unseen heavens laughs him to scorn. If we take the Pharaoh of Scripture from first to last, still the awful impression remains the same. 'Say unto Pharaoh,' was the language even of one of the latest Prophets, how much more of these earlier times,— 'say unto Pharaoh, "Whom art thou like in thy greatness?"' Those who had lain prostrate under such a monarchy would feel doubly the contrast of the freedom into which they were called. The Exodus was a deliverance, not only from idolatry of false divinities, but from the idolatry of human strength and tyranny. In the long democracy of Israel, and the hesitation with which that democracy, 'where every man did what was 'right in his own eyes,' was exchanged even for the monarchy which was to produce a David and a Solomon, we see the protest against the awful form of government which had once bowed them down.

6

The evils of this ambiguous and degraded state fast developed themselves. The old freedom, the old energy, above all, the old religion, of the Patriarchal age faded away. Not in the Pentateuch, but in the later books, the participation of Israel in the idolatry of Egypt is expressly stated. 'Your 'fathers served other gods . . . in Egypt.'1 They forsook 'not the idols of Egypt.'2 The Sabbath, if it had existed in some shape amongst their fathers,3 as seems likely, was forgotten; the rite of circumcision, by which the covenant with God had been made, fell into disuse; its loss became a reproach in the eyes even of their Egyptian masters, to whom, as to the rest of the ancient Eastern world, it was a necessary sign of all cleanliness and of all civilisation.4 Like slaves, too, like all those wandering populations which hang at the gates of nations or classes more wealthy and more stable than themselves, they learn to cling with a kind of sensual affection to the land of their bondage, to the green meadows of the Nile valley, to 'the flesh-pots, and melons, and cucumbers, and onions,' which it gave them in profusion; to the land, 'where they 'sowed their seed and watered it with their foot, as a garden

Josh. xxiv. 2, 14.

2 Eze. xx.8

Ex. iv. 24; Josh. v. 2-9.

3 Comp. Ex. xx.

' of herbs.' We shall have to bear this in mind during their whole subsequent history, in order to appreciate both the necessity and the effect of the vicissitudes which were dispensed to them. The bare Desert and the bald hills of Palestine formed a wholesome and perpetual contrast to the magnificence and the fertility of Egypt. They formed, as it were, a natural Monasticism, a natural Puritanism, in which the luxuries, and the superstitions, and the barbarism of their servile state were set aside by sterner and higher influences. But they were always taught, with pathetic earnestness, never to forget, nay, even, in a certain sense, to feel for and with, the condition of slavery which had been their original portion. 'Remember that thou wast a "slave" in the land of Egypt.' On this recollection, as on an immovable thought never to be erased from their minds, are made to repose even the great institutions of the Sabbath and the Jubilee.1

Leprosy.

3. There were two other traces of their dependent position in Egypt, which may be noticed as having left indelible marks both on their records and those of the nation which cast them out. One is the disease of leprosy,2which for the first time appears after the stay in Egypt,-is it too much to suppose ?-generated by the habits incident to their depressed state and crowded population. In the Israelite annals it appears only in individual though most significant instances,-- the hand of Moses, the face of Miriam. But the severe provisions of the Levitical law imply its wider spread; and in the Egyptian traditions the remembrance, as was natural, took a stronger and more general colour of aversion and disgust, and represented the whole people as a nation of lepers, cast out on that account.

4. The other relic of repugnance between the two races, though slight in itself, is both more deeply seated in their The use of original diversity of customs, and more lasting in its results. There is one animal which, even more than the camel, is from first to last identified with the history of Israel. With he-asses and she-asses Abraham returned from

the ass.

'Deut. v. 15, vi. 21; Lev. xxv. 42, 55.

2 Jos. c. Apion. i. 26, 34.

Egypt; with the ass Abraham went up with Isaac to the sacrifice; 1 on asses Joseph's brethren came thither; on an ass

Moses set his wife and his sons on his return from Arabia to Egypt; 2 an old man seated on an ass was the likeness of him which, according to Gentile traditions,3 his countrymen delighted to honour. On white asses or mules, through the whole period of the early history 4 till their first contact with foreign nations in the reign of Solomon, their princes rode in state; the prophecy, fulfilled in the close of their history, was that 'their King should come riding on an ass, and a colt the foal of an 'ass.' It was the long continued mark of their ancient, pastoral, simple condition. The rival horse came into Palestine slowly and unlawfully, and was always spoken of as the sign of the pride and power of Egypt; in the funeral procession of Jacob, the chariots and horses of Egypt are specially contrasted with the asses of the sons of Israel; they who in later times put their trust in Egypt founded their trust in her chariots and horses. But we know not only the Israelite, but the Egyptian feeling also. Whilst on the Theban monuments the war-horse is always at hand, the ass, in their minds, was regarded as the exclusive, the contemned, symbol of the nomadic race who had left them. On asses they were described as flying from Egypt;5 asses, it was believed, had guided them through the desert; 6 in the Holy of Holies (to such a pitch of exaggeration was the story carried) the mysterious object of Jewish worship was held to be an ass's head; and so generally was this persuasion communicated to the heathen world, that when a new Jewish sect, as it was thought, arose under the name of 'Christian,' the favourite theme of reproach and of caricature was that they worshipped in like manner an ass, the son of an ass, even on the cross itself." So long and far were the effects visible of this primitive diversity between the civilised kingdom of the Pharaohs and the pastoral tribe of the land of Goshen. So innocent

1 Gen. xxii. 3, 5.

2 Exod. iv. 20.

4

Diod. Sic. xxxiv. 1.

