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You are spells Ur . It is one of the shortest names I know. It is the name of a little place in that part of Babylonia called Chaldea. In this place—about nineteen hundred years B.C.—there lived a man named Abraham. Abraham had a very large family and though he had no money, he was rich. He had large herds of sheep and goats, and these were the chief riches in those days. Now Abraham believed in one God, as we do, while his neighbors, the Babylonians, worshiped many gods and the heavenly bodies, such as the sun, moon, and stars, as I have just said. Abraham did not agree with his neighbors for this reason; and his neighbors didn’t agree with him, either, for they thought his ideas were peculiar or even crazy. So, about nineteen hundred years before Christ, Abraham took his large family, his flocks, and his herds and moved to a land called Canaan, far away near the Mediterranean Sea.
Abraham lived to be a very old man, and he had a large family. One of his grandsons named Jacob, who was also known by the name of Israel, had a son Joseph. You probably remember the Bible story of Jacob’s favorite son Joseph with the coat of many colors. Joseph’s brothers were jealous of him, as children and even dogs are apt to be jealous of anyone who is liked better than they are. So they put Joseph into a well and then sold him as a slave to some Egyptians who were passing by. Then they told their father Jacob that Joseph had been killed by wild animals. The Egyptians took Joseph to far-off Egypt—far away from Canaan.
As I told you, it was very difficult for anyone to work his way up out of his class to a higher class. Nevertheless, Joseph was a slave in Egypt, and he was so bright that at last he became one of the rulers in Egypt.
Abraham leaving Ur, 1900 B.C.
At that time when he was ruler, there came a famine in Canaan and there was no food. In Egypt, however, there was plenty of food stored up. So Joseph’s wicked brothers went down to Egypt to beg the rulers for bread. They probably thought by that time their brother was dead. They did not know that he had become such a great man and that he was now the ruler from whom they were begging food. You can imagine how surprised they were and how ashamed they must have felt when they found out that the great ruler was their own brother, whom they had planned to kill and then had sold as a slave.
Joseph might have let his brothers starve to death or put them in prison, or sent them back to Canaan without anything, if he had wanted to revenge himself on them. Instead of doing any of these things, he gave them not only all the food they wanted and more to take back home, but made them rich presents besides. Then he told them to go back and get the rest of his family and return with them to Egypt, and he promised to give them a piece of land called Goshen where there would be no famines and they might live happily. They did as they were told, and Israel and his sons and all their families came down and settled in Goshen about 1700 B.C. They were called Israelites, which means of course the children of Israel. These are the people we now call the Jews.
After Joseph, who was of course an Israelite himself, died, the kings or Pharaohs of Egypt did not like these foreign people and treated them very badly, as other peoples have often treated the Jews badly ever since. Though the Jews and their children and children’s children lived in Egypt for about four hundred years, they were enslaved by the Egyptians.
Now about four hundred years from the time the Jews first came into Egypt—400 from 1700 is 1300 B.C.—there was a ruler of Egypt called Rameses the Great.
Rameses so feared the growing number of Jews that finally he gave orders to have every Jewish boy baby killed. In this way he thought to control these people. One little Jewish boy named Moses, however, was saved, and when he grew up he became the greatest leader of his people. Moses wanted to get the Jews out of this hostile country where the people worshiped false gods. At last he led all his people out of Egypt across the Red Sea. This was called the Exodus , and it took place about 1300 B.C.
Rameses’s mummy
After the Jews had left Egypt, they first stopped at the foot of a mountain called Mount Sinai, while Moses went up to the top where he could be by himself and learn what God wanted him and the Jews to do. Moses spent forty days praying on top of the mountain. When he came down from the mountain-top, he brought with him the Ten Commandments, the same Ten Commandments you may have learned in Sunday school. But Moses had been gone so long that when he came back again to his people, he found them worshiping a golden calf as the Egyptians had done. They had lived in Egypt until they had come to think it was all right to worship idols.
Moses was very angry. It was high time, he thought, that they should get rid of the bad influence of their old Egyptian neighbors. At last he succeeded in making them worship God again and gave them the Ten Commandments for their rule of life. So Moses is called a lawgiver and the first teacher of the Jewish religion. The Jews wandered from place to place for a great many years before Moses died. Then Joshua, their new leader, led them into Canaan.
The Jews had no kings. They were ruled by men called judges, but the judges lived very simply, just like everyone else and not like kings in palaces with servants and fine robes and rich jewels. But the Jews thought it would be better to have a real king like their neighbors had.
At last a judge who was named Samuel said they should have a king, and Saul was chosen. Then Samuel poured olive-oil over Saul’s head. To us this seems a strange thing to do, but it took the place of putting a crown on his head and was a sign that he was to be king. Samuel, therefore, was the last one of their judges, and Saul was their first king.
Rameses the Great
All other nations at that time believed as the Egyptians and Chaldeans did, in many different gods. The Jews alone believed in one God and lived by laws they believed God had given them. They had a holy book that contained these laws and recorded their early history. This book is also known as the Old Testament and has been made a part of the Christian Bible. Many Old Testament stories also appear in the Koran, the Muslims’ holy book.
This is the story of the Jews, who gave us the Old Testament and the Ten Commandments, and here is the way they wandered:
From Ur to Canaan—1900 B.C.
From Canaan to Egypt—1700 B.C.
From Egypt back to Canaan—1300 B.C.. You can see that they finally settled down in Canaan, and then they called that land their home.