KFLCC Kingdom Economics

Ways That the Lord Gives Provision

Philistines, who were fully armed with weapons. God knew that the Hebrews would see war and desire to return to Egypt (Exod. 13:17). These were 600,000 men with a slave and not a soldier mentality, trained to make mud bricks and not fight with swords and spears. It is the Jewish historian Josephus who gives us great insight into the question, where did the Hebrew’s get their weapons after departing from Egypt? The answer is that God gave the Israelites the weapons of their enemies. Josephus stated that Pharaoh led his army of charioteers to the edge of the mighty Red Sea. As the army entered the sea, the walls of water closed over them, drowning the entire Egyptian army. In the morning the bodies of the Egyptian soldiers washed upon the shore. The Biblical account reads: Thus the Lord saved Israel that day out of the hand of the Egyptians and Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the sea shore. E XODUS 14:30 Josephus revealed that the weapons of the Egyptians also washed upon the shore of the sea. The Hebrews stripped the dead bodies of their enemies and picked up the weapons that were lying upon the shore line. Here is the quote from Josephus: On the next day Moses gathered together the weapons of the Egyptians, which were brought to the camp of the Hebrews by the current of the sea, and the force of the winds resisting it; and he conjectured that this also happened by Divine Providence, that so that they might not be destitute of weapons. So when he ordered the Hebrews to arm themselves with them, he led them to Mount Sinai in order to offer sacrifice to God, and to render oblations for the salvation of the multitude, as he was charged to do beforehand. J OSEPHUS , A NTIQUITIES OF THE J EWS : B OOK II; C HAP . XV Normally, iron (such as an iron weapon) would sink in the water as the ax head did when the son of a prophet was chopping down a tree in the time of Elisha (2 Kings 6:4-5); however through divine intervention the iron floated to the surface (2 Kings 6:6). The miracle at the Red Sea was that heavy weapons that would normally sink were found washed ashore and transferred from the Egyptian soldiers to the hands of former slaves now ready for battle. The weapons that were intended to kill the Hebrews became weapons for them to defeat future enemies. In the Hebrew exodus, there was a gap of time between their physical departure and their actual entrance into the Promised Land. During this

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