Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

I will now give an instance that will include both. In those early times men had not been trained, as we have been, by ages of culture, to think abstractedly. They could only think, if we may so express it, concretely. It was necessary that a palpable image of what was meant should be before their minds. This was what made idolatry so attractive to the people Moses led up out of Egypt. It was so to all the young world, and is so still to all who are in the infancy of thought. And it was so in a pre-eminent degree with those Moses had to deal with, for they had been mentally degraded below even the level of the times, by the hard slavery in which they had been kept for some generations. Even among our own labouring class this inability to think abstractedly is very conspicuous. Their want of intellectual training, their ignorance, their life of toil, their poverty of language, particularly of abstract and general forms of expression, are the cause of it. They can never tell you what they themselves said, or what anybody else said, except in a dramatic form. With them it is always ‘I said,’ and ‘he said;’ in each case the very words being given. They cannot indicate the purport of what was said by the general, or abstract, form of expression that a man consented, or hesitated, or refused compliance, or remonstrated, &c. General forms of thought and expression are beyond them. Nor will they, for they cannot, tell you simply that a thing was done: instead of this they must tell you every step of the process. That which is very remarkable, in this nineteenth century, in one class, amongst ourselves, was a law, a necessity, of thought among those with whom Moses had to deal.

As a foundation, then, for the theocratic system he was about to establish, he had to announce the idea, not perhaps altogether new to some of those who had come out of Egypt, but one to which the thought of Greece and Rome was never conducted, that God was the Creator. Suppose, then, that he had contented himself, as we might, at this day, with stating it in that abstract form. We may be absolutely certain that the statement would have fallen dead on the ears of the people, to whom he had to address himself. They could not have taken in the idea. No effect whatever could thus have been produced upon them. He was therefore obliged, not as a matter of choice, but of necessity, to present the idea to them in the concrete. That is, to give them a series of pictures of creation. This, he had to say, was the picture of things before creation begun. This was what was done first. This was what was done next. And so on throughout the whole. And this was what was said at each act of creation. When the idea was presented to them in this concrete, dramatic form, they could understand it, and take it in. It was the only mode of thought, and the only mode of expression, that were possible then. When translated into modern modes of thought, and modern modes of expression, they simply mean God is the Creator. Nothing more. Those who would press them further, do so because they are not acquainted with the difference between archaic, rude, uncultured modes of thought and expression, and those of minds that have received culture, and been benefited by the slowly maturing fruits of ages of culture.

This method of historical criticism offers similar explanations of much besides these first chapters of Genesis. It tells us that good, and true, and God-fearing men, and who were moved by a holy spirit, which they described as coming to them ab extra (in which their metaphysics, if erroneous, were honestly so) could hardly in those times have thought, or expressed themselves otherwise than as they did; and that if, through some realization of the Egyptian idea of the transmigration of souls, they had returned to earth, and were now amongst us, with precisely the same yearnings for justice, truth, and goodness they had been moved by in those primitive days, they would not express themselves now as they did then, but as we do. Their metaphysics would have become the same as ours. But in either case there would be no difference in their meaning.

It is evident, by the way, that the historical method of interpretation differs also, in the effect it has on the feelings and practice, from the popular interpretation of the present day, and of former times. It is evident, for instance, that it could not lead a man to denounce the mythology and religion of Egypt, the aims of which were distinctly moral, as the invention of devils. The old popular methods of interpretation, also, naturally sanctioned the persecution of those who differ from us in religion, as they did at the time of the Crusades; and of those who differ from us only in interpretation, as in the case of the treatment of the Vaudois; and in the still more shocking case of the creation and maintenance of the Inquisition, one of the most dreadful episodes in human history. The historical method, however, suggests nothing of the kind. It can regard such extravagancies only as contradictions of the meaning and purpose of religion.

But to go back to the contrast between the popular and the historical methods of interpretation as applied to the particular instance I selected, that of the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. Some little time back I met with the following illustration of the errors into which we must fall, if we feel ourselves obliged to take them precisely in the sense that would belong to their words, had they been addressed by a living writer to ourselves. There happened to be an equestrian circus exhibiting in the neighbouring town. The gardener who was in my service at the time had rather an inquisitive mind; and the word equestrian, which occurred in the posters that announced the performance, puzzled him; and as he did not like to give his money without knowing what it was for, he asked me what the word meant. I told him it meant an exhibition in which horses bore a part, and that the word was derived from equus, the Latin name for a horse.

‘No,’ he exclaimed, ‘that can’t be right.’

‘Yes,’ I rejoined, ‘it is so.’

‘No;’ he continued, ‘it is impossible; because we are told that when the animals were created they were all brought to Adam, and that whatsoever he called each, that was the name thereof. So horse must be the name of the animal all over the world for ever. Being an animal, it can have only one name: the name Adam gave it.’

Argument was useless. For him to have been persuaded of anything that contradicted his literal interpretation would have been to abandon belief in the authenticity of the book.

Here then we have the popular method actually at work. We see the whole process. And the way in which it demonstrated to my gardener that equus could not possibly be Latin for horse, is much the same as the way in which some other conclusions have been arrived at, with which everybody is familiar, but with which very few people are satisfied.