And here we are at once assailed by formidable difficulties. As long as we confine ourselves to general views it may be accepted as historical that the Israelites really came out of Egypt under a great leader and legislator; but when we come to details, and to the events connected with Moses, and to a great extent supposed to have been written by him or taken from his journals, they are for the most part more wildly and hopelessly impossible than anything related of the earlier patriarchs, Abraham and Joseph. The story of his preservation in infancy is a variation of the myth common to so many nations, of an infant hero or god, whose life is sought by a wicked king, and who is miraculously saved. We find it in the myths of Khrishna, Buddha, Cyrus, Romulus, and others, and in the inscription by Sargon I. of Accade on his own tablet; he states himself to have been saved in an ark floated on the river Euphrates, just as Moses was on the Nile. When grown up he is represented first as the adopted son of Pharaoh's daughter, and then as a shepherd in the wilderness of Midian talking with the Lord in a fiery bush, who for the first time communicates his real name of Jehovah, which he says was not known to Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, although constantly used by them, and although men began to call him by that name in the time of Enos, Adam's grandson. At Jehovah's command Moses throws his rod on the ground, when it becomes a serpent from which he flies, and when he takes it up by the tail it becomes a rod again; and as a farther sign his hand is changed from sound to leprous as white as snow, and back again to sound, in a minute or two of time. On returning to Egypt Moses is represented as going ten times into the presence of Pharaoh demanding of him to let the Hebrews depart, and inflicting on Egypt a succession of plagues, each one more than sufficient to have convinced the king of the futility of opposing such supernatural powers, and to have made him only too anxious to get rid of the Hebrews from the land at any price. What could have been the condition of Egypt, if for seven days "the streams, the rivers, the ponds and pools, and even the water in the vessels of wood and of stone, through all the land of Egypt," had been really turned into blood? And what sort of magicians must they have been who could do the same with their enchantments?