Sacred Stones in the Vicinity of Newark, Licking County, Ohio

SACRED STONES IN THE VICINITY OF NEWARK, LICKING COUNTY, OHIO.

(Concluded from page 759.)

If we pronounce this stone a genuine Teraphim, we do not mean that it shows us the very form of the Teraphim which Rachel stole from her father Laban, and which he called his gods; because the Ten Commandments were not in existence at that time to be engraved on such objects. But when in the time of the Judges, the citizen of Mount Ephraim furnished his house with the Teraphim, along with an ephod, a graven image and a molten image and was afterwards so happy when he could have a Levite for the priest of his house, it is highly probable that his Teraphim was such an object as fills stone that if we could see what he had, we would see something similar to this. The roving Danites took his Teraphim from him by violence, along with his ephod, the graven image, and the molten image, and the Levite, because they desired Teraphim and priest to guide them in their journey northward to the foot of Lebanon, and furnish them with an oracle in their new settlement. Aben Ezra says the Teraphim exhibited the form of a human being: this is just what we have on this stone. He says that this human image in the Teraphim was made in the belief that the power of higher spirits would enter into it. The impression appears to have prevailed, that if the Teraphim was made at a particular auspicious hour, it would continue to be a speaking image. The great value of the Teraphim was in the belief that it revealed future events, and directed men in the best course. Its voice was to be the guide of the traveller. The prophet Zechariah denounced the Teraphim as a false guide, when he said “The Teraphim have spoken vanity.” (Zech, x, 2.) Rachel stole her father’s Teraphim, that it might not tell him how to follow them, and he felt that his gods were stolen. The Teraphim sent Nebuchadnezzar and his army to Jerusalem, as we learn from the prophet Ezekiel, chapter xxi. When this monarch came to the head of two great roads, he practiced divination to determine which road he should take, and this he did in three ways: first, he polished his arrows, perhaps expecting to see human forms on the bright surface: secondly, he inquired of the Teraphim; and thirdly, he inspected the liver. He inquired of the Teraphim whether he should take the right hand road to Jerusalem, or the left hand road to Rabbath Ammon.

Remember what a powerful influence the Teraphim held in Chaldea and Assyria, and how the ten tribes, especially, were brought under the idolatrous influence of eastern divination, and it is easily explained how such a stone as this, clearly indicating a wonderful mixture of genuine Mosaic theology and heathen superstition, could come into existence among some of the twelve tribes and acquire an awful sacredness. This stone was never made to be a graven image hung on the wall that men might bow down to it. In such a position most of the inscription would be against the wall and concealed by it, and any strap passed round the handle would have carried the image with the bead to the ground. If it was intended that the inscription should ever be read, it was intended that the stone be taken in the hand and turned over and round and round. Need any one hesitate to pronounce it a genuine Teraphim? The sculptured man is on it, and the name “Moses” is over his head. Much larger than this must have been the Teraphim which the daughter of Saul placed in the bed of David, and which made the bed appear as if David was lying in it, but the smaller Teraphim may have been as sacred as any other. Moses stands here in the midst of the Ten Commandments, those celestial oracles which Moses received at Mount Sinai, and all the people heard them: they are on the arch over his head, and in front of him, and behind him, and spread all over the opposite part of the stone and on the two sides and at the ends. How could any literary surrounding be more awful? The arch over the head may signify heaven; and farther, I am not certain that that central mark in the arch is not a star. The stone may have received its first honors in Palestine, and more probably from the sons of Joseph than from the sons of Judah. If any tribe carried it with them into foreign lands and the sore afflictions of the captive state, it would gradually increase in sacredness and gather the hearts of the tribe around it. They would often mention Moses, and go over the history how he led them forty years in the Wilderness, and they would express the wish that Moses were again with them and leading them. If they knew that they were carrying with them the figure of Moses carved in stone, they would attribute to it an inexpressible sacredness, and often the wish would be uttered that they could hear one voice from him, and thus be assured that they were not utterly doomed to perish. If the report ever spread among them that the image did once speak, they would feel as if their success or ruin depended on the image. No voice was more needed by them than the voice of Moses; and as they honor the ten great oracles of Sinai by writing them over and all round the figure of Moses, do they not deserve to receive a new oracle in their present need? and whence can such an oracle come more appropriately than from the lips of their sculptured Moses, and the bosom of the engraved Decalogue? If they passed over the ocean and found the American continent, it was natural they should say that their Teraphim, in the name of Moses, had preserved them on the mighty deep. And as they wandered through America, their sculptured Moses or Teraphim may have been consulted at every change of their course. It may have continued in America, during many centuries, to be the guide and palladium of the tribe. But finally, under the evil influences of a homeless and uncivilized life, they may have lost all that they knew about Moses, and all their knowledge of the mysterious letters; they may have even lost their confidence in their ancient. talisman, and finally buried it with the last one of their learned Levites or their greatest warrior. When they were carrying their greatest leader to his grave, they may have said, “Let the Teraphim, which has led our tribe in this world for so many centuries, go with him to be his guide in the land of spirits and shades.”

