Joseph, Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham are heroes of the race, the first two being at the same time tribal names. The last three have been revered at celebrated sanctuaries; and it must not be overlooked that the sanctuary of the first ancestor is the least important one. Moreover, it is a fact, proved by the history of different sanctuaries of the land, that those of Israel were considered sacred by the original inhabitants. This is the case at Sichem and Gibeon; Bethel was likewise a Canaanitish town in earlier times. Hebron was Edomitish, probably in the first place Horitish, and the very name of Beersheba shows its Canaanitish origin. If the ancient Israelites took over the sanctuaries from the original Canaanitish inhabitants, as we know definitely concerning some and must surmise in the case of others, and if they nevertheless maintain that these sanctuaries were founded by their fathers, the object of this assertion is merely to gain a legal title to the possession of these pre-Israelitic sacred spots, and to obliterate the fact of their non-Israelitish origin. We shall have to go even farther and say that the Israelites either adopted from the Canaanites the hero that was honoured in those places, or that they there localised a certain Hebraic hero. But in both cases there is no evidence of a pre-Egyptian sojourn of Israelitish families in the land west of Jordan. Moreover, the comparatively recent origin of the patriarchical tradition must be borne in mind. It is not quite so bad, though not essentially better, with the question of the residence of Israel in Egypt before its migration to the land east of Jordan. That, in spite of the most anxious search of apologetic Egyptologists and theologians, no trace of Moses and the Hebrews has been found in the Egyptian records is just as suspicious as the fact that the Hebrew account says nothing about all that happened between the time of Joseph and that of Moses. It seems as if the flight of story-spinning imagination had been sufficient to transpose both the historical personage of Moses and the eponymous hero, Joseph, together with the eponyms of the two tribes descended from him, to Egypt, but not to fill out the intervening period. Egypt has, however, been too often for longer or shorter periods the residence of Semitic families for one to dare to deny the possibility that some Hebrew tribes or families stayed in Egypt. But that the Hebrew people, to say nothing of the race of Israel, did not do so, follows necessarily from the origin of these terms.