Menephtah was no doubt the new Pharaoh whom the brothers accosted so boldly. What we glean of him elsewhere is highly suggestive of some grave event left unrecorded, exhibiting to us a man of uncontrollable temper yet of broken courage, a ruthless, godless, daunted man. There is a legend that he once hurled his spear at the Nile when its floods rose too high, and was punished with ten years of blindness. In the Libyan war, after fixing a time when he should join his vanguard, with the main army, a celestial vision forbade him to keep his word in person, and the victory was gained by his lieutenants. In another war, he boasts of having slaughtered the people and set fire to them, and netted the entire country as men net birds. Forty years then elapse without war and without any great buildings; there are seditions and internal troubles, and the dynasty closes with his son.[9] All this is exactly what we should expect, if a series of tremendous blows had depopulated a country, abolished an army, and removed two millions of the working classes in one mass. But it will be understood that this identification, concerning which there is now a very general consent of competent authorities, implies that the Pharaoh was not himself engulfed with his army. Nothing is on the other side except a poetic assertion in Psalm cxxxvi. 15, which is not that God destroyed, but that He “shook off” Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea, because His mercy endureth for ever. To this king, then, whose audacious family had usurped the symbols of deity for its head-dress, and whose father boasted that in battle “he became like the god Mentu” and “was as Baal,” the brothers came as yet without miracle, with no credentials except from slaves, and said, “Thus saith Jehovah, the God of Israel, Let My people go, that they may hold a feast unto Me in the wilderness.” The issue was distinctly raised: did Israel belong to Jehovah or to the king? And Pharaoh answered, with equal decision, “Who is Jehovah, that I should hearken unto His voice? I know not Jehovah, and what is more, I will not let Israel go.”