2
APART from a rather muddled chronology at the start of the Book of Exodus, the story of Moses it tells is quite straightforward. However, the picture changes when we examine other holy books and the work of Manetho, the third century BC native Egyptian historian, which was subsequently transmitted by the Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus.
While we know from the Old Testament that Moses was brought up in the royal palace, it does not suggest that he ever succeeded to the throne. Yet the story of Moses in the Talmud – the compilation of Hebrew laws and legends, dating from the early centuries AD and regarded as second only to the Old Testament as an authoritative source of the early history of the Jews – contains some details not to be found in the Bible and often parallels Manetho’s account of the Exodus, derived from Egyptian folklore. One of the details is that Moses was a king.
According to the Talmud, which agrees that Moses was brought up in Pharaoh’s palace, he grew into a handsome lad, dressed royally, was honoured by the people and seemed in all things of royal lineage. However, at about the age of eighteen he was forced to flee from Egypt after, on a visit to Goshen, he came across an Egyptian smiting one of his Israelite brethren and slew him.
The Talmud goes on to relate that, at about this time, there was a rebellion against the King of Ethiopia. The king appointed a magician’s son named Bi’lam – one of Pharaoh’s advisers, who was considered exceptionally wise but had fled to Ethiopia from his own country, Egypt – to be his representative in his absence and marched at the head of a large army, which vanquished the rebels. Bi’lam betrayed his trust, however, and, usurping the power he was supposed to protect, induced the Ethiopians to appoint him in place of their absent king. He strengthened the walls of the capital, built huge fortresses and dug ditches and pits between the city and the nearby river. On his return the Ethiopian king was astonished to see all these fortifications, which he thought were defences against a possible attack by an enemy. When he found that the gates of the city were actually closed against him, he embarked on a war against the usurper, Bi’lam, that lasted nine years.
One of the soldiers who fought on the side of the king, according to the Talmud story, was Moses, who, after fleeing from Egypt, had made his way not to Midian in Sinai, as the Old Testament says, but to Ethiopia. He became a great favourite with the Ethiopian ruler and his companions with the result that, when the king died, this inner circle appointed Moses as their new king and leader. Moses, who, according to the Talmud, was made king ‘in the hundred and fifty-seventh year after Israel went down into Egypt’, inspired the army with his courage and the city eventually fell to him. The account goes on: ‘… Bi’lam escaped and fled back to Egypt, becoming one of the magicians mentioned in the Scriptures. And the Ethiopians placed Moses upon their throne and set the crown of State upon his head, and they gave him the widow of their king for a wife.’
Moses reigned ‘in justice and righteousness. But the Queen of Ethiopia, Adonith [Aten-it in Egyptian], who wished her own son by the dead king to rule, said to the people: “Why should this stranger continue to rule over you?” The people, however, would not vex Moses, whom they loved, by such a proposition; but Moses resigned voluntarily the power which they had given him and departed from their land. And the people of Ethiopia made him many rich presents, and dismissed him with great honours.’1
So, according to this tradition, which has survived in the Talmud, Moses was elevated to the post of king for some time before eventually seeking the sanctuary of Sinai. Furthermore, where Akhenaten, as we shall see, looked upon himself as the high priest of his God, the Talmud tells us that ‘Moses officiated as the high priest. He was also considered the King of Israel during the sojourn in the desert.’ Where did the rabbis obtain the facts in the Talmud? They can hardly have invented them and, indeed, had no reason to do so. Like the accounts of the historian Manetho, the Talmudic stories contain many distortions and accretions arising from the fact that they were transmitted orally for a long time before finally being set down in writing. Yet one can sense that behind the myths there must have lain genuine historical events that had been suppressed from the official accounts of both Egypt and Israel, but had survived in the memories of the generations.
The Talmud description of Moses as a ruler is also supported by a verse of the Koran where Moses tells the Israelites after the Exodus that God has made of them kings:
Remember Moses said
To his people: ‘O my people!
Call in remembrance the favour
Of Allah unto you, when He
Produced prophets among you,
Made you kings, and gave
You what he had not given
To any other among the peoples …’ (Sura V, 20)
The reference here is not to two kings, but more than two, for Arabic has different plural forms for dual and multiple, and it is difficult to see in the light of later evidence how this can be anything other than a reference to the four Amarna kings.
