ites. It is almost inconceivable that the historian in Exodus should not have made special mention of the fact if the king himself had been drowned. The only passage that seems to intimate such a thing is the brief poetical resumé of Psalm cxxxvi., where in verse 15 the poet says that Jehovah "overthrew (Hebrew, 'shook off') Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea." But if a poet of modern times were to say that Napoleon Bonaparte and his army were overthrown at Waterloo, or that General Lee and his army were overthrown at Appomattox, we should not understand that in either case the commander himself lost his life; and the point we make is not affected by the fact that the word used in the poetic statement before us contains a suggestion of the precise manner in which the charioteers were "overthrown."

Mariette, in his Outlines of Ancient Egyptian History, says, p. 49: "A papyrus in the Berlin Museum states that Merneptah lost a son by a very sudden death. He appears to have been a great coward and very cruel. Lenormant says of him: 'He was neither a soldier nor an administrator, but a man whose whole mind turned upon sorcery and magic.' The probability is, that Merneptah himself did not take the field on this occasion."

(3), The only remaining objection to the identification of Merneptah as the Pharaoh of the exodus is a chronological one, viz., that if we place the exodus so late, it leaves too short a period for the age of the judges. The objection is answered by Professor Petrie as follows:

"By astronomical festivals the reign of Merneptah is fixed at about 1200 B. C. as its middle point; that the history of the Egyptian kings between him and Shishak well agrees with this date within a few years; that the genealogies of the Levites agree also within a few years of the same interval; and that the history of the judges, when carefully separated into its triple strands of north, west, and east, shows a complete history of each division of the country, covering just about the same period as indicated by each of the other methods. We are thus led to see that there is nothing inconsistent with history in placing the exodus under Merneptah, as is usually supposed; and that so there remains no difficulty in accepting the obvious conclusion that the last Egyp

tian raid was over before the twelve tribes entered Palestine in a

body."

This question of the chronology is a thorny one which we cannot now discuss. It is worthy of notice that if we adopt this view of the date of the exodus, to-wit, that it occurred early in Merneptah's reign, when the northern allies of the Libyans from the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean Sea were pushing their devastating way into Palestine, we have a natural explanation of the statement that God did not lead Israel by the way of the land of the Philistines, though it was near, lest they should repent when they saw war and return to Egypt. (Ex. xiii. 17.) "To proceed straight to Canaan by the beaten track would have been to run the risk of encountering there these moving hordes, or of jostling against the Egyptian troops, who still garrisoned the strongholds of the Shephelah," or were being recalled to reinforce the army of defence in the delta. These sea-peoples from the north "gave a fatal shock to the influence of the Hittites, and began a series of devastating attacks on the flourishing communities of the Canaanites, which, probably, contributed more than anything else to the anarchy that afterwards rendered that people unable to make successful combined opposition to the invading Israelites." Their first fierce attack upon Egypt in company with the Libyans was repulsed, as we have seen, by Merneptah, but "the energy of the Egyptian power seemed to exhaust itself in the effort. The throne fell into the hands of usurpers, and the house of Rameses was swept away by civil war and anarchy."

1

Such being the conditions in Egypt during the period of the wilderness wanderings of Israel, it is not difficult to see why there should have been no protracted and destructive war made by the Egyptians upon the escaped Hebrews.3

One campaign in Syria, however, or rather one raid, was made about the close of their wanderings, by Rameses III., "the last of the conquering Pharaohs."

'Maspero, Struggle of the Nations, p. 444.

2 McCurdy, Hist., Proph. and the Mon., Vol. I., p. 203.

3 "The Egyptians, indeed, absorbed in their civil discords, or in wars with foreign nations, soon forgot their escaped slaves."-Musp., p. 448.

The campaign of Rameses III. in Syria was "little more than a raid, but it left no permanent results behind it, and all traces of Egyptian authority disappeared with the departure of the Pharaoh's army. Canaan remained the prey of the first resolute invader who had strength and courage at his back."

