servants’ time from dawn till dark must be spent in scrabbling stubble out of the fields? The blame is not ours but Pharaoh’s and his overseers’, who deal unjustly with his servants.’

Then said Pharaoh: ‘Return thanks to what gods you have if, ere night come, you hang not by the neck to the loftiest gallows in Egypt. It is not because you have too much but too little to do that you come flocking out of Goshen in a rebellious rabble to make complaint. You are idle: you are idle! This also is why I am pestered with men of your race, puffed up with pride and folly, and asserting that some God requires your sacrifices in the sands of the desert. Begone from out of the city and trouble Pharaoh no more, lest the full vengeance of his wrath fall upon you, and that soon!’

And he decreed that the daily labour of the Hebrews should not be reduced by a single brick. The foremen of the slave-gangs were driven like sheep to the slaughter from out of the city. Their appeal to Pharaoh had left them in worse straits than before. They were indeed in evil case; on the one side an implacable tyrant and his overseers; and on the other the resentment of the Israelites who, wornout with this double toil, worked under them and for whom they were answerable.

As they went on their way, disputing together and racked with the rough usage they had received, they encountered Moses and Aaron. Eager for news of what had passed, they had come out to meet them. The mob raged with fury at sight of them.

‘Be God our witness of the evil you have brought on us,’ they shouted against them, ‘and may he judge between us and reward you as you deserve! You have poisoned the mind of Pharaoh against us, and made us to stink in the nostrils of all Egypt. And now because of your meddlings he will not rest until he has destroyed us altogether.’

Moses turned away and left them, their menaces and reproaches ringing in his ears. As soon as he was alone, in anguish of soul he poured out all that was in his heart to the Lord. All that he had attempted had come to nothing. Pharaoh had not only contemptuously rejected his petition, but had avenged himself on the Israelites and embittered them against himself.

‘O Lord God,’ he cried in his misery, ‘why hast thou sent me, and yet hast forsaken me? All that I do is in vain.’

And as he prayed, his mind became more serene. And the Lord comforted Moses in the solitude of his communion with him.

‘I am Jehovah the Lord God,’ he said, ‘who appeared unto Abraham and Isaac and Jacob; I am the Almighty whom they themselves worshipped. But they knew me only in part and could conceive of me only as their own hearts revealed to them. They knew not that I am the Eternal, who was and is and ever shall be. Yet it was I the Lord who established my covenant with them, that I would give the land of Canaan—the land wherein they themselves sojourned—to their children’s children. Speak again to my people. Bid them have faith and be not cast down. The Eternal will be their salvation, and will redeem them from all their grief and woe.

‘But if heartsick and impatient and made desperate by the cruelties they endure, they reject thee, and refuse to listen to thee, then do thou thyself return again to Pharaoh, and in all things as I bid thee, do. Stubborn with pride is the heart of Pharaoh, and his eyes are darkened. But my wonders shall be revealed, and a day shall come when thou thyself shalt be as a God to him, and he will humble himself before thee and plead with thee to intercede with the Lord of Hosts on his behalf, lest he himself be destroyed.’