The victory of Ramses II. at Kadesh and the epic poem of Pentaur must have been known to the generation before the Exodus as signal events. And if there is any truth in the account quoted by Josephus, they must have been aware that they did not fly from Egypt as a body of fugitive slaves, but as retreating warriors who for thirteen years had held Egypt up to Ethiopia in subjection. And yet of all these memorable events there is not the slightest trace in the Hebrew annals which have come down to us.
An even greater difficulty is to understand how, if the children of Israel had lived for anything like 400 years in such a civilized empire as Egypt, they could have emerged from it in such a plane of low civilization, or rather of ferocious savagery and crude superstitions as are shown by the books of the Old Testament, where they burst like a host of Red Indians on the settlements and cities of the Amorites, and other more advanced nations of Palestine. The discoveries at Lachish already referred to show that their civilization could not have exceeded that of the rudest Bedouins, and their myths and legends are so similar to those of the North American Indians as to show that they must have originated in a very similar stage of mental development.
If we adopt the short date of the genealogies we are equally confronted by difficulties. If the Exodus occurred in the reign of Menepthah, 180 years back from that date would take us, not to the Hyksos dynasty where alone it would have been possible for Joseph to be a vizier, and for a Semitic tribe of shepherds to be welcomed in Egypt, but into the midst of the great and glorious eighteenth dynasty who had expelled the Hyksos, and carried the dominion of Egypt to the Euphrates. Nor would there have been time for the seventy souls, who we are told were all of the family of Jacob who migrated into Egypt, to have increased in three generations into a nation numerous enough to alarm the Egyptians, and conquer the Canaanites.
The legend of Joseph is very touching and beautiful, but it may just as well be a novel as history, and this suspicion is strengthened by the fact that the episode of Potiphar's wife is almost verbatim the same as one of the chapters of the Egyptian novel of the Two Brothers. Nor does it seem likely that such a seven years' famine and such a momentous change as the conversion of all the land of Egypt from freehold into a tenure held from the king subject to payment of a rent of one-fifth of the gross produce, should have left no trace in the records. Again, the age of 110 years assigned to Joseph, and 147 to his father, are a sufficient proof that we are not upon strictly historical ground; and on the whole this narrative does not go far, in the absence of any confirmation from monuments, to assist us in fixing dates, or enabling us to form any consistent idea of the real conditions of the sojourn of the people of Israel in Egypt. It places them on far too high a level of civilization at first, to have fallen to such a low one as we find depicted in the Books of Exodus, Joshua, and Judges. Further excavations in the mounds of ruined cities in Judæa and Palestine, like those of Schliemann on the sites of Troy and Mycenæ, can alone give us anything like certain facts as to the real condition of the Hebrew tribes who destroyed the older walled cities of the comparatively civilized Amorites and Canaanites. If the conclusion of Mr. Flinders Petrie from the section of the mound of Lachish, as to the extremely rude condition of the tribes who built the second town of mud-huts on the ruins of the Amorite city, should be confirmed, it would go far to negative the idea that the accounts of their having been trained in an advanced code of Mosaic legislation, can have any historical foundation.
We come next to Moses. It is difficult to refuse an historical character to a personage who has been accepted by uniform tradition as the chief who led the Israelites out of Egypt, and as the great legislator who laid the foundations of the religious and civil institutions of the peculiar people. And if the passage from Manetho is correctly quoted by Josephus, and was really taken from contemporary Egyptian annals, and is not a later version of the account in the Pentateuch modified to suit Egyptian prejudices, Moses is clearly identified with Osarsiph the priest of Hieropolis, who abandoned the worship of the old gods, and headed the revolt of the unclean people, which probably meant the heretics. It may be conjectured that this may have had some connection with the great religious revolution of the heretic king of Tel-el-Amarna, which for a time displaced the national gods, worshipped in the form of sacred animals and symbolic statues, by an approach to Monotheism under the image of the winged solar disc. Such a reform must have had many adherents to have survived as the State religion for two or three reigns, and must have left a large number of so-called heretics when the nation returned to its ancient faith; and it is quite intelligible that some of the more enlightened priests should have assimilated to it the doctrine of one Supreme God, which was always at the bottom of the religious metaphysics of the earliest ages in Egypt, and was probably preserved as an esoteric doctrine in the priestly colleges. This, however, must remain purely a conjecture, and we must look for anything specific in regard to Moses exclusively to the Old Testament.
And here we are at once assailed by formidable difficulties. As long as we confine ourselves to general views it may be accepted as historical that the Israelites really came out of Egypt under a great leader and legislator; but when we come to details, and to the events connected with Moses, and to a great extent supposed to have been written by him or taken from his journals, they are for the most part more wildly and hopelessly impossible than anything related of the earlier patriarchs, Abraham and Joseph. The story of his preservation in infancy is a variation of the myth common to so many nations, of an infant hero or god, whose life is sought by a wicked king, and who is miraculously saved. We find it in the myths of Khrishna, Buddha, Cyrus, Romulus, and others, and in the inscription by Sargon I. of Accade on his own tablet; he states himself to have been saved in an ark floated on the river Euphrates, just as Moses was on the Nile. When grown up he is represented first as the adopted son of Pharaoh's daughter, and then as a shepherd in the wilderness of Midian talking with the Lord in a fiery bush, who for the first time communicates his real name of Jehovah, which he says was not known to Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, although constantly used by them, and although men began to call him by that name in the time of Enos, Adam's grandson. At Jehovah's command Moses throws his rod on the ground, when it becomes a serpent from which he flies, and when he takes it up by the tail it becomes a rod again; and as a farther sign his hand is changed from sound to leprous as white as snow, and back again to sound, in a minute or two of time.
