Forlong - Rivers of Life

168
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
lated chapters from Exodus xxv. onwards, but rather in the simple order for a box,
given in. Deut. x. 1), as soon I say as we hear of such an atk, we also have the
stones described as the. articles for which it was made, or vice versa, for precedence
would be given according to whether the writer was an Arkite or Lingaite.
It is becoming to write with diffidence, as I desire in all I have here said to be understood
to do; but it would be equally unbecoming, nay unmanly, to refrain from putting
these important points of the God and sacred records of Jews and Christians before my
countrymen, as I believe any intelligent Brahman, acquainted with the lore of his own,
and the Jewish people, could do. He would assuredly see all these tales concerning
sacred stones, Eduths, and arks as I have tried to depict them. It is unreasonable to
suppose that a small rude tribe should at its first birth in the deserts of Arabia, be
able to cut and grave stones—not an easy task—with many hundreds of words, not to
say write volumes of parchment or dried leather, laying down on these intricate laws,
rites, and ceremonies, which mostly concern only settled peoples living in towns and
cities; especially as the very writers of Exodus did notr event pretend to say they did
prepare or engrave any stones whatsoever, but on the contrary, allege that they
never did so, but that they got them in some mysterious and incomprehensible way on
the summit of a lofty mountain—ever held sacred, and inhabited by a fierce and fearful
Deity or Demon. They candidly confess also, that long years after the scenes of Sinai,
there was not so much as a smith in all their settled territories in the lands they had
seized and appropriated; that they had even to seek aid from the rulers of the plains
and meads of this land to sharpen their few rude agricultural implements; and though
capable of raids—armed, no doubt, with stones, and slings, and bludgeons, or with bows
and arrows, pointed probably with hard wood, bones, or natural flints; that yet, when
attacked, they had to “hide themselves away in holes and caves, pits, and inaccessible
hills;” that their very deity could not help them, even when all were in full armed
array, against a single tribe of “a. valley, who had “chariots of iron;” seemg all this,
it is unreasonable, I think. to suppose that such a rude untutored tribe had any capability
of extensively graving stone tablets, or writing long, intricate, and advanced
laws on religious rites and ceremonies, as well as on minute social and political subjeets;
and able to build or frame arks and tabernacles auch as are described in the latter
parts of Exodus; nor is it to be supposed that they had or could comprehend any such
spiritual, immutable, and Almighty Father as Christians desire we should understand.
On the contrary, all the early Jewish writings—divested here and there of most evident
inrerpolations of a far later period of their history, when Hebrews had long served as
slaves and labourers amongst the great peoples around them, recall to our minds many
tribes in the East who now live as they did, disorganised, brutal, and superstitious,
and dependent for every sign or symptom of culture, for every graving tool or war implement
among them, on their raids upon their neighbours or on their goodwill and
kindness.