3. Moses

The birth of Moses. – Pharaoh’s daughter. – Queen Hatasu and her significance in the history of Egypt. – The youth of Moses and his education. – Egyptian wisdom. – The military exploit of Moses. – His position at Pharaoh’s court. – Flight from Egypt. – Views of the Sinai peninsula. – Impressions of the Sinai landscapes. – The birth of the great idea of the people’s deliverance. – The activity of Aaron. – The burning bush. – The meeting of the great brothers. – The tidings of deliverance and the joy of the oppressed people.

Among the Israelites, during the time of their sojourn in Egypt, the tribe of Levi stood out as one of the most gifted and most receptive to Egyptian culture. And indeed all the Israelites in general did not remain strangers to this culture, and they acquired various crafts and branches of knowledge; but the tribe of Levi went ahead of all the rest in this respect, and acquired from the Egyptians even their highest wisdom – the art of writing, by the possession of which it naturally occupied a privileged position, after the manner of the priestly caste of the Egyptians. As the most gifted and the most cultivated, it at the same time most fully embodied the historical and religious sense of the people; in it the ancestral traditions were more vividly preserved; the faith of the fathers lived more whole, and as in a living ark the covenants of the fathers were kept therein. In this tribe was concentrated, so to speak, the soul of the nation, and during the very heaviest bondage and humiliation there lay hidden within it the spark of the people’s self-consciousness. From this very hearth of the people’s soul came forth its deliverance. In the midst of this tribe there lived the humble family of Amram and Jochebed. It was distinguished by nothing, except, perhaps, that it preserved the faith of the fathers more strongly and more wholly than others, and strove more than others to implant it also in its children – the little girl Miriam and the boy Aaron. This was a hard time for the whole people. The Egyptian policy of oppression had reached its highest development. The despotism of the Pharaohs sought out ever new means to check the growth of the young nation and to break its moral strength, and did not stop short of inhumanity. There was even issued a bloodthirsty decree concerning the putting to death of all newborn boys, and when this decree began to be carried into execution, a second son was born to Amram, bringing, instead of family joy, a terrible family grief. The boy was uncommonly beautiful, and the unhappy mother for three months hid him from the bloodthirsty gaze of Pharaoh’s police. But to hide him longer was impossible, and she resolved upon a desperate step, prompted, perhaps, by the legend of the Chaldean king Sargon preserved in their family[1]. She made a basket of reeds, daubed it over with asphalt and pitch, so that it should not let water through, and, placing the little one in it, with prayers and tears lowered the precious basket into one of the channels of the Nile overgrown with reeds, committing it to providence and to the light watch of a twelve-year-old girl, the sister of the poor boy[2]. The papyrus reed, found now only much farther south along the banks of the White Nile, in those days grew also along all the broad channels of the northern Delta, where the Hebrews lived and where, in the newly built cities, were the summer residences of Pharaoh’s court. By its foliage the reed could shelter the boy from the scorching rays of the sun, and at the same time, covering the river, it presented a convenient place where the ladies of the court might bathe without detriment to womanly modesty. The quiet current and the small volume of water were in both respects more convenient than the broad and swift stream of the main channel of the Nile.

