here, any more than in Chapter 1, necessarily imply more than one
person. The crime in question is one to which men are easily tempted in
certain stages of society. Abimelech, in the book of Judges (ix, 5),
“slew his brethren, the sons of Jerubbaal.” Jephthah had to “flee from
the face of his brethren.” Absalom had his brother Amnon assassinated,
and all the king’s sons fled in fear of sharing the same fate. Solomon
put to death his elder brother Adonijah. Athaliah, the queen mother,
“destroyed all the seed royal” of Judah. The annals of eastern[118] and
even western[119] nations are full of such occurrences. But, in
positions less exalted than that of claimants to royalty, ambition or
covetousness are motives to crimes like that of the wicked uncle of ‘the
Babes in the Wood.’[120] The reading ⁂⁂⁂⁂, which has for
determinative the sign ⁂ of _smallness_, seems to indicate that the
victims of the crime are _minors_, perhaps _wards_.
Some of the papyri (even that of Nebseni) have a _calf_, ⁂, as
determinative of the word, and as the ‘slaying of calves’ is not
necessarily a crime, other scribes have added ⁂⁂, ‘sacred,’ and
thus made the sin one of sacrilege.
The same word, like the Greek μόσχος and the Latin _pullus_, might be
applied to the young of all kinds of animals; but the Egyptian scribes
have in such cases a propensity to use a determinative which forces a
wrong sense upon the word.