"And Esau said, I have enough, my brother; keep that thou hast unto thyself."
The following expressive comment, from the able pen of Mr. Holyoake, deserves transcription: "The last portion of the history of Jacob and Esau is very instructive. The coward fear of Jacob to meet his brother is well delineated. He is subdued by a sense of his treacherous guilt. The noble forgiveness of Esau invests his memory with more respect than all the wealth Jacob won, and all the blessings of the Lord he received. Could I change my name from Jacob to Esau, I would do it in honor of him. The whole incident has a dramatic interest. There is nothing in the Old or New Testament equal to it. The simple magnanimity of Esau is scarcely surpassed by anything in Plutarch. In the conduct of Esau we see the triumph of time, of filial affection, and generosity over a deep sense of execrable treachery, unprovoked and irrevocable injury." Was not Esau a merciful, generous man? Yet God hated him, and shut him out of all share in the promised land. Was not Jacob a mean, prevaricating knave, a crafty, abject cheat? Yet God loved and rewarded him. How great are the mysteries in this bible representation of an all-good and all-loving God thus hating good and loving evil. At the time of the wrestling, a promise was made, which is afterward repeated by God to Jacob, that the latter should not be any more called Jacob, but Israel. This promise was not strictly kept; the name "Jacob" being used repeatedly, mingled with that of Israel in the after part of Jacob's history. Jacob had a large family; his sons are reputedly the heads of the twelve Jewish tribes. We have not much space to notice them: suffice it to say that one Joseph, who was much loved by his father, was sold by his brethren into slavery. This transaction does not seem to have called for any special reproval from God. Joseph, who from early life was skilled in dreams, succeeded by interpreting the visions of Pharaoh in obtaining a sort of premiership in Egypt; while filling this office he managed to act like the Russells and the Greys of our own time. We are told that he "placed his father and his brethren, and gave them a possession in the land of Egypt, in the best of the land." Joseph made the parallel still stronger between himself and a more modern head of the Treasury Bench; he not only gave his own family the best place in the land, but he also, by a trick of statecraft, obtained the land for the king, made slaves of the people, and made it a law over the land of Egypt that the king should be entitled to one-fifth of the produce, always, of course, excepting and saving the rights of the priest. Judah, another brother, sought to have burned a woman by whom he had a child. A third, named Reuben, was guilty of the grossest vice, equaled only by that of Absalon the son of David; of Simeon and Levi, two more of Jacob's sons, it is said that "Instruments of cruelty were in their habitations;" their conduct, as detailed in the 34th chapter of Genesis, alike shocks by its treachery and its mercilessness. After Jacob had heard that his son Joseph was governor in Egypt, but before he had journeyed farther than Beer-sheba, God spake unto him in the visions of the night, and probably forgetting that he had given him a new name, or being more accustomed to the old one, said, "Jacob, Jacob," and then told him to go down into Egypt, where Jacob died after a residence of about seventeen years, when 147 years of age. Before Jacob died he blessed, first the sons of Joseph, and then his own children, and at the termination of his blessing to Ephraim and Manasseh we find the following speech addressed to Joseph: "Moreover, I have given to thee one portion above thy brethren, which I took out of the hand of the Amorite with my sword and with my bow." This speech implies warlike pursuit on the part of Jacob, of which the bible gives no record, and which seems incompatible with his recorded life. The sword of craft and the bow of cunning are the only weapons in the use of which he was skilled. When his sons murdered and robbed the Hivites, fear seems to have been Jacob's most prominent characteristic. It is not my duty, nor have I space here, to advocate any theory of interpretation, but it may be well to mention that many learned men contend that the whole history of Jacob is but an allegory. That the twelve patriarchs but typify the twelve signs of the zodiac, as do the twelve great gods of the Pagans, and twelve apostles of the gospels.
From the history of Jacob it is hard to draw any conclusions favorable to the man whose life is narrated. To heap additional epithets on his memory would be but waste of time and space. I conclude by regretting that if God loved one brother and hated another, he should have so unfortunately selected for his love the one whose whole career shows him in a most despicable light.
NEW LIFE OF ABRAHAM.
