BOOK I. OF THE PRIMEVAL DEPOSIT AND ITS DISPERSION. HEAD I. OF THE DEPOSIT, AND OF THE EGYPTIAN WITNESS TO IT.

○It were premature, at the opening of an inquiry of which the several parts depend so largely upon one another, to attempt more than a statement of what the first thesis requires, and of the order in which the testimonies by which it is to be supported will be taken; for the thesis, which affirms that there was delivered to the first men a revelation of one Creator, of a Fall, of sacrifice, of a Deliverer promised, and of the Deluge, is of such a kind that no single place can be said to prove it, and that it can be said to be proved only by the concurrence of a number of places, of which not one is, taken by itself, decisive. I shall accordingly set down, under the present head, the relations of the Egyptians in so far as they bear upon the deposit, distinguishing, as I proceed, what the ancient witnesses affirm from what has been laid upon them by interpreters; I shall examine the manner in which two opinions, of which the one derives the heathen doctrine from the writings of Moses, and the other (which is Mr. Bryant's) describes the first corruption as an apostasy, would dispose of the same relations; and I shall reserve, for the heads which follow, the proof of each article of the deposit in the order in which it is named.¹ The objections which may be raised against the method I do not affect to underrate, and shall consider them in their place at the close of the head. NB-10-006 NB-47-015 NB-04-002

×The first of the testimonies, in the order of exposition though not of time, is that of Herodotus, who relates, in the second book of his history, that the names of nearly all the gods came to the Greeks from Egypt; that he was convinced of this by inquiry; and that, with the exception of the names of Neptune and of the Dioscuri, and of those of Juno, of Vesta, of Themis, of the Graces and of the Nereids, the names of all the gods had always existed in Egypt.² The historian adds that he says only what the Egyptians themselves say; and it is to be observed, before anything is built upon the place, that the relation is in the first instance an Egyptian one, and that it reaches us through a Greek, so that what it establishes is the road by which the names travelled, and not the country in which they began. A name which is found in Egypt is not for that reason of Egyptian making; nor does the historian, so far as I am able to perceive, undertake to say that it was; and it is not without some appearance of reason that a reader who should look in the passage for the origin of the gods in Egypt might be said to have read into it a question which the author did not propose to himself. It is to be seen, further, whether the Egyptians spoke of the names only, or of the persons also, and whether the exception which they made in favour of certain names was an exception of names or of the deities who bore them; and until this is determined the testimony is to be received for what it is, a confession on the part of the Greeks, upon the authority of the Egyptians, that they were debtors, and not a statement as to the quarter from which the debt had in the first place been contracted.³ NB-10-006

×The same historian declares, in the same place, that he is convinced by inquiry that the names came to the Greeks from foreign parts, and that they came, as he believes, chiefly from Egypt; and this declaration has been taken up by Huet, who holds that almost the whole theology of the heathen flowed from Moses, and that the doctrine of the Hebrews passed through the Phenicians and the Egyptians to the Greeks and to the maritime nations of the West.⁴ For the last stage of this road the historian and Huet are agreed, and I have no wish to dispute with either; but the first stage the historian does not touch, and Huet, as I conceive, has presupposed. For whether the Egyptians had the doctrine from the writings of Moses, or had it earlier, with Mizraim, from the family of Ham, is a question which the place cannot determine, and which Huet, in supposing that it flowed from the writings, has determined without having proposed. To suppose that a doctrine is derived from a book because it is afterwards found in a nation to which the book may have come is to suppose beforehand what the argument is designed to prove, and to make the existence of the book the explanation of the very coincidence from which its priority was to have been inferred; and it is the more necessary to observe this, in that the opinion has so much in it that is just, that it is easy to receive the whole of it for the sake of a part. He adds, I should observe, that the truth was afterwards wrapped in so many fables that it can hardly be unfolded; and in this, as the reader will perceive from what follows, I am entirely of his opinion.⁵ NB-11-005 NB-10-006

