thee. And I will make of thee a great nation." this town or village of Haran was, or where it was situated. What thread shall guide us in this labyrinth of conjectures and contradictions from the very first verse to the very last?-Resignation. The Holy Spirit did not intend to teach us chronology, metaphysics, or logic; but only to inspire us with the fear of God: since we can comprehend nothing, all that we can do is to submit. It is equally difficult to explain satis It is sufficiently evident from the text, hat Terah, having had Abraham at the age of seventy, died at that of two hundred and five; and Abraham, having quitted Chaldea immediately after the death of his father, was just one hundred and thirty-five years old when he left his country. This is nearly the opinion of St. Stephen, in his discourse to the Jews. But the Book of Genesis also saysfactorily how it was that Sarah, the wife "And Abraham was seventy and five of Abraham, was also his sister. Abrayears old when he departed out of ham says positively to Abimelech, king Haran." of Gerar, who had taken Sarah to himself on account of her great beauty, at the age of ninety, when she was pregnant of Isaac-"And yet indeed she is my sister; she is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my wife." This is the principal cause (for there are several others) of the dispute on the subject of Abraham's age. How could he be at once a hundred and thirty-five years and only seventy-five? St. Jerome and St. Augustine say that this difficulty is inexplicable. Father Calmet, who confesses that these two saints could not resolve the problem, thinks he does it, by saying that Abraham was the youngest of Terah's son's, although the Book of Genesis names him the first, and consequently as the eldest. According to Genesis, Abraham was born in his father's seventieth year: while, according to Calmet, he was born when his father was a hundred and thirty. Such a reconciliation has only been a new cause of controversy. Considering the uncertainty in which we are left by both text and commentary, the best we can do is to adore without disputing. There is no epoch in those ancient times which has not produced a multitude of different opinions. According to Moreri, there were in his day seventy systems of chronology founded on the history dictated by God himself. There have since appeared five new methods of reconciling the various texts of Scripture. Thus there are as many disputes about Abraham as the number of his years (according to the text) when he left Haran. And of these seventy-five systems, there is not one which tells us precisely what The old Testament does not inform us how Sarah was her husband's sister. Calmet, whose judgment and sagacity are known to every one, says that she might be his niece. With the Chaldeans it was probably no more an incest than with their neighbours the Persians. Manners change with times and with places; it may he supposed that Abraham, the son of Terah an idolater, was still an idolater when he married Sarah, whether Sarah was his sister or his niece. There are several Fathers of the Church who do not think Abraham quite so excusable, for having said to Sarah in Egypt. "It shall come to pass, when the Egyptians shall see thee, that they shall say, This is his wife; and they will kill me, but they will save thee alive. Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister, that it may be well with me for thy sake." She was then only sixty-five; since she had twentyfive years afterwards, the king of Gerar for a lover, it is not surprising that, when twenty-five years younger she had kindled some passion in Pharaoh of Egypt. Indeed she was taken away by him in the same manner as she was afterwards taken by Abimelech, the king of Gerar, in the desert. Abraham received presents at the court of Pharaoh, of many" sheep, and oxen, and he-asses, and men-servants, and maid-servants, and she-asses, and camels." These presents, which were considerable, prove that the Pharaohs had already become very great kings; the country of Egypt must therefore have been very populous. But to make the country inhabitable, and to build towns, it must have cost immense labour. It was necessary to construct canals for the purpose of dagining the waters of the Nile, which overflowed Egypt during four or five months of each year, and stagnated on the soil. It was also necessary to raise the town at least twenty feet above these canals. Works so considerable seem to have required thousands of ages. There were only about four hundred years betwixt the Deluge and the period at which we fix Abraham's journey into Egypt. The Egyptians must have been very ingenious and indefatigably laborious. since, in so short a time, they invented all the arts and sciences, set bounds to the Nile, and changed the whole face of the country. Probably they had already built some of the great Pyramids; for we see that the art of embalming the dead was in a short time afterwards brought to perfection; and the pyramids were only the tombs in which the bodies of their princes were deposited with the most august ceremonies. This opinion of the great antiquity of the pyramids receives additional countenance from the fact, that three hundred years earlier, or but one hundred years after the Hebrew epoch of the Deluge of Noah, the Asiatics had built, in the plain of Sennaar, a tower which was to reach to heaven. St. Jerome, in his commentary or Isaiah, says that this tower was already four thousand paces high, when God came down to stop the progress of the work. Let us suppose each pace to be two feet and a half; four thousand paces, then, are ten thousand feet; consequently the Tower of Babel was twenty times as high as the pyramids of Egypt, which are only about five hundred feet. But what a prodigious quantity of instruments must have been requisite to raise such an edifice! All the arts must have concurred in forwarding the work. Whence commentators conclude, that men of those times were incomparably larger, stronger, and more industrious than those of modern nations. So much may be remarked with respect to Abraham, as relating to the arts and sciences. With regard to his person, it is most likely that he was a man of considerable importance. The Chaldeans and the Persians