kinsman, will I require the life of man.

Whoso shed

deth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for after his [own] image God made man. Be ye then fruitful, and multiply, and increase upon the earth, and fill it. 8 And God spake unto Noah and his sons with him: 9 Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your seed 10 after you, and with every living creature with you, birds

Verse 6.-[The custom of sanguinary revenge in cases of homicide was universal among the ancient nations of Palestine, which is shown in the fear entertained by Jacob of the vengeance of the Canaanites after the murder of the Hivite princes. (Gen. xxxiv. 30, and xxxv. 5.) It was however in the power of the king to restrain the avenger of blood; and of this an example is given in 2 Samuel, xiv. 11, when David solemnly swears to the widow of Tekoah that the life of her surviving son, who had murdered his brother, shall be spared. The same monarch subsequently becomes reconciled to his own son Absalom, who had been exiled from the royal presence for five years on account of the murder of his brother Ammon. (2 Samuel, xiv. 33.) Such instances of royal authority seem to prove that the Hebrew custom of vengeance for blood was merely an old established usage which had been widely diffused in the East, and that the declaration in the text may not have been known in the time of David. At a later period, when the mild tenets of Christianity were beginning to be promulgated, Josephus softened down the severity of this traditionary command, by representing the Deity as requiring, that Noah and his descendants should "abstain from shedding the blood of man, and keep themselves pure from murder, and that they should punish those that committed any such thing."-Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, i. 3. 8.]

Verse 10.--Lěkol-Mikkol is always to be interpreted in the simplest manner, with Vater and Schumann, as well......as also; for it applies not only to the present, but also to all living beings through futurity (from all—to all).

VOL. II.

L

and cattle, and all beasts of the earth with you: from all that have gone out of the ark, to all animals of 11 the earth. And I establish my covenant with you, that all flesh shall not perish any more by the waters of the flood, neither shall there any more be a flood to 12 destroy the earth. And God said, This is the token

of the covenant which I make between me and you 13 and every living creature with you for ever: I set my bow in the clouds, and it is for a token of the cove14 nant between me and the earth. And when I gather the clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the

Verses 13-17.—The appointment of the Rainbow as a sign from God, promising reconciliation and peace to man, is narrated with the utmost simplicity, which renders it the more forcible and striking. The fundamental idea is the same as in the Hindoo myth: Indras, the god of the firmament (who may be compared to Jupiter), encounters the heaven-storming Asuras (the Titans and Giants) with storms and torrents of rain: like the son of Saturn, he bends his bow (Indrayudha), and discharges from it his arrows of lightning; after which he lays the bow aside as a sign of peace1. It may also be remarked that this physical myth is partly founded upon actual observation, inasmuch as the rain ceases when a full rainbow appears. In Homer, Iris is a messenger of the gods (and eipývn, peace, is connected with the name); but at the same time it is a sign of war and of winterstorms3. A close parallel to the Hebrew occurs in the Iliad, xi. 27, where the rainbow is set in the cloud as a sign to the human race : Ιριδες......ᾶς τε Κρονίων

Ἐν νέφεϊ στήριξε, τερας μερόπων ἀνθρώπων,

and there is a resemblance between Elohim, gathering together the clouds, and the cloud-gathering Jupiter (repeλnyepéτns Zeus).

1 See Alt. Indien, i. 237.

2 From ipid-s, compare îritâ, 'the sent one' (fem.). 3 Iliad xvii. 547.

15 clouds, then I [will] remember my covenant between me and you and all living souls in all flesh, that the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. 16 And when the bow is in the clouds, then I shall see it in remembrance of the everlasting covenant between God and between all living souls in all flesh that [is] 17 upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, This is the token of the covenant which I establish between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.

18

And the sons of Noah that went out of the ark were

Verses 18-29.-In these verses a curse is pronounced upon Canaan, because their patriarch Ham had witnessed the nakedness of his drunken father. This episode leads on to the tenth chapter', and hence Astrük, Ilgen, and Eichhorn have connected it directly with the genealogical tables in that chapter. The name of the Deity is here Jehovah; and the object of this portion is clearly shown, as in the fourth chapter, to be purely Israelitish; its only intent being to impose the curse of the patriarch [Noah] upon a kindred and neighbouring people [the Canaanites], and to claim his blessing [in the person of Shem] for their own nation.

