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The French are like the Israelites in the Wilderness, when, according to a Hebrew tradition, every morning they seemed on the verge of Pisgah, and every evening they were as far from it as ever. But still time rolls on, the pilgrimage draws to its close, and the Canaan must come at last! At Valerie's house, Maltravers once more met the De Montaignes.
I know well that our Christ-worshipers consider it a lack of intelligence to accept literally the promises and prophecies as they are expressed; they reject the literal and natural sense of the words, to give them a mystical and spiritual sense which they call allegorical and figurative; claiming, for example, that the people of Israel and Judea, to whom these promises were made, were not understood as the Israelites after the body, but the Israelites in spirit: that is to say, the Christians which are the Israel of God, the true chosen people that by the promise made to this enslaved people, to deliver it from captivity, it is understood to be not the corporal deliverance of a single captive people, but the spiritual deliverance of all men from the servitude of the Devil, which was to be accomplished by their Divine Saviour; that by the abundance of riches, and all the temporal blessings promised to this people, is meant the abundance of spiritual graces; and finally, that by the city of Jerusalem, is meant not the terrestrial Jerusalem, but the spiritual Jerusalem, which is the Christian Church.
But Moses would not yield so soon, and said to his father-in-law: "If thou dost not accompany us as a favor, I will command thee to do so, that the Israelites might not say thou hadst been converted to our religion only in the expectation of receiving a share in the promised land, but hadst returned to thy home when thou didst discover that proselytes have no claim on property in the Holy Land.
The stela of Meneptah, on which the name of "Israelites" occurs, implies that they had already been lost to sight in the desert. The other nationalities over whom Meneptah is said to have triumphed all have the term "country" attached to their names; the "Israelites" alone are without local habitation.
Hiram's friendly dealings with David and Solomon are well known; but the continued alliance between the Phoenicians and the Israelites has attracted less attention.
"Oh! it would not have signified if the children had been good for anything, but all their mothers were out at work, and, of those that did come, hardly one had learned their lessons Willy Blake had lost his spelling-card; Anne Harris kicked Susan Pope, and would not say she was sorry; Mary Hale would not know M from N, do all our Mary would; and Jane Taylor, after all the pains I have taken with her, when I asked how the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, seemed never to have heard of them."
Now when the Israelites saw this, they fell down upon the ground, and worshipped one God, and called him The great and the only true God; but they called the others mere names, framed by the evil and vile opinions of men. So they caught their prophets, and, at the command of Elijah, slew them.
They marched round the city carrying the ark, the priests blowing their trumpets; and on the seventh day they marched round seven times. The last time, when the priests blew their trumpets, the people shouted with a great shout, and the walls of the city fell down flat. Then the Israelites went up and took possession of it. Thus God delivered Jericho into the hands of His people.
Dogs were held in considerable veneration by the Egyptians, from whose tyranny the Israelites had just escaped. Herodotus, speaking of the sanctity in which some animals were held by the Egyptians, says that the people of every family in which a dog died, shaved themselves their expression of mourning and he adds, that "this was a custom existing in his own time."
But how to make him realise this, is the puzzle. Do you remember how the Israelites were shut in, between Migdol and the sea?
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