Most undoubtedly father Abraham is a personage whose history should command our attention, if only because he figures as the founder of the Jewish race—a race which, having been promised protection and favor by Deity, appear to have experienced little else besides the infliction, or sufferance of misfortune and misery. Men are taught to believe that God, following out a solemn covenant made with Abraham, suspended the operations of Nature to aggrandize the Jews; that he promised always to bless and favor them if they adhered to his worship and obeyed the priests. The promised blessings were, usually, political authority, individual happiness and sexual power, long life, and great wealth; the threatened curses for idolatry or disobedience: disease, loss of property and children, mutilation, death. Among the blessings: the right to kill, plunder, and ravish their enemies, with protection, while pious, against any subjection to retaliatory measures. And all this because they were Abraham's children!
Abraham is an important personage. Without Abraham, no Jesus, no Christianity, no Church of England, no bishops, no tithes, no church rates. But for Abraham England would have lost all these blessings. Abraham was the great-grandfather of Judah, the head of the tribe to which God's father, Joseph, belonged.
In gathering materials for a short biographical sketch, we are at the same time comforted and dismayed by the fact that the only reliable account of Abraham's career is that furnished by the book of Genesis, supplemented by a few brief references in other parts of the bible, and that, outside "God's perfect and infallible revelation to man," there is no reliable account of Abraham's existence at all. We are comforted by the thought that Genesis is unquestioned by the faithful, and is at present protected by Church and State against heretic assaults; but we are dismayed when we think that, if Infidelity, encouraged by Colenso and Kalisch, upsets Genesis, Abraham will have little historical claim on our attention Some philologists have asserted that Brama and Abraham are alike corruptions of Abba Rama, or Abrama, and that Sarah is identical with Sarasvati. Abram, is a Chaldean compound, meaning father of the elevated, or exalted father [———] is a compound of Chaldee and Arabic, signifying father of a multitude. In part V of his work Colenso mentions that Adonis was formerly identified with Abram, "high father," Adonis being the personified sun.
Leaving incomprehensible philology for the ordinary authorized version of our bibles, we find that Abraham was the son of Terah. The text does not expressly state where Abraham was born, and I can not therefore describe his birthplace with that accuracy of detail which a true believer might desire, but I may add that he "dwelt in old time on the other side of the flood." (Joshua xxiv, 2, 3.) The situation of such dwelling involves a geographical problem most unlikely to be solved unless the inquirer is "half seas over." Abraham was born when Terah, his father, was seventy years of age; and, accord-ing to Genesis, Terah and his family came forth out of Ur of the Chaldees, and went to Haran and dwelt there. We turn to the map to look for Ur of the Chaldees, anxious to discover it as possibly Abraham's place of nativity, but find that the translators of God's inspired word have taken a slight liberty with the text by substituting "Ur of the Chaldees" for "Aur Kasdim," the latter being, in plain English, the light of the magi, or conjurers, or astrologers. [———] is stated by Kalisch to have been made the basis for many extraordinary legends, as to Abraham's rescue from the flames.
Abraham, being born—according to Hebrew chronology, 2,083 years after the creation, and according to the Septuagint 3,549 years after the event—when his father was seventy, grew so slowly that when his father reached the good old age of 205 years, Abraham had only arrived at 75 years, having, apparently, lost no less than 60 year's growth during his father's lifetime. St. Augustine and St Jerome gave this up as a difficulty inexplicable. Calmet endeavors to explain it, and makes it worse. But what real difficulty is there? Do you mean, dear reader, that it is impossible Abraham could have lived 135 years, and yet be only 75 years of age? Is this your objection? It is a sensible one, I admit, but it is an Infidel one. Eschew sense, and, retaining only religion, ever remember that with God all things are possible. Indeed, I have read myself that gin given to young children stunts their growth; and who shall say what influence of the spirit prevented the full development of Abraham's years? It is a slight question whether Abraham and his two brothers were not born the same year; if this be so, he might have been a small child, and not grown so quickly as he would have otherwise done. "The Lord" spoke to Abraham, and promised to make of him a great nation, to bless those who blessed Abraham, and to curse those who cursed him. I do not know precisely which Lord it was that spake unto Abraham. In the Hebrew it says it was [———] Jeue, or, as our translators call it, Jehovah; but as God said (Exodus vi, 2) that by the name "Jehovah was I not known" to either Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, we must conclude either that the omniscient Deity had forgotten the matter, or that a counterfeit Lord had assumed a title to which he had no right. The word Jehovah, which the book of Exodus says Abraham did not know, is nearly always the name by which Abraham addresses or speaks of the Jewish Deity.