The Koran also provides a different picture of Moses’ departure from the Ethiopian capital. Where the Talmud indicates that it was a friendly farewell, the Koran suggests that it was an escape from a threat to his life:
And there came a man,
Running, from the furthest end
Of the city. He said:
‘O Moses! the Chiefs
Are taking counsel together
About thee to slay thee:
So get thee away, for I
Do give thee sincere advice.’ (Sura XXVIII, 20)
The Talmud also provides a different reason for the attempt to kill Moses at birth. It was Moses specifically who was to be murdered because he posed a threat to the throne of Egypt. Pharaoh, according to the Talmud, had a dream in which he was sitting on the throne when he saw an old man holding a large pair of scales. The old man placed the elders and princes of Egypt on one side of the scales and a lamb on the other. The lamb proved to be heavier. The king asked his adviser Bi’lam the significance of this strange dream. Bi’lam explained that a great evil would befall the country: ‘A son will be born in Israel who will destroy Egypt.’
Reu’el the Midianite, who is described in the Old Testament as the father-in-law of Moses, enters the scene here as another of the king’s counsellors, who advised him that he should not oppress the Israelites, but allow them to leave for Canaan. This advice did not find favour with the king, who responded by banishing Reu’el to his own country and accepting an alternative course of action recommended by Bi’lam – that as a precautionary measure all boys born to the Hebrews should be cast into the river.
Prior to this, coinciding with the accounts in the Bible, we are told that Amram had married Jochebed, who bore him a daughter, Miriam, described in the Old Testament as ‘a prophetess’, followed by a son, Aaron. Now we learn of a prophesy by Miriam that a second son would be born to her parents and this son would ultimately deliver the Israelites from their Egyptian oppressors. When the baby appeared as predicted, Jochebed hid the new-born infant in her home for three months, but a strict search of the Israelites’ homes was carried out regularly and various ruses were employed to discover any male children who had been concealed. One was for Egyptian women to bring their own babies into houses in Goshen and make them cry, whereupon any Hebrew babies hidden on the premises would start to cry as well and betray their place of concealment.
The birth of a male child to Jochebed came to light in this way, but she hid the baby in the reeds of the Nile before Pharaoh’s officers arrived to take him away. There, as in the Old Testament, he was rescued by a daughter of the king, Bathia – identified in a subsequent passage as the first-born of her mother – who gave him the name of Moses, saying: ‘I have drawn him from the water.’ Moses ‘became even as a son to Bathia … as a child belonging rightly to the palace of the king’.2
When Moses was about three years of age, the story goes on, in the course of a banquet at which his family and princes of the realm were present, Pharaoh took Moses on his lap, whereupon the child stretched out his hand, removed Pharaoh’s crown from his head and placed it on his own. The king felt this action had some possibly sinister significance. ‘How shall this Hebrew boy be punished?’ he asked.
Bi’lam confirmed the king’s suspicions. ‘Think not, because the child is young, that he did this thing thoughtlessly,’ he said. ‘Remember, o king, the dream this servant read for thee, the dream of the balances. The spirit of understanding is already implanted in this child, and to himself he takes thy kingdom.’
The judges and wise men, including Jithro (Reu’el), the priest of Midian, assembled and Pharaoh related what had happened and the interpretation Bi’lam had placed upon Moses’ action. Jithro, who was anxious to save the child’s life, suggested: ‘If it be pleasing to the king, let two plates be placed before the child, one containing fire, the other gold. If the child stretches forth his hand to grasp the gold, we shall know him to be an understanding being, and consider that he acted towards thee knowingly, deserving death. But if he grasps the fire, then let his life be spared.’ Two bowls were brought, one containing gold, the other fire, and placed before the child, who put out his hand and grasped the fire, which he put into his mouth, burning his tongue and becoming thereafter, as the Bible says, ‘heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue’. However, his life was saved.
Manetho, a native Egyptian, was a contemporary of the first two Ptolemies, rulers at the start of the Thirty-second and last Egyptian Dynasty early in the third century BC, and is said to have described himself in a letter to Ptolemy II as ‘High Priest and scribe of the sacred shrines of Egypt, born at Sebennytus and dwelling at Heliopolis’.3 He is one of the early Egyptians who wrote about his country in Greek, assembling tales that he had found in the temple library, made up in part of ancient stories that had initially been transmitted orally before being set down in writing.