Judg. v. 10, x. 4, xii. 14; 2 Sam. xvi.

1, 2; 1 Kings i. 33, 38.

5 Plutarch, De Iside, ch. 31.

6 Tac. Hist. v. 3. See Lecture VI. "The Palatine inscription (Dublin Rev. April 1857). Josephus, c. Ap. ii. 7; Tertullian, Apol. ch. 16

was the occasion of this long-standing calumny-a calumny not of generations or centuries, but of millenniums' growth before it was dispelled; perhaps the most curious of all the many like slanders and fables invented, in the course of ecclesiastical history, by the bitterness of national or theological hatred.

Points of contact.

It

5. Such are some of the points, greater or smaller, of lasting antagonism which their original relations left between Egypt and Israel. But there are also points of contact. would be against the analogy of the whole history, to suppose that this long period was wasted in its effect on the mind of the Chosen People; that the same Divine Providence which in later times drew new truths out of the Chaldæan captivity for the Jewish Church, out of the Grecian philosophy and the Roman law for the Christian Church, should have made no use of the greatness of Egypt in this first and most important stage of the education of Israel.

We need not go to heathen records for the assurance that Moses was 'learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.' Whatever that wisdom was, we cannot doubt it was turned to its own good purpose in the laws through him revealed to the people of God. The very minuteness of the law implies a stage of existence different from that in which the Patriarchs had lived, but like to that in which we know that the Egyptians lived. The forms of some of the most solemn sacrifices—as, for example, the scapegoat-are almost identical. Circumcision, the abstinence from swine's flesh, the division of time by weeks,1 of the day from sunset to sunset, were the same in each nation, though by each probably derived from a common source. The white linen dresses of the priests, the Urim and Thummim on the high-priest's breastplate, are, to all appearance, derived from the same source as the analogous emblems amongst the Egyptians. The sacred ark, as portrayed on the monuments, can hardly fail to have some relation to that which was borne by the Levites at the head of the host, and which was finally enshrined in the Temple. The Temple, at least in some of its most remarkable features,-its courts, its successive chambers, 1 Sharpe's Egypt, Book ii. § 16.

1

and its adytum, or Holy of Holies,-is more like those of Egypt than any others of the ancient world with which we are acquainted. In these and in many other instances we may fairly trace a true affiliation of such outward customs and forms as in like manner, at a later period, the Christian Church took from the Pagan ritual of the empire in which it had sojourned for its four hundred years. It is but an expansion of the one fact which has always arrested the attention of commentators, and which in its widest sense is a salutary warning against despising the greatness and the wisdom of the heathen.

This world of thine, by him usurped too long,

Now opens all her stores to heal thy servant's wrong.1 Rachel carried off her father's teraphim from Mesopotamia; the wives and daughters of Israel carried off from Egypt the sacred gems and vestments, which afterwards served to adorn the priestly services of the Tabernacle. When ye go, ye shall 'not go empty. But every woman shall borrow of her neigh'bour . . . jewels of silver and jewels of gold, and raiment, and ye shall put them upon your sons and upon your ‘daughters. . . . And the Lord gave the people favour in the 'sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent unto them such 'things as they required, and they spoiled the Egyptians.'

Points of contrast.

Yet the contrast was always greater than the likeness. When we survey the vast array of ancient ideas represented to us in the Egyptian temples and sepulchres, the thought forced upon us is rather of the fewness than of the frequency of illustrations which they furnish to the Jewish history. Of this absence of influence perhaps the most remarkable instance is, that, whilst the Egyptian sculptures abound with representations of the future state, and of the judgment after death, the Jewish Scriptures, at least in the Pentateuch,

1

2

Ewald, ii. 87, 88, on Exod. iii. 22; xii. 45. Keble's Christian Year (3rd S. in Lent).

2 If it be true that the Egyptian belief in a future state was inseparably united with the belief in transmigration, and that from this sprang the worship of animals, then the exclusion of the true doctrine from

the Mosaic theology may have been occasioned by the necessity of getting rid of this false excrescence-a remarkable instance of primeval Protestantism. (Bunsen's Egypt, iv. 649.) For the good side of the Egyptian belief in immortality, see the record of the 'Justification of the Dead' (ibid. v. 545).