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- 357 # MAKING BRICKS IN EGYPT
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361 UR young readers will naturally look at the picture, with its figures and forms of labor happily not now seen among us, but for all that full of sad suggestion. The men are carrying heavy burdens under the hot sun, whose heat is to dry and harden the bricks laid in order on the ground, and by-and-by to be carried and set in their places in the wall seen in the background. Two men are particularly to be noticed—one at the wall, and one at the end of the row of men laying the bricks on the ground. Each carries a long rod; one is holding it at his ease behind him, the other is about to lay it on the backs of the working slaves. These are the “taskmasters,” and their features are not the same with those of the toilers. Of these some are carrying the clay, some
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364 digging it out, and some erecting the brick walls.
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366 The usual way with the ancient Egyptians in some quarters was to dry the bricks in the sun, and even without straw they continue solid in walls erected four thousand years ago. On the other hand, where the bricks were made out of the Nile mud and similar material, they needed straw to prevent their cracking. Specimens of sun-dried bricks are to be seen in the British Museum, and many buildings, or the remains of them, still exist, such as, according to old historians like Herodotus, kings employed their poor enslaved captives in erecting. These points are mentioned here in connection with the picture, which is not merely for the eye, but is meant and adapted to suggest ideas to the mind, and to illustrate what is stated in plain language.
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368 Now we beg our young friends to turn in their Bibles to the opening chapter of the book of Exodus, and to give a careful reading to the story up to the fifteenth
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371 verse. They will remember that Joseph, having been raised to a place of great influence, encouraged his father and the great household of which he was one to come to Egypt; and, of course, as long as Joseph lived, and his great public service was gratefully remembered, they were treated with favor and enjoyed prosperity. It was a promise to their fathers that their offspring would increase and multiply, and in fulfilment of it the group of people that Pharaoh had welcomed—seventy in number (v. 5)—had now become so numerous that the monarch, who had nothing to do with or to recall Joseph’s services (v. 8), and who ruled that part of Egypt (for all the land was not under one ruler), began to fear them. He dreaded what might happen. If a war broke out—and such events were common where rival races and leaders held portions of a great country—the Hebrews might side with the enemy, defeat him and his army, and so be free to “get them up out of the land.” Incidentally he here confirms
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