×A testimony of the same class, and open to the same objection, is that of Origen, who reports that Numenius the Pythagorean quotes in many of his works from the writings of Moses and the prophets, and applies to the passages a not improbable allegorical meaning.⁶ What a heathen possessed of Moses he may have possessed by reading him; and a quotation from the writings is no proof of a tradition older than the writings. I enter the place, therefore, under the present head, not as a witness to the deposit, but as a witness that is not yet one: the point to be shewn is that the heathen had the substance before the books, and the testimony supplies only the books. The works in which Numenius is said to have made the quotations I have not seen, and I do not therefore pronounce upon the manner in which the passages were applied; I observe only that a writer who is reported to have given an allegorical meaning to a passage of Scripture has by that very act conceded that the passage was before him in a form in which it required to be interpreted, and that the allegorist and the author of the tradition are, upon this showing, not necessarily one person. NB-19-021 NB-11-005

×In the relation which Diodorus gives of the Egyptians there is a testimony of another kind, and one which has, I think, been less considered than its importance deserves. He reports, upon the authority of the Egyptians, that Hermes was endowed with an unusual ingenuity for devising things capable of improving the social life of man, and that it was by Hermes that the common language of mankind was first further articulated, that many objects which were still nameless received an appellation, and that the alphabet was invented.⁷ The word which is to be observed, and upon which the whole of what I have to say upon the place will be found to turn, is the word further. A common language is supposed to have been in use before Hermes, and he is said to have carried it on; the relation does not say that he made it, and the invention of letters, which is another claim, is not to be confounded with this one. Diodorus says Hermes, and not Thoth; the name of Thoth I supply, upon the ground that the Egyptian inventor of letters is elsewhere so called, and I do not take it from him. The question of the first speech is not decided by the place, and I reserve it for the next head; I enter the passage here because the Egyptian relation itself presupposes the primeval tradition, and because a people who ascribe to a single person the further articulation of a language already common have assumed, in so doing, that there was a time at which the language was common to all. NB-10-014

×Of the articles of the deposit, that which concerns sacrifice has in the Egyptian relations an attestation which I do not think the learned have sufficiently noticed. Diodorus reports that the priests ascribe to the first king of Egypt, whom he names Menas, the teaching of the people to worship the gods and to offer sacrifices.⁸ It is said that he taught, and nothing is said of whence he had it; and the Egyptians' account of the beginning of their rites is therefore of a thing delivered to the people, and not discovered by them. More than this the passage does not say, and I make no use of what follows it in Diodorus, in which the same king is charged with other and less reputable innovations; for it is a rule which I have found it safe to observe that a testimony is to be used for what it affirms in the sentence to which it is attached, and not for the character of the author or of his subject in the sentences which succeed. The identity of the king, and the question whether the tradition reported by the priests was of the deposit or of something else, are matters which cannot be determined here, and which belong to the sixth head of the present Book. NB-09-022

○Of the testimonies which concern the doctrines held among the Egyptians there remains one, which is of so doubtful an application that I should have omitted it altogether had it not been appealed to for the opposite purpose. Herodotus says that the Egyptians were the first who maintained that the soul of man is immortal, and that there are Greeks who have used this doctrine, some earlier and some later, as if it were their own, whose names he knows and does not record.⁹ A doctrine so delivered is a received doctrine, and the Greeks who took it up are its borrowers; and Huet, who holds that the Hebrew doctrine came to the Greeks through the Phenicians and the Egyptians, would doubtless find in the place a confirmation of the road. The stages are, I allow, in the order which the historian's relation would suit; but he names no stage beyond Egypt, and the word first is his own account of what he knew, which is not a witness to what the Egyptians had themselves received. Whether the doctrine was held in Egypt from the beginning I do not say that it was, and I do not say that it was not; and it were to give to the testimony a weight which it was not designed to bear to infer from it that the Egyptians were the authors of that which they were the first to hold, or that the earlier holders of the doctrine among other nations, if there were any, were of Egypt. NB-47-015 NB-11-005

