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.
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