CHAPTER XVIII.

MOSAIC, AND EGYPTIAN, WISDOM,

Derived from opposite sources.

IN the circles of those very learned men in modern society who go on studying with zest the idolatrous contents of the Egyptian galleries in the British, and many other, museums (and are known as hierologists, hieroglyphiologists, Egyptologists, and though calling themselves Biblical archæologists, are much more Anti-, than Pro-, therein), are found the doughtiest of those champions who are so ready in these days to insist, that “whereas Genesis was written by Moses, and Moses was for many years of his life a priest among the Egyptians, (who were a wealthy and civilized nation when the progenitors of the Israelites were still merely wandering shepherds; while moreover, according to the New Testament itself (Acts vii. 22), Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,)”—that therefore Moses must have borrowed all the best things he has put into Genesis, and his other books also, from the Egyptian priests.

On this question, much defence of the Divine inspiration, versus the Egyptian education, of the responsible author of the Pentateuch has been written in the modern world, from the literary side; but not always with so much decided effect as might have been done from the scientific point of view, as now established by the Great Pyramid investigations.

390Mere literature, indeed, has well set forth that as to the points of community, or similar complexion, claimed by the hierologists between the Egyptian and the Mosaic laws, they exist only in certain subsidiary forms required for social order and political independence; and are such as a common humanity, with a like geographical position, chronological epoch, and traditional information from Babel, would have infallibly produced, more or less, amongst any set of people endowed with ever so little desire to amend their position in the world. And then there comes also, to every real believer in the fundamental doctrine of Christianity, this further and grander result, flowing from an inductive investigation into the two systems as wholes; viz. that the real religious essence of the Mosaic law is as totally distinct from that of the Egyptian, as any two antagonisms in this world can possibly be. For while the Egyptian system bases on Cainite assertions and reassertions of self-righteousness, and a multitude of gods, half animal and half man—some of them, too, not a little abominable—who is there, of those who have felt the saving grace of Christ's Divine sacrifice, who cannot see, as the ruling principle in Moses, the most magnificent, and particular rebellion against all the would-be power of man to theo-technicize heavenly things, and a grand assertion both of the one, true, only living God, the Creator of all things, and the sinfulness of man in His sight? Over and above which, how grandly distinct is the great preparation, promised to Abraham, and practically begun in the time of Moses, of setting aside a peculiar people in the midst of whom, or rather of one section of whom, Christ Himself was to appear and suffer 1,500 years afterwards as the Divine Mediator and all-essential Atonement; and in the midst of the other sections of which people and His Church, He is still to appear as Universal King on earth!

391The holy zeal, too, of Moses, his earnest self-sacrificing for the cause of God, and his anxiety to show Him at once accessible by prayer, through an appointed method of sin-offering and mediation to every one, both rich and poor, are the liveliest contrasts that can well be imagined to the sordid routine of an Egyptian priesthood, placing itself immovably, for its own gain, between the people and their gods, such as they were.

Of the Number Five.

But the most decided overthrow of the modern hierologists comes involuntarily from themselves, when they attempt to handle the mechanical part of the question; for, to a great extent, what they, the hierologists, have succeeded at last in proving,—is precisely that which enables us to say most positively that a cubit measuring-rod of the Mosaic, and Newton-proved, length of 25 Pyramid inches nearly, and which has such extraordinary scientific value in its earth-axis commensurability, and was made so much of by Moses in the Tabernacle of the Wilderness,—was no part or parcel of the wisdom of the profane Egyptians during any portion of their historical career; and could not, therefore, have been learned or borrowed from them by either Moses or any one else.

And though the best ethnological theory of the Egyptians be that which makes them, not Ethiopians descending the Nile from the interior of Africa, nor Indian Aryans migrating by sea from Bombay and landing on the eastern coast of Africa,—but North Asiatics and Caucasians entering by the Isthmus of Suez into Lower Egypt, and ascending the course of the river—there seems no reason whatever to conclude that they had previously, wherever such previous existence had been passed, either received or adopted that peculiar 392measure of 25 inches, which Sir Isaac Newton considers the Israelites possessed, long before their going down into Egypt.

Not only, too, may it be further said, from this cubit-measure side of the question, that recent researches have proved the astonishing vitality of standards of measure through enormous intervals of time: and that an involuntary change of a free people’s standard from the undoubted Egyptian 20.68, to the Hebrew and Pyramid 25.0 inches, or vice versâ, was never yet seen in the history of the classic world; but it may be argued, that the ancient Egyptians, whatever faults they may have had, were both politically and socially a most conservative, methodical, and orderly people, with an immense taste for mechanics, a most commendable industry, and a marvellous appreciation of measure; so that they would be the last nation in the world, let alone their religious ideas on the topic, to lose or mistake their hereditary standards. In fact, one of the chief accusations which a late French writer brings against those ancient Egyptians is, that they had no genius, no invention, no love of change; that they were only dull plodders at routine work; and, besides never having produced a great poet or a first-rate warrior, they were actually so low in the scale of his own Gallic ideas of advancing, civilized humanity, so debased in fact amongst mankind, as never to have had a revolutionist of any kind or degree amongst them.

