These scholars have also found that the legends of the plagues of
Egypt are in the main but natural exaggerations of what occurs
every year; as, for example, the changing of the water of the Nile
into blood--evidently suggested by the phenomena exhibited every
summer, when, as various eminent scholars, and, most recent of
all, Maspero and Sayce, tell us, "about the middle of July, in
eight or ten days the river turns from grayish blue to dark red,
occasionally of so intense a colour as to look like newly shed
blood." These modern researches have also shown that some of the
most important features in the legends can not possibly be
reconciled with the records of the monuments; for example, that the
Pharaoh of the Exodus was certainly not overwhelmed in the Red Sea.
As to the supernatural features of the Hebrew relations with Egypt,
even the most devoted apologists have become discreetly silent.
Egyptologists have also translated for us the old Nile story of _The
Two Brothers_, and have shown, as we have already seen, that one of
the most striking parts of our sacred Joseph legend was drawn from
it; they have been obliged to admit that the story of the exposure
of Moses in the basket of rushes, his rescue, and his subsequent
greatness, had been previously told, long before Moses's time, not
only of King Sargon, but of various other great personages of the
ancient world; they have published plans of Egyptian temples and
copies of the sculptures upon their walls, revealing the earlier
origin of some of the most striking features of the worship and
ceremonial claimed to have been revealed especially to the Hebrews;
they have found in the _Egyptian Book of the Dead_, and in
various inscriptions of the Nile temples and tombs, earlier sources
of much in the ethics so long claimed to have been revealed only to
the chosen people in the Book of the Covenant, in the ten
commandments, and elsewhere; they have given to the world copies of
the Egyptian texts showing that the theology of the Nile was one
of various fruitful sources of later ideas, statements, and
practices regarding the brazen serpent, the golden calf, trinities,
miraculous conceptions, incarnations, resurrections, ascensions,
and the like, and that Egyptian sacro-scientific ideas contributed
to early Jewish and Christian sacred literature statements,
beliefs, and even phrases regarding the Creation, astronomy,
geography, magic, medicine, diabolical influences, with a multitude
of other ideas, which we also find coming into early Judaism in
greater or less degree from Chaldean and Persian sources.
Pages:
1349
1350
1351
1352
1353
1354
1355
1356
1357
1358
1359
1360
1361
1362
1363
1364
1365
1366
1367
1368
1369
1370
1371
1372
1373