them. Let us unfold from their ancient pages the leading points of the signal deliverance, when 'Israel came out of 'Egypt, and the house of Jacob from among the strange 'people.' The life of Moses, in the later period of the Jewish history, was divided into three equal portions of forty years each.1 This agrees with the natural arrangement of his history into the three parts, of his Egyptian education, his exile in Arabia, and his government of the Israelite nation in the Wilderness and on the confines of Palestine. The first two will be contained in the present Lecture. The birth of I. The early period of the life of Moses, as related in the Pentateuch, is so closely bound up with the later traditions concerning it, that it may be well to present it in the form in which it appeared to his nation at the time of the Christian era. His birth 2. -so ran the story—had been foretold to Pharaoh by the Egyptian magicians, and to his father Amram by a dream, as respectively the future destroyer and deliverer. The pangs of his mother's labour were alleviated so as to enable her to evade the Egyptian midwives. The beauty of the new-born babe-in the later version of the story amplified into a beauty and size almost divine3-induced the mother to make extraordinary efforts for its preservation from the general destruction of the male children of Israel. For three months the child, under the name of Joachim, was concealed in the house. Then his mother placed him in a small boat or basket of papyrus (perhaps from a current Egyptian belief that the plant was a protection from crocodiles), closed against the water by bitumen. This was placed among the aquatic vegetation by the side of one of the canals of the Nile. The mother departed as if unable to bear the sight. The sister lingered to watch her brother's fate. The basket 5 floated down the stream. The princess came down, in primitive simplicity, to bathe Acts. vii. 23, 30. 6 2 Jos. Ant. ii. 9, § 2-4. Ib. ii. 9, § 1, 5. 'AσTelos Tu Oe. Acts vii. 20. Plut. Is. et Os. 358. His education. in the sacred river. Her attendant slaves followed her. She saw the basket in the flags, or borne down the stream, and despatched divers after it. The divers, or one of the female slaves, brought it. It was opened, and the cry of the child moved the princess to compassion. She determined to rear it as her own. The sister was then at hand to recommend a Hebrew nurse. The child was brought up as the princess's son, and the memory of the incident was long cherished in the name given to the foundling of the water's side -whether according to its Hebrew or Egyptian form. Its Hebrew form is Mosheh, from mashah, 'to draw out'-'because 'I have drawn him out of the water.' But this is probably the Hebrew termination given to an Egyptian word signifying 'saved from the water.' 1 The 'Child of the water' was adopted by the childless princess. Its beauty came to be such, that passers-by stood fixed to look at it, and labourers left their work to steal a glance.2 Such was the narrative, as moulded by successive generations, and finally adopted by Josephus and Clement of Alexandria, from the simpler, but still thoroughly Egyptian, incidents of the Biblical story. 3 From this time for many years Moses must be considered as an Egyptian. In the Pentateuch, whether from absence of authentic information, or stern disdain, or native simplicity, this period is a blank. But the well-known words of Stephen's speech, which described him as 'learned in all the wisdom of 'the Egyptians,' and 'mighty in words and deeds,' are in fact a brief summary of the Jewish and Egyptian traditions which fill up the silence of the Hebrew annals. He was educated at Heliopolis, and grew up there as a priest, under his Egyptian name of Osarsiph or Tisithen.6 5 1 In Coptic, mo=water and ushe=saved. This is the explanation given by Josephus (Ant. ii. 9, § 6; c. Apion. i. 31), and confirmed by the Greek form of the word adopted in the LXX., Mwüons, and thence in the Vulgate Moyses (French Moïse). This form is retained in the Authorised Version of 1611, in 2 Maccabees-' Moises.' In the later editions it is altered. Brugsch (Histoire d'Égypte, 157, 173) 'He learned arithmetic, 1 'geometry, astronomy, medicine, and music. He invented 'boats and engines for building-instruments of war and of 'hydraulics-hieroglyphics-division of lands.' He taught Orpheus, and was hence called by the Greeks Musæus, and by the Egyptians Hermes. He was sent on an expedition against the Ethiopians. He got rid of the serpents of the country to be traversed, by letting loose baskets full of ibises upon them.2 The city of Hermopolis was believed to have been founded to commemorate his victory. He advanced to the capital of Ethiopia, and gave it the name of Meroe, from his adopted mother Merrhis, whom he buried there. Tharbis, the daughter of the king of Ethiopia, fell in love with him, and he returned in triumph to Egypt with her as his wife.5 4 3 The original account reopens with the time when he was resolved to reclaim his nationality. Here, again, the Epistle to the Hebrews, following in the same track as Stephen's speech, preserves the tradition in a distincter form than the narrative of the Pentateuch. 