[69] Gen. xlii, 24.—­It does not appear from the sacred
        narrative why Joseph selected his brother Simeon as
        hostage.  Possibly Simeon was most eager for his death,
        before he was cast into the dry well and then sold to
        the Ishmaelites; and indeed both he and his brother Levi
        seem to have been “a bad lot,” judging from the dying
        Jacob’s description of them, Gen. xlix, 5-7.

Jacob’s Sorrow.

But like a gem, among a heap of rubbish is the touching little story of how the news of Joseph’s being alive and the viceroy of Egypt was conveyed to the aged and sorrow-stricken Jacob.  When the brethren had returned to the land of Canaan, after their second expedition, they were perplexed how to communicate to their father the joyful intelligence that his long-lamented son still lived, fearing it might have a fatal effect on the old man if suddenly told to him.  At length Serach, the daughter of Asher, proposed that she should convey the tidings to her grandfather in a song.  Accordingly she took her harp, and sang to Jacob the whole story of Joseph’s life and his present greatness, and her music soothed his spirit; and when he fully realised that his son was yet alive, he fervently blessed her, and she was taken into Paradise, without tasting of death.[70]

   [70] “Jacob’s grief” is proverbial in Muslim countries.  In
        the Kuran, sura xii, it is stated that the patriarch
        became totally blind through constant weeping for the
        loss of Joseph, and that his sight was restored by means
        of Joseph’s garment, which the governor of Egypt sent by
        his brethren.—­In the Makamat of Al-Hariri, the
        celebrated Arabian poet (A.D. 1054-1122), Harith bin
        Hamman is represented as saying that he passed a night
        of “Jacobean sorrow,” and another imaginary character is
        said to have “wept more than Jacob when he lost his
        son.”

Moses and Pharaoh.

The slaughter of the Hebrew male children by the cruel command of the “Pharoah who knew not Joseph” was a precaution adopted, we are informed by the Rabbis, in consequence of a dream which that monarch had, of an aged man who held a balance in his right hand; in one scale he placed all the sages and nobles of Egypt, and in the other a little lamb, which weighed down them all.  In the morning Pharaoh told his strange dream to his counsellors, who were greatly terrified, and Bi’lam, the son of Beor, the magician, said:  “This dream, O King, forebodes great affliction, which one of the children of Israel will bring upon Egypt.”  The king asked the soothsayer whether this threatened evil might not be avoided.  “There is but one way of averting the calamity—­cause every male child of Hebrew parents to be slain at birth.”  Pharaoh approved of this advice, and issued an edict accordingly.  The Egyptian monarch’s kind-hearted daughter (whose name, by the way, was Bathia), who rescued the infant Moses from the common fate of the Hebrew male children, was a leper, and consequently was not permitted to use the warm baths.  But no sooner had she stretched forth her hand to the crying infant than she was healed of her leprosy, and, moreover, afterwards admitted bodily into Paradise.[71]