CHAPTER XVI.

THE SACRED CUBIT,

Of the Bible, opposes the Cainite.

In speaking of anything in this book as simply sacred, I mean, to the best of my limited powers and poor ability, to distinguish such thing, as sacred to the God of Israel, or to the one and only true God who liveth for ever and ever; and I have no respect of the same kind, nor similar comprehensive word, for anything attributed to the gods of Egypt, Assyria, or Babylon, no matter what the learned Egyptologists, Assyriologists, and other scholars of the present day may say in their defence or their favour.

Hence it is no light affair for every real Christian disciple, if we should indeed find anything sacred in the above higher sense, in the Great Pyramid; and especially if we should learn that the grand standard of length, or the very governing cubit employed in the scientific design of the primeval monument was—and if it was once, it must be still—sacred to the Lord Jehovah of the Bible and all Eternity.

Of Cubits of Ancient Renown.

The mere name of "cubit" mounts up the question at once to the beginning of human affairs, for it is one of the earliest-named measures of which there is any 332notice. Not indeed that the word cubit is ancient in itself; but that it is now the one English word always used by our translators to express whatever chief measure of length, long or short, did form the working and practical standard of linear measure to, or for, any and every nation in the ancient world. No nation could exist then, any more than now, without having some standard of linear measure belonging to it, and referred to by its subjects either directly or indirectly in all matters where lengths and breadths were concerned. But the standard length of one nation, though called now in our printed books by the same name, “cubit,” was no more the necessary standard length of another nation in a different part of the world and in a different age, than the yard of the British Government, or two-foot rule of the British people, is of the same exact length, identical origination, and social force as the mètre of the French nation, the Chinese chik, or the Turkish pike. National standards they are, each and all of them, legal, discriminating, and politically omnipotent in their own respective countries; but every one of a different length from the other, and their legal and commercial powers depending only, and precisely, on the absolute length of each.

Hence, under the one mere, and often misleading, word, or name, of cubit, improperly used for standard (which word by itself discriminates no linear dimensions whatever), our translators have heaped together a number of totally different measures of length, conflicting metrological symbolisms, and diverse national distinctions, as if they were all of one and the same length. They have even done worse; for most persons having Latin enough to derive cubit from cubitus, the elbow, they measure off 18 inches, more or less, from their own elbow to the end of the middle finger; and say, with a peculiarly knowing smile, whenever a so-called “cubit” 333of any time or nation whatever is mentioned,—that was the length of their standard of linear measure.

Yet, though both the cubitus of the Romans and πῆχυς of the Greeks were very close to the length of 18 inches, the standard measures of other and older nations were very different in length.

What names, then, were they called by; or were there different names for different lengths of national standards, in those days?

In Egypt the linear standard was called, from 2170 B.C. through all their long historical period and down to 100 A.D., according to different modern Egyptologists “mah,” “meh,” “mahi,” or “mai:” and signified, according to the late W. Osburn, “justified” or “measured off.”

Amongst the Assyrians, according to Mr. Fox Talbot and Dr. Norris, their standard measure was generally termed, in the age of Nebuchadnezzar, or 700 B.C., “ammat;” and in more ancient times, “hu.”

Among the Hebrews, again, the standard measure was called “ammah.”¹ There is discussion still amongst scholars whether this was the original, or Mosaic Hebrew, word, for the thing to which it is now applied; for some authors maintain that ammah is an Assyrian word, and introduced only by Ezra when he was recopying the Scriptures in Babylon during the captivity. But they cannot prove the case absolutely; and meanwhile, although there are some who will have it that the word alludes to “the fore part of the arm”—though too we are otherwise, and most practically, assured that the Hebrew standard was of a totally different length from such part of the arm, being rather, if the arm be alluded to at all, representative of its whole length,—there are others who maintain that the word rather implies, “the thing which was before in point of 334*time,” the thing which was “the first, the earliest, the ‘mother,’ measure,” and even “the foundation of all measure.”

But these disputations of philologists are not in my line, neither are they sufficient for what we require now to know, quite apart from any particular words; viz. what actually were the lengths of the several linear standards of the chief ancient, though idolatrous, nations, in terms of modern British inches. And we need, moreover, to be quite certain of these, before we can presume to say that there is anything peculiar in such other length as we shall afterwards find to characterize the one Sacred Cubit, both Hebrew, Christian, and of the Great Pyramid also.

Now the cubits of Greece and Rome (mediæval, however, rather than ancient, as compared with the times of the early Pharaohs) were, in length, 18.24 British inches nearly, as every one, I believe, allows.

The cubit of Egypt, a far older land than Greece or Rome, was always longer, and close to 20.68 (sometimes for shortness spoken of as 20.7) British inches, by almost equally unanimous and universal testimony. And hence we see at once that the word cubit, as now used even by the learned, signifies merely a national standard of measure, and gives no idea of exact length, unless we prefix some other word, as Greek, Roman, Phœnician, or Egyptian, &c.

