If the Israelites, as we now may call them--the tribe of which Jacob, who was also called Israel, was the head--were in the south of Judah for 600 years, between the time that they came from Chaldæa and the time that they went into the land of Goshen, it must have been in somewhere about the year 1700 B.C. that they made this later journey. That is 200 years before the rule of the famous eighteenth dynasty. And in 1700 B.C. the dynasty then ruling in Egypt was the so-called Hyksos dynasty. It was also called the dynasty of the Shepherd Kings. The Egyptians, as we have seen, had become weakened as a nation. They were constantly quarrelling among themselves, rather as the old English barons used to quarrel among themselves or against the king. The result was that foreign invaders came in from time to time, in the course of the story, and took the kingship for a while, excluding all the native Egyptian great men from the throne. These Hyksos, who had the rule in Egypt when the Israelites were welcomed there, were invaders of this kind, foreigners who had seized the throne and the {74} power. They were shepherds, living the pastoral life--though perhaps they left off that when they became the rulers of Egypt--and wherever they came from, whether direct from Arabia or, as is more likely, from farther north, probably from Syria, all scholars are, I think, agreed that they were Semites. Josephus, the historian of the Jews, asserts that they actually were the Israelites. Modern historians think him mistaken there. But, though not Israelites, they were almost certainly of the same Arabian origin. And there you have the answer to the question how it came about that the Israelites found a welcome in Egypt. The powerful people in the country were their relations. And so things went well with them for many years, perhaps about three or four hundred; but other powers--"a Pharaoh that knew not Joseph"--at length threw off the yoke of the Hyksos, the Shepherds, and took the throne from them. The Israelites were shown no favour then. They were set hard tasks, were treated like slaves, until finally, under the leadership of a very great man and prophet, Moses, they decided to flee away into the desert, away from the land of Goshen, in which they were made so unhappy, although it was a fertile land. [Sidenote: After the Exodus] Probably they were very useful slaves and tillers of the soil, and probably that was the reason why, as we are told in the Bible, Pharaoh was so unwilling to let them go. At length, however, go they did--only, as we are further told, to be pursued, and only, as the Bible also tells us, to be saved by a miracle at the passage of the Red Sea.