But even the analysis of the Hexateuchal critics fails to stand the test

of archæological discovery. Nowhere does there seem to be clearer

evidence of the documentary hypothesis than in the story of the Deluge.

Here the combination of a Yahvistic and an Elohistic narrative seems to

force itself upon the attention of the reader, and the advocates of the

disintegration theory have triumphantly pointed to the internal

contradictions and inconsistencies of the story in support of their

views. If anywhere, here, at any rate, the external testimony of

archæeology ought to be given on the side of modern criticism.

And yet it is not. It so happens that among the fragments of ancient

Babylonian epic and legend which have come down to us is a long poem in

twelve books, composed in the age of Abraham, or earlier, by a certain

Sin-liqi-unnini, and recounting the adventures of the Chaldæan hero

Gilgames. It is based on older materials, and is, in fact, the last note

and final summing-up of Chaldæan epic song. Older poems have been

incorporated into it, and the epic itself has been artificially moulded

upon an astronomical plan. Its twelve books, in each of which a new

adventure of its hero is recorded, correspond with the twelve signs of

the zodiac, and the months of the year that were named after them. The

eleventh month was presided over by Aquarius, and was the month of ‘the

Curse of Rain’; into the eleventh book of the poem, accordingly, there

has been introduced the episode of the Deluge.

The story of the Deluge had been the subject of many poems. Fragments of

some of them we possess, and the details of the story were not always

the same. But the version preserved in the epic of Gilgames became what

we may term the standard one; the very fact that it was embodied in the

most famous of the epics made it widely known. When it was discovered by

Mr. George Smith in 1872, its striking resemblance to the story of the

Flood in Genesis was at once apparent to every one. In details as well

as in general outline the two accounts agreed; even in the moral cause

assigned to the Deluge—the sin of man—the Babylonian story alone among

traditions of a Deluge was at one with the Biblical narrative.

A comparison of the Chaldæan and Biblical accounts leads to the

following results. The resemblances between them extend equally to the

Elohistic and the Yahvistic portions of the Hebrew narrative. Like the

Elohist, the epic ascribes the Deluge to the sins of mankind, and the

preservation of Xisuthros, the Chaldæan Noah, and his family to the

piety of the hero; all living things, moreover, are involved in the

calamity, except such as are preserved in the ark; its approach is

revealed to Xisuthros by the god Ea, who instructs him how to build ‘the

ship’; Ea also, like Elohim, prescribes the dimensions of the ark, which

is divided into rooms and stories, and pitched within and without; ‘the

seed of life of all kinds’ is taken into it, together with the family of

Xisuthros; the waters of the Flood are said to cover ‘all the high

mountains,’ and to destroy all living creatures except those that were

in the ark; this latter, too, had a window; and when the Deluge had

subsided and Xisuthros had offered a sacrifice on the peak of the

mountain, Bel blessed him and declared that he would never again destroy

the world by a flood while Istar ‘lifted up’ the rainbow, which an old

Babylonian hymn calls ‘the bow of the Deluge.’[135]

Like the Yahvist, on the other hand, the Babylonian poet sees in the

Flood a punishment for sin, and makes it destroy all living things

except those that were in the ark. He also states that Xisuthros sent

forth three birds, one after the other, in order to discover whether the

waters were subsiding, two of them being a dove and a raven, and that

while the dove turned back to the ark, the raven flew away. After the

descent from the ark, moreover, Xisuthros, we are told, built an altar

and offered sacrifice on the summit of the mountain whereon it had

rested, and there ‘the gods smelled the sweet savour’ of the offering.

In certain cases the epic even explains what is doubtful or obscure in

the Hebrew text. Thus it shows that in the account of the sending forth

of the birds one of the birds has been omitted; and that consequently,

in order to complete the number of times the birds were despatched from

the ark, the dove is sent forth twice, while the raven, instead of being

the last to leave the ark, has been made the first to do so. In the

Babylonian story the order is natural. First, the dove flies forth, then

the swallow or ‘bird of destiny,’ and lastly the raven who feeds on the

corpses that float upon the water, and accordingly does not return. But

the ‘bird of destiny’ carried with it heathen and mythological

associations. It has therefore been omitted by the Biblical writer, the

result being to throw the narrative into confusion.[136]

The Babylonian origin of the Flood, again, alone explains the statement

that it was partly caused by ‘the fountains of the great deep’ being

broken up. The ‘great deep,’ called Tiamat in Babylonian mythology, had

been placed under guard at the Creation, according to Chaldæan belief,

and so prevented from gushing forth and destroying mankind. The whole

conception takes us back to the alluvial plain of Babylonia, liable at

any time to be inundated by the waters of the Persian Gulf, and is

wholly inapplicable to a mountainous country like Palestine, where rain

only could have produced a flood.[137]

There are even indications that in the Biblical narrative the

mythological ideas and polytheistic phraseology of the Babylonian story

have been intentionally contradicted or suppressed. Thus, not only is

the whole colouring of the narrative sternly monotheistic, but God

Himself is made to reveal the approach of the Deluge to Noah, in

contrast with the Babylonian version, according to which the god Ea

announced the coming catastrophe to the Chaldæan Noah without the

knowledge of the supreme god Bel. And when the Flood was past, Bel was

enraged that any should have escaped living from it, and the other

deities had to intercede before he could be pacified. So, too, whereas

the Babylonian poet tells us that the Chaldæan Noah closed the door of

his ship, in the book of Genesis it is Yahveh Himself who does so. In

the view of the Biblical writer, nothing was to be allowed to lessen the

omnipotence of the God of Israel.

It will be noticed that the coincidences between the Babylonian and

Hebrew narratives are quite as much in details as in general outlines,

and these coincidences cover the Hebrew narrative as a whole. It is not

with the Elohist or with the Yahvist alone that the Babylonian poet

agrees, but with the supposed combination of their two documents as we

now find it in the book of Genesis. If the documentary hypothesis were

right, there would be only two ways of accounting for this fact. Either

the Babylonian poet had before him the present ‘redacted’ text of

Genesis, or else the Elohist and Yahvist must have copied the Babylonian

story upon the mutual understanding that the one should insert what the

other omitted. There is no third alternative.

As the Babylonian epic was composed in the age of Khammu-rabi or

Amraphel, neither of the two alternatives is likely to be accepted by

the advocates of the Hexateuchal theory, and the whole theory,

consequently, must be ruled out of court. It breaks down in the first

test case to which the results of archæological discovery can be

applied, a case, moreover, in which its plausibility is unusually great.

Henceforth the historian who pursues a scientific method may safely

disregard the whole fabric of Hexateuchal criticism.

The story of the Deluge itself suggests what may be put in place of it.

With all its likeness to the Babylonian story, the Biblical narrative

has nevertheless undergone a change. It has been clothed not only in a

Hebrew, but also in a Palestinian dress. The ship of the Chaldæan Noah

has become an ark, as was natural in a country where there were no great

rivers or Persian Gulf; the period of the rainfall has been transferred

from Sebet or January and February, when the winter rains fall in

Babylonia, to ‘the second month’ of the Hebrew civil year, our October

and November, the time of the autumn or ‘former rains’ in Canaan, while

the subsidence of the waters is made to begin in the middle of ‘the

seventh month,’ when the ‘latter rains’ of the Canaanitish spring are

over; and the dove is said to have brought back in its mouth a leaf of

the olive, a tree characteristic of the soil of Palestine. Though the

Biblical narrative has been borrowed from Babylonia, it has been

modified and coloured in the West. Even the hero of the Babylonian poem

has become the Noah or Naham of Canaan.