Scholars disagree about how many books can actually be attributed to Manetho, but it is accepted that he was the author of The History of Egypt (or Aegyptiaca) in three volumes. The main difficulty we face in trying to establish the contents of Manetho’s original work, however, is the fact that we do not have direct access to it: the fragments available have all come to us via other authors. Quotations from his work have been preserved mainly by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (AD 70); the Christian chronographers Sextus Julius Africanus (3rd century AD) and Eusebius (4th century AD); in isolated passages in Plutarch and other Greek and Latin authors, and a later compiler called George the Monk – an ‘attendant’, also known as Syncellus (AD 800), of Tarasius, Patriarch of Constantinople – who contributed greatly to the transmission.
According to Josephus in his book Contra Apionem, Alexandria had become a main centre for the Jews during the time of the Ptolemies. They enjoyed both Alexandrian citizenship and the city’s ‘finest residential quarter’ by the sea. The Alexandrian Jews were naturally interested in Manetho’s account of their historic links with Egypt, although they found some aspects of it objectionable. His original work therefore did not survive for long before being tampered with. The efforts of Jewish apologists account for much of the subsequent corruption of Manetho’s text and the creation of what is known as ‘Pseudo-Manethonian’ literature.
Although, as we shall see, Egypt tried to wipe out all trace of the four Amarna kings – Akhenaten, Semenkhkare, Tutankhamun and Aye – by excising their names from king lists and monuments after the fall of the Amarna regime, they are correctly named by Manetho as having ruled between the reigns of Amenhotep III, Akhenaten’s father, and Horemheb, who is to be identified as the Pharaoh of the Oppression. In addition, an epitome of Manetho’s history had already been made as early as Ptolemaic times in the form of lists of dynasties accompanied by short notes on outstanding kings and important events, including the defeat of the Hyksos invaders, followed by the founding of the Eighteenth Dynasty and the Exodus. These versions of the epitome differ from one another, indicating that some distortion has occurred in the process of transmitting and editing Manetho’s Aegyptiaca itself. However, a number of points are worth making:
• The list of Syncellus (according to Africanus) places the Exodus, when ‘Moses went forth from Egypt’, in the reign of Amos (Ahmosis), founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who drove out the Hyksos shepherds: this is an error arising from wrongly identifying, as Josephus did, the arrival of the conquering Hyksos as the Descent into Egypt of the Israelites and the subsequent expulsion of the Hyksos by Ahmosis as the Exodus;
• The lists of Syncellus (according to Eusebius) and the version of Eusebius which was found translated into Armenian place the Exodus of the Jews, with Moses at their head, more than two centuries later in the reign of the king who succeeded Orus (Amenhotep III, c. 1405–1367) – his son and coregent Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten);
• Syncellus (according to Africanus) also states that it was in the reign of Amos (Ahmosis), the first king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, that Moses led the Exodus;
• Syncellus (according to Eusebius) claims that it was ‘about’ the reign of a Pharaoh named Achencherres (Amenhotep IV, who later became Akhenaten) – that ‘Moses led the Jews in their march out of Egypt’;
• The Armenian version of Eusebius similarly lists the reign of Achencheres (Akhenaten) as the time ‘when Moses became the leader of the Jews in their Exodus’.
Josephus made an error by identifying the arrival of the conquering Hyksos as the Descent into Egypt of the Israelites and their subsequent expulsion by Ahmosis as the Exodus. What helped him to make the mistake was his desire to show that the Israelites had left Egypt long before Amenhotep III and the religious revolution that began in his reign. Josephus begins by saying that the Jews’ ancestors, whom he regarded as the Hyksos, ‘entered Egypt in their myriads and subdued the inhabitants’.4 Later they were driven out of the country, occupied Judaea and founded Jerusalem. At this point he complains that Manetho ‘took the liberty of introducing some incredible tales, wishing to represent us [the Israelites] as mixed up with a crowd of Egyptian lepers and others who for various maladies were condemned … to banishment from the country.’ (We should not take the descriptions of the rebels as being literally lepers or suffering from other maladies, the sense here being that they were impure because of their denial of Egyptian gods.) This sequence of events, says Josephus, is linked with a king named Amenophis (Amenhotep III), whom Josephus – believing that the Jews (Hyksos) had left Egypt centuries earlier – describes as ‘an imaginary person’. Josephus’ account then goes on: ‘This king, he [Manetho] states, wishing to be granted … a vision of the gods, communicated his desire to his namesake, Amenophis, son of Paapis [son of Habu], whose wisdom and knowledge of the future were regarded as marks of divinity. This namesake replied that he would be able to see the gods if he purged the entire country of lepers and other polluted persons, and sent them to work on the stone quarries to the east of the Nile, segregated from the rest of the Egyptians. They included, he adds, some of the learned priests, who were afflicted with leprosy. Then this wise seer Amenophis was seized with a fear that he would draw down the wrath of the gods on himself and the king if the violence done to these men were detected; and he added a prediction that the polluted people would find certain allies who would become masters of Egypt for thirteen years …’
The adviser known as son of Habu started his career under Amenhotep III as an Inferior Royal Scribe, was promoted to be a Superior Royal Scribe and finally reached the position of Minister of all Public Works. He was also appointed as Steward of Sitamun, the sister Amenhotep III had married in order to inherit the throne but failed to make his Great Royal Wife (queen). Son of Habu lived to be at least eighty and the last date we have for him is the thirty-fourth year of Amenhotep III. Later he became for the Egyptians a kind of saint whose cult was reported as late as Roman times.