We may therefore with perfect safety, and hierologists’ support too, regard the length of 20.68 inches as the veritable and admitted hereditary measure of all Pharaonic, Cainite, idolatrous, Egyptians; and the one which, if they had been really copied from by any other nation or individual, would have been the length imitated and faithfully reproduced.

Moses, consequently, in making the distinguished and 393by implication (see p. 357) sacred, use which he did, not of that length of 20.68, but of the very different length of 25 inches, was decidedly not taking anything there out of the known wisdom-book of the Egyptians.

And not only so, too; for if, with the absolute length of the Pyramid standard, Moses adopted its Pyramidic subdivision also into $5 \times 5$ parts, and wrote his whole laws and legislation in five books, or a “Pentateuch,”—he was adopting an arrangement which was particularly hateful to the Egyptians. Why it was so, does not appear; but Sir Gardner Wilkinson speaks of 5 as being the “evil number” in Modern Egypt¹ still; it is marked by o on their watches; and $5 \times 5$, or anything made up of 5, would seem to have been always repulsive there.

Particularly galling, therefore, to the old Egyptians it must have been to have seen the Israelites, when they escaped from bondage and went out of the country “with an high hand,” itself a symbol of 5,—especially galling to their spirits to see their late slaves go up, marshalled by “5 in a rank,” out of the land of Egypt; for so is the literal translation of the word expressed “harnessed,” in Exodus xiii. 18, of the English Bible.

But Moses had none of this unwise and anti-Pyramid hatred of 5, and times of 5; and though his first arrangement of years was the Sabbatical one of a “week of years,” his next, and by far the most important one, the grand standard, in fact, of sacred time, was the jubilee of $5 \times 10$ years; a number which, with the similar arrangement of days for the feast of Pentecost, brings up again the number of inches frequently referred to as an important standard in the King’s Chamber and the passages of the Great Pyramid.

And when we further find that in other important things, Moses was likewise going directly against the 394standards of the Egyptians, but coincidently with those of the Kosmos of God and also the long secret, but now being manifested, design of the Great Pyramid; of those very innermost parts of it, too, which the Egyptians knew nothing about, and which he, Moses, as a man, could never have seen—when we meet with all these telling circumstances, and so many parallel features between the inspired writings of the Bible, and the construction by number, weight, and measure of the Great Pyramid; they two on one side, versus on the other all profane Egypt, together with Babylon, Assyria, and Greece also, it certainly would appear that we must be coming close to the Biblical Sethite, or Israelitic, source of the truly high and transcendent knowledge displayed by that mighty, unique, and non-Egyptian fabric.

While as to the oft-repeated quotation that Moses was learned in “all the wisdom of the Egyptians,”—the particular question which that most provokes in the mind of one who has closely studied the Great Pyramid, and compared it carefully by mensuration and science against every known work of those same idolatrous Egyptians when working freely and voluntarily for themselves,—is, and pray what did all the wisdom of the Egyptians amount to? Must it not have been something extremely moderate, if Moses knew it all, besides his own superlative stores of higher wisdom, which Egyptians were by no means burdened with?

Moses knew therefore, doubtless, that the profane Egyptians believed the earth to be flat, and represented it in their hieroglyphics, still to be seen, as a thin cake of bread: and had no ideas of earth and heaven commensurability for their own cubit measure. But Moses was not led, by knowing that ignorant wisdom of the Egyptians, to follow it,—rather, on the contrary, to avoid it, and fight against it; arming himself therefor out of the very treasuries of Divine wisdom imparted to him from 395on high. And, first of all, let us see how he proceeded in that particular matter of his, or his God's, sacred cubit length, as expressive of the earth we live on; first in size, and next with its contents and all that is therein.

Of the Sacred Ark of the Covenant.

The length of the Great Pyramid's cubit having been 25.025 British inches cannot, I presume, now, after all that has preceded in this book,² be resisted; and, to all minds capable of grasping the subject, Sir Isaac Newton's testimony for the Mosaic cubit having also been close to that length,² is probably equally conclusive; yet at the same time, those able minds may desire to hear, if there is any further direct Biblical evidence for that end, over and above what Sir Isaac Newton adduced in his invaluable Dissertation. Now something of this sort there does appear to be in the Pentateuch's account of the Ark of the Covenant, the most sacred feature of the whole of the Tabernacle's arrangement under Moses.

