CHAPTER III

THE EXODUS OUT OF EGYPT

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.

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).

It is true that the tariffs of Carthage and Marseilles belong to a late period. But they embody regulations and usages which were common to the Semitic world of Western Asia, as we may gather from a comparison of them with the ritual of Babylonia, and which therefore must have been—at least in substance—of great antiquity. Two conclusions result from this fact. On the one hand the Levitical legislation cannot have been the invention of the Exilic age, as some adventurous critics have believed; on the other hand, it is based on customs and ideas which must have been prevalent in Israel long before the birth of Moses. The Hebrew legislator did but develop, modify, and define existing rites; the Levitical Code is not a new creation, but a body of religious and ritual laws which has been formed deliberately and with individual effort out of older customs and habits of thought. Doubtless there are laws and regulations which were the immediate creation of the lawgiver; from time to time new cases arose for which special legislation was needed, and of which the cases of Nadab and Abihu (Lev. x. 1-3), of the son of Shelomith and the Egyptian (Lev. xxiv. 10-16), and of the daughters of Zelophehad (Numb. xxvii. 1-11) are examples. To assume that such cases originated in the laws which they illustrated, and not the reverse, is a gratuitous supposition which is contradicted by the history of modern European law.[212]

Whether the Day of Atonement, the Feast of Trumpets on the first of each seventh month and the Year of Jubilee were also new creations of the lawgiver, may be questioned. The special legislation connected with them, as well as their association with the Exodus out of Egypt, was certainly peculiar to the Levitical code, but the same is true of the three older feasts of the Semitic calendar. These too were made to illustrate the events of Israelitish history, and new regulations were laid down for their observance. The Day of Atonement, however, had its counterpart in Babylonia and Assyria. There also in periods of danger or distress, days of humiliation and fasting were prescribed, and prayers and offerings were made to the gods that they might forgive the sins of the people. When at the beginning of Esar-haddon’s reign Assyria was threatened by the Kimmerian invasion, ‘religious ordinances and holy days’ were proclaimed by the priests for ‘a hundred days and a hundred nights,’ and the sun-god was besought to remove the sin of his worshippers.[213] So, again, after the suppression of the Babylonian revolt, Assur-bani-pal tells us that ‘by the command of the prophets I purified their sanctuaries and cleaned their streets which had been defiled. Their wrathful gods and angry goddesses I tranquillised with prayers and penitential hymns. Their daily sacrifice, which had been discontinued, I restored in peace and established again as it had been before.’ The Feast of Trumpets reminds us that in Babylonia the first day of each month was kept as a Sabbath, and the Babylonian analogy is still more manifest in the case of the Feast of Pentecost, on ‘the morrow after the seventh Sabbath,’ after the offering of the firstfruits. This ‘seventh Sabbath’ is the Babylonian Sabbath, on the 19th of the month, forty-nine days after the first Sabbath of the preceding month. The Year of Jubilee was a Babylonian institution of exceeding antiquity. We learn from classical writers[214] that once each year in the month of July the feast of Sakea was held at Babylon, when the slave changed places with his master, and for five days lived and was clothed as a free man. We can now carry the history of the institution back to the age of the third dynasty of Ur. Gudea, the high-priest of Lagas, B.C. 2700, states in his inscriptions that after he had finished building the temple of E-ninnu, he celebrated a festival; and ‘for seven days no obedience was exacted; the female slave became the equal of her mistress, and the male slave the equal of his master; the subject became the equal of the chief; and all that was evil was removed from the temple.’[215]

The Year of Jubilee, it is clear, was but an adaptation and improvement of one of the oldest institutions of Babylonian culture. To assert that, together with the other holy days of the Levitical Code, it was borrowed from Babylonia in the age of the Exile, is to assert what not only cannot be proved, but is in the highest degree improbable. In the age of the Exile, Babylonia had become a second Egypt to the Jews, and the religious party among them regarded with abhorrence all that was specifically Babylonian. The feasts consecrated to ‘Bel and Nebo,’ the rites associated with the worship of the Babylonian gods, were the last things that would be adopted or adapted by a pious Jew. Moreover, we now know that the culture which had been carried from Chaldæa to the west long before the period of the Exodus included the gods and sacred rites of the Babylonians. So distinctive a characteristic of it as ‘the feast of Sakea,’ or days of prayer and humiliation for ‘the removal of sin,’ would not be forgotten when Anu and Moloch and Ashtoreth and Nin-ip made their way to Canaan.

There are passages in the Levitical Code which look back very distinctly to Egypt. Thus marriage with a sister, whether a full sister or a half-sister, is forbidden (Lev. xviii. 9). This was one of ‘the doings of the land of Egypt’ (Lev. xviii. 3) which had been consecrated there both by the civil and by the religious law, and continued in force down to the time of the Roman conquest. So, too, tattooing the flesh, and shaving the head or lacerating the flesh for the dead, were prohibited (Lev. xix. 27, 28, xxi. 5), all of them practices which are still common in the valley of the Nile. But, on the whole, it is remarkable how entirely Egypt is ignored. The Mosaic legislation seems intentionally to close its eyes to all things Egyptian, and, wherever it is possible, to make enactments which tacitly contradict or set aside the beliefs and customs of Egypt. Even the doctrine of the resurrection, as Bishop Warburton long ago observed, is carefully dropped out of sight. There is no reference to it, no sign that obedience to the laws of Yahveh will benefit the Israelite in any other world than this. On any theory of the age and authorship of the Levitical law such a silence is remarkable. Indeed, if the law is as late as the epoch of the Babylonish exile the silence would be more than remarkable, since the doctrine of a future life and of the power of the god Merodach to raise the dead to life had been firmly established for centuries among the Babylonians. A belief in the resurrection, or at all events, in a life beyond the grave, could not but have betrayed itself in the atmosphere of the Exile. For those, however, who had the Egyptian house of bondage immediately behind them, and who feared lest the tribes in the desert might again lust after the flesh-pots and green pastures of the Delta, the silence is intelligible. The doctrine was closely associated with Egyptian idolatry, with Osiris and Anubis, with the assessors of the dead, and with the pictured polytheism of the Egyptian monuments.

The Levitical legislation was accompanied by a census of the people. What credit we are to attach to the numbers which have been handed down is a question that has been much debated. On the one hand it has been shown that the vast multitude presupposed by them could not have moved about in the desert, as it is represented to have done, and that many of the regulations in the Levitical Code could not have been carried out with a nomad population of over two millions.[216] On the other hand, the 600,000 men above twenty years of age who were ‘able to go forth to war’ are specified again and again, and the same number is implied in all the calculations that are made of the numerical strength of Israel. It is also the sum of the numbers assigned to the fighting men of the individual tribes. Throughout the history the ciphers are consistent with one another. If the number is exaggerated, it it is an exaggeration which has been consistently adhered to. We must either accept it, or believe that it belongs to an artificial system which has been framed with deliberate intention. But the same may be said of the chronology of the early patriarchs as well as of the chronology of the kings of Israel and Judah, and in both instances we know that the system is wrong. In the case of the chronology of the early patriarchs, indeed, there are at least three rival systems, all equally complete and self-coherent, while the chronology of the kings involves such hopeless anachronisms as have long since caused it to be rejected by the historian. The difficulties presented by the census of the Israelites in the wilderness are similar in character to the anachronisms presented by the chronology of the kings, and the same reasons which lead us to reject the one ought equally to induce us to reject the other.

Nevertheless, the chronology of the kings is not wholly incorrect. The length of reign assigned to the several kings is usually right. It is only the system into which it has been fitted that is at fault. And probably this is also the case as regards the numbering of the tribes of Israel. It may be that the 8580 Levites and the 22,273 firstborn males are authentic, and that the increase of the population by 3550 (Exod. xxxviii. 26; Numb. i. 46) a few months after the flight from Egypt, and its decrease by 1820 at the end of the wanderings (Numb. xxvi. 51), rest on a foundation of fact. Even the traditional number of 600,000 may have better support than its being a multiple of the Babylonian _soss_ and _ner_.[217] Perhaps it originally represented the whole body of fugitives from Egypt.

At all events, some light may be thrown on the matter by a comparison of the numbers given in the Pentateuch with those of the Libyans and their allies as recorded in the inscription of Meneptah. Of the Libyans, 6365 men were slain and 230 (including 12 women) were captured; of their allies, 2370 fell on the field of battle, and 9146 were taken prisoners, while no less than 9111 bronze swords were taken from the Maxyes. We gather from the history of the battle that few, if any, of the enemy escaped. The whole force of fighting men, therefore, would not have amounted to very much over 25,000. And yet this was one of the most formidable hosts that had invaded Egypt; and its male population had not been decimated by the tyranny of an Egyptian king. On the other hand, a population of 2,000,000 in the land of Goshen is inconceivable, and there would hardly have been room in the eastern Delta for 600,000 able-bodied brickmakers. The Sweet-water Canal was dug by only 25,000 fellahin, though 250,000 worked at the Mahmudîya Canal, and for some years 20,000 fresh labourers were sent monthly to excavate the Suez Canal. Even in the desert, moreover, the Egyptians required a considerable number of troops to guard the serfs or convicts who worked for them. At Hammamât, for example, in the reign of Ramses IV., the 2000 bondservants of the temples who effected the transport of the stone were attended by 5000 soldiers, 800 mercenaries, and 200 officers; and provisions for this large body of men were carried across the desert in ten waggons, each drawn by six pairs of oxen, and laden with bread, meat, and cakes.[218] For 600,000 Israelites the whole Egyptian army would not have sufficed. According to Manetho, the Hyksos, when driven from Egypt, did not number more than 240,000 in all.

We cannot, then, look upon the numbers that have come down to us as exact. The occupants of the Israelitish camp, continually under the personal supervision of Moses, and constantly required to assemble before the tabernacle, could not have been a very large body of men. Had the fighting population amounted to anything like the number recorded, there would have been no need of avoiding ‘the way of the land of the Philistines,’ lest the people should ‘see war,’ or of doubting the issue of the combat at Rephidim with the Bedâwin tribes.

The year after the flight from Egypt, Sinai, ‘the mount of God,’ was left behind. The service that Yahveh required had been performed, the legislation revealed there had been completed, and the tabernacle and ark had been made. Israel had henceforth another religious centre than the sacred mountain of the desert, which had now fulfilled its part in the religious training of the tribes. Canaan, and not the wilderness, was the destined home of the descendants of Jacob, and to Canaan the ark and the tabernacle were to accompany them.

The guiding column of cloud moved accordingly from the wilderness of Sinai to that of Paran (Numb. x. 12). This is in harmony with the rest of Old Testament geography. In the blessing of Moses (Deut. xxxiii. 2) it is said that when God came from Sinai, ‘He shined forth from the mount of Paran,’ and in Habakkuk (iii. 3) the mount of Paran takes the place of Sinai itself. Paran, in fact, was the desert which formed not only the southern boundary of Canaan, but also the western frontier of Edom. The real Mount Sinai of Hebrew geography, therefore, was upon the Edomite border; and since Paran was the home of Ishmael (Gen. xxi. 21), it is not surprising that Esau should have taken one of Ishmael’s daughters to wife (Gen. xxxvi. 3).

