Vol. XX, No. i 2 



WASHINGTON 



December, 1909 



JHI 



O- 



ATHONAL 



©(SMAIPMIKD 



ASAEH1 



/TTl 



o 



THE ROUTE OVER WHICH MOSES LED THE 

 CHILDREN OF ISRAEL OUT OF EGYPT 



By Franklin E. Hoskins, of Beirut, Syria 



With Photographs by the Author 



A FEW years ago a young woman 



/\ about to visit the Holy Land called 

 _/ J^. on an old lady friend who loved 

 her Bible and read it frequently from 

 beginning to end, and told her that she 

 soon hoped to see Jerusalem, Bethlehem, 

 Galilee, and all the places associated with 

 the life of Christ. The old lady put down 

 her work, removed her silver-rimmed 

 spectacles, and exclaimed : "Well now ! 

 I knew all those places were in the Bible, 

 but I never thought of their being on the 

 earth !" 



It may therefore interest many of the 

 readers of this Magazine to know that 

 the Desert of the Exodus has an actual 

 existence upon the face of the earth, and 

 that the route of the Exodus is being 

 mapped and studied and photographed 

 by enthusiastic scholars and travelers 

 with results as interesting and as brilliant 

 in their way as attended the modern ex- 

 ploration of the Holy Land and Egypt. 



It brings the doings of the Children of 

 Israel in the Pentateuch much closer to 

 modern life when we realize that the 

 route of the Exodus is cut in its first 

 section by the Suez Canal, one of the 

 greatest enterprises on our planet, and 

 that the Mecca Pilgrimage Railway fol- 



lows that route in its upper stretches 

 from a point near the Red Sea, Zalmo- 

 neh, northward for more than 100 miles 

 through Edom and Moab, and again 

 from Rabbath Amnion another 62 miles 

 to Edrei, once the capital of Og, King of 

 Bashan (Numbers 21:33), Dut now a 

 railroad center where the three lines, 

 from the seacoast at Carmel, from Da- 

 mascus, and from Mecca meet. 



Many will be surprised to learn that a 

 telegraph wire now stretches through the 

 desert from Suez to Tor, a little port 

 just below Mount Sinai; that another 

 wire connects Damascus via Maan with 

 Akaba opposite Ezion-geber on the Red 

 Sea ; that a steam launch now navigates 

 the Dead Sea and the Jordan River below 

 Jericho, and that Thomas Cook & Son 

 have added "Sinai and the Desert of the 

 Exodus, Edom, and Moab" to their wall 

 signs and tourist routes. 



A DAY FOR EACH YEAR OF THE EXODUS 



It has just been the great privilege of 

 the writer, in company with Dr John F. 

 Goucher, of the Woman's College of Bal- 

 timore, and Mr S. Earl Taylor, of New 

 York, to follow the route of the Children 

 of Israel from Egypt through the Sinaitic 



