The Commentary | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 14, 1887

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 13, No. 15.

The Commentary.

NOTES ON THE INTERNATIONAL LESSON.

ISRAEL IN EGYPT.

How long the Hebrews enjoyed peace and independence after the death of Joseph is only conjecture. But it was left to Rameses II., the Sesostris of the Greeks,—the third monarch of the nineteenth dynasty,—to earn for himself, especially, the evil distinction of the oppressor of the Hebrews. The first chapters of Exodus imply that the facts they recount took place under kings who reigned in peace, for had they had defensive wars on their hands they could not have oppressed the Hebrews, lest they should join the enemy. Rameses was undisturbed by any troubles in Egypt, or by any invasion, though his wars with the great Hittite Empire of Western Asia lasted from the fourth to the twenty-first year of his reign, and ended in a treaty gladly made on both sides, after a struggle in which each was equally exhausted.

From this time peace reigned on the Nile, and Rameses was free to carry out his policy of repression towards the Hebrews and their related fellow-settlers of the northeast of Egypt—at once to utilize their labor and to break their spirit. Such a period of quiet did not recur under his successors, who were disturbed by internal commotions, and thus, as has been said, Rameses seems marked out specially as the Pharaoh of the oppression.

That he is rightly thought so, seems further established by the fact that the incidents related in the beginning of Exodus demand the long continuance of a single reign. Not only must the successive persecutions of the Hebrews have required a number of years, but Moses, on his return to Egypt after his residence of forty years in Midian, found the same king still on the throne. No Pharaoh, however, of the nineteenth dynasty, held the scepter thus long but Rameses II. The son of one who was not of pure royal blood, he had been regarded as the true king, through his mother, even from his birth, and had hence, from childhood, been associated on the throne with his father; though he dates his reign only from Seti’s death, when he himself was eighteen or twenty years of age. Yet he lived to wear the crown for sixty-seven years, in wonderful accordance with the statement that “after a long time the king of Egypt died.” His reign therefore answers precisely the conditions required by the Bible narrative.

The monuments of this great king still cover the soil of Egypt and Nubia in almost countless numbers, and show him to have been the greatest builder of all the Pharaohs. There is not, says Mariette, a ruin in Egypt or Nubia that does not bear his name. Two grand temples at Ipsamboul, hewn out of the hills, with four colossal human figures, sixty-five feet high, at the entrances, were intended to perpetuate the memory of his victories over the negroes and the Syrians. At Thebes, the great temple of Amenhotep III. was finished, and adorned with two huge obelisks in granite, one of which is now in Paris. The second huge porch or pylon of the great temple of Amon at Karnak was covered with tableaux, representing the wars with the Hittites or Kheta of Western Asia. The temple of Gournou, begun by Seti, was finished and consecrated. The Ramesseum of Thebes, another great temple, is covered with sculpt-

ures also commemorating the Hittite wars. The temple of Abydos, built in honor of Seti, shows that king sitting on the throne in the midst of the gods, a club in one hand, in the other a scepter. Gods sit on each side, and in rows behind him, while Rameses offers homage, in front, to his father, as to one of their number. Everywhere,—at Memphis, at Bubastis, at the quarries of Silsilis, and at the mines of Sinai, similar memorials occur. The porch of the temple of Ptah, at Memphis, had a porch built by him at its entrance, at the sides of which were placed statues nearly fifty feet high, of himself and his queen. In the land of Goshen he restored and beautified the vast temple of Zoan-Tanis, neglected by the sovereigns of the eighteenth dynasty; the city itself being, besides, well-nigh rebuilt. He founded towns, dug canals, and filled the land with colossi, sphinxes, statues, and other creations. Of the thirty-two obelisks which yet exist in Egypt or elsewhere, twenty-one were either in whole or in part due to him; and of the eight temples which still remain in the ruins of Thebes, there is only one which he did not complete or build entirely. He also erected a chain of fortifications along the entire northeast frontier of Egypt, for 160 miles, to defend it from the invasions of the Syrians and Arabs. Cities which were endangered by the yearly inundations he protected by huge earthen dikes, and he intersected the entire region between Memphis and the sea with channels of irrigation so wide and so numerous, that it became henceforth impracticable for cavalry or war chariots, for which it had before been especially adapted. Herodotus further tells us that he marked off, in square blocks, the land thus reclaimed, and distributed them among his Egyptian favorites, treating the Delta as a new province, now, for the first time, incorporated with the rest of the kingdom.