That ark was kept in the Holiest of Holies, occupied its chief place of honour, and was never to be looked on by any but the High Priest alone, even during a journey. Near it was placed an ephah measure; and immediately outside its compartment, as Michaelis has shown, were various other standards of measure; though no metrological purpose, that I am aware of, has been hitherto assigned to the Ark itself.

As its original name, arca, implies, the Ark was a box or chest; and its first stated purpose as such was, to hold the Divine autograph of the law written on stone.

This Ark-box, then, made of shittim, or acacia, wood, was further lidless, so far as anything attached to it was 396concerned: though a crown of gold was afterwards added round about the rim, and a separate or loose lid was made for it of pure gold, called the Mercy-seat. The actual seat, however,—said to be occasionally occupied as a throne, by an expression of the Divine presence—was not that lid, but was formed by the wings of two angels, constructed in gold, at either end of the lid; which lid, at such time, together with the Ark below, then formed the footstool.³

With the lower part only of this arrangement, or the Ark itself, have we now to do; and the Ark, on its loose lid of gold being removed, was merely a box—a lidless rectangular, and rectilinear box, made of a hard and tough wood common to the hills of Sinai.

Now in so far, there was nothing new or peculiar in this arrangement of Moses; for of boxes there was already an abundance in the world, even in the very temples of Egypt, when time had waxed so late in human history as 1500 B.C. In fact, those very purposes of "rapacity," in subservience to which Josephus relates that Cain invented weights and measures, would seem to require that he should have made big and strong chests, wherein to keep the fruits of his organized spoliation and oppression of mankind; as well as the stone strongholds, banks, or "oers," of which more presently, for the custody of the said chests.

The only feature, therefore, of distinctive importance which we need expect to find in the particular box constructed by Moses for a sacred purpose, should be something akin to that which distinguished his sacred cubit from the profane cubit of the Egyptians. Mere 397measuring-sticks were both of them to the outside, contemptuous world; and yet one, not only of a different length from the other, but implying by the amount of that difference a commensurability with the Divinely grand in nature, far too difficult for man to have discovered for himself, or even to have fully appreciated when explained to him, in that age. Now the size of that Ark-box of Moses is given in Holy Scripture as being 2.5 cubits long, and 1.5 cubits broad, and 1.5 high; which measures being reduced to Pyramid inches, on Sir Isaac Newton's, or more exactly our own, evaluation of the sacred cubit of Moses, $= 62.5 \times 37.5 \times 37.5$ of those inches.

But was this outside measure, or inside measure? for that must make a very material difference in the cubical result.

Outside measure, without a doubt, and for the two following reasons:—

1st. Because the vertical component is spoken of as height, and not depth.

2nd. Because the lower lid of gold, or the Mercy-seat, being made only of the same stated length and breadth as the Ark itself, it would have stood insecure, and run a chance of tumbling down to the bottom of the box, if that length and breadth had signified the top of the box's inside, and not its outside, area.

Hence, with the true length of the sacred cubit (obtained now after so many mediæval ages of error), and the above understanding how to apply it, we may now approach the cubical contents of the Covenant's Ark. We are not, indeed, informed in Scripture what was the thickness of the sides, and therefore do not know exactly how much to subtract from the outside, to give the inside, dimensions; but the outside having been given, and the material stated, the limits within which such thickness must be found are left very narrow 398indeed. Let the thickness, for instance, be assumed 1.8 Pyramid inches; then the length, breadth, and depth will be reduced from an outside of $62.5 \times 37.5 \times 37.5$ to an inside of $58.9 \times 33.9 \times 35.7$; which gives 71,282 cubic inches for the capacity contents of this open box without a lid.

Or, if we consider the sides and ends 1.75 inch thick, and the bottom 2 inches,—also very fair proportions in carpentry for such a sized box in such a quality of wood,—then its inside measure would be $59.0 \times 34.0 \times 35.5$; which yields for the cubical contents 71,213 cubic Pyramid inches.

Thus, in any mode almost of practically constructing the Ark-box, on both the name and number data given by the Bible, and the sacred Hebrew cubit value first approached in modern times by Sir Isaac Newton, we cannot avoid bringing out a cubical capacity result almost identical with that of a still older box, known for several centuries past to moderns as a lidless box, but never known at all to the ancient Egyptians; viz. the coffer in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid.