Before Sinai was left, however, Hobab the Midianite, the brother-in-law of Moses, proposed to return to his own land. Sinai adjoined Midian, if indeed it was not included in Midianitish territory, and here, therefore, if at all, it was needful for the Midianite chief to quit the Israelitish camp. But his knowledge of the district was too valuable to be lost, and Moses persuaded him to remain with the Israelitish tribes and guide them to the places where they should encamp. The Kenites in later days traced their descent to him (Judg. i. 16, iv. 11), and the rocky nest of the Kenites was visible from the heights of Moab, perhaps in Petra itself (Numb. xxiv. 21).

The geographical details which follow are confused. In the itinerary (Numb. xxxiii. 15, 16) the camp is transported at once from the wilderness of Sinai to Kibroth-hattaavah. In the narrative, however, we are told that the people first went ‘three days’ journey,’ and then rested at Taberah, which seems to be identified with Kibroth-hattaavah; from thence they travelled to Hazeroth, and then pitched their tents ‘in the wilderness of Paran.’ On the other hand, the book of Deuteronomy (ix. 22) distinguishes between Taberah and Kibroth-hattaavah, and interpolates Massah between them, which, according to Exod. xvii. 7, was visited before Sinai. If we follow the official record, we must suppose that the incident connected with Taberah has been inserted in the wrong place, or else that Taberah and Kibroth-hattaavah are, like Massah and Meribah, one and the same. At all events, all these encampments must have lain on the outskirts of the desert of Paran. Hazeroth, ‘the enclosures,’ was a common name for the Bedâwin encampments in the desert south of Judah, and the Hazeroth mentioned here is doubtless that of which we read in Deut. i. 1. It lay near Paran on the borders of the plains of Moab.

Taberah, it was said, derived its name from the fire which had here consumed some of the people, while Kibroth-hattaavah marked the ‘graves’ of the murmurers who had died from a surfeit of quails. Similar flights of quails still visit the Egyptian Delta in the early spring, when the sky is sometimes overshadowed by myriads of birds. Hazeroth was remembered for the rebellion of Aaron and Miriam against their brother Moses, and the punishment that Miriam the prophetess had in consequence to endure. The authority of Moses was disputed because he had married an Ethiopian wife. It is the only passage in the Pentateuch where this ‘Cushite’ wife is alluded to; elsewhere we hear only of Zipporah the Midianitess. But it points to a traditional recollection of the days when Moses was still Messu, the Egyptian prince, and when, like that other Messu, his contemporary, he might have been the Egyptian governor of Ethiopia.[219] The objection to the Ethiopian wife came but ill from Aaron, whose grandson bore the Egyptian name of Phinehas, Pi-nehasi, ‘the negro.’ But Yahveh declared that the Cushite affinities of Moses were no bar to his being a true servant of the God of Israel and the divinely-appointed leader of the tribes. To him Yahveh had revealed His will openly, and as it were face to face; not, as to other prophets, in waking visions and dreams.

In the heart of the wilderness of Paran was the venerable sanctuary of Kadesh-barnea. Centuries before, the army of Chedor-laomer had swept through it, slaughtering its Amalekite inhabitants, and drinking the water of En-Mishpat, ‘the Spring of Judgment,’ where the shêkhs of the desert had given laws to their people. Its site has been found again in our own days by Dr. John Rowlands and Dr. Clay Trumbull.[220] The spring of clear water which fills the oasis with life and verdure is still called ’Ain Qadîs, the ‘Spring of Kadesh.’ It rises at the foot of a limestone cliff, in which a two-chambered tomb has been cut in early times, in the hollow of an amphitheatre of hills. The hills form a block of mountains which occupy the central part of the desert, midway between El-Arîsh and Mount Hor, and more than forty miles to the south of Sebaita, the supposed site of Hormah.

Kadesh, the ‘Sanctuary,’ was destined to be the second resting-place and scene of Israelitish legislation. The work which had been left unfinished at Sinai was completed here. The will of Yahveh, which had first been declared on the summit of the mountain, was now to be more fully unfolded among the soft surroundings of the oasis in the valley. Sinai and Kadesh-barnea were the two schools of the desert in which Israel was trained.

But Kadesh-barnea had other advantages as well. It was on the high-road from the desert to Canaan, it commanded the approach to the latter country, and nevertheless within its rocky barriers the Israelites were safe from attack. Here, therefore, at Kadesh-barnea, the first preparations were made for the invasion of Palestine. Twelve scouts were sent, in Egyptian fashion, to explore the land, and bring back a report of its capabilities for defence. They made their way as far as Hebron,[221] where a popular etymology derived the name of the valley of Eshcol from the cluster of grapes they had cut there.[222] But the report with which they returned was discouraging. The Amorites were tall and strong; by their side the children of Israel appeared but as grasshoppers; while the cities in which they dwelt were ‘very great,’ and walled, as it were, to heaven. It was folly for the desert tribes to dream of assaulting them; that would need the disciplined army of a Pharaoh, with its chariots and horses and machines for scaling the walls. ‘We be not able to go up against the people,’ they declared, ‘for they are stronger than we.’

Here, then, was an end to all the promises of Moses. The Promised Land was in sight, and they were excluded from it for ever. ‘Let us make another captain,’ they cried, ‘and return to Egypt.’ The leader who had brought them thus far had failed on the very threshold of their goal. The Hyksos, when they forsook Egypt, had found a refuge in Canaan; but the barren wastes of the wilderness were all that the Israelites could expect. It was little wonder that a rebellion broke out in the Israelitish camp, and that the supporters of Moses were threatened with stoning.

But experience soon showed that the Israelitish tribes were as yet no match for the people whose possessions they desired to seize. Despite the report of the spies, they climbed the cliff which formed the northern boundary of the oasis, and attempted to force their way beyond the frontiers of Canaan. But their enemies proved the stronger. When Seti I. had attacked the frontier fortress of Canaan, not far from Hebron, he had found it defended by Shasu or Bedâwin, and so, too, the Israelites now found themselves confronted not by the Canaanites only, but also by their Amalekite or Bedâwin allies. The assailants were utterly defeated and ‘discomfited even unto Hormah.’

Hormah was more usually known as Zephath (Judg. i. 17), and its site must be looked for south of Tell ’Arad. It was one of the cities of Palestine which Thothmes III. claims to have captured, and it lay towards the southern end of the Dead Sea, on the road to Hazezon Tamar (Gen. xiv. 7). The mention of it makes it clear that the Israelitish invasion of Canaan had been a serious attempt. The invaders had marched along the same military road as that followed by Chedor-laomer, and had penetrated as far as the hill country of what was afterwards Judah. But they did not succeed in getting further, and their shattered relics must have made their way with difficulty back to the fastness of Kadesh. The first attempt to conquer Palestine had failed.[223]

The disaster was never forgotten. It was some years before the Israelites again attempted to cross the Canaanitish boundary, and when they did so it was from a different quarter. A new generation had to grow up before they were strong enough to renew the attack; indeed, it is probable that most of the fighting men had been lost in the earlier expedition. When at last Israel felt able once more to march against Canaan, it was already in possession of land on the east of the Jordan, but its great ‘captain’ and lawgiver was dead. Israelitish history found its leader to the conquest of Palestine not in Moses, but in Joshua.

The history of the period that followed the disaster left little that was worth recording. The chief incidents of the life in the desert had been crowded into the first few months of the wanderings. But it was during this later period that trouble arose with Moses’ own tribesmen, the Levites. It was again a question of authority. The democratic spirit of the Israelites resented claims to superior power; and just as Aaron and Miriam had disputed the authority of Moses, so now the Levites disputed that of Aaron. It was a dispute which, if we are to believe modern criticism, was continued into later Jewish history, when it ended, as it did in the desert, in the triumph of the high-priest.

Aaron and his sons, like Moses, were at the outset Levites, and as such doubtless had no claim to superior sanctity and power. But circumstances had placed them at the head of their tribe; and when that tribe became the ministers of the sanctuary, Aaron and his descendants necessarily occupied the foremost place in its services. They were in a special sense the guardians of the ark, and thus alone privileged to enter the Holy of Holies, where Yahveh revealed Himself above the cherubim. As long as there was but one sanctuary, it was easy to maintain the distinction between the priest of the house of Aaron and the ordinary Levite. But with the conquest of Canaan all this was changed. Sanctuaries were multiplied all over the land; the old high-places became seats of the worship of Yahveh, and there were rival centres of religious authority, like that of Baal-berith at Shechem, or that of the graven image at Dan (Judg. xviii. 14, etc.). Local temples or tabernacles took the place of the one that was hallowed by the presence of the ark, and the line of Aaron fell into the background. In the age of national trouble and disintegration which preceded the accession of Saul, the character of the high-priestly family itself had much to do with the loss of its power and influence. Eli, its representative at Shiloh, was old and feeble, and his sons set at defiance the Mosaic law, which required that Yahveh’s portion of the sacrifice should be burned on the altar before the priests received their share, and so they made ‘the offering of the Lord’ to be ‘abhorred.’ The capture of the ark by the Philistines and the massacre of the priests at Nob by order of Saul completed the dissolution of the high-priestly authority; and when the temple at Jerusalem was built under Solomon, a new branch of the family of Aaron was appointed to minister in it, and his descendants became little more than hereditary court-chaplains. It has even been doubted whether there was any high-priest, properly so called, under the kings; if there were, he had been divested of the power and position which had been given him by the Levitical law.

To conclude, however, as has sometimes been done by modern criticism, that because the priests of Solomon’s temple were no longer the high-priests of the Pentateuchal law, therefore there had been no such high-priests at all, is contrary to the evidence of archæology. Monumental discovery has disclosed the fact that among the Semitic kinsmen of the Israelites as well as in Chaldæa the high-priest preceded the king. Not to speak of the _patesis_ or high-priests of the Babylonian cities who exercised royal sway within the limits of their territories, like the Popes within the limits of the Romagna, the earliest rulers both of Assyria and of Saba or Sheba in Southern Arabia were high-priests. The Assyrian kings followed the high-priests of the god Assur, and the Makârib or ‘high-priests’ of Saba came before the kings. Israel also had the same experience. The Israelitish kings appeared at a comparatively late period on the scene of Hebrew history, and Saul was preceded by the high-priest Eli.