We have learned from the Tel el-Amarna tablets how this could have come

about. There was one period, and, so far as we know, one period only, in

the history of Western Asia, when the literature of Babylonia was taught

and studied there, and when the literary ideas and stories of Chaldæa

were made familiar to the people of Canaan. This was the period of

Babylonian influence which ended with the Mosaic age. With the Hittite

conquests of the fourteenth century B.C., and the Israelitish invasion

of Canaan, it all came to an end. The Babylonian story of the Deluge,

adapted to Palestine as we find it in the Pentateuch, must belong to a

pre-Mosaic epoch. And it is difficult to believe that the identity of

the details in the Babylonian and Biblical versions could have remained

so perfect, or that the Biblical writer could have exhibited such

deliberate intention of controverting the polytheistic features of the

original, if he had not still possessed a knowledge of the cuneiform

script. It is difficult to believe that he belonged to an age when the

Phœnician alphabet had taken the place of the syllabary of Babylonia,

and the older literature of Canaan had become a sealed book.

But if so, a new light is shed on the sources of the historical

narratives contained in the Pentateuch. Some of them at least have come

down from the period when the literary culture of Babylonia was still

dominant on the shores of the Mediterranean. So far from being popular

traditions and myths first committed to writing after the disruption of

Solomon’s kingdom, and amalgamated into their present form by a series

of ‘redactors,’ they will have been derived from the pre-Mosaic

literature of Palestine. Such of them as are Babylonian in origin will

have made their way westwards like the Chaldæan legends found among the

tablets of Tel el-Amarna, while others will be contemporaneous records

of the events they describe. We must expect to discover in the

Pentateuch not only Israelitish records, but Babylonian, Canaanitish,

Egyptian, even Edomite records as well.

The progress of archæological research has already in part fulfilled

this expectation. ‘Ur of the Chaldees’ has been found at Muqayyar, and

the contracts of early Babylonia have shown that Amorites—or, as we

should call them, Canaanites—were settled there, and have even brought

to light such distinctively Hebrew names as Jacob-el, Joseph-el, and

Ishmael.[138] Even the name of Abram, Abi-ramu, appears as the father of

an ‘Amorite’ witness to a contract in the third generation before

Amraphel. And Amraphel himself, along with his contemporaries,

Chedor-laomer or Kudur-Laghghamar of Elam, Arioch of Larsa, and Tid’al

or Tudghula, has been restored to the history to which he and his

associates had been denied a claim. The ‘nations’ over whom Tid’al ruled

have been explained, and the accuracy of the political situation

described in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis has been fully

vindicated. Jerusalem, instead of being a name first given to the future

capital of Judah after its capture by David, is proved to have been its

earliest title; and the priest-king Melchizedek finds a parallel in his

later successor, the priest-king Ebed-Tob, who, in the Tel el-Amarna

letters, declares that he had received his royal dignity, not from his

father or his mother, but through the arm of ‘the mighty king.’ If we

turn to Egypt, the archæological evidence is the same. The history of

Joseph displays an intimate acquaintance on the part of its writer with

Egyptian life and manners in the era of the Hyksos, and offers the only

explanation yet forthcoming of the revolution that took place in the

tenure of land during the Hyksos domination. As we have seen, there are

features in the story which suggest that it has been translated from a

hieratic papyrus. As for the Exodus, we shall see presently that its

geography is that of the nineteenth dynasty, and of no other period in

the history of Egypt.

Thus, then, directly or indirectly, much of the history contained in the

Pentateuch has been shown by archæology to be authentic. And it must be

remembered that Oriental archæology is still in its infancy. Few only of

the sites of ancient civilisation have as yet been excavated, and there

are thousands of cuneiform texts in the Museums of Europe and America

which have not as yet been deciphered. It was only in 1887 that the Tel

el-Amarna tablets, which have had such momentous consequences for

Biblical criticism, were found, and the disclosures made by the early

contracts of Babylonia, even the name of Chedor-laomer itself, are of

still more recent discovery. It is therefore remarkable that so much is

already in our hands which confirms the antiquity and historical

genuineness of the Pentateuchal narratives; and it raises the

presumption that with the advance of our knowledge will come further

confirmations of the Biblical story. At any rate, the historian’s path

is clear; the Pentateuch has been tested by the comparative method of

science, and has stood the test. It contains history, and must be dealt

with accordingly like other historical works. The philological theory

with its hair-splitting distinctions, its Priestly Code and ‘redactors,’

must be put aside, along with all the historical consequences which it

involves.

But it does not follow that because the philological theory is

untenable, all inquiries into the character and sources of the

Pentateuch are waste of time. The philological theory has failed because

it has attempted to build up a vast superstructure on very imperfect and

questionable materials; because, in short, it has attempted to attain

historical results without the use of the historical method. But no one

can study the Pentateuch in the light of other ancient works of a

similar kind without perceiving that it is a compilation, and that its

author—or authors—has made use of a large variety of older materials.

Modern Oriental history has been written in the same manner; a book, for

instance, like the Egyptian history of El-Maqrîzî, though the production

of a single mind, nevertheless embodies older materials which have been

collected from every side. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, or the

Chaldæan Epic of Gilgames, bears the same testimony. The growth of the

Book of the Dead, the ritual which was needed by the souls of the

Egyptian dead in their passage to the next world, can actually be

traced.[139] It included and combined the doctrines of more than one

school of early Egyptian theological thought, and in later days was

extensively interpolated and modernised. Not only were glosses, once

intended to explain the obscurities of the archaic phraseology,

incorporated into the text, but even whole chapters were added to the

work. The Epic of Gilgames similarly embodies other poems or portions of

poems, of which the Episode of the Deluge is an example. Yet no

Assyriologist would dispute for a moment that from beginning to end it

is the work of one author.

Archæology has already shown us that we are right in believing that the

Pentateuch also has been compiled out of earlier materials. The story of

the campaign of Chedor-laomer must have been derived from a cuneiform

tablet; the story of Joseph seems to have been taken from a hieratic

papyrus. The account of the Deluge has made its way from Babylonia to

Canaan in the days when the culture of Chaldæa extended to the

Mediterranean. We thus have narratives which presuppose an acquaintance

not only with Babylon and Egypt, but also with Babylonian and Egyptian

documents.

So, too, the list of Edomite kings contained in the thirty-sixth chapter

of Genesis must have been extracted from the official annals of Edom. It

is a proof that such annals existed, that the Edomites, like the rest of

their neighbours, were acquainted with the art of writing, and that

their official records were accessible to a Hebrew scribe.

We cannot doubt the authenticity of the list, even though the ancient

territory of Edom has not yet been explored, and no Edomite inscriptions

consequently have as yet been found to verify it. The list, therefore,

does not yet stand in the same fortunate position as the account of

Chedor-laomer and his allies, which has been verified by archæological

discovery. Here even the names of the foreign kings have been preserved

in the Hebrew text with marvellously little corruption. The whole

account must have come from a cuneiform document coeval with the event

it narrates. That is to say, we can here trace one of the Pentateuchal

narratives not only to a written source, but to a written source which

is at the same time a contemporaneous record.