Wherefore, with that coffer’s cubic capacity, (ascertained by the modern measures already given in Chapter VIII. p. 165, and amounting to 71,250 cubic Pyramid inches,) the Ark of the Covenant immediately acquires all the commensurabilities of that coffer’s interior with the capacity and mean density of the natural earth as a whole: a something both utterly distinguishing it from any profane Egyptian box yet measured; and most appropriate to the Scripture-stated use of the Ark under circumstances of Divine presence as a footstool; agreeably with the words of the Lord in Isaiah and Acts, “the earth is My footstool.”

Such, then, looked at in the light of science, 3,300 years after its day of construction, must have been the sacred Ark of the Covenant, built according to the 399inspiration commands received by Moses after he had left Egypt for ever;—and that was the Ark which subsequently overthrew the idol gods of the Philistines, and was a source of safety to Israel, when used by permission of God, on many and many a national occasion. Yet what eventually became of it, or what was its latter end, Scripture does not inform us. The Eastern Churches have their traditions, but I do not know on what really secure data they found them.

The Abyssinians, too, have much to say about the Ark, and I believe claim it to be now in their country: while the Apocrypha, on the contrary, declares that, together with many other sacred vessels of the Temple, it was carried away and hidden by Jeremiah in Mount Nebo, to prevent its falling into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar at the destruction of Jerusalem by him.

Meanwhile the rising tide of national thought, inquiry, and growing belief in this country, touching the identity of the British nation with the lost ten tribes of the kingdom of Israel, is now leading, under the guidance of Mr. Edward Hine, Rev. F. R. A. Glover, Mr. E. W. Bird, and others, to the conclusion, that subsequently still to what is described in the Apocrypha, the Ark of the Covenant was brought, together with a daughter of the Royal House of Judah in the hereditary line of David, to these Isles of the West, by Jeremiah, in his latter days; and was finally deposited by him in the hill of Tara in Ireland; and is there still, in very secure masonic preservation for an expected day of bringing to light once again.

Papers on this subject are appearing almost every week in Mr. Hine's special Anglo-Israelite journals, Life from the Dead, and The Nation's Glory Leader, as well as in the Banner of Israel, under the unexceptionable editorship of Mr. E. W. Bird (Philo-Israel). Subscriptions, too, have even been sent in, though not 400desired yet, to pay for the expense of a search by excavation.

If this most remarkable, really miraculous, Biblical relic should ever be found, either at Tara or anywhere else, it is evident from all that has been already written here, that by its exact and scientifically-measured size it may prove its own case. And in the same category I may as well mention a further piece of solid information made out by the metrological researches of John Taylor and others in past years; viz. that within narrow limits of uncertainty, the brazen lavers of Solomon's Temple were also of the same cubic capacity as the coffer in the Great Pyramid; and measured on the Hebrew system, 40 baths or 4 homers; while each of those homers was equal to the Anglo-Saxon "quarter," used for corn-measures amongst that people, viz. our own forefathers. Those lavers, then, through the coffer, were—what no human science could have intentionally made them in that day—i.e. earth-commensurable incapacity, combined with weight.

Of Solomon's Molten Sea.

But there was still a far larger capacity vessel in the same Temple of Solomon: was it, also, earth-commensurable, and harmoniously proportioned with the world of God's creation?

This vessel, by name the "Molten Sea," was grandly cast in bronze, though of a shape and size which have defied all essayists hitherto to agree upon. Even in the Bible, something of what is there said about it, is stated variously in different books thereof; as in that of Kings, the cubical contents are given as 2,000 baths, while in Chronicles they are set down as 3,000. The latter account being but fragmentary, I adhere to the former; and then find, according to the simple statement in 401baths, that the “molten sea” would have contained the contents of a laver 50 times; or a Pyramid number at once.

Next we are told (1 Kings, vii. 23—26) that the “molten sea” “was ten cubits from the one brim to the other; it was round all about, and his height was five cubits; and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about; and it was an hand-breadth thick.”

The first point here, is to realize the shape. Some good men have imagined it cylindrical; some of a swelling caldron form; but the greater numbers, a hemispherical shape; and this, perhaps, is most agreeable (1) to the phrase “round all about,” (2) to its diameter being twice its height, and (3) to the traditionary testimony of Josephus that it was hemispherical.

This point settled, are the measures given, of the inside, or outside, denomination? By the rule established for the Ark, the breadth and height are outside, of course; but in that case, what is the meaning of a circle of 10 cubits in diameter, having a circumference of 30 cubits? That is a total impossibility; and wholly against the chief part of the teaching of the Great Pyramid itself, which proves in various ways that the circumference of a circle having 10 for diameter, cannot be less than 31.4159, &c.

