The expulsion of the Hyksos conquerors of Egypt, while it brought oppression and slavery to their Semitic kindred who were left behind, inaugurated an era of conquest and glory for the Egyptians themselves. The war against the Asiatics which had begun in Egypt was carried into Asia, and under Thothmes III and other great monarchs of the eighteenth dynasty the Egyptian armies traversed Palestine and Syria, and penetrated as far as the Euphrates. The tribes of Canaan paid tribute; the Amorites or “hill-men” were led into captivity; and the combined armies of Hittites and Phœnicians were defeated in the plain of Megiddo. On the temple-walls of Karnak at Thebes, Thothmes III (b.c. 1600) gives a list of the Canaanitish towns which had submitted to his arms. Among them we read the names of Zarthan and Beroth, of Beth-Anoth and Gibeah, of Migdol and Ophrah, of Taanach and Jibleam, of Shunem and Chinneroth, of Hazor and Laish, of Merom and Kishon, of Abel and Sharon, of Joppa and Achzib, of Beyrut and Accho, of [pg 059] Heshbon and Megiddo, of Hamath and Damascus. One of the conquered places bears the curious name of Jacob-el, “Jacob the God,” while mention is made of the Negeb, or “southern district,” which afterwards formed part of the territory of Judah.
Two centuries later, when the troublous times which saw the close of the eighteenth dynasty had ushered in the nineteenth, the same districts had again to be overrun by the Egyptian kings. Once more victories were gained over the powerful Hittites, in their fortress of Kadesh, on the Orontes, and over the tribes of Palestine. Seti I, the father of Ramses II, records among his conquests Beth-Anoth and Kirjath-Anab[4] in the south, as well as Zor or Tyre. Ramses II himself, the Sesostris of the Greeks, battled for long years against the Hittites on the plains of Canaan, and established a line of Egyptian fortresses as far north as Damascus. The tablets which he engraved at the mouth of the Dog River, near Beyrût, still remain to testify to his victories and campaigns. Representations were sculptured on the walls of Thebes of the forts of “Tabor, in the land of the Amorites,” of Merom and of Salem; and the capture of the revolted city of Ashkelon was celebrated both in sculpture and in song.
But the most interesting record which has come down to us from his reign is the account given by a mohar, or military officer, of his travels through Palestine, at a time when the country was nominally tributary to Egypt. The mohar made his tour during the latter part of the reign of Ramses II, the oppressor of the Israelites, so that the account he has given of Canaan shows us what it was like shortly before its conquest by Joshua. He journeyed [pg 060] as far north as Aleppo in a chariot, which is more than a traveller in Palestine could do now, and describes how his clothes were stolen one night, and how his own groom, or “muleteer,” joined the robbers. Among the places he visited were the Phœnician cities of Gebal, famous for its shrine of Ashtoreth, Beyrût, Sarepta, Sidon, and Tyre, which he says was built on an island in the sea, drinking-water being conveyed to it in boats. Old Tyre, on the continent opposite, seems to have been recently burnt. Hamath, Timnah, Hazor, Tabor, Horonaim, and perhaps Adullam, were also visited, and mention is made not only of the ford of the Jordan, near Beth-Shean, but also of “a passage” in front of the city of Megiddo, which had to be crossed before the town could be entered. Joppa, the modern Jaffa, was surrounded with gardens of date-palms, which have now been supplanted by oranges. The road, however, was not always good. In one place the mohar had to “drive along the edge of the precipice, on the slippery height, over a depth of 2,000 cubits, full of rocks and boulders;” while at another time his groom broke the chariot in pieces by driving over a slippery path, and necessitated the repair of the injured carriage by “the iron-workers” at the nearest smithy. Already, therefore, it is clear, Palestine possessed plenty of smithies at which iron was forged.