We may conclude, then, that the Pentateuch has been compiled from older

documents—some Babylonian, some Egyptian, some Edomite; others, as we

may gather from the nature of their contents, Canaanite and Aramæan—and

that many of these documents belong to the periods to which they refer.

This, however, is not all. In certain cases we can approximately fix the

latest date at which they could have been employed and combined in the

form in which we now find them. Thus in the geographical chart of

Genesis (x. 6), Canaan is made the brother of Cush and Mizraim. This

takes us back to the time when Canaan was a province of the Egyptian

empire; when that empire came to an end the description ceased to be

possible. After the epoch of the nineteenth dynasty and the Hebrew

Exodus, Canaan and Egypt were cut off from one another geographically

and politically, and Canaan could never again have been called in

Semitic idiom the brother of Mizraim. It became instead the brother of

Aram and Assur.

Here, therefore, the limit of age prescribed by archæology forbids us to

pass beyond the Mosaic epoch. Moses, in short, is the compiler to whom

the archæological evidence indicates that the tenth chapter of Genesis

goes back in its original shape. But by the side of this evidence there

is other evidence also which tells a different tale. Gomer, or the

Kimmerians, as well as Madai, are named among the sons of Japhet, and

the Assyrian monuments assure us that neither the one nor the other came

within the geographical horizon of Western Asia before the ninth century

B.C. It was in the ninth century B.C. that the Assyrian kings first

became acquainted with the Medes, while the Gimirrâ or Kimmerians did

not descend upon Asia from their seats on the Sea of Azof until about

B.C. 680. The same reasoning which gives us the Mosaic age as that of

the geographical chart of Genesis in its primitive shape gives us the

seventh century B.C. or later for the date of another portion of the

same chapter.

The list of the kings of Edom, again, is introduced by the remark that

‘these are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom, before there

reigned any king over the children of Israel.’ It was not inserted in

the book of Genesis, therefore, until after the age of Saul, a

conclusion which is supported by the fact that the first king named

seems to be Balaam, the son of Beor, who was a contemporary of Moses.

If, accordingly, the Pentateuch was originally compiled in the Mosaic

age, it must have undergone the fate of the Egyptian Book of the Dead,

and been enlarged by subsequent additions. Insertions and interpolations

must have found their way into it as new editions of it were made.

That such was the case there is indirect testimony. On the one hand the

text of the prophetical books was treated in a similar manner, additions

and modifications being made in it from time to time by the prophet or

his successors in order to adapt it to new political or religious

circumstances. Isaiah, for instance, has copied a prophecy directed by

one of his predecessors against Moab; and after breaking it off in the

middle of a sentence, has adapted it to the needs and circumstances of

his own time. On the other hand, a long-established Jewish tradition,

which has found its way into the Second Book of Esdras (xiv. 21-26),

makes Ezra rewrite or edit the books of Moses. There is no reason to

question the substantial truth of the tradition; Ezra was the restorer

of the old paths, and the Pentateuch may well have taken its present

shape from him. If so, we need not be surprised if we find here and

there in it echoes of the Babylonish captivity.

Side by side with materials derived from written sources, the book of

Genesis contains narratives which, at all events in the first instance,

must have resembled the traditions and poems orally recited in Arab

lands, and commemorating the heroes and forefathers of the tribe. Thus

there are two Abrahams; the one an Abraham who has been born in one of

the centres of Babylonian civilisation, who is the ally of Amorite

chieftains, whose armed followers overthrow the rearguard of the Elamite

army, and whom the Hittites of Hebron address as ‘a mighty prince’; the

other is an Abraham of the Bedâwin camp-fire, a nomad whose habits are

those of the rude independence of the desert, whose wife kneads the

bread while he himself kills the calf with which his guests are

entertained. It is true that in actual Oriental life the simplicity of

the desert and the wealth and culture of the town may be found combined

in the same person; that in modern Egypt Arab shêkhs may still be met

with who thus live like wild Bedâwin during one part of the year, and as

rich and civilised townsmen during another part of it; while in the last

century a considerable portion of Upper Egypt was governed by Bedâwin

emirs, who realised in their own persons that curious duality of life

and manners which to us Westerns appears so strange. But it is also true

that the spirit and tone of the narratives in Genesis differ along with

the character ascribed in them to the patriarch: we find in them not

only the difference between the guest of the Egyptian Pharaoh and the

entertainer of the angels, but also a difference in the point of view.

The one speaks to us of literary culture, the other of the simple circle

of wandering shepherds to whose limited experience the story-teller has

to appeal. The story may be founded on fact; it may be substantially

true; but it has been coloured by the surroundings in which it has grown

up, and archæological proof of its historical character can never be

forthcoming. At most, it can be shown to be true to the time and place

in which its scene is laid, and so contains nothing which is

inconsistent with known facts.

Such, then, are the main results of the application of the archæological

test to the books of the Pentateuch. The philological theory, with its

minute and mathematically exact analysis, is brushed aside; it is as

little in harmony with archæology as it is with common sense. The

Pentateuch substantially belongs to the Mosaic age, and may therefore be

accepted as, in the bulk, the work of Moses himself. But it is a

composite work, embodying materials of various kinds. Some of these are

written documents, descriptive of contemporaneous events, or recording

the cosmological beliefs of ancient Babylonia; others have been derived

from the unwritten traditions of nomad tribes. The work has passed

through many editions; it is full of interpolations, lengthy and

otherwise; and it has probably received its final shape at the hands of

Ezra. But in order to discover the interpolations, or to determine the

written documents that have been used, we must have recourse to the

historical method and the facts of archæology. Apart from these we

cannot advance a step in safety. The archæological evidence, however, is

already sufficient for the presumption that, where it fails us, the text

is nevertheless ancient, and the narrative historical—a presumption, it

will be noticed, the exact contrary of that in which the Hexateuchal

theory has landed its disciples.

But, these same disciples will urge, what becomes of those three strata

of legislation which we have so successfully disentangled one from the

other in the Hexateuch, and have shown to belong to three separate and

mutually exclusive periods of Israelitish history? Has not literary

criticism proved that no reconciliation is possible between the

enactments and point of view of the Book of the Covenant on the one

side, and those of the Deuteronomist on the other, or between the

legislation of the Deuteronomist and that of the Priestly Code? The

altar of earth or rough-hewn stones, which may be built on any high

place, makes way for the altar of the temple at Jerusalem, and this

again for the ideal altar of the tabernacle in the wilderness. One

sanctuary takes the place of many; the priesthood is confined first to

the tribe of Levi, and then more especially to the sons of Aaron; while

the simple feasts of harvest rejoicing, which were celebrated by early

Israel in common with its neighbours, are replaced by sacrifices for sin

and solemn festivals like the Day of Atonement.

