wrought in Egypt, but that in reality they repeat themselves, is clear from the manifest difference in particulars between the two. Of the two ways in which God reveals Himself as the one only true God, in the wonders of His almighty power, and in the displays of His omniscience in predictions, we meet with the former almost alone in Egypt, while in the exile it is the latter that prevails. Leaving out of view Pharaoh's dream in the time of Joseph, God spoke to the Pharaoh of the time of Moses through Moses only; and He showed Himself as the Lord of the whole earth only in the plagues. In the exile God showed His omnipotence only through the two miracles of the deliverance of Daniel from the den of lions, and of Daniel's three friends from the burning fiery furnace. All the other revelations of God consist in the prophetic announcement of the course of the development of the world-kingdoms and of the kingdom of God. For, besides the general object of all God's actions, to reveal to men the existence of the invisible God, the revelations of God in the time of the exile had a different specific object from those in Egypt. In Egypt God would break Pharaoh's pride and his resistance to His will, and compel him to let Israel go. This could only be reached by the judgments which fell upon the land of Egypt and its inhabitants, and manifested the God of Israel as the Lord in the land of Egypt and over the whole earth. In the exile, on the contrary, the object was to destroy the delusion of the heathen, that the God of the subjugated people of Judea was an impotent national god, and to show to the rulers of the world by acts, that the God of this so humbled people was yet the only true God, who rules over the whole earth, and in His wisdom and omniscience determines the affairs of men. Thus God must, as Caspari, in his Lectures on the Book of Daniel,[1] rightly remarks, “by great revelations lay open His omnipotence and omniscience, and show that He is infinitely exalted above the gods and wise men of this world and above all the world-powers.” Caspari further says: “The wise men of the Chaldean world-power, i.e., the so-called magi, maintained that they were the possessors of great wisdom, and such they were indeed celebrated to be, and that they obtained their wisdom from their gods. The Lord must, through great revelations of His omniscience, show that He alone of all the possessors of knowledge is the Omniscient, while their knowledge, and the knowledge of their gods, is nothing ... . The heathen world-power rests in the
- ↑ Vorlesungen ueber das B. Daniels, p. 20.
