Moses and Aaron made their way to the court of the Pharaoh, and there requested that the Israelites might be allowed to journey three days into the desert, and hold a feast to their God. The gods of the Asiatic nomads on the outskirts of the Delta were gods of the wilderness, whom the Egyptians identified with Set, the enemy of Horus, the deity of the cultivated land.[[166]] The Pharaoh refused the request. Once lost in the desert, the royal slaves would be lost for ever, and would never turn back to the line of fortifications which guarded the eastern frontier of Egypt, and, at the same time, prevented the escape of those who dwelt within them. The God of the Hebrews was no god whom the Pharaoh—himself the offspring and incarnation of the Sun-god—could recognise; they were the servants of the Egyptian king, and of none else.
The embassy of the representatives of Israel was followed by severer measures of repression. It indicated a rising spirit of rebellion, a desire to return to the old free life of the desert, and to be quit for ever of Egyptian burdens. Strikes were not unknown among the free workmen of Thebes; but a strike among the royal slaves was a more serious matter, and seemed to prove that the Bedâwi spirit of independence and insubordination was still active among the settlers in Goshen.[[167]] The Israelites were still employed in building cities and fortresses, and they were now bidden to find for themselves the tibn or chopped straw, which they mixed with the clay of the bricks, and, at the same time, to deliver the same number of bricks as before. The tibn was employed, as it still is, for binding the clay more closely together, but it is not essential, and many of the ancient bricks of Egypt, more especially those used in Upper Egypt, are made without it. In the Delta, however, with its damper climate, the tibn was more necessary, and the Egyptian taskmasters, accordingly, required it, or else some substitute for it.[[168]] The condition of the Israelites thus became intolerable; they were scattered over the land, seeking for ‘stubble instead of straw,’ and beaten mercilessly in traditional Egyptian fashion if the full tale of bricks was not delivered. The ‘stubble’ corresponded with the dry stalks of the durra, which are still sometimes used for a similar purpose, and was obtained from the beds of dry reeds which lined the marshes in the Eastern Delta.
Once more Moses and Aaron appeared before the Pharaoh, this time prepared to enforce their petition by signs and wonders. That they should have had such ready access to the sovereign may seem strange to the Western mind. But it is in full accordance with the traditions of the Egyptian court, which have been maintained down to the reign of the late Khedive. The ruler of the country was accessible to all who had a complaint to make before him, or a petition to offer. Bakshish might be needful before the charmed circle of officials by which he was surrounded could be broken through; but once it was broken, he was bound to give audience to whosoever came to him. Moses and Aaron, moreover, were the delegates and representatives of their people, and as such had a right to be heard. The system they represented is still in full force in modern Egypt. Each class of the community, each religion, each trade, each nationality, has its recognised representative or ‘shêkh,’ who stands between it and the government, and acts on its behalf in all political and legal matters. He is as much its representative as an ambassador or consul is the representative of the nation which has accredited him, and the rights and privileges which belong to an ambassador belong also to the ‘shêkh.’ The Pharaoh could not exclude Moses and Aaron from his presence, even though the people they represented were public slaves.
The Hebrew wonder-workers were confronted by the magicians of Egypt. Amon-Ra could not yield without a struggle to the God of the ‘impure’ stranger. The miracles performed by the representatives of the Israelitish people were not beyond the powers of his servants, and the magical powers of the Egyptian priests had been famous from the beginning of time. The Egyptian had an intense belief in magic—a belief which still survives in the modern Egypt of to-day. Books had been compiled which reduced this magic to a science, and enabled those who would learn its formulæ and methods to reverse the order of nature and work whatsoever wonder they desired.[[169]] To transform a rod into a serpent, or a serpent into a rod, was a comparatively easy feat, and one which the jugglers of Cairo can still perform. Equally easy was it to turn the water of the river into blood, or even to multiply the frogs on the wet land. It was only when the plague of lice touched themselves that the power of the magicians failed, and that they confessed themselves overcome by a stronger deity than those they owned. Their magic could not remove the plague which had fallen upon them; their own garments were defiled in spite of their charms and amulets, and they had become more unclean than the ‘unclean’ foreigner himself.
The account of the ten plagues of Egypt betrays an intimate acquaintance with the characteristics and peculiarities of the valley of the Nile. They are all plagues which still recur there; some of them indeed may be said never to have left the country. Still, each year, the water of the river becomes like blood at the time of the inundation. When the Nile first begins to rise, towards the end of June, the red marl brought from the mountains of Abyssinia stains it to a dark colour, which glistens like blood in the light of the setting sun.[[170]] Each year, too, the inundation brings with it myriads of frogs, which swarm along the banks of the river and canals, and fill the night air with continuous croakings. The lice, again, are an ever-present plague among the poorer natives, while every spring the flies still swarm in the houses and open air, and irritate the visitor to Egypt almost beyond endurance. Flies and lice, frogs and blood-red water, are all as much a part of modern Egypt as they were of the Egypt of the Mosaic age. Natives and strangers alike suffered from them, and that the plague of flies did not reach to Goshen must have seemed to the Egyptians a miracle of miracles.
