The inhabitants then who possessed Abyssinia, from its
southern boundary to the tropic of Cancer, or frontiers of Egypt, were the Cushites, or polished people, living in towns, first Troglodytes, having their habitations in caves. The next were the Shepherds; after these were the nations who, as we apprehend, came from Palestine — Amhara, Agow of Damot, Agow of Tchera, and Gafat.
Interpreters, much less acquainted with the historical circumstances of these countries than the prophets, have, either from ignorance or inattention, occasioned an obscurity which otherwise did not arise from the text. All these people are alluded to in scripture by descriptions that cannot be mistaken. If they have occasioned doubts or difficulties, they are all to be laid at the door of the translators, chiefly the Septuagint. When Moses returned with his wife Zipporah, daughter of the sovereign of the Shepherds of Midian, carriers of the India trade from Saba into Palestine, and established near their principal mart Edom, in Idumea or Arabia, Aaron, and Miriam his sister, quarrelled with Moses, because he had married one who was, as the translator says, an Ethiopian *[1]. There is no sense in this cause; Moses was a fugitive when he married Zipporah; she was a noble-woman, daughter of the priest of Midian, head of a people. She likewise, as it would seem, was a Jewess †[2], and more attentive, at that time, to the preservation of the precepts of the law, than Moses was himself; no exception, then, could lie against Zipporah, as she was surely, in every view, Moses's superior. But if the translator had rendered
- Numb. chap. xii. ver. I. † Exod. chap. iv. ver. 25.
