Excerpt from Hours With the Bible: Or, the Scriptures in the Light of Modern Discovery and Knowledge, From Moses to Judges
The district of Egypt which was to be the cradle of the Hebrew nation, lay on its north-east frontier, and, was thus at once nearest Canaan, from which their fathers had come, and most isolated from the Egyptian population, to whom the presence of foreign nomadic shepherds - was at all times distasteful. Shepherd races allied to the Hebrews had, moreover, already largely settled in it, and were this, virtually, a protection to the side of the Nile Valley lying open towards Asia, which had no other safeguard than the fortified wall between Suez and the Mediterranean. The precise position of Goshen is not mentioned in the Bible, but it is certain on various grounds, that it lay as above stated. Thus, Joseph's brethren were required to halt, on entering it, till pharaoh had been seen and had expressed his pleasure concerning them; and there is no mention of the Nile having been passed to reach it, or of the Hebrews having re-crossed that river at the Exodus. They were, moreover, near the Red Sea, for a few marches brought them to it. Further, the Egyptian "nome" or district Qesem - a name almost identical with Gesen or Gesem, used for Goshen in the Greek version - in the region otherwise suggested as that assigned to Jacob and his tribe, lay on the distant north-east of the country.
According to Elbers, the limits of this tract stretched southwards in a narrow tongue, almost to the present Cairo, on the west side of the Tanitic branch of the Nile, which formed, in fact, its western boundary to the sea. On the south, on the south, on the other hand, it bent, north-eastwardly from Cairo to the line of the present Suez Canal, which, however, it presently crossed, reaching the Mediterranean at Pelusium, where the ancient fortified wall from Suez abutted on the shore. But any exact knowledge of the boundaries is perhaps, as yet, impossible, if we my judge from the controversy respecting them.
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