I. THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT. "WHEN the King of Egypt gave the province of Goshen, on the East of the Lower Nile, to the family of Jacob, he scarcely thought that it would eventually be inhabited by two millions of the patriarch's descendants. Hence, no doubt, the district he assigned to them was not very large, though the gift would have been liberal enough had it been intended for only a hundredth part of that number. But as the size of their abode did not increase in proportion to their numbers, the advent of each new generation forced them more closely together, until they became so crowded that cleanliness was impossible, and contagious disorders-the infallible consequences of such a condition—naturally spread among them. In this manner the first seeds were sown of that evil which is still peculiar to them; but at that time the results must have been rapid to a fearful degree. That most horrible plague, the leprosy, attacked them, and B passed from parents to children, slowly poisoning the sources of life and the powers of reproduction. "Thus an accidental evil originated an hereditary one which centuries failed to eradicate. How common this evil was, may be inferred from the numerous precautions which the Lawgiver instituted against it; and the unanimous testimony of Manetho, Diodorus Siculus, Tacitus, Lysimachus, Strabo, and many others, who knew scarcely any thing of the Hebrews besides this national leprosy, prove how general and profound was the impression it made upon the Egyptians. "The leprosy, then, was a natural consequence of the crowded state in which they lived; while the wretched food that was doled out to them, and their bad treatment generally, induced fresh causes of the malady. They who had formerly been hated as shepherds, and avoided as strangers, were now shunned and detested as an infected people. Thus a deep feeling of repugnance was added to that fear and dislike which the Egyptians had always cherished against them. Their enemies considered no inhumanity too cruel to be practised upon a people who were so distinctly branded by the wrath of the gods, and they did not hesitate to rob them of the most sacred rights of man1" Such is the cool style in which a great German poet bemires the early history of a race, whose literature Schiller's Die Sendung Mosis (The Mission of Moses). |