history.53 Yet a comparison of these fables with the Mosaic narrative enables us, without much difficulty, to ascertain the truth; and the tomb of Menephtah still remains to corroborate, by its coeval testimony, the account of the Jewish lawgiver. The kings of Egypt began to excavate their tombs in the solid rock as soon as they began to reign. At the death of each monarch the labour stopped, and his body was deposited wherever the hammer and the chisel had struck the last blow. The tomb is, therefore, an epitome of the reign, showing whether it was long or short, and whether its termination was sudden or gradual, prepared for or abrupt. Imagine, then, the effect of the overthrow at the Red Sea. A nation so remarkable for the care of their dead hasten to remove the bodies of the king and his warriors from the shore; and the tomb of Menephtah III., in its unfinished state, receives his embalmed body. "It is the last," says Champollion Figeac, "in the valley of Biban-el-Molouk. It is wholly unfinished. The first bas-reliefs are completed, and are executed with admirable care and delicacy. The decoration of the rest of the catacomb, formed of three long corridors and two halls, was only traced with red. The fragments of this Pharaoh's sarcophagus of rose-coloured granite were found in a very small room, the walls of which, just roughly hewn out, are covered with some bad figures of divinities, drawn and daubed in haste.'' 54 VIII. Manetho, suppressing the defeat of the Egyptians and the death of the king, asserts that Moses invited the shepherds then living in Jerusalem to return to Egypt, and that Amenophis, as he calls Menephtah, retired before their united forces. into Ethiopia. Here he remained thirteen years, and then, returning with his son Sethos, otherwise called Ægyptus, drove out the shepherds a second time, and regained his sovereignty. The monuments correct his history, by disclosÉgypte Ancienne, p. 343. 53 Justini Epit. lib. xxxvi. c. 1. 54 ing the name of a king who reigned after Menephtah and before Sethos or Rhameses IV., the head of his 19th dynasty. We must, therefore, attribute to this king, whose name was Rhamerre, the thirteen years of exile. The Israelites, guided and strengthened by the power of God, had no need of human aid; but the shepherds, hearing of the defenceless condition of the Delta, would naturally seek to regain their lost dominion, and, in the weakness and consternation of the Egyptian government, would be easily successful. The fact, therefore, of the thirteen years' interregnum is probable, and elucidates many difficulties of Egyptian history. Sethos, or Rhameses IV., began to reign in the fourteenth year of the journeyings of the children of Israel in the wilderness.55 Having expelled the shepherds, he turned the tide of conquest into Canaan. His victories have been confounded, by Herodotus and Diodorus, with those of Sesostris, or Rhameses III., who preceded him one hundred years, and whom he greatly resembled. He, and not Sesostris, was the Ægyptus of the Greek historians, and his brother the Danaus who founded the kingdom of Argos. This we learn from the testimony of Manetho,56 and are thus enabled to connect the early history of Greece with that of Egypt and of Israel. But what is still more to our purpose is the remarkable fact that his victories over the nations of Canaan made him an instrument in the hands of the Almighty for their destruction, and prepared the way for the subsequent victories of the children of Israel. With rea son, therefore, is it supposed that he was the great HORNET promised in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, and subsequently mentioned at the close of the book of Joshua.57 The voracious, the venomous, the vindictive hornet, was an apt emblem of a power raised up as an instrument of God's wrath, when the iniquities of the accursed race of Canaan were come to the full. In this view the reign of Sethos prepared the way for the fulfilment of God's great covenant with Abra57 Exod. xxiii. 27, 28. Deut. vii. 20. 55 B. V. E. 1491. 56 Jos. cont. Apion. lib. i. § 15, comp. Josh. xxiv. 12. with §§ 26, 27. ham; and the wanderings of the Israelites, for forty years, in the wilderness, was not merely to punish their sins and reduce them to faith and obedience, but also an act of mercy, wrought even by the means of their greatest foe. The king of Egypt fought for them, and "drove out the two kings of the Amorites, though not with their sword nor with their bow." 1958 This will account for the easy victories over Og and Sihon. IX. 59 But to resume the narrative: After passing the Red Sea, the children of Israel went as they were guided by the Lord in the pillar of a cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night." When the pillar stopped they stopped, and when the pillar moved they moved, an apt emblem of the faith and obedience of the Church! Yet their insensibility to the greatness of divine mercy, their ingratitude, their