It is strange that these inconsistencies were left to European scholars

of the nineteenth century to discover, and that neither the

contemporaries of Ezra, who allowed themselves to be bound to the yoke

of a law which they believed to be divine, nor the Samaritan rivals of

the Jews, should have ever perceived them. The fact seems to the

historian to throw some doubt on their real existence, and he can leave

them to the tender mercies of Dr. Baxter, who has met the literary

critics on their own ground, and seriously damaged their house of

cards.[140] The historian can have nothing to do with a theory which not

only requires the whole of the historical books of the Old Testament to

be rewritten in accordance with it, but also declares at once every

passage which tells against it to be a gloss and interpolation. History,

like science, is not built on subjective judgments.

At the same time, there is an element of truth in the work of the

‘literary analysis.’ Years of labour on the part of able and learned

scholars cannot be absolutely without result, even though the labourers

may have been led astray by the will-o’-the-wisp of a false theory and

have followed a wrong line of research. The minute examination to which

they have subjected the text has revealed much that had never before

been suspected; and they have made it clear that the historical books of

the Old Testament are compilations, not free, moreover, from later

interpolations, even though we cannot share the confidence with which

they separate and distinguish the different elements. They have made it

impossible ever to return to the old conception of the Hebrew Scriptures

and the old method of treating Hebrew history. Where they have been

successful has been on the negative rather than on the reconstructive

side. For reconstruction, the scientific instrument of comparison was

wanted, and this the literary analysts did not possess.

The Old Testament books themselves make no secret of the fact that they

are compilations. The books of the Kings name the sources from which a

large part of them has been drawn, and the books of Samuel (2 Sam. i.

18) quote David’s ‘Song of the Bow’ from the book of Jasher. The same

work is referred to in the book of Joshua (x. 13), and in Numbers (xxi.

14) we have an extract from the lost Book of the Wars of the Lord. Old

poems are introduced into the text, like the Song of Deborah or the

Blessing of Jacob; even an Amorite song of triumph is cited in Numbers

xxi. 27-30. The so-called ‘Book of the Covenant’ of the literary critics

takes its name from a real ‘book of the covenant’ in which the first

legislation promulgated at Sinai was written down by Moses, according to

Exod. xxiv. 4, 7, and read by him ‘in the audience of the people;’ while

the Song of Deborah expressly states that the forces of Zebulun, which

took part in the war against Sisera, were accompanied by scribes, like

the armies of Egypt or Assyria.

That Moses could not have written the account of his own death was

discovered even by the Jewish rabbis; and references to the ‘Book of the

Covenant’ and the ‘Book of the Wars of the Lord’ prove that the

Pentateuch in its present form has not come down to us from the Mosaic

age. The materials may be Mosaic; it may thus be substantially the work

of the great Hebrew lawgiver, but the actual work itself is of later

date.

How far may we trust the accuracy of the traditional Hebrew text? Modern

criticism has been inclined to pronounce the text corrupt, not

unfrequently because the critic himself cannot understand it, and to

deal pretty freely in conjectural emendations. The Greek text of the

Septuagint is invoked against it, and undue weight is often given to its

variant readings or omissions, as, for instance, in the case of the

history of Saul. Doubtless the Septuagint text is of great value; it

goes back to a period centuries older than the oldest Hebrew MS. that

has survived to us; but it was made by Jews of Alexandria, whose

knowledge of the sacred language of their nation was not always complete

or exact. The recent discovery of the original Hebrew text of

Ecclesiasticus has gone far to shake our confidence in the readings of

the Septuagint, as a comparison of it with the Greek translation made

only two generations later has shown that passages are omitted in the

latter, through simple carelessness, or perhaps inability to understand

them. The discovery has also not been in favour of the emendations of

literary and philological criticism, not one of the many attempts made

to restore the lost Hebrew original having turned out to be

correct.[141]

On the other hand, a comparison of the Hebrew Scriptures with the clay

books of Assyria is on the side of accuracy in the text. The scribes

employed in the libraries of Assyria, and presumably, therefore, in the

older libraries of Babylonia, were scrupulously exact in their copies of

earlier texts. Where the tablet which they copied was injured and

defective, it was stated to be so, and the scribe made no attempt to

fill up by conjecture, however obvious, what was missing in the document

before him. He even was careful to note whether the fracture was recent

or not. Where, again, he was not certain about the Assyrian equivalent

of a Babylonian character of unusual form, he gave alternative

representatives of it, or else reproduced the questionable character

itself. Perhaps the most striking example of the textual honesty of the

Assyrian and Babylonian scribes is, however, to be found in a

compilation known as the _Babylonian Chronicle_—a chronological abstract

in which the history of Babylonia is given from a strictly Babylonian

point of view. Here the author candidly confesses that he does ‘not

know’ the year when the decisive battle of Khalulê took place, which

laid Babylon at the feet of Sennacherib; his materials for settling the

matter failed him, and, unlike the modern Hexateuchal critics, he

abstained from conjecture. We are more fortunate than he was; for, as we

possess the annals of Sennacherib, in which the Assyrian king gives a

highly-coloured account of the battle, we are able to determine its

date.

In the later days of the Jewish monarchy there was a library at

Jerusalem similar to those of Assyria and Babylonia, and we hear of the

scribes belonging to it in the days of Hezekiah re-editing the Proverbs

of Solomon (Prov. xxv. 1). There are indications that they were as

careful and honest in their work as the scribes of Assyria whose example

they probably followed. Thus the names of Chedor-laomer and his allies

are preserved with singular correctness, as well as the forms of two

geographical names which seem to imply translation from a cuneiform

original.[142] So, again, the Aramaic inscriptions of a contemporary of

Tiglath-pileser III. found at Sinjerli, north of the Gulf of Antioch,

show that in one case at least the spelling which we find in the books

of Kings has remained unchanged since the eighth century B.C. As in the

books of Kings, so at Sinjerli, the Assyrian name Tukulti-Pal-Esarra is

incorrectly written Tiglath-pileser, with _g_ instead of _k_, and even

the country over which he ruled is in both cases written _plene_ (with

the symbol of the vowel _u_). On the other hand, it cannot be denied

that there are many clear and unmistakable corruptions of the text. In

the fourteenth chapter of Genesis itself the name of the city Larsa has

been transformed into Ellasar;[143] elsewhere glosses have been received

into the text, while there are whole passages which are either

ungrammatical or unmeaning as they now stand. Ancient authors, whether

Hebrew or otherwise, did not write nonsense; and if the natural

rendering of a passage does not make sense, we may feel quite sure that

it is corrupt.

The historian of the Hebrews, then, is bound to treat his authorities as

the Greek historian would treat Herodotos or Thucydides or any other

writer on behalf of whose character and age there is a long line of

external testimony. The results of the ‘literary analysis’ may be left

to the philologist, as well as the conjectures and theories that have

been substituted by scholars of the nineteenth century for early

Israelitish history. They have vanished like bubbles wherever they have

been tested by the archæological evidence, which, on the other hand, has

vindicated the substantial truthfulness of those Old Testament

statements which had been scornfully thrown aside.

Where it is possible, the Biblical narratives must be compared with the

discoveries of archæological research; where this cannot be done, they

must be examined from the historical and not from the philological or

literary point of view. We are bound to assume their general credibility

and faithfulness, except where this can be historically disproved, and

to remember that while on the one hand inconsistencies in detail do not

affect the general historical trustworthiness of a document, the

agreement of such details with the facts of archæology or geography—more

especially when they are of the kind termed ‘undesigned coincidences’—is

a powerful argument in its favour. Above all, we must beware of that

favourite weapon of literary criticism, the argument from silence, which

is really merely an argument from the imperfection of our own knowledge,

and which a single instance to the contrary will overthrow. The literary

criticism of the Old Testament is full of examples of the argument that

have been demolished by the advance of Oriental archæology.