In the book of Deuteronomy, it is true, we do not find the distinction between ‘the priests, the sons of Aaron,’ and the rest of the Levites that is made in the Levitical law. Here the priests are all alike called Levites; it is not ‘the priests, the sons of Aaron,’ but ‘the priests the Levites’ who are appointed to perform the highest offices of the sanctuary. How far the phraseology is due to a different conception of the Mosaic law, or how far it testifies to an older usage of language, is a question which need not concern us; what is important to observe is that the difference of expression is linguistic and not historical. Historically all the priests were Levites, though from the outset some of them must have been assigned higher positions than others, and have been invested with more sacred functions. The Levitical law draws the distinction which the book of Deuteronomy is not so careful to do. In fact, there was not the same necessity for doing so in the case of the Deuteronomic retrospect.

The tabernacle had been constructed, its services arranged, and the grades and duties of its ministers appointed. Now, therefore, disappointed in their hope of invading Canaan from the south, the Israelites settled themselves tranquilly at Kadesh, in the heart of the wilderness of Zin, and slowly developed into a strong and united community. Here it was, by the waters of En-Mishpat, that the legislation of Moses was completed, and the undisciplined horde of fugitive serfs from Egypt was moulded into a formidable band of warriors knit together by a common religion and worship, and continually gathering increased confidence in its own strength.[224]

How long the Israelites remained in their desert fastness we do not know. A time came when they once more resumed their wanderings, or at all events a portion of them must have done so. The Itinerary in Numb. xxxiii. gives a long list of their encampments before they again found themselves in the oasis of Kadesh. One of the places at which they rested was Mount Shapher, another was Moseroth, of which we hear in the book of Deuteronomy (x. 6). Moseroth was in the territory of the Horite tribe of Beni-Yaakan,[225] and it was from the Beeroth or ‘Wells’ of the Beni-Yaakan—Hashmonah, as it is called in the Itinerary—that they had made their way to it.

At Mosera or Moseroth, according to Deuteronomy, Aaron died, and was succeeded in his office by his son Eleazar. The statement, however, is not easily reconcileable with what we are told in the book of Numbers. There it is said that the death of the high-priest took place on the summit of Mount Hor after the departure from Kadesh.[226] The fact that Gudgodah was also called Hor-hagidgad, ‘the mountain of clefts,’ may have been the cause of the transference.

But it must be remembered that Kadesh was merely the headquarters of Israel during its weary years of waiting in the wilderness. The scanty notice of the unsuccessful invasion of Southern Palestine shows that it was only the camp as a whole which remained fixed there. Like the Bedâwin of to-day, portions of the tribes made distant expeditions, and the Itinerary may relate rather to their encampments than to that of the stationary part of the people. Kadesh was a sort of centre from which fragments of the main body could be sent forth to scour the frontiers of Seir and Edom, or to encamp at the foot of Ezion-geber on the Yâm Sûph.

In the book of Numbers (xxi. 14, 15) there is a quotation from ‘the Book of the Wars of the Lord,’ one of the old documents on which the history of Israel in the wilderness is based. The introductory words are unintelligible as they stand, thus testifying to the antiquity of the passage; all that can be made out of them is that they relate not only to the struggle between Israel and the Amorites at ‘the brooks of Arnon,’ but also to a previous war carried on by the Israelites ‘in Suphah,’ near the gulf of Aqaba.[227] Here the Israelites would have been on the borders of Edom, if indeed they were not in Edom itself; and it is therefore noticeable that the Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramses III., whose reign coincided with the period of the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert, declares that he had ‘smitten the Shasu (or Bedâwin) tribes of Seir and plundered their tents’ (_ohélu_). Ramses III. was the only Pharaoh of Egypt who had ventured to attack the Edomite Bedâwin in their mountain strongholds; while Canaan and the plateau east of the Jordan had been Egyptian provinces the inhabitants of Mount Seir had retained their independence. The synchronism, therefore, of this Egyptian expedition against, not the Edomites only, but ‘the Bedâwin of Seir’ and the war in which Israel was engaged ‘in Suphah,’ is, at least, worthy of notice. It may be that part of the training undergone by the Israelites in the desert for their future conquest of Canaan was the help they had rendered their kinsfolk of Edom in their contest with the old taskmasters of the Hebrew tribes.

However this may be, of the three leaders who had brought Israel out of the house of bondage, Moses alone survived the long sojourn at Kadesh. Miriam had died there; the death of Aaron also, if we may trust Deuteronomy, had taken place before the final departure from the great desert sanctuary. In any case, it had happened in sight of Kadesh, and before the march had commenced which was to lead the Israelitish tribes to the Promised Land. The time had now arrived when Israel felt strong enough once more to attempt its conquest; not, this time, by the road through the mountains of the south along which Chedor-laomer had marched to Kadesh, but from the plateau eastward of the Jordan where the kindred nations of Moab and Ammon had already established themselves. Here, too, the Israelites made their first permanent settlements in the land which they had marked out for their own.

The Canaanite population east of the Jordan was sparse and weak compared with that to the west. It had been further weakened by foreign conquest. Between the fall of the Egyptian empire and the Israelitish invasion the Amorites under Sihon had formed a kingdom and occupied the territory of Moab as far south as the Arnon. As in the age of the eighteenth dynasty, so too under the kings of the nineteenth dynasty, Egyptian rule extended over what is called in one of the Tel el-Amarna tablets ‘the field of Bashan.’ The so-called Sakhret Eyyûb, or ‘Stone of Job,’ a little to the north of Tell ’Ashtereh, eastward of the Jordan, has been discovered by Dr. Schumacher to be a monument of Ramses II.[228] The figure of the Pharaoh is engraved upon it, with his name beside him, as well as the figure of a deity who wears the crown of Osiris, and is represented with a full face, while his Canaanitish name is written in hieroglyphs.[229] At Luxor[230] Ramses claims Moab among his conquests, and we may therefore gather that up to the time of the Exodus the authority of Egypt had been restored throughout the country east of the Jordan. But the Libyan invasion shattered the strength of Egypt, and long before the close of the nineteenth dynasty its possessions in Palestine passed from it forever. This is precisely the period to which the Pentateuch refers the kingdom of Og in Bashan and the conquests of Sihon in Moab, and the Biblical and monumental evidence thus stand in complete agreement.

Moses had requested permission from the Edomite king to pass through his dominions. The Song of Moses (Exod. xv. 15) still speaks of the _alûphim_, or ‘dukes,’ of Edom, who had originally governed the country; but while the Israelites had been lingering in the desert, the ‘dukes’ had made way for an elective monarchy. The dissolution of the Egyptian power may have had something to do with this; possibly the invasion of Mount Seir by Ramses III. had produced the same result in Edom that the Philistine invasion produced among the Israelites, and had obliged them to elect a king. At all events, the first king of Edom, we read, was ‘Bela, the son of Beor.’ Bela, however, is merely a contracted form of Balaam, and in the first Edomite king we must therefore see Balaam, the son of Beor. What relation he bore to the seer from Pethor will have to be considered later on.[231]

It is not surprising that the Edomite king refused the request that had been made to him. To have admitted within his frontiers a large body of emigrants like the Israelites, many of whom were armed, might have been as dangerous as the passage of the Crusaders through the Eastern Empire proved to Constantinople. The Israelites were not strong enough to force their way through a hostile country, and very reluctantly, therefore, they once more turned southward to the Gulf of Aqaba, and from thence marched northward again to the east of Edom. Their route brought them to the southeastern part of Moab.

The people, we are told, bitterly complained of the length of ‘the way.’ It was not strange. The Promised Land, so constantly in sight, seemed always to recede as soon as it was approached. They had vainly attempted to enter it from the south; the Philistines kept garrison in the cities on the Mediterranean coast; and now, when a third and last mode of approach was undertaken, their brethren of Edom closed the path. The road, too, which they were thus forced to adopt led them through a desert, which the Assyrian king Esar-haddon describes as a land of drought, inhabited only by ‘snakes and scorpions, which filled the ground like locusts.’[232] These were the ‘fiery serpents’ that bit the Israelites and increased their miseries. A memorial of their sufferings lasted down to the age of Hezekiah. The brazen ‘seraph’ or ‘fiery serpent’ which had been wrought by order of Moses, and planted on the top of a pole, was religiously preserved in the chief sanctuary of the nation. Incense was burned before it, for it had been the means of preserving the people from the fiery poison of the snakes. But the idolatry of which it was the object brought about its destruction. The relic, which had been spared by the earlier kings and priests of Judah, was destroyed by Hezekiah, who realised at last that it was but ‘a piece of brass.’ It is true that doubts have been cast upon its having actually been a monument of the life in the wilderness; but it is difficult for the historian to understand how a modern critic can be better informed on such a point than the contemporaries of Hezekiah.[233]

Zalmonah, Punon, and Oboth were the next stages on the journey after Mount Hor. Then came Iye-ha-Abârim, ‘the Ruins of the Hebrews’—a name, it may be, which contained a reminiscence of the settlement of the Israelites in the country.[234] Iye-ha-Abârim was in the plain east of Moab, under the shadow of the mountain-range of Abarim. Then the stream of the Zered was crossed, and the emigrants found themselves in Moab. The banks of the Arnon were the next resting-place.

The nation retained but little recollection of the dreary years that had been passed in the wilderness. A few incidents alone were recorded which had broken the monotony of their desert life. But here, on the verge of Canaan and of conquest, the national consciousness awakened into new life. The song was handed down which had been sung when at some station in the desert the ground had been pierced and water found. ‘Spring up, O well!’ it said; ‘sing ye unto it. O well that hast been dug by princes, that hast been pierced by the nobles of the people, by (the direction of) the lawgiver, with their staves!’ Similar songs, according to Professor Goldziher, were sung in old days by the Arab kinsmen of the Israelites when they too dug wells in the desert and the refreshing water bubbled up from below.[235]

Arnon was now the boundary between Moab and the new kingdom of Sihon the Amorite. Sihon refused permission to the Israelites to pass through his territories, along the ‘royal highway,’ and endeavoured to stop their advance. But the tribes were no longer the undisciplined rabble who had fled from the Canaanites of Zephath, and the result of the struggle was the complete overthrow of the Amorite forces. The district between the Arnon and the Jabbok, which had been taken by Sihon from ‘the former king of Moab,’ was occupied by the Israelites, who accordingly established themselves midway between Moab and Ammon. It is on the occasion of this conquest that the Hebrew historian has preserved the fragment of an Amorite song of triumph which had celebrated the capture of Ar, the Moabite capital, and which was now embodied by the Israelites in a similar song of triumph for their own victory over Sihon.

