Nevertheless, ‘the people multiplied.’ It was impossible to carry out literally the order of the Pharaoh, and there must have been many children who were saved from death. Among these was Moses, the future legislator of his race. The story of his preservation is familiar to every one. We are told how his mother made ‘an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.’ Then the daughter of the Pharaoh came to bathe, and taking compassion on the child, brought him up as her own son.
A similar story had been told centuries before of Sargon of Akkad, the great Babylonian conqueror and lawgiver. He, too, it was said, had been placed by his mother ‘in an ark of reeds, the mouth whereof she closed with pitch,’ and then launched it on the waters of the Euphrates. The child was carried to Akki the irrigator, who adopted him as his son, and brought him up until the day came when, through the help of the goddess Istar, the true origin and birth of the hero were made known, and he became one of the mightiest of the Babylonian kings.
A like destiny seemed in store for Moses. He was introduced into the family of the Pharaoh, and took his place at court among the royal princes. A punning etymology makes the princess who adopted him speak Hebrew and give him the name of Mosheh or Moses, from the Hebrew mâshah, ‘to draw out.’ Mosheh, however, is really the Egyptian messu, ‘son,’ a very appropriate name for an adopted child. The name was not uncommon in Egypt; and in the time of Meneptah, the contemporary of Moses, it was actually borne by a ‘Prince of Kush,’ that is to say, the Egyptian governor of Ethiopia.[[159]] The coincidence doubtless was the origin of that Jewish tradition of the successful campaign of Moses in Ethiopia as general of the Egyptian army, which is recorded in full by Josephus.
Conjecture, both ancient and modern, has played freely round the person of Pharaoh’s daughter. Modern writers have pointed to the fact that the favourite daughter of Ramses II. bore the Canaanitish name of Bint-Anat, and had been born of a Syrian mother. That she should have adopted a Hebrew child would have been nothing strange. Her own sympathies would naturally have been on the side of her Semitic ancestry. Moses himself belonged to the tribe of Levi, and future generations remembered that his father was Amram and his mother Jochebed. He had a brother Aaron, three years older than himself, and a sister Miriam. The names of all three were never forgotten in Israel.[[160]]
Nor did Moses, when he came to man’s estate, forget his own people. One day, when he was of that unknown age which the Hebrew writers expressed by the term of forty years, he saw one of his Israelitish brethren ill-treated by the Egyptian taskmaster; and with the unrestrained licence of a young Oriental prince, he forthwith remedied the injustice by slaying the Egyptian with his own hand. The act was soon known and discussed among the Hebrew slaves; and when he endeavoured to reconcile two of them who were quarrelling with each other, he was told that though he might be ‘a prince’ in the eyes of the Egyptians, he had no authority over the Hebrew tribes. The suspicions of the Pharaoh had already been aroused against him, and he now fled from Egypt in fear of his life. An Egyptian papyrus, written in the time of the twelfth dynasty, tells the story of a similar fugitive from the Pharaoh’s wrath. This was Sinuhit, who seems to have been accused of conspiring against the government, and who fled, accordingly, like Moses, alone and on foot. He made his way to the eastern boundary of Egypt; and there, when fainting from thirst, was rescued by the Bedâwin of the desert, and finally reached in safety the land of the Kadmonites among the mountains of Seir. The shêkh received him kindly, and Sinuhit in course of time married the daughter of the Bedâwi chieftain, and became one of the princes of the tribe. Children were born to him, and he possessed herds and flocks in abundance. But his heart still yearned for his native land; and when in his old age a new Pharaoh sent messengers to say that his political offences were forgiven, and that he might return to Egypt, Sinuhit left his Arab wife and children and went back once more to his own country.[[161]]
Like Sinuhit, Moses also fled to the eastern desert, beyond the reach of the Egyptian power. He did not feel himself safe till he found himself in Midian. The Sinaitic Peninsula—Mafkat, as it was called—was an Egyptian province, and the mines of malachite and copper on its western side were garrisoned by Egyptian troops. The ‘salt’ desert of Melukhkha, moreover, which lay between Egypt and Palestine, was equally under Egyptian control; and, as we learn from the Tel el-Amarna tablets, supplied contingents to the Pharaoh’s army.[[162]] But in Midian Moses was safe from pursuit; and the ‘priest of Midian,’ like the shêkh of Kedem with whom Sinuhit had to do, gave him a kindly welcome, and married him to Zipporah, one of his daughters.
Government by a priest was a peculiarly Semitic institution. Assur, the primitive capital of Assyria, had been governed by high-priests before it had been governed by kings, and so too had Saba or Sheba in the south of Arabia. There, as we learn from inscriptions, the Makârib, or High-priests, had preceded the kings.
Tradition has handed down more than one name for the high-priest of Midian. In one part of the narrative in Exodus he is called Reuel, in another part Jethro. Jethro is a distinctively north Arabian name, for which there is monumental evidence, and it is probably more correct than Reuel.[[163]] Whatever may have been his name, however, Moses remained with him for some time; but instead of being treated like a prince, as Sinuhit had been among the Kadmonites, he was set to keep the flocks of his father-in-law.
It was while thus shepherding the flocks of Jethro that Moses came one day to Horeb, ‘the mountain of God,’ which rose into the sky at the back of the desert. Here he beheld a seneh or ‘thorn-bush,’ lighted up with fire, which nevertheless did not consume it.[[164]] Approaching nearer, he heard a voice which he believed was that of God Himself, and which told him that the mountain whereon he stood was holy ground. Moses was then ordered to return to Egypt, and there in the name of the God of Israel to command Pharaoh to let His people go. Wonders and signs were to be performed before consent would be wrung from the obdurate heart of the Egyptian king, and ten sore plagues were to be sent upon the inhabitants of the Delta who had joined with the Pharaoh in his oppression of the Israelites. At the same time, God revealed Himself under a new name, which was henceforth to be that of the national God of Israel. On the slopes of Horeb the name of Yahveh was first made known to man.[[165]]
Moses was met by Aaron ‘in the Mount of God,’ and the two brothers returned to Egypt together, determined to deliver Israel from its bondage, and to lead it to that sacred mountain whereon the name of its national God had been revealed. Unlike Sinuhit, Moses took with him his Midianitish wife and the children she had borne him. At this point in the narrative there has been inserted the fragment of a story which harmonises but ill with it, or with the general spirit of Old Testament history. The anthropomorphising legend that ‘the Lord’ met Moses and would have killed him had not Zipporah appeased the wrathful Deity by circumcising her son, belongs to the folklore of a people still in a state of crude barbarism, and is part of a story which enforced the necessity of circumcision among the Hebrew worshippers of Yahveh. An over-minute criticism might find a contradiction between the statement that Zipporah had but one son to circumcise, and the fact that it was the ‘sons’ of Moses who accompanied him to Egypt (Exod. iv. 20). Such verbal criticism, however, is needless; it is sufficient for the historian that the story is a mere fragment, almost unintelligible as it stands, and in complete disaccord with the historical setting in which it is placed.