But before the transformation could be fully accomplished, a long season of growth and preparation was needful.  Egypt, and not Canaan, was to be the land in which the Chosen People should be trained for their future work.  Canaan itself was to pass under Egyptian domination, and to replace the influence of Babylonian culture by that of Egypt.  It was a new world and a new civilization into which the descendants of Jacob were destined to emerge when finally they escaped from the fiery furnace of Egyptian bondage.  The Egypt known to Jacob was an Egypt over which Asiatic princes ruled, and whose vizier was himself a Hebrew.  It was the Egypt of the Hyksos conquerors, whose capital was Zoan, on the frontiers of Asia, and whose people were the slaves of an Asiatic stranger.  The Egypt quitted by his descendants was one which had subjected Asia to itself, and had carried the spoils of Syria to its splendid capital in the far south.  The Asiatic wave had been rolled back from the banks of the Nile, and Egyptian conquest and culture had overflooded Asia as far as the Euphrates.

But it was not Egypt alone which had undergone a change.  The Canaan of Abraham and Jacob looked to Babylonia for its civilization, its literature, and its laws.  Its princes recognized at times the supremacy of the Babylonian sovereigns, and the deities of Babylonia were worshipped in its midst.  The Canaan of Moses had long been a province of the Egyptian Empire; Egyptian rule had been substituted for that of Babylon, and the manners and customs of Egypt had penetrated deeply into the minds of its inhabitants.  The Hittite invasion from the north had blocked the high-road to Babylonia, and diverted the trade of Palestine towards the west and the south.  While Abraham, the native of Ur, and the emigrant from Harran, had found himself in Canaan, and even at Zoan, still within the sphere of the influences among which he had grown up, the fugitives from Egypt entered on the invasion of a country which had but just been delivered from the yoke of the Pharaohs.  It was an Egyptian Canaan that the Israelites were called upon to subdue, and it was fitting therefore that they should have been made ready for the task by their long sojourn in the land of Goshen.

How that sojourn came about, it is not for us to recount.  The story of Joseph is too familiar to be repeated, though we are but just beginning to learn how true it is, in all its details, to the facts which Egyptian research is bringing more and more fully to light.  We see the Midianite and Ishmaelite caravan passing Dothan—­still known by its ancient name—­with their bales of spicery from Gilead for the dwellers in the Delta, and carrying away with them the young Hebrew slave.  We watch his rise in the house of his Egyptian master, his wrongful imprisonment and sudden exaltation when he sits by the side of Pharaoh and governs Egypt in the name of the king.  We read the pathetic story of the old father sending