But when such word is prefixed, it is most important to our present inquiry to know, that the then double word becomes one of immense power in primeval history; because cubits of intended different lengths were so few: and each cubit was so long-lived. Through all the old and new empires of Egypt, for instance, under native princes, there was but one length (20.68 inches nearly) for the Egyptian cubit handed down most carefully from father to son, monumentally and agriculturally.

335There has, indeed, been a notable attempt in modern London society, during the last few years, to assert that there was a second cubit, of the same short length as the later Grecian, viz. 18.24 British inches, in use in ancient Egypt; though reserved there, the hypothesis-markers said, for the one purpose of measuring land. They even declare that such employment of it was fully as early as the day of the Great Pyramid, and even had the honour of deciding the size of the base of that most unique monument.

This is an assertion, so directly in opposition to whatever has yet appeared in the present book, that we cannot but inquire into it with fulness, as follows.

Of the one old, profane Egyptian Cubit: and the recent attempt to say there was another, much shorter.

The whole case for there being, or ever having been, another cubit in historic profane Egypt, than the 20.68 British inch one, seems to have grown up thus.

The Director-General of the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain (1874), after having twice tried in the Athenæum to establish against the conclusions in my "Life and Work at the Great Pyramid," two other hypotheses for accounting for the length of the base-side of that ancient monument, he using a different length of base-side with each hypothesis, he at last brought out a third Great Pyramid base-side length, and a third hypothesis to account for it. This last assumed length was 9,120 British inches, and its explanatory theory, or rather hypothesis only, was the gratuitous statement that that 9,120 length was intended to be five hundred times the length of "the Egyptian land cubit"; and as that cubit was stated, after having been called into existence by him, to have been 18.24 British inches long,—of course $18.24 \times 500 = 9{,}120$.

336By itself, perhaps I might have passed this statement by as unworthy of serious notice; but when it was presently not only adopted and followed by “the Warden of the Standards” of Great Britain, printed and reprinted by the Royal Society of London, and quoted as irrefragable by an appointed Lecturer (the late Professor Clerk-Maxwell of Cambridge) at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science—the matter was becoming too prominent. And, further still, when the Rev. F. R. A. Glover, M.A., who had been deeply studying the mensurations of the Great Pyramid, attacked me with the remark—

“Did not you say in ‘Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid,’ Chap. II. of Second Edition, that the length of the Great Pyramid’s base-side, according to the best means of all the socket-defined measures, was 9,140 British inches; and that the length of the sacred, scientific, cubit of the Great Pyramid’s inspired and anti-Egyptian design was settled hereby?”

“Certainly.”

“And now here is the Royal Society publishing that the length is only 9,120 British inches, and you are a Fellow of that Society. So you are implicated in, and consenting to, telling the world one thing in the Society’s book, and quite a different thing in your own book. Pray which of them am I to believe?”

Such, nearly, were the words in which Mr. Glover brought the case home to my individual, human responsibility. So, having ascertained from the Professorial Lecturer at the British Association’s meeting at Bradford, that he had drawn all his information from the printed “Proceedings” of the Royal Society of London, I represented in a formal paper to be read before that learned Corporation, that if the Director-General had got 9,120, by taking a mean of certain two base-side measures of the Great Pyramid giving respectively 3379,110 and 9,130,—he had obtained it by improperly throwing out of view two other at least equally scientifically measured, and well-known, results giving 9,163 and 9,168 of the same inches; and which results, properly combined with the others, gave 9,140 for the base-side length, rather than 9,120.²

How the Council of the Royal Society thereupon absolutely refused to let my paper appear before an open meeting of the Society; how I then sent in a conditional resignation of my Fellowship, to be read in public together with the reasons why I so resigned; how the Council held back those reasons, and merely announced that I had resigned; how I therefore printed a pamphlet giving the whole case, and sent a copy to every member of the Society; and how the next annual general meeting of all the Fellows was held, and no move was made by any one (so far as I have yet heard) to question the Council's proceedings, or vindicate the true size of the ancient Great Pyramid; and how in fact the whole of the members have now homologated everything done by the Council in supporting one side, and suppressing the other side, of Great Pyramid measures—all that, I might perhaps have written here some forcible remarks upon, but have not, because I would rather refer readers to Appendix II., at the end of this book, as being an independent opinion from America on the case.

But in the meanwhile I desire not to conceal from any one, that the great, the wealthy, the powerful, and numerously organized association almost worshipped in the London world of science, the Royal Society, has now in fact, though not in its own words, pronounced for the Great Pyramid's base-side length being only 9,120 British inches, as well as having been anciently and 338even primevally intended to be that. Wherefore I find myself opposed by the whole Society, by its wealth, power, Government influence, by each and all of its 600 or so, of Fellows, and by some unknown number of officers or referees whose names are not disclosed. That is the fact; therefore any one who is influenced by a crowd, by numbers, by reputed authority, mysterious agencies and worldly success, may, and many no doubt will, join them.

