Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/221

Rh led the tribes across the Jordan. My friend, the Rev. Dr. Hitchcock of New York, President of the Union Theological Seminary, has kindly furnished the following table of the time of the Israelites in their successive journeyings:

This long desert life of the Israelites raises the question, often suggested before, but never so pressing as now, as to the means of their subsistence. How could two millions and a half of people find bread in the wilderness to keep them alive for thirty-seven years? Leaving for the moment the question of the miraculous supply of food, the problem may perhaps be solved in part by considering both the mode of life of the Israelites and the greater fertility of the country at the time of the Exodus in comparison with what it is to-day. The children of Israel were not unaccustomed to the desert. The patriarchs lived on it before they went down into Egypt. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were "dwellers in tabernacles," that is, in tents. They were nomads as truly as the Bedaween of the present day. They lived by their flocks and herds, moving from place to place, wherever they could find pasturage. When Joseph's brethren stood before Pharaoh, and he asked them of their occupation, they said "Thy servants are shepherds." For that reason he appointed them their place of abode not in Memphis, the capital, nor in the other cities of Egypt, but in the land of Goshen, where they could follow their accustomed occupation.