both sprang, became one of the chief causes or pretexts of their final rupture from each other. It is difficult to conceive the migration of a whole nation under such circumstances. This difficulty, amongst others, has induced the well-known French commentator 1 on The Flight. the Exodus, with every desire of maintaining the letter of the narrative, to reduce the numbers of the text from 600,000 to 600 armed men. The great German scholar defends the correctness of the original numbers.2 In illustration of the event, a sudden retreat is recorded of a whole nomadic people-400,000 Tartars-under cover of a single night, from the confines of Russia to the confines of China, as late as the close of the last century.3 We may leave the question to the critical analysis of the text and of the general probabilities of the case, and confine ourselves to what remains equally true under either hypothesis. Those who have seen the start of the great caravans of pilgrims in the East, may form some notion of the silence and order with which even very large masses break up from their encampments, and, as in this instance, usually in the darkness and the cool of the night, set out on their journey, the torches flaring before them, the train of camels and asses spreading far and wide through the broad level desert. Rameses. From Rameses the first start was made. This the Septuagint fixed on the north-east skirts of the Delta, and to the same locality we are directed by the most recent discoveries. All that follows is wrapt in too great an obscurity to justify any detailed description. The spots are indeed named with an exactness which provokes and tantalises in proportion to the certainty with which they must once have been known, and the uncertainty which has rested upon them since. Still the general direction of the flight, and the general features of the resting-places, may be gathered. South-eastward they went, not by the short and direct road to Palestine, but 1 Laborde on Exodus and Numbers. 2 Ewald, ii. 253, sqq. See Bell's History of Russia, ii. App. C. De Quincey's Works, iv. 112. Lepsius, Letters from Egypt and Ethiopia, p. 438. by the same circuitous route, through the wilderness of the Red Sea, which their ancestors had followed in bearing away the body of Jacob, as now they were bearing off, with different thoughts and aims, the coffin which contained the embalmed remains of Joseph. The nomenclature of the several halts indicates something of the country through which they passed. The first was 'Succoth,'-the place of 'booths' or 'leafy huts,'-the Succoth. Feast of last spot where they could have found the luxuriant foliage of tamarisk and sycamore and palm, 'branches of thick 'trees to make booths, as it is written.' How deeply that first resting-place was intended to be sunk into their remembrance may be gathered from the fact, that this, rather than any of the numerous halts in their later wanderings, was selected to be represented, after their entrance into Palestine, as a memorial of their stay in the wilderness. The Feast of TaberTabernacles. nacles, or Succoth, was a feast, not of tents,—but of huts woven together, from 'the boughs of goodly trees, branches 'of palm-trees, and the boughs of thick trees, and willows of the 'brook,' that 'all their generations might know that the Lord 'made the children of Israel to dwell in booths, when He 'brought them up out of the land of Egypt.'1 It was the first step that involved the whole; it was the first step, therefore, the last lingering on the confines of Egyptian vegetation and civilisation, the first step into the wandering state of the desert, that was to be henceforward commemorated. The next halt was Etham, on 'the edge of the wilderness.' Cities they had left behind them at Rameses, the groves and villages they had left behind at Succoth; the green land of Egypt, cut off as with a knife from the hard desert tract on which they now entered, they left behind at Etham. They were now fairly in the wilderness. Etham. And now came the command 'to turn,' not to go straight forward, as they would have expected, round the head of the gulf, but to turn' and 'encamp between Migdol Passage of the Red Sea. and the sea, beside the sea, before Pi-hahiroth, over 'against Baal-zephon.' Here is exactly a case of that precision 1 Lev. xxiii. 40-43. which guarantees to us that the spot was once well known, yet which now serves us but little. Could we but discover the site of the pastures of Pi-hahiroth (such must be the meaning of that Egyptian word), or the sanctuary of Typhon (such must be the meaning of Baal-zephon), the controversy respecting the locality and the nature of the Passage of the Red Sea would be at an end. As it is, we are led in two opposite directions,—on the one hand, the extreme northern point (beyond the spot where the present gulf terminates, but to which it must anciently have extended) 2 is indicated by the mention of Migdol, which can hardly be any other than the well-known town or tower called by the Greeks Magdôlon; on the other hand, the narrative of Josephus speaks distinctly of 'the mountain' as that which entangled and shut them in,' which can be no other than the lofty range of the Jebel Attâka, the Mountain of Deliverance, south of the modern Suez. But whichever of these it be, the narrative compels us to look for the Passage somewhere near the head of the then gulf, where the width would be such as to allow the host to pass over