The "new king," "which knew not Joseph," is gen- erally thought bj' those who hold with us as to the previous history, to have been an Egyptian, and head of the 18th dj'nast)'. It seems at first sight extremely probable that the king who crushed, if he did not ex- pel the Shepherds, would be the first oppressor of the nation which they protected. Plausible as this theory appears, a close examination of the Biblical narrative seems to us to overthrow it. AVe read of the new king that — '• he said unto his people, Behold, the people of the children of Israel [are] more and mightier than we : come on, let us deal wiselj' with them, lest they multiply, and it come to i)ass that, when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our enemies, and fight against us, and [so] get them up out of the land" (Exod. i, 9, 10). Tlie Israelites are therefore more and stronger than the people of the opjtressor; the oppress- or fears war in Egj-pt, and that the Israelites would join his enemies ; he is not able at once to adopt open violence, and he therefore uses a subtle system to re- duce them by making them perform forced lal)or. and soon after takes the stronger measure of killing their male children. These conditions point to a divided country and a w-eak kingdom, and cannot, we think, apply to the time of the istli and 19th dynasties. The whole narrative of subsecpient events to the Exodus is consistent witli this conclusion, to which 'the use of universal terms does not offer any real objection.
When all Egypt is spoken of, it is not necessary either in Hebrew or in Egyptian that we should suppose the entire country to be strictly intended. If we con- clude, therefore, that the Exodus most probably oc- curred before the 18th dynast}-, we have to ascertain, if possible, whether the Pharaohs of the oppression ap- pear to have been Egyptians or Shepherds. The change of policy is in favor of their having been Egyp- tians, but is by no means conclusive, for there is no reason that all the foreigners should have had the same feeling towards the Israelites, and we have al- ready seen that the Egyptian Pharaohs and their sub- jects seem in general to have been friendly to them, throughout their historj', and that the Egyptians were privileged by the law, apparently on this account. It may be questioned whether the friendship of the two nations, even if merely a matter of policy, would have been as enduring as we know it to have been, had the Egyptians looked back on their conduct towards the Israelites as productive of great national calamities, or had the Israelites looked back upon the persecution as the work of the Egyptians. If the chronology be cor- rect, we can only decide in favor of the Shepherds. During the time to which the events are assigned there Avere no important lines but the Theban, and one or more of Shepherds. Lower Egj'pt, and especially its eastern part, must have been in the hands of the latter. The land of Goshen was in the eastern part of Lower Egj'pt : it was wholly under the control of the oppressors, whose capital or royal residence, at least in the case of the Pharaoh of the Exodus, lay very near to it. Manetho, according to the transcript of Africanus, speaks of three Shepherd dj'nasties, the 15th, 16th, and 17th, the last of which, according to the present text, was of Shepherds and Thebans, but this is probablj' incorrect, and the dynastj' should rath- er be considered as of Shepherds alone. It is difficult to choose between these three : a passage in Isaiah, however, which has been strangely overlooked, seems to alFord an indication which narrows the choice. "My people went down aforetime into EgA'pt to eo- journ there, and the Assyrian oppressed them without cause" (Hi, 4). This indicates that the oppressor was an Assyrian, and therefore not of the loth dynasty, which, according to Manetho, in the epitomes, was of Phoenicians, and opposed to the Assyrians (Josephus, Apion, i, 14). Among the names of kings of this pe- riod in the royal Turin papyrus (ed. Wilkinson) are two which appear to be Assyrian, so that ^\■e maj' rea- sonaVdy suppose that some of tlie foreign rulers were of that race. Their exact date, however, is undecided. It cannot be objected to the explanation we have of- fered that the title Pharaoh is applied to the kings connected with tlie Israelites, and that they must therefore have been natives, for it is almost certain that at least some of the Shepherd kings were Egyp- tianized, like Joseph, who received an Egyptian name, and Moses, who was supposed by the daughters of Jethro to be an Egyptian (Exod. ii, 19). It has been urged by the opponents of the chronological schemes that place the Exodus before the later part of the fourteenth century B.C., that the conquests of the Pharaohs of the isth, 19th, and 20th dj-nasties would have involved collisions with the Israelites had they been in those times already established in Palestine, whereas neither the Bible nor the monuments of Egypt indicate any such event. It has been overlooked bj' the advocates of the Rabbinical date of the Exodus that the al>scnce of any positive Palestinian names, except that of the Philistines, in the lists of peoples and places subject to these Pharaohs, and in the rec- ords of their wars, entirely destroys their argument; for while it shows that they did not conquer Palestine, it makes it impossible for us to decide on Egyptian evidence whether the Hebrews were then in that coun- try or not. Shishak's list, on the contrary, presents several well-known names of towns in Palestine, be-