Here the Israelites alone are described as without local habitation. They alone had no ‘land’ in which they dwelt, and which was called after their name. It would seem, therefore, that when the song was composed they had already fled from Egypt and been lost in the unknown recesses of the eastern desert. But the poet knew that they were of Canaanitish origin; that they were, in fact, the kinsmen of the Horites of Southern Palestine. Their misfortunes, consequently, were equally the misfortunes of ‘Khar,’ whose women had been made as widows since the male seed of Israel had been cut off.[158] After the fashion of court-poets, the author of the hymn of victory is not careful about ascribing to his royal master such successes as he could himself really claim. He has skilfully combined the victories of Meneptah with those of his father, and given him the credit of conquests which he had not made. The Hittites had been ‘tranquillised’ by Ramses II., not by Meneptah, and Canaan had been the conquest of Ramses and his father Seti. We may accordingly conclude that in the case of the Israelites also Meneptah is made to claim what does not properly belong to him. According to the book of Exodus, it was the Pharaoh of the Oppression rather than the Pharaoh of the Exodus who ordered that ‘every son’ should be ‘cast into the river,’ and only the daughters saved alive. The agreement, however, between the Biblical narrative and the expression used on the stela of Meneptah is very remarkable. It is almost as if the writer of Exodus had had the inscription before him. In both it is the male seed which we are told was destroyed: the women were left as widows, for all ‘the men children’ were cut off. The victory over the Israelites, of which the poet boasts, was a victory obtained by slaying, like Herod, all the children who were males. Nevertheless, ‘the people multiplied.’ It was impossible to carry out literally the order of the Pharaoh, and there must have been many children who were saved from death. Among these was Moses, the future legislator of his race. The story of his preservation is familiar to every one. We are told how his mother made ‘an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.’ Then the daughter of the Pharaoh came to bathe, and taking compassion on the child, brought him up as her own son. A similar story had been told centuries before of Sargon of Akkad, the great Babylonian conqueror and lawgiver. He, too, it was said, had been placed by his mother ‘in an ark of reeds, the mouth whereof she closed with pitch,’ and then launched it on the waters of the Euphrates. The child was carried to Akki the irrigator, who adopted him as his son, and brought him up until the day came when, through the help of the goddess Istar, the true origin and birth of the hero were made known, and he became one of the mightiest of the Babylonian kings.