Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations. A. H. Sayce

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СКАЧАТЬ prevails alike in history and geography; a colony is the "daughter" or "son" of its mother-city, and the town of Sidon is the "first-born" of Canaan.

      Jacob had twelve sons, and his descendants were accordingly divided into twelve tribes. But the division was an artificial one; it never at any time corresponded exactly with historical reality. Levi was not a tribe in the same sense as the rest of his brethren; no territory was assigned to him apart from the so-called Levitical cities; and he represented the priestly order wherever it might be found and from whatever ancestors it might be derived. Simeon and Dan hardly existed as separate tribes except in name; their territories were absorbed into that of Judah, and it was only in the city of Laish in the far north that the memory of Dan survived. The tribe of Joseph was split into two halves, Ephraim and Manasseh, while Judah was a mixture of various elements—of Hebrews who traced their origin alike to Judah, to Simeon, and to Dan; of Kenites and Jerahmeelites from the desert of Arabia; and of Kenizzites from Edom. Benjamin or Ben-Oni was, as a tribe, merely the southern portion of the house of Joseph, which had settled around the sanctuary of Beth-On or Beth-el. Benjamin means the "Southerner," and Ben-Oni "the inhabitant of Beth-On." It is even questionable whether the son of Jacob from whom the tribe was held to be descended bore the name of Benjamin. Had the name of Esau not been preserved we should not have known the true name of the founder of Edom, and it may be that the name of the tribe of Benjamin has been reflected back upon its ancestor.

      In Goshen, at all events, the tribes of Israel would have been distinguished by the names of their actual forefathers. They would have been "the sons" of Reuben or Judah, of Simeon or Gad. But they were all families within a single family. They were all "Israelites" or "sons of Israel," and in an inscription of the Egyptian king Meneptah they are accordingly called Israelu, "Israelites," without any territorial adjunct. They lived in Goshen, like the Bedâwin of to-day, and their social organisation was that of Arabia.

      The immediate occasion of the settlement of Israel on the outskirts of Egypt was that which has brought so many Bedâwin herdsmen to the valley of the Nile both before and since. The very district of Goshen in which they settled was occupied again, shortly after their desertion of it, by nomads from Edom who had besought the Pharaoh for meadow-land on which to feed their flocks. The need of pasturage from time immemorial has urged the pastoral tribes of the desert towards the fertile land of the Nile. When want of rain has brought drought upon Canaan, parching the grass and destroying the corn, the nomad has invariably set his face toward the country which is dependent for its fertility, not upon the rains of heaven, but upon the annual overflow of its river. It was a famine in Canaan, produced by the absence of rain, which made Jacob and his sons "go down into Egypt."

      But besides this immediate cause there was yet another. They were assured of a welcome in the kingdom of the Nile and the gift of a district in which they might live. One of the sons of Jacob had become the Vizier of the Egyptian Pharaoh. Joseph, the Hebrew slave who had been sold into bondage by his brothers, had risen to be the first minister of the king and the favourite of his sovereign. He had foretold the coming years of plenty and dearth; but he had done more—he had pointed out how to anticipate the famine and make it subserve the interests of despotism. He was not a seer only, he was a skilful administrator as well. He had taken advantage of the years of scarcity to effect a revolution in the social and political constitution of Egypt. The people had been obliged to sell their lands and even themselves to the king for bread, and become from henceforth a population of royal slaves. The lands of Egypt were divided between the king and the priests; the peasantry tilled them for the state and for the temples, while the upper classes owed their wealth and position to the offices which they received at court.