In this dilemma, I venture to conclude (especially as here an indication of the thickness of the vessel is given, viz. at a hand-breadth) that the inside circumference was alluded to, but the outside diameter.

Take, then, a hemisphere with an inside circumference of 30 Pyramid cubits, its diameter would be 238.73 Pyramid inches, giving, with an outside diameter of 10 cubits, nearly 5.5 inches for the thickness (or a space which the hand of a strong man spread out would easily cross). The cubic contents, then, of such internal hemisphere will be 3,562,070 Pyramid cubic inches; and divided by the Pyramid number 50, give 71,241 of the

2 D 402same cubic inches; i.e. within a seven-thousandth part the same as either the Ark of the Covenant, or the coffer of the Great Pyramid.

But why did Solomon go to such pains and expense in making the “molten sea” so very much larger than his already large brazen vessels, the lavers; and larger, too, by the exact multiple of 50?

No profane Egyptian would have chosen that number, as we have already seen; but in the Great Pyramid, planned certainly by a Seth-descended, God-inspired teacher,—the lowest course of the King’s Chamber has been so adjusted in height, by the removal from sight of its lower 5 inches, that the cubic contents of that lowest course, as it now stands above the floor, amount, as already shown at p. 171, to 50 times the coffer’s contents; or, as we now see, were exactly equal to the contents of Solomon’s molten sea; unless we should rather say that Solomon’s molten sea was made to be equal to the lower adjusted course of the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. The cubit used by Solomon at the building of the Temple being also of the same 25-inch, and earth-commensurable, length as that employed by Moses on the Tabernacle in the Wilderness; and that again identical with the cubit chiefly monumentalized in the design of the Great Pyramid.

Yet if we have been already obliged to conclude that Moses, though he lived long in Egypt, could never have been inside the Great Pyramid, and had, therefore, no opportunity of humanly copying its cubic contents of the coffer; or humanly supplying himself with a note of the length of its cubit; vastly more certain may we be that King Solomon was never inside the Great Pyramid either, or in a position to note the exact amount of cubic contents of the lower course of the coffer’s containing chamber, or to copy the Pyramid cubit length and its subdivisions from the granite leaf in the ante-chamber.

403Whence, then, came the metrological ideas common to three individuals in three different ages; and involving reference to deep cosmical attributes of the earth, understood by the best and highest of human learning at none of those times? And the answer can hardly be other, than that the God of Israel, the Creator of the Earth, who liveth for ever, equally inspired to this end the Seth-descended architect of the Great Pyramid, the prophet Moses, and King Solomon.

The Ark of Noah.

Wherever, too, throughout the Bible, Divine commands, for spiritual purposes of high degree, were given in terms of linear measure, we may now confidently expect that one and the same length of cubit is always alluded to, viz. the “sacred cubit,” or the cubit 25 Pyramid inches long; and this equally in the parts of Scripture referring to the still unaccomplished future, as the primevally remote past.

Hence, when in Ezekiel (chap. xl. 5) the descriptions are given of the future temple which is still to be erected on the mountains of Israel, when her two houses, Judah and Ephraim, are once more to be joined together under one king,—the cubits of the measuring-rod employed are expressly described as “the cubit and an hand-breadth”; that is, the profane and undoubtedly 20.68-inch cubit of the Babylonish country (see p. 341) Ezekiel was then in, and a hand-breadth added to bring it up to 25. inches.

And hence, also, when in early Genesis the most important event, next to the appearance of Christ, in all the history of man upon earth is being prepared for,—viz. the Deluge for cleansing the earth of the wicked,—the commands of God to Noah respecting the size and shape of the Ark of Safety which he was to build, being given in cubits, they cannot be reasonably 404expected to be any others than the sacred 25-inch cubit of the Great Pyramid, the Tabernacle, and the Temple.

But can it be demonstrably shown that the cubits were the same?

I believe that it can, in a line first opened up by Mr. F. Petrie, though afterwards and independently discovered and more fully worked out by the Rev. C. W. Hickson, of Bristol.

Contrasts and comparisons between Noah's Ark and the Great Pyramid have long been indulged in by many. Both of the constructions evidently were primeval in date, but one, the greatest work ever executed in wood for floating temporarily on the waters; and the other, the loftiest and heaviest work ever prepared in stone for standing securely on the solid rock almost for ever.

Both of them have been attempted to be surpassed in their own lines within recent years by modern wealth, numbers and power, though with more of misfortune than success to those concerned. But the earlier ancient one lives only in story, the Divinely inspired story of Genesis, handed down by writings copied from writings indefinitely; while the other, little mentioned and only indirectly alluded to in the Bible, offers itself still in all the solid fact of existence for scientific modern measure throughout all its parts. One of them is everything for those who believe by faith; the other is for the Thomases of the latter day, who must still practically test and prove for themselves.

