[85] Moses, hearing this, and knowing how unsafe and hazardous it was to persist in gainsaying, took his departure, and travelled with his wife and children on the road to Egypt. During the journey he met his brother, to whom he declared the divine message, and persuaded him to accompany him. His brother’s soul, in fact, had already, through the watchful working of God, been predisposed to obedience, so that without hesitation he assented and readily followed.
[86] When they had arrived in Egypt, one in mind and heart, they first summoned the senators of the nation secretly, and informed them of the oracles, and how God had, in pity and compassion for them, assured them liberty and departure from their present to a better country, and promised to be Himself their leader.
[87] After this they were now emboldened to talk to the king, and lay before him their request that he should send the people out of his boundaries to sacrifice. They told him that their ancestral sacrifices must be performed in the desert, as they did not conform with those of the rest of mankind, but so exceptional were the customs peculiar to the Hebrews that their rule and method of sacrifices ran counter to the common course.
[88] The king, whose soul from his earliest years was weighed down with the pride of many generations, did not accept a God discernible only by the mind, or any at all beyond those whom his eyes beheld; and therefore he answered insolently: “Who is he whom I must obey? I know not this new Lord of whom you speak. I refuse to send the nation forth to run loose under pretext of festival and sacrifices.”
[89] Then, in the harshness and ferocity and obstinacy of his temper, he bade the overseers of the tasks treat the people with contumely, for showing slackness and laziness. “For just this,” he said, “was what was meant by the proposal to hold festival and sacrifice—things the very memory of which was lost by the hard pressed, and retained only by those whose life was spent in much comfort and luxury.”
[90] Thus they endured woes more grievous than ever, and were enraged against Moses and his companion as deceivers, abusing them, sometimes secretly, sometimes openly, and accusing them of impiety in that they appeared to have spoken falsely of God. Whereupon Moses began to show the wonders which he had been previously taught to perform, thinking that the sight would convert them from the prevailing unbelief to belief in his words.
[91] The exhibition of these wonders to the king and the Egyptian nobles followed very quickly;