Chapter III: The Exodus Out of Egypt (2)

The site of the town of Rameses is still uncertain. It is called Pi-Ramses, ‘the House of Ramses,’ in the hieroglyphic texts, and, like Zoan, it lay near the canal of Pa-shet-Hor. A long description is given of it by the scribe Paebpasa, who was stationed at Zaru, on the eastern frontier of Egypt, during the early part of Meneptah’s reign. He tells us (according to Brugsch’s translation)[180] how he had ‘arrived at the city of Ramses and found it excellent, for nothing can compare with it on the Theban land and soil.... Its canals are rich in fish, its lakes swarm with birds, its meadows are green with vegetables, there is no end of the lentils; melons with a taste like honey grow in the irrigated fields. Its barns are full of wheat and durra, and reach as high as heaven.... The canal, Pa-shet-Hor, produces salt, the lake-region of Pa-Hirnatron. Their sea-ships enter the harbour, plenty and abundance is abundant in it.’ And then the scribe goes on to describe the annual festivities of its inhabitants in honour of their founder Ramses II.

In Thukut or Succoth were fortresses which protected the Delta from Asiatic incursions, and at the same time prevented those who were in Egypt from escaping out of it without the permission of the Government. One of them was called ‘the Khetem,’ or ‘Fortress, of Thukut’; another the Khetem of Ramses II. Both seem to be mentioned in a report sent to Meneptah’s successor, Seti II. Here we read: ‘I set out from the hall of the royal palace (in Zoan) on the 9th day of the month Epiphi, in the evening, after the two (fugitive) slaves. I arrived at the Khetem of Thukut on the 10th of Epiphi. I was informed that the men had resolved to take their way towards the south. On the 12th I reached the Khetem. There I was informed that grooms who had come from the neighbourhood [had reported] that the fugitives had already passed the Wall to the north of the Migdol of king Seti Meneptah.’[181]

The runaway slaves must have taken the same road as that which had been taken by the Israelites before them. The Israelites had avoided the nearest and more usual road to Palestine, which ran along the edge of the Mediterranean and passed through Gaza. The Philistines were already threatening the southern coast of Canaan, and Gaza was garrisoned by Egyptian troops. The undisciplined and unwarlike multitude which followed Moses would have been cut to pieces had they ventured to force their way through them, or else would have returned to Egypt. They turned therefore southward towards the desert and ‘the way of the wilderness of the Yâm Sûph.’

From Succoth, we are told, they marched to Etham ‘in the edge of the wilderness.’ Brugsch was the first to see that in Etham we have a Hebrew transcription of the Egyptian Khetem. The only question is, which of the many Khetemu or ‘Fortresses’ which protected the Asiatic frontier of Egypt this particular Etham may have been. We hear of ‘the Khetem of Ramses II., which is in the district of Zaru,’ at the very point where one of the roads to Asia passed through the great line of fortification, and the report quoted above tells us of another Khetem, that of Thukut. It was, however, the second Khetem mentioned in the report which is referred to in the Old Testament narrative. This second Khetem lay between Succoth and the lines of fortification, and might therefore be described as ‘in the edge of the wilderness,’ which began on the eastern side of the Shur or fortified wall. It was, in fact, the fortress which guarded one of the roads out of Egypt at the point where it intersected the lines. To the south of it came the Migdol or Tower of King Meneptah.

It is possible that this may be the Migdol which is stated in the book of Exodus to have been near the next camping-place of the Israelites. From the fortress of Etham they had turned to the ‘sea,’ and had there pitched their tents ‘before Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea, over against Baal-zephon.’ In Baal-zephon, ‘Baal of the North,’ we have the name of a Phœnician temple, which is alluded to in an Egyptian papyrus;[182] and in place of Pi-hahiroth, the Septuagint and Coptic versions read ‘the farmstead,’ reminding us of the _ahu_ or ‘estate’ of Pharaoh in the district of Thukut, on which the Edomite herdsmen were afterwards allowed to settle.

But what is ‘the sea,’ by the side of which the Israelites encamped? Its identification has been the subject of much controversy—a fact, however, which ceases to astonish us when we find that the Hebrew writers themselves were uncertain about it. While in the narrative of the Exodus ‘the sea’ crossed by the Israelites is carefully distinguished from the ‘Yâm Sûph’ or ‘Reedy Sea,’ at which they subsequently arrived, there are other passages in the Old Testament, more especially of a poetical nature, in which the two seas are confounded together. Two irreconcileable systems of geography are thus presented to us which have hitherto made the geography of the Exodus an insoluble problem.

In the narrative, however, all is clear and exact. The children of Israel, it was determined, instead of following the northern road to Palestine, should march along that which led to ‘the wilderness of the Yâm Sûph.’ But between them and this wilderness lay the Egyptian wall of fortification, which extended from the marshes in the north to the Gulf of Suez, or its prolongation, in the south. It was only when they had turned the southern end of the wall by crossing ‘the sea’ that they entered ‘the wilderness of the wall,’ where they wandered for three days without finding water (Exod. xv. 22). Later they came to the palm-grove of Elim, and then after that to the Yâm Sûph (Numb. xxxiii. 10).

