The Historians' History of the World 02

Israel comes to Egypt a single family, and leaves the country a populous nation. Tradition connects the migration from Egypt into the land east of Jordan with the Levites, Moses and his brother Aaron, the forerunners and founders of the Israelitish priesthood. Moreover, the oldest form of the legend, as the Yahvistic text gives it, mentions only Moses. He is in it the liberator, leader, and priest of Israel. Neither the residence of the Patriarchs in the country west of Jordan, nor the stay of the Israelites in Egypt, have been historically proved, and the former is quite improbable.

Joseph, Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham are heroes of the race, the first two being at the same time tribal names. The last three have been revered at celebrated sanctuaries; and it must not be overlooked that the sanctuary of the first ancestor is the least important one. Moreover, it is a fact, proved by the history of different sanctuaries of the land, that those of Israel were considered sacred by the original inhabitants. This is the case at Sichem and Gibeon; Bethel was likewise a Canaanitish town in earlier times. Hebron was Edomitish, probably in the first place Horitish, and the very name of Beersheba shows its Canaanitish origin.

If the ancient Israelites took over the sanctuaries from the original Canaanitish inhabitants, as we know definitely concerning some and must surmise in the case of others, and if they nevertheless maintain that these sanctuaries were founded by their fathers, the object of this assertion is merely to gain a legal title to the possession of these pre-Israelitic sacred spots, and to obliterate the fact of their non-Israelitish origin. We shall have to go even farther and say that the Israelites either adopted from the Canaanites the hero that was honoured in those places, or that they there localised a certain Hebraic hero. But in both cases there is no evidence of a pre-Egyptian sojourn of Israelitish families in the land west of Jordan. Moreover, the comparatively recent origin of the patriarchical tradition must be borne in mind.

It is not quite so bad, though not essentially better, with the question of the residence of Israel in Egypt before its migration to the land east of Jordan. That, in spite of the most anxious search of apologetic Egyptologists and theologians, no trace of Moses and the Hebrews has been found in the Egyptian records is just as suspicious as the fact that the Hebrew account says nothing about all that happened between the time of Joseph and that of Moses.

It seems as if the flight of story-spinning imagination had been sufficient to transpose both the historical personage of Moses and the eponymous hero, Joseph, together with the eponyms of the two tribes descended from him, to Egypt, but not to fill out the intervening period. Egypt has, however, been too often for longer or shorter periods the residence of Semitic families for one to dare to deny the possibility that some Hebrew tribes or families stayed in Egypt. But that the Hebrew people, to say nothing of the race of Israel, did not do so, follows necessarily from the origin of these terms.

So it is easily seen why the search of the Egyptologists for traces of the residence of the Children of Israel or the Hebrews in Egypt must be fruitless. If any Hebrew clan did stay there, its name is unknown, and the Egyptologists would not recognise it, even if they understood more of Hebraic antiquity. But in any case the search for the Pharaohs, under whom Israel entered and left Egypt, is a useless jugglery with dates and names; and it is also useless to attempt to discover the route by which Israel left Egypt.

Tradition makes the institution of the Jewish religion on Mount Sinai contemporaneous with the emigration from Egypt; and it has been often surmised, especially by Egyptologists, that Moses imposed upon Israel elements of Egyptian theology. But there is no basis in fact for this theory. It is not known what the Hebrews may have borrowed from the Egyptians. Part of that which has been put under that category is entirely foreign to the old Jewish religion, and was gradually and spontaneously evolved, and the rest plays no part in it at all. It is especially absurd to attribute the idea of the unity of God to Egyptian influences.