Preface

Scholarly theological thought is at the present time labouring with particular energy in the field of biblical-historical science, where the latest scientific discoveries have furnished a mass of fresh material possessing all the interest of novelty. We do not deem it superfluous to lay before our readers some of the results of this scholarly-theological labour, and precisely in that field where the latest discoveries have yielded the most interesting and abundant material—in the field of the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the monuments of ancient Egypt. These discoveries undoubtedly constitute one of the greatest marvels of our age. Until the beginning of the current century ancient Egypt remained for the learned world an unexplained riddle, notwithstanding the fact that the “land of wonders” had drawn to itself the attention of inquisitive investigators both of the ancient and of the modern world. For whole millennia the majestic pyramids and the mysterious sphinxes, with their enigmatic inscriptions, gazed in silence upon the destiny of the historical life of their land, and firmly kept the secret of their inscriptions entrusted to them by history. Scholars approached them many times with the desire to wrest from them their age-old secret, but, constantly meeting with cold silence, “having whistled and waved their hands,” in the sarcastic expression of the prophet[1], they withdrew from them fruitlessly. It is only our century that has at last succeeded in wresting out the secret of the hieroglyphic inscriptions, and in them there was disclosed a whole world of historical knowledge, a very considerable part of which serves as an excellent confirmation of many biblical narratives. The discovery was accomplished very simply. During the campaign of Napoleon I in Egypt, an officer of the French army, Boussard, while carrying out certain works at Rosetta, found at a depth of four feet beneath the surface a part of an oblong rectangular slab of black basalt. Upon it there was an inscription in three languages—on the upper part hieroglyphic, on the lower Greek, and in the centre the so-called demotic, which had already come into use in the later ages of Egyptian history. The Greek text showed that the inscription had been made in honour of Ptolemy Epiphanes, about 205 B.C. Since the hieroglyphic inscription contained the same content as the Greek, there was thereby given a key to the discovery of the secret of the hieroglyphs. By the aid of the language of the Copts, the latest descendants of the ancient Egyptians—a language which, in the Coptic translation of the Bible and in certain liturgical books, is almost as near to the ancient Egyptian tongue as mediaeval Latin is to the classical language—scholars, and among others the celebrated Champollions, succeeded at last in learning to read and understand the hieroglyphic inscriptions. From that time Egyptology began to make rapid progress; thanks to the concerted efforts of a whole series of Egyptologists, the stone documents, as well as the papyrus scrolls laid in the tombs together with the mummies, became fully accessible and intelligible to scholars, and now not only are Egyptian documents freely translated and published, but on the very monuments of Egypt new hieroglyphic inscriptions are sometimes made by European scholars, in hours of merry mood—to the astonishment of generations yet to come[2].

The discovery of the key to the reading of the hieroglyphic inscriptions constituted not only a new epoch in the history of Egypt, but also wrought a complete revolution in the field of historical views and criticism with regard to biblical history. Egypt, as is well known, possessed a direct biblical-historical significance, since in it was played out the famous biblical-historical drama of the formation and earliest education of the biblical people, and in it likewise was reared the deliverer and lawgiver of that people, Moses. For this reason the interest of the newly deciphered inscriptions is increased tenfold precisely by their close relation to the biblical narrative. They constitute an excellent illustration of many biblical narratives and afford an explanation of many obscure passages of the sacred books. But they have a still greater significance in the historical-critical and apologetic respect. Rationalistic criticism, but recently, was subjecting to doubt the actuality of many biblical narratives and relegating them to the domain of poetic invention and myth, and since there were no factual data to confirm them, such critical views penetrated even into the field of theological commentaries. But recently the English bishop Colenso wrote that “all the details of the narrative of the book of Exodus call forth suppositions as monstrous and absurd as would be the proposition in arithmetic that twice two is five,” that “there is not the slightest ground for supposing that the author of the Pentateuch was writing actual history and not a tale”[3]. Now such criticism is inconceivable in science; it meets an inexorable accuser of its frivolity in the newly discovered and newly deciphered hieroglyphic inscriptions, which, on the contrary, in all their details confirm the truth of the biblical narrative.

The fact of the extraordinary coincidence of the data of Egyptology with the biblical narrative has lent a particular interest to Egyptology itself, and there have come forward upon its arena celebrated scholars who have enriched science with many remarkable investigations, shedding new light upon the ancient life and culture both of Egypt and of mankind in general. It is enough to name the names of Wilkinson, Brugsch, Lepsius, Ebers, Chabas, and Birch in order to give an idea of the extraordinary flourishing of scientific Egyptology in the most recent times[4]. The monuments that have been discovered and investigated furnished such a mass of material for the study of ancient Egyptian life in all its details, and the representations on the monuments reproduced so vividly this deeply interesting life and civilisation, that the study of them was not confined to dry scholarly investigations, but gave nourishment also to the imagination. Availing himself of all the wealth of the discoveries that have been made, the imagination of the celebrated Egyptologist Ebers fructified the raw material, and beneath his masterly pen the dead kingdom of ancient Egypt rose again to a new life—in his deeply interesting romances drawn from the ancient history of the “land of wonders.” The famous historical novels of this writer, “Uarda” and “The Daughter of Pharaoh,” give a full picture of ancient Egyptian life and culture as it appears upon the monuments, and they are as interesting in the scholarly respect as they are entertaining in conception and exposition[5].