The Yâm Sûph was well known to Hebrew geography, and corresponded with the modern Gulf of Aqaba. It was upon the Yâm Sûph, at Elath and Ezion-geber, ‘in the land of Edom,’ that Solomon built his ships (1 Kings ix. 26); and after the capture of Arad, in the extreme south of Canaan, the Israelites marched ‘from mount Hor by the way of Yâm Sûph, in order to compass the land of Edom’ (Numb. xxi. 4). Elim is but another form of Elath, the ruins of which lie close to Aqaba, while the town of Sûph lay ‘over against’ the wilderness in the plains of Moab (Deut. i. 1). The Yâm Sûph, in fact, so erroneously rendered ‘the Red Sea’ in the Authorised Version, was the Gulf of Aqaba. The sister Gulf of Suez was called by the Hebrews ‘the Egyptian Sea’ (Isa. xi. 15), a very appropriate name, since it was enclosed on either side by Egyptian territory. From the days of the third dynasty to those of the Ptolemies, Mafkat, the Sinaitic peninsula, was included among the provinces of Egypt.

In the list of the Israelitish stations given in Numb. xxxiii. a careful distinction is made between the Yâm Sûph (ver. 10) and ‘the sea,’ through the midst of which the fugitives from Pharaoh passed safely into the wilderness. This ‘sea’ washed the southern extremity of the Shur or ‘Wall’ of fortification, the line of which was approximately that of the Suez Canal. If Dr. Naville is right, in the days of the Exodus it would have extended much further to the north than is at present the case; the Bitter Lakes, in fact, marking its northern boundary. But there are serious difficulties in the way of this hypothesis. The canal which, in the time of Seti I., already united the Pelusiac arm of the Nile with the Gulf of Suez, ran southward as far as the modern town of Suez, where its mouth can still be traced. Only five miles north of Suez, moreover, the fragments of a stela can still be seen, on which Darius commemorated his reopening of the old canal of the Pharaohs. Had the gulf really extended so far north as Ismailîya and the Bitter Lakes, this southern prolongation of the canal would be hard to understand.

However this may be, the poets and later writers of the Old Testament came to forget what was meant by ‘the sea.’ It was confounded with the Yâm Sûph, and the scene of the Exodus was accordingly transferred from the Gulf of Suez to the Gulf of Aqaba. Dr. Winckler has recently endeavoured to show that besides Muzri or Egypt, the Assyrian inscriptions know of another Muzri or ‘borderland’ in the north-west of Arabia. If so, this second Muzri or Egypt might help to explain the confusion between the two seas.

It is in the song of triumph over the destruction of the Egyptians that the confusion first makes its appearance. Here (Exod. xv. 4) ‘the sea’ and ‘the Yâm Sûph’ are used as equivalents, and the contents of the song are summed up at the end in the statement that ‘Moses brought Israel from the Yâm Sûph.’ But elsewhere in the Pentateuch the geography is accurate, and it is not until we come to the speeches in the book of Joshua that the two seas are once more confused together.[183] The same geographical error is repeated in two of the later Psalms, as well as in a passage of the book of Nehemiah.[184] The older Hebrew geography had by this time been forgotten; with the loss of Edom and its seaports an exact knowledge of the two arms of the Red Sea had faded from the memories of the Jews. But in the historical narrative of the Pentateuch all is still distinct and clear.

Hardly had the Israelites left Goshen before the Pharaoh repented of his permission for their departure. The retreating multitude, encumbered with women and children, with flocks and herds, and with the booty that had been carried off from the Egyptians, was still encamped within the lines of fortification, near the southernmost Migdol or ‘Tower,’ and on the shores of ‘the sea.’ Southward was a waterless desert; behind were the hostile forces of Egypt. The situation seemed hopeless; ‘the wilderness,’ as the Pharaoh said, had ‘shut them in,’ and there seemed no escape from the Egyptian troops which had now been sent in pursuit of them.

But Israel was saved, as it were, by miracle. All night long the sky was black with clouds, while a strong east wind drove the shallow waters of ‘the sea’ before it towards the western bank. The fugitives marched in haste through its dried-up bed, and before morning dawned they had reached the eastern shore. The Egyptian forces pursued, but it was too late. The wheels of the chariots sank into the soft sand, and before they could advance far the wind dropped and the waters returned upon them. The chariots and host of Pharaoh were overwhelmed by the flowing tide.

Classical history knew of similar events. Diodoros (xvi. 46) tells us that when Artaxerxes of Persia led his forces against Egypt, part of his army perished, swallowed up in the ‘gulfs’ of the Sirbonian Lake on the Mediterranean Sea. Alexander’s troops, moreover, narrowly escaped being swallowed up by the waters of the Pamphylian Gulf, through which they passed during the winter, and their escape was magnified by later writers into a miracle.[185]

The Pharaoh was not himself among the six hundred chariots which had pursued the flying Israelites into ‘the sea.’[186] As in the great battle against the Libyans, Meneptah, while taking the field in person, nevertheless took care to avoid actual danger and to delegate his authority to others when there was a prospect of fighting. He lived several years after the Libyan victory, and therefore after the Israelitish Exodus; and though his tomb in the Bibân el-Molûk at Thebes was never finished, he was buried in it at a ripe old age. A dirge,[187] probably composed at the time of his death, speaks of the king as dying at an advanced period of life.

