here may have
been.

The spoiling of the Egyptians, a roguery on which Israel afterward
prided herself, is a trait perhaps too typical to be lightly
dismissed. On the other hand, if Moses were, which is at least
problematic, and if, in addition to being, he was both the nephew of a
pharaoh and the son-in-law of a priest, as such one to whom, in either
quality, the arcana of the creed would be revealed, it becomes curious
that nowhere in the Pentateuch is there any doctrine of a future life.
Of the entire story, it may be that only the journey into the
Sinaiatic peninsula is true, and of that there probably remained but
tradition, on which history was based much later, by writers who had
only surmises concerning the time and circumstances in which it
occurred.

Yet equally with the roguery, Moses may have been. Seen through modern
criticism his figure fades though his name persists. To that name the
Septuagint tried to give an Egyptian flavour. In their version it is
always [Greek: Mouses], a compound derived from the Egyptian _mo_,
water, and _uses_, saved from, or Saved-from-the-water.[32] Per contra,
the Hebrew form Mosheh is, as already indicated, the same as the
Babylonian Masu, a term which means at once leader and litterateur, in
addition to being the cognomen of a god.[33]

[Footnote 32: Josephus: Antiq. ii. 9.]

[Footnote 33: Sayce: The Religion of the Babylonians.]

Moses is said to have led his people out of bondage. He was the writer
to whom the Pentateuch has been ascribed. But he was also a prophet.
In Babylon, the god of prophecy was Nebo. It was on Mount Nebo that
Jahveh commanded the prophet of Israel to die. Moreover, the divinity
that had Masu for cognomen was, as is shown by a Babylonian text, the
primitive god of the sun at Nippur, but the sun at noon, at the period
of its greatest effulgence, at the hour when it wars with whatever
opposes, when it wars as Jahveh did, or as the latter may be assumed
to have warred, since Isaiah represented him as a mighty man, roaring
at his enemies, exciting the fury of the fight, marching personally to
the conflict, and, in the Fourth Roll of the Law (Numbers), there is
mention of a book entitled: _The Wars of Jahveh_.

Whether, then, Moses is but a composite of things Babylonian fused in
an effort to show a link between a god and a people, is conjectural.
But it is also immaterial. The one instructive fact is that, in a
retrospect, the god, immediately aft