This little event, which afterward had such an immense significance in the history of mankind, came to pass in the reign of Pharaoh Thothmes I. After his far-off campaigns he loved to spend his time of rest in the frontier castles, in order from thence the more conveniently to undertake new campaigns. He had three children – a daughter by his first wife and two sons by his second. The princess Hatasu was the favorite daughter of Pharaoh, and therefore played an important part in the history of Egypt. By the laws of Egypt, which required the preservation of the purity of the royal blood, she was to become the wife of her half-brother, the crown prince, who ascended the throne after the death of his father under the name of Thothmes II. But the latter was none too clever and soon passed from the scene, while his wife, the energetic and wise Hatasu, became the absolute ruler of the country, though under the title of guardian of her younger half-brother Thothmes III. Casting off the veil of widowhood, she began to appear in all the splendor and majesty of a Pharaoh, in the character of a fully sovereign queen, in male attire, in the crown and the royal regalia. Her marriage had evidently been unhappy, and now, having become queen, she avenged herself upon the memory of her husband, effacing his name on all the monuments and setting up her own in its place, beside the name of her father. She vigorously continued the building of the temples and palaces begun by her father, but these works could not satisfy the ambition of the queen. She fitted out an expedition for the discovery of new lands, and her ships penetrated far along the coasts of Africa, discovering new countries and bringing back new treasures. The walls of the temples built in her reign relate, in their inscriptions, the marvels of the enterprise of this famous woman. On the return of the expedition, she was met with sumptuous ceremonies. The treasures brought back were solemnly dedicated to the god Amon, under whose protection the voyage had been undertaken. A new festival was established in his honor, and the queen made her appearance at it in her richest attire, in a “spotted leopard skin with metal clasps upon her shoulders, and her ankles were fragrant as the bright dew.” The sacred bark of Amon the priests bore upon their shoulders, to the sound of music and hymns, and an enormous procession of court officials, military and other dignitaries and priests directed its way toward the temple – amid boundless masses of the people, who filled the air with cries of triumph and joy. It was this famous queen who, while she was still a princess and lived with her father, having gone with her maids of honor to bathe, found in the reeds a basket with a weeping infant. The kind heart of the princess was wrung with pain at the sight of the unhappy lot of the abandoned child. She understood that this was an innocent victim of her father’s cruel decree against the Hebrews, and, relying on the power of her father’s love for her, resolved to save him and even to adopt him. She took a nurse from among the Hebrew women, who proved to be the mother of the child, Jochebed, and thus the stream of fate directed the everyday basket of the child toward historical greatness and worldwide fame. When the infant had grown, the princess took him to herself in the palace, officially adopted him, and gave him the name Moses, “because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water”[3]. The monuments to a considerable degree confirm this Biblical history. Judging by the free actions of this daughter of Pharaoh, one must suppose that she enjoyed a special influence over Pharaoh; and the fact that she afterward initiated her adopted foundling of the despised Hebrew race into “all the wisdom of the Egyptians,” thus violating the caste privilege so jealously guarded by the priests, shows that at that time she was perhaps already an absolute queen upon the throne of the Pharaohs. On the basis of the monuments it may be shown with satisfactory certainty that in the whole line of the Pharaohs, beginning with the third dynasty, when this title first comes into use, down to the Persian conquest, in the course of more than sixteen centuries, only one queen is known to have ruled the country in her own right. Her name occurs on the monuments in its full form, namely Hatasu-Numt-Amun, and precisely in the place where it ought to be expected according to the Biblical narrative, in the character of the great-granddaughter of the king who knew not Joseph. Queen Hatasu is constantly represented on the monuments with a beard, as a token that she was an absolute queen, like, for example, our Catherine the Great, whom she closely resembles in her destiny and in her character. She raised two obelisks at Thebes in memory of her father, and of these one still stands, while of the other the fragments are scattered round about. The surviving obelisk – the second largest and surely the most beautiful in the world – is hewn from a single rock of red granite, carefully polished and covered with reliefs and hieroglyphs of uncommon beauty. The inscription upon it shows that it was begun in the fifteenth year of the reign of Queen Hatasu and finished in the seventeenth. On each side of the obelisk it is stated that she reigned “in the name of her father.” In the inscriptions she is glorified with various titles: “royal consort, queen of Upper and Lower Egypt,” and among these titles there occurs also her well-known Biblical title: “daughter of Pharaoh”[4]. Between her and her half-brothers, the first of whom was also her husband, there existed some irreconcilable enmity, rooted in their very nature. They were opposite even in outward appearance. While the features of Queen Hatasu reveal the graceful and regular lines of the Greek type, in the face of her half-brother Thothmes III, as may be seen on his bust in the British Museum, the repulsive features of the negro type plainly come forward. Such, perhaps, was also her husband, of whom very little is known and only faint traces have survived on the monuments.

The Biblical narrative imparts no details of the early life of Moses at Pharaoh’s court, and there are but faint indications in tradition. Thus Josephus relates that even at three years old he was wonderfully tall of stature, so that all involuntarily stopped to look at him when he passed by. The report of his beauty is confirmed by later Biblical testimonies[5]. Josephus has also preserved a fragment from the Egyptian historian Manetho, supplementing the history of Moses from the Egyptian point of view. According to him, Moses was born in the city of Heliopolis, or On, and his original name was Osarsiph, from Osiris, the patron of On, but he afterward changed it to the name of Moses[6], and he was a priest of Osiris in the great temple of the Sun in his native city, but was excluded from the priesthood on account of leprosy. As one adopted by the princess Hatasu, he received a brilliant courtly education, was initiated into “all the wisdom of the Egyptians,” and became a member of the royal house and of the priestly caste. The place of his education tradition assigns to the great temple of the Sun in the city of On, beside which was the chief university of the country; and if this is so, he must have possessed an extensive knowledge of Egyptian life, since the inhabitants of the temple and its outbuildings made up almost a whole little town. From the temple corridors led to the lecture-halls for the students and to the quiet quarters of the professors and priests – of various grades and offices. Behind these, also in the temple outbuildings, were lodged the dwellings of the temple servants – the keepers of the sacred animals, the doorkeepers, the porters, the water-carriers, the washers, the laundresses and the cooks, and also the rooms of the pastophori, who prepared the incense and the fragrant unguents. At the library and the writing-rooms was a multitude of scribes, who all lived in the temple buildings, and besides this there were here, among the members of this large population, the officials of the counting-house, the choirs of singers, and finally the noisy throng of the temple school Eton, or the Furrows of Time, from which Moses entered the university and passed by degrees into the lecture-halls of its various faculties[7]. Clement of Alexandria has preserved an account of one of those religious processions which Moses must often have seen on coming out of the doors of this vast sanctuary, namely a procession in honor of Isis. In front went the singers, whose chanting was accompanied by instruments. After them, with a palm-branch and a particular measuring instrument, went the horoscopist, who foretold the future by the stars, and further the sacred scribes with ink, pens and books. The first of these was bound to know by heart thirty-six of the forty-two books of the god Thoth, containing hymns in honor of the gods and rules for the king; the second had to know by heart the books treating of astrology; the third was to be a specialist in hieroglyphs, geography, the structure of the earth, the phenomena of the Nile, and the niceties of measurements and offerings. After the scribes went special attendants of the goddess, bearing the “staff of righteousness” and a vessel for the offering of drink. From the chief of these was required a perfect acquaintance with all that pertains to the worship of the idol. Then went the prophets, the foremost with the sacred vessels, and the others with bread. The chief prophet was the president of the temple and was bound to know by heart the ten priestly books. Further went the pastophori, or sacred physicians, clad in their special ceremonial costumes and famed for knowing by heart six books on medicine; after them followed others, and so on without end.

