When they awoke towards evening, refreshed by their sleep, the conversation respecting Goshen was resumed. Elisama, seated upon his carpet, thus took up the discourse:
“It seems then that we are at least on the skirts of that fruitful district of pasturage, in which the children of Abraham sojourned, and where they grew from a family to a people. Thou hast already heard, Myron, that our father Jacob came down to Egypt, with seventy persons, to his son Joseph, who had preserved the land of Pharaoh, by his wise precautions, from the miseries of famine; that two hundred and fifteen years after Jacob went down into Egypt, and four hundred and thirty years after Abraham left his native country at God’s command, 603,550 fighting men of the Israelites quitted Egypt, without reckoning the 22,000 Levites, or the women and children. During these [four hundred and thirty years] Israel grew into a nation.
“In order that the promise of Jehovah, ‘that all nations should be blessed in Abraham,’ might be accomplished, it may easily be conceived that it was necessary that Abraham should become a people. But there was no country where it could have been accomplished in so short a time as in this. Canaan was already fully peopled, but in Goshen there was ample room for them to increase and spread. The Canaanites would not have looked quietly on for so many years, and have witnessed their increase, whereas the Egyptians would feel themselves bound by gratitude to Joseph, at least during the first century after his death, to abstain from any injury towards his nation. Nowhere else could Israel have been kept so free from mixture with other nations, as in the neighbourhood of the Egyptians, whose religion inspired them with a [horror of pastoral tribes]. The land was at the same time fruitful, and facilitated the existence of numerous families. Finally, Egypt already possessed a civil polity more perfect than existed at that time in any other country; and though no human means were necessary to form a lawgiver for Israel, yet by constantly observing a people living under a constitution which regulated the rights and duties even of the lowest order of the people, the Israelites were prepared to value and receive a similar constitution themselves.
“When therefore Israel had become a numerous people, and began to feel the want of a system of laws, Divine Providence so arranged circumstances, as to awaken in them a longing for freedom and for the promised land. The Pharaohs inhumanly oppressed them, and made their lives bitter to them, by labour in brick and tile, and in all manner of service in the field. At length it was even given in command to the midwives to kill all the male infants. This was indeed, in one point of view, only a just punishment for the guilt of Israel, in worshipping the sacred animals of the Egyptians, and leaving the service of the true God: but as calamity, by the wise ordinance of Jehovah, serves at once for punishment and deliverance, the cruelty of the Egyptians proved the means of Israel’s deliverance and exaltation.
“God raised up Moses and laid his spirit upon him. After the command of Pharaoh for the murder of the male infants, he was exposed by his parents among the reeds of the Nile, and rescued in a wonderful manner by the king’s own daughter. At the royal court, where he was brought up, he became acquainted with all the wisdom of the Egyptians. When forty years of age, hurried away by sympathy for his suffering countrymen, whom even at Pharaoh’s court he had not forgotten, he slew an Egyptian who was committing an outrage upon an Israelite, and was compelled to flee. He took refuge in the wilderness, and by a pastoral life of forty years formed his mind in solitude and amidst the sublimities of nature, where only a faint remembrance of the world remained to him, and thoughts of God filled his soul. Here God appeared to him in mount Horeb, in a bush that burned with fire and yet was not consumed. ‘And Moses said, I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burned. And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses, and he said, Here am I. And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. Moreover he said, I am the God of thy fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face. And the Lord said, I have seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters. I know their sorrows, and I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them out of that land unto a good land and a large, a land flowing with milk and honey. Come now, therefore, I will send thee to Pharaoh, that thou mayest bring forth my people, the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt.’[[29]]
“This was the calling of Moses. His apprehension of his own unworthiness was removed, and the Lord made known his name unto him; I will be that I will be. He began the great work, and at the first step had to contend with the unsteadiness of Israel, which, during the remaining forty years of his life, occasioned him no less trouble than the assaults of their enemies. Pharaoh refused to let the people go, and nine plagues in succession, which Jehovah denounced by Moses, and then brought upon the land, were able only for a time to overcome Israel’s fickleness and Pharaoh’s obstinacy. At last the tenth was inflicted, and on the fourteenth of the month Nisan, Israel, with their wives and their children, and all their possessions, came out from the house of bondage in Egypt, and passed through the Red Sea, in which the Egyptians, following them, were drowned. This is, of all the events in the history of our nation, the most important, from its connection with the giving of the law which immediately followed. We keep the feast of the Passover in remembrance of this event. Our great leader was also a poet, and sang the following song, the oldest and the noblest ode of victory that the world can show:
I sing unto the Lord for he is great—
Chariot and horse he hath thrown into the sea.
The Lord is my strength, my song, my salvation:
He is my God, and I will sing praise unto him,