Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

FROM THE DIVINE ORACLES TO THE HIGHER CRITICISM.
376
resurrections, ascensions, and the like, and that Egyptian
sacro-scientific ideas contributed to early Jewish and Chris-
tian sacred literature statements, beliefs, and even phrases
regarding the Creation, astronomy, geography, magic, medicine,
diabolical influences, with a multitude of other ideas,
which we also find coming into early Judaism in greater or
less degree from Chaldean and Persian sources.
But Egyptology, while thus aiding to sweep away the
former conception of our sacred books, has aided biblical
criticism in making them far more precious ; for it has shown
them to be a part of that living growth of sacred literature
whose roots are in all the great civilizations of the past, and
through whose trunk and branches are flowing
the currents
which are to infuse a higher religious and ethical life into the
civilizations of the future.*
* For general statements of agreements and disagreements between biblical ac
counts and the revelations of the Egyptian monuments, see Sayce, The Higher
Criticism and the Monuments, especially chap. iv. For discrepancies between the
Hebrew sacred accounts of Jewish relations with Egypt and the revelations of mod-
ern Egyptian research, see Sharpe, History of Egypt ; Flinders Petrie, History of
Egypt ;
and especially Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of Civilization in Egypt and
Chaldea, London, published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,
1894. For the statement regarding the Nile, that about the middle of July " in
eight or ten days it turns from grayish blue to dark red, occasionally of so intense a
colour as to look like newly shed blood," see Maspero and Sayce, as above, p. 23.
For the relation of the Joseph legend to the Tale of Two Brothers, see Sharpe and
others cited. For examples of exposure of various great personages of antiquity in
their childhood, see G. Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, Sayce's edition, p. 320.
For the relation of the Book of the Dead, etc., to Hebrew ethics, see a striking pas-
sage in Huxley's essay on The Evolution of Theology, also others cited in this chap-
ter. As to trinities in Egypt and Chaldea, see Maspero and Sayce, especially pp.
104-106, 175, and 659-663. For miraculous conception and birth of sons of Ra,
ibid., pp. 388, 389. For ascension of Ra into heaven, ibid., pp. 167, 168 ; for
resurrections, see ibid., p. 695, also representations in Lepsius, Prisse d'Avenues, et
al. ; and for striking resemblance between Egyptian and Hebrew ritual and wor-
ship, and especially the ark, cherubim, ephod, Urim and Thummim, and wave offer-
ings, see the same, passim. For a very full exhibition of the whole subject, see
Renan, Histoire du Peuple Israel, vol. i, chap. xi. For Egyptian and Chaldean ideas
in astronomy, out of which Hebrew ideas of " the firmament," " pillars of heaven,"
etc., were developed, see text and engravings in Maspero and Sayce, pp. 17 and 543.
For creation of man out of clay by a divine being in Egypt, see Maspero and Sayce,
p. 154 ; for a similar idea in Chaldea, see ibid., p. 545 ; and for the creation of the
universe by a word, ibid., pp. 146, 147. For Egyptian and Chaldean ideas on magic
and medicine, dread of evil spirits, etc., anticipating those of the Hebrew Scriptures,
see Maspero and Sayce, as above, pp. 212-214, 217, 636 ; and for extension
i