ISRAELITE AND INDIAN. 55 



adapt them. If any one of them e. g., Moses had done so as an 

 individual act, the feat would have had but one historic parallel, 

 which would have furnished another coincidence between Israel- 

 ite and Indian. It was performed by the Cheroki, Sequoia, who 

 in less prosaic days would have become the hero of a Kadmos 

 myth. But Sequoia left very distinct marks of his invention, 

 while there is no evidence that the Israelites possessed an alpha- 

 bet before they settled in Canaan, and there are strong inferences 

 against that supposition. 



The compilers of the Old Testament felt no doubt that the law 

 could have been written on Sinai at the time of the exodus. They 

 knew how to write and knew that their predecessors for several 

 generations had written, so it did not occur to them that there 

 had ever been a time in which persons of the higher classes were 

 ignorant of writing. 



It is probable that in the days of Samuel the Israelites had 

 made some progress in the art of writing. An alphabet had been 

 known to some of them before ; but its common use is of greater 

 consequence, and that depends much upon the substances used for 

 writing, their cost, and the convenience of procuring them. The 

 use, not the mere invention, of writing, not only divides the mythi- 

 cal and the historical periods, but reacts upon the character of the 

 people in all their institutions, forming a new epoch in culture. 

 The people did, perhaps, write under David at about 1100 b. c. 



Moses flourished about fifteen centuries before Christ, and the 

 oldest legends relating to him are, in their present shape, four or 

 five centuries later than his death. He did not practically organ- 

 ize a new formal state of society, or if he did, temporarily, by his 

 personal power, it had no direct consequence or historical continu- 

 ity. The old system of clans and religions continued as before. If 

 the legislative portion of the Pentateuch was the work of Moses, 

 it remained a dead letter for centuries, and not until the reign of 

 Josiah did it become operative in the national history. 



The historical account undoubtedly states that Moses was, by 

 inspiration, the founder of the Torah ; but the question is, What 

 was that Torah ? It was not the finished legislative code. Long 

 after the exodus a dramatic account was furnished of the pro- 

 mulgation of the whole law at Sinai to produce a solemn impres- 

 sion, and thus the code, which had slowly and imperceptibly 

 grown during centuries, was represented as having been pro- 

 nounced on one occasion celebrated by tradition as momentous. 



The code now ascribed to Moses was a revised code, and in an 

 unusual sense a mosaic work. When the Israelites attained the 

 use of writing they did as all people in the world have done when 

 they began to use writing i. e., they wrote out their own myths, 

 traditions, and legends as they knew them at the time of writing. 