×There is a word, used by Mr. Bryant at the entrance of his work, which requires to be considered here, because it seems to me that in using it he has conceded a thesis which it was not his design to concede. He says of the Cuthites, the descendants of Chus, that "they were the first apostates from the truth; yet great in worldly wisdom."¹⁰ Josephus has the name and no more: it was still, in his day, the name of a nation. But an apostasy supposes a truth previously held; and a writer who describes the first corruption by that word has affirmed, whether he has intended it or not, that there was something to be corrupted, and that those who corrupted it had first received it. I do not find that Mr. Bryant has proved this in his preface, nor do I contend that he was bound to prove it there; I observe only that the proof, which he has taken for granted, is the proof which the present head has to give, and that the question which he has left, namely from whom the first apostates received the truth which they forsook, is the question to which the first thesis is the answer. It will be perceived that I do not rest the argument upon the word; a writer who uses it by a figure of speech is not to be held to have conceded what a writer who uses it in earnest would have affirmed; and I shall be careful, in what follows, to ascribe to Mr. Bryant nothing which he has not said. NB-04-002 NB-19-021

○The view which I propose, as at present sketched, is that these testimonies, which have been taken severally to prove that the Egyptians were the authors of the religion of the Greeks, or that the Greeks borrowed from the Hebrew writings, or that the Egyptians were the first of men to hold some one doctrine, are in truth the partial remains of a single tradition, which was delivered to the first men, was carried by the Dispersion to the several nations, and was in each of them retained in some part, and obscured in others; and that the testimony of Egypt is of peculiar value, not because Egypt was its fountain, but because the line which settled there was that of Ham, in which, as I shall endeavour to shew, the corruption was greatest and the remembrance, therefore, most readily recognised. The proof of this, which requires that the Dispersion should first be considered, and the line of Ham distinguished from the rest, belongs to the heads which follow, and I shall here content myself with indicating the objections which may be urged against it. NB-10-006 NB-11-005 NB-19-021 NB-10-014 NB-09-022 NB-47-015

○It may be objected, in the first place, that the Egyptians may very naturally have represented the Greeks as their debtors, and that the testimony of a nation in its own favour is not to be admitted without confirmation; to which I answer, that the testimony of Herodotus is the confession of a Greek, and that the nation which is said by him to have given is not the nation which has recorded the gift. It may be objected, in the second place, that a tradition which was delivered to the first men, and of which no single testimony contains the whole, is a tradition that cannot be refuted, and that an opinion which no testimony can refute is not on that account the more to be received; to which I answer, that the objection is just, and that I do not claim for the thesis that it cannot be refuted, but that it is the opinion which accounts for the greater number of the facts with the fewest suppositions, and that I shall in the following heads expose it to every refutation of which I am aware.¹¹ It may be objected, in the third place, that Numenius, who read Moses, and the Greeks of whom Herodotus speaks, who read the Egyptians, afford a sufficient explanation of whatever the heathen possessed in common with the Scriptures, and that no tradition earlier than the books is required; to which I answer, that this explanation is not excluded by the present view, but that it is not sufficient for those places, which will be examined at length in the heads that follow, in which the heathen have the substance without the names of the books, and in which a derivation from the writings would require that the writings should have been known to nations among whom no trace of them is found. And it may be objected, lastly, that the view which I propose gives to the line of Ham a part in the preservation of the deposit which the sacred text does not assign to it; to which I answer, that the sacred text assigns to that line nothing at all in this connexion, and that for this very reason it is necessary to consider with the greatest care what the heathen relate, and what is afterwards made of it. These objections, and others which may be urged with less force, will be considered at greater length under the next head. NB-10-006 NB-19-021 NB-47-015