IN

CHAPTER XIV

THE ARK

N Acts vii. 22, in the speech of Stephen, it is said that "Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians." This is not derived from the Old Testament account of Moses, but from later Jewish tradition. From the statement that Moses was rescued by an Egyptian princess and brought up under her direction, and from the further statement that he contended with the Egyptian sorcerers before Pharaoh, Jewish tradition developed the idea that Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of Egypt.

The story of Moses, as we find it in the Book of Exodus, represents him as the son of a Levite woman. Strangely rescued from death, he was placed in a papyrus box smeared with bitumen, and laid among the flags on the brink of the Nile. A royal princess found him, and conjecturing that he was a Hebrew child, gave him to a Hebrew woman to nurse, the Hebrew woman selected for that purpose being his own mother. Reared among his own people, his sympathies were with the oppressed Hebrews, and finally, having slain a brutal taskmaster who was beating a Hebrew, he fled into the eastern desert. There by marriage he became a member of the family or clan of a certain Hobab, or Reuel, a priest in the mountain regions southward or south-westward from Edom. The shrine which this Hobab, or Reuel, served was not, of course, a temple, but merely a sacred place, a stone, or stones, presumably regarded from time immemorial as holy, and a place of pilgrimage for the tribes round about. At least such

was in general the character of those holy places which were served by priests.

A priest among the Arabs was not a sacrificer, but rather the interpreter of the oracles of God at some sacred place, one who knew its traditions and expounded to the people its ways. The gods were localised. A god dwelt at some given spot, generally in a sacred stone, and was sought there by those who would worship him. His circle of worshippers consisted ordinarily of the inhabitants of the immediate locality. Sometimes, however, his worship was more extended, tribes from a distance making pilgrimages to his shrine. Holy places which were sufficiently important to be visited by distant tribes had, ordinarily, a priest or priests, but that was not the case with more insignificant holy places. The priestly family in charge of a holy place did not necessarily belong to the tribe within whose boundaries that holy place was situated; but where the priest did not belong to the tribe it may be assumed that another tribe originally occupied that territory, and that the priestly family belonged to the tribe of those former occupants.

The family to which Moses attached himself was, if we may judge from the scant references in the Bible, a priestly family, officiating at a holy place, not belonging originally to the people of that locality, but handed down from an earlier time and possessing a considerable degree of sanctity, so that its god was worshipped by others besides the denizens of the immediate neighbourhood.

The Bible further tells us that Moses, by the command of God, went back to his own people, to bring them out of Egypt to worship Him in the wilderness; that he was aided in this by his brother, Aaron; what wonders they wrought, and how, having started to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, they were miraculously saved from the pursuing Egyptians. Arrived in the wilderness, we find the old priest, Moses' father-in-law, giving him advice and instruction. The Bible narrative thus suggests to us the close connexion between the religion of Israel and the religion of the wandering bedawin, who wor

shipped God at the holy place where Moses' father-in-law was priest. In point of fact, the religious ideas of the Hebrews, before the time of Moses, were substantially the same as those of the Arabians before the time of Mohammed, as is shown by a comparison of the Bible references to ancient Hebrew customs and practices with the customs and practices of the pre-Mohammedan Arabians.

But with all this I am not concerned at present, except only to say that the Bible constantly indicates the methods of God to be of this nature: He teaches man through that which man has learned from his own experience and the experience of those who went before him; teaches him in the beginning through forms and methods which seem to us of a later age strange and barbarous, because we have advanced so far; teaches him through things which shall afterwards be laid aside when they have served their purpose. And so the revelation through Moses is not an entirely new thing, any more than the revelation through Christ. It attaches itself to what had gone before, but puts into it a new spirit and a new life. Many of the forms and practices of the religion of Moses' time were destined to drop away at a later date, just as in the case of Christianity it was found necessary, in course of time, to drop the Jewish rites and ceremonies which were at first made use of in the Christian Church.

