Egyptian belief and modern thought / by James Bonwick.

  • James Bonwick
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Egyptian belief and modern thought / by James Bonwick. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    461/474 (page 447)
    THE EXODUS. T LLUSTRATIONS of Bible History from the monuments of Egypt J- are always welcomed, though they do not enter into the scope of the present work. Yet the writer would venture upon a brief reference to a remarkable statement of M. Brugsch, so many years resident in Egypt. Objecting as many had done to the popular tradition of Moses crossing the Red Sea at Suez, he examined monuments on the spot in search of names and sites of ancient cities, placing them in relation to the accounts in Scripture, and so obtained some singular results. Goshen, on the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, may still be traced by ruins. When several of the old beds, by which the river found its lazy way through low lands to the sea, disappeared in being silted up, or raised by subterranean forces, the fruitful Goshen became a desert. to speak, is an artificial land, dependent upon man’s atten- tion to the annual inundation and the storage of waters. Intestinal commotions and foreign invasions produced this neglect of the canals and mounds. There has been, also, a great change in the course of the main stream itself, affecting the distribution of settlements. The Red Sea, too, which is now closed at Suez, ran formerly higher up into the country, as far as the Bitter Lakes, so-called. An elevation of Egypt threw back the waters southward to Suez. Did the Israelites cross before the recession of the Red Sea.? or did they cross many miles above Suez ? ’ M. Brugsch determines, after years of research on the spot, that they marched eastward from Ramses to the crossing of the water, and not southward. He then states that they passed north-eastwardly toward, but not through, the land of the Philistines, going along a narrow spit of sand beside the Mediterranean Sea, till they gained the extreme north-eastern position at Baalzephon, on the Mediterranean, not far from the boundary between Egypt and Palestine.