every year; as,
for example, the changing of the water of the Nile into blood--evidently
suggested by the phenomena exhibited every summer, when, as various
eminent scholars, and, most recent of all, Maspero and Sayce, tell us,
"about the middle of July, in eight or ten days the river turns from
grayish blue to dark red, occasionally of so intense a colour as to look
like newly shed blood." These modern researches have also shown that
some of the most important features in the legends can not possibly
be reconciled with the records of the monuments; for example, that the
Pharaoh of the Exodus was certainly not overwhelmed in the Red Sea. As
to the supernatural features of the Hebrew relations with Egypt, even
the most devoted apologists have become discreetly silent.

Egyptologists have also translated for us the old Nile story of The Two
Brothers, and have shown, as we have already seen, that one of the most
striking parts of our sacred Joseph legend was drawn from it; they have
been obliged to admit that the story of the exposure of Moses in the
basket of rushes, his rescue, and his subsequent greatness, had been
previously told, long before Moses's time, not only of King Sargon,
but of various other great personages of the ancient world; they have
published plans of Egyptian temples and copies of the sculptures upon
their walls, revealing the earlier origin of some of the most striking
features of the worship and ceremonial claimed to have been revealed
especially to the Hebrews; they have found in the Egyptian Book of the
Dead, and in various inscriptions of the Nile temples and tombs, earlier
sources of much in the ethics so long claimed to have been revealed
only to the chosen people in the Book of the Covenant, in the ten
commandments, and elsewhere; they have given to the world copies of the
Egyptian texts showing that the theology of the Nile was one of various
fruitful sources of later ideas, statements, and practices regarding
the brazen serpent, the golden calf, trinities, miraculous conceptions,
incarnations, resurrections, ascensions, and the like, and that Egyptian
sacro-scientific ideas contributed to early Jewish and Christian sacred
literature statements, beliefs, and even phrases regarding the Creation,
astronomy, geography, magic, medicine, diabolical influences, with a
multitude of other ideas, which we also find coming into early Judaism
in greater or less degree from Chaldean and Persian sources.