Ammon was too strong to be attacked (Numb. xxi. 24), but ‘Moses sent to spy out Jaazer,’ not far from Rabbah, the future capital of the Ammonites, and the fall of the Amorite city of Jaazer brought with it the conquest of Gilead. The tribes of Reuben and Gad were settled in the newly-acquired districts, on condition, however, that they should acknowledge their relationship to the rest of the tribes, and help the latter in case of necessity (Numb. xxxii. 29-32; Judg. v. 15-17). Gilead had been conquered by Machir, a branch of the tribe of Manasseh (Numb. xxxii. 39; Deut. iii. 15; Judg. v. 14), and the conquest was subsequently extended further by armed bands under chieftains, like Jair and Nobah, who occupied outlying districts on their own account.[236]

The Havoth-Jair, or ‘Villages of Jair,’ were in the ‘stony’ region of Argob, the Trachonitis of Greek geography, which extended northward to the Aramaic kingdoms of Geshur and Maachah. It formed part of the ‘Field of Bashan,’ which in the Mosaic age was ruled by Og ‘of the remnant of the Rephaim.’ Like Sihon, he is called an Amorite, and his two capitals were at Edrei and Ashtaroth-Karnaim.[237] His rule was acknowledged from the Haurân in the south to Mount Hermon in the north, and he must thus have been one of the native princes who arose out of the ruins of the Egyptian empire. But his power was shortlived. He was unable to withstand the shock of the invaders from the desert, and his dominions became Israelitish territory. It would seem that what was afterwards the eastern side of Ammon was included in his kingdom, since in after ages a huge sarcophagus of black basalt, which was preserved in Rabbah of Ammon, was pointed out as his ‘iron bed’ (Deut. iii. 11).

These conquests of the Israelites doubtless occupied a considerable space of time. Some of them, indeed, were made after the Mosaic age, and were merely extensions of the conquests made at that time. But the overthrow of Og must have followed quickly on that of Sihon. A year or two would have sufficed to allow the Israelitish bands to overrun the districts to the north-east of the Arnon.

It is not wonderful that the Moabites should have wished to rid themselves of such dangerous neighbours. But their king, Balak the son of Zippor,[238] was uncertain how to act. The Moabite forces were no match for the fierce desert-tribes who had overthrown Sihon and burnt his towns. An embassy was accordingly sent to the seer, Balaam the son of Beor, who lived at Pethor on the Euphrates, in ‘the land of the children of Ammo.’ The site of Pethor has been recovered from the Assyrian monuments. It lay on the west bank of the Euphrates, a little to the north of its junction with the Sajur, and consequently only a few miles south of the Hittite capital Carchemish, now Jerablûs. The Beni-Ammo must have claimed the same ancestry as the Beni-Ammi or Ammonites, and the name is probably to be found in that of the country of Ammiya or Ammi, which is mentioned in the Tel el-Amarna tablets.[239]

The fame of Balaam must have been widespread. But it is permissible to ask whether the only object of the embassy was that the seer should ‘curse’ the descendants of Jacob. A curse usually meant something more substantial than a form of words; and, as we have already seen, the first Edomite king given in the extract from the chronicles of Edom bears the same name and has the same father as Balaam. Did Balaam end by becoming elected king of Edom, and finally falling in battle against the Israelites, along with his allies the Midianitish chiefs?[240] The materials for an answer are not yet before us.

The story of Balaam seems to form an episode by itself. The narrative and the prophecies constitute a single whole, which cannot be torn apart. It is the first example in the Old Testament of a written prophecy, and that the prophet should have been a Gentile diviner is of itself significant. Nothing can be more vivid and lifelike than the picture that is presented to us. We see the ambassadors of Balak persuading the half-reluctant seer to accompany them; we read of the strange miracles that accompanied the journey, and of the altars that were reared, and the sacrifices that were offered in the hope that his enchantments might prevail over those of Israel. He was taken from high-place to high-place, whence he could look down upon the distant hosts of the enemy, and upon each, in Babylonian fashion, seven altars were erected. But all was unavailing. The God of Jacob refused to be turned from His purpose by the bullocks and the rams that were offered Him, and the curses of the Aramæan seer were turned into blessings. When Balaam fell into the prophetic trance, seeing ‘the vision of the Almighty, but having his eyes open,’ the words which were put into his mouth were words which predicted the future glories of Israel. ‘A star should come out of Jacob, and a sceptre should arise out of Israel, which should smite the corners of Moab and destroy all the children of Sheth.’[241] Edom, too, should at last become the possession of his younger brother, and the Amalekites of the desert should perish for ever.

The age of the episode has been often disputed. Much depends on the question whether the references in the last prophecy to the Kenites and others belong to the original document, or are later insertions. The Assyrians did not penetrate into the desert south of Judah, where the Kenites lived, until the time of Tiglath-pileser III. and Sargon in the eighth century B.C. The Amalekites were destroyed by Saul; Moab and Edom were conquered by David. But the concluding verse of the prophecy is at present difficult to explain. When was it that ships came from Cyprus and ‘afflicted’ Assyria and the Hebrews, so that they too perished for ever? In the age of the Exodus, the pirates of the Greek seas joined their forces with those of the Libyans in the invasion of Egypt, and the Philistines and their allies sailed from Krete and other islands of the Mediterranean, and established themselves on the coast of Palestine. Was it here that the Hebrews lived who were to perish for ever? It is, at any rate, worthy of note that it was the Philistines more especially among whom the Israelites were known as the ‘Hebrews.’ In the time of the Tel el-Amarna tablets we already hear of Assyrian intrigues in the far West. The Babylonian king asks the Pharaoh why the Assyrians, his ‘vassals,’ have been allowed to come to Canaan and enter into relations with the Egyptian court.[242] At a later period, while Israel was ruled by judges, more than one Assyrian monarch actually made his way to the Mediterranean coast.[243]

As the historical chapters of the book of Isaiah, including the prophecies contained in them, have been embodied in the book of Kings, so, too, the history of Balaam and Balak has been embodied in the book of Numbers. There is no reason for denying its substantial authenticity. Written prophecies were already known both in Egypt and in Babylonia,[244] and it is almost inconceivable that a Jewish fabricator of prophecies would have made a Gentile diviner the mouthpiece of Yahveh. Moreover, there is nothing in the narrative or the prophecies themselves which is inconsistent with the date to which they profess to belong, unless indeed it is maintained that the conquest of Moab and Edom by the Israelites could not have been predicted at the time. But, apart from theological considerations which lie outside the province of the historian, it did not require much political foresight to conclude that a people which had begun by destroying the power of Sihon was likely to end by conquering the nations surrounding them. In fact, it would seem from the enumeration of the cities occupied by Reuben and Gad (Numb. xxxii. 34-38) that at one time little, if any, territory was left to the Moabite king.

In the embassy to Balaam ‘the elders of Midian’ are united with those of Moab. In fact, it is to the ‘elders of Midian,’ and not to those of Moab, that Balak first addresses himself (Numb. xxii. 4). It is the Midianites, moreover, and not the Moabites, who tempted Israel to sin ‘in the matter of Baal-Peor,’ and who were accordingly massacred in the war that followed, although ‘the people had begun to commit whoredom’ with ‘the daughters of Moab’ (Numb. xxv. 1). It is clear, therefore, that Moab was at the time occupied by the Midianites, just as the eastern portion of Israelitish territory was occupied by them in later days before it was freed by Gideon. Then they had swarmed up from the south along with the Amalekite Bedâwin and the Kadmônim of the south-east, and under their five shêkhs had overrun the land of Israel. Moab had now undergone the same fate, perhaps in consequence of its weakened condition after the unsuccessful war against Sihon. At any rate, it is probable that the Moabites had eventually to thank their Edomite neighbours for their deliverance from the invaders, since in the list of the Edomite kings we are told that the fourth of them, Hadad, the son of Bedad, ‘smote Midian in the field of Moab’ (Gen. xxxvi. 35). The age of Hadad and that of Gideon could not have been far apart, and Gideon’s success may therefore have been one of the results that followed upon the Midianite defeat in Moab. The losses sustained by the Midianites, however, in their struggle with the invading Israelites, must have weakened their hold upon the territories of the Moabite king. The storm-cloud which had terrified Balak passed over him to his Midianite foes.

The conquest of the Moabite cities brought with it intermarriages between the Israelites and their inhabitants as well as an adoption of the native forms of faith. Yahveh was deserted for Baal-Peor, the Moabite Baal of Mount Peor, but it was not long before He avenged Himself. Pestilence broke out in the camp, and the people saw in it the finger of God. By command of Moses ‘all the heads of the people’ were ‘hanged before the Lord in face of the sun’; while Phinehas, the son of the high-priest, jealous of the rights of Yahveh, stabbed to the death an Israelite and his Midianitish wife who had dared to show themselves before the sanctuary of the Lord. The time had passed when Moses was justified in marrying a wife of Midianitish race; Israel had now become a peculiar people, dedicated to Yahveh, who would allow ‘no other god’ to share His place. The Midianitish wife was a sign and evidence that Yahveh of Israel had been forsaken for a Midianitish Baal.

Thus far, it would seem, Israel and Midian had mixed together on friendly terms. Both were desert tribes, both were connected together by old traditions and intercourse, and claimed descent from a common ancestor. But it was now a question of rival deities and forms of faith. The very existence of the Law that had been promulgated from Sinai and Kadesh was at stake; and if Israel and its religion were not to be absorbed into the world of heathenism around them, it was time for the tribe of Levi—the keepers of the sanctuary—to awake. Moses and Phinehas saw the danger, and swift punishment descended on the backsliders within Israel itself. How formidable, however, the danger had been may be gathered from the statement that ‘all the heads of the people’ were put to death.

The turn of Midian came next. The Midianite tribes were overthrown, and their five shêkhs slain, one of whom, Rekem, gave his name to the city which is better known as Petra. ‘Balaam also, the son of Beor, they slew with the sword.’ The Midianite villages and forts were burned to the ground, and the captives and spoil were brought to the Israelitish camp. Here they were divided among the people, Yahveh and His priests receiving their share. Out of a total of 16,000 captives, thirty-two slaves were given to the Lord. Henceforth it became the rule that the spoil taken in war should be divided into two equal parts, one-half for the fighting men, the rest for the people as a whole; and that while the fighting men had to deliver up only one share in five hundred to the Levites, the priestly tribute levied on the rest of the ‘congregation’ was as much as one in fifty. The regulation was reinforced by David after his defeat of the Amalekites when his companions clamoured for the whole of the spoil (1 Sam. xxx. 24, 25), at all events in so far as the equal division of it was concerned between the combatants and those who remained at home.

The Midianites were driven from Moab and its frontiers. Their overthrow meant the triumph of the priestly tribe in Israel. The war had been waged not against Midian only, but against the allies and kinsmen of Midian in Israel itself. The old relationship between Israel and Midian had been severed on the confines of the Promised Land; the supremacy of Yahveh in Israel had been once more asserted, and Israel had become more than ever His peculiar people. Before they entered Canaan, it was needful that the last links that bound them to the wild tribes of the desert should be cut in two.

