Confirming the Word by S. S. Times

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 25, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 45.

Confirming the Word.

By S. S. Times

How we all used to laugh over the story of the credulous old woman who doubted some of the more truthful stories of her returned sailor boy, but who was prompt to believe him when he told of the raising of a wheel of Pharaoh's chariot with his ship's anchor out of the Red Sea! It was such an obvious impossibility that one of those chariot wheels could have been preserved, even below the bottom of the sea, during thirty centuries and more, that the silliest man could join in the sneer of the accomplished scientist over the weak-minded woman's credulity.

Yet here stands the wide world in admiring interest, while the very bodies of the father and the grandfather of that Pharaoh whose host pursued Moses and the Hebrew multitude down into the bared bed of the Red Sea, are unrolled from the garments of the grave; and as men look into those faces, which struck terror to the hearts of the ancestors of Moses and Aaron, none question the identity of the recovered bodies without subjecting themselves to such sneers as were given to that old woman's reverent credulity.

No sooner had the unrolled mummy of Rameses II., the chief oppressor of the Hebrews, been put on exhibition in the museum at Boolaq, than the mummy of his father, Setee I., was also exposed to view there. Setee I. was probably the father of the princess who rescued the infant Moses from the Nile. He was a mighty conqueror in his day. He was also a predecessor of M. de Lesseps in opening the Suez Canal between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean; and he began again the building of the Great Wall in front of that canal, which had fallen into ruins during the sway of the Shepherd kings.

No chariot wheels are found buried with these kings; but delicate linen cloths which wrapped their bodies are well preserved; and with some of the mummies of an approximate date there are even found intact the funeral garlands—the "flowers of the field" which are proverbially so frail and perishable. After all, was the old woman's belief so far inferior to that of the scientists? There are strange discoveries now making in the Bible lands; and every discovery is only an added confirmation of the historical accuracy of the Book of books.—S. S. Times.