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Show New Light Is Shed Upon the Laws of Moses g & ,i5 Jf Held Responsible for Present World Upheaval - y jTHmDCAMPJNVYAOi SELAH fi "lA GREEN SPOT IK WA5( 1PST UOOH HALT AT WAD I HEBRON ENTRAMCL IN j! THE SHADOW OP A GREAT HOCK ; LEFT TO RIHT Belated Praise Is Bestowed Upon the Doughty Old Reformer. By WILLIAM T. ELLIS. (Copyright, liily, by the New York Herald Compay. All Rights Reserved.) (Copyright, Canada, bv the New York Herald Company.) (Special to the 8alt Take Tribune and New York Herald.) MOD NT SINAI. Julv 5. Moses, after all, and not President Wilson, must be held primarily responsible responsi-ble for the present world upheaval. up-heaval. If he had not enunciated enunci-ated a new set of laws, divinely sanctioned and now made universally applicable, for the establishment of justice and equity between man and man, we should not at the present time have all the peoples of the earth, small and great, in an irrepressible irre-pressible ferment of liberty. That doughty old reformer was effecting a greater emancipation than he knew when he liberated his fellows from the bondage of Pharaoh. He. started something some-thing that has been going on with increasing in-creasing momentum and is nowadays bowling over kaisers and tsars, kings and kinglets so rapidly that we can scarcely keep count of them. Surely Moses and his achievements arc worth looking into on the spot, even though the spot be so remote and unreal to the average person that it is well described de-scribed by the old lady who said, "T always al-ways knew these places were in the Bible, but I did not suppose you could go to them." Seen From Suez Canal. Passengers on ships going through the Red sea and the Suez canal often have pointed out to them the mountains to the eastward. "There is Mount Sinai," . indir eating Jebel Serbal, the loftiest near peak, which is not anything of the sort, except as the entire range of mountains bear the name of Sinai. Nearer, an oasis near Suez is shown as "The Wells of Moses," a halting place of the Children of Israel, which it doubtless was. Westward lies Egypt, and in particular the rich Land of Goshen, entering at the modern city of Zagazig, where the Egyptian rioters have lately raised a serious ruction. If they only knew it, these casual travelers trav-elers through the scene of the Exodus have really seen the three essential factors in that bit of Bible history which has proved to be a turning point for the human hu-man race. On the one hand, they have beheld be-held the flat, low, lush river lands of Egypt, with their unparalleled fertility and ptentv. On the other, they have looked upon the stretch of barren, gray, sizzling sand and the high rocky peaks of the wilderness which caused the continual grumbling of tho freed slaves and made them long for the abundant food and water wa-ter and comfort of the Egypt they had left. i .i Hie th i rH nln.ro. everv ncryon who to eat, even with servitude, looked better bet-ter than this life of liberty with hunger. The other contrast is between Sinai and Canaan ; as compared with tnis desolate region of sterile sands and bare mountains, moun-tains, the Land of Promise truly seemed "flowing with milk and honey" miik and honey being prized products of the wild bees and the domestic flocks, staple to the diet of the region. These Hebrews thought in terms of the simple menus of all other Bedouins. Much Water Needed. Our water supply, aside from individual canteens, was carried in two steel cylinders, cylin-ders, each aboit the size of a soda-water tank. These were the standard cq uip-ment uip-ment of the Egyptian camel corps, and we owed them, as also our tents and escort, es-cort, to the;courtesy of the Egyptian frontier administration. Our Arabs carried car-ried their store of water in skins, after the desert fashion of thousand.; of years; and when on the march one man's water ski n sprang a leak and the water was nearly all lost, the incident created considerable con-siderable excitement. Tho person who has never done desert traveling cannot know the precioutmess of a swallow of warm water at midday. When we drew near a stream or a spring in Wady Hcbran one or more of the Arabs would run ahead to be first to drink of the water. Camels and men together drank with their heads in the water and those lower down seemed in no wise troubled that the commotion above them muddled the water. Usually we filled our canteens to assure a clean supply. Size of Hebrew Host. At the present time there are between five and ten thousand Bedouins on the Sinai Peninsula divided into five tribes. The land really does not support those for their wheat conies from Ugypt. Were all the agricultural possibilities of the region re-gion utilized it might be self-supporting. Manifestly, thuugh. the Sinai Peninsula could never have maintained any such multitude of people as our Knglish Dib'c gives as the number of" Israelites 600. 