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event itself. These objections, when analyzed carefully, are all predicated upon the personal ignorance of the individual critic concerning some phase of the proceedings that climaxed with the departure of Israel from servitude.

One of the commonest objections to the credibility of the Old Testament history was the oft-repeated assertion that though the children of Israel were in bondage for a long period in Egypt and left that land in the most dramatic exodus antiquity had known, there is no record from Egyptian sources of the people or history of Israel. Such is not now the case, but had it been so this would not necessarily have diminished the value of the historical statements to be found in the record of the book of Exodus.

Very few of the races of antiquity recorded in detail their defeats! Certainly no nation that prided itself upon its greatness and power ever suffered a more complete overthrow than did Egypt in the redemption of Israel. It is only natural to presume that they would make very little reference to the crushing blow that they suffered at that time. There is even today a strong tendency on the part of the Egyptians to hush up all evidence of this event as far as it is possible to do so. In the great Egyptian Museum at Cairo, for instance, we find a record of one of these texts that does refer to the Israelites.

Exhibit 599 in this aforesaid Museum is a large stele in dark gray granite, which is beautifully engraved on both sides. On one side there is an extensive inscription in which Amenophis the Third gives a categorical list of his gifts and offerings for the temple of Amon. The other side of the stele has been appropriated by Amenpthah. He gives a highly dramatic account of his battles and victories over the Libyans, and then alludes to the assault of Ascalon, of Gezer, and of Yanoem in Palestine. In the course of this later record, the inscription reads, "Israel is crushed. It has no more seed."

In the Egyptian Museum this exhibit is accompanied by the following ingenious statement: "This is the sole mention of the Israelites in the Egyptian texts known up to the present day."

This is not exactly the truth. The Egyptian Museum itself at Cairo has a number of the tablets containing the correspondence between the Egyptian court and the kings and governors who were vassals to Egypt in Palestine and Syria. These communications make urgent demands upon the crown of Egypt for military help against the invasion of an armed horde who are called in the text, Hebiru. The word "Hebiru" is commonly identified with the modern term Hebrew.

Again, the late Director General of the Department of Antiquity of Egypt and the great founder of the Cairo Museum, Maspero, has left us an interesting note of this monument of Menepthah. Maspero points to the fact that in comparison to Egypt, Chaldea and Assyria, Israel was a very insignificant race. If this was true when the nation was ruled by her greatest and most glorious dynasty, that of David and Solomon, it would be more so when the nation consisted of a slave company lodged in a corner of the delta.

In the very nature of the case, these details could not have been comprehended by the scholars of the past generation, as they dealt with customs and ideas that were lost to our age. The insatiable curiosity of the archeologist, combined with the care with which the Egyptians preserved their records, can be credited with the recovery of this lost information, the possession of which so wonderfully establishes our faith in this more enlightened age.

The prosecutors of the old charge of "folklore and mythology" so constantly directed against the faith of those who hold to the credibility of our present Scripture text, found some of their keenest shafts in the Biblical account of the exodus from Egypt. Scrutinizing the record of that notable event under the microscope of prejudice, the critics claimed to have found many outstanding weaknesses in the text. Particularly was this so in that section of the story which dealt with the plagues with which Almighty God smote the land and broke down the resistance of Pharaoh.

Professing to accept the historical record of the ten plagues, the writer of this article then craftily proceeds to offer a peculiarly human and mechanistic theory to account for the disaster. In reading this news item, we are at once struck by the fact that every element of a supernatural nature is deleted from the strange series of events, and the credit for the entire victory of Israel is ascribed to the human genius of the man Moses. This news item appeared in the following form:

THE PLAGUES OF EGYPT SHOW THAT MOSES ANTICIPATED BY 3,000 YEARS THE GREATEST FEAR OF MODERN SCIENCE

Science has been inquiring into one of the greatest catastrophes that befell a nation--the ten plagues of Egypt.

They have found that modern theories are in accord with the Bible story.

The plagues were brought upon the Egyptians by Moses in the days of Israel's captivity. Dr. Charles J. Brim, a New York authority on public health, says that Moses must have anticipated by 3,000 years modern science's greatest fear--the use of disease germs, water pollution and other attacks on sanitation as war weapons--in short, bacteriological warfare.

Moses, states Dr. Brim, in addition to being the founder of the science of hygiene, showed that germ warfare could annihilate man and beast more effectively than arms and man power. With it he bent the mighty Egyptians to his will and thus brought about the Exodus, the release of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. With it he so undermined their man power and morale that it became impossible for them to face the hardships of war.

The ten plagues, in their order, were:

Changing the water into blood; The frogs; The lice; The flies; The murrain of cattle; The boils on the Egyptians; Hail; The locusts; The darkness; The death of the first-born.

"The first step in this carefully planned attack," says Dr. Brim in a newly published book, "Medicine in the Bible," "was the pollution of Egypt's water supply."

This had two results: First, it attacked the god of Egypt--the Nile; secondly, it sapped the very fountain of the country.

Egyptian legend said that the Nile sprang from the blood of the god Osiris. Hence, "the waters of the Nile were turned into blood."

Egypt depended on the Nile for its drinking water, on its yearly inundations for the irrigation of the fields.

A polluted Nile was a smashing blow at the water supply and at the crops and cattle. Nobody could wash or drink.

The fish--one of the staple foods--died. Frogs were forced to leave their natural haunts in the river banks and invaded the streets, fields and houses in their millions.

Swarms of frogs, with no water or food, died and rotted over the countryside. Cartloads were burned, but not before the germs of pollution had time to multiply.

