upon Joseph,” but finding that he rejected her shameless advances, she accused him of having offered violence to her person.  Being cast into prison, he astonished his companions in misfortune by his skill in reading dreams, and was summoned to Court to interpret to the king his dream of the seven lean kine who had devoured the seven fat kine, which he did by representing the latter as seven years of abundance, of which the crops should be swallowed up by seven years of famine.  Joseph was thereupon raised by Pharaoh to the rank of prime minister.  He stored up the surplus of the abundant harvests, and as soon as the famine broke out, distributed the corn to the hunger-stricken people in exchange for their silver and gold, and for their flocks and fields.  Hence it was,that the whole of the Nile valley, with the exception of the lands belonging to the priests, gradually passed into the possession of the royal treasury.  Meanwhile his brethren, who also suffered from the famine, came down into Egypt to buy corn.  Joseph revealed himself to them, pardoned the wrong they had done him, and presented them to the Pharaoh.  “And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, Say unto thy brethren, This do ye; lade your beasts, and go, get you unto the land of Canaan:  and take your father and your household, and come unto me:  and I will give you the good of the land of Egypt, and ye shall eat the fat of the land.”  Jacob thereupon raised his camp and came to Beersheba, where he offered sacrifices to the God of his father Isaac; and Jahveh commanded him to go down into Egypt, saying, “I will there make of thee a great nation:  I will go down with thee into Egypt:  and I will also surely bring thee up again:  and Joseph shall put his hand upon thine eyes.”  The whole family were installed by Pharaoh in the province of Goshen, as far as possible from the centres of the native population, “for every shepherd is an abomination unto the Egyptians.”

In the midst of these stern yet touching narratives in which the Hebrews of the times of the Kings delighted to trace the history of their remote ancestors, one important fact arrests our attention:  the Beni-Israel quitted Southern Syria and settled on the banks of the Nile.  They had remained for a considerable time in what was known later as the mountains of Judah.  Hebron had served as their rallying-point; the broad but scantily watered wadys separating the cultivated lands from the desert, were to them a patrimony, which they shared with the inhabitants of the neighbouring towns.  Every year, in the spring, they led their flocks to browse on the thin herbage growing in the bottoms of the valleys, removing them to another district only when the supply of fodder was exhausted.  The women span, wove, fashioned garments, baked bread, cooked the viands, and devoted themselves to the care of the younger children, whom they suckled beyond the usual period.  The men lived like the Bedouin—­periods of activity alternating regularly with times of idleness, and the daily routine, with its simple duties and casual work, often gave place to quarrels for the possession of some rich pasturage or some never-failing well.