In what precisely the “wisdom” consisted into which Moses was initiated, it is not easy to determine, since the priestly scribes, although in their compositions and writings they make allusions to it, yet speak so enigmatically and so carefully conceal the meaning of their words, that it is difficult to judge of it with any certainty. They regarded it as their exclusive possession, which it was not permitted to communicate to anyone outside their circle. Faith in One Supreme God was, as it appears from the Book of the Dead, the kernel of these secret teachings; but this “wisdom,” it must be supposed, contained besides this much else also – all that was lofty and attractive in science, since from this source the wisest of the Greeks – Lycurgus, Solon, Thales, Pythagoras, Democritus, Plato and others – drew their principles of politics, geometry, astronomy and physics. It contained also the principles of morality and even of medicine, and in this respect Moses was undoubtedly much indebted to it[8]. It is remarkable that the forty-two deadly sins, of which the soul was, according to the Egyptian teaching, to cleanse itself before the forty-two judges of death in the world to come, without which it was not supposed possible to obtain blessed immortality, exhaust almost the whole moral law of Moses, presenting in reality the substance of that universal moral law which in all ages has made men responsible for their conduct, as a law written in their hearts, making them by nature a law unto themselves[9]. The ibis-headed god Thoth, the scribe of the gods, according to the teaching of the priests wrote six books on medicine, which contained anatomy, pathology, therapeutics and the treatment of the diseases of the eyes, so prevalent on the banks of the Nile. These books, composed by learned priests, were undoubtedly of value to so receptive a genius as Moses. Nor must it be forgotten that to this same “scribe of the gods” is ascribed that lofty definition of God, according to which He is likened to a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. The library of Thebes at about this time contained as many as 20,000 books, and over the entrance to it was the inscription: “For the healing of the soul.” The statue of Thoth, the god of wisdom, and of Saphekh, the goddess of history, adorned the entrance to the library, and in the museums there are still preserved priestly papyrus rolls from that time. This library is often mentioned in the Egyptian rolls, and the tombs of two of its librarians of the time of Rameses II may still be seen at Thebes. These were, it appears, father and son, and throughout the whole of their lives bore the honorary title of “keepers of the books”[10]. And this was not the only library in the time of Moses. In the Book of the Dead there is mentioned the library of Osiris-Seb; there was also a library at the temple of Ptah at Memphis, which contained medical books as well. Later there existed yet another library in the Serapeum at Alexandria. The temples in general, like the medieval monasteries, were at the same time book-repositories, and often contained valuable collections of books[11].

According to one tradition, Moses, upon the completion of his university education, while living at the court, so far enjoyed the confidence of Queen Hatasu that she placed him at the head of a military expedition against the Ethiopians, in the course of which he displayed brilliant military abilities and won important victories. This tradition is confirmed by the representations on the walls of a certain temple at Thebes (built by Queen Hatasu), executed with great elegance, in the highest style of Egyptian art. In them is depicted a campaign against the Ethiopians on the Arabian peninsula. The Egyptian general of Queen Hatasu receives the enemy’s general, who stands before him in a humbly suppliant posture, accompanied by his wife and daughter[12]. It is very possible that the figure of the commander-in-chief of the troops of Queen Hatasu refers to her adopted son Moses, because, according to the testimony of Holy Scripture, he was “mighty in words and in deeds”[13]. Josephus and Irenaeus also testify to the fame which Moses acquired as the commander of the Egyptian army in the war with Ethiopia[14]. Although this whole legend is colored with legendary fancy, nevertheless it helps to elucidate the report found in the Book of Numbers, that Moses was married to an Ethiopian woman[15].

