A very evident objection to the Farwardigân-theory is that, in meaning, the Jewish Purim is altogether different from the Persian festival held in honour and memory of the dead. De Lagarde meets this objection by the analogy of the festivals of the Christian Church. The Christian Easter, for example, is altogether different from the original festival whose name it bears -the festival held in honour of the heathen spring-goddess Ostara. "Always," he says, "with really popular festivals, their deep tap-root and numberless fibrils strike down into the soil of more ancient beliefs." And thus the old Iranian All-Hallows, vulgarized by the usages of a later and degenerate time, invested by Jewish legend with a foreign meaning, and disfigured by the imported elements of national hatred and revenge, survives to this day in "the Judengassen of Europe "-in name, if in nothing more. In common with all critics who discard the Book of Esther as history, and refuse to accept its explanation of the origin of Purim, De Lagarde makes a marked point of the fact that púr, which the Book gives as a Persian word meaning "lot," is a word not found in Persian at all. The Persian for "lot," he says, is pisk, which by no ingenuity can be tortured into púr. The ordinary (suggested) derivations-from the Persian bahraq ("piece "), or páre ("part ")-he utterly rejects. The former means invariably "a piece torn off," "a rag"; the latter, "part of a whole" neither can be the root of a word meaning "lot." "The practice of putting questions to the Divine Being by the lot," he adds, " was Semitic; I know of no such practice among the Persians." : On this point M. Dieulafoy has something to say, and to show. The French Mission de Susiane has enriched the Louvre collections with many objects of the highest archæological value, unearthed from the buried palaces of the Achæmenian kings. One of these "finds" seems to the chief of the Mission peculiarly interesting. "Among the objects discovered in the course of deep excavations of the Memnonium," says M. Dieulafoy (Le livre d'Esther et le palais d'Assuérus: Conférence faite à la Société des Études juives) "is a quadrangular prism, one centimètre broad and four and a half high. On its rectangular faces different numbers have been engraved-1, 2, 5, 6. Throw the prism, and necessarily it falls either on an odd or even number. The Persians were as fond of games of chance as they were of wine; may not this little Susian relic have been one of their dice?—and may not their dice, under the name of pour, have been used in trying luck and consulting fate? Pour may not have the proper meaning of lot any more than cards, urn, dice. But all these words may have entered into similar phrases-cast the pour, draw the cards, put the hand into the urn, shake the dice—the idea called forth by all four being the same; that, namely, of consulting fate." M. Dieulafoy offers as a probable etymon of púr the Sanscrit par, Persian por, Latin plere, French plein, and remarks "how thoroughly appropriate is the Persian expression pour - literally, 'full,' 'solid to the shape of the Achæmenian die. Does not a parallelopiped, a square prism, realize the most perfect image of the bodies which we, French and Persians alike, call the solids'?" M. Dieulafoy is no doubt right in his supposition that the púr which Haman is said to have used, like the Hebrew and Egyptian oracles, returned only the answer Yes or No to the questioner; month was tried after month, day after day, till by a process of exhaustion the auspicious time was found. That the ancient Persians had recourse to divination by oracles need not be doubted; the practice of sortilege was Aryan as well as Semitic. M. Dieulafoy's find of the prismshaped die is interesting; so is his proposed derivation of the word pûr. It would have been more to the purpose, no doubt, if among the numerous cuneiform inscriptions he has brought to light the word púr itself had been found; that such a discovery may yet be made is not impossible. Meantime, the want of such evidence cannot fairly be held to invalidate the Book. Our vocabulary of Old Persian, compiled from the inscriptions of Behistun, Naksh-i-Rustam, Persepolis, and Hamadan, is, after all, far from complete. It seems to me, after an unbiassed consideration of these various theories, that to accept any one of them involves greater difficulties than to accept the main facts as stated in the Book. I look upon it as almost certain that the Hebrew book, at whatever date it was written, came before the Greek version. That it was written primarily for synagogue use may be doubted; more probably it pushed its way into the synagogue, as into the canon, by the sheer weight of popular favour behind it. And while we may be sure that the Book would not have won such favour unless the story it told had been believed, we may at the same time be permitted to doubt whether that story would have been so widely and firmly believed unless there had been a measure of truth in it. Taking the main facts of the narrative as it stands, apart from details, we find in them a perfectly reasonable account of the origin of the Feast of Purim. The situation described in the Book of Esther has nothing novel or strange about it; it has been often reproduced in ancient and modern times. An explosion of Judenhass in the capital and central