tyranny would be almost impossible. And it is very
doubtful whether the flagrant wrongs, which must be comparatively rare,
cause as much real mental suffering as the frequent small ones. Does
mankind suffer more from wild beasts than from insects? But how few that
aspire to emancipate oppressed nations would be content, in the hour of
their overthrow, to assert the rights of a handful of women against a
trifling fraud, to which indeed they were so well accustomed that its
omission surprised their father!

Is it only because we are reading a history, and not a biography, that
we find no touch of tenderness, like the love of Jacob for Rachel, in
the domestic relations of Moses?

Joseph also married in a strange land, yet he called the name of his
first son Manasseh, because God had made him to forget his sorrows: but
Moses remembered his. Neither wife nor child could charm away his home
sickness; he called his firstborn Gershom, because he was a sojourner in
a strange land. In truth, his whole life seems to have been a lonely
one. Miriam is called "the sister of Aaron" even when joining in the
song of Moses (xv. 20), and with Aaron she made common cause against
their greater brother (Num. xii. 1-2). Zipporah endangered his life
rather than obey the covenant of circumcision; she complied at last with
a taunt (iv. 24-6), and did not again join him until his victory over
Amalek raised his position to the utmost height (xviii. 2).

His children are of no account, and his grandson is the founder of a
dangerous and enduring schism (Judges xviii. 30, R.V.).

There is much reason to see here the earliest example of the sad rule
that a prophet is not without honour save in his own house; that the law
of compensations reaches farther into life than men suppose; and high
position and great powers are too often counterbalanced by the isolation
of the heart.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] The same word is used for Noah's ark, but not elsewhere; not, for
example, of the ark in the Temple, the name of which occurs elsewhere in
Scripture only of the "coffin" of Joseph, and the "chest" for the Temple
revenues (Gen. 1. 26; 2 Chron. xxiv. 8, 10, 11.)

[4] Or his sister, the daughter of a former Pharaoh.

[5] Nor would it have made the women call their deliverer "an Egyptian,"
for the Hebrew cast of features is very dissimilar. But Moses wore
Egyptian dress, and the Egyptians worked mines in the peninsula, so that
he was naturally taken for one