** Numb. xxi. 17, 18.  The context makes it certain that this song was sung at Beer, beyond the Arnon, in the land of Moab.  It has long been recognised that it had a special reference, and that it refers to an incident in the wanderings of the people through the desert.

The wanderers took possession of this region after some successful brushes with the enemy, and settled there, without being further troubled by their neighbours or by their former masters.  The Egyptians, indeed, absorbed in their civil discords, or in wars with foreign nations, soon forgot their escaped slaves, and never troubled themselves for centuries over what had become of the poor wretches, until in the reign of the Ptolemies, when they had learned from the Bible something of the people of God, they began to seek in their own annals for traces of their sojourn in Egypt and of their departure from the country.  A new version of the Exodus was the result, in which Hebrew tradition was clumsily blended with the materials of a semi-historical romance, of which Amenothes III. was the hero.  His minister and namesake, Amenothes, son of Hapu, left ineffaceable impressions on the minds of the inhabitants of Thebes:  he not only erected the colossal figures in the Amenophium, but he constructed the chapel at Deir el-Medineh, which was afterwards restored in Ptolemaic times, and where he continued to be worshipped as long as the Egyptian religion lasted.  Profound knowledge of the mysteries of magic were attributed to him, as in later times to Prince Khamoisit, son of Ramses II.  On this subject he wrote certain works which maintained their reputation for more than a thousand years after his death,* and all that was known about him marked him out for the important part he came to play in those romantic stories so popular among the Egyptians.

     * One of these books, which is mentioned in several
     religious texts, is preserved in the Louvre Papyrus.

The Pharaoh in whose good graces he lived had a desire, we are informed, to behold the gods, after the example of his ancestor Horus.  The son of Hapu, or Pa-Apis, informed him that he could not succeed in his design until he had expelled from the country all the lepers and unclean persons who contaminated it.  Acting on this information, he brought together all those who suffered from physical defects, and confined them, to the number of eighty thousand, in the quarries of Turah.  There were priests among them, and the gods became wrathful at the treatment to which their servants were exposed; the soothsayer, therefore, fearing the divine anger, predicted that certain people would shortly arise who, forming an alliance with the Unclean, would, together with them, hold sway in Egypt for thirteen years.  He then committed suicide, but the king nevertheless had compassion on the outcasts, and granted to them, for their exclusive use, the town of Avaris, which had been deserted since the