the sickle into fifty days sooner, or at the Passover, which nearly answered to the time of the hail. Yet so far from obvious is this point of harmony, that nothing is more easy than to mistake it; nay, nothing more likely than that we should even at first suspect Moses himself to have been out in his reckoning, and thus to find a knot instead of an argument. For on reading the following passage,* where the rule is given for determining the second feast, we might on the instant most naturally suppose that the great wheat harvest of Judea was in the month Abib, at the Passover-“ Seven weeks shalt thou number unto thee, begin to number the seven weeks from such time as thou beginnest to put the sickle to the corn." Now this "putting the sickle to the corn" is at once perceived to be at the * Deuteronomy, xvi. 9. Passover when the wave-sheaf was offered, the ceremony from which we see the Feast of Weeks was measured and fixed. Yet had the great wheat harvest been here actually meant, it would have been impossible to reconcile Moses with himself, for he would then have been representing the wheat to be ripe in Judea at a season when, as we had elsewhere gathered from him, it was not grown up or out of the sheath in Egypt. But if the sickle was to be put into some grain much earlier than wheat, such as barley, and if the barleyharvest is here alluded to as falling in with the Passover and not the wheat-harvest, then all is clear, intelligible, and free from difficulty. In a word then my argument is this— that at the Passover the barley in Judea was ripe, but that the wheat was not, seven weeks having yet to elapse before the firstfruits of the loaves could be offered. This I collect from the History of the Great Jewish Festivals. Again, that at the Plague of Hail (which corresponds with the time of the Passover to a few days,) the barley in Egypt was smitten being in the ear, but that the wheat was not smitten, not being yet bolled. This I collect from the History of the Great Egyptian Plagues. The two statements on being compared together, agree together. I cannot but consider this as very far from an unimportant coincidence-tending, as it does, to give us confidence in the good faith of the historian, even at a moment when he is telling of the Miracles of Egypt, "the wondrous works that were done in the land of Ham." For, supported by this circumstantial evidence, which, as far as it goes, cannot lie, I feel that I have very strong reason for believing that a hailstorm there actually was, as Moses asserts; that the season of the year to which he assigns it, was the season when it did in fact happen; that the crops were really in the state in which he represents them to have been-more I cannot prove -for further my test will not reach. It is not in the nature of miracles to admit of its immediate application to themselves. But when I see the ordinary circumstances which attend upon them, and which are most closely combined with them, yielding internal evidence of truth, I am apt to think that these in a great measure vouch for the truth of the rest. Indeed, in all common cases, even in judicial cases of life and death, the corroboration of the evidence of an unimpeached witness in one or two particulars is enough to decide a jury that it is worthy of credit in every other particular-that it may be safely acted upon in the most awful and responsible of all human decisions. XVII. THE argument which I have next to produce has been urged by Dr. Graves,* though others had noticed it before him; I shall not, however, scruple to introduce it here in its order, connected as it is with several more, all relating to the economy of the camp. The incident on which it turns is trifling in itself, but nothing can be more characteristic of truth. On the day when Moses set up the Tabernacle and anointed and sanctified it, the princes On the Pentateuch, vol. i. p. 111. |