each claim him as their own. The ancient religion of the Magi has, from time immemorial, been called Kish { Ibrahim, Milat Ibrahim; and it is agreed that the word Ibrahim is precisely the same with Abraham, nothing being more common amongst the Asiatics, who rarely write the vowels, than to change the i into a or the a into i in pronunciation. It has even been asserted that Abraham was the Brama of the Indians, and that their notions were adopted by the people of the countries near the Euphrates, who traded with India from time immemorial. The Arabs regarded him as the founder of Mecca. Mahommet, in his Koran, always viewed in him the most respectable of his predecessors. In his third sura or chapter, he speaks of him thus:"Abraham was neither Jew nor Christian: he was an orthodox Mussulman ; he was not of the number of those who imagine that God has colleagues." The temerity of the human understanding has even gone so far as to imagine that the Jews did not call themselves the descendants of Abraham until a very late period, when they had at last established themselves in Palestine. They were strangers, hated and despised by their neighbours. They wished, say some, to relieve themselves by passing for descendants of that Abraham who was so much reverenced in a great part of ABRAHAM. Asia. The faith which we owe to the sacred books of the Jews removes all these difficulties. Other critics, no less hardy, start other objections relative to Abraham's immediate communication with the Almighty, his battles, and his victories. said to be inconceivable that a strange who drove his flocks to graze in the neighbourhood of Sodom, should, with three hundred and eighteen keepers of sheep and oxen, beat a king of Persia, a king of Pontus, the king of Babylon, and the king of nations, and pursue them to DaThe Lord appeared to him after he mascus, which is more than a hundred went out of Egypt, and said, "Lift up miles from Sodom. Yet such a victory now thine eyes, and look from the place is not impossible, for we see other similar where thou art, northward and south-instances in those heroic times, when the ward, and eastward, and westward. For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever." The Lord, by a second oath, afterwards "from the river of promised him all Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates." The critics ask, how could God promise the Jews this immense country which they have never possessed? and how could God give to them for ever that small part of Palestine out of which they { have so long been driven?" arm of God was not shortened. Think of Gideon, who, with three hundred men, armed with three hundred pitchers and three hundred lamps, defeated a whole army! Think of Sampson, who slew a thousand Philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass! Even profane history furnishes like examples. Three hundred Spartans stopped, for a moment, the whole army of Xerxes, at the pass of Thermopylæ. It is true that, with the exception of one man who fled, they were all slain, together with their Again, the Lord added to these pro-king Leonidas, whom Xerxes had the mises, that Abraham's posterity should { baseness to gibbet, instead of raising to be as numerous as the dust of the earth-his memory the monument which it de"so that if a man can number the dust served. It is moreover true, that these of the earth, then shall thy seed also be three hundred Lacedæmonians, guarded a steep passage which would numbered." scarcely admit two men abreast, were supported by an army of ten thousand Greeks, distributed in advantageous posts among the rocks of Pelion and Ossa, four thousand of whom, be it observed, were stationed behind this very passage of Thermopylæ. Our critics insist that there are not now on the face of the earth four hundred thousand Jews, though they have always regarded marriage as a sacred duty, and made population their greatest object. To these difficulties it is replied, that the church, substituted for the synagogue, is the true race of Abraham, who are therefore very numerous. who These four thousand perished after a long combat. Having been placed in a situation more exposed than that of the It must be admitted that they do not three hundred Spartans, they may be said possess Palestine; but they may one day to have acquired more glory in defending possess it, as they have already con-it against the Persian army, which cut quered it once, in the first crusade, in the time of Urban II. In a word, when we view the Old Testament with the eyes of faith, as a type of the New, all either is or will be accomplished, and our weak reason must bow in silence. Fresh difficulties are raised respecting It is Abraham's victory near Sodom. are them all in pieces. Indeed, on the monu- the whole army of the archduke Leopold Jacob conquered only a very smal! coun of Austria, consisting of twenty thousand try, which they have lost; whereas the men. They destroyed the cavalry, by descendants of Ismael conquered part of } throwing down stones from a high rock:, Asia, of Europe, and of Africa, establishand gave time to fourteen hundred Hel-ed an empire more extensive than that of vetians to come up and finish the defeat the Romans, and drove the Jews from of the army. This achievement at Mor- their caverns, which they called The Land gat is more brilliant than that of Thermo- of Promise. pylæ, inasmuch as it is a finer thing to conquer than to be conquered. The Greeks amounted to ten thousand, well armed; and it was impossible that, in a mountainous country, they could have to encounter more than a hundred thousand Persians at once; it is more than probable that there were not thirty thousand Persians engaged. But here fourteen hundred Swiss defeat an army of twenty thousand men. The diminished proportion of the less to the greater number, also increases the proportion of glory. But, how far has Abraham led us? These digressions amuse him who makes and sometimes him who reads them. Besides, every one is delighted to see a great army beaten by a little one. SECTION II. Abraham is one of those names which were fan.ous in Asia Manor and Arabia, as Thaut was among the Egyptians, the first Zoroaster in Persia, Hercules in Greece, Orpheus in Thrace, Odin among the northern nations, and