1. The length of the sojourn of Israel in Egypt cannot be determined with certainty. It is fixed in Exo_12:40 at 430 years, with which Gen_15:13 approximately agrees. In the LXX, however, this period is made to include the time spent by the patriarchs in Canaan; and if value can be placed upon the genealogies given in Exo_6:16-20, Num_26:5-9; Num_27:1, the number of generations from Jacob to Moses and his contemporaries amounted only to four or five (cf. Gen_15:16). Nor can help be obtained from Egyptian sources, as the monuments furnish little or no information respecting the Hebrews. It is probable that the migration into Egypt took place during the domination of the Asiatic Hyksos, to whom the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth dynasties are assigned. During their occupation of Lower Egypt (which, according to Manetho, lasted 511 years), they were constantly at war with the native Egyptian princes who had established themselves at Thebes; and the latter, in the time of Aames (Amosis), about 1600 b.c., succeeded in expelling them. The accession to power of a native line of rulers would naturally produce a change in the circumstances of those settlers who had been attached to, or protected by, the Hyksos; and the alteration in the attitude of the Egyptians to the Israelites, described in Exo_1:1-22, may not improbably be connected with this dynastic revolution. The Pharaoh of “the oppression,” who is unnamed, was probably Rameses ii., of the nineteenth dynasty. The monuments discovered at Tell el-Mashkuta, eleven or twelve miles from Ismailia, amongst the ruins of the city of Pithom, one of the two store-cities named in Exo_1:11, show that it was for that monarch that the place was built; whilst the other city mentioned together with Pithom actually bears the name of Raamses. It was not, however, in the reign of Rameses ii., but probably in that of his successor Meneptah, that Israel effected its escape. This is implied in Exo_2:23, and the only tradition outside the Bible which seems to relate to the departure of the Israelites assigns it to the reign of Meneptah. The dates of Rameses ii. and the kings who succeeded him are variously stated; but the Exodus may be fixed approximately to 1250 or 1200 b.c.
2. Of the condition of the Israelites in Egypt, practically nothing is known beyond what can be inferred by conjecture from analogy. We must picture them as a body of settlers numbering some 5-6000 souls, settled in “Goshen,” i.e. the fertile district at the west end of Wady Tumilat within “the triangle lying between Saft, Belbeis, and Tell el-Kebir,” covering an area of about 70 square miles. These settlers will have had the same simple habits of life, with elementary institutions for the maintenance of justice and order-tribal leaders, sheikhs acting as judges, councils of elders, simple rules for the punishment of offenders, rudimentary religious observances-which are still in operation among nomad Arab tribes. In all probability they were of little importance in the eyes of the Egyptians. “In the eyes of their Egyptian contemporaries,” writes Professor Sayce, “the Israelites were but one of many Shasu or Bedawin tribes who had settled in the pasture lands of the Eastern Delta. Their numbers were comparatively insignificant, their social standing obscure. They were doubtless as much despised and avoided by the Egyptians of their day as similar Bedawin tribes are by the Egyptians of the present day. They lived apart from the natives of the country, and the occupation they pursued was regarded as fit only for the outcasts of mankind.” Their growing numbers made them dangerous, because, “in case of invasion, they might assist the enemy and expose Egypt to another Asiatic conquest. Hence came the determination to transform them into public serfs, and even to destroy them altogether. The free Bedawin like settlers in Goshen, who had kept apart from their Egyptian neighbours, and had been unwilling to perform even agricultural work, were made the slaves of the State. They were taken from their herds and sheep, from their independent life on the outskirts of the Delta, and compelled” to do field-labour, to make bricks, and build for the Pharaoh his store-cities of Pithom and Raamses.
“Behold the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we. Come, let us deal with them wisely, lest they multiply, and it come to pass that, when there falleth out any war, they also join themselves unto our enemies, and fight against us: and get them out of the land.” Such are the words which the new king who knew not Joseph, when he came to the throne, spoke to his people with regard to the alien population which had been allowed during a former reign to settle in the land of Goshen, a fruitful district on the north-east of Egypt, east of Bubastis (Zakazik). It is the speech of one who feared that, if nothing were done to prevent them from becoming too powerful, they would be a source of danger to the State, as they might join, with every chance of success, in any attack which might be made on the kingdom over which he ruled. It was, in all probability, the presence of a similar foreign (Semitic) population in or near this district, about 2100 years b.c., which had contributed to-or perhaps even made-the success of the Hyksos invaders, through which Egypt had been ruled by an alien dynasty for five hundred years. The repetition of such a catastrophe was at all hazards to be prevented. It would seem, therefore, that the persecution of the Hebrews was not undertaken altogether wantonly, but with the object of turning aside a possible misfortune.1 [Note: T. G. Pinches, The Old Testament in the Light of the Historical Records of Assyria and Babylonia, 268.]