'Moses, when he was come to years, 'refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter; choosing ' rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy 'the pleasures of sin for a season; esteeming the reproach of 'Christ greater riches than the treasures' (the ancient accumulated treasures of Rhampsinitus and the old kings)' of Egypt.' In his earliest infancy he was reported to have refused the milk of Egyptian nurses, and, when three years old, to have trampled under his feet the crown which Pharaoh had playfully placed on his head. According to the Egyptian tradition, although a priest of Heliopolis, he always performed his prayers according to the custom of his fathers, outside the walls of the city, in the open air, turning towards the sun-rising. The king was excited to hatred by his own envy, or by the priests of Egypt, who foresaw their destroyer. Various plots of assassination were contrived against him, which failed. 8 The last was after Jos. Ant. iii. 10, § 1. Heb. xi. 24-26. Jos. Ant. ii. 9, § 5, 7. he had already escaped across the Nile from Memphis, warned by his brother Aaron, and when pursued by the assassin he 1 killed him. The same general account of conspiraHis escape. cies against his life appears in Josephus. All that remains of these traditions in the Sacred narrative is the single and natural incident, that, seeing an Israelite suffering the bastinado from an Egyptian, and thinking that they were alone, he slew the Egyptian (the later tradition said, 'with a word of 'his mouth'), and buried the corpse in the sand—the sand of the desert, then, as now, running close up to the cultivated tract. The same fire of patriotism which thus roused him as a deliverer from the oppressors, turns him into the peacemaker of the oppressed. It is characteristic of the faithfulness of the Sacred records that his flight is occasioned rather by the malignity of his countrymen than by the enmity of the Egyptians. And in Stephen's speech 3 it is this part of the story which is drawn out at greater length than in the original, evidently with the view of showing the identity of the narrow spirit which had thus displayed itself equally against their first and their last deliverer. II. Where these later traditions end, the Sacred history begins. Whatever may have been the preparation provided The call of by Egyptian war or wisdom, it is in the unknown, Moses. unfrequented wilderness of Arabia,—in the same school of solitude and of exile, which in humbler spheres has so often trained great minds to the reception of new truths,that the mission of Moses was revealed to him. In that wonderful region of the earth, where the grandeur of mountains is combined, as hardly anywhere else, with the grandeur of the desert, amidst the granite precipices and the silent valleys of Horeb, as to his people afterwards, so to Moses now was the great truth to be made manifest, of which, as we have seen, he was recognised even by the heathen world to have been the first national interpreter. 'Now Moses kept the 'flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the Priest of Midian: and 1 2 Clem. Alex. Strom. i. 23. Acts vii. 23-39. The Israelites were encamped on the western shore of the Red Sea, when suddenly a cry of alarm ran through the vast multitude. Over the ridges of the desert hills were seen the well-known horses, the terrible chariots of the Egyptian host: 'Pharaoh pursued after the children of Israel, and they were 'sore afraid.' 'They were sore afraid;' and in that terror and perplexity the sun went down behind the huge mountain range which rose on their rear, and cut off their return to Egypt; and the dark night 2 fell over the waters of the sea which rolled before them, and cut off their advance into the desert. So closed in upon them that evening; where were they when the morning broke over the hills of Arabia? where were they, and where were their enemies? They stood in safety on the further shore; and the chariots, and the horsemen, and the host of Pharaoh had vanished in the waters. Let us calmly consider, so far as our knowledge will allow us, the extent of such a deliverance effected at a moment so critical. Passage from Africa to Asia; First, we must observe what may be called the whole change of the situation. They had passed in that night from Africa to Asia; they have crossed one of the great boundaries which divide the quarters of the world; a thought always thrilling, how much more when we reflect on what a transition it involved to them. Behind the African hills, which rose beyond the Red Sea, lay the strange land of their exile and bondage, -the land of Egypt with its mighty river, its immense buildings, its monster-worship, its grinding tyranny, its overgrown civilisation. This they had left to revisit no more: the Red Sea flowed between them; 'the Egyptians whom they saw yesterday they will now see no 'more again for ever.' And before them stretched the level plains of the Arabian desert, the desert where their fathers and their kindred had wandered in former times, where their great 1 Philo, V. M. i. 30. "Being the 18th or 19th of the month, the moon would not rise till some hours after nightfall. |