provinces may have. occurred in the reign of any Persian king. Equally the threatened destruction of the Jews by their enemies may have been averted by a train of events in which a Jew was the chief actor. There have been Hamans in plenty in the long history of Israel; of Mordecais not a few. As regards the name of the feast, the explanation given in the Book does not seem unreasonable. It has been objected by more than one critic that this explanation is too far-fetched to be credible; that we cannot suppose a circumstance so trivial, so remote from the real issue, as the casting of the lot, to have given the festival its name. But is it at all unlikely that the arch-enemy of the Jews, before taking his final measures to destroy them, should have consulted his oracles? And if he did so, and was known to have done so, is it wonderful that a fact so significant-the fact that the choice of a day for the massacre of Jehovah's people had hung on the hazard of the die-should have grasped the popular imagination, and stamped its name upon the feast? NO. VI.-VOL. I.-THE THINKER. II Either Purim is a national festival commemorative of an actual event in Jewish annals, or it is a monstrous imposture-a heathen changeling which the synagogue, unable to kill or expel, has dressed up in the garb of Jewish religion and nationality, and taken to its bosom. Of these alternatives, the weight of evidence, as of probability, seems to be very decidedly in favour of the former. It may be conceded that the extraordinary popularity of the Purim Festival is out of all proportion to the historical importance of the event which it commemorates. When compared with the history of the Chanukha Festival, for example, that of Purim presents a singular phenomenon. Everything was in favour of the Maccabean Feast of Dedication. It was authoritatively instituted at Jerusalem; it was closely connected with the Temple; it was consecrated by the chanting of the Hallel; it preserved the remembrance of a glorious feat of arms and of an illustrious name. Yet, the Chanukha dropped before long into a secondary place, and Purim, which had none of these credentials, came to the front and stayed there. The explanation of this may be found in the fact that Purim was the more ancient festival of the two; also, that it appealed irresistibly to the dominant feelings of a proud people under foreign oppressors, to their political passions and racial hate. But most of all the Book of Esther itself accounts for the popularity of this festival. The "Feast of Lights" had no Megillah; the the "Feast of Lots," on the other hand, was continuously exalted by the currency of that literary masterpiece, that marvellous dramatization of a passage of history, which to the Jew is "The Megillah," the story of stories. NOAH'S FLOOD. THE HISTORY OF THE FLOOD. BY THE REV. J. MAGENS MELLO, M.A., F.G.S., &c. No physical event in the history of our earth has left a deeper impress upon the now widely dispersed members of the human family than the great flood recorded in the Bible, which, in the days of Noah, destroyed the world of the ungodly. The remembrance of this catastrophe can be traced with more or less distinctness amongst peoples and races to whom the Hebrew Scriptures were unknown, and whose traditions cannot, therefore, have been derived from these. We may, then, look upon the occurrence of such a flood as an established fact, even though no physical traces of its work can be now detected on the earth's surface. But when we come to details we at once find ourselves in the presence of difficulties, not as to there having been a flood, but as to its nature and scope. There was a time when few or none dreamt of questioning whether or no the flood involved the whole globe; it was assumed that it did do so as a matter of course; the terms by which it is described seemed to preclude the possibility of any other view; but to-day a very large number of persons, probably the greater number of students of the sacred text, are convinced that the area of the flood must have been a comparatively restricted one. There are doubtless many who even now hesitate or fear to embrace this opinion, dreading anything which appears to them to be a concession to rationalism; but the one great question for us is, what is the truth? We ought to have faith enough to believe that no ascertained facts in the realm of nature, or in history, can be really in conflict with the revealed word of the Creator and Ruler of all things. Let us, therefore, approach the consideration of this subject with open, unprejudiced minds, seeking simply to ascertain, if it be possible, what was the true nature of the flood, what is the right interpretation of the account. given to us in the Book of Genesis ?1 In order to do this, we must examine the several theories of interpretation which have been proposed, and weigh them well, bringing to bear upon them all the light obtainable from the text of Scripture, and also from such other sources as may be available. We find that three distinct systems of interpretation have been propounded. There is, first, the old popular view of the absolute universality of the flood as involving the entire globe. Secondly, we have the theory of the restriction of the flood to a certain limited area, whilst it was universal as regarded the human race. And then, lastly, we have an interpretation which has more recently been urged upon us, namely, that the flood was partial, not only with respect to the globe, but also with respect to mankind. We shall consider these different interpretations in order. 