With the waters of ‘the sea’ between themselves and Egypt, the Israelites felt that they were at last free men. The fortified wall of Egypt was behind them; they were already in the desert-home of their Asiatic kinsmen, free to move whithersoever they desired. But there was one road which they could not take. If the fear of ‘seeing war’ had kept them back from the northern road to Palestine, it would still more keep them from the road which led into the Egyptian province of Mafkat. Here on the western side of the Sinaitic peninsula were the mines of copper and malachite worked by Egyptian convicts, and strongly garrisoned by Egyptian troops. To venture near them would have been to court again the danger from which the fugitives had just escaped.[188]

The road was well known. For centuries it had been trodden by Egyptian troops and miners, by civil officials and the convicts of whom they had charge. There was no difficulty, therefore, in avoiding it, and in plunging instead into the desert which led to their kinsfolk in Edom and that land of Canaan which was their ultimate goal.

Old errors die hard, and the belief that the Sinaitic peninsula was the scene of the wanderings of the Israelites still prevails among students of the Old Testament. It originated in the wish of the early Christian anchorites in the Sinaitic peninsula to find the localities of the Pentateuch in their own neighbourhood, and has been fostered by the geographical confusion between ‘the sea’ crossed by the Israelites and the Yâm Sûph. But the belief is not only irreconcileable with the facts of Egyptian history, it is also irreconcileable with the narrative of the Pentateuch itself. It transports the Amalekites or Bedâwin of the desert south of Judah to the western side of the Sinaitic peninsula, and performs the same feat for the wilderness of Paran.[189] It makes Jethro, the high-priest of Midian, cross the Gulf of Aqaba and make his way through barren gorges and hostile tribes in order to visit his son-in-law, and sets at defiance the express testimony of Hebrew literature that Mount Sinai was among the mountains of Seir.[190]

The wilderness into which the Israelites emerged is called indifferently that of Shur and Etham. Shur was the Semitic equivalent of the Egyptian Anbu or ‘Wall’ of fortification, while Etham took its name from one of the Khetemu or ‘Fortresses’ which guarded the approach to the valley of the Nile. It was a wilderness which stretched away to the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba, and the Hebrew tribes accordingly marched along it. They took, we are told, ‘the way of the wilderness of the Yâm Sûph,’ following the Haj road, which is still traversed by the pilgrims from Egypt to Mecca. But the caravan moved slowly, and for three days they could find no water. Had they turned southward into the Sinaitic peninsula, a few hours would have brought them to the Wells of Moses—now a place of picnic for the visitors to Suez,—while the road to the Egyptian mines was provided with cisterns and wells. But to have done so would have been merely to exchange Egypt for one of its strongly-garrisoned provinces.

How long the wanderers were in crossing the desert we do not know; nor do we know where Marah was, whose ‘bitter’ waters refreshed them after three days of scarcity. But at last they reached the oasis of Elim, which the itinerary in the book of Numbers (xxxiii. 10) couples with the Yâm Sûph. Elim, in fact, is but a variant form of Elath,[191] and Elath is the Aila of classical geography, of which Aqaba is the modern successor. When the Israelites left Elim a whole month had elapsed since their departure from Egypt (Exod. xvi. 1).

Between Elim or the Yâm Sûph[192] and Mount Sinai lay the Wilderness of Sin. Sinai and Sin alike derived their names from Sin, the moon-god of Babylonia, whose worship had long since been brought by Babylonian conquest to the West. More than two thousand years before the Exodus the Babylonian conqueror, Naram-Sin, ‘the beloved of Sin,’ had carried his arms as far as the Sinaitic peninsula, and the inscriptions of Southern Arabia show that there also the Babylonian deity was adored.[193] It would seem probable that a temple dedicated to his service stood on the slopes of Mount Sinai.

Numerous attempts have been made to identify the mountain which the Israelites regarded as the scene of the first pronouncement of their Law. Most of these attempts are based on the belief that it is to be sought in the Sinaitic peninsula. The rival claims of Jebel el-’Ejmeh, Jebel Umm ’Alawî, Jebel Zebîr-Katarîna, Jebel Serbâl, and Jebel Mûsa have all been eagerly discussed. Jebel Mûsa alone can claim the support of tradition, though this does not go back further than the third or fourth century A.D., when the Christian hermits first settled in its neighbourhood. The Sinai of S. Paul and Josephus was still in the Arabia of Roman geography, the kingdom of which Petra was the capital.

In the geography of the Old Testament, however, Mount Sinai was in Edom. This is expressly stated in the Song of Deborah, one of the oldest products of Hebrew literature. Here we read (Judg. v. 4, 5), ‘Lord, when Thou wentest out of Seir, when Thou marchedst out of the field of Edom, the earth trembled, and the heavens dropped, the clouds also dropped water. The mountains melted from before the Lord, even that Sinai from before the Lord God of Israel.’ Similar testimony is borne by the blessing of Moses (Deut. xxxiii. 2), ‘The Lord came from Sinai, and rose up from Seir unto them; He shined forth from the Mount of Paran,’ an expression which appears in another form in Habakkuk (iii. 3), ‘God came from Teman, and the Holy One from the Mount of Paran.’ Teman denoted Southern Edom, and Paran was the desert which adjoined Edom on the west and Judah on the south, and in whose midst was the sanctuary of Kadesh-barnea.[194] In the Blessing of Moses the parallelism of Hebrew poetry requires that Sinai and Seir should be equivalent terms.

