Before concluding this section, we must say a word of the practical morality connected with this theology.  We have seen, above, the stress laid on works of justice and mercy.  There is a papyrus in the Imperial library at Paris, which M. Chabas considers the oldest book in the world.  It is an autograph manuscript written B.C. 2200, or four thousand years ago, by one who calls himself the son of a king.  It contains practical philosophy like that of Solomon in his proverbs.  It glorifies, like the Proverbs, wisdom.  It says that “man’s heart rules the man,” that “the bad man’s life is what the wise know to be death,” that “what we say in secret is known to him who made our interior nature,” that “he who made us is present with us though we are alone.”

Is not the human race one, when this Egyptian four thousand years ago, talks of life as Solomon spoke one thousand years after, in Judaea; and as Benjamin Franklin spoke, three thousand years after Solomon, in America?

Sec. 7.  Influence of Egypt on Judaism and Christianity.

How much of the doctrine and ritual of Egypt were imported into Judaism by Moses is a question by no means easy to settle.  Of Egyptian theology proper, or the doctrine of the gods, we find no trace in the Pentateuch.  Instead of the three orders of deities we have Jehovah; instead of the images and pictures of the gods, we have a rigorous prohibition of idolatry; instead of Osiris and Isis, we have a Deity above all worlds and behind all time, with no history, no adventures, no earthly life.  But it is perhaps more strange not to find any trace of the doctrine of a future life in Mosaism, when this was so prominent among the Egyptians.  Moses gives no account of the judgment of souls after death; he tells nothing of the long journey and multiform experiences of the next life according to the Egyptians, nothing of a future resurrection and return to the body.  His severe monotheism was very different from the minute characterization of gods in the Egyptian Pantheon.  The personal character of Jehovah, with its awful authority, its stern retribution and impartial justice, was quite another thing from the symbolic ideal type of the gods of Egypt.  Nothing of the popular myth of Osiris, Isis, Horus, and Typhon is found in the Pentateuch, nothing of the transmigration of souls, nothing of the worship of animals; nothing of the future life and judgment to come; nothing of the embalming of bodies and ornamenting of tombs.  The cherubim among the Jews may resemble the Egyptian Sphinx; the priests’ dress in both are of white linen; the Urim and Thummim, symbolic jewels of the priests, are in both; a quasi-hereditary priesthood is in each; and both have a temple worship.  But here the parallels cease.  Moses left behind Egyptian theology, and took only some hints for his ritual from the Nile.