Joseph also married in a strange land, yet he called the name of his first son Manasseh, because God had made him to forget his sorrows: but Moses remembered his. Neither wife nor child could charm away his home sickness; he called his firstborn Gershom, because he was a sojourner in a strange land. In truth, his whole life seems to have been a lonely one. Miriam is called “the sister of Aaron” even when joining in the song of Moses (xv. 20), and with Aaron she made common cause against their greater brother (Num. xii. 1–2). Zipporah endangered his life rather than obey the covenant of circumcision; she complied at last with a taunt (iv. 24–6), and did not again join him until his victory over Amalek raised his position to the utmost height (xviii. 2). His children are of no account, and his grandson is the founder of a dangerous and enduring schism (Judges xviii. 30, R.V.). There is much reason to see here the earliest example of the sad rule that a prophet is not without honour save in his own house; that the law of compensations reaches farther into life than men suppose; and high position and great powers are too often counterbalanced by the isolation of the heart. FOOTNOTES: [3] The same word is used for Noah’s ark, but not elsewhere; not, for example, of the ark in the Temple, the name of which occurs elsewhere in Scripture only of the “coffin” of Joseph, and the “chest” for the Temple revenues (Gen. 1. 26; 2 Chron. xxiv. 8, 10, 11.) [4] Or his sister, the daughter of a former Pharaoh. [5] Nor would it have made the women call their deliverer “an Egyptian,” for the Hebrew cast of features is very dissimilar. But Moses wore Egyptian dress, and the Egyptians worked mines in the peninsula, so that he was naturally taken for one of them. CHAPTER III. _THE BURNING BUSH._ ii. 23–iii. “In process of time the king of Egypt died,” probably the great Raamses, no other of whose dynasty had a reign which extended over the indicated period of time. If so, he had while living every reason to expect an immortal fame, as the greatest among Egyptian kings, a hero, a conqueror on three continents, a builder of magnificent works. But he has only won an immortal notoriety. “Every stone in his buildings was cemented in human blood.” The cause he persecuted has made deathless the banished refugee, and has gibbeted the great monarch as a tyrant, whose misplanned severities wrought the ruin of his successor and his army. Such are the reversals of popular judgment: and such the vanity of fame. For all the contemporary fame was his.