Chapter VII (2)

Another circumstance which tells strongly against the historical character of Abraham is his connection with Lot, and the legend of Lot's wife. The history of this legend is a curious one. For many centuries, in fact down to quite modern times, the volcanic phenomena of the Dead Sea were appealed to as convincing confirmations of the account in Genesis of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha, and hundreds of pious pilgrims saw, touched, and tasted the identical pillar of salt into which Lot's wife was changed. It is now certain that the volcanic eruptions were of an earlier geological age, and that the story of Lot's wife is owing to the disintegration of a stratum of salt marl, which weathers away under the action of wind and rain into columnar masses, like those described by Lyell in a similar formation in Catalonia. Innumerable travellers and pilgrims from early Christian times down to the seventeenth century returned from Palestine testifying that they had seen Lot's wife, and this was appealed to by theologians as a convincing proof of the truth of the Scripture narrative. Some saw her big, some little, some upright, and some prostrate, according to the state of disintegration of the pillars pointed out by the guides, which change their form rapidly under the influence of the weather, but no doubt was entertained as to the attestation of the miracle. It turns out, however, to be one of those geological myths of precisely the same nature as that which attributed the Devil's Dyke near Brighton to an arrested attempt of the Evil One to cut a trench through the South Downs, so as to let in the sea and drown the Weald. The episode of Lot and his daughters is also clearly a myth to account for the aversion of the Hebrews to races so closely akin to them as the Moabites and Ammonites, and it could hardly have originated until after the date of the Book of Ruth, which shows no trace of such a racial aversion.

Many of the events recorded of Abraham's life, though not so wildly extravagant as those attributed to Noah, are still clearly unhistorical. That a woman getting on towards one hundred years old should be so beautiful that her husband passes her off for his sister, fearing that, if known to be his wife, the king would kill him in order to take her into his harem, does not seem to be very probable. But when precisely the same thing is said to have occurred twice over to the same man, once at the court of Pharaoh and again at that of Abimelech; and a third time to his son Isaac, at the same place, Gerar, and to the same king Abimelech, the improbability becomes impossibility, and the legend is obviously mythical. Nor is it very consistent with the character of the pious patriarch, the father of the chosen people, to have told such lies, and apparently connived at his wife's prostitution, so that he could save his own skin, and grow rich on the "sheep and oxen, asses, manservants, maidservants, and camels" given him by the king on the supposition that he was Sarah's brother.

Nor can we take as authentic history, Abraham talking with the Lord, and holding a sort of Dutch auction with him, in which he beats down from fifty to ten the number of righteous men who, if found in Sodom, are to save it from destruction.

On the whole, I do not see that there is anything in the account of Abraham and his times which we can safely assume to be historical, except the general fact that the Hebrews were descended from a Semitic family or clan, who migrated from the district of Ur in Lower Chaldæa probably about the time, and possibly in consequence, of the Elamite conquest, about 2200 B.C., which set in motion so many wars, revolutions, and migrations in Western Asia.

The chronology from Abraham to Moses is hopelessly confused. If Abraham is really an historical character, his synchronism with Chedorlaomer or Kudur-lagomer, the Elamite King of Chaldæa, must be admitted, which fixes his date at about 2200 B.C. Again, if the narrative of the Exodus is historical, it is generally agreed that it took place in the reign of Menepthah, or about 1320 B.C. The interval between Abraham and Moses therefore must have been about 900 years. But if we take the genealogies as authentic history, Jacob, in whose time the Hebrews went into Egypt, was Abraham's grandson, and Moses, under whom they left it, was the son of Jochebed, who was the granddaughter of Levi, the son of Jacob, who was a man advanced in life when he came to Egypt. The genealogies therefore do not allow of more than five generations, or, at a high average for each, about 200 years for this interval between Abraham and Moses.

