Joseph's. He was more like Daniel in his private life than any of those
Jews who have arisen to great power in foreign lands, though he had not
Daniel's exalted piety or prophetic gifts. He was faithful to the
interests of his sovereign, and greatly increased the royal authority.
He got possession of the whole property of the nation for the benefit of
his master, but exacted only a fifth part of the produce of the land for
the support of the government. He was a priest of a grossly polytheistic
religion, but acknowledged only the One Supreme God, whose instrument he
felt himself to be. His services to the state were transcendent, but his
supremest mission was to preserve the Hebrew nation.

The condition of the Israelites in Egypt after the death of Joseph, and
during the period of their sojourn, it is difficult to determine. There
is a doubt among the critics as to the length of this sojourn,--the
Bible in several places asserting that it lasted four hundred and thirty
years, which, if true, would bring the Exodus to the end of the
nineteenth dynasty. Some suppose that the residence in Egypt was only
two hundred and fifteen years. The territory assigned to the Israelites
was a small one, and hence must have been densely populated, if, as it
is reckoned, two millions of people left the country under the
leadership of Moses and Aaron. It is supposed that the reigning
sovereign at that time was Menephtah, successor of Rameses II. It is,
then, the great Rameses, who was the king from whom Moses fled,--the
most distinguished of all the Egyptian monarchs as warrior and builder
of monuments. He was the second king of the eighteenth dynasty, and
reigned in conjunction with his father Seti for sixty years. Among his
principal works was the completion of the city of Rameses (Raamses, or
Tanis, or Zoan), one of the principal cities of Egypt, begun by his
father and made a royal residence. He also, it appears from the
monuments, built Pithon and other important towns, by the forced labor