soul, in the midst of all the inundations of evil.' Bp. Hall. animal found in the plain when the flood began would soon be merged in water several feet deep, independent of 24. The waters prevailed upon the the overwhelming torrents dashing up-earth an hundred and fifty days. That on his head. And were he to attempt is, five months, before they began to advancing up the rising grounds, a cat- abate. This might seem to us unnearact or sheet of water, would be gush-cessary, seeing every living creature ing all the way in his face, besides impending water from the 'flood-gates' of heaven momentarily rushing over him. He would almost instantly become a prey to the resistless element. 'In vain is salvation hoped for from the hills.' Jer. 3. 23. 23. Every living substance. Heb. yekum, as above, v. 4, rendered by the Gr. nav avaornpa every thing that stood up.-T Was destroyed. Rather according to the Heb. 'he, or it (the flood) destroyed (wiped out) every living thing.' The verb is active and not passive, though no nominative is expressed. This has to be supplied by the reader from the tenor of the narrative. How securely doth Noah ride out this uproar of heaven, earth, and waters! He hears the pouring down of rain above his head; the shrieking of men, and the roaring and bellowing of beasts on both sides of him; the raging and threats of the waves under him; and the miserable shifts of the unbelievers; and, in the meantime, sits quietly in his dry cabin, neither feeling nor fearing evil. How happy a thing is faith! What a quiet safety, what a heavenly peace, doth it work in the would be drowned within the first six weeks; but it would serve to exercise the faith and patience of Noah, and to impress his posterity with the greatness of the divine displeasure against man's sin. As the land of Israel was to have its Sabbath during the captivity; so now the whole earth, for a time, shall be relieved of its load, and fully purified, as it were, from its uncleanness. CHAPTER VIII. 1. God remembered Noah. That is, put forth a token of his remembrance; acted as a person does who would manifest remembrance towards one who was ready to deem himself forgotten. The phrase is figurative; for, strictly speaking, God cannot be supposed ever to have forgotten Noah from the moment of his entering the ark. But the import here is not that of a constant mindfulness. God remembered Noah by making a wind to pass over the earth, to assuage the waters of the deluge. Comp. Gen. 30. 22.-¶ Made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters assuaged. Heb. 15 sunk, were depressed, i. e. began to subside: the original being spoken Jer. 5. settled down, settled upon its resting-place, it is evident that the waters were calm. In a stormy sea it would have foundered and not rested; at least without a miracle. As Noah seems to have had no agency in steering the ark, it was doubtless conducted hither by the special providence of God, who watches equally over the floatings and the wan- Upon the 26, of the stooping posture of a bird-ly dangerous; but as the ark gently catcher in laying or watching his snares. It is elsewhere applied to the subsiding of anger, Est. 21, and of murmurings, Num. 17. 5. The usual effect of wind upon a body of water is to agitate and work it to a tempest; in this case the effect was directly the reverse; but for w at reason is not wholly obvious. The blowing of a strong wind from the north, would nat-derings of his church.urally clear away the clouds from the mountains of Ararat. Heb. atmosphere, and thus enable the sun al hare Ararat, literally renderto act upon the watery mass which ed in our version. The opinion is very would cause a rapid evaporation; but general among commentators that this by comparing this with what is said expression, though of a plural form, Ex. 14. 21, of the agency of the east points at one well known mountain of wind in drying up the Red Sea, it would the same name situated in the modern seem that the wind acted also mechan-Armenia. The Heb. Ararat ocically in propelling the waters off from the surface of the habitable regions which they had submerged and driving them to their appropriate reservoirs. Yet it is obvious that the ark must have been so situated as to be exempt from this action of the aerial element. curs but in three other places, 2 Kings 19. 37. Is 37. 38. Jer. 51. 27, in the last of which it is rendered as here by Ararat, and in the other two by Armenia. This mountain, which consists of two separate peaks of unequal elevation, is situated in a vast plain twelve 3. The waters returned—continual-leagues east from Erivan, and rises to ly. Heb. 27777 going or walking and returning; a Heb. idiom for expressing the gradual and yet conatant progress of any thing. See note on Gen. 3. 8.-¶ Were abated; i. e. went on abating. The true force of the original term is to become scant. 