives no counter-indication. In
the case of the Central African races, history cannot enable us to decide
their origin any more than language, for Central Africa may be said
to have no history. Geography, however, points distinctly to a Hamitic
source for all the populations of Africa. South-western Asia was the
cradle of the human race, and the nature of the case requires, consequently,
that Africa should have been entered from its north-eastern quarternot
across the Isthmus of Suez only, but also from the shores of the Red
Sea and the Indian Ocean to the south of it. The early Hamitic Chaldeans
had ships, and were great traders by sea to these regions, as we know.
Now as Ethiopia, Nubia, and Egypt were unquestionably peopled by Hamites,
we have no reason to doubt that it was the same with the rest of the
continent. Conquest, commerce, and colonization have, in the course
of ages, introduced many other elementsArabs, Moors, Greeks, Romans,
English, French, Portuguese, and Dutch. But in considering the dark
races as one and all descended from Ham, we take the most probable,
and therefore the most scientific, ground. As long as one whit of evidence
can be adduced for an opposite theory, we are justified in assuming
from geographical probabilities, and from the marvelous and long-continued
social degradation of the people, that the condition of the population
of the Dark Continent illustrates and fulfils the brief but pregnant
foreview of Noah as to the posterity of his youngest son.
Four men and four women were saved in
the ark; who were the latter? We know the names and characters of the
men, but Scripture gives no particulars of the women. Noah?s wife was
doubtless a godly woman, and so, in all probability, the wives of Shem
and Japhet. Ham?s unfilial and impious character suggests the question
as to the sort of wife such a man would have been likely to choose.
Can the foreseen character of his posterity, which was to blight them
with the doom of servitude in the earth, be traceable to the mother?s
character as well as to that of the father? We must remember that Noah
was five hundred years old when he begat Shem, Ham, and Japhet, and
six hundred years old at the time of the flood, so that the young men
had lived for a century in the midst of that ungodly antediluvian race,
one of whose specially recorded sins was the contraction of unequal
marriages. Ham, though actually one of the godly family, may, like others,
have taken to himself a wife of Cainite origin (as Esau afterwards intermarried
with the daughters of Heth and Canaan). If soand there is nothing in
Scripture to forbid the thought, and much, on the other hand, to suggest
itmay there not lie in this fact an explanation of more difficulties
than one? Not only would it account for the character of the family
of Noah?s youngest son, as evidenced afterwards in their conduct, but
it may furnish an explanation of the remarkable physical differences
which existed in the very earliest ages between the Hamites and the
rest of mankind.
REVIEW OF THE FACTS.
We have now indicated the three groups
of nations descended respectively from the three sons of Noah, including
all those whose ancestry can
be undoubtedly ascertained. We have consequently before us the facts
on which must be based any valid reply to the question, Has the second
section of the Divine program of the world?s history been fulfilled?
We recall first the dark foreview which
it gives of the descendants of HAM, and we inquire, Does the state of
the Hamitic peoples of this day justify it? We look round the world,
we see many ruling races, foremost among which is the Anglo-Saxon, girdling
the globe with its empires, and holding in subjection men of all breeds
and colors. Published 1887. We see Europe and America
in the forefront of civilization and powerAsia enormously behindhand,
and Africa almost immeasurably in the rear.
Europe and America call Japhet father;
and even India, if we except its degraded aboriginal hill-tribes, is
Aryan or Japhetic. China and the Turanian races of Asia cannot be adduced
in evidence at all, as their ancestry is uncertain; the Jews and the
Arabs are Shemites, and there remains only poor, dark, degraded Africa
to tell us the present condition of the descendants of Ham. The distinguishing
feature of Africa is slavery. The low type of its populations morally
and intellectually is such that liberty and independence, to say nothing
of rule and dominion over others, is to them impossible. To tyrants
at home, and to slave-raiders from afar, they submit without a thought
of struggling for their liberties. Disunion and mutual distrust reign
among neighbouring tribes, and forbid their uniting for mutual defence.
Public spirit is wholly wanting; the bracing and elevating influence
of true religion is replaced by degrading superstition, and hence despotic
tyranny and cruel devil-worship reign unopposed. The woman is slave
to the man, the subject to the chief, the petty tyrant to the great
tyrant, and the Negro races as a whole to the white races. In America,
until recently, millions of Africa?s sable sons served the children
of Japhet as bond-slaves. In Egypt, the Hamitic races have foe ages
served the Semitic; the degradation of the land is indeed wonderful,
and especially so when contrasted with its early glory.
It is long since its days of dominion passed away for ever. Nebuchadnezzar, a Semitic
monarch, was its first conqueror; and Ezekiel, the prophet of the Captivity,
announced its fate from that time forth in a very distinct and detailed
way. ?It shall be a base kingdom; it shall be the basest of the kingdoms; neither shall it exalt itself any more above
the nations.? ?I will diminish them, ? said God, ?that they shall no
more rule over the nations.. ..