Let this accordingly be the rule of the historian: to believe all

things, to hope all things, but at the same time to test and try all

things. And the test must be scientific, not what we assume to be

probable or natural, but external testimony in the shape of

archæological or geographical facts. The history of the past is not what

ought to have happened according to the ideas of the critic, but what

actually did happen.

Such a manner of treating our authorities does not, of course, exclude

our recognition of what the literary critics call their several

‘tendencies.’ No history, worthy of the name, can be written without a

‘tendency’ of some sort on the part of the writer, even though it be not

consciously felt. We must have some kind of general theory within the

lines of which our facts may be grouped; and however much we may strive

to be impartial, our conception of the facts themselves, and our mode of

presenting them, will be coloured by our beliefs and education. The

historian cannot help writing with an object in view; the necessities of

the subject require it.

That the historical books of the Old Testament should have been written

with a ‘tendency’ is therefore natural. And literary criticism has

successfully pointed out in the case of one of these books what the

‘tendency’ was. If we compare the books of Chronicles with those of

Samuel and Kings, the contrast between them strikes the eye at once. The

interest of the Chronicler is centred in the history of the Jewish

temple and ritual, of its priests and Levites, and the manifold

requirements of the Law. His history of Israel accordingly becomes a

history of Israelitish ritual; all else is put aside or treated in the

briefest fashion. The incidents of David’s reign narrated in the books

of Samuel are subordinated to elaborate accounts of his arrangements for

the services in the tabernacle or temple; the history of the northern

kingdom of Israel, which lay outside that of the temple at Jerusalem, is

passed over in silence; and the Passover held in Hezekiah’s reign, about

which not a word is said in the books of Kings, is dwelt upon to the

exclusion of almost everything else. Nor, had we only the Chronicler in

our hands, should we know that the pious Hezekiah had entered into an

alliance with the Babylonian king and boastfully displayed to his

ambassadors the treasures of the Jewish kingdom, thereby bringing upon

himself the rebuke of the prophet Isaiah. All that the Chronicler has to

say on the matter is that ‘in the business of the ambassadors of the

prince of Babylon, who sent to inquire of the wonder that was done in

the land, God left him, to try him, that he might know all that was in

his heart’; and even here a theological turn is given to the occurrence

by the motive assigned for the embassy. As a matter of fact, we know

from the cuneiform inscriptions that the real object of Merodach-baladan

was to form a league with the princes of the West against their common

Assyrian enemy, to which, as the books of Kings inform us, was naturally

added a polite inquiry after Hezekiah’s health.

‘Tendencies’ there are, therefore, in the historical writings of the Old

Testament; they would not be human productions if there were not. The

authors have had one great object in view, that of showing from the past

history of the people that sin brings punishment with it, while a

blessing follows upon righteous action. They believed in the Divine

government of the world, and wrote with that belief clearly before them.

They believed also that Israel was the chosen nation in whose history

that Divine government had been made manifest to mankind, and that the

God of Israel was the one true omnipotent God. In this belief in a

theodicy they were theologians, like most other Oriental writers. But

their theological point of view did not prevent them from being

historians as well. It did not interfere with their honestly recording

the course of events as it had been handed down to them, or reproducing

their authorities without intentional change. Doubtless they may have

made mistakes at times, their judgment may not always have been strictly

critical or correct, and want of sufficient materials may now and then

have led them into error. But when we find that no attempt is made to

palliate or conceal the sins and shortcomings of their most cherished

national heroes, that even the reverses of the nation are chronicled

equally with its successes, and that the early period of its history is

confessed to have been one of anarchy and crime, and not the golden age

of which popular (and even historical) imagination loves to dream, we

are justified in according to them, in spite of their theological

‘tendencies,’ a considerable measure of confidence.

It will have been noticed that chronology—the skeleton, as it were, on

which the flesh of history is laid—has been alluded to in the previous

chapter only in the vaguest possible manner. ‘The age of Abraham,’ ‘the

age of the Exodus,’ ‘the Mosaic age,’ are the phrases that have been

used in referring to Old Testament events. Israelitish chronology in the

true sense of the word does not begin till the reign of David, and even

then we have to deal with probabilities rather than with facts. Like

Egyptian history, which has to be measured by dynasties instead of dates

before the rise of the eighteenth dynasty, the early history of the

Hebrews has no chronological record. Before we can attach dates to the

events of the patriarchal period or the Exodus, it is necessary to find

synchronisms between them and the dated history of other peoples.

It is a commonplace of Biblical students that numbers are peculiarly

liable to corruption, and that consequently little dependence can be

placed on the numbers given in the text of the Old Testament. But the

conclusion does not follow from the premiss. The later dates of

Israelitish history are for the most part reliable, and it would be

strange if the causes of corruption were fatal only to the dates of an

earlier period. Moreover, the numbers fit into a self-consistent system,

the several fractions of which agree with the whole summation. Such a

self-consistent system would perhaps demand acceptance were it not that

there are three such systems, rivals one of the other, and mutually

incompatible. One is that of the Massoretic Hebrew text, which makes the

period from the Creation to the call of Abraham exactly 2000 solar years

(or, 2056 lunar years), 1600 of which extend from the Creation to the

Deluge, and the remaining 400 from the Deluge to the call of Abraham. A

second is that of the Septuagint, according to which the period from the

Creation to the Flood is 2200 solar years (or, 2262 lunar years), 1600

of these elapsing between the Creation and the birth of Noah, and 600

from that event to the Flood, while 1200 are counted from the Flood to

the call of the patriarch. The third is that of the Samaritan text which

divides the period into two halves of 1200 years each; the first 1200

comprising the time from the Creation to the birth of the sons of Noah,

and the second 1200 the rest of the period.

It is obvious that all these systems are like the similar chronological

systems of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, or the Hindus, mere

artificial schemes of an astronomical character, and differing from the

latter only in their more modest computation of time. For historical

purposes they are worthless, and indicate merely that materials for a

chronology were entirely wanting. The ages assigned to the patriarchs

before the Flood, for example, stand on a level with the reigns of the

ten antediluvian kings of Chaldæa which are extended over 120 sari, or

432,000 years. The post-diluvian patriarchs are in no better position;

indeed, one of them, Arphaxad, is a geographical title, and the

Septuagint interpolates after him a certain Kainan, of whom neither the

Hebrew nor the Samaritan text knows anything.

Even after the call of Abraham, Hebrew chronology is equally uncertain.

