Indeed, the Scriptures themselves give us, elsewhere, to understand that St. Peter did not correctly interpret this history. “Come thou,” says Gen. vii. 1, “and all thy house, into the ark!” This gracious invitation, at so critical a juncture, would have been too welcome a proffer to be lost sight of by anyone who could make it available; and must not we suppose that the domestics to whom the extension was addressed, with their several dependants and collateral offspring, would have been glad and happy to grasp at it with delight?
But the name of the type itself is worth a hundred deductions from equivocal premises. The coffer of the law, the coffin of Joseph, the money chest of the temple, are all severally translated ark, and recorded in Hebrew by the word ארון aron: but the “ark of Noah”[283] and Moses’s “ark of bulrushes”[284] are peculiarly designated, תבת Thebit, or תבה tebah.[285]
What is the meaning of these mysterious terms?
“Quo spectanda modo, quo sensu credis, et ore?”
As the Tau of the Hebrews is, indifferently, in power, T and Th, Thebit has as good a right to be spelled with, as without, an h at the end of it,—and, indeed, a better right, considering the elements whereof it is compounded. Thebith, then, is the proper and true sound, and the mystery of its import I thus unravel.
Its first syllable, The, signifies sacred or consecrated;[286] and since the letters b and p are commutable—bith is the same as pith, that is, Cteis or Yoni. The words The-bith, then, together, in all the attraction of truth, intimate the consecrated Cteis; or the sacred Yoni![287]
But Pith, itself, is only a conversion of Fidh, the initial letters P and F being always interchangeable, and not more so than the penultimates t and d. And Fidh, in its abstract and original position, such as we have early seen it, is masculine, the plural of Budh, conveying variously the significations of Lingams, trees, and bulrushes. Here, however, where it is feminine, its sex reversed, and the anatomy of nature pourtrayed by the physics of language, the idea of the bulrushes alone presents itself; and the basket in which Moses was saved from the waters, and which was made of such reeds, was appropriately denominated by this mysterious symbol, as a type of the virginity in which the Messiah was to be incarnated, not less than of the redemption which was to accrue from His sufferings.
Another stage has been thus advanced; and lo! the beautiful union which subsists, as to design, between the results of our discoveries, and the consoling assurances of pure Christianity!
Let us now proceed a little farther in this course—
“Sanctos ausi recludere fontes,”[288]