Of the Fifty Thousand and Seventy Jews Struck with Sudden Death for Having Looked Upon the Ark; of the Five Golden Emeroids Paid by the Philistines; and of Dr. Kennicott’s Incredulity.

Men of the world will perhaps be astonished to find this word the subject of an article; but we here address only the learned and ask their instruction.

Bethshemesh was a village belonging to God’s people, situated, according to commentators, two miles north of Jerusalem. The Ph?nicians having, in Samuel’s time, beaten the Jews, and taken from them their Ark of alliance in the battle, in which they killed thirty thousand of their men, were severely punished for it by the Lord:

“Percussit eos in secretiori parte natium, et ebullierunt vill? et agri. . . . et nati sunt mures, et facta est confusio mortis magna in civitate.” Literally: “He struck them in the most secret part of the buttocks; and the fields and the farmhouses were troubled . . . . and there sprung up mice; and there was a great confusion of death in the city.”

The prophets of the Ph?nicians, or Philistines, having informed them that they could deliver themselves from the scourge only by giving to the Lord five golden mice and five golden emeroids, and sending him back the Jewish Ark, they fulfilled this order, and, according to the express command of their prophets sent back the Ark with the mice and emeroids on a wagon drawn by two cows, with each a sucking calf and without a driver.

These two cows of themselves took the Ark straight to Bethshemesh. The men of Bethshemesh approached the Ark in order to look at it, which liberty was punished yet more severely than the profanation by the Ph?nicians had been. The Lord struck with sudden death seventy men of the people, and fifty thousand of the populace.

The reverend Doctor Kennicott, an Irishman, printed in 1768 a French commentary on this occurrence and dedicated it to the bishop of Oxford. At the head of this commentary he entitles himself Doctor of Divinity, member of the Royal Society of London, of the Palatine Academy, of the Academy of G?ttingen, and of the Academy of Inscriptions at Paris. All that I know of the matter is that he is not of the Academy of Inscriptions at Paris. Perhaps he is one of its correspondents. His vast erudition may have deceived him, but titles are distinct from things.

He informs the public that his pamphlet is sold at Paris by Saillant and Molini, at Rome by Monaldini, at Venice by Pasquali, at Florence by Cambiagi, at Amsterdam by Marc-Michel Rey, at The Hague by Gosse, at Leyden by Jaquau, and in London by Beckett, who receives subscriptions.

In this pamphlet he pretends to prove that the Scripture text has been corrupted. Here we must be permitted to differ with him. Nearly all Bibles agree in these expressions: seventy men of the people and fifty thousand of the popula............