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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Untitled Article
ments have yet been brought to light * About the year 2080 before Christ , a people distinguishable from the inhabitants of Egypt or the adjacent countries by their red hair and blue eyes , which seem to connect them with the tribes of the North , possessed themselves of the valley of the Nile , and established a sovereignty under one of their chiefs named Salatis . Under him and his successors they carried on a cruel war against the native
population with the hope of entirely destroying it , imprisoned the magistrates , burnt the cities , and laid the temples in ruins ; and having massacred all whom they could of the men capable of bearing arms , reduced the women and children to slavery . To the ravages of the shepherds M . Champollion ( Lettre II . a M . le due de Blacas , p . 8 ) attributes the almost entire
destruction of all the monuments of the preceding dynasties of Manetho . The native race of kings , however , was not extinct ; in a distant part of Egypt and in Nubia they still retained a precarious power , and at length succeeded in raising an insurrection against them . Misphrathoutmosis drove them from the rest of the country , and obliged them to confine themselves in the fortress of Avaris , on the frontiers of Arabia , constructed by their first kingv
Salatis ; and Thoutmosis finally compelled them to evacuate this place , and delivered his country from them for ever . The events of this war are recorded in the great historical basreliefs , of which Belzoni and the French commission have given plates . No wonder that " every shepherd should be an abomination to the Egyptians . " " The priests , " says M . Champollion , ( Lettre II . p . 142 , ) " neglected no means of keeping up in the minds of the Egyptians a profound horror for the Hykshos ; they covered the public monuments with the scene of their defeat and destruction ; and this patriotic
sentiment , consecrated by religion , had penetrated the minds of all the castes . They even trampled under foot the memory of these barbarians ; the shoes of the living and the dead which have been collected in Egypty have on their outer soles the figure of a Hykshds on his knees and loaded with chains . " With such recollections and feelings , can we wonder at the alarm which they afterwards felt at the increase of the Israelites in Goshen , at the means which they took to make them abandon their nomadic habits , and convert them into servile labourers , or even at the inhuman methods
to which they had recourse to check their growing population ? As the kings of Egypt are mentioned only by the title of Pharaoh in Qenesis and Exodus , it is . impossible to say with certainty in whose reign either the going down of the Israelites into Egypt or their departure took place . According to the common chronology , however , the Exodus which occurred 1492 B . C . must fall in the reign of Rameses V . or Amenophis-Rameses , the last of the eighteenth dynasty , and immediate predecessor of Sesostris . From this the eroiner down into Esrvot will of course be differently
calculated , according as the 400 or 430 years ( Gen . xv . 13 , Exod . xii . 40 , Acts viu 6 ) are reckoned from the commencement of the bondage of the Israelites , or from the promise to . Abraham . The martyr Stephen , following the Hebrew , the expression of which is not at all obscure , makes the " evil entreatnient" of the people to , have lasted 400 years ; which added to the " sojourning" of those whov tiad been born in Canaan , and in whose life-time they were kindly treated , agrees not only with the Hebrew but even with the reading of the Samaritan * in Exod xii , 40 , while
—• JYJr . Wellbeloved , who adopts the Samaritan reading , thus ' renders the verse : <• Now the sojournment pf the children of Israel and of their fathers who had dwelt in the tend of Canaan and in the land of Egypt , was 430 years / 11 This
Untitled Article
3 iq Biblical Gleaning ?*
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1827, page 316, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1796/page/4/
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