Chapter III: The Exodus Out of Egypt (1)

Goshen—The Pharaohs of the Oppression and Exodus—The Heretic
King at Tel el-Amarna—Causes of the Exodus—The Stela of
Meneptah—Moses—Flight to Midian—The Ten Plagues—The
Exodus—Egyptian Version of it—Origin of the Passover—Geography
of the Exodus—Position of Sinai—-Promulgation of the
Law—Babylonian Analogies—The Tabernacle—The Levitical Law—The
Feasts—Number of the Israelites—Kadesh-barnea—Failure to conquer
Canaan—The High-priest and the Levites—Edom—Conquests on the
East of the Jordan—Balaam—Destruction of the Midianites—Cities
of Refuge and of the Levites—The Deuteronomic Law—Death of
Moses.

‘There arose up a new king over Egypt which knew not Joseph.’ Commentators on the passage have often imagined that this event followed almost immediately upon the death of Joseph and his generation. So, too, it was supposed before the decipherment of the Assyrian inscriptions that the murder of Sennacherib took place immediately after his return from Palestine. In both cases the student had been misled by the brevity of the Hebrew narrative, and that foreshortening of the past which causes events to be grouped together even though they may have been separated by an interval of many years. In the present instance, however, the Biblical writer has done his best to indicate that the interval was a long one. Before the rise of ‘the new king which knew not Joseph,’ the children of Israel had had time to ‘increase abundantly,’ to ‘multiply’ so that ‘the land was filled with them.’ The family of Jacob had become a tribe, or rather a collection of tribes. They had become dangerous to their rulers; the Pharaoh is even made to say that they were ‘more and mightier than’ the Egyptians themselves. In case of invasion, they might assist the enemy and expose Egypt to another Asiatic conquest.

Hence came the determination to transform them into public serfs, and even to destroy the males altogether. The free Bedâwin-like settlers in Goshen, who had kept apart from their Egyptian neighbours, and had been unwilling to perform even agricultural work, were made the slaves of the State. They were taken from their herds and sheep, from their independent life on the outskirts of the Delta, and compelled to toil under the lash of the Egyptian taskmaster and build for the Pharaoh his ‘treasure-cities’ of Pithom and Raamses.

Egypt is the most conservative of countries, and the children of Israel still have their representatives in it. The Bedâwin still feed their flocks and enjoy an independent existence on the outskirts of the cultivated land, and in that very district of Goshen where the descendants of Jacob once dwelt. Even when they adopt a settled agriculturist life, like the villagers of Gizeh, they still claim immunity from the burdens of their fellahin neighbours on the ground of their Bedâwin descent. They are exempt from the conscription and the _corvée_, the modern equivalents of the forced brickmaking of the Mosaic age. The attempt to interfere with these privileges has actually led to an exodus in our own time.[153] The Wadi Tumilât, the Goshen of old days, was colonised with Arabs from the Nejd and Babylonia by Mohammed Ali, who wished to employ them in the culture of the silkworm. Here they lived with their flocks and cattle, protected by the Government, and exempt from taxation, from military service, and the _corvée_. Mohammed Ali died, however, and an attempt was then made to force them into the army, and lay upon them the ordinary burdens of taxation. Thereupon, in a single night, the whole population silently departed with all their possessions, leaving behind them nothing but the hearths of their forsaken homes. They made their way back to their kinsfolk eastward of Egypt, and the Wadi remained deserted until M. de Lesseps carried through it the Freshwater Canal.

We owe to Dr. Naville the recovery of Goshen. In 1884 he excavated at Saft el-Henna an ancient mound close to the line of railway between Zagazig and Tel el-Kebîr. The monuments he found there showed that the mound represents the ancient Qosem or Qos, called Pha-kussa by the Greek geographers, which was the capital of the Arabian nome. The Septuagint, with its Gesem instead of Goshen, implies that the site of Goshen was still remembered in Alexandrine times.[154]

The Arabian nome took its name not only from its proximity to Arabia, but also from the fact that its inhabitants were mainly of the Arab race. But the name did not come into existence until after the age of the nineteenth dynasty. When Ramses II. was Pharaoh, the whole region from the neighbourhood of Cairo to the Suez Canal was included in the nome of On or Heliopolis. It was only at a subsequent date that the nomes of Arabia and of Bubastis were carved out of that of On.

Previously to this, Qosem was the name of a district as well as of its chief city. It comprised not only the fertile fields immediately surrounding Saft el-Henna, and stretching from the mounds of Bubastis, close to Zagazig, on the west to Tel el-Kebîr on the east, but also the Wadi Tumilât, through which the railway now runs eastward as far as Ismailiya. Belbeis, south of Zagazig, was also included within its limits. At the eastern extremity of the Wadi was Pithom, now marked by the ruins of Tel el-Maskhûta.

Meneptah II., the Pharaoh of the Exodus, thus refers at Karnak to the arable land about Pi-Bailos, the modern Belbeis. ‘The country around it,’ he says, ‘is not cultivated, but left as pasture for cattle because of the foreigners. It has been abandoned (to them) since ancient times.’ They had settled with their herds in the neighbouring-valley of Tumilât, and the richer land which adjoined the valley was also assigned to them. Here they were in the nome of Heliopolis, the daughter of whose high-priest was married by Joseph, as well as in the near neighbourhood of Bubastis, where Dr. Naville has found Hyksos remains.

