Page:David Baron – The History of the Ten "Lost" Tribes.djvu/78

 brother, he fled with his fifty daughters to Argos in Peloponnessus, where he was elected king by the Argives in place of Gelanor, the reigning monarch. Thither, however, he was followed by the fifty sons of Ægyptus, who demanded his daughters for their wives. Danaus complied with their request, but gave to each of his daughters a dagger with which to kill their husbands in the bridal night. All the sons of Ægyptus were thus murdered, with but one exception. The life of Lynceus was spared by his wife, Hypermnestra, who, according to the legend, afterwards avenged the death of his forty-nine brothers by killing his father-in-law Danaus.

The fifty daughters of Danaus, known as "the Danaides," were punished in Hades for their crime by being compelled everlastingly to pour water into a sieve. Note also that the fable propagated by Manetho that the Jews were expelled from Egypt as lepers, and the legend of Hecatæus, quoted by Diodorus Siculus that, "the most distinguished of these expelled followed Danaus and Cadmus into Greece, but the greater number were led by Moses into Judea," is also accepted as history. Some of these same pagan writers believed that the object of worship in the Holy of Holies was the head of an ass, and other absurdities of the same nature. I wonder if Anglo-Israel "theologians" accept this also as "history."

I may here add that the identification by Anglo-Israel writers of Tea, or Tephi, the heroine of some Irish ballads, with a princess of the royal house of Judah, whom Jeremiah brought to Ireland in one of the ships of Dan, and who married Esincaid, King of Ulster, and so became the ancestress of the royal houses of Ireland and Scotland, and subsequently of England—has just as much "history" for its basis as the identification of Danaus with Dan, or of Ægyptus with Joseph.

The value of Irish legends and ballads (upon which