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“ Behold, I will set my face against you for evil, and to cut off all Judah. 12 And I will take the remnant of Judah, that have set their faces to go into the land of Egypt to sojourn there, and they shall all be consumed, and fall in the land of Egypt; they shall even be consumed by the sword and by the famine: they shall die, from the least even unto the greatest, by the sword and by the famine: and they shall be an execration, and an astonishment, and a curse, and a reproach. ”

“ AMBROSE TO IRENÆUS, GREETING.
1. YOU tell me that you have felt a difficulty in the text Exod. viii. 26. We shall sacrifice the abomination of the Egyptians to the Lord our God. But you had the means of solving it, for it is written in the book of Genesis, that Gen. xlvi. 34. a shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians, and this not on account of the shepherd himself, but of his flocks. For the Egyptians were tillers of the ground, but Abraham and Jacob, and afterwards Moses and David, were shepherds, and in this function exercised a certain kingly discipline. ”

“ Go not down into Egypt: dwell in the land which I shall tell thee of. Sojourn in this land, and I will be with thee, and will bless thee: for unto thee and unto thy Seed will I give all these countries, and I will perform the oath which I sware unto Abraham thy father; and I will make thy seed to multiply as the stars of heaven, and will give unto thy seed all these countries: and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed: because that Abraham obeyed my voice, and kept my charge and commandments, my statutes, and my laws. ”

“ Even the Egyptians have long known that they obeyed the bidding of Moses and Aaron as the sheep follow the shepherd. Have those who brought the terrible pestilence on so many guiltless human beings also wrought the miracle of blinding the minds of you and of your wife? ”

“ Here, again, we have another Biblical parallel, for, like his brother Mohammedan in Egypt, the life of the desert Arab, no less than the dwellers on the "black soil," still preserves many of those poetical customs and characteristics which render the history of Abraham so attractive, and although these pages have only been able to give a partial picture of Egypt and its people, perhaps enough has been said to induce my readers to learn more about them, as well as to enable them a little more fully to realize how very real, and how very human, are the romantic stories of the Old Testament. ”

“ With the Egyptians, therefore, there is another domination of the whole elements in generation, and of the powers contained in them; four of these powers being male and four female, which they attribute to the sun. ”

“ But visible fury and love, frank and masculine, remained as a light of Egypt — as the imaginative and God-like thing in this dark world — till Los beat it in the body of the sun and made it one with the blood, as the Spirit of God and the dark waters were made one in Genesis. ”

“ His family had instilled into his young heart hatred of the Egyptians as the oppressors of his race, but could they be so wicked, could he detest a people among whom were creatures like this lovely, gentle woman, who gazed into his eyes so softly, so tenderly, whose voice fell on his ear like harmonious music, and whose glance made his blood course so swiftly that he could scarce endure it and pressed his hand upon his heart to quiet its wild pulsation. ”

“ The god hides his face to-day. Gloomy days have often brought me good fortune; but this is a strange experience of the eternal sunshine of Egypt! Men and sky have given me the same kind welcome; gray, gray, and always gray-without and within—and my poor soldiers out on the square! ”

“ With joyous gratitude he felt that he was one of the people whom the Most High preferred to all others, that he belonged to a community, whose humblest members, nay even the children, could raise their hands in prayer to the God whom the loftiest minds among the Egyptians surrounded with the barriers of secrecy, because they considered their people too feeble and dull of intellect to stand before His mighty grandeur and comprehend it. ”

“ Let every man cast away the scandals of his eyes, and defile not yourselves with the idols of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
8 But they provoked me, and would not hearken to me: they did not every man cast away the abominations of his eyes, neither did they forsake the idols of Egypt: and I said I would pour out my indignation upon them, and accomplish my wrath against them in the midst of the land of Egypt. ”

