Israelites, round the southern extremity of the Dead Sea, the great procession moved on till, at the threshing-floor of Atad, there was a seven days' halt, and such a lamentation, shared in so thoroughly by the Egyptians of the company, that the Canaanitish onlookers said that it was a grievous mourning to the Egyptians, and called the place Abel-mizraim, "the mourning of Egypt." It was a very graceful way for the Egyptians to repay the services of Joseph; but we cannot but regard it also as a very striking testimony to the impression which, during his seventeen years' residence among them, the character of Jacob had made upon them. The Egyptians would seem to have stayed behind at Abel-mizraim, leaving it to Joseph and the rest to lay the body, as they did, in the cave of Machpelah. Most of the other bodies deposited there have long since mouldered away. If we could get access to that cave, and have the tombs of Abraham and Isaac opened, all that we could ever hope to see would be what has been seen sometimes in the Catacombs of Rome, the shadow of a human figure composed of the thinnest layer of dust. Not so with the body of Jacob. It was embalmed with all the art of Egypt. Under Jewish or Christian guardianship, tombs so sacred as those of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah, would be carefully shielded from invasion; and ever since the Mussulman occupation, in 1187, the great Mosque that covers the cave has been so superstitiously guarded, that for six hundred years no European has been permitted to set foot within its sacred precincts. When entered, it was by stealth, and during all this period only three accounts of its having been so visited have come down to us. In 1862 the Prince of Wales, accompanied by the Dean of Westminister and a few friends, was, after many difficulties made, and as an extreme favour, permitted to enter the Mosque,1 and to inspect the shrines, which, upon its floor-level, stand above the tombs; but they were not allowed to go down into the cave, or set eye upon the places in which the remains of the dead were laid. Mussulman fanaticism will, however, in due time relax; and the men may be alive who shall see that mummy of Jacob-if it still be there-unwrapped, and who shall gaze upon the face of the dead just as it was when, a few moments after death, "Joseph fell upon his father's face, and wept upon him, and kissed him." NOTE.—In the preceding narrative we have adopted the chronology of Jacob's life which is generally received, and have referred in the table to the passages by which it is regarded as being established. The chief ground upon which it rests is the conclusion, which at first sight appears not only warrantable, but inevitable, that Jacob himself twice tells us that the whole period of his sojourn in Padan-aram was twenty years (Gen. xxxi. 38, 41). Dr. Kennicott, however, has suggested that the twenty years of ver. 38 are not the same as the twenty years of ver. 41, and that the sense of the Hebrew would be better expressed as follows:-Ver. 38, "One twenty years I was with thee" (i.e., taking care of thy flocks for thee, but not in thy house); and ver. 41, "Another twenty years I was for myself in thy house, serving thee fourteen years for thy two daughters, and six years for thy cattle.” Bishop Horsley has said that the reasons by which this interpretation are supported by Dr. Kennicott appear to him unanswerable; and Bishop Harold Browne has recently indicated a preference for it. As it is quite certain that Joseph was born in the ninety-first year of his father's life, six years before the departure from Haran, if we adopt the interpretation which bears that Jacob spent two twenties, or forty years in Padan-aram, we must throw back the date at which Jacob fled from Hebron from his seventy-seventh to his fifty-seventh year, and arrange the residence at Padan-aram as follows: First, fourteen years' service for his wives, in the course of the last six years of which Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah are born of Leah, and Dan and 1 A most interesting account of this visit to the Mosque of Hebron is given in Stanley's History of the Jewish Church, vol. ii., Appendix ii., pp. 484-509. Naphtali of Bilhah. Then the twenty years of chap. xxxi. 38, in course of which Gad and Asher are born of Zilpah; Issachar and Zebulun of Leah, and Dinah also. Then the closing six years, at the commencement of which Joseph is born, his father being then ninetyone. This arrangement of the dates has this great recommendation, that it spreads the birth of the eleven sons over a period of twenty-six years; whereas the common calculation obliges us to conclude that all the eleven were born within six years—a thing not impossible, if we admit a few cotemporaneous births, but yet, it must be admitted, highly improbable. It has also the advantage of assigning such ages to Simeon, Levi, Dinah, Judah, Er, and Onan as harmonise with the events described in chaps. xxxiv. and xxxviii. (See Speaker's Commentary, vol. i., pp. 177, 178.) |