The tradition respecting this seems to have been already very confused when Genesis was compiled, for we find in chap. xv. vers. 15, 16, the Lord saying to Abraham, that his descendants shall come back to Palestine and possess the whole country from the river of Egypt to the river Euphrates, "in the fourth generation" after Abraham had "gone to his fathers in peace, and been buried in a good old age"; while only one verse before it is said, "thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them for four hundred years."

Even if 400 years were allowed for the sojourn of the Hebrews in Egypt, it would not extend the interval between Moses and Abraham to more than 500 years, or 400 years less than is required by the synchronism with Chedorlaomer. It is needless to say that neither in the fourth or in any other generation did the descendants of Abraham "possess the whole country from the river of Egypt to the river Euphrates."

There is no period of Jewish history so obscure as that of the sojourn in Egypt. The long date is based entirely on the distinct statement in Genesis xii., that the sojourning of the children of Israel was 430 years, and other statements that it was 400 years, both of which are hopelessly inconsistent with the genealogies. Genealogies are perhaps more likely to be preserved accurately by oral tradition than dates and figures, which Oriental races generally deal with in a very arbitrary way. But there are serious difficulties in the way of accepting either date as historical. There is no mention of any specific event during the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt between their advent in the time of Joseph and the Exodus, except their oppression by a new king who knew not Joseph, and the building of the treasure cities, Pi-thom and Ramses, by their forced labour. The latter fact may be taken as probably true from the monuments discovered by Mr. Flinders Petrie; and if so, it occurred in the reign of Ramses II. But there is no other confirmation, from Egyptian records or monuments, of any of the events related in the Pentateuch, until we come to the passage quoted from Manetho by Josephus, which describes how the unclean people and lepers were oppressed; how they revolted under the leadership of a priest of Hieropolis, who changed his name from Osarphis to Moyses; how they fortified Avaris and called in help from the expelled Hyksos settled at Jerusalem; how the Egyptian king and his army retreated before them into Ethiopia without striking a blow; and the revolters ruled Egypt for thirteen years, killing the sacred animals and desecrating the temples; and how, at the end of this period, the king and his son returned with a great army, defeated the rebels and shepherds with great slaughter, and pursued them to the bounds of Syria.

This account is evidently very different from that of Exodus, and does not itself read very like real history, nor is there anything in the Egyptian monuments to confirm it, but rather the reverse. Menepthah certainly reigned many years after he was said to have been drowned in the Red Sea, and his power and that of his immediate successors, though greatly diminished, still extended with a sort of suzerainty over Palestine and Southern Syria. It is said that the Egyptians purposely omitted all mention of disasters and defeats, but this is distinctly untrue, for Manetho records events such as the conquest of Egypt by the Hyksos without a battle, and the retreat of Menepthah into Ethiopia for thirteen years before the impure rebels, which were much more disgraceful than would have been the destruction of a pursuing force of chariots by the returning tide of the Red Sea.

The question therefore of the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt and the Exodus has to be considered solely by the light of the internal evidence afforded by the books of the Old Testament. The long period of 430 years is open to grave objections. It is inconceivable that a people who had lived for four centuries in an old and highly-civilized empire, for part of the time at any rate on equal or superior terms under the king who "knew Joseph"; and who appear to have been so much intermixed with the native Egyptians as to have been borrowing from them as neighbours before their flight, should have carried away with them so little of Egyptian manners and relics. Beyond a few rites and ceremonies, and a certain tendency to revert to the animal worship of the golden calf, there is nothing to show that the Hebrews had ever been in contact with Egyptian civilization. This is most remarkable in the absence of all belief in a resurrection of the body, future life, and day of judgment, which were the cardinal axioms of the practical daily life of the Egyptian people. Temporal rewards and punishments to the individual and his posterity in the present life, are the sole inducements held out to practise virtue and abstain from vice, from the Decalogue down to the comparatively late period of Ecclesiastes, where Solomon the wise king is represented as saying, "there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge in the grave whither thou goest." Even down to the Christian era the Sadducees, who were the conservative aristocracy who stood on the old ways and on the law of Moses, and from whose ranks most of the high priests were taken, were opposed to the newfangled Pharisaic doctrine of a resurrection. How completely foreign the idea was to the Jewish mind is apparent from the writings of the Prophets and the Book of Job, where the obvious solution of the problem why goodness was not always rewarded and wickedness punished, afforded by the theory of a judgment after death and future life, was never even hinted at by Job or his friends, however hardly they might be pressed in argument.