“ Of the five startling classes into which the dictionary divides the human temperament, namely, the bilious or choleric, the phlegmatic, the sanguine, the melancholic, and the nervous, it is probable that the first, the second, and the fourth would be those assigned to the ancient Egyptians by these people. ”

“ Today I see not only that Thou hast the heart of a lion, but that Thou art a man full of prudence, who knows how to estimate his own acts, who is able to restrain himself, and who feels for the interests of Egypt. ”

“ A girl will conceive, and will bear a child who shall be called Emmanuel. He shall eat butter and honey until the day when he shall reject evil and choose good; and before this child is of age, the land which thou detestest shall be forsaken by its two kings; and the Lord shall hiss for the flies that are on the banks of the streams of Egypt and Assyria; and the Lord will take a razor, and shave the King of Assyria; he will shave his head and the hair of his feet. ”

“ Cast out wholly from yourself the spirit of the slave, and cherish the spirit of the son and heir. The slave-born may seem for a while to have a firm footing in the father’s house, but it cannot last. The temper and tastes of Ishmael are radically different from those of Abraham, and when the slave-born becomes mature, the wild Egyptian strain will appear in his character. ”

“ Can we imagine a conduct more abominable, than that which Moses tells us his God showed towards the Egyptians, where that assassin proceeds boldly to declare, in the name and by the order of his God, that Egypt shall be afflicted with the greatest calamities, that can happen to man? ”

“ At this remark the other smiled, and answered in a self- satisfied tone, "My knowledge of the world, and particularly of women, is, I flatter myself, an extended one, and yet I repeat, that in all Egypt I know of no nobler creature than this grey-haired woman. ”

“ For you know how we dwelt in the land of Egypt, and how we have passed through the midst of nations, and passing through them,
29:17. You have seen their abominations and filth, that is to say, their idols, wood and stone, silver and gold, which they worshipped.
29:18. Lest perhaps there should be among you a man or a woman, a family or a tribe, whose heart is turned away this day from the Lord our God, to go and serve the gods of those nations: and there should be among you a root bringing forth gall and bitterness. ”

“ Father Abraham is calling to the Ethiopians to know what has been the result of the great emancipation, and can we not send the echo back with a jubilee, that we are marching on in education in double file, and longing to see the day that not one of your sons and daughters of this broad earth but [Pg 35] what shall learn to read and write; though it may bless the earth with a tenfold blessing that they will not forget to bless God with a hundred fold. ”

“ I BELIEVE it was the old Egyptians, a very wise people, probably indeed much wiser than we know, for in the leisure of their ample centuries they had time to think out things, who declared that each individual personality is made up of six or seven different elements, although the Bible only allows us three, namely, body, soul, and spirit. ”

“ The God of his race, through her, commanded him to fulfil his father's expectations. Instead of the Egyptian troops whom he must forsake, he was in future to lead the men of his own blood forth to battle! ”

“ Each tried to lead a more austere life than that of his neighbour, believing that through the multitude of his fastings, vigils, and prayers he could make himself acceptable to God. Some, no doubt, repented of their evil deeds and thoughts with absolute sincerity, and their repentance lasted for years at a time, but repentance had never been a characteristic of the Egyptian, as we may see from the older literature of Egypt. ”

“ The Jews took up this great truth where the Egyptians dropped it, and over the heads and over the ruins of Egypt, Chaldea, Phœnicia, Greece, Rome, and India this handful of poor shepherds,—ignorant, debased, and despised,—have carried down to our times a conception which could only have originated in the highest possible state of human society. ”

“ My Spirit, for the sake of adding sin to sin; 2. those walking to go down to Egypt, and My mouth they have not consulted, to take refuge in the strength of Pharaoh, and to trust in the shadow of Egypt. 3. And the strength of Egypt shall be to you for shame, and the trust in the shadow of Egypt for confusion. 4. For his chiefs are in Zoan, and his ambassadors arrive at Hanes. 5. All are ashamed of a people who cannot profit them, a people not for help and not for profit, but for shame, and also for disgrace. ”