The air became filled with the disease germs bred in this ideal forcing-ground. People and animals became infected.

Flies descended in swarms greater than people had ever seen, bringing more germs with them. Cattle died in their thousands.

Dust, in a naturally dusty country, became infected, spreading more disease and death. Nature took a turn. A terrific hailstorm shrieked over Egypt. The few crops that were left standing were flattened and destroyed. Animals were killed by the force of the hailstones. Next came the locusts, dropping in their millions on the fields, eating everything the hail had left.

When they passed, a dust storm, caused probably by the hot, electrical wind known as the hamsin, blew up and darkened the sky for days on end, as sandstorms still do in that part of the world. The tenth and last plague, the death of the first-born, was a natural consequence of all that had happened since the day the water became polluted.

The Bible does not say explicitly that only the first-born died in this plague.

What it does say is:

And it came to pass that at midnight the Lord smote all the first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh that sat on his throne to the first-born of the captive that was in the dungeon.

The epidemic killed many others, but in the death of the first-born lay the greatest calamity, for the first-born son was chief in every Egyptian household.

Dr. Brim does not explain how the first plague was brought about, but if Moses did pollute the Nile it must have been done when the water was low.

It is certain that Moses was a medical genius, as his laws of health prove, and knew the certain effects of water pollution.

It is perhaps an inaccuracy to talk about "modern" attempts to thwart and deny the Word of God! There is nothing modern about this entire propaganda, popular as it may be in our own day. The error is ancient, as is the attitude of mind that would set aside the element of the supernatural in Holy Writ, and oppose the time-honored revelation of God's will by the modern self-satisfaction with human learning. Indeed, this common and basic sin of our generation is so far from being modern, that the very first recorded case of denial of God's Word comes from the Garden of Eden, man's first and original home.

Even before sin had reared its ugly head, to shatter the sweet communion and spoil the fair harmony that was the basis of man's fellowship with his Creator, this error appeared. It was Satan who, encroaching upon the beauty of Eden's fair content, first said, "Hath God said?" The denial of the truth of God's spoken word originated with the enemy of man: and it would behoove us all to remember that any man who has questioned His written word from that hour to this, is also an enemy, and an emissary of the original foe of mankind! Do we owe Satan so great a debt of gratitude for the deep and dark pit of woe into which he has lured our race, that we must lend slavish attention to the same old error when he sponsors it today?

For this "modern" attempt to discredit the Scripture is but a recrudescence of his ancient and simple strategy for the hurt of mankind. Well does he know that if he can but shake the faith of our generation in the integrity of the Bible, faith in God must soon be lost as well. Once more pedantic scoffers, professors of this and of that, arise solemnly to refute the truth of the only "map" that can ever guide men back to the Paradise we lost when the first man rejected God's revelation.

It is interesting to see that this old error is in no new guise, in the article referred to above. This is nothing new, it is just an original approach to the same old mess of Satanic whispering. Indeed, Paul warned us of the possibility of this very article and method in II Timothy 3:8, when he said:

Now as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith.

He introduces the very age of Egyptian history, and the events connected with the Exodus in speaking thus of the false teachers of the apostate days that should precede the time of our Lord's return. And lo! the event transpires in this year of grace, as the press of the twentieth century casts doubt upon the Ten Plagues in this subtle manner.

A few years ago it was customary for criticism to deny that these plagues ever happened. Classifying them among the reputed folklore of the Hebrews, and relegating them to the realm of the purely mythological, the critic calmly and boldly denied that they ever occurred at all. But these past years of research and study have so established the historicity of the record, that this procedure is no longer possible; so the new attack is made, on the basis of naturalism.

More marvelous than all this, he did it by simply polluting the Nile River, the source of the life of Egypt. This of course was a simple task! The Nile is a mighty river. If we follow its course just from the First Cataract at Assuan to the mouth, it is over five hundred miles as the river twists and bends round and about.

Most conveniently, the author of the above cited article does not mention how the lice were spread over the land by Moses! Did he personally catch them and spread them all around, or had he been breeding and storing them for years in advance? The flies may have increased in the rotting piles of frogs, but what kept this pest of flies out of the small section of Egypt called the Land of Goshen, where the children of Israel were? Given the conditions that caused the flies to breed, why did they refrain from the particular portion of the land where Moses and his people were camping?

So also for the murrain on the cattle, and the boils on the Egyptians. None of Israel were affected by these disasters. Did Moses have some kind of salve or prophylactic serum that he used, he being the great medical genius that this article makes him to be? Even that will not account for the fact that when the hail came, it, also, avoided the camp of Moses and his three and a half million compatriots!

At midnight, simultaneously, death smote a certain restricted class.

The prince in the palace, and the felon in the dungeon; the cattle as well.

Quaint epidemic, was it not? It came as a result of disease germs in the river Nile, it killed all its victims out of just one class, the first-born, and it passed over any home that had lamb's blood on the door posts!

Is it necessary for a man to believe such arrant nonsense, and accept such utterances of folly before he can qualify as an educated man, or a scientist?

Most fortunately, it is not!

To show the truth of this matter, we can indeed study these ten plagues in the light of modern science. Not by the flickering rays of the lamp of human speculation can understanding be achieved. Only in the full illumination of the sunshine of historical fact can the truth be discerned. So, we will turn to the great and truly modern science of archeology to study the Ten Plagues of Egypt, and see what the truth of the matter really is.

In the first place, thanks to the vast amount of research in the archeology of Egypt, we now know that these ten plagues were a contest between the Lord God of the Israelites, and the pantheon of Egypt.

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