      It would seem that the Israelites entered Egypt when the country was governed by the last of those foreign dynasties from Asia which had conquered the kingdom of the Pharaoh, and are known by the name of the Hyksos or Shepherd kings. The Egyptian monuments have shown us that during their dominion its internal constitution underwent precisely the change which is described in the history of Joseph. Before the Hyksos conquest there was a great feudal aristocracy, rich in landed estates and influence, which served as a check upon the monarch, and at times even refused to obey his authority. When the Hyksos conquerors are finally expelled, we find that this feudal aristocracy has disappeared, and its place has been taken by a civil and military bureaucracy. The king has become a supreme autocrat, by the side of whom the priests alone retain any power. The land has passed out of the hands of the people; high and low alike are dependent for what they have on the favour of the king.

      The Hyksos dynasties were allied in race and sympathies with the settlers from Asia. Joseph must have died before their expulsion, but it is probable that he saw the outbreak of the war which ended in it, and which after five generations of conflict restored the Egyptians to independence. The Eighteenth dynasty was founded by the native princes of Thebes, and the war against the Asiatic stranger which had begun in Egypt was carried into Asia itself. Canaan was made an Egyptian province, and the Egyptian empire was extended to the banks of the Euphrates.

      But the conquest of Asia brought with it the introduction of Asiatic influences into the country of the conqueror. The Pharaohs married Asiatic wives, and their courts became gradually Asiatised. At length Amenophis IV., under the tutelage of his mother, attempted to abolish the national religion of Egypt, and to substitute for it a sort of pantheistic monotheism, based on the worship of the Asiatic Baal as represented by the Solar Disk. The Pharaoh transferred his capital from Thebes to a new site farther north, now known as Tel el-Amarna, changed his own name to Khu-n-Aten, "the Glory of the Solar Disk," and filled his court with Asiatic officials and the adherents of the new cult. The reaction, however, soon came. The native Egyptians rose in revolt; the foreigner fled from the valley of the Nile, and the capital of Khu-n-Aten fell into ruin. A new dynasty, the Nineteenth, arose under Ramses I., whose grandson, Ramses II., reigned for sixty-seven years, and crowded Egypt with his buildings and monuments.

      One of the cities he built has been shown by the excavations of Dr. Naville to have been Pa-Tum, the Pithom of the Old Testament. Ramses II., therefore, must have been the Pharaoh of the Oppression. The picture set before us in the first chapter of Exodus fits in exactly with the character of his reign. The dynasty to which he belonged represented the reaction against the domination and influence of the foreigner from Asia, and the oppression of the Israelites would naturally have been part of its policy. Such of the Asiatics as still remained in Egypt were turned into public serfs, and measures were taken to prevent them from multiplying so as to be dangerous to their masters. The free spirit of the Bedâwin was broken by servitude, and every care was used that they should be unable to help their brethren from Asia in case of another "Hyksos" invasion. The incessant building operations of Ramses needed a constant supply of workmen, and financial as well as political interests thus suggested that merciless corvée of the Israelites which rendered them at once politically harmless and serviceable to the state.

      In spite of all repression, however, the oppressed people continued to multiply, and eventually escaped from their "house of bondage." The stela of Meneptah, on which the name of "Israelites" occurs, implies that they had already been lost to sight in the desert. The other nationalities over whom Meneptah is said to have triumphed all have the term "country" attached to their names; the "Israelites" alone are without local habitation. Egyptian legend, as reported by the native historian Manetho, placed the Exodus in the reign of Meneptah, and as Meneptah was the son and successor of Ramses II., the correctness of the statement is antecedently probable. It was in the fifth year of his reign that the Delta was attacked by a formidable combination of foes. The Libyans threatened it on the west: on the north, bands of sea-pirates from the coasts of Asia Minor and the islands of the Mediterranean attacked it by sea and land. A mutilated inscription of Meneptah tells us how the tents of the invaders had been pitched on the outskirts of the land of Goshen, within reach of the Bedâwin shepherds who fed their flocks there, and how the troops of the Pharaoh, pressed at once by the enemy and by the disaffected population of Goshen, had been cooped up within the walls of the great cities, afraid to venture forth. The fate of the invasion was sealed, however, by a decisive battle in which the Egyptians almost annihilated their foes. СКАЧАТЬ