XXIII. COMMUNICATION OF NEWS IN ANCIENT TIMES

Some circumstances in the history of Balak and Balaam supply me with another argument for the veracity of the Pentateuch. But before I proceed to those which I have more immediately in my eye, I would observe, that the simple fact of a King of Moab knowing that a Prophet dwelt in Mesopotamia, in the mountains of the East, a country so distant from his own, in itself supplies a point of harmony favouring the truth and reality of the narrative. For I am led by it to remark this, that very many hints may be picked up in the writings of Moses, all concurring to establish one position, viz. that there was a communication amongst the scattered inhabitants of the earth in those early times, a circulation of intelligence, scarcely to be expected, and not easily to be accounted for. Whether the caravans of merchants, which, as we have seen, traversed the deserts of the East—whether the unsettled and vagrant habits of the descendants of Ishmael and Esau, which singularly fitted them for being the carriers of news, and with whom the great wilderness was alive—whether the pastoral life of the Patriarchs, and of those who more immediately sprang from them, which led them to constant changes of place in search of herbage—whether the frequent petty wars which were waged amongst lawless neighbours—whether the necessary separation of families, the parent hive casting its little colony forth to settle on some distant land, and the consequent interest and curiosity which either branch would feel for the fortunes of the other—whether these were the circumstances that encouraged and maintained an intercourse among mankind in spite of the numberless obstacles which must then have opposed it, and which we might have imagined would have intercepted it altogether; or whether any other channels of intelligence were open of which we are in ignorance, sure it is, that such intercourse seems to have existed to a very considerable extent. Thus Abraham had a servant, Eliezer, whose ancestors were of Damascus [Gen. 15:2, 3.] , Thus, far as Abraham was removed from the branch of his family which remained in Mesopotamia, “it came to pass that it was told him, saying, Behold, Milcah, she hath also born children unto thy brother Nahor;” and their names are then added [Gen. 22:20.] . In like manner Isaac and Rebekah appear in their turn to have known that Laban had marriageable daughters [Gen. 28:2.] ;—and Jacob, when he came back to Canaan after his long sojourn in Haran, seems to have known that Esau was alive and prosperous, and that he lived at Seir, whither he sent a message to him [Gen. 32:3.] ;—and Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, who went with her to Canaan on her marriage, is found many years afterwards in the family of Jacob, for she dies in his camp as he was returning from Haran [Gen. 35:8.] , and therefore must have been sent back again meanwhile, for some purpose or other, from Canaan to Haran;—and at Elim, in the desert, the Israelites discover twelve wells of water and threescore and ten palms, the numbers, no doubt, not accidental, but indicating that some persons had frequented this secluded spot acquainted with the sons and grandsons of Jacob [Exod. 15:27.] ;—and Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, is said “to have heard of all that God had done for Moses and for Israel his people.” [Exod. 18:1.] And when Moses, on his march, sends a message to Edom, it is worded, “thou knowest all the travail that hath befallen us—how our fathers went down into Egypt, and we have dwelt in Egypt a long time;” [Num. 20:15.] together with many more particulars, all of which Moses reckons matters of notoriety to the inhabitants of the desert. And on another occasion he speaks of “their having heard that the Lord was among his people, that he was seen by them face to face, that his cloud stood over them, and that he went before them by day-time in a pillar of cloud, and in a pillar of fire by night.” [Num. 14:14.] And this may, in fact, account for the vestiges of so many laws which we meet with throughout the East, even in this very early period, as held in common—and the many just notions of the Deity, mixed up, indeed, with much alloy, which so many nations possessed in common—and the rites and customs, whether civil or sacred, to which in so many points they conformed in common. Now all these unconnected matters hint at this one circumstance, that intelligence travelled through the tribes of the Desert more freely and rapidly than might have been thought, and the consistency with which the writings of Moses imply such a fact (for they neither affirm it, nor trouble themselves about explaining it) is a feature of truth in those writings.