That Ramses II was the Pharaoh of the oppression, has long been suspected by Egyptian scholars. The accounts of the wars of himself and his predecessors in Canaan show that up to the date of his death that country was not yet inhabited by the Israelites. Not only is no mention made of them, but the history of the Book of Judges precludes our supposing that Palestine [pg 061] could have been an Egyptian province after the Israelitish conquest. It must have ceased to be tributary to the Pharaohs before it was entered by Joshua. Moreover, the name of the city of Ramses (Raamses) built by the Israelites in Egypt points unmistakeably to the reign of the great Ramses II himself. As has already been observed, the name was given to Zoan after its reconstruction by this monarch, whose grandfather, Ramses I, was the first Egyptian king who bore the name. As Ramses I reigned but a very few years, while his successor, Seti I, associated his son, Ramses II, with him on the throne when the latter was but twelve years old or thereabouts, it could only have been during his long reign of sixty-seven years that Ramses II brought the name by which he had been christened into vogue. It is possible that those Egyptian scholars are right who see the Hebrews in a certain class of foreigners called Aperiu, and employed by Ramses II to work at his monuments; if so, we should have another proof that the Exodus could not have taken place until after his death. The identification, however, is rendered very doubtful by the fact, that long after the time of Ramses II, a document of the reign of Ramses III speaks of 2,083 Aperiu as settlers in Heliopolis, and describes them as “knights, sons of the kings, and noble lords of the Aperiu, settled people, who dwell in this place.” If, therefore, the Aperiu were really the Hebrews, we should have to suppose that some of them who had obtained offices of honour and influence in Egypt remained behind in Heliopolis, the city of Joseph's wife, when their poorer and oppressed kinsmen followed Moses and Aaron into the desert in search of the Promised Land.
However this may be, the question as to the date of the Exodus, and consequently as to the Pharaoh of the oppression, has now been finally set at rest by the excavations recently undertaken at Tel el-Maskhûta. Tel el-Maskhûta is the name of some large mounds near Tel el-Kebîr and other places which were the scene of the late war; and M. Naville, who has excavated them for the Egyptian Exploration Fund, has found inscriptions in them which show not only that they represent an ancient city whose religious name was Pithom, while its civil name was Succoth, but also that the founder of the city was Ramses II. In Greek times the city was called Heroöpolis, or Ero, from the Egyptian word ara, “a store-house,” reminding us that Pithom and Raamses, which the Israelites built for the Pharaoh, were “treasure-cities” (Exod. i. 11). M. Naville has even discovered the treasure-chambers themselves. They are very strongly constructed, and divided by brick partitions from eight to ten feet thick, the bricks being sun-baked, and made some with and some without straw. In these strawless bricks we may see the work of the oppressed people when the order came: “Thus saith the Pharaoh, I will not give you straw.”
The treasure-chambers occupy almost the whole area of the old city, the walls of which are about 650 feet square and 22 feet thick. Its name Pithom—in Egyptian Pa-Tum—signifies the city of the Setting Sun; and since it had another name, Succoth, we can now understand how it was that the Israelites started on their march not from Goshen, but from Succoth (Ex. xiii. 20), that is, from the very place where they had been working. Etham, their next stage, seems to be the Egyptian fortress of Khetam, while Pi-hahiroth [pg 063] (Ex. xiv. 2), is probably Pi-keheret, which is mentioned in an inscription found at Tel el-Maskhûta as somewhere in the neighbourhood of the canal that led from the Nile to the Red Sea.
The Pharaoh under whom the Exodus actually took place could not have been Ramses II himself, but his son and successor, Meneptah II, who ascended the throne about b.c. 1325. His reign lasted but a short time, and it was disturbed not only by the flight of the Children of Israel, but also by a great invasion of Northern Egypt by the Libyans, which was with difficulty repulsed. This took place in his fifth year. Three years later a report was sent to him by one of his officials stating that “the passage of tribes of the Shasu (or Beduins) from the land of Edom had been effected through the fortress of Khetam, which is situated in Succoth (Thuku), to the lakes of the city of Pithom, which are in the land of Succoth, in order that they might feed themselves and their herds on the possessions of the Pharaoh.” The lakes of Pithom must be those of Bâlah and Timsah, on which Ismailia now stands, not far from Tel el-Maskhûta, and Khetam is the Etham of Scripture. It is possible that Timsah, “the lake of crocodiles,” is the yâm sûph, or “sea of papyrus reeds,” of Scripture, which the translators of the Septuagint erroneously identified with the Red Sea.
