Israel in the Wilderness. By the Rev. Charles Foster, B.D.
(R. lkintley. J—The crotchet that the inscriptions on the Sinaitio rocks were made by the Israelites during the Exodus is one which the author Cannot leave. He tells us that it is not the design of this volume to re-enter on the subject, but "to elucidate the scenes of the wanderings." Never was there, then, a more complete failure, for this volume is all about the Sinaitic inscriptions. The great new fact is that Mr. Pierce Butler found in the Djebel Magbara a pure Sinaitic inscription, illustrated by the hieroglyphic of an ostrich engraved on the same tablet with two purely hieroglyphic inscriptions, on the principle apparently of the Rosetta Stone. Now Mr. Foster argues this could not be Egyptian, because the ostrich is not represented conventionally, as is "a breathing copy from nature." Judging from the engraving, we can only say that the ostrich looks far more like a swan or a goose. Grant, however., that it is an ostrich, and not Egyptian, what then ? Why, it mast be Israolitish, because at Lamentations iv. 3 Jeremiah complains that the Israelites are become cruel, like ostriches in the wilderness. This is not a solitary specimen of clerical logic. "That Israel," says Mr. Foster, "was in the wilderness none as yet venture to deny. That the Sinaitic inscrip- tions were the work of the Israelites is the one only consequent logical and reasonable conclusion" (p. 145, note). A reasoner of this sort of course is never tired of attributing to "self-styled Rationalists," and indeed every one who does not agree with him, "amazing foolishness," " fatuitous audacity," and even worse faults. The simple truth seems to b3 that nobody knows who made these inscriptions. They are not in any known tongue, not in any dialect of Hebrew. And Mr. Foster's theory on the subject is an entirely imaginative as all the other theories.
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