in a single night, and the waters to be parted by the means described, namely by a strong wind,3 or by the shortness of the distance required for the Israelites to escape the pursuers. The ancient theory adopted by the Rabbinical and early Christian writers, that the Israelites merely performed a circuit in the sea and returned again to the Egyptian shores, will now be maintained by no one who has any regard to the dignity of the story or the grandeur of the event described. Dismissing, therefore, these geographical considerations, we may fix our minds on the essential features of this great deliverance, as it will be acknowledged without dispute by every reader. Sea and the bed of the Red Sea, 'the Ser'bonian bog' of Milton (Paradise Lost, ii. 592), where, according to Diodorus Siculus, whole armies have more than once perished (i. 30; xvi. 46). Brugsch, Egypt under the Pharaohs, ii. 345-364 (Eng. Tr.) This would exclude Josephus's reference to 'the mountain.' 3 Not necessarily 'east.' See LXX. (Ex. xiv. 21), and Philo, V. M. i. 32. Temple, brought into the most familiar relations with the highest powers, equal in form and majesty, suckled by the greatest goddess, fondled by the greatest god, sitting beside them, arm entwined within arm, in the recesses of the most holy place? It is no priest, or prophet, or magician, or saint, but the king only the Pharaoh, the Child of the Sun, the Beloved of Ammon. And if there is one king who towers above all the rest in all the long succession, it is he whose name first dimly appears to us in the history of the Exodus, the great Rameses II.. Rameses, the Sesostris of the classical writers. As of all objects of idolatry, in the natural world of those early times, the stars and sun were the most overwhelming in their fascination, so, in all the world of man, there was nothing to be compared to those mighty kings, least of all to the mighty conqueror who has left his traces throughout all the haunts of ancient civilisation in Asia,2 and from end to end of his own country. With a certainty beyond that with which Alexander was acknowledged as the greatest sovereign of the Grecian, or Cæsar of the Roman world, must Rameses II. have been hailed or feared as the hero of the primeval age before Greece and Rome were born.3 His very form and face are before us, with a vividness which belongs only to these colossal representations, and refuse to be forgotten. We see his profound yet scornful repose, expressed both in countenance and attitude. We see the long profile, majestic and beautiful beyond any of his successors or predecessors. We see even the peculiar curl of his nostrils, and the fall of his under lip.4 Such was the Pharaoh who must have looked down on the Israelite sojourners during some one period or generation of their stay in Egypt, probably during the time of their oppression. And such, not in detail, but in its general outline, is the image presented to us by the Pharaoh of Scripture. There is 'By Brugsch (i. 156) identified with the Pharaoh of Moses. "Near Sardis, near Beyrout, in Nubia, in Memphis, in Thebes. (See Sinai and Palestine, p. li. 117.) 3 He reigned for sixty-six years, coming to the throne very young, like Louis the Fourteenth. Brugsch, i. 137. • On the likenesses of the Egyptian kings, see Bunsen, v. 561. Pharaoh. no other king of the Patriarchal times represented as nearly on the same level. Nimrod, the mighty hunter, has been indeed invested by Oriental tradition-perhaps he appears in Assyrian sculptures-with something of the same sanctity and majesty. But he does not so appear in any part of the Sacred narrative. Pharaoh is the only potentate whom Abraham and Jacob alike approach with awful reverence. From Joseph and from Moses alike, whether as friend or foe, he commands the submissive respect of a subject who can of himself do nothing against the royal will. 'What God is about to do He showeth unto Pharaoh.' 'I am ' of uncircumcised lips, and how shall Pharaoh hearken unto 'me?' The supreme oath, by which safety of person and property is secured, is 'By the life of Pharaoh.' Kinglike and priestlike, he stands by the side of the sacred river, and sees in visions the good and evil fortunes of Egypt coming up from its stream. At sunrise he goes out to look upon its beneficent waters, as if it were all its own. At a word he summons princes, and priests, and magicians, and wise men, and interpreters round him. At a word he plants a stranger over his people. See, I have set thee over all the land of Egypt. ‘... I am Pharaoh, and without thee shall no man lift up 'his hand or his foot in all the land of Egypt.' And when the last great struggle comes on between his power and that of a Greater than himself, it is the struggle rather of a god against the Lord, than of a man against man. He has hardened his heart like the Indian Kehama, rather than like a mortal prince of modern days. If there were any prouder state or loftier dream in the primeval monarchies of Central Asia, it is remarkable that the Eastern traditions of these events merge them in the person of the Egyptian sovereign; and in the Mahometan version of the Exodus, Nimrod and Pharaoh, the builder of the Tower of Babel and the builder of the Pyramids, are blended together in one and the same gigantic, selfsufficing, God-defying king. He stands with one foot on each of the two great Pyramids, and darts his spear into the sky in the hope of killing the Divine Adversary, who from the |