14 PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 



the Kenitc list. Mehetabel kept the Empire 15 years for her 

 brother, pushing the Egyptian border in the regions overrun by the 

 Hittites. In the north her husband Hadrai left his name on the 

 Sphynx, the Hittite monument at Gizeh. He was the hero of 

 the eighteenth dynasty, and fought his battles from the Euphrates 

 in the north, to Ethiopia in the south, while his wife Mehetabel, as 

 regent for Barneses II., sat upon the Memphite throne. Barneses 

 did not like his sister's tutelage, and would have cast it off had he 

 not feared his brother-in-law, Hadrai, who was the stronger of the 

 two. At the birth of Moses he seems to have had full authority, 

 for from him originated the edict that the infant sons of the 

 Hebrews were to be put to death. Prior to this the captive 

 dwellers of Goshen were condemned to hard labour as builders of 

 the treasure cities of Pithom and Rameses. They are represented at 

 this task on the monuments of Thothmes II., father of Rameses II. 

 His son-in-law Hadrai was then in the height of his career, and his 

 daughter Mehetabel regent, when the infant Moses was consigned 

 to the waters of the Nile in the ark of bulrushes. Her motherly 

 heart revolted against the cruel edict, and she not only saved but 

 adopted the infant at the time her husband and her son Shimon were 

 then at the wars. It is for this reason probably her name is the 

 only one given of a consort to kings who reigned in Edom 

 (Gen. xxxv i., 39) ; no other in Egypt except Mehetabel could have 

 dared to save the child. At the death of Hadrai his son Shimon, 

 under the name of Amonoph III., succeeded to the lower kingdom of 

 Ethiopia. He must have been the protector of Moses. The 

 monuments show that Mehetabel's regency did not extend to the 

 twentieth year of her brother's reign, so that she must have 

 bequeathed her adopted son to the care of Shimon. There is no 

 proof that he shared the faith of Moses, who made a princely 

 convert of the royal line of the Sekenens, the Kenezite Jephunneh, 

 the father of Caleb, who became incorporated with the tribe of 

 Judah in the Kenite record. Rabbinical writers represent 

 Moses as a dweller in Ethiopia. The language of St. Stephen is 

 conformable to this tradition, for it says that " He was mighty in 