0i" men, or approximately two and a "alf million souls in all. Only a miracle could feed this host, which would have been one-fifth the size of the present total of Jews in all the world. Professor Petrie has advanced the theory the-ory that the Hebrew word "alaf," meaning mean-ing "thousands," al,so means families, or clans. If there has been this mistranslation mistransla-tion then all difficulties that arise in accounting ac-counting for the movements and sustenance suste-nance of such immense company vanisn, for the number of the Israelites would be reduced to a total of well under a hundred thousand. The' point is one much discussed dis-cussed by Biblical scholars; T can understand under-stand why travelers in Sinai favor the "clan" translation. As a confirmation of the historicity of the Mosaic record of the wanderings of the children of Israel a visit to Sinai is impressive. Nobody can read the Exodus story amid this wilderness without being convinced that the man who wi;ote it knew this region. The land fits the record; rec-ord; the record fits the land. A modern city man misses tho ''local color" of the inspired page; there is nothing in his experience to interpret this migration of a primitive and essentially nomadic people. peo-ple. On tho other hand, a sojourner in Sinai preceives not only the rationale of the Exodus story, but he also sees how that supreme experience colored much of the subsequent literature of the Old Testament. Tes-tament. Suffering Encountered. Barefooted Israelites found their feet cut by this flinty wilderness even as did our horny soled guide. They were overcome over-come and overawed by the difficulty of the mountain passes, with their thick-strewn thick-strewn boulders impeding the way and seetning ready to fall upon the traveler. Mnft of ali, the mountains themselves steep, sheer, sttrn and seamed must have filled the fouls of these people from the flat lands of the Nile with an awe amounting to terror. These gigantic red peaks, with outjutting crags and rocks of every conceivable formation, have no parallel in all the world. They seem peopled with strange shapes and objects of granite gi.mts and gnomes, beasts i - j Society Will Never Be Right Unjil It Squares With Sinai. and birds and. to our fancy, airplanes, guns, tanks, forts and symbols. or a long time we viewed a huge cross m the face of a cliff' at the head of a wady. admiring the bold imagination imagina-tion of the hermits who doubtless carved it only to learn, with the help of field glasses, that it was formed of natural peams. One mammoth rock stands apart as an open-jawed hippopotamus; another is like a carved camel ; another almost duplicated the Sphinx. It is a weird world, striking fear to superstitious hearts. Other mountains seem softened by time; these granite peaks are as stern and hard and bare as when the Israelites first saw them. None of the geological periods seem to have affected this marvelous mar-velous group, whose mighty tops have been uplifted in grandeur above all natural nat-ural and humm processes since the beginning be-ginning of time. Predominantly red (though as different from the Garden of the Gods in Colorado br the Petra cliffs as sandstone is from granite), the great Sinai cluster of peaks is occasionally slashed across with black lines of slate or shale, like a copy reader's marks on a bit of bad manuscript. View Is Inspiring. I have seen many mountain ranges.'as in the Caucasus r.nd Kurdistan, where the little hills seemed to . nestle cozily against the sides of the mother mountains moun-tains like lambs with their ewes at evening; eve-ning; but there is nothing of this soft and intimate ;.spect abou Sinai. Sublime, impressive and mpving the spirit to reverent rev-erent wonder are these seamed and furrowed fur-rowed mountain faces; they call Jorth thoughts of the thunderous judgments of the supernatural. "High places" of w..-ship w..