In this indispensable department of primæval history it is possible that we may have been misled by a very natural misapprehension as to the character of the earlier portions of the Hebrew Scriptures. We read them as if they were addressed to ourselves, and as if their object was historical. These are, both of them, erroneous and misleading ideas. It is evident, on the face of the documents, that their writers had in view no readers excepting those for whose immediate behoof they were composed, and no objects excepting religion and patriotism. Their aim was to form the Israelites into a people by the instrumentality of a Code, sanctioned and enforced by religion. The writings, therefore, necessarily lay a foundation for the religion, give an exposition of it, and set forth the motives for its observance. The Code is the point of view from which the religion, and the formation of the people that from which the Code, is to be regarded. History is no more their object than science. They do, of course, contain a part, and that a most important part, of the history of mankind; for, in carrying out their aim, they give much of the history of a people that was destined to have a great, and permanent, and ever-growing effect on the world. But it is important to observe that even this they contain only incidentally. To us both their religious aims, and their incidental history, give them a value which cannot be over-estimated. We shall, however, only fall into mistakes if we lose sight of their primary, limited, Hebrew, religious purpose, and regard them as universal history.
This is a question of broad as well as of minute criticism—of the interpretation of the whole as well as of particulars. Are these Scriptures to be regarded as containing the religion and the history, limited to the point of view of the religion, of one of the smallest of all people, or as containing the whole primæval history of man, in such a sense that nothing but what appears to be in harmony with what has come to be their popular interpretation, can be taken into consideration? It was for many ages an unavoidable mistake to entertain respecting them the latter assumption. (That some of the elements of Hebrew religious thought were subsequently taken up into the religious thought of a very considerable portion of mankind does not affect the question immediately before us.) It maybe, precisely, the attempt to maintain this misconception of their nature which is now causing so much confusion of thought and ill-feeling. If regarded in their true light, no documents of the old world are more precious to us historically (I am not speaking of them in any other sense now); for, to refer to that which is the chief concern of man, if the great lesson of history is to teach us that it has itself no meaning, purpose, or value, excepting so far as it is the story of the intellectual and moral growth of the race, and that this double growth is the paramount object of national and of individual life, then how precious and how luminous a portion of history do these documents become!
But this value is very much lessened, and this light obscured, by the determination to find in them, not a part, but the whole of primæval history. The civilization of Egypt, which reaches back into so remote a past that the Pyramids were monuments of hoar antiquity when Abraham saw them, and the civilization—perhaps contemporary with the date of the Pyramids—which existed on the banks of the Euphrates, the Ganges, and the Yankse Kiang, must be made harmoniously to find a place by the side of what is recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures. So must the mythology, and the moral and intellectual aptitudes of the Aryan race of man. So must also the knowledge to which we have attained of the history of our globe itself, and of the succession of life upon it. This process has already been passed through with respect to the discoveries of astronomy. Against them there was a long and fierce struggle. At last everybody admitted both that what astronomers taught might be believed, and that the Hebrew Scriptures did not teach astronomy. There is no reason for confining to astronomy the rule that was established in its favour. It must be extended so as to include our knowledge of the greatness and the remoteness of Egyptian civilization, and every other kind of knowledge. We need not, and we must not, so interpret the Hebrew Scriptures as to reject on their authority, or even to feel repugnance to accept, any clearly-established facts. To make this use of them is to wrest them to a purpose for which it is clear they were never intended.
Their historical value to ourselves is only an incident and accident of their designed purpose: that was to teach to the Israelites their code, and to give them motives for observing it (which has come to be to us a part of history), and not to teach history to us. The idea of history, taking the word in the meaning it has for us, did not exist then. It could not, indeed, have existed then, for everything has its own place and time, and the time for history had not come then. First, the seed is deposited in the ground, then comes the tender shoot, next the stem and blades, after that the plant flowers; last of all comes the full corn in the ripe ear. Those early days were the time when the materials were in many places being collected, out of which we have to construct human history. It is fortunate for us that in those first times men did not forestall the idea of history: that would have prevented their attending singly to what they were themselves doing, and to the thoughts that were at work in their own minds.
CHAPTER XI.
GOING UP TO THE TOP OF THE GREAT PYRAMID.
How fearful
And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low:
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles.—Shakspeare.