We must, then, look to the frontiers of Edom and the desert of Paran for the real Sinai of Hebrew history. But it is useless to seek for a more exact localisation until the mountains of Seir and the old kingdom of Edom have been explored. Then, if ever, the Sinai of the Pentateuch may be discovered. It would seem that it formed part of a range that was known as ‘Horeb,’ the ‘desert’ mountains, and as late as the age of Elijah it was still reverenced as ‘the Mount of God’ (1 Kings xix. 8).[195]

Before the Israelites actually reached the sacred mountain, they had to make more than one encampment in ‘the Wilderness of Sin.’ The itinerary in the book of Numbers gives the names of three—Dophkah, Alush, and Rephidim—the narrative mentions only the last. Rephidim, the ‘Encampments,’ was the scene of the first conflict the Israelites were called upon to face. Here they were attacked by the Amalekites, the Bedâwin tribes who still consider the desert as their own, and whose hand is against all that pass through it. The attack was repulsed, but not without loss, and the remembrance of it never faded from the minds of the Hebrew people. There was henceforth to be war between Amalek and Israel ‘from generation to generation,’ until the Bedâwin marauders of the desert should be destroyed. The Song of Deborah (Judg. v. 14) tells us how the struggle was continued after the settlement in Canaan, and the first Israelitish king did his utmost to root out these pests of the Hebrew borderland. Saul smote them, it is said, from Havilah to Shur (1 Sam. xv. 7), from the ‘sandy’ desert of Arabia Petræa to the great Wall of Egypt. And the Hebrew writer expressly adds that these were the same Amalekites as those who had lain in wait for Israel ‘in the way when he came up from Egypt.’ There were no Amalekites in the Sinaitic peninsula; the desert in which they ranged was that which adjoined Edom, and was known to the ancient Babylonians as the ‘land of Melukhkha.’ Hence it was that Edomites and Amalekites were mingled together, and that Amalek was counted by the genealogists a grandson of Esau.

The battle at Rephidim was followed by the visit of the father-in-law of Moses, Jethro, ‘the priest of Midian.’ The visit was natural, for the real Sinai lay on the frontier of Midian. It was while Moses was feeding the flock of Jethro that he had first come to it and received his commission from Yahveh. Here, therefore, at ‘the Mount of God,’ he was within hail of his old home.

Jethro’s visit marked the first step in the organisation of Israel. Under his guidance and counsel judges of various grades were appointed before whom minor cases could be brought, and each of whom was invested with a certain amount of power. The functions of the ‘judge’ were administrative and executive as well as legal; what was meant by the term we may learn from the book of Judges as well as from the Shophetim or judges who at one time took the place of the kings at Tyre. They corresponded closely with the higher officials in the Turkish provinces, who possess an undefined and in some respects absolute authority, subject only to the official who is immediately above them. The ‘judges’ established by Moses on Jethro’s advice derived their titles from the numerical extent of their jurisdiction. They were judges ‘of thousands,’ ‘of hundreds,’ ‘of fifties,’ and ‘of tens.’ The community was divided into ideal units, of larger and smaller size, the basis of the arrangement being the decimal system. The whole arrangement may have been of Midianite origin; at all events, in the Assyrian texts we hear also of a ‘captain of fifty’ and a ‘captain of ten.’[196]

Moses remained the supreme ‘judge’ and lawgiver of his people. To him alone all ‘great matters’ were referred, and from him came all the laws and ordinances, the rules and regulations which they were called upon to obey. The leader who had brought them safely out of ‘the house of bondage’ now became their recognised head and legislator. Moses ‘was king in Jeshurun,’ exercising all the authority in Israel which in later times belonged to the king.

Hardly was the political organisation of the new community completed before the Israelitish tribes reached the venerated sanctuary of Sinai, and encamped before ‘the Mount of God.’ The first object of their journey was accomplished, and the promise of Yahveh was fulfilled that they should ‘serve God’ on the mountain where He had appeared to their leader. Here at Sinai the earlier portion of the Mosaic legislation was promulgated. It was subsequently supplemented by the legislation at Kadesh-Barnea, that second resting-place of the tribes, where by the side of En-Mishpat, ‘the Spring of Judgment,’ they prepared themselves in the security of the heart of the desert for the future invasion of Canaan.

It was amid the terrors of a thunderstorm that Yahveh declared His laws to the people of Israel. While darkness rested on the summit of the mountain, broken only by the flashes of the lightning and the voice of the thunder, ‘the Ten Words’ were delivered to man. In their forefront stood that stern, uncompromising declaration of monotheism which henceforth marked the religion of Israel. They began with the commandment that Israel should have ‘no other gods before’ the Lord. Yahveh had brought them forth from Egypt, and Yahveh only must they therefore serve. The commands which followed were partly general, partly applicable to the Israelites alone. The prohibition to make ‘the likeness of any thing in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth,’ defined the character of the God before whom no other was to be worshipped. He had no form or attributes which could be represented by art; it was the gods of the Gentiles only of whom images or pictures could be made. Egypt had been a land of idols, and in leaving Egypt Yahveh required that the idols also should be left behind. In the simple life of the desert there was no place for art: here man was alone with his Creator, who revealed Himself in the light of the burning bush or the thunderings of the storm, not under the forms of the creatures He had made. The second commandment was part of the teaching which the wanderings in the desert were intended to enforce; and if Israel was to remain a ‘peculiar people,’ dedicated to the service of Yahveh, and secure from absorption into the nations that surrounded it, it was necessary that it should be fenced about with a law of puritanical strictness, which forbade the introduction of art under any shape. Art in the world of the Exodus was too closely interwoven with the religions of Egypt and Canaan and Babylonia to be other than a forbidden thing. The subsequent history of Israel proved how wise and needful had been the prohibition. The art which adorned the temple and palace of Solomon was followed by the erection of altars to the divinities of the heathen, and even in the wilderness the golden calf was worshipped in sight of Sinai itself.