The sword shall come upon Egypt, and great pain shall be in Ethiopia,
when the slain shall fall in Egypt, and they shall take away her multitude,
and her foundations shall be broken down.? ?They also that uphold Egypt
shall fall. ... I will also destroy the idols, and
I will cause their images to cease out of Noph; and there shall be no more a prince of the land of Egypt:
and I will put a fear in the land of Egypt.. .. The pomp of her strength shall cease in her, ... a cloud shall cover her, and her daughters
shall go into captivity.? {#Eze 29:, 30}
When the Persian power succeeded the
Babylonian, Cambysesa Median, and therefore Aryan or Japhetic monarch
conquered Egypt, and treated the people with barbarous cruelty. As Isaiah
had predicted, they were given over ?into the hand of a cruel lord,
and a fierce king ruled over them.? The Persians oppressed them so severely
that they were driven again and again to revolt, but each time they
were subdued with fresh cruelties. When the Persian empire fell, Alexander
the Greata Grecian, and therefore another Aryan or Japhetic conquerorbecame
their master, and left the city of Alexandria as a memento of his dominion
in the land. After his death Egypt fell to the share of his general,
Ptolemy, whose successors governed it for many generations, the first
few fairly well; but, as Strabo asserts, ?all after the third very ill,
being corrupted by luxury.? This dynasty, after reigning 294 years,
ended in the suicide of the infamous Cleopatra. Octavius C~sar then
reduced Egypt to a Roman province (30 B..), and for 670 years it was
governed by prefects sent from Rome, orafter the division of the empire
from Constantinople. Then succeeded the Saracen dominion, when Omar
conquered Egypt, and burned the invaluable Alexandrian library of 400,
000 volumes, sinking the already base kingdom lower than ever before,
by leaving it a prey to ignorance and superstition. For six centuries
this Saracenic rule lasted; and then a dynasty of actual
slaves ruled Egypt for 267
years. Until A.D. 1517.
THE MAMELUKS were Circassian or Turkish
slaves bought young and trained to military service by the Sultans of
Egypt, who grew insolent at last, slew their sovereign, and usurped
the government of the country. Here then were the once proud Egyptians
become servants of servants indeed The rule of the Mameluks was a succession
of ?wars, battles, injuries, and rapines. Twenty-four Turkish and twenty-three
Circassian sultans succeeded each other, the last being hanged before
one of the gates of Cairo by Selim, the Turkish emperor, who put an
end to the Mameluk government, and annexed Egypt to the Ottoman empire,
to which nominally it still belongs.
Thus, for twenty-five long centuries,
the Egyptian descendants of Ham have been in subjection to successive
forms of Semitic and Aryan rule; never once independent, never ruled
even by a native viceroy, never able to throw off the yoke, much less
to impose their authority on others, they have continued a kingdom,
but have been, and are, ?the basest of the kingdoms.? ?A servant of
servants will he be unto his brethren, ? said Noah; and such is Egypt
to this day. Look where we will the world over, nowhere can we see Hamitic
races in a position of supremacy.
But it was not always thus. The earliest
empires of antiquity were Hamitic. Nimrod conquered Semitic peoples;
Egypt held Israel in bondage. In chronological order, supremacy in the
earth fell first to the Hamites,
then to the Shemites or Semitic nations, and lastly, up to the present
time, to the descendants of Japhet.
Now, here a remarkable and most interesting
fact claims our attention, and is in itself a strong argument for the
inspiration of this Noahic prophecy. So far from there being any sign
of its fulfillment in the days of Moses, or even at the latest date
to which sceptical criticism assigns the authorship of the Pentateuch,
appearances were all entirely the other way.
No human foresight would have anticipated degradation and servile subjection
for the Hamitic races in those early ages. Things looked as if nothing
could have well been more mistaken than the prediction. All the greatest
empires of the earliest antiquity were Hamitic the mighty and long-continued
kingdom of Egypt; the great empire of Nimrod, of whose gigantic and
magnificent cities and temples we have ocular evidence in our own day;
all the seven nations of Canaan; and above all, this mighty, warlike,
extensive, and long-lasting empire of the Hittites all were Hamitic.