When the great inscription of Meneptah II. was engraved on the walls of Karnak the Exodus would have already taken place. The ‘foreigners,’ therefore, to whom he alludes must have been the Israelites, who had now deserted the spot. The district accordingly would once more have needed inhabitants, and the Pharaoh had the power of handing it over to the first Bedâwin tribe who begged for pasturage in the Delta. He had not long to wait. Among the papyri in the British Museum there is a letter dated in the eighth year of Meneptah’s reign, and addressed to the king. In this the scribe writes as follows:—‘Another matter for the consideration of my master’s heart. We have allowed the tribes of the Shasu from the land of Edom to pass the fortress of Meneptah in the land of Thukut (Succoth), (and go) to the lakes of Pithom of Meneptah in the land of Thukut, in order to feed themselves, and to feed their herds on the great estate of Pharaoh, the beneficent sun of all countries. In the year 8.’[155]

The Wâdi Tumilât was accordingly regarded as crown-land, as indeed it is to-day, and it was handed over to the Edomites by officers of the Pharaoh, just as it had been to the Israelites several centuries before. But now the Israelites had fled from it, and disappeared into the wilderness, and it was necessary to fill their place.

The Biblical writer distinguishes the Pharaoh of the Oppression from the Pharaoh of the Exodus (Exod. ii. 23). It was after the death of the great royal builder of Egypt that the Hebrews were delivered from their bondage. The Pharaoh of the Oppression and not the Pharaoh of the Exodus was ‘the new king which knew not Joseph.’

The full meaning of the phrase has been explained to us by the tablets of Tel el-Amarna. They have made it clear that towards the end of the eighteenth dynasty the Egyptian court became semi-Asiatic. The Pharaohs married Asiatic wives; and eventually Amenophis IV., under the influence of his mother Teie, publicly abandoned the religion of which he was the official head, and avowed himself a convert to an Asiatic form of faith. Amon, the god of Thebes, was dethroned by a new deity, Aten-Ra, ‘the Solar Disk.’ The Solar Disk, however, was but the visible manifestation of the one Supreme God, who was diffused throughout nature, and corresponded in many respects with the Semitic Baal. The Egyptians accordingly identified him with Ra, the ancient Sun-god of Heliopolis, who in earlier times had similarly been identified with the Hyksos Baal.

Amenophis, the cast of whose face taken immediately after death displays the features and expression of a philosopher and enthusiast,[156] endeavoured to force the new faith upon his unwilling subjects. The very name of Amon was proscribed and was erased wherever it occurred, the followers of the old religion of Egypt were persecuted, and the Pharaoh changed his own name to that of Khu-n-Aten, ‘the radiance of the Solar Disk.’ A violent struggle ensued with the powerful hierarchy of Thebes. Khu-n-Aten was finally compelled to leave the capital of his fathers, and build himself a new city further north, where its site is now marked by the mounds of Tel el-Amarna. He carried with him the State-archives, consisting mainly of foreign correspondence in the Babylonian language and cuneiform script, and these were deposited in one of the public buildings adjoining the palace, every brick of which was stamped with the words, ‘Aten-Ra! the Record-Office.’[157]

The palace itself was a marvel of art. Its walls and columns were encrusted with precious stones, with gold and with bronze, and it was adorned with painting and statuary, some of which reminds us of Greek art in its best period. Even the floors were frescoed with pictures of birds and animals, of flowers and trees. The new religion was accompanied by a new form of art, which cast aside the traditions of Egypt, and looked rather to Asiatic models. It strove after a realism which was sometimes exaggerated, and was always in strange contrast to the conventionalism of Egyptian art. Hard by the gardens of the palace rose the temple of Aten-Ra in the centre of the city. Like the palace, it was gorgeous with ornament. But it contained no image of the deity to whom it was consecrated. His symbol, the Disk, was alone permitted to appear. The pantheistic monotheism of the Pharaoh thus anticipated the puritanism of the Israelitish Law.

We learn from the inscriptions that Khu-n-Aten was not contented with making himself the high-priest of the new faith. Daily in the morning he gave instruction in it, expounding its mysteries to those who would listen to him. Acceptance of its doctrines was naturally a passport to the offices of State. Many of these had long been held by Asiatics, more especially by Syrians and Canaanites, and under Khu-n-Aten these foreign immigrants more and more usurped the highest functions of the Government. The native Egyptians saw themselves excluded from the posts which had brought them not only dignity, but wealth. Naturally, therefore, the bitter feelings engendered by the war waged against the old religion of Egypt were increased by this promotion of the stranger to the offices of State which they had regarded as their own. The Canaan they had conquered had revenged itself by conquering their king. Not only religion, but self-interest also, urged the native Egyptian to put an end to the reforming schemes of the Pharaoh, and to religious animosity was added race hatred as well.

The storm broke shortly before Khu-n-Aten’s death. His mummy indeed was laid in the magnificent grave he had excavated in the recesses of a desolate mountain-valley, but the granite sarcophagus in which it was deposited was never placed in the niche prepared for it, but was hacked to pieces by his enemies as it lay in the columned hall of the tomb, while the body within it was torn to shreds. Nor was his mother Teie ever laid by his side. Even the bodies of his dead daughters were maltreated and despoiled.

Khu-n-Aten was followed by one or two short-lived Pharaohs in the city he had built. Then the end came. The city was destroyed, the stones of its temple were transported elsewhere to furnish materials for the sanctuaries of the victorious Amon, and such of the adherents of the new faith as could not escape from the country either apostatised or were slain. A new king arose who represented the national party and the worship of the national god, and the Semitic strangers who had governed Egypt as European strangers govern it to-day disappeared for a time from the land. Their kinsfolk who remained, like the Israelites in Goshen, were reduced to the condition of public slaves.

