MOSES. BY THE REV. J. P. NORRIS, B.D., CAN ON OF BRISTOL, AND VICAR OF ST. MARY REDCLIFFE; Author of "Rudiments of Theology," "Key to the Gospel Narrative," &c. MOSES. CHAPTER I. The Cotemporary Egyptian History. THE Bible is essentially historical. It is a record of certain revelations which God has given to man from time to time -revelations of Himself, of what He has done for us, and of what He expects us in return to do for Him. And these revelations claim to be accepted as historical facts. The faith of the Christian rests on the facts of the birth, death, and resurrection of our Lord. The faith of the Israelite rested on the facts of Abraham's call, the Exodus, the conquest of Canaan. What is supernatural in these facts is so bound up with what is historical, that the two cannot be separated. What confirms our faith in the one confirms our faith in the other. It happens, therefore, very providentially, that, while certain modern habits of thought are making belief in the supernatural difficult to some minds, criticism and research are tending every year to strengthen the certainty of those historical facts with which the supernatural revelation is inseparably interwoven. Most strikingly has this been the case with the most important of all the Old Testament records, the record of the Exodus. Just when the destructive criticism of unbelievers was trying to prove it all legendary-trying, by a studied exaggeration of every apparent difficulty, to shake our faith in it—it pleased God to open up to us the buried monuments of that kindred nation with which Israel at this period was so closely connected. Slowly out of these monuments we are reconstructing Egypt's history. We cannot yet speak of the results with confidence; but thus much we may safely assert, that the Egypt portrayed on these stones and papyrus-scrolls is precisely the Egypt implied and required by the Mosaic narrative. And, further, something has already been done-something that may well serve as the preface to a life of Moses-to fill up the blanks and clear up the difficulties of the sacred history. What we want most of all to fill up is that blank in the inspired narrative between the death of Joseph and the birth of the great lawgiver. At the close of Genesis the curtain falls on a patriarchal family mourning round the death-bed of an honoured chieftain, high in favour at the Egyptian court. It rises and reveals to us the descendants of that same family, multiplied into a nation of hundreds of thousands, but enslaved and broken-spirited, groaning under an oppressor's rod in the brick-fields of the Nile valley. How long was the intervening time? what change of dynasty had taken place? who and of what race was the Pharaoh who exalted Joseph? who and of what race the Pharaoh of the oppression ?—these are questions that we long to answer. Slowly and laboriously, with the help of the inscriptions which every year is bringing to light, learned men are assigning dates to Manetho's lists of Egyptian kings,1and 1 Manetho (B.C. 280) and Eratosthenes (B. C. 240) were natives of Egypt, and its historians. Manetho was a priest of Heliopolis, employed by Ptolemy Philadelphus to translate into Greek the lists of kings inscribed in the temples. His work, therefore, was cotemporary with the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. Fragments of it have been preserved for us by Josephus, Africanus, and Eusebius, |