badly as the leading tribe of Israel, in the desert; how they again and again ever indulged sinful murmuring, and still He continued to give proofs of His power and of His loving-kindness. The (according to Num 13:22) very ancient Zoan (Tanis), ancient Egyptian Zane, Coptic G'ane, on the east bank of the Tanitic arm of the Nile, so called therefrom - according to the researches to which the Turin Papyrus No. 112 has led, identical with Avaris (vid., on Isa 19:11)[1] - was the seat of the Hyksos dynasties that ruled in the eastern Delta, where after their overthrow Rameses II, the Pharaoh of the bondage, in order to propitiate the enraged mass of the Semitic population of Lower Egypt, embraced the worship of Baal instituted by King Apophis. The colossal sitting figure of Rameses II in the pillared court of the Royal Museum in Berlin, says Brugsch (Aus dem Orient ii. 45), is the figure which Rameses himself dedicated to the temple of Baal in Tanis and set up before its entrance. This mighty colossus is a contemporary of Moses, who certainly once looked upon this monument, when, as Ps 78 says, he “wrought wonders in the land of Egypt, in the field of Zoan.” The psalmist, moreover, keeps very close to the Tôra in his reproduction of the history of the Exodus, and in fact so close that he must have had it before him in the entirety of its several parts, the Deuteronomic, Elohimistic, and Jehovistic. Concerning the rule by which it is appointed ‛ā'sa phéle, vid., on Psa 52:5. The primary passage to Psa 78:13 (cf. נוזלים Psa 78:16) is Exo 15:8. נד is a pile, i.e., a piled up heap or mass, as in Psa 33:7. And Psa 78:14 is the abbreviation of Exo 13:21. In Psa 78:15. the writer condenses into one the two instances of the giving of water from the rock, in the first year of the Exodus (Ex. 17) and in the fortieth year (Num. 20). The Piel יבקּע and the plural צרים correspond to this compression. רבּה is not an adjective (after the analogy of תּהום רבּה), but an adverb as in Psa 62:3; for the giving to drink needs a qualificative, but תהמות does not need any enhancement. ויּוצא has ı̂ instead of ē as in Psa 105:43.
- ↑ The identity of Avaris and Tanis is in the meanwhile again become doubtful. Tanis was the Hyksos city, but Pelusium = Avaris the Hyksos fortress; vid., Petermann's Mittheilungen, 1866, S. 296-298.