In the simplest manner, however, or by lineal measure, there is, at first sight, not the least apparent agreement between the two grand works; the three hundred cubit length of the Ark having no likeness to the 365.242 cubit length of a base-side of the Great Pyramid.

But what if we take them by capacity measure, for there may be identity there, though no ostensible similarity in linear dimensions. Over and above which 405known law, while the whole purpose of the Ark of Noah was eminently its large internal capacity, in order to be an Ark of Safety to all those appointed, —the Great Pyramid is equally remarkable for being nearly solid; and yet the exceedingly contracted hollow space which it does contain, centres about a small, empty box or vessel, the coffer, whose chief value as we have already shown, again rested in its precise amount of capacity. On the principle, therefore, of like with like, in species, quality, and purpose, the great Ark of Noah may be compared in matter of interior contents of space with the relatively very small, but most exactly sized Ark-box or Coffer of the Great Pyramid; and when that is done, behold the one is exactly commensurable with the other by the sacred and precise Pyramid number of 100,000 or $10^5$; that is, however, only when we assume that the cubits which were commanded to Noah by God were the Newton-derived sacred cubits of Israel, and had nothing to do with the much shorter profane and Cainite cubits of Egypt, Babylon, and Nineveh. For it thus comes about:—

The capacity contents of the Great Pyramid’s coffer are 71,250 cubic Pyramid inches. (See Chapter VIII.)

The capacity contents of Noah’s Ark are to be found, from the Biblical statement, $300 \times 50 \times 30$ cubits; and these being reduced to Pyramid inches, at the rate of 25 for each cubit $= 7,500 \times 1,250 \times 750 = 7,031,250,000$.

That quantity, however, is, so far, by no means exact; and does not, as yet, include a very peculiar addition which the Bible describes to the Ark, viz. “and a window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above.”

It was well enough for the coffer, in the well-ceiled interior King’s Chamber apartment of the Great Pyramid, to remain so long an open lidless box; but that would not have been suitable to the Noah’s Ark’s far 406larger box, whose very object was to float outside, and there afford shelter to those within it from the preternaturally heavy rains which were to descend from above, and, with the other miraculously supplied waters, destroy all the rest of men.

Of this window, the venerable John Taylor had already written in his book, “The Great Pyramid,” p. 308:—

“The window extended, probably, the whole length of the Ark, along the roof, and acted as a ventilator, being covered over by a ridge roof.” And Mr. Hickson further imagined a double but low sloping roof, extending lengthwise, open at the ends, and raised along its middle line to the same height, “in,” or within, a cubit.

If, moreover, we ask, how much within, we can hardly do otherwise than remember the Pyramidal 5-inch space taken off the height of the walls in the King’s Chamber, and say therefore 5 inches. In which case 20 inches are left for the central longitudinal height; and with that, computing the additional capacity contents which such a window-roof would give, it amounts to 93,750,000 cubic Pyramid inches. Now this number, added on to the larger quantity obtained before for all the hollow box part of the Ark, gives for the final result $7{,}125{,}000{,}000$ Pyramid cubic inches. That is, exactly 100,000 times the 71,250 measured cubic inches of the interior of the Great Pyramid’s coffer-box or ark; and if of that, then also of the Ark of the Covenant in the Tabernacle of Moses, and the lavers in the Temple of Solomon as well.”

* Some further important Pyramidal connections by number and measure on one side, and by symbol and shape on the other, with both Noah’s Ark and Christian Churches, on the other side,—have lately been developed by Major Tracey, R.A., out of the Scripturally-recorded measures of Solomon’s Temple and other buildings; and may be found either in The Banner of Israel Volume for 1878; or Philo-Israel’s “The Great Pyramid of Egypt,” a pamphlet published in London during the present year.

Of Stone Sanctuaries, “ Oers ” and Pyramids.

So far for the vessels contained in the several sanctuaries, whether Pyramid, Tabernacle, or Temple. But something now requires to be said, touching these sanctuaries themselves; and chiefly on account of the new light thrown on them by Mr. Henry Tompkins.*⁴

The chief instrument with which he voluntarily works is indeed linguistic only, and therefore rather outside my methods of procedure; but involuntarily he brings to bear certain necessary business features essential to the very existence of any, and every, community of men, whether large or small. All such, for instance, must have amongst them, in whatever age they live or have lived, something approaching to a safe, or treasure-stronghold; even, and perhaps much more so, if they be a community of robbers, rather than of peaceful men.

