nd carry men far. Pharaoh is in earnest as well as
Moses, and can act with perilous energy. And this great narrative begins
the story of a nation's emancipation with a human demand, boldly made,
but defeated by the pride and vigour of a startled tyrant and the
tameness of a downtrodden people. The limitations of human energy are
clearly exhibited before the direct interference of God begins. All that
a brave man can do, when nerved by lifelong aspiration and by a sudden
conviction that the hour of destiny has struck, all therefore upon which
rationalism can draw, to explain the uprising of Israel, is exhibited in
this preliminary attempt, this first demand of Moses.

Menephtah was no doubt the new Pharaoh whom the brothers accosted so
boldly. What we glean of him elsewhere is highly suggestive of some
grave event left unrecorded, exhibiting to us a man of uncontrollable
temper yet of broken courage, a ruthless, godless, daunted man. There is
a legend that he once hurled his spear at the Nile when its floods rose
too high, and was punished with ten years of blindness. In the Libyan
war, after fixing a time when he should join his vanguard, with the main
army, a celestial vision forbade him to keep his word in person, and the
victory was gained by his lieutenants. In another war, he boasts of
having slaughtered the people and set fire to them, and netted the
entire country as men net birds. Forty years then elapse without war
and without any great buildings; there are seditions and internal
troubles, and the dynasty closes with his son.[9] All this is exactly
what we should expect, if a series of tremendous blows had depopulated a
country, abolished an army, and removed two millions of the working
classes in one mass.

But it will be understood that this identification, concerning which
there is now a very general consent of competent authorities, implies
that the Pharaoh was not himself engulfed with his army. Nothing is on
the other side except a poetic assertion in Psalm cxxxvi. 15, which is
not that God destroyed, but that He "shook off" Pharaoh and his host in
the Red Sea, because His mercy endureth for ever.

To this king, then, whose audacious family had usurped the symbols of
deity for its head-dress, and whose father boasted that in battle "he
became like the god Mentu" and "was as Baal," the brothers came as yet
without miracle, with no credentials except from slaves, and said, "Thus
saith Jehovah, the God of