UNCLE IN ENGLAND. 229 



make it more apparent, it will be proper to con- 

 sider the precise meaning of Shem's blessing- 

 a blessing obliquely conveyed in this emphatic 

 ejaculation, ' Blessed be Jehovah, the God of 

 Shem !' This evidently implied that Jehovah 

 was to be more peculiarly the God of Shem ; 

 and in the same sense that he afterwards vouch- 

 safed to call himself the God of one branch of 

 Shem's progeny of Abraham, Isaac, and of 

 Jacob, and of their descendants the Jewish 

 people. Although the universal Father of all 

 the nations of the earth, he may be said to have 

 more particularly adopted the descendants of 

 Shem, in choosing them to be the depositaries of 

 the true religion, while the rest of mankind were 

 sunk in idolatry and ignorance. Among them 

 he preserved the knowledge and worship of him- 

 self, by a series of miraculous dispensations ; to 

 them he confided the representative priesthood, 

 the type of the Messiah ; and when the destined 

 season came, he raised the Messiah himself from 

 among the offspring of that chosen family. 



"But the expression, ' the tents (or taber- 

 nacles) of Shem,' alludes to the Jewish tabernacle, 

 which was one of the external means of pre- 

 serving the worship of the true God. The word 

 in Hebrew is the same for both tent and taber- 

 nacle. This holy tent was Shem's tabernacle, 

 because it was entrusted to his descendants, and 

 because none but them might bear a part in. 



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