Notwithstanding his belonging to the royal house, Moses was not constantly in close relation with the members of the royal family. The time of his education at the university of On, if indeed he studied there, and the periodic removals of the court to distant Thebes, practically separated him from the family of Pharaoh. But more than all else, what estranged him from this court was his deep sympathy with his suffering people. From the luxurious chambers of Pharaoh’s palace it was the more painful to him to look upon the humiliation and bondage in which his own people, of one blood with him, were placed, and the more plainly was the groan of his brethren heard by him. At the sight of the calamities of his people, the splendor of the gilded palaces became hateful to him, and he would withdraw to the wretched hut of his parents, in order to still the tempest of his outraged spirit. With the house of Pharaoh he might still be bound by sympathy and gratitude toward his benefactress Queen Hatasu; but when she had passed from the scene and her half-brother Thothmes III ascended the throne, who expressed his hatred of her by the destruction of the monuments she had raised, then Moses was left without any ties at the court, and even, perhaps, his position became unsafe. Queen Hatasu, owing to her ill-will toward her half-brother, may perhaps not have wished to transmit the throne to him, and secretly cherished the thought of making Moses her heir. When this thought was not realized and the throne fell to Thothmes III, the latter was naturally hostilely disposed toward his rival; upon his half-sister he avenged himself by the destruction of her monuments, while Moses, perhaps, he wished to humble through intensified oppression of his kindred tribe. This of course grieved and outraged him still more, and once, in a fit of indignation, he slew an Egyptian overseer who was cruelly chastising a Hebrew laborer, and buried him in the sand, endeavoring to conceal the traces of his involuntary homicide. The rumor, however, managed to spread about this, and Moses was threatened with the death penalty appointed by the Egyptian laws for homicide. In consequence of this he had to flee from the country[16].

In order the more conveniently to hide from the persecutions of Pharaoh’s police, Moses in all probability directed his way toward Pelusium, or some other frontier city on the line of the great fortified wall, and through it penetrated into the desert. The Egyptian monuments vividly reproduce before us an example of such a flight. A certain Sineh relates of his escape and the adventures accompanying it. “I went on foot,” he says, “and came to the fortress which the king had built in order to hold back the eastern foreigners, and an old man, a seller of herbs, gave me shelter. But I was frightened at the sight of the watch upon the wall, which was relieved daily. When the night had passed and dawn began, I set about making my way from one place to another, and arrived at the station of Kamur. But thirst overpowered me on the way, my throat grew parched, and I said: This is the taste of death; but hearing the pleasant voices of cattle, I gathered my spirit and took courage in my members. I saw a Bedouin, who asked me whither I was going, supposing that I was from Egypt. He gave me water and poured me out milk, and I went with him to his tribe, and they passed me along from place to place, until I arrived at Atuna”[17]. The same thing, perhaps, was experienced by Moses also. Having gone forth beyond the bounds of the country, he directed his way to the southern part of the Sinai peninsula, which presents a mountainous triangle, about 200 versts in extent from north to south. The northern part of the peninsula was occupied by the Amalekites, and the southern by a part of the great Midian tribe – the Midianites, who traced their descent from Abraham, through Keturah[18]. The bond of common origin gave Moses confidence in a friendly reception, and also, perhaps, aroused the hope of the possibility of an alliance against the Egyptians, in case the Hebrews should attempt to free themselves from bondage. Having reached the chief encampment of the tribe, which was usually situated near some well-known well or spring, he was at once vouchsafed a friendly reception from the head of the tribe, to whose daughters he had rendered a courtesy and assistance[19]. The simplicity of the surroundings in which he now found himself breathed of patriarchal life and freedom. His host was both the sheikh and the emir of his tribe, its civil and religious head, bearing in consequence of this the two names of Jethro and Reuel, corresponding to the one office and the other. “Moses was content to dwell” here, and he married one of the daughters of Jethro – Zipporah. But the name given by him to his first son by this marriage showed that his thoughts were still on the banks of the Nile, his heart there, in the midst of his oppressed and groaning people. He called his son Gershom, “because,” he said, “I have been a stranger in a strange land”[20].