The length of life assigned to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is surprising,

though not quite impossible, but the dates connected with it do not

always agree together. How, for example, can Abraham have had six

children after the death of Sarah (Gen. xxv. 1, 2), when the birth of

Isaac nearly forty years before had been regarded as extraordinary on

account of the patriarch’s age? Or, again, to quote the words of

Professor Driver[144]: ‘Do we all realise that according to the

chronology of the Book of Genesis (xxv. 26, xxvi. 34, xxxv. 28) [Isaac]

must have been lying upon his deathbed for _eighty years_? Yet we can

only diminish this period by extending proportionately the interval

between Esau’s marrying his Hittite wives (Gen. xxvi. 34), and Rebekah’s

suggestion to Isaac to send Jacob away, lest he should follow his

brother’s example (xxvii. 46), which from the nature of the case will

not admit of any but a slight extension. Keil, however, does so extend

it, reducing the period of Isaac’s final illness to forty-three years,

and is conscious of no incongruity in supposing that Rebekah,

_thirty-seven_ years after Esau has taken his Hittite wives, should

express her fear that Jacob, then aged seventy-seven, will do the same!’

The length of the period during which the Israelites were in Egypt has

been the subject of endless controversy. The Old Testament statements in

regard to it are clear enough. Abraham is told (Gen. xv. 13) that his

descendants shall ‘serve’ the Egyptians and be ‘afflicted’ by them for

400 years. As a generation was counted at thirty years, this implies

that the whole period spent in Egypt was 430 years, though the statement

is not quite exact, since Joseph lived more than thirty years after the

settlement of his brethren in the land of Goshen, and their servitude

and affliction did not begin till after his death. In Exodus (xii. 40)

we are informed explicitly that ‘the sojourning of the children of

Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was 430 years.’ Four hundred and thirty

years, therefore, must have been the length of time during which Israel

was officially regarded as having lived in Goshen.

But it is difficult to reconcile it with another statement in Gen. xv.

16, where it is said that ‘in the fourth generation’ the children of

Israel should return to Canaan. As the words were spoken to Abraham, the

fourth generation would be that of Joseph himself. Since this seems out

of the question, they are usually interpreted to refer to Moses and

Aaron, who are placed in the fourth generation from Levi. Moses and

Aaron, however, did not ‘come again’ to Palestine, and the genealogy of

the daughters of Zelophehad (Num. xxvii. 1) makes the generation that

did so the seventh from Joseph. Time, in fact, cannot be reckoned by

generations; we do not know how many links in the chain may have been

dropped, ‘son’ in Semitic idiom being frequently equivalent to

‘descendant,’ while the names are often merely geographical, like Gilead

and Machir in the genealogy of Zelophehad, and therefore have no

chronological value. It was, however, the mention of ‘the fourth.

generation’ which produced the rabbinical gloss, alluded to by S. Paul

(Gal. iii. 17), according to which the four hundred and thirty years of

Gen. xv. 13 did not mean the time during which the Israelites were

‘afflicted’ in Egypt, but—in spite of the definite assertion to the

contrary—a period which included the lives of the patriarchs as well as

the government of Joseph.

If the statements in regard to the period of the Israelitish settlement

in Egypt are contradictory, the statements in regard to the lapse of

time from the conquest of Canaan to the building of Solomon’s temple are

still more so. In 1 Kings vi. 1 we read that the foundations of the

temple were laid in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign, and four hundred

and eighty years after the Exodus from Egypt. If we add together the

numbers given in the book of Judges, they amount to four hundred and ten

years, thus leaving only seventy years for the wanderings in the desert,

the judgeships of Eli and Samuel, the reigns of Saul and David, and the

first four years of Solomon! The endeavours that have been made to get

over the difficulty have all been fruitless. Wellhausen and others, for

instance, have conjectured that the four hundred and eighty years are

intended to represent twelve generations, each being reckoned at forty

years, and the seventy years assigned to the five ‘lesser judges’ being

overlooked. But the conjecture is destitute of support, and is contrary

to such notices as we have of the number of generations which covered

the period of the judges. Moreover, the five lesser judges do not

constitute a group by themselves.

The period of four hundred and eighty years cannot be reconciled with

the genealogies any better than with the apparent chronology of the book

of Judges. Between Nahshon, who was a contemporary of Moses, and

Solomon, only five generations are given (Ruth iv. 20-22); and between

Phinehas and Zadok, whom Solomon removed from the priesthood, there were

only seven generations of priests (1 Chron. vi. 4-8). Doubtless some of

the links in the ancestry of David have been dropped, but that can

hardly be the case as regards the priests. Seven generations would give,

at the most, not more than two hundred and ten years.

That the number four hundred and eighty, however, has really been based

on the number forty seems probable. Forty years in Hebrew idiom merely

signified an indeterminate and unknown period of time, and the Moabite

Stone shows that the same idiom existed also in the Moabite

language.[145] Thus Absalom is said, in 2 Sam. xv. 7, to have asked

permission to leave Jerusalem ‘after forty years,’ although the length

of time was really little more than two years (2 Sam. xiv. 28 _sqq._),

and Jewish tradition has supplied the lost record of the length of

Saul’s reign with a date of forty years. The period of forty years,

which meets us again and again in the book of Judges, is simply the

equivalent of an unknown length of time; it denotes the want of

materials, and the consequent ignorance of the writer. Twenty, the half

of forty, is equally an expression of ignorance; and the only dates

available for chronology are those which represent a definite space of

time, like the eight years of Chushan-rishathaim’s oppression of Israel,

or the six years of Jephthah’s judgeship.

We can learn nothing, accordingly, from the books of the Old Testament

about the chronology of Israel down to the time of David. For David’s

reign we have the seven years of his rule at Hebron, followed by the

thirty-three years of his sway over the whole of Israel. For the reign

of Solomon we have again the indeterminate ‘forty years’; but since

Rezon of Damascus, like Hadad of Edom, was ‘an adversary to Israel all

the days of Solomon,’ it is probable that the reign did not actually

last more than thirty years at the most. Even the chronology of the

divided kingdom after the death of Solomon, in spite of the synchronisms

the compiler of the books of Kings has endeavoured to establish between

the kings of Judah and those of Israel, has been the despair of

historians, and scheme after scheme has been proposed in order to make

it self-consistent. The Assyrian monuments, however, have now come to

our help, and shown that between the time of Ahab and that of Hezekiah

it is forty years in excess.

For Hebrew chronology, therefore, we must look outside the Bible itself.

At certain points Hebrew history comes into touch with the monumental

records of Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria; and if we are to date the

events it records, it must be by their aid. Egypt can assist us only

after the rise of the eighteenth dynasty; before that period it is as

much without a chronology as the Israelites themselves. But the case is

different as regards Babylonia and Assyria. In Babylonia time was dated

by the reigns of the kings and the events of the several years of each

reign. The extensive commercial relations of the country, and the

contracts that were constantly being drawn up, made accurate dating a

matter of necessity. The Assyrians were even more exact than the

Babylonians; they were distinguished among Oriental nations by their

strong historical sense, and at an early epoch had devised an accurate

system of chronology. The years were reckoned by a succession of

officers called _limmi_, each of whom held office for a year and gave

his name to it, the king himself, during the earlier period of Assyrian

history, taking the office in the first year of his reign. Lists of the

_limmi_ were kept, and a reference to them would show at once the exact

age of a document dated by the name of a particular _limmu_. None of the

lists hitherto discovered are, unfortunately, older than the tenth

century B.C.; but, thanks to those that have been found, from B.C. 909

to 666 we have a continuous and accurate register of time.