The work of Moses was completed. He had led Israel from the house of bondage, had given it laws and made it a nation in the wilderness, and had fitted it for the conquest of Canaan. The land flowing with milk and honey, which the Semitic settlers in Egypt seem always to have regarded as a home of refuge to which they should ultimately return, was now within their grasp. Egyptian troops no longer garrisoned it, and its population was weakened by intestine troubles, by the long war between Egypt and the Hittites, and, above all, by the invasion of the Philistines and other pirates from the Greek seas. A large portion of the cultivated territory on the east side of the Jordan was already in Israelite hands; all that was needed was to cross the river and take possession of ‘the land of promise.’ Israel never forgot that it was from hence that its ancestors had come, and tradition recorded that the bodies of the patriarchs still lay in the rock-tomb of Machpelah. Even now the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh carried with them the mummy of Joseph, from whom they claimed their origin, ready to deposit it wherever they could gain a permanent foothold and build for themselves a central sanctuary.

The scene of the last legislation of Moses is laid in the plains of Moab, in the newly-won territory of Israel, and almost within sight of the mountains of Canaan. The additional laws and regulations which needed to be made were not many. Reuben and Gad were settled in the districts which subsequently bore their names, the Reubenites pasturing their flocks like nomad Bedâwin among the northern wadis of Moab, while Gad occupied the greater portion of the Amorite kingdom of Sihon. Part of the tribe of Manasseh also made its home in the districts of Gilead and Bashan, which it had won by the sword.

The institution of the six cities of refuge, moreover, as well as of the forty-eight cities of the Levites, is assigned to the same period. Modern criticism, however, has shown itself unwilling to accept its Mosaic authorship. But sacred cities, to which the homicide could flee for refuge, were an ancient institution in both Syria and Asia Minor. We find them also in the region of the Hittites. Such _asyla_, as the Greeks called them, lasted down to the classical period, and played a considerable part in the local history of Asia Minor. Wherever we find a Kadesh or a Hierapolis, there we may expect to find also an asylum in which the gods and their ministers would protect the unintentional shedder of blood from the vengeance of man. It was a means of checking the _vendetta_ or blood feud, which was in full harmony with primitive law.[245]

In establishing the cities of refuge, therefore, the Israelites did but carry on the traditions of the past. And two at least of the cities, which were subsequently set apart for the purpose, were sanctuaries, and consequently ‘asyla,’ long before the children of Jacob entered Palestine. These were Kadesh in Galilee and Hebron (Josh. xx. 7). The name of Kadesh declares its sacred character, and the sanctuary of Hebron had been famous for centuries.

The institution of the Levitical cities, again, was a result of the new position assigned to the tribe of Levi as the priests and representatives of the national God. The overthrow of the Midianites and their Israelitish allies had definitely settled the place of the tribe in Israel. Yahveh had prevailed over all other gods, and those who worshipped another god had been put to the sword. It had been the work of Levi, of those who had been chosen to be the ministers of Yahveh or had voluntarily devoted themselves to the service of the sanctuary. On the day that the spoil of Midian was divided it was recognised that Levi was not a tribe in the sense that the other tribes were so; it represented the priests and ministers of Yahveh, whoever and wheresoever they might be. And as, in the division of the spoil, due care was taken of Yahveh and His priests, so, too, in the division of the land, it was needful that similar care should be taken for them. The priests of Egypt had their lands, out of the revenues of which the temples were supported, and Egypt was not the only country of the Oriental world in which the same practice prevailed. Indeed, while Canaan was an Egyptian province temples had been built in it by the Pharaohs, and doubtless endowed in the same way as the temples of Egypt itself. The revenues of Syrian towns, moreover, had been given to Egyptian temples; Thothmes III., for example, immediately after the conquest of Syria, settled three of its towns (Anaugas, Innuam, and Harankal) upon Amon of Thebes.[246] The custom lingered on into late times; the Persian king assigned the three cities of Magnesia, Myos, and Lampsacus for the maintenance of Themistoklês,[247] and the taxes of the Fayyûm in Egypt formed the ‘pin-money’ of Queen Arsinoê Philadelphos.[248]

Later ages misunderstood the regulations that related to the Levitical cities, and, misled by the belief that the tribe of Levi was constituted like the other tribes of Israel, imagined that they were intended to be places where the Levites should dwell and none else. This misconception has coloured the existing text of Numb. xxxv. 2-8, but we have only to turn to the list of the cities given in Josh. xxi. to see how unfounded it is. In fact, the Levites, as ministers of the national God, lived wherever there was a sanctuary of Yahveh to be served; in the days of the Judges we find a Levite even in the private house of Micah, on Mount Ephraim, from whence he is taken by the Danite raiders along with the image of his God (Judg. xviii.). There was no intention of shutting up the Levites in certain cities apart from the rest of the people; on the contrary, they were to be ‘scattered’ throughout Israel, the priests and representatives everywhere of the national God.

The book of Deuteronomy is the testament of Moses. Even the most sceptical criticism admits that such was already the belief in the age of Josiah, so far, at any rate, as regards the main portion of the book. At the same time, the stoutest advocates of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch also admit that it cannot all have come from his hand. The account of his death, which forms the close of the book, cannot have been written by the great legislator himself. Here, as elsewhere, it is for the historian to decide where the narrative may belong to the Mosaic age, and where it transports us to the atmosphere of a later period.

The original Deuteronomy of philological criticism begins with the twelfth chapter, without introduction or even explanation. The Deuteronomy of Hebrew tradition is the fitting conclusion of the Pentateuch. Moses, worn out with years and labour, addresses his people for the last time. They are about to cross the Jordan and enter Canaan; here on the threshold of the Promised Land his task is done, and he must leave the work of conquest to other and younger hands. He has been the legislator of Israel, Joshua must be its general.

We have, first, a recapitulation of the chief events of the wanderings in the wilderness from the day that the Covenant was made in Horeb, the mount of God.[249] They are intermingled with antiquarian notes, which may, or may not, be of the Mosaic age, as well as with exhortations to obedience to the Law. Then follows a series of enactments which constitute the Deuteronomic Law itself. The enactments necessarily go over some of the ground already traversed by the previous legislation; in some points they even seem to contradict it. But the contradictions are more apparent than real, like the reason assigned for observing the Sabbath. Sometimes they are supplementary to the Levitical laws, sometimes are supplemented by the latter; at other times the same regulation is repeated from a different point of view.[250]

A special characteristic of the Deuteronomic Law is its tenderness and care for animals as well as for the poor, ‘the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow.’[251] Even the Egyptian is not to be ‘abhorred’ (Deut. xxiii. 7), and all Hebrew slaves are to be released every seventh year. Along with this, however, we find the ferocity which distinguished the Semites in time of war. If the enemy lived afar off, all the males of a vanquished city were to be mercilessly slain, and the children and women spared, only to become the slaves and concubines of the conquerors. But even this amount of mercy was forbidden in the case of the Canaanitish cities; here the massacre was to be universal, lest the Israelites should take wives from the conquered population and fall away from the worship of Yahveh. A similar spirit of ferocity breathes through the Assyrian inscriptions, where the kings boast of the multitudes of the vanquished whom they had tortured and slain in honour of their god Assur. Alone of the ancient nations of the East the Egyptians seem to have understood what we mean by humanity in war.

Like the poor, the Levite is commended to the care and support of the people. He has no land or property of his own—much less a ‘Levitical city,’—the Lord alone ‘is his inheritance,’ and consequently those who remember the Levite remember at the same time the Lord whom he serves. The portion of the offering is defined which is to be the due of the Levites, and tithe is to be paid to them upon all the produce of the land. No distinction is drawn in the book of Deuteronomy between the Levites and the priests, ‘the sons of Aaron,’ and therefore the laws relating to the Levites apply to all the priests alike.

Another characteristic of the Deuteronomic Law is its insistence on a central sanctuary. It was to this central sanctuary that the God-fearing Israelite was commanded to ‘go up’ three times in the year at each of the great feasts, and there offer his firstlings and sacrifices to the Lord. This central sanctuary, however, did not exclude the existence of local altars or shrines. The Levite is described as living in the families of the other tribes throughout the land (xii. 19, xiv. 27), and as deciding cases at law, wherever they might occur, along with the judges (xvi. 18, xvii. 9, xix. 17, xxi. 6). Nor was it necessary when an animal was slaughtered, and its life-blood poured out before Yahveh, that this should be done in the one chief temple of the nation. It was only such offerings as had been specially vowed to the national God that were required to be brought there. They had been dedicated to Yahveh as God of the whole nation, and it was therefore to that sanctuary in which Yahveh was worshipped by the nation as a whole that they had to be taken. In his individual or local capacity the Israelite was free to offer his sacrifices where he would. For, it must be remembered, the very fact that the life-blood was shed made the death of the animal a sacrifice to the Lord, and the feast on its flesh which followed was a feast eaten in the presence of the Lord.

The insistence on the central sanctuary implied an equal insistence on the absolute supremacy of Yahveh in Israel. Idolaters and enticers to idolatry were to be cut off without pity; even the prophet who spoke in the name of another god, and whose words came to pass, was to be stoned to death. The fulfilment of a prediction guaranteed its truth only if the prophet was the messenger of Yahveh. Yahveh would suffer no other gods to be worshipped at His side, and the Deuteronomic Law accordingly forbids all such practices as were connected with the heathenism of the neighbouring peoples. The Israelites were forbidden to tattoo themselves like the Syrian worshippers of Hadad, to scarify their flesh like the Egyptians in mourning for the dead, far less like the Canaanites around them to sacrifice their firstborn by fire. Every effort was made to preserve them from contact with their neighbours; their king was forbidden to ‘multiply’ horses and wives; for the one would lead to intercourse with Egypt, the other would introduce into Israel the worship and the images of foreign deities. The sacred trees which from time immemorial had been planted near the altars of the gods, some of them by the patriarchs themselves, were to be destroyed like the conical pillar of the goddess Asherah and the upright column which symbolised the sun-god.

Few aspects of Hebrew life are left untouched by the enactments of Deuteronomy. Marriage and divorce, murder and other crimes, the institution of the cities of refuge, the observance of the great feasts, the election and duty of a king, sanitary laws including the distinction between clean and unclean meats, slavery, commerce, and usury, are all alike subjects of the Deuteronomic legislation. And the whole legislation is marked by a spirit of compassion for the poor and suffering, at all events if they belong to the house of Israel, or have been allowed to share some of its privileges. The creditor is enjoined to give back to the poor man before nightfall the raiment he had taken in pledge, and the master is bidden to pay at the close of the day the wages of ‘the hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates.’ Even the curious prohibition to mix like and unlike together, as in the case of a garment of wool and linen (xxii. 11), seems to be a reduction from the principle which forbade the yoking together of the ox and ass.

The legislation relating to the king is perhaps somewhat striking, especially when we bear in mind the protest raised by Samuel against the election of one (1 Sam. vii. 6-18). Samuel, however, was not altogether disinterested in the matter; and it was obvious that as soon as the conquest of Canaan was completed, there could be no national unity without a monarch who could represent the people and lead them in war. Before the time of Samuel, Abimelech had established a kingdom in Central Palestine, and tradition spoke of Moses also as ‘king in Jeshurun’ (Deut. xxxiii. 5). The Israelites, if ever they were to form a nation, were destined to follow the example of their neighbours; even in the wild fastnesses of Mount Seir the ‘dukes’ of Edom had been succeeded by kings. The idea of kingship was so familiar to the Mosaic age, that it is difficult to conceive of any legislation which did not contemplate it. Whether the legislation would have taken precisely the same form as that which we find in Deuteronomy is another question.

