Let us hope that the hearts of the saved people were deeply moved in the spirit of this sublime song; that they saw God as never before, and gave him the homage of their hearts, grateful, trustful, and adoring!
It may be noticed that Moses leads the thought of the people forward to the remote results of this redemption: “The nations shall hear and be afraid; sorrow shall take hold on the inhabitants of Palestine; all the inhabitants of Canaan shall melt away; fear and dread shall fall upon them ... till thy people pass over and thou hast planted them in their promised inheritance.”
The moral results of this scene, we may hope, were really wholesome and effective upon the multitude. It amazes us to find that so soon afterward there were some among them who murmured for water, rebelled against Moses, made and worshiped a calf of gold: but the young, less depraved by their Egyptian life and perhaps more impressible by such manifestations of God, seem to have drank in the solemn lessons of these grand events.
The locality of the Red Sea crossing has been not a little controverted—until the researches of modern times. Since Dr. Robinson’s personal examination of that region, including the site of Goshen, the route of their three days’ travel till they reached the sea, the widthof the sea at the various points between which the selection must be made, there has been a general if not universal concurrence in the conclusions to which he came. The location a little below Suez where the sea was supposably not far from one mile in width; where a strong easterly wind would drive out the waters from the channel—seems to fulfill all the historical conditions of the problem. See his Researches in Egypt and Palestine, Vol. I. pp. 74–86.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE HISTORIC CONNECTIONS OF MOSES WITH PHARAOH AND EGYPT.
THE thread of our history having now reached a point where we leave Egypt and have seen the last of that one particular Pharaoh, it is in place to take a final review of the questions—Who was this Pharaoh? Can he be identified in the annals of Egyptian antiquities? Have any points of chronological contact between the records of Egypt and the records of Moses been fixed reliably so that the one system can be laid alongside of the other and positive correspondence be made out?
Comparing the Hebrew records with Egyptian monuments and history, the following points of coincidence may be regarded as established.
1. That (as already observed) the kingdom of Egypt was thoroughly organized, was powerful, and had, apparently, the ripeness of age, in the times of Joseph and of Moses. In all these respects it was far in advance of the adjacent populations of Northern Africa and of South-western Asia.
2. That the state of the arts, the attainments of the learned in science, the usages of the people, the reign of law and of social order, indicated a state of civilizationmuch in advance of any thing else known in that age.