Abraham was the contemporary of Chedor-laomer and Amraphel, and the

position of Amraphel among the Babylonian kings has been given us by the

native annalists. He was the sixth king of the first dynasty of Babylon,

and reigned fifty-five years. Unfortunately, the only copy we possess at

present of the native Babylonian list of dynasties is broken, and owing

to the fracture of the tablet, a doubt hangs over his precise date. The

most probable restoration of the text would make it about B.C.

2300.[146] Between this and the Exodus there would be an interval of

more than a thousand years.

Dr. Mahler has attempted to fix astronomically the dates of the two

leading Pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, Thothmes

III. and Ramses II., and his dates have been accepted by Brugsch and

other Egyptologists. If his calculations are correct, Thothmes III. will

have reigned from the 20th of March B.C. 1503 to the 14th of February

B.C. 1449;[147] and Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the oppression, from B.C.

1348 to 1281. The eighteenth dynasty, accordingly, would have commenced

about B.C. 1600, and the Exodus would have taken place subsequently to

B.C. 1280.

If Apophis II. was the Hyksos king under whom Joseph governed Egypt, he

would have lived four generations before Ahmes, the founder of the

eighteenth dynasty.[148] The ‘four hundred years,’ therefore, during

which Israel was evil-entreated in Egypt (Acts vii. 6) will correspond

with the era of four hundred years mentioned on a stela discovered by

Mariette at San, the ancient Zoan.[149] The stela commemorates a visit

paid to Zoan in the reign of Ramses II. by Seti, the governor of the

frontier, on the fourth day of the month Mesori, and ‘the four hundredth

year of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Set-âa-pehti, the son of the

Sun, who loved him, also named Set-Nubti, beloved of Harmakhis.’ Since

Set or Sutekh was the Hyksos god, and Zoan the Hyksos capital, it is

clear that we have here a Hyksos era, the four hundredth anniversary of

which fell in the reign of Ramses II. It seems probable that it marked

the accession of the third and last Hyksos dynasty. According to

Manetho, as reported by Africanus, this lasted for one hundred and

fifty-one years, which would take us to about B.C. 1720, and the same

date is obtained if we calculate the four hundred years of the stela of

Sân, back from the thirtieth year of Ramses II. One generation more—the

thirty additional years given in Exod. xii. 40—will bring us to the

period of the Exodus, which, as we shall see hereafter, must have taken

place under Meneptah, the son and successor of Ramses II.

The precise connection between the Hyksos and Hebrew eras must be left

to the future to discover. At present, the only reference found to the

first is that on the stela of Sân. Some connection, however, there must

be between them, like the connection between Zoan and Hebron indicated

in Numb. xiii. 22, where it is said that ‘Hebron was built seven years

before Zoan in Egypt.’ The Hyksos were invaders from Asia, and between

them and the Hebrews there may have been a closer relationship than we

now suspect.

Two approximate dates have accordingly been found for early Hebrew

history. One results from the synchronism between Abraham and Amraphel,

and may be set down as about 2300 B.C.; the other is the synchronism

with Egyptian history, which gives us about B.C. 1720 for the settlement

of the Hebrew tribes in Goshen. We must now see what light can be thrown

by the Egyptian monuments on the date of the Exodus.

Various reasons had led an increasing majority of Egyptologists to

regard Ramses II., the most prominent figure in the nineteenth dynasty,

if not in the whole history of the Pharaohs, as the Pharaoh of the

Oppression, and the question was finally settled by Dr. Naville’s

excavations at Tel el-Maskhûta on behalf of the Egypt Exploration

Fund.[150] Tel el-Maskhûta proved to be the site of Pi-Tum, the Biblical

Pithom, and to have had the civil name of Thuku or Thukut from the nome

of the district in which it was situated. Brugsch had already pointed

out that Thukut is the Succoth of the Old Testament, the Egyptian _th_

corresponding to the Hebrew _’s_, and Succoth was the first stage in the

flight of the Israelites after their departure from Raamses (Exod. xii.

37). Pi-Tum was the sacred name of the city, which was dedicated to Tum,

the setting Sun.

The monuments found on the spot showed that the founder of the city was

Ramses II.; and since the Pharaoh of the Oppression was also the builder

of Pithom (Exod. i. 11), those who attach any credit to the historical

character of the Biblical statement must necessarily see in him the

great Pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty. The conclusion is further

supported by the name of ‘Raamses,’ or Ramses, the second of the two

cities which it is said the Hebrews were employed in building. Ramses

I., the founder of the nineteenth dynasty, and the grandfather of Ramses

II., was the first king of Egypt who bore that name; and the shortness

of his reign, which does not seem to have exceeded two years, as well as

the disturbed condition of the country, would have prevented him from

undertaking any architectural works. Ramses II., however, was

essentially a building Pharaoh; he covered Egypt from one end to the

other with his constructions; he founded cities, erected or restored

monuments, and not unfrequently usurped them. There was more than one

city or temple of Ramses which owed its existence to his architectural

zeal and was called after his name. As the date of the third Ramses of

the twentieth dynasty is too late to fit in with any theory of the

Exodus, there remains only Ramses II. for ‘the treasure-city’ mentioned

in Exodus. Ramses II. restored Zoan, and made it a seat of residence;

this will explain why, in Gen. xlvii. 11, Goshen is proleptically said

to have been situated in ‘the land of Rameses.’ Brugsch has made it

probable that ‘the city of Ramses’ referred to in an Egyptian papyrus

was Zoan itself.[151]

If Ramses II. was the Pharaoh of the Oppression, the Pharaoh of the

Exodus will have been one of his immediate successors. The choice lies

between Meneptah II., who succeeded him, his grandson, the feeble Seti

II., and the usurper Si-Ptah, with whom the dynasty came to an

inglorious end. The Egyptian legend of the Exodus given by Manetho

places it in the reign of Meneptah; and a stela discovered at Thebes in

1896 by Professor Petrie makes any other dating difficult. Here the

‘Israelites’ are spoken of as having been brought low, ‘so that no seed

should be left to them’; and since their name alone is without the

determinative of locality which is added to the names of all the other

conquered populations associated with them, we may conclude that they

had already been lost in the desert, and, so far at any rate as was

known to the Egyptian scribe, had no fixed local habitation.[152] As

this was in the fifth year of Meneptah’s reign, B.C. 1276, according to

Dr. Mahler’s chronology, the Exodus from Egypt may be approximately

assigned to B.C. 1277. The period of oppression, according to the

calculation in Gen. xv. 13, would consequently have commenced in B.C.

1677, or nearly a hundred years before the expulsion of the Hyksos.

It must be remembered, however, that the date is more precise in

appearance than in reality. It depends partly on the accuracy of Dr.

Mahler’s calculations, which is disputed by Professors Eisenlohr and

Maspero, partly on our regarding the round number 400 as representing an

exact period of time. If we knew in what year of Ramses II.’s long reign

of sixty-seven years the stela of Sân was inscribed, we should be better

able to check the reckoning. As it is, we have to be grateful for what

we have already learned from the excavated monuments of the past, and to

look forward with confidence to more light and certainty in the future.

Footnote 126:

This, however, is beginning to be doubtful, in view of the discoveries

made by Messrs. de Morgan and Amélineau in 1886-87.

Footnote 127:

For the logical goal of the ‘Higher Criticism,’ see Bateson Wright,

_Was Israel ever in Egypt?_ (1895.)

