‘There arose up a new king over Egypt which knew not Joseph.’ Commentators on the passage have often imagined that this event followed almost immediately upon the death of Joseph and his generation. So, too, it was supposed before the decipherment of the Assyrian inscriptions that the murder of Sennacherib took place immediately after his return from Palestine. In both cases the student had been misled by the brevity of the Hebrew narrative, and that foreshortening of the past which causes events to be grouped together even though they may have been separated by an interval of many years. In the present instance, however, the Biblical writer has done his best to indicate that the interval was a long one. Before the rise of ‘the new king which knew not Joseph,’ the children of Israel had had time to ‘increase abundantly,’ to ‘multiply’ so that ‘the land was filled with them.’ The family of Jacob had become a tribe, or rather a collection of tribes. They had become dangerous to their rulers; the Pharaoh is even made to say that they were ‘more and mightier than’ the Egyptians themselves. In case of invasion, they might assist the enemy and expose Egypt to another Asiatic conquest. Hence came the determination to transform them into public serfs, and even to destroy the males altogether. The free Bedâwin-like settlers in Goshen, who had kept apart from their Egyptian neighbours, and had been unwilling to perform even agricultural work, were made the slaves of the State. They were taken from their herds and sheep, from their independent life on the outskirts of the Delta, and compelled to toil under the lash of the Egyptian taskmaster and build for the Pharaoh his ‘treasure-cities’ of Pithom and Raamses.