Here, then, is the explanation of the rise of that ‘new king which knew not Joseph.’ We must see in him, not the founder of the eighteenth dynasty who expelled the Hyksos, but Ramses I., the founder of the nineteenth dynasty, with whom all danger of Asiatic domination in Egypt came finally to an end. The nineteenth dynasty represented the national reaction against the Asiatic faith of Khu-n-Aten and the government of the country by Asiatic officials. It meant Egypt as against Asia. And the policy of the new rulers of Egypt was not long in declaring itself. Ramses I. indeed reigned too short a time to do more than establish his family firmly on the throne; but his son and successor, Seti Meneptah I., once more overran Syria and made Palestine an Egyptian province; while Ramses II., who followed him, took measures to prevent such of the Asiatics as were still in Egypt from ever again becoming formidable to the native population.

The causes that led to the enslavement of the Israelites and to the Exodus out of Egypt were the same as those which in our own day led to the rebellion of Arabi. Religious and race hatreds were mingled together, and the ‘national party’ which grudged to the foreigner his share in the spoils of government aimed at destroying both him and his religion. Ramses I., however, was more fortunate than Arabi. No foreign power came to the help of the Syrian settlers on the Nile, and the leader of the Egyptian patriots became the favourite of the Theban priesthood and the sovereign of Egypt. From this time forward we hear no more of the use of the Babylonian language and script in the public correspondence of the Egyptians.

The oppression of the Israelites, then, is a natural and necessary part of the political history of the nineteenth dynasty. It fits in with the policy which the dynasty was placed on the throne to carry out. And an inscription discovered by Professor Flinders Petrie in 1896 supplements the story in an unexpected way. It was engraved by order of Meneptah II., the son and successor of Ramses II., on a large slab of granite, and placed in a temple he built at Thebes, on the western bank of the Nile. Its twenty-eight lines contain a song of triumph over the defeat of the Libyans and their allies from the Greek seas which took place in the fifth year of the king’s reign. Towards the end the poet sums up all the glorious deeds of the Pharaoh. ‘The chiefs,’ he says, ‘are overthrown and speak only of peace. None of the Barbarians (literally, the Nine Bows) lifts up his head. Wasted (?) is the land of the Libyans; the land of the Hittites is tranquillised; captive is the land of Canaan and utterly miserable; carried away is the land of Ashkelon; overpowered is the land of Gezer; the land of Innuam (in Central Syria) is brought to nought. The Israelites are spoiled so that they have no seed, the land of Khar (Southern Palestine) is become like the widows of Egypt.’

Here the Israelites alone are described as without local habitation. They alone had no ‘land’ in which they dwelt, and which was called after their name. It would seem, therefore, that when the song was composed they had already fled from Egypt and been lost in the unknown recesses of the eastern desert. But the poet knew that they were of Canaanitish origin; that they were, in fact, the kinsmen of the Horites of Southern Palestine. Their misfortunes, consequently, were equally the misfortunes of ‘Khar,’ whose women had been made as widows since the male seed of Israel had been cut off.[158]

After the fashion of court-poets, the author of the hymn of victory is not careful about ascribing to his royal master such successes as he could himself really claim. He has skilfully combined the victories of Meneptah with those of his father, and given him the credit of conquests which he had not made. The Hittites had been ‘tranquillised’ by Ramses II., not by Meneptah, and Canaan had been the conquest of Ramses and his father Seti. We may accordingly conclude that in the case of the Israelites also Meneptah is made to claim what does not properly belong to him. According to the book of Exodus, it was the Pharaoh of the Oppression rather than the Pharaoh of the Exodus who ordered that ‘every son’ should be ‘cast into the river,’ and only the daughters saved alive.

The agreement, however, between the Biblical narrative and the expression used on the stela of Meneptah is very remarkable. It is almost as if the writer of Exodus had had the inscription before him. In both it is the male seed which we are told was destroyed: the women were left as widows, for all ‘the men children’ were cut off. The victory over the Israelites, of which the poet boasts, was a victory obtained by slaying, like Herod, all the children who were males.

Nevertheless, ‘the people multiplied.’ It was impossible to carry out literally the order of the Pharaoh, and there must have been many children who were saved from death. Among these was Moses, the future legislator of his race. The story of his preservation is familiar to every one. We are told how his mother made ‘an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.’ Then the daughter of the Pharaoh came to bathe, and taking compassion on the child, brought him up as her own son.

A similar story had been told centuries before of Sargon of Akkad, the great Babylonian conqueror and lawgiver. He, too, it was said, had been placed by his mother ‘in an ark of reeds, the mouth whereof she closed with pitch,’ and then launched it on the waters of the Euphrates. The child was carried to Akki the irrigator, who adopted him as his son, and brought him up until the day came when, through the help of the goddess Istar, the true origin and birth of the hero were made known, and he became one of the mightiest of the Babylonian kings.

A like destiny seemed in store for Moses. He was introduced into the family of the Pharaoh, and took his place at court among the royal princes. A punning etymology makes the princess who adopted him speak Hebrew and give him the name of Mosheh or Moses, from the Hebrew _mâshah_, ‘to draw out.’ Mosheh, however, is really the Egyptian _messu_, ‘son,’ a very appropriate name for an adopted child. The name was not uncommon in Egypt; and in the time of Meneptah, the contemporary of Moses, it was actually borne by a ‘Prince of Kush,’ that is to say, the Egyptian governor of Ethiopia.[159] The coincidence doubtless was the origin of that Jewish tradition of the successful campaign of Moses in Ethiopia as general of the Egyptian army, which is recorded in full by Josephus.

