XVI

OF BRAM, ABRAM, OR ABRAHAM

IT SEEMS that the name of Bram, Abram, Abraham, or Ibrahim, was one of the most common names with the ancient people of Asia. The Indians, whom we look upon as one of the first nations, make their Brama a son of God, who taught the Bramins the manner of adoring him. This name came gradually into veneration. The Arabians, the Chaldeans, the Persians, all used it, and the Jews looked upon him as one of their patriarchs. The Arabs, who traded with the Indians, were perhaps the first who had some confused idea of Brama, whom they called Abrama, and from whom they afterwards boasted of being descended. The Chaldeans adopted him as a legislator; the Persians called their ancient religion, Millat Ibrahim; the Medes, Kish Ibrahim. They supposed that this Ibrahim, or Abraham, was born in Bactria, and that he resided near the city Balk; they revered in him a prophet of the religion of ancient Zoroaster: he belonged doubtless, only to the Hebrews, as they acknowledge him for their father in their sacred books.

Some of the learned have thought that it was an Indian name, because the Indian priests called themselves Bramins or Brachmanes; and that several of their sacred institutions have an immediate affinity with this name: whereas, among the western Asiatics no institution can be traced, which derives its name from Abram or Abraham. There never was any Abramic society; no rite or ceremony of this name: but as the Jewish books say that Abraham was the stock of the Hebrew race, they should be credited without hesitation.

The Alcoran quotes the Arabian histories, with regard to Abraham, but very little is said about him: according to those historians, he was the founder of Mecca.

The Jews make him come from Chaldea, and not from India or Bactria; they were in the neighborhood of Chaldea; India and Bactria were unknown to them: Abraham was a stranger to all these people, and Chaldea being a country long famed for arts and sciences, it was an honor, humanly speaking, for a small nation inclosed in Palestine, to reckon among the number of their ancestors an ancient sage, a reputed Chaldean.

If it be allowable to examine the historical part of the Judaical books, by the same rules as are followed in the criticisms of other histories, it must be agreed with all commentators, that the recital of the adventures of Abraham, as it is found in the Pentateuch, would be liable to many difficulties, if it were found in another history.

According to Genesis Abraham came out of Haran at the age of seventy-five, after the death of his father.

But it is said in the same Genesis that Thareus his father having had children at the age of seventy, he lived to be two hundred and five years old; so that Abraham was a hundred and thirty-five years old when he came from Chaldea. It appears strange, that at such an age he should abandon the fertile country of Mesopotamia, to go three hundred miles from thence, in the barren rocky country of Sichem, where no trade was carried on. He is made to go from Sichem to Memphis, which are about six hundred miles distant, to purchased corn; and upon his arrival, the king becomes enamoured with his wife, who is seventy-five years old.

I do not enter upon the divine part of this history, I keep close to my researches into antiquity. It is said that Abraham received considerable presents from the king of Egypt. This country was from that time a powerful state; the monarchy was founded, and arts were therefore cultivated; the flood was stopped; canals were dug on every side to receive its inundations, without which the country would not have been habitable.

Now, I ask any reasonable man, whether ages were not required to establish such an empire in a country which had been for a length of time inaccessible and laid waste by the very waters which rendered it fertile? Abraham, according to Genesis, arrived in Egypt two thousand years before our vulgar era. The Manetons, Herodotuses, Diodoruses, Eratos-theneses, and many others are to be forgiven, when they allow the kingdom of Egypt to be of such amazing antiquity; and this antiquity must have been very modern, in comparison of that of the Chaldeans and Syrians.

May it be allowable to examine a passage in the history of Abraham? He is represented upon his going out of Egypt as a Nomadian pastor, wandering between mount Carmel and the lake of Asphaltides: this is the most barren desert of all Arabia Petraea. His tents are conveyed thither by three hundred and eighteen domestics, and Lot, his nephew, is settled in the borough of Sodom. A king of Babylon, a king of Persia, a king of Pontus, and kings of several other nations, league together to wage war against Sodom, and four other little neighboring boroughs. They take these boroughs and Sodom. Lot is their prisoner. It is not easy to comprehend how five such great and powerful kings should league together to make an attack, in that manner, upon a band of Arabs, in such a savage corner of the earth; or how Abraham defeated such powerful monarchs with only three hundred and eighteen country valets, or how he could pursue them beyond Damascus. Some translators have wrote Dan for Damascus; but Dan did not exist in the time of Moses, much less in the time of Abraham. Lake Asphaltides, where Sodom was situated, was more than three hundred miles distant from Damascus: all this is above our comprehension. Everything is miraculous in the history of the Hebrews; we have already said it, and we again repeat it, that we believe these prodigies, and all the others, without examining them.