4. The ark rested in the seventh month. That is, of the year, not of the flood. The flood had now continued precisely five months, or 150 days. For a ship in the sea to have struck upon a rock or upon land, would have been extreme an height of upwards of 15,000 above the ocean. It is called by the Eastern people by the various names of Masis, Ardag or Agridagh, i. e. the fingermountain, from its standing alone and rising like a finger held up, Kuhi Nuach, or mountains of Noah, and Meresoussar, or the stopping of the ark. In like manner the name of the neighbouring city of Nak-schivan is said to be composed of two words Nak, ship, and Schivan, stopped or settled; all indicating a prevalent tradition that this was no other than the real resting-place of the ark after the flood. Of a place so memorable it will be proper to give a somewhat more detailed account, notwithstanding the reasons which we shall shortly of fer for entertaining very strong doubts whether this were in fact the true locality to which the inspired narrative points. Mr. Morier describes Ararat as being most beautiful in shape, and most awful in height; and Sir Robert Ker Porter has furnished the following graphic picture of this stupendous work of nature:-'As the vale opened beneath us, in our descent, my whole attention became absorbed in the view before me. A vast plain peopled with countless villages; the towers and spires of the churches of Eitch-miaadzen arising from amidst them; the glittering waters of the Araxes flowing through the fresh green of the vale; and the subordinate range of mountains skirting the base of the awful monument of the antediluvial world, it seemed to stand a stupendous link in the history of man, uniting the two races of men before and after the flood. But it was not until we had arrived upon the flat plain that I beheld Ararat in all its amplitude of grandeur. From the spot on which I stood, it appeared as if the hugest mountains of the world had been piled upon each other, to form this one sublime immensity of earth, and rock, and snow. The icy peaks of its double heads rose majestically into the clear and cloudless heavens; the sun blazed bright upon them, and the reflection sent forth a dazzling radiance equal to other suns. This point of the view united the utmost grandeur of plain and height, but the feelings I experienced while looking only black. At that part of the moun. the mountain are hardly to be described. My eye, not able to rest for any length of time on the blinding glory of its summits, wandered down the apparently interminable sides, till I could no longer trace their vast lines in the mists of the horizon; when an inexpressible impulse, immediately carrying my eye upwards again, refixed my gaze on the awful glare of Ararat; and this bewildered sensibility of sight being answered by a similar feeling in the mind, for some moments I was lost in a strange suspension of the powers of thought.' Of the two separate peaks, called Little and Great Ararat, which are separated by a chasm about seven miles in width, Sir Robert thus speaks;-'These inaccessible summits have never been trodden by the foot of man, since the days of Noah, if even then, for my idea is that the ark rested in the space between these heads, and not on the top of either. Various attempts have been made in different ages to ascend these tremendous mountain pyramids, but in vain; their form, snows, and glaciers are insurmountable obstacles, the distance being so great from the commencement of the icy regions to the highest points, cold alone would be the destruction of any person who should have the hardihood to persevere. On viewing mount Ararat from the northern side of the plain, its two heads are separated by a wide cleft, or rather glen, in the body of the mountain. The rocky side of the greater head runs almost perpendicu larly down to the north-east, while the lesser head rises from the sloping bottom of the cleft, in a perfectly conical shape. Both heads are covered with snow. The form of the greater is similar to the less, only broader and rounder at the top, and shows to the northwest a broken and abrupt front, opening about half way down into a stupen dous chasm, deep, rocky, and peculiar. tain, the hollow of the chasm receives an interruption from the projection of the minor mountains which start from the side of Ararat, like branches from the roots of a tree, and run along in undulating progression, till lost in the distant vapours of the plain.' The Rev. E. Smith, American Missionary to Palestine, as will be seen from the following extract, coincides with the popular belief on this subject. And certainly not among the mountains of Ararat or of Armenia generally, nor those of any part of the world where I have been, | have I ever seen one whose majesty could plead half so powerfully its claims to the honour of having once been the stepping stone between the old world and the new. I gave myself up to the feeling, that on its summit were once congregated all the inhabitants of the earth, and that, while in the valley of the Araxes, I was paying a visit to the second cradle of the human race. Nor can I allow my opinion to be at all shaken by the Chaldee paraphrasts, the Syrian translators and commentators, and the traditions of the whole family of Syrian churches, which translate the passage in question mountains of the Kurds.' Robinson's Calmet, art. Ararat. At the time when Sir Robert Porter published his travels, and indeed till very recently, the summit of this lofty mountain was considered absolutely inaccessible. Several attempts had at different times been made to reach its top, but few persons ever succeeded in getting beyond the limit of perpetual snow. The French traveller Tournefoot, in the year 1700, persevered long in the face of many difficulties, but was foiled in the end. Nearly thirty years since the Pacha of Bayazeed undertook the ascent, but with no better success. The honour was reserved to Dr. Parrot, a German traveller, who in 1829 was the first to tread this towering eminence. For a detailed and interesting account of his ascent see my 'Illustrations of the Scriptures,' p. 14. The fact of such an ascent is however still doubted by the Armenians, but their incredulity is based upon their superstition. They are firmly persuaded that Noah's ark ex ists to the present day on the summit of the mountain, and that, in order to preserve it, no person is permitted to approach it. This tradition, founded upon some monkish legend, has receiv ed the sanction of the church, and become in effect an article of faith which an Armenian would scarcely renounce, even if he were placed in his own prop er person on the very top of the mountain.