If the sojourn in Egypt really lasted for 430 years, it must have embraced many of the greatest events in Egyptian history. The descendants of Jacob must have witnessed a long period of the rule of the Hyksos, and lived through the desolating thirty years' war by which these foreign conquerors were gradually driven back by the native armies of Upper Egypt. They must have been close to the scene of the final campaigns, the siege of Avaris, and the expulsion of the Hyksos. They must have been subjects of Ahmes, Thotmes, and the conquering kings of the eighteenth dynasty, who followed up the fugitive Hyksos, and carried the conquering arms of Egypt not only over Palestine and Syria, but up to the Euphrates and Tigris, and over nearly the whole of Western Asia. They must have witnessed the decline of this empire, the growth of the Hittites, and the half-century of wars waged between them and the Egyptians in Palestine and Syria.

The victory of Ramses II. at Kadesh and the epic poem of Pentaur must have been known to the generation before the Exodus as signal events. And if there is any truth in the account quoted by Josephus, they must have been aware that they did not fly from Egypt as a body of fugitive slaves, but as retreating warriors who for thirteen years had held Egypt up to Ethiopia in subjection. And yet of all these memorable events there is not the slightest trace in the Hebrew annals which have come down to us.

An even greater difficulty is to understand how, if the children of Israel had lived for anything like 400 years in such a civilized empire as Egypt, they could have emerged from it in such a plane of low civilization, or rather of ferocious savagery and crude superstitions as are shown by the books of the Old Testament, where they burst like a host of Red Indians on the settlements and cities of the Amorites, and other more advanced nations of Palestine. The discoveries at Lachish already referred to show that their civilization could not have exceeded that of the rudest Bedouins, and their myths and legends are so similar to those of the North American Indians as to show that they must have originated in a very similar stage of mental development.

If we adopt the short date of the genealogies we are equally confronted by difficulties. If the Exodus occurred in the reign of Menepthah, 180 years back from that date would take us, not to the Hyksos dynasty where alone it would have been possible for Joseph to be a vizier, and for a Semitic tribe of shepherds to be welcomed in Egypt, but into the midst of the great and glorious eighteenth dynasty who had expelled the Hyksos, and carried the dominion of Egypt to the Euphrates. Nor would there have been time for the seventy souls, who we are told were all of the family of Jacob who migrated into Egypt, to have increased in three generations into a nation numerous enough to alarm the Egyptians, and conquer the Canaanites.

The legend of Joseph is very touching and beautiful, but it may just as well be a novel as history, and this suspicion is strengthened by the fact that the episode of Potiphar's wife is almost verbatim the same as one of the chapters of the Egyptian novel of the _Two Brothers_. Nor does it seem likely that such a seven years' famine and such a momentous change as the conversion of all the land of Egypt from freehold into a tenure held from the king subject to payment of a rent of one-fifth of the gross produce, should have left no trace in the records. Again, the age of 110 years assigned to Joseph, and 147 to his father, are a sufficient proof that we are not upon strictly historical ground; and on the whole this narrative does not go far, in the absence of any confirmation from monuments, to assist us in fixing dates, or enabling us to form any consistent idea of the real conditions of the sojourn of the people of Israel in Egypt. It places them on far too high a level of civilization at first, to have fallen to such a low one as we find depicted in the Books of Exodus, Joshua, and Judges. Further excavations in the mounds of ruined cities in Judæa and Palestine, like those of Schliemann on the sites of Troy and Mycenæ, can alone give us anything like certain facts as to the real condition of the Hebrew tribes who destroyed the older walled cities of the comparatively civilized Amorites and Canaanites. If the conclusion of Mr. Flinders Petrie from the section of the mound of Lachish, as to the extremely rude condition of the tribes who built the second town of mud-huts on the ruins of the Amorite city, should be confirmed, it would go far to negative the idea that the accounts of their having been trained in an advanced code of Mosaic legislation, can have any historical foundation.