But shall I therefore yield the ancient point; and submissively allow, that the Royal Society was justified by all the learning of the time and the facts of the case, in keeping out of view everything that tended to show that the Great Pyramid's base-side length was 9,140, rather than 9,120 British inches? No! For although I knew well that I was, when still F.R.S., one of the least of those so honoured scientifically; and know also that the ranks of the Society contain numerous men almost infinitely learned in difficult sciences which were, and are, strange to me,—yet the present question was within my moderate compass, had been the subject of my special attention, under the open sky in Egypt, as well as in the closet at home; and is rather one of simple honesty than scientific difficulty,—one, therefore, which a single human mind, with a soul to be saved and an immortal hereafter, must form a far higher tribunal for judging, than any Society, Corporation, Secret Council, or any Association which, as such, is the work of man and not of God, and has no soul belonging to it, nor any future in heaven before it.

Having therefore already indicated (pp. 36—39 and 337) how little of observational and true foundation there is for any one asserting the Great Pyramid's base-side length to be 9,120 British inches only, let us here go forward to the next part of the question;—and which asserted, with most astonishing anachronism, that there

339was in ancient profane Egypt, besides its undoubted 20.68-inch cubit, another cubit only 18.24 British inches in length: so that, when multiplied by 500, such a short cubit should yield exactly 9,120 of the same inches.

This second assertion turned out to be simply a literary mistake of the late Director-General of the Ordnance Survey, when reading a passage in Herodotus; which passage, in reality, says the very opposite; as thus—

Herodotus, that charming relater of history as a pleasant family tale, we must remember, is telling his story to the Greeks; and amongst other particulars of what he saw in Egypt, informs them of an allowance of land to each of the soldiers there; a liberal and highly prized allowance too, of so many cubits square; to which account he appends the explanatory remark, evidently for the benefit of his then hearers, the Greeks, —that the Egyptian cubit is of the same length as that of Samos.

Of what length then was the cubit of Samos?

“Of the same length as the Greek cubit, viz. 18.24 inches,” instantly asserted the surveying military chief at Southampton; and now is implicated in the same assertion the Royal Society, London.³ But was it so in very fact?

As there is no other scrap of ancient authority now existing in the world, so far as I am aware, touching the absolute and material length of the cubit of Samos in the time of Herodotus, 445 B.C. (except that slight verbal comparative notice of his, identifying it with the 340Egyptian, and not with the Greek), we must endeavour to ascertain from him, himself, what he, Herodotus, meant,—when he explained to a Greek audience in Athens, that the length of the Egyptian cubit was the same as the cubit of Samos. Why, for instance, did he not say that the Egyptian cubit was the same as the Greek cubit, if he meant it; and was speaking to Greeks themselves, who would of course know what the length of their own cubit was?

By turning to his book “Thalia,” 55, we shall find that Herodotus there makes a Lacedæmonian refer to the Samians (in their isle so close to Asia Minor and so far from Greece), not as Greeks, but as “foreigners.” And again, in “Thalia,” 56, he himself speaks of a siege of Samos by the Lacedæmonian Dorians as “their (the Greeks') first expedition into Asia.” “Words,” writes the Rev. Professor Rawlinson, in a note to his excellent translation, “which are emphatic. They mark the place which the expedition occupies in the mind of Herodotus. It is an aggression of the Greeks upon Asia, and therefore a passage in the history of the great quarrel between Persia and Greece, for all Asia is the king's” (i. 4).⁴

Samian, then, in the mind and feelings of Herodotus, eminently meant Asiatic or Persian, the antipodes of everything Greek; and the phrase was a rather delicate mode of that admirable describer telling his polite Athenian audience, that the cubit of the strange and far-off Egyptians he had been travelling amongst, was of the same length as that of their hated and dreaded foes, the Persians; but without offending Attic ears by the sound of the detested and threatening Eastern name. For Samos was but a poor little island, in itself altogether innocent of plotting any aggressions on such a combination of states as Greece; and since its actual 341invasion by the Lacedæmonians, was much better known to Greeks than the continental and somewhat mysterious country of the Persians themselves.

Now, the Persian cubit, at and about the times of Herodotus, say from 332 B.C. to 600 B.C., according to Dr. Brandis, of Berlin (whose investigations into the Babylonian measures, weights, and money before Alexander the Great, are original and most valuable), was somewhere between 20.866 and 20.670 British inches.