murmurings, their low and carnal desires, and the dreadful punishments which it was necessary to inflict upon them, are so many fearful and instructive warnings to us in the more perfect dispensation to which we have been called.60 On the fifteenth day of the second Hebrew month, Iyar, or Sunday, the twenty-eighth of April, one month after they had left Egypt, manna was sent for their sustenance in the wilderness, and continued to fall, for forty years, until they came to the land of Canaan. It was intended to prefigure that true and living Bread which came down from heaven to give life unto the world.61 "He that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack;" 62 meet emblem of that charity by which there is an equality in God's Church between them that abound and them that 63 want. It was their " daily bread," and could not be kept for the morrow, save only on the Sabbath. On Friday, the third of May, "they gathered twice as much;" and when some, from carelessness or unbelief, went out the next day to gather, they found none.4 On the third day of the third month, Sivan, or Thursday, May sixteenth, the Israelites arrived at Mount Sinai.65 "Moses went up unto God;" and preparations were made for that solemn covenant which, on the third day after their arrival, or the sixth of Sivan, was to constitute them the Lord's peculiar people. That day was Sunday, the nineteenth of May; and we have only to count the days from the great Paschal Sabbath to see that it was the feast of weeks, or Pentecost. How wonderful is this coincidence! It was the fiftieth day from the Paschal Sabbath; and, therefore, the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai and the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the apostles occurred on the same festival! Such coincidences cannot be fortuitous. They exhibit the adjustments of Almighty wisdom. Each event was a new epoch in the history of God's Church. Of all the posterity of Abraham, the descendants of Jacob alone are henceforth to be his covenant people. The new separation is attended with solemn and severe judgments. The power of the oldest, the wisest, the most opulent, and the most renowned of nations for arts and arms, is in one little month prostrated. Amalek is doomed to be blotted out forever.66 The nations of Canaan are now to be exterminated, and to pity or spare them will be visited upon Israel as a sin. It has been objected to the history of that nation, that it is a history of barbarous and cruel warfare; but the objection proceeds from that blind unbelief which cannot see in them the executioners of divine vengeance. As well may it object to the famine or the pestilence. The Creator has a right to do what he will with his own; and when nations have sinned against him past even divine endurance, the sword, when he commands it, is as just a punishment as the earthquake, the famine, or the plague. 64 Exod. xvi. 14-36. 65 On the questions relative to the place where the law was given, see note p. 64, and the authors there enumerated. 66 Exod. xvii. 14. THE FOURTH PERIOD. FROM THE GIVING OF THE LAW TO THE CAPTIVITY IN BABYLON. The whole period, including the captivity in Babylon, to the return of the Jews to Jerusalem in the first year of Cyrus, is nine hundred and sixty-eight years and four months, as follows: According to Ezra i. 1, and iii. 1, the Jews assembled at Jerusalem when the seventh month was come, in the first year of Cyrus. That year corresponded with A. J. P. 4178, B. T. Æ. 530, B. V. E. 536; and the first of the seventh month, or Tisri, the feast of Trumpets, fell that year on Thursday, September 20th. The law was given at Mount Sinai on what was afterwards the day of Pentecost, which in the year of the Exodus fell on Sunday, the nineteenth of May, A. J. P. 3210, B. T. E. 1498, B. V. E. 1504. Expressed in solid years, months and days, the sum is thus: The return of the Jews to Jerusalem, 4177 years 8 months 20 days. CHAPTER I. FROM THE ARRIVAL AT SINAI TO THE REBELLION OF KORAH. I. Baptism. Special renewal of the gospel covenant. II. Feast of Pentecost, and covenant sacrifice. - Broken by the idolatry of the golden calf. Renewed. III. Worldly sanctuary and divine service. IV. Tabernacle erected. Aaron and his sons separated. — Anniversary of the Passover. V. Departure from Sinai.— Order of encampment and march. - Second Passover. VI. Paran. The seventy or seventy-two elders. Quails sent. VII. Hazeroth. - Mutiny of Aaron and Miriam. Wilderness of Paran. Pentecost. -- Spies sent. - The tenth provocation. — Punishment, death of that generation in the wilderness. VIII. Rebellion of Korah, Dathan and Abiram. I. The great co eman, eat been was HE great covenant established with Abraham, and re newed with Isaac, had been violated by Esau, and was now therefore to be confined to Jacob or Israel. For the better fulfilment of this purpose, he and his sons had been made to dwell alone in Egypt, and had so increased, that, without |