I will break the bar of Damascus, And cut off the inhabitant from the valley of Aven, And him who holds the scepter from the house of Eden; And the people of Syria shall go into captivity to Kir," says Yahweh.
They employed in the like way the Israelites, whom they had received peacefully. Their earlier works were carried on by native labor . After Tothmosis III, in whose reign is the first representation of prisoners employed in forced labor , they could, during their greatness, spare their subjects. They imported labor, not by slave trade, but through war. Nubia was incorporated with Egypt , and Nubian prisoners were, of course, employed, not in their own country but in the north of Egypt; Asiatic prisoners in Nubia . But they were prisoners made in a campaign, not a population; a foreign element in Egyptian soil, not an interchange of subject-populations. Doubtless, “the mixed multitude” Exodus 12:38, which “went up with” Israel from Egypt, were in part these Asiatic captives, who had been subjected to the same hard bondage.