1. Those who maintain the absolute universality of the flood necessarily rely upon their interpretation of the text of Scripture in what they conceive. to be its strict literal sense, and apparently take it for granted that the forty days' rain and the overflow of the oceans would have sufficed to cover the entire surface of the dry land, so as to submerge its highest mountains-even the Alps, Himalayas, and Andes-beneath a volume of water more than 27,000 feet in depth: a hypothesis which, as we shall see, is contrary to all probability, not to say possibility, and which involves its upholders in a maze of difficulties, from which the only escape is by an unwarranted assumption of a series of stupendous miracles, of which there is not the slightest indication in the text of Scripture. If we are to believe in a flood which involved the entire globe, we have, first of all, to show whence the water sufficient to produce this effect could have been derived. All the water now existing on the earth, whether in its 1 A LIST OF AUTHORITIES.- *Le deluge Biblique et les races antediluviennes. *Les theories du deluge. L'humanité primitive et ses origines, by Jean d' Estienne. *L'universalité du deluge, R. P. J. Brucker. *La non-universalité du deluge, M. l'Abbé Ch. Robert. Le deluge Biblique, M. Motais. Histoire anc. de l'Orient, F. Lenormant. Origines de l'histoire d'après la Bible, F. Lenormant. Introduction à l'étude des races humaines, Quatrefages. Histoire anc. des peuples de l'Orient, Maspero. The Races of the Old Testament, Prof. Sayce, 1891. Essai sur l'inegalité des races humaines, A. de Gobineau. Testimony of the Rocks, Hugh Miller. Recherches Bibliques, Review des études Juives, 1886, J. Halevy. De l'universalité du deluge, M. Schæbel, Paris, 1858. * Revue des questions scientifiques, Bruxelles. rivers, seas, and oceans, or atmosphere combined, might submerge onequarter of the earth's surface, but only by leaving the other three-quarters dry. Some have supposed that great chains of mountains may have suddenly been depressed in one area, whilst others were simultaneously thrown up elsewhere beneath the sea, and that thus the waters of the ocean would be violently projected over the continents; but geology, although it affords many instances of elevation and subsidence, gives us no evidence of movements of so violent or sudden a character and on such a gigantic scale as is required by this hypothesis, which would, besides, involve a very serious disturbance of the earth's equilibrium. The hypothesis of an abrupt change in the inclination of the earth's axis has also been appealed to, which might have produced a general rush of the seas upon the continents, but science knows nothing of such a change. It may also be observed that all these theories require us to believe in a violent and sudden rush of waters, whereas the account in the Bible is rather the history of a gradual, steady increase of the flood during the forty days of rain-a flood which as gradually subsided as it rose. There was a steady invasion of the land by the water, probably from different directions, and supplemented by an extraordinary rainfall, by which the ark was uplifted and floated peacefully. The late Abbé Moigno, in his work, "Les splendeurs de la foi," attempted to meet the difficulty of insufficiency of water by assuming the production of cosmic (or nonterrestrial) water, which was, he suggested, brought in from space to supplement the earth's supply. But it is well observed that such a theory requires us to believe in a marvellous and unparalleled miraculous intervention. Not only would there be the miraculous creation of this cosmic water, but the bringing it at a given time to a minute point in space, and then the getting rid of it when it had fulfilled its purpose; also there would be required the regulation of the perturbations which would have affected the entire solar system. Of course we know well that God is Almighty, and that with Him all things are possible; but God, as far as we can gather, does not work what we call miracles when the ordinary workings of nature are sufficient to fulfil His purposes. When a miracle is necessary, God will doubtless work one; but we have no right to appeal to supposed miracles to get rid of difficulties of our own making. Another difficulty which the upholders of an absolutely universal flood have to meet is that connected with the consequent destruction of all animal life of a terrestrial character, save such as was preserved in the ark, and its redistribution over the globe when the flood had passed away. Even supposing the ark to have been large enough to contain examples of every existing species, and a sufficient supply of food of every description, are we to invoke once more the miraculous, and picture to ourselves all the animals of every clime first crossing oceans and continents, and assembling of their own accord round the ark, and then again leaving it, and passing each to its own peculiar habitat, whether temperate, arctic, or tropical, the fauna of every region of the earth taking up its previous position, as zoological science |