We come next to Moses. It is difficult to refuse an historical character to a personage who has been accepted by uniform tradition as the chief who led the Israelites out of Egypt, and as the great legislator who laid the foundations of the religious and civil institutions of the peculiar people. And if the passage from Manetho is correctly quoted by Josephus, and was really taken from contemporary Egyptian annals, and is not a later version of the account in the Pentateuch modified to suit Egyptian prejudices, Moses is clearly identified with Osarsiph the priest of Hieropolis, who abandoned the worship of the old gods, and headed the revolt of the unclean people, which probably meant the heretics. It may be conjectured that this may have had some connection with the great religious revolution of the heretic king of Tel-el-Amarna, which for a time displaced the national gods, worshipped in the form of sacred animals and symbolic statues, by an approach to Monotheism under the image of the winged solar disc. Such a reform must have had many adherents to have survived as the State religion for two or three reigns, and must have left a large number of so-called heretics when the nation returned to its ancient faith; and it is quite intelligible that some of the more enlightened priests should have assimilated to it the doctrine of one Supreme God, which was always at the bottom of the religious metaphysics of the earliest ages in Egypt, and was probably preserved as an esoteric doctrine in the priestly colleges. This, however, must remain purely a conjecture, and we must look for anything specific in regard to Moses exclusively to the Old Testament.

And here we are at once assailed by formidable difficulties. As long as we confine ourselves to general views it may be accepted as historical that the Israelites really came out of Egypt under a great leader and legislator; but when we come to details, and to the events connected with Moses, and to a great extent supposed to have been written by him or taken from his journals, they are for the most part more wildly and hopelessly impossible than anything related of the earlier patriarchs, Abraham and Joseph. The story of his preservation in infancy is a variation of the myth common to so many nations, of an infant hero or god, whose life is sought by a wicked king, and who is miraculously saved. We find it in the myths of Khrishna, Buddha, Cyrus, Romulus, and others, and in the inscription by Sargon I. of Accade on his own tablet; he states himself to have been saved in an ark floated on the river Euphrates, just as Moses was on the Nile. When grown up he is represented first as the adopted son of Pharaoh's daughter, and then as a shepherd in the wilderness of Midian talking with the Lord in a fiery bush, who for the first time communicates his real name of Jehovah, which he says was not known to Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, although constantly used by them, and although men began to call him by that name in the time of Enos, Adam's grandson. At Jehovah's command Moses throws his rod on the ground, when it becomes a serpent from which he flies, and when he takes it up by the tail it becomes a rod again; and as a farther sign his hand is changed from sound to leprous as white as snow, and back again to sound, in a minute or two of time.

On returning to Egypt Moses is represented as going ten times into the presence of Pharaoh demanding of him to let the Hebrews depart, and inflicting on Egypt a succession of plagues, each one more than sufficient to have convinced the king of the futility of opposing such supernatural powers, and to have made him only too anxious to get rid of the Hebrews from the land at any price. What could have been the condition of Egypt, if for seven days "the streams, the rivers, the ponds and pools, and even the water in the vessels of wood and of stone, through all the land of Egypt," had been really turned into blood? And what sort of magicians must they have been who could do the same with their enchantments?

