vention of the God of
Israel in behalf of his chosen people.

Moses was here afforded an excellent opportunity to deliver the
Israelites from their slavery and have them pass under his own
domination.

In obedience to Pharaoh's will--according to the Buddhistic
version--Moses led the Israelites outside the walls of the city; but,
instead of building a new city within reach of the capital, as he was
ordered, he left with them the Egyptian territory. Pharaoh's indignation
on learning of this infringement of his commands by Moses, can easily be
imagined. And so he gave the order to his soldiers to pursue the
fugitives. The geographical disposition of the region suggests at once
that Moses during his flight must have moved by the side of the
mountains and entered Arabia by the way over the Isthmus which is now
cut by the Suez Canal.

Pharaoh, on the contrary, pursued, with his troops, a straight line to
the Red Sea; then, in order to overtake the Israelites, who had already
gained the opposite shore, he sought to take advantage of the ebb of the
sea in the Gulf, which is formed by the coast and the Isthmus, and
caused his soldiers to wade through the ford. But the length of the
passage proved much greater than he had expected; so that the flood tide
set in when the Egyptian host was halfway across, and, of the army thus
overwhelmed by the returning waves, none escaped death.

This fact, so simple in itself, has in the course of the centuries been
transformed by the Israelites into a religious legend, they seeing in it
a divine intervention in their behalf and a punishment which their God
inflicted on their persecutors. There is, moreover, reason to believe
that Moses himself saw the occurrence in this light. This, however, is a
thesis which I shall try to develop in a forthcoming work.

The Buddhistic chronicle then describes the grandeur and the downfall of
the kingdom of Israel, and its conquest by the foreign nations who
reduced the inhabitants to slavery.

The calamities which befell the Israelites, and the afflictions that
thenceforth embittered their days were, according to the chronicler,
more than sufficient reasons that God, pitying his people and desirous
of coming to their aid, should descend on earth in the person of a
prophet, in order to lead them back to the path of righteousness.

Thus the state of things in that epoch justified the belief that the
coming of Jesus was signalized, imminent, necessary.