Conjecture, both ancient and modern, has played freely round the person of Pharaoh’s daughter. Modern writers have pointed to the fact that the favourite daughter of Ramses II. bore the Canaanitish name of Bint-Anat, and had been born of a Syrian mother. That she should have adopted a Hebrew child would have been nothing strange. Her own sympathies would naturally have been on the side of her Semitic ancestry. Moses himself belonged to the tribe of Levi, and future generations remembered that his father was Amram and his mother Jochebed. He had a brother Aaron, three years older than himself, and a sister Miriam. The names of all three were never forgotten in Israel.[160]

Nor did Moses, when he came to man’s estate, forget his own people. One day, when he was of that unknown age which the Hebrew writers expressed by the term of forty years, he saw one of his Israelitish brethren ill-treated by the Egyptian taskmaster; and with the unrestrained licence of a young Oriental prince, he forthwith remedied the injustice by slaying the Egyptian with his own hand. The act was soon known and discussed among the Hebrew slaves; and when he endeavoured to reconcile two of them who were quarrelling with each other, he was told that though he might be ‘a prince’ in the eyes of the Egyptians, he had no authority over the Hebrew tribes. The suspicions of the Pharaoh had already been aroused against him, and he now fled from Egypt in fear of his life. An Egyptian papyrus, written in the time of the twelfth dynasty, tells the story of a similar fugitive from the Pharaoh’s wrath. This was Sinuhit, who seems to have been accused of conspiring against the government, and who fled, accordingly, like Moses, alone and on foot. He made his way to the eastern boundary of Egypt; and there, when fainting from thirst, was rescued by the Bedâwin of the desert, and finally reached in safety the land of the Kadmonites among the mountains of Seir. The shêkh received him kindly, and Sinuhit in course of time married the daughter of the Bedâwi chieftain, and became one of the princes of the tribe. Children were born to him, and he possessed herds and flocks in abundance. But his heart still yearned for his native land; and when in his old age a new Pharaoh sent messengers to say that his political offences were forgiven, and that he might return to Egypt, Sinuhit left his Arab wife and children and went back once more to his own country.[161]

Like Sinuhit, Moses also fled to the eastern desert, beyond the reach of the Egyptian power. He did not feel himself safe till he found himself in Midian. The Sinaitic Peninsula—Mafkat, as it was called—was an Egyptian province, and the mines of malachite and copper on its western side were garrisoned by Egyptian troops. The ‘salt’ desert of Melukhkha, moreover, which lay between Egypt and Palestine, was equally under Egyptian control; and, as we learn from the Tel el-Amarna tablets, supplied contingents to the Pharaoh’s army.[162] But in Midian Moses was safe from pursuit; and the ‘priest of Midian,’ like the shêkh of Kedem with whom Sinuhit had to do, gave him a kindly welcome, and married him to Zipporah, one of his daughters.

Government by a priest was a peculiarly Semitic institution. Assur, the primitive capital of Assyria, had been governed by high-priests before it had been governed by kings, and so too had Saba or Sheba in the south of Arabia. There, as we learn from inscriptions, the Makârib, or High-priests, had preceded the kings.

Tradition has handed down more than one name for the high-priest of Midian. In one part of the narrative in Exodus he is called Reuel, in another part Jethro. Jethro is a distinctively north Arabian name, for which there is monumental evidence, and it is probably more correct than Reuel.[163] Whatever may have been his name, however, Moses remained with him for some time; but instead of being treated like a prince, as Sinuhit had been among the Kadmonites, he was set to keep the flocks of his father-in-law.

It was while thus shepherding the flocks of Jethro that Moses came one day to Horeb, ‘the mountain of God,’ which rose into the sky at the back of the desert. Here he beheld a _seneh_ or ‘thorn-bush,’ lighted up with fire, which nevertheless did not consume it.[164] Approaching nearer, he heard a voice which he believed was that of God Himself, and which told him that the mountain whereon he stood was holy ground. Moses was then ordered to return to Egypt, and there in the name of the God of Israel to command Pharaoh to let His people go. Wonders and signs were to be performed before consent would be wrung from the obdurate heart of the Egyptian king, and ten sore plagues were to be sent upon the inhabitants of the Delta who had joined with the Pharaoh in his oppression of the Israelites. At the same time, God revealed Himself under a new name, which was henceforth to be that of the national God of Israel. On the slopes of Horeb the name of Yahveh was first made known to man.[165]

Moses was met by Aaron ‘in the Mount of God,’ and the two brothers returned to Egypt together, determined to deliver Israel from its bondage, and to lead it to that sacred mountain whereon the name of its national God had been revealed. Unlike Sinuhit, Moses took with him his Midianitish wife and the children she had borne him. At this point in the narrative there has been inserted the fragment of a story which harmonises but ill with it, or with the general spirit of Old Testament history. The anthropomorphising legend that ‘the Lord’ met Moses and would have killed him had not Zipporah appeased the wrathful Deity by circumcising her son, belongs to the folklore of a people still in a state of crude barbarism, and is part of a story which enforced the necessity of circumcision among the Hebrew worshippers of Yahveh. An over-minute criticism might find a contradiction between the statement that Zipporah had but one son to circumcise, and the fact that it was the ‘sons’ of Moses who accompanied him to Egypt (Exod. iv. 20). Such verbal criticism, however, is needless; it is sufficient for the historian that the story is a mere fragment, almost unintelligible as it stands, and in complete disaccord with the historical setting in which it is placed.

