DR. BEKE'S MOUNT SINAI.*
TEE reviewer, like Iago, is nothing if not critical ; but his scorn for all that is amiable or confiding in either man or woman must be as bard and as cold as that of Iago, if he does not feel himself somewhat paralysed and disarmed by the book now before us. Dr. Beke, a scholar and geographer of some reputation, went out to Egypt and the Gulf of Akaba at the age of seventy-four, hardly recovered from serious illness, with very insufficient funds at his command, and leaving his wife behind in bad health, in order to verify by observation on the spot the belief which he had maintained for forty years as to the place where the true Mount Sinai was to be found. He accomplished the journey and re- turned home, but did not live to write more than the three first chapters of the work in which the results of his investigation were to have been given to the world. And these are now published by his widow, together with the journal which he kept during the expedition, by way of record of what the wife, in entire sympathy with her husband, holds to be an important discovery in the matter of Biblical geography and history, as well as a memorial of the worthy man of whom she not unreasonably writes with affection and respect. By the help of private munificence, Mrs. Beke has been enabled to publish this large and handsome volume, illustrated with engravings and a map, and revised by literary and scientific friends, as she gratefully acknowledges in her preface. It is a book well fitted, both for appearance and for matter, to lie on any drawing-room or library table ; and—apart from the main controversy involved—the reader will find much interesting information, and especially a pleasant and amusing, because quite unaffected, journal of the expedi- tion of Dr. Beke, written from day to day in letters to his wife. Dr. Beke proposed to himself to verify the double hypothesis that the true Mount Sinai was to be found near the head of the Gulf of Akaba, and that it had been a volcano ; and as he was not himself a man of science, he took with him a young geologist of the name of Milne, who proved a very pleasant and useful companion, and who has supplied the illustrations, as well as the scientific information of the book. They left England on December 8th, 1873, and reached Egypt by way of Brindisi on the 18th. At Alexandria and Cairo they were detained till the middle of January, Dr. Beke hoping against hope that he might, by the help of the British Consul-General (General Stanton), the Minister (Nubar Pasha), or the great bankers and other Europeans of weight and influence, obtain from the Khedive the favour of being sent from Suez to Akaba in a Government steamer. At last, in despair of obtaining his suit, he had made all the arrangements for travelling by land, with Abu Nabut, the old attendant of Lepsius, for his dragoman, when he was summoned by Nubar Pasha to an interview with the Khedive, on the termination of which the Minister informed him that his desire—of which he had been warned that he must say nothing—would be granted, and that he would have a passage given him in a steamer from Suez to Akaba. The steamer proved to be a vessel of sixty-five tons, with a bottom through which the brush went when she was being painted to prepare for the voyage. The camels were sent on to meet Dr. Beke at Akaba, and after infinite delays in getting the 'Erin' ready, he • The Late Dr. Charles Beke's Discoveries of Sinai, in Arabia, and of Midian Edited by his Widow, Author of " Jacob s Flight," Sc. London: Trlibtier anciCloc. left Suez on the 18th of January with Mr. Milne, and on the 27th arrived at Akaba, which makes a very picturesque sketch, with its castle and palm trees and Arabs in the foreground, and lofty moun- tains behind, though it is in fact "a village, composed of miserable mud huts, and the whole population may be some two hundred souls, including the garrison.'' After some ten days spent in the —to Dr. Beke satisfactory—verification of his hypothesis of the true position of Sinai, they turned homewards through the desert,
and eventually reached Brindisi (where the journal ends) on the 13th of March, 1874.