The whole account of these plagues has distinctly the air of being an historical romance rather than real history. Those repeated interviews accompanied by taunts and reproaches of Moses, the representative of an oppressed race of slaves, in the august presence of a Pharaoh who, like the Inca of Peru or the Mikado of Japan, was half monarch and half deity, are totally inconsistent with all we know of Egyptian usage. The son and successor of the splendid Ramses II., who has been called the Louis XIV. of Egyptian history, would certainly, after the first interview and miracle, either have recognized the supernatural power which it was useless to resist, or ordered Moses to instant execution. It is remarkable also how the series of plagues reproduce the natural features of the Egyptian seasons. Recent travellers tell us how at the end of the dry season when the Nile is at its lowest, and the adjacent plains are arid and lifeless, suddenly one morning at sunrise they see the river apparently turned into blood. It is the phenomenon of the red Nile, which is caused by the first flush of the Abyssinian flood, coming from banks of red marl. After a few days the real rise commences, the Nile resumes its usual colour, percolates through its banks, fills the tanks and ponds, and finally overflows and saturates the dusty plains. The first signal of the renewal of life is the croaking of innumerable frogs, and soon the plains are alive with flies, gnats, and all manner of creeping and hopping insects, as if the dust had been turned into lice. Then after the inundation subsides come the other plagues which in the summer and autumn seasons frequently afflict the young crops and the inhabitants--local hail-storms, locusts, murrain among the cattle, boils and other sicknesses while the stagnant waters are drying up. It reads like what some Rider Haggard of the Court of Solomon might have written in working up the tales of travellers and old popular traditions into an historical romance of the deliverance of Israel from Egypt.

When we come to the Exodus the impossibilities of the narrative are even more obvious. The robust common-sense of Bishop Colenso, sharpened by a mathematical education, has reduced many of these to the convincing test of arithmetic. The host of Israelites who left Egypt is said to have comprised 603,550 fighting men above the age of twenty; exclusive of the Levites and of a mixed multitude who followed. This implies a total population of at least 2,500,000, who are said to have wandered about for forty years in the desert of Sinai, one of the most arid wildernesses in the world, destitute alike of water, arable soil, and pasture, and where a Bedouin tribe of even 600 souls would find it difficult to exist. They are said to have been miraculously fed during these forty years on manna, a sweetish, gummy exudation from the scanty foliage of certain prickly desert plants, which is described as being "as small as the hoar frost," and as being so imbued with Sabbatarian principles, as to keep fresh only for the day it is gathered during the week, but for two days if gathered on a Friday, so as to prevent the necessity of doing any work on the Sabbath.

Bishop Colenso points out with irresistible force the obvious impossibilities in regard to food, water, fuel, sanitation, transport, and other matters, which was involved in the supposition that a population, half as large as that of London, wandered about under tents from camp to camp for forty years in a desert. No attempt has ever been made to refute him, except by vague suppositions that the deserts of Sinai and Arabia may then have been in a very different condition, and capable of supporting a large population. But this is impossible in the present geological age and under existing geographical conditions. These deserts form part of the great rainless zone of the earth between the north tropical and south temperate zones, where cultivation is only possible when the means of irrigation are afforded by lakes, rivers, or melting snow. But there are none of these in the deserts of Sinai and Northern Arabia, and therefore no water and no vegetation sufficient to support any population. No army has ever invaded Egypt from Asia, or Asia from Egypt, except by the short route adjoining the Mediterranean between Pelusium and Jaffa, and with the command of the sea and assistance of trains to carry supplies and water. And the account in Exodus itself confirms this, for both food and water are stated to have been supplied miraculously, and there is no mention made of anything but the present arid and uninhabited desert in the various encampments and marches. In fact, the Bible constantly dwells on the inhospitable character of the "howling wilderness," where there was neither grass nor water. Accordingly reconcilers have been reduced to the supposition that ciphers may have been added by copyists, and that the real number may have been 6000, or even, as some writers think, 600. But this is inconsistent with the detailed numeration by twelve separate tribes, which works out to the same figure of 603,550 fighting men for the total number. Nor is it consistent with the undoubted fact that the Hebrews did evacuate Egypt in sufficient numbers and sufficiently armed to burst through the frontiers, and capture the walled cities of considerable nations like the Amorites and Canaanites, who had been long settled in the country. The narrative of Manetho, quoted by Josephus, seems much more like real history; that the Hebrews formed part of an army, which, after having held Lower Egypt for thirteen years, was finally defeated, and retreated by the usual military route across the short part of the desert from Pelusium to Palestine, the Hebrews, for some reason, branching off, and taking to a Bedouin life on the outskirts of the desert and cultivated land, just as many Bedouin tribes live a semi-nomad life in the same regions at the present day.