The country in which Moses had to pass many years, namely the mountainous peninsula of Sinai, was especially suited by its seclusion to hide him from the outer world, and at the same time by the impressions of its wild desolation to attune him to great thoughts and to prepare him for the great service that lay before him. The white limestone of Palestine and of the desert of Tih extends along its northern bounds. To the south go hills of sandstone, usually of medium height, but striking by a wonderful variety and brilliance of color together with a fantastic quality of outline. But the hills soon give way to the mountains of Sinai, which fill the southern end of the peninsula, presenting masses of primeval rocks, rising in their summits 9,000 feet above the surface of the sea. Their crystalline masses, being monuments of the early ages of creation, remain to this day the same as ever, notwithstanding all the alterations of the surface of the earth. The enormous masses of rock are entirely bare of all vegetation, but their colors are so various and so sharply defined that from afar they seem clothed with the richest and most varied vegetation. The effects of light, again, in the dry, clear air and beneath the deep azure of the sky, have an inexpressible power and charm – in the variety of their hues, from a dazzling whiteness to a deep violet color. For one who has come hither from the rich cornfields of the Egyptian Delta, all this splendor of rock and sky cannot, however, replace what he has left behind him, and the region must have seemed a desert. In the times of Moses, however, this country was less barren than it is now. The felling of trees, carried on for ages for the use of the miners of ancient Egypt, and also for the making of charcoal, which is still carried on there even now, not only contributed to the destruction of the forests, but also increased the barrenness of the soil, owing to the diminution of the rains. Many valleys, having now only a few scanty shrubs, were perhaps three thousand years ago covered with a dense forest. Even 400 years before Christ an eyewitness relates that the whole country was covered with forest and brushwood. Even now there are met with there rich oases, at least in five of the Sinai wadies, and not one valley, in the very center of the mountains, is wholly destitute of vegetation. Acacias and tamarisks grow in great quantity in the wadies Sheikh and Garandel, and palm groves in many valleys yield a good harvest of magnificent dates. Various kinds of thorn-bushes nestle along the ravines of the most sheer precipices. Thousands of goats and sheep find sufficient pasturage throughout the whole year, while many chamois and rock-badgers seek their food on the almost inaccessible peaks of the summits. Panthers also are met with in these lofty valleys. Song-birds enliven the bushes during the cool spring with their many-voiced chirping, and sometimes whole flocks of quail, exhausted by their long flight from the west across the Red Sea, settle for a time on the rocky slopes and the open plains. Wild ducks live in the little lakes of one or two wadies. In some of the bays there are seals of a particular kind, whose skin is used for sandals, which protect the feet well from the thorns common there. There is so much fish that the Arabs, with their crude appliances, catch it in great quantity in the Red Sea[21]. Serpents, both venomous and harmless, also abound in some parts. Taken as a whole, the Sinai peninsula presents one of the wildest countries. The mountains rise from afar in red and gray masses and peaks of porphyry and granite. On all sides lie heaps of dark-gray ashes of extinct volcanic fires, or fragments of porphyry. Waves of rock, with a greenish gleam, rise bare and menacing; ungainly, wild ridges tower like towers above the black and brown masses of stone, which seem as if purposely shattered by the gigantic hammers of giants. The horizon takes ever new forms with each step forward, when one hollow gives way to another, and the grandeur of the landscape grows in proportion as one ascends on high. Having reached a certain level, you see how the mountains rear up round about with their huge heights; but you climb higher, and these same mountains seem, as it were, to grow numb before new giants that block the way. “If I were a painter,” says Ebers, “and could illustrate the Hell of Dante, I would set up my drawing-table here and fill my book with sketches. For the depicter of the dark abyss of hell there is here no lack of every kind of landscape – stern, terrible, immeasurably mournful, inexpressibly wild, inaccessibly majestic and menacing”[22].

Such a region must have produced a powerful impression upon so impressionable a man as Moses. No country could be found more favorable for preparation for a lofty mission. Nature, owing to the lack of water and the poverty of vegetation, is stern and simple, presenting no objects for distraction. The majestic, pensively silent mountains round about, with their bold, precipitous masses of granite and porphyry, fill the soul with a solemn seriousness, which is heightened still more by the distant horizon that opens out from most of the summits, and by the uncommonly transparent air. The wanderer stands, for example, on the summit of Jebel-Musa, the mount of Moses; below before him yawns a frightful abyss, round about – innumerable peaks with the ravines and precipices of many-colored rocks – white and gray, gray-yellow, blood-red and ominously black, wholly destitute of vegetation. To the north the desert of Tih stretches beyond the mountains into infinite distance. To the east and west the reflection of the blue sea gleams from the depths; beyond it, toward the sunrise, are seen the pale sands of Arabia, while in the direction of sunset the mountains of Egypt rise up, half-shrouded in the blue of distance. Such a place, more than the narrowly compressed valley of the Nile, was capable of calling forth great thoughts[23]. In such a desert region the soul finds rest, withdrawing into itself from the surrounding monotony. Undistracted and undisturbed from without, the spirit lives its inner life, follows every movement of thought, analyzes and lives through every feeling in its finest shades. In the city there is no solitude: everyone forms part of a great whole, in which he acts and under whose influence he lives. But the lonely wanderer in a region like Sinai is wholly cut off from the world and must fill the void of solitude with his own personality. The present recedes into the background, and the spirit, roused to an inwardly intense life, is overflowed with infinite thoughts. In so highly gifted a personality as was Moses, the solemn stillness of the mountains and the boundless canopy of the day and night sky overwhelmed human thought and filled the soul with the majesty of the Deity. When he meditated upon the possibility of the deliverance of his people, the solitary boundlessness of the desert smoothed away before him the contrasts of his weakness in comparison with the might of Egypt, which might otherwise have paralyzed resolution and shattered hope with despair. But what is man, whose days are as a span’s breadth and whose foundation is in the dust, before the Almighty Creator of heaven and earth, before the rock of Israel? Even less lofty minds, in the midst of this majestic and menacing desert, were from age to age kindled with the consciousness of the nearer presence of the Deity. The mount Serbal from time immemorial was dedicated to Baal, and even now the wandering Bedouin brings hither a lamb as a sacrifice, in thanksgiving for special mercies[24]. The mount Horeb already bore the name of “the mount of God” when Moses came to settle near it[25], and the whole group of mountains in general, like, for example, Ararat or the Himalayas, was reckoned sacred among the surrounding tribes[26].

