The Pulpit Commentary — Exodus — Volume 1 — Section 31

senao on the monument representing brick- which "expresses e. mixture of loathing and muking, which has been supposed by some to alarm"(' Speaker's Commentary,'vol. i. pt. I, be o picture of the Hebrews at work. (See p. 251). Kalisch translates forcibly, if in- Cook, in the' Speuker'e Commentary,' vol. i. elegantly-" They had a horror of the children pt. i. p. 253, ond compare Brugsch, • History of of Israel." Egypt,' vol. i. p. 376.) To e.flliot them with Ver. 13.-The Egyptians made the chil- their burdens. Among the tasks set the dren of Israel to serve with rigour. The !abourem in the representation above e.lluded word translated rigour is a very rare one. U to are the carrying of huge lamps of clay and is derived from a root which means " to break of water-jam on one shoulder, and also the in pieces, to crush." The " rigour " would ba conveyance of bricks from pince to place by shown especially in the free use of the stick. means of a yoke. They built for Pharaoh by the taskmaster, and in the prolongation of treasure-oities, Pithom and Baamsea. By the hours of work. " treasure - oities " we are to understand Ver. 14.-They me.de their lives bitter "store-cities," or "cities of store," as the same with hard bondage, in morter and in word is translated in 1 K. ix. 19 and 2 Chr. briok. While stone was the material chiefly viii. 4. Such cities contained depots of pro- employed by the Egyptians for their grand visions and magazines of arms. They were edinces, temples, pa.laces, treasuries, and the genere.lly to be found on all assailable like, brick was also made use of to a larg~ frontiers in ancient as in modem times. extent for inferior buildings, for tombs, (Compare 2 Ohr. xi. 5, 12; xxxiii. 28, etc.) dwelling-houses, walls of towns, forts, enclo- Of the cities here mentioned, which the sures of temples, etc. There are example9 of Israelites are said to have "built," or helped its employment in pyramids (Herod. ii. 136 ; to build, Pithom is in all probability the Vyse, 'Pyramids of Gizeh.' vol. iii. pp. 57-71); Patamos of Herodotus (ii. 158), which was but only at a time long anterior to the nine- not far from Bubastis, now Tel-Basta. Its teenth and even to the eighteenth dynasty. exact site is uncertain, but if identical with If the Pharaoh of the present passage was the Thou, or Thoum, of the ' Itinerary of An- Seti I., the bricks made may have been tonine,' it must have lain north of the Canal of destined in the main for that great wall which Necho, not south, where most maps pince it. he commenced, but did not live to complete, The word means " abode of the sun," or rather between Pelusium and Heliopolis, which was " of the setting sun," ce.lled by the Egyptians to secure his eo.stem frontier (Birch, ' Egypt Tam, or Atum. Names formed on the model from the Earliest Times,' p. 125). All manner were very common under the nineteenth of labour in the :field. The Israelitish dynasty, Rameses II. having built a Pa-Ra, colony was origine.lly employed to a large a Pa-Ammon, and a Pa-Phthah in Nubia extent in tending the royal flocks and herds (Brugsch, 'History of Egypt,' vol. ii. p. 90). (Gen. xlvii. 6). At e. later date many of Pa-Tum itself has not been found among the them were engaged in agricultural operations cities of this period (ib. p. 99), but appears in (Dent. xi. 10). These, in Egypt, are in some the records of the twentieth dynasty as a pince respects light, e.g. preparing the land and where the Setting-Sun god had a treosury ploughing, whence the remark of Herodotus (' Records of the Past,' vol. vi. p. 54). The (ii. 14); but in other respects exceedingly name Baameee is probably put for Pa-Ra.meses heavy. There is no country where care and (as Thoum for Po.-Tum), a city frequently labour are so constantly needed during the mentioned in the inscriptions of the nineteenth whole of the year. The inandation necessi- dynasty, and particularly favoured by Ra- tates extreme watchfulness, to save cattle, to meses II., whose city it wo.s especie.lly called prevent the houses and the farmyards from (' Records of the Past,' vol. ii. p. 77 ; vol. vi. being inundated, and the embankments from p. 13), and by whom it was greatly enlarged, being washed a.way. The cultivation is contin- if not wholly built. We incline to believe uous throughout the whole of the year; and suc- that the building was commenced by Seti, cess depends upon a system of irrigation that who named the p!llCe, es he did his great requires constant labour and unremitting atten- temple, the Rameseum, after his father. The tion. If the " labour in the field " included, city was, according to Brugsch, e. sort of as Josephus supposed (1.s.c.), the cutting of suburb of Tanis (' History of Egypt,' vol. ii. canals, their lives would indeed have been p. 94 ). It was a magnificent place, and "made bitter." There is no such exhausting under Ro.meses II. and his son Menephtbah toil as that of working under the hot Egyptiilll was the ordinary residence of ihe court. sun, with the feet in water, in an open cutting, Hence the miracles of Moses are said to have where there can be no shade, and scarcely a been wrought " in the field of Zoan,'' i.e. ijie breath of air, from sunrise to sunset, as force1l country about Tanis (Ps. lxxviii. 12, 43). • labourers are genernlly required to do. Me- Ver. 12.-They were giieved because of . hemet Ali lost 20,000 lnboarers out of 150,000 the ohildren of Israel. The word grieved in the constn1c.tion of the Alexandrian Canul very insufficiently renders the Hebrew verb, towards the middle of the present century  12 THE BOOK OF EXODUS. [oB, I. 7-14,