Moses and Aaron made their way to the court of the Pharaoh, and there requested that the Israelites might be allowed to journey three days into the desert, and hold a feast to their God. The gods of the Asiatic nomads on the outskirts of the Delta were gods of the wilderness, whom the Egyptians identified with Set, the enemy of Horus, the deity of the cultivated land.[166] The Pharaoh refused the request. Once lost in the desert, the royal slaves would be lost for ever, and would never turn back to the line of fortifications which guarded the eastern frontier of Egypt, and, at the same time, prevented the escape of those who dwelt within them. The God of the Hebrews was no god whom the Pharaoh—himself the offspring and incarnation of the Sun-god—could recognise; they were the servants of the Egyptian king, and of none else.

The embassy of the representatives of Israel was followed by severer measures of repression. It indicated a rising spirit of rebellion, a desire to return to the old free life of the desert, and to be quit for ever of Egyptian burdens. Strikes were not unknown among the free workmen of Thebes; but a strike among the royal slaves was a more serious matter, and seemed to prove that the Bedâwi spirit of independence and insubordination was still active among the settlers in Goshen.[167] The Israelites were still employed in building cities and fortresses, and they were now bidden to find for themselves the _tibn_ or chopped straw, which they mixed with the clay of the bricks, and, at the same time, to deliver the same number of bricks as before. The _tibn_ was employed, as it still is, for binding the clay more closely together, but it is not essential, and many of the ancient bricks of Egypt, more especially those used in Upper Egypt, are made without it. In the Delta, however, with its damper climate, the _tibn_ was more necessary, and the Egyptian taskmasters, accordingly, required it, or else some substitute for it.[168] The condition of the Israelites thus became intolerable; they were scattered over the land, seeking for ‘stubble instead of straw,’ and beaten mercilessly in traditional Egyptian fashion if the full tale of bricks was not delivered. The ‘stubble’ corresponded with the dry stalks of the durra, which are still sometimes used for a similar purpose, and was obtained from the beds of dry reeds which lined the marshes in the Eastern Delta.

Once more Moses and Aaron appeared before the Pharaoh, this time prepared to enforce their petition by signs and wonders. That they should have had such ready access to the sovereign may seem strange to the Western mind. But it is in full accordance with the traditions of the Egyptian court, which have been maintained down to the reign of the late Khedive. The ruler of the country was accessible to all who had a complaint to make before him, or a petition to offer. _Bakshish_ might be needful before the charmed circle of officials by which he was surrounded could be broken through; but once it was broken, he was bound to give audience to whosoever came to him. Moses and Aaron, moreover, were the delegates and representatives of their people, and as such had a right to be heard. The system they represented is still in full force in modern Egypt. Each class of the community, each religion, each trade, each nationality, has its recognised representative or ‘shêkh,’ who stands between it and the government, and acts on its behalf in all political and legal matters. He is as much its representative as an ambassador or consul is the representative of the nation which has accredited him, and the rights and privileges which belong to an ambassador belong also to the ‘shêkh.’ The Pharaoh could not exclude Moses and Aaron from his presence, even though the people they represented were public slaves.

The Hebrew wonder-workers were confronted by the magicians of Egypt. Amon-Ra could not yield without a struggle to the God of the ‘impure’ stranger. The miracles performed by the representatives of the Israelitish people were not beyond the powers of his servants, and the magical powers of the Egyptian priests had been famous from the beginning of time. The Egyptian had an intense belief in magic—a belief which still survives in the modern Egypt of to-day. Books had been compiled which reduced this magic to a science, and enabled those who would learn its formulæ and methods to reverse the order of nature and work whatsoever wonder they desired.[169] To transform a rod into a serpent, or a serpent into a rod, was a comparatively easy feat, and one which the jugglers of Cairo can still perform. Equally easy was it to turn the water of the river into blood, or even to multiply the frogs on the wet land. It was only when the plague of lice touched themselves that the power of the magicians failed, and that they confessed themselves overcome by a stronger deity than those they owned. Their magic could not remove the plague which had fallen upon them; their own garments were defiled in spite of their charms and amulets, and they had become more unclean than the ‘unclean’ foreigner himself.

The account of the ten plagues of Egypt betrays an intimate acquaintance with the characteristics and peculiarities of the valley of the Nile. They are all plagues which still recur there; some of them indeed may be said never to have left the country. Still, each year, the water of the river becomes like blood at the time of the inundation. When the Nile first begins to rise, towards the end of June, the red marl brought from the mountains of Abyssinia stains it to a dark colour, which glistens like blood in the light of the setting sun.[170] Each year, too, the inundation brings with it myriads of frogs, which swarm along the banks of the river and canals, and fill the night air with continuous croakings. The lice, again, are an ever-present plague among the poorer natives, while every spring the flies still swarm in the houses and open air, and irritate the visitor to Egypt almost beyond endurance. Flies and lice, frogs and blood-red water, are all as much a part of modern Egypt as they were of the Egypt of the Mosaic age. Natives and strangers alike suffered from them, and that the plague of flies did not reach to Goshen must have seemed to the Egyptians a miracle of miracles.

