admiration of the Egyptian courage and conduct, that they
shortly afterwards entered the Egyptian service, and came to hold a
place among the most trusted of the Egyptian troops.

Despite his cowardice in absenting himself from the battle of Prosopis
under the transparent device of a divine vision, Menephthah took to
himself the whole credit of the victory, and gloried in it as much as if
he had really had a hand in bringing about the result. "The Lubu," he
says, "were meditating to do evil in Egypt; they were as grasshoppers;
every road was blocked by their hosts. Then I vowed to lead them
captive. Lo, I vanquished them; I slaughtered them, making a spoil of
their country. I made the land of Egypt traversable once more; I gave
breath to those who were in the cities." Egyptian generals, like Roman
poets, had to content themselves with complaining secretly, "Sic vos non
vobis."

So far as we can tell, no long period elapsed between the expedition of
Marmaiu, son of Deid, and the second great trouble in which Menephthah
was involved. Moses must have returned to Egypt from his sojourn in
Midian within a year or two of the death of Ramesses II., and cannot
have allowed any very long time to elapse before he proffered the demand
which he was divinely commissioned to make. Still, as he was timid, and
a somewhat unwilling messenger, he may have delayed both his return and
his first address to Pharaoh as long as he dared (Ex. iv. 19); and if
the invasion of Marmaiu had begun before he had summoned courage to
address Pharaoh a second time, he would then naturally wait until the
danger was past, and the king could again be approached without manifest
impropriety. In this case, the severe oppression of the Israelites,
which followed the first application of Moses (Ex. v. 5-23) may have
lasted longer than has generally been supposed; and it may not have been
till Menephthah's sixth or seventh year that the divine messenger became
urgent, and began to press his request, and to show the signs and
wonders which alone, as he had been told (Ex. vii. 2-4), would break the
spirit of the king. The signs then followed each other at moderately
short intervals, the entire series of the plagues not covering a longer
space than about six months, from October till April. None of the
plagues affected the king greatly except the last, through which he lost
his own eldest son, a bereavement mentioned in an inscription. This
loss, combined with th