And now we must approach the substantial question with which this volume deals, though, as we have said, we do so with reluct- ance. Not that we fear, for ourselves, the fires which smoulder under these ashes, and perhaps there is no need to fear them for the author and editor of the book. For, indeed, Mrs. Beke has given in an appendix not only her late husband's letters to the Times and Athenmum, in which his own conclusions from his visit to the Gulf of Akaba are stated, but also the replies—we must say, refutations—of Major Wilson, Major Palmer, Professor Palmer, Mr. Ilolland, and others. If the theory of the worthy Dr. Beke is as little capable of resisting the strokes of its critics as was
the bottom of Dr. Beke's steamer to resist the touch of the paint- brush, there is—in this full and impartial reprint of all that can be said against Dr. Beke's hypothesis—a courage all the more admir- able. Dr. Beke was a man of some reputation as a scholar and a traveller, but he was also a lover of paradox and a humourist, and the final cause of his researches seems to have been to enjoy the in- vention of his theories, and to make fun of them and of the un- substantial evidence on which they rest, while he at the same time holds them with undoubting credulity. Speculative critics of another order have raised the question how far the account of the migration of Jacob into Egypt, and the return of his descendants to the Promised Land, is to be taken for history, and how far it is a late and free reconstruction of old traditions, or even mythical tales. But Dr. Beke's hypothesis is not of this kind- He takes the Biblical narrative as he finds it, as properly his- torical; only he says that Egypt is not Egypt, that the River is not the Nile, that Pharaoh is not Pharaoh, nor Sinai Sinai, and that the Red Sea through which Moses led the children of Israel is not the Gulf of Suez. In his own words :—
" It is requisite that I should say a few words on the subject of the situation of the Mitzraim of the Hebrew Scriptures, the land of bondage of the children of lame!, which, by the common consent of ages, is generally believed to be the Egypt of profane history, but which I have, during upwards of forty years, maintained to be a distinct and separate kingdom, lying to the east of the Isthmus of Suez, and thence extending to the land of the Philistines,—a kingdom which, in the course of time, lost its independent existence, and was merged in its more powerful and more fortunate western neighbour, Egypt, whilst it became itself 'utterly waste and desolate,' in accordance w ith the pro- phecies that had foretold its destruction. And in immediate relation to and connection with this translocation of the Land of Bondage, I have in like manner maintained that the Yam Suf, or Red Sea, through which the Israelites passed on their exodus from Mitzraim, was the Sea of Edom, or Gulf of Akaba, and not the Gulf of Suez, as is generally sup- posed In thus speaking of the Wady-elArish, or Nakhal Mitzraim [shown, on the authority of Professor Palmer, to have once been a full perennial stream, flowing through a fertile country], I wish it to be understood that this Wddy, or one of its branches, and not the Nile of Egypt, is the Yedr of the Biblical Mitzraim, on the brink of which the infant Moses was exposed, and the water of which was turned into blood by the deliverer of the Israelites."
For the arguments by which Dr. Beke establishes his position we must refer our readers to the book itself, for we confess we are quite unable to understand them, or, consequently, to give an , intelligible account of them. But the practical result of them to Dr. Beke himself was that—as we have already stated—he went on this mission to discover the real Sinai near the head of the Gulf of Akaba, in the position in which it must have lain in order to correspond with his hypothesis of the true geography of the Return of Israel to the Promised Land. He was prepared to find the mountain among those seen and mentioned by Captains Irby and Mangles and Dean Stanley to the north-
east of Akaba ; and while waiting at Cairo was delighted to learn from his dragoman that "near Akaba is a mountain called Djebel-en-Nur (the Mountain of Light), on which, the Arabs say, God spoke to Moses ; and therefore they stop and say their prayers there." And though he had afterwards some transient misgiving, he arrived at Akaba quite ready to see Sinai in this mountain : his feeble health prevented him from himself ascend- ing it, but this task was accomplished by his friend and com- panion, Mr. Milne, and the question was solved in the affirmative, though we cannot give the evidence, because we find none. All we can say is that when the Arabs were asked which was Mount Sinai, they, like Bird o' Freedom Sawin,—
Picked out a middling shiny one, And said that that was it."
Mr. Milne thereupon went up it, and,—Solritur ambulando.
If Dr. Beke's "historical conscience" was satisfied of the dis- covery of the true Sinai, and the place where the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea, his sense of humour was not less gratified by the indications that the Arabs would speedily create appropriate traditions for the sacred sites:—
I"I am content with the discoveries I have made. And the best of it is, that the Sheikh says he has given orders to all the Bedouins to dis- continue the use of the name Baighir (Mount Sinai), and to call it Jebel-e'-Nur alone. So that in a few years the tradition 'will be that it has always been known by that name as the true 'Mount Sinai' by people who have never heard of Dr. Doke, just as it is with Herren; and Cook's tourists will be sent to the ' Mountain of Light' as the trim Mount Sinai ; its being so little out of the way of the ordinary tourist's route to the Holy Land, and so absolutely free from danger, will induce numbers of them to come, and my views will doubtless soon be adopted by many, both at home and abroad."
"Just as it is with Herren " refers to an amusing story given by Dr. Beke in an earlier part of his journal, how he and Mrs. Beke had visited Damascus in order to verify another of his historico- geographical paradoxes,—that the Herren in Mesopotamia of Genesis xxiv. 10 was not in Mesopotamia, but at Damascus, and had there found a suitable well, which they assumed to be that where Abraham's steward watered Rebecca's flocks ; and how, since then, travellers have found a firmly-established tradi- tion, of which there was not a trace at the time of Dr. Beke's visit, that this was "Abraham's Well." Dr. Beke gives the story in proof of the worthlessness of the orthodox traditions as to the site of Sinai in the Desert of Et-Tih ; but we see in the passage above quoted how he enjoys the fun of the thing, and how, like Sir Thomas More, and other lovers of paradox, he believes a thing the better for an under-consciousness of its absurdity. Credo, quia impossibile est.
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