Those who have had experience of the flies of Egypt can sympathise with the Pharaoh when he hastily summoned the leaders of Israel and bade them offer sacrifice to the God who had thus shown himself a veritable ‘Lord of Flies.’ The plague which followed—the murrain upon the cattle[171]—is of rarer occurrence, though from time to time it still decimates the cattle and horses of Egypt. A strict quarantine upon animals, however, is now enforced at the Asiatic frontier, and some years, therefore, have elapsed since the last outbreak of the cattle-plague. But the plague of boils and blains is still endemic, and residents in the country seldom wholly escape it. The plague of the thunder and hail is also not unfrequent; as recently as the spring of 1895 a violent storm of the kind swept along the valley of the Nile and destroyed three thousand acres of cultivated land. The locusts, too, now and again, are carried by the south-east wind from the shores of the Red Sea to devour the rising crops, while the darkness that might be felt was but a heightened form of the darkness occasioned by the _khamasin_ winds and sand-storms of the spring. Even the death of the firstborn has its parallel in the epidemic of cholera. In the space of a single year (1895-1896) the Egypt of our own days has experienced most of the plagues of which we read in the book of Exodus. Blood-red water, frogs and lice, flies and boils, hailstorms and darkness, the scourge of cholera, have all visited the land.

There was nothing, consequently, in the plagues themselves that was either supernatural or contra-natural. They were all characteristic of Egypt, and of Egypt alone. They were signs and wonders, not because they introduced new and unknown forces into the life of the Egyptians, but because the diseases and plagues already known to the country were intensified in action and crowded into a short space of time. The magicians beheld in them ‘the finger’ of the God of the Hebrews, since they came and went at the command of the Hebrew leader, and all the magic of Egypt was powerless before them. Amon-Ra had found a mightier than himself; and the books of Thoth contained no spells or mystical incantations which could avail against the scourges that afflicted priest and layman alike. The reluctant Pharaoh could no longer resist the cries of his people. Egypt was perishing, and his own son had died of the plague. It was better that his cities should remain unfinished than that there should be none to fill them when they were built. In the plagues that had descended on them, his subjects saw the hand of the wrathful Hebrew Deity, eager for the sacrifices which His people had been prevented from offering to Him in the desert, and the sceptical Pharaoh himself at last became a convert to their belief. In fear lest a worse evil might befall him, he gave the order that the Israelites should be allowed to pass the fortresses that separated Goshen from the wilderness beyond, and the royal slaves were free to depart.

For how long a time Egypt had thus been stricken by plague after plague is hard to determine. The impression left by the narrative is that they followed quickly one upon the other, and that consequently the period was of no great length. It is true that the Nile turns ‘red’ in July, and that the wheat ripens in the spring; but, on the other hand, the locusts, we are told, eat ‘all that the hail had left.’ At any rate, it is clear that the Hebrew writer intended us to believe that less than a year elapsed between the first visit of the Israelitish representatives to the Pharaoh and the flight into the wilderness. All was over before the end of March—‘the first month’ of the Hebrew year.

The Egyptian monuments have given us a different version of the causes which obliged Meneptah to consent to the exodus of his Asiatic serfs. In the light of the stela discovered by Professor Petrie at Thebes, we can now understand the mutilated inscription in which the Pharaoh records on the walls of Karnak his victory over the barbarians in the fifth year of his reign. Lower Egypt and its civilisation were never nearer to destruction. The Libyans of Northern Africa had combined with the populations of the Greek Seas, and the barbarians had overrun the Delta, destroying its cities, massacring its population, and carrying away its spoil. While Maraiu, the Libyan king, devastated the eastern banks of the Nile, his northern allies—the Sardinians and Achæans, the Lycians and Siculians—landed on the coasts of the Delta, and marched southward until they joined him.

It would seem that they found allies in Egypt itself. Meneptah tells us that he endeavoured to save what was left of his dominions by throwing up fortifications in front of Memphis and Heliopolis, ‘the city of Tum.’ For Egypt was threatened not only on the west and on the north. Eastward also, in the land of Goshen, there were enemies, pastoral nomads from Asia, who had been allowed to live there for many generations. Their ‘tents,’ the Pharaoh declares, had been pitched ‘in front of the city of Pi-Bailos,’ the modern Belbeis, at the western extremity of the region in which the Israelites were settled. ‘The kings of Lower Egypt’ found themselves shut up and isolated in their fortified cities, ‘cut off from everything by the foe, with no mercenaries whom they could oppose to them.’[172]

But Meneptah had been ‘crowned to preserve the life’ of his subjects. In the month of Epiphi, our July, the great battle was fought which annihilated the hordes of the invaders and saved the inhabitants of Egypt. Six thousand three hundred and sixty-five Libyan slain were counted on the field of battle, and 2370 of the northern barbarians, while 9376 prisoners fell into the hands of the conqueror. It was little wonder that the Egyptian poets composed pæans in honour of the victory, or that one of these hymns of triumph should have been engraved on a stela of the temple which Meneptah raised at Thebes to Amon-Ra.

It is in this latter hymn, as has been already said, that the name of the ‘Israelites’ has been found. They are included among the enemies over whom the Pharaoh had triumphed; but, unlike his other enemies, they possessed no land which they could call their own. They had no fixed habitation, there was no locality which was called after their name. But the Egyptian poet knew that they had come originally from Southern Palestine; the destruction of their male ‘seed’ had widowed the women of ‘Khar.’