In this very sanctuary of the mountains, in expectation of the time when, according to the predetermined plans of God, Israel should ripen for the great movement toward its liberation, and at the same time unconsciously preparing himself for the great exploit that lay before him, Moses passed not less than forty years[27]. His constant wanderings with the flocks of his father-in-law must have made him acquainted with every valley, every plain, every ravine, hill and mountain of all this country; with its population, both native and that laboring in the Egyptian mines; with every spring and well, and with the resources of every kind presented by the region, all of which together constituted a preparation in the highest degree important for the task of leading his people, after its liberation from Egypt, to a sure refuge and to the great sanctuary of their long future sojourn. Moreover, in these years of inward peace there gradually arose in his mind problems concerning the organization of the people, and there too they might find a quiet solution; and, chief of all, his own spirit, owing to his detachment from the world and his close, unbroken communion with the Deity, was gradually strengthened and purified[28].

While Moses thus led the quiet shepherd’s life amid the thought-rousing mountains of Sinai, at this same time, on the banks of the Nile too, among the Hebrews, there was secretly ripening the thought of liberation from the Egyptian bondage. The family in which such persons as Miriam, Aaron and Moses grew up and were brought up, faithful to the God of their fathers and filled with an unconquerable aversion to the religion of Egypt, surely presented no solitary example of hereditary devotion to the faith and the covenants of Israel. Undoubtedly Amram and Jochebed, in their very names[29], bore the token of their faith, which was preserved by many even in these gloomy times. One may suppose that they were fairly indifferent to the memories of Bethel and Beersheba; but the calamities of life roused the religious feelings of the people and gave to the promises of Jehovah to Abraham and his posterity such significance as hitherto they had not had. This great spiritual revolution, so far as it can be seen now, was accomplished chiefly through the agency of the tribe of Levi, to which the parents of Moses belonged, and their children were destined to come forward as its chief accomplishers. But Amram and Jochebed themselves undoubtedly received by inheritance that spiritual disposition which their family was destined to spread to others and to bring to such great consequences. That their tribe was deemed worthy of the honor of becoming the priesthood of the nation was its natural inheritance. Through it, its brethren again turned to Jehovah in Egypt, and through the efforts of its sons, Aaron and Moses, they became a free people. As the agents of the national regeneration in Egypt, both religious and political, the members of the tribe of Levi were from the very beginning, both by their former merits and by their special capacity, destined for the dignity of the highest service among the people.

Aaron was undoubtedly the chief agent in this great work, but he had need of the help of the “elders” of the people, that is, the heads or princes of the tribes, clans, families and houses, for the spreading of his influence over the whole population. But with help of any kind whatever, to attain this was not easy, because the masses are difficult to rouse by lofty ideas, especially when they are crushed by the burden of life. Yet it was essentially important to raise their spirit. Their liberation in the simple physical sense would not have made them fit for the great destiny as the people of God. In order to lay the foundation of a firm and serious acknowledgment of Jehovah as the national God, it was necessary to set before them graphically the contrast between the true and the false and to imprint it upon their hearts, while they were still surrounded by Egyptian idolatry, and to kindle them with hatred against its adherents, as their oppressors. The Hebrew overseers over the separate working parties of their brethren, under the command of the Egyptian taskmasters, undoubtedly showed sympathy for their inhuman sufferings, because these overseers are everywhere identified with the “elders”[30], who were in close relations with Aaron[31]. The heads of each clan or house were evidently responsible for the conduct of the members belonging to it, and thus a close bond was maintained between the tribes. The fact that Aaron set out for Sinai, in order there to meet his brother Moses, shows that his work had at last ripened for great ends, and also that between them, in the course of the long years of their separation, communications had been maintained, though perhaps only by means of chance tidings conveyed by the merchants who passed through the district of Jethro.

