[290]. See Records of the Past, new ser., vi. pp. 28, 29, 34, 45.
[291]. Brugsch, Egypt under the Pharaohs (Eng. tr.), ii. p. 151; Records of the Past, new ser., vi. pp. 31-45.
[292]. Records of the Past, new ser., vi. pp. 38-41. As only the qau or ‘district’ of Shalam is mentioned, it is possible that the city itself was not captured by the Egyptian troops. Hebron is written Khibur, i.e. the city of the ‘Khabiri.’
[293]. Was the campaign of Ramses III. the mysterious ‘hornet’ sent before the children of Israel to destroy the populations of Canaan (Exod. xxiii. 28, Deut. vii. 20, Josh. xxiv. 12)? At any rate, this is more probable than the suggestion that tsir’âh, rendered ‘hornet,’ is a variant of tsâra’ath, ‘plague.’
[294]. The name has been Hebraised, and perhaps corrupted, so that it is difficult to suggest what could have been its Mitannian original. The Khusarsathaim of the Septuagint, however, reminds us of the name of Dusratta or Tuisratta, the Mitannian king who corresponded with the Pharaoh Amenophis IV.
[295]. Livy, xxviii. 37, xxx. 7.
[296]. The Welsh laws allowed a stranger to acquire proprietary rights in the fourth generation, and to become a tribesman in the ninth (Seebohm, in the Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1895-96, pp. 12 sqq.).
[297]. This is expressly stated in the Song of Deborah: the Reubenites could not come to the help of their brethren, for they had become a body of scattered and nomad shepherds (Judg. v. 15, 16).
[298]. See Judg. xx. 16.
[299]. P’sîlîm, mistranslated ‘quarries’ in the Authorised Version. They were the sacred stones, believed to be inspired with divinity, which formed the Gilgal or ‘Circle.’ Modern critics have raised unnecessary difficulties about the geography of the narrative, and conjectured that the name of the capital of Eglon has dropped out of the text in Judg. iii. 15 (see Budde: Die Bücher Richter und Samuelis, p. 99). The Biblical writer makes it plain that Eglon was at Gilgal, not at Jericho as his would-be critics assert.