namely, by the son of Tamar, a Jewess, Is not this fact a proof that the negro blood was not estimated to be as good as the blood of Shem, even by the Creator himself, as manifested in that transaction. He even preferred the line of the illegitimate son of Tamar, by Judah, for the line of the Messiah, rather than the line of the Canaanitish race. In agreement with this rejection of the negro blood, as it related to things holy in the Jewish religious economy, it is seen, that although the two sons of Moses by his Ethiopian wife, whose names were Gershom and Eliezar, were reckoned with the tribe of Levi, yet, in the service of the temple, they were never allowed to officiate in any office above that of porters, scribes, or some kind of laborious service. Even the temple, and the priesthood of the Jews, had negro slaves, who were the whole tribe of the Gibeonites, one of the nations of Canaan, appointed to that doom by Joshua, chap. ix, 23, as follows: "Now, therefore, ye are cursed; and there shall none of you be freed from being bondmen, and hewers of wood, and drawers of water, for the house of my God."
This class of slaves, says Adam Clarke, were called "Nethinims, or slaves of the temple," and had been thus from the days of Joshua till the time of Solomon, and from thence to the time of the great Babylonian captivity, when it is likely, says Clarke, they remained among the Chaldeans, as, by going back to Judea, they could gain nothing but their old condition of bondmen.
Now from the time of Joshua till that captivity, was over eight hundred years, during which time it
