After many years of suffering they were saved from their miserable fate by a young Jew, called Moses, who for a long time had dwelt in the desert and there had learned to appreciate the simple virtues of his earliest ancestors, who had kept away from cities and city-life and had refused to let themselves be corrupted by the ease and the luxury of a foreign civilisation.
历经多年的磨难,终于有一位名叫摩西的年轻犹太人带领族人逃出了苦海。摩西曾常年居住在沙漠,那里的牧民遵循祖先的传统,拒绝被外国文明的安逸奢华所污染。摩西很欣赏祖先们的质朴美德,决意唤回族人对它们的热爱。
Moses decided to bring his people back to a love of the ways of the patriarchs. He succeeded in evading the Egyptian troops that were sent after him and led his fellow tribesmen into the heart of the plain at the foot of Mount Sinai. During his long and lonely life in the desert, he had learned to revere the strength of the great God of the Thunder and the Storm, who ruled the high heavens and upon whom the shepherds depended for life and light and breath. This God, one of the many divinities who were widely worshipped in western Asia, was called Jehovah, and through the teaching of Moses, he became the sole Master of the Hebrew race.
他成功地躲过了埃及追兵,带领族人来到西奈山脚下的平原中心。他曾在漫长而孤单的沙漠生活中,学会了敬畏闪电与风暴之神的力量。这位神统治着天庭,牧人的生命、取火和呼吸都有赖于他。此神是西亚广受崇拜的众神之一,名为耶和华。通过摩西对族人的教诲,耶和华成为了希伯来民族唯一的主宰。
One day, Moses disappeared from the camp of the Jews. It was whispered that he had gone away carrying two tablets of rough-hewn stone. That afternoon, the top of the mountain was lost to sight. The darkness of a terrible storm hid it from the eye of man. But when Moses returned, behold! there stood engraved upon the tablets the words which Jehovah had spoken unto the people of Israel amidst the crash of his thunder and the blinding flashes of his lightning.
一天,摩西突然离开犹太人的营地不见了,有人传言他是带着两块粗石板出去的。当天下午,乌云蔽日,风暴大作,人们望不见西奈山的山顶。可当摩西返回时,看啊,两块粗石板上已经刻满了耶和华在电闪雷鸣中对以色列民族说的话。
来源:可可英语 http://www.kekenet.com/Article/201610/469432.shtml