This story of Moses, as we find it in the Bible, shows us a certain connexion with Egypt, but not necessarily an intimate acquaintance with Egyptian religion or with Egyptian civilisation. The Hebrews, according to the Old Testament account, lived in Egypt, separate from the Egyptians, maintaining their own customs and rites, and rejecting everything Egyptian. In the later civilisation of Israel we find nothing that can be referred to Egypt. Outside of the deliverance from Egyptian bondage, the remembrance of which played a great part in the making of the people of Israel, there is nothing in their culture which attaches itself to Egypt until long after the Babylonian exile. For a long time, therefore,

it seemed to me improbable that Moses or the Israelites had derived anything of their religion from Egypt. But there is one thing, and that of the first importance, which I have at last been forced to conclude may be, and seemingly must be, connected with the influence of Egyptian religion upon Moses.

I have already said that the gods of the Arabians were localised, and a study of Hebrew literature shows that this ancient idea of the god as inhabiting a locality was strong in Israel also. So when Elijah would seek the presence of Yahaweh, the God of Israel, he travels to Horeb (1 Kings xix. 8). Deborah sings (Judges v. 4) that Yahaweh's habitation is in Seir, which is the same as Horeb, and that He comes thence to lead the armies of Israel to victory against their heathen foes. So also Habakkuk (iii. 3) sings that Yahaweh's dwelling is in Paran or Teman, which is again the same place as Seir or Horeb.

Now it was necessary that the Israelites should advance beyond this stage of localising God in Horeb, or else, entering Palestine, they would gradually cease to be worshippers of God-Yahaweh, Whose dwelling was at Sinai or at Horeb and would become worshippers of the gods of the land into which they had entered. However much they might think of Horeb or Sinai as the original home of their God, in some form He must go with them into Palestine. In the new religion given by Moses this continuing presence of Yahaweh was provided for through the Ark.

The Ark is unlike anything which we find among the Arabians, and indeed there are only two analogies which seem fairly available for comparison. In Egypt representations of the gods were carried about in ships. Originally capable of navigating the Nile and its canals, these ships were finally so reduced in size that they could be carried on the shoulders of men. In the cabin or box occupying the central part of the ship was some representation of the Deity, but precisely what in any given case we do not know, as the cabin or

box was kept carefully covered up and its contents concealed from view.

In Babylonia there were god-ships of a similar character. These also seem to have been carried on the shoulders of men, but we have no representations of them. At a later date the ship developed into a box, carried by poles passed through rings on the sides. On the Assyrian bas-reliefs these boxes are represented as without covers, and small figures of the gods stand in them looking out over the sides. It is possible that this is a mere artistic convention to show what were the contents of the box, and that in reality the box was covered and the images of the gods invisible. But at least it shows that the Assyrian did not exercise that extreme care to prevent the interior from being seen which we find in the case of the Egyptian god-ships. Finally we find a litter substituted for the box, and the god seated upon a throne on this litter, which is carried by poles on the shoulders of men.

Was the Hebrew Ark suggested by the ships or boxes used in Egypt or in Babylonia to carry the gods in procession? It seems to me that such was the case, and until recently I had supposed that the suggestion came from Babylonia; that the Ark was a tradition from the ancient times when the ancestors of the Hebrews were in close connexion with Babylonia. But the difficulties connected with this view are very great, and I am now inclined to suggest that the idea came from Egypt, and that in the Ark we have an evidence of information possessed by Moses with regard at least to certain of the salient features of Egyptian religious practices.

No altogether

Sayce supposed

The name Moses is of doubtful origin. satisfactory etymology of it has been given. that he had found the word in Assyrian. Some of the best scholars to-day consider it Egyptian, and compare with it such Egyptian names as Thutmosis, Ahmosis, and the like. The Septuagint Greek translators of the Old Testament were of the same opinion as to its Egyptian origin. Aaron and Miriam also are claimed by some as Egyptian, and the name of Phinehas, the high priest, the son of Aaron, does actually