Don Vincent Queipo, in his “Metrology” (Vol. I. pp. 277—280), makes the same Persian cubit to be 20.670 inches long. M. Oppert establishes the same length for the Babylonian cubit in the times of Darius and Xerxes. Dr. Hincks makes that same cubit, equally too of the Babylonian, Persian, and Assyrian empires, chiefly from cuneiform inscriptions = 21.0 inches. All of them, therefore, within their limits of error, coinciding sufficiently with a mean length of 20.68 inches nearly, for the Persian cubit of and about 500 B.C. And that cubit length, we may be sure, the said Persians established in Samos for as long as they had the upper hand there; seeing that from the same Herodotus we learn (Book VI. ch. 24), that no sooner were the Ionian cities under Histiæus conquered by Artaphernes, than he took the measurement of their whole country in parasangs (a Persian measure of length, based on the Persian cubit), and settled thereupon the tributes which they were in future to pay.

Hence the Samian cubit alluded to, could have been no other than the Persian cubit of the day of Herodotus; and that cubit having now been proved of the length of 20.68 British inches nearly, by all modern research, we may immediately see how close to the truth was the Father of History, when he declared the length of the Egyptian and Samian, i.e. Persian, cubits to be the 342same,—for the profane Egyptian cubit has been found by all Egyptological explorers to be within a few tenths, or even hundredths, of an inch, that very quantity; viz. 20.68 British inches.

Thus Sir Gardner Wilkinson, in his "Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians" (Vol. IV. pp. 24—34, third edition, 1847), expressly declares against the idea of there having been intentionally two different-lengthed cubits in Pharaonic Egypt; and gives the following as measures of accidental variations of the one and only profane Egyptian cubit belonging to any, and every, period between 2200 B.C. and 320 B.C. :—

And other more recent measures by other investigators, some from cubits, and some from ancient monuments where certain parts seemed to have been laid out, so as to be even multiples of 2, 4, or more cubits,—have yielded 20.73 and 20.66 British inches.

Hence it must surely now be perfectly clear,—in spite of even the Royal Society and what that body has been pleased to issue in its two publications, and is tacitly supported in by all its six hundred members,—that while there was in ancient Egypt a cubit 20.68 British inches long, there was no such thing nationally there then, as a cubit 18.24 British inches in length; and whose multiple by 500 should, or could, amount to 9,120, as first erroneously assumed by the Director-General of the Ordnance Survey, in connection with, or in furtherance of, alas! degrading theories of the original scientific design of the primeval Great Pyramid.

But time presses, and I will now beg to call attention 343to an unexpected, and all the more important, because unexpected, result of the inquiries I have been obliged to make, in pure self-defence from attempted extinguishment, in as I firmly believe, a most righteous cause.

Origination of the one Sole and Profane Cubit of the earliest East, 20.68 British Inches long.

The unlooked-for result alluded to above, is this, that not only was the cubit of Samos of the same 20.68-inch length as that of all ancient Egypt, from one end of that land to the other,—but the same identical length characterized the cubits of Babylon, Nineveh, and apparently all Mesopotamia, Persia, Assyria, and Syria, with the coasts and islands thereof.

That could hardly have been accidental in its origin, and still less so in its immense duration; for it survived those countries’ wars, their empires, and even their languages; and could only have been kept up by some most active and powerful system of surveillance, on which they were all agreed; and were even sworn to uphold more fervently, more passionately, than any national distinction or political difference among them.

Now, what could such a system have been?

Something more or less connected with religion; not with its outward forms, for these had different idols, with different names and very different figures as well as attributes in every different country,—but with its original and inmost foundation, its mysteries, freemasonries, and secret abominations. And when looked at in this manner, we see immediately that all the countries holding to that 20.68-inch cubit were, through all history, arrayed in religion against Israel and against Israel’s God. But on what special point of antithesis did they chiefly unite?

344Self-righteousness versus admitted guilt and the need of a Divine atonement.

That very part of the Egyptian Dead-book so scrupulously inserted in the coffin of every profane mummy throughout the Pharaonic empire, and which is intended to enable the soul, almost first and foremost of all things, to declare before Osiris that its owner had never been guilty of shortening the cubit,⁵ puts a long string of other declarations into his mouth, protesting him to be also perfectly free from any and every other possible sin, great or small, that was ever heard of. And whether such unhappy being also believed and trusted, as most of them did, in idols of animal-headed gods, of whom there were sometimes more, and sometimes less, in the Egyptian Pantheon, all that—dreadful as it is for human beings with souls to be saved, and special instruction from the Creator—sinks into comparative insignificance before this unblushing assertion of whole self-righteousness. For this principle lasted through all their varying theogonies; and not only shows the innate, settled Cainite direction of their thoughts, but their continual antagonism also to the religion of Abel, and to the whole Revelation doctrine of the lost condition of man, with the consequent Christian necessity of an atonement by sacrifice and pardon through the blood of a Divine Mediator.

