Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

I said that the date of the Exodus has an important bearing on the inquiry of why the doctrine of a future life was excluded from the Mosaic Dispensation: it has this importance, because it enables us to know what had been going on in that part of the world for some time immediately preceding the promulgation of that Dispensation. Knowing the date, we know that reciprocal barbarities, such as this age can fortunately form but a feeble conception of, had for centuries been the order of the day between the Egyptians and the Semites. At last the Egyptians had got completely the upper hand, and had driven out the main body of the Semites from their country, had devastated in a most sweeping, and ruthless manner neighbouring countries, and most frequently and most completely those parts of Syria which soon afterwards fell into the hands of the Israelites. If we can form but a feeble conception of the barbarities of those times, we can perhaps form only a still less adequate conception of that which prompted them—the gluttonous hatred that animated these two races towards each other. No amount of blood, no form of cruelty on any scale, could satiate it. There is nothing in the practices, the history, the religion, of the modern world which enables us to understand their feelings. We see much evidence of them on the Egyptian monuments, and some indications of them in the Hebrew Scriptures; and these, of course, must be translated, not in accordance with our ideas, but with the ideas of those times. Every shepherd was an abomination to the Egyptians. The Hebrews took the opposite view, and regarded the first tiller of the ground as the first murderer. The Hebrews might not eat with the Egyptians, for that was an abomination to them.

It is the date, which enables us, in some measure, to understand the feelings that underlie these statements.

The next question is, who were the Israelites? We are now regarding the question singly from the historical point of view, just as we should the question of who were the Lydians, the Etruscans, the Dorians, or any other people of antiquity? There is no question but that they were substantially a Semitic people, mainly of the same race, and of the same dispositions and capacities as the other branches of the Semitic stock, as for instance, the Phœnicians, and the Moabites of the old, and the Arabs of the modern world. It is clear, however, and this is a point of some importance, that they were not of unmixed Semitic blood. Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees, and was therefore a Chaldean, whatever that appellative stood for at that time. The Hebrew Scriptures describe him as a Syrian. He can, therefore hardly be regarded as of pure Semitic descent. Furthermore, when the people left Egypt they must have had in their veins a large infusion of Egyptian, that is old Aryan blood, somewhat mixed with Ethiopian. This must have been the case, because during their sojourn in Egypt there had been no disinclination among them to intermarry with Egyptians. Joseph had had for his wife a high-caste Egyptian woman, Amenath, the daughter of Potipherah, priest of On; and the wife of Moses is called a Cushite, or Ethiopian woman. Besides this, we are told that when the people—their blood being already mixed in this way with that of the semi-Aryan Egyptians—went up out of Egypt, there went out with them a mixed multitude, which can only mean Egyptians, who cast in their lot with them, or a remnant of the Hyksos, who had stayed behind at the time of the expulsion of the main body, or the descendants of the Asiatic captives of Sethos and Rameses, and their predecessors. I need not go to the Egyptian accounts. The above facts will be sufficient for our present purpose. They enable us historically to understand the people. They were of mixed descent, of very composite blood. The preponderant element was Semitic, but that had been enriched by large additions of better blood; still, however, not to such an extent as to efface, or even to any decisive degree alter the Semitic characteristics. The mental capacity and vigour, the apprehensiveness and receptiveness of the people, had been increased, but still they were in the main Semitic; in language, in sentiment, in cast and direction of thought.

At that particular juncture, then, in the history of that part of the world to which our attention has just been recalled, Moses had to deal with the material we are examining. Still limiting our inquiry to historical objects, historically investigated, what he had to do at that time was to make these mixed and unpromising materials into a people—a work that was from first to last entirely a moral one: as hard a task as was ever undertaken, the very idea of which has no place in the minds of us moderns. He was thoroughly aware of the difficulty of his task. Had it ever been heard before, and, after some thousands of years, we may add, has it ever been heard since, of a nation taken out of another nation, and, according even to the Hebrew accounts, the object of which is not historical, taken chiefly from the servile class of another nation, and yet welded into a true people, with the strongest, the most enduring, and the most distinctive characteristics? What material was ever more unlikely? And yet was ever success more complete? A scion, not a vigorous and healthy offset, but a bruised sprout, was so planted, and surrounded with such influences, as that it took good root, grew vigorously, sent forth strong and spreading branches, and bore, and even still bears, its own peculiar fruit. Nowhere in Europe in these days, except it may be to some extent in northern Germany, is any attempt made to fashion in this way the mind, and sentiments, and instincts of a people, which, and not the amount of population, or of wealth, is what truly constitutes a people.

Why, then, did Moses, in this great attempt, omit entirely the one thought we consider the most potent of all? His object was to make a people. It was not primarily to reveal a religion. We come to this conclusion from an observation of the facts, from an analysis of the Dispensation, and from taking into account the principle, that religion is for man, and not man for religion. But a nation, especially such a nation as he contemplated, is made only by moral and intellectual means. The revelation, therefore, of a religion was not at all an accident, or in any sense something which might be, according to circumstances, included in, or excluded from, his plan. It was a necessity—a necessary part of the one means for the one object. These materials could not have been made into a people without a code, nor could there have then been a code without a religion. The question, then, before him was not simply—as is generally supposed—to promulgate a religion, but to make the mass of living integers before him into a nation by a code, sanctioned by a religion. The religious part of the question, therefore, was limited to the consideration of what form of religion would best effect this?

