hey had moved westward
looking for a little piece of unoccupied territory where they might set
up their tents.

This tribe of shepherds was known as the Hebrews or, as we call them,
the Jews. They had wandered far and wide, and after many years of dreary
peregrinations they had been given shelter in Egypt. For more than five
centuries they had dwelt among the Egyptians and when their adopted
country had been overrun by the Hyksos marauders (as I told you in
the story of Egypt) they had managed to make themselves useful to the
foreign invader and had been left in the undisturbed possession of their
grazing fields. But after a long war of independence the Egyptians had
driven the Hyksos out of the valley of the Nile and then the Jews had
come upon evil times for they had been degraded to the rank of common
slaves and they had been forced to work on the royal roads and on the
Pyramids. And as the frontiers were guarded by the Egyptian soldiers it
had been impossible for the Jews to escape.

After many years of suffering they were saved from their miserable
fate by a young Jew, called Moses, who for a long time had dwelt in the
desert and there had learned to appreciate the simple virtues of his
earliest ancestors, who had kept away from cities and city-life and had
refused to let themselves be corrupted by the ease and the luxury of a
foreign civilisation.

Moses decided to bring his people back to a love of the ways of the
patriarchs. He succeeded in evading the Egyptian troops that were sent
after him and led his fellow tribesmen into the heart of the plain at
the foot of Mount Sinai. During his long and lonely life in the desert,
he had learned to revere the strength of the great God of the Thunder
and the Storm, who ruled the high heavens and upon whom the shepherds
depended for life and light and breath. This God, one of the many
divinities who were widely worshipped in western Asia, was called
Jehovah, and through the teaching of Moses, he became the sole Master of
the Hebrew race.

One day, Moses disappeared from the camp of the Jews. It was whispered
that he had gone away carrying two tablets of rough-hewn stone. That
afternoon, the top of the mountain was lost to sight. The darkness of
a terrible storm hid it from the eye of man. But when Moses returned,
behold! there stood engraved upon the tablets the words which Jehovah
had spoken unto the people of Israel amidst the crash of his thunder and
the blinding f