Similarly also proceeded the inhabitants of Babel, from the time when they first collected together, and said (Gen. xi.), ‘‘ Go to, let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth,” down to the days when (Dan. iv.) Nebuchadnezzar walked in the palace of the kingdom of 345Babylon, and spake and said, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?”

All the above doctrine, with the history also, besides being found under absolute condemnation in the Bible, appears to some extent in Josephus’s account of Genesis times also; but where he obtained his further particulars of Cain, and how far they are to be, or should be, trusted, I know not. Yet he is a great author before the Church and the world, and his remarks on this case, or rather the traditions which he hands on from an earlier time, are pertinent to the present question, and run thus; viz. that after Cain’s expulsion from a more blessed society, and after the mark was put upon him, he went on from one wickedness to another until he at last invented “weights and measures”; using them however as instruments of rapacity and oppression against all the peaceably inclined inhabitants round about him.

In self-defence therefore, implies Josephus, the descendants of righteous Seth, in whose line afterwards came Noah, Shem, Abraham, and Moses, betook themselves to studying astronomy, with the special approval and help of Almighty God; and when they had perfected those discoveries, he says, they set forth from their own land (which was probably in Mesopotamia), to the land of Siriad (that is, the Siriadic, or Dog-star land of Egypt), and inscribed their discoveries there on two pillars, one of stone and one of brick.

They did not therefore seek either to teach or enforce these things on the Cainite Egyptian people whom they found there; they merely recorded their astronomical discoveries in their own monumental way, for their own internal satisfaction in that land, because it was in some way a more suitable land for that purpose than their 346own; or they had received a Divine command to make the record there, and obeyed the command in faith, like all the good patriarchs of old. And what such discoveries in astronomy could have been, to enable them to have a counter-effect to the bad weights and measures of Cain, unless they were connected with a principle of earth and heaven commensurability in all their standards, leading them to think lovingly, harmoniously, and Abel-like, of God, and with God, in all His wondrous works for the benefit of man,—it is difficult to conceive.

In fact, according to the nature of the things said to have been inscribed, the above alluded to stone pillar, or monument (which Whiston, wholly ignorant of hieroglyphic interpretation, proposed unhappily to identify with a Cainite obelisk of an idolatrous king of Upper Egypt in Thebes during the long-subsequent 19th Dynasty),—can be no other than the Great Pyramid as now coming to be understood and interpreted by modern science. While the similar brick monument, said to have been erected by the same Sethite parties, must, if ever really in existence, have gone the way of all the brick Pyramids of profane Egypt; viz. subsided into a heap of decaying mould, leaving the stone Great Pyramid of Jeezeh, the only witness in the latter day to the God of Israel, in the midst of a Cainite land.

Hence, without by any means trusting entirely to Josephus, there is, with the help of his history of primeval times, a very suggestive view opened up of a world-wide metrological contrast, entirely agreeable with Biblical characteristics in religion, though depending on scientific refinements, or minute differences of measure only understood by modern men within the last century. And it tells us, I venture to remind, of a continued and most radical opposition between Cain and Abel having been carried by their descendants 347through the Flood: as well as of these parties having been openly distinguished before the world (whatever were the mysteries of certain of them in their secret conclaves), by the most opposite kinds of weights and measures. And when we further find by later researches that the anti-Israel, and decidedly Cainite, nations in religion, spread abroad even from the Nile to the Euphrates, though often warring vehemently with each other, were yet banded together to employ one and the same profane cubit length of 20.68 of our inches, we must look upon that measure as the Cain-invented, Cain-descended, cubit or standard. When, too, we find that that length is apparently incongruous to the measures of both the earth and the heavens, we may at once allow that that was just what might have been expected of Cain, and any rationalistic human efforts in that age to act without God in the world.

But then, again, that very fact excites the most intense anxiety to inquire by any independent means that may be available in the case, whether the cubit of the descendants of Seth, in the line of Abraham, Moses and David, as especially representative of the cause of righteous, and God-obeying, God-acknowledging, Abel, was anything essentially different.

The Sacred Cubit of the Sethites and Hebrews.