Eventually, after the men in the stone quarries had spent many miserable years, the king heard their pleas for less harsh treatment and gave them the abandoned city of the Hyksos, Avaris. There, having at last a base of their own, they appointed as their leader one of the priests of Heliopolis (On), called Osarseph, and undertook to obey all his orders. By his first law, Osarseph ordained that his followers should not worship the gods of Egypt, nor abstain from the flesh of any of the animals held in special reverence in the country. He also commanded that they should form an exclusive society, mixing only with their own kind. Manetho’s account, as interpreted by Josephus, then goes on:
After laying down these and a multitude of other laws, absolutely opposed to Egyptian custom, he [Osarseph] ordered all hands to repair the city walls and make ready for war with King Amenophis [Amenhotep III]. Then, in concert with other priests and polluted persons like himself, he sent an emissary to the shepherds who had been expelled by Tethmosis [the Asiatic Hyksos, who were expelled by Ahmosis] in the city of Jerusalem, setting out the position of himself and his outraged companions and inviting them to join in a united expedition against Egypt. He undertook to escort them first to their ancestral home at Auaris [Avaris], to provide abundant supplies for their multitudes, to fight for them when the moment came and, without difficulty, to reduce the country to submission. The shepherds, delighted with the idea, all eagerly set off in a body numbering two hundred thousand men …
In the face of this threatened invasion, Amenophis (Amenhotep III) ‘sent for the sacred animals which are held in most reverence in the temples and instructed the priests in each district to conceal the images of the gods as securely as possible.’ However, he did not do battle with the invaders, but retreated to Ethiopia (Kush), ‘whose king was under obligation to him and at his service’. This king made Amenophis welcome and provided accommodation and food for him and his followers for the thirteen years of banishment that the son of Habu had predicted. Manetho’s account, according to Josephus, then continues:
‘Meanwhile, the Solymites [who originated in Jerusalem] came down with the polluted Egyptians and treated the inhabitants in so sacrilegious a manner that the regime of the shepherds seemed like a golden age to those who now beheld the impieties of their present enemies. Not only did they set cities and villages on fire, not only did they pillage the temples and mutilate the images of the gods, but, not content with that, they habitually used the very sanctuaries as kitchens for roasting the venerated sacred animals, forced the priests and prophets to slaughter them and cut their throats, and then turned them out naked …’ Manetho adds that Amenophis subsequently advanced from Ethiopia with a large army and his son, Rampses, at the head of another, and that the two attacked and defeated the shepherds and their polluted allies, killing many of them and pursuing the remainder to the frontiers of Syria.
Modern scholars have tended to accept the view that Manetho did not rely in his account of the Israelites’ sojourn in Egypt entirely on Ancient Egyptian historical sources. Gardiner, for instance, says in his book Egypt of the Pharaohs: ‘… the story of Amenhophis (Amenhotep III) and the lepers quoted from him by Josephus … show that he made use not only of authentic records, but also of popular romances devoid of historical value.’ He also makes the point a page earlier: ‘… Josephus’ excerpts from Manetho were introduced to support the latter’s belief that the biblical account of the Exodus and the expulsion of the Hyksos under Tethmosis refer to one and the same historical event … Admittedly the lengthy excerpts in question embody also several popular stories of the most fantastic description, explicitly recognized as such by the Jewish historian.’
