the strong bond of well-tried companionship in hardships and in arms, were very likely to act with one common council, and to have a desire still to dwell beside one another, after the toil of battle, as quiet neighbours in a peaceful country, where they were finally to set up their rest. Here again is an incident, I think, beyond the reach of the most refined impostor in the world. What vigilance, however alive to suspicion, and prepared for it- what cunning, however bent upon giving credibility to a worthless narrative, by insidiously scattering through it marks of truth which should turn up from time to time and mislead the reader, would have suggested one so very trivial, so very far fetched, as a desire of two tribes to obtain their inheritance together on the same side of a river, simply upon the recollection that such a desire would fall in very naturally with their having pitched their tents side by side in their previous march through the wilderness? XXI. SOME circumstances in the history of Balak: and Balaam supply me with another argument for the veracity of the Pentateuch. But before I proceed to those which I have more immediately in my eye, I would observe, that the simple fact of a King of Moab knowing that a Prophet dwelt in Mesopotamia, in the mountains of the East, a country so distant from his own, in itself supplies a point of harmony favouring the truth and reality of the narrative. For I am led by it to remark this, that very many hints may be picked up in the writings of Moses, all concurring to establish one position, viz. that there was a communication amongst the scattered inhabitants of the earth in those early times, a circulation of intelligence, scarcely to be expected, and not easily to be accounted for. Whether the caravans of merchants, which, as we have seen, traversed the deserts of the East--whether the unsettled and vagrant habits of the descendants of Ishmael and Esau, which singularly fitted them for being the carriers of news, and with whom the great wilderness was alive-whether the pastoral life of the Patriarchs, and of those who more immediately sprung from them, which led them to constant changes of place in search of herbage-whether the frequent petty wars which were waged amongst lawless neighbours-whether the necessary separation of families, the parent hive casting its little colony forth to settle on some distant land, and the consequent interest and curiosity which either branch would feel for the fortunes of the other— whether these were the circumstances that encouraged and maintained an intercourse among mankind in spite of the numberless obstacles which must then have opposed it, and which we might have imagined would have intercepted it altogether; or whether any other channels of intelligence were open of which we are in ignorance, sure it is, that such intercourse seems to have existed to a very considerable extent. Thus, far as Abraham was removed from the branch of his family which remained in Mesopotamia, "it came to pass that it was told him, saying, behold, Milcah, she hath also borne children unto thy brother Nahor;" and their names are then added.* In like * Genesis, xxii. 20. manner Isaac and Rebekah appear in their turn to have known that Laban had marriageable daughters;*-and Jacob, when he came back to Canaan after his long sojourn in Haran, seems to have known that Esau was alive and prosperous, and that he lived at Seir, whither he sent a message to him; -and Deborah, Rebekah's nurse, who went with her to Canaan on her marriage, is found many years afterwards in the family of Jacob, for she dies in his camp as he was returning from Haran, and therefore must have been sent back again meanwhile, for some purpose or other, from Canaan to Haran; and at Elim, in the desert, the Israelites discover twelve wells of water and three-score and ten palms, the numbers, no doubt, not accidental, but indicating that * Genesis, xxviii. 2. + Ibid. xxxii. 3. |