look as they did to the covenant of the Lord with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, can acknowledge limits more circumscribed. And the spirit of faith breaks through the bonds with which a false theory concerning the limits of Israel has fettered inquiry, and gives full freedom to read the words as they are written, and to seek the "borders" where they are to be found, in the utmost bounds of Solomon's dominion. At no other time did the Israelites so fully possess their promised inheritance as in the days of Solomon. After his death the glory of Israel was greatly diminished, and the kingdom was rent in twain. The seed of Jacob, a divided and often mutually conflicting people, did cleave to the remnant of the nations that were left around them, and forsook the Lord God of their fathers. Ephraim vexed Judah, and Judah Ephraim. The tide of conquest, renewed by David, was turned back, and never rose so high again. The enemies of Israel prevailed. The inheritance which the Lord had given them, they lost. Ephraim was given up to his idols, and fell in his iniquity. Ten tribes were destroyed from off the land of Israel, and their place was occupied by aliens from their commonwealth. Judah never regained what Ephraim had lost. And for the perfect completion of the covenant of God with their fathers, in respect to the extent as well as the perpetuity of the promised inheritance, we must look to the days when "Judah and Ephraim shall be one in the hands of the Lord," and when, according to the new division of the land, as defined by Ezekiel, the twelve tribes of Israel, one as well as another, shall inherit the land,* from the River of Egypt to the great River Euphrates SECTION II. THE RIVER OF EGYPT. The River of Egypt, from which to the Euphrates the inheritance of Israel extends, might at once and universally, without an explanatory word, be identified with the Nile, which is emphatically and exclusively, as known to all the world, the River of Egypt. But because the Holy Land, as possessed by the Israelites in ancient times, never reached to Egypt, and the Nile never form. *Ezek., xlvii., 13, 14, ed its boundary, the brook Besor, in the land of Philistia, a mere streamlet compared to the Nile, and sometimes nearly, if not altogether dry in summer, without being transported to its borders, has been exalted into the River of Egypt. If the terms of the covenant be not altogether disregarded, such an opinion is unworthy of confutation, as a brook, were it even worthy of being the boundary of a large kingdom, cannot, while flowing only in one country, be the river of another which it never reaches. The translation of the term Nahal Mitzraim (273 S) in a single instance in the Septuagint, into Rhinocorura (Pivokopovрoç), seemed to give warrant for the opinion to which it gave rise, that a river or stream near the town of that name was the River of Egypt. This opinion was ably controverted and refuted by Dr. Shaw, who states that, "in geographical criticism, little stress can be laid on the authority of the Septuagint version, where the phrase so frequently, as he shows, varies from the original, and where so many different interpretations are put upon one and the same thing.' Pelusium, situated on the banks of the eastern branch of the Nile, formed the extreme boundary of Egypt on the coast of the Mediterranean, and the region between it and the Red Sea pertained, as Strabo relates, not to Egypt, but to Arabia. But, as the covenant concerning the land has evidently respect to the latter days, even as the inheritance is declared to be an everlasting possession, the fatal objection against Rhinocorura is that there is no stream, or river, or torrent there, that could in any way form as a river the boundary of a kingdom. Amid sandy hills all around, there is indeed something like the form of a valley close upon the sea, wide enough for a large river, but, in the summer at least, as the writer witnessed in passing it, there was no stream, or even streamlet, or drop of water there; and the ground, nearly on the level with the seashore, was as dry as the parched wilderness. The River of Egypt, as a border of the large dominion forming the everlasting inheritance of Israel, is not surely such as cannot be seen. The country around Rhinocorura is as it was in the days of * Shaw's Travels, Supplement, p. 23, 24. See APPENDIX I. † Strabo, cap. 17, tom. ii., p. 1138, ed. Falcon. Diodorus Siculus, Herodotus, and Strabo, as their authorities are adduced on this very point by Dr. Shaw, a barren country deprived of the necessaries of life; without the walls there are several salt-pits; within, the wells yield only a bitter, corrupted water. Herodotus confirms this account by telling us that in those deserts there was a dreadful want of water to the distance of three days' journey from Mount Casius, bordering on Egypt, on the Sirbonic Lake. Strabo relates that the whole country between Gaza and the Sirbonic Lake was barren or sandy. There was no "River of Egypt" there either in ancient or modern times. The writer has not been able to discover any mention of it as a stream or streamlet (though such in winter there possibly may be) by any modern or ancient author, though it has been so placed in many maps. The River of Egypt is doubtless the Nile, to which the Nahal Mitzraim of the Hebrews seems to have given its name. From it, in the estimation of the learned Bochart, that name by which the River of Egypt is universally known, was "most certainly derived."