The third and fourth commandments were, like the second, Israelitish rather than general in character. The third forbade taking in vain the name of Yahveh; the name of the national God of Israel which had been so specially revealed was too sacred to be lightly spoken of. The ‘name’ of Yahveh, in fact, was equivalent to Yahveh Himself, and to deal lightly with the name was to deal lightly with One of whose essence it was. The obligation to keep the Sabbath was part of the culture which Western Asia had received from Babylonia. Among the Babylonians the Sabbath had been observed from early times, and the institution seems to have gone back to a pre-Semitic period. At all events, it was denoted in Sumerian by a term which a cuneiform tablet explains as ‘a day of rest for the heart,’ and its Assyrian name of Sabattu or ‘Sabbath’ was even derived by the native etymologists from the two Sumerian words _sa_, ‘a heart,’ and _bat_, ‘to rest.’[197] In Babylonia and Assyria, as in Israel, the Sabbath was observed every seventh day, perhaps in accordance with the astronomical system which dedicated the seven days of the week to the seven planets of Babylonian science. These seven-day weeks, however, were based on the lunar months of the Babylonian year, the Sabbath or rest-day being on the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th of each month. There was, moreover, another Sabbath on the 19th of the month, that being the end of the seventh week from the first day of the preceding month. On these Sabbath days work of all kinds was forbidden to be performed. The king, it was laid down, ‘must not eat flesh that has been cooked over the coals or in the smoke, must not change the garments of his body, must not wear white clothing, must not offer sacrifices, must not ride in a chariot, must not issue royal decrees.’ Even the diviner was not allowed to ‘mutter incantations in a secret place.’ Nor was it permitted to take medicine.

With the other elements of Babylonian culture the institution of the Sabbath had made its way to the West. But at Sinai it was given a new and special application. Not only was it to be observed each seventh day of the week, irrespective of the beginning of the month, it became also a sign and mark of the covenant between Israel and its national God. In the book of Exodus, it is true, the reason given for keeping it is that Yahveh had rested on the seventh day from His work of creation—a reason which will hardly be accepted by the geologist—but in Deuteronomy (v. 15) it is more fittingly brought into direct connection with the deliverance from Egypt: ‘Remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm: therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the Sabbath day.’

The sanction of the fifth commandment is also one which applied to Israel alone: children were enjoined to honour their parents that their days might be long in the land which Yahveh had promised to give them. But the last five commandments are of general application, and accordingly no reason is given for keeping them derived from the accidents of Hebrew history. They apply to all mankind, at all times and in all parts of the world. Murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and covetousness are all crimes forbidden everywhere by the legal or moral code. But it is strange that lying and deceit are not included among them; in this respect the so-called negative confession, which the soul of the dead Egyptian was called upon to make in the next world, was more complete.[198] The lie, however, which does not involve false witness is apt to be condoned among the nations of the East.

The ten commandments were followed by a series of other laws, many of which were probably re-enactments of laws or regulations already in force. The law of retaliation, for instance (Exod. xxi. 23-25), is as old as human society; so also is the law that murder should be punished by death (xxi. 12). The law which punished the master for the murder of a slave if he died on the spot, but allowed him to go scot-free if the slave lingered for a day or two (xxi. 20, 21), had its parallel in ancient Babylonia, and the death-penalty exacted from the ox which had gored a man (xxi. 28-32) is a survival from the days when dumb animals and even inanimate objects were regarded as responsible for the injuries they had caused.[199] The regulations in regard to ‘a field or vineyard,’ or ‘the standing corn’ of a field (xxii. 5, 6), belonged to the land of Goshen or to Canaan, not to the life in the wilderness, and the dedication of the firstborn to God (xxii. 29, 30) was one of the most ancient articles of Semitic faith.

Equally applicable to Egypt or Canaan only are the injunctions to let the land lie fallow every seventh year (xxiii. 11), and to celebrate the three great feasts of the year (xxiii. 14-19). They were all feasts of the agriculturist rather than of the pastoral nomad. The year was ushered in with the spring festival of unleavened bread; then in the summer came the feast of harvest, and finally in the autumn—‘the end’ of the old civil year—the feast of the ingathering of the fruits.

Such were some of the laws promulgated under the shadow of the sacred mountain, when Israel first encamped before Mount Sinai. They concluded with an exhortation to march against Canaan. Yahveh declared that He would send His Angel before His people to guide them in their way, like the _sukkalli_ or ‘angels’ of the Babylonian gods. Yahveh would fight for them, and they should drive out the older inhabitants of the land and take their place. They were in no wise to mingle with them or worship their gods; like the idolaters themselves, the idols they adored were to be destroyed. ‘From the Yâm Sûph to the sea of the Philistines and from the desert to the river’ were to be the bounds of their new home, a promise which was fulfilled in the kingdom of David.[200] That, too, extended to ‘the river’ Euphrates, and included the land of Edom with its two ports on the Yâm Sûph. ‘The sea of the Philistines’ is a new name for the Mediterranean, and bears testimony to the maritime fame those pirates from the north had already acquired.[201]

The laws thus promulgated at Sinai became the first code of Israel. They rested on the covenant that had been made between Yahveh and His people, of which the first clause was that they should worship none other gods but Him. The book in which they were written by Moses was accordingly called the Book of the Covenant, and its words were read aloud to the assembled multitude (Exod. xxiv. 7). The audience, it must be remembered, included not the Israelites only, but the ‘mixed multitude’ as well (Numb. xi. 4).