The commandments enjoined by Moses were ordered to be written on the stuccoed face of ‘great stones.’ Whether the whole of the Deuteronomic legislation is meant is more than doubtful. But that the chief enactments of the code should be thus placed before the eyes of the people was in accordance with the customs of the age. The acts and events of the reign of Augustus engraved on the marble slabs of Ancyra are a late example of the same usage; and the great inscription of Darius on the cliff of Behistun has similarly preserved to us the history of the foundation of the Persian empire. To cover stone or rock with stucco, which was then painted white and written upon, was a common practice in Egypt. It seems to imply, however, that the writing could be painted with the brush, and thus to exclude the use of cuneiform characters. At the same time, these characters could be cut in stucco as well as in stone, and it is possible that the stucco was intended to be a substitute for clay, where a large surface had to be covered. However this may be, the monument was ordered to be erected on Mount Ebal, by the side of an altar of unwrought stones.

On Ebal, moreover, and the opposite height of Gerizim, it was prescribed that a strange ceremony should be performed. While half the tribes stood on the one mountain, and the other half on the other mountain, the Levites were to curse from Ebal all those who disobeyed the law, and to bless from Gerizim those who obeyed it.[252] Unfortunately, as might have been expected, the curses much predominated over the blessings. We hear afterwards in the book of Joshua that the ceremony was duly performed, excepting only that Joshua read the words of cursing and benediction in place of ‘the priests the Levites.’ Critics have doubted the historical character of the occurrence, but it is inconsistent with no known fact, and it is difficult to find a reason for its gratuitous invention.

The latter part of the book of Deuteronomy brings the life of Moses to an end. It includes the final covenant made between himself on behalf of Yahveh and the people of Israel, to which are attached the various calamities that would await the breaking of it. It also tells us that the law contained in Deuteronomy was really written by the legislator, and delivered to the priests the sons of Levi with an injunction that it should be read every seventh year (xxxi. 9-11). Like the ‘witness’ to S. John’s Gospel, therefore, the compiler of the Pentateuch in its present form wishes to add his testimony to the belief that the Mosaic law was written by Moses himself.

Two songs, attributed to Moses, are also incorporated in the book. They seem to be a reflection of the curses and blessings pronounced respectively on Ebal and Gerizim. The one paints the sufferings which forgetfulness of Yahveh was to bring upon Israel; the other describes the future happiness and glory of the several tribes. Chiefest among them are Levi and the house of Joseph; ‘the precious things’ of the Promised Land are reserved for Ephraim and Manasseh, whose warriors shall drive the enemies of Yahveh to the ends of the earth. Levi shall be the lawgiver and instructor of Israel, while Benjamin shall be the ‘beloved of the Lord,’ who shall ‘dwell between his shoulders’ at Shiloh. Judah, on the other hand, stands in the background; little is said of him except a prayer that he should be delivered from his enemies. And Simeon is passed over altogether. It is plain that this second song or ‘blessing’ must be of early date. It cannot be later than the early days of the conquest of Canaan, when Ephraim and Manasseh were still the most powerful of the tribes, and when the tabernacle of Yahveh was erected at Shiloh. The tribes were still united among themselves; they still recognised a common God and a common worship, and had not as yet fallen upon the evil days depicted in the book of Judges. The tone of the song throughout is that of triumph and success; the Israelites must have still been in their first flush of victory, and the house of Joseph have still been their leader in war. But history knows of only two periods when such was the case; the one period that which followed the conquest of the Amorite kingdoms east of the Jordan, the other period that which saw Joshua the Ephraimite at the head of the armies of Israel. Hebrew antiquity decided that it was to the first period that the song belonged.[253]

The death of Moses was placed on the summit of one of the mountains of Abarim—the mountains of the ‘Hebrews’—in the land of Moab over against the temple of Baal-Peor. On the one side he looked down upon the scene of his last victory over the opponents of his law, on the place where the Midianites and their Israelitish sympathisers had been slain; on the other side lay the Land of Promise, to the borders of which he had led his people. The peak of Pisgah on which he stood had been dedicated in old days to the worship of Nebo, the Babylonian god of prophecy and literature, the interpreter of the will of Merodach, the supreme divinity of Babylon. It was no accident that the prophet and legislator of Israel, the interpreter of the will of Yahveh, should die on the same mountain-peak.

The high-places which the kindred Semitic nations dedicated to the gods become in the history of Israel the scenes of the death of its great men. Aaron dies on the summit of Mount Hor, and even to-day the tomb of the prophet Samuel is pointed out on the lofty top of Mizpah. But no tomb marked the spot where Moses died; alone among the heroes of Hebrew history he was buried in a foreign land, and the place where he was buried was unknown. The legislator of Israel, he who had made Israel a nation, and with whom Israelitish history began, vanished utterly out of sight. The fact is a strange one, whatever be the explanation we attempt to give of it. Can it be that Moab had been more completely conquered by Israel than the narrative in the Pentateuch would lead us to suppose, but that with the death of Moses the dominion of Israel passed away?[254] In that case Moab would have had little interest in preserving a memory of the last resting-place of its conqueror, and the time would soon have come when its site was forgotten.

Footnote 153:

See Sayce, _The Higher Criticism and the Monuments_, p. 249.

Footnote 154:

E. Naville, _Goshen and the Shrine of Saft el-Hennah_, Fourth Memoir of the Egypt Exploration Fund (1887).

Footnote 155:

Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_ (Eng. tr.), second edit., ii. p. 133.

Footnote 156:

Flinders Petrie, _Tel el-Amarna_, pp. 40-42.

Footnote 157:

See above, p. 115.

Footnote 158:

For Khar, the Horites of the Old Testament, see Maspero, _Struggle of the Nations_, p. 121.

Footnote 159:

On the road from Assuan to Shellâl, ‘Messui, the royal son of Kush, the fan-bearer on the right of the king, the royal scribe,’ has left his name and titles on a granite rock (Petrie, _A Season in Egypt_, No. 70). Below the inscription is Meneptah in a chariot, with Messui holding the fan and bowing before him.

Footnote 160:

For Dr. Neubauer’s suggestion that the name of Aaron, otherwise so inexplicable, is the Arabic Âron or Âran written in the Minæan fashion, see above, p. 34, note 1. If the suggestion is right, it was specially appropriate that Aaron should have met Moses in ‘the Mount of God,’ on the frontiers of Midian (Exod. iv. 27).

Footnote 161:

A translation of the papyrus has been given by Professor Maspero in _The Records of the Past_, new series, ii. pp. 11-36.

Footnote 162:

See Preface to Maspero’s _Dawn of Civilisation_, p. v.

Footnote 163:

Reuel, ‘Shepherd of God,’ was a son of Esau, according to Gen. xxxvi. 4. It may have been a title of the high-priest, since _rêu_, ‘shepherd,’ is one of the titles given to the kings and high-priests of early Babylonia. The high-priest Gudea, for instance, calls himself ‘the shepherd of the god Nin-girsu.’ On the other hand, Hommel (_The Ancient Hebrew Tradition_, p. 278) compares the name Reuel-Jethro with the Minæan Ridsvu-il Vitrân.

Footnote 164:

In the word _seneh_ a popular etymology seems to have been found for the name of Mount Sinai. Hence it is that in Deut. xxxiii. 16, Yahveh is described as ‘him that dwelt in the _seneh_.’ The _seneh_ was probably the small prickly _acacia nilotica_.

Footnote 165:

No satisfactory etymology of the name Yahveh has yet been found. This, however, is not strange, considering that the etymology was unknown to the Hebrews themselves, as is shown by the explanation of the name in Exod. iii. 14, where it is derived from the Aramaic _hewâ_, the Hebrew equivalent being _hâyâh_, with _y_ instead of _w_ (or _v_). The Babylonians were also ignorant of the original meaning of the word, since one of the lexical cuneiform tablets gives _Yahu_ or Yahveh as meaning ‘god’ (in Israelitish), and identifies it with the Assyrian word _yahu_, ‘myself’ (83, 1-18, 1332 _Obv._; Col. ii. 1). No certain traces of the name have been found except among the Israelites. It is a verbal formation like _Jacob_, _Joseph_, etc.

Footnote 166:

Maspero, _Dawn of Civilisation_, pp. 132-134.

Footnote 167:

For ‘strikes’ among the Egyptian artisans, see Spiegelberg, _Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung im Pharaonreich unter den Ramessiden_ (1895).

Footnote 168:

At Tel el-Maskhuta, or Pithom, however, the bricks were not mixed with straw.

Footnote 169:

See Wiedemann, _Religion der alten Aegypter_, pp. 142 _sq._

Footnote 170:

Exod. vii. 19 contains an exaggeration which could easily be omitted without any injury to the sense of the narrative. The change of water in the river would affect the canals and such pools and ponds as were fed from the Nile, but nothing else. The river-water is not considered fit for drinking in the early days of the inundation. The green and slimy vegetation brought from the Equatorial regions renders it quite poisonous, and it is not until some days after it has become ‘red’ that it is again fit to drink.

Footnote 171:

The ‘camels’ mentioned along with the cattle in Exod. ix. 3 have been inserted from an Israelitish point of view. The Egyptians had no camels; and though the Bedâwin doubtless used them from an early period, none were employed by the Egyptians themselves until the Roman or Arab age.

Footnote 172:

The passage is, unfortunately, mutilated. What remains reads thus: ‘... the tents in front of the city of Pi-Bailos, on the canal of Shakana; ... [the adjoining land] was not cultivated, but had been left as pasture for cattle for the sake of the foreigners. It had been abandoned since the time of (our) ancestors. All the kings of Upper Egypt sat within their entrenchments ... and the kings of Lower Egypt found themselves in the midst of their cities, surrounded with earthworks, cut off from everything by the (hostile) warriors, for they had no mercenaries to oppose to them. Thus had it been [until Meneptah] ascended the throne of Horus. He was crowned to preserve the life of mankind.’ The word translated ‘tents’ is _ahilu_, the Hebrew _ôhêl_, which is used by Ramses III. of the ‘tents’ of the Shasu or Edomites of Mount Seir. For translations of the text, see E. de Rougé, _Extrait d’un Mémoire sur les Attaques dirigées contre l’Égypte_, pp. 6-13 (1867); Chabas, _Recherches pour servir à l’histoire de la ^{xix}e Dynastie_, pp. 84-92 (1873); Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_, Eng. tr. (2nd edit.), ii. pp. 116-123; Maspero, _The Struggle of the Nations_, pp. 433-436.

