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| The Exodus.
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Chapter XXXV.—The
Exodus.
“After this, Moses, by the command of God,
whose providence is over all, led out the people of the Hebrews into
the wilderness; and, leaving the shortest road which leads from Egypt
to Judæa, he led the people through long windings of the
wilderness, that, by the discipline of forty years, the novelty of a
changed manner of life might root out the evils which had clung to them
by a long-continued familiarity with the customs of the
Egyptians. Meantime they came to Mount Sinai, and thence the law
was given to them with voices and sights from heaven, written in ten
precepts, of which the first and greatest was that they should worship
God Himself alone, and not make to themselves any appearance or
form557
| 557 That is, picture or
statue. | to worship. But when Moses had gone
up to the mount, and was staying there forty days, the people, although
they had seen Egypt struck with the ten plagues, and the sea parted and
passed over by them on foot, manna also given to them from heaven for
bread, and drink supplied to them out of the rock that
followed558
them, which kind
of food was turned into whatever taste any one desired; and although,
being placed under the torrid region of heaven, they were shaded by a
cloud in the day-time, that they might not be scorched by the heat, and
by night were enlightened by a pillar of fire, lest the horror of
darkness should be added to the wasteness of the
wilderness;—those very people, I say, when Moses stayed in the
mount, made and worshipped a golden calf’s head, after the
fashion of Apis, whom they had seen worshipped in Egypt; and after so
many and so great marvels which they had seen, were unable to cleanse
and wash out from themselves the defilements of old habit. On
this account, leaving the short road which leads from Egypt to
Judæa, Moses conducted them by an immense circuit of the desert,
if haply he might be able, as we mentioned before, to shake off the
evils of old habit by the change of a new
education.”
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