his request, and to show the signs and wonders which alone, as he had been told (Ex. vii. 2-4), would break the spirit of the king.  The signs then followed each other at moderately short intervals, the entire series of the plagues not covering a longer space than about six months, from October till April.  None of the plagues affected the king greatly except the last, through which he lost his own eldest son, a bereavement mentioned in an inscription.  This loss, combined with the dread power shown in the infliction during one night of not less than a million of deaths, produced a complete revolution in the mind of the king, and made him as anxious at the moment to get rid of the Israelites out of his country as he had previously been anxious to retain them.  So he called for Moses and Aaron by night and said.  “Rise up, get you forth from among my people, both ye and the children of Israel, and go, serve the Lord, as ye have said.  Also take your flocks and your herds, as ye have said, and be gone; and bless me also” (Ex. xii. 31, 32).  Moses was prepared for the event, and had prepared his people.  All were ready, with their loins girded, their sandals on their feet, and their staves in their hands; the word was given, and the exodus began.  “The children of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand on foot that were men, beside children; and a mixed multitude went up also with them; and flocks, and herds, even very much cattle.”

Hereupon the king’s mind underwent another change.  “Unstable as water,” he was certain not to “excel.”  Learning that the Israelites, instead of marching away into the desert, had after reaching its edge turned southward, and were “entangled” in a corner of his territory, between high mountains on the one hand, and on the other the Red Sea, which then stretched far further to the north than at present, perhaps to Lake Timseh, at any rate as far as the “Bitter Lakes,” he thought he saw an opportunity of following and recovering the fugitives, whose services as bondsmen he highly valued.  Rapidly calling together such troops as were tolerably near at hand, he collected a considerable force of infantry and chariots—­of the latter more than six hundred—­and following upon the steps of the Hebrews, he caught them on the western shore of the Red Sea, encamped “between Migdol and the sea, over against Baal-Zephon.”  The exact spot cannot be fixed, on account of the alterations in the bed of the Red Sea, and the uncertainty of the ancient geography of Egypt, in which names so often repeat themselves; but it was probably some part of the region that is now dry land, between Suez and the southern extremity of the Bitter Lakes.  Here in high tides the sea and the lakes communicated; but on the evening of Menephthah’s arrival, an unusual ebb of the tide, cooperating with a “strong east wind” which held back the water of the Bitter Lakes, left the bed of the sea bare for a certain space; and the Israelites were thus able to cross during