That prophetic denunciation is the last recorded fact of the life of Noah, though he lived through the subsequent period of 350 years. It is a pro phecy of the most remarkable character, having been delivered in the infancy of mankind ; in its undeniable fulfilment reaching through more than 4000 years down to our own time ; and being even now in a visible course of fulfilment. It seems more strictly correct in philology, and more in ac cordance with fact, to render it as a prophecy, than as precatory of malediction and blessing. We give it in the closest version.
Accursed Canaan ! A slave of slaves he will be to his brethren. Blessed Jehovah, God of Shem ! And Canaan will be slave to him.
God will make Japheth to spread abroad, And he will inhabit the tents of Shem, And Canaan will be slave to him.' The first part of this prediction implies that, in some way, the conduct of Canaan was more of.
fensive than even that of his father Ham. The English reader will perceive the peculiar allusion or alliteration of the third member, when he is in formed that the name Japheth comes from a verb, the radical idea of which is opening; widening, expansion. In two ways one might imitate it : by translating both the words, or by coining a verb ; thus, 1, God will enlarge the enlarger ; or, 2, God•will japhethize Japheth. The whole para graph, short as it is, contains a germ which, like the acorn to the oak, comprehends the spirit of the respective histories of the three great branches of mankind. The next chapter presents to us the incipient unfolding of the prophecy. [NATIONS, DISPERSION OF.] God will give to Japheth an abundant pos terity, which will spread itself into different re gions, and will dwell among the posterity of Shorn; and Canaan's posterity will be compelled to be slaves to that of Japheth. The following chapter shows how this chapter has been fulfilled. The descendants of Japheth peopled Europe, the northern parts of Asia, Asia Minor, Media, Iberia, Armenia, the countries between the Black Sea and the Caspian, Great Tartary, India, China, the European settlements in America, and pro bably America itself. They also inhabit in part the more southerly parts of Asia, mingling fetely with the posterity of Shem, who chiefly peopled those regions. On the other hand, Africa, which was peopled by the descendants of Canaan and [other sons of] Ham, was conquered and brought under the yoke by the Romans, descendants of Japheth.' [This applies only to the Carthaginians and settlers in other districts along the north coast of Africa, which had been peopled by the Phoenicians and other Canaanitish tribes. We have not the shadow of authority for deriving the negro tribes, or any of the nations of Medial and South Africa, from Canaan.] Down to our own times Africa has been to all other nations the source of the supply of slaves' (Dereser, in the Roman Catholic Germ. Transl. of the Bible, by him, Brentano, and Scholz, 17 vols. Francf. 1820-33• It is an old tradition of the Rabbinical Jews, on which they lay great stress, that at this juncture Noah delivered to his children seven precepts, to be enjoined upon all their descendants. These prohibit—I, idolatry ; 2, irreverence to the Deity ; 3, homicide ; 4, unchastity ; 5, fraud and plunder ing ; the 6th enjoins government and obedience ; and the 7th forbids to eat any part of an animal still living. Mr. Selden has largely illustrated these precepts, and regards them as a concise tablet of the Law of Nature (De u,eNat. et Gent. juxta Disciplin. Ebraornm), which excellent work of 90o pages is taken up in commenting upon them. Though we have no positive evidence of their having been formally enjoined by the great patri arch, we can have no great reason for rejecting such an hypothesis.
After this event, we have, in the Scriptures; no further account of Noah, than that all his days were nine hundred and fifty years ; and he died.' That he had no more children is evident from the nature of the case, notwithstanding the antediluvian longevity, from the impossibility of his having a second wife without horrid incest, which surely no man of sound mind can impute to him, and from the absence of the constant clause of ch. v., which
would naturally have come after the 28th verse of ch. ix., 'and begat sons and daughters.' Mr. Shuckford regards this absence of any mention of Noah, as a strong intimation that he neither came with the travellers to Shinaar, nor was settled in Armenia or Mesopotamia, or any of the adjacent countries. He was alive a great while after the confusion of Babel, for he lived 350 years after the flood ; and surely, if he had come to Babel, or lived in any of the nations into which mankind were dispersed from thence, a person of such eminence could not at once sink to nothing, and be no more mentioned than if he had not been at all ' (Connect. i. 99). But it must be confessed that the argument from silence, however strong it may appear in this case, is not decisive. The narratives of the Bible are not to be judged of by the common and just rules of writing history. Those narratives are not, properly speaking, a history, but are a collection of such anecdotes and detached facts as the Spirit of holiness and wisdom determined to be the most practically proper for the religious and moral instruction of all sorts of men. The Bible was written for children and poor peasants, as well as for scholars and philosophers. That learned and judicious author supposes that Noah migrated far into the East, and that the Chinese mean no other than him when their traditions assign Fohi as their first king, having no father, i.e., none re corded in their legends ; to whom also they attri bute several actions and circumstances which appear to be derived by disguisement from the real facts recorded in our sacred book of Genesis. One in particular is in connection with a universal deluge ; and this is mentioned also by Sir William Jones, who says, the great progenitor of the Chinese is named by them Fohi,' and that the earth's being wholly covered with water just preceded the ap pearance of Fohi on the mountains of Chin' (Works, iii. 151-55). It may be very rationally conceived that Noah remained long in the neigh bourhood of his descent from the ark ; and that, at last, weighty reasons might induce him, with a sufficient number of associates, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who would be born in some So or too years, to migrate far to the East.
Sir William Jones, also, is evidently inclined to think the seventh Menu of the Hindoos, connected in their ancient books with a universal deluge, to be no other than a legendary representation of Noah. The very name is, indeed, identical, Me Nutt, the M being a common Oriental prefix, and Nulz is Noah without the points.
As the flood affected equally the common an cestry of mankind, all nations that have not sunk into the lowest barbarism would be likely to pre serve the memory of the chief person connected with it ; and it would be a natural fallacy that every people should attach to itself a principal in terest in that catastrophe, and regard that chief person as the founder of their own nation and be longing to their own locality. Hence we can well account for the traditions of so many peoples upon this capital fact of ancient history, and the chief person in it ;—the Xisuthrus of the Chaldaeans, with whom is associated a remarkable number of precise circumstances, corresponding to the Mosaic narrative (Alex. Polyhist. in the Chronicle of Ease bins, so happily recovered by Mr. Zohrab, in the Armenian version, and published by him in 1818) ; the Phrygian Arai' of the celebrated Apamean medal, which, besides Noah and his wife with an ark, presents a raven, and a dove with an olive ' branch in its mouth (figured in Bryant's Anc. Myth. vol. iii.) ; the Manes of the. Lydia.ns (Mr. W. J. Hamilton's Asia Min. iii. 383) ; the Deucalion of the Syrians and the Greeks, of whose deluge the account given by Lucian is a copy almost exactly circumstantial of that in the book of Genesis (Dea Syria ; Luciani Opp. iii. 457, ed. Reitz ; Bryant, iii. 28) ; the many coincidences in the Greek mythology in respect of Saturn, Janus, and Bacchus ; the traditions of the aboriginal Ameri cans, as stated by Clavigero, in his History of Mexico; and many others.—J. P. S.