The preparation of Moses for his great exploit, as for every lofty end, was accomplished slowly and gradually. The sense of a calling to the great role of a prophet of God itself entails an exaltation of spirit, an enthusiasm and a concentration of the soul, attained only by degrees. The outward duties of such a service must be the free expression of a deep conviction, rising above all the doubts and questions over which the majority of others ponder, and this is undoubtedly acquired slowly. Every manifestation of prophetic inspiration afterward displayed by Moses gives to understand that the being and the constant co-presence of God, as the supreme directing and overseeing power in human affairs, was realized in his consciousness with an irresistible force and vividness that carried away his whole being. His flight, after the slaying of the Egyptian taskmaster, was the first step toward this lofty inspiration, since he broke off every tie with Egypt and gave himself wholly to the cause of his people. Although his heart always belonged to this people, even when he was in learned confinement at the university temple in On, or in the brilliant chambers of Pharaoh’s palace, and although even then he often moved secretly among those whom he loved as “his brethren” and sympathized with them in their “burdens,” yet his flight first freed him from the constraining conditions of his position and gave him over wholly to the service of the people.

A prophet, in the true meaning of this word, is a herald of God among men, both in respect of the present and of the future. Prediction is only one of the forms of the divine service performed by him. His chief office consists in the proclamation of the present purposes and will of God. But to rise to such a state of spirit, in which a man becomes the verbal organ of the Deity to men, is possible only with natural development. Before the spirit of man is filled with the Divine Spirit, as a wick with fire, it must long be warmed and concentrated within itself – to such a degree as is unknown to other men. The earth must almost vanish before heaven is opened as a dwelling for lofty thoughts. The invisible must become a palpable reality, before which all that is visible and earthly recedes into the background. In this sense Moses was the first and greatest of the prophets, because no one before Christ spoke in the name of God with such authority and shed such a flood of light upon the being and the laws of God. All the subsequent prophets borrow their light from this central luminary, because he implanted in the hearts of his people the great truths which it remained for his successors only to spread among their contemporaries. The burning bush of Horeb was a graphic symbol of that sacred fire with which his whole being blazed and by which there was kindled in the world the inextinguishable light of the true religion. But how much inward struggle, how many ponderings upon the mysteries of nature round about him and above him, how much purely intellectual struggle with the teachings of the Egyptian instructors, and what contrasts of the gods of the Nile valley with the cherished faith in the one living and true God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – must his soul have lived through, before there stood before him Jehovah, the One Most High, the Almighty, the all-holy Lord God of heaven and earth! That he, even with supernatural help, arrived at so astonishingly great a conclusion, in the clearness and force with which it arose in his consciousness, sets him apart from the ranks of ordinary men, because the God of Moses is revealed in His relations to mankind and in the self-revelation of His being with infinitely greater fullness than the God of Abraham. Revelation undoubtedly poured into his soul the light by the aid of which he apprehended such truths; but his whole being had to be previously attuned to this light, in order to be capable of receiving such revelations. In the realm of the spirit it can be given only to those who have. Besides this concentrated inspiration, which slowly, with the years, raised him to the conviction that he was called to be a prophet for his people and to speak to it in the name of God, the exploit that lay before Moses required of him at the same time the mind of a statesman, a lawgiver and an organizer in the broad sense of this word; and lo – the combination of these qualities with his supreme authority as a herald of God made him fully capable and ready for the great work.

The first divine revelation, which transformed the whole being of Moses and brought to a decisive crisis all the half-conscious dreams and spiritual aspirations of the past, came to pass to him in the desert of Sinai, amid the mountains of Horeb – the “dry” mountains, as the vast heights of the Sinai group are generally called – when he was pasturing the flocks of his father-in-law. Tradition, since the sixth century, has reckoned the deep hollow, to which he afterward led the children of Israel and where the monastery of Justinian was built, to be the very place where a mysterious voice commanded him to take off his sandals. But whether the place of this event was the “valley,” or the plain on the mount Serbal – the surrounding circumstances are equally suitable. The mountains, which, according to the testimony of Josephus[32], even in the eyes of the Arab tribes were surrounded with the halo of a special sanctity and were called “the mountains of God,” looked down with menacing majesty from all sides upon the great shepherd. He went after his flock of sheep and goats, which sought out vegetation along the ledges of the rocks, in the ravines of the narrow valleys or along the banks of streams that chanced to be met with, thinking little of whither it would lead him. The wild acacia and the thorn of every kind here and there covered the bare ledges and the scorched soil of the hollows. But lo – suddenly a glow of fire, like that which consumed Israel in the furnace of bondage, appeared amid the branches of one of the thorn-bushes that stood before him: Moses looks in wonder – “the thorn-bush burns with fire, but the bush is not consumed”[33]. When he had approached nearer “to look upon this great sight,” from the bush there sounded a voice, in which he involuntarily recognized the voice of God. Having commanded him to take off his sandals[34], the mysterious voice disclosed to him new and closer relations of God to His chosen people and laid upon the bewildered shepherd the awful mission of being His prophet. He had been known to his forefathers and was knowable by them under various names, more or less in use among the kindred peoples in respect of their gods – under the names of El, Elohim, Shaddai – “the Almighty.” They used also the name of Jehovah, but the full plenitude of the meaning contained in it had never been disclosed to them[35]. Henceforth a sharp line was to be drawn between the true God and the idols of Egypt, and this line was to consist in the appropriation of the name of Jehovah in its full significance, as the expression of the One only living God, the true “Existing One,” the mysterious source of all being. “Go to thy brethren and to the sons of Israel,” continued the Divine voice, “and say to them: Jehovah, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, hath sent me to you. This is My name for ever; thus call ye Me from generation to generation”[36]. All other gods are simply elilim – “nothings,” they have no being, but are only the invention of man. Jehovah alone, by His very name, proclaimed of Himself that He is the only One Living God. Moses was to proclaim to his brethren that this Existing God, mindful of His covenant with Abraham, was ready to free them from bondage and to gather them beside the mountains, where this very Divine voice thus spoke, and there He would give them laws, as His people, and would then lead them into the good land which He had promised to their fathers.

