Before the Israelites actually reached the sacred mountain, they had to make more than one encampment in ‘the Wilderness of Sin.’ The itinerary in the book of Numbers gives the names of three—Dophkah, Alush, and Rephidim—the narrative mentions only the last. Rephidim, the ‘Encampments,’ was the scene of the first conflict the Israelites were called upon to face. Here they were attacked by the Amalekites, the Bedâwin tribes who still consider the desert as their own, and whose hand is against all that pass through it. The attack was repulsed, but not without loss, and the remembrance of it never faded from the minds of the Hebrew people. There was henceforth to be war between Amalek and Israel ‘from generation to generation,’ until the Bedâwin marauders of the desert should be destroyed. The Song of Deborah (Judg. v. 14) tells us how the struggle was continued after the settlement in Canaan, and the first Israelitish king did his utmost to root out these pests of the Hebrew borderland. Saul smote them, it is said, from Havilah to Shur (1 Sam. xv. 7), from the ‘sandy’ desert of Arabia Petræa to the great Wall of Egypt. And the Hebrew writer expressly adds that these were the same Amalekites as those who had lain in wait for Israel ‘in the way when he came up from Egypt.’ There were no Amalekites in the Sinaitic peninsula; the desert in which they ranged was that which adjoined Edom, and was known to the ancient Babylonians as the ‘land of Melukhkha.’ Hence it was that Edomites and Amalekites were mingled together, and that Amalek was counted by the genealogists a grandson of Esau. The battle at Rephidim was followed by the visit of the father-in-law of Moses, Jethro, ‘the priest of Midian.’ The visit was natural, for the real Sinai lay on the frontier of Midian. It was while Moses was feeding the flock of Jethro that he had first come to it and received his commission from Yahveh. Here, therefore, at ‘the Mount of God,’ he was within hail of his old home.