Upon a review of all the four relics, there are some points which are established beyond all question. First, it is established beyond all question, that in the most remote antiquity families came from Asia to the American continent. The cradle for the infancy of the human family appears to have been in some part of Asia, and from that primitive home the race spread to all parts of the earth. It is established beyond all question, that Hebrews labored in the construction of the immense mounds of this western country, and laid their bones beneath them. Here are Hebrew letters, and words, and sentences, and law, brought out from the depths of these mounds. This is not that Syrian language which Rabshakeh was requested to speak at Jerusalem, but then the people on the wall would not have understood him, but it is that same Hebrew which he persevered in speaking with a loud voice, that all the people might hear, and understand, and lose their courage. These letters are not Syriac, or Arabic, or Egyptian, or Chinese. They are Hebrew, and Hebrews must have placed them where we find them. If no other Hebrew inscription had been found, except the one engraving of the Ten Commandments, in that colossal stone mound, we might conclude that some solitary vagrant Hebrew had become the supreme leader of a tribe of Indians, and that when he died the Indians honored his grave with a holy inscription in his own national tongue; but the fact must not be overlooked, that other Hebrew inscriptions have been found in other places, several miles distant. The sons of Jacob were walking on the soil of Ohio many centuries before the birth of Columbus. The ten thunders which uttered the Ten Commandments from the flaming top of Mount Sinai, have struck on the colossal stone mound near Newark, and they echo back from the quiet stones and bones in its depth. Both the beautiful letters which Ezra used, and the letters which preceded him, have come to light in these Indian works. Farther, the evidences are unmistakable of a two-fold decline, a decline of religion and a decline of literature. If the carved Moses was a figure before which men should bow themselves in worship, it indicates that the people were given to idolatry, and their state was growing worse; or if, on the other extreme, the chief use of the stone was pedagogic, if the figure was nothing more than a respectful memorial of Moses, if the Ten Commandments were cut on the stone to preserve them from becoming lost, and preserve the knowledge of the letters among the people, and instruct the scribes how to transcribe them, the arrangement is so poor, and the many mistakes so glaring, that we must conclude the sacred literature of the people had already reached the lowest stage of decline. If the truth lies between these two views, and is this, that the stone was a highly prized talisman, or, more specifically, the old Teraphim, it is still the same unmistakable evidence that the people were fearfully sinking from that high position where they once stood. The stone shows us God’s law with a desolating eclipse on it. When that stone box was 'deposited in the fire clay, and the personage was buried above, the sun of divine truth had already sunk beneath the horizon, and only its last rays were still visible on the lower edge of the western cloud, and the night of heathenism and barbarism was already on the tribe. A fourth point, which must be marked as established beyond question, is that the builders of these mounds cherished a high respect for their dead, and the hope of an existence after death. The forehead, with the letter Shin inscribed on it, meaning Shaddai, or Almighty, was left in the grave with the body, to be a witness of the man’s piety when all his bones should be changed into dust; it indicated that that had been a praying Hebrew, that he was buried in the name of the Almighty, that his grave was a holy house, and demons might not enter it. When the Indians deposited articles with their dead, they did it with the idea that these articles might be useful to the dead in another life. In one part of this continent the aborigines had a custom that, when their chief was buried, many of his servants were buried with him, on the supposition that he might need them to wait on him in the other world.

