CHAPTER XXIV.

MOSES.

THE transfer into Egypt was the next memorable change in the condition of Israel. It has been asked, why a transfer was suffered, so hazardous to the simplicity of their manners, their religion, and their independence? The true answer may be, that, hazardous as the measure unquestionably was, it was adopted as a security against the still greater hazard of their extinction as a people.

In this view, the whole progress of the event forms one of the most striking displays of a particular Providence. As the time was still distant when the Israelites were to be put in possession of the land of Canaan; a time to be regulated by two circumstances, the arrival of the Canaanite population at the degree of iniquity, where longsuffering must be exhausted; and the fitness of the Israelites, in point of numbers, to hold the land; some provision must be made for their existence during a period of nearly 300 years. They could not have remained in Palestine with any degree

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of safety; for, by a sudden invasion, about twentyseven years before, of the savage tribes expelled from Egypt, the greater part of the former inhabitants had been conquered, the Philistine shepherds were masters, and their fierceness and idolatry must have finally exterminated or corrupted the descendants of Jacob. In this difficulty, what expedient can be conceived more effectual, than the transfer of the whole family to the protection of a great, intelligent, and warlike kingdom, lying so close to Palestine, that the return might be merely a march across a frontier. We have no knowledge that Egypt at this time was idolaIts religion was probably altogether free from idol worship; when we find Joseph allying himself to the daughter of the high priest, acting as prime minister of the country, and securing to the priesthood their original property, in the time of a general alienation of lands'. But some

trous.

1 Joseph has been charged by Infidelity (Larcher, &c.) with making a treacherous bargain for the people, and even reducing them to slavery. But the charge arises from disregarding the text. The evident fact is, that he changed the old severe tenure of their property for one of remarkable advantage. The land was originally divided into three parts, by the constitution of Menes; the king, the priesthood, and the soldiery, having each a third. In the famine, all the lands were sold to the government for food; the general holding of property was thus changed; and the king, thus becoming the general proprietor, was enabled to make a new distribution of a more equal kind. The whole of the lands were now given to the people, at the rent of a

preparative for the reception of Israel might be of value, peculiarly in the instance of strangers coming from a hostile and wild country ("ye are spies, to see the nakedness of the land ye are come"). And the preparative had been made by the extraordinary advancement of Joseph to royal confidence, to public gratitude, and to distinction among the learned and priestly class (of whom the king himself was always one). But the casualty might yet arise, of their being lost among the Egyptians? The expedient against this natural consequence, was their being sent to Goshen; a settlement selected by Joseph, for the express purpose of separating them from the nation" Ye shall say, Thy servants' trade hath been about cattle, that ye may dwell in the land of Goshen; for every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians." The separation being thus secured by the double obstacle of an isolated district, and an occupation scorned in Egyptian eyes, the Israelite family of seventy souls were left in peace, to augment during a hundred years. But the increase was still regulated by an especial

fifth part of the produce to the crown-the land of the priesthood only excepted; Joseph, in his wisdom, clearly, not thinking fit to make the religious establishment of the country a dependent on either the people or the crown. This agreement fully met the national approbation; the people saying, “Thou hast saved our lives," and tendering anew their allegiance, (Gen. xlvii. 25.)

Divine reference to their return. "When the time of the promise drew nigh, which God had sworn to Abraham, the people grew and multiplied in Egypt." It is also obvious that this increase, by compelling them to spread beyond the narrow land of Goshen', must have exposed the Israelites to a close intercourse with the Egyptians, long before they had amounted to the three millions who were to march for Palestine.

The tyranny of the existing Egyptian king, a Pharaoh "who knew not Joseph," was now converted into the actual means of their religious purity. Egypt had sunk into the grossest worship of idols: that worship has had powerful attractions for the vice and ignorance of man in every age; and the Israelites, spreading freely through the fields and cities of this opulent, voluptuous, and idolatrous community, must soon have imbibed the infection of its manners. But the old separation of space was to be followed by a new separation of feeling. It was the Israelite who once drew the line it was the Egyptian who drew it now. The monarch,

1 Goshen lay immediately contiguous to Palestine (1 Chron. vii. 21.) and extended southward, perhaps as far as Heliopolis, including partly those places on the Nile, which, from the Epics of Heliodorus, we know under the name of Bucolia, a marshy tract overgrown with weeds, and fit only for pasture; partly those deserts towards the East, where the wandering hordes found some sustenance for their sheep. (Michaelis on the Laws of Moses.)

in real or feigned alarm at their numbers; by policy not uncommon in the East, degraded the whole people into Helotism, and embittered the loss of liberty by the heaviest tasks of the slave. "The Egyptians made their lives bitter with hard bondage." But the suffering was salutary. Nothing could be more effectual to alienate Israel from the habits, worship, and corruptions, of the idolator.

The hatred of the slave, and the severity of the tyrant, grow together by nature. At the period when the Deliverer of Israel was about to be born, an act of more than savage cruelty consummated the oppression. A command was issued for the general destruction of the male infants. Moses was born nearly under the first promulgation of this decree; for it was not in force at the birth of Aaron, but three years before. Yet, as if for the express purpose of showing with what completeness the Divine wisdom baffles the malice of man, the daughter of the tyrant himself was made the instrument of counteracting his decree; the Court became the place in which Moses acquired the qualities essential to the deliverance of the people; and even his name seems a direct contempt of the royal will 2.

At the age of forty Moses abandoned the

1 Exod. i. 14.

2 Moses" preserved from the water."