lour hours additiono.l would be required for similarly completing the movements of the other three divisions. Meantime Judah has been travelling, let us suppose, four hours o.t the rate of two or two and a half miles an hour, so that, after a. journey of ten miles, he is ready for encampment, which consumes, we may conjec- ture, not more than four hours. Thus the entire day of Judah was divided into three equal portions of four hours ea.eh, the first of which was spent in breaking up and forming into line, the second in travelling, and the third in re-camping. As we have supposed the last line to be four hours later than Judah in starting, they would likewise be four hours later in arriving. And though darkness must have set in before the last travellers were quartered for the night, it is not likely that that would greatly impede their progress or interfere with their comfort, since, according to the story, Jehovah went before them in a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night. Of course in the above calculations we do not pretend to show how the march actually was accomplished, but simply to demonstrate that assertions as to its impossibility are extremely rash, and not such a.a would be made by any modern general of intelligence and capacity. Besides, it should be noted that, though the ideal order and method of marching a.re depicted by the historian, it is not necessary to assume, what certainly the historian does not assert, that these were in every minute particular carried out on the first trial with the same faultless precision that might have been exhibited by a highly-disciplined modern army, or that they themselves would display at a. later period when practice had ma.de perfec- tion. On the contrary, it may be rea.sona.blysupposed that, during the fortnight which intervened between the construction of the camp and the marching of the host, the various sections of the army, under their captains of hundreds and fifties and tens, would be subjected to a sort of preparatory drill in anticipation of the general advance, and that though, in consequence of the numerous hitches that might naturally be expected to occur in an initial experiment on so great a scale, the fast day's marching would al.most certainly prove a. serious o.fl'e.ir, occupying a. gro.1.t many hours, and leaving them only a. few miles from Sinai ; yet, as the days went by, and frequent repetition imparted facility to their movements, these imperfection~ would gradually disappear, and the actual method of marching more nearly approach the ideal. Then, if it further be borne in mind that the narrative does not affirm that the work of reconstructing the camp was undertaken every night, thus involving the tedious labour of deploying into line each successive morning, which would certainly have involved an unnecessary expenditure of time and energy that might have been otherwise profitably consumed in journeying, but that only then was the tabernacle set up when, as at Kibroth-Ha.ttaa.vah, they had reached a station where the multitude could conveniently rest-when this circumstance in addition is remembered, it will be seen that, attended though it must have been with much painful labour, the marching of the host need not by any means have been an insuperable difficulty, and much less a physical impossibility. IV. THE VIOTORY OVER MIDI.AN. While dwelling largely and with much impressiveness upon the immoral aspects of this remarkable campaign, Colenso, after Bohlen, is particularly scandalised at the idea of 12,000 Israelites slaying all the male Midia.nites, capturing all their famo.les and children, including 32,000 virgins, seizing all their cattle and flocks (72,000 oxen, 61,000 o.sses, 675,000 sheep), and all their goods, and burning all their cities and all their goodly castles, without the loss of o. single man! (oh. xxxi. 49; 'On the Pentateuoh,' Vol. I. ob. xxii.). De Watte regards this particular statement as proof oonolusive of the mythical cho.re.cter of the narro.tive; but Taoitus (' Annals,' xiii. 39) records an instance in xvi THE AUTHENTICITY AND AUTHORSHIP OF
w~ich, at ~e cap~re or a Parthian castle, the Romane slaughtered all their foeg. mthout losmg a emgle man, and Strabo (xvi. 1128) mentions a battle in whioh 1000 .A.rabe were slain by only two Romane (vitk Rosenmilller on Numb. xxxi, 49), while Hiivernick affirms that the life of Saladin oontaine eJmoet in the eam& words a like statement respecting the issue of a battle ('lntrod.,' p. 330). Hence the extraordinary preservation whioh Israel enjoyed on thie oooaeion, though owing more to Divine interposition than to the operation of natural co.ueee, such ae the non-military character of the Midianites and the euddennees of the attack to which they were exposed, oan BO&rO?ly be h?1d, on any principles of sound reasoning, to afford oolourable pretext for 1ID.peaching the oorrectness of the narrative,