Footnote 128:

The theory of Jean Astruc, the French Protestant physician, was set

forth in his _Conjectures sur la Genèse_ published anonymously at

Paris in 1753. In this he assumes that Moses wrote the book of Genesis

in four parallel columns like a Harmony of the Gospels which were

afterwards mixed together by the ignorance of copyists. Astruc

intended his work to be an answer to those who, like Spinoza, asserted

that Genesis was written without order or plan. It is interesting to

note that Dr. Briggs in his able defence of the ‘critical’ hypothesis

(_The Higher Criticism of the Hexateuch_, pp. 138-141) quotes with

approval Professor Moore’s appeal to Tatian’s _Diatessaron_—a mere

‘patchwork’ of the Gospels—in support of the literary analysis of the

Pentateuch.

Footnote 129:

See Bissell, Introduction to _Genesis printed in Colours_ (1892), pp.

xi-xiii; also p. vii, where he says: ‘The argument from language

outside the divine names requires extreme care for obvious reasons. It

is admitted to be relatively weak, and can never have more than a

subordinate and supplementary value. There is no visible cleavage line

among the supposed sources.’ Professor Bissell’s work is an attempt to

represent by different colours the text of Genesis as it has been

analysed and disintegrated by the ‘higher critics,’ and the result at

which he arrives in his Introduction is that the analytical theory is

a house built upon sand. As regards the account of the Flood, in which

‘it is claimed’ that two distinct narratives can be distinguished from

each other, he remarks: ‘Two flood-stories, originating, according to

the theory, hundreds of years apart, and literally swarming with

differences and contradictions ... are found to fit one another like

so many serrated blocks, and to form, united, a consecutive history

whose unity, with constant use for millenniums, has been undisputed

till our day. Is this coincidence, or is it miracle? But let us take a

closer look. We shall find no loosely joined, independent sections,

but mutually dependent parts of one whole. An occasional overlapping

of ideas, a repetition for emphasis, or enlargement, in complete

harmony with Hebrew style, there undoubtedly is. But there is also a

marked interdependence and sequence of thought wholly inconsistent

with the theory proposed. Let the reader test what J’s story would be

alone. Beginning it has none; no preliminary announcement of the

catastrophe; no command to make preparations; no report of Noah’s

attitude.... And so P’s story, taken by itself, would be equally

incomplete.... As to the alleged discrepancies in other respects, they

appear, as we have seen, to be true in other cases, only after the

text is rent asunder. The lighting system of the one does not exclude

the one window of the other; nor the covering for the roof, the door

in the side. Without the door, for which one document alone is

responsible, how is it supposed that the occupants of the ark got in

and out of it? If objects are thrown out of their due perspective, as

in a mirage, it need surprise no one if they appear distorted and

grotesque.... It is particularly in the matter of language and style

that resort is taken to this illogical and dangerous means of

text-mutilation. There are certain stylistic peculiarities of one or

the other document, it is claimed, which are fixed from the usage of

previous chapters. But unfortunately for the scheme, they appear not

unfrequently in the wrong place. For instance, the expression “male

and female” is held to be characteristic of P, J using another for it.

In vii. 3, 9, J uses this expression twice, and our critics must make

the redactor deny it. The oft-recurring formula, “both man, beast, and

creeping thing and fowl of the air,” is found in the first chapter of

Genesis, and so is said to be characteristic of P. Here J has it in

vi. 7 and vii. 23, and the redactor is called in to square the

document to the theory.... In all these changes we are supposed to

have the work of a redactor. How is it possible? What motive could a

redactor have had for it? It is claimed by our critics that he has

left the principal points of contrast between the two great documents

from which he compiled in their original ruggedness. The principal

changes made, with rare exceptions, are of single words, detached

phrases, verses or parts of verses,—every one of them changes in what

was originally homogeneous matter to what is now heterogeneous, from

what was once true, from the point of view of the document, to what is

now false!’

Footnote 130:

Cf. the plates in Flinders Petrie’s _Tel el-Amarna_ (Methuen and Co.,

1894).

Footnote 131:

Literally, ‘Aten-Ra! the Record Office.’ Many of the bricks with the

inscription upon them still lay on the spot when I visited it in 1888.

Footnote 132:

See my _Patriarchal Palestine_, p. 222.

Footnote 133:

Hommel, _Aufsätze und Abhandlungen zur Kunde der Sprachen, Literaturen

und der Geschichte des vorderen Orients_, pp. 2 _sqq._

Footnote 134:

See my _Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, pp. 56

_sq._

Footnote 135:

The Elohist and the Chaldæan story further agree in making the hero of

the Deluge the tenth in descent from the first man.

Footnote 136:

See my _Archæological Commentary on Genesis_, in the _Expository

Times_, July and August, 1896.

Footnote 137:

Cf. Gunkel, _Schöpfung und Chaos_, p. 114.

Footnote 138:

See above, p. 13.

Footnote 139:

Naville, _Das aegyptische Todtenbuch der XVIII. bis XX. Dynastie_,

Einleitung; Maspero, _Études de Mythologie et d’ Archéologie

égyptiennes_, i. pp. 325-387.

Footnote 140:

_Sanctuary and Sacrifice_, by W. L. Baxter (Eyre and Spottiswoode,

1895).

Footnote 141:

Cowley and Neubauer, _The Original Hebrew of a Portion of

Ecclesiasticus_, p. xviii.

Footnote 142:

Ham for Am or Ammon, and Zuzim for Zamzummim (Gen. xiv. 5); see my

_Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, pp. 160, 161.

Footnote 143:

This probably stands for the Babylonian al-Larsa, ‘the city of Larsa.’

Footnote 144:

_Contemporary Review_, February 1890, p. 221.

Footnote 145:

Mesha says in the inscription (l. 8): ‘Omri took the land of Medeba,

and [Israel] dwelt in it during his days and half the days of his son,

altogether forty years.’ The real length of time was not more than

fifteen years.

Footnote 146:

Oppert dates the reign B.C. 2394 to 2339; Sayce, B.C. 2336-2281;

Delitzsch, B.C. 2287-2232; Winckler, 2264-2210; and Peiser, 2139-2084;

while Hommel suggests that the compiler of the list of dynasties has

reversed the true order of the first two dynasties in it, and

accordingly brings down the date of Khammu-rabi or Amraphel three

hundred and sixty-eight years. This would better suit the Biblical

data, but so far nothing has been found on the monuments in support of

the suggestion. Dr. Hales’s date for the birth of Abraham was B.C.

2153.

Footnote 147:

_Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache_, 1889, pp. 97-105.

Footnote 148:

The ‘prince’ of Thebes who revolted against Apophis was Skenen-Ra Taa

I., whose fourth successor was Ahmes.

Footnote 149:

_Revue Archéologique_, March 1865.

Footnote 150:

E. Naville, _The Store-city of Pithom and the Route of the Exodus_

(1885).

Footnote 151:

_Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache_, 1872, p. 18; see also J. de

Rougé, _Géographie ancienne de la Basse-Égypte_, pp. 93-95.

Footnote 152:

Cf. the articles of Sayce and Hommel in the _Expository Times_ for

August, October, and November 1896, pp. 521, 18, and 89.

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.