Footnote 173:

_Cont. Apion._ i. 26.

Footnote 174:

This name, however, varied in different versions of the legend. Chærêmôn makes it Phritiphantes, which may represent Zaphnath-paaneah, the dental (_t_) taking the place of _z_, and _pa-Ra_, ‘the sun-god’ of _pa-Ankhu_, ‘the living one.’

Footnote 175:

The papyrus is in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg (Golénischeff, _Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la Philologie et à l’Archéologie égyptiennes et assyriennes_, xv. pp. 88, 89).

Footnote 176:

Dr. Wilcken has pointed out (_Zur Aegyptisch-hellenistischen Literatur_ in the _Festschrift für Georg Ebers_, 1897, pp. 146-152) that two fragments of a Greek papyrus published by Wessely in the _Denkschriften der Wiener Akademie_, 42, 1893, pp. 3 _sqq._, contain a legend which closely resembles that of the Egyptian version of the Exodus. In this, however, a potter takes the place of the seer Amenôphis, the desire of the king to see the gods is explained by his wish to know the future, the ‘impure people’ are called the ‘girdle-wearers,’ and the beginning of a Sothic cycle is apparently combined with the story. Moreover, it would seem that the papyrus does not yet know of the identification of the ‘impure people’ with the Jews.

Footnote 177:

_The Threshold Covenant or the Beginning of Religious Rites_ (New York, 1896).

Footnote 178:

_The Threshold Covenant_, pp. 203, 204.

Footnote 179:

See above, p. 155.

Footnote 180:

_Egypt under the Pharaohs_ (Eng. tr.), second edit., ii. pp. 96-98.

Footnote 181:

_Anastasi_, v. 19. For the translation, see Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_ (Eng. tr.), second edit., ii. p. 132.

Footnote 182:

First pointed out by Goodwin in the Sallier Papyrus, iv. 1, 6.

Footnote 183:

Josh. ii. 10; iv. 23; xxiv. 6-8.

Footnote 184:

Ps. cvi. 7-9, 22; cxxxvi. 13-15; Neh. ix. 9; see also Acts vii. 36.

Footnote 185:

The event was first recorded by Kallisthenes, and Plutarch (_Alex._ 17) states that ‘many historians’ had described it. Arrian (i. 27) alludes to it, and Menander introduced a scoffing reference to the miracle in one of his plays. The actual facts are given by Strabo (_Geog._ xiv. 3, 9), who says that near Phasêlis Mount Klimax juts out into the sea, but that in calm weather a road runs round its base on the seaward side. If the wind rises, however, the road is submerged by the waves. Alexander ventured to march along it while still covered by the sea, and though the water was up to the waists of the soldiers, passed safely through it, the wind not being very strong. His success came to be regarded as a miracle, and the miraculous passage of the sea by his army is narrated with many embellishments in the fragment of an unknown historian in a lexicon discovered by Papadopoulos in 1892.

Footnote 186:

The narrative is careful to indicate that this was the case (Exod. xiv. 23, 28). It is only in the Song of Moses (Exod. xv. 19) that ‘Pharaoh’s horses’ are changed into ‘the horse of Pharaoh,’ a change which, like the confusion between ‘the sea’ and the Yâm Sûph, shows either that the Song is of later date or that its language has been modified and interpolated.

Footnote 187:

_Pap. Anastasi_, iv. A translation of it by Dr. Birch will be found in _Records of the Past_, first series, vol. iv. pp. 49-52. The poet says of the king: ‘Amon gave thy heart pleasure, he gave thee a good old age.’ The name of the king, however, is not given, and it is therefore possible that Seti II. rather than Meneptah is referred to.

Footnote 188:

The last Pharaoh whose monuments have been found in the Sinaitic peninsula is Ramses VI. of the twentieth dynasty (De Morgan, _Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte_, p. 237).

Footnote 189:

The Amalekites adjoined Edom (Gen. xxxvi. 12) and southern Israel (Judg. v. 14), and extended from Shur, or the Wall of Egypt, to Havilah, the ‘sandy’ desert of Northern Arabia (1 Sam. xv. 7; see Gen. xiv. 7). That these Amalekites were the same as those conquered by Moses is expressly stated in 1 Sam. xv. 2 (cf. Exod. xvii. 16). The latter, therefore, lived miles to the north of the Sinaitic peninsula. The wilderness of Paran lay on the southern side of Moab (Deut. i. 1) and Judah (Gen. xxi. 14, 20, 21). Kadesh, now ’Ain Qadîs, was situated in it (Numb. xiii. 26). The geography of the Exodus is treated with great ability and logical skill in Baker Greene’s _Hebrew Migration from Egypt_ (1879).

Footnote 190:

Judg. v. 4, 5; Deut. xxxiii. 2; Hab. iii. 3.

Footnote 191:

First pointed out by Baker Greene, _The Hebrew Migration from Egypt_, p. 170; Elim is the masculine, and Elath the feminine plural. Compare El-Paran, perhaps ‘El(im) of Paran,’ in Gen. xiv. 6, as well as Elah in Gen. xxxvi. 41.

Footnote 192:

Exod. xvi. 1 compared with Numb. xxxiii. 11.

Footnote 193:

The name is found in an inscription of Hadramaut (Osiander, _Inscriptions in the Himyaritic Character_, p. 29), where the god is called the son of Atthar or Istar instead of her brother, as in Babylonia, as well as in a Sabæan text from Sirwaḥ.

Footnote 194:

Numb. xiii. 26. The sanctuary had originally been Amalekite (Gen. xiv. 7).

Footnote 195:

Unfortunately, no calculation of distance can be made from the statement that Elijah was ‘forty days and forty nights’ on his way from Jezreel to Horeb, since ‘forty’ merely denotes an unknown number.

Footnote 196:

In the early days of the monarchy the armies of both the Israelites and the Philistines were similarly divided into companies of a hundred and a thousand (1 Sam. xxii. 7; xxix. 2; 2 Sam. xviii. 1). The system could not have been derived from Babylonia, where sixty was the unit of notation.

Footnote 197:

See my _Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, pp. 74-77, and Hibbert Lectures on the _Religion of the Ancient Babylonians_, pp. 70-77.

Footnote 198:

The text of this is given in the 125th chapter of the Book of the Dead. A translation of it will be found in Wiedemann’s _Religion der alten Aegypter_, pp. 132, 133.

Footnote 199:

The conceptions which underlay this were embodied in the mediæval jurisprudence of Europe, and curious reports exist of the trials of cocks, rats, flies, dogs, and even ants, which lasted down to the eighteenth century (see Baring-Gould, _Curiosities of Olden Times_, second edit., pp. 57-73).

Footnote 200:

The exhortation, together with some of the laws, is given again in a somewhat changed form in Exod. xxxiv. 10-26.

Footnote 201:

The name belongs to the period when the Philistines were infesting the sea, before they had settled on the coast of Palestine, and indicates the early date of the passage in which it occurs. Perhaps the Greek tradition of the command of the sea by the Kretan Minos is a reminiscence of the same period.

Footnote 202:

W. A. I. i. 54, Col. ii. 54 _sqq._

Footnote 203:

_Transactions_ of the Society of Biblical Archæology, vii. 1, pp. 53, 54.

Footnote 204:

A contract-tablet dated in the 32nd year of Nebuchadrezzar, and published by Dr. Strassmaier (_Inschriften von Nabuchodonoser_, No. 217), gives us an insight into the details of Babylonian sacrifices, though, unfortunately, the signification of many of the technical words employed in it is doubtful or unknown. The tablet begins as follows: ‘Izkur-Merodach the son of Imbiya the son of Ilei-Merodach of his own free will has given for the future to Nebo-balásu-ikbi the son of Kuddinu the son of Ilei-Merodach the slaughterers of the oxen and sheep for the sacrifices of the king, the prescribed offerings, the peace-offerings (?) of the whole year, viz., the caul round the heart, the chine, the covering of the ribs, the ..., the mouth of the stomach, and the ..., as well as during the year 7000 sin-offerings and 100 sheep before Iskhara who dwells in the temple of Sa-turra in Babylon (not excepting the soft parts of the flesh, the trotters (?), the juicy meat and the salted (?) flesh), and also the slaughterers of the oxen, sheep, birds, and lambs due on the 8th day of Nisan, (and) the heave-offering of an ox and a sheep before Pap-sukal of Bit-Kidur-Kani, the temple of Nin-ip and the temple of Anu on the further bank of the New Town in Babylon.’

Footnote 205:

_The Ancient Hebrew Tradition_, pp. 282-284.

Footnote 206:

See the illustration in Erman’s _Life in Ancient Egypt_ (Eng. tr.), p. 298.

Footnote 207:

Mr. G. Buchanan Gray (_Studies in Hebrew Proper Names_, p. 246, note 1) suggests that Aholiab is a foreign name. At all events, while we find names compounded with _ohel_, ‘tabernacle,’ in Minæan and Phœnician inscriptions, no other name of the kind is found among the Israelites.

Footnote 208:

Sir Thomas Browne, in his _Religio Medici_ (Part i.), remarks on this: ‘I would gladly know how Moses, with an actual fire, calcined or burnt the golden calf into powder; for that mystical metal of gold, whose solary and celestial nature I admire, exposed unto the violence of fire, grows only hot and liquefies, but consumeth not.’

Footnote 209:

An interpolation (Exod. xxxiii. 1-5) makes the worship of the golden calf account for the fact that, as declared in Exod. xxiii. 20, an angel should lead Israel into Canaan, and not Yahveh Himself. But it ignores the further fact that Yahveh was really present in the Holy of Holies as well as in the pillar of fire and cloud.

Footnote 210:

Hadad-sum and his son Anniy (see my _Patriarchal Palestine_, p. 250). Small stone tablets like those of Balawât, engraved with cuneiform characters, are in the museums of Europe.

Footnote 211:

Sayce, _Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments_, pp. 79-83.

Footnote 212:

The contrast between such cases, where the names and details are as circumstantially stated as in the legal tablets of early Babylonia, and cases which rest merely upon the memory of tradition, will be clear at once from a reference to Numb. xv. 32-36. Here we have to do with tradition only, and accordingly no name is given, and the story is introduced with the vague statement that it happened at some time or other when the Israelites ‘were in the wilderness.’ The whole of the chapter is an interpolation which is singularly out of place in the narrative, and seems to have been substituted for a description of the disasters which followed on the abortive attempt of the Israelites to invade Canaan.

Footnote 213:

Sayce, _Babylonian Literature_, pp. 79, 80; Knudtzon, _Assyrische Gebete an den Sonnengott_, pp. 73 _sqq._

Footnote 214:

Athenæus, _Deipn._ xiv. 639 c.

Footnote 215:

Amiaud’s translation of the Inscriptions of Telloh in the _Records of the Past_, new ser., ii. pp. 83, 84.

Footnote 216:

This was clearly shown by Colenso, _The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua critically examined_, Pt. i.