One indispensable requisite was that it must be a religion that would never take them back in thought and heart to Egypt. With Egypt he must break utterly and for ever. This was a most difficult task. The thoughts of the people went back to the flesh-pots of Egypt. They remembered the fish, and the leeks, the onions, the cucumbers, and the melons they had eaten in Egypt; but, more than all this, they remembered the palpable and intelligible religion, the magnificent and touching ceremonies and processions, the awe-inspiring temples—all that had satisfied at once the eye, the heart, and the thought, while they had sojourned in, and served the gods of, Egypt. They even recurred to the worship of the bull Mnevis, the divinity of Heliopolis—Joseph’s On—at the very foot of Sinai. Everything, therefore, that could recall Egypt and its religion, everything that might present a point of contact between the thoughts, the worship, the lives of the new people and of their old masters, was to be studiously avoided. The dividing lines must everywhere be deep and sharp—there must be no bridges from one to the other. So it must be. But the doctrine of the future life was the very kernel—the heart itself—of the religion of Egypt. There was, therefore, no choice; this must be utterly abandoned and excluded: to admit it would be to admit Osiris, the judge of the souls deceased this world, his assessors, and his array of avengers, and the whole apparatus of the lower world. As to Heaven, too, or the place of the blessed, the Egyptians had already appropriated the sun, which, in that material age, must have appeared as the best—indeed, the only suitable—locus in quo. That was already peopled with Egyptians; and it could, therefore, be no heaven for the Hebrews—for Semites. Or, if they were, in the end, to inhabit the same heaven, sympathy for the Egyptians, and for their ideas, would be kept alive; and, if so, then the design of forming a peculiar people, separate and distinct from all other people, must be abandoned. It would be impossible to carry it out.

This view of the reason for the omission of the great doctrine has in it, I think, some truth, though it is far from being the whole truth. Moses may have seen clearly that it would have been impossible to carry out his paramount object if this doctrine was allowed a place in his system; but this view falls short of what is required. It does not account for the whole of the fact. It does not account, for instance, for the doctrine not having been admitted into the system in after times—and no explanation can be complete, or satisfactory, which does not include that. We know, also, that Moses did not reject absolutely everything that was Egyptian. He retained, for instance, circumcision, and the Egyptian division of the lunar month into four weeks of seven days each, etc.

Another conceivable supposition is that, if the doctrine of a future life had been admitted, it was foreseen that the priestly caste, instead of remaining the ministers and servants of the congregation, would have become its masters, as in Egypt; and that the law would then have been wrested into an instrument for giving them undue power and domination. It would have given them the lever for moving this world at their pleasure, and for their own behoof; and so its primary object, which was a moral and political one, would have become only secondary to the maintenance of a dominant privileged class. This supposition, when applied to those early times, is not, as the history of Egypt shows, altogether an anachronism; and it is evident that dangers of this kind were foreseen, and, to some extent, provided against. We see an indication of this in the intentional absence, during the earlier periods of the history of the nation, of monarchical institutions, which, in those times, were, externally and politically, almost necessary, and, consequently, almost universal in the outside world. We trace, also, this thought in the comment made on their adoption, when it had become impossible any longer to dispense with them. And, again, in the fact that the Prophets, who were the authorized expositors and maintainers of the law, were not Priests. But of this supposition, also, we must say that it does not explain the whole of the phenomenon—for there were periods when, notwithstanding the amount of truth and force contained in the reason it suggests, the great doctrine might have been, but was not, introduced.

Or was it, and this I propose as a third conjecture, that the Hebrews were too unimaginative a people to realize in thought the conception of a future life? And, therefore, was this one instance, amongst others, of the progressiveness of the Revelation, which had spoken in one mode to the fathers, and which spoke afterwards—of course, within certain intelligible limitations—in a diverse manner to their descendants? This progressiveness every one is aware of; but I do not think that the Hebrew was quite so unimaginative as the supposition implies. The Semitic race is imaginative in its way. It is, and was, a gross race; which, of course, implies grossness of imagination; but we can hardly suppose that the Hebrew of old would have been less capable of imagining a future Paradise than the modern Arab; though, we may be sure, it would have assumed, like his, very much of an earthly character; and that earthly character would not have been of the highest and most refined kind. Feasting, for instance, would have been an ingredient in the future bliss of a healthy and hungry people, who, in this world, had very little to eat. And here it would be interesting to ascertain what, on this subject, was the belief of the Phœnicians, Canaanites, Moabites, and ancient Arabians. It is to the point, also, to remember that the Hebrew system had a Paradise. It was, however, one which came at the beginning, and not at the end, of all things. It was, also, an earthly Paradise. In this I see implied contradictions to the Egyptian doctrine on this subject. And I believe that there are other similarly implied contradictions without direct references; and that there are such points of allusive protest, and of intended contrast, is of importance. For instance, I am disposed to think that the comment on the Ten Commandments—‘these words ... and no more’ is an implied contradiction of the Divine authority of the Forty-two Commandments, with reference to which the Egyptian believed that he should be tried at the Day of Judgment; an article of Egyptian faith, with which Moses, and the people who were listening to him, must have been quite familiar; and which could hardly, at that moment, have been absent from their minds. But as to the supposition before us, I think, to whatever extent we may be able to allow it to be true in itself, we shall still be unable to accept it, just as was the case with the two others we considered before it, as a sufficient cause for the phenomenon we are now investigating.