But with what an expenditure of human misery must all this have been attended! It fills the mind with horror to think of the thousands of prisoners of war, of forced laborers and workmen, who must have died under the blows of the drivers, or under the weight of privations and toil too great for human endurance, in raising these innumerable creations. When slaves could not be had in sufficient numbers, after the close of the Syrian wars, great slave-hunting razzias to Ethiopia were organized, to harry the far South and drag off thousands of negroes and others, in chains, to toil in the brickfield, the quarry, or the temple precincts. All the foreign tribes of Semitic origin who had settled in the Delta were oppressed by forced labor. Even the native population had to suffer. A letter of the period is still extant, which tells how “the tax-collector arrives (in his barge) at the wharf of the district, to receive the Government share of the crops. His men, armed with clubs, are with him, and his negroes, with batons of palm-wood, cry out, ‘Where’s your wheat?’ and there is no way of checking their exactions. If they are not satisfied, they seize the poor wretch, throw him on the ground, bind him, drag him off to the canal at hand, and throw him in, head first, the neighbors running off, to take care of their own grain, and leaving the poor creature to his fate. His wife is bound, and she and his children carried off.” The numbers of prisoners taken in wars were, indeed, far too small to meet the demand for labor on such vast and countless works as Rameses undertook, for in the records of each campaign the returns, carefully given, are singularly insignificant, men preferring death to the horrors of slavery. He could only procure the toil required for works more numerous than those of all the

other kings of Egypt for 2,000 years, by driving off to them, as forced laborers, all the population he could venture to enslave, the Hebrews among them.

The tasks to which they were set included all that the plans of Rameses demanded. They were doubtless marched in gangs to the quarries to hew out huge blocks of granite and limestone, and then set to drag them to their respective destinations, or to ship them on rafts and pilot them down the Nile. They would be employed in digging canals; in making bricks and mixing mortar for the countless erections always in progress; in painfully raising the Nile waters into the canals for irrigation and their circulation over the land, as we still see it along the banks of the river, where the peasants, naked under the burning sun, work through the day, like pieces of machinery, drawing up the buckets of water from the stream, to the fields above. "All manner of service in the field," in short, would be exacted from them, besides all their other labor, which they put upon them with rigor.

"It is very hard to make the smooth road on which the colossus is to slide along," says an inscription of the period, "but how unspeakably harder to drag the huge mass like beasts of burden." There was no machinery then; little mechanical help; the strain lay almost wholly on human thews and sinews. "The arms of the workman," continues the inscription, "are utterly worn-out. His food is a mixture of all things vile; he can wash himself only once in a season. But that which above all is wretched is when he has to drag for a month together, over the soft yielding soil of the gardens of a mansion, a huge block of ten cubits by six." Egypt in all ages has been so marked by the oppression of its toiling thousands, that one of the crimes from which an Egyptian had to clear himself before the judge of the soul, was cruelty to them. Thirty thousand men died in this very century in digging out the Mahmoudieh Canal with their hands, without picks, or spades, or wheel-barrows—falling, worn-out with toil exacted from them by the blows of their pitiless taskmasters; and the monuments show similar misery to have been inflicted from the remotest ages. Doubtless the Hebrews suffered in the same way, and their groans and murmurs may well have taken the shape of those of the wretched fellahs of our own day, whose songs have such refrains as, "The chief of the village, may the dogs tear him, tear him, tear him;" "They starve us, they starve us;" "They beat us, they beat us"—"But there's someone above who will punish them well, who will punish them well."

The Bible statement, that the Hebrews "built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses," is strangely corroborated in the case of the latter by contemporary documents, which mention the Israelites under the name of Aperiu or Aberiu, the Egyptian pronunciation of their own way of naming themselves, as the "Iberim," or, as we say, Hebrews. In the first, a scribe called Kaonisar writes to his superior, the scribe Bekemptah, thus: "For your satisfaction I have obeyed the command you gave me, saying, Deliver their food to the soldiers, and also to the Aperiu who transport the stone for the great Bekhennu—depots and fortified magazines—of the king Rameses, the lover of Amon, which are under the charge of Ameneman, the chief of the Mazai, or gendarmerie. I give them rations each month according to your excellent instructions." The second document is from another scribe to his superior Hius, high official, of Rameses II. "I

have obeyed," says he, "your command to give provision to the Egyptian soldiers, and also to the Hebrews who transport the stones"—great blocks dragged from the other side of the river—"for the Sun-temple of Rameses-Miamun, on the southern part of Memphis." Mazai, or gendarmerie, a corps of foreign mercenaries drawn from Libya, and thus in no danger of sympathy with the oppressed, filled the hateful office of the under taskmasters, who punished the wretched gangs.—Hours with the Bible.

Note.—For the necessity and design of this bondage see article on page 227 of this paper entitled "Design and Necessity of the Bondage in Egypt."