Wherever the eye turned, the posterity of the youngest son of Noah would
in those early ages have been observed to be in the ascendant. While
Abraham was still nothing but a sheik of a pastoral tribe wandering
over the quiet uplands of Palestine, the Hamitic Pharaoh surrounded
by his princes was already reigning in state in Egypt; and centuries
later, when Abraham?s posterity were groaning under cruel bondage in
the land of Ham, its proud monarch refused to liberate his oppressed
captives. Even when a first instalment of fulfillment occurred in the
conquest of the Canaanites by the Israelites under Joshua, the mighty
empire of the Hittites remained, and continued to hold by far the larger
part of the territory promised to the seed of Abraham. Just as Cain,
who was cursed from the earth which had opened her mouth to receive
his brother?s blood from his hand, went out from the presence of the
Lord, and with his descendants built cities, invented arts, cultivated
music, grew rich and great and wicked, so with the descendants of Noah?s
youngest son. Their doom of degradation did not overtake them all at
once. God?s great judgments linger; they are slow, but sure. The nations
of Canaan were not expelled until their iniquity was full; the Hamites
generally did not sink into servile subjection to their brethren until
they had proved their utter unfitness to be the leading races of the
world. A thousand years is with the Lord only as one day. The Lord was
not slack concerning His promise of supremacy to Shem and Japhet, but
He was in no haste to vindicate His own truth and faithfullness. The
two great branches of the Hamitic family the African and the Asiaticwere
both permitted to rise into eminence in the earliest ages of history:
?For the last three thousand years the world has been mainly indebted
for its advancement to the Semitic and Indo-European races, but it was
otherwise in the first ages. Egypt and Babylon, Mizraim and Nimrodboth
descendants of Hamled the way and acted as the pioneers of
mankind in the various untrodden fields
of art, literature, and science. Alphabetic writing, astronomy, history,
chronology, architecture, plastic art, sculpture, navigation, agriculture,
textile industry, seem all of them to have had their origin in one or
other of these two countries.? Rawlinson?s
?Ancient Monarchies, ? vol. i. p. 60.
Is this strange? No, but it is in harmony
with the course of Divine providence revealed to us throughout Scripture:
?That was not first which is spiritual,
but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual.? ?Many
that are first shall be last, and the last shall be first.? These sons
of Ham had ample time and a wide sphere allowed them in which to show
forth what was in them, in which to display the character that was subsequently
to bring down upon them the degradation predicted. God never inflicts
undeserved judgments; He waits until men fill up the measure of their
iniquity. had servitude overtaken the Hamites from the first, it might
have seemed an arbitrary and unjust infliction a thing of which the
providential government of God affords no instance. He renders to every
man according to his works. What a man sows, that
he also reaps; and what is true of individuals, is true also of nations
and of races. Egypt and Babylon, the Canaanites and the Hittites, one
and all fell into the lowest depths of idolatry, and into the vilest
forms of sensualism, cruelty, and sin; they perished in their own corruption,
and were the victims of their own iniquities. They deserved the degradation
that in after ages overtook them, and sank not into servitude ere they
had proved themselves unworthy of supremacy. The Hamitic races have
left us what? The inheritance of great and influential religions, like
the Semites? Descendants who form the leading nations of the earth to-day,
like the Japhetites? A rich and precious literature moulding still the
minds of men? No; none of these. They have left usthe pyramids of Egypt,
the monstrous carvings of Memphis and Thebes, the masses of masonry
buried in the mounds of Nimrud; boastful, vainglorious inscriptions
by the hundred, with bas-relief presentations, all too vivid, of their
horrible cruelties, their devastating wars, and their degrading superstitions.
We know what their religion and their morals must have been from these,
as well as from the assertions of history. Nineveh, Babylon, and Egypt
were, besides all of them, enemies and oppressors of Israel. Ezekiel?s
description of the idolatry, the pride, and the wickedness of Egypt
present an awfully dark picture of the nation.
They are described by contemporary historians
as a luxurious, unwarlike, vicious, and faithless people. ?Such men
are evidently born not to command, but to obey; they are altogether
unworthy of liberty, and slavery is the fittest for them, as they are
fittest for slavery.? For ?righteousness exalteth a nation; but sin
is a reproach to any people.? Where now are the Hamite races? What thrones
do they occupy? what sceptres do they wield? What influence do they
exert in the earth? They have disappeared from the stage of history
as rulers, leaders, actors, almost as completely as if they had never
been. They continue to exist,
but as degraded and enslaved
peoples; living witnesses of the truth of God, almost as great a miracle
as the Jews themselves.
And next we inquire, What about the
religious supremacy of Shem? Has God in any peculiar sense been the
God of His descendants, and have they held Hamitic races in subjection?
The answer to this question is the simple
but all-comprehensive statement that Sheni
was the father of Abraham. As we shall see more fully in a later
section, all the true religion in the world comes to it through Abraham,
and thus through Shem. The only three religions on earth which have
any knowledge at all of the one living and true God are Semitic. Judaism,
Christianity, and Mohammedanism (which, defective and even blasphemous
as it is, is yet infinitely nearer the truth than any form of idol-worship
or ?fetish ?)all three flow from Abraham, the Hebrew, as their human
fountain-head; and thus from the second son of NoahShem. God has been
the Lord God of Shem in an altogether peculiar and distinctive sense.