This view has been challenged recently, however, by Redford in Pharaonic King-Lists, Annals and Day Books. After giving an account of the surviving library of the temple of Sobek in Fayum, which dates from the first century BC to the fourth AD, has been brought to light over the last hundred years and is currently in process of publication, he comments, in discussing some aspects of Manetho’s work that is conventionally dismissed as ‘Pseudo-Manethonian’: ‘There is absolutely no justification in … construing them as interpolations. Nor is it correct to imagine Manetho garnering oral traditions and committing them to writing. He would have had no use for, and probably would have despised, material circulating orally and not found formally represented by the temple scroll. What he found in the temple library in the form of a duly authorized text he incorporated in his history; and, conversely, we may with confidence postulate for the material in his history a written source found in the temple library, and nothing more.’ Redford identified the source of Manetho’s Osarseph story as the events of the Amarna religious revolution, first remembered orally and later set down in writing.
Although the leader of the contaminated people was given as Osarseph by Manethos, other writers have favoured the name of Moses. In his History of Egypt in five books, Apion himself – who lived in the first half of the first century AD, was born in Upper Egypt, studied in Alexandria and taught rhetoric in Rome under Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius – wrote in his third book, as quoted by Josephus: ‘Moses, as I have heard from old people [the elders] in Egypt, was a native of Heliopolis who, being pledged to the customs of his country, erected prayer-houses open to the air in various precincts of the city, all facing eastwards, such being the orientation also of Heliopolis. In place of obelisks he set up pillars, topped by human figures, beneath which was a model of a boat; and the shadow cast on this basin by the boat described a circle corresponding to the course of the sun in the heavens.’5
Another Alexandrian author named Chaereman (1st century AD philosopher and librarian of Alexandria, who afterwards became the tutor of Nero), also favoured Moses: ‘Moses and another sacred scribe Joseph’,6 as did Lysimachus (Alexandrian writer of uncertain date, but later than the 2nd century BC), also quoted by Josephus.7
There are a number of conflicts between these various accounts of the life of Moses, which one would expect with stories passed on by word of mouth for centuries before they were finally written down. We are, for instance, given two dates, more than two centuries apart, for the Exodus. Furthermore, while the Talmud tells us that it was Moses who fled to Ethiopia, Manetho claims that it was Amenhotep III, whom I look upon as having been Moses’ father. For the moment, however, several points in these two opening chapters are worth emphasizing.
Both at the time of the birth of Moses and when he was seeking permission for the Israelites to leave Egypt, the indications are that the ruling Pharaoh was in residence in the vicinity of Goshen, where the Israelites had been allowed to settle … Moses, who is described as a native of Heliopolis, where Akhenaten is thought to have spent much of his childhood, protested to the Lord that he would have difficulty in communicating with the Israelites … the Exodus is linked in three cases with the reign of Akhenaten … the name of the Egyptian queen who became the wife of Moses is given as Adonith (Aten-it) and is clearly derived from the Aten, the one God whom Akhenaten attempted to force upon the Egyptian people … Moses remained in Egyptian memory also by the name of Osarseph, a priest of Heliopolis, which links him with vizier Joseph, the Patriarch who brought the tribe of Israel down to Egypt, whom I have identified as Yuya, Akhenaten’s maternal grandfather8 … Manetho’s identification of the reign of Amenhotep III – while the son of Habu was still alive, some time before the king’s Year 34 – as the right time for the start of religious rebellion and the Jewish Oppression is not built simply on popular tales of his time, but on old traditions, already set down in writing, that he found in his temple library … it is clear from the biblical narrations that the Oppression of the Israelites took two separate forms – the threat to the lives of Hebrew male children and the use of the Israelites’ forced labour to build the cities of Pithom and Raamses, which, as we shall see, followed a period of religious upheaval … Moses was not allowed to enter the Promised Land for the alleged offence of striking a rock with his rod to obtain water for his followers.
On the subject of the Israelite occupation of the abandoned Hyksos city of Avaris, Redford has also commented: ‘The occupation of a deserted area, set apart (though in the modified form of the story replaced by Avaris) sounds like the hegira to Amarna’ – Akhenaten’s move from Thebes to his new capital in the face of opposition to his religious ideas by nobles and priests of the State god Amun – ‘and the thirteen years of woe wrought by lepers and shepherds can only be the term of Akhenaten’s stay in his new city. The figure of Osarseph/Moses is clearly modelled on the historic memory of Akhenaten. He is credited with interdicting the worship of all the gods and, in Apion, of championing a form of worship which used open-air temples oriented east, exactly like the Aten temples of Amarna.’9
What are the historical events that inspired these varied, and often contradictory, accounts – and at what precise point in history did they take place?