The Jews, for the most part, differed widely from such barbarians. They
had become sedentary at the time of the exodus, whatever they may have
been when Abraham migrated from Babylon. They were accustomed in Egypt to
living in houses, they cultivated and cooked the cereals, and they fed on
vegetables and bread. They did not live on flesh and milk as do the
Bedouins; and, indeed, the chief difficulty Moses encountered in the
exodus was the ignorance of his followers of the habits of desert life,
and their dislike of desert fare. They were forever pining for the
delights of civilization. "Would to God we had died by the hand of the
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.
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