3. The Israelites dwelt “in the land of Goshen.” The site of Goshen has been fixed by recent discoveries. Ancient hieroglyphic lists of the “nomes” of Egypt mention Kesem as the twentieth nome of Lower Egypt, and state that its religious capital was P-sapt, i.e. the modern “Saft el-Henneh,” a village about forty miles N.E. of Cairo, the ancient name of which Naville ascertained in 1885, from inscriptions found on the spot, to be Kes. “Goshen” must thus have been the fertile district around Saft, where the Wady Tumilat opens out at its west end towards Bubastis, “within the triangle lying between the villages of Saft, Belbeis, and Tell el-Kebir” (Naville), embracing an area of 60-80 square miles (Petrie, Sinai, 208), about 40-50 miles N.E. of Cairo.
The modern tourist in Egypt who lands at Port Said instead of at Alexandria, and travels to Cairo by the eastern route, is well repaid for the little extra expense and time involved in the journey; for he passes through districts, towns, and villages incomparably more interesting than those through which the more direct railway runs. From Port Said to Ismailia the line skirts the great waterway of Lesseps, and from the latter town, turning sharply to the right, strikes west into the narrow valley richly nourished by the Sweetwater Canal, which from the fourteenth century before the Christian era, carried the fertilizing Nile flood into this district. It was the course of this canal which, after centuries of neglect, the great French engineer followed and reopened in many places, when he constructed the present conduit for traffic, and for the supply of fresh water to Ismailia and Suez. The appearance, therefore, of this region-a thin line of brilliant green, flanked, on either side, by an arid and tawny stretch of desert sand, above which rise the low plateaux of ancient river cliffs-is exactly such as was familiar to many an ancient Egyptian as well as to the Israelite of the bondage. Known now as the Wady Tumilat this valley runs due west for about forty miles, before it opens wide upon the rich fields of the Eastern Delta. The fascination of the district is great; for here within its narrow confines the corvées of Israelites endured the galling experience of forced labour, when building the two “treasure-cities” of Pithom and Raamses, and down its weary length they streamed to the great muster at Succoth, prior to their final departure for the desert. After leaving Ismailia and before we reach the little station of Mahsame-the Arab variant of Raamses-which sweeps us back in memory to the times of ancient Israel, although it is not the site of the “treasure-city” of that name, we pass the mounds of Tell-el-Mashkuta to the south of the railway and on the far side of the canal, where Naville in the year 1883 identified, beyond all question, the site of Pithom. Further on, and still to the south, is Tell-er-Retabeh, which Petrie, as the result of explorations carried out in 1905-6, claims to have determined to be the site of the long-sought second treasure-city of Raamses; and then our memories are brought back to England's share in Egypt's prosperity, when further on we pass Kassassin and Tell-el-Kebir, the latter with its little well-kept cemetery by the rail side, where the English who died in the battle rest beneath some shady trees. Here the valley opens wide to embrace the broad plains of Goshen, and here, too, an exquisite scene of Eastern pastoral life begins. The green fields of beans and bersim are dotted with the industrious fellaheen; the shaduf and sakkieh creak and hum their not unmelodious song; strings of camels, herds of goats, black and grey water-buffaloes, graceful lebbek trees, feathery tamarisks and waving palms, complete a picture of pastoral charm. Some miles from Tell-el-Kebir, we reach the little station of Saft-el-Henneh, again a scene of Naville's labours, the mounds of which he has identified as the site of the city of Pa-Sopt, the ancient capital of the surrounding district of Kesem, Geshem, or more familiarly Goshen; and if on our map we join Tell-el-Kebir and Saft el-Henneh, and then form a triangle by linking up Belbeis to the south with both, we cannot be far wrong in identifying the space so enclosed with the area of the historic Land of Goshen.1 [Note: L. E. Steele, in The Irish Church Quarterly, i. 123.]
4. Of the religion of the Israelites in Egypt we have no information. “In the land of Goshen,” says Robertson Smith, “the Hebrews had not even a vestige of national organization. The tribes into which they were divided acknowledged a common ancestry, but had no institutions expressive of the unity of race; and, when Moses called them to a united effort for liberty, the only practical starting-point for his work was an appeal to the name of Jehovah, the God of their fathers. It is not easy to say how far the remembrance of this God was a living power among the Hebrews. The Semitic nomads have many superstitions, but little religion. The sublime solitudes of the desert are well fitted to nourish lofty thoughts about God, but the actual life of a wandering shepherd people is not favourable to the formation of such fixed habits of worship as are indispensable to make religion a prominent factor in everyday life. It would seem that the memory of the God of the Hebrew fathers was little more than a dormant tradition when Moses began his work; and among the Israelites, as among the Arabs of the desert, whatever there was of habitual religious practice was probably connected with tribal or family superstitions, such as the use of teraphim, a kind of household idols which long continued to keep their place in Hebrew homes. The very name of Jehovah (or Iahwè, as the word should rather be pronounced) became known as a name of power only through Moses and the great deliverance.”1 [Note: W. Robertson Smith, The Prophets of Israel, 32.]
