math, and in Lebanon, and throughout all the land of his dominion. He made a navy of ships in Ezion-geber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red Sea, in the land of Edom. And he laid a tribute of bond-service upon the children of the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, which were left in the land, whom, as emphatically stated, the children of Israel were not able utterly to destroy.3 But neither in the reign of David nor Solomon were their enemies driven out before the children of Israel, whose proper bounds were still the same as at the time of the death of Joshua. For when the fullest limits, recorded in scriptural history, were assigned to the kingdom over which these monarchs reigned, it is added, as descriptive even of the farther glory of Solomon's reign, "and Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig-tree, from Dan even to Beersheba, all the days of Solomon." 4 יי The extent of the covenanted inheritance may therefore be seen not in the land of Israel of old, but in the dominion of Solomon, including all the lands of tributary kings, from the land of Hamath, its king in the number, to the shores of the Red Sea; and from the border of Egypt to the Euphrates, including all the kings on the west side of that river. But the borders of Judah and Israel, viz., Dan and Beersheba, within which the children of Israel dwelt in safety, were not the borders of Solomon's dominion; and no more are they the borders of Israel's decreed and destined inheritance. The terms of the Abrahamic covenant rise far higher than the record of Solomon's reign. In them there is no word of nations that should not be driven out; nor of any other ! 2 Chron. viii. 3-6. 2 1 Kings ix. 26. 2 Chron. viii. 17. kingdom than that of Israel alone, from the river of Egypt to the river Euphrates. But the sovereignty which he exercised over all the kingdoms of his dominion, reaching to the heaven-appointed borders, give a practical illustration of the extent of the inheritance of Israel, whenever, in the completion of the covenant, all these countries shall be the land of their possession. David and Solomon acknowledged no other "borders" than the border of Egypt, the Euphrates, the Red Sea, and Hamath: and none who 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 inheri tance, 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,1 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 formed 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 (D ), in a single instance in the Septuagint, into Rhinocorura (Pivoxogougos), seemed to give warrant for the opinion to which it gave rise, that a river or stream near 1 Ezek. xlvii. 13, 14. 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."1 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.2 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. Amidst 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 sea-shore, 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 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 con 2 1 Shaw's Travels, Supplement, pp. 23, 24. See APPENDIX I. Strabo, cap. 17, tom. ii. p. 1138, ed. Falcon. firms 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 Cassius (bordering on Egypt) on the Sirbonic lake. Strabo relates that the whole country betwixt 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." For Nahal the Jewish interpreters read the Nile. 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 self-same river. According to Pliny, Solinus, and Dionysius, the Nile was called 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 1 Nahal torrens pro Nilo accipitur, ut in scriptura passim. Num. 34.5 pro Hebræo Nahal, b, legitur Nilus □ in Jonathane et Jerosolymitano interprete, atque hinc Nili nominis origo certissima est. Bochart, iii. 764. |