Those who have had experience of the flies of Egypt can sympathise with the Pharaoh when he hastily summoned the leaders of Israel and bade them offer sacrifice to the God who had thus shown himself a veritable ‘Lord of Flies.’ The plague which followed—the murrain upon the cattle[[171]]—is of rarer occurrence, though from time to time it still decimates the cattle and horses of Egypt. A strict quarantine upon animals, however, is now enforced at the Asiatic frontier, and some years, therefore, have elapsed since the last outbreak of the cattle-plague. But the plague of boils and blains is still endemic, and residents in the country seldom wholly escape it. The plague of the thunder and hail is also not unfrequent; as recently as the spring of 1895 a violent storm of the kind swept along the valley of the Nile and destroyed three thousand acres of cultivated land. The locusts, too, now and again, are carried by the south-east wind from the shores of the Red Sea to devour the rising crops, while the darkness that might be felt was but a heightened form of the darkness occasioned by the khamasin winds and sand-storms of the spring. Even the death of the firstborn has its parallel in the epidemic of cholera. In the space of a single year (1895-1896) the Egypt of our own days has experienced most of the plagues of which we read in the book of Exodus. Blood-red water, frogs and lice, flies and boils, hailstorms and darkness, the scourge of cholera, have all visited the land.
There was nothing, consequently, in the plagues themselves that was either supernatural or contra-natural. They were all characteristic of Egypt, and of Egypt alone. They were signs and wonders, not because they introduced new and unknown forces into the life of the Egyptians, but because the diseases and plagues already known to the country were intensified in action and crowded into a short space of time. The magicians beheld in them ‘the finger’ of the God of the Hebrews, since they came and went at the command of the Hebrew leader, and all the magic of Egypt was powerless before them. Amon-Ra had found a mightier than himself; and the books of Thoth contained no spells or mystical incantations which could avail against the scourges that afflicted priest and layman alike. The reluctant Pharaoh could no longer resist the cries of his people. Egypt was perishing, and his own son had died of the plague. It was better that his cities should remain unfinished than that there should be none to fill them when they were built. In the plagues that had descended on them, his subjects saw the hand of the wrathful Hebrew Deity, eager for the sacrifices which His people had been prevented from offering to Him in the desert, and the sceptical Pharaoh himself at last became a convert to their belief. In fear lest a worse evil might befall him, he gave the order that the Israelites should be allowed to pass the fortresses that separated Goshen from the wilderness beyond, and the royal slaves were free to depart.
For how long a time Egypt had thus been stricken by plague after plague is hard to determine. The impression left by the narrative is that they followed quickly one upon the other, and that consequently the period was of no great length. It is true that the Nile turns ‘red’ in July, and that the wheat ripens in the spring; but, on the other hand, the locusts, we are told, eat ‘all that the hail had left.’ At any rate, it is clear that the Hebrew writer intended us to believe that less than a year elapsed between the first visit of the Israelitish representatives to the Pharaoh and the flight into the wilderness. All was over before the end of March—‘the first month’ of the Hebrew year.
The Egyptian monuments have given us a different version of the causes which obliged Meneptah to consent to the exodus of his Asiatic serfs. In the light of the stela discovered by Professor Petrie at Thebes, we can now understand the mutilated inscription in which the Pharaoh records on the walls of Karnak his victory over the barbarians in the fifth year of his reign. Lower Egypt and its civilisation were never nearer to destruction. The Libyans of Northern Africa had combined with the populations of the Greek Seas, and the barbarians had overrun the Delta, destroying its cities, massacring its population, and carrying away its spoil. While Maraiu, the Libyan king, devastated the eastern banks of the Nile, his northern allies—the Sardinians and Achæans, the Lycians and Siculians—landed on the coasts of the Delta, and marched southward until they joined him.
It would seem that they found allies in Egypt itself. Meneptah tells us that he endeavoured to save what was left of his dominions by throwing up fortifications in front of Memphis and Heliopolis, ‘the city of Tum.’ For Egypt was threatened not only on the west and on the north. Eastward also, in the land of Goshen, there were enemies, pastoral nomads from Asia, who had been allowed to live there for many generations. Their ‘tents,’ the Pharaoh declares, had been pitched ‘in front of the city of Pi-Bailos,’ the modern Belbeis, at the western extremity of the region in which the Israelites were settled. ‘The kings of Lower Egypt’ found themselves shut up and isolated in their fortified cities, ‘cut off from everything by the foe, with no mercenaries whom they could oppose to them.’[[172]]