Footnote 217:

The _soss_ was 60, the _ner_ 600.

Footnote 218:

Erman, _Life in Ancient Egypt_ (Eng. tr.), p. 475.

Footnote 219:

So in Josephus, _Antiq._ ii. 10.

Footnote 220:

Trumbull, _Kadesh-barnea_ (1884).

Footnote 221:

Numb. xiii. 21 seems to be a later exaggeration when compared with the following verse. No argument, however, can be drawn from the statement that the spies were absent only ‘forty days,’ since here, as elsewhere, ‘forty’ merely means an unknown length of time.

Footnote 222:

Eshcol, however, was already the name of an Amorite chieftain of Mamre in the time of Abraham (Gen. xiv. 13).

Footnote 223:

Numb. xxi. 1-3 is a combination of this abortive attempt and the subsequent conquest of Arad and Zephath by Judah and Simeon (Judg. i. 16, 17), and is intended to resume the thread of the history which had been broken by the insertion of chapter xv.

Footnote 224:

In Numb. xx. 1-13 a tradition about the waters of Meribah takes the place of a history of the long period that elapsed between the first and the second arrival at Kadesh, during which the numerous series of stations mentioned in Numb. xxxiii. 19-36 was passed. A comparison with Exod. xvii. 1-7 and Deut. xxxiii. 8 seems to show that the story of ‘the water of Meribah’ has been transferred from Rephidim to Kadesh. At Kadesh, indeed, there would have been no want of water (see Gen. xiv. 7), and it may be that the meaning of the word Meribah, ‘contention,’ has been the cause of the transference. En-Mishpat, ‘the Spring of Judgment,’ where contentions were decided, had been for centuries the name of the spring at Kadesh-barnea. As for the name of Zin, it possibly signifies ‘the dry place.’

Footnote 225:

Gen. xxxvi. 27; 1 Chron. i. 42.

Footnote 226:

In Deut. x. 6, 7 (which has been interpolated in the middle of the narrative of the legislation at Mount Sinai), the order of events is: (1) Departure from Beeroth of Beni-Yaakan to Mosera, (2) death of Aaron at Mosera, (3) departure to Gudgodah, (4) departure to Yotbath. In Numb. xx., xxxiii. 30-39 it is, on the contrary: (1) Departure from Hashmonah to Moseroth, (2) departure to Beni-Yaakan, (3) departure to Hor-hagidgad, the Gudgodah of Deuteronomy, (4) departure to Yotbathah, (5) departure to Ebronah, (6) departure to Ezion-geber, (7) departure to Kadesh, (8) departure to Mount Hor, (9) death of Aaron on Mount Hor.

Footnote 227:

The passage was already corrupt in the time of the Septuagint translators. But instead of _eth-wâhab_, their text reads _eth-zâhâb_. If this was correct, the reference would probably be to Dhi-Zahab, ‘(the mines) of gold’ which, according to Deut. i. 1, was not far from Sûph.

Footnote 228:

_Zeitschrift des Palästina Vereins_, xiv. pp. 142 _sq._ Tell ’Ashtereh is the Ashteroth-Karnaim of Gen. xiv. 5.

Footnote 229:

Professor Erman reads them Akna-Zapn, perhaps Yakin-Zephon, ‘Jachin of the North.’ Above the figures is the winged solar disk (Erman, _Der Hiobstein_ in the _Zeitschrift des Palästina Vereins_, xiv. pp. 210, 211).

Footnote 230:

On the left side of the base of the second statue in front of the pylon, where it follows the name of Assar, the Asshurim of Gen. xxv. 3; see Daressy, _Notice explicative des Ruines du Temple de Louxor_, p. 19.

Footnote 231:

Bela’s city is stated to have been Dinhabah (Gen. xxxvi. 32), which Dr. Neubauer has identified with Dunip, now Tennib, north-west of Aleppo, which played an important part in the history of Western Asia during the fifteenth century B.C.

Footnote 232:

W. A. I. i. 46; Col. iii. 29, 30. In another passage Esar-haddon describes them as ‘serpents with two heads’ (Budge, _History of Esar-haddon_, p. 120).

Footnote 233:

Bronze serpents were regarded in Babylonia as divine protectors of a building, and were accordingly ‘set up’ at its entrance. Thus Nebuchadrezzar says of the walls of Babylon, ‘On the thresholds of the gates I set up mighty bulls of bronze and huge serpents that stood erect’ (W. A. I. i. 65, i. 19-21).

Footnote 234:

It is called simply Iyîm in the official itinerary (Numb. xxxiii. 45). Punon is the Pinon of Gen. xxxvi. 41, where it is coupled with Elah, the El-Paran of Gen. xiv. 6.

Footnote 235:

Those who wish to see what can be done by ingenious philological conjectures which satisfy none but their authors may turn to a paper by Professor Budde in the _Actes du Dixième Congrès Internationale des Orientalistes_, iii. pp. 13-18, where they will find a ‘revised’ version of Numb. xxi. 17, 18. The two last lines are changed into ‘With the sceptre, with their staves: From the desert a gift!’

Footnote 236:

Numb. xxxii. 41, 42; Deut. iii. 14. We learn from Judg. x. 3, 4, that Jair was one of the judges, so that the conquest of Havoth-Jair must have taken place long after the death of Moses.

Footnote 237:

Now Dar’at (pronounced Azr’ât by the Bedâwin) and Tell-Ashtereh.

Footnote 238:

Zippor of Gaza was the name of the father of a certain Baal- ... whose servant carried letters in the third year of Meneptah II. from Egypt to Khai, the Egyptian governor of the fellahin or Perizzites of Palestine, and the king of Tyre (Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_, Eng. tr., second edit., ii., p. 126).

Footnote 239:

Ammiya is said to have been seized by Ebed-Asherah the Amorite (_The Tel el-Amarna Tablets in the British Museum_, 12. 25., 15. 27). It is also called Amma (_ib._ 17. 7., 37. 58, where it is associated with Ubi, the Aup of the Egyptian inscriptions) and Ammi (W. and A. 89. 13).

Footnote 240:

If the two Balaams, ‘son of Beor,’ are really the same person, Edomite and Israelitish history will have handed down two different conceptions of him. The Israelitish chronology, moreover, would make it impossible for him to have been the _first_ Edomite king (see Numb. xx. 14).

Footnote 241:

Sheth are the Sutu of the Assyrian inscriptions, the Sittiu or ‘Archers’ of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Bedâwin of modern geography. The Beni-Sheth will be the Midianite Bedâwin who are associated with the Moabites in the Pentateuch (Numb. xxii. 4, 7; xxv. 1-18; xxxi. 8).

Footnote 242:

_Records of the Past_, new ser., iii. pp. 61-65.

Footnote 243:

Tiglath-pileser I. (B.C. 1100) boasts of having sailed upon the Mediterranean in a ship of Arvad, and of there killing a dolphin, while his son, Assur-bil-kala, erected statues in the cities of ‘the land of the Amorites’ (W. A. I. i. 6, No. vi.). A little later Assur-irbi carved an image of himself on Mount Amanus, near the Gulf of Antioch, but the capture by the king of Aram of Mutkina, which guarded the ford over the Euphrates, subsequently cut him off from the west. Palestine is already called Ebir-nâri, ‘the land beyond the river,’ in an Assyrian inscription which Professor Hommel would refer to the age of Assur-bil-kala, the son of Tiglath-pileser I. (_The Ancient Hebrew Tradition_, p. 196). Professor D. H. Müller (_Die Propheten_, p. 215) conjecturally emends the Hebrew text of Numb. xxiii. 23, 24, and sees in it a reference to the kingdom of Samalla, to the north-east of the Gulf of Antioch. The two verses become in his translation, ‘[And he saw Samalla], and began his speech, and said, Alas, who will survive of Samalla? And ships [shall come] from the coast of Chittim, and Asshur shall oppress him, and Eber shall oppress him, and he himself is destined to destruction.’ Samalla, however, was only the Assyrian name of a district called by natives of Northern Syria Ya’di and Gurgum; nor is it easy to understand how Balaam could have ‘seen’ the north of Syria from Moab. Professor Hommel is more probably right in his view that Asshur here does not signify the Assyrians, but the Asshurim to the south of Palestine (Gen. xxv. 3, 18).

Footnote 244:

For the Messianic prophecy of Ameni, see above, p. 175.

Footnote 245:

Similar cities of refuge, called _puhonua_, existed in Hawaii. ‘A thief or a murderer might be pursued to the very gateway of one of those cities; but as soon as he crossed the threshold of that gate, even though the gate were open and no barrier hindered pursuit, he was safe as at the city altar. When once within the sacred city, the fugitive’s first duty was to present himself before the idol and return thanks for his protection’ (Trumbull, _The Threshold Covenant_, p. 151, quoting Ellis, _Through Hawaii_, pp. 155 _sq._, and Bird, _Six Months in the Sandwich Islands_, pp. 135 _sq._). For the _asyla_ of Asia Minor see Barth, _De Asylis Græcis_ (1888); Daremberg et Saglio, _Dictionnaire des Antiquités, Grecques et Romaines_, i. pp. 505 _sqq._; Pauly’s _Real-Encyclopädie_ (ed. Wissowa), iv. pp. 1884-5.

Footnote 246:

Erman, _Life in Ancient Egypt_ (Eng. tr.), p. 299.

Footnote 247:

Cornelius Nepos, _Them._ ii. 10.

Footnote 248:

Mahaffy, _The Empire of the Ptolemies_, pp. 144, 156-158. For the _hiera_ or priestly cities of Asia Minor, see Ramsay, _The Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia_, pp. 101 _sqq._; their constitution resembled very closely that of the Levitical cities in Israel. Examples of such cities in the history of Israel are Nob in the time of Saul and Anathoth in the age of Jeremiah.

Footnote 249:

The order of events is in many places confused, which probably points to later insertions in the text. See, for example, Deut. x. 6-9, which interrupts the context, and has nothing to do either with what precedes or with what follows.

Footnote 250:

_E.g._ Deut. xiv. 21, compared with Lev. xvii. 14-16.

Footnote 251:

In this respect it resembles the ‘Negative Confession’ of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which the soul of the dead man was required to make before the judges of the other world (Wiedemann, _Religion der alten Aegypter_, pp. 132, 133).

Footnote 252:

Levi is included among the six tribes which stood on Mount Gerizim to bless. This is an inadvertency, as the Levites were placed on both mountains, it being their duty to utter the curses as well as the blessings.

Footnote 253:

If it did so, xxxiii. 4 can hardly be original. Perhaps Yahveh rather than Moses was described as ‘king in Jeshurun’ (cf. _v._ 26). A very ingenious attempt has been made by Dr. Hayman to explain the corruptions of the text in the song by the theory that it was originally written on a clay tablet, a fracture of which has caused some of the words at the ends of the lines to be lost.

Footnote 254:

Cf. 1 Chron. iv. 22.