By this and the foregoing note I would caution against a false
opinion of the eastern boldness, from passages in them ill
understood.
43 "His eyes are like the eyelids of the morning." I think this gives
us as great an image of the thing it would express as can enter the
thought of man. It is not improbable that the Egyptians stole their
hieroglyphic for the morning, which is the crocodile's eye, from
this passage, though no commentator, I have seen, mentions it. It is
easy to conceive how the Egyptians should be both readers and
admirers of the writings of Moses, whom I suppose the author of this
poem.
I have observed already that three or four of the creatures here
described are Egyptian; the two last are notoriously so, they are
the river-horse and the crocodile, those celebrated inhabitants of
the Nile; and on these two it is that our author chiefly dwells. It
would have been expected from an author more remote from that river
than Moses, in a catalogue of creatures produced to magnify their
Creator, to have dwelt on the two largest works of his hand, viz.
Pages:
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375