"A "TIME' in the Book of Daniel and in the Revelation signifies as many years as there were days in the Hebrew year, viz., 360.”—Gaussen on Daniel. See also "Smith's Dictionary of the Bible," Art. Year. RESURRECTION OF LANGUAGES. 25 CHAPTER II. THE CRADLE OF NATIONS. DISINTERMENT OF LANGUAGES-WITHSTANDING MOSES-OUR LORD'S WIT- PIRE-URUKH-CHEDORLAOMER-HAMITIC AND SEMITIC RACES-THE T is by the discovery, disinterment, and deciphering within the last ten years, of dead languages (languages which lived before Greek and Latin became the spoken tongues of the civilized world), that we are carried back to cities and peoples whose names are found in the earliest records of our race after the Flood. We have too seldom considered the relatively great space of time, of which the Bible gives account, and no other book is left to tell, of the years before the Flood. Nor do we often realize how much of the history of those years and their deeds—the deeds of the antediluvian "giants," and "men of renown -came down to the new era of the world, through the memories of the family "saved in the ark." دو We are not left, however, to the traditions of men on this subject; for while these must have existed, and also in the course of time must have died away, there remains to us one brief, grand, inspired record. 26.* DIVINE REVELATIONS. The Creator and the Destroyer of that elder race, whose wickedness was great in the earth, Gen. vi. 5,“ made known his ways unto Moses," and left it to the "perilous times" of the "last days" (Are they not these on which we ourselves have fallen?) for men to "resist the truth" (see 2 Tim. iii. 8), and withstand Moses, as Jannes and Jambres (the supposed magicians of Egypt) "withstood" him of old. Singular to say, it is also written, "But they shall proceed no further, for their folly shall be manifest unto all men as their's also was.' "" The shadows of doubt may surely depart with the divinely-inspired testimony, the assurance of the Lord to Joshua, "As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee," Josh. i. 5-with our Saviour's record of Abraham's witness to the souls in prison, who desired a messenger to be sent to those still in the flesh, "They have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them," Luke xvi. 29; and with the narrative of His walk with the disciples to Emmaus, when "beginning at Moses and the prophets, Christ expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself," Luke xxiv. 27. Did our Lord in that favoured interview go back to the first majestic announcement of the ways of God to man? "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The apostle John opens his Gospel by declaring, "The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made." This is the account of the creation laid up in the apostolic archives, and where could John have had it but from his Master? Were Cleopas and his privileged companion told of the hour when the foundations of the earth were laid (Job xxxviii. 4), “when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy ?" Did the Great THE ANTEDILUVIANS. 27 Teacher explain to His devout listeners the mighty contrast, and span for them the outline of the ages from the Creation to the Cross? Oh, what an exposition was then given by God himself to man! and such converse must some time be repeated with every soul that shall be taught to sing "the song of Moses and the Lamb." THE ANTEDILUVIANS. For 1656 years the Lord bore with the sins of the Antediluvians; preserving to Himself a holy line in the posterity of Adam's third son, Seth, who are said to have "lived by faith" (see Heb. xi.), and the duration of whose individual and successive histories furnishes us with the chronology of the period from the day that Adam stood before the Lord "a living soul.” In the seventh century after Adam, there arose his seventh lineal descendant, Enoch, of whom it is said that after a life of 365 years (during which "he walked with God") "he was not, for God took him." Enoch, though living in that early period, is said by Jude to have had committed to him a prophecy, that, like those of Paul and Peter, concerned "the last days," and the second coming of Christ, "with ten thousand of His saints, to execute judgment upon the ungodly for the hard speeches which ungodly men have spoken against Himself." The veiled intimations of a future Redeemer and a future Judge must therefore have been the theme of converse in the antediluvian age,, to which, indeed, judgment first came. 1656 years are less merely by about two hundred than the era of time that seems to us, the children of a modern day, so lengthened since the birth of our Lord |