The early history of the Hebrews

by A. H. Sayce

The palace itself was a marvel of art. Its walls and columns were encrusted with precious stones, with gold and with bronze, and it was adorned with painting and statuary, some of which reminds us of Greek art in its best period. Even the floors were frescoed with pictures of birds and animals, of flowers and trees. The new religion was accompanied by a new form of art, which cast aside the traditions of Egypt, and looked rather to Asiatic models. It strove after a realism which was sometimes exaggerated, and was always in strange contrast to the conventionalism of Egyptian art. Hard by the gardens of the palace rose the temple of Aten-Ra in the centre of the city. Like the palace, it was gorgeous with ornament. But it contained no image of the deity to whom it was consecrated. His symbol, the Disk, was alone permitted to appear. The pantheistic monotheism of the Pharaoh thus anticipated the puritanism of the Israelitish Law.

We learn from the inscriptions that Khu-n-Aten was not contented with making himself the high-priest of the new faith. Daily in the morning he gave instruction in it, expounding its mysteries to those who would listen to him. Acceptance of its doctrines was naturally a passport to the offices of State. Many of these had long been held by Asiatics, more especially by Syrians and Canaanites, and under Khu-n-Aten these foreign immigrants more and more usurped the highest functions of the Government. The native Egyptians saw themselves excluded from the posts which had brought them not only dignity, but wealth. Naturally, therefore, the bitter feelings engendered by the war waged against the old religion of Egypt were increased by this promotion of the stranger to the offices of State which they had regarded as their own. The Canaan they had conquered had revenged itself by conquering their king. Not only religion, but self-interest also, urged the native Egyptian to put an end to the reforming schemes of the Pharaoh, and to religious animosity was added race hatred as well.

The storm broke shortly before Khu-n-Aten’s death. His mummy indeed was laid in the magnificent grave he had excavated in the recesses of a desolate mountain-valley, but the granite sarcophagus in which it was deposited was never placed in the niche prepared for it, but was hacked to pieces by his enemies as it lay in the columned hall of the tomb, while the body within it was torn to shreds. Nor was his mother Teie ever laid by his side. Even the bodies of his dead daughters were maltreated and despoiled.

Khu-n-Aten was followed by one or two short-lived Pharaohs in the city he had built. Then the end came. The city was destroyed, the stones of its temple were transported elsewhere to furnish materials for the sanctuaries of the victorious Amon, and such of the adherents of the new faith as could not escape from the country either apostatised or were slain. A new king arose who represented the national party and the worship of the national god, and the Semitic strangers who had governed Egypt as European strangers govern it to-day disappeared for a time from the land. Their kinsfolk who remained, like the Israelites in Goshen, were reduced to the condition of public slaves.

Here, then, is the explanation of the rise of that ‘new king which knew not Joseph.’ We must see in him, not the founder of the eighteenth dynasty who expelled the Hyksos, but Ramses I., the founder of the nineteenth dynasty, with whom all danger of Asiatic domination in Egypt came finally to an end. The nineteenth dynasty represented the national reaction against the Asiatic faith of Khu-n-Aten and the government of the country by Asiatic officials. It meant Egypt as against Asia. And the policy of the new rulers of Egypt was not long in declaring itself. Ramses I. indeed reigned too short a time to do more than establish his family firmly on the throne; but his son and successor, Seti Meneptah I., once more overran Syria and made Palestine an Egyptian province; while Ramses II., who followed him, took measures to prevent such of the Asiatics as were still in Egypt from ever again becoming formidable to the native population.

The causes that led to the enslavement of the Israelites and to the Exodus out of Egypt were the same as those which in our own day led to the rebellion of Arabi. Religious and race hatreds were mingled together, and the ‘national party’ which grudged to the foreigner his share in the spoils of government aimed at destroying both him and his religion. Ramses I., however, was more fortunate than Arabi. No foreign power came to the help of the Syrian settlers on the Nile, and the leader of the Egyptian patriots became the favourite of the Theban priesthood and the sovereign of Egypt. From this time forward we hear no more of the use of the Babylonian language and script in the public correspondence of the Egyptians.

The oppression of the Israelites, then, is a natural and necessary part of the political history of the nineteenth dynasty. It fits in with the policy which the dynasty was placed on the throne to carry out. And an inscription discovered by Professor Flinders Petrie in 1896 supplements the story in an unexpected way. It was engraved by order of Meneptah II., the son and successor of Ramses II., on a large slab of granite, and placed in a temple he built at Thebes, on the western bank of the Nile. Its twenty-eight lines contain a song of triumph over the defeat of the Libyans and their allies from the Greek seas which took place in the fifth year of the king’s reign. Towards the end the poet sums up all the glorious deeds of the Pharaoh. ‘The chiefs,’ he says, ‘are overthrown and speak only of peace. None of the Barbarians (literally, the Nine Bows) lifts up his head. Wasted (?) is the land of the Libyans; the land of the Hittites is tranquillised; captive is the land of Canaan and utterly miserable; carried away is the land of Ashkelon; overpowered is the land of Gezer; the land of Innuam (in Central Syria) is brought to nought. The Israelites are spoiled so that they have no seed, the land of Khar (Southern Palestine) is become like the widows of Egypt.’

Here the Israelites alone are described as without local habitation. They alone had no ‘land’ in which they dwelt, and which was called after their name. It would seem, therefore, that when the song was composed they had already fled from Egypt and been lost in the unknown recesses of the eastern desert. But the poet knew that they were of Canaanitish origin; that they were, in fact, the kinsmen of the Horites of Southern Palestine. Their misfortunes, consequently, were equally the misfortunes of ‘Khar,’ whose women had been made as widows since the male seed of Israel had been cut off.[^[158]]

After the fashion of court-poets, the author of the hymn of victory is not careful about ascribing to his royal master such successes as he could himself really claim. He has skilfully combined the victories of Meneptah with those of his father, and given him the credit of conquests which he had not made. The Hittites had been ‘tranquillised’ by Ramses II., not by Meneptah, and Canaan had been the conquest of Ramses and his father Seti. We may accordingly conclude that in the case of the Israelites also Meneptah is made to claim what does not properly belong to him. According to the book of Exodus, it was the Pharaoh of the Oppression rather than the Pharaoh of the Exodus who ordered that ‘every son’ should be ‘cast into the river,’ and only the daughters saved alive.

The agreement, however, between the Biblical narrative and the expression used on the stela of Meneptah is very remarkable. It is almost as if the writer of Exodus had had the inscription before him. In both it is the male seed which we are told was destroyed: the women were left as widows, for all ‘the men children’ were cut off. The victory over the Israelites, of which the poet boasts, was a victory obtained by slaying, like Herod, all the children who were males.