But, around this most interesting record of unquestionable points, there is a very wide margin for conjecture, fancy, and interrogation. First, conjecture may look towards the tribe of Reuben, which was settled east of the Jordan, and was one of the first tribes to suffer from the Assyrians, and be swept into a foreign land. Did Reuben wander through Asia northward, pass into America at Behring’s Strait, and, after a bitter experience of Asiatic oppression, seek a resting place in the New World? Did this tribe bring with them to America the history of Moses and the Decalogue? and, after some years of vagrant life, did they have this stone prepared, to be an enduring monument, when they felt the danger that both Moses and the Decalogue might become forgotten? Did they then preserve this stone, with all the sacredness of a shrine for many ages, until finally it seemed best that it should be buried with the last man in the tribe who could tell the names of its letters? Or, conjecture may look towards the tribe of Dan; which, at a very early period, preferred the society of the heathen to the heart of Palestine, and fixed its settlement in the north at the foot of Lebanon. Did the Danites preserve most sacredly the Teraphim which they took violently from the house in Ephraim, along with the graven image, the molten image, and the ephod, and did they find all which the Teraphim told them concerning their journey and destiny to be true? Was that only the start of their wandering life? Did they wander over many unfriendly countries and wide seas until they found America, and always have their Teraphim with them to direct their course? Was this stone their tribal talisman or revered Teraphim, for many ages in America, until finally it was buried with the last man of the tribe who could communicate with its spirit or cared for it? Or, conjecture may look towards Zebulun, who should have the abundance of the seas. Did some of this tribe sail for Tarshish, measure the length of the Mediterranean, pass through the strait, and go out into the Atlantic, there to get new ideas of die abundance of the seas? And when their ship was mounting up to the clouds, or plunging down between the mountains of water, and all nature was in one darkening universal storm, was this stone with them in the ship, to assure them that the storm would end, and they would reach land? or that, if they must go down to the ocean’s bottom, it would go down with them, to be an imperishable witness at their watery grave, that they were men of God, and open the gate of paradise to their souls? But let Joseph be mentioned as the representative—the front and chief of all the ten tribes. Their first king, Jeroboam, was of the tribe of Joseph, and Samaria belonged to the same tribe which we always find standing as the pre-eminent tribe. The Patriarchs were astounded in Egypt when they heard the words, I am Joseph; but vastly more wonderful it is if the voice that comes to us from the bones and buried rock in the depth of that stone mound of gray antiquity, a few miles from Newark, is really this, I am Joseph. Does Judah still live? Does David still occupy a throne? Is it possible that Joseph is to be found here? It is most amazing, if the true voice in that rude receptacle of the ancient dead is, I am Joseph. The weight of many centuries of a dismal captivity was on me when I laid my bones down here. We tried to carry in our memories the wonderful life of Moses, and we carried the Ten Commandments inscribed on a rock. We carried for ages our little sculptured Moses, and we hung over it and around it the ten blazing oracles of Sinai. We located heathenish divination even within the bosom of the Ten Commandments. We carried our talismanic rock or Teraphim until we lost confidence in it, or some disaster occurred to it, which deprived it of its magic power, and then we laid it in the grave with our most honored dead, and with the burial of that stone the darkness of night was upon us, and the mighty waves of barbarism were rolling on us and becoming more stormy, until we went down. We did go down.—This stone marks the last moment before we went down; and when we buried this Teraphim, we had entirely forgotten how a Prophet in our own land had declared that the children of Israel should remain many days without Teraphim, as well as without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice, and without an image, and without an ephod, and that after these many days they should return and seek the Lord their God and David their king our wanderings among enemies and through deserts, and over land and ocean, our wars and woes, never can be told: never! never! but the sum of all the long experience of Joseph is this, that it is a most evil and bitter thing to depart from the God of Judah.

