Lord in the land of Egypt, when we eat by the flesh-pots, and when we did
eat bread to the full! for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness,
to kill this whole assembly with hunger." [Footnote: Ex. XVI, 3.]

"We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers,
and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick." These
were the wants of sedentary and of civilized folk, not of barbarous nomads
who are content with goat's flesh and milk. And so it was with their
morality and their conceptions of law. Moses was, indeed, a highly
civilized and highly educated man. No one would probably pretend that
Moses represented the average Jew of the exodus, but Moses understood his
audience reasonably well, and would not have risked the success of his
whole experiment by preaching to them a doctrine which was altogether
beyond their understanding. If he told them that the favor of God could
only be gained by obeying the laws he taught, it was because he thought
such an appeal would be effective with a majority of them.

Dr. Budde, who is a good example of the modern hypercritical school, takes
very nearly the opposite ground. His theory is that Moses was in search of
a war god, and that he discovered such a god, in the god of the Bedouin
tribe of the Kenites whose acquaintance he first made when dwelling with
his father-in-law Jethro at Sinai. The morality of such a god he insists
coincided with the morality which Moses may have at times countenanced,
but which was quite foreign to the spirit of the decalogue.

Doubtless this is, in a degree, true. The religion of the pure Bedouin was
very often crude and shocking, not to say disgusting. But to argue thus is
to ignore the fact that all Bedouins did not, in the age of Moses, stand
on the same intellectual or moral level, and it is also to ignore the gap
that separated Moses and his congregation intellectually and morally from