It was the pressure of the Libyan invasion, therefore, which had placed Meneptah at the mercy of his Israelitish slaves. With the Libyans and their allies in the east and north, and a hostile population in the land of Goshen, he had been forced to fortify Memphis and Heliopolis, and to yield to those demands for freedom which he was not strong enough to resist. To the ten plagues of which we have the record in the book of Exodus there was added the more terrible plague of the Libyan invasion. In his inscription Meneptah speaks not only of the barbarian enemy who harassed the frontier and devastated the seaports, but also of the ‘rebels’ who were destroying the country from within, and in these rebels whose tents were pitched ‘in front of Pi-Bailos’ we must see the Israelites of the Old Testament. Crushed and unwarlike though they may have been, they were nevertheless a source of danger, and, like Mohammed Ali in the presence of the Bedâwin, the Pharaoh found it necessary to agree to their demands.

Meneptah’s victory was gained in the middle of the summer. It was in the spring that the Exodus of the Israelites had taken place. Along with the descendants of Jacob had gone ‘a mixed multitude,’ fragments, it may be, of that wave of Libyan invasion which was rolling over the Delta. At any rate, it was not the Israelites only who had made their way towards Asia. There were other royal slaves also, like the ‘Apuriu who were employed in drawing the stone that was quarried on the eastern bank of the Nile. The resemblance between their name and that of the Hebrews may have led to a confusion between the brickmakers of Pharaoh and the transporters of his stone.

There was an Egyptian legend of the Israelitish Exodus which was embodied in the history of Manetho, from whom it has been quoted by Josephus.[173] The Pharaoh Amenôphis, it was said, desired to see the gods, as his predecessor Oros (or Khu-n-Aten) had done. On the advice of the seer, Amenôphis the son of Paapis, he accordingly cleared the land of the leprous and ‘impure,’ separating them from the rest of the Egyptians, to the number of eighty thousand, and condemning them to work, like the ’Apuriu of the monuments, in the quarries on the eastern side of the Nile. But among them were some priests who were under the special protection of the gods. When the seer heard of the sacrilege that had been committed against their persons, he prophesied that the impure people would find allies, and with their help rule over Egypt for thirteen years. Not daring to tell the king of his prophecy, he committed it to writing, and then destroyed himself. After a while the workers in the quarries begged the Pharaoh to send them to Avaris, the old fortress of the Hyksos, which lay on the Asiatic frontier of Egypt, empty and uninhabited. The request was granted; but no sooner were they settled in their new abode than they rose in rebellion, and chose as their leader Osarsiph, a priest of On. He gave them new laws, forbidding them, among other things, to revere the sacred animals, and set them to rebuild the walls of Avaris. He also sent to the Hyksos at Jerusalem asking them for their help. A force of two hundred thousand men was accordingly despatched to Avaris, and this was followed by the invasion of Egypt. Amenôphis fled to Ethiopia, with the bull Apis and other holy animals, after ordering the images of the gods to be concealed. His son Sethos, who was also called Ramesses, after his grandfather Ramesses the Great, and who was at the time only five years of age, was placed in charge of a friend. Amenôphis remained in Ethiopia for thirteen years, while Osarsiph, who had assumed the name of Moses, and his Hyksos allies committed innumerable atrocities. Temples and towns were destroyed, and the priests and sacred animals were killed. But at last the fated term of years was over; Amenôphis returned at the head of an army, and the enemy was utterly overthrown and pursued to the borders of Syria.

In this legend truth and fiction have been mingled together. The foreigner, and more especially the Asiatic foreigner, was stigmatised as ‘impure’ by the Egyptians, and in the leprous people who were confined in the quarries of the eastern desert we must, therefore, see simply a stranger race. Osarsiph derives his name from Joseph, the latter name being regarded (as in Psalm lxxxi. 6) as a compound of Yo or Yahveh, which is identified with the Egyptian Osiris. Amenôphis,[174] the son of Paapis, is Amenôphis (or rather, Amenôthes), the son of Hapi who erected the colossal statues of ‘Memnon’ and its companion at Thebes during the reign of Amenôphis III., and the Pharaoh Amenôphis, the son of Ramesses, and father of Sethos, is Meneptah, the son of Ramses II., and father of Seti II.

The return of Amenôphis from Ethiopia was derived from a sort of Messianic prophecy found already in a papyrus of the age of Thothmes III. Here we read that ‘a king will come from the South, Ameni the truth-declaring by name. He will be the son of a woman of Nubia, and will be born in.... He will assume the crown of Upper Egypt, and will lift up the red crown of Lower Egypt. He will unite the double crown.... The people of the age of the son of man will rejoice and establish his name for all eternity. They will be far from evil, and the wicked will humble their mouths for fear of him. The Asiatics will fall before his blows, and the Libyans before his flame. The wicked will wait on his judgments, the rebels on his power. The royal serpent on his brow will pacify the revolted. A wall shall be built, even that of the prince, so that the Asiatics may no more enter into Egypt.’[175]

With this prince of ancient prophecy who should save Egypt from its Asiatic and Libyan foes, it was easy for popular tradition to identify the Meneptah who had annihilated both Libyans and Asiatics, and to combine his name with that of Ameni into the compound Amenôphis. At any rate, the Egyptian legend bears witness to the fact that Meneptah was the Pharaoh of the Exodus, and that the flight of the Israelites was connected with the Libyan invasion of the valley of the Nile.[176]

The Israelites themselves connected the flight with the institution of the feast of the Passover. But the feast of the Passover seems to have been a combination of two older festivals. One of these was commemorated by eating for seven days unleavened bread; the other by the sacrifice of a lamb, the blood of which was smeared on the doorposts and lintel of the house, the lamb itself being roasted and eaten at midnight with bitter herbs. The feast of unleavened bread followed immediately upon the feast of the Passover, which lasted from the tenth to the fourteenth day of the first month of the Hebrew sacred year.

