At this latter period they were in Kanaan. Whether in the interval a tribe, the Beni-Israel, went down into Egypt, is a subject on which Continental scholarship has its doubts. The early life of the tribe's leader and legislator is usually associated with Rameses II., a pharaoh of the XIX. dynasty. But it has been found that incidents connected with Moses must apparently have occurred, if they occurred at all, at a period not earlier than the XXVI. dynasty, which constitutes a minimum difference of seven hundred years. Yet, in view of the decalogue, with its curious analogy to the negative confession in the _Book of the Dead_; in view also of a practice surgical and possibly hygienic which, customary among the Egyptians, was adopted by the Jews; in view, further, of ceremonies and symbols peculiarly Egyptian that were also absorbed, a sojourn in Goshen there may have been. The spoiling of the Egyptians, a roguery on which Israel afterward prided herself, is a trait perhaps too typical to be lightly dismissed. On the other hand, if Moses were, which is at least problematic, and if, in addition to being, he was both the nephew of a pharaoh and the son-in-law of a priest, as such one to whom, in either quality, the arcana of the creed would be revealed, it becomes curious that nowhere in the Pentateuch is there any doctrine of a future life. Of the entire story, it may be that only the journey into the Sinaiatic peninsula is true, and of that there probably remained but tradition, on which history was based much later, by writers who had only surmises concerning the time and circumstances in which it occurred. Yet equally with the roguery, Moses may have been. Seen through modern criticism his figure fades though his name persists. To that name the Septuagint tried to give an Egyptian flavour. In their version it is always [Greek: Mouses], a compound derived from the Egyptian _mo_, water, and _uses_, saved from, or Saved-from-the-water.[32] Per contra, the Hebrew form Mosheh is, as already indicated, the same as the Babylonian Masu, a term which means at once leader and litterateur, in addition to being the cognomen of a god.[33] [Footnote 32: Josephus: Antiq. ii. 9.] [Footnote 33: Sayce: The Religion of the Babylonians.]