This article, of course, is tentative, as we said before when writing of this inscription in another place. As it was discovered only last year, and as the exact meaning of its most important passage is still in dispute, it may seem premature to make any use of it at this time. But, while we cannot yet speak positively, it has seemed not improper to show that the most probable interpretation of it may be made to dovetail with that scheme of the history which is now adopted by nearly all Egyptologists. Whether our attempted adjustment of this new matter to the knowledge we already possess be accepted or not, it seems increasingly probable that the exodus from Egypt and the conquest of Canaan took place in the declining period of the nineteenth dynasty, since it was only then that all three of the indispensable conditions of their occurrence seem to be found. Those conditions were: (1), A time later than the Syrian campaigns of the Pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, since, if the exodus had taken place before those campaigns, there must have been some mention of them in the Hebrew records, as well as some mention of the Hebrews in the Egyptian records, whereas there is neither; (2), Political disturbance and military weakness in Egypt; and (3), Division, disorganization, and disharmony in Canaan, and no single strong power in possession there to repel an invasion. W. W. MOORE.

Union Theological Seminary in Virginia.

II. THE DIATESSARON OF TATIAN, AND ITS EVIDENTIAL VALUE.'

THE fact that a popular monthly magazine has lately contained an article on the question, "When Were the Gospels Written?": is significant. Such themes are not generally discussed in these purveyors of pleasant pabulum for the palates of the lovers of light reading; and the publication of a discussion of this sort through this sort of a medium is a very sure indication that such questions are now "in the air," and that the general public are feeling a keen interest in them. The time has been when the words "genuineness and authenticity" have made theological classes yawn, and many a one, apparently, would have been perfectly willing to leave the discussion of the subject in which these terms were employed to the dry-asdust professors of Evidences, while he gave his energies to the investigation of living themes and the acquisition of practical knowledge. Now, all this is changed, and questions like this are the questions of the hour. Why is it that while, in a past generation, Horne's Introduction, with its facsimiles of old manuscripts and its endless discussions about them, was the bète noir of the theological student, in our day, facsimiles of Syriac Gospels and so-called 'Logia' are found on the pages of our most popular daily newspapers and magazines, while discussions about them are eagerly read, not only by theologians, but by that great mass of the public, to the individuals composing which we give the

1"The Diatessaron of Tatian," by Rev. Hope W. Hogg, B. D., in the recently published volume (ix.) of The Ante-Nicene Fathers; Allan Menzies, D. D., editor. Original supplement to the American edition. Christian Literature Company, New York. 1896. "The 'Diatessaron' of Tatian," Walter R. Cassels, Nineteenth Century, April, 1895. "The Diatessaron: A Reply," J. Rendel Harris, Contemporary Review, August, 1895. Articles on Tatian, by M. Maher, in The Month, London, November and December, 1892. A resumé of these two articles of Maher first called the writer's attention to this subject, and he is indebted to them for many interesting facts.

"By F. G. Kenyon, M. A., assistant keeper of the manuscripts in the British Museum, in McClure's Magazine, September, 1897.

name of "the general reader"? The answer to the question is that, as the president of Princeton University has impressively said, "The question of the day is, What is the Bible?" But a further question is, How did it come about that this is the question of the day? The answer to this is, that the hosts of unbelief have made a combined attack on the Bible, such as scarcely any other age has ever witnessed. The unprecedented development of human knowledge in our nineteenth century, especially as regards the physical facts and potencies of the world we live in, the great achievements of discovery and invention, and the overturning of so many old theories and beliefs about these things, seem to have set in motion a skeptical, revolutionary process of overturning and investigation in all other departments of knowledge. The result, in the case of a vast multitude of the writers and readers of our day, is something like an "eclipse of faith," and many have been in the habit of speaking of the simple and happy faith of the days of our fathers and grandfathers as a thing utterly unattainable by the well-informed of our times. However dark, cold, and cheerless may be the way of the skeptic, and however painful the chill about the heart of the orphaned unbeliever, their lot seems to be regarded as one of the inevitable results of that disillusionment which comes from the letting in of modern light.

The combined influence of Darwinism' and Higher Criticism is undoubtedly responsible for this questioning of the truth and divine origin of the Scriptures; but while these two great movements have promoted the growth of skepticism about the Bible in general as a revelation from God, four men, two of them Germans, another a Frenchman, and the fourth an Englishman— or, at least, an English writer who wrote anonymously, have made an attack upon the central shrine of divine truth, the Gospels which give us those facts about Christ which form the basis of the Christian's hope. Strauss, Baur, Renan, and the unknown author of Supernatural Religion, all striving to eliminate the supernatural from the Christian religion, have, perhaps, done most to bring about this state of mind in a part of the reading public and among the writers of our time.

1The writer uses the term "Darwinism" as a popular name for atheistic evolution.