Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Teachers | Page 4

Jacob, and his brethren were
naturally jealous of him. So one day out on the range they sold him into
slavery to a passing caravan, and went home and told their father the
boy was dead, having been killed by a wild beast. To make the matter
plausible they took the coat of Joseph and smeared it with the blood of
a goat which they had killed. Nowadays, the coat would have been sent
to a chemist's laboratory and the blood-spots tested to see whether it
was the blood of beast or human. But Jacob believed the story and
mourned his son as dead.
Now Joseph was taken to Egypt and there arose to a position of
influence and power through his intelligence and diligence. How
eventually his brethren, starving, came to him for food, there being a
famine in their own land, is one of the most natural and beautiful
stories in all literature. It is a folklore legend, free from the fabulous,
and has all the corroborating marks of the actual.
For us it is history undisputed, unrefuted, because it is so natural. It
could all easily happen in various parts of the world even now. It shows
the identical traits of human nature that are alive and pulsing today.
Joseph having made himself known to his brethren induced some of
them and their neighbors to come down into Egypt, where the
pasturage was better and the water more sure, and settle there. The
Bible tells us that there were seventy of these settlers and gives us their
names.

These emigrants, called Israelites, or Children of Israel, account for the
presence of the enslaved people whom Moses led out of captivity three
hundred years later.
One thing seems quite sure, and that is that they were a peculiar people
then, with the pride of the desert in their veins, for they stood socially
aloof and did not mix with the Egyptians. They still had their own god
and clung to their own ways and customs.
That very naive account in the first chapter of Exodus of how they had
two midwives, "and the name of one was Shiphrah and the other Puah,"
is as fine in its elusive exactitude as an Uncle Remus story. Children
always want to know the names of people. These two Hebrew
midwives were bribed by the King of Egypt--ruler over twenty million
people--in person, to kill all the Hebrew boy babies. Then the account
states that Jehovah was pleased with these Hebrew women who proved
false to their master, and Jehovah rewarded them by giving them
houses.
This order to kill the Hebrew children must have gone into execution, if
at all, about the time of the birth of Moses, because Aaron, the brother
of Moses, and three years older, certainly was not killed.
Whether Moses was the son of Pharaoh's daughter, his father an
Israelite, or both of his parents were Israelites, is problematic. Royal
families are not apt to adopt an unknown waif into the royal household
and bring him up as their royal own, especially if this waif belongs to
what is regarded as an inferior race. The tie of motherhood is the only
one that could over-rule caste and override prejudice. If the daughter of
Pharaoh, or more properly "the Pharaoh," were the mother of Moses,
she had a better reason for hiding him in the bulrushes than did the
daughter of a Levite, for the order to kill these profitable workers is
extremely doubtful. The strength, skill and ability of the Israelites
formed a valuable acquisition to the Egyptians, and what they wanted
was more Israelites, not fewer.
Judging from the statement that there were only two midwives, there
were only a few hundred Israelites--perhaps between one and two

thousand, at most.
So leaving the legend of the childhood of Moses with just enough
mystery mixed in it to give it a perpetual piquancy, we learn that he
was brought up an Egyptian, as the son of Pharaoh's daughter, and that
it was she who gave him his name.
Philo and Josephus give various sidelights on the life and character of
Moses. The Midrash or Commentaries on the History of the Jews,
composed, added to or modified by many men, extending over a period
of twenty centuries, also add their weight, even though the value of
these Commentaries is conjectural.
Egyptian accounts of Moses and the Israelites come to us through
Hellenic sources, and very naturally are not complimentary. These
picture Moses, or Osarsiph, as they call him, as an agitator, an
undesirable citizen, who sought to overturn the government, and failing
in this, fled to the desert with a few hundred outlaws. They managed to
hold out against the forces sent to capture them, were gradually added
to by