Apart from statistics, however, the Books of the Pentateuch ascribed to Moses are full of the most flagrant contradictions and absurdities. It is evident that, instead of being the production of some one contemporary writer, they have been compiled and edited, probably many times over, by what I have called the "scissors and paste method," of clipping out extracts from old documents and traditions, and piecing them together in juxtaposition or succession, without regard to their being contradictory or repetitions.

Thus in Exodus xxxiii. 20, God says to Moses: "Thou canst not see my face and live; for there shall no man see me and live"; and accordingly he shows Moses only his "back parts"; while in ver. 11 in the very same chapter we read, "And the Lord spoke unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto a friend." Again in Exodus xxiv. the Lord says to Moses, "that he alone shall come near the Lord" (ver. 2), while in vers. 9--11 of the same chapter, we are told that "Moses, Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up; and they saw the God of Israel, and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone," and although they saw God, were none the worse for it, but survived and "did eat and drink." Is it possible to believe that these excessively crude representations of the Deity, and these flagrant inconsistencies, were all written at the same time, by the same hand, and that the hand of a man who, if not a holy inspired prophet, was at any rate an educated and learned ex-priest of Hieropolis, skilled in all the knowledge of the Egyptians?

The contradictions in the ideas and precepts of morality and religion are even more startling. These oscillate between the two extremes of the conception of the later prophets of a one Supreme God, who loves justice and mercy better than sacrifice, and that of a ferocious and vindictive tribal god, whose appetite for human blood is as insatiable as that of the war-god of the Mexicans. Thus we have, on the one hand, the commandment, "Thou shalt do no murder," and on the other, the injunction to commit indiscriminate massacres. A single instance may suffice. The "Book of the Law of Moses" is quoted in 2 Kings xiv. as saying, "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, nor the children for the fathers; but every man shall be put to death for his own sin." In Numbers xxxi., Moses, the "meekest of mankind," is represented as extremely wroth with the captains who, having warred against Midian at the Lord's command, had only slaughtered the males, and taken the women of Midian and their little ones captives; and he commands them to "kill every male among the little ones, and every woman that hath known man by lying with him; but all the women children that have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."

These Midianites, be it remembered, being the people whose high priest Jethro had hospitably received Moses when he fled for his life from Egypt, and gave him his daughter as a wife, by whom he had children who were half Midianites, so that if the zealous Phinehas was right in slaying the Hebrew who had married a Midianite woman, Moses himself deserved the same fate.

The same injunction of indiscriminate massacre in order to escape the jealous wrath of an offended Jehovah is repeated, over and over again, in Joshua and Judges, and even as late as after the foundation of the Monarchy, we find Samuel telling Saul in the name of the Lord of Hosts, to "go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy them, slaying both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass," and denouncing Saul, and hewing Agag in pieces before the Lord, because this savage injunction had not been literally obeyed. Even under David, the man after the Lord's own heart, we find him torturing to death the prisoners taken at the fall of Rabbah, and giving up seven of the sons of Saul to the Gibeonites to be sacrificed before the Lord as human victims. It is one of the strangest contradictions of human nature that such atrocious violations of the moral sense should have been received for so many centuries as a divine revelation, rather than as instances of what may be more appropriately called "devil worship."

Nor is it a less singular proof of the power of cherished prepossessions that such a medley of the sublime religious ideas and lofty poetry of the prophetic ages, with such a mass of puerile and absurd legends, such obvious contradictions, and such a number of passages obviously dating from a later period, should be received by many men of intelligence, even to the present day, as the work of a single contemporary writer, the inspired prophet Moses.