The Savior of the world descended from this son of Noah. Revealed religion
has flowed through Semitic channels. This is a fact that none can deny,
and a fact that must have been foreseen, and that well deserved to be
foretold. We do not dwell further on it here, as it must come under
consideration in our next chapter in another connection. Every psalm
of David, and every Christian hymn and sacred song of later days, every
authentic narrative of the earliest ages of humanity, the sublime law
of Sinai, and the beatitudes and parables of Christ, the visions of
prophecy, the teachings of apostles, the testimony of the martyrs, the
missions of modern Christianityall that has lifted our world from ruin
and misery and darkness and death, all that has purified and ennobled
it and opened to it a door of hope for the future all has come to it
through Shem.
It is true that the bud of Judaism,
when it blossomed into the flower of Christianity, exhaled its heavenly
perfume far and wide, and knew no distinction of races. The sons of
Japhet and the sons of Ham shared in the great salvation. It was to
the Jew first and also to the Gentile, but the point is that it
came through Shem. Religious supremacy belonged to his line. No
fact in human history is clearer than this. The prediction has been
fully accomplished, and the future will exhibit this even more clearly
than the present; for the unspeakable blessings of the ages to come
all flow to our race through Christ, who, as Son of man, is the offspring
of Shem.
And it is equally clear that the prediction
as to Japhet has been and is abundantly accomplished. Not only were
the Medo-Persian, Grecian, and Roman empires, which ruled the world
in their day, Japhetic, or Aryan (meaning, in Sanskrit, lordly, or of
good family), but so are the vast majority of the nations of modern
Europe Teutonic, Slavonic, and Celtic alike, with all their colonies
throughout the world, as well as the United States of America, and some
of the leading nations of Asia, including India, Armenia, and Persia.
When we remember what the dominion of Greece and Rome were,
and what the dominion of the Teutonic race now is, to say nothing
of the vast power of Russia and the Slavonic nations, there can be no
question as to the superior dominion
which has fallen to this branch of the human family. The British empire
alone exceeds the old Roman empire both in area and in population. For
industrial and commercial development and for wealth it has no equal
in the world, and never had even in bygone ages. No previous kingdom
ever extended its dominions into all parts of the world. And yet it
represents only half the Anglo-Saxon race, and that race is only one
out of a multitude of Japhetic kingdoms. Some 300 millions of mankind
are under the government of Great Britain; and if we add to this the
sixty millions governed by the United States, we may say a third of
the human family is under the dominion of the Anglo-Saxons alone! The
Germans and French rule another 150 millions, and the Russians 100 millions
more. The Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, and other European nations
rule about another too millions; so that probably half
the human race is even now under the government of the sons of Japhet,
and that in all parts of the world. Here is indeed enlargement and dominion
on a vast and long-enduring scale!
The HAMITIC races lost all rule and
empire twenty-five centuries ago; they now count for nothing among the
powers of the world. The SEMITIC races were never greatly enlargednever
great conquerors, save for a short period in the Saracenic era. They
have ruled the world by another weapon than the sword; they rule it
still, and will rule it for ever religiously. The Japhetic races are, and
have for over 2, 000 years been, supreme among the children of men.
The round globe itself is the only measure of their enlargement. They
influence even China and Japan and the vast expanses of Central Asia
and Central Africa. The North Pole and the South alike are visited by
them. They girdle the globe with submarine cables, cross its continents
with their railways, and its oceans with their steam-ships, carry their
commerce to its most distant shores, and force the unwilling heathen
into friendly intercourse. Moreover, they dwell in the tents of Shem
both spiritually and physically; they share by faith the blessings of
Abraham?s covenant, and they occupy and influence lands once occupied
by Semitic peoples.
Is not all this fulfilled prophecy on
the grandest of scales? The entire ethnological development of the posterity
of Noah foreseen and foretold when as yet the patriarch himself still
lived! Did he guess how all
this prolonged future would turn out? Was it by chance he assigned these
widely different destinies to the descendants of his three sons? How
came he to make no mistake? If Moses puts these words into his lips,
why did he delineate a future absolutely contrary to every indication
of his times? Why did he not make Noah assign supremacy to Ham,
seeing, as he did, Hamitic empires all around
him? Why did he not assign enlargement to Shem) and, as he knew little
of Japhet, put the servitude down to his account? It would have seemed
to human foresight a much more likely outline of the future. But no.
Moses had nothing to do with the prophecy save as an editor. Noah had
nothing to do with it save as an utterer. God Himself was and must have
been its Author; and the second father of the human race was and must
have been one of the ?holy men of old, ? who ?spake as they were moved
by the Holy Ghost.?
Index Intro 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Conclusion
