Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/65

 co-existence in the Pentateuch of the documents called Elohistic and Jehovistic is in itself no argument against the authorship of Moses. But the fact that these documents continue to run through the book of Joshua furnishes an argument which admits of no reply. The book of Joshua and the book of Exodus are parts of one and the same work, and the historical allusions in the book of Joshua have compelled some of the commentators who pride themselves most upon their orthodoxy (Matthew Henry, for instance), to refer the authorship of it to times subsequent to the foundation of the Hebrew monarchy.

But though the book of Exodus as a whole may not be the work of a contemporary, there is really no reason for doubting the accuracy of the statement about Pithom and Rameses. Egyptian history renders it most probable that Moses was a contemporary of the great Rameses. The exodus of the Israelites cannot with any probability be brought lower down than 1310 years before Christ, and it is about 2050 before this that I would place the lowest limit for estimating the beginning of the historical Egyptian monarchy. The date of the Great Pyramid cannot be more recent than 3000 B.C.

Pre-historic Antiquity of Human Race in Egypt.

This is undoubtedly a great and venerable antiquity, but it is after all very inferior to the antiquity of the