Now the first builder of such a safe, according to this new author, was Cain; and Moses told us of it long ago: though bad Hebrew translations have hidden the fact from our eyes, by speaking rather of “the city” which Cain built in the land of Nod. Yet Moses only said an “oer,” meaning thereby, some chambered tumulus of earth and stones, which one man might possibly, or even easily, have built single-handed; and might then with full right “call it after his son’s name.” Such an “oer” was rude probably, yet exactly adapted to serve both as a stronghold and strong room, or a necessary practical addition to what Josephus tells us of Cain, at that very period of his life, too, when “he invented weights and measures, and used them for the purposes of rapacity and oppression.”

408Hence every few Cainites might well have an “oer” amongst them, but not “a city”; and in freeing us from this latter word, where Moses wrote “oer,” Mr. Tompkins seems to have done excellent service; though when he proceeds further, to call every “oer” a Pyramid, he wanders from the provable stone facts.

The word Pyramid (by sound, of course, rather than by letter) is not very distinctly read in any of the early Pharaonic hieroglyphics, nor proved to have been known before the visit of Herodotus to Egypt in 445 B.C. There too, the word Pyramid,⁵ when used at last, was applied to a particular form of the “oer” seen nowhere else; and the progress of mathematics since then has still more strictly confined the word’s application. Hence, when we read in Genesis of the rebellious and Cain-following men, after the Flood, uniting together to build “a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven,” according to King James’s translators,—and when Mr. T. tells us rather to read, “Let us build a Pyramid, and one of great extent, whose top,” &c.,—let it be our part to endeavour to ascertain mechanically, to some extent, what was built.

Nor is this very difficult; for though Babel’s old structure may long since have been buried in the soft alluvial earth of its foundations, yet the researches of Layard, Botta, Loftus, and others in Mesopotamia, all unite in showing, that the buildings which served the purposes of “oers” next in order of time to Babel, and

“The Egyptians signified a pyramid by a certain group of hieroglyphic characters, which give the sound abumer, and meant a vast tomb. The Greeks, by a kind of metastasis, made it aburam, then buram, and next buramis, or πυραμὶς, a pyramid.” 409were evidently a locally favourite form in that part of the world, were invariably oblong, elevated, and eccentrally terraced temples; structures therefore not to be called pyramids in any degree; while their astronomical orientation was of the very opposite kind to the memorable example set by the Great Pyramid of Jeezeh.

Similarly, too, the chambered tumuli of the Lydians, Etruscans, Pelasgi, and many other early people, were all of them “oers,” and many of them treasury “oers” too, but not one of them a pyramid. In Egypt only did the “oers” become truly pyramidal; and though in that land, their primitive Cainite purpose of strongholds for treasure rapaciously acquired, was gradually overshadowed by sepulchral service, yet they were not always wholly merged therein, whatever the modern Egyptologists choose oracularly to declare. For,—

Besides the many early local traditions, which can hardly but have some foundation, of treasure having been deposited in the Egyptian Pyramids by kings who lived close after the Flood,—Colonel Howard-Vyse and Mr. Perring (on pp. 45, 46, of the former’s 3rd vol. of “Pyramids of Gizeh”), give an account of a chamber in the Great, terraced, and rather oblong, Pyramid of Saccara, closed in the ceiling by a granite stopper; of the shape of what is employed in a “stoppered” glass bottle of the present day, but of four tons weight: and that peculiar chamber was confidently declared by those authors to have been “a treasury,” “a secure and secret treasury,” and one that had certainly “never been put to tombic use.”

To the intense Cainites, that all Egyptians were, some form of “oer” was most necessary in their early national life; and though they did perhaps begin in two or three small examples with chambered tumuli, or Babel terraced temples, or in fact the so-called Great Pyramid of Saccara, or circular Lydian mounds, or 410even round towers,⁶ the captivating, crystalline, example of the Great Pyramid, as soon as that appeared, led them off at once into that shape alone; and they put its mark so effectually on themselves, that the uniquely Sethite character of the Great Pyramid was soon lost to general view in Egypt, among the numbers of newly pyramidized Cainite “ oers ” there.

Of the Epi-methean construction of profane Egyptian Pyramids, and the Pro-methean features of the Great Pyramid alone.

And yet to a deeper insight there was, even in the mere putting together of the material, the most essentially different character in the one Great Pyramid original, and all its supposed subsequent copies.

The Egyptians, for instance, according to Dr. Lepsius’s law of their Pyramid building (pages 103 and 105), proceeded in exactly the same exogenous manner as all Cainites with their chambered tumuli ; i.e. beginning with a chamber centre, and extending the structure around and above, more or less, wider or higher, but continuously, merely as opportunity offered; and terminating at last at such a distance, as accident of some kind or another determined in the end.

