408 ROD NOT EMPLOYED—REASONS 
To most of us unacquainted with the making of bricks the 
cruelty of the Pharaonic command, “ There shall be no straw 
given you, yet shall ye deliver the tale of bricks,’”’ seems to 
consist in demanding from the sojourners the same quantity 
of output without their possessing, as the Egyptian workers 
did possess, an essential constituent in the brick-straw. 
But Petrie points out that straw, so far from being an 
essential of the mixture, is absent from most ancient and 
modern bricks. The complaint arose because finely chopped 
straw is very useful for preventing the mud from sticking to 
the hand, for dusting over the ground, and for coating each 
lump before dropping it in the mould, thus enabling the work 
to go on quickly and easily. From the strawless Jew, however, 
was extorted for the same hours a tale of bricks equal to that 
of the Egyptian enjoying these advantages. 
In direct opposition to Petrie, Maspero states, and Erman ! 
agrees, that the ordinary Egyptian brick, both ancient and 
modern, is ‘a mere block of mud, mixed with chopped straw 
and a little sand.”’ 
Other reasons for the Jewish unfamiliarity with the Rod, 
viz. its merely local use, and their settlement in the North 
East of Egypt remote from “ the River of Egypt,”’ would fully 
be met, were it not for Isaiah, with the simple statement that 
at present they can neither be proved nor disproved. 
But the words of Isaiah xix. 8, “ The fishers also shall 
lament, and all they that cast angle into the Nile shall mourn,” 
surely demonstrate—if we allow that ‘‘cast angle’’ is the 
proper technical translation, and that the two words cannot 
mean the mere throwing of a hook with a hand-line—that the 
Israelites during the 430 years (Exodus xii. 40) of their sojourn 
in Egypt did acquire familiarity with the methods of fishing 
employed by their taskmasters. 
Still, even if we take it as proved that for some reason 
Angling was at the time of the Exodus an unknown art to the 
Jews, why with all the intercourse of the subsequent centuries 
1 Egyptian Archa@ology (1902), 3-4. Erman, op. cit., 417. The English 
translators state that the bricks were usually unburnt and mixed with short 
pieces of straw. 