Once more Moses ascended the sacred mountain, to learn the ‘pattern’ of the tabernacle in which Yahveh was henceforth to be worshipped. It was to be a tent, moving along with the people, and containing all the objects of Israelitish veneration. Chief among these was the ark of the Covenant, surmounted by the mercy-seat and its two cherubim, between which Yahveh sat enthroned when He revealed Himself to His worshippers. Babylonia also had its arks, its mercy-seats, and its cherubim, and Nebuchadrezzar speaks of ‘the seat of the oracles’ in the great temple of Babylon ‘whereon at the festival of Zagmuku, the beginning of the year, on the 8th and 11th days, Bel, the god, seats himself, while the gods of heaven and earth reverently regard him, standing before him with bowed heads.’[202] The cherubim, indeed, were of Babylonian origin, and their presence in the tabernacle seems somewhat inconsistent with the prohibition to make a carven image. But the Israelites were the heirs of the ancient culture of Western Asia, and the tabernacle and its furniture embodied familiar forms of architecture and older religious conceptions.

In Egypt, too, the gods had their shrines, though these were usually boats which on the days of festival floated over the sacred lakes. Arks, however, were not unknown, and, as in Babylonia, contained the images of the gods. Sometimes, however, in Babylonia and Assyria, the ark, like that of Israel, had no image within it: the stone coffer, for instance, found by Mr. Hormuzd Rassam in the inner sanctuary of the little temple of Balawât contained two tables of alabaster on which the annals of king Assur-nazir-pal were engraved. The native workmen who discovered them naturally saw in them the two tables of stone which had been similarly placed by Moses in the ark (Deut. x. 5).[203]

The parallelism between the temples and ritual of Israel and of Babylonia is indeed close. The temple itself was of the same square or rectangular form. Outwardly it presented the appearance of a huge box. Within were the forecourt and court, while at the back came the Holy of Holies, with its altar and ark. There was, however, one distinguishing feature in the Babylonian temple which was lacking in the Hebrew tabernacle. That was the great tower which mounted up towards heaven, and the topmost stage of which seemed to approach the gods. In the absence of a tower the Hebrew tabernacle agreed with the temples of Canaan.

The Israelitish altars found their counterpart in Babylonia. So, too, did the table of shewbread, which similarly stood in the sanctuaries of the Chaldæan deities. The sacrifices and offerings were also similar. Babylonia had its daily sacrifice. its ‘meal-offering,’ and its offerings for sin; the same animals that were sacrificed to Yahveh were sacrificed also to Bel; and the Babylonian worshipper sought the favour of his gods with the same birds and the same fruits of the field. Oil, moreover, was used for purposes of anointing, and herein the ritual of Babylonia and Israel differed from that of Egypt, where oil was not employed.[204]

The contrast between Egypt and Israel, indeed, in the details of religious service was as great as the agreement in this respect between Israel and Babylonia. The children of Israel had never forgotten their Asiatic origin; throughout their long sojourn in Goshen they had preserved their old culture and habits of thought as tenaciously as they had preserved their language. Between them and the Egyptians, on the contrary, there had been antagonism from the outset. And this antagonism was accentuated by their lawgiver, who was naturally anxious to turn their thoughts from ‘the fleshpots of Egypt,’ and to prevent them from lapsing into Egyptian idolatries. Even the Egyptian legend of the Exodus bears witness to this fact.

In one detail, however, we find an analogy in Egypt. Professor Hommel[205] has pointed out that the breastplate of the high-priest, the mysterious Urim and Thummim, with its twelve engraved stones, is pictured on the breast of an Egyptian priest. Thus Seker-Khâbau, a high-priest of Memphis in the age of the nineteenth dynasty, wears upon his breast a sort of double network with four rows of precious stones set in it, each row consisting of three stones, alternately in the form of crosses and disks.[206] The Hebrew breastplate was used as an oracle, like the linen ephod which was worn under it, though how the future was divined from it we do not know. But in moments of danger it was usual to consult it; and the fact that ‘when Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets,’ is brought forward as a proof that he had been forsaken by his God (1 Sam. xxviii. 6). Like the lawgiver himself, it was the mouthpiece of Yahveh, and as such it bore the name of ‘the breastplate of judgment.’

The architects of the tabernacle and its adornment in precious metals were Bezaleel of Judah and Aholiab of Dan.[207] Modern criticism would hold them to be part of an elaborate fiction, of which the tabernacle was the subject. But the fiction would be too elaborate, too detailed, to be conceivable. Moreover, we have references to the tabernacle or ‘tent of meeting’ in the later history of Israel; and to declare these to be interpolations or the products of the same pen as that which invented the tabernacle itself may be an easy way of saving a theory, but it is not scientific. How far the description of the tabernacle is exact, how far it has not been coloured by the conceptions of a later age, is, of course, a question that may be asked. Those who maintain that the Pentateuch goes back in substance to the Mosaic age must nevertheless allow that it has undergone many changes and modifications before assuming its present shape. But, except in rare instances, it is impossible to indicate these changes with the assurance that the historian demands, and we must therefore be content with the probability that in the description of the tabernacle we have the revised version of an old story.