On returning to Egypt Moses is represented as going ten times into the presence of Pharaoh demanding of him to let the Hebrews depart, and inflicting on Egypt a succession of plagues, each one more than sufficient to have convinced the king of the futility of opposing such supernatural powers, and to have made him only too anxious to get rid of the Hebrews from the land at any price. What could have been the condition of Egypt, if for seven days "the streams, the rivers, the ponds and pools, and even the water in the vessels of wood and of stone, through all the land of Egypt," had been really turned into blood? And what sort of magicians must they have been who could do the same with their enchantments?
The whole account of these plagues has distinctly the air of being an historical romance rather than real history. Those repeated interviews accompanied by taunts and reproaches of Moses, the representative of an oppressed race of slaves, in the august presence of a Pharaoh who, like the Inca of Peru or the Mikado of Japan, was half monarch and half deity, are totally inconsistent with all we know of Egyptian usage. The son and successor of the splendid Ramses II., who has been called the Louis XIV. of Egyptian history, would certainly, after the first interview and miracle, either have recognized the supernatural power which it was useless to resist, or ordered Moses to instant execution. It is remarkable also how the series of plagues reproduce the natural features of the Egyptian seasons. Recent travellers tell us how at the end of the dry season when the Nile is at its lowest, and the adjacent plains are arid and lifeless, suddenly one morning at sunrise they see the river apparently turned into blood. It is the phenomenon of the red Nile, which is caused by the first flush of the Abyssinian flood, coming from banks of red marl. After a few days the real rise commences, the Nile resumes its usual colour, percolates through its banks, fills the tanks and ponds, and finally overflows and saturates the dusty plains. The first signal of the renewal of life is the croaking of innumerable frogs, and soon the plains are alive with flies, gnats, and all manner of creeping and hopping insects, as if the dust had been turned into lice. Then after the inundation subsides come the other plagues which in the summer and autumn seasons frequently afflict the young crops and the inhabitants—local hail-storms, locusts, murrain among the cattle, boils and other sicknesses while the stagnant waters are drying up. It reads like what some Rider Haggard of the Court of Solomon might have written in working up the tales of travellers and old popular traditions into an historical romance of the deliverance of Israel from Egypt.
When we come to the Exodus the impossibilities of the narrative are even more obvious. The robust common-sense of Bishop Colenso, sharpened by a mathematical education, has reduced many of these to the convincing test of arithmetic. The host of Israelites who left Egypt is said to have comprised 603,550 fighting men above the age of twenty; exclusive of the Levites and of a mixed multitude who followed. This implies a total population of at least 2,500,000, who are said to have wandered about for forty years in the desert of Sinai, one of the most arid wildernesses in the world, destitute alike of water, arable soil, and pasture, and where a Bedouin tribe of even 600 souls would find it difficult to exist. They are said to have been miraculously fed during these forty years on manna, a sweetish, gummy exudation from the scanty foliage of certain prickly desert plants, which is described as being "as small as the hoar frost," and as being so imbued with Sabbatarian principles, as to keep fresh only for the day it is gathered during the week, but for two days if gathered on a Friday, so as to prevent the necessity of doing any work on the Sabbath.
Bishop Colenso points out with irresistible force the obvious impossibilities in regard to food, water, fuel, sanitation, transport, and other matters, which was involved in the supposition that a population, half as large as that of London, wandered about under tents from camp to camp for forty years in a desert. No attempt has ever been made to refute him, except by vague suppositions that the deserts of Sinai and Arabia may then have been in a very different condition, and capable of supporting a large population. But this is impossible in the present geological age and under existing geographical conditions. These deserts form part of the great rainless zone of the earth between the north tropical and south temperate zones, where cultivation is only possible when the means of irrigation are afforded by lakes, rivers, or melting snow. But there are none of these in the deserts of Sinai and Northern Arabia, and therefore no water and no vegetation sufficient to support any population. No army has ever invaded Egypt from Asia, or Asia from Egypt, except by the short route adjoining the Mediterranean between Pelusium and Jaffa, and with the command of the sea and assistance of trains to carry supplies and water. And the account in Exodus itself confirms this, for both food and water are stated to have been supplied miraculously, and there is no mention made of anything but the present arid and uninhabited desert in the various encampments and marches. In fact, the Bible constantly dwells on the inhospitable character of the "howling wilderness," where there was neither grass nor water. Accordingly reconcilers have been reduced to the supposition that ciphers may have been added by copyists, and that the real number may have been 6000, or even, as some writers think, 600. But this is inconsistent with the detailed numeration by twelve separate tribes, which works out to the same figure of 603,550 fighting men for the total number. Nor is it consistent with the undoubted fact that the Hebrews did evacuate Egypt in sufficient numbers and sufficiently armed to burst through the frontiers, and capture the walled cities of considerable nations like the Amorites and Canaanites, who had been long settled in the country. The narrative of Manetho, quoted by Josephus, seems much more like real history; that the Hebrews formed part of an army, which, after having held Lower Egypt for thirteen years, was finally defeated, and retreated by the usual military route across the short part of the desert from Pelusium to Palestine, the Hebrews, for some reason, branching off, and taking to a Bedouin life on the outskirts of the desert and cultivated land, just as many Bedouin tribes live a semi-nomad life in the same regions at the present day.