But Meneptah had been ‘crowned to preserve the life’ of his subjects. In the month of Epiphi, our July, the great battle was fought which annihilated the hordes of the invaders and saved the inhabitants of Egypt. Six thousand three hundred and sixty-five Libyan slain were counted on the field of battle, and 2370 of the northern barbarians, while 9376 prisoners fell into the hands of the conqueror. It was little wonder that the Egyptian poets composed pæans in honour of the victory, or that one of these hymns of triumph should have been engraved on a stela of the temple which Meneptah raised at Thebes to Amon-Ra.
It is in this latter hymn, as has been already said, that the name of the ‘Israelites’ has been found. They are included among the enemies over whom the Pharaoh had triumphed; but, unlike his other enemies, they possessed no land which they could call their own. They had no fixed habitation, there was no locality which was called after their name. But the Egyptian poet knew that they had come originally from Southern Palestine; the destruction of their male ‘seed’ had widowed the women of ‘Khar.’
It was the pressure of the Libyan invasion, therefore, which had placed Meneptah at the mercy of his Israelitish slaves. With the Libyans and their allies in the east and north, and a hostile population in the land of Goshen, he had been forced to fortify Memphis and Heliopolis, and to yield to those demands for freedom which he was not strong enough to resist. To the ten plagues of which we have the record in the book of Exodus there was added the more terrible plague of the Libyan invasion. In his inscription Meneptah speaks not only of the barbarian enemy who harassed the frontier and devastated the seaports, but also of the ‘rebels’ who were destroying the country from within, and in these rebels whose tents were pitched ‘in front of Pi-Bailos’ we must see the Israelites of the Old Testament. Crushed and unwarlike though they may have been, they were nevertheless a source of danger, and, like Mohammed Ali in the presence of the Bedâwin, the Pharaoh found it necessary to agree to their demands.
Meneptah’s victory was gained in the middle of the summer. It was in the spring that the Exodus of the Israelites had taken place. Along with the descendants of Jacob had gone ‘a mixed multitude,’ fragments, it may be, of that wave of Libyan invasion which was rolling over the Delta. At any rate, it was not the Israelites only who had made their way towards Asia. There were other royal slaves also, like the ‘Apuriu who were employed in drawing the stone that was quarried on the eastern bank of the Nile. The resemblance between their name and that of the Hebrews may have led to a confusion between the brickmakers of Pharaoh and the transporters of his stone.
There was an Egyptian legend of the Israelitish Exodus which was embodied in the history of Manetho, from whom it has been quoted by Josephus.[[173]] The Pharaoh Amenôphis, it was said, desired to see the gods, as his predecessor Oros (or Khu-n-Aten) had done. On the advice of the seer, Amenôphis the son of Paapis, he accordingly cleared the land of the leprous and ‘impure,’ separating them from the rest of the Egyptians, to the number of eighty thousand, and condemning them to work, like the ’Apuriu of the monuments, in the quarries on the eastern side of the Nile. But among them were some priests who were under the special protection of the gods. When the seer heard of the sacrilege that had been committed against their persons, he prophesied that the impure people would find allies, and with their help rule over Egypt for thirteen years. Not daring to tell the king of his prophecy, he committed it to writing, and then destroyed himself. After a while the workers in the quarries begged the Pharaoh to send them to Avaris, the old fortress of the Hyksos, which lay on the Asiatic frontier of Egypt, empty and uninhabited. The request was granted; but no sooner were they settled in their new abode than they rose in rebellion, and chose as their leader Osarsiph, a priest of On. He gave them new laws, forbidding them, among other things, to revere the sacred animals, and set them to rebuild the walls of Avaris. He also sent to the Hyksos at Jerusalem asking them for their help. A force of two hundred thousand men was accordingly despatched to Avaris, and this was followed by the invasion of Egypt. Amenôphis fled to Ethiopia, with the bull Apis and other holy animals, after ordering the images of the gods to be concealed. His son Sethos, who was also called Ramesses, after his grandfather Ramesses the Great, and who was at the time only five years of age, was placed in charge of a friend. Amenôphis remained in Ethiopia for thirteen years, while Osarsiph, who had assumed the name of Moses, and his Hyksos allies committed innumerable atrocities. Temples and towns were destroyed, and the priests and sacred animals were killed. But at last the fated term of years was over; Amenôphis returned at the head of an army, and the enemy was utterly overthrown and pursued to the borders of Syria.
In this legend truth and fiction have been mingled together. The foreigner, and more especially the Asiatic foreigner, was stigmatised as ‘impure’ by the Egyptians, and in the leprous people who were confined in the quarries of the eastern desert we must, therefore, see simply a stranger race. Osarsiph derives his name from Joseph, the latter name being regarded (as in Psalm lxxxi. 6) as a compound of Yo or Yahveh, which is identified with the Egyptian Osiris. Amenôphis,[[174]] the son of Paapis, is Amenôphis (or rather, Amenôthes), the son of Hapi who erected the colossal statues of ‘Memnon’ and its companion at Thebes during the reign of Amenôphis III., and the Pharaoh Amenôphis, the son of Ramesses, and father of Sethos, is Meneptah, the son of Ramses II., and father of Seti II.
The return of Amenôphis from Ethiopia was derived from a sort of Messianic prophecy found already in a papyrus of the age of Thothmes III. Here we read that ‘a king will come from the South, Ameni the truth-declaring by name. He will be the son of a woman of Nubia, and will be born in.... He will assume the crown of Upper Egypt, and will lift up the red crown of Lower Egypt. He will unite the double crown.... The people of the age of the son of man will rejoice and establish his name for all eternity. They will be far from evil, and the wicked will humble their mouths for fear of him. The Asiatics will fall before his blows, and the Libyans before his flame. The wicked will wait on his judgments, the rebels on his power. The royal serpent on his brow will pacify the revolted. A wall shall be built, even that of the prince, so that the Asiatics may no more enter into Egypt.’[[175]]
With this prince of ancient prophecy who should save Egypt from its Asiatic and Libyan foes, it was easy for popular tradition to identify the Meneptah who had annihilated both Libyans and Asiatics, and to combine his name with that of Ameni into the compound Amenôphis. At any rate, the Egyptian legend bears witness to the fact that Meneptah was the Pharaoh of the Exodus, and that the flight of the Israelites was connected with the Libyan invasion of the valley of the Nile.[[176]]
The Israelites themselves connected the flight with the institution of the feast of the Passover. But the feast of the Passover seems to have been a combination of two older festivals. One of these was commemorated by eating for seven days unleavened bread; the other by the sacrifice of a lamb, the blood of which was smeared on the doorposts and lintel of the house, the lamb itself being roasted and eaten at midnight with bitter herbs. The feast of unleavened bread followed immediately upon the feast of the Passover, which lasted from the tenth to the fourteenth day of the first month of the Hebrew sacred year.
Dr. Clay Trumbull has shown that the Passover was but an adaptation of the old rite which he terms the ‘Threshold Covenant.’[[177]] It was a rite which went back to the earliest age of mankind, and of which we find traces in many parts of the world. Even in the Egypt of to-day the building of a new house or boat is not complete without the slaughter of a sheep, the blood of which is allowed to fall on the threshold of the house or the deck and side of a vessel. The blood was the mark of the sacrifice by which the master of the house entered into covenant with the stranger, or even with his god. Where it appeared the avenging deity passed by, mindful of the covenant, and remembering that the house contained a friend and not an enemy. The threshold became an altar, and those who passed over it were made members of the family, and shared with them their rights and their religion. When once the bride had crossed the threshold of her new home, she left behind her all her old ties and relations, and became a member of a new family.