CHAPTER II.

ON BIBLICAL DREAMS.

Ir will help to give freedom and simplicity to our after method, if at the outset we discuss shortly and apart, those dreams of which our information is furnished by the Scriptures. Of these there are three well-defined kinds :

(1.) Those which were characterized either (a) by a Divine manifestation; or (b) by an angelic visitation of such a nature as to be immediately and necessarily demonstrative of Divine authenticity.

(2.) Those to which the sacred text explicitly refers as being characterized either (a) by angelic agency which, professing or not to be Divine, was in fact diabolical; or (b) by the invention of some sordid trafficker in dreams, to whom truth and falsehood were alike indifferent, and who cared only to secure so much plausibility and veri

VARIETIES OF SCRIPTURE DREAMS.

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similitude as would suffice to keep together his credit and his clientèle.

(3.) Those which, barely narrated, are to be judged indifferently, and by precisely the same canons as extraBiblical dreams,-which evidence whatever Divine or anti-Divine commission they may be charged with, only morally; and which postpone the recognition of their claims to significance till future events shall have approved their validity.

The above formed, so to speak, the aristocracy or chivalry of dreams, that either blazoned a motto, claimed a crest, or wore a cognizance. But besides these there were the oi Tooí, the mob of dreams that fell beneath the dignity of classification, that flitted across the brain as traceless and meaningless as the motes across a sunbeam, and that from their utter vanity were pressed into the service of proverb, metaphor, and simile, to point the moral of lightness, worthlessness, and evanescence.

Thus Zophar, the Naamathite, speaking of the wicked man, says, ' He shall fly away as a dream, and shall not be found; yea, he shall be chased away as a vision of the night.' (Job xx. 8.) In a kindred train of thought, the Psalmist says of the same class of persons, 'As a dream when one awaketh; so, O Lord, when thou awakest, thou shalt despise their image.' (Psalm lxxiii. 20.) And the prophet Isaiah, after denouncing woe to Ariel, to Ariel, the city where David dwelt !' presently goes on

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MOSES AMYRALDUS.

to denounce woe more hopeless against her enemies. The curse of Ariel was to be the scattering of her people like small dust and like chaff; but the multitude of all the nations that fight against Ariel, even all that fight against her, and her munition, and that distress her, shall be as a dream of a night-vision. It shall even be as when a hungry man dreameth, and behold, he eateth; but be awaketh, and his soul is empty: or, as when a thirsty man dreameth, and behold, he drinketh; but he awaketh, and behold, he is faint, and his soul hath appetite; so shall the multitude of all the nations be, that fight against Mount Zion.' (Isaiah xxix. 7, 8.) A propos of such passages, Dr. Lee judiciously observes: When the sacred writers do not refer to Divine revelation, or to the means by which it was imparted, we observe how carefully they indicate their clear appreciation of the fact that ordinary dreams or visions are altogether valueless.'

The distribution we have adopted is an ethical one; but it is evident that possible classifications are as numerous as the points of view from which the dreams of Scripture may be regarded. Moses Amyraldus, vulgariter Moÿse Amyraut, who in 1659 published at Saumur a 'Discours sur les Songes divins, dont il est parlé dans l'Escriture,' a few sentences from which we may by-and-by find it convenient to quote, has his own peculiar theory and classification; and Philo Judæus,

CLASSIFICATION OF PHILO.

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to go back for more than a decade and a half of centuries, in his treatise On Dreams being sent from God,' where he confines his attention to such Biblical revelations as seemed to him to come under that category, discriminated them as follows:- The first kind of dream was that which proceeded from God, as the author of its motion, and, in some invisible manner prompted us what was indistinct to us, but well known to himself. The second kind was when our own intellect was set in motion simultaneously with the soul of the universe, and became filled with divine madness, by means of which it is allowed to prognosticate events which are about to happen; and for this reason the interpreter of the sacred will very plainly and clearly speaks of dreams, indicating by this expression the visions which appear according to the first species, as if God, by means of dreams, gave suggestions which were equivalent to distinct and precise oracles. Of the visions according to the second species Moses speaks neither very clearly nor very obscurely; an instance of which is afforded by the vision which was exhibited of the ladder reaching up to heaven-for this vision was an enigmatical one; nevertheless, the meaning was not hidden from those who were able to see with any great acuteness.

"The third species of dreams exists whenever, in sleep, the mind being set in motion by itself, and agitating

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THEOPHANIC DREAMS.

itself, is filled with frenzy and inspiration, so as to predict future events by a certain prophetic power. But these visions which are afforded according to the third species of dreams, being less clear than the two former kinds, by reason of their having an enigmatical meaning deeply seated and fully coloured, require the science of an interpreter of dreams. At all events, all the dreams of this class, which are recorded by the lawgiver, are interpreted by men who are skilled in the aforesaid art.

Whose dreams, then, am I here alluding to? Surely, every one must see, to those of Joseph, and of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and to those which the chief baker and the chief butler saw themselves.'

(1.) The first class of Scripture dreams, according to our arrangement, varied as they were illustrated by a divine or by an angelic manifestation. Of the former, or theophanic variety, an instance occurs in the twentieth chapter of the Book of Genesis, where, after Abimelech, king of Gerar, had taken Sarah, the wife of Abraham, on that patriarch's representation that she was his sister, God came to Abimelech in a dream by night, and said to him, Behold, thou art but a dead man, for the woman which thou hast taken; for she is a man's wife.' Here the dignus vindice nodus was that of preventing a just man from committing, in the integrity of his heart, a heinous but involuntary offence.

In the same manner it is recorded (Genesis xxxi. 24)