Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/110

 steady gaze up into the blue sky. Hard indeed was it to realize that this very rock had borne up the bloody altars of Baal, and that these tranquil heavens had heard the shrieks of human victims. The very memory of such things still brings a shadow over the scene, like the shadows of the clouds that were at that moment sailing across the heavens above us. Well was it that Moses invaded these mountains and valleys, to extirpate not indeed such a race, but such a religion. The descendants of the Baal-worshippers are here still, but their worship, like the worship of Moloch, has perished forever.

As to the question whether Serbal or Sinai were the Mount of the Law, I am not so rash as to enter into a controversy in which both explorers and interpreters differ so widely. Dean Stanley states at once the advantage of Serbal and the objection to it, when he says that it would be impossible to find a more commanding height for giving the law, were there only a plain or valley below the Mount for receiving it. This circumstance has great weight, and yet I cannot think it decisive: for it assumes what it is by no means necessary to suppose, that all the Israelites stood together in a compact mass. Certainly there is no broad plain under Serbal, like that of Er Rahah under Sinai. Rephidim is comparatively but a mountain pass, to which Dr. Post returned after we had entered Wady Feiran, to measure it with a careful eye. He found it but a mile long and a third of a mile wide — a space ample for the battle with the Amalekites, for Joshua "chose out" his men, and they might have been only a few thousands, but quite inadequate to contain the two millions of people supposed to have been present at the giving of the Law. But why must we take it for granted that all stood in one vast plain, in ranks and battalions, like an army? There are half a dozen wadies from which they might see the top of