preserve it from the bites of insects and stings of mosquitoes. The vegetables and trees of India produce large quantities of berries and fruits yielding oil; and every village has its oil-mill, turned by a camel or a bullock. The oil of the castor-tree is much used, and mustard-oil in large quantities; these are perhaps most frequently employed by the natives for anointing their bodies, while the finer cocoa-nut oil they store for lights and cooking. Sandalwood oil is also used for anointing the person, by men of rank, ladies of the hareem, and dancing-women, but the anointing of themselves with oil after ablution, by all ranks, seems so essential to ease, health, and comfort in the East, from the beggar to the prince, that no curse could perhaps more heavily afflict a native of India than depriving him of the means for doing this, as it doubtless did afflict the Israelites when they were told that their olivetrees should each cast his fruit.' And yet there came even a heavier curse upon them, as we read in the 42nd verse-All thy trees and fruit of thy land shall the locust consume.' I have already alluded to my observation of the devastating effect of a locust band in Cutch, which came so thickly, that the servants in going out to the bazaar were constrained to roll their heads up in heavy cloths, and arm themselves with staves, to avoid being hurt and wounded by the flying of these insects against their faces. During the day, by means of tomtoms and shrill trumpets, the locusts were prevented from settling, but at night devoured every green thing in the fields of the poor cultivators, remaining as a curse on the land for three days and nights, while the want and misery that followed were indeed great, for those who had taken much jowarree seed into the field, gathered in but few ears at harvest, for the locust had consumed it in the blade.

In thus drawing attention to a few, and yet but a very few, of the interesting comparisons that may be made between facts and usages described in the five earliest books of the Old Testament, and the manners and usages of the people of the East, of India particularly, in the present day, I have left unnoticed many prominent points, because as such they have frequently been spoken of by various travellers, and again to dwell on them might be considered useless as well as tedious. I allude to the reception of the travellers by Abraham on Mamre; of his going forth to meet his guest, a point of etiquette always observed in Eastern hospitalities; his offer of water, Let a little water I pray you be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree,' the most necessary refreshment that can be offered to the weary foot-sore traveller, and one which always precedes that of food. The preparation, again, of meal, and the making cakes upon the hearth by Sarai, similar

VOL. II.-NO. III.

domestic.

domestic service to which may be hourly observed by the traveller in the East, inasmuch as the wife, whatever be her rank, must prepare the family food; then, the standing of Abraham by his guests, this being the attitude of deep respect, always observed in the East, towards those to whom honour is to be shown; the setting up by Jacob of a stone for a pillar before he poured oil upon the top of it,' such stones, as memorials of things remarkable or uncommon, whether marking a halting-place, as in Sindh; a foray, as in Kattiawar; or a suttee, as in Cutch, being of daily erection, and always anointed with oil or ghee; the meeting of the servants of Isaac with Rebecca at the well of Nahor, with its kneeling camels and Oriental groups; of the damsels of the city at eventide; the striving of the herdsmen at the wells of Gerar; the circumstances of the famine that was so sore in the land' when Jacob fled to Egypt, these are passages where the comparisons are so prominent, that they cannot have escaped notice by all travellers in the East; but, as I have before said, it is in the minuter points that perhaps most interest lies: and the more we consider these things the more are we impressed with the idea, that men in parallel conditions are uniform beings; that under a similar climate, with similar food, and influenced by similar exterior circumstances generally, the result of a patriarchal state, and pastoral habits, we find an agreement of usage: thus, the manners and customs of the people of Eastern and Western Asia did not very materially differ, and the tracing these resemblances between what we see in the present with what we read of the past, appears to give a life, a vivid portraiture, an absolute presence, to the incidents of sacred history, which seems to annihilate the mighty interval of many thousand years, and while in no way robbing antiquity of its majesty, but, on the contrary, awakening the dull mind more and more to its authority, these traced resemblances seem at once of more touching interest, and affect more intimately our general sympathies. Before closing this paper I cannot avoid observing on the present character of the people of India, on their ignorance, apathy, and credulity. I have seen the snake-charmers of an Indian village, and heard the remarks of the people on their power. And this has easily induced the belief, of what the confidence of Pharaoh may have been in the power of the magicians of Egypt. I stood by the side of one of the best navigators on the coast of India, when the first steamboat came into harbour against wind and tide, and the man said he saw no reason why 'if wind brought a boat, fire might not, they were both elements.' I have witnessed in Brahmins and princes the most stolid indifference to the most wonderful models of art and to their powers; previous experience was contradicted, but the observers were ignorant of the

laws

laws of nature. Were the sun to stand still, as it did on Gibeon, or the waters to part and stand on an heap, as at Jordan, the native would scarcely express surprise; and noting this characteristic in the Oriental mind, I have been less astonished at the hardness of heart of the ignorant and enslaved children of Israel, who, coming from making bricks under the taskmasters of Egypt, forgot the mighty wonders wrought for them, and murmured and wept for rest and water. As the subject of this paper is enlarged on, extended, considered, and illustrated, its matter must become more and more interesting, more and more valuable. Truth, past and present, forms its data; facts, that meet the Eastern traveller in his ordinary life path, form a mirror reflecting with wondrous brightness the mighty and most solemn things of ancient days, and afford proof that whatever industrious, intelligent, and wellinformed travellers may tell us of the present condition of the East, its manners and customs, we shall yet find the sacred Scriptures to be our most certain text-book, and one which tells us infinitely more, of all that was, and is, and ever shall be.

