Part 16 (1/2)
and of Dan, ”Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward.”
These two last prophecies supply the ”water” and the ”serpent,” which, added to the ”man” and ”eagle” of the cherubic forms, are needed to complete the traditional standards, and are needed also to make them conform more closely to the constellation figures.
No such correspondence can be traced between the eight remaining tribes and the eight remaining constellations. Different writers combine them in different ways, and the allusions to constellation figures in the blessings of those tribes are in most cases very doubtful and obscure, even if it can be supposed that any such allusions are present at all.
The connection cannot be pushed safely beyond the four chief tribes, and the four cherubic forms as represented in the constellations of the four quarters of the sky.
These four standards, or rather, three of them, meet us again in a very interesting connection. When Israel reached the borders of Moab, Balak, the king of Moab, sent for a seer of great reputation, Balaam, the son of Beor, to ”Come, curse me Jacob, and come, defy Israel.” Balaam came, but instead of cursing Jacob, blessed the people in four prophecies, wherein he made, what would appear to be, distinct references to the standards of Judah, Joseph and Reuben.
”Behold the people riseth up as a lioness, And as a lion doth he lift himself up.”
Then again--
”He couched, he lay down as a lion, And as a lioness; who shall rouse him up?”
And in two pa.s.sages--
”G.o.d bringeth him forth out of Egypt; He hath as it were the strength of the wild ox.”
The wild ox and lion are obvious similes to use concerning a powerful and warlike people. These two similes are, therefore, not sufficient by themselves to prove that the tribal standards are being referred to. But the otherwise enigmatical verse--
”Water shall flow from his buckets,”
appears more expressly as an allusion to the standard of Reuben, the ”man with the river,” Aquarius pouring water from his pitcher; and if one be a reference to a standard, the others may also well be.
[Ill.u.s.tration: AQUARIUS AND THE NEIGHBOURING CONSTELLATIONS.]
It is surely something more than coincidence that Joseph, who by his father's favour and his own merit was made the leader of the twelve brethren, should be a.s.sociated with the bull or wild ox, seeing that Taurus was the leader of the zodiac in those ages. It may also well be more than coincidence, that when Moses was in the mount and ”the people gathered themselves unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us G.o.ds, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him,” Aaron fas.h.i.+oned the golden earrings given him into the form of a molten calf; into the similitude, that is to say, of Taurus, then Prince of the Zodiac. If we turn to St. Stephen's reference to this occurrence, we find that he says--
”And they made a calf in those days, and offered sacrifice unto the idol, and rejoiced in the works of their own hands.
Then G.o.d turned, and gave them up to wors.h.i.+p the host of heaven.”
In other words, their wors.h.i.+p of the golden calf was star wors.h.i.+p.
It has been often pointed out that this sin of the Israelites, deep as it was, was not in itself a breach of the first commandment--
”Thou shalt have no other G.o.ds before me.”
It was a breach of the second--
”Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them.”
The Israelites did not conceive that they were abandoning the wors.h.i.+p of Jehovah; they still considered themselves as wors.h.i.+pping the one true G.o.d. They were monotheists still, not polytheists. But they had taken the first false step that inevitably leads to polytheism; they had forgotten that they had seen ”no manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto” them ”in h.o.r.eb out of the midst of the fire,” and they had wors.h.i.+pped this golden calf as the similitude of G.o.d; they had ”changed their glory into the similitude of an ox that eateth gra.s.s.”
And that was treason against Him; therefore St. Stephen said, ”G.o.d turned, and gave them up to wors.h.i.+p the host of heaven;” the one sin inevitably led to the other, indeed, involved it. In a later day, when Jeroboam, who had been appointed by Solomon ruler over all the charge of the house of Joseph, led the rebellion of the ten tribes against Rehoboam, king of Judah, he set up golden calves at Dan and Bethel, and said unto his people, ”It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem: behold thy G.o.ds, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.” There can be little doubt that, in this case, Jeroboam was not so much recalling the transgression in the wilderness--it was not an encouraging precedent--as he was adopting the well-known cognizance of the tribe of Joseph, that is to say, of the two tribes of Ephraim and Mana.s.seh, which together made up the more important part of his kingdom, as the symbol of the presence of Jehovah.
The southern kingdom would naturally adopt the device of its predominant tribe, Judah, and it was as the undoubted cognizance of the kingdom of Judah that our Richard I., the Crusader, placed the Lion on his s.h.i.+eld.
More definitely still, we find this one of the cherubic forms applied to set forth Christ Himself, as ”The Root of David,” Prince of the house of Judah--