I have purposely not touched the subject of the relation between the American Indians and that ancient people who made these Hebrew inscriptions, and built the mounds, as this would introduce the difficult question whether the Indians are not a separate barbarous race, who rolled over the country in desolating waves, sweeping the earlier and better people before them. The faces carved on these stones are not, in our judgment, Indian. But if the Indians did conquer an earlier Hebrew population, there is evidence that they learned from the Hebrews. The Indian name Manito, the name for the Great Spirit, the Supreme Creator, the Master of life, may be the Hebrew “mah attah,” “Who art thou?” a phrase which the inquiring, devout, and praying mind would very naturally address to Him who is incomprehensible and supreme. The Indian name, “malcha manito,” the name for the demon or evil spirit, may be the same as the angel of “manito,” or the Hebrew “malach maveth,” “angel of death.” Sorcery was universal among the Indians, which fact is consistent with the idea that the stone carrying the Ten Commandments was an ancient Hebrew talisman. It is an interesting fact, that both the nation of Indians called Iroquois and the earliest Arabs of Asia, called the same constellation by the name of the “Great Bear,” while the constellation in no way resembles a bear or any other animal. It is appropriate to add that Mendelssohn, when he comes to give his comment on that law which required the Hebrews to have fringes, threads, knots, and a ribbon of blue attached to their garment, finds an illustration of his subject in those sacred boxes belonging to the original inhabitants of Peru, which contained threads, knots, ribbons, and different colours, and by these the record was accurately preserved of the lives of their kings and the history of their empire for ages.

The great and irretrievable wrong step of the ten tribes occurred at the fountain-head of their separate existence, when they declared that they had no portion in David, and cut themselves off from David's house, and the same pernicious sentiment manifests itself now in the question what we have to do now with David’s son. It is a sentiment which is now taking deep root among the more favoured tribes, that the prediction of the prophet, after the captivity that in a future day the feeble one of Israel should be as David, and the house of David should be as God, as the Angel of the Lord before them, may now be laid aside as one of the illusive pictures of patriotic hope, and that the Jews and the world can now advance and fulfil their highest mission without any son of David. Sad feelings come over us, as we meditate how that stone, engraved with the Ten Commandments, was laid beneath the coffin, deep in the bottom of the tumulus, and how the last rays of sacred knowledge were then leaving the tribe to the night of barbarism; but there is a way in which the same thing can be done now and the law of God be made just as dead and useless. If we take away from the Ten Commandments all those brilliant surroundings of miracle which they had at Sinai, and pronounce all the great fire, smoke, cloud, and trumpet-voice to be the only phenomena of nature; if we find the origin of the Decalogue in the enlightened statesmanship of Moses, rather than in any Voice from Heaven, which was heard by all the people, and suspect that Moses shrewdly constructed a national God for the Hebrews, out of the materials of the Egyptian system, and that, when be furnished the water at Horeb, he knew where to strike the rock, where water was, without any miracle, and that the manna was only the waxy substance that drops from the tarfa shrub, and that when the company of Korah were buried in the earth it was the result of some concealed contrivance of Moses; but he ascribed it to God, that he might hold the people in awe,—if we avow these principles, we are really divesting the Ten Commandments of all that celestial radiance which originally and naturally surrounds them, and changing them into a lifeless, black, common stone; and we may just as well form a funeral procession, and carry them in a coffin before us, and let them down into a grave, and then, when they are covered up, speak the funeral oration over the dead and buried.

M.R.M.

P.S. Since the foregoing article was written and finished, I have become able to answer a question which my friends often asked when they were examining the relics, but I could not give the answer, namely:—Whether the little handle at the feet of the sculptured Moses, reaching from side to side of the stone, which was broken off, had been found broken off when the stone box was first opened, or whether it has since been broken off? I have conversed with Dr. Nicol of Newark, who saw Mr. Wyrick strike the stone box, and draw it out from its bed in the fire clay, and who saw it opened. He assures me that the handle was found broken off when the box was first opened, and that it must have been lying in the box broken off, before they touched the box. It is fortunate that this question is now settled. That fracture of the stone may have been the principal reason why it was buried. It may have been considered as cancelling the sacredness of the stone, or destroying its magic virtue, and prohibiting its farther use, and consequently it was buried; just as I have been informed by persons who have given their lives to the study of such subjects, that if a synagogue scroll becomes defaced or unfit from age to be read, it is buried with some Rabbi, and phylacteries, when they are worn out, are buried. If an idolator breaks a piece off from his idol, a Jew can then put the idol to some use, because the fracture has desecrated it.