thers found themselves together. Esau, partly by
marriage, partly by conquest, dispossessed the Horites of Mount Seir,
and founded the kingdom of Edom, while the sons and flocks of Jacob
scattered themselves from Hebron in the south of Canaan to Shechem in
its centre. The two hallowed sanctuaries of the future kingdoms of Judah
and Israel, where the first throne was set up in Israel and the monarchy
of David was first established, thus became the boundaries of the
herdsmen's domain. In both the Hebrew patriarch held ground that was
rightfully his own. It was a sign that the house of Israel should
hereafter occupy the land which the family of Israel thus roamed over
with their flocks. The nomad was already passing into the settler, with
fields and burial-places of his own.

But before the transformation could be fully accomplished, a long season
of growth and preparation was needful. Egypt, and not Canaan, was to be
the land in which the Chosen People should be trained for their future
work. Canaan itself was to pass under Egyptian domination, and to
replace the influence of Babylonian culture by that of Egypt. It was a
new world and a new civilization into which the descendants of Jacob
were destined to emerge when finally they escaped from the fiery furnace
of Egyptian bondage. The Egypt known to Jacob was an Egypt over which
Asiatic princes ruled, and whose vizier was himself a Hebrew. It was the
Egypt of the Hyksos conquerors, whose capital was Zoan, on the frontiers
of Asia, and whose people were the slaves of an Asiatic stranger. The
Egypt quitted by his descendants was one which had subjected Asia to
itself, and had carried the spoils of Syria to its splendid capital in
the far south. The Asiatic wave had been rolled back from the banks of
the Nile, and Egyptian conquest and culture had overflooded Asia as far
as the Euphrates.

But it was not Egypt alone which had undergone a change. The Canaan of
Abraham and Jacob looked to Babylonia for its civilization, its
literature, and its laws. Its princes recognized at times the supremacy
of the Babylonian sovereigns, and the deities of Babylonia were
worshipped in its midst. The Canaan of Moses had long been a province of
the Egyptian Empire; Egyptian rule had been substituted for that of
Babylon, and the manners and customs of Egypt had penetrated deeply into
the minds of its inhabitants. The Hittite invasion from the north had
blocked the high-road to Babylonia, and