Forlong - Rivers of Life

Serpent and Phallic Worship.
years before the Sinaitic wanderings (1490 B.C.), because during all this time the
tribes had existed in Egypt only as poor oppressed slaves, knocked about from public work
to public work, and we are therefore justified in assuming that whilst in Egypt, they had
always been in an utterly disorganised state, and perfectly illiterate—more so than any
band of African slaves in the West Indies and America, in the worst times of such slavery.
This being so, these Jewish slaves could not have carried forward the ideas of their
ancestors, nor avoided adopting the most superstitious beliefs and rites of the lowest and
most depraved classes in Egypt, even had they cared to remember the Betyls of Jacob,
and the. little Lingam idols of Rachel. Up to the days of David these Edumeans were
poor and uncivilized beyond that of almost any tribe we now know of, save a few
small ones here and there, who still wander about with no weapons save bows and
arrows, stones, slings, and sticks. Up to the days of Saul (1090 B.C.), “there was no
king in Israel, and every man did that whieh was right in his own eyes,” and (as the
keen but very fair investigator of the Hebrew history, Mr. T. Lumisden Strange, here
adds) “it was anarchy socially, politically, and, as the position of this sentence
occurring in the midst of Micah’s idolatrous ways shows, also in religious practices.
. . . There was no safety in the highways, and travellers resorted to by-paths; the
villages were deserted, and the people, surrounded by hostile races, unarmed.” 1 For
Deborah, the valiant prophetess, twits them asking if a spear or shield can be found
among 40,000 in Israel? (Jud. v. 8). One great hero had distinguished himself before
Deborah’s day by slaugbtering “600 Philistines,” but it was with “an ox-goad,” and
another killed 1000, sometime after the days of this Joan of Arc, but he alao had only the
“jawbone of an ass;” and the mighty David had to start on his war with giants with nought
but a sling and a stone, and was glad, says Mr. Strange, to arm himself with the giant’s
sword. Even up to the beginning of the tenth century B.C., “there was no smith found
throughout all the land of Israel; and the tribes had even to go dowm to the Philistines to
sharpen every man” his agricultural instruments! the Philistines only permitting them
to have “files!” and in the day of battle none save Saul, and Jonathan his son, had
either sword or spear! (1 Sam. xiii. 19 to end.) It is clear that the tribe occupied, and only
on sufferance, the high and wilder parts of Syria, and “did stink” in the eyes of, or were
“held in abomination (xiii. 4) by the Philistine” kings and princes who ruled the country;
they were troublesome, and made raids, but when attacked in earnest, “they hid themselves
in caves, and in thickets, and in rocks, and in high places, and in pits!” (verse 6).
The idea of such a tribe building an ark, or even tabernacle, &c., such as is described
in Exodus xxv. and onwards, in the deserts of Sinai, about 1500 B.C., is
therefore preposterous; and we do not require Bishops of the Chureh to tell us that
these chapters here are all interpolations, nor yet Hebraists to explain that the Eduth
and Jahveh-Nissi of such a tribe, is philologically incomprehensible. Common sense,
if allowed to range freely over the histories of all similar people, assures us in a
1 Legends of Old Testament, Hebrews, pp. 144, 5: Trübner, London, 1874.
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