=Jewish Refugees in Egypt.= After the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. the Jews were to be found in three great centres--Egypt, Babylonia, and Palestine. Egypt, because of its friendly attitude toward the Jews and its nearness to southern Palestine, was the refuge to which most of the Jewish fugitives fled. Inasmuch as the approach of the Chaldean armies was from the north, the main highway running south from Hebron through the solitary desert was the most natural line of escape. The result was that a very large proportion of the Jewish race were to be found from this time on in the land of the Nile. Even before the final destruction of Jerusalem, both Jeremiah and Ezekiel addressed the Jewish refugees in Egypt. They were found in four important towns. The two nearest to Palestine were Migdol and Tahpanhes. Migdol means tower or fortress, and the reference is evidently to one of the frontier towns that guarded the eastern boundary of Egypt. It was probably the Migdolos mentioned in the _Itinerarium Antonini_, and was situated midway between Pelusium on the Mediterranean coast and Sele, a little west of the Crocodile Lake, the present Lake Timsah. This would identify it with the ruins known as the Tell es-Semut, twelve miles southwest of Pelusium, beside the ancient caravan route that ran from Palestine to Egypt. [Illustration: BABYLONIAN EMPIRE PERSIAN EMPIRE ALEXANDER'S EMPIRE THE M.-N. CO. ] =Situation of Tahpanhes.= Tahpanhes, the biblical name of the Græco-Egyptian city, Daphne, is represented by the modern Tell Defenneh. It lay on the right bank of the Pelusiac branch of the Nile and close to the caravan route from Palestine. On the north was the marshy Lake Menzaleh. It was, however, close to the fertile lands of the Nile Delta and from the days of Psamtik I an important military and commercial town. Here were settled Greek and Phœnician colonists, and here the Jews who fled with Jeremiah after the murder of Gedaliah found refuge. Here and at Migdol the refugees were in closest touch with their kinsmen who had remained behind in Palestine and were in a position to return thither whenever conditions were favorable. They were also in the midst of a cosmopolitan life that offered them ample opportunity to engage in trade, which must have been the chief occupation of these semi-desert towns. =Memphis.= A third home of Jewish colonists in Egypt was Noph, which was the biblical designation of the sacred city of Memphis. This great city lay ten miles south of Cairo, at the southern end of the Nile Delta. It was a large metropolitan city, with an exceedingly diverse population. Herodotus found in the vicinity of the Egyptian temple of Ptah a Tyrian colony with a temple dedicated to the "foreign Aphrodite." Here were probably settled the Jews who had decided to make permanent homes in Egypt, and who may have reared here a temple to Jehovah.