When we pass from the Pentateuch to the succeeding Books of Joshua and of Judges the same remarks apply. The falling of the walls of Jericho at the sound of the trumpet, and the defeat of an army of 135,000 men of Midian and Amalek with a slaughter of 120,000, by 300 men under Gideon, armed with pitchers and trumpets, are on a par with the wandering of 2,500,000 Israelites in the desert for forty years, fed with manna of the size of hoar-frost. The moral atmosphere also continues to be that of Red Indians down to the time of David, for we read of nothing but murders and massacres, sometimes of other races, sometimes of one tribe by another; while the actions selected for special commendation are like those of Jael, who drove a nail into the head of the sleeping fugitive whom she had invited into her tent; or of Jephthah, who sacrificed his daughter as an offering to the Lord in obedience to a vow. This barbarous state of manners is confirmed by Flinders Petrie's discoveries at the supposed site of Lachish, which show the ruins of a walled city of the Amorites, built upon by the mud hovels of a race as rude as the rudest Bedouins who now wander on the edge of the Arabian desert.

The only safe conclusion seems to be that authentic annals of Jewish history only begin with the Monarchy, and that everything prior to David and Solomon, or possibly Saul and Samuel, consists of myth, legend, and oral tradition, so inextricably blended, and so mixed up with successive later additions, as to give no certain information as to events or dates.

All that it is safe to assume is, that in a general way the Hebrews were originally a Semitic tribe who migrated from Chaldæa into Palestine and thence into Egypt, where they remained for an uncertain time and were oppressed by the national dynasty which expelled the Hyksos; that they left Egypt probably in the reign of Menepthah, and as a consequence of the rebellion recorded by Manetho; that they then lived for an unknown time as wandering Bedouins on the frontier of Palestine in a state of very rude barbarism; and finally burst in like a horde of Aztecs on the older and more civilized Toltecs of Mexico. For a long period after this, perhaps for 200 or 300 years, they lived in a state of chronic warfare with one another, and with their neighbours, massacring and being massacred with the alternate vicissitudes of war, but with the same rudeness and ferocity of superstitions and manners. Gradually, however, they advanced in civilization, and something of a national feeling arose, which led to a partial consolidation under priests, and a more complete one under kings.

The first king, Saul, was opposed by priestly influence and defeated and slain in battle, but a captain of condottieri, David, arose, a man of great energy and military genius, who gradually formed a standing army and conquered province after province, until at his death he left to his successor, Solomon, an empire extending from the frontier of Egypt to Damascus, and from the Red Sea almost to the Mediterranean.

This kingdom commanded two of the great commercial routes between the East and West, the caravan route between Tyre and Babylon, _viâ_ Damascus and Tadmor, and the route from Tyre to the terminus at Ezion-Gebir, of the sea-routes to Arabia, Africa, and India. Solomon entered into close commercial relations with Tyre, and during his long and splendid reign, Jerusalem blossomed rapidly into a wealthy and a cultured city, and the surrounding cities and districts shared in the general prosperity. The greatness of the kingdom did not last long, for the revolt of the ten tribes and the growth of other powers soon reduced Judæa and Samaria to political insignificance; but Jerusalem, down to the time of its final destruction by Nebuchadnezzar, _i.e._ for a period of some 400 years after Solomon, never seems to have lost its character of a considerable and civilized city. It is evident from the later prophets that it was the seat of a good deal of wealth and luxury, for their invectives are, to a great extent, what we should call at the present day, Socialist denunciations of the oppression of the poor by the rich, land-grabbing by the powerful, and extravagance of dress by the ladies of fashion. There were hereditary nobles, organized colleges of priests and scribes, and no doubt there was a certain amount of intellectual life and literary activity. But of a sacred book there is no trace until the discovery of one in the Temple in the reign of Josiah; and the peculiar tenets of modern Judaism had no real hold on the mass of the people until after the return from Exile and the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah.

The history, therefore, contained in the Old Testament is comparatively modern. There is nothing which can be relied on as authentic in regard to events and dates prior to the establishment of the Monarchy, and even the wildest myths and the most impossible legends do not carry us back within 2000 years of the time when we have genuine historical annals attested by monuments both in Egypt and Chaldæa.