ay. Here they
multiplied and grew wealthy, until the evil days came when the Egyptians
rose up against Semitic influence and control, and Ramses II.
transformed the free-born Beduin into public serfs.

But the age of Ramses II. was still far distant when Jacob died full of
years, and his mummy was carried to the burial-place of his fathers "in
the land of Canaan." Local tradition connected the name of Abel-mizraim,
"the meadow of Egypt," on the eastern side of the Jordan, with the long
funeral procession which wended its way from Zoan to Hebron. We cannot
believe, however, that the mourners would have so far gone out of their
road, even if the etymology assigned by tradition to the name could be
supported. The tradition bears witness to the fact of the procession,
but to nothing more.

With the funeral of Jacob a veil falls upon the Biblical history of
Canaan, until the days when the spies were sent out to search the land.
Joseph was buried in Egypt, not at Hebron, though he had made the
Israelites swear before his death that his mummy should be eventually
taken to Palestine. The road to Hebron, it is clear, was no longer open,
and the power of the Hyksos princes must have been fast waning. The war
of independence had broken out, and the native kings of Upper Egypt were
driving the foreigner back into Asia. The rulers of Zoan had no longer
troops to spare for a funeral procession through the eastern desert.

The Chronicler, however, has preserved a notice which seems to show that
a connection was still kept up between Southern Canaan and the Hebrew
settlers in Goshen, even after Jacob's death, perhaps while he was yet
living. We are told that certain of the sons of Ephraim were slain by
the men of Gath, whose cattle they had attempted to steal, and that
their father, after mourning many days, comforted himself with the birth
of other sons (1 Chron. vii. 21-26). The notice, moreover, does not
stand alone. Thothmes III., the great conqueror of the eighteenth
Egyptian dynasty, states that two of the places captured by him in
Palestine were Jacob-el and Joseph-el. It is tempting to see in the two
names reminiscences of the Hebrew patriarch and his son. If so, the name
of Joseph would have been impressed upon a locality in Canaan more than
two centuries before the Exodus. The geographical lists of Thothmes III.
and the fragments of early history preserved by the Chronicler would
thus support and complete one another. The E