ON THE

DIFFERENT COMPUTATIONS OF THE FIRST TWO PERIODS IN THE BOOK OF GENESIS,

AND ON THE

CHRONOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS ON WHICH THEY ARE BASED.a

By DR. ERNST Bertheau,

Professor of Oriental Languages in the University of Göttingen.

Translated by JOHN NICHOLSON, B.A., Ph. D.

THE first two periods of history, which are very precisely defined in our present book of Genesis-on the authority of an ancient historical work of which it has made much use-embrace the intervals from the creation of the world to the great flood, and from the flood to Abraham's immigration into Palestine. Their chronological determination is almost exclusively dependent on the

a This Essay was read at a meeting of the "German Oriental Society," held at Darmstadt in 1845, and was then printed in the Society's Jahresbericht für 1845-6. I 2

data

data given in Gen. v. and xi., although some other passages in the first eleven chapters, which we will enumerate further on, must be adduced to complete the calculation, and to define the compass of the periods exactly. Now it is notorious that the statements in Gen. v. and xi. have come down to us under different shapes in the Hebrew and in the Samaritan texts, and in the version of the LXX. Christian chronologists-who from the earliest times laid the greatest stress on the numerical statements of the book of Genesis, because, as the data of a sacred book, they appeared to afford a firm basis on the unstable ground of the chronology of the whole of ancient history, and in the labyrinth of the many chronological numbers which nations, such as the Egyptians and Babylonians, for instance, have fixed independently of each other-have instituted numerous inquiries into the discrepancies in the different texts; and it would be profitable to give an account of them, but our space forbids it here. In recent times, in which the endeavour to make the dates of the Old Testament the basis for an exact chronology of the remotest periods, has taken a subordinate place, the purely critical question as to the superiority of the readings of one text to those of the others, has very much engaged the attention of the learned. Most of them, following the precedent of J. D. Michaelis, have decided that the numbers in the Hebrew are the most original, and, therefore, the most correct, on the ground that the numbers of the Samaritan text and of the LXX. betray systematic alterations, and do not agree with each other. Ewald is the only one who asserts that he by no means considers the. Hebrew text to be, throughout and without exception, the preferable one, and grounds his opinion-which he does not, however, further confirm -on a deviation of the Samaritan text and LXX. from the Hebrew, which, as is generally admitted, is likewise a consequence of systematic alteration, and which has hitherto been used as a proof of the superior correctness of the Hebrew text. The ques tion which text is superior, is by no means to be decided by those systematic alteration which have hitherto been pointed out on the ground of assumptions which appear at first sight correct: and the reason why they cannot, is this, because many discrepancies, and among them precisely those very important ones in the odd numbers in the case of Methuselah and Lamech, for instance, cannot be explained by them, as is evident to all who have studied these matters. All that was left for a man to do, who was unwilling arbitrarily to assume inadvertent alterations and errors in

b Geschichte des Volks Israel, i. 326.

writing,

writing, and to amend them according to his discretion, was candidly to admit that the enigma of the discrepancies had not yet been solved-an admission which I have never been reluctant to make. Nevertheless, I still entertained a hope that the problem might be solved; first, because the statements of numbers have fortunately been preserved to us in three different recensions, and indeed with scrupulous accuracy on the whole-for the testimonies of Josephus, Julius Africanus, Eusebius, and later chronologists, as well as the fact that all three recensions agree in most odd numbers, are our security for the safe tradition of the numbers for the space of nearly eighteen centuries; and, secondly, because the discrepancies were in part already considered to be the effect of systematic alterations: which fostered the encouraging presumption that a stricter investigation might succeed in explaining all discrepancies in the numbers, and in accordingly attaining a minute and sure knowledge of the chronological data and systems on which they depend. It is true that, if the chronological systems are discovered, the question as to the correctness of the numbers in one text or the other will lose its importance, since they may all, however different they may be, be right within their respective systems; and the only question that would still remain would be, which of the discovered systems deserves to be preferred before the others-which could hardly receive a positive answer.

The idea that the statements of numbers in the three recensions are based on different chronological systems, has not only recently occupied my mind: I am induced to pursue it at present, partly in consequence of the chronological investigations into which I have entered in my Commentary on the book of Judges, and partly by Bunsen's excellent work on Egypt's Position in the History of the World,' which, like all other really important historical inquiries, is distinguished, amidst other great merits, also by this, that it inspires courage in him who despaired of success in the elucidation of obscure problems, and cheers him on to venture a fresh effort with renewed energy. The present occasion only permits a brief statement of my researches: I hope it may exhibit the results in a clear and intelligible form.

FIRST PERIOD.

From Adam to the Flood.

It is necessary to give a tabular view of the numbers in the different recensions of the fifth chapter of Genesis. The first column constantly denotes the years before the birth of that son who carries on the genealogical series; the second column, the

remainder