“ He feared lest his sons should be tainted with the idolatry of Egypt, and forget the land of their fathers, or enamoured with the pleasures of Egypt, and forget the land of promise. (3.) Probably, he thought of what God had said to Abraham concerning the bondage and affliction of his seed, (ch. 15. 13.) and was apprehensive that his remove to Egypt would issue in that. Present satisfactions should not take us off from the consideration and prospect of future inconveniences, which possibly may arise from that which now appears most promising. ”

“ The Almighty shows us the way, and every one must hasten, in His name and by the command of Moses. Keep strictly to the old order. We head the procession, then come the other tribes, lastly the strangers and leprous men and women. ”

“ If Abraham and his race enjoyed prosperity, it was only for a short period; the Hebrews became afterwards the slaves of the Egyptians, and were, as has been seen, the most unfortunate people on earth. ”

“ He rushed to splendid victories, overthrew nations, and raised the glory of the Egyptian name to a giddy height, though stained with the blood of his people; I passed my life in industry and labor, in teaching the young, and in guarding the laws which regulate the intercourse of men and bind the people to the Divinity. ”

“ Look into your Bible—look into contemporaneous and concurrent history—look at existing facts outside of the Bible, and running from the flood down to the present day, and hear the prophet of God defiantly ask, Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?—both beasts ”

“ I have given years of study to the early youth of Christianity, particularly in Egypt, and it affords me particular satisfaction to help others to realize how, in Hadrian’s time, the pure teaching of the Saviour, as yet little sullied by the contributions of human minds, conquered—and could not fail to conquer—the hearts of men. ”

“ The Jewish Scriptures and Jewish literature abound in allusions to this distant and mysterious people, the annals of the Egyptian priests are full of them, and uniformly, the Ethiopians are there lauded as among the best, the most religious, and most civilized of men.—Christian Examiner. ”

“ The conclusions to be drawn from so slight a treatment of so vast a subject are, that in Egypt, as elsewhere, a mythical and a religious, a rational and an irrational stream of thought flowed together, and even to some extent mingled their waters. ”

“ The nature of the folk-tales is equally indicative of the temperament of a nation. The stories which have come down to us from ancient Egypt are often as frivolous as they are quaint. Nothing delighted the Egyptians more than listening to a tale told by an expert story-teller ”

“ We shall find another testimony in confirmation, in the fact that the best of the philosophers, having appropriated their most excellent dogmas from us, boast, as it were, of certain of the tenets which pertain to each sect being culled from other Barbarians, chiefly from the Egyptians—both other tenets, and that especially of the transmigration of the soul. For the Egyptians pursue a philosophy of their own. ”

“ As these two verses (Exod. iii. 21, 22) relate to the spoiling of the Egyptians, by the women of Israel borrowing from the Egyptian women silver, gold, and raiment; and as no one can know how the matter is to be understood except by a revelation concerning things which are done in the other life,—for the internal sense involves such things as are done among angels and spirits,—therefore something is to be told on the subject. ”

“ Here was no negro-blood, but rather that of some ancient people such as Egyptians or Phoenicians: men whose forefathers had been wise and civilized thousands of years ago, and perchance had stood in the courts of Pharaoh or of Solomon. ”

“ O thou daughter! dwelling securely and delicately in Egypt, that fruitful pleasant country, do not think this will last always, but furnish thyself to go into captivity; instead of rich clothes, which will but tempt the enemy to strip thee, get plain and warm clothes; instead of fine shoes, provide strong ones; and inure thyself to hardship, that thou mayest bear it the better. ”

“ An aggravation of Abraham's alarm arose from the complexion of his wife, -- `Thou art a fair woman.' Though the Egyptian ladies were not so dark as the Nubians and Ethiopians, they were of a browner tinge than the Syrians and Arabians: we also find on the monuments that ladies of high rank are usually represented in lighter tints than their attendants.... ”