blocked the high-road to Babylonia, and diverted the trade of Palestine
towards the west and the south. While Abraham, the native of Ur, and the
emigrant from Harran, had found himself in Canaan, and even at Zoan,
still within the sphere of the influences among which he had grown up,
the fugitives from Egypt entered on the invasion of a country which had
but just been delivered from the yoke of the Pharaohs. It was an
Egyptian Canaan that the Israelites were called upon to subdue, and it
was fitting therefore that they should have been made ready for the task
by their long sojourn in the land of Goshen.

How that sojourn came about, it is not for us to recount. The story of
Joseph is too familiar to be repeated, though we are but just beginning
to learn how true it is, in all its details, to the facts which Egyptian
research is bringing more and more fully to light. We see the Midianite
and Ishmaelite caravan passing Dothan--still known by its ancient
name--with their bales of spicery from Gilead for the dwellers in the
Delta, and carrying away with them the young Hebrew slave. We watch his
rise in the house of his Egyptian master, his wrongful imprisonment and
sudden exaltation when he sits by the side of Pharaoh and governs Egypt
in the name of the king. We read the pathetic story of the old father
sending his sons to buy corn from the royal granaries or _larits_ of
Egypt, and withholding to the last his youngest and dearest one; of the
Beduin shepherds bowing all unconsciously before the brother whom they
had sold into slavery, and who now holds in his hands the power of life
and death; of Joseph's disclosure of himself to the conscious-stricken
suppliants; of Jacob's cry when convinced at last that "the governor
over all the land of Egypt" was his long-mourned son. "It is enough;
Joseph my son is yet alive: I will go and see him before I die."

Jacob and his family travelled in wagons along the high-road which