Yahweh—God of the Hebrews

96:3.1The be­gin­ning of the evo­lu­tion of the He­braic con­cepts and ide­als of a Su­preme Cre­ator dates from the de­par­ture of the Semites from Egypt un­der that great leader, teacher, and or­ga­nizer, Moses. His mother was of the royal fam­ily of Egypt; his fa­ther was a Semitic li­ai­son of­fi­cer be­tween the gov­ern­ment and the Bed­ouin cap­tives. Moses thus pos­sessed qual­i­ties de­rived from su­pe­rior racial sources; his an­ces­try was so highly blended that it is im­pos­si­ble to clas­sify him in any one racial group. Had he not been of this mixed type, he would never have dis­played that un­usual ver­sa­til­ity and adapt­abil­ity which en­abled him to man­age the di­ver­si­fied horde which even­tu­ally be­came as­so­ci­ated with those Bed­ouin Semites who fled from Egypt to the Ara­bian Desert un­der his lead­er­ship.

96:3.2De­spite the en­tice­ments of the cul­ture of the Nile king­dom, Moses elected to cast his lot with the peo­ple of his fa­ther. At the time this great or­ga­nizer was for­mu­lat­ing his plans for the even­tual free­ing of his fa­ther’s peo­ple, the Bed­ouin cap­tives hardly had a re­li­gion wor­thy of the name; they were vir­tu­ally with­out a true con­cept of God and with­out hope in the world.

96:3.3No leader ever un­der­took to re­form and up­lift a more for­lorn, down­cast, de­jected, and ig­no­rant group of hu­man be­ings. But these slaves car­ried la­tent pos­si­bil­i­ties of de­vel­op­ment in their hered­i­tary strains, and there were a suf­fi­cient num­ber of ed­u­cated lead­ers who had been coached by Moses in prepa­ra­tion for the day of re­volt and the strike for lib­erty to con­sti­tute a corps of ef­fi­cient or­ga­niz­ers. These su­pe­rior men had been em­ployed as na­tive over­seers of their peo­ple; they had re­ceived some ed­u­ca­tion be­cause of Moses’ in­flu­ence with the Egyp­tian rulers.

96:3.4Moses en­deav­ored to ne­go­ti­ate diplo­mat­i­cally for the free­dom of his fel­low Semites. He and his brother en­tered into a com­pact with the king of Egypt whereby they were granted per­mis­sion peace­ably to leave the val­ley of the Nile for the Ara­bian Desert. They were to re­ceive a mod­est pay­ment of money and goods in to­ken of their long ser­vice in Egypt. The He­brews for their part en­tered into an agree­ment to main­tain friendly re­la­tions with the Pharaohs and not to join in any al­liance against Egypt. But the king later saw fit to re­pu­di­ate this treaty, giv­ing as his rea­son the ex­cuse that his spies had dis­cov­ered dis­loy­alty among the Bed­ouin slaves. He claimed they sought free­dom for the pur­pose of go­ing into the desert to or­ga­nize the no­mads against Egypt.

96:3.5But Moses was not dis­cour­aged; he bided his time, and in less than a year, when the Egyp­tian mil­i­tary forces were fully oc­cu­pied in re­sist­ing the si­mul­ta­ne­ous on­slaughts of a strong Libyan thrust from the south and a Greek naval in­va­sion from the north, this in­trepid or­ga­nizer led his com­pa­tri­ots out of Egypt in a spec­tac­u­lar night flight. This dash for lib­erty was care­fully planned and skill­fully ex­e­cuted. And they were suc­cess­ful, not­with­stand­ing that they were hotly pur­sued by Pharaoh and a small body of Egyp­tians, who all fell be­fore the fugi­tives’ de­fense, yield­ing much booty, all of which was aug­mented by the loot of the ad­vanc­ing host of es­cap­ing slaves as they marched on to­ward their an­ces­tral desert home.