-But to the opinion that the Agridagh was the resting-place of the ark there are very strong objections both philological and physical; for (1.) The words of the text, 'upon the mountains of Ararat,' are not, in their obvious sense, applicable to a single isolated eminence, like that so denominated. It may indeed be contended that the double peak of Agridagh makes the words pertinent, and that the ark, as Sir R. K. Porter thinks, may have rested in the valley between the two peaks, and thus, as it were, on the two mountains; but to this it may be replied, that since we are told v. 5, that it was not until the tenth month, in the first day of the month, after the waters had decreased continually, that the top of the mountains were seen, it is not possible that the ark should have rested in the valley between the two peaks, and far below their tops, more than two months previously to that period, on the seventeenth day of the seventh month, v. 4. The only fair way of understanding the words 'upon the mountains of Ararat,' is in their plain grammatical sense as meaning a mountainous district within a country or province called Ararat, just as we construe the expressions, the mountains of Israel,' 'the mountains of Samaria,' 'the mountains of Abarim,' &c. i. e. the mountainous districts of those countries. Compared with general scriptural usage, the phrase, mountains of Ararat,' as popularly understood, is as great a violation of correct language as it would be to say in English, 'mountains of 5 And the waters decreased | day of the month, were the tops continually, until the tenth month: of the mountains seen. in the tenth month, on the first Alps-of Appenines-of Andes-of Alleganies,' &c. But the phraseology 'mountains of Switzerland-of Spain -of South America, &c. every one recognises as perfectly proper. (2.) From the account given by all travelers of this double-peaked mountain in Armenia, it is in our view clear that without a positive miracle a large portion of the inmates of the ark could never have descended from the highest of the two summits, and the highest it must have been, if either, for the reasons just stated drawn from a comparison of the two texts, ch. 8. 4 and 5. If to ascend the mountain now is an achievement all but actually transcending human power, and never known to have been accomplished but in a single instance, how can it be believed that camels, horses, elephants, oxen, and other quadrupeds should have been able to make their way down the steep declivities of a precipitous pile of rocks thousands of feet in height? True, indeed, omnipotence could have effected it, and so too it could have saved Noah and his family and the animals without an ark by hemming them all in on dry land by a wall of waters, like that which stood upon the bed of the Red sea when the Israelites were crossing; but as God did not see fit to have recourse to miracles in the first instance, we see not why he should in the second. We know of no reason for resorting to the hypothesis of a miracle, when such an alternative is not necessary; and necessary it certainly is not in the present case, as the Most High, whose counsels guided the motions of the ark, could easily have selected such a spot for its resting as would have afforded a safe and convenient descent to the plain below. And if he could have done this, shall we not suppose that he would have done it?-On the whole, therefore, we cannot but be conscious that the opinion or tradition which assigns the particular mountain in question as the locality designed by the sacred writer, is liable to very serious objections. In fact, we deem it extremely problematical whether Moses had the least intention of pointing out the particular lodgement of the ark, after the waters began to abate. If we mistake not his object was simply to say in general terms, that this took place in some part of the mountain range which distinguishes the country of Ararat; and that this was either in or very near to the modern Armenia there is good reason to believe. It is easy to imagine, however, that the tradition of the country became attached to this mountain, in preference to the true locality, on account of its conspicuous situation and remarkable appearance. As to the actual spot, the probability is, that although some of the ancient versions seem to point to the Gordiæan mountains, or some part of the chain of Mount Taurus, as the genuine locality, yet that it can only be approximately determined by ascertaining, as nearly as possible, the situation best suited to accomplish the ends which infinite wisdom had in view in reference to the future peopling of the earth, in the selection of the spot for the resting of the ark. As it is quite impossible to lay down in a map any point which can be claimed as the true one, the only means of investigation which can be pursued will be to consider the characters required to be possessed by such a spot, and as this will come in more appropriately in connection with the journeyings of the Noachida from the east to the plains of Shinar, ch. 11. 1, 2, the reader |