Dr. Clay Trumbull has shown that the Passover was but an adaptation of the old rite which he terms the ‘Threshold Covenant.’[177] It was a rite which went back to the earliest age of mankind, and of which we find traces in many parts of the world. Even in the Egypt of to-day the building of a new house or boat is not complete without the slaughter of a sheep, the blood of which is allowed to fall on the threshold of the house or the deck and side of a vessel. The blood was the mark of the sacrifice by which the master of the house entered into covenant with the stranger, or even with his god. Where it appeared the avenging deity passed by, mindful of the covenant, and remembering that the house contained a friend and not an enemy. The threshold became an altar, and those who passed over it were made members of the family, and shared with them their rights and their religion. When once the bride had crossed the threshold of her new home, she left behind her all her old ties and relations, and became a member of a new family.

To quote the words of Dr. Clay Trumbull, ‘Long before’ the night of the Exodus, ‘a covenant welcome was given to a guest who was to become as one of the family, or to a bride or bridegroom in marriage, by the outpouring of blood on the threshold of the door, and by staining the doorway itself with the blood of the covenant. And now,’ on the eve of the flight from Goshen, ‘Jehovah announced that He was to visit Egypt on a designated night, and that those who would welcome Him should prepare a threshold covenant, or a passover sacrifice, as a proof of that welcome; for where no such welcome was made ready for Him by the family, He must count the threshold as His enemy.’[178]

The belief that sacrifice alone could secure the house from the wrath of Heaven has been spread widely over the world. Numberless traces of it are to be found in the folklore of Europe. Popular legend knows of bridges and castles which refused to stand until the human victim had been buried beneath their foundations, and even S. Columba was held to have been unable to build his cathedral at Iona until his companion Oran had been immured alive beneath its foundation-stones. We learn from the Old Testament that the belief was strong among the Israelites also. When Hiel of Beth-el rebuilt the ruined Jericho, we are told that ‘he laid the foundation thereof in Abiram his firstborn, and set up the gates thereof in his youngest son Segub’ (1 Kings xvi. 34). The Deity had a right to the firstborn; and if this right were not recognised by the sacrifice either of the firstborn himself or of a substitute, there could be no covenant between the family and its gods. A new building implied a new local habitation for the family and the gods it worshipped; and where there was no covenant between them, the gods would come as foes and not as friends.

The Passover feast was therefore nothing new. The rite connected with it and the ideas associated with the rite must have long been familiar to the Israelites. What was new was the adaptation of the rite to the new covenant that Yahveh was about to enter into with His people. It became ‘the Lord’s Passover,’ commemorating the deliverance from Egypt when Yahveh smote the Egyptian firstborn, but ‘passed over the houses of the children of Israel.’ Like the old springtide feast of unleavened bread, it was given a new signification, and made a memorial of the first event in the national life of Israel. A similar significance was given to a change that was made in the calendar. The Hebrew year had begun in the autumn with the month of September; but side by side with this West-Semitic calendar there had also been in use in Palestine another calendar, that of Babylonia, according to which the year began with Nisan or March. It was this Babylonian calendar which was now introduced for ritual purposes. While the civil year still began in the autumn, it was ordained that the sacred year should begin in the spring. The sacred year was determined by the annual festivals, and the first of the festivals was henceforth to be the Passover. The beginning of the new year was henceforth fixed by the Passover moon.

It was at midnight that the angel of death passed over the land of Egypt. The plague spared neither rich nor poor. The firstborn of Pharaoh died like the firstborn of the captive in prison. Vain attempts have been made to discover which among the sons of Meneptah this may have been. But Meneptah lived many years after the overthrow of the Libyans, and consequently after the Exodus of the Israelites, and it may not have been till late in his reign that his successor, Seti II., became crown-prince. More than one elder brother may have died meanwhile. Moreover, none but the son of a princess of the royal solar race could sit on the throne of the Pharaohs. The reigning king might have elder sons born to him by foreign princesses, but his successor could not be chosen from among them. He only who could trace his descent to the Sun-god, who was, in short, a direct descendant of the Pharaohs, had any right to the throne.

Amid the terrors of the plague, and under cover of the darkness, the Israelites and their companions, the ‘mixed multitude,’ departed from the land of Goshen. They took with them their flocks and herds; they took also such precious plunder as they could easily carry away from the houses of their terrified masters. They ‘borrowed,’ according to the euphemistic expression of the chronicler, ‘jewels of silver and jewels of gold, and raiment,’ ‘and they spoiled the Egyptians.’ It was little wonder that the Pharaoh subsequently determined to pursue the retreating hordes.

They first made their way from ‘Rameses to Succoth.’ Succoth is the Thukut of the Egyptian texts, the district in which Pithom was situated, and which extended from the land of Goshen to the line of fortifications that enclosed Egypt on the East. It is mentioned in the letter sent to Meneptah three years after the Israelitish Exodus, which we have already had occasion to quote.[179] The flight of the Israelites had left the district uninhabited, and it was not very long before it was again handed over to some of their Edomite kinsmen, who wanted pasture for their herds.