If Israel would follow His guidance, and accept a somewhat austere destiny, then the desert air and exercise, and even its privations, would become the efficacious means for their exemption from the scourges of indulgence. A time arrived when they looked back with remorse upon crimes which forfeited their immunity, when the Lord said, “I have sent among you the pestilence after the manner of Egypt; your young men have I slain with the sword” (Amos iv. 10).
But it is a significant fact that at this day, after eighteen hundred years of oppression, hardship, and persecution, of the ghetto and the old-clothes trade, the Hebrew race is proverbially exempt from repulsive and contagious disease. They also “certainly do enjoy immunity from the ravages of cholera, fever and smallpox in a remarkable degree. Their blood seems to be in a different condition from that of other people.... They seem less receptive of disease caused by blood poisoning than others” (Journal of Victoria Institute, xxi. 307). Imperfect as was their obedience, this covenant at least has been literally fulfilled to them.
It is by such means that God is wont to reward His children. Most commonly the seal of blessing from the skies is not rich fare, but bread and fish by the lake side with the blessing of Christ upon them; not removal from the desert, but a closer sense of the protection and acceptance of Heaven, the nearness of a loving God, and with this, an elevation and purification of the life, and of the body as well as of the soul. Not in vain has St. Paul written “The Lord for the body.” Nor was there ever yet a race of men who accepted the covenant of God, and lived in soberness, temperance and chastity, without a signal improvement of the national physique, no longer unduly stimulated by passion, jaded by indulgence, or relaxed by the satiety which resembles but is not repose.
From Marah and its agitations there was a journey of but a few hours to Elim, with its twelve fountains and seventy palm trees—a fair oasis, by which they encamped and rested, while their flocks spread far and wide over a grassy and luxuriant valley.
The picture is still true to the Christian life, with the Palace Beautiful just beyond the lions, and the Delectable Mountains next after Doubting Castle.
FOOTNOTES:
[28] There is no warrant in the use of Scripture for Stanley’s assertion that the word translated “dances” should be rendered “guitars.” (Smith’s Dict. of Bible, Article Miriam.)
[29] This is to be taken literally; it does not mean the waves, but the quicksands in which they “drave heavily,” and which, when steeped in the returning waters, engulfed them.
[30] Wellhausen, Israel, p. 439.