Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

VICTORY OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY METHODS. 375
tens, throwing much light on the manner in which the sacred
chronicles of ancient nations were generally developed.
These scholars have also found that the legends of the
plagues of Egypt are in the main but natural exaggerations
of what occurs ; every year as, for example, the changing of
the water of the Nile into blood evidently suggested by the
phenomena exhibited every summer, when, as various eminent
scholars, and, most recent of all, Maspero and Sayce, tell
us, " about the middle of July, in eight or ten days the river
turns from grayish blue to dark red, occasionally of so intense
a colour as to look like newly shed blood." These
modern researches have also shown that some of the most
be recon-
important features in the legends can not possibly
ciled with the records of the monuments ;
for example, that
the Pharaoh of the Exodus was certainly not overwhelmed
in the Red Sea. As to the supernatural features of the Hebrew
relations with Egypt, even the most devoted apologists
have become discreetly silent.
Egyptologists have also translated for us the old Nile
story of The Two Brothers, and have shown, as we have
already seen, that one of the most striking parts of our sa-
have been
cred Joseph legend was drawn from it ; they
obliged to admit that the story of the exposure
of Moses in
the basket of rushes, his rescue, and his subsequent greatness,
had been previously told-, long before Moses's time,
not only of King Sargon, but of various other great person-
of the ancient world they have published plans of
ages ;
Egyptian temples and copies of the sculptures upon their
walls, revealing the earlier origin of some of the most striking
features of the worship and ceremonial claimed to have
been revealed especially to the Hebrews; they have found
in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and in various inscriptions
of the Nile temples and tombs, earlier sources of much in
the ethics so long claimed to have been revealed only to the
chosen people in the Book of the Covenant, in the ten commandments,
and elsewhere ; they have given to the world
copies of the Egyptian texts showing that the theology of
the Nile was one of various fruitful sources of later ideas,
statements, and practices regarding the brazen serpent, the
golden calf, trinities, miraculous conceptions, incarnations,