Involuntarily terrified at a commission so lofty and at the same time so difficult, Moses naturally desires to receive a special assurance of the co-presence of God with him, before appearing before the face of the mighty Pharaoh, or attempting to rouse the oppressed people from its apathy. But this assurance too is given him. Overwhelmed by the vision and at the same time roused in soul, trembling at the thought of his own nothingness, but strong in holy hope at the remembrance of Jehovah, he returns to his flock another man. Now he is in the full sense inspired and rises to the height of the great enterprise entrusted to him. If he is not eloquent, has not Jehovah said that Aaron shall speak in his stead to Pharaoh and to the people? It remains for him only to act through Aaron in the character of a representative of God. He had only to direct, and Aaron would express his directions in fitting words. In relation to the people he was, so to speak, to take the place of God, and in relation to Aaron to be the same that God is in relation to His prophet, whom He inspires[37]. He would fain have had a symbol of his high office; but did not the shepherd’s staff in his hands already serve as an instrument of divine power? His work could not be accomplished by mere human powers. If it were required of him to come forward against mighty Egypt, raising an insurrection among the people and in the hope of military success, then he might fall into despair; for how could a throng of an enslaved people hold out even a day against disciplined troops? But the peaceful symbol which he held in his hands, namely the staff with which he drove the flock of his father-in-law and over which the wonders just seen by him had been wrought, testified to an invisible power, before which the strongest of the Pharaohs is powerless. With such a token in his hands, he could boldly go forward, in full assurance that Jehovah, Who had sent him, in the coming struggle would take the side of Israel. For had not this simple staff, at the command of God, been turned into a serpent, the symbol of death, and had not the hand which holds it been covered with leprosy and again healed by this same voice? And the vision of the burning bush, did it not show that, although the thorn-bush of itself cannot withstand the blazing fire and on the contrary yields to it most easily, yet it remained unharmed, and consequently there was here a Power that protected even that which was so weak? Israel of itself would be incapable of withstanding Egypt, but it has a mighty Deliverer. As God, being in the blazing bush, protected it from destruction, so He was also in the midst of His people during its trials and would preserve it from extermination. The people would be delivered not by the art or the mind of a leader, but only by the power of Jehovah. This deliverance was to be so much the work of Jehovah alone, that the people was in all the subsequent ages to see in it the pledge that He had chosen it as His people, out of pure love and compassion for it[38].

The meeting of Aaron with his brother, which took place at the mount Horeb, must have filled their hearts with joy and with hope in God, because if Moses related the inspiration he had received for the great enterprise, the very same was conveyed by Aaron also. Besides this, he reported that the Hebrews, their brethren, had at last, after long years, again blazed up with zeal for the faith of their fathers, which secured their cooperation in the carrying out of the great plan for their speedy liberation from the Egyptian bondage and from the proximity of the hateful idolatry. Of this there was no need to wait long for proofs. All the elders of Israel, being gathered together for consultation and receiving the tidings of the approaching upheaval, joyfully received this news; through them it flew with the swiftness of lightning over all the tribes, all the clans and families, and the people lifted up its head and was filled with joy. The elders reported to the great brothers that “the people had believed” them and had rejoiced that “the Lord had visited the children of Israel” through His chosen messengers, and in thankful hope bowed down in worship[39]. The crisis was thus accomplished, and from this point there began that great historical struggle of an insignificant alien tribe with mighty Egypt, which lies as a shameful stain upon the pages of the history of this foremost country of the ancient civilized world.