ond as the first. There was the same necessity that the second rock
or stream should follow them as there was of the first; for they were
yet a long way from Canaan, with a waterless desert before them. We
can, therefore, see no reason why the first should be a type of Christ
and not the second.

Was it the stream or the rock which followed the Israelites? Paul says
the rock. But commentators seem generally to agree that the "rock" is
here put by metonymy for the water of the rock, Barnes says, "It would
be absurd to suppose that the rock that was smitten by Moses literally
followed them in the wilderness." Just why it is more "absurd" to
suppose the rock followed them, than the stream from a stationary
fountain at Horeb, we are wholly unable to see. Let us look at the
facts and probabilities in the case.

We must keep in view the important fact, as mentioned in the last
chapter, that these people were _dependent on God_. They had seen the
mighty hand of God in their delivery, and now they were to be taught
dependence on Him, as the only source of life. They had, therefore, to
be sustained by miraculous food and miraculous drink. The country
supplied neither food nor water. The miraculous supply of water was as
great a necessity as that of bread. For two or three millions of
people, with their flocks and herds, a large stream, even a small
river, would be required. It is also true that their cattle had to have
food, as well as themselves. Just how this was furnished, we are not
told. Here is a large field for conjecture. It is generally held that
the river continued to flow from a stationary source at Horeb, and that
it irrigated the country in its following of the people, and thus
caused vegetation for the flocks and herds. But in the fortieth year
they are again found without water. Why was this? What had become of
the river that had followed them from the first year, if it was the
river, and not the rock, that followed them? On this point we can not
refrain from quoting Macknight and Barnes, as examples of how learned
commentators, led by a theory, sometimes drop their readers into a
perfect abyss of darkness. Macknight says: "For as Wall observes, from
Horeb, which was a high mountain, there may have been a descent to the
sea; and the Israelites during the thirty-seven years of their
journeying from Mount Sinai may have gone by those tracts of country in
which the waters from Horeb could follow them, till in the th