-ship are placed here naturally; but lovers would never hoi 1 tryst on these pinnacles. This is a world apart a piece of dread revelation. Nature set the stage fittingly for the giving of the law. From the top of Jebel Musa, the traditional tradi-tional Mount of the Law, 7300 feet high, one sees a vast expanse of bold and barren bar-ren peaks, in whatever direction the eye is turned. Northward the countrv opens out; and in that direction the Israelites moved. On his summit where Moses spent forty days there is a spring, or well, but it is not marked by any vegetation. vege-tation. The fossil ferns and flowers in the ancient pilgrim steps of granite seem a more fitting emblem of the spot than the modest flowers that find a hold in the rock crevices. Where Law Was Give.. A stone chapel, the floor of which is strewn with fragrant herbs to keep the, insects from books and pictures and vestments, vest-ments, and a rude stone mosque crown the heights of Jebel Musa. Hero also is shown the very cave in the rock where, tradition says, Moses hid himself when Jehovah appeared. It matters not about the particular footof ground; it was on one of these peaks', within our view as we look around, that the Word, which is still the world's most needed law, came to the Fit'Man. Part of the Jebel Musa cluster to Rasies Safsafeh, with its triple peaks, rising sheer from tho one great plain within the Sinai mountains whereon the entire company of Israelites could have encamped. en-camped. There can be no possibility of doubt ahout this site. Here the Law was first proclaimed. Upon one of the neighboring neigh-boring hills Aaron set up the golden calf. Hvery condition of the Hxodus narrative is met. This is the scene of the transaction transac-tion which settled forever that man must worship one God; and that bis God demands de-mands obedience to a moral law which makes for the highest welfare of humanity. hu-manity. Here our religion began. From this mountain hns run a stream of Justice and morality that is contorminus "with civilization. civili-zation. Thencefori-h, there was to be one God for all. and ono set of divinely givn standards by which man's relations with his creator, and with his fellow man. are to be determined. Changeless as Sinai's own rocks that law stands. . Jt is for nations and for ind i vidua Is. Jealous Guardian of it sits Jehovah above, exacting exact-ing justice and displaying mercy. Sociel y will never he right until It squares with Sinai; the place that was more pivotal to present history than is Versailles. Here, amid stateiinrys surpassing sur-passing man's devising, was held the first peace conference. passes through the Suez canal crosses the scene of tho miracle of the dividing of the waters to permit the escape of the Israelites Israel-ites fleeing from Phitraoh. If the traveler be one familiar with the Kiblc, he sees written in the topography the necessity of the passing through the waters. The Hebrews seemed caught in a pocket. In front of them and on their right were the Libyan mountains. On their left was tho Red sea Behind them was Pharaoh s host, with onlv a concealing cloud intervening. interven-ing. Once across the waters in the Mnai wilds, they were reasonably sate iroin i pursuit. Monuments to Moses. Their leader was an old man learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and with fortv vears of experience of Bedouin life on Siiuii, so that be knew every nwle of the land with the intimacy of a shepherd and the broad vision of a strateg.st. soldier sol-dier and statesman. Ripe and ready was is extraordinarily trained man before ever he w,as called to become tho leader (if his DKol)!o. K orv third Arab on Sinai appears lo be named' after Moses. Lift up your voice ? , crowd of Arabs and cry -Musa: and a third of then, will answer. Cry Mo-"mod!" Mo-"mod!" and another third will reply. T lav Moses, who Is accepted as a prophet 'bv Jew. Christian and Moslem, . U patron saint of the Sinai region. Most of the outstanding objects on the penin-la-niountains, wells and peculiar rook for rUions-arc associated with his na:. e. Moses may have had a hard time with he u ,-rateful Israelii es wih.ui ho led. but s n onunicnts are many today. Ho met l c fate of all K.cat reformers while ho lived but history has vindicated him. Minsmcse deposits of vast extent and v-d ,'e are now Loins worked bv the Prittso lit the Sinai peninsula, where the unsus-e.-tlni ehrews trudped; and the old Kcvptian tuninoise and o.prer mines near bv. which they kn'w may poS?n,y supplanted by mooern Nr:nsh I orises the result of the inspection of the P bv e-n-'ineers. It may be that science sci-ence a , .'ndustrv will effect, chances in his i'herto ohanueless reir.on as no. aM re" are discovered in the ear: iut for the Israelites the pn.bloms of .. wilderness were those that exist tort' to-rt' v-w u" food and difficult travel Thev had to muKiplv the numbers of WL,N even as did the German led 1 urka h, their attack upon the Suez canal. . Is a Sandy Waste. stones and - joI ., ,;, K-.r-wastau-e of an i i rrwadvs. rrrof il nt nnd o.hcr stones that, make a wildorno?s v..if. rc. ir,( f;oo,ss fr,:; he at i.an.l of Goshen. The waste .1.10 - j.iticed their new ex- liy'r in KSym. rlcnty |