Among the incidents connected with the deliverance of the Israelites are two which especially deserve notice. When God appointed Moses to his mission of leading his enslaved brethren out of Egypt, He at the same time revealed Himself by the name of “Jehovah,” the special name by which He was henceforth to be known to the Children of Israel. It is unfortunate that [pg 064] this sacred name has descended to the readers of the Authorised Version of the Old Testament in a corrupt and barbarous form. The Hebrew alphabet was designed to express consonants only, not vowels; these were supplied by the reader from his knowledge of the language and its pronunciation. As long as Hebrew was still spoken, there was little difficulty in doing this; but the case was changed when it ceased to be a living language. A traditional pronunciation of the sacred records was preserved in the synagogues; but it necessarily differed in many respects from the pronunciation which had actually been once in use, and was itself in danger of being forgotten or altered. To avoid such a danger, therefore, the so-called Masoretes, or Jewish scribes, in the sixth century after the Christian era, invented a system of symbols which should represent the pronunciation of the Hebrew of the Old Testament as read, or rather chanted, at the time in the great synagogue of Tiberias in Palestine.[5] It is in accordance with this Masoretic mode of pronunciation that Hebrew is now taught. But there was one word which the Masoretes of Tiberias either could not or would not pronounce. This was the national name of the God of Israel. Though used so freely in the Old Testament, it had come to be regarded with superstitious reverence before the time when the Greek translation of the Septuagint was made, and in this translation, accordingly, the word Kyrios, “Lord,” is substituted for it wherever it occurs. The New Testament writers naturally [pg 065] followed the custom of the Septuagint and of their age, and so also did the Masoretes of Tiberias. Wherever the holy name was met with, they read in place of it Adônai, “Lord,” and hence, when supplying vowel-symbols to the text of the Old Testament they wrote the vowels of Adônai under the four consonants, Y H V H, which composed it. This simply meant that Adônai was to be read wherever the sacred name was found. In ignorance of this fact, however, the scholars who first revived the study of Hebrew in modern Europe imagined that the vowels of Adônai (ă or ĕ, o, and â) were intended to be read along with the consonants below which they stood. The result was the hybrid monster Yĕhovâh. In passing into England the word became even more deformed. In German the sound of y is denoted by the symbol j, and the German symbol, but with the utterly different English pronunciation attached to it, found its way into the English translations of the Old Testament Scriptures.
There are two opinions as to what was the actual pronunciation of the sacred name while Hebrew was still a spoken language. On the one hand, we may gather from the contemporary Assyrian monuments that it was pronounced Yahu. Wherever an Israelitish name is met with in the cuneiform inscriptions which, like Jehu or Hezekiah, is compounded with the divine title, the latter appears as Yahu, Jehu being Yahua, and Hezekiah Khazaki-yahu. Even according to the Masoretes it must be read Yeho (that is, Yăhu) when it forms part of a proper name. The early Gnostics, moreover, when they transcribed it in Greek characters, wrote Iaô, that is, Yahô. On the other hand, the four consonants, Y H V H, can hardly have been pronounced otherwise [pg 066] than as Yahveh, and this pronunciation is supported by the two Greek writers Theodoret and Epiphanios, who say that the word was sounded Yavé. The form Yahveh, however, is incompatible with the form Yahu (Yeho), which appears in proper names; and it has been maintained that it is due to one of those plays on words, of which there are so many examples in the Old Testament. The spelling with a final h was adopted, it has been supposed, in order to remind the reader of the Hebrew verb which signifies “to be,” and to which there seems to be a distinct allusion in Exod. iii. 14.[6]
We must now turn to a second incident which is specially connected with the deliverance out of Egypt. This is the rite of circumcision, which was observed in so solemn a manner at the moment when the Israelites had at last crossed the Jordan and were preparing to attack the Canaanites. It was a rite which had been practised by the Egyptians from the most remote times, and had been communicated by them, according to Herodotus, to the Ethiopians. Josephus tells us that the rite was also practised by the Arabs, to whom Herodotus adds the Syrians of Phœnicia, as well as the Kolkhians and the Hittites of Kappadokia. A similar rite is found at the present day among many barbarous tribes in different parts of the world, and distinguishes not only the Jew but the Mohammedan as well.