But the Great Pyramid, as testified by the facts of construction and measure, detailed through the whole of this book, and by all the accounts of Herodotus also, collected at the place as to the actual history and course of proceeding,—was commenced on the opposite, or endogenous method ; viz. by laying out the external boundary of a long previously settled plan, procuring all the materials carefully beforehand, and then building up rapidly within the given outline only.

411While, therefore, the Cainite Egyptian Pyramids were “Epimethean,” or such as spoke to hasty act, and then, after that, thought, when thought was too late to be of any real service,—the Great Pyramid was essentially Promethean, or the result of previous wise and provident thought; and then, careful act following thereupon. And it was still more than that; for,—

The Epimethean, even according to classic tradition, brought infinity of ills on all humanity; but the Promethean told mysteriously, from far earlier ages than those of the Greeks, of One who should, in the fulness of time, voluntarily sacrifice Himself in order that He might (in antagonism to the false gods of heathen idolatry), bring down sacred fire, or regeneration life, from heaven to men. In fact it told of the first coming of Christ as the Messiah, to save mankind from their sins, though by suffering Himself, the Divinely innocent for the human guilty, nailed to the accursed tree.

But of this primeval and inspired phase of the long subsequent Promethean myth, long before the Greeks polluted its purity and branded its chief actor as impious, because he was opposed to all their own invented obscene rout of gods and goddesses of Olympus,* we shall have further positive evidence, on studying more advanced features of construction found only in the Great, the most ancient, the Promethean, Pyramid of Jeezeh, and utterly unknown to profane Egypt throughout all its historic days and amongst its innumerable Epimethean Lepsian-law buildings.

APPENDIX OF 1879.

Again, within the short interval of a year, the progress of society requires an addition to the cubit portion

* See “Seven Homilies on Ethnic Inspiration,” by the Rev. Joseph Taylor Goodsir; and “The Religions of the World,” by William Osburn. 412of the above, and previous, chapters; and the necessity has come about thus, on the present occasion:—

The Palestine Exploration Fund's Journal, or "Quarterly Statement" for September, 1879, contains on its pages 181—184, an essay on "The Sacred Cubit—Test Cases"; and declares for the said cubit having been, after all, only 17.72, and not 25·, British inches long. But how does the Society, or their author Mr. S. Beswick, obtain that short value? Have they discovered practical examples in any kind of sound material, or ancient monument, contemporary with the primal age in which the real Sacred Cubit first became known to the chosen Patriarchs as God-approved; and have they compared their absolute examples with the earliest Scriptural metrological statements?

Nothing whatever of the kind! They start merely with Mr. Beswick's verbal statement that he thinks 17.72 inches is the length, and that he is also of an opinion, which would make any virtue in that Sacred measure equally common to all the Cainite and idolatrous nations. (See Banner of Israel, December 10, 1879.) He then compares the measures of some of the mere latter-day ruins of sinful, crucifixional Jerusalem, as recently taken in British inches, against two older statements of them in cubits of their day. But as one of these cubit statements is an Arab MS. of only 1444 A.D. date, it may be passed on one side at once; and as for the other, it is merely Josephus' vernacular description, in about 70 A.D., of a bridge on which Titus stood on a particular occasion. But that was a time closely following the period when, not only had the Jews been for generations Greecised in language and customs, and had then submitted to Roman masters, but had culminated at last in sin, by their crucifying the Lord's Christ, and positively desiring the guilt of His blood to remain for ever on themselves and their children.

413How horrible, if they had then possessed the really Sacred $25.025$-inch Cubit of Noah, Moses, Solomon, and the Great Pyramid, amongst them, and professed to use it in all their works! But they had it not; or at least the cubit they did then employ, and put themselves under the domination of, is now shown, involuntarily proved, by the Palestine Exploration Fund to have been still more different from the truly Sacred Cubit of Biblical Inspiration, than even the $20.68$ inch Cainite Cubit of profane Egypt and idolatrous Babel (pp. 353—355), being barely 18 inches long. A length which shows it evidently to be a comparatively modern affair; and to have been rather the representative standard of Greece in the days of Alexander the Great and his generals, as well as of both the “great red dragon” powers of the Apocalypse, Rome and Constantinople, during their lengthy Imperial military rule over all that region.

Wherefore, to behold in these days the truly Sacred Cubit of the early Patriarchs approved by the God of peace and love, and undisturbed from Abraham’s day, we must betake us, as already explained in this book, to the great “oer” and primeval spiritual treasure-house of Jeezeh’s Great Pyramid,—wherein none of the popular military conquerors of the earth, and their destroying legions, ever entered; and which had no hand in the crucifixion of our blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.