It has been asked how the materials used in the construction of the tabernacle could have been obtained in the desert, from whence came the silver and gold, the bronze and precious stones, the rich embroideries and cloths stained with Tyrian dye? Those who ask such questions have forgotten that the Israelites were not wild Bedâwin, and that they were laden with the spoils of Egypt. Like the invading hosts who attacked Egypt in the reign of Ramses III., they carried with them in their retreat the treasures of their late masters. And we are specially told that the gold was obtained from the bracelets and earrings and rings which were offered by the people and melted down.

It was during the second absence of Moses, when the conception and form of the tabernacle were being revealed to his mental vision, that his followers showed how little they understood the spirit and character of the legislation he was endeavouring to give them. They believed he had deserted them, and with his departure his religious teaching departed also. Israelitish religion was no slow growth: like Zoroastrianism or Buddhism or Christianity itself, it implies an individual founder who gave it the impress of his own individuality. Modern theories which attempt to explain it as a process of evolution start with a false assumption, and arrive consequently at false conclusions. None of the great religions of the world has been a product of evolution except in an indirect sense; they are all stamped with individualism, and owe their existence to the genius or inspiration of an individual. The religions of Babylonia and Egypt, as far as we know, were the results of a slow development; but Mosaism and Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Christianity derived not only their names, but their essence also from the individual founders who created them. We cannot understand the religion of Israel without the Law in its background, and we cannot understand the Law without the personality of its lawgiver.

The declaration that Israel should serve no other gods before Yahveh stood or fell with Moses, to whom Yahveh had revealed Himself. And Moses seemed to have vanished among the clouds that enveloped the summit of the sacred mountain. Their leader and his God had deserted them, and the people required another. Aaron the priest was ready to take the place of the lost lawgiver, and to provide them with a new deity and a new faith. And, after all, it was but an ancient faith, the faith of the kindred nations that surrounded them, their own faith, moreover, in the days before the Exodus. A calf was fashioned out of their golden earrings, and in it both priest and people beheld the god who had brought them out of Egypt. Aaron proclaimed a feast in honour of the divinity whose worship was celebrated with the same shameless rites as those which characterised the cult of the Semitic populations of Babylonia, of Canaan, and of Arabia.

But in the midst of the festival Moses suddenly reappeared. The sons of Levi rallied round their tribesman, and fell with him upon the rebels against his laws. Some of the latter were slain, the rest were terrorised, and the golden calf was ground to powder.[208] Aaron was forgiven, perhaps because he too had gone over to the side of Moses, perhaps because he was too powerful or too necessary to be removed.[209] But in his wrath at the defection of his people Moses had dashed to the ground the two stone tables on which the words of God had been written, and it was needful that they should be replaced. Once more, therefore, Moses left the camp and sought solitary communion with Yahveh on the summit of Sinai. Two fresh tables of stone were hewn, and with these he ascended the mountain.

We must not picture to ourselves heavy stelæ of stone such as the kings and princes of Egypt delighted to set up in their tombs and temples, or the ‘great slab’ which Isaiah was bidden to engrave (Isa. viii. 1). They were rather like the small alabaster slabs found in the ark of the Assyrian temple at Balawât, which measure only twelve and a half inches in length by eight in width and two and a half inches in thickness, and nevertheless contain a long and valuable text. They were, in fact, stone tablets cut in imitation of the clay tablets which served as books in the Asiatic world of the Exodus, and, like the latter, were probably inscribed with cuneiform characters. That these characters were used for ‘the language of Canaan’ we know from the existence of two seals of the age of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, now in the possession of M. de Clercq, which record the names of two Sidonians.[210] It is probable that the first draft of the Ten Commandments was also in the cuneiform script.

The book of Exodus ends fitly with the conclusion of the legislation which was promulgated from Mount Sinai and with the building of the tabernacle. Henceforward Yahveh was to reveal Himself to His people, not amid the clouds of a mountain in the wilderness, but in the sanctuary which they had raised in His honour. The first stage in the education of Israel had been completed; the Israelites had become a nation with a national God and a national sanctuary. Henceforth the sanctuary was to be the centre of their religious faith, the place where the law and judgment of God were to be declared, and to which the tribes were to resort that they might ask counsel from Him. The tabernacle, nomad though it still was, like the tribes themselves, had taken the place of ‘the mount of God,’ and with the legislation of Leviticus a new book of the Pentateuch begins.

We are not to suppose that this legislation has descended to us from the age of Moses without addition and change. Such a belief would be contrary to the history of other religious law-books, or indeed to historical probability. As the utterances of the Hebrew prophets were modified or enlarged according to the circumstances of the successive ages to which they were applied, so too the Mosaic legislation must have undergone revision and enlargement. Laws and regulations which suited the life in the desert needed adaptation to the changed conditions of life in Canaan; tribes fresh from their servitude in Egypt required different guidance from that required by a nation of conquerors; and the details of a legislation which was adapted to the period of Moses would have been wholly unsuited to the period of the Judges, and still more to the period of the Kings. So far as the change and modifications are concerned, which all institutions in this world must necessarily undergo, the Mosaic legislation was a matter of growth. But it was the form and details that changed, not the substance of the legislation. The spirit and conceptions of the legislator had imprinted themselves too indelibly upon it ever to be obliterated. The reiteration of the same law in various forms, and the confused arrangement of many of them, may indeed show that later hands have been at work, but in essence and origin they remain his. The book of Leviticus, modernised though it may be, nevertheless goes back to the age of Moses.