And here, alas for the Churches! from the time of Bishop Cumberland of Peterborough, down to the Bible Dictionaries of Kitto and Smith, down to most of the annotated Bibles of the Government printers, and even the earlier maps of Jerusalem prepared for the Palestine Exploration Association by the Ordnance Survey establishment at Southampton. For all these hitherto supposed unquestionable authorities merely indicate, lazily, 348I am sorry to say, and ignorantly (both as Christians and scientists), something as follows:—“‘The ancient Hebrew measures are impossible to find out by the mere words of the Bible or of any book, so we go to the Egyptians (Cainites though they were, and desperate idolaters): and we take from their architectural monuments, and give you, their self-righteous, pagan, God-defying measures, and bid you accept them as the Inspired, Sacred measures of God’s chosen people from the beginning. And such numbers of inches too as these modern most blinded and misleading men give, even under that profane Egyptian guise, are not very ancient, being more often derived from mediæval, or Grecianised, or Romanised, but still idolatrous, Egypt, than the Egypt of her earliest day; and range anywhere between 16 and 22 inches. Very recently too, or in the “‘Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund” for October, 1879, at pp. 181, 184, a lamentable paper has appeared on “‘The Sacred Cubit”; endeavouring to show that it was only $17.7$ British inches long; but by means of merely mediæval tests; latter-day things which can only bring out the then fallen condition of Jerusalem; and prove that it had adopted the Greek cubit, as well as the Greek language when it culminated in its rebellion against every institute of God, by crucifying His Christ, the Saviour of mankind.⁶

In this dilemma of the flock’s desertion, or misguidance, by its intended shepherds, how thankful should we be, that it pleased God to raise up the spirit of Sir Isaac Newton, and enabled him to make it one of the most important discoveries of his riper years,—that while there undoubtedly was in very ancient, pre-Grecian, pre-Roman, times a cubit of $20.68$ inches nearly, characterizing the idolatrous nations of Egypt 349<thinking_mode>auto</thinking_mode>

Assyria, Babylonia, and Phœnicia, and which cubit Newton was gifted to call unhesitatingly “the profane cubit”; there was another which he equally unhesitatingly speaks of as “the sacred cubit of the Jews”; and shows that it was decidedly much longer, by several inches, than the above, and was most earnestly preserved, treasured up, and obeyed, among some very limited branches of the house of Shem. The exact date of its promulgation Newton does not attempt to fix, but alludes to the certain fact of its having become the “proper and principal cubit” of the Israelites, long before they went down to Egypt.⁷

Now this is precisely what it is important to get at; and the measured size of this remarkable cubit, and which seems eventually to have remained in the sole possession of the early Hebrews, and to have been, after the Egyptian captivity, employed by them for sacred, Biblically sacred, purposes only, Sir Isaac Newton attempts to ascertain in various modes thus:—

1. By notices from Talmudists and Josephus in terms of Greek cubits, which on calculation give, as limits, something between 31.24 and 24.30 British inches.⁸ Very rough or rude limits, but indicating without doubt something so much greater than, as to be describable to the general public as, quite a different size from, that of the Cainite 20.68-inch cubit.

2. From Talmudists by proportion of the human body, giving as limits, from 27.94 to 23.28 British inches.

3. From Josephus’s description of the pillars of the Temple, between 27.16 and 23.28 British inches.

4. By Talmudists and “all Jews’ ” idea of a Sabbath day’s journey between 27.16 and 23.28 British inches.

5. By Talmudists’ and Josephus’s accounts of the 350steps to the Inner Court, between 26.19 and 23.28 British inches.

6. By many Chaldaic and Hebrew proportions to the cubit of Memphis, giving 24.83 British inches. And,

7. From a statement by Mersennus, as to the length of a supposed copy of the sacred cubit of the Hebrews, secretly preserved amongst them, and concluded = 24.91 British inches.

In all these seven methods any one may observe that the Cainite cubit length of Egypt and Babylon, viz. 20.68 inches, has no standing-place whatever; neither beside the single determinations, nor within the widest limits of the double determinations. It is something totally and absolutely different. Still more decidedly are both the Greek and Roman profane cubits of 18.24 inches long, or anything shorter, excluded. What is indicated by the whole of the numbers appears to be,—either 24 inches with a large fraction, or 25 inches with a small fraction, added to it, or something between those two near limits; and though Sir Isaac himself concluded for 24.88 inches being the probable length, yet he expressly warned his readers that he was not certain of the precise quantity; and that that must be left to future measurers to settle.

There Sir Isaac Newton stopped. Further light and correct local information were then wanting. In fact, he was furnished with so few, and some such bad measures of the Great Pyramid (the base-side length for instance 70 feet short) that in the very same "Dissertation" where he so happily arrives close upon the really Sacred cubit of Genesis,—he concludes for the Great Pyramid to have been merely a sepulchre, and built according to the profane cubit of Egypt. But had he enjoyed our means of information, and come to know by accurate mensurations and full descriptions that the data he went by then, were chiefly a blind of the builders in the 351eyes of the Pharaonic Egyptians, similarly with their subterranean sepulchral chamber never finished for sepulture (pp. 100, 105); and that the secretly monumentalized cubit of the grand structure in its entirety as well as the minutest, particular, had not only no resemblance at all to the Cainite, Egyptian, profane cubit of 20.68 inches, but was identical with the latest result now deduced from his own data for the sacred cubit of the Israelites before they went down to Egypt, —viz. 25.025 inch more or less,—the sacred, scientific, and Israelite theory of the one Great Pyramid would have been opened two centuries before its appointed time.