The name of Canaan 2 was frequently applied to the primitive races of Palestine in general, all of which spoke the Semitic language, as the language of Canaan3; but this name was first extended by the important race of the Phoenicians, who possessed the low country at the foot of Lebanon. From the Phoenician people the name retained the signification of merchant1; and as Isaiah (xxiii. 11.), in addressing Tyre and Sidon, employs the

1 Compare verse 19 with x. 5.

2 Kena'an, properly the low-land [west of Jordan], contrasted with the mountainous district of Gilead and the high-land of Syria, Aram, in general; see Rosenmüller, Handbuch der Bibl. Alterth. ii. 1. p. 76.

3 Isaiah xix. 18. Gesenius, Geschichte der Hebr. Sprache (History of the Hebrew Language), p. 16.

4" Tyre, whose merchants [kincaneyha] are princes," Isaiah xxiii. 8; Job xli. 6. [Ezek. xvii. 4.]

Shem, Ham and Japheth, and Ham is the father of Ca19 naan. These are the three sons of Noah, and by them 20 has the whole earth been peopled. And Noah began

special name of Canaan for the Phoenicians, so here likewise this people are alone designated; for it is not until afterwards that the author narrates similar invidious legends with reference to the other principal races and kindred neighbouring nations,-— such as the Ishmaelites (chap. 16), the Moabites and Ammonites (chap. 19), and the Edomites (chap. 25); and he expressly designates Sidon as the first-born of Canaan the son of Ham2. According to Herodotus however3 the Phoenicians were supposed to have migrated from the Red Sea; but the same author also informs us that the Persians dwelt on the Red Sea1; for the Mare Erythræum (Edom, the red) included the whole south sea", especially southward from the Persian Gulf, where Phoenician colonies always remained. The Phoenicians probably retained their name from that sea, from poivik, red, as well as the Edomites, and not from the palm-tree or from their trade in purple dye and scarlet mantles7. They were considered by the Hebrews as foreigners, and were not supposed to have been descended from Shem, for they are purposely included in the generation of Ham; but this is a specimen of Hebrew exclusiveness, which seeks in vain to deny the affinity [of the two nations], especially when the purely Hebraic inscriptions of the Phoenicians are taken into account.

Verse 20.-It is well known that the finest vines grow over the whole of the Caucasus, and frequently in a wild state, so abundantly indeed that in some parts the trees throughout whole

1 "Jehovah hath given a commandment against Canaan.”—Isaiah xxiii. 11. '(Luther's translation)," the merchant city," (common version).

2 Gen. x. 6, 15.

4 Herod. iv. 37.

6 See Michaelis, Spicileg. i. 166.

3 Herod. i. 1; vii. 89.

5 See Rosenmüller, iii. 99.

7 As Böttiger says, in his Andeut. zu einer Kunstmythol. (Notes for a Mythology of Art) p. 343.

8 Gen. x. 6, 15.

21 to be a husbandman and planted a vineyard. Then he drank of the wine and became drunken and uncovered 22 himself in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told it to his two

forests are covered with vines'. The Grecian mythology also transfers hither the scene of the legend of Dionysus (or Bacchus), and our author evidently connects with his narrative a similar myth; but in this, as in other instances of national ill-will by the same author, the introduction of the fiction is forced and is awkwardly carried out. Apart from the insipid account of the drunkenness of Noah, the writer is obliged, even in verse 18, to remind the reader that Ham is the father of Canaan; he has to repeat this emphatically in verse 22; he afterwards draws attention (v. 24) to the circumstance of Ham being younger than Shem; and then all at once he pronounces a curse upon the descendants of Ham (verse 25), for the trifling and unintentional transgression of their father. This is told in such a forced manner, that the old translators deemed it necessary to correct the narrative: seven manuscripts of the Septuagint represent the curse as being pronounced on Ham, and Saadias puts it down as directed against Abu Kana'an (the father of Canaan). Ilgen? interprets it to imply the unhappiness which Ham must have felt at foreseeing the misery of his descendants. This idea however, as well as every alteration of the text, is opposed to the meaning of the prophetical and political myth, the full explanation of which is contained in the curse itself. The exhortation to Shem (i. e. to the descendants of Shem as a people, to whom the poetical expression lamo, to them, in the plural also refers,) derives its principal force from the praise of Jehovah who blessed him. The wish subsequently expressed that God, their own God, Elohim, may "enlarge" the descendants of Japheth3, alludes to the wide

1 See Elphinstone, Kabul, i. 409; Sprengel, Histor. Rei Herbariæ, i. 40; Bujack, Die Geogr. Verbreitung des Weinstocks, in den Vorträgen aus dem Gebiete der Naturwissenschaften: Königsb. 1834, p. 46; Alt. Indien, i. 143. 2 Urkunden, i. 35. 3 See Introduction to Chapter X.