Even in the age of Moses many of its regulations were not new. We find their parallels in Babylonia and Canaan, and they had doubtless long been among the unwritten institutions of Israel. But Moses gave them a new sanction and a new adaptation. The Israelites must have had priests like the nations round about them; but it was Moses who defined the priestly character of the sons of Aaron, and consecrated his own tribe to the service of Yahveh. If Yahveh was the national God of Israel, He was also in a special way the tribal God of Levi.

We still know too little about the details of Babylonian ritual to be able to compare it with the religious institutions of Israel. We know, however, that the peace-offerings and trespass-offerings of the Mosaic Law were represented in it, that even the heave-offerings found in it their counterpart, and that solemn fasts and days of atonement were observed in Babylonia and Assyria as well as among the Israelites. In Babylonia, too, a distinction was made between clean and unclean animals, and, as in Israel (Lev. xxi. 17-23), none who was maimed or diseased was allowed to minister to the gods. Purification with water, moreover, played much the same part in Babylonian ritual that it played in the ritual of the Israelites, and tithes were exacted for the support of the service in the temples.

Similar regulations prevailed in Canaan, as we may learn from the Phœnician sacrificial tariffs found at Carthage and Marseilles. Both are mutilated, but the missing portions of the one can to a large extent be supplied from the other. The text thus obtained is as follows:—

‘In the temple of Baal the following tariff of offerings shall be observed which was prescribed in the time of the judge ...-Baal, the son of Bod-Tanit, the son of Bod-Ashmun, and in the time of Halzi-Baal, the judge, the son of Bod-Ashmun the son of Halzi-Baal, and their comrades. For an ox as a full-offering, whether it be a prayer-offering or a full thank-offering, the priests shall receive ten shekels of silver for each beast, and if it be a full-offering, the priests shall receive besides this three hundred shekels’ weight of flesh. And for a prayer-offering they shall receive besides the small joints (?) and the roast (?), but the skin and the haunches and the feet and the rest of the flesh shall belong to the offerer. For a bullock which has horns, but is not yet broken in and made to serve, or for a ram, as a full-offering, whether it be a prayer-offering or a full thank-offering, the priests shall receive five shekels of silver for each beast, and if it be a full-offering they shall receive besides this one hundred and fifty shekels’ weight of flesh; and for a prayer-offering the small joints (?) and the roast, but the skin and the haunches and the feet and the rest of the flesh shall belong to the offerer. For a sheep or a goat as a full-offering, whether it be a prayer-offering or a full thank-offering, the priests shall receive one shekel of silver and two _zar_ for each beast; and in the case of a prayer-offering they shall have besides this the small joints (?) and the roast (?), but the skin and the haunches and the feet and the rest of the flesh shall belong to the offerer. For a lamb or a kid or a fawn as a full-offering, whether it be a prayer-offering or a full thank-offering, the priests shall receive three-fourths of a shekel of silver and two _zar_ for each beast; and in the case of a prayer-offering they shall have besides this the small joints (?) and the roast (?), but the skin and the haunches and the feet and the rest of the flesh shall belong to the offerer. For a bird, whether wild or tame, as a full-offering, whether it be _shetseph_ or _khazuth_, the priests shall receive three-fourths of a shekel of silver and two _zar_ for each bird, and [a certain amount of flesh besides]. For a bird, or for the offering of the firstborn of an animal, or for a meal-offering, or for an offering with oil, the priests shall receive ten pieces of gold for each.... In the case of every prayer-offering which is offered to the gods, the priests shall receive the small joints (?) and the roast (?); and the prayer-offering ... for a cake and for milk and for fat, and for every offering which is offered without blood.... For every offering which is brought by a poor man in cattle or birds, the priests shall receive nothing.... Anything leprous or scabby or lean is forbidden, and no one as regards that which he offers shall taste of the blood of the dead. The tariff for each offering shall be according to that which is prescribed in this publication.... As for every offering which is not prescribed in this table, and which is not made according to the regulations which have been published in the time of ...-Baal the son of Bod-Tanit, and of Bod-Ashmun the son of Halzi-Baal, and of their comrades, every priest who accepts the offering which is not included in that which is prescribed in this table shall be punished.... As for the property of the offerer who does not discharge his debt for his offering [it shall be taken from him].’[211]

The general resemblances between these regulations and those of the Levitical law are obvious. In both we have the same kind of sacrifices and offerings—the ox, the sheep and the goat, the lamb and kid, birds and cakes, meal and oil. Silver shekels were to be paid to the priests, like the silver shekels of the sanctuary exacted in certain cases from the Israelite (Lev. v. 15, xxvii. 25), and the blood and the fat were to be offered to the gods. The necessities of the poor man were remembered as they were in the Levitical law (Lev. v. 7, xii. 8, xiv. 21), and whatever was ‘leprous or scabby or lean’ was forbidden to be brought to the altar. The firstborn could be claimed by Baal as they were claimed by Yahveh, and the offerer was not permitted to taste of the blood of the slain beast (compare Lev. vii. 26, 27). The ‘full-offerings’ of the Phœnician tariffs mean that the whole of the victim had been given to the gods, and so correspond with the burnt sacrifices of the Mosaic Code. It is unfortunate that we cannot fix with certainty the exact signification of the words denoting the parts of the animal which were the due of the priests, and consequently cannot be sure whether or not they answer to the breast and shoulder of the peace-offering, which under the Levitical legislation were assigned to the sons of Aaron (Lev. vii. 33, 34).