The Chosen People | Page 3

chosen from among the descendants of Seth, to be saved out of the
general ruin of the corrupt earth, and to carry on the promise. His faith
was first tried by the command to build the ark, though for one hundred
and twenty years all seemed secure, without any token of judgment;
and the disobedient refused to listen to his preaching. When the time
came, his own family of eight persons were alone found worthy to be
spared from the destruction, together with all the animals with them
preserved in the ark, two of each kind, and a sevenfold number of those
milder and purer animals which part the hoof and chew the cud, and
were already marked out as fit for sacrifice.
It was the year 2348 B.C. that Noah spent in floating upon the waste of
waters while every living thing was perishing round him, and
afterwards in seeing the floods return to their beds in oceans, lakes, and
rivers, which they shall never again overpass.
The ark first came aground on the mountain of Ararat, in Armenia, a
sacred spot to this day; and here God made His covenant with Noah,
renewing His first blessing to Adam, permitting the use of animal food;
promising that the course of nature should never be disturbed again till
the end of all things, and making the glorious tints of the rainbow,
which are produced by sunlight upon water, stand as the pledge of this

assurance. Of man He required abstinence from eating the blood of
animals, and from shedding the blood of man, putting, as it were, a
mark of sacredness upon life-blood, so as to lead the mind on to the
Blood hereafter to be shed.
Soon a choice was made among the sons of Noah. Ham mocked at his
father's infirmity, while his two brothers veiled it; and Noah was
therefore inspired to prophesy that Canaan, the son of the undutiful
Ham, should be accursed, and a servant of servants; that Shem should
especially belong to the Lord God, and that Japhet's posterity should be
enlarged, and should dwell in the tents of Shem. Thus Shem was
marked as the chosen, yet with hope that Japhet should share in his
blessings.
It seems as if Ham had brought away some of the arts and habits of the
giant sons of Cain, for in all worldly prosperity his sons had the
advantage. In 2247 B. C. the sons of men banded themselves together
to build the Tower of Babel on the plain of Shinar, just below the hills
of Armenia, where the two great rivers Euphrates and Tigris make the
flats rich and fertile. For their presumption, God confounded their
speech, and the nations first were divided. Ham's children got all the
best regions; Nimrod, the child of his son Cush, kept Babel, built the
first city, and became the first king. Canaan's sons settled themselves in
that goodliest of all lands which bore his name; and Mizraim's children
obtained the rich and beautiful valley of the Nile, called Egypt. All
these were keen clever people, builders of cities, cultivators of the land,
weavers and embroiderers, earnest after comfort and riches, and utterly
forgetting, or grievously corrupting, the worship of God. Others of the
race seem to have wandered further south, where the heat of the sun
blackened their skins; and their strong constitution, and dull meek
temperament, marked them out to all future generations as a prey to be
treated like animals of burden, so as to bear to the utmost the curse of
Canaan.
Shem's sons, simpler than those of Ham, continued to live in tents and
watch their cattle, scattered about in the same plains, called from the
two great streams, Mesopotamia, or the land of rivers. Some travelled

westwards, and settling in China and India, became a rich and wealthy
people, but constantly losing more and more the recollection of the
truth; and some went on in time from isle to isle to the western
hemisphere--lands where no other foot should tread till the world
should be grown old.
Japhet's children seemed at first the least favoured, for no place, save
the cold dreary north, was found for most of them. Some few, the
children of Javan, found a home in the fair isles of the Mediterranean,
but the greater part were wild horsemen in Northern Asia and Europe.
This was a dark and dismal training, but it braced them so that in future
generations they proved to have far more force and spirit than was to be
found among the dwellers in milder climates.

LESSON II.
THE PATRIARCHS.
"The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham."--Acts, vii. 2.
Among the sons of Shem (called Hebrews after his descendant Heber,
who dwelt in Mesopotamia) was