The authors named pursue in their learned investigations exclusively the scientific interests of Egyptology; but its data touched so closely upon biblical history that they were of necessity obliged to deal also with this field, and we do indeed find in their works a most abundant biblical-historical material. Some of them, as for example Ebers, directly examine the hieroglyphic discoveries in parallel with the biblical data. But investigations of this kind already constitute the subject of biblical exegesis and of biblical-historical science, and in this field there is going forward a concerted and energetic labour, having for its exclusive aim to turn to account all the wealth of the new discoveries in the interests of purely theological science. The result of this labour is not only extensive commentaries on the various biblical books, but also whole investigations presenting biblical history worked up with the aid of all the resources of science. Among such works, besides the well-known labours of Ewald, Smith, Milman, Graetz, and others, may be reckoned the deeply interesting works of Vigouroux[6] in French literature and of Geikie in English[7]. Both of these works have in view to set the latest scientific discoveries in the field of ancient history and archaeology side by side with the data of the biblical narrative, in order that by such a comparison they may not only confirm the truthfulness of the latter, but also shed upon it a new and purely scientific light. Both of them fulfil their task with equal success, but the English work considerably surpasses the other in the wealth and variety of its material, as well as in its manner of exposition.

The work of Geikie is still wholly unknown among us in Russia, although it began to appear in 1882, and each of its five volumes now issued has been received with extraordinary success in English literature. Its author has long enjoyed an extensive literary reputation, and his “Life of Christ”[8] fully shares the fame and popularity of Farrar’s celebrated work on the same subject. Criticism, in some cases, when comparing these productions, even gives the preference to the work of the former, since he, displaying no less theological and scholarly erudition, is advantageously distinguished from the work of Farrar by his sober, calm scholarliness, free from the not always temperate, purely homiletical pathos of the latter’s work. The new biblical-historical work is distinguished by first-class merits and is a work unique of its kind—in the originality of its conception and the success of its execution. Biblical history, beginning from the creation of the world, is set forth by him in the light of all the scientific data and discoveries that bear some relation or other to it, and the whole book presents an excellent scientific illustration of the Bible in its connected exposition and investigation. In its entirety this work would undoubtedly be a valuable contribution to our biblical-historical literature. But, given the feebleness of our publishing enterprise, this cannot soon be expected, and therefore, in order to acquaint our readers both with this work and with the state of biblical-historical science in general in its most recent scholarly treatment, we offer several biblical-historical sketches, composed on the basis of this valuable but still, in our literature, unknown work. As the subject of our sketches we take that field where the latest discoveries have yielded the greatest mass of interesting material, namely the history of the sojourn of the Hebrews in Egypt, and we begin with the author of this whole history, Joseph, in order to conclude with the exodus from Egypt and the giving of the law.

Footnotes

[2] Over the entrance to the Great Pyramid of Gizeh there attracts the attention of travellers an elegant hieroglyphic inscription, which reads as follows: “Thus speak the servants of the king whose name is the sun and the rock of Prussia—Lepsius the scribe, Erbkam the architect, the brothers Weidenbach the painters, Frey the painter, Franke the husbandman, Bonomi the sculptor, Wild the architect. Glory to the eagle, the protector of the cross, to the king, the sun and the rock of Prussia, the son of the sun, the deliverer of the land, Frederick William IV, the most gracious father of his country, the favourite of wisdom and of history, the guardian of the Rhine, the chosen of Germany, the giver of life. May the Most High God grant to the king and to his consort, the Queen Elizabeth, the most gracious mother of her country, a happy life on earth and a blessed dwelling in heaven for ever. In the year of the Christian era 1842, in the tenth month and the fifteenth day of the month, on the forty-seventh birthday of his majesty, upon the pyramid of King Khufu, in the third year, fifth month, ninth day of the reign of his majesty, in the year 3164 from the beginning of the Sothic cycle, under Pharaoh Menephtah.” We may remark, by the way, that this curious inscription did not pass without a scholarly curiosity. A certain Chinese Egyptologist, who travelled in Egypt for a scholarly purpose, was especially interested by this inscription, wrote about it a whole learned investigation, and found that this inscription, by reason of its antiquity, must be contemporary with the third dynasty in China, that is, belongs to the period some 2200 or 2300 years before the Christian era!! The name of this celebrated Egyptologist of China is Pin-ch-un. It remains for the Peking Academy of Sciences to award him an honorary prize.

[4] Here are the best of their works and learned editions: 1) Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, vol. 5; the same author’s Egyptians in the times of the Pharaohs, London 1857; 2) Brugsch, Egypt under the Pharaohs, 2 vols. (a Russian translation exists); 3) Lepsius, Königsbuch der alten Ägypter, and the same author’s Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien, Berlin 1849–59; 4) Ebers, Aegypten und die Bücher Mose’s, Leipzig 1868; the same author’s Durch Gosen, Leipzig 1872; 5) Chabas, Études sur l’antiquité historique d’après les sources égyptiennes, Paris 1874; the same author’s Mélanges égyptologiques, 3 series, Paris 1862–1873; 6) Birch, History of Egypt; his edition—Records of the Past, an English translation of the Assyrian and Egyptian monuments, in some ten volumes, and so forth and so forth. Their full titles are given here in order that they may not be repeated in the citations in the further exposition.

Preface

Предисловие