sion, but it is in just this way, only with a far smaller kernel of fact in many cases, that Wellhausen has produced much of that extraordinary volume which, for some inscrutable reason, he has been pleased to call The History of Israel. We will therefore pause a moment to indicate, however briefly, the impossibility of such an explanation of the Hebrew story of the sojourn. There will be some advantage in citing against this wild theory the arguments of two German scholars, who, though accepting the modern analysis of Old Testament books in one of its fashionable forms, nevertheless reject unequivocally this legendary theory of the sojourn. Prof. Kittel says: "There is no event in the entire history of Israel that has more deeply imprinted itself in the memory of later generations of this people than the abode in Egypt and the exodus from the land of the Nile. Samuel, Saul, Solomon, almost David himself, stand in the background, compared with the Egyptian house of bondage and the glorious deliverance thence. Evidently we have here no mere product of the legends of the patriarchs, but a fact which lived deep down in the consciousness of the people in quite early times, from Hosea and the Book of Samuel onwards, a fact graven deep in their memory. It would betoken a high, a more than normal degree of deficiency of historical sense in the Israelite national character, if a purely mythical occurrence gave the key-note of the whole national life, and formed the starting-point of the entire circle of religious thought as early as the days of the first literary prophets."

In like manner, but with even more emphasis, writes Dr. Sellin: "It cannot be denied that throughout the whole ancient history of Israel there is a vivid recognition of an actual sojourn in Egypt... Now, let some one explain (1) whence comes the surprising familiarity of J and E with Egyptian customs, which shows conclusively an actual personal knowledge of them. Let some one explain (2) whence date the most ancient reminiscences of single events that happened during the migration from Egypt to Canaan of Sinai, of Kadesh. Above all, let some one show the 'genesis' of the poem in Exodus xv. (3) Finally, let some one answer the following question: How was it that this people, who quietly handed down to posterity even the worst defeats in

its own country, but who, on the other hand, considered banishment from its own land, from the land of its God, the greatest shame and dishonor, against which their whole being revoltedhow was it that such a people came to make out of such a defeat a fiction about the bondage in a strange country and to put this at the head of their whole history? This might be called hanging up a hundredweight by a thread. One could only decide to accept this desperate hypothesis if every other way out had been cut off."

III. The third view is that our inscription refers to the inhuman attempts of the Pharaohs to suppress the swarming numbers of the Israelites in Goshen by means of infanticide. "The people of Israel is spoiled; it hath no seed." Translated thus, and taken by itself, this statement inevitably brings to mind the measures taken by the Pharaohs for the destruction of the male children of the Israelites as described in the first chapter of Exodus. But there are three objections to this view.

(1), We are confronted with the fact that this policy of suppression, which the Bible describes in connection with the infancy of Moses, must have been inaugurated nearly a century before Merneptah's victory over the Libyans and his erection of the tablet to commemorate it, for Moses was about eighty years of age at the time of the exodus. (Exodus vii. 7.) In other words, if Merneptah was the Pharaoh of the exodus, occupying the throne when Moses was some eighty years old, how could he claim, in the fifth year of his reign, and in connection with his conquest of the Libyans at that time, to have diminished Israel by means of the persecution which was visited upon them during the infancy of Moses? It was not he who "diminished" that people by infanticide, but his father or grandfather. To this objection it might be replied that there is no improbability in supposing that Merneptah revived the murderous edict of his predecessors, especially if, at the time of the Libyan invasion, the Israelites showed any disposition to improve this opportunity to revolt. An aggravation of their sufferings shortly before the exodus seems to be implied in the Scriptural narrative. (Exodus ii. 23.)

1 Neue Kirch. Zeitsch., VII., 6.

Another answer to this objection might be made. The account is highly poetical, and Merneptah's exploits are no doubt greatly exaggerated. The poet is not careful to ascribe to him only what were really his own victories. In celebrating Merneptah's overthrow of the Libyans, he speaks of certain exploits of his father, Rameses II. (for it was he who "tranquillized" the Hittites). So the "diminishing" of Israel here referred to may also be a measure inaugurated by that Pharaoh or his father.

(2), The second objection to the view that the inscription refers to the destruction of the male children of the Israelites in Egypt is that as Pa-Kanana, Askelon, and Gezer are places in Palestine, and as Israel is mentioned between Yenuam, in the north, and Kharu, in the south, Israel, too, must be thought of as in Palestine. To this it may be replied that the order of the names in the list is not strictly geographical. The writer passes from the Libyans in North Africa to the Hittites in North Syria, then to Pa-Kanana, in southern Palestine, and after mentioning Gezer, Askelon, and Yenuam in their proper order from south to north, he jumps back again to "Israel" and Kharu, in the south, whereas the geographical order of the places in Syria from north to south would have been Hittites, Yenuam, Gezer, Askelon, Kanana, and Kharu. (Cf. Acts ii. 9-11.)