* Nahal the Jewish interpreters read the Nile. For The River of Egypt bears, in parallel passages of Scripture, the name of Sihor, which is plainly identified with the Nile. Like other names given to that river by various nations, who, according to Dr. Hales and many other authors, have translated it into their own languages, it literally signifies "black." These are too numerous to owe their origin to any other than a common cause, which gave in them all its significancy to each name of the selfsame river. According to Pliny, Solinus, and Dionysius, the Nile was ealled Siris, "its Ethiopic name derived from Sihor or Sihr." The words Melas and Melo, like the Hebrew Sihor, also literally signifying "black," were among the Greeks names of the Nile. The Egyptian name of the river, according to Diodorus, was Okeames, from Okema, or Okem, signifying "black," whence also it was styled by the Hindus Cali," all names of the same import.† * Nahal torrens pro Nilo accipitur, ut in scriptura passim. Num., xxxiv., 5, pro Hebræo Nahal,, legitur Nilus in Jonathane et Jerosolymitano interprete, atque hinc Nili nominis origo certissima est.-Bochart, iii., 764. Shaw's Trav., ibiḍ., p, 31. Hales's Chronology, vol. i., p. 413, 414. The Thus the name given in Scripture to the bounding river of Israel's inheritance on the side of Egypt is similar in sound and in significancy to Sihr, the Ethiopian name of the Nile, and is precisely of the same import with the names which it bears in other languages. name is specially appropriate to the Nile, loaded as it is with the dark loam of Abyssinia and Upper Egypt, and flowing for hundreds of miles through its own dark deposites, with which, as in the days of Virgil and in earlier times, it fertilizes the land in annual overflow. Viridem Egyptum nigra fœcundat arena. Its dark and muddy waters, though sweet to the taste, need first to be filtered, and leave a large dark sediment. The name of Sihor is most appropriate to the Nile; but, having passed by both, the writer may remark, that it would but ill apply to a river of Rhinocorura, were there a river there; for the sandy hills around it, and boundless sandy plains joining the desert, might so filter any stream, or purify even the Nile itself, as to rob it of all title to this scriptural name. The Nile, forming emphatically, and, it may well be said, exclusively, "the River of Egypt"-the name by which it is now universally known being most certainly, on high authority, derived from the very word which is translated in our own version the river or stream of Egypt-the eastern branch of the Nile having been the boundary of that country, according to Strabo, who is second, in accuracy at least, to none of the ancient geographers, and its dark waters having given it the name which it bears in Scripture, in exact analogy to other appellations by which it was known in their own tongue to various heathen nations, strong and conclusive proof may hence arise that the River of Egypt "could be none other than the Nile." The fact, too, that "none of the old geographers-Strabo, Mela, Pliny, Ptolemy, &c.notice any stream or torrent at Rhinocorura," and no river, or, in summer at least, not even the smallest streamlet now existing there, it is left without an actual competitor. And yet the proofs and authorities are not exhausted, that the River of Egypt is the Nile, even as assuredly as the Nile is the River of Egypt. That the Sihor, as Gesenius states,* is "necessarily” * Apud vocem. the Nile, is farther evident from other passages of Scripture. In describing the commerce of Tyre, the mart of nations, Isaiah records, in terms applicable to the Nile alone, that "by great waters the seed of Sihor, the harvest of the river (or, as translated in the Vulgate, the Nite) is her revenues. That river is alike pointedly referred to by Jeremiah, as the Lord did plead with Israel concerning the judgments brought on them for their iniquities. "Is Israel a home-born slave? The children of Noph (Memphis, on the banks of the Nile) and Tahaphanes have broken the crown of thy head. And now what hast thou to do in the way of Egypt, to drink the waters of Sihor? or what hast thou to do in the way Assyria, to drink the waters of the river ?" Associated as Egypt thus repeatedly is with its river, or the Sihor, and Assyria with its river, or the Euphrates, there seems no room for doubt, that as the Euphrates is the River of Assyria, so the Nile is the River of Egypt. of The same identical word is descriptive of them both in the original covenant, as the promise was made to Abraham, Gen., xv., 18. The word translated river is not, as in other passages, Nahal, but Nehar, or NeharMitzraim, the River of Egypt; even as in the same passage Nehar Phraat is the River Euphrates. The same word, too, in the plural number, is applied undoubtedly to the separate branches of the Nile (forming rivers, though divided) in a passage that cannot possibly apply to any other river, Exod., vii., 19: "And the Lord spake unto Moses, say unto Aaron, Stretch forth thy hand with thy rod, over the streams, over the rivers (neharim), and over the ponds, and cause frogs to come up upon the land of Egypt." It may here be remarked, though anticipating another branch of the subject, that the boundaries of Israel thus approach as closely on the one side to Egypt, as to Assyria on the other, as if preparation had thus been made from the beginning for the completion of the farther promise, that the Egyptians shall serve with the Assyrians, when these nations shall be joined, though in subserviency, to Israel, "whom the Lord of Hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance."‡ * Isa., xxiii., 3, Jer., ii., 14-18, Isa., xix., 23-25. |