so many others, known more by their fame than by any authentic history. I speak here of profane history only; as for that of the Jews, our masters and our enemies, whom we at once detest and believe, their history having evidently been written by the Holy Ghost, we feel towards it as we ought to feel. We have to do here only with the Arabs. They boast of having descended from Abraham through Ismaël, believing that this patriarch built Mecca and died there. The fact is, that the race of Ismaël has been infinitely more favoured by God than that of Jacob. Both races, it is true, have produced robbers; but the Arabian obbers have been prodigiously superior to the Jewish ones; the descendants of Judging of things only by the examples to be found in our modern histories, it would be difficult to believe that Abraham had been the father of two nations so widely different. We are told that he was born in Chaldea, and that he was the son of a poor potter, who earned his bread by making little earthen idols. It is hardly likely that this son of a potter should have passed through impracticable desarts, and founded the city of Mecca, at the distance of four hundred leagues, under a tropical sun. If he was a conqueror, he doubtless cast his eyes on the fine country of Assyria. If he was no more than a poor man, he did not found kingdoms abroad. The Book of Genesis relates that he was seventy-five years old when he went out of the land of Haran after the death of his father Terah the potter; but the same book also tells us, that Terah, having begotten Abraham at the age of seventy years, lived to that of two hundred and five; and afterwards, that Abraham went out of Haran; which seems to signify, that it was after the death of his father. Either the author did not know how to dispose his narration, or it is clear from the Book of Genesis itself, that Abraham was one hundred and thirty-five years old when he quitted Mesopotamia. He went from a country which is called idolatrous, to another idolatrous country named Sichem, in Palestine. Why did he quit the fruitful banks of the Euphrates, for a spot so remote, so barren, and so stony as Sichem? It was not a place of trade, and was distant a hundred leagues from Chaldea, and deserts lay between. But God chose that Abraham should go this journey; he chose to show him the land which his descendants were to occupy several ages after him. It is with diffi- mentators have written a prodigious numculty that the human understanding com- ber of volumes to justify Abraham's conprehends the reasons for such a journey. duct, and to explain away the errors in Scarcely had he arrived in the little chronology. To these commentaries we mountainous country of Sichem, when must refer the reader; they are all comfamine compelled him to quit it. He posed by men of nice and acute percepwent into Egypt with his wife Sarah, totions, excellent metaphysicians, and by seek a subsistence. The distance from no means pedants. Sichem to Memphis is two hundred leagues. Is it natural that a man should go so far to ask for corn in a country, the language of which he did not under-sert, that he was the same legislator whom stand? Truly these were strange journies, undertaken at the age of nearly a hundred and forty years! He brought with him to Memphis his wife Sarah, who was extremely young, and almost an infant when compared with himself; for she was only sixty-five. { As she was very handsome, he resolved to turn her beauty to account. "Say, I pray thee, that thou art my sister, that it may be well with me for thy sake." He should rather have said to her, "Say, I pray thee, that thou art my daughter." The king fell in love with the young Sarah, and gave the pretended brother abundance of sheep, oxen, he-asses, sheasses, camels, men-servants and maidservants; which proves that Egypt was then a powerful, and well-regulated, and consequently an ancient kingdom, and that those were magnificently rewarded who came and offered their sisters to the kings of Memphis. The youthful Sarah was ninety years old when God promised her that, in the course of a year, she should have a child by Abraham, who was then a hundred and sixty. Abraham, who was fond of travelling, went into the horrible desert of Kadesh with his pregnant wife, ever young and ever pretty. A king of this desart was, of course, captivated by Sarah, as the king of Egypt had been. The father of the faithful told the same lie as in Egypt, making his wife pass for his sister; which brought him more sheep, oxen, men-servants, and maid-servants. It might be said that this Abraham became rich principally by the means of his wife. Com For the rest, this name of Bram, or Abram, was famous in Judea and in Persia. Several of the learned even as the Greeks called Zoroaster. Others say that he was the Brama of the Indians; which is not demonstrated. But it ap{pears very reasonable to many, that this Abraham was a Chaldean or a Persian; from whom the Jews afterwards boasted of having descended, as the Franks did of their descent from Hector, and the Britons from Tubal. It cannot be denied that the Jewish nation were a very modern horde; that they did not establish them-selves on the borders of Phoenicia until a very late period; that they were surround{ed by ancient states, whose language they adopted, receiving from them even the name of Israel, which is Chaldean, from the testimony of the Jew Flavius Josephus himself. We know that they took the names of the Angels from the Babylonians, and that they called God by the names of Eloi or Eloa, Adonai, Jehovah or Hiao, after the Phoenicians. It is probable that they knew the name of Abraham or Ibrahim only through the Babylonians; for the ancient religion of all the countries from the Euphrates to the Oxus was called Kish Ibrahim or Milat Ibrahim. This is confirmed by all the researches made on the spot by the learned Hyde. The Jews, then, treat their history and ancient fable as their clothes-men treat their old coats-they turn them and seli them for new at as high a price as possible. It is a singular instance of human stupidity, that weave so long considered the Jews as a tion which taught all others, while their historian Josephus himself confesses the contrary. It is difficult to penetrate the shades of |