But that could not be, in a world ruled over by God who keeps times and seasons in His own hand. Sufficient then for us to confess, in our day, that the Newton-determined length of the Sacred Cubit of the older Israelites, improved now from 24.88 to 25.025 British inches, being the same as that of the only recently disclosed interior design of the Great Pyramid, must have been, like it, earth-commensurable and nature harmonious in the best conceivable manner even of the highest science yet arrived at by man; or in term sand exactitudes which, as we have already shown in the first part of this book (pp. 39—48), could not have been intentionally arrived at by any race in that early, pre-Mosaic, age, without their having been favoured by the assistance of Divine Inspiration to that special end.

But that is precisely what the Bible tells us the Hebrew race did continually receive in early days. We need have therefore no longer any difficulty as to whence came the superhuman, wisdom and meaning of their measures, as compared with those of the idolatrous Egyptians. Indeed a still further question is answered, almost as soon as it is asked: viz. whether the Hebraic most significant metrological possession of a cubit the $10^7$th of the Earth's Polar radius in 352length, may not after all have come to the said early Hebrews originally in the manner, more or less, indicated by Josephus; i.e. through primeval Divine assistance accorded to Seth, as represented in his earlier descendants; and whether it was not also granted, before the building of the Great Pyramid by a Sethite architect, specially to strengthen them against the both politically and religiously opposed descendants of Cain, banded together in nations, as they were, under their 20.68-inch standard, for the oppression of those of an opposite principle in religion.

The Egyptians were Cainites not only from what has already been shown from their own “Dead-book,” but from Biblical history indicating that they had, like Cain, refused the sin-offering lying at their door, and had scornfully conspired together, to consider the Divinely appointed means of reconciliation “an abomination unto them.”⁹ Therefore, when Israel was in Egypt, Abel and Cain typically met once again, and we all know with what results of cruelty within the power of Cain to inflict. We also know in a parallel manner, by monumental and metrological research, that that Mizraite Cain held then, and continued to hold through all his national existence, to his 20.68-inch standard measure; while, through Sir Isaac Newton, the astounding information first came, that the Hebraite Abel at the same time likewise kept true, through all his persecutions, to his oppositely derived, Seth-descended, better standard, of, as we have shown, 25.025 British, but 25. Pyramid, inches in length.

The two largely opposing cubits, therefore, after continually warring together in the Promised Land among the Canaanites in Abrahamic days, clashed together still more signally in Egypt, B.C. 1542, and God gave the final victory then to Abel’s. 353But they met together again, as Sir Isaac Newton himself points out, after the Exodus, and even in the very presence of the Tabernacle in the wilderness. For the Israelites would occasionally employ the Egyptian cubit of 20.68 inches long for many of their ordinary purposes; though Moses was always most precise, and apparently successful, in seeing that in their sacred work they employed only their truly and peculiarly sacred cubit, viz. the earth-axis commensurable cubit of 25.025 British inches long.

The Mixed and Opposing Presence of the Two Cubits, Sacred and Profane; or the 25.025 Inch, versus the 20.68 Inch.

But it may be asked, Why did the Israelites continue to employ two cubits? If, as Sir Isaac Newton states, they brought their own sacred cubit, which they had possessed of old, down with them into Egypt, preserved it when there, and took it out with them again,—why was that one not enough for all their purposes?

The first answer to this question is by Sir Isaac himself.

“They, the Hebrews, brought,” says he, “their own sacred measure to Egypt with them; but living for above two hundred years (four hundred according to some chronologists) under the dominion of the Egyptians, and undergoing a hard service under them, especially in building, where the measures came daily under consideration, they must necessarily learn the Egyptian (20.68 inch) cubit.”

The second answer is, “Did the Israelites succeed in freeing themselves at the Exodus from every other taint and sin of the Cainite people they had been sojourning amongst? Nay, indeed, were they free from the sins of many innate, born, and predestined Cainites among 354themselves? Search the Scriptures, and the proof comes up too plainly.”

It was not, apparently, the purpose of God to create even His chosen people absolutely immaculate; or to make it impossible for them to sin, even if they should try. Therefore was it that temptations to evil (though in a measure only) were left to prove them; and amongst other forms of seduction, the insidious Cainite 20.68-inch cubit, as well as the true cubit of Abel with the 25.025 British-inch length.

Now, exactly as these two cubits were contending with each other, and either ensnaring or saving men’s souls in the very camp of the Israelites ruled by Moses, so is it still even in this Christian country wherein we, their descendants, dwell.

If the Book of the Revelation of St. John assures us so clearly that even in these present times, on the now closely approaching termination of the Turkish mission to destroy the worshippers of idols, that idolatry shall yet raise its head, and that men will not yet repent of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold and silver, and brass and stone, and of wood; which can neither see, nor hear, nor walk,—so we may be certain that the Cainite cubit will not be forgotten, or unreverenced, by them either.