Furthermore, as we have seen, while all the other names in the text are followed by the determinative of "land" or "country," the name Israel is not. This would seem to indicate that they were not yet identified with any country of their own, but were either a mere body of desert wanderers or a subject race in Egypt. That the writer had the collective people in mind is further shown by the fact that he refers to "Israel" by means of the masculine pronoun "his" (in "his grain is not"), for "had he meant the land, the pronoun would have been feminine."

(3), The third objection to the view under consideration, and the one of greatest weight, is that the word (prt) translated "seed" cannot here mean offspring, but must mean "grain," and therefore the phrase does not refer to the diminishing of Israel by infanticide, but merely to the loss of their supplies of grain or Sayce, Hom. Rev.

2 Bib. World, January, 1897, p. 67.

produce. It is not denied that the word rendered "seed" has this figurative meaning in some places. It has just the same range of meaning as in English, seed being generally used for seed-corn, but poetically used for posterity, as we say "the seed of Abraham." But it is denied that it can have that meaning here, since the phrase in which it occurs is shown by its usage to be "a conventional, stereotyped phrase, which could be and was applied to any conquered and plundered people." Breasted' cites five other occurrences of it, in each of which the meaning of destroying or carrying away provisions seems to be required by the context, and in two of which it is associated with destruction by fire. Thus: (a), "Their cities are turned to ashes, destroyed, desolated: their grain is not." (b), "The fire has made entrance to us; our grain is not" (words of defeated Libyans). (c), "The Seped are desolated; their grain is not." Exactly like this last example is the statement under consideration, "The Israelites are desolated; their grain is not." It must be conceded, therefore, that Breasted has made out a strong case for his view, that the meaning of the statement is that "Israel had suffered defeat and been spoiled of her provisions and produce." He thinks this occurred in Palestine after the exodus from Egypt and the conquest of Canaan. He says: "It is perfectly clear that the author of the text thinks of Israel as in Syria, among the Syrian peoples and places mentioned with her." This brings us to the fourth interpretation of the inscription :

IV. The view that it refers to a conquest of the twelve tribes after their settlement in Canaan. Those who take this view hold, of course, that the exodus had taken place long before the time of Merneptah. (1), Some would put it near the end of the eigh

1

Breasted, Bib. World, January, 1897, pp. 66, 67.

* Petrie, Cont. Rev., May, 1896, pp. 623, 624.

3 Bib. World, January, 1897, p. 66.

*Cooke makes the point against Breasted's view that the word for seed is accompanied by a plow or hoe for a determinative, whereas in our inscription the word has no such determinative, but only a circle. He concludes that "seed" or "grain" is not the meaning here, and cites an example of the word with the circle determinative in the Book of the Dead, where, he says, it has unquestionably the meaning of going out. Hence his translation: "The Israelites are crushed; they will have no exodus."

teenth dynasty, reminding us that, according to the Tel-el-Amarna letters, written to Amenophis IV. about 1400 B. C. from various places in southern Palestine, a people called Habiri had come from the desert, attacked Jerusalem, seized the country around Ajalon, wrecked the temples, and killed the chiefs who remained faithful to Egypt. All these facts fit well the theory that these Habiri were no other than the Hebrews who conquered Canaan under Joshua.' An additional argument in favor of this view might be based on the fact that more than a century after these invasions of the Habiri both Seti I. and Rameses II., in their Syrian campaigns, had to fight against a tribe in northern Palestine called in the Egyptian records Aseru, and believed by some (e. g., W. Max Müller, Indep., July 9, 1896) to be identical with the tribe of Asher. (2), Others are disposed to place the exodus at a still earlier period, under Ahmosis, the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, and to identify the Hebrews with the Hyksos whom that monarch expelled; for, not to mention other reasons, the names "Jacob-el" and "Joseph-el" are found as names of Palestinian towns in the list inscribed by Thotmes III. (c. 1450 B. C.) at Karnak. These facts are thought to raise a strong presumption that the descendants of Jacob and Joseph were already in Canaan in the time of Thotmes III., and that the exodus had taken place at the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty, to which he belonged. But this particular argument has been greatly weakened by the discovery of the names "Jacob-el" and "Joseph-el" in Babylonian contract tablets of the age of Abraham.

To say nothing of other enormous difficulties connected with this hypothesis (IV.), it is almost inconceivable that, if the exodus had taken place at any time during the eighteenth dynasty, there should be no mention in the Old Testament of the frequent invasions of Palestine by the kings of the nineteenth dynasty; no reference to the campaigns of Rameses II., which extended over Moab, Judea, and Galilee; no allusion to the undisputed domination

1A very strong presentation of this view may be seen in The Expositor for March, 1897, from the pen of Prof. James Orr, of Edinburgh, who accepts 1445 B. C. as the approximate date of the exodus, makes Thotmes III. the Pharaoh of the Oppression, and identifies the Habiri of the Tel-el-Amarna tablets with the invading Hebrews under Joshua.