Nor was it, rather ominously and unhappily, at the already-mentioned lecture before the British Association for Science at Bradford, in 1873. For the lecturer there, who might have done either thing,—elected to hold up to the admiration of his audience, and as the best possible example of a long-lived, well-cared-for, and in the present day to be imitated, and in the present Christian country, loved and respected, ancient standard of linear measure, not the sacred 25-inch cubit of Seth (and, as we shall show more positively in Chapter 355XVIII., equally of Noah, Moses, and Solomon), with its lasting monument, the Great Pyramid, central to all the inhabited land-surface of the earth,—but the profane 20.68-inch cubit of both the once idolatrous and now Divinely crushed, Egyptians; and of Babylonians, whose boastful city and impious nation have altogether disappeared. Yet much did the lecturer enlarge on the most exemplary care, far exceeding anything known until very lately among Christian communities, with which metrical commissioners from Egypt, Babylon, Nineveh, and other such idolatrous empires in primeval time, must have travelled about from country to country, with examples of that horrible Cainite cubit for instruction, comparison, and regulation; keeping every one of those heathen kings, governments, and peoples,—whether worshippers of Isis, or Astarte or the Phœnician Fishgod or any other,—true to their ancestral, but anti-Israel’s God, covenant in metrology; binding them moreover, for secret and unhallowed reasons, to respect that 20.68-inch¹⁰ cubit and no other.

Of the views of Moses and the Bible, touching “the sacred cubit of the Jews.”

But shall our British, Christian people,—under the plea of being taught science, in grandly adorned halls where fashion and wealth do congregate,—be exposed 356to the temptation, the danger of unknowingly admiring, following, and patronising the profane, instead of the sacred, example in metrology?

The attempt will be made upon them, they may be sure, again and again; and in various ways; one of which is showing itself in part just now, by its being circulated in various quarters, that though Sir Isaac Newton spoke of “the sacred cubit of the Jews” (as to this last name, however, meaning no doubt Hebrews or Israelites, and not the exclusive subsequent people to whom we now more properly restrict the name of Jews), he nowhere says that those Jews themselves used the term “sacred cubit”; and that such a compound word is not to be found in all the writings of Moses.

Certainly; for Moses did not write a treatise on metrology, and mentioned any such matters only incidentally. Yet he did so in a spirit which is perfectly unmistakable.

Does he not, for instance, expressly state in Exodus, that the instructions to make the several parts of the Tabernacle in so many cubits of measure, were given to him by his God, viz. God, the only, one, and true living God, on Mount Sinai? And that this further instruction was impressed upon him, Moses, from the same unique Divine source,—“And look that thou make them after their pattern, which was showed thee in the Mount?” (Exod. xxv. 40.)

If that is not enough to prove to any unprejudiced person that of course those cubits so announced were sacred cubits of the Lord God of Israel, and not the profane cubits of idolatrous Egypt; let the doubter read first the inspired Prophet's words and terrific denunciations when the children of Israel fell away from those Mount-announced commandments he had given them, and made themselves by preference a golden calf after the fashion of the animal-worshipping Egyptians. And 357then let the same doubter compare therewith, on the other hand, the holy approval of Moses when at length the whole work of the Tabernacle, cubit by cubit of it, according to his original numerical instructions, had been faithfully completed; completed, too, by workmen specially called to it by God, and stated to be filled by Him for that very purpose “with the spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship” (Exod. xxxv. 31): and then—

“Moses did look upon all the work, and, behold, they had done it as the Lord had commanded, even so had they done it: and Moses blessed them.”

While finally came the still higher approval of Divine condescension, in that “the glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle.”

Hence, though the word “sacred cubit” be not written in the Bible, it is surabundantly implied; but always as restricted to a certain cubit of a 25.025 inch, or most opposition, length to the Cainite 20.68-inch cubit; and if the term be used here by ourselves, it is not as a quotation, but as a corollary. As such, too, it is indeed so largely deducible from whole sections of the Sacred Book, that the full spirit in which that 25.025-inch cubit we have here called sacred, was looked on by Moses, cannot be expressed, or even indicated, by us in any less positive terms than the most decided and powerful ones we have been privileged to employ.¹¹

Moses, too, as we have already hinted, did not write on Metrology, but on Religion; and therefore had no occasion to give an account of the sacred, the 25.025 British inch, or the earth-commensurable, and God's creation harmonious with, cubit in and for itself alone. 358The Great Pyramid, on the other hand, is largely a treatise on metrology; and therefore, being as to its design inspired from the same supernatural source, has at last taught us how to speak of appropriately, and reverently to understand, the one and only cubit used by Moses after he came down from communion with Omniscient, Omnipotent Divinity, on the Mount.